Sunlight colored the insides of her eyelids a golden pink. Deepa squeezed her eyes tight to keep out the light, to sleep for the next twenty years, longer, if she could manage it, to terminate consciousness, to somehow pack it in the folds of her brain’s cortex until her own death.

A thumb massaged her clavicle, kneaded her shoulder. A cool, soft cloth draped across her forehead. She shook it off.

Bala had hardly left Deepa’s side over the past three days. She had entertained, on her own, the carousel of neighbors and patients who wailed and beat their chests and tried to outdo each other in grief. Deepa hid in her room, muted the hysteria with her palms flattened against her ears.

In the weeks leading up to Independence, fireworks exploded in the sky to celebrate the birth of the nation of India. Last night was no different. She huddled in the corner of her room, quaked in Bala’s arms. Bala rocked her, thumped her back with a slightly cupped hand just as she once did to soothe a colicky infant Deepa.

“Deepa,” Bala said more firmly. “I received a telegram from Dr. Davies.”

Her eyelids, tempted, fluttered. She smeared her face in her pillow. Her cheeks were sticky with honey. It removed the sting of burns but failed to diminish the stench of charred wood and flesh from that night. Those odors had lodged themselves in her nostrils. Blisters covered her palms, her forearms. They bubbled up like suds.

“He and Nora will be in Delhi by tomorrow night,” Bala continued. “They’re going to stay with you here, in the house … until things are settled.”

Until things are settled. Things would never be settled. John and Nora would stay with Deepa until they could figure out what to do with their best friends’ orphan, who had no place else to go, no one else to care for her.

Two days earlier, Dev, Papa-ji’s only sibling, had arrived just in time to light the funeral pyre. His thin skin hung loose from his bones, his back curved into a stoop. He was only eight years Papa-ji’s senior but looked like a grandfather.

She’d never met him, had no idea how he even found out her parents had died. Probably Bala sent word. She still kept their estranged family’s information in her address book. “I’m sorry, Deepa,” he said from the doorway of the flat, on his way to catch his train back to Bombay. “But I’m not in good health and Aunty and I have four daughters to marry off. We can’t afford another.” Before stepping out into the night air, he looked at Deepa once more, wrinkling his nose. “Perhaps if your father had sent us money over the years, we could have taken you.”