at a time when they didn’t expect overcast skies. She was an unexpected, unpleasant surprise—rather late in their lives. Her father was in his forties, her mother in her thirties. When they were desperately hoping it would at least turn out to be a boy after having had two girls, now ages thirteen and eleven, she came along—another screaming infant girl—with all the wants and needs and tribulations of a female, all the burdens of a Hindu Brahmin woman.
Her father never recovered from the disappointment. Her mother quietly accepted it as her destiny. Together they began to contemplate how they would ever manage to put aside enough money to pay three varadakhshinas. Dowries.
Some Hindus believe that if you give your child a depressing name, you can keep evil away from it. They often apply a dot of kohl on a baby’s face to mar its perfection, as no one will be tempted to put a hex on a flawed child. Megha was told she was an unusually beautiful baby, bright and full of energy. She often wondered if the name Megha was her spot of kohl, guaranteed to deflect the evil eye. When asked about it, her mother said the only reason they called her Megha was because they happened to like the name.
Then there was the astrologer, a man known for his accuracy, who had cast her janam-patrika. Horoscope. He had apparently predicted a dark, threatening period in Megha’s life, when a large cloud would settle over her head, and Yama, the god of death, would pay her a visit. He wasn’t able to foretell exactly when…but the menace would come, he’d warned.
It would come. It was bound to come—sooner or later.
Chapter 2
At the age of twenty-one, Megha Ramnath was not only married for a year but was about to be executed. In the damp, foggy darkness of the night, she stood outside the woodshed, her brows drawn in puzzlement, the loose end of her plain blue cotton sari tightly drawn around her slim shoulders. Had she heard correctly, or was her mind playing strange tricks on her?
Standing on her toes, she peeped into the shed’s window, secretly listening to her would-be murderers whispering, hatching their sinister plan to finish her off.
There was no light anywhere except for the ominous, dull yellow glow coming from the kandeel. Lantern. It barely illuminated the woodpile leaning against the wall in the corner and the two tins of kerosene standing nearby. The concrete floor, reduced to a blotchy gray from decades of sawdust, oil stains, and dirt, looked grungier than ever.
Icy fingers crept down the nape of her neck, telling her something was not quite right. What was it she sensed? What unexplained electric charge sent chills up and down her spine? Megha strained to listen, trying to make sense of the conversation going on inside the shed.
Kuppu, the fat old calico cat, sat huddled at her feet, shuddering, sending tremors up Megha’s legs. Was it experiencing the same eerie feeling she was? Cats could sense danger better than humans. The leaves rustled in the nearby guava tree, making her jump. She looked up, afraid to breathe, but realized it was only some night creature stirring—perhaps a bird disturbed by Kuppu’s presence. Just then Kuppu’s back lifted in an arch—a definite sign of fear. And Megha’s breathing turned ragged.
Then it dawned on her. Her large dark eyes opened wide with alarm. She was going to be killed! Realization struck her like a punch in the stomach. Terror replaced numbing shock, sending her heartbeat soaring.
Oh, God! Could this really be happening to her? And why? She was an ordinary housewife with a boring life; she had no enemies. She was considered pretty, but it couldn’t possibly be a reason for anyone to kill her. She had no particular talents and posed no threat to anyone. Although her life meant little to anybody but herself, her death would mean even less.
And yet, she was going to be murdered!
The most puzzling part of the mystery was that her executioners were none other than her husband, Suresh Ramnath, and his ferocious mother, Chandramma Ramnath. The children in the family called her Amma. In their native Kannada language, Amma meant mother, but since she was also the eldest female in the family, she was Amma to all the kids, including nieces and nephews. Even the male servant who came in daily to wash the clothes and mop the floors addressed her as Amma-bai. Bai was the respectful Indian equivalent of the English term madam.
Despite what was going on in the woodshed, the surrounding scene looked perfectly normal. The nondescript Ramnath home, with its sooty windows and aged concrete frame, was like many other homes in Cantonment Galli or Street—single-storied, with three bedrooms and a small backyard. The houses were dark, boxy squares rising out of the fog.
The neighborhood was middle-class, where most of the women stayed home and cooked and raised the children while the men held office jobs or owned small businesses. Most every family had a servant come in daily for an hour or two to perform the menial tasks—not a luxury but a necessity. Very rarely did this class of folks travel for pleasure. They ate at a restaurant or went to the cinema perhaps once a month. Money was usually tight and every rupee had to be saved for the children’s futures.
At this late hour, the rural town of Palgaum was asleep. Even the most vigilant watchdogs dozed in languorous abandon in the sultry humidity of the tropical October night. The last show at the movie theaters had let out and the crowds had gone home to their beds. Except for a handful of individuals who had business staying awake, like night-shift guards and policemen, nurses minding hushed hospital wards, industrious prostitutes, and the occasional nocturnal youth or drunk loitering on a darkened street, the place was tranquil. A fine, damp mist had wound its way from the river and spread like a ghostly shroud, while a silent quarter-moon watched over the slumbering town.
After long hours of slogging in the kitchen to keep her husband and in-laws well-fed and content, Megha usually slept like the dead. It was her sole escape from a life she had slowly come to abhor—her only relief for those aching feet, back, and arms that resulted from shopping for endless lists of rations and hauling them home on foot, grinding spices, coconut and various kinds of batters on the heavy grinding stone, serving meals, and handling heavy pots of steaming food and buckets of bath water. One of the advantages of being so young was the ability to sink into oblivion once her head settled on the pillow each night.
And yet, a little earlier, startled by an odd sound, her eyelids had flown open in an instant. It was different from the normal nightly cacophony of snores coming from her in-laws’ room. She could only hear her father-in-law, Vinayak Ramnath, or Appaji as the kids called him, snoring in the master bedroom, and her teenaged sister-in-law, Shanti, breathing like a muffled whistle in her room across the passageway.
But what about Amma, her mother-in-law, the Amazon witch? The older woman’s notorious snoring was ominously absent. It was generally riotous enough to disturb anyone within a hundred meters. Was that corpulent mass of a woman, Chandramma, lying awake? Was she hatching another one of her twisted plans to make Megha’s life even more difficult?
After a minute, Megha recognized the peculiar sound. It was the door to the small storage shed that sat at a little distance from the rear of the house and contained their monthly supply of wood and kerosene. The hinges on the door were rusty and squeaked every time it was opened or shut. It was a familiar echo from her daily trips to the shed to haul in the wood for the kitchen and bathroom hearths. The Ramnaths were too stingy for a gas stove, and the daily bath water was heated in a big brass cauldron because electricity was both expensive and unreliable.
Megha’s breath caught on the possibility that she might have forgotten to lock the shed before retiring for the night. Amma would surely take her to task for such carelessness. Her fierce and tyrannical mother-in-law would never tolerate incompetence on Megha’s part. A young daughter-in-law could not afford to make even trivial mistakes. A bride had to earn her keep and the right to be called a good
