was the problem. His mother had caught an infectious disease and she was in quarantine, which is why nobody was allowed to see her. It was probably measles or chicken pox. Why didn’t they just say so? She would soon recover, and Apumashi would come to wash her hair again and they would laugh and eat chili tamarind in the sun.
For now, he would have to take care of his younger brother. Biren invented little games for them to play and tried to teach Nitin his ABCs. Nitin solemnly chanted in a singsong with his finger on each letter: “A for pipra, B for cheley,” substituting the Bengali words for ant and boy, and Biren did not have the heart to correct him.
The next day he combed Nitin’s hair, holding him firmly by the chin just as his mother used to do, and took him for a walk down the road.
“Is Baba coming home today?” Nitin’s small face was bright with hope.
“Not today,” said Biren. He wondered how much longer he would have to lie to his little brother. How could he explain anything when he was so baffled himself?
A neighbor they only vaguely knew hurried down the road on her way home from the fish market. She stopped to ask how they were doing, but made no mention of their mother.
“My mother is getting better,” he called after her. “Come and see her soon.” The neighbor just nodded and hurried along.
Three days passed in a blur. The house was sickly with the smell of incense and dying tuberoses. Most nights Biren dropped off to sleep from exhaustion. In his dreams he saw black twisted smoke, and smelled burning ghee. He started awake with a great choking sensation, unable to breathe, unable to cry. Every sound was amplified in the night. The soft wheezing snore from his grandfather’s room, the rustle of a mouse scrambling on the thatch. One night, late, he heard a sound. It was same sound he had heard from Apu’s house the day his father had died: the low, moaning sound of an animal in pain.
He crept out of bed, tiptoed out into the courtyard and stood beside the holy basil plant and listened. There it was again, louder this time. The sound came from the direction of the old woodshed next to the taro patch. He walked toward the shed and could see the flickering yellow glow of a diya lamp through the slatted wooden walls. There was somebody inside. The sound was a singsong moan, rising and falling, regular and monotonous, almost mechanical. Biren inched up to the papaya tree, not daring to go any farther. Someone was quarantined in the shed, and she was in a lot of pain.
Ma!
He ran across the undergrowth to the shed. The door was locked.
He rattled the lock. “Ma!” he whispered urgently. “Ma! It’s me.”
The moaning stopped. He peeped through the slats and froze in terror. It was not his mother at all but a bald old man dressed in a white cloth sitting on the floor with his back turned.
It was a ghost—the petni that Kanai spoke about!
Biren thought he would suffocate with fear. He was about to step backward when the man turned his head around and looked at him. The face was dull and white, flat as the moon with bloodshot eyes.
Biren stifled a scream, stumbled through the bushes and ran back toward the house. He flung himself down on his bed and lay there. His teeth chattered uncontrollably, his fingers dug into his palms; every muscle in his body was contorted with fear.
That pale, flat face with its red eyes kept floating into his mind. He had no doubt the creature in the woodshed was his mother. She had stretched out her hand and he’d recognized her plaintive voice as she called his name.
But what had happened to her?
* * *
He drifted off into a fitful sleep. Random choppy images swirled through his brain. He saw himself in a large field. The ground was strewn with damp white lilies and tiny pencils with broken points. There were so many broken pencils that they looked like scattered peanuts. Biren was bending down to examine the pencils when he heard something that sounded like the drone of bees in the distance. He looked up to see a crowd approaching. They were faceless, hairless people, neither men nor women, all dressed in white, moving toward him in a serpentine wave. As they drew closer, their hum turned into a mournful wail that looped over and over in a mounting crescendo. They trampled over the delicate lilies and left behind a brown, slimy waste. They headed toward the fish market and Biren followed them.
Next he found himself in the fish market with his father. Biren reached for his father’s hand but came up with a fistful of coarse, white cloth. He panicked. Where was Baba? None of the people around him had any faces. To his relief, he saw the chicken man. Biren knew he could wait safely at the chicken stall and his father would surely find him. The chicken man acknowledged him with a friendly nod. He was in the middle of telling his customer the story of a man who contacted rabies after being bitten by a chital fish. Biren listened idly, thinking one did not get rabies from a fish bite. But he didn’t want to spoil the chicken man’s story. The chicken man stroked the beautiful black rooster on his lap as he spoke. The rooster’s yellow eyes were closed and it looked like it would purr like a cat. Its blissful expression reminded Biren of his mother’s face when Apu gave her a head massage.
The chicken man finished his story. He took a puff of his bidi and, with the bidi still dangling between his lips, he placed both his hands around the rooster’s neck and broke it with a single, sharp twist. Then he held the bird down until its wings stopped flailing. Biren felt bile rise in his throat as he watched the chicken man chop off the rooster’s head, pluck the feathers, gut its entrails and tear out a small pink heart that was still pulsing. After splashing water from a bucket to wash off the blood, he shoved the heart, liver and gizzard back inside the chicken, trussed up the bird in a banana leaf and put it in the man’s cloth shopping bag. Then the chicken man counted his money, shoved it under his mat, rocked back on his haunches and smoked the rest of his bidi. Every time he drew in the smoke, he narrowed his eyes.
Biren woke up clammy with sweat and lay in bed thinking. That was what had happened to his mother. In the same way the rooster was changed from a bright-eyed bird to three pounds of meat and bone in a banana leaf, his mother was stripped of her long hair, her colorful sari, her bright laugh and the kohl in her eyes. Dehumanized, she was just meat and bones wrapped in a white piece of cloth. She had become one of those cursed ones: a widow.
Biren returned to the woodshed again that night. Shibani was expecting him. She pressed her cheek to the wall and touched a finger to his through a gap in the wooden slats.
“You came back, my son,” she whispered. “I think of you and Nitin all the time.”
“What happened to you, Ma?” Biren cried in a broken voice. “Who did this to you? What happened to your hair?”
Shibani touched her bald head. “Oh, I must look a sight, don’t I?” she said ruefully. “I have not seen myself, which is just as well. This is what being a widow is all about, mia.”
“Did they cut all your hair off?”
She nodded. “The priest shaved it.”
“Why?”
