Karem obeyed one of her directives and produced another packet. “I really am sorry.”
“Fuck you.”
“At least he got his. Blind is pretty clear karma.”
She stilled. “What?”
Karem squinted at her. He wore the careful, frozen mien of someone who’d stepped on a twig in a lion’s den. “What?”
“What did you say about being blind?”
“Nothing. What? You said blind.”
“No,” Geeta said slowly. “You did. Just now.”
“It was a compliment. Like, he must’ve been blind. Obviously. To leave a woman like you.”
He was lying. Poorly, too, which was somewhat endearing: a criminal incapable of a fib. Like a baby in a three-piece suit. But Geeta had what she’d come for and much fatter problems than Karem’s half-assed riddles. Tomorrow she’d have to walk the three hours to Kohra to find cheap poison. She placed four ten-rupee notes on the counter.
Karem shook his head. “No, no need.”
Geeta stared at him for so long, he had no choice but to reluctantly return her hostile gaze. “No,” she told him. “I don’t want you thinking you’re off the hook. Ever.”
SIX
When Geeta returned home, she left her sandals by the door and rinsed her dusty feet in the compact cubicle she used for bathing. Her water buckets were low, but she’d replenish them tomorrow. Feet damp and restless, she milled about with an unusual ennui. Typically, she was quite content at home; she’d learned she was a woman who fared well alone. But now she wandered from her worktable to her kitchen alcove, where she set down the two tharra packets. She toyed with one’s knot, but did not open the bag. Outside the back door was an old clay stove, which she still often used, cow pies being far less expensive fuel than gas.
Against the wall to her right, where the ever-present lizard was currently resting, its throat puffing—that was where she wanted her refrigerator to stand. Geeta had been saving up for one since she’d joined the loan group. It would be so convenient to cook a few days’ worth of meals at once and store them. She would often look up from her work and be pulled under a wave of hunger so strong, it left her dizzy. By that time, there was no question of cooking, just scarfing biscuits until she no longer felt faint.
And she’d finally be able to buy and keep perishables, the juices and pickles that families could finish in one go, but a single woman could not. Her bread wouldn’t mold as quickly; her milk would survive independent of the season; she might even try eggs. A refrigerator would change everything—including how others saw her. Her mother had frequently said: Elephant goes to the bazaar; thousands of dogs bark. Though Geeta was accustomed to the village’s stale contempt, she worried about the renewed attention, the envy and the spite and the fresh whispers. Even as she told herself that she didn’t care, that she’d manage, imagining the sneers filled her stomach with stones.
Well. There would be no sneering and no refrigerator unless she got back to work. Geeta left the kitchen and stood at her worktable. Jars of black beads lined her station like soldiers awaiting orders. An organized desk was a source of comfort to her. She should put on some music and begin sketching a wedding mangalsutra. If that project didn’t suit her mood, she could begin converting another necklace into a bracelet. That was the trend with modern brides—a marital bracelet was far easier to pair with jeans than a traditional, looping necklace. This suited Geeta just fine as it doubled her work and income: craft a necklace before the ceremony, a bracelet afterward.
Geeta unlocked her metal armoire. On the top shelf sat a maroon jewelry box and a small lockbox where she kept gold wire and beads for necklaces. She ignored the combination lockbox and took down the jewelry box. Age had blackened the corners, but the felt remained soft. When Geeta opened the lid, she released the faint smell of saffron. Inside was her own wedding necklace and, in a false bottom below that, her savings: 19,012 rupees.
In her second year of marriage, Geeta’s parents passed away, her mother first, her father a few months after. Fate’s thin kindness meant that they’d seen her happy, not cowed. Her father, though many things （funny, kind, doting）， hadn’t possessed a head for money, a secret that only saw daylight upon his death, when he could no longer hide the true condition of his finances. They’d apparently lost Geeta’s family home to the bank long ago. New loans taken to pay old loans to pay other loans; Ramesh had shaken his head at the state of it—an absolute mess, Geeta—the callous censure of her dead father barely penetrating through Geeta’s grief. Her parents had been fortunate, Ramesh told her, that his family had eschewed dowries as archaic, but now they’d have to sell Geeta’s wedding jewelry （it was, after all, her side’s debt）。 She supposed that was fair but wished Ramesh had kept it a private matter. He criticized her father’s mistakes to the village, bemoaning that he’d received no thanks for not demanding a dowry. Geeta’s maiden name died with her father, and perhaps that was for the best, as Ramesh ensured it was synonymous with shame.
Then Ramesh disappeared, bequeathing her with even more debt, and only Geeta’s mangalsutra had survived her efforts to keep afloat. She’d been tempted many times to sell it. It was likely worth twenty thousand rupees, and she could buy a refrigerator immediately, with funds to spare. But she didn’t want the refrigerator that way, linked forever to Ramesh. She ate no one’s salt but her own.
Geeta toyed with her wedding necklace, chosen by Ramesh, testing its tensile strength.
Perhaps it was pathetic to have kept it, and by extension to have wasted any time missing Ramesh, but he was all she’d known for a while. At first the new solitude had scared her. Friendship might’ve eased the transition but, much like a refrigerator, that was a luxury she lacked, and so she managed without.
Eventually, through discovering her talents for jewelry making, salient truths emerged: There was a Geeta before Ramesh’s hands had found her, and that Geeta was still alive, and even if no one else was interested in knowing her, Geeta was. She found extra salt pleased her palate. She made it a point not to apologize. She liked music and danced to her old radio to jump-start her mornings （though after stumbling upon an interesting bit about orcas, she’d been tuning into Gyan Vani’s nature program of late）。 Biscuits and tomato Lay’s were a perfectly acceptable dinner some nights. And （this might’ve been the magic of converting an impossibility into the illusion of choice） she wouldn’t have done well with babies, primarily because she just didn’t like them very much. Her grapes, whether sour or fair, were her grapes. Conditioning, not actual desire, had informed her that she wanted children; and Ramesh—cruel as he’d been about the matter—had at least released her from its constraints.
Geeta dumped the necklace back in the box. She identified with the Bandit Queen’s disappointing revelation about marriage: the necklace men tied to them, it was no prettier than the rope tying a goat to a tree, depriving it of freedom.
But freedom, Geeta had once heard or read somewhere, is what a person does with what’s been done to her. Geeta used hers to start a business. It would never be a big business, that was a given, but it existed solely because of her talent and vision, which made her, according to the loan officer, an entrepreneur.