“No,” Karem said. “The business was supplying a demand. Not poisoning people over a few rupees.”
“A few rupees!” Bada-Bhai laughed. “This is how I know you’re a villager—you just have no idea, do you, boy?”
“Come on, Geetaben,” Karem said. “Let’s go.”
“Fine,” she said. “But.” She held up her pinky finger, the semiotic for su-su, or a “number one” deposit.
“Again?” Karem asked.
“No, no,” Bada-Bhai said. “My mother has similar problems.” He told Karem, “It comes with the age.”
Geeta gritted her teeth. “I’ll meet you outside.”
Bada-Bhai was at her heels the entire way. In the hallway, Geeta recognized the woman who’d slapped Lakha. “Chintu,” she called Bada-Bhai. “I can’t tolerate her much longer, I won’t.”
His voice was dismissive as he said, “You’ll have to, and you know why. I can’t talk, I’m busy right now.”
As they reached the bathroom, Geeta spun and nearly bumped his belly.
“Are you joining me?” she asked snidely.
He appeared appalled, which was doubly insulting. “Of course not.”
“A little privacy then?”
He refused.
“What do you think I’m going to get up to?” She gestured to herself: harmless, apparently old, armed only with a sari and jute bag.
He hesitated, but then seemed to concur with her self-deprecation with a roll of his eyes.
“Sir?” a young boy called.
Bada-Bhai walked down the hallway to rest his hands on the boy’s shoulder. “Papa,” he corrected, his voice gentle, leading his son toward the kitchen.
Geeta closed the bathroom door and retraced her steps to the backyard, where she ran straight to the latch. She pushed open the gate and whispered to the dogs, “Go! Get! Hutt!”
Three of them listened, bolting. The sick one limped, eager to please, and accomplished a sloppy circle. “This way,” she hissed at him. “Follow my voice.” He veered toward her in a promising turn, but then bopped his nose on the fence and promptly fell onto his side.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” She didn’t have time for this. Even if she plopped the whelp outside the fence’s boundary, he wouldn’t get very far. They’d find him immediately. Geeta petted him twice, allowing him to sniff her hand with his black nose. Then she scooped up his thin brown body. He had a long torso, but his legs were stubby. His crowning feature were his ears, foxlike with pink innards and far too big for his tiny face. His fur was dirty, his tail a nasty rope. She felt his warm skin give between each rib. As she placed him in her empty bag, he whimpered, tongue lolling. He offered no resistance to her foreign touch, curling into himself with a defeat that triggered Geeta’s simultaneous sympathy and rage.
Back in the house, she checked the hallway and quietly locked herself in the toilet. “Kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi.” Her heart barely had time to settle before Bada-Bhai came pounding.
“Ben?” he called. “Oi, ben! What happened? Did you fall?”
She seethed into the mirror above the pink sink. Good god, did she really look frail enough to be on the hip-shattering watch list? Sure, she had a few wrinkles congregating near her eyes, didn’t everyone who’d wasted their youth smiling? She was well into her thirties, so she’d earned her few wisps of grey, but she was still overwhelmingly black of head. And, she thought with relished spite, at least she still had hair.
Her home had one mirror and she rarely bothered with its warped surface; there was little need for vanity. She no longer wore bindis or jewelry. She knew how her clothes looked on her: serviceable. She could even do her hair blindly. Comb, comb, comb, roll in a bun, tie. It was apparent now that the look wasn’t exactly doing her any favors, scraping the hair from her forehead and temples with a severity that mimicked schoolmarm caricatures, but who the hell cared about her appearance anyhow? It wasn’t as though she wanted people looking at her—it was far safer to be invisible. And yet…how old did Karem think she was?
At that uninvited curiosity, Geeta flushed the toilet and opened the door, hoping Bada-Bhai wouldn’t notice the new bulge in her previously empty bag.
“Finally,” he grumbled. “Would you care to take your leave now?”
The dog, whose warmth seeped through the bag to Geeta’s midriff, mewled. It wasn’t particularly loud, but the house was silent.
“What was that?”
She flattened a palm against her abdomen. “Indigestion,” she explained. “It comes with the age.”
SEVEN
Karem waited for her outside the gate, his demeanor glum as he toed a rock. “Everything okay, Geetaben?”
“Yeah,” Geeta said. “But we should get going.”
“Yes, you had errands, correct? Where to?”
She looked behind them. How long before Bada-Bhai or his men wandered into the backyard? She pulled on Karem’s forearm. Her touch seemed to surprise him; he looked down at their skin. “Um…we should probably run.”
“What?”
A yawp of outrage rose from the house.
“Like, now. Run.”
They scurried to the end of the street, neither of them remotely spry, and turned the corner into the busy bazaar. Geeta wove through rather than around the most crowded portions, hoping to lose anyone in pursuit. She worried the jostling was further harming the dog, but she didn’t dare slow down. Karem kept pace behind her; he likely thought her mad. Lackadaisical vendors sat cross-legged on tarps, swatting flies with desultory flicks of handkerchiefs tied to sticks. The more aggressive peddlers stood, thrusting everything from shoes to bouquets of fennel seeds into passing faces. The end of the bazaar deposited them on a street lined with brick-and-mortar establishments. By tacit agreement, they stopped running.
“What—？” Karem gasped before bending over, hands cupping his kneecaps. “Just—what was that about?”
“I released the dogs. I had to.”
“You what?” But he wasn’t angry. Geeta knew anger; Karem was bewildered.
They inched back as a truck, its windshield smothered in marigold garlands, wove through the market toward the temple on the other end. Mounted on the vehicle’s roof were two horns and some political banners. The horns squawked, but Geeta’s heart was pounding too loudly to hear.
After a moment, Karem straightened and said, “Well, good.”
“You’re not mad? What if Bada-Bhai comes after you?”
Karem shrugged. “He already took away his business. That’s plenty. Hit me right in the belly.”
Geeta swallowed. It occurred to her then that she and Farah had been planning on letting Samir’s tab die with him. They’d planned on essentially robbing Karem and, until this moment, it’d seemed a victimless crime. “You’ll find another.”
“Not here, I won’t.”
Geeta’s fear of retaliation returned. Now she’d have two men gunning for her blood. “Is Bada-Bhai really that big of a don?”
Karem laughed through his nose. “He’s not a don at all, he just wants to be. He gave himself that name to seem tough, but he’s mostly just stuck between his wife and…” He coughed and quieted.