High on a hot wet summer in Quilon, Maragatavali Iyer was made mad by a broken heart. This is what Alarmelu Amma imagines anyway, and what she whispers to Komi Kutty when that eldest granddaughter of hers arrives by the late train from Bombay.

With her are her children, three children, and they line up behind her: two squat duckling sons hidden by one tall daughter, whose teeth shine like square pearls in her mouth. Come for the summer and stay, Komi’s telegram had said, and made no mention of the frantic and frequent letters they had received from that desperate husband—he who made her mad—begging them to look after his wife. Maragatavali has sad eyes and a sweet voice, both of which she has worn her whole life, and when her husband’s name is said aloud—Gopalakrishna Iyer—she wails long, loud, and pleading.

The kids are Quilon-born, each of them delivered by blood-soaked hands in this very home, but they are brought-up Bombay brats, with the stink of white soldiers and city spoils, like light switches and kerosene stoves. Alarmelu shows them the outhouse, the match sticks to light the lantern that guides them in the night, and the banana tree in garden, whose long stiff leaves they chop for plates. The sleeping quarters are crowded now: one room, two cots, six people.

What Alarmelu has learned from her grandson-in-law’s letters is that Krishna Iyer is foolishly idealistic, the kind of man who starts businesses abroad and leaves his wife to a lonely house. “This,” she whispers to Komi, “is what happens to our men when they go to the north.” He had even adopted the ridiculous British sensibility, as if in protest against his own people: top hat, the coattails, the shined shoes, all in the sweltering heat. The monsoon marks the first season of the second year in which Maragatavali is meant to stay in that Matunga flat alone, with neither husband nor helping hand.

“You never should have married her off,” Komi scolds. “See what a trouble a man is?”

“With a mouth like that, it’s no wonder you’re the sister who stayed home.” But Komi is bald-headed, brown-saried, simple, her husband buried before her tenth birthday. To be anywhere else was never an option.

It becomes clear that Maragatavali’s madness is not the kind that manifests from men alone. Three days go by and it is evident: certain silences stretch too thin. When she stares into the sun, she smiles and squints as if in conversation.

The girl is Alarmelu’s first concern, then the mother, then the boys. Boys, she knows, harden like hot-pulled sugar into taffy-stiff men, but girls grow to women and lay foundations for families. Where can a girl go, but to a husband’s home? Somewhere in cities, impractical idiots dream of a revolution—our own land, our own country—but here in the village, there are only mountains and marriage. The girl is just shy of eleven, her breasts not buds enough yet to require a half-sari, but sweat shines and darkens the creases of her blouse. In the old days, marriage was for children. Alarmelu knows that city people have different sensibilities, sometimes wrong ones: Krishna Iyer might as well be waiting for his wife to grow wings before he finds a suitable husband.

“Have you found a match yet?” Alarmelu asks Maragatavali one morning when her eyes are focused.

“A match?”

“For Lakshmi,” Alarmelu says. “She’s one full year older than you were when you married.”

That wedding was simple, festive, bright: Krishna, then fifteen, and Maragatavali, eight-or-nine, front teeth still missing, the flower garland heavy on her skinny neck, petals practically spilling from her ears.

“She hasn’t bled yet,” Maragatavali says, “we have time.”

Alarmelu, who knows how well eons and eras can blend seamlessly with seconds, walks to the kitchen and waves her hand to Komi to come and cut the okra.

◆

Time burns like a wick oiled by heartbreak. There are mornings where Maragatavali lays in the dark sleeping room, legs spread wide across a cot built for three, belly empty and moaning for a man. There are mornings where she throws things. There are mornings where she hangs half her body from the window, wailing.

“We can call the doctor,” says Komi.

Alarmelu clicks her tongue. “For what? She’s going mad. What will he tell us that we don’t already know?”

“He may give medicine.”

“I’ll tell you what he’ll do, he’ll take her away, put her in a hospital somewhere,” Alarmelu says. “Is that what you want? The children need a mother. A mad mother is still a mother.”

Mother she is, and mother she does, for even in her most frightening fits, Maragatavali shakes herself free to see to her children’s needs. Her mind wanders—away with her heart, perhaps—but returns always to resolve tiffs, plait hair, or wipe tears with her thumb’s gentle edge.

“She can’t even come to cook,” Komi says, “what good will she be back in Bombay?”

But where there are women, there is always a way, and Alarmelu is quick to thank Komi for the reminder. “Bring that girl here,” she says one afternoon before a meal, “bring that Lakshmi here and let’s show her the best use of her hands.”

They fry mustard seeds in oil, coat daal with ghee, and grind rice flour to a thin, melting paste. Alarmelu teaches Lakshmi to dry red chilis in the hot sun, to grind them into powder with mortar, pestle, and fist alone. “Good for your anger,” she says with a laugh. “Show your husband your anger like this!” Lakshmi flattens balls of flour in her palm, rolls the water-wheat dough into chapatis that spark, speckle, and puff on an open flame. Alarmelu shows her to break coconuts while squatting in a sari, to extract the flesh with a dull steel spoon, to season food without even tasting.

When rust stains the space between Lakshmi’s legs, it is her mother she calls, and it is that mad Maragatavali who sets aside her stitching and comes running, cooing at the bathroom door.

Lakshmi’s face is solemn. Long before her mother’s madness, when her breasts began to bud, Maragatavali had said, “Blood will come, and stay for some time.” Her mother wraps cheesecloth into her petticoat, ties it tightly to her hem, and whispers a kiss into her temple. But it is Alaremelu Amma who pulls her from the bathroom, sends her to sleep in the old outhouse and forbids her to lift a finger until four days have passed.

“You can use the outhouse bathroom,” Alarmelu offers. “You have your books. I will bring your food. Nothing in the house should be touched until after four days, and then only after a bath.”

Lakshmi, whose mother has cooked and cleaned and loafed aimlessly in the Matunga flat, both with blood and without, narrows her eyes. “This is a prison.”

Alarmelu squats, the hem of her cotton sari catching in her wide hips. “It is.”

“You don’t do it.”

“I don’t.”

“Then why do I?”

“I live here,” she says, “in this house, with Komi, where we have no husbands and no men to bother us except those brothers of yours. We have been lucky, us ladies, to be away from them for so long. When your mother married, your father was different. Your husband may not be. Most men mind the blood, and they think God minds too.”

“God minds?”

“God doesn’t mind,” Alarmelu says, her voice deepening in its certainty. “Men mind, and it is easier to change God’s mind than a man’s.”

Alarmelu stares into the shining panic between Lakshmi’s brows.

“Sweet girl,” she says. “You enjoy this week. No chores to do here in the outhouse!”

“You are going to marry me off,” Lakshmi says. “I don’t want to get married.”

Alarmelu stands. “No one does,” she says.

She goes to the kitchen, where Komi is waiting with a pen and paper.

“Good,” she says. “Write as I say.”

In thin, messy script, her poor widowed granddaughter writes Krishna Iyer’s name, and then the message for the telegram: “The time has come to make a match.”

◆

The whole house is made Mahabali. Gold comes in swathes: from friends, from the girl’s father, from friends, from funds scraped together by Alarmelu and her neighbors. Earrings, chains, pendants carved into elephants and oms, jimiki studded in pink princess stones. Two nose rings come, one for the engagement and another for the wedding, and a pullaku to pinch and pierce the skin between her nostrils. Lakshmi touches the round pegs behind them, wondering at the holes to be hammered into her flesh. “So pretty,” says Komi, but Lakshmi wrinkles her nose. Gold comes in packages and envelopes, in bags and velvet-lined boxes, in tiffin tins carried from friends’ purses, and Alarmelu buzzes and hums with the arrival of each one, laying them across Lakshmi’s skin first before sending them into a locked wooden drawer.

The local ladies congratulate Lakshmi, bless her with good wishes. “May you make a good home, a good wife, and have many sons,” they say, as if daughters are an afterthought, as if the house they were visiting were not full of daughters left over. “Periyavalar!” they exclaim to her, to each other, to Alarmelu Amma in sing-songy sweetness. “The girl has come of age! The girl has grown up!”

Lakshmi clutches her aching belly, her swollen sides. She has a pimple, which Komi puts paste on in the evenings: gram flour, goat’s milk, and lemon. Komi, always Kutty, is the only one who enters the outhouse before bed, massaging the skin of Lakshmi’s scalp with coconut oil while she cries.

“So much gold,” she sobs.

“So much gold,” Komi agrees. “We don’t usually mind all this nonsense here. Only for you, this time, your first time.”

“Why?” Lakshmi asks.

Komi’s hands are soft and strong, grease-buttered with oil. She holds Lakshmi’s shoulders in her lined palms. “Your husband may do things this way. What will you do then, if you don’t know how to do them?”

“I don’t want any husband,” Lakshmi pouts.

“Don’t say such things,” Komi says. “Some men do things this way, they can still be good, ha? Some good men don’t know another way. You can change them, or you can love them. Love is easier.”

Lakshmi exhales. “Do you love any men?”

Komi touches her bald head and smiles. “How did I become this way, then?”

Lakshmi touches Komi’s ear, the whisp of scalp where hair might have grown.

“Child,” Komi says, eyes shining, “be grateful to God that you have been given the chance to grow up.”

◆

Once the match is made, Lakshmi’s suitcase is layered with the gifted gold. Alarmelu packs the case, lists the things that Lakshmi will need now that she is a woman, recites them aloud as if the girl is taking notes. Saris, petticoats, front-button blouses made to measure, sanitary cloths, bar soap and body powder. She folds clothes while she talks, her steady stream of speech making a rhythm over the sobs behind her.

She unhooks her chain from her neck and walks to the wardrobe, where Lakshmi is hunched in a sobbing heap.

“I’ve gone mad,” Lakshmi says. “No husband will have me, I’m mad, I’m mad.”

“You are not mad. You are foolish, like your father. Get up, girl, crying is the silliest costume of all.”

Lakshmi stands.

Alarmelu clips her chain around Lakshmi’s neck. “One day, you will see. When I am an old woman, you will be happy, and you will understand, and then you will thank me.”

Lakshmi touches the corners of her eyes.

She whispers something in English, then stops speaking.

What is it, Alarmelu almost asks, what did you mean to say. But then, she thinks, perhaps it is safer for a curse to fall on deaf ears.

◆

There was the wedding, of course, somewhere off in the country, because the boy had been brought up there and Lakshmi would be an orthodox bride. Even Alarmelu had some hesitance when she learned this, that the boy’s family found piety alone insufficient, that the smallest observation of impurity could suffer serious consequence, but Krishna was confident. “This is an excellent match,” he wrote. The letter—which came many months later, long after he had returned home and Maragatavali had returned to Matunga by train—was read aloud to her by Komi Kutty, who clutched her neck in relief. “A good boy, a good family!”

And so it was that Lakshmi busied herself with baby-making, while her mother slid slowly back toward sanity. With her husband home, Maragatavali’s wits stayed well within reach, or so her letters made it seem, and it was only a matter of time before Alarmelu was asked to attend Lakshmi’s third pregnancy.

This is how she comes to be on a bus, directions hand-drawn by Komi on a map from the market. She cannot read the map or Maragatavali’s letters, and at each stop she asks the driver: shall I get down here, this place? No?

Lakshmi lives in Madras, and while the bus carries her across the country, Alarmelu imagines the hours of travel between blue points on the map: Bombay and Quilon, Madras and Kerala. We are all one country now, she thinks, or so they say, so they say. The girl carried a suitcase at only eleven years of age, she recalls, but she holds the repurposed rice bag containing her clothes tightly to her chest with pride. From the window she watches the green of the Kerala countryside give way to dry dirt roads and dry dirty cities. I was born in God’s own country, she thinks, no wonder I’ve never left.

When she arrives at the house—five rooms, two floors, sufficiently luxurious—she hands the husband her bag.

“We weren’t expecting you,” he says, scrambling.

“I am a mother,” she says, “Who else would come?”

Lakshmi greets her with a warmth that Alarmelu had worried she would withhold. Her belly is swollen, bright, and her hips are practiced in their balance. She shows Alarmelu the house: the servants paid to sweep and cut vegetables, a stove that lights on its own, a tap indoors with water that runs hot. Alarmelu’s chest swells. Well, she thinks, well.

Lakshmi is a strange mother: haphazard, affectionate, unconcerned. Her daughters rise at odd hours, run ruthlessly between the yard and kitchen, and only the eldest, Kamakshi, offers her hand to help in the home. Still, Lakshmi insists that they spend more time with schoolbooks than the stove.

“What good will come of that?” Alarmelu asks.

Lakshmi lifts her belly, straightens her back. “My daughters,” she says, “will be doctors.”

But even in this home, one without gas lamps or well-drawn water, there is still the outhouse, a tiny shack behind the house where Lakshmi spends four days each month, where every baby must be born, where the girls will be sent once womanhood becomes them. Alarmelu asks whether the girls’ books will be welcome there as well.

“I keep some there,” Lakshmi says. “For me, only me. Not for them. My girls will never go there.”

In this home, with this husband? Alarmelu thinks, but this she does not say. Instead she shifts conversation to the ceremonies, which begin the next day. First the seemantham, where Lakshmi wears a black sari and kunkumum in her parted hair, her in-laws standing in stony silence around the priests’ fire. Then, the valaikaapu, where ladies fill the house, bringing bags of gold and glass bangles, husbands evicted in a sea of screams: “No gents allowed!” They eat sweets and sing, slide bracelets onto Lakshmi’s arms until they reach her elbows, her wrists wrapped in an armor of well-wishes and womanhood.

When water pools between her legs, Lakshmi squats in the outhouse with Alarmelu and the midwife, her thighs spread wide, bangles tinkling together as she grips the wall and groans. The baby is round-faced and rat-like, a thatch of black hair plastered to her forehead, covered in white wax and the same thin blood that coats her mother’s thighs. Alarmelu holds her in her palms, that sweet, flat-bottomed girl, while the midwife cuts the cord with shears. “A girl,” the midwife says, without inflection.

“A girl!” Alarmelu says.

“A girl,” Lakshmi says, and smiles.

“Not everyone is so happy with three girls,” the midwife says, her eyebrows raised, while she wipes wet cloths across the child.

The child squeals and Alarmelu laughs. “Already opinionated! Like her mother.”

“Bhavani,” Lakshmi says, “her name is Bhavani.”

The doctor comes soon after, and when he has left, Alarmelu leaves Lakshmi nursing. She goes first to bathe, where she rinses cold bucket water into her skin and hair, scrubbing herself free of birth and blood. When she is dry, she wraps herself in clean clothes, her sari from the outhouse carefully discarded in the same bin as the bloody birthing towels. She coils her hair and enters the kitchen, where Lakshmi’s husband and mother-in-law sip coffee quietly from tin cups.

“A girl,” Alarmelu says, and she is pleased when the husband smiles. “Bhavani.”

The mother-in-law’s lips tighten. “All is well? Baby healthy? Good. Punyavachanam in ten days’ time.”

“Shall I give Lakshmi a bath and bring her and Bhavani right to upstairs, then?” she asks.

The husband shakes his head. Alarmelu understands.

In the outhouse, Bhavani sleeps in Lakshmi’s elbow.

“You’ve already showered,” Lakshmi scolds.

“Why did you come back here?”

“You cannot go back to the house for ten days,” Alarmelu says, and then, “I will stay here to help you.”

Lakshmi sighs.

Alarmelu clicks her tongue. “Separate, yes, I thought as much, but this outhouse? For ten days they keep you here? After giving birth? Appa! Ridiculous.”

Lakshmi’s brow creases. “I am here because of you,” she says.

Alarmelu shakes her head. “You are here because God made you a woman.”

“I wanted to go to school,” Lakshmi says.

“We can never escape it,” Alarmelu says, “we women can never escape it.” She stares at Bhavani in Lakshmi’s arms, the stack of books beside them. Her hands shake.

◆

Alarmelu arrives again in Madras two weeks before her seventy-fifth birthday. Her skin sags in lumps like the leather lining an elephant’s eyes. Her hair and teeth are white, yellow, and thin, and when she moves it is with a walking stick, her suitcase towed behind her by some grateful great-great-grandchild.

In the ten years that have passed since her last visit, the five-room home has been made into a two-story kingdom: four bedrooms, three bathrooms, two verandahs. One Indian toilet, tucked behind the first floor staircase. The whole house reeks of wealth and the west, its opulence made obvious for the eyes of others. For what other reason, Alarmelu asks herself, might one family have so many rooms in which to eat and sleep and shit? She thinks of her hut, and the small flat shared by five where Lakshmi was brought up. She wonders if her great-great-grandchildren have ever become lost in their own house, if any of them have ever been lonely.

The time for loneliness is upon them, anyway, now that Kamakshi is marrying. Alarmelu recalls Lakshmi’s brothers, those black-eyed boys whose expressions opened into sadness upon learning that Lakshmi would leave them. The invitation was unexpected, but rules around widows and weddings are always somehow worked around or waived: Alarmelu is allowed in the home—not the wedding hall—where she can offer her blessings absent any umbrella of misfortune.

She is ushered by a servant to the sitting room, and the family is summoned. She is offered hot, creamy coffee, which scalds her throat while she waits for them to arrive.

They arrive in a hustle and bustle, all dhoom dhamak between the ceremonies and served luncheon. Lakshmi wears a silk sari, a streak of gray pressed into the hair at her temple, Alarmelu’s simple chain nestled in the catch of her grand jewels.

“My girl,” Alarmelu says.

Lakshmi hands her a tiffin stuffed by the wedding hall chefs. “Your lunch,” she says, “please eat.”

“Blessings first,” Alarmelu says, setting the tiffin by her coffee.

They make a queue: first the men—the husband and soon to be son-in-law, both bare-chested and bathed in fragrant oil—and then the ladies. The men lay flat before her in turn, grazing their noses against the floor in a swoop and standing before she can touch her hands to their heads. The girls take time. Sankari touches Alarmelu Amma’s feet, closes her eyes as if in prayer, hugs her when she stands. Kamakshi is blushing, beautiful, her flowered braid held up by her sister’s hands. When she presses her small forehead to the floor, Alarmelu closes her eyes and calls to Parvati Devi: bless her, bless her, bless her.

“Many happy returns,” she says when Kamakshi stands.

Lakshmi kneels, last in line to avoid a show, her forehead grazing the space between Alarmeleu’s feet. Alarmelu’s arms circle absently above her head.

She searches the room, helps her great-granddaughter stand. “Where is Bhavani?”

Lakshmi inhales.

“That girl I delivered,” Alarmelu says, “where is she? Where is Bhavani?”

Sankari pauses, stares open-mouthed at her mother, then points toward the outhouse.

“Bhavani?” She touches her hand to her chest.

Alarmelu looks at the husband.

He starts to speak.

Lakshmi interrupts. “The outhouse,” she says. “She is in the outhouse.”

Alarmelu shifts her gaze. “Bhavani?” she asks. “Periyavalar?” Weight tumbles in her belly. Her voice is a whisper.

Lakshmi meets her gaze. She nods. She tilts her eyes downward and gathers her family toward the door.