reading

“Tigers, swans and rampion—Anita Felicelli’s Love Songs for a Lost Continent captures the senses with skillful explorations of sexual being and human vulnerability. This collection not only rallies the imagination; it challenges the intellectual self and the diverse self. A beautifully rendered collection, both enchanting and lyrical.”

“This is a wild, startling collection about loss, migration, colonization, and constantly shifting identities. What does it mean to be an outsider, and where does our power really lie? For the characters in Love Songs for a Lost Continent, living and loving in the margins is as precarious as a tightrope walk.”

“Love Songs for a Lost Continent is an expansive, inventive meditation on the shifting landscape of identity, on how people can be shaped and reshaped by violence and power and love. Anita Felicelli has a singular eye for the moments that transfigure lives, and this tremendous debut collection announces the arrival of a stunning new voice.”

“These stories probe the limits of love, the fluidity of home, and the pressures and resistance of women in a patriarchal landscape without ever losing humor, engagement, and a quiet elegance and tenderness. They move with assurance through ideas, themes, and landscapes revealing what is new within what might have been expected. A very strong debut.”

“The thirteen sparkling pieces in Anita Felicelli’s debut collection grapple with the power of fiction itself: the mythologies handed down to us, the false promises of the American dream, and the stories we don’t recognize we’re telling ourselves.”

Nonetheless, reluctant and angry and ashamed, she’d followed him to his home at the edge of the village. But to her surprise, Anand was resolutely romantic, so unlike the boys in her engineering college. He recited poetry, and his pursuit of her was focused and thoughtful. He read the books she recommended, even the British murder mystery novels, discussing why the clues didn’t quite add up or marveling at the skillfulness of the author’s plotting. They attended outdoor movies every Saturday night, eating popcorn and drinking Thums Up cola at the intermission and sitting in the back, out of sight of the gossipers.

After the tiger was murdered, newspapers across India branded Sita a killer, and all the charm fell away from her memories of those early courtship days. Everyone claimed they knew what had happened. At parties in the neighboring state, raconteurs and conspiracy theorists drunk on cashew feni would put forth detailed hypotheses on why she’d done it and how, describing all manner of bloody horrors. In the village streets, the wallahs gossiped about the latest clues being considered in the police investigation. Grandmothers spent long languid afternoons sipping tea and munching on vada, and although they started with the best of intentions—talking about their children’s marital problems and shaking their heads with sighs of ayyo—eventually the conversation would turn to what sort of family Sita must have had, to marry her to a tiger, and what sort of family the dead tiger must have had, to marry him off to a Brahmin girl. Environmental groups called for the death penalty. The shame Sita had forgotten about returned.

It was a clear Friday morning in March when a neuroscientist loaned his Smriti 3000 fMRI lie-detection machine to the police department in Sita’s village. Jacaranda trees in front of the hospital’s double doors were blooming, their mauve canopy of blossoms thick and sweet. Beneath the trees, the fallen flowers were nearly reflective, shimmering purple in the light that bleached the gravel road. The Smriti 3000 arrived in two parts: the first was a human-sized computer that needed to be lifted by five heavyset men, and the second was a cylindrical MRI machine with its trail of sensors like red roses on floppy rainbow stems. It was an oracle made of metal, fit for the modern age, and it occupied the hospital room with its cheap Formica-topped desk and black rotary telephone with all the phony confidence and ostentation of a slot machine.

Dr. Kumaraswamy, the neuroscientist who had invented the machine, appeared at the hospital twenty minutes after the machine arrived. He was small and frail with wide grey-brown lips and long narrow nostrils. He walked with an engraved silver walking cane, which he employed liberally to admonish people who irritated him.

“Careful! I say, careful, you bloody moron!” he shouted at the young man trying to follow his directions on how to attach the sensors to the young woman’s head.

He spent several hours training all of the hospital technicians and a few police officers on how to record Sita’s responses and how to play the interrogation tapes he had compiled to question her.

Senior-ranking police officers watched Dr. Kumaraswamy with a mixture of resentment and admiration. Resentment because he was a doctor trying to usurp their role of ferreting the truth from recalcitrant subjects—and admiration because they believed medicine was the most noble of professions. However cumbersome, however much it jeopardized their jobs, the machine had the potential to ensure that the most elusive and dangerous suspects in India were put away forever or sentenced to death.

Fifty thousand times stronger than the earth’s magnetic force, Dr. Kumaraswamy explained. “This is the strongest machine of its kind.”

“How does it work?” one of the officers asked.

“It sends radio waves into the suspect’s body,” the doctor said. “And knocks the protons out of line, then reads the signals released by the protons. See these? The protons in the areas where the oxygenated blood flows produce the strongest signals.”

Two police officers and the commissioner hovered around him.

“Are you sure it works?” one of them asked.

“Yes, absolutely,” the doctor said.

“You know about the woman we have here?” the commissioner asked. He tapped a shiny black billy club on the table. “Are there any precautions we should take, doctor?”

“None, unless she’s pregnant or wearing an intrauterine device,” he replied.

“Not a problem, doctor,” the commissioner said.

“Then the technician will hook her up. And the computer will tell you if she’s lying.”

Sita’s lawyer arrived to represent her during the interrogation, but he said nothing as wires were fastened to Sita’s head. He was a tall man who wore a crisp button-down shirt and spoke with a British accent even when he was speaking Tamil. Although he had been born in Madurai, he’d studied in England from a young age, and he’d returned to India “to do good.” He said this without even the slightest hint of wit or amusement.

One of the police officers stood outside the room, his thick arms crossed and his head tilted slightly to listen. The tape played a series of sentences. The machine was humming as it measured the way the young woman’s brain responded to them. Bored, the commissioner and the other police officer went downstairs to eat at the cafeteria. The young woman squirmed inside the MRI machine. Bang, bang, bang. The gong-like pulses after each question were so loud they could be heard down the hall.

“Keep still,” the technician said.

She wiggled her toes in defiance. The technician took a pamphlet and thwacked her toes with it. She gave one last half-hearted kick and stilled.

A proper voice with a British accent continued to state sentences, each of them short and declarative, together forming a black web of her misdeeds, both real and imagined. The technician paced uneasily back and forth in front of the machine to make sure there were no errors, while the officer and Sita’s lawyer took notes. The officer scratched his notes in longhand in a spiral-bound notebook. Sita’s lawyer hunted and pecked on his laptop with a bony index finger. Inside the white tunnel of the machine, Sita closed her eyes and tried to remember the city of pink palaces, the rosy homes of kings and their consorts, as the voice told her a tale about her husband’s death.

The voice on the tape was a polite, confident woman’s voice. As it uttered the shaky narrative investigators had pieced together, the machine registered that a quiet territory of Sita’s brain was whirring, responding to the words:

I poured arsenic in the batter.

I walked to the bus stop.

I took a bus to Srinivasan’s house.

I had planned the murder in the weeks before.

Srinivasan knew about the murder.

We took the rickshaw to the train station.

It was strange how the phrases were worded, as if the proper-sounding voice was meant to be a stand-in for her own husky one. She wasn’t quite sure what the Smriti 3000 measured, but she’d gathered from the technician’s chitchat with her lawyer that a part of her brain lit up to tell the technician that she had a memory of the sentence being uttered, that it was not an alien thought, but one that comfortably wedged into her mind like the teenage summers spent lounging on the colored sands of Kanyakumari with her brothers or the cheap mystery novels she read. And hearing the sentences, she was persuaded. After all, she had wanted the tiger dead. She’d grown repulsed by him, her contempt born from overfamiliarity.

But during a break, she complained privately to her lawyer that she didn’t actually remember what the machine said she remembered. Her lawyer suggested that perhaps she had blacked out the truth. “People don’t always know the truth about themselves or what’s happened to them.” He said this with no hint of emotion, as if it were simply information, not necessarily applicable to her situation. When she raised her eyebrows, he assured her this wasn’t what he told the prosecutors. Confusion and loneliness swirled through her.

The technician shepherded her back into the eerie white tunnel of the MRI. The voice and the booming sounds commenced again. She kept her eyes closed.

Outside the Smriti 3000, electrical signals zinged from the colorful wires attached to her shaved scalp and ran to the large computer where they spit out their results. “EXPERIENTIAL KNOWLEDGE” said the screen in big red letters, a proclamation of truth.

I did not care that my husband had died.

“What happened?” asked Sita as the technician pulled her from the tunnel. “What does that mean?”

The technician administering the test nodded. He unclipped the sensors from Sita’s head and gestured at the truth printed on the screen.

“But it’s wrong,” she said.

He didn’t respond.

The technician gave her a gel to clean the stickiness from her head. It was still horrifying to her to feel the bristles of her hair emerging on her scalp, so similar to Anand’s whiskers—prickly, tiny needles spearing her fingertips. Her hair had once been so long, it had extended the full length of her spine, a luxurious cascade of black curls. She hadn’t cut it since her schooldays, though she trimmed the ends occasionally. She was ashamed of her vanity now.

Her lawyer shook her hand, and hurried off to his next client. He was absolutely sincere in everything he said, and she knew she was supposed to trust him because he’d studied at Cambridge and came so highly recommended, but all she could feel was dismay that her life was now in the hands of some British man who didn’t even know how to make jalebis, who didn’t understand it was preposterous to think she could pour rat poison into the batter and not have the finished product taste toxic. Anand would have known straightaway something was wrong. In fact, he probably would have beaten her for making jalebis incorrectly. He’d hit her for less in the past, his claws raking her face. The villagers all knew how he treated her, but they met their knowledge with silence.

For months before the tiger’s death, she’d been seeing Srinivasan during long, lazy afternoons. He was a literature professor at a local college. She met him at a reading by a foreign author one weekend in January. They both had read the book before the reading and brought their copies of the book to be signed, but afterward, during the book signing, he whispered he hadn’t been satisfied with the ending, and since she too was dissatisfied, they invented other more exciting endings—the butler was actually a killer! No, the butler had been on holiday and the maid set him up to take the fall.

After the author had signed Sita’s copy, Sita was ready to leave, but Srinivasan was waiting for her outside. They strolled through the muddy village streets, keeping their bodies a modest few feet apart, before leaving each other with long looks and promises to meet again the next afternoon. Anand was angry with her for coming home late, but at least he hadn’t thrown anything. He lolled on the carpet in front of the television as he watched a game show, growling as the man he hoped would win was eliminated. He rolled over on his back and stretched his limbs, exposing his white furry belly, and then flipped back over again, licking his paws.

It was so satisfying to clean the tiny house during the morning while Srinivasan taught his literature courses. It was so satisfying to leave for a leisurely walk on the beach with her lover—even the word “lover” was thrilling, perhaps partly because of the breathtaking danger and the terrible consequences if the tiger found out, but she did not admit that thought. It was too dark, too disturbing, too complicated.

She and Srinivasan would spend hours wandering between driftwood and wet ribbons of olive-green kelp, dodging the low black cloud of flies that buzzed up from rough sand. Cow dung and cowrie shells. Closer to the water, the sand was packed, icy smooth. They would stand knee-deep in the waves, feeling the fierce rush of it returning to the ocean, the salty white foam like gentle soapsuds around their toes.

Srinivasan wore his straight dark hair so that it fell just above his shoulders. He would tell her stories about his class, advising her on books to read to improve her vocabulary and her familiarity with Anglo literature. He would run a finger around the curve of her cheek, look deeply into her eyes. It was like something out of an American movie where people believed they were soul mates.

His kisses tasted like fresh mint and sweet-bitter fennel seeds, rather than blood and fresh meat. His mother was Punjabi and he was an excellent cook, claiming his proficiency arose from his long-term bachelor status. He would invite her to his house for succulent curries and naan and freshly fried samosas. There was something intoxicating in their connection, consisting as it did almost entirely of delicious food and literature. She’d been taught her whole life that a Tamil woman should be devoted to her husband, should cook and clean and serve him. But in books, in movies, there was romance, and although most people she knew were driven by obligation, her own sense of romance—that it tossed you out on the edge of a cliff, just waiting to fall, that it shook you through and through like a violent earthquake—was vastly more powerful than her sense of duty.

And when he asked her to run away with him to Jaipur, the Pink City, because he’d accepted a job there, she said yes immediately, thinking of fairy tales, thinking of the intricate facades of the palaces she’d seen only in friends’ vacation pictures, thinking that all she wanted was to escape her village, escape the people with whom she’d long since stopped identifying.

She and her older brother, Deepak were standing on opposite sides of a fence that divided the visiting room of the women’s prison from the prison itself. The floors were smooth, unstained white-grey concrete that stank of urine. Behind her brother, she saw a vending machine. She imagined putting a few rupees in the machine, the Cadbury chocolate bar she would buy, the way it would melt on her tongue, a soft brown drizzle in the heat.

“Then why did the machine tell the doctors you did?” Her brother wore a pink shirt and his copper-colored skin smelled like Old Spice, a scent he’d bought from a store full of imports. The stench of Anand—mud and fresh grass, the dirty fur, the sweaty skin of a hunter, the metallic taste of blood when he kissed her—never left her mind now, so she stuck her nose between the bars and breathed her brother in. He stepped back, uncertain, and she pulled back, too, eyeing him warily. Why was he so certain about her guilt?

She shook her head. “It told the technician, not the doctors. But I tell you, I’m innocent.”

“Come on. They’re doctors. And doctors invented the machine,” said Deepak. “It’s scientific. They can tell if you’re lying.” Perhaps, like most people, he was giving too much credit to the prevailing notions of the time, that they were right, that they were good, simply because the powerful espoused them.

She knew otherwise. “No, they can’t. The machine isn’t right. I didn’t poison him.”

“Okay, well, since there was arsenic in the dosas and you made the dosas—” Deepak looked away.

“They said it was in the jalebi, not the dosas.” Sita stepped forward, unsettled, wanting to probe what he knew.

Deepak continued to speak, but most of the conversation seemed trivial to Sita, filled as it was with reminders of a world she probably wouldn’t see again. He shared the minutiae of their parents’ health troubles. She wanted to tell him to stop, but she didn’t know what they would talk about if he didn’t elaborate on her mother’s hypochondria and her father’s bowel troubles. Was there any other common point of reference? He didn’t read, didn’t watch movies, didn’t think about the world. His entire conception of reality grew out of the tiny corner of the world where he’d lived since birth.

Apple pie and sausages. Snow angels and men. Stuff she would probably never want to eat or make, only read about in American books. And yet, and yet—just knowing of exotic things that happened in places other than the village was enough to rattle her sense of reality, make her realize that her life in the village had been more limited than other people’s lives elsewhere. Western nonsense, Deepak would have said, if she’d given voice to any of these ideas, if she’d shared what she thought. But East, West—anybody could be free. She knew girls from school who had been free. They’d gone out dancing with boyfriends and planned careers in marketing. When they graduated, they had not gotten married, at least not immediately, but had gone to work in jobs they liked in the city. They shaped their reality, they sculpted it. They didn’t wait for the stars and planets to align. The world is changing, she wanted to tell Deepak, but she never did.

Instead she nodded, pretending to listen to the litany of ailments their parents suffered, tuning in again when Deepak began talking about Srinivasan. He said that newspapers reported that her boyfriend had passed the lie-detector test and was living back in Jaipur.

“Why hasn’t he written me, at least?”

Deepak shrugged. Sita could tell that he thought she was being shallow, focusing on the wrong things, impractical nonsense again. She could see it on his visage, in the terrible smug curl of his lip as he spoke sentences he intended to be reassuring.

She was supposed to understand that she deserved Srinivasan’s scorn—she’d done something so terrible, she would never recover her dignity. She was in prison awaiting trial because she deserved it. She was not supposed to be angry, nice girls didn’t get angry. Oh, nobody said, you can’t be angry, but it was implied, wasn’t it? The way people looked away when she tried to explain how wrong they had it, when her voice rose just a fraction, when she started moving her hands. She didn’t know who had murdered Anand, of course, but it wasn’t her. She didn’t concoct the murder plot her own attorney called “fiendish” as if they were all characters in the black-and-white Nick and Nora movie she had seen at a film festival in Chennai last year.

It was only after Deepak left that she had time to wonder why he believed the arsenic was in the dosas, not the jalebi. The machines claimed that she remembered pouring poison into the syrup, and this supposed fact was what the newspapers reported.

The first thing Sita did when she and Srinivasan arrived in the city of pink palaces was to locate a doctor who would perform abortions with a forged certification. The certification claimed that the abortion was necessary to protect her health, but it was written by a doctor who drew breath only in her imagination: Dr. Venkateshwaran. She didn’t tell Srinivasan, of course. She was too afraid of what he would say, what he would think of her. Instead, she snuck out one morning while he was at his new university job.

Morning air. The green, watery smell of monsoon rains as the bright orange rickshaw hurtled toward the clinic. After the procedure, she woke from the anesthesia in tears, not sure why she was crying. The city doctor held something that smelled terrible. “Mam, see here, you were pregnant with a tiger cub,” he said with an expression of disgust, showing her the dish, the tiny curled tiger fetus, furless and grey and still covered with viscous amniotic fluid. A tiny tail unfurled beside his body. Unmistakable pointy ears sticking up from the sides of his head. She breathed a sigh of relief that she’d escaped being the mother of this tiny copy of Anand.

“Here, you take it,” he said.

“I don’t want it,” she said. “You throw it out.” For more than twenty years, she’d visited the same village doctor. He helped deliver her. She couldn’t imagine what he would have said about the tiger fetus, if he’d performed the procedure.

The city doctor forced her to take the dish, and her hands trembled as she took hold of it, but by the time she arrived home, she’d changed her mind about throwing it out. Or perhaps she’d convinced herself she’d changed her mind because she felt strange about throwing it aside, like it meant nothing, when it actually represented her freedom. She was too superstitious to throw it away, and so instead she laid it gently in a large embossed silver jewelry box, as a reminder of what had happened, of what she had done. The box sealed well, sealing away the stench of the aborted fetus.

As much as it saved her, the abortion proved to be her undoing, too, for it was how the police located her. The doctor’s nurse saw the news of the tiger’s death, the call for information about his murderer. She reported the woman who sought an abortion of a tiger cub at the clinic. As newspapers would report, the police discovered the fetal cub inside a jewelry box.

News of her abortion inflamed not only the villagers, but also the entire country. A woman who would forge a note to secure an abortion of her tiger cub could surely be motivated to kill the tiger that was his father as well, or so they seemed to think.

What Sita couldn’t understand was how learning of a possible motive so easily transformed speculation into a firm belief that she had murdered the tiger. How easily the fictions that a closed circle of people told each other could grow wings, take flight as if they were truth.

After the story of what happened grew fuzzy with time, after the newspapers and the local gossips transformed her story into theirs, it was hard to get any sort of clarity back, to disentangle what she had imagined from what she remembered. She stood on the precipice of reality, but it was not her reality. The memories she understood to be true before Smriti 3000’s proper voice had spoken would never be recovered. Instead she had truth as conveyed by the Smriti 3000.

That evening around six, young professionals were arriving home from the city, carrying empty silver tiffin boxes and books for reading on the train. The women she no longer envied, the men who rejected her parents’ efforts to marry her off. They were returning to their homes just as she planned to leave hers. No streetlights. Through the window, a faint pink shimmer from the setting sun filtered through the arecas, illuminating potholes and deep gouges on the village road, and she imagined this light was like the light she would see all the time in her new life, in the city of pink palaces.

She made jalebis first. She stood over the cast iron wok, squirting long curling strings of dough into concentric circles in the hot oil. After the jalebi had fried, sucking up the oil, turning a deep gold, she dunked them in sugar syrup. Was there arsenic in the batter? Once the machine told her there was, her mind filled in other information, building off the first lie: the batter was laced with rat poison she had purchased that day. As she dunked the jalebi, she was careful not to lick her fingers as she usually did. She washed her hands thoroughly with the half-dissolved bar of green-blue soap by the sink. Next, she mixed hing, coriander, and mustard seeds into the curd rice. The okra curry was from the day before. She made the lemon sevai last, tossing rice sticks and lemon juice with gusto. As she added chopped coriander leaves, a lizard ran up the wall. She knocked it off and across the cool teal linoleum tiles with a broom, sweeping it out of the house. The night before, she’d prepared the dosa batter, and left it to ferment in a plastic container as she always did. She opened the top of the container and put another cast iron pan on the range. She sniffed the container, noticing it smelled a little different, not bad, just slightly sweet and metallic.

A farewell dinner. Not that Anand knew that it was a farewell, but for her, it had been the most complete way to say goodbye. All of Anand’s favorite foods, including one of the primary reasons he had wanted to marry a human wife—the large, just-fried dosas. She liked the sense of closure that preparing the feast provided.

He had been in a good mood for some time and hadn’t hit or kicked her in ages. The last fight had involved a lamp flung across the room, smashing against the wall and leaving a red streak from the painted ceramic base. Since that night, everything had stayed quiet for several weeks, yet she was overcome with joy at the thought of her escape.

On the table, she set out stainless steel bowls filled with curd rice, lemon sevai, vada, and okra curry. Fragrant steam rose from the bowls, whitening the air. Anand arrived home at 6:45 as he always did, his fur matted with sweat, lying in shaggy orange and white clumps around his muscular shoulders. His big paws were muddy, flecked with bits of grass from hunting in the nearby forest, and the thick wide nails curling over the edge of his paws were black with grit.

Sita welcomed him with a kiss. She didn’t like touching him anymore, but she did not want him to suspect anything. She swallowed the urge to spit in his large eyes. His whiskers worked against her upper lip and cheeks like rasps on alabaster. Places around her mouth were rubbed raw and red now from his kisses. He sauntered into the bedroom to freshen up in the cement shower. She arranged the jalebis on a plate and placed the plate on the table next to a jar of hot onion pickle. Again she washed her hands. She began frying the dosas he liked so much.

When he returned to the kitchen, Anand was discoursing on deforestation, complaining about how his tracking of deer and buffalo had changed as a result of humans. She poured some Kingfisher beer into a bowl and set it out in front of him on the table. Without a word to her, his enormous wide pink tongue lapped it up. When he was finished drinking, he tore into a dosa and slurped from a bright orange pool of molaga podi. She tuned out his lecture. Soon this charade would be over.

She touched her thali, turning the gold pendant first one way with her thumb and then the other, feeling a familiar pang of shame. Just a few months after they married, Anand had begun to snap at her. There would be good days for long stretches and then, without any clear warning, he would snap, “Be quiet or I shall show you my true shape.” They were walking by a lake one day when he repeated the words. By now she had come to think of him as an enormous cat, and she laughingly replied, “Fine, show me your true shape.”

He growled at her and gnashed his teeth. Sharp and suicide white. His nostrils flaring. Steel blue lake reflected in his bright round eyes. She walked backward for a moment, before spinning and running. He chased her to the base of a jujube tree as she fled up into the branches, coaxing her down several hours later with a slim volume of Irish poetry and a bowl of gulab jamun.

Once she invited him to show his true shape, there was no way to turn it off. He could no longer suppress his true shape, the way he had during their first few weeks of courtship. What she once experienced as a passionate intensity transformed into an energy that was threatening, raging, controlling. He wanted the house to be spotless—no easy feat since he shed long thin orange hairs all over the linoleum floor that collected into hair balls that blew around the room on hot days when she turned on the ceiling fan. He wanted everything in its right place, his music and books scrupulously alphabetized. He was enraged about the politics of the forest, the relentless press of the human population against the trees, and sometimes he took it out on her.

He did peruse the books she suggested, and they still went to the movies. Little luxuries, but at first, somehow, they made up for the larger devastations. For a time, she told herself that his true shape was not so bad.

The first time he hit her with his enormous paw, it was painful because it was surprising, not because the blow had much force. It didn’t leave a bruise. There was no proof that what happened had happened and this absence of evidence made it easy to push the hitting, the shoving, out of her consciousness. But her family, for all its faults, had been a gentle one. She’d never been beaten in her life and so she had never developed the vigilance, the anxiety that those who are beaten from an early age grow as an invisible second skin. She soldiered on. By the tenth or twelfth time, her ribs were streaked black and blue. She tasted blood for the first time. He always explained that she didn’t seem to understand the first time he told her things. She only responded to extreme messages, to violent measures, and for that he was sorry. When her brothers saw her after one of his beatings, she concocted a story about falling into a statue at the Meenakshi temple, but she could tell they didn’t believe her.

On the night in question, she was pregnant, and this seemed like the most extreme message of all. The fetus could be a tiger cub, or it could be a human baby. If the latter, Anand would be unlikely to accept the child. If the former, she would not know what to do. Raise another Anand? The notion was grotesque. Far more likely to be a human, she thought, but she couldn’t take the risk that it would be a tiger cub in the image of her husband.

She watched the tiger scoop curry with large pieces of warm dosa. She watched as he lectured her. Licking his paws with abandon as he ate. His shiny black nose sweating as he nearly inhaled his spicy food. She was a good cook. He took so much pleasure in her food that she was almost ashamed, thinking of how absurdly close to freedom she stood, and how he didn’t even know. She ate more slowly. Later she would briefly wonder if she was trying to be careful about what she was eating. Was the machine right about her?

Every time Anand picked up a dosa, she discreetly wiped her fingers on the edge of her violet-blue dupatta. She didn’t hear a word because she was thinking about escape, about a freedom she’d only ever read about or seen in foreign films, a freedom some of her friends—friends with more liberal parents—enjoyed. She was intoxicated by what she thought it would be like, by the imagined sensation of weightlessness.

When Anand was finished with the curd rice, he reached out for a jalebi, his claws scratching the wooden table. It was covered with gouge marks from his carelessness during meals. He paused for a moment before popping the jalebi into his mouth and said, “You haven’t made these for months.”

“I had some extra time after my cleaning.” She sipped her water.

He handed her a jalebi and said, “Take it. You’ve been working so hard.”

“I don’t want to get fat.”

She set the jalebi on the edge of the plate.

“You look nice, Ma,” said Anand. “You don’t want to be a skinny thing, do you?”

She shrugged. There was nothing wrong with being thin, she thought, but of course he liked women with curves and meat. He took another jalebi for himself and bit into it, sighing with pleasure as the sweet liquid gushed across his large tongue. He closed his shining yellow eyes. She was nauseated by the carrot-colored syrup sticking to the brownish-orange fur on his paws. The syrup pooled on the fur at his jowls and glimmered under the overhead fluorescent light, where a few moths were hovering. She placed another jalebi on his plate. He grabbed it and scarfed it down. Another and another. With his disarming weakness for sweets, he ate fifteen or sixteen of them with true pleasure, licking his whole paw after each one. After he consumed everything on the plate, she started clearing the table.

When she was done packing the refrigerator with leftovers, she turned. He clutched his head between his massive paws, digging into his own skull with his sharp claws.

“I don’t feel well, Ma,” he said. “My stomach pains me.”

“Go lie down,” she said. “We’re out of coffee. I’ll just go fetch some at the corner store.”

He padded to their bedroom. Usually his tail moved as he walked, but it had been stilled by the torpor that accompanied the poison. She unplugged the telephone. She turned and glanced back at the house, its whitewashed exterior and clunky iron gate, the bright pink and blue kolam she had drawn with rice powder on the doorstep just that morning.

Sita had planned her escape carefully. Anand knew nothing of Srinivasan, but she’d read too many suspense novels to risk his discovery. She rode a bus to the northeast edge of the city to save money, instead of hailing a rickshaw.

As she stepped off the bus at the stop by Srinivasan’s house, she breathed in the sweet scent of roses, the warmth of hot dough frying. The shouts of the paan wallah, his teeth stained red and his bare arms blackened by eczema. There were so few of these perfect moments in her life, these interstices between one mundane horror and another.

After the Smriti 3000 did its work, she doubted that this perfect moment had ever existed. It seemed to belong to someone else, someone who was not caught up in a nightmare, someone who had been that most reckless of things—happy. Was it enough to feel this giddy sense of expansion, this blooming, for only a few pure weeks in a whole long lifetime? Perhaps this was still more than her parents—at least the version of her parents plagued by health troubles—had ever known.

Over the years, she played detective behind prison walls. She developed theories about who had killed her husband, the most plausible of which was that her brothers had done it—had noticed her bruises and believed it was better for her to be a widow—not realizing how painfully close she’d been to escape. At first, haunted by her imaginings of what might have happened, she tried to trick Deepak into revealing more than he already had, but after a few failed attempts at squeezing the truth out of him, she grew resigned.

She would never know or understand what her brothers had done, but no matter. There would be no return to the city of pink palaces. Instead, resignation became a kind of friend, a way to stanch the horrible turmoil that hope stirred inside her blood. Sitting in her tiny prison cell, exiled from her village, she could still remember clearly the stars that night, the white swirl of them like splattered milk, and how she thought for that shining instant as she walked down the street, that the whole universe was now hers.

In the morning, the Sarma family explored the Jaipur palace hotel grounds. Kai lagged a few paces behind his parents and little sister. As they strolled through the spring gardens past blue iridescent peacocks with fanned-out tails, he daydreamed about what it might be like to be a prince, to have the world at your feet. But as they passed the long gravel drive, his thoughts shifted to consider the mystery at its end—the chaotic streets of the Pink City, a phantasmagoria of forts and street markets and fortune-tellers.

Reading to his family from the guidebook, Gopal explained that the palace, a sedate tan edifice with Islamic filigree and blood-red railings, had been converted to a hotel in 1925. “We got special rates because I’m still an Indian citizen.”

“Why?” Hema asked, skipping down the brick path. Prahba had dressed Hema in an electric blue chiffon salwar that matched her own.

“They charge Americans more, but they didn’t check your citizenship statuses.”

“I’m Indian, too!” Hema said.

“You were born in America. If you come here when you’re grown up, you’ll have to pay full price,” Prabha said.

Hema grabbed her mother’s hand, yanking for leverage as she jumped.

“Then again, it’s not like you’d even come to India if Mom and Dad didn’t make you come, Shrimp,” Kai said. He straightened his thrift-store pinstriped suit, which he wore with skull cuff links over a Dead Kennedys T-shirt as a form of protest against the vacation.

“Yes, I would, too!” Hema put her hands on her hips and thrust them forward. “I’ll visit India every year all my life, just like Mommy and Daddy.”

“Nobody made you come with us, Kai!” Gopal said.

“You didn’t give me a choice. You never give me a choice.” Kai had come out to his parents during Pillayar Chaturthi. He’d been planning to tell them for some time and resolved to do so while they stood in front of the statue of Ganesha, as a priest spooned vibhuti, sacred ash, into his palm. They returned home from the temple in Livermore in a hot car that smelled like musty marigolds and sugar. He blurted it out, wanting to get it over with. Back home in Palo Alto, Kai had a number of bisexual and gay friends who were out to their parents and had been for years. He hadn’t expected his own to take it so badly.

“What? I didn’t give you a choice?” Gopal slammed the book shut. “What nonsense! We let you wear that ridiculous outfit, didn’t we?”

“Engineering college, no dating boys, skipping the spring break trip, visits to India year after year. Everything in my life has to be your way,” Kai said.

“That’s enough, you two. We’re here to have fun, right?” Prabha pleaded. She adjusted her dupatta, breathing heavily as she huffed up the short flight of steps to the hotel. A month before the trip, Prabha had reminded Gopal that Kai would be graduating high school that summer. She was intent on having one last happy family vacation together and so, instead of spending two weeks shuttling between relatives’ houses in Chennai, the Sarmas used their second week to tour Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, northern parts of India none of them had ever visited.

Kai sighed loudly in the direction of his mother, veered off the path, and cut across the lawn toward the restaurant.

It was early for lunch, and the Sarmas were the only people seated at the palace’s Pearl Restaurant. On the gaudy gold-papered walls hung gilt-framed mirrors reflecting infinite rows of polished wooden tables and a wide Persian carpet, violet with hot-pink roses. None of them felt quite right under the chandeliers, but Kai was the only one to voice it.

“All this is too fancy. Biriyanis and pilafs and meat.” Kai gestured at the placid Renaissance frescoes in oval frames that loomed in the high ceiling. “I just want idlis and sambar.”

“We’ve been away from Chennai a day, you can’t be sick of North Indian food yet.” Gopal scanned the detailed menu. Kai knew his father was looking at the prices.

“Kai da, you can’t spend this whole vacation complaining. What would you like to do today?” Prabha asked.

He frowned. “Nothing. Watch TV maybe.”

“But you only turn eighteen once! We should celebrate, so you won’t forget.”

“We’re going to the elephant polo match,” Gopal reminded Prabha.

Kai rolled his eyes. The waiter appeared, quietly holding his pen and notepad ready. “You are ready to order, sir?”

Gopal waved a squat hand. “A Kingfisher beer for everyone at the table—except the little one. Do you want a mango lassi, kutty?” he asked Hema. She nodded. The waiter jotted down their orders and smiled with an obsequiousness that made Kai cringe.

Kai ordered only a chicken appetizer.

“That all you want?” Gopal asked. “Get something fancier.”

Kai shrugged. “I’d rather have a bucket of KFC, but this’ll do.”

“You never eat properly,” Prabha said. “That’s why you’re so depressed all the time.”

“Not this again.”

Prabha’s face crinkled, but her tone was conciliatory. “We’ll go out again for your birthday when we get back home.”

“So, this is an exciting time for you, Kai.” Gopal spoke in a cheery voice. “Where are your friends going to college?”

“How would I know?”

The waiter set down three glasses brimming with amber beer and the mango lassi. Gavin was Kai’s best friend, the blue-eyed boy he’d harbored a crush on for three years, the only other boy at his school who bought indie vinyl records and skateboarded at the bowl to The Clash, the boy who’d gone with him to the thrift store to buy the pinstriped suit. The boy who, just last week while they were studying calculus, told Kai that even though he was bi, he just wasn’t attracted to him. A cute redheaded girl in their Spanish class had already asked Gavin to prom, and he’d said yes.

After the waiter left, Gopal took a sip of his beer. “You’re not friends anymore?”

“Nope. You’ll be happy to know.”

“I didn’t want you to stop being friends.”

“No, you just told me I couldn’t date him, that I couldn’t date anyone I find attractive. Which doesn’t matter because he doesn’t even like me like that.”

Hema sipped her mango lassi. Prabha frowned. “Do we have to talk about this in front of your sister? Kai, you know that all this gay business makes us uncomfortable. Let’s talk about something pleasant. And how would you know you’re gay, anyway?” Gopal continued. “At your age, you don’t know.”