Only the Women Are Burning. Nancy Burke
with you then,” he said, returning in dry clothes. “The mud is slippery.”
He walked ahead of us. Banhi linked arms with me and whispered. “Harshad wants a child. But Rehani and Jayant sleep between us.”
I said, “She hits you.”
“Just make up a story that you need me in your work for a day.”
I stopped walking. “Will she allow it?”
“She might be happy if I bring in some money.”
I thought otherwise but only asked, “What does Jayant say?”
“He says nothing.”
“What does Harshad say?”
“There is no privacy.” All this in a hurried whisper, all with a hand clutching my arm, a continual checking the distance between Harshad and us, and several furtive glances back toward the row of shacks where it was hard now to distinguish which one we had just stepped away from. Harshad turned after overhearing us.
“Banhi,” he said. “You can’t go out of the house with Cassie.”
“I live like a sister to you, Harshad. If I am to be your wife, I need to help retire the debt your father is ashamed of.”
“It won’t be like this forever, Banhi.” He glanced back toward the row where their dwelling melted anonymously into all the other tin-walled houses. “Things will change, if your father can help us again.” He turned to me. “Cassandra, can you take a message back to Kiran? The dowry money is gone. If he is prospering, he is duty bound to share that with his daughter’s family.”
“More dowry will help,” Banhi said. “But what happens when that money is gone too?” She touched the sleeve of her sari and I saw her skin was blackened, partially healed but raw and swollen around the edges of a burn with an ooze of pus near the wrist bones. Her gaze focused on Harshad’s face.
“She is awkward with the matches,” he said.
“Banhi,” I said. “Come on.”
Harshad made a move toward her. I stepped between them. “Stop!” I said. “She is coming with me.”
“Banhi is a part of my family now. I beg you not to do this.”
Harshad went to touch her and she pulled away and stepped behind me.
“You can come back if you want, but right now you are coming with me to the hospital.” I glared at Harshad. “If you love her, tell your mother she is going for medical care for her burn.” I looked hard at Banhi. “You’re going to the hospital. Tell Harshad you’ll be back when your arm is healed.”
Harshad said, “We have no money for a doctor.”
I took firmer hold of Banhi’s hand, turned and dragged her through the lane, but after a few hundred feet I let go of her hand.
“You will shame yourself. You will be shunned and left alone to die on the street,” Harshad called. “Do you think your father will take you back?”
Banhi stopped and turned. She backed away from both of us. Then, she walked back in the direction we had come. She gave a cry and ran to their front door and the structure shook as the door opened, then hit against the frame. “Leave her alone, Cassie,” Harshad said when I turned to follow, his hand on my arm restraining me.
“No,” I said. “Let me go. You don’t get her to a doctor? It isn’t about not having money. It’s about not letting her suffer.”
He said, “Please. Even if we take her to the free clinic, they will expect us to pay.” He said this, explaining it to me as though I were a child.
“Who will expect you to pay?”
“Not the doctors,” he said. “Bribes so the police don’t come and accuse us of…of…”
“Of what?”
“Of trying to kill her. They would ruin our family if they accuse us of a dowry murder.”
I stood and stared at him. “A what?”
“Surely you know what that is.” He stared at me. “You’ve worked with these women. Banhi and you. Have none of them shared this with you?”
I just stared at him. “Tell me,” I said.
“If we went to the hospital, the police would go to Kiran and tell him their daughter was burned by her mother-in-law.”
“But the truth…”
“Kiran would press charges. It would ruin us.”
“But Kiran is a good man. He won’t do that. He’d help.”
“And Banhi would be shamed by this. She would not be able to return to her father. She would not have a home with us anymore. She would be cast out, shamed, ruined.”
“This is why Rehani did not want me to visit.”
“Why are you trying to take her away?”
I shifted Lila a bit. She felt so heavy, her head leaning on the back of me.
“She asked me to give her work. Was that burn an accident? Tell me. Do you know?”
Harshad looked away, then back at me. “My saying will only make Rehani punish her more.”
I saw a flash of light, heard a whoosh and felt a wave of heat. I ran to their shack. Rehani’s back was to me where she stood just inside the kitchen. Banhi was standing as still as a statue, her hair in disarray, flame creeping up her arm on the sleeve of her sari, up her legs to her torso and the skin I’d seen black and oozing was now under the glow of blue flame. I heard a hissing sound, blood sizzling under the flame. All of her was aflame. She collapsed and her head hit the floor. The wrinkle on Rehani’s brow smoothed to silk. Her hands came together in prayer and she said, “The stove. She left it burning. She is careless.” Banhi’s jewel, the one she wore on her sari, the one that signified her soul, rolled away from the flame and lay there at Rehani’s feet.
“I think the devil will not have me damned, lest the oil that’s in me should set hell on fire.” - William Shakespeare
Chapter 1
Hillston, New Jersey
Friday started as an ordinary day, but that was before I failed to save Ann Neelam from burning to death. I stepped through the usual golden light filtering through the branches onto the blacktopped path through my park to the train. I greeted a squirrel poking out of a trash can with a chunk of someone’s discarded bagel in its jaw. That station, with its quaint station house, its coffee window for busy commuters, its old wooden roof and neat platform will never feel tranquil again, but that Friday my girls were off to school, my coffee maker was shut off and unplugged, the front door was closed and locked into its frame, and I walked my usual eight minutes to the station. I had a vague recognition that my life was so routine that I was entering a phase of middle age where habits and patterns would repeat endlessly and I would perish from my own boredom.
My neighbors in their own routines were already aboard the midtown direct to their big jobs in New York, which stopped in Newark and would normally drop me to my twelve dollar an hour job teaching visiting school groups at the museum, but not that morning. I never got on the train. They, however, watched from the windows while I tried to save her.
That day should have been a happy acknowledgment of spring. I liked teaching the kids and I got home before the school bus dropped Mia and Allie, my eight-year-old twins, at the corner. Before that day, it all worked.
On the platform, the whistle announced the train, commuters shifted briefcases, newspapers, and their weight from one foot to the other. A man dropped a coffee cup into the wastebasket. Headlines in the newspaper dispenser offered the only hint of dread, “Roadside bombs incinerate three U.S. Marines,” along with three head-shots. I stared at the soldier’s portraits, there in their