One of my legs is shorter than the other. The doctor told me that. How would I know, unless he’d told me?

I wake Aarti in the night and hobble to the toilet holding her arm and then hobble back. I either sit on my bed and talk to myself or lie down. I embroider sometimes – little yellow champak flowers on white pillow cases or pink roses on handkerchiefs. I can never tell what the time is; the only clock in the house is in the front room. If my thimble slips to the floor I have to shout for someone. If I need to piss I have to wait. Aarti is always doing something else when I want to go – making rotis or washing clothes. At night, I wait for them to bring me food. There was a time, after my sahib died, when I’d single-handedly cook for eight people – roast baingans on the coals, make dal, thicken milk for kheer. I didn’t think the kind of thoughts I think now. Now if I think of something I don’t want to think about, then I think about it even more. It can keep going in my mind all night like television. I think of how my mother-in-law fainted when my sahib died. The way she lay there with her mouth open! I think of the first time my father let me carry the oil jar back from the shop to our home in Sabzi Mandi and I dropped it.

When do one’s thoughts start to curdle like this? When you’re young, people can see you. Your sister-in-law walks in and out of the kitchen so you don’t pop any pistas into your mouth while making halwa. Your sahib kneads your breasts at night. Your nephew laughs at you when you ask him to explain what’s happening in the newspaper. All the time, you have your eyes on yourself but from the outside. When you’re older, when you’re an old woman like me and people forget to take away your empty thali, forget to give you the mirror when they give you the comb, then your eyes are not on the outside any more. Everything is inside.

Who’s left to whom I can ask – have I been alright? If there is anyone who holds a grudge against me let them say it now. I ask Ambika Ma, I tell her when I can walk I’ll take the train and come to her, I’ll bring her all the clean new notes I’ve been saving under my mattress. I’ll climb the steps up to her and fall at her feet. But nothing. Silence. I feel as if an important visitor has come and gone and I’ve forgotten to ask him the most important question – have I been alright? Did I wrong anyone? Did I destroy anyone’s life? Did I cast the evil eye in anyone’s direction?

When my sahib died everyone started saying to me – Can you winnow this rice, it’ll just take five minutes. Can you bathe the boy, he has to go to school. For 10 years I did all the work I used to do when he was alive and on top of that the work of another person. I had become two people – sahib’s wife and sahib’s widow. And then last year, this happened. Aarti had washed clothes by the outside tap one day and the black-face didn’t even have the brains to throw down water afterwards and let the soap run. I was holding the child on one hip and a bucket in the other. I fell so hard, I broke my leg. But Babua was fine, not even a scratch. They took me in a rickshaw across the Yamuna all the way to Safdarjung Hospital and the doctor said, operation. After two months the pain was still so bad I used to cry when coming down the steps, cry shifting position in bed. They took me back to the same doctor and again he said, operation. Later he told me that they had to cut away some piece of bone that wasn’t healing, and my right leg was now shorter. Everything will be fine now, he said. You’ll just have a limp. But it isn’t. Three months have passed and the same pains, the same questions in my head.

Someone is doing this to me, the person I’ve wronged. It’s my accursed memory otherwise I’d have known exactly who it is. Sahib is not here for me to ask him. And even Ambika Ma with all her powers cannot control this. Who can stop revenge once it takes root in someone’s mind? If I sleep, I sleep, but once I wake up in the night then it’s hell. The pain feels like it’ll take the leg off. I plead with the sleeping person, whoever they are, the man or the woman who is cursing me in their dreams. I’m a poor woman, I say. I’ll give you all the money I have. At other times, I scream silently in the dark: take me away. If you have the courage, take me away. Why have you stopped at the leg? Eat up all of me.

This has happened to me before. I remember one litchi season in the village, my sister and I sitting with a basket between us, litchis so juicy the flies wouldn’t leave them. Our neighbour Sanno came in to borrow a sickle. We could have offered her some litchis. There was no good reason not to but it was as if we had lost our reason. We just sat there giddy with sweetness, our hands sticky, our laughter blinding us, making our already sweaty faces sweatier. The next day Sanno’s evil eye came for me. My stomach cramped so badly and I vomited so much I thought I would die like that, before I had a chance to clean myself up. I only ate dal water for ten days. But this leg is something else. This is not some slip of a girl cursing me over a basket of fruit. This is Ravana someone has set upon me.

I woke up this morning and told Aarti to help me up to the roof. I wasn’t going to sit in the cold all day, waiting for someone to come and thread my needle for me. Each high step to the roof was like a knife in my leg but I made it somehow.

The winter sun melts my bones and I tell Aarti to sit by me so I can pick the lice from her hair. She is the same age that I was when I came to this house. She is my elder brother-in-law’s grandson’s wife. I helped to raise her father-in-law, he was only three when I married sahib. I’ve brought up Babua, my younger brother-in-law’s son. And when Aarti has a baby, she’ll throw it at me of course and go off to do the cooking. And what can I do – I’ll take care of him. Women who’ve never had children have that itch in their hands. They want to oil a small boy’s limbs. They want to braid a girl’s hair.

‘The baby is going to be one-year-old tomorrow,’ says Aarti. She’s talking about Golu, the neighbour’s daughter.’

‘Mausi’s father has come from his village and they’re going to take Golu to the temple tomorrow.’

I give Aarti a sharp rap on her skull, then squash a fat black louse onto it.

‘Don’t go on about what Mausi is saying and what Mausi is doing. Keep your mind on your own work,’ I say.

This makes no difference to her jabbering. She is besotted with Golu; if she has a minute between her chores she’ll run off to play with the infant. She’s still so childish. How will she raise her own baby if I’m not there to help her?

‘What’s the time?’ I ask her, separating her hair into two black streams with the edge of the comb. After I have finished doing her hair, I limp to the parapet and look at the river. Sahib would go there whenever he wanted some peace of mind. If his brothers were fighting he’d say to me – Urmila, I’m going. In those days my sisters-in-law and I used to go to the river to bathe and wash clothes. Early morning was the women’s time, not the men’s. Now the Yamuna is so dirty it refuses to show you your reflection.

But I’m happy, looking at that river. Aarti drags my mora to the wall and I sit there all afternoon, thinking of nothing, counting the imli trees by the bank and watching the boys who come to strike stones at the water as if they want to beat it to death. I almost forget my leg till I stand up and then the beast starts howling again.

That night the pain is worse than it’s ever been. I think of waking Aarti, who’s sleeping with her back to me on the floor next to my bed, but what can she do? Somewhere a baby is crying and I start to cry with it. What is the worst thing about pain? That you don’t know when it’ll end. If someone told me, your leg is going to hurt for the next one hour, I could sing through that hour. If someone said, one month, I could live through that month without cursing. But the gods, the demons, whoever made pain, hasn’t made it that way. There’s no point asking what time it is because in the land of pain there are no clocks.

I’m too tired to even pray. I lie there with an empty mind, no words left to fight with. And then, suddenly, without my even asking for it, a voice comes to comfort me. ‘Urmila, oh Urmila.’ A voice that’s muffled and far off and yet closer to me than the beating of my own heart. ‘Urmila, oh Urmila.’

A gentle voice, no urgency in it. It’s the voice of my sahib. Who else in the world remembers my name? Everyone calls me chachi. This is my sahib telling me that no one’s to blame. ‘Urmila, oh Urmila.’ Pain is not the fault of the person suffering it.

I feel such relief and joy that I get out of bed without caring about the leg, and drag myself to the front room. I haven’t been here since my fall. Now the room looks small to me. Its smallness makes everything that has happened in it seem so unimportant, trivial – all the Shah Rukh Khan films I have watched on TV and all the scoldings that Babua has got over his homework and all the visitors who have sat cross-legged on the sofa eating the malpuas I have made. The clock is in the same place, above the TV. I take it, go back to my room and wrap a blanket around myself. Then, holding the clock tight, my steps slow and heavy, the voice still calling to me as clearly as the voice of a man in the next room, I go to the kitchen, unlatch the door and am soon out in the gali. In the old days it used to take ten minutes to walk to the river. Now it will probably take me hours but I’m determined. I turn back to look at the house. No one moved. No one has their ears attuned to the voices of the dead.

The cold slows me. It is like a wall I have to break through at every step. When I am finally at the river, when the moonlight in the smelly water wakes up at the touch of my toes, I drop the blanket and fling the clock into the Yamuna, as far out as my tired old limbs will allow. Then shivering and smiling and stumbling and praying to my sahib to keep his arms outstretched for me on the other side, I slowly wade into the water.

Aarti stirs in her sleep, hearing voices from the neighbour’s house. Golu’s crying. She listens without breaking the filament of her dream. ‘Urmila, oh Urmila,’ calls Golu’s visiting grandfather, trying to get her to go back to sleep. But Golu cries even louder. Why does he call the child by her big name – Urmila – wonders Aarti, when everyone else calls her Golu? Her head sinks deeper into her pillow at the thought of snuggling with Golu the following day and, breathing rhythmically, she goes back to dreaming her dream.

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