Fiction: A couple tries to start over in a new home after their son’s death upends their marriage

On the day Anuradha Patwardhan was leaving Udaipur for Bombay to marry a man she had not even met in the twenty-one years of her existence, her mother clutched her lovely hand through the window of the black Victoria and whispered: “In this life, my darling, there is no mercy.” Anuradha nodded respectfully and ached to ask her what exactly she meant by that. But even before she could articulate her question, Mrs Patwardhan’s large, oval eyes, the hue of liquid soot, misted over and she shut them with gracious restraint. At that moment, young Anuradha decided that her mother had never looked lovelier: robed in a cobalt-blue sari with a gold-leaf border, she was a woman of altitude although not imposing, slim but with pertinent parts of her biology eye-catchingly endowed, and a certain gift of Song that was, to say the least, a legend in Udaipur.

It was this same simple but inexplicably alluring beauty which her daughter had inherited. Indeed, Anuradha Patwardhan’s looks were so fabled that more than a few young Romeos of the Udaipur Sonnets Society categorically claimed her as their Muse. Was it her hair, that dense, fierce swathe of it – a poem in...

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