Breaking Water Read Online Free Page B

and if she does, eat the flowers. Small, they don’t hurt her. Good, beta, good.” He grinned, the pride on his face clear. The guru looked like a boy showing his mother a trick he’d taught his pet.
    The mother stared, and gasped with what sounded like laughter. She laughed, perhaps, and then she sobbed, sitting on the dirty ground of that courtyard. She sobbed and sobbed, scrunching the surgical mask into her face like a handkerchief as her daughter’s corpse munched on a marigold, and her unasked-for son-in-law held her hand with hope and fear in his eyes. The moment lasted barely a minute before she got up and asked to leave immediately. She had come to officially identify her daughter’s corpse, but she’d barely seen it. And yet, how could I force that? How could I ask that the flowers that hid that monstrous, infantile thing that was once her daughter be removed? I dreaded to see the decay, and so did she.
    â€œI am sorry for your loss, Mother,” the guru said as we left, his voice different from how it had been.
    â€œI want it burned. I can’t have that walking around. It’s not my daughter anymore. She’s gone. I want it burned,” the mother said to me in the car, once she had regained some of her composure.
    I drove her back to her apartment. She remained silent the whole time. Once I had parked by her building, she turned to me, eyes swollen. She grasped my arm, the first time she’d touched me. She held me very tight.
    â€œMiss Sen, do you think I made the right decision?” she asked.
    Swallowing, I told her, “I don’t know, ma’am. I truly don’t.”
    â€œI don’t think he killed my daughter,” she said, letting go of my arm. Her hand fell limp to her lap.
    â€œI don’t think so either. I interviewed a lot of people who were at the ghat, both when he found the body and when he came back. Everyone confirms he was among the morning bathers when the body washed onto the ghat.”
    She let out a long and heavy breath. “I don’t think it should be burned.”
    I don’t know why, but I was relieved when she said that. I remembered those horrible, deformed hands lifting a flower to that rotting mouth, and my chest ached.
    â€œAll right,” I said, nodding too hard. “Whatever you feel is right, ma’am. And please, call me Paromita.”
    She placed her fist against her forehead, her bangles jangling. Her eyes closed, she said, “He can keep it. You know”—she opened her eyes, looked at me—“my daughter never seemed interested in marriage. I know I asked her about it too much. I wanted grandchildren very much, a son-in-law. To fill up our family, you know? It was so empty when my husband left, even though he was just one person. So, I pestered her all the time to meet a man. She was still young, after all, but had no interest in weddings and children. Such a good student, always career-minded. She was so happy to go to college. Really, she wanted to go abroad to study. I didn’t have the money. I don’t know how much that hurt her, but she never, ever used it against me, even when we fought about things. And we did fight. College was good for her. She needed to live apart from me. But I missed her so much. She’d say, ‘Ma, that’s ridiculous; we live in the same city,’ so I didn’t tell her, but I missed her all the time. Honestly, I was grateful she didn’t go abroad, so that she could still visit me. And she did. She did, until she was missing. And then that was that. Now I don’t know what’s happening.”
    â€œNobody does,” I said. I put my hand, very lightly, on her arm, before returning it to the steering wheel.
    â€œYou’re not as young as my daughter,” she said. “But you’re young. You have so much energy, to be doing all this, figuring out who she was, finding me, when the police should be doing