A girl in Delhi has a brilliant mind and secrets darker than the nights that won't let her eyes close.
She lives in the Labyrinth, a place that always seems dim, even in the middle of the day. There, customers flock in their dozens, and there, th...
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Most people would celebrate having a room to themselves. Yashvi, though, despises every moment she must spend alone in the initially cramped, now relatively spacious chamber she and Prisha once shared.
Digging the math textbook out from beneath the floorboard, Yashvi reads: Surface arearefers to the area of each face of a three-dimensional figure combined. Imagine you are a city worker looking at a house your employer has asked you to paint from bottom to top.
Yashvi closes her eyes, pictures herself in faded blue jeans, lugging two hefty tin cans. In her back pocket, a paintbrush dents her buttock. It is a silly image.
You wonder, continues the textbook, how much paint it will take to cover the entire house. Must you buy extra cans, or do you have enough, perhaps even more than enough?
To solve this problem, you must find the surface area of the house.
Instead, Yashvi wonders if Prisha is inside the house.
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Ruby's stomach has grown. The girl who gets the most customers is pregnant, her belly a soft orb under her shirt.
Whisperings sputter through the alleys she roams. Tiya refrains from jesting about whorishness. There are no giggles as Ruby stretches at the edge of the shallow pool under the bridge. No more jokes about her flexibility. The girls treat her with a gawky reverence that Yashvi suspects Ruby finds worse than ridicule.
Madam has decided the pregnancy should not be terminated. She prepares a room with towels and surgical utensils, buckets, scissors, forceps, amniotic hooks. Ruby makes a ritual of weeping every morning on the steps leading into the courtyard, and Yashvi sits with her one day.
Ahead and in the distance, you can see the way the Labyrinth winds into the morbid spiral it is, the passages twisting and weaving together in such a muddle of combinations that nobody can trace beginning to end.
"Kill the fetus," Yashvi says under her breath. "Kill it."
"How?" Ruby's eyes appear to leak tar due to the mascara blackening her tears.
