"Hey, Kay." He shook an ant off his sleeve and extended his knuckles, which she brushed lightly with her own.

"Jeddy. You got one? Is it real?"

He turned the inside out to show her the label: Herkimer, genuine. "Found it," he said. "Know whose?"

He'd thought she might, but she had nothing to say. Her lip gloss smelled like the candles on his grandmother's mantle. She shook her head and sent a spray of light flying from the colorful glass-beaded tips of her many braids.

"I should turn it in . . . " he said hopefully.

"Give it here." She snatched it, her expression shifting from vacant to canny, though in the critical moment she snapped her gum.

"There's this bird you should hear-" What was he saying now, any old thing apparently.

She wasn't listening, not to him or any pointless birds. Shut up, he told himself, and went on, "It's just that it's really interesting because it can do all these-and it only sings at night, well morning really, but early, like thirteen hundred."

"A bird that sings in the morning," she repeated, absently, but still with clear enough disdain. "Can I have this or what?" She lifted the mask and shook it a little like a dead scalp. "Sure. I just found it anyway. I don't care." His arches flexed and he heeled off, squeezing his eyes shut against the reflected sprites from her braids dancing on the brick wall.

Extra credit meant extra access-clean and simple. Go over the blue line into the purple, and you could float there forever. One plus up over average got you an hour. That got you another plus, and so on. Jedward knew everyin the labs very well, because the faces never changed. The masks did, of course; mostly wolves now, a few bats from last season, one unicorn with a saggy fabric horn. They dangled from fingertips or swung cheerfully from belt-loops, and their owners fiddled with them as the big glowing clock chucked through its daylight cycle.

After an hour at his station, he felt a padded hand grip the back of his neck. Plastic claws chattered over his skin, but he forced himself not to jump. Instead, he reached up swiftly to grip the glove, yanking it off and slapping it on the table. "Just sit and try not to be annoying."

Danny's bright evil grin, absent two bottom teeth, swung into view. His mask was wadded up and shoved into his front shirt pocket, which was at least two times too small for it, so bulging out like a shoplifted corsage. His fiercely combed-out puff of hair was now bleached out to red, striking against his deep brown skin. Jedward thought he looked like a clown. It was better than the horns from two seasons ago, anyway. The pointy ends always ended up tangled in branches when they'd gone hiking.

"Found a Herkimer," he said as they passed components and chemicals between them, tweaking each other's work. Danny was quick with sums and nimble-fingered, but he had no patience for plans, so Jedward set the pace and the tasks. "Kay Mendez took it, I mean I let her have it." He felt his face swell and blemish as he heard the suggestive way this came out of it. "I mean-"

"Yeah Jeddy, I know what you mean," Danny snorted at him. He jammed a wire against a Nano Pylon and soldered it without looking, too distracted by his own amusement.

Jedward wondered how far into Danny's brain he could get before they pulled him off, if he were to, for example, grab the hot soldering iron and shove it directly into his best friend's right eye. "It's not that funny, jerkface." Once he'd said it, he knew it would just make Danny worse.

But the red puff descended as Danny signaled his line-crossing with a quick nod. They'd never talked about it, but Jedward supposed it was obvious anyway. His loneliness felt like a hood, a sack on his head that everyone could see.

With deadly psychic accuracy, Danny changed the subject to an even worse one. "Are you going or what?"

Jedward stared into a beaker and tried to pretend he hadn't heard the question, but this time Danny wasn't going to fade on it. After a few hard elbows in the ribs he relented. "I still don't know, I'll just go if I do, or not, otherwise."

"Yeah obviously." Danny was almost done with his first board, somehow, though he never seemed to pay attention or care about his work. "You'll go or you won't, that is the question. What are you gonna do, start walking and see if you end up there?" Now he was the one who sounded irritable; Jedward knew he was personally offended by the very idea of indecision. "Just go. You're being stupid."

"So I'm stupid." Jedward sped up, fingers agile as he wove copper wires through leather pegs, and then stopped. "It's all stupid. You're stupid. I'm going home." He stood and kicked his chair back, though not so hard it would jostle someone else's station. "You finish that, you're better at it anyway."

That would help a little, make up for lashing out. Danny was relatively free inside himself, but he still had feelings.

There would be a label check at the doors. Wildhaus didn't throw chintzy parties. Sometimes a loser with a cruddy knock-off would crash in and flail around like a loon, pretending to be on the level, hoping nowould summon the door guardians. More often, the maskless would creep in and clutter up the walls, hoping-for what exactly Jedward couldn't ken. To find a lost one like he had, maybe, but they'd never give it away. Of course, Danny's mask was always the best, the freshest pressing, and he always treated it like an old dirty sock, tossing it around and cramming it wherever.

Jedward wondered, lying under his thin, felty wool blanket, whether Karolin would even speak to him if not for the aura of Danny that followed him like a bodyguard. But she would, of course she would. She was a nice girl. She had a lot of growing up to do, that was all.

He crossed his arms in the dark privacy of his own bunk. Look out for yourself for once, he told the magic circle of Danny in his mind, and vanished it in a poof of smooth tan smoke. I'm smarter than you think. I know how to beat the Herks.

"Sure buddy, I'll go to the party," he said out loud, feeling good again at last. From the bunk above he heard Danny's head lift from his pillow and then drop again.

They always started at noon. Even the freshest faces couldn't peel off in time for moonup without some time to soak. Anyway there were streamers to hang, tall translucent towers of rapidly crystallizing sugar to press and mold into fantastic shapes, all the party details. It was a colorful year. Jedward was glad about that. Last season had been monochrome, which made his eyes feel like they were full of static. Danny had looked sharp in his checkered linen suit, though, that was true.

Eyes were all that was left by three. Soaked in, the masks began to ripple, and tiny silver-blue bubbles appeared at the edges where some skin was still left showing, spreading out over the backs of their heads and down their necks. A rubberized hand feels like a suede bag full of sausages and sticks. Jedward, creeping in from the gallery, was careful to keep a few feet of clearance all around him as two-legged, half-melted wolf-people snittered and worbled through the arches and into the den.

In the foyer there would be a messy hill of jeans and windbreakers looming up under a hanging rack of blouses and ties, with no one bothering to guard it. Jedward stepped through the spaces in the crowd and went there. As soon as he was alone, he touched his own face to reassure himself it was still real.

He had the new formulation in his bag. With nothing much else to do at night he'd always been up in the purple. He stripped out of his old jeans and pilly sweater and buried them, digging out a much nicer set before striding out confidently toward the wallflowers and poseurs he knew he would find leeching around the back gate.

"You guys looking for some fresh masks?" He smiled at them like Danny, like the whole world could just come right up and sit in his lap.

He sold out in less than fifteen minutes. Looping around front, he listened to his own boots crunching on the gravel and thought about the kids back there. Somehad to look out for them, even if they were desperate and annoying, that much was clear. You could do anything to them, or with them, for that matter. Anycould.

He saw Karolin and Danny when he was still out of earshot. They were hanging around the front arch, smoking through their masks and avoiding eye contact.

"It kind of sucks in there," he said by way of greeting as he reached them. "Why don't we just go out to the woods?"

Kay's mask distorted as she rolled her eyes beneath it, briefly giving her the appearance of a blanked-out zombie-wolfgirl. The plastic teeth already looked more like bone. It wasn't even the one he'd given her. "Jeddy, there are bugs in the woods," she said, barely patient with his foolishness. "And Tynesha brought those rum balls. And it's almost time anyway. We'd never make it out there. Your birdy girlfriend can wait, just come inside."

"Actually it's a juvenile male," he heard himself saying, and wished he wasn't. "Looking for a mate by showing off his repertoire."

"You always want to go," Kay told him, stubbing out her smoke and yanking open the Wildhaus door. "You always want to be somewhere else."

"It's not my fault most places suck," he said to the door as it swung shut with awkward slowness.

"Maybe it is." Danny sounded serious, but he smiled. "If you're the common denominator." He leaned on the wall and lit a second brown cigarette from the first. "You notice she said that while leaving."

"I like that she's not fake," Jedward said, because it was what he always said in his mind when practicing for this inevitable conversation. "She says whatever she's thinking and does whatever she feels like."

"Yeah, you know who does that? Assholes." Danny's anger, always flittering around his head, dive-bombed into the discussion again. "You just like it because you're all scrunched up on yourself. You go around like nothing means anything, like you'll wake up any time now. And it makes everythink you think you're better than them."

Danny loomed up so close suddenly that Jedward was sure he was finally mad enough to actually hit him, and then for a second it seemed like maybe he was going to do something even weirder, but instead he fell back and sulked on the wall again. Nothing, Jedward realized. He just felt nothing at all.

"Something's going to happen, Danford," was what his mouth said this time. "You have to come and see."

The woods were cool and the color of glowing scallions. Fresh green leaves filtered the moonlight into tinted planes and striated beams, so every gap in the canopy became a projector and every flat surface an empty movie screen. Back at Wildhaus, the plastic wolf-people were probably gathering under the big skylight, waiting for the peak, the final hit that would take them over the edge. Into nowhere. Nothing. Another party. Another night nowould remember, except who had the Herks to make it in. One plus up got you an hour. Everykept running in the same direction and noever moved.

Not tonight. They could hear it coming from two miles off-a rumble, a rustle that gained bass until it became a steady throb. Danny grabbed his hand and stood too close, and Jedward could see the silvery-blue ripples starting to pulse and shine along the seams of his mask-where they would be, anyhow, if he weren't fully soaked now. Along the edges and between the lines, and the light was entirely unnatural, especially here, and then the wolf face stared back at him without Danny inside it.

But Jedward knew he was there, cheery and managerial, pulling the mental levers from inside. The paw on his arm felt warm again, articulated and alive, and the claws were real enough to lightly tear his shirt where they touched it. The legs were basically the same, though bright red fur now ran down Danny's chest and belly and thighs. It wasn't quite thick enough to hide his genitals when he was standing, so with a very unwolflike gesture he plucked a few leaves and soft green stems from the bushes around them and wrapped them around his waist. They'd have loincloths on in Wildhaus, though some of them not for very long.

Jedward offered his arm again once his friend was covered, then on an impulse threw the arm up around Danny's fuzzy shoulders, feeling the new muscles tensing. Standing side by side, facing the road, they listened.

The rumble died away into a heavy quietness. Then a howl rang out, far off, and another answered it. Shrieks followed, coming closer as the Wildhaus partiers fled stupidly towards the woods, because that was what they always did before if the cops crashed in. Faster and stronger now, they reached the edge of the trees in just a few minutes, and Jedward hugged Danny closer as they heard crashing and stumbling all around them. Then another howl, this one taken up almost instantly by a pack that was clearly now unified and on the move. Jedward had sold two or three of his new masks to some of the stragglers, to hand out to their friends, so he figured the real wolves would well outnumber the plastic ones, since there were always more people outside than in.

Finally they saw one, and Jedward felt floaty with pride. It was beautiful, seamless and soft, flowing as it ran like a soft bead of black mercury with fur and white jaws. Nearby they heard plastic wolf-people trying to force unfamiliar, stiffened limbs to climb trees, and another shriek as someone fell from one. The black wolf that had just run by them pounced, but the Herks were thick and tough especially now, and its jaws could only pull away long gooey strands of furry morphic rubber, many of which snapped back onto the owner in warped crisscrosses and ugly lumps.

Danny, watching this, made the noise which Jedward recognized as a human laugh coming out of a mask-warped mouth. "Right," he said, muffled but clear enough, uncannily. He sounded relieved, as if he'd been a little worried his friend might have finally snapped. "Okay, it's funny. But these are good, really good. You can't even see that they're masks."

"That's because they aren't anymore," Jedward said, tightening his arm on Danny's shoulders in his excitement. "The masks are gone once triggered. One-use."

Danny's mask stared at him as the futile chaos of growls and shrieks and scampering around them in the dark woods continued. "Do you realize," he said finally, "how stupid rich we're going to be?"

"No." Jedward didn't mind; he knew this was how it would go. He'd been there too at first. Danny would come around, though. He would get it, and maybe Kay would too. Once she tried one, and maybe went on a run with him. Then she'd understand that he didn't think he was better than anybody. He just wanted things to be fair.

"No? Why? You . . . we made it, right?"

"Yeah," Jedward said. "But it's really one-use. One time. After that, it just happens on its own. Every full moon. For anythat wants to."

Two more wolves ran by them, heads up with pleasure at the chase. They ignored Danny, who was funny and always remembered names. The masked who'd managed to get into trees were clinging and whimpering above, and Jedward knew some of them would wait there until morning rather than risk ruining their genuine Herks, not yet understanding that they were worthless now.

"I don't know, buddy, if you want us to make a living you might want to change the formula," Danny said slowly, doing math in his head and finding the brick wall at the end of the figures. "I don't think it'll work."

Jedward took a flashlight and a rope ladder from his bag and began sweeping it through the trees, looking for Karolin's beads shining in the white beam. She might be really scared, and if he helped her down, she might be really pleased.

"It's already working," he said.

THIRST.

VANDANA SINGH.

In the dream there were snakes coiling about her, dark and glossy as the hairs on her head, and an altar, and the smell of sandalwood incense, her mother's favorite kind. When her eyes opened she could not remember for a moment who she was. Even the familiar room, with the whitewash peeling off the walls and summer dust on the sill of the open window, the sag of the bed, the curve of the man's shoulders as he lay in sleep with his back to her-all that seemed imbued with remoteness, as though it had nothing whatever to do with her. Slowly her name came to her: Susheela, and with it the full weight of her misery returned. Her husband stirred in sleep, but he did not turn towards her.

Then she remembered (as she sat up very carefully so as not to wake her husband) that tomorrow was the day of Naag Panchami, the Snake Festival, and that was why the dream had come. The monsoons were late, and this was the hottest summer ever. Perhaps it would rain tomorrow. A Festival day rain would be a good thing. She slipped out of bed, bathed quickly using an inadequate half a bucketful of water and dressed in a pink cotton sari. An early morning hush lay deep over the house; the ceiling fans had wound down during the night (another power failure) and even the birds in the bougainvillea outside the window seemed reluctant to break the silence. As Susheela entered the kitchen she heard the creak of her mother-in-law's bed from the other end of the house, and the old woman's plastic slippers slapping the bare floor as she shuffled to the bathroom. Susheela's son was very likely still asleep in his grandmother's bed; she could see him in her mind's eye, forehead beaded with sweat, plump hands closed into fists, cheeks flushed with heat, lips tremulous with the passage of some childish dream. For a moment she wanted desperately to see him and hold him, but she could not face the old lady just yet. Instead she put the tea water on to boil and turned on the taps so that when the water came (one precious hour in the morning and one in the evening) the buckets would begin to fill for the day's use. Now the tap only belched warm air; heat came in from the small window like the breath of a hungry animal.

She stood at the window, looking out into the courtyard and the untended garden behind it. The drought had reduced the back garden to a mass of dead, spiny shrubs dotting withered grass. Only the little harsingar tree stood proud, its young, leafy branches dotted with tiny orange and white flowers. It had survived on a daily cupful of water and her love.

Afterwards, as she rolled paratha dough for her husband's breakfast, hoping she would not (again) make him late for office, she heard the household stir; and the water came gurgling out of the taps. She felt the old hunger in her as though she was waiting for something. As the earth waits for rain, she thought, licking her dry lips.

She thought of the lake in the park, and-despite herself-the thin face of the gardener who worked there, and the way he said "namaste" so respectfully while his eyes looked at her in a way that dissolved all distance between them, all barriers of class and caste and propriety . . . She really shouldn't go there so often. But Kishore loves it, her mind said rebelliously, and she thought of how her little boy loved to walk under the trees and watch the parakeets eat the neem berries. She would make up stories for him about imaginary people who lived in the ruins around the lake and ate nothing but milk-sweets all day. The park was on the way to the vegetable market that came up in the late afternoon like a miniature city on the sidewalks, complete with towers of jewel-toned purple eggplants and cascades of coriander leaves and citadels of fat, shiny little onions. The market was her excuse for surreptitious visits to the lake in the park, with her boy (poor, innocent boy!) as chaperone and protector. Sweat rolled off her temples; she dabbed at it with the free end of her sari and thought of the translucent coolness of the lake, the lips of the water against her bare toes. I am a cursed woman, she thought to herself with a shudder. My mother-in-law is right, the water draws me and draws me, to what other thing but death. Curses do run in families. She thought of her own mother, and her maternal grandmother, and she resolved that today she would not go to the lake, even though that would make Kishore cry.

In the end she broke her promise to herself, as she had done many times before. In the dry, breathless heat of the day, Susheela felt as though the air in her lungs had turned solid. She went blindly about her tasks, cooking and serving lunch, piling the steel dishes noisily in the sink for the servant boy to wash when he came in the evening. The grandmother took Kishore off for his afternoon nap. Susheela collected the kitchen leavings-potato peels, turnip ends and scraps from lunch-into a battered tin and went up the short driveway to the front gate. Dead leaves crunched under her feet. Piling the refuse by the side of the gate, she waited for Muniya, the milkman's ancient cow, to come meandering down the lane.

The lane shimmered in the heat. The three shisham trees in the garden stood very still, their small, round leaves drooping. Behind her the house crouched like a yellow cat. Plaster flaked off its front, revealing an underflesh of burnt red brick. Susheela leaned on the gate. A breeze, no more than a breath, stirred the dead leaves on the trees, smelling of dust. But Susheela smelled-or imagined she smelled-water.

Suddenly she made up her mind. She crept into the still, dark house and saw with relief that the grandmother had fallen asleep with Kishore. The two lay together like exhausted children, damp with sweat, the old lady's arm protectively around the boy. I have not been a good mother, Susheela thought. Her eyes burned with tears. She went out into the bright and dusty afternoon.

In less than ten minutes she was at the iron fence, with the rusty, indecipherable Archeological Survey of India sign leaning over the entrance. She paused for a moment, looking around her a little apprehensively. A bicycle-repairman sat nodding under a tree with his paraphernalia around him, but there was no one else about. She let herself into the gap in the fence where there had once been a gate; inside, tall neem trees made deep shadows. A clerk or two lay sleeping in the shade. Then she saw the gardener, sleeping, his turban spread out over his face. The bullock that had been pulling the lawn mower lay beside him like a white, humped mountain, chewing cud. Susheela crept soundlessly to the lake's edge.

The lake itself was small, more like a large pond. The edge was paved with stone, brown and weathered with age; at one end there was the old ruin with crumbling steps leading down into the quiet, green water. What ancients had built and frequented the place Susheela did not know, but it was tranquil here, under the neem trees. The water had receded with the heat of summer, but there was enough to allow a few fragile blue lotuses to bloom in the shade.

She leaned against a tree trunk, savoring the peace. Then she slipped a slender brown foot out of her embroidered shoe, over the sun-warmed stone paving into the water. She felt the cool silk of the water on her foot, and a tremendous longing arose within her, a desire to feel the water lick the dry heat from her body, to envelop her in its fluid embrace . . .

Some small sound jolted her back into herself. She withdrew her foot hurriedly from the water, wiped it on the stone. What had she been about to do? A bead of sweat ran down her cheek to the corner of her mouth. Then she saw that there was something in the water, making ripples as it swam towards her. A turtle, perhaps-or a snake? She leaned forward, peering. In the emerald depths, apparitions of pale fish scattered as the thing came closer. It was a snake-a cobra.

Just as she identified it she saw a stone skimming over the water, falling a few feet short. The snake dived and disappeared.

Her skin prickled. The gardener was standing beside her.

"They say it is good to see a cobra the day before the Snake Festival," he said. He wiped the sweat off his face with his turban. "It means rain. But better not to let the Naag Lords get too close, behen. Would you like some flowers? Amaltas blooms, yellow as sunlight, lovely tied in your bun, against your neck . . . or would you prefer . . . a delicate twig of harsingar?"

She edged away nervously. For a moment she imagined his fingers on the nape of her neck.

"No, I don't want anything," she said shortly. He was looking at her without any shame, as though she were a woman of his own class, not a respectably married housewife. But respectably married housewives didn't wander about parks alone.

"If ever there is anything you need . . . I will be happy to serve you. But tell me, where is your little boy?"

Oh why hadn't she brought Kishore? She looked around her, terrified, and was reassured to see a young couple enter the park, holding hands surreptitiously. Some of her fear abated.

"I have to go," she said, drawing herself up. The gardener put his palms together, accepting her dismissal, his gaze licking at her face. "Achha, behen-ji," he said. Yes, sister. He watched her leave. She was conscious of the movement of her hips, the slight swing of her arms, the dust she raised with every step. She did not draw breath until she was out in the lane.

She had grown up off-balance. All her life she had carried inside her an empty space that disturbed her center of gravity, that drew her to the sheltering closeness of trees, walls, wilderness. Nothing she had done in her life-not her studentship, not marriage, not even the birth of her son-had assuaged that emptiness, that feeling of the earth waiting for rain. She was still waiting.

In her childhood the Snake Festival had been special. It was the one day she had always understood to be her own. Here in this small town where her husband had grown up, Naag Panchami would be marked only by a visit to the temple and prayers to the gods to prevent death by snakebite. But in her hometown of Ujjain, tomorrow, there would be special ceremonies and processions in the streets . . .

In her parents' house, every Festival day, the child Susheela had helped her mother arrange flowers and sweet offerings on the kitchen altar. Dressed in silks, Susheela had sat with her brother on the flower-strewn floor, watching as their mother lit the oil diyas. In the flickering light, her mother would become remote and solemn, chanting the ancient Sanskrit phrases: homage to the snakes of the earth. Homage to the snakes in the rays of sun, the tree-snakes. Homage to the snakes of the waters, homage to them all. The names of the Snake lords were then recited: Anantha, who supports the earth in his coils, Vasuki the king, who rules their fabulous, gem-studded underworld city. Takshaka, Muchilinda, all the greater and the lesser lords. They bring us life, her mother would say; they foster fertility and renewal. They bring also death. They are in the fire of Agni and in the primeval ocean.

Her mother would turn from the altar to her children and take the child Susheela onto her lap. Then the stories would come, wondrous tales, fierce or sad; about the Snake divinities speaking to gods and mingling secretly with humans; about their exquisite underwater palaces, where they kept the knowledge and wisdom they had accumulated, waiting until humankind was ready for the gift. As her mother spoke her hands would rise and fall in smooth and sudden gestures, and the stories, built thus of words and hands, would come to life in the fragrant air. Her mother's urbanized Hindi would give way to the sing-song village dialect she had spoken as a girl. Even as a five-year-old, Susheela was aware that what was being passed on to them on these occasions was meant particularly for her; that her brother, sitting wistful-eyed across from them was in some inexplicable way, excluded.

But the most wonderful thing about it all was that the three of them were sheltered for a while, in a cocoon of mystery and ceremony, from the mundane, silent bitterness between her parents. Her father kept away from them during Naag Panchami, leaving them to an unfamiliar peace. As she grew older, it became increasingly clear to Susheela that the undercurrents of ill-feeling in the house, the raised voices (mainly her father's) behind locked doors in the night, the misery, guilt and yearning in her mother's eyes-were all her fault. Her father treated her with a distant regard; his love he kept for his son, expressing it with his eyes whenever he looked at the boy, unaware that the boy feared him and longed to escape.

Coming home from school-she remembered how it felt to enter the dark, polished hallway, the high-arched ceilings-how the house diminished her. The respite of the garden and the parakeets in the guava trees, the three harsingar trees (her favorite kind) bright with tiny flowers . . . And then quite suddenly she was grown up and her marriage arranged with a stranger she had met only three times. He had come once for tea in the garden, and later they had walked together, chaperoned by her mother and aunts. She had lost her reserve, pointing out to him the trees and flowers and her favorite shady spot under the jamun tree, and he had impressed her with the way his hands touched the blossoms, the ripe fruit, so gently for such a big, quiet man. She had wanted him to touch her like that . . .

For the five years of her marriage the Festival had brought her nothing but shadows from the past, and a small remembrance from her brother. Only this year-this year was different. The intensity of the old dream, the tightness in her chest, the feeling of breathless anticipation . . . Entering the dim stillness of the house, Susheela found herself longing for her son. But he was still asleep in his grandmother's bed. She wanted to hold him forever because she feared that she would not hesitate to leave him for the nameless hunger that was in her.

In the late afternoon, when the heat had abated a little, Susheela's husband came home from work. His name was Prakash, but she couldn't think of him by his name, only by the way he made her feel, a mixture of bewilderment and yearning. Kishore ran up to him at the doorway, calling "Baba!" in his high voice. The child had sulked all afternoon when she told him they were not going to the park. Finally she had made him a paper boat and told him he could play in the washing-up water. Now he held out the damp boat to his father. A brief smile broke the serious cast of her husband's face, accentuating the lines that made him look older than he was. He glanced at Susheela quickly, noncommittally, and went into the back to wash his hands, leaving in his wake a faint odor of musty offices and old ledgers. Standing in the silence and heat of the dining room, with the silver teapot and the array of delicacies arranged on the table, Susheela felt suddenly bereft of hope. How had she come to this?

Once she had almost loved him. Not at first-she remembered sitting terrified before the nuptial fire under a canopy of marigolds in the front lawn, with this man that she hardly knew. Her father had died the previous year. She had left the large suburban bungalow, the luxuriant garden that had been her refuge, and her mother, alone, serene now after years of unhappiness, but with a haunted, fragile air about her-all that, for the life of a senior accountant's wife in a strange town. Still, in the beginning, her husband's gentleness had won her over. He had been loving and attentive, filling her with a joyous, incredulous relief, allaying her fears that her married life would be as dreary and bereft of happiness as her mother's had been. She had started to fall in love with him, with his patience, his long, contemplative silences, and the inexplicable, endearing seriousness with which he took his work. But then, quite soon after the birth (nearly painless) of their son, everything had changed. Her husband suddenly began to avoid her as much as was possible, and sometimes she had caught him giving her peculiar, wary, sidelong glances that she could not fathom. It had disturbed the healthy, animal joyfulness of motherhood.

He had evaded her questions, meeting her pleas, tears and anger with a pained silence. Finally she had come to accept that things would stay this way between them. Four years later he was still the kind, quiet man she'd known, but he had kept his distance; he no longer looked at her much, even when they (infrequently) made love.

The evening wore on-dark fell and mosquitoes came swarming in through cracks in the shutters. The power was still out so her husband lit candles in the rooms that cast large, tremulous shadows. The air was thick as a blanket.

There was a sudden loud crash in the house, and the sound of water splashing. Her mother-in-law screamed, "Susheela? Arrey Susheela! Look what your son just did! Don't cry, my darling . . . "

In the kitchen, which was lit dimly by a candle, Kishore stood soaked to the skin in the washing-up water. The bucket lay overturned on the floor. He was crying noisily, holding the soggy remains of the paper boat. As Susheela picked him up, her mother-in-law shook her head. "It's the curse on your family!" she said. "Drawn to water-and to death! He had climbed into the bucket with his boat. He would have drowned if I had not come in just then. My poor boy, what will become of him!"

"Let her be, Ma-ji," her husband said. He was standing in the doorway. He gave Susheela a quick, shy look. When she came towards the door with their son he laid his hand on the boy's dripping head.

"Susheela?"

He spoke her name tentatively, questioningly, but her eyes were already filling with tears. She stepped past him with her burden. In the bedroom she stood Kishore on the bed to dry him down and change his clothes. "I'll make you another boat tomorrow," she told him, glad that the semi-darkness hid her tears. Curses did run in families . . . She remembered her brother's escapades to the pond at the end of their street when they had been children, and how their father had scolded him as he stood dripping and half-naked on the polished floor of the hall. Nothing he said had made a difference to the boy; the next afternoon he would be gone again with the servant children, diving and splashing in the pond among gleaming green lily-pads, coming reluctantly home in the evenings through the dining room window, all aglow with his adventure, swearing her to secrecy . . .