The matches were almost gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meena counted them without picking them up \u2014 four left in the box, maybe five if she had miscounted the night before, which she doubted because she had learned long ago to count everything carefully. Flour. Days. Matchsticks. The things that stood between her family and complete darkness had to be tracked the way a general tracks ammunition, because running out was not an inconvenience. Running out was a different kind of war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The small fire in the clay pit was holding. Barely. She fed it a thin stick and watched the flame shiver and recover and shiver again, and she thought about what was in the pot \u2014 water, two fistfuls of lentils, a piece of ginger she had found at the very back of the shelf behind everything else. Not enough. It was never quite enough. But it was hot, and hot counted for a great deal when the walls were made of old stone and the wind came through the gaps without asking permission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Behind her, her husband Rajan slept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She did not resent him for it. She had made a decision years ago not to spend her energy on resentment, because resentment was a fire that consumed the person holding it and heated nothing. Rajan had worked the construction site for eleven straight days before his back had given out three mornings ago, and now he lay on the mat with his eyes closed and his breathing slow, a man the shape of exhaustion, a man whose body had simply filed its final complaint and refused further negotiation. He would be up by tomorrow. He always got up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her daughter Priya slept beside him. Sixteen, with her mother’s dark eyes and her father’s stubbornness, curled on her side with her shawl pulled over her face. Priya had been coughing since the cold came in September. A dry, persistent cough that Meena tracked the same way she tracked everything \u2014 counting the episodes at night, noting whether they were getting better or worse, running the calculation of what a doctor’s visit cost against what they had and arriving at the same answer every time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not yet. Wait. Find another way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the corner, little Dev stood with his metal cup held in both hands, watching his grandmother with the particular stillness of a five-year-old trying to be invisible. He had learned that when adults wore certain faces, the best thing a child could do was make himself small and quiet. He was very good at reading faces. It was a skill Meena wished he hadn’t needed to develop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Beside him sat three-year-old Asha, who had not yet learned to read faces and so simply stared at everything with round, interested eyes, still young enough to find the world more curious than frightening. She was holding the metal cup too \u2014 her brother’s, borrowed without asking \u2014 and looking into it with the serious concentration of someone conducting an important scientific inquiry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meena looked at her grandchildren and felt the thing she always felt when she looked at them \u2014 something between fierce love and fierce terror, so tightly braided together that she had stopped trying to tell them apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She had been the one holding things together for twenty-two years. She had held them together through the drought of 2002 that took the crop and very nearly took Rajan. Through the fever that killed her youngest son at fourteen, a loss she carried in her body like a stone she had learned to walk with. Through the landlord who raised the rent every year with the cheerful indifference of a man who had never wondered where next month’s money would come from. Through every season that arrived with its hand out and left with whatever they had managed to scrape together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was sixty-one years old. Her hands were the hands of a woman who had wrung every drop of use out of every day she had been given. Cracked at the knuckles, dark with old sun, steady in a way that had nothing to do with ease and everything to do with practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She stirred the pot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The lentils were softening. The ginger had given the broth a thin warmth that was more promise than substance, but promise was something. She had built entire days on less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dev took a small step toward her. “Nani,” he said. “Is food ready?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Soon,” she said. She didn’t look up. If she looked at his face she would give him her portion, and she needed to stay upright until at least the evening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I’m not very hungry,” he said. It was the most transparent lie she had ever heard, delivered with the earnest conviction of a boy who wanted it to be true for her sake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She looked up then. She couldn’t help it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was watching her with those careful eyes \u2014 his father’s eyes, her dead son’s eyes \u2014 and his chin was doing the thing it did when he was trying not to show something, pulling in slightly, tightening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She set down the spoon. She crossed the room in three steps and pulled him against her without ceremony and held him there, his small face against her neck, his arms coming up around her automatically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“You are the hungriest boy in this room,” she said into his hair. “And the food will be ready soon. And it will be enough.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It would not be a feast. It would not be what he deserved. But it would be hot, and she would make sure his bowl was the fullest, and after they ate she would tell him the story he always asked for \u2014 the one about the river king and the clever girl \u2014 and his eyes would go wide and slow the way they did when the story took hold, and for that hour the stone walls would recede and the wind through the gaps would be just wind, and they would be warm enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was what she knew how to do. Not fix everything. Not enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Just enough for today, lit with the last of the matches, kept alive by a woman who had simply decided \u2014 again, the way she decided it every morning \u2014 that the fire was going to stay lit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"