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to Kris but soon recognized the glazed look of disinterest in his eyes. He was still in his neurosurgery residency and didn’t share her intensity about getting pregnant. Fortunately, Somer had enough drive for both of them, so it didn’t seem to matter that for the first time since they’d met, they weren’t forging down the same road.
     
    N OW, SITTING ALONE ON A SUBURBAN SIDEWALK INSTEAD OF drinking blue punch, Somer knows that day, three years ago, has become the dividing line of her life. Before that miscarriage, she remembers being happy—with her work, the house with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, the friends they saw on weekends. It seemed enough. But since that day, she has felt as if something is missing, something so immense and powerful that it overwhelms everything else. With each passing year and every negative pregnancy test, that void in their lives has grown until it has become an unwelcome member of their family, wedging itself between her and Krishnan.
    Sometimes she wishes she could return to the naïve happiness of their earlier life. But mostly, she aches to go forward, to a place her body doesn’t seem willing to take her.

7
SHANTI
    Bombay, India—1984
K AVITA
    W HEN THE BULLOCK CART DRIVER DROPS OFF K AVITA AND R UPA in the city, the sun is high and they are parched and hungry. They are engulfed by chaotic noises: honking lorries, yelling vendors. The street is crowded with overflowing trucks, assorted livestock, intrepid bicycles, rickshaws, and scooters. They stop to share a single coconut, first drinking the water, and then waiting while the tender coconut flesh is cut from the shell. On both sides, the road is lined by makeshift shacks with corrugated tin roofs; women squat in front, cooking over small fires and scrubbing clothes in buckets of dirty water.
    Rupa asks the chaat-wallah for directions to Shanti Orphanage, but he simply shakes his head as he takes in the two women with their conspicuous bare feet and rural garb. She asks a cabdriver leaning idly against his car, who spits betelnut juice onto the road and looks Kavita up and down. They all try to ascertain whether the baby is deformed, or Kavita is unwed or just too poor to keep the child. Finally, a bearded old man roasting peanuts on the corner helps them. He shovels the warm nuts into hand-rolled newspaper cones, and inbetween his calls of “ sing-dhana, garam sing-dhana, ” he tells them where to go.
    Rupa takes Kavita’s hand tightly in hers and ushers them through crowded footpaths and across busy streets. Kavita struggles to keep up with her sister, stopping only once to nurse the baby. Rupa looks up at the darkening sky and at the people scurrying around them. She leans in and says, “ Challo, bena, hold her like this.” Rupa helps her position the nursing baby so she can keep walking. “We have to hurry. It won’t be safe for us here after dark.”
    Kavita obliges, walking faster. A few hours from now, she knows, after Jasu has finished his evening meal and sat around the fire drinking and smoking beedis with the other men, he will come looking for her. She will tell him only that he need not worry about the baby, it has been taken care of. He may be angry, perhaps he will even beat her, but what punishment is that compared to what she will already have suffered? For nearly two hours, Kavita and Rupa walk without speaking. Finally they come to the two-story building with peeling blue paint. Standing outside the gate, Kavita’s legs feel like lead and her feet drag with each step. She turns to her sister, shaking her head. “ Nai, nai, nai …,” she repeats.
    “ Bena, come, you must,” Rupa says softly. “There is nothing else you can do. What can you do?” Rupa pulls her by the hand up to the door and rings the bell. Kavita stares at the red-lettered sign, carving into her memory the illegible markings that promise SHANTI , peace. An elderly hunchbacked woman in a faded orange print cotton sari opens