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wrappings off and flush the cotton down the toilet, which was not, but all in all it wasn’t so bad. Even if Latha couldn’t see Gehan, think about what she could tell him when she went back to school!
    “What are they doing out there?” Thara asked on the third afternoon.
    “Lots of telephone calls and lots of trips to the market for food,” Latha said, picking up the tall, narrow bedside table that always seemed on the verge of collapsing and scraped the floor with a piercing sound if she dragged it, which, of course, she didn’t, having learned through hard experience not to, and putting Thara’s plate of rice in front of her.
    “For whom?”
    “Not for baba, clearly,” Latha said, laughing at Thara’s face as she surveyed her latest meal of rice with ash plantains and okra, both cooked white, gotukola mallum, and no meats. “I can smuggle some dried fish for you if you like,” she offered, feeling sorry for Thara.
    “No. Amma says it’s bad to eat fried things and meats and chili and sweets until the seven days are over.”
    “Then what?”
    “Then I can eat,” Thara said, stuffing a ball of rice into her mouth.
    “Do you have to do this every month?”
    “No, you fool! This is special because it’s the first time. You don’t know anything, do you?”
    Well, it had been only three days since Thara knew nothing either, but Latha was willing to believe in the power of blood between her legs to enlighten her too. She wondered when she would get hers. Soon, she hoped. Then, not too soon, because Mrs. Vithanage would make her stay home like this, and who would keep her company? Not Thara, that was clear. Thara would go back to school. Soma, perhaps? Latha pictured the portly, uni-breasted—that’s what she and Thara called breasts like that: breasts so large they seemed to have merged like the trunks of ancient trees—old woman unfolding her mat next to hers on the floor of the storeroom instead of on the raised platform in her own room. She had a room because she was old; that’s what Mrs. Vithanage had told Latha once. She was old and she had looked after Mrs. Vithanage as a girl, so she had earned the right to her room and her bed. Frankly, Latha could not imagine either of those women as girls, but particularly not Mrs. Vithanage, because what girl could turn into such a solid, feet-firmly-planted woman? A woman with so little understanding of girls? Besides, that was not a bed Soma had; it was just a plank of wood. Beds had mattresses, didn’t they? And did Soma have a mattress? No, she didn’t. It was better to sleep on the floor, like Latha did, and not have to be grateful for a plank of wood—that’s what she thought as she lay down on the cool concrete each night, her face to the ceiling, and traced the felt definition on her body: her collarbones, her rib cage, the slope toward her belly button, the rise to the bones beneath.
    On day five Thara’s bleeding stopped and she asked to come out of her room to take a bath but her mother refused.
    “You can’t take a bath until the dhobi is here to wash you,” she said, smiling kindly, Latha felt, at Thara. Mrs. Vithanage was a tall, erect woman with very good posture, and when she was kind, it made her look positively stately. Like a queen. Queen Elizabeth II, Latha thought, remembering a picture from a glossy tome called The Book of Queens, which Thara had shown her. Except taller, with heavier breasts and more hair. Maybe not Queen Elizabeth II. Maybe some other kind of queen. Latha ran down the list of queens in her head and forgot to be quiet and servantlike, the spoons clanging against the dishes as she cleaned up.
    “I don’t want a stupid dhobi washing me,” Thara said, frowning again. She should stop frowning; she did it so often. It was not attractive on a face built for sweetness like Thara’s; not beauty, definitely not, but sweetness, which, with the blessing of her parents’wealth and privilege, endowed it with a