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fallen free of her careless upsweep and took a step back from Faizal. After buttoning her blouse hurriedly, Sangita snatched her notebook off the table and brushed past him. “You can leave the money with my husband when you get it,” she called over her shoulder. Faizal knew her words were meant to sting, but the breathlessness in her voice pleased him. He smiled after her, watching as she weaved through his frangipani trees with their great white-and-yellow blossoms and slipped, soundless, into her own yard.

The Rude Awakening
    Monday August 5, 1974

    CHANCE, TRINIDAD
    V imla opened her eyes and rolled onto her side. She listened to the kiskadee morning call and watched the flutters of black and yellow in the guava and tamarind trees at her bedroom window. They trilled and rustled in the treetops, cocking their heads at impossible angles and announcing their presence to the world:
kis-kis-kiskadee!
    Vimla blinked at the blue sky from her bed until slowly a feeling of foreboding stirred awake and spread thick and oily over her heart. Memories of last night burst in her mind in dreadful detail. She covered her face with her hands and curled into a tight ball as the image of her father hovering over her and Krishna with a torchlight held high flashed through her mind. Vimla groaned from her soul. He had looked so injured.
    She reached under the pillow beside her and retrieved the conch shell Krishna had left for her in the market on Saturday.It was the length of her hand, a glossy shell of peach and ivory swirls. She ran her fingers over the ridges and sharp points and inside the shell where it was as smooth and cool as marble. She held it to her ear the way Krishna had shown her and heard the ocean rise up and crash against an invisible shore. Vimla had seen conches a hundred times before—during prayers pundits blew into the shells like trumpets—but she hadn’t known that the sound of the ocean lived inside them, too.
    “What you hear?” Krishna had asked when he’d given it to her.
    “Water. Energy. Something powerful,” Vimla said. She put the shell to his ear. “What you hear?”
    “The ocean. Freedom.
You
.”
    Vimla still wasn’t sure what Krishna had meant by that, but it made her feel special and cherish the conch that much more. She took it away from her ear and tucked it back under the pillow.
    “Wake she up, Om! Wake she up so I can kill she!”
    Startled, Vimla scrambled to her window and peered behind the house, where Chandani was untying the goats from their stall. The kids bleated and pranced about the moody ram goat and he lowered his head and butted one away.
    Om took the ropes from his wife’s hands and led the goats toward the field to graze. “Vimla!” he bellowed as he walked away. “Get up so your mother can kill you!”
    Vimla leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. How many Saturdays had she pretended to go to Port of Spain for exam preparation classes, only to steal away with Krishna when she arrived? How many times had she and Krishna hidden inher father’s sugar cane to exchange a quick word, a nervous kiss? Vimla groaned. She had become careless in the past few weeks under Krishna’s self-assured care, taking bigger risks, meeting him at ungodly hours closer and closer to home. She let the back of her head rap against the wall as she sank to the floor. What would she do now?
    The stairs creaked and Vimla froze. She heard footsteps draw nearer then stop outside her bedroom door. She held her breath as the door was thrown open with a crash. Chandani stood four foot ten and frightening in the doorway. Her eyes, red and puffy—presumably from a night of crying—bulged from her small face in fury now. She breathed in through her nose and out heavily through her mouth. Gripping the sides of the door frame with her tiny hands, Chandani leaned forward and peered down at Vimla cowering on the floor. “What the ass is wrong with you?”
    Vimla’s heart struck irregularly against