When the night, like watery ink, had leaked across the sky, when the first delicate dusting of stars appeared overhead, when the fruit vendor parked across the street began to move away with his plaintive cries trailing behind him like rags, the year when the little sister turned ten and skinny, and the older sister, 16 and tall, when they turned on the lights in their house, methodically flicking on switch after switch, that’s when news of Rajan’s death spread through the neighbourhood. He’d been missing for two days and they’d finally found him at the bottom of the local pond. The two girls wanted to go down the road right away to see the body, only to see if it still looked like Rajan, the little sister explained.

“Of course it does!” their mother replied, “What do you expect?”
But she also insisted that they could wait till the next morning, it was after sunset, she said, after they’d washed our hands and feet in readiness for bed, after their compound gate had been locked, after she had strung the jasmine for the next day’s worship and wrapped it in a damp leaf. “After all these years!” she said, “the man is actually dead! Who’d believe it?”
So the girls had to wait till daybreak, though they barely slept. It seemed like there were streams of people shuffling up and down the street through the night, and the little sister, still beside herself with excitement, wondered if the dead man also walked on ghostly feet, and if that muffled sound they heard carried by the damp, cool breeze every now and then was the sound of weeping.

The large living room of the dead man’s house was crowded with the concerned and the curious. Rajan had not been popular in life because he’d not only been the richest man in this small town, he’d also been the most arrogant. The little sister looked at the shrouded body and wondered if there was algae still entangled in his hair and scum in his spongy lungs. The older sister thought about how once, racing down the street, she’d run headlong into Rajan and he’d looked down at her from what seemed a tremendous height and asked in an icy voice if she was blind or simply a fool. She was a proud girl and dumbstruck with rage, she’d not answered.

But their thoughts were interrupted. A whisper ran through the room and the crowds at the door parted to let someone in. She was dressed in widow-white, she who was known to wear the brightest of saris and the gaudiest of jewels.
“What is this!” someone panted in excitement. “What is this now!”
“What’s what?” the little sister piped up.
“Nothing,” their mother muttered, pinching her arm to hush her up.
But she was wrong. It was something.

“That one was his first woman,” the older sister whispered importantly to the younger one. “And the other one was his other.” This information did not seem to excite the child though it had created little dust clouds of excitement in the room. No one had imagined that she, Rajan’s mistress, would actually come here. She paused only for an instant before she made her way, as bold as brass, as cool as ice, as grand as a goddess, to the head of the bed – the position of the lawful wife, who was already seated there, head appropriately lowered, dressed dutifully in white.

She is going to protest, the onlookers thought. There is going to be a quarrel like we’ve never seen and he is no longer around to do anything about it.
They were all in suspense. Only the little sister speculated on the mysteries of water, on death by drowning, on death.
Rajan’s widow raised her eyes to the other’s face and then made space for this other woman, his mistress. The crowd shifted uneasily and murmured. The dead man’s hair was graying and his face was bloated and bruised, no longer as handsome as it had been in life but still with the sharp, cruel look around the mouth. The two women looked like twins, mirror images of each other. The chanting priest, who had momentarily hesitated and stumbled, continued his rituals.

“The b... actually has two women mourning for him!” the men in the room thought ruefully, with envy. They didn’t seem to notice that neither of the women wept.
This woman, what did she think? Perhaps she thought: I am the Mistress. I am bold red hibiscus, wild fire, big sky. I don’t steal men, though that’s what people think. I borrow the best parts. The rest their wives can keep – for them is the burnt edge of the day to day business of marriage: the boredom, the weariness, the irritation. For me the night. I don’t want to marry because I know men so well. Haven’t I myself aided and abetted their deceptions and their infidelities? This man here, dead now, was most alive when he was with me, his body taut, his skin supple. These other men here, even men half my age, long for me to look at them.

The little sister sighed and shifted, it looked like she had had enough. The older sister looked at the two women in mourning and wondered...
The other woman, the widow, maybe she thought: I am the caged bird who they mistakenly pity. The birds outside have mangled wings and broken limbs. They starve and eventually die premature deaths. The thrill of freedom bears a heavy price. I might be old now, but I am ageless because I have the infinite patience of time. I have waited for him to return day after day. For this day I’ve waited.
The onlookers thought: how much these two must hate each other.

But perhaps the women had discovered that the line between hate and love is a fine, fine one. Each had looked again and again for traces of the other on the terrain they shared, this man’s person. A strand of hair, a scent, a smell, something, some mark. They had thought obsessively about the other, like it seemed they were in love, not with him, but with each other. They had wondered: what does she think, what does she do, what does she say. He had never ever brought them together of course; he knew that wives and mistresses belonged to different worlds, but they had caught glimpses of the other on the streets. “So that is the one…!” They’d even followed each other sometimes, only to capture the details of the other’s life.

They’d both grown old together. Together, yet always apart, they’d experienced sagging flesh and thinning hair. Apart, yet always together. As his attention had strayed from his aging mistress to other, younger women, she’d learned the sharp edge of neglect and humiliation – the same pain the other had known for years.
“I wonder what she feels now,” each one had thought.
Perhaps they’d both followed each other and him – the night he left home to meet his death. The lake was in flood, it was a moonless night. Who knows what happened? But surely, he should have known better than to walk so close to the murky water, along the edge of the slippery bank? Better than to call out for help when no one was around, but two watching shadows, together but always apart?

They priest indicated that the ceremony was complete. It was time to take up the body. The little sister perked up again. She noticed that the pall-bearers staggered under the weight of the corpse. The onlookers were still waiting for the two women to scream, to scratch each other’s eyes out, for an eruption, a flood, for the house to break into flames, for something. But it turned out to be the most ordinary of funerals after all. Only the older sister, watching carefully, noticed that the two women let their eyes meet a couple of times and may have even smile.

After the neighbours had gone home, after the ashes and petals had been swept away, after this rainy season had ended and the next and the next, after the children playing on these streets had grown up and gone their ways – after all of this, which of these women will I choose to be, the older sister wondered. The one or the other? Wife or mistress? Would there be a choice at all? She glanced at her little sister, intelligent, pretty, dreamy, yet curious, trailing languidly behind them as they walked home, and wondered about her and what she would choose.