Interpreter of Maladies

and worried. We wondered what to do. 
    "Leather!" someone cried suddenly. "She needs to smell leather." Then we remembered; the last time it had happened, a cowhide sandal held under her nostrils was what had finally freed Bibi from the clutches of her torment. 
    "Bibi, what happened? Tell us what happened," we asked when she opened her eyes. 
    "I felt hot, then hotter. Smoke passed before my eyes. The world went black. Didn't you see it?" 
    A group of our husbands escorted her home. Dusk thickened, conch shells were blown, and the air grew dense with the incense of prayers. Bibi muttered and staggered but said nothing. Her cheeks were bruised and nicked here and there. Her hair was matted, her elbows caked with dirt, and a small piece of one front tooth was missing. We followed behind, at what we assumed to be safe distances, holding our children by the hand. 
    She needed a blanket, a compress, a sedative tablet. She needed supervision. But when we reached the courtyard Haldar and his wife would not have her in the flat. 
    "The medical risk is too great for an expectant mother to be in contact with an hysterical person," he insisted. 
    That night Bibi slept in the storage room. 
    Their baby, a girl, was delivered by forceps at the end of June. By then Bibi was sleeping downstairs again, though they kept her camp cot in the corridor, and would not let her touch the child directly. Every day they sent her to the roof to record inventory until lunch, at which point Haldar brought her receipts from the morning's sales and a bowl of yellow split peas for her lunch. At night she ate milk and bread alone in the stairwell. Another seizure, and another, went unchecked. 
    When we voiced our concern, Haldar said it was not our business, and flatly refused to discuss the matter. To express our indignation we began to take our shopping elsewhere: this provided us with our only revenge. Over the weeks the products on Haldar's shelves grew dusty. Labels faded and colognes turned rank. Passing by in the evenings, we saw Haldar sitting alone, swatting moths with the sole of his slipper. We hardly saw the wife at all. According to the scullery maid she was still bedridden; apparently her labor had been complicated. 
    Autumn came, with its promise of the October holidays, and the town grew busy shopping and planning for the season. Film songs blared from amplifiers strung through trees. Arcades and markets stayed open all hours. We bought our children balloons and colored ribbons, purchased sweetmeats by the kilo, paid calls in taxis to relatives we had not seen throughout the year. The days grew shorter, the evenings colder. We buttoned our sweaters and pulled up our socks. Then a chill set in that made our throats itch. We made our children gargle with warm saltwater and wrap mufflers around their necks. But it was the Haldar baby who ended up getting sick. 
    A doctor was summoned in the middle of the night and commanded to reduce the fever. "Cure her," the wife pleaded. Her shrill commotion had woken us all. "We can give you anything, just cure my baby girl." The doctor prescribed a glucose formula, crushed aspirins in a mortar, and told them to wrap the child with quilts and covers. 
    Five days later the fever had not budged. 
    "It's Bibi," the wife wailed. "She's done it, she's infected our child. We should never have let her back down here. We should never have let her back into this house." 
    And so Bibi started to spend her nights in the storage room again. At the wife's insistence Haldar even moved her camp cot up there, along with a tin trunk that contained her belongings. Her meals were left covered with a colander at the top of the stairs. 
    "I don't mind," Bibi told us. "It's better to live apart from them, to set up house on my own." She unpacked the trunk-some housecoats, a framed portrait of her father, sewing supplies, and an assortment of fabrics-and arranged her things on a few empty shelves. By the week's end the baby had recuperated, but Bibi was not asked to return downstairs. "Don't worry, it's not as if they've locked me in here," she said in order to set us at ease. "The world begins at the bottom of the stairs. Now I am free to discover life as I please." 
    But in truth she stopped going out altogether. When we asked her to come with us to the fish pond or to go see temple decorations she refused, claiming that she was stitching a new curtain to hang across the entrance of the storage room.