Free The Smoke is Rising by Mahesh Rao

unread section of the newspaper, the telephone book or an old copy of the
Reader’s Digest
: anything that might stave off a descent towards that final recourse.
    The intensely irritating thing about being a widow, apart from all the other intensely irritating things, was that she had been rendered void by most of their social set. In the immediate aftermath of Sridhar’s death the messages of condolence had flooded in, as they should. The sombre visits, the enquiries as to the final days, the ceremonial panoply, everything had been correctly in place. It was after those first few months of bereavement that Susheela had dropped to the bottom like a sunken stone. Perhaps they thought that her grief would make her incapable of pleasant intercourse; perhaps they lacked the idiom required to extend a social courtesy to a woman missing a crucial appendage; perhaps they thought she would run off with one of their decrepit husbands; perhaps they had never warmed to her in the first place. Whatever the real reason, a curtain had fallen with a heavy thud over the invitations to bridge evenings at the Erskine Club, concerts at Jaganmohan Palace, drinks at the JW Golf Club and dinners at the Galleria by Tejasandra Lake. There were still the weddings, housewarmings and naming ceremonies, of course; anything where a woman with a dead husband could be seated in a corner among other women with dead husbands, so that they could all quietly discuss their loss.
    Across the road, the Nachappa boy had just returned from work. As he reversed his car into the garage, a tinny version of ‘Que Sera, Sera’ sputtered out into the early darkness. Susheela admitted defeat and turned on the television. A news channel was relaying footage of the chaotic scenes witnessed in the Karnataka Legislative Assembly earlier in the day. A number of MLAs had stormed the Speaker’s podium in protest at what they saw as continued procedural unfairness in the conduct of debates. The Speaker had been escorted to another part of the building for his own safety while his microphone was dismantled by a particularly zealous member of the House. Balled-up paper flew across the room and,in the background, two MLAs had hoisted a chair up on to their shoulders, an action whose legislative purpose remained unclear.
    Susheela’s mouth turned down in disgust at the sight of these hooligans who were in charge of running matters. What had the people of Karnataka ever done to deserve such representatives?
    The newsreader announced impassively that one MLA had threatened to take poison in the House, at which point the Speaker had adjourned proceedings for the day before slipping away. The Assembly members had carried on with their protest against the disregard for parliamentary rules, apparently too absorbed to notice the adjournment.
    ‘What we need is someone to just come and take charge and put all these
goondas
in their place,’ thought Susheela. ‘If you give a little bit of freedom to these thugs, they just abuse it.’
    She flicked through the channels, looking for something indicative of a more enlightened society.

    Mala slid open the glass doors of the cabinet and gingerly fluttered a duster over the ceramic debris of her late mother-in-law’s life. Girish’s mother had died some ten years ago in a flash flood while on pilgrimage to Badrinath. Discussions of a possible match between Mala and Girish were at an early stage when Rukmini and Mala’s elder sister, Ambika, came to know of the tragedy. They had clucked appropriately, Rukmini’s eyes gazing sadly into the middle distance, but there existed an unspoken contentment that came with the knowledge that Mala would not have to endure any mother-in-law related guerrilla warfare. Girish’s stock had just risen.
    A week after the wedding, when Mala arrived at the house in Sitanagar, she wondered whether it would have been preferable for the departed lady to have been present in the flesh. As a memory, Girish’s