Deepa Kumari re-reads the text from her husband saying for the last time no, he’s definitely not coming back. She sinks under the sheets as the air conditioner hums overhead, straining to push away the steam from the Arabian Gulf.
So what if she threw a steel cashbox at his head, landing him in the ER? They had been married for twenty years‒they built an empire together. He can’t just leave.
After escaping her job as a maid, Deepa worked under the table. She scraped, saved, and studied. She met Anish in an accountancy course and after their wedding, they opened their own practice.
Deepa runs a hand over her husband’s cold spot in the bed. For three weeks now she’s been alone. She flings off the covers and marches across the rug. She’s made more money than she ever dreamed she would when she was a kid in her parents’ shanty outside Kochi. She turns the faucet and clean water comes out, but she stares at the mold growing between the marble tiles. She still can’t afford someone to clean it.
Anish and she did well enough; they grew their practice into two branches. They were on the cusp of going international‒of vast riches. But no one in that damn place worked hard enough, Deepa thought.
The more success they earned, the less the others worked. Deepa crisscrossed the country for new clients and spent long nights in the office. Anish and the partners napped at their desks and cut out early for dinner. Deepa became a taskmaster; she yelled at partners and beat associates with rulers. A few complained, but nothing came of it. Force brings results, Deepa knows. She’s the only one with drive.
And what has it got her, Deepa wonders as she takes another Valium from the medicine cabinet. Nothing, she knows. Her husband fled and the firm was dissolving. The partners are on their way back to Delhi and Dhakka and Nairobi, and she’s stuck in the Gulf‒and in debt. She and Anish had wanted children, but she always put it off. If they could only sign the next clients, she had thought, finish the next deal. Now she’s 41‒too old for a new start, she thinks‒and alone.
Deepa blames one person for it all. Not her mother or father‒so poor they had to ship away their daughter‒no. Deepa faults the woman who brought her to Najah in the first place. In the years since Deepa left the woman’s house, she’s dreamt a thousand times of her murder. And just then, the woman’s name pops up on her phone like an invitation.
“Sheikha al-Harbi is sick,” the text message reads, from one of the girls who still works in the old neighborhood, “it’s pretty bad, you should visit.”
The thought of seeing Sheikha makes the skin on her arms crawl. But she realizes she has one last opportunity. I’ll pay her a visit, alright, she thinks, looking in the mirror.
Deepa puts on a fresh, white sari and her Guttapusalu necklace, an ornate web of gold and pearls she bullied her husband into buying for her years ago, before they could afford it. She wants them to see her coming. Her Land Rover’s door shuts with a satisfying thunk, and she sees it’s almost 10 p.m., but it’s Ramadan and the streets are filled with string lights and fanous lamps, and traffic. She can’t bear to watch the happy families strolling beside the palms and fountains. Her tears blur the lane lines. She should have stayed in Kerala, she thinks, where none of this would have happened. Sheikha’s house is in a rich neighborhood in the foothills, and Deepa hasn’t been there in years, but she would never forget. She floors it.
She passes the cemetery, with its low, stone markers, and thinks of when she first met the woman. Deepa’s mind had still been on the airplane; the view, the thrust against the seat, the perfectly square biscuits. Deepa floated through the gleaming white airport terminal like a cloud to the exit, where the woman in the black abaya waited. Sheikha was strong and beautiful; she had jewels, makeup, a family, and her own car. She was a tigress. Someday, Deepa would be like her, she thought.
They lived in a mansion, but Deepa would sleep in the laundry room, on a floor mattress behind the plywood-thin door. Deepa was 19 and away from the village for the first time. She wanted her employer to like her. She smiled bravely and surrendered her passport and contract. Sheikha locked them in her safe.
Deepa cooked, ironed abayas, and scrubbed toilets; it was hard but no worse than anything back home. Deepa could handle it, she thought, and the pay would change her life.
But Sheikha gave her a new to-do list every morning and another at night, and the chores piled up.
“That’s stained,” Sheikha would say, passing in the hall, peering from behind designer sunglasses, “you’ll have to get on your knees.”
The two boys, Saad and Raad, demanded meals at odd hours, and if Deepa didn’t bring them in time, they threw the plates on the floor. Linens, thobes, and abayas mounted, and Deepa started waking in the middle of the night to keep up with the laundry.
The husband, Fahd, was tall and fat with a thick beard. His voice thundered, and he never spared the family his hairy, overgrown fists.
The teenage daughter Sarah teased Deepa. About her clothes and her skin, and her weight‒lighter every day‒and Sheikha encouraged it and even joined her. Deepa worked twice as hard to impress them.
Pay came short and late. Most other maids in the neighborhood got their full, agreed-upon salary and weekends off. The family next door even paid for their nanny, an Indonesian girl named Citra, to go to college, and let her use the car at night. A few had it worse than Deepa. Jendy, a Ugandan woman across the street, was barely allowed outside.
Deepa often stared at the thin, laundry-room door, listening for footsteps and praying Sheikha wouldn’t come. But Deepa stuck with it. Even with half the promised salary, she still sent money home and saved some for herself. Someday, Deepa thought, she’d be on the other side of that door.
The first time Sheikha hit her, it was a slap on the hand. Then a knock to the back of the head. Deepa began walking with her eyes downcast, crying silently in her room. When she lay on her floor mattress at night, she dreamt of escape.
“You know if you were to leave,” Sheikha said once in the bathroom, while Deepa shaved the woman’s legs, “they’d bring you back.” Sheikha massaged cream into her own black eye, then went to the safe in her closet. She held a diamond necklace against her breast. “Or throw you in jail, if I wanted.”
Deepa stayed for two years, terrified. Until one morning, foggy from a sleepless night, she forgot to boil the eggs for breakfast. When Sheikha came into the kitchen, Deepa remembered and started for the fridge, but she was too late. Sheikha seized her by the arm. She pressed a scalding teapot into her skin, and Deepa breathed in her own charred flesh. Tears trickled down her cheek, and bile coated her tongue. Deepa lay awake again that night in the sweltering heat, staring at the flimsy black door. Go through it, she willed herself. Still, it took her months longer to work up the courage to actually leave.
Now, Deepa pulls up in front of the arched windows and gold-necked columns, and her heart pounds like the express to Chennai. But she manages to slow her breathing. She used to think this was a palace but now she sees it’s just a house‒hers is at least as big. A crack runs up the wall, sprouting weeds.
She rings the doorbell and when it’s answered, she comes face to face with Sheikha again‒the bold jaw, the stunning, brown eyes, and the black abaya. She hasn’t aged. Then Deepa realizes it’s not Sheikha but her daughter, Sarah.
Frankincense wafts through the majlis. Deepa recognizes Saad and Raad, now with paunches and bushy beards of their own. They recline on the sofa while their kids play. So much time has passed, Deepa thinks.
“I remember you,” Raad says, “Priyanka, right?”
Deepa bobbles her head.
A girl in a taupe sari comes in from the kitchen with more children and a platter of plastic-wrapped samosas. Time has passed, Deepa thinks, but little has changed.
Even the kids’ abayas and turbans are pressed‒they are about to leave for a party, Deepa knows. Saad squints at her.
“You’re the one that ran away,” Saad says.
“Hey, yeah,” Sarah says, her eyes lighting up.
They don’t notice Deepa’s fancy SUV or her Guttapusalu necklace, and they don’t ask how she’s been. They barely remember her. Her skin burns.
“Why’d you come back here,” Sarah asks, moving to a mirror to primp herself, “you know we could have had you locked up?”
Deepa stares at the intricate weave of the carpet.
“I heard Madam was sick,” Deepa says, “she was my friend, and I want to apologize.”
Sarah takes the dish from the maid, chomps into a samosa, and winces.
“Yuck, too mushy,” she says, and tosses it back on the platter with the others. She turns to her brothers. “We should report her.”
“She’s technically our responsibility,” Raad says.
No surprise, Deepa thinks, that a rotten tree produced sour fruit. Deepa knows they don’t have her old documents, and she has long since acquired a new visa. Still, they could cause her a lot of trouble.
Saad stands, groaning just like his father.
“If you two make me late to this party, I will explode,” Saad says. “Besides, the old hag could use some company.” Saad scoops the children up off the carpet, but the two boys don’t want to leave. Saad strikes them across the face until they cry, and then everyone heads toward the door.
“Mom’s fragile so don’t stay long,” Sarah says, sticking her head out of the car window. “I would say Anika can show you to her room, but I’m sure you remember.” They drive off.
In the living room, Deepa steps carefully over the toys and half-eaten sandwiches, knowing that the girl must make the house spotless again before they return. She hears the scrubbing of dishes from the kitchen, and a few moments later, the whir of the washing machine.
Deepa skulks through the study and the bedrooms, touching the same walls she did years ago. She was so fragile, she thinks, and she relives each indignity. As she comes to the upstairs hallway, her chest tightens.
She sees the mahogany door to the main bedroom. Deepa pictures Sheikha laying in her king-size bed, decrepit, and she presses forward. Family portraits line the hall; Bedouin grandparents, wedding pictures, the family on the corniche. How awful they are, Deepa thinks. In her head, she goes over what she’s about to do. She can almost feel the silk sheets, smell Sheikha’s jasmine perfume as she hovers over her. She will writhe, and Deepa will have to strain as she presses down the pillow, but Sheikha is old and weak. She won’t last long.
At first, the family may be outraged. But they see their mother as little more than a burden, and even if they wanted to, they don’t know where to find Deepa. They don’t even remember her name. Pulse surging through her hand, she touches the door. Next to her, Sheikha’s husband Fahd stares out from an old photo.
He’s dead, Deepa knows‒one of the neighborhood girls texted her a few years earlier. No surprise; he was fat, old, choleric. She remembers how he attacked Sheikha and the children, like Saad does now. Deepa thinks of her own husband, and her former employees. She counts the dents in the mahogany door.
It’s all Sheikha’s fault. But Sheikha didn’t have it so easy, either, Deepa knows. She looks at Fahd’s picture again, and her own reflection stares back at her from the glass frame. Deepa has wrinkles but not as many as Fahd did. Maybe for her, there’s still time. But she can’t leave the witch unpunished. From the other side of the door, she hears a rustle‒Sheikha tossing in her sleep.
Deepa opens the door and creeps across the rug, panther-quiet. She slips past the bed to the bathroom before Sheikha has time to roll over.
“Anika,” Sheikha says, raspy, “is that you, sweetheart?”
Deepa becomes her younger self, turning her voice timid, high-pitched.
“Just a moment, Madam,” Deepa says.
So Sheikha has softened with age, Deepa thinks‒it won’t be enough to save her. From the spacious bathroom out of view, Deepa spies the frail body under the covers. She sees Fahd’s portrait in her head again, and her own reflection. Deepa makes up her mind. Suffering disease with only her children to care for her will be punishment enough.
Deepa rummages through the bathroom and walk-in closet. She finds the key and unlocks the safe. Deepa scrounges through it and takes what she needs. As she shuts it, though, the latch snags her Guttapusalu necklace, ripping it. Gold and pearls scatter across the tile. Her heartbeat thunders between her ears in panic. She loved that necklace and doesn’t want to leave a trace.
She hunches over and scrapes up the bits. But a familiar ache returns to her knees, and she’s a girl again, polishing Sheikha’s same marble floor. Deepa stops and stands upright. She only has so much time, and the necklace doesn’t mean to her what it once did. The family can have it, she thinks, as long as Deepa gets what she wants. Because what Deepa wants now is everything. It could change her life, even save it. She grabs the documents she pilfered from the safe, leaves her shattered necklace, and walks out of Sheikha’s room. As she flies back down the hallway, she hears Sheikha call for her girl again. Deepa smiles that Sheikha hasn’t recognized her‒and that the girl won’t be answering.
Deepa comes to the laundry room. She clutches the girl’s passport and contract in her left hand and knocks on the door with her right. Deepa’s heart thumps like a tabla drum. For the first time since she was young, a new path stretches out before her. She will start another business and make another fortune. She’ll take the girl in and fatten her up on rice and halwa. Give her the education that Deepa got only too late. She will raise her as a daughter, and Deepa won’t be alone anymore. She’ll save them both.
But the girl isn’t answering, and Deepa’s eyes water. She knocks again and presses her ear to the door. Deepa can hear the girl sobbing, and it’s like they’re Deepa’s own cries‒as if it's her on the other side. Come on, Deepa wills, staring at the thin, horrifying door, come through it.
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