“You both rest,” she said. “I’ll be back soon.”
A woman ladled rice onto banana leaves and began to fold them shut for neater transport. As she worked, Arwa looked around idly, across the stalls, until her gaze was caught by a building in the distance, set back against the walls of the caravanserai.
The building should not have caught her attention. It was no brighter than the ones that surrounded it, but it was large, and upon its surface was a large painting in rich greens and browns. A tree with a vast canopy and great snarled roots, that curled in streaks of paint across the ground beneath the building’s wall.
Arwa thought of the hermitage. Thought, too, of Aliye’s tale, of a doe that was a woman, who died so Ambha could live. A story that lived in the blood, the air, the bones of the Empire.
“What is that place?” Arwa asked the woman. “With the tree.”
“The House of Tears,” the woman said. Her gaze flickered to Arwa’s shorn hair. “They give widows a home there,” she added. “Not a bad place to be, if you have no family to care for you.”
The House of Tears.
With a murmur of thanks, Arwa paid her coin and tucked the parcels into a sling made of her shawl. She turned to return to their makeshift room. Then stopped.
She could not pretend that she didn’t know how to resist her impulses. She’d learned to be whatever was required of her. But she did not want to resist this impulse. Her heart was singing in her chest. She turned on her heel and walked—slowly, deliberately—toward the House of Tears.
There was a pool of silence around it. The only person she could see was a short-haired widow in a pale Chand sari, cross-legged in the shade of the roof, filling small clay lamps with clarified butter. The widow did not look up as Arwa crossed the building’s threshold, stepping into the cool dark of the interior.
She walked forward. Unexpectedly there were steps leading down to a room below the ground. She thought of Zahir’s tomb enclosure, and kept on walking. Heavy doors at the base of the stairs were open. She passed through them, and the sight that greeted her stole her breath.
Lanterns upon the walls. Flames in miniature clay lamps, set upon the floor. And before her: an effigy. Maha and Emperor both.
The statue of the Maha was carved from grief itself. Pale as ivory, pure and austere. The world in its palm was a liquid sheen of silver and gold in the flickering light.
Arwa took a step toward it.
The ground was covered, from end to end, with grave-tokens made of green and also of clay. The clay tokens glimmered in the faint light, dusted with paints and fragments of mirror, ceramic and silver.
The widow at the last caravanserai they’d visited had been right: She would have benefited from having a grave-token to hand. Her palms felt empty, graceless at the sight before her.
She was kneeling. She hadn’t intended to kneel.
All the Maha has done, she thought,and yet the awe and adoration wells up in me like blood still.
How terrible to have the Empire she’d lived in and loved be a thing born from such darkness. To be born from a person she had been inculcated to love, and couldn’t let go of, in her bones and heart.
She looked at the Maha’s statue, fear and grief buzzing at the back of her skull; then she stood and walked up the stairs, back into the blistering light.
The widow was no longer alone. She had a companion. The two of them looked at Arwa as she passed.
“Where are you going, sister?” one widow yelled. She rose to her feet, striding over to Arwa. “Where’s your offering? Don’t you know it’s bad luck not to make an offering at a grief-house?”
She took hold of Arwa’s arm. Turned her.
“Stop, stop,” said the other widow. “Look at her hair.”
The widow lifted Arwa’s face to the brash daylight with a wrench of her fingers against Arwa’s chin.
“Ah,” said the widow. Her eyes narrowed, calculating, thoughtful. “Are you here looking for a home, sister?”
For a moment, Arwa could not talk. The House of Tears had stoppered her throat.
The moment was enough.
“Come with me, then,” said the woman. She led Arwa around to the back of the House of Tears, despite Arwa’s ineffectual protests, where a large group of widows sat under an awning. One, older than the rest, was holding court, seated on her own chair and smoking a pipe.
“Aunt Madhu,” said the woman. “There’s a new widow.”
