In each of the schools she went to, the teachers noted that she:

(a) Was an extremely polite child.

(b) Had no friends.

It appeared to be a civil, solitary form of corruption. Arid for this very reason, they all agreed (savoring their teacherly disapproval, touching it with their tongues, sucking it like a sweet) all the more serious.

It was, they whispered to each other, as though she didn’t know how to be a girl.

They weren’t far off the mark.

Oddly, neglect seemed to have resulted in an accidental release of the spirit.

Rahel grew up without a brief. Without anybody to arrange a marriage for her. Without anybody who would pay her a dowry and therefore without an obligatory husband looming on her horizon.

So as long as she wasn’t noisy about it, she remained free to make her own enquiries: into breasts and how much they hurt. Into falsehair buns and how well they burned. Into life and how it ought to be lived.

When she finished school, she won admission into a mediocre college of architecture in Delhi. It wasn’t the outcome of any serious interest in architecture. Nor even, in fact, of a superficial one. She just happened to take the entrance exam, and happened to get through. The staff were impressed by the size (enormous), rather than the skill, of her charcoal still-life sketches. The careless, reckless lines were mistaken for artistic confidence, though in truth, their creator was no artist.

She spent eight years in college without finishing the five-year undergraduate course and taking her degree. The fees were low and it wasn’t hard to scratch out a living, staying in the hostel, eating in the subsidized student mess, rarely going to class, working instead as a draftsman in gloomy architectural firms that exploited cheap student labor to render their presentation drawings and to blame when things went wrong. The other students, particularly the boys, were intimidated by Rahel’s waywardness and almost fierce lack of ambition. They left her alone. She was never invited to their nice homes or noisy parties. Even her professors were a little wary of her-her bizarre, impractical building plans, presented on cheap brown paper, her indifference to their passionate critiques.