Low (Extract)
When the priests told him to push the button that would slide her into the electric furnace, he had worried that the absurd sari would burst into flame. He’d taken a last look at her slight figure dwarfed by piles of flowers and sundry low-priced objects, her face obscured by the sari’s pallu, artfully obscured so no viewer would remark at the blood vessels that had burst on her cheeks and forehead and neck like scarlet-brown buds that would never bloom. “Kar do,” the priest had said. Obediently Ullis slid her in, and some time later his mother-in-law divided his wife’s ashes into two boxes: “One for you and one for me.”
An extract from the opening chapter of Jeet Thayil‘s Low, out today!