The rickety little wooden bridge. On either side are a couple of almond trees with wide-stretched branches, their trunks bending down toward the water in the ditch. The trade winds tug gently at their dark-green, oval-shaped leaves and at the small piece of paper in her hand. She looks down at the address, then at the numbers on the shanties in front of her and becomes frightened. It can’t be. Ajodiadei doesn’t exist. No, this is a dream, a nightmare. She should go back, forget everything, give up. But that’s not an option, not to her. This is no nightmare. This is her body—dark, lean, strong, tireless, a body she has trouble naming, even when talking to herself. The sun is blinding. The heat humid. Drops of sweat form under her nose, between her leather schoolbag and her back. This is no nightmare. This is the address that the market woman, Soenderdei, gave her. Number 199. With a little “c” behind it. Letters. Numbers. Janakya’s registration number was 199 qq. Numbers, digits, amounts, years—they’re not bound by time. 1951 is yesterday, the past. 1951 is today, tomorrow. Now.

She walks across the rickety planks of the bridge. The narrow edge along the ditch is overgrown with grass, potato vines, water spinach. The ground is black and soggy. She’s on the property. A pungent, sour smell hangs in the air. The earth is spongy. The wind spreads the desolate stench of poverty, the stench of the outhouses in the backyard. Wild grasses with long, aggressive stalks jut out here and there without the lovely greenish sheen that ripples across a meadow. On the left are six or so shanties, shoulder to shoulder, huddled together, as if they’re challenging each other’s cry of misery. In front of every door is a small pile of stacked stones. At the communal water tap in the middle of the yard is a young, barefoot Hindustani woman.

She is washing her long black locks. Curious, she looks up as she runs the comb through her hair. S. walks slowly toward the tap. She smiles shyly, nervously. Is she on the wrong property again?

“Who are you looking for?”

“Ajodiadei . . . An old woman . . . She sells vegetables on the side of the road.”

“There’s an Ajodiadei at number c. But I don’t know if she’s the one you’re looking for.”

They look in the direction of the c. S. walks up to the middle shanty and knocks. The paint on the narrow door and walls is cracked from the heat, the color almost completely washed away by the rain. She can’t think beyond that. She’s too agitated.

“You have to knock hard,” the woman calls. “Otherwise she won’t answer. She might be drunk again.”

Her heart begins to pound. Drunk again? Her mother had vaguely insinuated that she drank. At least . . .

“Harder,” the woman calls out.

She knocks again and again. Slowly, the latch on the door slides open. A suspicious woman’s face appears behind the crack, her eyes blinded by the light. She blinks.

“What do you want? Who are you looking for?” Her breath stinks of rum.

“Are you Ajodiadei?” the girl stutters.

“And what do you want from Ajodiadei? Vegetables? Gone. You hear? Gone!”

“Koffiedjompo . . . Lelydorp . . . Radjkumarie,” the girl replies.

The woman attempts to size her up from head to toe, to compare her to the images in her memory. But she’s much too drunk to get a good look.

“Hirjalie? Radjkumarie Hirjalie?”

“Yes,” the girl answers, happy and spiteful at the same time.

“Are you Radjkumarie’s child?” she asks hoarsely.

S. nods. The woman opens the door and lets her in.

Muttering, she props the door open behind her and sets a big, jagged rock behind it to keep it from swinging out further. She straightens up and seems to remember something, something she needs to do. She ignores the girl and looks around hazily. Her gaze falls on the rock behind the door. Suddenly, she remembers where the pans and other household items are kept. She bends down and grabs a white enamel tub from the corner behind the door. In the bottom of the tub is a bunch of bhadjie. She squats down and pulls her black skirt up over her skinny legs. Listlessly, she plucks the small round leaves from their pink stalks with her bony, wrinkled fingers.

I have to talk, the girl thinks, I have to say something. Otherwise, she’ll just sit here like this until it’s late, and I have to leave. Why did she let me in? Does she even realize what my visit might mean for her? What should I say? Murderess? Witch? Devil? I’ve come to pass judgment on you? To see you judged by time?

No, S. has to control herself. Now’s not the time to do something rash. Still, she’d love to rattle the old woman’s cage, to pour a bucket of water over her head to wake her up. She wants to know the truth. Here she is, the sole survivor of the drama that played out between Harynarain Hirjalie and his wife, Janakya, the only one who knows what really happened. Did Harynarain Hirjalie love Janakya? Why did he go back to India after his contract ended? Did he actually go back? Or . . .

The old woman carelessly tosses a bare stem on the floor beside her. The girl takes a seat on a footstool a few feet away from her; it’s the only thing in the house to sit on. She feels calm again.

“Did you know my grandfather?” she asks.

“What did you say?”

“Harynarain Hirjalie, my grandfather. Did you know him?”

“Yes.”

“Did he love my grandmother?”

“I don’t know.”

The old woman’s voice sounds empty and scattered, as if she were talking to herself, or to the emptiness of the shack. For more than a year, S. has been searching for this woman who had cared for her mother since she was a child. There were hundreds of Ajodiadeis out there. At the immigration office, they didn’t know anything about a guardianship. After Janakya’s death, her child must have been adopted by another woman. Had her grandfather already left Suriname by then? Or did he leave afterward? S. can’t imagine that her grandfather would have entrusted his child to this stranger, an uprooted woman who reeked of alcohol. Soenderdei, the market woman, had nothing good to say about her, but she also said that she didn’t remember anything about Ajodiadei’s former life or her mother, Radjkumarie’s, childhood.

S.’s mother rarely talked about the years she’d spent in Lelydorp as a child and a young woman. Whenever she asked her about it, her mother became evasive. Even later, when S. was older and you could tell by the somber, disgruntled look on her face that she was wondering about her grandfather’s family. Most likely her mother knew S. no longer believed the childish explanation that she had given her. Did her mother really not realize what had happened to her? Had she been tamed by Ajodiadei’s punishments, the abuse, the lack of love? Did she think it was normal to be an orphan? Again, S. couldn’t imagine why her grandfather would subject his daughter to this woman’s despicable behavior, to a future with no past. Still, her mother went back to Koffiedjompo a few times. But why? Was she homesick? It was certainly possible. Maybe she couldn’t find the words to express herself. Maybe she knew everything.

She brought me into the world without knowing who she was herself, S. thinks. Did she ever think about her own parents, about Harynarain and Janakya? Did she ever blame them for abandoning her—her father for leaving her, her mother for dying? Once again, S. is feeling around in the dark. Assumptions and doubts flow into one another. Why had her mother kept so much hidden from her? About her life in the rice fields among the cows? She did say that she had a calf. Whenever S.’s mother mentioned it, her eyes drifted off in the distance, and her face filled with sadness. She talked about the little huts she used to build out of dry branches as a child, the kwie kwies and other freshwater fish she would catch with her hands between the grasses in the flooded paddies. She didn’t say whom she played with. There were no names but one: Ajodiadei.

“How old was my mother when my grandfather went back to India?” S. asks desperately.

The old lady tosses another bare stem on the wood floor. “I can’t remember,” she replies coldly.

“Did he really go back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Liar! You’re lying!” The girl’s voice trembles as if she’s about to cry.

“Get out!” the woman shouts.

S. doesn’t move. She gazes out through the hole in the wall. The clouds of the setting sun remind her of the fires of hell. That same glow is in her blood. She could strangle Ajodiadei. The old woman is one of the only guilty ones still alive.

And S.? She’s nothing but an insignificant witness for the prosecution walking into the courtroom after the verdict: no one was forced to sign the contract. Those people chose to do it. What happened after that wasn’t the immigration office’s fault. Or at least not when you assumed that they weren’t really people, that they were just bony claws digging in the dirt in the heat of an evil sun. That’s how the girl sees it now, because there’s no way it was hotter in India. And who could guarantee that the Hirjalie family in Calcutta, where her grandparents were from, could even be identified based on numbers and the year of disembarkation in Suriname?

Ajodiadei gets to walk free. She’s innocent before the law. She can always blame the parents’ irresponsible behavior and the registration process. It was a time of numbers. And every number was another coolie. If one died, there was one number less. Radjkumarie was probably four and a half years old when she was taken to Ajodiadei’s shanty in Lelydorp. With that, she lost her identity. She became an orphan. Or rather, she was forced to feel like an orphan and live like one. Ajodiadei never bothered to give up her guardianship at the immigration office. Why should she care about the future of Janakya’s child? She wasn’t the mother. But she could have refused the guardianship.

The woman doesn’t look up. Her face is almost entirely covered by a grubby white veil. Her blouse is as dirty as the sheet and pillowcases on the hard, wooden bed. A thin bamboo piercing protrudes from her right nostril. Her silver bracelets jingle lazily every time she picks off a leaf or throws away a stalk of bhadjie. Close to the stone behind the door are two black iron pans on legs, two copper plates, and a copper drinking bowl. These, too, were items from the old life. Lelydorp! Cows! Grass, plates, wood fire, and a few lonely children’s games, constantly interrupted and disturbed by the sleepy, husky voice of a drunken woman calling the child back to reality, to the drudgery of daily life: cutting the grass, husking rice, cleaning vegetables.

“Who were the others from my grandmother’s time?”

Ajodiadei shakes her head dismissively, displeased. “Didn’t I tell you everything? Who sent you here?”

S. doesn’t answer her. Would she think I was sent by my mother to interrogate her? She certainly doesn’t know that Radjkumarie is dead. Nor does it matter if she knows. It would probably leave her cold. S. never imagined this woman as anything other than a miserable wretch. Which is why she never understood why her mother still went back to Koffiedjompo.

S. was only four years old at the time, but she still remembers the sparks and the burning smell of the steam train, her mother’s beautiful melancholic face, how she sat in her lap as they drove along the lower rice fields in silence. What was it that drove or drew her into that remote corner of the jungle, with its vicious mosquitoes that swarm up from the swamps, with its air of backwardness and poverty? Did she hope she might one day inherit the land as compensation for the beatings?

S. looks up. The longer she stays in the miserable shanty, the stuffier it gets. The dark brown head of a fat cockroach peeks out through a seam in the wall. Slowly, it spreads its wings and rustles along the wall above the vegetables and pans. If you want to exterminate one you have to exterminate them all, she thinks. She keeps her eye on the insect until it has disappeared through a hole in the other corner of the wall above the head of the bed.

Ajodiadei’s silver bracelets jingle in the silence of the falling evening. S.’s mind is bursting with questions. They are always the same questions that never get answered. Why did this woman, of all people, have to adopt Janakya’s child? Were there no other women who left India at the same time as her grandparents? Had the child perhaps been abandoned by Harynarain?

Was there really no one else?

Ajodiadei’s coughing summons S. back to reality. Hunched over, the woman drags herself to the bed. With her hands under her stomach, she throws herself onto the dirty sheets with her last strength. S. gets up and walks to the window. The bright orange clouds hanging over the rooftops, above the dark-green canopy of palms and other trees, are turning brown at the edges. Evening is settling in. In the other hovels, people are making dinner. They diligently fan the fire with pieces of cardboard and stoke the coals under the rusty charcoal pots. The charcoal pots are set on the wide window frames. A child cries. Three women stand around the water tap.

They are deep in conversation but fall silent for a moment when they see the girl looking at them. S. becomes shy and sits down again. Bhadjie leaves are scattered across the floor. Ajodiadei’s coughing subsides. S. gets up and walks around a bit to prepare her next question.

Inside the shanty, it’s quiet again. Ajodiadei is breathing very slowly. Exhausted, she stares at the rough, exposed beams. After a long time, she calms down and opens her eyes wide. The look is hostile, full of hatred, probably more against herself than the intruder. She has remained a number. A drunken woman. She has no one. No one to help her.

“Go away,” she says. “Go to your father.”

“So, you do know my father?”

“Sly . . . sly as a slave.”

“I didn’t come here to ask you who my father is. I want to know why my grandfather went back alone.”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“You know that I have no respect for you?”

“Did I ask you to?”

“No, that’s true, you didn’t.”

The woman has nothing else to add. S. wanders helplessly around the musty room, then returns to the window. The sweet smell of rice rises from the pan above the charcoal pot next door. A dark hand lifts the lid with a dirty dishcloth. The crickets hum in the trees out back. Mosquitoes begin to swarm and buzz outside the window. She slaps a few against her face and looks down at her own blood, fascinated. Then she turns around.

“Your grandmother,” Ajodiadei says very slowly. Rather than finish the sentence, she brings a hand to her throat and bursts into laughter. She laughs until there are tears streaming down her wrinkles. It is a horrible sight. She laughs and sobs at the same time.

“What do you mean?” S. demands.

Again, the woman brings a hand to her throat. S. opens her mouth. No sound comes out. She takes a step forward. Suicide. Suicide—it flashes through her mind. She is outraged, embarrassed.

“Vinegar?” she asks, in a tone that almost sounds like weeping.

The woman shakes her head, as a cheerful, senile laugh escapes from her throat.

“A rope?”

“Don’t you know? Ha ha . . . Didn’t your mother ever tell you?”

The girl bites her lips to keep from crying. She is defeated, feels ridiculed, humiliated—she’s no match for Ajodiadei. What is that sparkle in her eye? Did she hate Janakya? Was she perhaps in love with her grandfather? Is that why her grandmother committed suicide? Ajodiadei’s laughter grows louder. She’s going crazy, S. thinks. Crazy from her memories that have developed over the years into hideous chimeras, tormenting and haunting her, depriving her of all kindness and sympathy.

S. thinks of the scar that parted her mother’s hair down the middle. When she asked her mother how she got it, she brushed it off at first. After several evasive answers, S. was told that Ajodiadei had hit her with a scythe. She was five and not strong enough to hoist the burlap sack of cut grass onto the woman’s bowed head. The bag fell backward. Ajodiadei was livid. With that story in mind, S.’s gaze falls on the old woman’s wrinkled hands. It was with those same hands that she had tried to strangle her mother. It happened one day during the great rainy season. Ajodiadei had just come home from the market. Her mother hadn’t heard her knock.

“Do you want to know more?” the old woman asks.

S. looks at her scornfully. She’d like to harass the woman into another coughing attack.

“Do you know what Soenderdei told me about you? The stinkbirds will dig you up.”

“Go away, go to your father,” Ajodiadei says as she straightens up.

“I’ll stay here as long as I want.”

“Aren’t you bold. Your mother was very different.”

S. takes another step closer. Her fingers tighten into claws. Slowly, she bends over.

“No,” the woman says pleadingly. “No . . . No.”

The girl relaxes her fingers. What came over her? She won’t find anything out this way. The photos, she thinks. She has to give me the photographs. After that . . . There will be so many possibilities after that. But why would she get her hands dirty, commit murder? There’s no point. That thought calms her down. The porch light from the house next door seeps through the holes in the zinc fence and through the shanty’s cracks. The old woman slumps back into the cushions and turns away from S. She rolls over to one side, her face turned toward the light penetrating the cracks in the wall.

Your mother was very different; the words buzz through her mind. Different. Exactly. But that is precisely why she is here to fight for her, because she was so defenseless. Her mother never lived. She never could, because she’d been so irreparably broken. She was dead long before she died. She liked to talk about death, even when she was healthy. “Will I still be here when you grow up?” or “You know, when you grow up I might not be here anymore.” And when she was sick, death was all she talked about. “You’ll bounce back,” S. tried to encourage her. “No. This is incurable. I always thought it would end like this.” “But if you want to. You have to get better. . . . We need you.” “No, I will leave the hospital. In a coffin.” She was thirty-three years old when she said that.

Lost in thought, S. pulls hard on Ajodiadei’s sleeve.

“Was my grandfather already gone when Janakya . . . ?”

The woman opens her mouth to scream. She thinks twice and throws her head back into the pillows. S. feels somewhat relieved. No scenes, no neighbors, oh God, no. This is between them. She wipes a hand across her tired, childish head, full of theories from her schoolbooks, full of imagination, big enough to unravel the mystery of the immigration of 1916.

“Was my grandfather already gone when my grandmother died?” she asks hopefully.

“No.”

“No?”

Now S. is really starting to believe that Ajodiadei played a role in her grandparents’ love life. Or was the marriage arranged in India, a forced union?

“Why won’t you tell me anything? Everything?”

The old woman rears her head violently. “Go away, go home,” she says with a dismissive gesture of her hand. She clears her throat and spits on the floor beside the bed. S. isn’t paying attention. She bends down to set the footstool, which she knocked over in her anger, back on its feet. Then she sits down.

Ajodiadei gets up, cursing. A moment later, she is shuffling across the sandy floorboards. She walks to the side wall across from the foot of the bed. She lights the lamp hanging from a large, rusty nail. A cold shiver ripples down S.’s spine. She is suddenly frightened by Ajodiadei’s hands and averts her gaze. The woman turns down the knob ever so slightly and then back up again, bringing the wick to the right height and ridding the flame of soot. Then she pulls the two windows shut one by one with a hard slam, kicks the door shut, and fiddles with the big, rusty iron hook. She walks back toward the bed to the window she has just slammed shut. On the rough windowsill is a spiral mosquito candle in a tin candleholder. She strikes a match and sets the poisonous wax aflame. Her black skirt rustles softly, her bracelets jingle. An early evening melody. For a second, S. softens inside. It’s as if the old woman is about to make an offering to the gods.

I’m tired, S. thinks. I hate her as I’m sure I will never hate anybody again. I’m just too tired and too limp with hunger to explain it to her anymore. We’re alone, Ajodiadei. It’s as if I’m a visitor in your home. Soon you will ask me if I want some rice with bhadjie. Soon you will become hospitable. Ha ha.

The woman puts the candle down on the floor close to the foot of the bed. The toxic smell slowly permeates the low space. S. longs for fresh air. “Where are the pictures?” she asks, a last-ditch effort to achieve something here.

A light shock pulses through the woman’s body. She doesn’t answer but walks back to the wall the lamp is hanging on. She takes it off the nail and moves it along the shelves to kill the mosquitoes with its radiating heat. The black insects fall through the narrow, jagged nozzle of the lamp and remain motionless against the underside of the glass.

“I want the photos,” S. says.

The old woman continues her extermination work and says, without looking up or around, that she doesn’t have any photographs. She acts indignant and calls on heaven as her witness. S. knows she’s lying. And how does she know that S. is talking about photos of her grandfather specifically? She mentioned her grandfather’s name, not her grandmother’s. A love affair? As she suspected earlier? It’s possible. She’s too tired to keep guessing. She wants the pictures. Her mother had said something about pictures of Janakya, taken somewhere in India, and how she had wanted to take them with her when she left Ajodiadei. Nothing else was ever said about the photos. They were probably forgotten in the hurry of her flight. Because she must have fled, right? Such horrible circumstances. Strange that the photos never came into her mother’s possession. She had gone back to Lelydorp several times to look for the old woman. Did she also hope to retrieve the photos of her parents too? S. never figured out why they suddenly stopped taking all those boring train trips. At first she thought the old woman had died. Later she suspected her father didn’t want them to go, and even later that it had something to do with the photos Ajodiadei didn’t want to return.

“My mother said something about photos. I want them back.”

“Photos, huh? Photos? Who sent you?” Ajodiadei spits on the floor as she walks toward the wall near the pans.

“My father sent me,” the girl lies with some reluctance.

“Your father, huh? Sneaking . . . sneaking around in the dark, are we?”

“I want the pictures,” she says impatiently.

The woman hangs the lamp back on the wall. Her eyes sparkle. “Why do you want the photos?” she asks with a hand on her throat, reminding S. of the rope. Again, S. is embarrassed, but she looks indifferently at the woman standing in front of her. Seconds pass.

“Fine,” the old woman says. “I will give them to you if you promise never to set foot in my house again. Understood?”

S. doesn’t respond.

“Did you hear me?”