Excerpt from Moth by Melody Razak, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She listens to the rain and cleans the knife. Yesterday, she threaded yellow marigolds that she picked from behind the mali's hut. She puts her hand now into a cavity of the tree, pulls out the sodden garland. Places it around the baby's head.

The baby soaked in rainwater is heavy. Her face is blue-grey and cold. The girl places the flat of her palm against the small cheek, and there is something about the small cheek blue-grey and cold that feels unreal, as if the baby were already dead.

Is a sacrifice a proper sacrifice if the sacrificial being is already dead?

I think I gave her too much opium, she says to the rain, stomach curdling.

It is better this way, says the rain. Slit the throat first, then break the skull to release the spirit.

The girl takes the knife, now clean, and holds it to the baby's throat.

Part One
1

Delhi, early February 1947

The dogs outside are fighting and the gutters on Nankhatai Gali are overflowing.

In Pushp Vihar, the House of Flowers, Alma sits up in her Sunday dress and leans against the bedstead. From her bedroom on the first floor, she can hear the jingles on All-India Radio from the courtyard downstairs. This means that Bappu is either awake and listening, or asleep on the swing with his head fallen into his chest.

Alma is fourteen. She will be married-soon and she will be an exemplary wife. She hugs her knees tightly. To be married-soon is like snow. Alma has never actually seen snow, but has come to the conclusion—after examining the diagrams in Volume Seven of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—that snow is a miracle of nature. Snow is like putting your feet in the icebox, drinking nimbu pani as fast as you can, with the fan set on six and blowing straight into your face.

Alma has only ever had glimpses of her husband-to-be, at his house first and then at Pushp Vihar, when the two of them had mostly stared at their feet. For a minute, she had caught his eye, the ghost of a smile soft on his mouth, and of course, she had smiled back. He was so fair she could hardly believe it. It was as if Kamadev himself had stood behind her and struck her with one of his arrows. "Would you like some chai," she had asked, averting her eyes, and "Yes," he had replied, "yes, I would." She was like a gopi bathing unclothed in the lake, all hot and cold at once. Glancing down she had peeked at the boy's feet. He wore clean socks and proper shoes, chocolate-coloured and laced.

Alma's grandmother, Daadee Ma, who had made the match in the first place and organised the horoscopes and set the date, is very keen. Questionably so in fact. Daadee Ma told Dilchain-ji, the family cook, that she had never seen such an auspicious horoscope and the quicker Alma was wed the better. That it will be a small wedding can't be helped. A small wedding is in keeping with the climate. Alma will invite a few of the girls from school and Sister Ignatius and Mary.

Mary is new and not necessarily the kind of girl that Alma would be friends with, but Mary has a secret and secrets are always interesting.

Outside the bedroom window, the night sky is thick with lilac-grey mist that Bappu says is the smoke of wood-and-mud huts burning all the way from West Punjab. Alma had asked Bappu if they would come here, those people that burnt down each other's homes; he had reassured her they would not.

Inside, Alma leans across the tin chest of extra winter bedding and lights the stub of a candle with the one match left in the box. There has been a shortage of matches recently and Dilchain-ji has rationed each family member to two matches a day. Alma turns to prod her sister and tug her plaits. "Wake up," she says.

Roop squirms sleepily and kicks her.

There are three long-legged beds in a row, but Roop is always in with Alma. The third bed belongs to Bappu's dead little brother and is never slept in.

Excerpted from Moth by Melody Razak. Copyright © 2022 by Melody Razak. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.