She had, Geeta noticed, a rather uncharming habit of finding amusement in everything, even premeditated murder. “Oh, hi!” she chirped, as though they’d bumped into each other at the market. They’d all grown up with kerosene lamps and candles, but after many fires, NGOs came into their town with a rush of concern and gifts, like lanterns and the larger solar lights installed in the more trafficked portions of the village.įarah stood in the dark, her thin elbow at a right angle, hand still lifted. The scheduled power cuts (“power holidays” they called them, as if it were a rollicking party to grope in the dark and knock your knees on furniture) were increasingly longer and less scheduled.

Without the lantern, it was as dark inside as it was outside. Solar lantern in hand, she opened the door before Farah could knock. It was after ten when Geeta heard someone approach. How, for the first year of their marriage, he’d slept with one hand on her shoulder, her hip, her stomach. Like when his parents first came to inspect her suitability, and he’d saved her skin by properly roasting a papadam for her.

But little was monochromatic in marriage and even in abuse, because there were other parts, too, parts she’d loved, parts that, when she wasn’t vigilant, still drew drops of unwilling tenderness from her.īut missing Ramesh now was more habit than compulsion the memories she had felt like someone else’s-all soft focus and cinematic. The part that drowned himself in drink, the part that was quick to fury but slow to forgive, the part that blamed her for their childlessness, though it could’ve just as easily been him. She never had any desire to destroy him, just parts of him. Contrary to neighborhood chatter, she did not “remove her own nose ring” by killing Ramesh. While Geeta regarded herself as a self-made woman, she was not, in fact, a self-made widow.

“And you know it won’t be the last,” Saloni finished. Saloni-a woman whose capacity for food was exceeded only by her capacity for venom-goaded most of the conversation. Instead, the women pieced their respective Farah sightings into a jigsaw of gossip that, to Geeta’s ears at least, failed to align. The other four women of their loan group had convened, as they did every Tuesday, to aggregate their respective funds. Rather, Farah and her two hundred rupees were missing. The loan officer was due to arrive in a few hours, and they were still missing two hundred rupees. Filled with clever criminals, second chances, and wry and witty women, Parini Shroff’s The Bandit Queens is a razor-sharp debut of humor and heart that readers won’t soon forget.

The bandit queens by parini shroff