'You have a dentist appointment next Friday, by the way.' Gift, even though Shoba and Shukumar hadn't celebrated Christmas that year. A friend had sent the calendar in the mail as a Christmas She looked at it as if for the first time, studying the wallpaper pattern carefully on the top half before allowing her eyes to fall to the numbered grid on the bottom. Is today the nineteenth?' Shoba walked over to the framed corkboard that hung on the wall by the fridge, bare except for a calendar of William Morris wallpaper patterns. To complete the final chapters of his dissertation on agrarian revolts in India. Since January he'd been working at home, trying He put a glass lid on a pot of lamb, adjusting it so only the slightest bit of steam could escape. 'When I'm here, you mean,' Shukumar said.

'But they should do this sort of thing during the day.' Still fixed on the notice in her other hand. She dropped a sheaf of mail on the table without a glance. Shukumar thought, on mornings after a party or a night at a bar, when she'd been too lazy to wash her face, too eager to collapse into his arms. Her cranberry lipstick was visible only on the outer reaches of her mouth, and her eyeliner had left charcoal patches beneath her lower lashes. She wore a navy blue poplin raincoat over gray sweatpants and white sneakers, looking, at thirty-three, like the type of woman she'd once She let the strap of her leather satchel, plump with files, slipįrom her shoulders, and left it in the hallway as she walked into the kitchen. 'It's good of them to warn us,' Shoba conceded after reading the notice aloud, more for her own benefit than Shukumar's. The work would affect only the houses on the quiet tree-lined street, within walking distance of a row of brick-faced stores and a trolley stop, where Shoba and Shukumar had lived for three years. A line had gone down in the last snowstorm, and the repairmen were going to take advantage of the milder evenings The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight P.M.

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