“That’s all she could recall her mother ever doing: something for someone else. Even Poornima’s most tender memories – of being fed by her mother’s hand on the bus trip to see her grandparents, or the weight of it against her hair while she’d been combing it – had all of them to do with her mother doing something for her child, never for herself. Is that how she’d meant to spend her life? Is that how lives were meant to be spent?”
