Parul Kapur
Age: 62. Residence: Atlanta. Book: Inside the Mirror (University of Nebraska Press, March 2024), a novel about twin sisters in pursuit of artistic aspirations and independence while pushing against familial and traditional expectations, set in post-partition India. Agent: Julie Stevenson. Editor: Courtney Ochsner.
Chapter One
Inside the gunnysacks were the makings of a man. There were two bags, roughly dividing the bones for the upper and lower halves of the body, and Jaya had not wanted them inside the bedroom. But her father said they should not be stored on the balcony during the monsoons, where she’d kept them last month, because they might start to smell in a heavy rain. The servant boy had climbed a stool and placed the sacks on top of the wardrobe at her father’s instruction, her mother grimacing as the thin boy raised the bundles overhead. Jaya had been told to ask the servant to retrieve the sacks for her whenever she was ready to work in the afternoons. Instead, she had moved the rootless bones once again. She’d removed a pile of household wreckage from the corner between the wardrobe and the wall—a broken towel rack, loose shelves, boxes of childhood belongings—and pushed the bone-sacks into the space, where she could easily reach them.
Today she had pulled out both bags, not only the one containing the bones of the upper body, which she had to mark up. She hesitated before removing the rib cage and placing it on an old sheet spread over the dhurrie on the floor. She glanced behind her—the door was shut. No one liked to see her laying the bones on the bedroom floor and taking her red chalk to draw a line where a muscle originated, and marking in blue chalk where the muscle inserted. Now she took out the brownish basin of the pelvis, searched for the long shaft of the thigh, and found a fully formed foot, all the knotty bones threaded together. These were new bones to her; she had not dared to assemble them like this before.
The first couple of times she’d set out to do her assignment, she had asked Kamlesh to stay in the room on the pretext of holding open Gray’s Anatomy for her. Searching inside the sacks was frightening, all sorts of forms coming into her hands, rough protrusions and smooth cavities. She’d have to pull out a number of bones until she found the ones for the arm that they were dissecting in college. Her twin had frowned and asked to leave the room, looking so distraught that Jaya realized she would have to do her work in privacy. If their grandmother happened to be in her alcove at the back of the bedroom, which the three of them shared, Jaya would ask her to shift to another room and Bebeji would rise from her bed, taking with her the many newspapers she read religiously. Bebeji found it indecent for a person to handle human remains.
From her writing table, Jaya fetched her pen and ink bottle and tore a sheet from a tablet of drawing paper. She tacked it to a small plank she used as an easel. She sat on the floor, leaned against Kamlesh’s curio cabinet, and considered the skull with its clenched set of teeth and hollow eyes, the winged whole of the rib cage, the rod of a femur, and beneath a gap of white sheet the fanlike foot. The morgue prepared the bones from the bodies of the unclaimed dead found in the roads and railway stations; each first-year medical student was partnered with a fresh skeleton.
Here were the pieces of a man. Who had he been? Jaya drew the rib cage with a slower hand. The trunk of the sternum and looping branches of ribs needed close attention to be given form as a whole, with lines and shading. A splotch of ink spread on the half-made foot, the toes sharp as pincers. A thought came to her: How do you become someone? She wrote the words like a banner in a fluttering script and capped the pen, lifting the board from her lap.
Excerpted from Inside the Mirror by Parul Kapur. Copyright © 2024 by Parul Kapur. Published by the University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.
Author photo: Leah Roth
