Welcome to Reliance

M RS. PURI couldn’t measure the things she’d seen in her life. She’d been through the Partition, for example, when she was seven years old, but she didn’t have a strong idea of what it was at the time. The stories said trains were arriving in Amritsar with blood leaking out from under the carriages, and when the doors were pried open, bodies would come tumbling out like overpacked cargo. No stories came out of her father’s radio though, only empty static, and even the static was more important than anything she, or her mother, or anyone in the house had to say. For her own part, she knew this thing was reaching her neighbors and friends, even her cousins in Kanpur. Before bed, she would feel scared about never seeing them again, and that felt like the right amount of scared to be.

As she grew older, she was supposed to get better at judging sizes of things around her, but that never happened. During the military government in the 1970s, she was scared for her husband and two sons, but didn’t know where to put that fear, next to the need to feed them. She didn’t know what it meant when it was too dangerous to buy groceries. At some point she admitted she wasn’t intelligent like her father, that she was a smaller person with smaller issues—which got harder to admit when she was older, because people talked down to her for it. “Respected Granny,” she imagined them saying, “you have seen this country from birth, you remember the day our Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, was shot in her home like a dog, and you want to talk about your knuckles popping?” Yes, actually, she did, given that Indira Gandhi