Kamla came to the dispensary town as a bride of nineteen, and for thirty years she counted. She counted what was owed and what was short, whose child had not eaten, which of her husband's patients had stopped coming. Nobody outside the lane knew her name and nobody inside it could manage without her. At fifty-one, offered the operation that would save her, she refused, and left one line in a register that would govern her son's whole life. The quietest book of the five, and the one holding up the other four.
