We are four men and a boat, and the river pays our wages. When someone goes into the Hooghly, jumped or fell or was helped, the family pays us to bring the body back, so that there is something to burn. Nineteen years I have done this. You learn where the river sets things down. There are three or four bends where the current tires and lets go of what it carries.
The women are the worst, people say. It is not the women. It is one woman.
She comes back every monsoon. Fourth bend past the ghat, caught in the reeds, a red anklet on the left foot. The first time a family claimed her, wept, burned someone. The second monsoon she was there again, same bend, same anklet, and no family came, so we let the river take her back, because what else. It is nine monsoons now. My partners have stopped seeing her. They row past the fourth bend, feel only the cold, and say nothing.
I see her every time. Each year I keep the anklet, and each year it is gone from my pocket by morning, back on her foot when she returns.
My wife wore a red anklet. My wife went into the river on a night I have arranged, in my memory, so that I was not there. But the river was there. The river keeps better records than I do. Every monsoon it opens the ledger to the same page and holds it up, patient, waiting for me to read my own name where the current tires and will not, will not let her go.