Excerpt from An Unrestored Woman by Shobha Rao, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The events, as Neela peeked from behind the bamboo screen separating the main room of the hut from the kitchen, followed many of the stories of madness in the months after Partition. The train had been traveling its western course, the last evening run to Lahore. Babu had gotten on with his kettle of tea at Wagah and that was the last anyone had seen of him. The train had been ambushed a few miles outside of Wagah by a horde of Muslim men. They'd torched each of the cars one by one, back to front, as if lighting a row of candles. "My son's body," Neela's mother-in-law asked slowly. Lalla shook his head. "They were laid out like rows of roasted corn," he said indecently. "No one can tell them apart." Then he rose to leave, handing her mother-in-law something Neela couldn't see. "Enough for both of you," he said, closing the door behind him.

* * *

The next morning Neela's mother-in-law bathed, dressed in a crisp white sari (the only color she was allowed to wear as a widow), and conducted her daily prayers while Neela heated water and the few drops of milk they could afford for tea. Then she waited. She was fifteen years old. And now she too was a widow.

Her mother-in-law, bent by a long and pitiless life, entered the kitchen. She sat in her usual corner on a thin reed mat and looked at Neela. Since Partition the cataracts in her gray eyes had ripened like winter squash, burrowing into the hollows of her wrinkled brown face. They brimmed now with tears. "My child," she whispered. Neela couldn't tell if she was referring to Neela or to some memory of her son. Then her mother-in-law reached up and brushed at Neela's face. The gesture was blunt, nearly cruel, but she managed to wipe the kumkum from Neela's forehead. The crimson powder drifted down and a few specks landed in Neela's cup. They floated on the surface like tiny red islands on a dirty sea.

"Finish your tea, beti," her mother-in-law said. "Then we'll take care of your hair." Neela nodded. She would soon be bald. She would never again be allowed to use kumkum or anything else to adorn her face. She would not be allowed to grow out her hair or go to the temple or to ever wear anything but white, the color of death. Even the thin gold mangal sutra she slid off her neck and handed to her mother-in-law, who buried it deep in the bag of rice for safekeeping. Though none of this Neela minded, not very much, not as much as she'd minded the nights with Babu.

* * *

They hadn't been so bad in the beginning. He'd seemed just as shy as she was when he'd reached for her in the dark. There had been blood and a little pain but that had soon passed. It was only after a few months that Babu had become rough. Tugging at her sari, pushing himself inside her, slapping her if she resisted. She knew it was her duty, a part of being an obedient wife, and she bore it without a word of complaint. But what she didn't understand was why he never spoke to her. Why he ate his dinner without a word. Even when the jasmine bloomed lush and fragrant in her hair, and she served him tea in the evening shade of the banyan tree, he'd hardly look at her.

"Will you build me a swing?" she'd once asked, a year after they'd been married. "It could hang from there," she'd said, pointing to the lowest branch of the tree.

He'd looked up toward where she was pointing, into the wide cover of green, leathery leaves and hoary branches and said, "Swinging is for monkeys. Are you a monkey?"

Neela thought of monkeys and of bananas and realized—with a clarity that was surprising in its force—that she recognized the man sitting in front of her no more than she had on their wedding day.

On some afternoons, while her mother-in-law slept through the heat of midday, Neela cried from loneliness and dread. Night was drawing close. And she missed her playmates, most of whom were now married. She also missed her father but knew that when he'd kissed her on the forehead after the wedding the tears in his eyes had not just been from sadness but from relief: he'd married off his last daughter. In the midst of her tears Neela sometimes found herself peering down at her stomach, willing it to grow; at least then she'd have someone to talk to. Someone to hold.

Excerpted from An Unrestored Woman by Shobha Rao. Copyright © 2016 by Shobha Rao. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.