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As the river wound away from Allahabad, the sounds of mourning faded and eventually, Asha could only hear the slap of water on the hull. She looked out towards the villages on the banks of the Ganges. A woman squatted on a rock doing her washing. A herd of water buffalo munched in the shallows. Men worked in the fields, their laughter and good-natured chatter rippling out towards her. The sounds of rural India, a background to life that she had never known growing up in the craziness of Mumbai and the privilege of wealth.
Maybe if she had grown up out here, she would have found love and had a family, a simpler life that may have satisfied her. But she would never know those pleasures now.
Asha sighed and brushed away the tears from her cheeks. She had lost her brother to the boiling
