She kept playing the game of going away until the weary creep of menarche. With
nascent, wide-mouthed cackles she would stagger backwards through the valley house. After
that, new walks looking up, nose facing east. Even if she were to see a distant exploding thing,
she could only breach its shockwave when she crossed it, or it crossed her. It could not infect her
walk, not unless it exploded before she set out, or before she was born. Such a thing could play
no games with time. 
“An institution unto herself" 
Her wry uncle, brushing his teeth on the valley house stoop: you’re thinking as the crow
flies, but the ghat pass you’re looking at is nine hairpin bends spread over ninety kilometers. Her:
a walk of ninety kilometers is just ten kilometers times ten, less even. Defeated, in the bus: in the
sway of the middle seat she has a noxious dream, and awake she stamps her heel on the pliant,
gout-ridden foot of some old nun. 
“Some faculty advisor! She spoke to the Kashi delegation exclusively in English. But we
forgive her, don’t we?”
From her year in Kashi, she remembers kicking rocks into the river – big rocks that made
her toes ache, even some rocks painted red. 
“As she passes, all the merchants say ‘Professor Peace is on her morning walk!’” 
Foreign-body, even perhaps extraterrestrial. She rejects the thing’s inherence because of
the rumble of its eventual excision looming backwards through the decades. It scaffolds up her
calves, bundling around her knees like hinges. Its walnut-shaped brain sits behind her clitoris. Its
motivation has dulled over the years, chafed into numbness. 
“At the 2006 Annual Day function. What I will never forget is the way she laughed under
the blade.”
That night, she felt the sort of elation last available to her during the conception of her
second boy. In the anticipation, she could only let out raucous peals, eyes closed, delectable
sweat making her gloss under the stage lights, the dips of her breasts within the box, and the
imminent saw. 
Whispered to her, over cake: “Don’t be surprised, but the second time he pulled the box
apart, I saw some dripping blood, but he closed it quickly after. And then when you stepped
down and they wheeled the contraption away, I thought I saw a flap of your small intestine on
the stage floor. But then it was curtains.”
The first time, just a trick – tucked into a hidden compartment. The second time, just a
hinged box. Saw, first dull against the pads of her fingers, now slicing through skin, sinew, even
bone, even thing. The thing which had to have quickened in her before her first walk, in her
androgynous games, even perhaps in the womb. Maybe her stupid uncle led her mother towards

Leffie / The Legs on Professor Peace / 3
the thing when Professor Peace was only a smear of cells. In the box, she writhed like a nautch
girl as the illusionist exposed her halves to the throng.  
Parallel conference of men, over cake: “In her prime, by God, the legs on her.”
The finest Hindi sentence she ever encountered was “You are such a motherfucker that in
God’s name I shall kick your head so many times so your skull smashes over these rocks.” 
On her blackboard: “Goodbye Professor Peace.” Addendum: “Boring old bitch.” 
She resigned after the illusionist’s exhibition to go home and smother the thing. A
cesarean scar for the seam where the saw met her hips. Varicose veins as scaffold. The walnut at
the peak of her sex was perimenopausal engorgement: last longing for a rut. After the box, one
part of her was now new and the other remained as before. She asked the illusionist which was
which.
“An institution unto herself. She was already teaching for five years when I joined the
department. So, obviously, they called me Professor War.”
The thing is easily distracted – discombobulated by hairpin bends. It may be a seed
germinated in the spangled box made for sawing women. It may have moved from her legs to her
head. It never learned how to kill.
“She could’ve gone anywhere, but she chose to stay here. That’s the thing.”