How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder

Set in the small oil town of Marley, Wyoming, in 1986, the novel is narrated by Georgette (Georgie) Ayyar Creel, a half-Indian, half-white girl who is nearly 12 years old. She addresses the reader directly, revealing that she and her older sister, Agatha Krishna (whom Georgie calls AK Akka, using the Tamil word for "older sister"), killed their uncle. The question of blame, Georgie explains, stretches far back: to Reagan, the Cold War, their parents' decision to settle in Wyoming, and, as AK Akka insists, to the British, whose colonial legacy shaped their mother's world and their own.

Georgie's mother, Amma, grew up in Madras (now Chennai), India, attending the British-run Doveton Corrie school, where she memorized Wordsworth and learned to bake Madeira cake. After studying at Oxford and training as a lawyer, Amma met Georgie's father, Appa, a white Texan geologist, in a pub in England's Lake District and followed him to Texas, then to Wyoming, where he works on oil rigs and is away for weeks at a time. The family attends St. George's Episcopal Church. The sisters are named after Amma's favorite British authors: Agatha Krishna after Agatha Christie and Georgie after Georgette Heyer.

The novel's crisis begins when Amma's brother, Vinod (Vinny) Ayyar, his wife Devi (Auntie Devi), and their 12-year-old son Narayan arrive from India. Amma has sponsored Vinny Uncle's immigration. Auntie Devi, a trained engineer, occupies AK Akka's old bedroom, forcing the sisters to share a room. Georgie describes Auntie Devi as "ghost-Amma," a quiet presence who cooks dosas and sambar, South Indian crepes and lentil stew, and fades into the furniture. Vinny Uncle takes a graveyard shift at a concrete factory but otherwise watches the children while the adults work.

Georgie reveals that Vinny Uncle sexually abuses both sisters. He takes them into the bathroom one at a time while the television blares. He threatens that if they tell, he will have to return to India and Amma will lose her only family. The abuse creates a dissociative split: Georgie describes feeling as though she leaves her body and watches from above, comparing the experience to being frozen in a game of freeze tag, waiting for someone to slap her back and yell "Safe." At night, AK Akka chants: "The British are to blame, the British are to blame, and Vinny Uncle will pay."

The novel moves month by month through 1986. In January, the Space Shuttle Challenger explodes, and Georgie links its destruction to a pervasive theme of splitting: India partitioned by the British in 1947, Marley built on Arapaho land after the tribe's removal, AK Akka's body changing with puberty. A neighbor's cat dies from drinking antifreeze that leaked from Amma's car. AK Akka tastes the residue, then pushes her bed against Georgie's and whispers that she knows how they will be free.

Through winter and spring, the household fractures. Amma and Auntie Devi compete over cooking, television, and Vinny Uncle's attention. The children find a companion in their neighbor Angel Moore, a girl who claims to speak in tongues. In February, Vinny Uncle wakes the children before dawn to search for Halley's Comet, the only moments Georgie feels safe with him because outdoors he cannot hurt them. They never see the comet. When AK Akka begins menstruating fully in May, Vinny Uncle stops abusing her, and all his attention shifts to Georgie. The sisters begin sleeping in a tent in the backyard, huddling together while AK Akka whispers plans.

At a Ritusuddhi ceremony marking AK Akka's womanhood, the sisters make their first poisoning attempt, pouring antifreeze into Vinny Uncle's soda. He vomits violently. They feel guilty when Narayan brings him Alka-Seltzer and Auntie Devi makes him rice, so they decide to give him the rest of the summer. AK Akka hums "The Final Countdown" to remind Georgie the reprieve is temporary.

In June, Georgie attends Girl Scout camp, where the director casts her as Sacagawea in a pageant because she "looks the part." She reflects on the real Sacagawea, a Shoshone woman kidnapped at Georgie's age, sold to a trapper, and forced into marriage at 13, and sees in her a pattern of brown women guiding and interpreting for white people. In July, AK Akka escalates the poisoning, mixing spoonfuls of antifreeze into Vinny Uncle's sweet drinks throughout the month.

On August 14, one day before the anniversary of India's independence, Vinny Uncle dies. The sisters believe they have killed him, having poured increasing amounts of antifreeze into his drinks over nearly three weeks. No autopsy is performed, per Auntie Devi's request, and the death is attributed to a weak heart from childhood rheumatic fever, compounded by heavy drinking and smoking.

AK Akka disposes of the antifreeze bottle in a park and makes Georgie swear never to speak of it again. Instead of drawing closer, the sisters splinter apart. AK Akka separates their beds, loses weight, drinks from a hidden bottle of Jack Daniel's, and stares into space. Their invented secret language disappears. Georgie realizes that Vinny Uncle split them twice: first from themselves through the abuse, then from each other through the secret of his death. In October, AK Akka grows obsessed with conjuring the dead through Ouija boards and Bloody Mary. When Narayan breaks down crying, wanting to talk to his dead father, Georgie comforts him with the lie that Vinny Uncle is in heaven.

In December, Georgie makes a discovery that reframes everything. While searching for Christmas presents in Auntie Devi's closet, she finds a nearly empty blue bottle of antifreeze hidden in a suitcase, along with papers listing "ethylene glycol" and mathematical calculations. The sisters' own bottle had been yellow. That night, Georgie tells AK Akka: Auntie Devi is an engineer who knew the correct dosage. The sisters' small, inconsistent spoonfuls only made Vinny Uncle sick. They did not kill him. Auntie Devi did.

AK Akka cries all night. She retrieves the bottle and papers and disposes of them but deliberately leaves a torn scrap on Auntie Devi's dresser, signaling that they know. Georgie reflects that Auntie Devi likely knew about both the abuse and the girls' attempts. Years later, when Amma remarks that Auntie Devi was not as simple as she had once assumed, neither sister reveals that this quiet woman had saved them.

The novel closes with a flash forward. Georgie and AK Akka travel to India to scatter Amma's ashes at Kanyakumari (Cape Comorin), the southern tip of the subcontinent where the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean converge. Kanya Kumari was Lord Krishna's sister, a goddess who killed a demon king when he tried to marry her against her will; the waters are said to absolve sins. Georgie holds the bag of ashes and dips beneath the surface. When AK Akka reaches to pull her up, Georgie instead pulls her sister under. They hold each other beneath the water, and for the first time in years, Georgie feels whole. The Tamil farewell Naan poyitu vaarein means "I'll go and come back." AK Akka had always said she would go. In spite of everything, she has come back.