“Women, in Color” by Neela Vaswani 1. I had a neighbor whose husband shouted. I suppose the husband was my neighbor too, but I didn’t want him to be. Once home from work, he let loose, shouting between Hindi and a Garhwali dialect I couldn’t follow, a few phrases settling in my ear: the apathy of women, dinner criticism. Sometimes he read the newspaper outside on a grey metal chair. He shouted there, too. It’s possible he was capable of shouting and reading at the same time, but more likely the newspaper was a prop. When he went to sleep, the quiet was sudden. The clink of my neighbor washing her pots at the outdoor tap sounded spacious and free. I was there—on a single street two miles above a small town in the foothills of the Himalayas—to teach for a few months in a village school run by a local NGO. I was also there in an attempt to tend to some mid-twenties grief and confusion.…