Editor’s note: This debut novel revolves around two Indian-American sisters living in rural Wyoming in the 1980s. They plot to murder their abusive uncle, but place the blame for their crime on factors eventually landing on the generational effects of British colonialism.

Prologue: The Blame

My sister Agatha Krishna said it started when they came, and so that’s where you could put the blame. But then she said we had to go farther back than that. So we blamed it on Reagan; everyone blamed him that summer, the summer the country went into a bust, the summer we watched an exodus empty our town. Then I blamed the Cold War, and Gorbachev—he had the stain on his head, and thus, I felt, couldn’t be trusted. We blamed famine in Ethiopia after Amma posted a photo on the fridge of a child with a belly like a hot air balloon. We blamed AIDS, which we didn’t really get, but thought you could get from the water fountain at the public library you stepped on with your foot. We blamed the Olympics, and hated Sam the Eagle, their feathered mascot, who dressed as an American flag, though secretly I had a button of him with his sly smile and torch. We blamed it on my parents for moving to Wyoming in the first place, for settling in Marley. Then we just generally blamed them for everything. We thought they shouldn’t have married, that they shouldn’t have mixed us up. Shouldn’t have made us halfies. Agatha Krishna said we could blame it on my grandparents too, for having one child who went to school, and another who stayed at home. For letting Amma wear a crisp, white uniform and leaving Vinny Uncle to read Curly Wee comics. 

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But then she said—let’s blame it on the British. Everything went back to the British. They did it first, Agatha Krishna said. They were colonists. They were the reason our Amma went to school and our uncle stayed home; they were the reason that we were quiet around most white people, the reason my mom drank tea when everyone else we knew, except the Mormons, drank coffee. It was the British that shaped Amma’s world. That made her spell favor with a u, use a knife and fork, and bake fruitcake with sultanas and nuts. It was the British that taught us to keep our upper lips stiff at all times. 

That year, we had an Indian summer twice. A frost had come and left the garden in disarray. Tomato stalks broke in two, my mother’s peppers dangled like limp green earrings from the stem. But then the days warmed again and an infestation of millers descended. They threw themselves in swarms at the streetlights marking the intersections. They offered a kind of suttee to the light. Black dots against the Krishna-colored sky. My father, tired from coming off rigs, would fill a large stainless-steel bowl with dish soap at night. Leaving it on his desk, he would shine a desk lamp into the soapy bowl. By morning, the bubbles would long have gone flat and the little bodies of the millers would be floating in the water, their wings soaked and black. 

“How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder”

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I always felt bad for them. Drawn to something beautiful, something almost ethereal, only to find themselves trapped. I didn’t think it was a good way to die. But what is? And the only way you could justify it was when Amma held up saris eaten to lace, sweaters with holes the size of coins. 

Years later, I would learn that miller moths don’t eat clothes. They’re actually great pollinators. We were wrong. Small clothes moths are the real pests. Clothes moths barely fly and don’t like the light. But Appa didn’t like the sound of the millers hitting the lights at night. Of them clogging the sills of our doors and windows with their downy scales. 

It was in that second wave of warmth that they came to us. Not tired or wretched or tempest-tossed, but poor. We drove to Denver to pick them up. They did not come off the plane looking bewildered by this new land before them. If anything, they came at us like moths. Fast, a little frantic, and seemingly, as the months would show, drawn to all the wrong things. 

Amma, who had not seen a member of her family since marrying my father almost fourteen years earlier, ran to her brother, Vinny Uncle, pressed a carton of Marlboro Reds in his pocket, then squeezed my cousin, Narayan, like a lemon, and filled his hands with chocolate. She gave my Auntie Devi a rhinestone necklace. 

We piled into two cars to drive home. Narayan screamed when he saw his first antelope. Auntie Devi stuck her head out the window to catch the wind. Vinny Uncle just remarked on how fast the car went. That we didn’t have to stop for animals in the road, or pause at scooters packed with bodies. 

The Ayyars dipped into our lives like a teabag into the whiteness of a porcelain cup. They muddied the water and made our house feel small, having taken over Agatha Krishna’s old bedroom. Now she slept with me. They left rings of talcum powder on the carpet; the bathroom floor was slick with water from their cup and bucket, and the house became smelly with the food my Aunt Devi cooked: dosas and sambar, prawn frys and molee. If she wasn’t cooking, she stood on the lawn in a sari and cardigan, looking out at nothing. Feeling the air and the altitude with a kind of wonder. Or sometimes she sat in front of the television. She watched a lot of Dynasty. She no longer had her own house, she didn’t drive. She had to ask Amma to buy her everything, from underwear to airmail paper. To us, she said little, just cooked us food, then slipped back to the bedroom to watch TV late into the night. She was like Amma. Same long black hair. But not Amma. She was ghost-Amma. The Amma who didn’t say anything. The Amma in the room who faded into the furniture. As if she had only half come to America. 

When you really came down to it, we blamed my uncle. And no matter who started it, we were the ones who had to finish it. So at night, as we lay in bed, Agatha Krishna in a sleeping bag zipped tight to her head, and me under a blanket half-eaten by moths, we told ourselves that it wasn’t our fault. She sang a mantra: the British are to blame, the British are to blame, the British are to blame, and Vinny Uncle will pay. And soon, I joined her. We would make him pay. 

Looking back, though, I’m not sure if that’s how it works. I’m not sure you can ever cancel out someone who has taken from you by taking more from someone else. But I think that was the only way we could do it, the only way we could have killed him. The only way we could take our uncle’s life and not look back. Not be filled with any blame. 

Nina McConigley is the author of “How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder” and “Cowboys and East Indians,” which was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and High Plains Book Award. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. She teaches at Colorado State University.