Someone Else’s Garden

DIPIKA RAI

For Indira so she might remember

&

Shaan and Tara so they might know

Contents

Cover

Title Page

The Sky is for Dreaming

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Monsoon Darkness

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Love is a River

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

The Smell of Wet Earth

Chapter 22

Glossary

BEHIND THE SCENES

‘SOMETHING SPLENDID’ - A Word from the Author

‘LEARN THE TRUTH’ - Things to Think About

‘OPENED WITH EXPECTATION’ - What to Read Next

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Sky is for Dreaming

Chapter 1

PEOPLE ARE DEFINED BY WHAT THEY love and what they hate.

Lata Bai loves the sound of a cycle’s bell. She loves the rain. She hates having yet another baby.

She neither knows nor cares that somewhere the world has celebrated a new millennium, she only knows that another baby will make it seven in all. This time, after the first three weeks, she’ll give it to Sneha, her youngest daughter to look after. It really should be Mamta’s turn, but, with her getting married soon, her mind should be on other things. Mamta’s father was too hasty with her. He is determined to marry her off soon after the baby is born: as soon as Lata Bai can look after the marriage preparations, is how he puts it. Almost twenty, so old and still unmarried, Mamta’s very presence serves as a reminder of his failure.

Lata Bai’s face contorts with the first birth pains. After six children, she can tell exactly when it starts and when it will finish. Only her first had taken her by surprise, but she was strong then at fifteen, and had managed just fine, cutting the cord with her husband’s betel-leaf knife. She’d even cooked his meal that very evening.

‘When?’ Mamta is excited, almost too excited about her impending wedding; her world consists almost entirely of whens. She helps her mother change into her oldest sari, one she can cut into rags for the forty-day bleeds.

‘Soon,’ says Lata Bai, taking off her only bangle, more precious than anything else she owns, and hiding it in the pot of ash she saves both for her bath and her utensils. ‘Shsh,’ she says, ‘tell no one. Just in case I die, my spirit will know where to look for it. And don’t you dare pinch it!’

Lata Bai extracts her daughter’s wedding sari from the tin trunk. Luckily Seeta Ram bought it last week, and she can deliver the baby on its crisp, clean wrapping. She peels the noisy brown paper away carefully. Mamta tries to rub her hand over the precious material but her mother slaps it away and returns the sari to the tin trunk.

‘Shall I come?’ asks Mamta.

‘No, I must do this alone,’ she says. Mamta watches her mother from the doorway cautiously. She knows what is to come – another baby. ‘This is what will happen to you once you’re married,’ says Lata Bai, using the opportunity to impart a lesson.

The thought of babies makes Mamta smile.

The same thought of babies makes Lata Bai grimace. Most women have the widow Kamla helping them, but not her. After doing her first, then second, and third all the way to the sixth herself, why waste money on an expensive midwife now? The paper rustling in her hand, she rushes to her mustard field and into the misty grey cloud that has slipped from the sky to settle close to the earth where the sun has forgotten to fall. Oh, Devi, give me a boy. She prays to the goddess of her clan – Devi, universal female energy, absolute divinity.

She knows her destination. With distance in her eyes she lurches away from her house towards her lucky patch of ground (the same place where she found her golden bangle, the one she’s hidden in the ash). The baby’s water is running down her legs. It won’t be long now.

Careful not to crush the paper, she lies down, the furrow her pillow. Devi, give me a boy. She prays aloud: Jai ho Devi, Devi jai ho. No one hears her.

It was always a different colour.

With her first it was the green of young wheat. Green everywhere. With her second it was yellow. Then there was another green, one gold, one white, one purple, and now again yellow.

All she can see is yellow. Dancing above her head, in her mouth, in her hair. Yellow in her ears, her toes, and, with her sari pushed up all the way to her waist, yellow on her big swollen belly. Even yellow in her navel and all the way inside her. All the way to the baby.

She knows this field intimately, suddenly in flower with the first rain. Jai ho Devi, Devi jai ho. She’s worked it for how long? Much longer than twenty years. So long she doesn’t remember. She has laughed in it and cried in it. Hidden in it and rejoiced in it. She’s had all her babies in it and played with all her babies in it. It is her history. The field has watched her through her life. It watches her now. Its soul reaches out to her and its arms protect her. She feels the field’s love pour over her. It sinks in through her pores and mixes with her blood, feeding every atavistic part of her with its generosity. Her field. She’d die without it.

She feels another pang.

At first she is like a cricket on its back, her arms and legs waving to the clouds above. Then she forces herself to be still. She knows she has to open like a flower. The more she holds, the more it’ll hurt. But the baby doesn’t come. Each time her body asks, she pushes, yet the baby doesn’t come. She thinks of the bangle in the ash. Why won’t the baby come? Should she shout for help? Who will hear her? Her life is pouring out of her. Great big rushes of blood. Every drop of blood that comes out of her dredges up another memory from her deepest being.

How was it? With her first, green, soon-to-be-married Mamta?

How green Mamta had hurt her coming out with a fat blob of blood. Mamta, her first born, who loves running in the wind. She loves to lie alone on the hay and hates the red birthmark over her eye.

With her second, yellow, Jivkant, it was over even before she knew it had started. Jivkant, already a man, disappeared on a train somewhere. Jivkant the cruel one. How he loved the power he had over his sisters, especially Mamta. How he hated the love his father showed for Mohit, his youngest brother.

With green Prem it was again over quickly. Slow plodding Prem, sent to work in the Big House to pay off his father’s debt, bringing home pats of butter each day. Being born was the quickest thing he’d ever done in his life. Prem loves the river. He loves flying his kite. He hates working the fields.

With gold Ragini there was some pain, and it took a long time, but that was the only trouble she ever gave her mother. Lucky gold Ragini with more marriage offers than any other Gopalpur girl. Ragini, hardly a woman, already married. She loves steaming her hair. She loved running her hands through her trousseau. She hates her brother-in-law accidentally brushing up against her.

White Sneha. She can’t remember Sneha’s birth . . . It’s all a haze now. Sneha with the beautiful eyes. She loves flowers . . . wading in the river . . . but beyond that what else?

Purple Mohit. What about Mohit? . . . Nothing. She remembers nothing. He’s her last born, still she doesn’t remember . . . and doesn’t remember. Only pain. Was it this painful with him too? All her births merge into one. Was it this one or the last one that hurt so bad? It’s odd that it should be so yellow . . .

‘Hey Devi, help me. Help me . . .’ Prayer is her only option. It is a plea, not just for her life, but for the outcome of her pain. Devi, the mother goddess, she is a finicky one; say her prayer all wrong and you could earn her wrath for eternity. ‘Hey Devi, accept your daughter. Hey Devi, save me.’

Devi knows all about suffering. Wasn’t Devi herself forced to hide in the Himalayas for ten days and nine nights to escape her pursuers, living off plants and seeds, but no grain? Come those same ten days and nine nights, Lata Bai and her daughters fast diligently, living off wild berries and water. By the third the mind starts to wander among forests of fruit, mountains of crisp twisted yellow jalebis oozing syrup, and rivers of sweet creamy lassi. The fourth night is probably the worst, when the mind returns and the stomach burns. An internal fire without any fuel. How is that possible? From then on, the girls feel little. Their desires leached from them like precious salt in desert soil.

She recites her childhood prayer. It is the one memory that hasn’t failed her. She’ll do well to placate the mother goddess. Everything lies in her eternal womb as seed. This day Lata Bai interprets the word seed literally. For herself, she asks that her seed might be pure. Uncorrupted. Whole. Male. For all those years of fasting, Devi must listen.

A long screech of pain. And then another. Another fifteen minutes and the pain becomes a slab, more blood and a huge slab of pain.

‘Devi, my mother, help me.’

Was it ever this bad? The clouds float over her head. She feels her self being pulled right into them. Floating away from her colourful children; and the yellow becomes white. She is dying and that’s why everything is so slow. Now the pain has gone into the clouds. It is floating away. Let me float in your arms forever, she prays.

Devi answers. Instead of taking her away somewhere peaceful, the clouds send a small, cold, stinging rain. Get up. Get up.

There is no other way.

She must stand.

She bunches her hands round the mustard plants. They come up with their roots. She would never have pulled out mustard plants by their roots on any other day. She turns to one side, her knees pressed into her chest. She vomits. A bit of grey slime trickles into her ear. She turns her head. The trickle climbs out of her ear and runs into her field. There is no white now, only pain. She is on one knee, then the other. She sits back on her heels, her bulbous belly slung low over her thighs. She can see it quiver. She takes her lumpy belly in her hands. She can feel her baby struggling to live inside.

‘Hey Devi. There is nothing but you. Keep and protect your daughter.’

In that moment her pain and prayer merge to become a conduit for Devi’s emotive love. She feels waves of energy flow and ebb through her like an open sea. The goddess’s manifestations unfold before her: Kali, eternity, governess of all cosmic destructive power; Varahi, the perfect cycle of life, digesting the whole universe without discrimination; Aindri, pure perception, the ticket holder to heaven; Vaishnavi, preserving, sustaining, maker of the cycle of birth and death: Maheshvari, bound by none, but compassionate to all; Kumari, the mother of valour; Lakshmi, benevolent, giving grace; Ishvari, pure reflection, holding authority over all universal wisdom; and Brahmi, governess of divine communication. Yes, she sees the energies, all-encompassing, governing what the eye can and cannot see. She knows why Devi must be all things to everyone. Is she herself not manifested in various forms: mother to her children, wife to her husband, friend to friend, sister to sister, daughter-in-law, worker . . . if she cannot simply be Lata Bai in her tiny world, then how can one form of the formless Devi satisfy all the longing in the universe?

Another pang, and then another. The flickering memory of a prayer learned falls into the pain and dies. She compromises, whispering the words into the earth. ‘Hey Devi, there is nothing but you. Wherever I look I see only you. Pick me up, give me your strength. Jai ho Devi, Devi jai ho.’ She can feel the baby’s head now. It is smooth and slippery like skinned fish. She pulls and then the baby pops right out on the wedding sari wrapping.

The baby’s head is filled with wet black hair, a full head of hair like a grown-up’s. Its skin is slippery smooth with whitish birth cream. A baby girl waves at the clouds, at the sky, at heaven. At Devi.

Another girl. With so much blood and pain, what did she get? Another girl, her girl parts swollen just to mock the mother. The baby’s body screams, Look at me, I am a girl.

The wind has started to pick up. The clouds are moving away, higher and higher. She can see the tip of a deformed electric pole miles away on the flat. They had promised electricity to Gopalpur years ago, that’s when they put in the garland of poles. But it was a broken promise, producing a broken garland, stopping miles short. What the villagers haven’t chipped away for firewood is going into the bellies of white ants. The last time she looked, the poles seemed to have been abandoned by the white ants too. It is a garland that won’t fulfil anyone’s dreams, not the insects and certainly not the humans. She can hear whimpering. The baby is alive.

How long has it been? The clouds have moved quite a distance and the wind is getting harsh. Soon there will be dust. Her body has started to shake with cold and fatigue. She links her fingers together, trying to still their shaking.

‘Devi, help me.’

Having asked for Devi’s help, it is now Lata Bai’s duty to show that she deserves it. What better way to show she deserves it than in receiving it? She must be renewed. She gropes for her husband’s knife. Her blind hand flicks this way and that above her head. At last, the feel of metal.

She looks at the knife. It is sharp. Sharp enough to cut the cord that unites mother and baby. Certainly sharp enough to kill. When does a female baby become a human being? At conception? At birth? At five? At puberty? At marriage? Never? When her parents can offer her a life?

The baby isn’t anything yet. Just blue and red and white. The white birth cream she should save. Take it off this girl and give it to the one who is getting married. It makes the skin soft. She holds the knife tight in her hand. She shifts, sending the baby rolling down the furrow, trailing cord. Grains of mud stick to the girl baby like black sesame seeds on a stick of caramel. She is on her elbows. The baby is crying – an open-mouthed full-throated cry, producing less than a trembling bleat. She can see right down the pink of her throat. What do they say about human babies? They are the most helpless creatures in the world. Calves walk within seconds of their birth. Turtle babies manage to rush to the sea and never forget where they were born. Snake babies fight with their siblings for survival. Bee babies eat their way out of their prisons. And human babies? What about howling helpless human babies? Useless-helpless-howling-human girl babies? She rolls after it, bringing the knife down swiftly and sharply.

For the rest of the world it may be the new millennium, but in Gopalpur time is static. Here the land lives quietly under the hills that rise from its dust, suddenly at ease with the sky, but shying away from the earth. The hills snare the rain that feeds the Chambal River that runs through the plains like a molten braid of silver.

It is impossible to piece together the story of these people’s lives from what the eye can see. There is nothing personal in the surroundings, except soil squares in different colours which announce the farmers’ crop choices for the season. Gopalpur belongs to a shifting land of mud and dust. The villagers must rebuild their homes of reed and packed dung each time the wind has finished toying with them. The most permanent material here is wood, saved for ploughs, their most important need.

Why do they continue to live in this hostile land of hardship and starvation? Where would they go? To leave somewhere there has to be a contemplation of a different life, an image of different scenery. None of them has ever sensed such a thing. That is the obvious explanation. But the truth is, offered a better life they wouldn’t move. It is because Gopalpur defines them as people. It makes sense of their existence and strengthens it with a homogenous experience. There is velocity in such experience, it is that which metamorphoses the present into the future. None of these people is chasing time, their future is not moving away from them, their future is moving closer. Towards them. Here time is not a force, it is a flow, not always benevolent, but nevertheless a flow.

The shadows lie low and long. They reach over the pale outline of the mountains like birds of prey and search out the woman who walks with difficulty, clutching her belly with one hand and a bundle of what looks like mustard plants in the other.

Lata Bai is grateful for the shadows. Her body is still cold, and there is no respite from the sandpaper wind.

The shame of a female birth has propelled her in the wrong direction, away from her house. How long has she been walking? A row of renegade bitter mustard, breaking away from some field to find a life on sandy soil of unploughed land, is her only guide.

She limps past the Red Ruins, planted on land too rocky for crops. The sandstone wall blushes like a shy bride beneath the veil of leaves and vines etched into stone like delicate embroidery on muslin. Superstition has been its saviour. There is the legend of the ghost shimmering in the lone window. No one dares take away one stone from the Red Ruins. If I had a house like this I would return from the dead to look after it too. Lata Bai can see the faint outline of dark brown fingerprints plastered all over the wall, even enough to form a pattern. Everyone knows they are the hand marks of the bandit girls, abducted from their families and raped, only to fall in love with their captors. They say they come to this wall at night to break their bangles in a secret ritual when their husbands die, leaving bloody fingerprints as proof of their grief. An offering lovingly placed at the base of the wall withers accusingly under Lata Bai’s careless feet.

She feels a cramp which pushes her into the ground. Oh, Devi, all this for a girl. The wind urges her forward. It knows its destination, having returned once again just before winter like a diligent relative on a family visit. Where it comes from no one asks, it just appears on the far mountains, rolling down the sides like a conquering horde bringing with it dust. It is said that the dust of Gopalpur can drive people mad. Like darkness, it creeps into everything – every dip, every iron-crease, every eye, under every nail, in stiff broom hair, everything.

It is now blowing with that familiar abandon that will become a storm in no time. She must get home before the storm breaks. She turns around to face the wind. Then lowers her head as if in obeisance.

Lata Bai is careful not to crush another’s plants. She employs the sure tread of a peasant, and negotiates the furrows as lightly as her children play hopscotch – up, down, up, down – through the furrows, in between colours, yellows, golds and greens, thinking only of the next step.

Another cramp. She must get home. She pulls her sari low over her face. Her eyes become one with her bare feet. The gloating storm has no part of her. Her pain has distilled the untidy thoughts in her head into a single mission: keep walking.

No one sees her approach the hut. She can sense the lacy cracks that are about to spread decoratively on its packed mud walls. She must ask the girls to speed up the dung collection, it won’t be long before they will have to start plastering again. She cannot see the earthenware pots, but she knows they are there, melding with their surroundings. Outside there is no sign of her family, a father and four children, within. The children have been using the rope to skip again. It isn’t coiled in its usual place, but lies discarded by the brambles like a snake’s first skin. There is no smoke rising from her roof. Her daughters aren’t home. She is disappointed and then angry.

Her breasts are already aching with milk. She puts the mustard plants down and washes with yesterday’s well water before anyone sees her. She’s pleased to see two extra pots, at least the girls remembered to bring the water from the well. Before forty days, she really should be washing away from the house, taking her impurity with her. The dust has started to swirl in manic curtains of grittiness. She enters her hut. The storm keeps pace with her thoughts, raging outside as an equally nervous storm builds inside her body. Home at last she can experience her pain at leisure.

Another girl.

Seeta Ram, the father, loves picking his teeth. He loves polished shoes. He hates delayed meals. Today the meal is delayed. With one wife and four children still at home why is the meal delayed?

‘Lata, Lata. Food,’ he shouts, sitting cross-legged and placing his turban carefully on the floor beside him. He’s come home early to escape the storm.

‘Coming,’ she shouts back, annoyed that her daughters aren’t home.

Lata Bai claims her bangle from the ashes. For a minute she is frightened that someone else has found it first. But it’s the ash that’s the thief. Reluctant to part with its treasure, it has slipped the bangle a little deeper into the pot.

She still has difficulty walking. You give me a girl and all this pain too. She looks at the picture of Devi, incarnated as Lakshmi the goddess of wealth, hanging above the fire, her lower lip pouting, her chin crinkling like a piece of paper. The picture swings in the wind. Back and forth, back and forth, ticking her life away. It pleases her to see the edges of the frame already black with soot. Not all pink and gold with all four of your palms leaking money, standing coyly on your pure lotus, are you? What do you know about our lives? She’s angry. She doles out the daal, laying out the chapattis in a fan alongside. She looks at the picture of the goddess again. You’ll get no lamp today. She places a defiant dot of butter on each chapatti. The same butter that Prem has brought home from the Big House wrapped in ficus leaves. She’s dedicated each of her baby girls to the goddess. The boys need no such dedication. Suddenly reluctant to offend the goddess, she offers up a token apology, ‘Sorry,’ she says to Lakshmi, ‘today I need the butter more than you.’

She puts the tray at his feet. He doesn’t look up at his wife. Her eyes don’t leave the back of his head for one second.

‘The talk is that Daku Manmohan is going to surrender.’ What an unusual piece of information to give his wife: talk of bandits is exclusively for the men.

There are few written words in Gopalpur, and without written words, talk is all important. Thus far, the monsoon rains have had a monopoly on their words, ever present: an extra mouth at dinner, an impartial listener at the gambling tents, a secret bed-fellow at the Red Bazaar, a deep inhaler of the communal hookah . . . But rumours of the bandit chief Daku Manmohan’s surrender have changed all that. It is giving the people of Gopalpur a chance to participate in someone else’s life for the first time. This is a big change.

‘Daku Manmohan,’ says Seeta Ram, opening and closing his raised fist, flashing the invisible words in the air. ‘It was always Daku Manmohan . . . Daku Manmohan. That killer! And now they say he’s surrendering.’

‘Nathu’s daughter Sunita said that Singh Sahib’s second son, Lokend Bhai, is going to bring him in. I suppose we should be thankful. This will end the raids.’ For as long as they can remember, the bandits have been lodged in the river ravines more solidly than the most stubborn piece of stringy meat in a set of old teeth.

He is irritated that his wife has heard already and not from him. He still hasn’t looked at her and seen the wincing pain flicker on and off her face as sudden as a streak of lightning. If she’s heard, he’s not going to talk any more. Let her hear everything at the well.

‘Let’s call her Shanti,’ sticky with fear, the reluctant words drop slowly from her lips. She has to shout the name over the wind. ‘Shanti!’ Shanti is sleeping silently in her corner, though the wind tries its best to draw her out of her unconscious world.

Shanti! She has run out of love words. That’s how she wanted to name all her children, with love words. Mamta, soft-comforting-selfless-melting mother’s love. The kind of love that has staying power. The kind of love needed by her daughter, stained above the eye with a virulent birthmark. She had consulted the pundit and he’d produced the letter M for green Mamta. Jivkant, she’d had a difficult time naming him. There were no love words starting with J, and the priest wouldn’t change the letter even though Lata Bai offered him twenty rupees to do so. So she had to settle for Jivkant, beloved of the world, not a true love word, but close enough. After Jivkant there were no more priests. Prem she named all by herself. Prem, kindly love that outlasts all passion, it is the best love between husband and wife. Then came Ragini, love, attachment, an apsara. A beautiful name for her beautiful daughter who fulfilled every dream she’d dreamt up for her. After Ragini it was Sneha, another girl. Sneha, tenderness, mutual attraction, gentle, warm, flowing, congenial love. Ordinary Sneha, to whom it seems as if the entire beauty quota has been appropriated by her elder sister Ragini. And finally, Mohit. Eight-year-old Mohit, falsely destined to be the last of her children. How could she have named Mohit anything else? Mohit, deep love, the kind that makes you want to cling on forever. The kind that drives you mad.

‘Fix Mamta’s date for next week. We will be ready then,’ she adds, quickly changing the conversation to one that deals with getting rid of a daughter instead of adding one to their household.

He is not beguiled. ‘Not another girl,’ he says.

‘We must accept what God gives us.’

You can’t say that Seeta Ram hates talking about God, but it’s somewhere up there with delayed meals. He looks at his wife. ‘Don’t talk to me about God,’ he says. The hut is pummelled by more wind just as thunder takes over their world, proof that the gods immediately recognise irreverence.

Her children run in giggling and laughing. For them the storm has become a source of fun. Sneha and Mohit will go shower in the rain. No one asks after the baby. A birth of a child is a natural event, like the wind; they will be told the important details – boy or girl – by and by.

‘It’s coming down now,’ Mamta shouts, pulling her wet chunni round her head even tighter. Her new modesty is endearing. She is very conscious of her upcoming wedding, and behaves as if her future husband is already in the room.

‘Don’t you have any work? Your wedding isn’t for another seven days.’ Her father is angry.

‘Mamta, Mohit, go tie down the hay,’ commands Lata Bai. ‘Sneha, watch Shanti.’ The name out of her mouth, the reality of the baby is sealed. They have a little sister. They all know what that means. Another girl. Another burden.

‘Your children, they do no work until they are told.’ He accuses her of producing foul offspring.

This time she drops her eyes . . . You are my husband of over twenty years. I have lived with you more than I have with my own parents. Except two hundred days, we have slept on the same bed every day all these years. Tonight we will sleep apart, and we should remain apart for the next forty days till I am once again pure. But on the twelfth day, you will take me back to your bed. Then you will climb over me that very night. We will pull the cloth over our heads and, healed or not, in pain or not, bleeding or not, you will pour your seed into me.

For forty days at least she won’t have to worry about another baby. But still, she does worry. She hates the nightly sex in full view of the children. Mostly Mamta gets up and goes outside to look at the sky as Seeta Ram goes up and down over Lata Bai. The boys just giggle. Then it’s over. No other man would think of coupling with his wife during the first forty days, but not Seeta Ram. He’ll roll off, leaving blood stains on the hay, and then she’ll put her aching legs together. That’s how it has been. Every time.

A baby and then another. That’s where the life is going to pour out of me when I die. From between my legs and not from my nose like other people.

‘I will be going to see him for myself. These men are tricky, they say one thing and they do another.’

‘Who?’ She’s still with her children, but her husband has returned to the more important matter at hand.

‘Daku Manmohan. He’s only doing it because Lokend Bhai has guaranteed his family’s safety. Why the police don’t just kill him, I’ll never know,’ he says, eating, quietly watched by his children. Mohit joins his father, also sitting cross-legged on the floor. Lata Bai calculates the meals precisely. Today she will publicly give Mamta an extra half chapatti. Seeta Ram will say nothing, but only because she is to be married in a few days and leaving for good. Every other day he would say, ‘Let her eat the leftovers. Why water someone else’s garden?’

‘I have explained their roles to them. You will remember when the time comes, won’t you?’ Lata Bai asks her children from her corner. She will eat with the girls after Seeta Ram has finished.

Seeta Ram refuses to be dragged into marriage talk. ‘Daku Manmohan, surrendering. That’s really something! The government is offering him and his gang limited freedom,’ he says, cautiously prodding a sleeping memory of looting and slaughter. ‘Pah! Limited freedom! We all know what that translates to. A jail cell more comfortable than the best hotel, with hot tea on tap, a game of cards with the guards and food cooked by their wives who will be given pukka brick houses,’ he says, spitting on the floor. ‘That murdering motherfucker, how many has he killed? How many has he maimed?’

‘None from our family. Thank God. And only because Amma’s brother is in the gang,’ says Mamta, giggling. During the harvest, more than twenty years ago, when the farmers scaled down their rations and looked for new places to hide their precious grain, Lata Bai’s brother disappeared. The whole family searched for his dead body, but not her father. No one knows for sure what happened to the boy, but Lata Bai’s father cut and threshed his wheat with impunity that very day, while other farmers left their crops standing to rot in their fields. Blood money. That’s what Lata Bai suspected it was. Blood money. A boy in exchange for protection. A boy who would one day become a man. ‘Imagine, my uncle in the gang.’ Her almost-wed status has made Mamta bold.

‘Mamta!’ Both father and mother censure her in unison. It isn’t a subject to be discussed, as it separates the family from the rest of Gopalpur’s inhabitants.

‘Well, it’s true.’

‘Mamta, leave things that don’t concern you alone,’ says Lata Bai. To this day she feels guilty that her hut wasn’t burned down with the rest.

‘You had better shut her up,’ Seeta Ram adds, slicing his palm through air in a smacking motion.

Shanti starts to cry. Lata Bai lets her cry. It will be a while before she will pick her up. That’s how she’s trained all her daughters into silence. The boys are picked up at once.

Mamta brings the baby to her mother. ‘Tch,’ the mother shakes her head at her eldest, and then she says proudly, ‘See, she’ll make a good mother,’ because as far as Lata Bai is concerned daughters are born to be good mothers first, before anything else.

‘She’s just playing,’ replies Seeta Ram with remarkable perspicacity. ‘If she didn’t have Shanti, she’d be teasing those boys from across the river. Still, she’d better make a good wife.’ As far as Seeta Ram is concerned, daughters are born to be good wives first, before anything else.

Mamta will satisfy both her parents and make a good wife and mother. Loving Mamta. Patient Mamta.

‘I am going out,’ says Seeta Ram suddenly, unable to stand being in the house with the women any longer.

‘In this weather? Where will you go?’

‘To hell,’ he says, charging out of the hut. He won’t give her more information than is necessary.

‘Take this for the rain –’ She follows him out into the wet darkness, holding a spreading jute bag over his head.

As soon as Seeta Ram leaves the hut, Mamta starts with her questions. She has been dogging her mother for days, it seems she can never have enough answers. ‘Tell me how it was for you,’ she asks. Her giddiness irritates Lata Bai.

‘You should be concentrating on your work: go collect the dung, go finish the washing, go pick the berries, collect the spinach . . . do something useful instead of following me around! You are going to be a wife and mother soon, stop wasting your time.’

‘Come on, Amma, I have only a week left, then I’ll be gone and I . . . I might never come back, just like Ragini.’

‘Your sister married up. It’s not easy for her to come back.’

‘So will I have a pukka house too?’

‘Oho, stop dreaming dreams, they will get you nowhere. Now go gather the dung.’ Lata Bai knows all about dreaming dreams. She had her own dreams before she was married to Seeta Ram at eight.

‘Okay, okay. I’ll do it. Amma, but first tell me, what was it like?’

Lata Bai looks into Mamta’s eyes ringed with lashes, two bright big moons of excitement. What should I say? It was frightening . . . painful . . . it snatched my childhood from me.

‘You got married after the drought, and then . . .’ Mamta starts her mother’s story for her, but she is fishing in muddy waters, there is no bite. Lata Bai looks away, remembering . . .

‘What, Amma? Tell me . . .’ Mamta puts her arms around her mother’s waist.

‘No more of this hugging baby business,’ says Lata Bai in exactly the same tone her own mother had used on her, unlocking her arms and making distance between them. ‘You are a woman now. Soon you will have your own children to look after, you won’t be able to keep running home to me.’

‘My own children? Will they be just like my Ladli dolly?’ Mamta had made Ladli dolly herself when she was seven, with rags and tree cotton, embroidering her eyes, nose, mouth, and covering her head with bright red string hair.

‘Oh, grow up, you’ll be sorry if you don’t.’ But in fact it is Lata Bai who is sorry as soon as those words leave her lips. At once she pulls Mamta’s arms round her again and says, ‘Yes, yes, they’ll be just like your Ladli dolly.’

The thought of children makes Mamta so happy and so scared. She knows children come only after jiggery. And jiggery hurts like anything. She’s seen dogs do it, cows do it, cats do it, and it looks awful. How will she ever do it?

‘Do you like Bapu?’ she asks her mother.

‘What sort of a question is that? I am a wife and a mother.’

‘No, I mean do you like Bapu like the heroes like the heroines in the films?’

‘So when have you seen a film?’

‘Oh, Amma, you know what I mean. Do you think he will be as handsome as Guru Dutt?’

‘Maybe.’ Lata Bai hasn’t met the prospective groom. The marriage was arranged exclusively by Seeta Ram. I hope he checked on the family. Hai, Mamta, I hope your fate is better than mine.

‘Amma, what will I have to do? How did you do it?’ This is the first time Mamta has asked her mother questions about babies and sex.

‘Do what?’

‘You know, have all of us.’

Lata Bai sees a disconcerting calm in her daughter’s face, an acceptance that she never had a chance to own as a young bride. ‘Mamta, you’ll get to know all about it by and by.’ That’s what her own mother had said to her, hadn’t she? You’ll get to know all about it by and by. And she was right. She did get to know all about it by and by . . .

When Lata Bai turned twelve, Seeta Ram came with the tongawala to collect his bride. They rode back to her husband’s house bouncing in a bullock cart all the way. Her father-in-law was so kind to her that first day. He dandled her on his knee all day and gave her sweets to eat. That night her father-in-law got on top of her, opened her legs to the ceiling and brought his fat body all the way inside her, till she thought she would choke on it. She’d screamed with the blood and pain. But only once. Her mother-in-law shouted, ‘Quiet! Do you want to wake the dead?’ from behind the curtain.

Her eyes were red from sorrow and shame the next day. ‘Sorry,’ her husband said to her, ‘he gets the first taste. That’s our custom.’

The first taste of a twelve-year-old girl. That was the last time her husband ever said sorry to her.

After that, every night her father-in-law tried to climb on her again. Every night he was stopped by her mother-in-law. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘You’re only entitled to the first taste. She belongs to Seeta Ram now.’

His father was dying to get inside her, but her husband wasn’t sure how to do it. Her father-in-law took care of that too. He took Seeta Ram to the gambling tents and bought him his own prostitute for one whole hour. It was jiggery from then on. Every night . . .

‘The girls say the first time is the hardest . . . that there’s blood . . . Amma, is that true?’ Mamta speaks through the modest security of her chunni pinched between her teeth.

Lata Bai squeezes Mamta to her breast. ‘The best day of my marriage was when I became pregnant with you . . . I remember it exactly . . . it happened when your bapu’s mother went back to her own village to meet her sister and secretly sell her gold bangles to buy a transistor radio she’d had her eye on for some time . . .’

Lata Bai went to bathe at the river when her husband and mother-in-law left for the tonga stand. She’d calculated everything perfectly. Forty minutes there and forty minutes back, half an hour maximum for chit-chat, that added up to one hour and fifty minutes. Just to be on the safe side she would come back after two and a half hours, her husband would surely be home by then. The cicadas almost always started their song around five thirty in the evening. That’s when she would lazily wander home, after the insects sang their first movement.

It was the last tonga fare that had decided Lata Bai’s fate. The tongawala refused to start the journey without his complement of ten. The cost of feeding those bulls alone would amount to four passenger fares. Then there were two fares for emergencies, one fare for his food and a visit to his favourite prostitute. That left him with three fares of profit. That added up to one fare each for his sons and one for his wife and daughter. Less than that and it wasn’t worth his while.

Seeta Ram and his mother were still sweating buckets under their banyan, waiting for the tenth passenger when Lata Bai meandered back home, humming a little, still hot and damp under her ghaghra with water dripping off her hair, leaving a wet patch in the centre of her back. All this time, her father-in-law searched the house for her. He looked in the fields: ‘Come out, little mouse. Come out, little mouse. I’m going to get you,’ he said softly.

She didn’t see him, still holding on to her song and happiness. It was only when he stepped up behind her and lifted her off her feet that she knew she’d been caught in a trap from which she wouldn’t get out till the hunter was well and truly done with her.

That time she said nothing, she didn’t scream, just turned her head away and closed her eyes tight enough to see bright green dots behind her lids so she wouldn’t have to look at her father-in-law’s distorted features lurking above her own. He’d raped her twice, or was it thrice? Like he would never have enough of her teenage body. Her body, with its newly sprouted breasts as small as plums, a tiny waist and a bottom as hard as a teenage boy. After he was done, he’d stuffed a piece of brown sugar into her mouth. She’d spat it out on her mother-in-law’s pillow.

He’d filled her body with his semen and one of those sperms made its way to her awakening ovaries. That’s how Mamta came to be.

Then Seeta Ram came back. The whole world was still in order. The house was exactly as he’d left it. His wife was peeling potatoes from their field. There was washing hanging out to dry, and drips from the oil lamp staining the altar. It really was just another day. The kind of day he’d got used to.

He wasn’t disappointed with his wife. She’s a good woman, he thought, looking at her working with her chunni pulled low over her head. Then he saw the wet patch on the back of her blouse and felt something rush up from inside and grab his throat. Her knife flicked little potato peels on the floor. Her bangles jangled. Her feet stuck out under her ghaghra. She’d wiggled her toes, a spot of sparkle played on her toe ring. He was by her side in a second. He took the knife out of her hand. Caught her by the wrist and led her to the cow shed. She followed, a little like a tethered cow herself. ‘I have to show her the new calf, it looked sickly this morning,’ he’d said to his father over his shoulder.

His father smiled. ‘Of course you do.’

Seeta Ram bedded his wife in the cow shed, his seed mixing with his father’s inside her. That time too, Lata Bai said nothing, just shut her eyes to see those little green spots again.

Her father-in-law managed to rape her five more times. At first Lata Bai just stared at her mother-in-law with intense eyes as deep as drought wells, but the older woman refused to understand. So she didn’t keep quiet during the sixth rape, but screamed and screamed so that the world might hear her. The world didn’t hear her, but the person she most wanted to did . . .

‘Your bapu’s mother didn’t buy the transistor radio. Instead she got your bapu his own field, and that’s how we came upriver to live here in Gopalpur.’ At least that last rape hadn’t been in vain.

Lata Bai holds on to her daughter’s eyes for a long time. ‘My life changed for the better after I moved here with your bapu . . . we made this house ourselves,’ she says, falsely recalling her own early months as wedded bliss. ‘Remember, the first months are the best, enjoy them. You build so much together, lay a foundation for yourself and your children,’ she says convincingly. In truth it wasn’t until months after Mamta was born that they’d gathered enough clay from the riverbed and wood from the forest and begged a stack of hay from their neighbour’s field to build their hut. The hut hasn’t changed much, it is still just one large room where the family cooks, sleeps and dreams.

‘But you will also have to work hard,’ she needlessly warns her industrious daughter, ‘maybe even harder than you do here. There will be only two of you there, here we are five . . . But I know you will do whatever you have to. You have never shirked work. And believe me, you will be rewarded, just as I was . . .

‘Our first wheat was marvellous, each stalk fat with grain without a single telltale black powdery ear that could ruin the whole crop. It was such a good time to bring a baby into the world, Mamta. Fat wheat dancing over my head, a hut to live in, and not a rupee in debt. And then you appeared, just before the wheat turned golden. A beautiful plump baby girl.’

Lata Bai looks away, she can remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. She’d rushed home with her new baby. ‘Can you hear me?’ she’d cried. ‘Can you hear me? Our baby’s come. Our baby’s here,’ she’d shouted again and again. Seeta Ram came running from the latrine, washing his hands quickly in the ditch. Lata Bai had held the baby out to him. Even wrinkled up and bruised from birth, she thought Mamta was a beauty. ‘She’s beautiful, no?’

Seeta Ram had jerked back from his wife as if he’d been stung. ‘You called me this loud for a girl? Do you want us to celebrate and tell the whole world of this baby girl? God, did you have to give me a girl?’ he’d said, and walked out of the house leaving Lata Bai standing holding Mamta out to him as if she was a temple offering.

Girl or otherwise, that’s when Seeta Ram became ‘Mamta’s father’. That’s right, from that day to this, Seeta Ram has been called Mamta’s father and nothing else by his wife. ‘Arey-oh, Mamta’s father, lunch is ready,’ she shouts at noon, and then again, ‘Arey-oh, Mamta’s father, dinner.’ Every day it’s Mamta’s father this and Mamta’s father that. Each time his wife calls him Mamta’s father, Seeta Ram thinks she is deliberately punishing him for Mamta’s sake; he never blames custom that ordains the link between the father’s name and his first-born’s.

That evening the hijras came. They saw the baby was a girl and blessed it for free. They hadn’t the heart to ask the new mother of a daughter for money. ‘Devi has blessed you,’ said the eunuchs, looking back at Lata Bai, sharing in her sorrow as only other women could. ‘She will be lucky. She has the mark.’ Of course the mark had to be a blessing, just like accidental bird droppings on one’s finest clothes. Yes, Lata Bai had seen it too, a red birthmark tucked away in her daughter’s hair.

‘At least we can be thankful that the hijras won’t come today. They know we have nothing,’ says the mother.

‘Yes, and probably they won’t show up at my wedding either,’ says Mamta ruefully. ‘At last Bapu can be glad, he won’t have to look at my ugly face much longer,’ she adds.

‘Uffo,’ Lata Bai replies in half-agreement. Ugly-face-talk before the wedding is fitting, because any kind of praise is inauspicious. There is always someone listening, people willing to spoil your plans. She places a dot of lampblack behind Mamta’s ear to take the ‘perfect’ out of her beauty, more as a courtesy to her daughter than anything else. They both know Mamta’s beauty isn’t perfect, the red birthmark dangles above her eyebrow like a sign of disapproval from God.

‘I shall put the henna leaves to dry as soon as the rain stops,’ says Mamta. ‘Just imagine, beautiful red henna patterns all the way to my shoulders and up to my knees . . . hai,’ she sighs.

Her mother shakes her head, but says nothing. She is going to be married after all. Another six days and she’ll be gone. Thank you, Devi. That should put an end to the village sniggers: ‘Arey, Lata Bai, how is it that you got your younger daughter married before your elder one?’ . . . ‘Arey, Lata Bai, have you had an offer for Mamta yet?’ Even those guised as concern: ‘Arey, Lata Bai, what can a mother do but love her daughter, good, bad, beautiful or ugly?’ And the pitying, this-is-destiny ones: ‘Don’t worry, someone will come for her. You just wait and see. After all, girls are someone else’s gardens. We mothers only borrow them for a time.’

Lata Bai has woken Mamta and Sneha early and ushered them out of the hut. They must be quick today, bringing the water from the well, cooking two days’ food that won’t spoil with keeping, repairing the roof and collecting the dung pats. At last, mid-morning she packs some dried chapattis and spicy baked potato skins in some ficus leaves for their journey. They will travel light, the only thing of value they carry is a bottle of homemade chilli pickle for her father.

‘Okay, we are ready,’ says Lata Bai to Seeta Ram when he comes home for lunch. ‘I am taking Mamta and Shanti,’ she adds, quickly placing his tray at his feet. Her husband winces, the name Shanti is too new, too disappointing, too female.

‘So what about Sneha?’ he says, pulling Prem and Mohit to one side of the hut, separating the females from the males as if in some fiercely competitive game. ‘Take the girls, the boys are staying with me.’

Lata Bai cradles Shanti and leaves without looking back at the house. The women walk towards the tonga stand under a flowing ficus tree, an hour away. She hides the baby deeper inside her pallav to spare her the sunlight that can crisp skin faster than an open flame. It beats down on them like a pounding stick, knocking all the energy out of their stride. The Red Ruins glimmer in the distance. Two girls are praying at the shrine. Lata Bai walks faster, lifting her hand in acknowledgement, but not her head.

‘Who are they?’

‘Must be some girls from the village, come to pray for sons.’

‘When I’m married, I will come here to pray for sons too. I wish I was a boy. Bapu says to wait and see, my husband will sort me out well and good. I think he’s waiting for that.’ In Seeta Ram’s eyes Mamta has no right to exist at all, but since she does, she has to prove herself day after day, working harder than the boys, eating nothing that might be noticed, and being silently present. Like the extra baby section in an orange, not missed if it isn’t there, but swallowed whole if it is, without releasing any of its flavour into the mouth.

‘I won’t let my husband rule over me. Husbands aren’t kings, you know.’

‘Look here, Mamta,’ Lata Bai takes hold of her daughter’s shoulders tight and hard, ‘you will not survive a day with that attitude. For now, work sincerely at home and stay out of your bapu’s way. That’s the best and safest thing for you to do. Pray to Devi every night that your husband is kind to you . . .’

‘. . . and that he won’t beat you or send you back to us in disgrace,’ adds Sneha, who has learned the lesson of womanhood much faster and better than her elder sister.

‘Huh. Small mouth, big talk,’ says Mamta.

Under the appointed tree, Lata Bai opens her blouse to suckle Shanti. ‘Sneha, you better go home. Nani hasn’t room for us all. You can visit her any time, let Mamta have her attention, she is going away for good. I promise I’ll take you next winter.’

‘Next winter! But Nani might be dead next winter!’

‘Sneha, back to the house! If you start walking now, you’ll be there before sunset,’ says Lata Bai, brushing aside Sneha’s tears.

‘Stay out of Bapu’s way and he won’t even notice you are back,’ says Mamta viciously.

* * *

They arrive early in the morning, to the smell of home fires.

‘Arey, Lata, what’s happened to this girl of yours? Look at her hair, it is orange,’ says the grandmother, tugging at Mamta’s oily plait.

‘Oho, what am I to do, he won’t give her food. Each time I say give her food he says, “Am I made of money? Do you think we live in the Big House? Throw some more oil into her hair, it’ll get black in no time at all.” Then he says, “Look at her huge belly, is that the belly of a starving child?”’ Of course they all know that a distended belly means starvation. How many children have they seen die holding their ball-bellies in their hands? But Mamta’s father creates his own mirage, an image that suits his ends. He neither minds nor cares if she lives or dies.

‘Come. Come here. Now you will have more to eat. You need meat on your bones, good body fat before you are married. We don’t want your husband thinking we cheated him, do we?’ says Mamta’s grandmother, putting their hands in red clay and plastering their handprints on the mud walls of her house. ‘In case I never see you again, your hands will hold me as I ride Yamraj’s bull to my next life.’

‘I won’t let Yamraj take you any time soon, Nani. You can’t go before you’ve told us all the stories.’

‘Look at this girl of yours, Lata, to be married soon, and still she wants to hear only stories.’

‘Why do you think I brought her here, Amma?’ laughs Lata Bai. ‘For your stories . . . and your food, of course. Hai, I am exhausted, her ears are never satisfied.’

‘Come, see your bapu, Lata. Not that he’ll know you.’

The women enter the hut. Lata Bai touches her father’s feet. He is lying on the charpoy, loosely tied to the rope bed with strips of sari material.

‘Namaste, Bapu.’

‘Who?’ The man’s eyes seem to float in their sockets, moving from his daughter to his granddaughter’s face. Lata Bai kneels by his side and runs her fingers over his feet.

‘It’s Lata, I’m here,’ she says.

‘Who?’ He asks no one in particular.

The grandmother replies. Her frustration reaches into her gullet and pulls her voice out of her throat, catapulting it to a high pitch: ‘Your daughter is here!’

‘Sh, sh, Amma, sh, he’s not deaf. Bapu, it’s Lata.’ The husband and father lies on the charpoy, useless to the two women who depend on him. ‘You remember me, don’t you? It’s Lata.’ An unconscious thought flashes through her mind which makes complete sense of the situation. Men, you can’t count on them, even if your life depends on it, and still, she looks on with eyes full of love for her father.

‘Bapu, we’re here now. Don’t worry. You can come out to greet us whenever you are ready.’ Of course by the ‘you’ Lata Bai means his inner self, for her mother has no intention of freeing her senile husband to wander off and leave her a virtual widow. Her mother takes him to the outhouse herself and walks him round and round the yard like a cow threshing wheat. Some evenings, she oils his hair, or massages his feet, or clips his toenails, whatever is dictated by her mental calendar built up over six years of care and feeding.

‘Leave it, Lata, he can’t change. Not even though you are here.’

‘So what’s wrong with him, Nani?’

‘Oh, he’s been like that for years; I just hope he has a few more left in him. I don’t want to survive your grandfather. At least he’s given me a good life. Now just look at him . . . doesn’t know who I am. I’m afraid one day he’ll wander away and then the villagers will think him dead. And then your mother’s brothers will come to take this land away from me.’

‘Why? You saved them in the drought.’

‘Yes, I did. I confused Death into thinking my boys were girls by making them wear their dead sisters’ clothes. I painted their eyes with kohl and put bangles on their wrists, so Yamraj spared their lives. I did my duty, child, but no one cares for the past, least of all sons. Just look at that Pavan, threw his mother out of the hut the instant she became a widow and when she refused to leave, he dragged her out by her hair. When you are rejected by your own blood, what will other people do but shun you as well.’

‘Oh, Nani, no one will throw you out. You can come live with Amma if they do.’

Her grandmother just smiles at the naïveté of the offer given with love. Of course she could never go to Lata Bai’s house. Not even to visit, let alone to live. That would be the one thing that would disgrace her daughter like no other. Since Lata Bai has been married her mother has only been to see her once, and that time she stayed in the back of Saraswati Stores with the stinking fertiliser that burned her eyes and gave her headaches. She met her daughter at the well, and refused all her presents and food during her stay so she would not be a burden to her.

‘Nani, story. Tell us about the dry season, when all my aunts died.’ Mamta has always been a long-story girl; in that department, she was born mature.

‘Just listen to my granddaughter. Cooing like a pigeon. All the time she wants to hear only that story. I try and tell her about our gods, but she only wants to hear about us humans.’

‘Mamta, you cannot know the world by peeping through a keyhole. Always the same old stories,’ says Lata Bai.

‘Okay, Nani, then tell me about Aunt Lucky Sister and how she sent her husband packing, or about Amma’s brother who was stolen by the bandits.’

‘Ha, ha Lucky Sister . . . Go on, Lata, you tell your daughter about that sister of yours. All I can say is that you have to be prepared for anything after marriage . . . it can be heaven, it can be hell . . .’

‘Amma, let’s not talk about that now. Mamta will have a fine marriage,’ says Lata Bai cautiously.

But the grandmother hasn’t had company in a long time, and like a starving child who gorges itself to sickness, she can’t stay away from saying too much, from giving away painful memories lightly, no matter how heartsick it might make the three of them. ‘I married my daughters, your amma’s sisters, just before the drought. That was lucky, because after that, no one would have come to claim them. You remember the drought, Lata. It was so bad that the earth cracked and split like chapped skin.

‘Hai, I wasn’t lucky with my daughters. My eldest simply disappeared after her wedding day. We suspected she was dead, because there was never any news. My second, who moved five miles away, came home three times with a huge gash on her head. Each time I gave her a paste of turmeric and sacred basil to bind on her wound and sent her back. After the third time, she stopped coming home too. My third daughter, Lucky Sister, married an engine driver. Everyone said lucky girl. She came home every other year with saris for everyone . . .’ The grandmother stops, even she can’t say the words. It was through well-side gossip that they learned the true story behind the saris and Lucky Sister’s happy marriage to a rich engine driver. Her rich engine driver husband put his own wife out to work, setting her up in a little hut behind the station. First it was just her husband’s friends who came to spend an hour or two with her, but later, she slept with anyone. Once she became established, she threw her pimping husband out of her house. Now she has six other girls working for her. No one in Lata Bai’s family speaks of Lucky Sister any more.

‘So what about my fourth auntie?’

‘Your fourth auntie was married at eight, like your amma.’

‘Yes, and like me, she too had to wait for her period to arrive before her husband claimed her,’ says Lata Bai.

‘Hai, so young. Imagine if . . .’ says Mamta, eyes wide.

‘Oho, it was a different time, that’s all,’ replies the grandmother.

‘A different time?’ Lata Bai laughs bitterly. ‘I suppose you could say that it was a different time.’

‘So? What? Do you blame me, Lata? Do you think I had any choice? Don’t you remember that damned drought? I can still remember the tiniest details . . . the sky a constant blue; the moon on its back, surrounded by a dance of stars, so still, so lifeless on scorching, murderous nights; the cicadas stopping mid-chirp and falling to the ground like dead leaves; the well water turning bitter; your bapu praying for rain; giving all our food to the priest who promised us rain; the rains not coming for six months; the crops drying up . . .’

‘Even so, you should have checked up on the family, on their customs . . .’

‘Yes, yes, we should have. I suppose you believe we could have. There were no marriage offers for you girls . . . Oh, Mamta, you should have seen it: all round us, girls were dying of hunger. Lata, how can you forget the pickled pea plants so easily?’

‘Yes, yes, the pickled pea plants . . .’ Lata Bai’s voice is flat, emotionless. ‘I haven’t forgotten. Amma pickled all the withering plants she could find, just pickled them right down to a soup in salt. That’s what we lived on: pickled pea plants. There were always heaped spoonfuls of green pickled soup for Bapu with a wheat dumpling or two . . . all three meals. Bapu reached a point when he couldn’t swallow any more salt. Just the sight of pickled pea shoots made him want to run outside and look for a drink of water. Salt goes with water. But there was no water . . .’ She can still remember the time her father threw his plate in her mother’s face, splattering her clothes with green pickle stains, blaming her for the drought, the salt and no water. Her mother scraped the stains off her clothes and put them back in the pickle jar again. Nothing was wasted. She stayed in those stained clothes till the end of the drought.

‘That’s when my sisters started to die . . . one by one.’

‘But not your amma, she was a survivor. Lata found food in anything . . .’

‘I would walk up and down the riverbank collecting anything I could eat. A fallen bird, a sparrow’s nest, lotus seeds, reeds, anything. Sometimes I’d come back with the last rotting wild potatoes of the season, sometimes with dried berries still hanging on brittle stems. The lotus seeds I ate alone, in the shade of a dune. Those I never took home. Perhaps that’s how I survived, on a handful of lotus seeds . . . But, Amma, I never told you about the rotting cow. You remember Radha, my friend who got sick and died? She ate cow meat . . .’ says Lata Bai still afraid to tell the whole truth. It wasn’t just Radha who ate the cow, she did too. Neither of them told. The villagers would have killed her before the drought did for eating the cow. Lata Bai ate only the hooves. Threw them into a grass fire which she kept going for five hours. The hoofs melted and as soon as they started to drip, she caught the drip on a stick, blew on it and popped it into her mouth. Radha wanted the meat. That’s why the day after Radha was dead and she wasn’t.

‘Yes, and you ate the hooves. I knew about those,’ says Lata Bai’s mother.

‘You did?’

‘Oh, forget it, Lata. We’ve all done worse things in our lives.’ It is clear this is the first time Lata Bai and her mother have spoken honestly of those days.

‘If you knew about the hooves, why did you give me my sisters’ food? That’s why they died, because I ate their food . . .’

She physically bites down into those old images, clamping her jaw shut. Lata Bai remembers her youngest sister: two big-moons-in-the-water eyes looking around at the world. First lively, looking for anything that might help her live, a game, a laugh, a touch. Then looking around more slowly, for something to ease the pain. Lata Bai cut her sari in two, the only one she owned, and made a sling for her sister. Each time before she left to look for food by the river, she’d give her sister a huge swing. Her other sisters didn’t expire quite so quietly. They screamed their terrible screams and fought with her to the end, biting and kicking, opening her mouth to snatch their food back from inside her throat. When she woke, there was a bit of vomit beside her head where her sisters had managed to drag their food out of her body. Even after they died, they continued to visit her in her dreams and pull food from deep inside her gullet every night.

‘Because you were the strong one. You are still the strong one. I made that choice, and it was a good one.’

‘Nani, did you eat cow hooves as well?’

‘Ha, ha . . . no. I licked the dregs off the plates instead of washing them. At first the taste of the pickled soup was less bitter than the taste of shame. Later the taste of shame became less bitter than the taste of despair. Finally, the taste of despair disappeared and it was just the taste of pickled soup again.’

‘Hai, Mamta, I hope you never have to witness such days,’ says Lata Bai. ‘Three of my friends died, and one became sick with a disease that curled her legs right into her hips. As for the other two . . .’ It was around the time of her wedding that she heard about two others who had survived. They’d been sent to the city with one of their uncles where there was food to be had. They all knew what happened to the girls who went to the city. They eventually became prostitutes and turned up in the Red Bazaar.

‘Finally, the drought ended, and two months later your amma was married to your bapu.

‘You remember, that Seeta Ram of yours turned up with his elder brother. His face was covered with a red cloth that shivered slightly at the mouth every time he breathed. I lifted the groom’s veil just to check if it was really Seeta Ram beneath it. Those days there was a lot of switching of grooms, men who changed their minds often paid someone else to pick up their brides. His brother said your amma was too frail and sunken to be a good wife. But I said no, she is strong as a plough. And to prove it, I made her balance all our earthenware pots filled with water on her head . . . all six of them. Do you remember that?’

‘Yes, I remember how you hit me on the head, and pulled my veil lower over my eyes, and pushed my head down so that my eyes pointed to the floor, all the time smiling at Mamta’s father and his brother. Hai, I was so scared that I thought I would drop the pots on their toes. Ha, ha, ha . . .’ Lata Bai laughs with that special relief that comes with the memory of averted disaster.

‘I remember we ate one sweet semolina ball cut into eight. That was my wedding.’

‘But yours will be different, Mamta, yours will be very different. Now, enough of stories, go make some the tea,’ says the grandmother. ‘What about Mamta’s dowry? What have you given her? Is it more than what we gave you?’ Both mother and grandmother regard the bride-to-be, who smiles at them from the stove out of earshot. ‘Her dowry better be enough. I mean, look at her. That ungodly birthmark has snatched away her beauty. You’d better give her a decent dowry, otherwise she might come back to you charred,’ hisses the grandmother.

‘Mamta’s father has taken a loan from the Big House for her dowry,’ the mother drops her voice too, ‘we had to, otherwise we would never have managed to get a proposal for her. We thought Singh Sahib would be kind to us, because of how much he loved his own wife Bibiji, and because we took the loan for a marriage . . . you could say to . . . to sanctify the act of love . . . but not a chance. Singh Sahib is sick. He can’t be bothered with us. It’s his son Ram Singh or his pet dog Babulal who come for the interest every month. Now Prem goes there to work every day, paying it off. Slavery is what it is.’ Her voice is thick with disappointment. ‘We took a loan and managed to buy nothing. No gold. No cows or goats either, just a bicycle, some pans, and a few clothes . . . I gave her Lucky Sister’s gold earrings, they were the only jewellery I had.’ Days before her own wedding, Lucky Sister had sent her a pair of earrings. They had arrived secretly at night in the hands of one of her customers, the person Lucky Sister most trusted.

‘Now we are like the rest of Mamta’s father’s hookah-sucking friends – all debtors of the Big House. But there is some glamour in it, I suppose. They invite you that one and only time to the Big House veranda and give you tea. They said they would come for the wedding. I think that’s really what made Mamta’s father do it. You know how he is, he loves show.

‘Remember when Ragini got married,’ Lata Bai drops her voice even lower to spare Mamta the anguish of her ensuing words, ‘how excited he was? How much show we put on. He gave Ragini enough dowry for three girls. How rich they were. We nearly passed out when the groom arrived on a horse. Hai, for this wedding we will be paying for the rest of our lives. Better to have been robbed by bandits.’

‘It’s the same anyway, robbed by bandits or the Big House. It’s just the same,’ says the old woman. ‘I don’t envy you. After Mamta and Sneha, you will still have another one to marry off,’ she says, looking at the baby in Lata Bai’s arms. Then she plucks a betel-leaf off her vine, quickly slaps some lime on it and carefully places half in the corner of her mouth. She pops the other half into her husband’s.

‘And now those damned bandits are surrendering.’

* * *

Showing remarkable prescience, Lata Bai has saved last season’s daal for the wedding, trimming her family’s rations by one spoon each day. Daal and chapattis, that’s what she’ll serve, and mustard greens. She will steal some mustard greens from her own field. Why steal? Because, except for a few plants, minutely calculated as sustenance for the family, the crop belongs to Singh Sahib, and the labour of her son too. That was the deal. He gave them money for Mamta’s dowry, they are to give him all their produce in return. All their produce, even the vegetables they grow, go with Prem to the Big House. Why are girls born at all? All they do is get us in debt.

How should she cook the daal? Chillies, of course. The more chillies she uses the less people will eat. She’ll make it go round with enough chillies from her own bush. She opens the earthenware pot and looks inside at the hoarded daal.

It’s almost gone . . . Almost gone? Yes, almost gone. Into the bellies of weevils. They look like seeds themselves. Fat on her grain, they wiggle slowly along the edge of the pot.

Her heart beats in her mouth. The next thing, her ears go deaf to her body’s sounds. She looks around. Her eyes see nothing. She remembers nothing. Not the daal or the weevils that caused all this. Her whole life can be summed up in weevils. The clouds move lazily overhead. The mustard says shrk, shrk. What should she do? She can hear everything clearly. Serve the weevils. That’s what. Grind them into a paste with the daal and serve the weevils. Weevils on her daughter’s wedding.

It is the good time of year, after the visiting dust vanishes into its permanent home somewhere in the mountains. Luckily, this time the storm didn’t take their roof, so the girls don’t have to gather too many reeds from the riverbank, and there’s little work in the fields. Mamta is still with Shanti, masking the holes in her coverlet with dainty embroidered peacocks, and popping pumpkin seeds into her mouth that her mother has slyly hidden for her fittingly behind the picture of the all-giving goddess Lakshmi. Mamta really should be checking the mustard leaf by leaf for aphids. They can destroy the whole crop in a matter of weeks.

‘I’m watching you,’ says Seeta Ram from the door. Her father has returned unexpectedly. ‘What are you doing at home? Get out there to work. And take that . . . that baby with you,’ he smacks her on the back of her head, a safe place for hidden bruising. ‘I’m watching you, just you remember that. I can still send you to the Red Bazaar if that husband of yours doesn’t turn up.’

Seeta Ram had always disliked his eldest daughter with something bordering on revulsion. The revulsion turned to hatred the night Mamta tried to beat him off her mother crying, ‘Don’t touch her, don’t you kill her . . .’ That was when he cut her rations down to a single meal a day of nothing but a dry chapatti.

Mamta looks at her father, blaming him for her whole life. I am glad I’m leaving you, and I won’t have to meet you again. What Mamta sees is a dictatorial, loveless, cruel man. What she doesn’t see is that Seeta Ram is a man without choices, a typical Gopalpur inhabitant, shaped by the destiny of the village. A powerless, brooding man, who has never hankered after things he didn’t deserve. No alternatives ever appeared on his horizon, or in his impermanent world of grass reeds and mud. His world is governed by the force of Gopalpur’s dusty winds and monsoon rains, and the amount of money he owes the Big House, a force he considers on par with an act of God.

She quickly drops Shanti in her tiny hammock and rushes outside.

She swishes through the mustard. Its flowers are high, they leave little pollen dabs all across her clothes like dainty block prints. The mustard says, shrk, shrk, dropping little yellow flowers at her feet. A butterfly snags in her billowing pallav. She removes the creature as gently as she can; still, the wings come off, leaving her holding the wriggling body that looks so much like a worm. For some reason, the death of the butterfly gives her a lump in her throat, and she has to blink hard to keep the tears from running down her face. She looks into the wind, dreaming of her husband-to-be. She judges the intensity of the storm, dallying a little longer, dancing uncharacteristically, her skirt tickling her ankles. Her younger sister Sneha, a little distance away, does her job much more diligently, lifting each leaf carefully. The bride-to-be feels a pang of guilt for work-abandoned moments.

Very secretly she harbours tremulous dreams of marrying someone who loves her. But what does she know of love? Can there be such a thing between a man and a woman? She has only heard of the legend of Singh Sahib and Bibiji, but to her it is more a myth. In her experience men are so far above women that she can’t conceive of a man showing anything more than kindness, bordering on pity, for his wife. Yes, for her kindness is love. Above all, she wants a kind husband.

‘I bet he has a quiff like Guru Dutt in Pyaasa!’

‘Guru Dutt, Didi, really?’ She can always count on Sneha’s unquestioning gullibility.

‘Yes, just like him . . .’ No one in the village has seen a film, but Lala Ram, the owner of Saraswati Stores, put up his favourite movie poster over thirty years ago as a community service. After that, the antique poster became the standard for good looks in Gopalpur. With his brooding cowlick towering over his sideburns, his streaky moustache, and his soft-focus sentimentality, Guru Dutt has sidled into every female heart upon teary jerks of breath.

‘Hai, Didi, how lucky. With such a handsome husband you can really tell that Ramu off when he teases you.’

‘Mamta! Sneha!’ warns Lata Bai. ‘You leave those boys from across the river alone, you never know what they might do.’

‘Amma, that Ramu comes over each day to my dung patch to take the sweet out of my sugar. He says my husband won’t be like Guru Dutt at all.’ Mamta squeezes her eyes closed, she’s not a child but Ramu’s words have the power to hurt her – ‘Look at you, black as dirty oil. Do you think your mother could have got you married to a Guru Dutt?’ – Damn that motherfucker. Each day she runs to the river, makes a pool with her hands, fills it with water and searches it for her reflection. Ramu is right, she is black as dirty oil, but not dirty enough to hide her wretched birthmark.

‘You mustn’t listen, Mamta,’ says Lata Bai feebly, unwilling to waste time on simple lessons which she thinks her daughter should have learned a long time ago.

But Mamta can’t let go. Just yesterday Ramu’s friends tried to teach her a thing or two. Prem wanted to defend her, but she’d said, ‘They want me, let them talk to me.’ No one talked to Mamta. She could pitch a stone from a catapult better than any of them, and when she hitched up the skirt of her ghaghra and ran, there was no catching up. ‘Motherfuckers,’ she laughed, and tossed curses over her shoulders, ‘Catch me if you can.’ When they couldn’t, they’d started taunting her:

Marked Mamta’s getting married, Marked Mamta’s getting married, To an old, old man, He’ll come on an old horse to get her, He’ll give her an old sari to wear, They’ll jiggery all night together, They’ll jiggery all night together.

Marked Mamta’s getting married, Marked Mamta’s getting married, To an old, old man, He’ll beat her black and blue, Her belly will be swollen in no time, They’ll jiggery that night too, They’ll jiggery that night too.

She catches herself humming the ditty, feeling betrayed. ‘He tried to tease me again today, but I chucked a stone at his head. Oh, what fun that was! How he ran!’ says Mamta, putting her arms around her mother’s neck.

Lata Bai undoes her daughter’s arms saying, ‘Careful he doesn’t catch you one day, Mamta.’

‘Huh, what if he does? He can do nothing to me now. I will belong to someone else soon. My husband will protect me.’

‘Don’t start with the dreams. Marriage can be anything. Pray you have a good husband.’

‘You mean a good husband, just like Bapu?’ Mamta says sarcastically. ‘Amma, I don’t know why . . . why you bother with him.’ Her boldness takes her by surprise.

‘You watch out. That kind of talk will get you a beating from your husband.’

‘A beating from my husband . . . I don’t think so. We will be in love as much as . . . as our own zamindar Singh Sahib and Bibiji.’

‘Mamta!’ Lata Bai cups her daughter’s mouth violently with her hand. It is such a bad omen to say something so lofty about your future husband so close to your wedding date.

‘What a love that was,’ says Mamta with a sparkle in her eyes. Singh Sahib’s great love for his wife Bibiji is legendary. He is Gopalpur’s own home-grown Romeo. Gopalpur loves all of them – Romeo–Juliet, Laila–Majnu, Hir–Ranja . . . and of course Singh Sahib–Bibiji . . . all star-crossed, desperate couples dying for love. Love stories form the substratum of Gopalpur’s daydreams. A man like Singh Sahib who is willing to love in the glorious tradition of daydreams is naturally a legend. Secretly all Gopalpur’s men aspire to Singh Sahib’s love-standard, and some even think they love their women with the same honourable hopelessness, but they don’t. Their passion is nothing but a tremor in their collective imagination, a swindle by their egos.

‘Love stories will get you nowhere,’ says her mother.

‘Yes, hai, what if he is old and beats you?’ Sneha verbalises her sister’s worst fears. Sneha’s unquestioning gullibility isn’t the only thing Mamta can count on.

Once again the ditty takes hold of her . . .

Marked Mamta’s getting married, Marked Mamta’s getting married, To an old, old man, He’ll come on an old horse to get her, He’ll give her an old sari to wear, They’ll jiggery all night together, They’ll jiggery all night together.

Marked Mamta’s getting married, Marked Mamta’s getting married, To an old, old man, He’ll beat her black and blue, Her belly will be swollen in no time, They’ll jiggery that night too, They’ll jiggery that night too.

‘Amma, that Ramu said Bapu would sell me to the bandits if no one turns up to marry me,’ says Sneha. The taunting has left her nervous too.

‘Well, you can just tell him that there won’t be any bandits left by next planting season. Singh Sahib’s youngest son is bringing them all in and locking them in jail,’ says Mamta. ‘Amma, tell us again about the bandits,’ she says, moving away from the sordid world of taunting boys.

‘Yes, Amma, tell us, what did the bandits do?’

‘Where do these questions come from? All the time stories, stories, as if you girls have no work to do . . . as if I have no work to do. We can’t fritter our lives away on stories,’ says Lata Bai.

‘C’mon, Amma, tell us about Daku Manmohan,’ says Mamta. She knows she has to plead but a little for her mother to capitulate. It was Lata Bai who gave her a taste for stories in the first place. Bending the boundaries of time and place, she would weave together threads as separate as Kashmiri silk and Bengali cotton into one gargantuan tale of bravery, epic love and histrionic honour, leaping into the arena of myth with alacrity from a very lofty height.

‘Yes, come on, Amma, Mamta Didi will be leaving soon. There will be no one to beg you for stories after she goes,’ says Sneha, pulling a face.

Lata Bai smiles. Her children are still children. She suckles Shanti. ‘Stories, stories, that’s all you care for,’ she says mock-angry. ‘What about the cooking? What about the washing? What about the weeding and tying the vines back against the walls? What about the spices? The well water? Kneading the clay for a new pot; collecting the resin and the wild mangoes. So who will do all that then? Your father?’ The children look at her, their cheeks chubby with smiles. Of course she isn’t serious, they know that.

‘Come on, Amma . . .’

‘Okay, okay. But only for five minutes. What a time that was . . .’ Lata Bai’s eyes glass over. The children come closer to her, not to miss a word. They’ve heard this story many times before, but it is always slightly different, always exciting. ‘The surprise of the bandit raid was more traumatic than the bloodiness of it.

‘I remember it was evening. Earthy clouds heralded their arrival minutes before the rhythmic hoofbeats. They looked magnificent with their turban tails flowing behind them and their oiled moustaches gleaming in the sun . . .’ The romanticism of the gang’s appearance was shattered all too soon. Not one bandit had to dismount from his horse. Gopalpur simply capitulated, offered herself up spread-eagled, naked, defenceless, to the plunderer for his taking. All night the moans of the dead and dying glided through the fields. It wasn’t a night for heroism. People hid in the hay, in ditches and in sugarcane fields. In the morning they walked out to greet a pitiless sun that showed up the destruction in its unaccountable manifestations.

‘Of course they spared the landlords, the Singh family ensconced in the Big House. Some said the Big House paid the bandits to stay away . . .’

‘But Prem says that isn’t true. He says Singh Sahib is a man of honour, and his honour wouldn’t have allowed it. He says Singh Sahib hates his son because of this surrender and if he wasn’t so sick, Singh Sahib would gladly hunt down Daku Manmohan . . . right this minute,’ interjects Mamta, filling in for her absent favourite brother.

‘Maybe, maybe. But what do we know of Singh Sahib, the zamindar of Gopalpur living in his Big House, out of our sight? We only know how much he charges for his loans and that damned son of his, Ram Singh, is like a vulture, usurping lands left, right and centre, just like Daku Manmohan. One son adds to the bandit numbers, while the other tries to cull them . . .

‘Those damned gangs. They came sweeping in from the direction of the dusty Gopalpur wind where the famines were so awful that it was said that people had begun to eat cow meat and sometimes even human flesh. At first, they took whatever their horses could carry, mostly sacks of wheat and washing left to dry unguarded on clothes lines. But we weren’t under any illusions. We knew that once the bandits attacked, they returned.

‘Each night, we had to find a different place to sleep. Under the ridge, by the riverbank, or hidden in the roots of the banyan trees . . .’ (never at the Red Ruins or the dry well, that’s where the bandits raped the girls) ‘. . . in the mornings we dragged ourselves back to our huts. As the gangs became stronger, they became bolder, and started looting everything . . . including children. That’s when my brother went missing. Others lost family too. Shyam Lal lost a son and Moti a son and a daughter. Nutan Bai thought the bandits had taken her daughter Kanno, but she found her hiding in a haystack, her leg poked through with the point of one of their knives.’

‘Even now, after all this time, Kanno doesn’t speak. We used to think her tongue was cut off, but she stuck it out at me just last week. I wonder why she doesn’t speak.’ Sneha is most concerned for the fate of dumb Kanno.

Lata Bai continues: ‘Gope’s teashop also vanished with the bandits. Gope’s tea was famous. He could pour the liquid from a great height, pulling it into brown rainbows a metre long. Each time the bandits came, they stopped at Gope’s for a cup of tea, tossing him not one rupee coins, but five rupee notes for his frothy drinks.

‘Of course, it couldn’t last. Gope was making money off the bandits, while Gopalpur was paying in sacks of grain. So the farmers managed to convince Gope to lace his tea with rat poison.

‘The bandits burned down his teashop, killed his son, and, and . . . they had their way with Gope’s daughter-in-law.’

‘Amma means raped,’ says Mamta.

‘. . . and left her to die.’

‘But you know what I heard from Sunita only yesterday? She said that Daku Manmohan is a hero to the girls in the village. She said he saved her sister from rape by that, that, that . . . Babulal. And Prem says he’s only surrendering because Lokend Bhai asked him to.’

‘I don’t know about the rape, all I know is that he never shied from killing. I remember them systematically burning everything in the village and cutting off the hands of those who dared to fight back. They left the handless and Gope alive as a lesson to others who might think of defying them. These creatures hang around by the Lakshmi temple begging for scraps . . .’

The last raid took place almost two years ago. Since then Gopalpur has managed to pull itself together. People are prosperous enough to get in debt again. And now the bandits, offered government amnesty, are surrendering all over India, and with Lokend’s persuasion in Gopalpur as well. All those years of looting didn’t earn Gopalpur a mention in the city papers, but news of the surrender has. From now on, Gopalpur’s fate will be to teeter on the edge of infamy, written up far too often in the daily papers.

Evening has come to Gopalpur and with it some lone cowherd’s flute cries out to them. Its lilting voice melts into their pores, stirring up a sympathetic pathos. Such is the nature of this trained wind, to bring equal parts sorrow and joy to the listener.

Chapter 2

RAM SINGH ENJOYS THE CRISP FEEL of the razor blade against his cheek. He needn’t bother shaving for the wedding, but he does. He shoos off the flies dancing around his face with his free hand.

‘Looks respectful,’ he says to Babulal his overseer who comes over with steaming tea. ‘When they see me all shaved and dressed up, they will know I care about them. You can’t let slaves know they are slaves, they might become discontent. All you need to do is throw these people a bone or two and like starving dogs they will stop barking and lick your hand.’ His words are carefully chosen for maximum effect. ‘You’ve put Seeta Ram down in the book, haven’t you?’ Babulal nods, taking a warming sip of tea. ‘My father always made the time to attend both weddings and funerals in the lands, and I will be damned if I’m the one to break with tradition.’

‘Ram Bhaia, Ram Bhaia!’ Lokend comes running to his elder brother, grinning from ear to ear. His teeth, big like shelled peanuts, burst out of his face. ‘Ram Bhaia, I believe Seeta Ram’s daughter is getting married. Take this box of sweets to her, will you. I would take it myself, but those damn policewalas have made a hash of Daku Manmohan’s case and now he says he won’t surrender unless I am there to guarantee the safety of his family. As if I could guarantee anyone’s safety. They only listen to me because I am Singh Sahib’s son. Anyway, if Bapu’s position can be used to help someone, then why not.’

Ram Singh arranges his stance for a fight. ‘What should I tell you? What could I tell you that you don’t already know? The evidence is before you. You know what the villagers say? They say they will find peace only in their graves. They say that once again the bandits will rule this land, and do you know why? Because of your ridiculous surrender scheme. Every four years a politician passes through this place with a stack of promises, a bunch of gundas and a pack of chaiwalas. All standard issue from Delhi, but they have done nothing for our village. We shouldn’t let those bandits surrender; we should hunt them down like rabbits.’

‘Bhaia, guns will bring more guns. You hit a man with a rock, he’ll come back at you with a stick. You hit a man with a stick, he’ll come back at you with a sword. You attack him with a sword, he’ll retaliate with a gun. Surrender is the only answer. Non-violence is the only lasting weapon. To that there can be no retaliation.’ It’s easy to mistake the younger for the elder.

‘This may be the land of Gandhi, non-violence may have worked against the British, but against these motherfuckers we need guns.’

‘Guns can never be the answer; violence is a primitive tool, the antithesis of civilisation.’

‘You are a dreamer,’ says Ram Singh. ‘All your effort won’t move one grain of the future.’

‘Yes, in a way you are right, but even so, you only make your enemies stronger by fighting them. It’s a misguided man who’ll fight without the backing of his people. It’s a foolish man who’ll fight without the backing of his god . . .’ He laughs. ‘We must all be foolish men then.’

Ram Singh feels himself pulled into his younger brother’s eyes. He shivers with irritation and says, ‘I have to go, I will be late.’

‘Don’t forget the sweets, and give Prem a ride too. I don’t think he’s ever sat in a jeep before,’ Lokend shouts before running off, his white dhoti flapping in the breeze.

At first glance he is a hunchback, with none of the awkwardness of the deformed, but at a second it is easy to see the deformity for what it is – a pet mongoose.

‘I wish he’d get rid of that damn thing. It gives me the creeps. He says he keeps it to remind him that sometimes kindness can defeat cruelty, just like a mongoose can tear the head off a snake. Why is the mongoose “kind” and the snake “cruel”, I ask you? I think he says that to make an impression on me. As if I care. Our great-great-great-grandfather was a zamindar. Should we stop now just because my younger brother doesn’t have the taste for it?’

The overseer knows better than to reply to Ram Singh’s rhetorical questions. His brother’s presence induces self-doubt. Nothing a little rum won’t cure. Babulal takes a bottle out of his kurta pocket.

‘No, not before the wedding,’ says Ram Singh. This time Lokend’s presence has an unusually long-lasting effect on him. ‘I am going to see Bapu,’ he says, without moving his reluctant feet. ‘I better go see Bapu . . .’ He looks back at the Big House. Anxious beads of perspiration have sprouted on his face. ‘I must go see Bapu now or I’ll be late.’ Managing to convince himself in stages, he moves swiftly towards the house.

The Big House shimmers in the distance with an inner light that shrieks at the onlooker. Its gleaming whitewash puts a glare in the eye. It has been that way since it was built more than one hundred years ago. It has stood gleaming through every summer, every monsoon and every addition. Its glow comes not just from the trueness of the whitewash, but also from the belief in its power. It stands apart and above the brown plane, a jewel of prosperity and control.

Many families living in Gopalpur owe their existence to the Big House. Most of their forefathers worked on it during the great drought. Singh Sahib’s great-great-great-grandfather, the then king, kept extending the building as a means of paying the villagers in grain. The construction stopped only when the rains arrived, and it was at its completion that Gopalpur got its name.

In the old days this land of ravines was a malingering nomadic expanse, visited mostly by cattle. They would arrive from nowhere and everywhere to leave great heaps of dung pats for the wandering tribes to collect. The tribes’ people named the place Gobarpur: gobar – cow dung, pur – site. Cow dung site. But Gobarpur didn’t sound elegant enough to support the shining Big House, so Singh Sahib’s great-great-great-grandfather changed the name to Gopalpur – the abode of Gopal, the flute-playing, blue-skinned god of love. And to firmly establish Gopalpur as the true eponymous land of the love god, the great-great-grandfather planted a virtual forest of mango trees brought all the way from Vrindavan, from the very same legendary orchards in which the young Gopal was believed to have seduced throngs of milkmaids with a lot more than just his flute-wielding prowess. Few trees survive today, but their fruits are blessed with extraordinary sweetness. Come dusk, there is at least one flute to be heard in Gopalpur, perpetuating its name.

The Singhs didn’t remain kings much longer after Gobarpur became Gopalpur. They were forced to give up the throne and their privy purses when the country achieved independence from British rule.

Gobarpur or Gopalpur, king or zamindar, the people still look to the Big House for sustenance.

Ram Singh strides to his father’s room, a man with a purpose. The slaps of his sandals echo so loudly in the corridor that he has to turn and look to make sure he is alone. Asmara Didi is standing outside Singh Sahib’s room, waiting as it were for Ram Singh’s appearance. He is annoyed.

They enter the room together.

Singh Sahib, the widowed father of the two boys, is in bed. An untidy chess game is spread before him like an unfinished meal. From his vantage point Ram Singh can see that the black king is in a snare he can’t get out of. He feels in much the same snare himself.

‘You are white, I hope?’ He mocks his father. ‘Which one of his pet dogs did he get to play with him today?’ Ram Singh asks Asmara Didi. She has no intention of replying. In days long past father and son might have played a game of chess together, but that is no longer the case.

Singh Sahib looks at Asmara Didi and lifts his left hand slightly. That one tiny movement serves as a swath of communication between them. Her knees are stiff and both crack mutinously at different times as she kneels to touch his purple gout-infected toes with her forehead.

‘Oh sht . . . op.’ Singh Sahib absolved Asmara Didi from touching his feet months after she cured his wife Bibiji of her mysterious illness and made her strong enough in the ‘female department’ to bear him a child. But Asmara Didi has neither acknowledged her status in the Big House nor her employer’s wishes.

Still kneeling, she removes Singh Sahib’s quilt with one flick, a little like a magician revealing the finale to a most complicated trick, and places his turban on his head in an unpunctuated movement. Singh Sahib, standing six feet five inches, the biggest man in the region, at his heaviest one hundred and ten kilos, was never a fat man. Now, uncovered and turbaned, his immense frame takes over the room.

Singh Sahib’s right arm dangles like a curtain pull by his side. Asmara Didi places the limp limb in his lap, palm facing upwards. It falls to the ground. Once again she places it with great care in his lap. Again, it slips. She has to discipline the unruly curled hand a few times before it will stay still.

Ram Singh moves closer to his paralysed father, allowing the dead limb no dignity in his scrutiny. Asmara Didi wrinkles her brows and throws her head quickly forward and back a few times like an old mare. Move back, she says silently. Move back or else.

Even now, five years since his father’s illness, Ram Singh feels uncomfortable standing taller than him. He bends his knees and straightens. Sitting, head higher than Singh Sahib’s, is unthinkable. Technically, standing is disrespectful too, but standing is more deferential than sitting.

The son looks from the shining buckles on his sandals to his father’s feet. He stopped touching them long ago. He still remembers the day that his father spitefully kept pulling them out of reach till Ram Singh was almost chasing those elusive toes on his hands and knees like a dog.

Singh Sahib makes an initial attempt to speak from the mobile side of his mouth. He only manages to leak spit like a dripping tap. Asmara Didi wipes his spit with a towel. It is clear the old man puts up with the woman’s fussing with a degree of annoyance. But he has grown used to her. He installed her in the Big House years ago to keep his fading wife company. He has a lot to thank her for, including his own two boys. She was clever with her potions even then.

‘How’sh . . . brother? Come . . . closher.’ Singh Sahib’s words are like river stones bounced by young boys across rushing water, leaping along, with great gaps in between.

Asmara Didi and Ram Singh move forward together in the single movement of a cast net. Again the turbaned man signals to the woman with a look; this time she leaves the room. Her eyes linger long and hard on Ram Singh’s back where the whitewash from the wall has left powder marks on his indigo Nehru jacket.

Ram Singh feels an old welt open up again, and he says, ‘Fine, I imagine,’ with practised nonchalance.

‘Whe . . . ll . . . you sheen him?’ Wheeze in. Wheeze out.

‘Yes.’ Monosyllabic answers convey more than full sentences. ‘. . . jealoushy . . . no . . . n,’ the old man says out of the working side of his mouth.

The son looks into his father’s face without a trace of emotion. His father is forbidden to him. Singh Sahib’s long morning in bed has not dulled the glow of his pristine crackly starched embroidered white muslin kurta with precisely thirty-seven deliberate creases in each sleeve. Asmara Didi takes great care of Singh Sahib’s clothes and puts the creases in herself each morning with a heavy brass iron studded with little arched windows along both sides through which she blows at the hot coals.

The sun is high outside. The light perfectly illuminates the picture of the elephant-headed Ganesha flanked by peacocks painted by Bibiji on the back wall of the room. There are bars on the window. Rectangles of sunlight dance just above Singh Sahib’s head, falling in and out of his eyes.

The old man lies prone, mentally shading his eyes. As it is, he can’t use his good hand for fear of falling over. The thought of falling over makes Singh Sahib’s mouth flicker with the hint of a smile. He can clearly recall how Bibiji had fallen over in the backseat of their jeep when he’d brought her back as his new bride. How embarrassed it had made her and how prettily she’d blushed. How that blush had reached out to him and grabbed his heart from inside his chest, never to let go.

What does he have to smile about? Ram Singh has learned to read the nuances of his father’s face but not his thoughts. The old man closes both eyes as the sunlight catches him mid-thought. He thinks of his wife a lot. That’s one thing he can still do with his crippled body.

‘Ask Asmara Didi to put in curtains,’ says Ram Singh, his voice packed with irritation, starting to pace the room, placing one diffident foot slowly in front of the other, thinking each step carefully through. He knows his father doesn’t like pacing. He has to calculate exactly when to stop, just before Singh Sahib’s irritation burbles over into a spurt of reprimand. He wants to bring up the issue of the property again, but doesn’t. He already knows the answer, from years of having this conversation, way before his father’s face got twisted. ‘Want me to die, do you? I am not dying yet, my brain is still as sharp as a new lemon. Forget about things that don’t concern you. You will get what you deserve when you deserve it.’ His father always spoke as if he was talking about Fate, but of course he was talking about his own plans for his son. Today he would want to say the same things through his paralysed mouth. Why bother? The son already knows the words.

Ram Singh has to grind his teeth together to stop himself from speaking. His father’s unsaid words make him prickly. Forget about things that don’t concern me, indeed. The property does concern me, all seven hundred hectares of it. And if Babulal is to be believed, the additional four hundred and sixty-seven hectares virtually owned by them in everything but name.

‘Lokend . . . Daku?’ Always talk of Lokend, his younger brother. What has Lokend got that he hasn’t? The sun drops. The rectangles slip with finality into the old man’s eyes. A trail of ants marches through the scene of pastoral delight and frolicking gods behind Singh Sahib’s head. Silent rebellion will get you nowhere, my friend. As long as you divide the land fairly, half and half. After all, there are no smaller halves. Or are there? In your realm anything is possible.

‘Can we talk about the lands? There are two problems.’

The father keeps his eyes closed, forbidding him the consideration of sight.

‘Well, you have left me in charge, haven’t you? Do you want me to quit? Would you like to handle the lands yourself?’ It is the continuation of the same argument they have been having since before the stroke. Ram Singh’s words have become progressively more cruel. His father doesn’t attempt to reply.

‘Then if you can’t handle the lands, let me do the work. I am the only one who has kept this place together. Why can’t you see that?’ The son speaks for both of them, aloud for himself and silently for his father. He knows his father’s mind, and there is no approval in it. You wish I was more like Lokend. But he is the least like you. Look at me. Can you not see yourself in me? There is more than a vestige of the old man in his son’s finely carved features, the straight nose and the strong moustache.

Singh Sahib has that twitch in his lip that tells his son the interview is over.

But the son won’t be brushed away this easily. Physically he has the upper hand. Trapped in his inactive body, his father can do nothing. Ram Singh squats close to the old man’s ear. ‘We have to act soon. More and more people are talking about taking loans from that Lala Ram. We have to stop that. I have a plan,’ he whispers harshly.

Lala Ram tried to hide the tin signs collecting in a growing heap in one corner of his shop, even so, they have popped up all over Gopalpur: Hypothecated to the Bank of India, written in curly-wurly yellow paint on black.

‘We are losing ground. There is talk of opening a branch here soon, right in that Saraswati Stores. Then we can forget about getting any interest payments at all.’

‘Huh,’ says the father, who isn’t at all worried about the Bank of India grabbing his share of the loan business. After all, who in Gopalpur is going to fill out a litany of papers asking impossible questions requiring complicated answers? Date of birth? Repayment terms? Security? And on and on. With him, they just have to plant their thumbprints in the lower right corner, place the paper bonding them – sometimes for life, sometimes for generations – in their rafters away from mice and, if they are lucky, termites, and forget about it for eternity.

‘You just give me the word, and I make sure Lala forgets about the banking business.’

Singh Sahib finally opens his eyes. He still has one weapon left: The Look. Ram Singh hasn’t seen that look in his father’s eyes for years now. The last time he had seen it was when he and Lokend fought and he had broken his younger brother’s jaw. His father had lashed him in full view of the servants, continuing the thrashing till the belt broke. Ram Singh still has the scars on his back. After a particularly bad day, he likes to look at them.

‘Lea . . . ve!’

‘Times are changing. You will have to do it sooner or later if you are to survive as Gopalpur’s zamindar. After all, it is my future too. I will not be the one to break with family tradition because of you. You yourself say that tradition and honour are everything . . .’

‘. . . do . . . hnt! Honour! It ish . . . n’t . . . you!’

The ruthlessness of the insult shoves Ram Singh to the wall. Defeated but not crushed he bounces back: ‘I know what you think. You think I have no honour. Do you really think you would do things differently? Say what you like, I am more like you than you know. Honour before Life.’ He shouts out his father’s motto before leaving the room.

Singh Sahib does nothing to curb the hatred that lodges in his throat making it difficult for him to breathe.

‘You leave him alone!’ Asmara Didi accosts Ram Singh outside the door. ‘Remember, I brought you into this world.’

‘Yes, you keep telling me so . . . So damned what, do you think you can take me out of it too?’

‘It would have been better if she’d never had you!’ says Asmara Didi, surprised at her brutality. ‘Your father loves you, I wish you could see that.’

‘Yes, he loves me so much that he never wants to see my face.’

‘That’s not true! Don’t you remember how the two of you used to eat dinner together every night? It was always Lokend who didn’t have his attention.’

‘Lokend may not have had his attention then, but he certainly has his love now.’

‘Give him a chance, won’t you . . .’ she says, visibly softening. ‘He is in a bad way. When your amma died, he stopped living too . . .’

‘He better have, it was he who killed her. She was too good for him.’

‘Ram Singh! Your father loved Bibiji more than life itself,’ she says. ‘A love like that is fraught with danger, it can be very fragile . . . but you wouldn’t understand . . .’

‘He went with other women till she died of a broken heart.’

‘No . . . she was weakened by her breathing sickness,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘She was very weak, she couldn’t handle the strain of bearing a second child,’ she reiterates, trying to convince herself as much as Ram Singh. In her opinion it was misguided jealousy that killed Bibiji, not childbirth.

It was a cruel trick of providence that had placed Bibiji at the window the day Singh Sahib put his hands on the shoulders of a village woman waiting under the spreading mango tree. The woman, one of his numerous bachelor dalliances, had come to ask for money to go to the city. Singh Sahib had grabbed her shoulders to impress upon her never to come to his home again. The woman may have been no one to him, but for Bibiji she was her nemesis, sent by the gods to quell her laughter and teach her the one universal truth: Nothing is Permanent.

That day an alien loneliness, thus far held at bay by her husband’s love, rushed up and grabbed Bibiji by the throat. All her loneliness and desolation attacked her, and for the first time since she had arrived at the Big House she regretted her superior marriage that made her unfit to return home. After that, she lived in constant fear, her stomach balled up so tight that she was unable to eat. Day after day, the situation received sustenance from the placenta of her imagination. Her love became desperate. In his absence she found herself cleaning all her husband’s things in a frenzy, just to be close to him. She lay alert and unsleeping night after night thinking her self-cruelty would give her resilience, but it only intensified the pain. More and more, she spent long hours at her open window gazing into the fields, closing it only on the days when the maddened dust came to visit Gopalpur, accepting her situation, having nowhere to go and nothing to change. That’s when she’d started having the midnight attacks which left her breathless and half-conscious.

‘What do you know? You were only four when she died,’ says Asmara Didi. ‘Did you know your mother was a commoner, a mere village girl, but still he married her. He went against his whole family, this village, tradition, to bring her into this house. She didn’t have children for many years, and he could have taken another wife, but he didn’t.’

‘Maybe he should have taken another wife, then she might be alive today . . .’ Ram Singh misses his mother in that gruff way of tough men who can never acknowledge their feelings.

‘Your mother was – no, is, your father’s entire world. She was simply too suspicious of her good fortune, she couldn’t accept her destiny. She was so lovely, so delicate, so lonely, so weak . . . Everyone has a story, Ram Singh, mark my words; each of us has our own burden.’

‘Huh, each one of us, indeed, except my perfect brother, damn him, and that godawful mongoose of his.’

‘You used to keep mongoose pups too, you know. After your mother died you spent all your time beside a wooden crate hidden behind the cowshed which held four abandoned mongoose pups. Their eyes just barely open, you kept them alive on a rag dipped in milk.’

‘Do you really expect me to believe that?’ he says, his voice wavering. Of course he remembers. He remembers vividly. It was on one of those dank days when the clouds were distended over the fields, stretched big and fat with rain, that he thought he would make the world right for his grieving widowed father. He’d brought one of his pet mongoose pups into his father’s despondent room, walking heel to toe like a thief in a vaudeville act, and quickly placed the pup in his father’s hands before thought could change his mind. Then he’d run to the safety of the darkest corner in the room to hide behind the curtains, believing his father would be fooled into thinking the present came from the heavens if he hid well enough. He’d watched secretly as the pup arranged itself into a confident ball, so tiny that it was no more than a bony warm feeling in those massive palms. He had wanted to leap out from behind the curtain straight on to his father’s lap, but before he could make a sound his father dropped the pup on the floor. The spell was broken and Ram Singh knew not to declare himself.

‘You are free to believe what you want.’

‘Amma died, but not me, I was alive, I am still alive – when will he see me? Honour before Life. My God, what does that man in there know about honour then?’

The chill has returned to the air. It enters Singh Sahib’s good leg and spreads through his body like ink on blotting paper. Asmara Didi is back to light the fire. ‘Leave h . . . it,’ he says. He can’t get his temperature just right with the fire going. It’s comfortable for a while, then too hot to bear. Of course Singh Sahib could keep a retinue of constant servants by his side to move him around the room, if he so wished, but he doesn’t. He wants to be alone, as do all the guilty. He can just about stand to be in the company of Asmara Didi, and that too for very short periods.

‘Lokend has gone back to the bandits. Hai, when will he learn? After they have lopped off his obstinate head in one swift stroke? As if those scoundrels need our help now, after they’ve ravished our fields and raped our women . . .’ Asmara Didi’s chastisement contains more pride than anything else. It is a description of Lokend’s foolish courage, with the emphasis on courage. ‘Through and through he’s your son . . .’ Far from the truth, her words die on her lips. In fact, every cell in Lokend’s body proclaims him as his mother’s son, even though Bibiji never had a chance to hold him. She never recovered from childbirth, and when Lokend was only four weeks old, she died with a soft sigh. All joy died with her and the Big House’s fate as a place of sadness and guilt was sealed.

The memory of that time still brings a shudder to Asmara Didi’s frame. Overnight Singh Sahib’s skin began to hang on him like baggy wet clothes two sizes too large, and prayers and incense ruled the Big House, lodging deep inside cupboards, up trees, under quilts and in each and every vessel in the kitchen. Ram Singh and his father had their heads shaved so all the world would know of their grief.

After that, Singh Sahib never left his room and refused to see his younger son, whom he blamed for his mother’s death. The little Lokend, talking in a language oiled with m’s, had only Asmara Didi. When he said Am-m-ma for the first time, Asmara Didi was tempted to let the word fly free on shimmering wings right into her waiting ear to fill the child-lonely spot in her heart. But she couldn’t. ‘Not Amma,’ she’d said, ‘Didi.’ There is a reason why mothers are called Amma. It was much harder for the boy to say didi, elder sister, it was a word learnt, not like amma, which sprang from his soul unsolicited. But she was more than a mother to him.

The word out of his mouth, there was never any confusion in Asmara Didi’s mind as to her duty, and she aggressively grasped her role as surrogate mother and teacher. She instantly recognised a special stillness in Lokend, which she couldn’t shake in spite of her attempts to draw him into her world with childish games. Sometimes she thought she didn’t have to teach him anything, just jog his memory a little for ancient knowledge to pour out of his mouth in a fountain of pure speech.

She is glad she wasn’t picked to be his mother. There is something heart-rendingly tragic about a spiritual child because he belongs to everyone and to no one at the same time. It was her duty to formally impart the holy knowledge of scriptures to him. Luckily she knew the words of the Bhagvat Gita and the mantras of the Vedas. Her husband had been a bit of a dilettante with his learning, and though he never made it to the enlightened stage, he certainly knew the theory by heart. More than most, Asmara Didi and her husband had shared a closeness that rarely occurs in childless couples. It was to fulfil her role as companion that she had thrown herself equally into divine learning. But her knowledge wasn’t for herself, and it was only years later, in the employ of the Big House, that Asmara Didi realised it was fated for her tiny charge.

She looks at the old man’s face. It is a pleading face full of confused sorrow. He should have made peace with his son years ago. Such torment in a father is no good. Asmara Didi has come to know the staunchest part of the zamindar. It is a part certainly worthy of respect, perhaps even love.

‘Ra . . . hm Shingh’s ta . . . hlking . . . Lala,’ Singh Sahib’s thoughts are still with his elder son.

‘Why do you let him upset you like this?’ It’s clear the woman has no softness for the subject of their conversation.

‘Look Lok . . . hend. He . . . sh so . . .’

‘Different,’ she completes the sentence for him like she has been doing for years. ‘Some pups are born black, others white. That’s just the way it happens. It’s no one’s fault. Do you really wish Ram Singh was more like Lokend? You don’t really wish that, do you? Having a soul like Lokend’s is a huge burden.’

‘. . . but . . .’

‘Don’t you think Ram Singh wishes he was more like Lokend? Don’t you think he would be if he could? Be nice to him. That’s the least he deserves. He’ll come around.’ She knows it is no more possible to take her own advice than it is to bring back the black into her hair.

The father shakes his head, the only part of his body over which he has any real control. The zamindar may wish for Ram Singh to be more like Lokend, but he cannot accept his younger son or the path he has chosen. Singh Sahib is a temporal man. Lokend’s asceticism incenses him, he feels as if he has been somehow left behind by his son. You live vicariously through the lives of those you help. You remain detached and pure, a rock, loving everyone equally. Loving everyone equally, you love no one. But nothing I say gets to you. You are ice, freezing any water that comes to change you into a shape of yourself.

‘Is it better to spar with one or admire the other always from a distance?’ Asmara Didi asks, reading his thoughts. She knows it is Singh Sahib’s intransigence that keeps him deeply disappointed with both his sons. If he had his way, they would have turned out like him, with his values, playing by his rules, upholding his brand of honour.

* * *

It is that bright blue time of evening when the sky appears deep and close. The big man looks out of his window. It will be some time before the stars come out. How his wife loved this time of day. The cicadas are in full swing, and the house is rumbling with kitchen sounds. He doesn’t eat like they used to, still, the cooking goes on. Asmara Didi presides. She has taken him off garlic and onions and all manner of vegetables with tiny seeds. What does it matter? His tongue is dry from talking and disappointment. It feels like a piece of cardboard in his mouth.

He lets his thoughts return to her. Do you know what your son did today? He went to help those bandits surrender. Don’t shudder, meri jaan, it’s true, they will surrender and fill up the jails like cows returning home from the forests after a fat feed. He is giving away his share of the lands to them, and I can do nothing to stop him. He thinks zamindari is wrong. He said as much. In the eyes of God these lands aren’t ours, is what he said. After all these years he can still remember the parchment frailty of her body. She is as delicate as a deer’s leg. He can see her blood as it travels beneath her skin. She gets that familiar colour in her cheeks for no reason at all and looks so beautiful that he has to stop breathing. He can sense the pulse beating in her neck. That single pulse, up, down, up, down, ticks in unison with his own. Tick, tick, tick. He tries to push her away, but she stays. What can I do? I have to sit here and wait for news like a moulting bird. You are my only companion now. One of our sons gives away our lands while the other never tires of acquiring more. And they both do it in the name of honour! What do they know of real honour? Nothing. How could they, you say? I never taught them about my kind of honour. I should have brought them up after your death.

Talk to Lokend, you say. How can I? He defies me at every turn. That is a strange way to love a father, no? He owns the words, but somewhere inside there is admiration for his boy, so secret that even he doesn’t know it’s there, under the frustration, anger and guilt. Have I been a bad father? Maybe he is standing up for what he believes. I should know all about that, you say. I know what you think, my beliefs . . . my traditions, will be the death of me. You are probably right. That’s what used to upset you the most, our traditions . . .

Perhaps I should have allowed you to change some things around here, then you might have been happy. Oh, meri jaan, I miss you . . . Do you remember how we used to go hunting every winter? I know you cried inside yourself each time I bagged a deer. I’m not hungry, you would say at dinner, just so you wouldn’t have to eat its flesh, my dear sweet love. You were so delicate in so many ways, but so strong when you wanted to be. I remember our chess games, you were much better than me. Don’t think I didn’t notice that you let me win . . .

If you could see me now. Would you pity me? Would you love me? Your boy did this to me. No sooner do the words become a coherent thought than he regrets them. But everyone knows the zamindar blames Lokend for his stroke. I try not to think of it. But I can still smell the stink. There he was, on all fours like an animal, cleaning the shit with his hands. His hands, the hands you and I created, doing a Sudra’s work. It might as well have been my hands that were polluted. We are Singhs, we are not Sudras. I have never let the shadow of a Sudra fall on my family, and there he was, cleaning shit. Bibiji, you are the lucky one, dead before your son could baffle you with his behaviour. An angry tear struggles out of his good eye. Protected by darkness, he doesn’t wipe it away.

Every time he goes to the toilet he is reminded of that other shameful day. His son on his knees, holding a piece of wood piled high with brown human waste, a stinking brown blob with no sense of decency. It was slipping off its perch, sliding to the ground like a slow drip on a spider’s web. A taunting, insulting pile that his own son was handling with his pure, even loving, hands. Neither his son nor his pet mongoose was disturbed by his labour, by the stench of it or the blue flies that settled alternately on the brown mass and face unchecked because the hands that belonged to the face were too busy to wave them off. But that’s not what disgusted his father into a stroke. It was the complete sense of normalcy in Lokend’s bent back, as if he’d knelt to pet a favourite dog, that crippled the old man.

The first thing Asmara Didi did after the stroke was get rid of the squatting toilets. They were replaced with Parryware commodes. Grey and ageing, the commodes now support a brown ring just at the top edge. The flush has never been used. The rusty chain hangs down from the ceiling like a noose. There are always buckets of water sitting in the bathroom to be poured into the cistern. Singh Sahib leaves a hanky hanging on the door handle if there is some big business in the toilet, otherwise, he pours a mug of water in himself to dilute the colour to a respectable, barely noticeable yellow. He is still uncomfortable on the Bakelite seat, and if he could have stood without support, he might have squatted on it. But he can’t, so he sits, properly, legs falling off the edge, cringing every time his skin touches the cold hard surface. Bibiji, in the cities everyone is using these filthy things. Can you imagine? I have to trust Asmara to clean the seat for me. You are the lucky one, dying once . . . I may be alive, but I do not live . . . I die a little every day . . .

‘Brooding isn’t good for you.’ She comes on silent feet. She shakes her head to herself. She can smell it in the room, that air of resignation. She tries to shun her thoughts physically by shrugging her shoulders, but they stay wrapped round her like a warm shawl. She wipes her upper lip and with a smile faces the man waiting for death. Still smiling, she lights the candles and ignores the tear.

He is tempted to tell her to go lose herself in the kitchen, but he doesn’t. ‘Lokend will be back tomorrow. Will you see him?’ she asks.

The big man says nothing, he looks at his feet with great intent. What can he say? Yes, he would love to see his son, nothing would make him happier, but there is so much history in their desperate destinies. How does one wash away history? He is in that gully of silence between mountains of anticipated rejection. To climb up one of those mountains he would have to give up his crushingly heavy fear. He might have been able to release his burden to Bibiji for safekeeping, but he has nowhere to put it now. The gully is a safe place. Help me. Please help me, he asks of the dead.

It is the living that replies, ‘Good, I’ll tell him then. I’ll make something nice for your lunch. Lokend loves puris.’ Asmara Didi chuckles. ‘Does he love them, or does his mongoose? What’s its name again? Raja?’

Today it’s just the same. The memory of holding a mongoose pup rushes over the old man unbidden. He feels the tears once again creep up under his skin, thick and strong.

‘Go,’ he says with desperation to the woman.

There isn’t just sadness in his tears, there is also anger.

But as they fall, they become tears of regret.

Lokend jumps into the jeep. ‘Let’s go,’ he says to the mongoose, ‘let’s go find those bandits.’ He starts the engine. The jeep jumps into life, Ram Singh has left it in gear again. The sudden jump jogs Lokend’s thoughts. ‘Better not, my friend. I better take the truck. My brother is all spruced up for the wedding. He’ll kill me if I take the jeep and he has to ride in the truck.’ He chuckles.

Lokend started talking to Raja a long time ago. All through his lonely youth, he knew he was different from his brother who deserved and received his father’s vague attention. If he was someone else he might have been jealous. But he has no time for jealousy, or for that matter sadness. If there is one regret in his life, it is that his mother died before him. He would have liked to have known her.

Chapter 3

WHAT CAN SHE DO ABOUT HER BIRTHMARK? Her mother has suggested a little turmeric mixed with flour. When her father became indebted to the Big House, Ram Singh magnanimously invited him to consult with the widow Asmara Didi. She had silently begged her father to take her to the Big House and get a cure for her birthmark then, but he did not. Why? Acceptance, that’s why. Her father had accepted the birthmark on his daughter’s forehead as finally as he accepted the weather or the bandits.

The dew hasn’t formally evaporated off the mustard leaves outside. Except for the sleeping baby, she is alone at home. Her mother gave her this much. As an excuse Lata Bai left Shanti behind for Mamta to look after. She has an hour before her mother will return from the well.

Mamta runs her hand over her wedding sari. For a minute she considers why it is already lying unwrapped, in precise folds gleaming like a treasure in her mother’s tin trunk, then she remembers her mother had used the wrapping to deliver Shanti. She picks up a corner and looks through the sheerness of the fabric. Everything turns red, the red of love. Mamta smiles. It is as it should be. ‘Keep my world red, oh Devi,’ she prays. ‘Jai ho Devi, Devi jai ho,’ she recites her mother’s words. Almost a married woman, she feels she has an equal right to them. The baby stirs in her cot. ‘Shanti, hey, Shanti. I am to be married. I hope Amma will be proud of me,’ she says with a laugh, and then quickly makes a face and adds, ‘and I hope Bapu will be pleased with me for the first and only time in his life.’ Shanti gurgles. ‘You should be happy, your turn will come. I will pray you get many suitors and that each one is more handsome and richer than the next!’ Shanti gurgles again.

Mamta interprets her baby sister’s sounds: ‘Will mine be a handsome hero?’ She cannot afford to indulge in self-doubt. By Gopalpur standards she is already an old woman, her younger sister was married before her. She looked after all her brothers and sisters and she’s still at home. Without the borrowed money, no one would have taken her. What kind of man accepts a woman, almost in her twenties, with a birthmark? It has to be a desperate man. ‘Of course he will be a handsome hero. Do you think Amma could have picked anyone else for me?’

‘He’ll come on a horse and then we’ll ride away together . . .’ I’ll make sure to cover my birthmark with my pallav. She takes the sari over to the baby. ‘Have you ever seen anything this beautiful?’ She rubs it against Shanti’s skin. The rough ersatz silk makes the baby cry.

Mamta scoops up the baby and starts rocking her, automatically. ‘Yes, we will be in love forever like Singh Sahib and Bibiji. What a love that was! Then, when I have my own baby, I will come home and you two can play together.’

She bends her head over Shanti protectively. The baby sees the red birthmark approach. It is a comforting red, it is this patch of red that has cared for her since her birth. The patch of red and her mother’s wiggly nipple, that’s what Shanti knows of love.

Mamta regards her sister carefully, dressed in one of her old converted blouses, now no more than a cartography of spilt meals. She outlines each stain with her finger as she sings.

‘He’ll come on a horse to get me, He’ll come on a horse to get me, He’ll bring me a new sari to wear, He’ll bring me flowers for my hair . . .’

She sings into the baby’s ear. It is the song that the boys from across the river use to taunt her. Delivered by Ramu, the words, sung to the same tune, are much harsher. But singing it to Shanti, she takes the bitterness out of it, much as she does with the wild cucumbers, rubbing one cut end against the other to bring out the poison, as foamy as a madman’s spit.

‘You are not married yet, get back in the field.’ Her father has returned earlier than usual.

Mamta drops Shanti in her swing, and rushes out, forgetting to give it one push before she leaves. The abandoned baby starts to cry. But it has learned not to cry long; no one will come.

Mohit and Sneha are beating the dust out of the reed mats. Prem had hung them up in the Babul tree before he left for the Big House in the early-morning dark. He’d stopped Mamta from helping him: ‘Your hands are already shredded,’ he’d said, ‘save them to massage oil into your husband’s hair.’ For an instant she feels the tips of her fingers on a strange skull of black hair, soft and light, and a timorous shyness envelops her like diaphanous silk.

‘Mamta, come play,’ says her sister. The word ‘play’ sits uncomfortably with her. She is so old that she feels no right to their game, invented to sweeten their work. There is such a gap between them. Their youth makes her feel older than she is.

‘Stop it, you two. Come on. We have to finish here and then help Amma bring water from the well. We have to make lots of tea. Prem is bringing fresh milk today and he is going to try and get a big pat of butter too.’

The golden cry of the koyal calls to them. The children recede into the dust. After a while, they are barely visible from their hut.

Seeta Ram extracts the contracts from beneath his wife’s green sari in the tin trunk. The paper creaks accusingly as he bends the pages open, one by one. He cannot read, but the bureaucratic text still speaks to him. Why did he do it? Because he had a brand-new baby daughter? Because he hoped the crop would be good this year? Because of destiny? Because of nothing? No, he did it to get Mamta off his hands. He can’t come close to her without feeling a deep rage. For her and what she stands for. And for what she has made him do.

He will never look at those contracts again once she leaves, he tells himself. But the sturdy thumbprint in the right-hand corner tells him another story. He knows he might have given away more than he bargained for. He thinks of Daku Manmohan. Lucky bastard. First he lives off the fat of the land, then off the fat of the government. Lucky motherfucker.

The baby whimpers uselessly in its swing while staring at the unfamiliar face. He doesn’t feel any urge to pick her up. She starts whimpering again. Resentment fills his belly, then his lungs and lurches towards his throat, like rising froth on boiling milk.

‘That’s done,’ Lata Bai comes in wiping her hands on her sari pallav. She’s cooked the daal well and is satisfied. ‘How many is he bringing with him?’ she asks about the wedding party. ‘Do you think Jivkant will come?’

Jivkant was born when Mamta was two years old. Lata Bai had prayed for a boy and Devi had answered her prayers. The birth of a son changed his mother’s fate. Had he been born a girl, Seeta Ram would undoubtedly have taken a new wife, letting Lata Bai find her own way in the world. She had chosen the Red Ruins to have her second baby, far away from the house, for she’d decided that, if she produced another girl, it would be a stillborn birth. It happened very quickly. She hardly had time to smooth Mamta’s freshly washed blanket under her hips as the boy appeared, bright and fat, just like a boy should be. Her heart had leaped out of her body to dance with the pale lemon clouds overhead. She’d clutched him to her breast, coaxing her nipple into his mouth. Through her watery happiness the damaged electric poles danced as they did in the heart of summer, and her whole field had shimmered and sparkled. Still aching, she’d run towards the house, shouting, ‘A boy, a boy. Mamta’s father, you hear? You have a boy. Mamta’s father, come see your boy.’

The hijras arrived promptly. They must have plucked the news of his birth, achieved almost silently close to the Red Ruins, from the wind. This time they conducted themselves differently than the time they had come to bless Mamta. There was a lilt to their song, and they danced for hours in front of the house, wiggling their hips still much too stiffly to be mistaken for true women. Seeta Ram had circled their heads three times with rupee notes without getting annoyed, such was the extent of his happiness. Eventually he chased them off with curses as one always has to.

Jivkant was her husband’s from the start. She took no credit for the baby, it was an obligation fulfilled, a duty completed.

A distant train whistle makes the air quiver. Husband and wife look up. The wife runs to the door. It is a train whistle that’ll bring her son home. She has forgotten the disquiet she feels. She is anxious to have her progeny close.

‘I’m sure he can write now. The first in the family,’ she says.

‘What for would he learn to write?’ The father cannot see a life beyond the farm for himself or his children.

‘Perhaps Prem will get a chance to learn. And then Mohit.’

‘From whom, the Big House?’ he mocks her.

‘I know the Big House gives nothing away.’ She is more perspicacious than him. ‘But Prem could learn from one of Lala Ram’s twins after he gets home from work.’ She is also more optimistic than him.

‘Leave it,’ he says. ‘Reading and writing is not for us.’

‘I wish Jivkant would come,’ she says. ‘The widow Kamla has arranged Mamta’s henna ceremony.’

It is the women’s time before the wedding; laughing, talking openly about their men and completely comfortable in each other’s company.

Lata Bai undresses Mamta. Kamla helps her, pulling her clothes off her eagerly. ‘Arey, Kamla, be gentle. I am not in a hurry to send my daughter off.’ The mother looks into her daughter’s eyes and cracks her knuckles against her temples. ‘Be happy, my daughter, be happy.’

Mamta’s heart is gripped by love. A stone of tears lodges in her gullet. She swallows painfully, but doesn’t let the tears fall. She hugs her mother. Lata Bai doesn’t undo her arms this time. ‘Now remember, there will be no running home to me over the slightest problem. You will have to learn to sort things out for yourself in your husband’s house.’ Practical advice, the best salve for a sentimental heart, sounds just right for a young bride but not for someone well past her prime.

‘Oho, Lata Bai, of course she will. She’s not a child, you know. Look at her. She’s a grown woman. Surely you know all this. Right, Mamta? Right?’ Kamla will not stop till she has extracted the embarrassment to the surface on the bride-to-be’s face, just as she has the pigment from the henna leaves. Lata Bai looks away from her unfortunate daughter. Kamla gives the henna another determined stir. She has mixed the powder herself, equal parts leaf dust and okra mucus. She tests the consistency delicately on the back of her hand like she might unproved rice custard. The henna feels as slimy as an oiled snake. Perfect. She quickly rubs the paste off.

‘Don’t want to get my hands yellow like a bride’s again, now, do I?’

Kamla guffaws at her own joke. Lata Bai abandons her uneasiness and joins in the laughter, encouraging Mamta to do the same. It is unthinkable that the widow Kamla’s hands will ever be decorated again. She isn’t entitled to any kind of adornment, having shamefully outlived her husband. Now she stays dressed in one of her two white saris, next to the outhouse on her son’s farm. She makes sure her head is closely shaved and sometimes one can see her bald grey-green scalp peek out from under her sari pallav. It is because she is the only skilled midwife in these parts that she has a home at all. Cursed and thought to bring bad luck, the last three widows were chased out of town. Two went to beg at strangers’ doors, one preferred to stay, and lies very still on the temple steps. She lets her hair grow and fall down her back, but no one cares. In the old days she would have flung herself on her husband’s funeral pyre.

‘No thank you. No more husbands for me,’ Kamla says, as if she has a choice in the matter. She has let loose words that could only be said at a henna ceremony. For this one day, men are fair game. ‘But for those who still need them, it’s lucky we have Asmara Didi to cure the impotent ones,’ she guffaws. ‘Remember how she cured Lala Ram?’ She directs her story at Mamta: ‘Lala Ram tried his hand with Nathu’s daughter. Now you know Nathu’s daughter, she would have given herself to a pig if it brought her a new bangle or pair of sandals, but even she rejected Lala Ram, though he had the shop and land . . . the everything. He brought her four silk saris. No response. Hai, did she tease him good . . . walked blouse-less up and down the street right under his nose, her boobs jiggling like horse bells, and him salivating after her like a dog. He tried, but couldn’t get her to accompany him for even a minute behind the well. Finally he went to Asmara Didi for help. That concoction she whipped up really did something for him: Lala Ram couldn’t get his dhoti to behave after that, stuck out in front like a raised flag. He was so proud when someone asked if he had a pound of flour under his dhoti. They tell me the village boys applied the same concoction to the stray dog that used to feed in the rubbish tip. Had him humping all the bitches in no time!’ Kam la hoots with laughter, ‘that was something. Hump, hump, hump, up and down the street all day long, till he burst!’

Mamta looks up with a sharp jerk of her head and disbelief in her eyes, not for the story, but for the indelicacy of it, while Lata Bai shakes her head with bemused resignation from side to side. Kamla nudges Lata Bai in the ribs: ‘Your husband has taken a loan from the Big House. He is entitled to ask for her services, you know . . . if need be . . .’ The two older women are tangled in a dance of words and companionship, of shared fortunes, and experiences of plain and simple womanhood.

‘No need for Asmara Didi’s concoction in my home . . . but really, sometimes I wish mine was impotent.’ Lata Bai’s hands flitter to her mouth like butterflies to cover the embarrassing words that just left her lips. She looks up and catches sight of her daughter, brows knitted in the middle of her forehead, a question forming in her inexperienced mind. ‘Forget it . . . let’s be serious now,’ says her mother quickly.

‘Did you hear the news?’ Kamla asks earnestly.

‘Yes, about Daku Manmohan. Mamta’s father said –’

‘No, not that old news, this other thing . . . they found Sharma’s wife.’

‘You mean the one who ran away after the last big wind?’

‘Yes, what a fool, but quite a beauty, no?’

‘I guess her mother should have tattooed the “ugly” dot to spoil her perfection on her face instead of the back of her ear. I heard she ran away with the circus.’

‘Circus? No circus – with another man.’

‘Oho, what is the world coming to?’

‘It would have been better if she had run away with the circus, they never would have found her, but they did. Stripped her naked under the banyan, shaved her hair, four of Sharma’s brothers raped her and then they rubbed shit on her body.’

‘Hai, poor thing,’ says Mamta.

‘Poor thing nothing, she got what she deserved. Imagine if all the wives started running away, simply because they were unhappy,’ says Lata Bai.

‘Amma, how can you say that?’

‘Leave it, Mamta, you won’t understand. You have to be married as long as me to understand.’ Lata Bai turns to Kamla. ‘Why are you telling this story now, on this auspicious day?’ she whispers fiercely enough for Mamta to hear.

‘Okay, okay, let’s leave it, but let me tell you just one more thing . . . the poor girl has to still live with Sharma, in the cowshed. Her head stays shaved, he has already taken another wife. That’s it, no more talk about Sharma’s wife.’ She clamps a hand over her mouth. ‘Okay, so who’s doing the ceremony? Not that thief, Pundit Jasraj.’

‘Yes. He was the cheapest,’ says Lata Bai, defending her choice.

‘I believe he tried to feel up the last two brides,’ Kamla says, arresting her giggles.

‘Really? I hadn’t heard,’ lies Lata Bai. ‘Well, it won’t be a problem this time,’ she says, trying to set her daughter’s mind at rest.

‘Why not? Do you think me that ugly?’ Mamta touches her forehead. She’s heard of new brides being bathed in milk, but for her, a teaspoon of turmeric paste is what the widow Kamla prepared. Mamta rubs the turmeric off; underneath, her birthmark is a bilious caricature of its former self.

‘Oh no, Mamta. That’s not what I meant.’ It’s too late to paint over her slight, so Lata Bai changes the subject. ‘I wish Jivkant would come.’

‘Maybe he will come just as we sit down with the priest.’ What Mamta really means to say is, why would he bother? He was the cruellest of all to her. Fat little Jivkant. The love of his father’s life. From the day that he emerged, soiling Mamta’s blanket, he became the thief of his sister’s future.

The first thing to go was Mamta’s thali, her dented tin plate into the back of which her mother had impressed the symbol Ohm in tiny dots by hammering a nail in a pattern. It was given to Jivkant and Mamta began to share her mother’s thali and food. Whereas before Seeta Ram had never objected to Lata Bai preparing a thali especially for her daughter, now he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Let her eat the leftovers,’ he said. ‘Why should I water someone else’s garden?’

‘Do you remember when I made him drink kerosene? That was something!’ Her mother looks at her with disappointed eyes. ‘Oh, come, Amma, don’t be that way. He probably has a big city job now.’

Lata Bai knew all along that Jivkant would leave; hadn’t he always believed he deserved better? She can’t remember a day when he was still inside his skin, yet Seeta Ram was surprised when his son took off, full of as much live powder as a late-firing cracker, following a train whistle to his destiny. He wanted to be an engine driver just like Lucky Sister’s husband, the one who put his wife out to work as a prostitute.

‘Perhaps he can’t get leave.’

Lata Bai’s eyes cloud over for a second. Yes, gone to a good city job over a year now and not one rupee sent back to your family. What did you say before you left? ‘Amma, look for your money order at Lala Ram’s shop every month.’ ‘Maybe he can’t get leave, but what stops him from sending us money? He had one of Lala Ram’s twins write down the address for him, not once, but twice, one for his pocket and a back-up for his satchel. The day he left, I put a red tilak on his brow and fanned the flames of the oil lamp towards his bowed head. Your father had tears in his eyes and Prem ran behind him all the way to the waiting tonga. But he left without looking back at us, twirling his moustache. He was so eager to go. I went to Lala Ram’s shop every month for a whole year, sometimes twice, sometimes thrice a month.’

At first Lala Ram would give her some brown sugar – for the children – he’d say. Then later, when he saw her approaching, he would go into the back, reluctant to deal with her expectation and disappointment. Finally, he started shooing her away from a distance, saying, ‘Go away, he maybe lost . . . dead . . . the city swallows them up.’

I know my son isn’t dead or lost. If anyone could make it in the city, it would be Jivkant. So where are those promised money orders?

Her husband has prepared his verbal offence carefully. He will let loose his tirade upon his son as soon as he sees him. There will be no ‘When will you help us? After we are dead?’ or ‘Look at your mother, her eyes swollen from crying every night.’ No, he will appeal to his intellect, because he knows, sure as the red birthmark on Mamta’s forehead, that his son has learned the most useless skill of all – to read and write – and is now an educated man.

‘Even if he does show up at the last minute, he won’t bring any money with him. Of that I’m sure,’ says the mother, still hoping she is wrong, but armouring herself against disappointment by pointing out the worst.

‘Leave it. It may be a man’s country, Lata Bai, but you will get joy only from the girls,’ counters Kamla. ‘Why, even the men see the dependability in our sex. Just see how they organise their lives so that they can be looked after by a woman. Have you seen one in our village that isn’t married? Have you seen one widowed father who hasn’t got a daughter or a daughter-in-law looking after him? I tell you, we were better off when our country was looked after by a woman Prime Minister. Poor thing, murdered like that, and her sons too. Just look at us now, under this big man Atal Bihari Vajpayee, bandits running wild as weeds. I might have to shave my head as a concession to the men, but it is only because our sex has the true power.’ Kamla’s features have long acquired that androgynous look of so many women who are forbidden from celebrating their femaleness.

‘What power, Didi? They keep us pregnant from year to year. I say to Mamta’s father, the country is moving into a new era. Our children aren’t dying like they used to because of the government’s survival drops. I tell you, those things have magic in them. There hasn’t been one curled leg in Gopalpur since the drought. Remember how bad it used to be? The legs of girls, and even boys, used to just wither and die at the slightest sign of unseasonable rain. Remember?’ Sickness in the family was the most debilitating thing of all. With each waking minute accounted for, there was never any time to look after the sick, especially when it required collecting special herbs and plants and supplicating the gods. Who had the time to make poultice after poultice or check on a fever? None but the old and the discarded, who more often than not perished together with their patients. But things have changed with the city mobile clinics making sporadic forays into the villages, bringing medicines, cures and vaccinations. ‘You’ve seen the change? Whenever those doctor-vans come from the city, I go to the Big House for my dose. To tell you the truth, I have more faith in them than in Asmara Didi, though Mamta’s father will say that is blasphemy. I can tell it to you straight, their medicines work better than hers. Why can’t we use those things that stop the babies from coming?’

The mobile clinics not only bring polio drops for the children but birth control pills and IUDs for the women. Though the women know not to couple in the middle of their cycle, because that is the most blessed time, no one understands the nature of pills. To take one every night to stop a baby from happening sounds too much like magic. IUDs they accept, but it is a brave woman who has an IUD inserted without the knowledge of her husband. Recently the van brought Nirodh condoms. Nirodh, the sheath to a happy life, that’s what the advertisement says, that is what Lata Bai believes.

‘My husband refuses. He says . . .’ she lowers her voice and cups her hand to her mouth, pouring her words directly into the older, more experienced, woman’s ears, ‘he says it isn’t natural that there should be something between a man and woman when they are, they are . . . you know what. It’s not satisfying, like smelling the smoke from another’s hookah.’ She raises her voice back up again: ‘He has a third ear that hears those thoughts before I have them. Look at me, a new baby only weeks old, and I am marrying off my first daughter. My second daughter has children older than mine. Now what’s the sense in that? Weren’t six children enough? I think it’s because we have no other form of entertainment, but to, to . . .’

‘Is it that? Or is it because our religion demands it?’

‘When it suits us, we follow the letter of our religion. We all aspire to emulate the myths, should we all have a hundred sons, just like the Kaurav clan then?’

‘I agree with you, Lata Bai, but someone has to think about such things to want to change them. I was lucky I only had sons, three sons, and then my husband died. That Seeta Ram of yours sees his friends having one child after another. He thinks, more children . . . more hands to work the fields . . . a better crop, he doesn’t see them as mouths to feed. What do you expect from that husband of yours, then?’

‘Nothing, I suppose,’ says Lata Bai, suddenly realising that her husband is a weak man, whose inaction will continue to cost her dearly, just as it did when she first married him and was repeatedly raped by his father. But in fact Lata Bai is wrong, Seeta Ram is not just a weak man, he is a cruel man; a cruel man whose brutality isn’t deliberate, but stems from something as innocuous as an unquestioning nature. And therefore it is the worst kind of cruelty, that can’t be shut off at will. Where the wind blows, Seeta Ram will follow. He will never be one to change anything.

‘Still, Lata Bai, if you really look at it, seven children in twenty years is nothing. You have to consider yourself lucky that you aren’t like your Seeta Ram’s cousin’s wife, married fifteen years with fourteen children to show for it, five of them already dead, one stupid in the head and one not able to walk. At least yours are healthy.’

‘Yes, I suppose they are healthy, for the most part. Though Mamta’s hair has been getting more orange these last few months, and Sneha’s getting that big belly on her matchstick legs.’

‘Oho, come now, now’s not the time to talk of this,’ says Kamla, putting an arm around her friend’s despondent shoulders.

But Lata Bai is a train, off and running. ‘No, she should know how to protect herself.’ She shakes with humourless laughter. ‘What protection can there be against a man who wants to couple? Eh, daughter, if after sex you start itching down there, make sure you wash with lemon juice and neem tea. But if you start making pimples and fainting, then you have to find some government doctor man to help you – that’s if your husband will allow you to go to one. The pimpling disease has no cure, though you can try Asmara Didi’s prescription – drinking your own piss.’

Mamta listens intently while pretending not to, gelled solid by equal parts embarrassment and fear.

‘Lata Bai! Does she have to know all this?’

‘Yes! Yes, she does. I am her only defence. You know how it was with poor Lalita.’ All the women of Gopalpur are familiar with Lalita’s story, though the men hardly discuss it at all. ‘Now you listen to me, Mamta: it’s our place to accept, and accept . . . be demure. Don’t say anything till addressed, don’t make a sound, don’t do anything to make him beat you, because you’ll only have yourself to blame for it. If you displease him, he will beat you. And if you do something really bad, then he might hold you over the stove and start by singeing the hair from your eyebrows, and after that, it’s burning to death and a hasty burial. You remember how Lalita turned up at the well, looking like a boiled egg.’ Even now the memory of that day makes the two older women shudder. An impertinent wind had blown Lalita’s pallav off her burned dome, and they had put their hands to their lips and laughed out loud. Lata Bai and Kamla couldn’t stop even when the poor creature was far away, a tiny speck chased by laughter. She had left her pots behind, and they never thought to return them.

‘Poor Lalita, her husband gave her the disease and then denied her the medicine. And finally, he burned her to death so he could have a cleaner, healthier wife,’ says Kamla. ‘Yes, you better listen sharp to your mother. No one will be able to interfere or help you if you get in trouble. But enough now, Lata Bai, we have shared enough secrets. Let’s talk about something else. Tell me, what about that Ragini of yours? Lucky girl.’

‘Yes, she is blessed,’ says Lata Bai, her words heavy with pride. Lata Bai never worried about Ragini. Golden Ragini, blessed with beauty so unassailable that it was impossible not to be awed by it. Mamta took care of Ragini like her very own child, and at fifteen Ragini was married and gone before her elder sister got even one offer of marriage.

The groom’s family had approached her. He was a gentle soul, with no ambition. One look into his face and Lata Bai knew his type instantly. He would be ruled by Ragini. Seeta Ram sold the family cow for the wedding. He’d insisted on a grand wedding because Ragini’s in-laws seemed so rich and refined. For years Lata Bai dreaded seeing her daughter returned to her scarred and burned because she didn’t bring in enough dowry.

But Lata Bai doesn’t have to worry any more. Her daughter’s position in her new home is secure with the birth of her children: two sets of male twins, little darling children, with large dancing eyes like rabbits, all bright and black with kohl. Of course she would have produced only boys. Golden Ragini.

‘Even the mother-in-law, who thinks she’s spoilt, can’t touch one hair on her head.’ Lata Bai laughs silently inside. ‘Bless you, Ragini,’ she says, ‘bless you. Live, my child, like I never did. No, I don’t worry about her at all. She is loved by all those who know her.’

‘I’ve heard that. She is loved by too many, in fact. She should be careful. Thoo, thoo, thoo, thoo,’ Kamla spits into the four directions to ward off any evil spirits who might be hovering, waiting to ruin Ragini’s future. ‘Stop that! Running your hands through the bucket like a thief through gold! How can I pattern your hands if your whole palm is red?’ says Kamla. But it is too late. It’s good henna. Sneha’s hands are already a strong orange. Kamla laughs and puts them on her cheeks.

‘Yellow hands already, and still so young,’ says Lata Bai with a tear in her voice.

The women sing. Mamta is quiet. Kamla dances, her hips strangely agile for her age and her widowhood. Lata Bai feels very much that she is losing a part of herself, something that should have been cut from her a long time ago. But she has grown so attached to her eldest that she doesn’t know how she’ll survive without her.

‘I am the fruit on your vine, craving water from your hand. Why do I let you go, my innocent one? I am the dove in your cage, cooing for your attention, Why do I let you go, my innocent one? When your palanquin departs there will be emptiness . . .’

Kamla’s feet stir up puffs of dust. Dhhub, dhhub, dhhub . . . she leaves definite footprints in the earth.

‘Enough, Didi, that’s enough. Let’s sing something more cheerful. This song is putting a grinding stone on my chest.’

‘So what’s it to be?’

‘The groom’s song. Let’s do the groom’s song.’

‘Come, come, my beloved I wait here, dyed in love Without you there is no garland, No jasmine, no rose, no queen of the night, no blossom. Without you there is no sense in jewellery, No bangle, no earring, no necklace, no hair braid. Without you there is no pleasure in adornment, No kohl, no rouge, no powder, no henna . . .’

Kamla claps her unpainted hands, while the other three smile at the words of the deeply familiar wedding songs. The songs stir up Mamta’s excitement again; she is eager to accept her new life. She chooses to ignore the example of her mother’s marriage, the story of singed and burned Lalita, and Sharma’s runaway wife. Her fate will be different. She will bring indomitable love to her duty and like a river bursting its dam it will be unstoppable, covering everything in its path, much like the dust of Gopalpur.

The green henna patterns glisten industriously. Lata Bai will wash her hands off ahead of time, in accordance with custom, else her husband will never cook his own food. It was the same for Ragini’s wedding; after painting her hands with henna she’d had to wash them to cook the evening meal. Lucky for her, her hands receive colour willingly.

Mamta is careful with her pattern. Every so often she dabs her hands with lamp oil. A dark pattern means she will be loved by her mother-in-law.

A new life at last. Something to be excited about at last. Marriage at last. What is marriage? Coupling. Sex. Disease. Her mother’s words have unsettled her, but then Nature calls out to her, shouting louder than her unsettled feeling. The whole universe seems to be in harmony with her being, a part of the same crescendo. Everywhere she looks she sees the signs, and in them reads the language of love: long beans entwined passionately on their vine, pumpkin flowers nuzzling each other, doves necking, weaver birds building their nests . . . She sinks luxuriously into her new womanly feeling.

She knows what is expected of her. Still this wedding is a dream. A love dream. She lies on the floor in the cool of her hut, palms up to the ceiling. Her mother lets her be, it might be the last time.

Lata Bai can see Mamta’s chest rise and fall in contented breaths. In spite of her age, her daughter looks tiny, lying stretched out like that. Lata Bai crushes the urge to lie beside her. She remembers the days when she had sung her daughter songs and told her stories, correcting her notions with playful lies and filling her heart with fanciful images of pearly halos on kings’ heads and mysterious forests filled with magical creatures with immense powers. Lata Bai watered the desert of her daughter’s intellect with colours and bubbles, and as she grew up, she’d added an immense amount of practical knowledge, which Mamta remembers more by rote than anything else. What was the true value of her gift? Did she give her daughter mirages to accompany her on her unwary journey, or prosaic knowledge that could rescue her wandering heart from the worst dangers of ignorance and injustice? Did she solidly carve out a place in this world for her or keep her seeking in vain for what could never be found? Did she give her sadness or vision?

Lata Bai feels the anxiety burbling up into her throat. Oh, Devi, make him a good man. Jai ho Devi, Devi jai ho.

‘Amma, what was that you and Kamla were saying about the lemons and babies? Who will I ask about all that when you are not there? Amma, I’m afraid.’

‘Tch, tch, you are getting married, not going to some hell.’ ‘Look what happened to Lalita and her sister.’ ‘Oho, that’s not going to happen to you.’ It is time to put things in perspective, so Mamta can realise that she is better off than the sisters. ‘You won’t be like Lalita. You will be a good wife. You won’t be like her sister either, expecting a baby from God knows whom. You will be a good girl.’ Lata Bai has only words, but she knows there are no guarantees. Lalita, burned for no fault of her own, but only because she became sickly, and her sister, sent to the Red Bazaar soon after her baby was born because she was unfortunate enough to get pregnant with her own father’s child. Lata Bai has seen the boy, no longer a baby, at Saraswati Stores and has to drag her thoughts away from his history. He was accepted by his grandmother as one of her own to redress the deficiency of a womb that produced only girls. Had he been a girl, he wouldn’t be alive today.

Her disquiet temporarily allayed, Mamta rolls on to her stomach, propping her chin up with the backs of her open hands, still careful with her hennaed palms. ‘Tell me about Shakuntala. Just the short version. How she had pearls in her hair and beauty –’

‘No, enough!’ says Lata Bai, slightly annoyed now by her memory. Each time she’d told that story, she’d replaced the main character with her own daughter. But it is now time to acknowledge that Mamta is anything but beautiful. Fantasies are the worst thing a bride can take to her new home.

Mamta lingers all day with her hennaed hands held out to the sun like a beggar asking for alms. It is custom, and custom alone that makes this the women’s day, the day they rest and beautify themselves. Seeta Ram doesn’t approve, but he can’t do anything about it. Today Lata Bai and Sneha will do all the cooking.

‘I am the fruit on your vine, craving water from your hand. Why do I let you go, my innocent one? I am the dove in your cage, cooing for your attention, Why do I let you go, my innocent one? When your palanquin departs there will be emptiness . . .’

It is a while before Lata Bai realises she is humming Kamla’s song. She switches off her internal melody; it brings her no pleasure. Today Mamta will become paraya, the other, and when she needs succour or solace after this day, she may not seek it from her mother because she belongs to another.

Shanti has been quiet most of the day. Lata Bai has fed her twice since the morning, but she didn’t feel like sucking much. She’s blown on her face at least four times for a reaction since the morning to make sure she was still alive. She would have skimmed off some of the daal water for her, but because of the weevils she thinks she might stick to breast milk today.

She looks in on the baby. She is sleeping peacefully, each eye ringed by a cluster of flies thick as smudged kohl. She shoos off the flies, wets the corner of her pallav in some water and bends over her to clean out her eyes. Then she changes her mind. Instead she opens her blouse and squeezes a bit of milk out of her wrinkled right nipple. She cleans the baby’s eyes with breast milk. Shanti whimpers, but stays sleeping. Her forehead feels clammy, but Lata Bai ignores the dampness and goes about her business with gusto. If her daughter has to fall sick at all, she is determined that it will be only when the government doctor-van arrives in Gopalpur, and not a moment before.

‘You know what, they are coming to the wedding. I overheard Ram Singh Sahib and Lokend Sahib talking to each other,’ Prem bursts in, followed by the sweet smell of roses. ‘Look what I’ve brought back. When I told Asmara Didi my sister was getting married today she cut all her roses and gave them to me. “Go, decorate your house like a king,” she said to me.’

‘I wish she’d given us something to feed the guests instead,’ says Lata Bai. ‘Did you get any butter? Any milk?’

‘Yes, yes . . .’ He pulls out a parcel of ficus leaves from his kurta pocket and a pot of milk. The leaves glisten from the grease. The smell of stale milk mingles with the roses.

‘She’ll part with fresh roses, but not fresh butter.’

Prem looks at his mother, at the unfamiliar sound of bitterness in her voice. ‘Look, I got this too –’ He places a lump of jaggery in her hand, the size of a grapefruit, and looks at her, his eyes saying Happy?

She looks away. Yes, she should be happy . . . one daughter producing only sons, one son with a good job in the railway, Prem working at the Big House and bringing back pats of butter and, after Mamta’s wedding, one less female mouth to feed. What more can she ask for? What more could her heart possibly want?

‘Sneha, get to work!’

‘Amma, there’s time yet.’ Sneha wants to leave the henna on her hands a little longer.

‘Sneha,’ she warns, ‘chapattis.’

‘Yes, Amma.’ She washes her hands in a cup of water. ‘What about Jivkant Bhaia?’

‘And what about your brother? A fancy job and not one rupee sent back to his family in all this time.’ She speaks in the third person to disassociate herself from her offspring.

Prem says nothing, but his eyes give him away. Jivkant is who Prem aspires to be, except for the not-one-rupee-sent-back-to-his-family part. Perhaps one day he too will leave to find his place on a train going somewhere. He can hear the faintest whistle blow across the fields, and when it does, he lifts his head suddenly like a watchdog and looks over to see if there is any smoke, proof that the whistle isn’t just a fibrillation of his desire. He doesn’t know what Jivkant has made of his life, but he’s meant to be coming back for Mamta’s wedding. That much he knows. Prem had taken his brother’s letter to the Big House to be read, and it said that Jivkant was coming back. Prem had wondered if Jivkant had written the letter himself and for a moment he’d felt the high fever of jealousy ride up under his skin and bring a flush to his face.

‘Even Lucky Sister sent us something. She didn’t just fritter the money away on herself, and she had more reason to . . . the way we all shunned her,’ says Lata Bai. In spite of her anger she can see that comparing her son’s railway job to her sister’s prostitution is unfair. ‘Still, there’s time. Perhaps he will show up for the wedding tonight, after all. Well, you might as well put the roses out. Keep a few nice ones for your sisters’ hair,’ she says, softening.

Lata Bai pulls the sari tight round her daughter’s waist. At her age, Mamta still can’t get the pleats right. Sneha is more accomplished at tying a sari.

‘Stand up straight!’ The mother tugs at the five-metre cloth, dragging her daughter with it like a piece of driftwood on a sea of red. ‘Can’t you stand still?’ Mamta goes rigid to obey her mother’s command, but the moment is spoilt.

The widow Kamla left straight after lunch, so there are no outsiders at the house now. Though Prem has been sent home early by Asmara Didi to help with the wedding preparations, he works the fields with his father and brother. Why waste labour? Almost a man, his back is bent over exactly like Seeta Ram’s. He is most like his father physically, but he has his mother’s softness. Mohit never turned out quite as robust. He has the delicate frame of a girl, long wiry legs and a skinny chest with two sunken nipples defiling the even brown terrain.

‘We’re off.’ The mother is dressed in her green sari. The one she wears on every special occasion. It looks new. Her oiled hair makes a huge knot at the nape of her neck. She has no need for pins. The man and boys look up in unison.

They briefly see a flash of green, one of pale orange and another of red. Seeta Ram recognises the red sari as the one he bought for Mamta for her wedding with borrowed money last week. He shakes his head, trying to rid himself of the memory of the incarcerating thumbprint.

The women walk purposefully away, Lata Bai carrying a thali with a bit of jaggery, sindhoor and rose petals. Sneha holds Shanti; and Mamta, the bride-to-be, walks unfettered. The flute plays on.

The evenings here are long and languid, it is well before sunset.

The mother sets the pace, slow, sure, deferential. The flame has gone out of the sunshine. Still the stones cling to their heat and poke the women’s bare feet. At this time of day the land is feminine. It is full of colour, both divine and human.

A waterline meandering home from the well intersects their path. Sneha lifts her hand, filtering the sun through her pallav. There is no pantone for that particular orange, diluted with sunshine, distilled through the muslin, alive, organic, elemental, yet changing as soon as the mind grasps its tone. It is truly a colour created from the earth. Here the women prepare their own dyes from leaves and tubers. It takes three seasons to extract an unyielding indigo blue, and even longer for a hectic yellow that doesn’t fade. But what is time to them? They have learned that degree of patience that favours minute industry, recherché dyeing techniques, intricate patterns, tiny stitches, weaving something out of nothing. And yet, they take their colours for granted and don’t recognise the certain alchemy of the turquoise green as deep as a bountiful pond; or the freedom of the yellow as weighty as a sunflower dial; or the self-indulgence of the saffron as loquacious as a cloudy sunset. The women go quietly about their business, unaware of the psychedelic circus that endures without their attendance.

At this hour, the men can be found under the banyan smoking a hookah and listening to the news on Lala Ram’s transistor radio. The power of this innocuous activity cannot be overstated. Talk, and implicit belief in the common wisdom of the peer group is what unites them. There is only one type of man under the banyan in this place of tight traditions and few choices, cut from a die which fashions uncomplicated puzzle shapes that link easily together to form a larger picture. Each time someone wants to break free, he is reminded of Kalu, the untouchable Sudra who dared to bring water from the village well a mile away instead of the river four miles off. He had every bone in his Sudra body broken and his wife had her nose cut off. Such popular justice is the staunchest protector of tradition, and deviation, even the slightest one, is unimaginable.

Seeta Ram hurries to the banyan to catch the tail end of the news on the communal transistor. The news is slow today, so the men twiddle the knobs till they hear the scratchy sound of Hindi movie music. These days they strain to listen for word about the bandit surrender, but it doesn’t come.

The Red Ruins are waiting for the women, pink with anticipation in the buttery light. Mamta clasps her pallav closer. This is the place she did most of her growing up, picking wild spinach and berries. Lata Bai walks to the east-facing wall. Her daughters follow close behind. They pray together. The praying is reserved for females on the bride’s side.

What does Lata Bai really know of Mamta’s husband and his family? Not much. She doesn’t even know that he has two children from a previous marriage. She knows nothing of his nature and yet she is bequeathing her daughter to him in good, bad or indifferent faith. Why? Because Mamta is someone else’s garden, a female burden to be rid of. Even her second daughter, lucky Ragini, had to pickle her lemons right until she produced her male twins.

The chants leave Lata Bai’s lips on an anonymous journey. She has the drought to thank for the purity of her knowledge and the discipline of her ritual. That’s the time her family had turned to rigorous prayer. Only Lata Bai knows the true meaning of the words, whereas her daughters know their essence, the stories they tell, and the superstitions they embrace.

Lata Bai circles the air with the thali, dispersing more incense smoke as the flame cavorts in the breeze but doesn’t go out. It is a robust oily flame, culminating in strong, creamy smoke. She looks over her shoulder, Mamta steps forward to take the thali from her mother’s hands. She continues to sing her mother’s song, but she does so very softly. She’s afraid to make an audible mistake. Finally it’s Sneha’s turn. She hands Shanti to her mother and starts with her own smoke circles.

‘Ohm, Ohm, Ohm . . .’ the beginning of the universe. First there was nothing and then there was the cosmic sound Ohm, which manifested Nothing into Everything. Its residue resides in all nature, the sound of the wind, the warmth of sunshine, the blue of the sea, in every heart, in every thought. It is the link to eternity, it will transcend everything, never ending, once sounded always enduring. The mother sings the Gayatri Mantra, the girls join in. The energy is transferred back and forth between the women and they know exactly when to stop together . . . Just like that, there’s silence.

‘This prayer is very important for you, Mamta. Devi is your everything. She will fulfil you and protect you.’ Her mother’s tone is sombre.

‘Let’s see if there are any fingerprints.’

‘Sneha, your head is filled with hay,’ says her mother, but she walks them to the other side of the wall to fulfil their curiosity.

‘Aiee.’ Sneha drops to the ground. Not only are there prints, there are also broken bangles, hundreds of them, lying on the ground. Sneha picks the glass out of her foot. She licks her finger to seal the bleeding wound. Lata Bai sits on a rock to feed Shanti, saying, ‘We should be getting back soon. Your bapu will be wondering.’

‘Amma, so many bangles. Did all their husbands die?’ Soon to join their ranks, Mamta is worried for the fate of all the married women in the world.

‘Must be this Daku business. Some in his gang maybe didn’t want to surrender and went out looting instead. This is the result.’ Lata Bai scours the ground for offerings, picking out discarded spices from far richer plates than hers. She ties the cinnamon, jaggery, cardamom and fennel seed in a ball at the end of her pallav.

‘What will the widows do?’

The mother shrugs.

The women start walking back to the hut. The green and red are upright, the orange bobs up and down all the way, like the float on a fishing line, bouncing unevenly on a wounded foot.

Mamta’s nervousness is a runaway horse. It gathers speed as her mother and sister knead the dough for the chapattis and boil the last of the tea leaves. The mother flavours the tea with offerings from the Red Ruins. ‘Thank you, Devi. Jai ho Devi, Devi jai ho,’ she whispers each time she tosses in a spice.

Mamta needs something to do. She’s twisted the end of her pallav into permanent creases which radiate out to the rest of her sari from the damaged corner like a fan. ‘So what is the first thing I’ll have to do?’

Her mother and sister don’t look up from their work. Sneha has already started on the chillies for the chutney and her hands have started to burn. ‘You’ll get to know by and by.’ Usually her mother loves to talk while cooking, but today is different. Today the weevils are worrying her almost as much as the fact that Jivkant and Ragini haven’t arrived.

‘They will be arriving soon.’ Seeta Ram struggles out of his kurta and puts on a fresh one. The boys stay as they are. They have nothing to change into.

Lata Bai gives Lucky Sister’s gold earrings to Mamta. ‘Put these on.’ Mamta approaches the mirror hanging from the tin door with a length of wire, the family’s only piece of vanity. She can’t see her whole face in it at once any more. The last big wind blew it off the door and left a huge horizontal crack in it. Luckily it didn’t break completely. Her face is divided along the crack, and the two halves don’t match up.

She looks at her lips first. They are her best feature. She turns away from her birthmark sulking like a child might from a disappointing present. The yellowed skin crinkles as she looks closer. She bares her teeth, trying to look even uglier to satisfy some desire to hurt inside. She has started to despair. She replaces the sacred basil sticks in her earlobes with the gold earrings.

‘Now what are you looking at? Haven’t you seen yourself hundreds of times before? Spending all day at the mirror as if you were a great beauty or something!’

‘Stop it, she’s only putting on her earrings. On this one day . . .’

Seeta Ram doesn’t let her finish: ‘Every day is “this one day” where Mamta is concerned. Yours is precisely the kind of useless “love” that spoils girls. See how Sharma’s wife turned out; I bet her mother also gave her some funny ideas. Running away like that. Serves her right. Serves her right, you hear?’ he shouts towards Mamta, pulling the inalienable rules from under the banyan tree into the room. ‘You listen to your man, you hear.’ Next he attacks the mother: ‘What will her husband think? That we’ve sent him someone vain and lazy and old?’

‘Namaste. Namaste.’

Seeta Ram rushes out when he hears his son’s voice greet the guests.

Lata Bai pulls the pallav low over Mamta’s head, covering her whole face and neck. ‘Don’t worry, people have been getting married for thousands of years, it will be fine. Just don’t run away,’ she says half joking, bending beneath Mamta’s veil to smile into her daughter’s eyes.

The women stay indoors. It’s men’s business outside. Mamta’s dowry is piled up on the family’s hay mattress in the centre of the newly flattened courtyard. The dishes reflect a lusty sunset.

She hears her father say, ‘Come, come, my friends,’ hesitating at the word friends, and shouting loudly, ‘Lata, tea!’ with singular authority.

‘They’ve come,’ whispers her mother under her breath, as if it’s a huge surprise that anyone’s turned up at all to partake in her careful preparations. She carries the tea out in tin mugs that the widow Kamla kindly lent her. Her husband doesn’t introduce her and once the hands have grabbed the mugs, she retires inside to be with her daughters.

‘There are four of them. Your husband looks very handsome in his turban. Mamta, you are a lucky girl,’ she says, pulling her daughter towards her. In actual fact, she didn’t look up from serving the tea so she doesn’t know what the groom looks like. Not that she could have seen his face anyway beneath the curtain of slightly bruised jasmine garlands that hung down from his forehead to chin like so many plumb lines. She hopes her lie will ease the pain of separation. Mamta has started to sweat and quiver. Finally the almost-twenty-year-old realises that she might never see her mother and siblings again. Up till now, the wedding has been a game.

‘What’s keeping that damn priest? I gave him the advance he asked for.’ She would never have dared to say this about some other priest, but Pundit Jasraj-feeler-up-of-brides-to-be is undeserving of her reverence. Her mother’s fretting fuels Mamta’s agitation.

Finally Prem brings the message Mamta dreads: ‘The priest is here.’ She hugs her favourite brother for a long time. His presence comforts her.

‘I . . . I . . .’

‘I’ll be there, don’t worry,’ he says. She pulls up her veil and looks into her brother’s eyes, still filled with childlike luminescence. Prem, the boy she looked after when she was only five years old. He would always stop crying for her, and she took him on her hip wherever she went. But today, it is he who is the stronger, easing her nervousness.

Just three steps to a new life, through the door of her hut. Mamta puts one foot in front of the other. She stops in front of the door. Lata Bai kicks it open and pulls her daughter through by her arm. It’s as awkward as being born. The two women pull in different directions. The mother wins. Did the mother pull her daughter through on the day of her birth as well?

Lata Bai pushes Sneha back. ‘Stay here, don’t you go outside, and look after Shanti. Give her some water if she cries.’ She wants no comparisons made between the two sisters, one young enough to make the other look even older than she is.

Just out of the door, Mamta hears an engine running at full capacity. She feels the dusty breeze on her face and up her nose before the engine stops with an angry cat screech. She stands forgotten, all eyes except hers are on the jeep. Hers stay looking on the ground.

‘Not too late, I hope. Not too late.’

‘Sahib, you are our mother and father, how can you ever be too late. We would repeat the wedding for you. You grace our home with your presence. The gods have smiled on us today,’ there is a cringing awe in her father’s voice.

For Ram Singh, coming or not was a matter of casual choice, but for Seeta Ram and his family, Ram Singh’s appearance is nothing short of a miracle. This is the classic social seesaw that isn’t going anywhere. Ram Singh is so far above Mamta’s family that he has no conscious notion of what impact his attendance at the wedding makes. The stage set is instantly different, the players are totally reshuffled, someone new now has top billing.

Brown sandals alight from the jeep. They are adorned with large decorative shiny brass buckles. The sandals are followed by oversized sturdy black leather shoes, with an air hole for the big toe to breathe. Ram Singh doesn’t go anywhere without Babulal his bodyguard. Mamta can see her father’s blue rubber Hawaii slippers walk up to the brown sandals. The buckles flash decisively in the fading light. The buckled sandals make her nervous. She can see her father’s feet fidget. Just like a new bride, she thinks, and almost giggles.

‘You’ve done well. I can see that you haven’t wasted your loan.’ At the sound of the word loan, her father’s Hawaii slippers do a small dance. Her mother’s bare feet walk to the dancing slippers. The slippers are still.

‘Tea, please.’ Her father’s voice is pleading.

There are four more sets of matching new shoes, the smart polished city kind, with laces. The kind her father loves and will for sure envy. Mamta doesn’t know it, but her dowry has paid for them all. The laced shoes fill her with pride. Her new in-laws have taken the time to dress well. Just like Guru Dutt in Pyaasa, she thinks. The four pairs are in a circle. A cloud of murmured conversation rises like smoke from the huddle.

‘Meet our new in-laws.’

The shoes fan out to form a straight line so the buckled sandals can make the acquaintance of their owners face to face.

‘Namaste.’

‘Namaste.’

‘From where?’

‘Barigaon.’

‘Ah, Barigaon, do you know Rattan Das? He’s a family friend.’

‘Not our zamindar, Rattan Das?’

‘Yes, exactly.’

The buckles have successfully set the stage for conquest. Suddenly the owners of the city shoes realise who Ram Singh is. It’s the turn of the city shoes to dance.

‘Please, sit. Come, come, why are we standing round?’ The shoes squash together on the rope charpoy, jostling to get a place next to the buckles. They sit, leaving a wide gap on either side of them. Mamta can see more of the men now. She can see the hems of the dhotis, hanging limp above the shoes.

‘My daughter, the bride,’ Seeta Ram introduces Mamta from a distance like he might the Red Ruins to a visitor. Mamta’s blouse is wet with sweat. First she was hot, now the wetness has left her cold, a little later, she will be shivering. Her mother stands next to her.

Sneha is still in the house, all decked up with no one to look at her. Her sister almost married, she is dreaming her own dreams. She peeks outside, rocking Shanti violently. She hopes to see one suitable face she can place in her daydream, but all the men seem too old to her. Guru Dutt has raided her thoughts too, and one of Lala Ram’s boys. She let him feel her up behind the temple last week. She thinks Pundit Jasraj might have seen them. She wasn’t careful. The searing hot blood in her veins and liquid feeling between her thighs had made her crazy.

Lata Bai seizes the moment to push Mamta towards the shoes. Mamta knows exactly what she has to do. She goes from sandal to shoe to shoe, bending low to touch each big toe.

The buckles give her their blessing, from the oversized black shoes there’s nothing. Then again from three of the city shoes there are more blessings, each one brushing the top of her bowed clothed head with a hot heavy palm. She presumes the city shoes that didn’t give their blessings belong to her groom, still too shy to touch the top of her head with his palm in the company of strangers. She is both pleased and eased by her deduction. Not to leave her father out, Mamta touches the toes in the Hawaii slippers also.

Lata Bai pulls Mamta towards the charpoy. Three city shoes rearrange themselves to give the bride room to squeeze in next to her future husband. Only the buckles stay where they are, surrounded by a moat of space.

Then the white apparition that is Pundit Jasraj-feeler-up-of-brides-to-be appears, and deposits itself on the floor. Instinctively Mamta pulls her bare toes away, like a cat retracting its claws. The train whistle sounds in the distance. There is only one word on Lata Bai’s mind: Jivkant. She looks up, showing her face to her guests. Mohit and Sneha poke their heads out of the hut as the whistle goes off.

It is up to the priest to create a miniature replica of the cosmic world on the earth between him and the couple. He deftly places a small pot with sacred fire at his feet and surrounds it with geometric symbols.

Pundit Jasraj-feeler-up-of-brides-to-be may not be wholly holy, but he knows the philosophy of enlightenment well and is able to impart it with authority. He starts by propitiating the prodigious pantheon of over three million gods, demi-gods and avatars. His hymn is an ancient secret code revealed to the sages during their deepest meditation in a language long dead. It celebrates the universe in its myriad and infinite forms, thereby proving that the universe must be formless; and acknowledges the multiple opportunities that exist concurrently embodied by cause and effect, thereby proving the connectivity of creation.

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