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Chapter Four

Hira Lal’s body was cremated just before dawn. Their rituals at the ghats completed, the little group trudged through the narrow streets of Rawalpur. Holding a lantern, Hira Lal’s mother led the way down the dim alleyways. Chuyia walked silently behind her, clutching a small cloth bundle under one arm. Her feet were bare. Somnath followed closely behind Chuyia, holding a larger bundle and an umbrella with a silver handle. The sounds of roosters crowing and of dogs barking broke the silence. In the pre-dawn darkness, they passed a slightly open door; a slice of light fell through the slit, illuminating the cobbled street and an ancient, dilapidated wall. Chuyia, with the resilience of the very young, was again alive to the new stimuli and looked around her with inquisitive eyes. The walls were pockmarked with patches of brick that showed through the crumbled cement and flaking whitewash. Every instance of architecture appeared to be a crumbling, slowly disintegrating shell of once stalwart structures.

They continued up the cobbled streets until they came to an old building with stray patches of whitewash spared by the elements. A bicycle lay against a broken wall. Chuyia had never seen one before, and she turned to her father. His glance slid past her: it was no time for explanations. A tree grew out of the wall, its entwined willowy trunk crowned by patches of green. Hira Lal’s mother led them past it to a door with worn black paint. The walls on either side were marked with inverted swastikas, an ancient holy symbol. She walked up the steps and knocked.

A shadowy figure opened the door to reveal a dark hallway. Hira Lal’s mother gestured to them to remain outside, while she followed the figure in. Somnath and Chuyia sat on the front steps, placing their bundles at their sides. Chuyia looked around her, eyes wide with questions. She saw moving figures at the end of the hall where it was lighter, and against her father’s protests darted into the hallway and boldly walked down it.

Chuyia pressed a small hand to the wall of a parapet and peered over it into a courtyard. Barely two feet from where she stood, holding a string of wooden prayer beads between her fingers, a woman, who could as easily have been a man, sat on her haunches staring at her. She was very dark, and the thick white fuzz on her tonsured head made a stark contrast. Two ashen lines were drawn perpendicularly from the top of her forehead to a point between her eyebrows, giving her elongated face a fierce aspect. The woman acknowledged Chuyia’s presence with a slight nod that appeared to beckon her, as she continued to slowly rock back and forth on her haunches, counting her beads. A small plant sprouted from a crack at the base of a pillar near her. Chuyia vaguely registered the hectic chirrup of sparrows in the courtyard. The woman’s mouth was clamped in a sombre line, but her eyes were kind.

Chuyia, terrified by this frightening apparition, turned away and rushed back down the hall to her father, hurriedly saying, “Baba, let’s go home; Baba, let’s go home. I don’t like this place.”

Somnath pulled her down beside him on the step and said, “This is your home now, bitya.”

Chuyia’s face crumpled with disbelief. Cutting through the questions that swirled in her mind, she asked, “Where is amma?”

His face heavy with sadness, Somnath turned away, unable to answer his daughter. His lip was drawn in a taut, grieved line, and his chin crumpled beneath it. The flesh beneath his neck hung in a deep fold.

Almost quaking with fear, Chuyia again asked, “Baba, where is amma?”

Somnath could neither meet his daughter’s gaze, nor bring himself to answer her.

Chuyia’s voice rose in anger, and she slapped his hand and thigh as she demanded, “Baba, Baba, where is amma?” She could not understand why he didn’t answer her.

Hira Lal’s mother emerged from the doorway with the widow Kunti. In her early thirties, Kunti had brown skin the colour of creamed coffee and black cropped hair. She stooped to pick up Chuyia’s bundle from the stairs, and Hira Lal’s mother grabbed Chuyia by the wrist. As Chuyia fought to break free, Kunti, strong and wiry as a whip, clamped her steely fingers around Chuyia’s other arm and hoisted the struggling child to her feet. Together, they pulled her up the stairs and through the hallway. Abandoning the howling child to her fate, Hira Lal’s mother, blaming the girl for a karmic debt of past sins that had deprived her of her son, trudged back stone-faced and grieving, while Chuyia screamed, “Baba, don’t leave me here! Baba, don’t leave me!”

Somnath stood helpless, resigned to his fate and the fate of his daughter. Hira Lal’s mother pulled the black panels together and firmly shut the door of the ashram on his daughter’s fearful cries and on her life.

Somnath turned and led the way, and Hira Lal’s mother followed him to the river.

Inside the ashram, Chuyia continued to shriek her outrage at finding herself deserted in her strange surroundings. “Let me go! I’m not staying here!” she screamed over and over as Kunti, using both hands, pulled her into the courtyard. A couple of elderly widows who had been tending a tulsi plant sprouting from a concrete planter on the verandah straightened their backs to watch. Another, applying fresh clay to the unpaved courtyard, hastily carried her bucket out of harm’s way to a groove beneath a weedy, slanting tree that cut into the verandah roof.

Kunti, grimacing with the effort, held Chuyia by both shoulders as the girl continued to kick and scream. Chuyia managed to free one hand and struck the widow wherever she could. Alternately remonstrating and scolding, Kunti tried to calm her.

The commotion drew the ashram’s other residents into the courtyard. Around twenty widows, ranging in age from twenty-five to seventy, emerged slowly and gathered around Kunti and Chuyia. Wraith-like figures in white saris, their every movement seemed to be an apology for their continued existence. They were unadorned except for the two-pronged ash-smears on their foreheads that marked them as devotees of Lord Krishna. With their shaved heads and long, stern faces, some looked like men. They watched in silence as Kunti struggled with the new arrival. Chuyia had by now become quite hysterical.

Suddenly, Chuyia’s cries were interrupted by a loud command. “Quiet! Shut her mouth!”

Chuyia was shocked into silence by the power of the voice, and watched in amazement as a large old woman, supported by two widows, emerged from the shadowy recesses. Madhumati hobbled precariously to the takth, her accustomed perch in the courtyard, and sat down heavily on the weathered planks. In contrast to the stringy widows, Madhumati had an abundance of slack flesh that made her look much older than her fifty-odd years, and though she wore the same drab white sari as the other widows and her grey hair was as closely cropped to her scalp, she was clearly the ruler of the dilapidated ashram.

“Hey, you whore; why haven’t you fed my Mitthu?” she shouted at Snehlata, the widow Chuyia now recognized as the mannish-looking person she had seen when she peeped over the parapet wall. The woman was still counting her beads and rocking dispiritedly.

“The poor parrot won’t stop squawking.”

“Didi, there are no lentils,” replied a lantern-faced widow, looking up meekly.

“What? No lentils? Then go buy some, you wretch!” Madhumati shouted. “‘No lentils,’ she says,” she muttered, disgusted.

Madhumati’s expressive face underwent a remarkable transformation as she turned her attention to the bewildered newcomer. Her features softened and her face was suffused with sympathy, as she smiled fondly and beckoned the child to come to her. Chuyia, whose crying had slowed to an occasional involuntary sob, walked tentatively toward Madhumati.

In a voice surprisingly sweet, Madhumati exclaimed, “You poor child. How I feel for you! I was also very young when my bastard husband died! Come! Sit here.”

Hesitantly, Chuyia clambered up onto the ample lap proffered by Madhumati. It was like scaling a slippery hill. Sweat oozed from Madhumati as from a wet sponge. She rocked Chuyia gently back and forth on her lap and stroked her shorn head. Chuyia’s breath still came in short gasps. Continuing to speak in dulcet, sympathetic tones, Madhumati told her, “In our shared grief, we’re all sisters here, and this ashram is our only refuge.”

The other widows softly murmured their agreement. A tear trickled down Chuyia’s forlorn face. “I want my amma,” she said on a sobbing intake of breath.

Unmoved by Chuyia’s grief, Madhumati continued her practised spiel. “Our Holy Books say, ‘A wife is part of her husband while he’s alive.’ Right?”

The widows nodded their heads in solemn concurrence. “And when our husbands die, God help us, the wives also half die.” She paused for effect and sighed dramatically. “So, how can a poor half-dead woman feel any pain?” she asked, not really expecting any answer.

Chuyia, tears still slipping down her face, raised her head, and between sniffles, replied with a child’s innocent logic, “Because she’s half alive?”

Flaring into a sudden rage, Madhumati heaved herself up from her charpoy and threw the little girl to the ground. Chuyia was stunned and terrified. Looming over her, Madhumati snarled, “Don’t try and be too clever with me, or I’ll throw you into the river!”

Repulsed and frightened by the grotesque figure standing over her, Chuyia shouted, “I don’t want to be a stupid widow! Fatty!” And before anyone knew what was happening, Chuyia darted forward on all fours and dug her sharp teeth into Madhumati’s thick ankle. Then she took off, scrambling for her life.

The shocked widows, stunned into inaction by what they had just witnessed, looked dismayed, except for one ancient, sunken-cheeked widow, Patirajji, who was enjoying the spectacle of someone getting the better of the bullying old bat.

Madhumati yelped with pain and screamed after Chuyia, “What did you say? I’ll teach you to speak to me like that!” She turned to the immobilized widows. “She bites like a little bitch! What are you corpses staring at? Go. Catch her! Ass-lickers!” she shouted, galvanizing them into a spurt of action.

For the next few minutes, chaos reigned as Chuyia led the women on a wild chase through the courtyard, weaving between the crumbling pillars of the verandah and dodging past them among the few gnarled trees that had survived in this barren place.

Madhumati shrieked, “Are your arms and legs broken? Catch her!”

Kunti and two younger women were making a good effort, but Chuyia eluded their grasp. She escaped through an open door and quickly crouched behind it. Beyond this door the widow Shakuntala was at work, grinding turmeric roots. She looked at the frightened girl speculatively. When Kunti burst into the room and pulled the kitchen door to reveal Chuyia, Shakuntala intervened. “Let her be,” she said, with a quiet note of authority that surprised Chuyia.

Kunti stammered, “But . . . Madhu-didi wants—”

Shakuntala looked at her steadily. “Leave,” she said.

Kunti, and the other widows who were standing in the door, reluctantly withdrew.

Shakuntala studied Chuyia indifferently, all the while continuing her task.

Crouched behind the door, Chuyia lowered her eyes. She was awestruck. The other widows had deferred to her stern-visaged saviour. She would do well to keep on her good side. Adversity is a rapid teacher.

“Come here,” Shakuntala ordered.

Chuyia crawled over to her on all fours and raised her head to look at her with her expressive, questioning eyes. The widow’s skin was smooth, and her cropped hair was a black fuzz.

“Sit with your back to me,” instructed Shakuntala.

Chuyia did as she was told. Shakuntala took a great yellow glob of turmeric paste from the grinding slab and spread it all over Chuyia’s raw scalp. It stung.

“It’s turmeric. It cools the head,” she said.

With her white sari and bald, yellow head, Chuyia was a very different child from the girl who had ridden in the bullock-cart.

Chuyia turned to face Shakuntala. “You saved me like the Goddess Durga,” she said, her eyes round with the beginnings of trust.

Shakuntala turned Chuyia’s head back around firmly and continued to apply the paste to the girl’s scalp. “Sharp teeth and an even sharper tongue! I’m no goddess. Now go sit in the sun. Go,” said Shakuntala, dismissing her. She dipped her fingers into a bowl of coconut oil to remove the dark stains.

Chuyia made no move to go.

Shakuntala spoke impatiently. “Are you deaf?”

After a pause, Chuyia, speaking in a small, fearful voice, said, “They’ll throw me into the river!”

“Only if you bite someone else. Now go.”

Reluctantly, Chuyia left the sanctuary of Shakuntala’s room, but not before she had impishly stuck out her tongue.

Ambling back into the courtyard, Chuyia came upon Patirajji, sitting on the verandah with her back to the pillar. The old widow greeted her with a twinkle in her eyes, and Chuyia got the impression that she had been waiting for her. Chuyia squatted close to Patirajji, as if for protection, ready to spring up at any sign of a widow-attack.

They sat in silence while Patirajji peered at Chuyia short-sightedly. Girlishly formal, she asked, “What’s your name?”

“Chuyia.”

Shakuntala, concerned for the girl, lifted a ragged yellow curtain to look at Chuyia and Patirajji from her window.

Patirajji made up bit of doggerel and sang:

Chuyia the mouse,

With the sharp little teeth,

And the tight little bite,

Bled the lumpy old louse.