Читать книгу Someone Else’s Garden - Dipika Rai - Страница 6

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.