Читать книгу Someone Else’s Garden - Dipika Rai - Страница 8

Chapter 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Circus? No circus – with another man.’

‘Oho, what is the world coming to?’

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

‘Hai, poor thing,’ says Mamta.

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

‘Amma, how can you say that?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Perhaps he can’t get leave.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘So what’s it to be?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Sneha, get to work!’

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

‘Sneha,’ she warns, ‘chapattis.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What will the widows do?’

The mother shrugs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Namaste. Namaste.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I . . . I . . .’

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

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

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

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

‘Not too late, I hope. Not too late.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Meet our new in-laws.’

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

‘Namaste.’

‘Namaste.’

‘From where?’

‘Barigaon.’

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

‘Not our zamindar, Rattan Das?’

‘Yes, exactly.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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