Читать книгу The Good Girls - Sonia Faleiro - Страница 19

The Invisible Women

The women could do even less. If Veere’s wife, Jhalla Devi, stuck her head out the door, she went unacknowledged. If she lingered it was with the understanding that she’d better not open that mouth of hers.

The invisible woman preferred her own company anyway, usually in the ditch opposite the house. There she sat, patting and shaping dung cakes for fertiliser, disinfectant and fuel, in the one sari she wore day and night wrapped around her like a sack, its pallu pulled over her like a hood. Her glass bangles tinkled and her silver toe rings gleamed, but her face simmered with resentment.

The other Yadav woman didn’t even make it this far. Veere’s only daughter-in-law was so strictly regulated that her neighbours couldn’t say for sure what she looked like. In fact, Basanta was big-eyed and fleshy-lipped; an exhausted teenager with a scrawny one-year-old. Basanta cooked and cleaned for everyone. Early on she had even offered to help her mother-in-law pat dung, but Jhalla Devi had tilted up her pinched face and glared.

Now, when Basanta was done with every possible chore in the near-empty house, she dropped to the floor. Flies nibbled at the sweat that soaked through the thin fabric of her dirty sari blouse. They clustered around her daughter’s leaking bottom, settling on her rose gold earlobes. By late afternoon, when the breezes started up, Basanta shook herself and took her little one to the back of the house. The family plot spilled into the Katra fields, with not even a fence in between. Here, the bored new mother could amuse baby Shivani without being accused by her mother-in-law and the men of flaunting herself before strangers.

‘Look, a farmer, see, grazing goats; listen, boys, look, a kite, listen, birds, see, a well. Moo, baa, bow-wow.’

Straight ahead, at a distance covered in a few minutes on foot, was Ramnath’s orchard. That summer every one of his thirteen trees heaved richly with fruit. One was a fragrant-leafed fig tree; the others were mango.