Читать книгу The Good Girls - Sonia Faleiro - Страница 20

Lalli Asks for a Memento

Lalli’s parents returned from their pilgrimage with presents of amulets and chains. Things went quiet for a while.

Then one magical afternoon, everyone was out. Padma and Lalli asked cousin Manju to open her suitcase. They went through her clothes carefully. The blouses were brightly coloured and made of a soft fabric. They slipped like water between the girls’ fingers. The jeans were very, very tight. Did Manju really wear such clothes? Could she even sit in them? Here in the village, she had been as boring as they, sticking to roomy salwar kameezes.

They decided to try on the clothes. They wriggled into the blouses and jeans and then turned to look. The same heart-shaped face, the same long hair. The solemn eyes. But the funny costumes pinched their bottoms and brought out the giggles.

‘You look smart,’ they said to each other when they had recovered their composure.

‘Yes, yes!’ shouted Siya Devi, walking through the door. ‘Show off your thighs!’ The jeans didn’t reveal the girls’ thighs; they only revealed that the girls had thighs. But it was more than Siya Devi allowed. She disparagingly referred to the outfits as ‘tiny clothes’, too provocative to wear, and ordered the children to change back into their salwar kameezes.

Later, perhaps to show her gratitude, Lalli drew her younger cousin aside. ‘Yaar,’ she said, ‘you’ll go away. We should get a photo taken together at the bazaar.’ Manju brought up the subject in a phone call to her mother who was back home in Noida. Her mother wasn’t keen, perhaps because money was tight. ‘What’s the hurry,’ she complained. ‘Are you dying sometime soon?’

But Manju was pleased to be acknowledged by her cousin. And it had felt nice to share her clothes. The girls weren’t allowed in the bazaar, but they weren’t watched all the time either. ‘We went!’ Manju said later. ‘Chori chupke!’ On the sly.

Out the door, down the lane. There it was, just ahead, a little bit further. They held hands, squeezed and then plunged forward.

The road was packed with rows of tiny, peering shops that looked like the eyes of a dragonfly. The Katra shopkeepers sat in their undershirts, surrounded by sacks of rice, animal feed and barrels of cooking oil. They chatted on their mobile phones and read the newspaper, only looking up when a customer stopped by. Some of their customers were young men who took selfies against the background of nice cars that happened to be parked there, but most reminded the girls of their fathers. There was something so familiar about the way these men retrieved the thin roll of notes from their shirt pockets, almost in slow motion, and the care with which they counted the change they got back. That look of dread was familiar too. Too much was going out, too little was coming in, everything was fragile.

There were too many men, the girls suddenly realised. They were shouting and laughing. They were roaring phat phat phat past in motorcycles. Into the shop, quickly now.

The flash went POP.

The girls blinked.