by Alka Joshi
March 15, 1956
By March, our henna business had grown so much that I had to put new clients on a waiting list. The three of us were busy around the clock. Radha mixed henna paste before she left for the Maharani School. Malik and I packed the tiffins and traveled across Jaipur to our appointments. After school, Radha went to Kanta’s. When she returned to Mrs. Iyengar’s in the evening, she helped me cook delicacies for the ladies. All of us were so exhausted by day’s end that we only spoke when necessary.
Did you get the limes we needed for the hair tonic?
How is your math homework coming?
Did we get reimbursed for the stale bawchi oil?
I was also finishing up the Rajnagar house. Using Samir’s loan, I had paid off Narayan and hired another builder to complete the privy. There was still no electricity, but we could manage with lanterns. We were almost ready to move in.
One fine morning, when the temperature had not yet begun to rise, I was bringing a few tiffins down the stairs for our first appointment of the day. Radha and Malik had gone down before me. When I got to the courtyard doors, I heard them talking outside.
“No, it was you. I saw you as clearly as I see you now in front of me.” Malik sounded as if he were talking to someone much younger, who needed explaining.
“What if it were me? I don’t owe you any explanations, Malik.”
“Who said you did? Just be careful, accha?”
Lately, they had been bickering like tetchy siblings. I put it down to too much work and not enough sleep.
I stepped through the gates. “Careful about what?”
Radha shot a hot glance at Malik before she walked away, headed for school.
He wouldn’t meet my eyes. Instead, he said, “Be right back. I forgot the khus-khus fans.”
* * *
I attended to Maharani Latika once a week now, more as a way for her to relax than recuperate. The young queen’s mourning period was all but over. She was becoming more involved in the day-to-day workings of her school.
One day as Malik and I arrived at the palace, a sleek black Bentley was just coming out of the gates.
Maharani Latika leaned out of the driver’s window. She was wearing dark sunglasses and a white chiffon scarf. Her lady-in-waiting sat in the passenger seat.
“I was hoping to catch you!” Her lips widened in a brilliant smile. “I regret I must cancel today, but the bursar will pay you. I’ve decided to teach the young ladies the fox trot. Why not come along and watch your sister?”
I was torn. I would love to see Radha dance like a fine lady, but would Radha want me to see her? Or would she think I was spying on her?
I politely declined. I decided to go see Kanta instead. I wanted to see how her pregnancy was progressing, and to be honest, I wanted to talk to her about Radha. As much as I told myself my sister would outgrow her sullenness with me, I wasn’t convinced. Kanta, who was closer in age to Radha, would know better how I should deal with it.
* * *
I found Kanta relaxing on her living room couch, listening to the radio. She was happy to see me and called for tea. She told me she’d been spotting blood, and her doctor had advised her to lie prone for the remainder of her pregnancy. She pulled her sari off her shoulder, revealing her belly, proudly displaying the small swelling there.
“Don’t laugh at me, Lakshmi, but I’ve taken to doing puja with Saasuji!” Kanta chuckled when she saw the look on my face. “I’ll do anything to bring good luck on my baby.”
I smiled and held up my hands in surrender.
Her servant, Baju, entered with the tray, his mustache twitching. Manu’s mother, Kanta’s mother-in-law, was right behind him, complaining that he had made her lassi too thick. Baju handed me a cup of tea and Kanta a glass of rose milk and a plate of black-eyed peas.
“For luck,” her saas said, nodding at the plate.
Grumbling under his breath, Baju left the room.
Kanta’s mother-in-law settled in for a visit, telling me that, without her help, Kanta wouldn’t know how to raise a baby. “She didn’t even know that rose milk gives babies pink cheeks!”
Kanta hid a smile behind her glass.
Finally, her saas left, saying she didn’t want Baju making the subji too spicy. “Too much heat and the baby comes out angry,” she said.
When she was out of earshot, I set my cup down. I felt awkward talking to my friend about Radha, embarrassed that I wasn’t able to understand or handle my own sister.
“Kanta...you and Radha—you’re so close. I was hoping you could help me figure out—”
Before I could finish my sentence, Radha burst into the room, followed by Malik, Kanta’s saas and Baju. Still in her school uniform, my sister was holding her hand over her left eye. She looked glum.
I rose from the sofa. “What happened? Why aren’t you at school?”
Radha froze. She hadn’t expected to see me. She lowered her hand. Her left eye was swollen and surrounded by a deepening purple hue.
I gasped and ran to my sister.
“Hai Ram!” Kanta cried from the sofa.
“Are you hurt anywhere else?” I put my hands on Radha’s shoulders, scanning her for other injuries. “Baju, bring me ice.”
Kanta’s saas asked, “Should we call the police?”
“No!” Radha said, too loudly, curling her fists.
“Radha!” I scolded her for speaking harshly to an elder.
Baju brought the ice bag. I pressed it to Radha’s swollen eye until she yanked it from my hand and took over. She walked farther into the room and flopped down in an armchair, still holding the ice bag against her eye. “That stupid Sheela Sharma!”
My heart did a somersault. What now?
“Sheela Sharma robbed you?” This was from Saasuji, who directed her next comment to Kanta: “I told you that the Sharma girl was ill-mannered. And to find out she’s a goonda!”
Kanta said nothing. Her eyes were round with shock.
Radha said impatiently, “She didn’t rob me. She hit me with her elbow when we were dancing the fox trot.”
“Fox trot?” Saasuji said in heavily accented English. Her tone implied that Western dance was a worse offense, to her, than robbery. “You see what kind of thing that school is teaching? These foreign customs—not at all suitable for Rajasthani girls.” She sniffed.
“Baap re baap, Saasuji!” Kanta turned to Radha. “This happened at school? It was an accident?” Kanta asked.
“Yes. No.” Radha looked down at the carpet. “I know she meant to do it.”
“Why?”
“She doesn’t like me.” My sister hesitated. “The maharani paired us up for the dance—Sheela and me. Sheela kept telling me I would never learn how to dance—my feet were too big. Then she hit me in the eye with her elbow and said, ‘Kala kaloota baingan loota.’” You’re as dark as an eggplant.
Kanta looked at me. “We should call Mrs. Sharma.”
Radha slapped her free hand on the arm of her chair, making us all jump. “No! I’m not a tattletale. It’s just—I didn’t grow up in a big fancy house like her. I don’t fit in with any of them. I’m clumsy. I don’t wear the right clothes. I don’t have the right shoes. I’m different and they know it.”
She flicked a nervous glance at me, caught my startled expression. She’d never told me that she felt left out. It never occurred to me that more privileged girls might pick on her.
Kanta frowned. “That’s the reason Sheela did this? Because you’re not like them?”
Radha eyed me from the corner of her eye. In a small voice, she said, “Maybe she remembers that I tried to throw rocks at her once.”
Kanta looked to me for confirmation.
I shook my head. “It was just silly nonsense. No one was hurt.”
“It’s jolly well no one was hurt! Yo
ung women shouldn’t be throwing rocks at one another,” Kanta said.
“My head.” Radha pressed her forehead with her free hand.
Kanta’s saas glared at Baju, who was hovering by the door. “Why are you still here, you fool? Go get aspirin and water.”
Baju’s mustache twitched as it did when he was offended as he left the room.
“Well, there’s an easy fix to this.” Kanta turned to the table beside the sofa and picked up the phone. Before I could stop her, she was chatting with her tailor, informing him that she would bring Radha the next afternoon to get measured for English dresses. Then she called her hairdresser and made an appointment to have Radha’s hair cut in a smart pageboy.
When she put the phone down, she was smiling. She looked at Radha, then at me. “Now, don’t scold me, Lakshmi. It’s important for a modern girl to look, well, modern.”
Radha jumped up and threw her arms around Kanta’s neck.
I turned away. Kanta always knew just what to say and do to make my sister happy when I seemed to have no clue.
ELEVEN
April 20, 1956
I wasn’t keen on having a move-in ceremony for my new house. But Malik kept asking, and I finally relented. Malik’s fondness for rituals like the Hindu Griha Pravesh wasn’t surprising. Many Muslims, the majority of whom had lived in India for centuries and decided to stay after Partition, observed Hindu customs as well as their own. After all, celebrations were happy occasions and no one was excluded.
At the entrance of my new Rajnagar house, Malik erected two bamboo poles and strung a garland of mango leaves between them. They were fertility symbols, per custom, but since I was a woman who didn’t see children in my future given my circumstances, they made me slightly uneasy. Still, I was excited about finally being able to call this house my home. Perhaps that’s what Malik, who knew me almost as well as I knew myself, wanted to help me celebrate. The walls belonged to me. The windows, the mosaic floor, the dirt in the courtyard. I even felt entitled to the stars above my roof.
Malik had also lobbied for a pandit to purify the house for the Griha Pravesh ceremony. Unless we transferred all our belongings on the auspicious date chosen by the priest (which, as it turned out, was to be April 20), we’d be inviting bad luck.
“I’ll find a pandit for us, cheap-cheap, Auntie-Boss,” he promised.
“And I’ll cook the food,” Radha added. She was eager for us to leave Mrs. Iyengar’s house. Six months ago, when she first arrived in Jaipur, she’d been happy to sleep on the stone floor of my room, but the more time she spent at Kanta’s and the Maharani School, the less enchanted she became with our humble lodgings.
Radha and Malik packed our belongings into two metal trunks and a great number of vinyl and cloth bags. They scrubbed the windows of our new house with newspapers, dusted the built-in shelves, polished the terrazzo floor until it gleamed and swept the courtyard. Over the packed dirt in the courtyard, they laid sheets and blankets for our guests to sit on. No one was allowed to enter the house now until it had been purified.
True to his word, Malik found a twenty-rupee priest, a tiny man with a bald head whose scrawny arms and legs protruded from his saffron robes like shoots on a potato. He wore eyeglasses as thick as the bottles of colored water sold at street stalls. (Did all priests look like Gandhi-ji, I wondered, or was it Gandhi-ji who started to resemble all pandits?) Because I still couldn’t afford shutters on the windows (a requirement for Griha Pravesh), the pandit was uncomfortable agreeing to the ceremony until Malik sweetened the pot with another five rupees.
The priest’s assistants began unloading their supplies for the ceremony: a statuette of Ganesh, several silver plates, three silver bowls, sandalwood incense, freshly cut flowers (red, of course, for good luck, and picked, I was sure, from a park along the way, as many women did on their way to temple in the mornings), leaves of the camphor laurel tree, a red candle, red cotton thread, sesame seeds, whole wheat grain, a clay pot of red vermillion and water paste, a silver pot of ghee, bells and a wooden rosary tied with red thread.
Malik added the fresh sweets he’d bought this morning from the corner shop.
First, the pandit built an altar to Lord Ganesh. From time to time, he consulted a well-thumbed book of incantations, although he seemed to know the words by heart. “‘The tusk he holds represents service; the goad prods us along our path; the noose reminds us of that which binds us; to his favored he grants all boons.’”
Guests began arriving. Since it was tradition to invite every neighbor to ceremonies with a box of sweets (whether you knew them or not), Malik had dropped off boxes at everyone’s doorstep. They were the first to arrive, curious to meet us and to get a firsthand glimpse of the new house on the street.
Radha and I were both delighted to welcome Mr. and Mrs. Pandey from our former lodgings at Mrs. Iyengar’s. I suspected that, like me, Radha had a small crush on Sheela Sharma’s handsome music teacher.
Mr. and Mrs. Iyengar came, too. My former landlady made a show of examining the premises and wrinkled her snub nose. “The courtyard certainly makes such a small house more tolerable.”
I smiled at the rebuke. Nothing was going to spoil my mood today.
I had not mentioned this celebration to my ladies. It would not have been fitting for me to invite them to my home—so much more humble than theirs. But Radha must have let it slip to Kanta because I saw my sister leap up to greet Kanta and Manu and usher them into the courtyard. With a stab of envy, I thought Radha never showed such enthusiasm when I came into a room. It reminded me that the gap between us had widened since she started attending the Maharani School a few months ago.
Kanta appeared cheerful even though the hollows under her eyes were dark. Manu helped ease her onto a blanket. I asked Kanta how she was feeling as it had been several weeks since I had seen her. She hadn’t felt well enough to keep our appointments.
“Except for reading and riding in moving vehicles, both of which I like to do very, very fast, all’s well. Oh, and also sleeping and eating are an issue!” she cackled.
As guests made themselves comfortable and soft-voiced conversations continued, the priest began dropping laurel leaves into the clay pot of ghee. He then lit them with a match, and prodded the flame. Without skipping a beat in his repetitions of Om Ganapati Namah, he pointed to the virgin incense stub, and one of his assistants hurried to light it. The unexpected combination of scorching camphor, ghee and sandalwood was musky, sweet, bitter and rich at the same time—the scents of past ceremonies, long forgotten.
I thought of my marriage years ago, the hasty ritual, the pandit complaining that he could barely afford the ghee with the fee he was being offered. No chura ceremony for my uncles to slide bangles on my arm and give me money, for I had no uncles. Pitaji struggling to stay upright, the yellows of his eyes red-veined from drink. Maa shooing flies from the meager platters of pilao, samosas, subjis and sweets.
With my red wedding sari shielding my face, I’d cried and cried, amazed I still had tears left after arguing with Maa for five straight days: Did Maa not need me to help to teach the school when Pitaji was absent? Was fifteen so very old to still be at home? Who would roast and grind the gram after I left? Who would bring water from the well?
Maa was gentle, but firm. She was brought up to obey her parents and her husband, not to defy, question or contradict. She told me Pitaji’s books had filled my head with too many silly ideas. They had given me the useless notion that I could make my own decisions. As a daughter, my job was to marry the man my parents chose for me, as she had. She was as powerless to change that age-old tradition as I was. Besides, there was no money to keep me at home.
I glanced at Maa’s neck, where her gold chain used to hang and where the groove it had carved would always be a reminder of what she had sacrificed, and knew that to be true.
But I also knew that as soon as
I married, I would become jaaya—my husband taking birth in my womb in the form of future children. And once there were children, there would be no more I or me, only we and them. So often I’d begged my namesake, the goddess Lakshmi, to hear my pleas—I’m hungry for the knowledge of three Swaraswatis! Let me see the wider world before shutting me inside a small life. But, as always, she’d held up her delicate hands in apology: It’s the way it has always been.
It would have been so much sweeter to share today’s ceremony with my parents. I would have seated them in the place of pride—in the front of the pandit—and introduced them to my guests, fed them rich burfi with my own hands, cooled their faces with khus-khus fans—
The rustling beside me brought me back to the ceremony. Radha was holding a chunni to her nose as if the fragrance of the altar was too strong. She rose, weaving toward the privy. It was the third time in an hour she had done so.
Malik met her as she came out, whispered in her ear, then ran to the mutki to get her a drink of water. It was only April, but she was fanning her face as if the heat were unbearable. Malik handed her the tumbler. She took a sip and blanched. I blamed myself. The packing and cleaning of the last few days, school, the chores for our henna business—it had been too much for her.
When she returned to her seat, I noticed she’d rinsed her face—the tendrils on her forehead were damp and her cheeks pink. She looked so different from the dusty, hollow-cheeked girl I’d first met just six months ago. Now, her face looked as ripe as a mango in June. She even carried herself differently—shoulders back, neck long. She walked with a surer step. The pageboy suited her oval face. Her village diction was less noticeable; she’d dropped double words like small-small and far-far. The other day she used a word—what was it? Antediluvian?—and I had to ask her the definition. It made me proud—how easily she picked things up.
Pandit-ji poured sesame seeds, whole wheat and red paste into the small fire, dousing it. Smoke curled up into the open sky. He wrapped banana leaves around the warm pot, and turned to hand it to me. But I nodded at Radha. I knew she would enjoy being the bearer. She bit her lower lip and smiled shyly as she lifted the pot to her head. Then she rose carefully and went into the empty house to disinfect and purify it.