‘You two have a lot to learn,’ says Gurleen, seizing a chance to reassert some dominance. She gets herself comfortable on the charpoy again, her head on the pillow. ‘Where’s my shawl? I can hear a mosquito.’
‘Here, sisters,’ says Mehar, and they each take a corner of the shawl and billow it out so it floats down and over their faces.
4
It is their second Sunday married and an hour before the sun drops, Mehar, Gurleen and Harbans slip into some old cottons and heave the giant sloshing vat into the courtyard and on to the groundsheet. At this hour the air is lushly warm rather than oppressive and the courtyard is free of the brothers. They think their men go to the bazaar on these nights, though that is another thing they have never been told. Perhaps they play cards, Mehar suggests, as if she knows what that is. All three hitch up their salwars and twine some old jute around their legs, so they’re naked from the knees down. ‘The leaves have come up,’ Gurleen says, feeling for a way out of the chore, a rare one she finds even more tedious than rubbing clean the spinach. But Harbans is having none of it and points out that there is still plenty of ink left in them. They hold hands, forming a triad, and one by one step inside the metal vat, the indigo plants sliding around the soles of their feet. The water, as if answering a question, rises up to their calves and their feet begin their work, up-down-up-down, a surging spilling tempest, the colour wrenched out and out. They do not speak, it is enough to try to keep their balance, and slowly the pool starts to darken, their clothes and skin too, indigo staining legs and hips and face, but they stay in harmony, up-down-up-down, minutes upon minutes, so that by the time the sun has disappeared and the moon is the whole light, they let go of one another’s hands and double over, gasping.
‘One more week,’ Harbans says, as they haul the vat back to its spot against the wall.
‘Oh, go crack an egg! Surely we’re done now!’ Gurleen complains.
Mehar says nothing, picks up the crumbling soap at the pump and starts on the blue bands striping her feet. It’s up to Mai, in any case. She will decide when the time is right to colour their blooded wedding sheets and hang them out to dry.
5
‘Mehar! The fire needs kindling!’
‘Yes, Mai!’ Mehar sighs, placing down the bucket of milk and turning indoors, her thoughts wheeling.
She is shovelling out the old ashes when Mai enters and kicks the flour barrel to see how much the girls are using for themselves.
‘You three guzzle more than the men,’ Mai says. ‘Halve it next time.’
‘As you wish. But we only eat—’
‘Are any of you seeded yet?’ Mai asks, in a grotesque swerve.
‘No, Mai.’ Be strong, she reminds herself. Her hands slow in their work. ‘I wondered if sister Gurleen should have her child first. She’s the eldest.’
‘The fool doesn’t know which way round a kettle goes.’
Mehar takes a breath, in through her nose, out from her mouth. ‘Is she also married to the eldest?’
When she looks up, Mai is gazing at her silently, a look of horrible amusement on her face.
‘We don’t need to know,’ Mehar says in a rush, wishing she’d never asked.
‘Are you certain I send the same son to you each time?’ Mai’s expression gives in to a huge laugh: ‘The look on you!’ She strokes Mehar’s hair, a touch that Mehar hates, that feels far from maternal. ‘I’m only playing. But you’re right. You don’t need to know.’ Her face changes, the smile faltering. ‘Be thankful you’ve no father-in-law to paw and prowl over your body every night.’ She pats Mehar’s head in a leave-taking gesture. ‘Ashes. Carry on,’ and Mehar does, industriously, desperate to finish up and wash herself for an hour or more. If this is how asking the question makes her feel, she’ll never ask again. She’ll just do the work. And she does, they do:
Breaking up blocks of jaggery. Picking cotton. Picking guavas. Collecting dung. Shovelling ashes. Cutting Mai’s corns. Milking. Cooking. Preparing for the cooking. Dyeing salwars. Ironing dhotis. Sweeping the yard. Watering the yard. Draining the yard. Polishing the plates. Going to market. Going to temple. Going to pray for sons and for the long life of their husbands. Scrubbing the stone bath clean of moss. Sewing buttons. Boiling tea. Midwifing calves. Removing buffalo shit. Going for a shit amongst the high wheat (in pairs). Bathing before dawn. Eating last of all. In their room by dusk. Slats turned, window shut, moon out, veils off. Yet more darkness.
6
‘You’re used to this life now.’
He strokes Mehar’s anklebone with his thumb, back and forth, back and forth. It tickles and she wants to move her foot but knows she mustn’t. She can see nothing of him. When he stepped across the room and lifted his knee on to the bed, he moved through blackness. When he was on top of her she, like any respectable wife, averted her head. Still he strokes her anklebone. It’s as if he wants to say something. Or perhaps she’s the one who should be doing the saying? No. No. You’ll know when to open your mouth.
‘We went to see the priests.’
Ah. Children.
‘Pearls. I need to buy pearls. If you keep them under the bed you will swell. Glow. A boy.’
‘Yes,’ she says, after a moment.
She thinks she hears him nod or sigh and before he departs he closes his hand around her entire ankle and presses.
Alone, Mehar exhales with relief, rising in the same breath, and reties her hair into the nape of her neck. Children, she thinks, and sits very still in the dark to discover what she really feels about the prospect. On the one hand, the sooner sons arrive, the sooner her presence in the house is secure. Not everyone is as forgiving as her father, willing to overlook a wife who can’t birth males, refusing to switch her for another who can. But, then again, once her child comes her few moments of peace will be gone. At least now, when Mai’s out, she and Harbans can steal across the yard for a nap in the shade. What hope for that when her son is latched to her breast? Mehar’s hand goes to her neck, protectively, as if only now appreciating the luxury of being alone with herself. Another minute passes, two, until she knows she must go, and she drapes her chunni over her head, ready to yank down the veil should she need to. She opens the door and the cool marble meets her feet – her feet – as she steps outside. She feels suddenly alive, enough to levitate into the night, and it is an immense effort to remain grounded, here in this horseshoe of a yard with the three doors all opposite. Which did he enter, if any? Mehar descends the two steps that take her beyond the overhang of the veranda and on to the outer yard, where she knows to duck for the bats flying overhead and to avoid the deep divot to her right, walking a path between the washing line and the charpoys piled against the wall. At the unmarbled entrance to the china room she places her fingernails in the one spot where the door can be prised open and not make a sound. She does all this without pause or misstep because in a purely practical sense (she gets in beside Harbans) her husband is right: she is already used to this life, to this small world of hers, which is, she is now saddened to recall, just what Monty said would happen.
7
Around ten years earlier – for who can be sure? – Mehar spent most afternoons playing pittu in the hot cobbled lanes around her house. You had to stack seven stones in a tall pile before everyone on your team was struck by the opposition’s hard leather ball. Mehar, aged five, loved the game and was so quick at it. She was always first to be picked after the boys and today she’d also been the last of her team to be got out, but not before she’d picked off three from the other side, more than any other player – these were the thoughts crowding her head as she came rushing home only to be brought up short by the sight of two guests she did not recognise. They were not her aunts or uncles, nor were they anyone she knew from the village. Mehar, who was not called Mehar then, came slowly, watchfully, down the uncovered passageway, in and out of shadow. They hadn’t yet noticed h
er. The guests seemed friendly, she had to admit, sitting in the shaded half of the small square courtyard. She could see empty glasses of tea on the table along with a fussy plate of mangoes, sliced lengthways and sprinkled with some green herb. There was also a round steel tea-bowl covered with a lemon-pale cloth.
‘Ah, here she is!’ said her baba, with a smile as wide as a river, because too long in the company of adults was always difficult for him. His name was Arvind and though he had the spirit of a child, he seemed to be trying very hard to look serious today. He was wearing English trousers instead of his usual dhoti, and his turban seemed far too neat, all of which made Mehar nervous. ‘Come here,’ he said, and Mehar obliged, sitting beside her baba on the charpoy, her head snug against his armpit. She looked up into the hot blue sky and momentarily wondered what might be on the other side of the sun, but it was too white and it hurt. Her gaze fell back down, to her ordinary courtyard and these four oddly smiling adults.
‘Lovely features,’ said the female guest, whose smile seemed more tepid than her husband’s, her eyes more sly.
‘Mustard oil works wonders, when we can get it, but who can these days?’ said Mehar’s mother apologetically.
Simran was, even in the natural course of things, a very apologetic woman, a state that had only deepened following her failure to conceive another child. Her hands were in her lap and her painted – why were they painted? – thumbnails fidgeted against each other. Her daughter’s arrival seemed to have increased her anxiety and her ma, Mehar noticed, was not at all looking towards the other woman, who, for some reason, was very blatantly appraising Mehar.
‘I think she has a nice face,’ Simran ventured, ‘and, god willing, I’m sure she’ll grow into her forehead. Rest assured, I apply downward pressure on it most mornings,’ she finished, smiling, not smiling, smiling again.
‘Uff, her forehead’s fine,’ Arvind said. He turned to the male guest. ‘If they’re not washing their faces in cream, they’re pinching pegs on to their noses, and if not that then kneading the hell out of their foreheads. You’re lucky you’ve only sons. You must save a fortune in milk.’
The man laughed, a full bright overcooked laugh that made his wife wince. ‘What we save in milk we lose in flour. The rotis can’t come fast enough, isn’t that right?’
His wife, who was, of course, Mai, didn’t answer. She made a quarter turn of her knees towards Simran, tacitly suggesting that there’d been enough jibber-jabber and it was time to get down to business. ‘She’s adequate,’ she said, with the lavish rudeness a woman rich in sons finds easy to dispense. ‘In any case, an agreement was made. Shall we move on?’
Mehar’s mother nodded, with difficulty, and when tears sprang to her eyes, Mehar noticed her baba raise his hand in a caring, calming gesture. Was her ma leaving? Was Baba not going to do something?
The woman unknotted her cloth bag smartly, with her long fingers and longer palms, and lifted out a heavy-looking scarlet chunni, all sequined lozenges and gold tasselled trim. Mehar reached across and touched the tassels, which felt creepily ticklish. The man laughed, too loudly. His eyes were very red.
‘She likes it . . . It’s for you, you know.’
Mehar wanted to protest, to say that he was mistaken, that she found it revolting and didn’t want it at all, but she had a feeling she’d been caught in something too big and would be better off standing aside while the situation passed by. She returned to her baba, who picked her up by her armpits and planted her in the middle of the group. Mehar made to return to her spot but her baba’s ‘Nup!’ stayed her. The woman billowed out the scarlet chunni behind Mehar, then set it across her head and down her sides. She held her palm out towards her husband, who placed into it a crisp tan two-and-a-half-rupee note, which she touched to Mehar’s forehead before passing it to Simran. Simran then retrieved from her wedding cupboard in the inner room a glass pot of salt and handed it to her in exchange.
‘There was no need,’ the woman said, pocketing it all the same. ‘It’s got so expensive nowadays.’
‘Which of your sons have you decided upon for her?’ Arvind asked.
The woman spoke before her husband could answer. ‘Where’s the rush? Details can be agreed later. For now . . .’ And she pulled the large brocaded chunni down over Mehar’s eyes, her mouth, all the way to her stomach, and Mehar realised with a sudden thick panic in her chest that it was her they had come to wrap up and take away. ‘Her new name is Mehar Kaur. And may she bring mercy with her.’
* * *
*
That evening, with the awful guests gone and, moreover, gone without her, Mehar made a start on her father’s shirt. For some weeks now, Simran had been building up Mehar’s repertoire of household chores, fortifying her daughter with those skills that would prove most useful in her new life. Weaving baskets, separating lentils, catching mice, and, as now, ironing. Mehar spat into the oven and the coals hissed theatrically. Gingerly, she leaned in with a long-handled spoon and extracted all three pieces from the fire, dropped them into a flat-bottomed brass jar, and gripping the pot under its thick lip, ran to the room where she’d laid the shirt out on a muslin blanket. As she pressed the hot bottom of the jar across the rough cotton, in and out of the creases, her tongue between her teeth, the repetition of the act sent her mind back to the guests, to the stern woman with the thin face and skinned-back hair. Not nice people. And not allowed back, she told herself, even as she touched her forehead experimentally. What was wrong with her forehead?
She snapped out of it when Monty’s silhouette appeared across the red glaze of the window. He was Mehar’s cousin and had been living with them for several months, sent by his mother (Simran’s sister, who’d birthed two sons) to help on the land until such time as Simran delivered a boy of her own. It was a situation the eight-year-old Monty still resented and Mehar ignored him as he entered the room and searched under the charpoy and behind the incense burners lined unevenly upon the shelves. His hair was clipped short, his sleeves sliced off at the shoulder, and his movements were quick and abrupt, as if living here made him flinch.
‘Have you seen my spittoon?’ he asked.
Mehar smacked her tongue against the roof of her mouth – no.
‘Hell.’ He stepped towards her. ‘Do mine next?’
‘Where is it?’
He paused. ‘Your front teeth overlap. Did you know that?’
Her forehead and her front teeth. With great forbearance, Mehar smiled, carried on with her work, but Monty continued, his grievance against this family fuelling him on.
‘Those people here earlier. You know you’re marrying their son?’
‘I’m not,’ Mehar said calmly, used to Monty’s nastiness. ‘They’ve gone, anyway.’
He raised one foot on to the charpoy, deliberately mussing her ironing, and ran his hand down his shin. Mehar pulled the muslin blanket taut again.
‘You’ll be going to live with them soon. They’ve even changed your name.’
‘That’s silly,’ Mehar said, though it disturbed her that Monty seemed to be repeating something her baba had mentioned a few hours ago, after they’d gone. Back then, she hadn’t been really listening, too busy with the elation of the guests departing alone.
‘Maybe their son chose your new name.’
‘Which son?’
‘The one you’re going to marry and live with.’
And now Mehar was starting to panic again, the same wildness she’d felt when they’d pulled the scarlet chunni down over her face.
‘I think your grandfather and their grandfather were friends. They’d shaken hands on it or something.’
He really did sound like he knew a lot, Monty did. ‘Shut up,’ Mehar said, feeling suddenly hot and tearful and overwhelmed. ‘Or I’ll burn you.’
‘You’ll burn that shirt first,’ Monty warned, and Mehar removed the jar to the stee
l plate. ‘Oh, God,’ he continued, ‘I hope your mother gives you a brother soon or I bet I’ll end up carrying you into the temple. What’s taking them so long?’
She didn’t want anyone carrying her in anywhere, ever. She looked down at the shirt, fighting tears, and then, with the same calm stoicism she often overheard her mother praising, looked up into Monty’s face. ‘When will I have to go? Can I see Diwali first?’
‘In about ten years,’ Monty said, authoritatively, and Mehar’s eyes widened in euphoria and a small laugh burst out of her mouth, because ten years were unimaginable: twice as long as she’d already been on this earth, yes, she knew that, and yet strangely incalculable in all the ways that mattered. Each year seemed to contain so many more, the seasons stretching on and on, so much so that Monty might as well have said ‘never’, and thoughts of marriage slipped away, away and down the drains outside their house, only resurfacing when Mehar was eleven and Monty came running up the stairs and on to the roof, his slippers quick against the concrete.
‘Your mother-in-law’s here!’ he gasped.
Mehar had been playing pat-a-cake with one of the neighbours’ toddlers, both of their faces painted in the black and red of Kali, for Dussehra would be upon them in a few days. ‘Who? Here now?’ she said and he lunged for her arm and pulled her towards the stairs. ‘But my face!’
‘She asked to see you straight away. Ma sent me.’ Monty had been with the family for so long now that he had taken to calling Mehar’s mother Ma, and Simran’s sister, the woman who birthed him and whom he saw perhaps once a year, he addressed as Massi, as like-a-mother. At the bottom of the stairs they slowed and Monty, still with his hand around Mehar’s wrist, led her to the window at the rear of the yard and peered into the house. Dust idled in shafts of sunlight. On a brown, bruised-looking settee sat Mai, straight-backed, nibbling decorously at a sweetmeat while Ma violently fanned her.
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