That morning, 27 May, it was just the girls in the house, with the two mothers. Padma was frying slices of bottle gourd in a seasoning of salt and chilli powder. Over the wall, Siya Devi and Lalli made sure the buffaloes were fed, the courtyard was swept and an afternoon meal of curry and rotis prepared over the smoky outdoor fire. Siya Devi reminded her daughter to keep the food covered. ‘These brazen monkeys will steal every last roti if they can; given half a chance they will run off with the aate ka dabba.’
When Lalli picked up her sharp-tongued sickle to lend family members a hand with the harvest, Padma insisted on tagging along. Cousin Manju had succumbed to the heat and was asleep on a charpoy.
In the fields, the perspiring men had roped turbans around their heads. The women wore rubber slippers. The high temperature had turned the ground into a thousand pieces of glass. Padma wandered off with her goats.
It had been a good year for the mint harvest, and Sohan Lal had more than thirty kilograms of fragrant green leaves bundled up and ready to go. He would sell the oil to a wholesaler in the bazaar, and that man would sell it on to factories that made toothpaste, tobacco, medicines and mouthwash. Sohan Lal’s mint would travel from Katra village across towns and cities in India and perhaps even go abroad.
But first, the leaves had to be taken to the oil distillation machine sixteen kilometres away. A cousin with a tractor had agreed to help out, but there was still plenty to do. As Sohan Lal was stuffing some things into a polythene bag, he asked his daughter Lalli for assistance. Would she make a call on his behalf, he said, handing over his mobile phone. Sohan Lal had two sons still at home, but they were little. For now, Lalli, who was her mother’s right hand, was also her father’s.
By this time, cousin Manju had recovered sufficiently to join the older girls out in the sun. Although they had never had much use for her, they now smilingly beckoned for her to join them in the shade of a mango tree. ‘Ask mummy to let us go to the fair,’ Lalli beseeched. ‘She’ll listen to you.’
To no one’s surprise, Siya Devi said absolutely not.
‘Ladkiyan bahar nahin ghoomti,’ she scolded. Girls don’t wander about outside the house.
Manju was on the threshold of adolescence, already familiar with the art of breaking down resistant parents. ‘Why, why, why?’ she wheedled. Why had she come to visit, if not to go to the fair? Her father had given her 500 rupees to spend.
Siya Devi had little tolerance for such behaviour, but she was conflicted. Her husband always said girls didn’t go to the bazaar, what would they do there? But Lalli was her only daughter still living at home. She was such a good girl. She did everything she was asked to, immediately and devotedly. If it weren’t for her, Siya Devi would have no one to talk to.
Soon Lalli would go away, to her husband’s home, and then what opportunity would Siya Devi have to spoil her little girl? Surely a quick outing after the day’s chores would do no harm.
But Siya Devi’s mask didn’t drop, and Lalli would never know the loving thoughts that had crossed her mother’s mind.
‘Don’t eat or drink anything,’ Siya Devi said, sternly, for it wouldn’t do for girls to be seen enjoying themselves in a public place. ‘Whatever you want your father will buy for you later and you can have at home.’
The excited girls took the advice in one ear and let it out the other. They locked the doors into the courtyard and took turns at the water pump. They washed their face and feet. Padma brushed her hair, and put on her green salwar kameez, a favourite gift from her maternal uncles. Lalli’s purple and red outfit hung inconspicuously over her frame.
Sometime between 4 and 4.30 p.m. the three girls crossed the bazaar and joined the throng of villagers picking their way through the rubbish-strewn ground where the fair was set up. In the far distance, the Ganga gleamed like diamonds. Vendors in tarpaulin shacks showed off shirts and saris, bras and panties, glass bangles and bindis. Fluffy teddy bears, plastic flip phones and pellet guns. Kerchiefs for the heat, golden nose pins for special occasions. One vendor cried, ‘Watermelons! Watermelons!’ Another beckoned with hot jalebis. A barefoot man in a vest stirred a pot of spicy golgappa water. Children squealed with joy from the tippy-top of a clanking Ferris wheel.
The cousins immediately saw familiar faces. There was Somwati, whose father had a vegetable stall at the fair. She’d brought along her little niece. With them was a neighbour, Rekha, who was surely a saint. Rekha was now fourteen – but she was only six when her mother died of cancer, and she was pulled out of school to cook and clean for her family of four. A disability prevented one of her brothers from walking, so the task of looking after him also fell to Rekha. If the demands placed on her seemed extreme, she never said so to her friends. The span of childhood was in the hands of fate.
Shortly afterwards, Padma took cousin Manju aside and asked her to stay right there, not to move one inch. They would be back soon, she promised. But they took so long – at least fifteen minutes, as the younger girl later remembered – that she went in search of them.
Although the fair was concentrated in a small area, it was swarming with people. Some farmers were coaxing a weighing machine up the embankment towards their taro crop, and the crowd surged forward to gape. It was possible that the men would slip, and the scales would fall and crush them. At first Manju wandered through the exclaiming people, but she quickly changed her mind. All she could make out was a sea of heads and backs.
‘If they don’t show up,’ she told herself. ‘I’ll go home.’
Pappu entered the fair at around 5.45 p.m.
As was often the case, he was the only one of the Yadav brothers with any time for recreational activities. After work Avdesh went straight to his wife and baby. At this moment he was cutting tobacco plants for a neighbour for some extra money. In fact, there was so much to do that he had taken Basanta along. Pappu’s other brother, Urvesh, was across the Ganga with their father. When he was done, the quiet young man would retrieve his tenth-class exercise books. Urvesh was twenty-one, an age at which better-off contemporaries were graduating college, but his days working in the watermelon patch left him worn out. He studied when he could.
Pappu, at nineteen, had no plans to marry. Nor did he know what it meant to study. Someone had offered to teach him how to write his name, but ‘Darvesh’ proved tricky to spell; so ‘Pappu’ was all he knew.
That evening, he and his companion Sannu Pandit, younger than Pappu by two years, settled on the bare ground, ready to watch the Ramlila.
Manju found the teenaged girls near some stalls, examining their purchases – nail polish for Somwati and Rekha, a tube of cream for Padma. But the mood was weighted and sour. Her cousin Lalli looked upset, ‘as though she’d been in a fight’, she later remembered.
Padma was cursing to herself.
Manju was taken aback.
‘You took your time,’ she said lightly.
‘Keep quiet!’ Padma snapped. ‘Let’s go.’
The moment passed for Manju, who enjoyed herself on the Ferris wheel while the others gazed up at her. ‘You go on,’ they had said, ‘that thing gives us a headache.’ Disregarding her aunt’s advice, she treated everyone to packets of hot, greasy vegetable pakodas, and they made their way to the play.
They arrived at a pivotal moment in what was, to them, the greatest love story ever told. Lord Ram, upon lifting the divine bow to string it – a demand that was made of all the men who had come to win the hand of the beautiful princess, Sita – ended up breaking it instead. By doing so, he had proved his extraordinary strength and worth.
Like the thunder’s pealing accent rose the loud terrific clang,
And the firm earth shook and trembled and the hills in echoes rang,
And the chiefs and gathered monarchs fell and fainted in their fear,
And the men of many nations shook the dreadful sound to hear!
Pale and white the startled monarchs slowly from their terror woke,
And with royal grace and greetings Janak to the rishi spoke:
‘Now my ancient eyes have witnessed wond’rous deed by Rama done,
Deed surpassing thought or fancy wrought by Dasa-ratha’s son,
And the proud and peerless princess, Sita glory of my house,
Sheds on me an added lustre as she weds a godlike spouse,
True shall be my plighted promise, Sita dearer than my life,
Won by worth and wond’rous valour shall be Rama’s faithful wife!’14
The girls couldn’t tear their eyes away.
14 ‘Rama’s faithful wife!’: The Ramayana and the Mahabharata condensed into English verse by Romesh C. Dutt (J. M. Dent, 1917), oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1778
Padma Lalli, Gone
The sky drained, signalling that it was time to go home, and so the girls got up. Around this time, Pappu and his friend also brushed the dust from their clothes. The two groups followed a similar route, exiting the fairground, ambling past the police chowki – outpost – and then entering the bazaar. But while the girls crossed over into Katra, the boys walked five minutes further to their hamlet.
On the way, Padma and Lalli divided up the remainder of the day’s chores. Typically, they packed Manju off. ‘You sweep the courtyard,’ they ordered. Then they took to the fields with the seven goats the family owned.
An age passed, or so it seemed to Manju, until finally boredom prompted her to seek out the older girls. She walked down the sloping path that led into the alleyway. There they were on their way back from the fields. They had one more job to do before they came in, they said. Offering a perfectly reasonable explanation – they had to tether the goats in their shelters – they insisted, ‘run along now.’ They assured her they would promptly follow.
To Manju, it was obvious that the older girls were reluctant to return home. The fair had turned out to be a whole lot of nothing as far as she was concerned, no better than the hawkers at home, but she knew that for Padma and Lalli, it had been a day to remember.
All through the evening the heat had leached out of the village and now the night air was perfumed and cool. The aroma of taro and soya coming to a boil on wood fires, the creak of a front door swinging shut, a mother’s call beckoning her children home – all signalled the day’s end.
A crescent moon rose in the sky.
Padma and Lalli finally walked through the courtyard. The two best friends who did everything together, now unclasped. Padma joined her stepmother, Sunita Devi, in the kitchen and started to roll out rotis, toasting the circular discs carefully over the fire with a pair of tongs. As Lalli went over to Siya Devi, a set of small solar panels filled one end of the courtyard with a watery grey light.
Separated by the wall, the girls started to discuss the evening’s events. What a wonderful thing a mela was!
It was too much for Sunita Devi who had thought it undignified for them to have gone at all. ‘Shut up!’ she roared. ‘Get on with the food.’
Over the next hour, the women sweated over fires and laboured over small errands. The children brought down grass brooms, beating out the day’s dust from the courtyard. There was a button to thread, a broken slipper to twist into a knot, nits to comb out, wicker fans to wipe clean. The men were out, smoking beedis and talking among themselves.
Sunita Devi was feeding the animals in her corner of the courtyard when her husband Jeevan Lal returned for dinner. Padma laid out a stack of rotis and the bottle gourd left over from lunch. Over in the next section of the house, the visitor from out of town, cousin Manju, had succumbed to the heat once more and was snoring peacefully on a charpoy.
After dinner, Padma’s father rinsed his mouth and started for his animal shelter, which was perched on the edge of the fields. The shelter had high walls and a sturdy wooden door to protect his buffalo and calf. ‘Where there are animals,’ he always said, ‘there are thieves.’ There was also a charpoy in the shelter, so that he and his wife could keep an eye on things and still enjoy some privacy.
Sunita Devi was at the handpump rubbing ash into a pile of dirty dishes. She’d join him soon, she promised. Their daughter Padma walked the few feet over to the end of the courtyard to catch up with those of her cousins who had skipped the fair to milk the buffaloes.
Meanwhile in Jati, the Yadav men polished off the dal that Basanta had placed before them. Pappu’s father then left for their riverside plot to guard the watermelon harvest. His sons gathered their rolls of bedding and headed to their respective charpoys. The eldest went up to the terrace to await his wife and child. The second liked to sleep outside the house, on the main road – there was barely any foot traffic once the sun had set and the leaves of tall trees delivered silky breezes.
As Jhalla Devi pottered about, her daughter-in-law finally sat down to her meal. When Pappu walked out of the house the women assumed he was going to see his cousin, who lived in a shack just down the road.
In Katra, at this time, Padma complained loudly of a stomach ache. ‘I have to go to the toilet,’ she said. Lalli piped up from the centre of the courtyard. ‘Me too! I’ll come along.’
Their mothers barely gave them a glance. It wasn’t very late, and there would be others in the fields taking a final squat for the night. Anyway, Padma had a phone.
It was common knowledge that the girls would be half an hour, since they usually went to the set of family plots near the orchard. But thirty minutes passed and there was still no sign of them. ‘Where have they disappeared to,’ grumbled Sunita Devi.
Her mother-in-law, who was particularly attuned to Padma’s welfare, hobbled to the door. ‘Padma,’ rasped the old woman. ‘Lalli!’
At around 9.30 p.m., Pappu bounded into his cousin’s shack. The two were good friends and often chatted late into the night. Pappu sometimes used Raju’s phone to make calls and send text messages to girls he liked. They would fall asleep side by side.
He was coming from the orchard, Pappu explained, where he’d been ‘to the latrine’. His stomach was off, he’d probably eaten too many spicy snacks at the fair.
Raju commiserated. Would Pappu like some watermelon? They had enjoyed a bumper harvest and would take a lorry to Delhi to sell the lot. But for now, they could make a dent in this pile that stood six feet high, no one would notice. Pappu agreed, and the two young men devoured the juicy red fruit.
‘How was the fair?’ Raju asked.
‘I saw the girls,’ Pappu replied, munching loudly. ‘But they were with some others so we couldn’t chat.’
Thieves in the Tobacco
Jeevan Lal was stretched out on a charpoy dreamily awaiting the company of his wife, when a furious knocking brought him to his feet. It was his nosy cousin, the one who was always roaming about. ‘Khet mein admi hai!’ Nazru shouted. There are thieves in your field.
Jeevan Lal’s elder brother, Sohan Lal, had taken the family’s mint that very morning. The tobacco was also gone. That left little worth robbing. Even so, Jeevan Lal grabbed hold of a bamboo stick. With Nazru by his side he turned right from the animal shelter, taking a shortcut straight into the fields. As he hurried along, he pulled out his mobile phone to call for backup. His first instinct was to phone Sohan Lal, but he still wasn’t home from his long journey to press the mint; so, he tried his other brother.
It was 9.29 p.m.
Ram Babu, who was at home, hurriedly informed his wife of what had happened. Then he grabbed a torch and a lathi and took off. But where his brother had turned right, he took a left, unthinkingly traversing a longer route. He pounded down the road, diving through an opening between two brick houses. The fields frilled darkly before him. A melancholic tune wafted down from the fair. ‘What if they shoot us?’ Ram Babu thought.
So many people in western Uttar Pradesh had access to a gun that the
area had come to be known as Tamancha Land. Although some strapped manual-loading Lee Enfield rifles proudly to their backs, most packed sanitation pipes or automobile steering rods to make long-necked tamanchas to stick down their trousers. It was mostly ‘dabbang dikhane ke liye’ – a display of swagger – but showing off had tragic consequences. Between 2010 and 2014, the state accounted for 40 per cent of all deaths from gun violence in India.15 In fact, there had been armed robbers in the fields just a few days earlier, so Ram Babu’s fears were warranted.
He looked around and saw a figure lying on a charpoy. ‘Thieves in the tobacco field!’ he shouted. ‘Thieves in the tobacco!’ The man jumped up to join in the search. Soon three other men were striding alongside Ram Babu. What was there to be scared for, he thought. If they saw the thieves, they’d catch them!
His brother and cousin Nazru were already in the trio of family plots, craning their necks as they peered this way and that. Just ahead was the orchard, at a distance of less than a hundred feet. The ground was mostly bare, and it should have been easy enough to see far. But in the darkness, it was like staring into a well, hoping to catch a snake in the gaping chasm.
The men felt a deep familiarity with the fields. It was everything to them, their ancestral land, the home of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. They themselves had worked on this land when they were children. They had tagged alongside their elders just like their sons did now, learning how to tend for the earth, how to invest in it, how to protect it from pests like jungli cows and thieves like moneylenders. This was where they had spent the happiest times of their lives and where they had confronted their greatest fears. In fact, their fields were so intimately familiar to them that although they couldn’t see much, they believed they would sense if something was amiss, just as one can sense a change in the texture of one’s palm.
The Good Girls Page 4