by Shobha Rao
“I was never on that train,” he said. “A whole week in a cell without a window. Stripping a man just to see if he’s a Muslim. Lying, telling me my mother is dead. Those bastards, they’re no better than animals.”
He reached for her absently, as if reaching for fruit on a high branch. For fruit he barely wanted to eat. It occurred to her in that moment that her husband had not died. He had not. And that her life had taken yet another turn: she was no longer a widow. Neela also knew that from then on she would remain a fruit her husband didn’t really want to reach, that he would watch ripen and fall with only a vague and stolid interest. She heard the laughter of the women in the camp. The sound came to her as if through a long and airy tunnel. She listened for Renu’s. What reached her instead was Babu’s voice saying, “Get your things. The bus leaves in ten minutes.”
* * *
This time the bus ride seemed much longer than four hours. Neela was crushed against the window on the women’s side of the bus. A fat mother with both children perched on her lap sat next to her. The older of the two children—a boy who Neela guessed was two or three—kicked and dug sharply into Neela’s thighs. When Neela asked the woman to watch her boy’s legs, she turned and glared at Neela and said, “Watch yours.” Neela strained her neck trying to spot Babu, but he was too far back, on the men’s side.
Near Rangarh the woman and her children disembarked and an old woman with gray-blue hair sat next to Neela. She held a small bundle in her lap close against her chest. Even on the dusty and crowded bus Neela could smell the clean, scrubbed scent of the old woman’s skin, with only the slightest hint of sweat, almost pleasant, in the din of the bus. Neela turned and looked out into the endless landscape of dirty fields and sparse, drooping trees. She closed her eyes. When she opened them the sun was setting; she must’ve dozed off. She noticed the old woman with the gray-blue hair leaning toward the man in the seat across from theirs, in the opposite aisle. He too was old. Neela pretended to be adjusting the bag at her feet to hear what they were saying. “They were plump, for the season,” the man was saying.
“We should’ve bought more,” the woman said, “I could’ve sent pickle to the girls.”
The old man leaned closer. Neela realized they were husband and wife. “Rajan’s coming by next week for the receipts. I’ll tell him to bring another bushel.”
“I thought he got them last week.”
The bus bounced over a pothole. The old woman hugged the bundle closer.
“Did you take your medicine?”
“No, not yet,” the old woman replied.
Neela turned toward the window. The landscape was the same though the wind had changed direction. She thought again of turning, looking for Babu, smiling, but she didn’t. She only screened her eyes, shielding them from the dust.
* * *
The hut was just as she’d left it. Babu’s pants still hung from the nail by the door. The reed mats were still folded neatly in the kitchen. The bag of rice stood untouched. Even the banyan tree looked as if not a wisp of wind had troubled it in the nine days Neela had been gone.
For dinner that night she made rice and dal and subzi with the eggplant Babu had purchased at the market on their way home from the bus stop. After they’d eaten she made two cups of tea and took them out to the banyan tree. Babu was sitting cross-legged beneath it. Earlier she’d noticed his eyes glisten with tears when he’d discovered that the police hadn’t lied: his mother was dead. He’d stood at the door, stolen one quick glance at Neela then left the hut without a word. Now he was bent over something she could not see. When she handed him his tea she saw that it was her mangal sutra. She sat down beside him.
Babu took a sip of his tea. “I’m glad I found you,” he said.
Neela turned to look at him. He was? A sudden warmth flooded her. Her fingers gripped the cup tighter as her thoughts tumbled and tripped over each other. She’d been wrong. He cared for her after all. He’d been lonely too. He just hadn’t known how to show it but now he would. Now they’d show each other.
“That’s the only way Lalla would give the mangal sutra back,” he continued. “He said, ‘Why do you need it? She’s gone.’ You should’ve seen the look on his face when I told him I’d found you.” He finished his tea and held the empty cup out to Neela. “Hope that hair doesn’t take long to grow back,” he said. “Your head looks like a melon.”
That night Babu took her, as Neela knew he would. Then he turned over and went to sleep. She lay awake for a long while afterward. The night was quiet, interrupted occasionally by the chirping of crickets, the wail of a dog. They’d moved their reed mat outdoors because of the heat. The branches of the banyan tree swayed in the hot wind and Neela lay in the dark, looking into them. How long had it stood there? Maybe hundreds of years. She thought of her mother and wondered whether she’d been cradled in her arms for even a moment before she’d died. She thought of her father. She even thought of the old lady on the bus with the gray-blue hair and the scent of her scrubbed skin. Then she thought of Renu. The plans they’d made, the cot they’d shared. She felt her eyes warm with tears. With hardly a thought, almost as if the decision had been waiting there all along, Neela rose soundlessly and walked back into the hut. She dug her fingers through the bag of rice and lifted the dark brown bottle out of the kernels.
And so there was one thing that was different: the color of the bottle no longer reminded her of the color of chocolate. Now it was simply a bottle, the thing it had always been.
She went back to the reed mat and lay down next to Babu. He was snoring lightly. She looked again into the branches. They fluttered and hummed with her every breath. The stars beyond spun like wheels. The branches reached down and just as she closed her eyes they gathered her up onto their shoulders and held her as she had always dreamed of being held. As she would never be held again.
THE MERCHANT’S MISTRESS
The first time Renu traveled as a man was while on her way to Ahmedabad. It happened like this: she had changed trains in Phulera, and was forced to buy a second-class ticket to Ahmedabad, in the women’s compartment, because the third class was full. She seated herself in the corner of the berth, next to the window, and watched as the other passengers loaded their suitcases and bags bursting with food and thick winter blankets for the overnight journey. Renu had nothing to put away. She wore everything she owned in the world, including both her sweater and her shawl. Her remaining money, eight anna in all, was tucked into her pocket, and she had no need of toiletries: her hair was hardly an inch long, and whenever she passed a pump, she rinsed out her mouth and washed her hands and feet.
Across from her settled two young women. They looked about Renu’s age, but they were clearly educated. One was reading a book and the other was looking over her friend’s shoulder and then out of the window and then at Renu. Renu looked away. Beside her sat two little girls, one about five and the other eight or nine. Their father, a middle-aged man with thinning hair and a fat, boyish face, adjusted and readjusted their luggage. He looked sadly at the little girls, as if from sheer longing he could turn them into boys, and said, “Don’t put your hands out of the window, do you hear? And listen to your mother.”
They both nodded.
At this, the mother entered the berth. She was a wide woman, her breasts pendulous, even while obscured beneath her knit shawl, and her hair hennaed and pulled tight into a braid, a few strands aglow like copper in the fading light, framing her round face. Her eyes passed over her family and paused only when they reached the two young women. She seemed to approve. Then they stopped at Renu.
“You,” she said. “What are you doing here? Do you see that, ji, there’s a man in our berth.”
It took a moment for Renu to realize she was talking about her. That she had mistaken her for a man. She opened her mouth to speak, but the woman continued, “Nakaam, creep, get out, or I’ll call the police.” She turned to her husband, who was staring at his wife. The young women were star
ing at Renu. “Ji,” she told her husband. “Go call the conductor.” She plopped down next to Renu, crossed her arms, and rested them on her round stomach.
The husband left the berth. Renu could no longer see the woman’s daughters; her body blocked them completely. Only her face, now so close she could see the thin eyelashes, the plucked chin, the voluminous chest heaving with effort. She might’ve been beautiful once, Renu thought, before she had her daughters, before the husband’s disappointments had colored her own, before life had been cruel, nearly meticulous, in its onslaughts, but now she was simply a fat, well-fed woman. It would never occur to her—once she’d decided on the matter—that Renu could be anything but a man.
Renu was intrigued. It made her feel somehow lighter. Then it gave her an idea.
She walked through to the men’s compartment and settled into a slim space, in a seat facing the lavatory. All the men around her were smoking and playing cards and eating roasted peanuts and paid her no attention. She watched them for a while, careful not to bring attention to herself, and then fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Renu was nineteen when she left the refugee camp and traveled to Ahmedabad. It was the winter of 1949. She’d been there two years, just long enough to understand that she, along with the eight hundred other widows stationed at the camp, had absolutely no future ahead of them. Certainly, the government of India had been a passable guardian: they’d been fed, most days, and if they chose, the residents could enroll in vocational training programs to teach them various skills, such as how to be a seamstress. A darajin. Even the sound of the word was a dead end. Some of the younger and more beautiful widows, Renu noticed, had been pitied by a guard or a camp administrator and were married to them. Could pity combined with lust make a marriage? Renu didn’t know, but what she did know was that she had no desire—none whatsoever, not even in the face of a bleak and empty future—to be a darajin.
The other thing Renu refused to do was let her hair grow out. All of the other widows at the camp were delighted when their bald heads began to sprout. The slightest fuzz and they’d scramble to affix an artless ribbon to the top of their heads, or vie for the one cracked mirror in the camp, admiring their woolly scalps, as if the hair were falling halfway down their backs. But Renu was mortified. What she loved—beyond even her own understanding—was the feel of the wind on her scalp. It reminded her of standing with her husband, Gopichand, who’d been killed by a Muslim mob two years ago, on their three scrubby acres of land, and gazing toward the blue and distant Shivalik Hills. She’d gazed like that, with his arms around her, and imagined that they would remain that way forever. Not literally, of course, but that the Shivaliks would stand like they always stood against the morning sky, whipped and creamy like clotted ghee, and that the dandelions would bend like baby’s heads in the northeasterly wind, and that she would be a farmer’s wife, with its days of toil and earth and anguish, measuring the rains as one measures sugar into a teacup, with care and constancy, and by the spoonful. And she assumed something further: that her destiny was like the small stream that ran at the edge of their property. That it would flow—diverted at times by a fallen branch or a pile of rock, true, and thinned in the dryness of summer while abundant in spring, undoubtedly—but that essentially and always, it would flow, and be tied, deeply and incontrovertibly, to the destiny of the man to whom she clung.
Renu couldn’t have been more wrong.
She understood this, in a terrible, twisted way, on the evening she watched the mob torch their hut, slaughter their goats, and decimate their three meager acres of wheat. She had run and jumped into the stream, hidden as it was by a slight ravine, and watched as the figures of the men danced in the flames. Then she looked to her left and her right. Her husband wasn’t there. She thought he was behind her and maybe he had been, but he wasn’t any longer. Renu arched her neck, but she still couldn’t see him. So she crawled on her stomach to the top of the ravine. Her mouth filled with dust, her arms pushed against the crumbling dirt, her eyes lifted over the crest, and that was when she saw him. In the firelight. His head tilted back, the gleam of a knife against his throat, then a gesture that was unmistakable. And in that moment Renu understood one last thing: that nothing she’d imagined of her life, of her destiny, would ever come to pass. Not one thing remained. Not one, except—and these she saw as angry open mouths gnawing at the tender twilit sky—the Shivaliks still stood.
* * *
When she left the camp she was given twenty rupees and a pair of chappals. She tucked the money into an inside pocket of her shalwar—which she’d asked one of the darajins to sew for that express purpose—and then she put the chappals on her bare feet. It was almost as if the Indian government, in providing these last gifts, was saying, If money and a long walk won’t get you there, nothing will. Renu stood at the entrance gate to the camp, wrapped in a wool shawl over her thick sweater, a man’s—passed down to her after a resident who’d saved it as a memento of her late husband had herself died—and turned toward Mrs. Kaur, the camp director. She was staring at Renu’s head.
“Where will you go?” she asked.
Renu shrugged. “I don’t know. As far as the money will take me.”
They stood silently. Renu thought of the life of the camp. Of all the women she’d never see again. She thought especially of Neela.
“You could’ve married again, you know,” Mrs. Kaur said. “You were one of the prettiest ones. If only you’d let it grow out.”
Renu pulled the shawl over her head. “But then I wouldn’t have gotten the twenty rupees and the chappals, Mrs. Kaur.”
“You’re insolent. That’s your other problem. Besides, a husband’s worth far more than that.”
“Is he?” Renu smiled.
Mrs. Kaur shook her head and called a rickshaw that was passing by the camp.
When Renu arrived at the train station, a few miles away, it was midday, and the next train was leaving for Chandigarh in twenty minutes. The train after that wasn’t until eight o’clock in the evening, so Chandigarh, though not very far from Amritsar, was where she decided to go. She bought a third-class ticket, in the women’s compartment, and arrived in Chandigarh that evening. She slept in a corner of the train station, her shawl spread on the stone floor, then took the morning train to Delhi. In Delhi she counted her money; she had fifteen rupees left. Now, from Delhi and with the fifteen rupees tucked into her shalwar, she had a number of choices: she could go to Bhopal, via Jhansi, she could travel to Mathura and then on to Varanasi, or she could go west, through Phulera and ending in Ahmedabad. Renu stood under the timetable of train departures. She breathed, hugging the sweater and shawl close against her body. South, east, or west?
She hailed a passing puri wallah and bought a packet of three puris with potato curry. She took the packet, stepping gingerly over the mass of sleeping bodies on the railway platform, through the main concourse and then outside, into the cold morning air. The sky was the color of kheer. A horde of rickshaws, bicycles, a few cars, and even an old horse-drawn brougham idled in the roundabout that fronted the railway station. A few men stood in groups, drinking chai and smoking beedies. She heard the wail of an approaching train and once it had subsided there descended from the Gothic arches and down the bloodred pillars of the station’s facade a sudden silence. It was disturbing, lovely, and perfectly befit the first morning in two years that she had not woken to the harsh clang and peal of the bell at the camp. It was invariably followed by the rush of eight hundred women and children to the toilets, a fight for a cup of water from the three drums set next to the supply tent, and then came exactly what had come for the past two years: a long, listless day of waiting. For what? Renu never quite grasped for what. Food, certainly, that meager daily helping of roti and curry, but something else too. Something whose lack she’d felt but could never name. Neela, if she’d asked her, would’ve wrapped her arms around Renu in the dark, played her fingers against the hollow of Renu’s neck, and wh
ispered, “They’re waiting for a guard to marry them, or for some lost family member to come and find them, they’re waiting for their hair to grow out. But we, we aren’t waiting for anything.” And though it was true—Renu had been content, even after Neela had left—there was still a sense that there was something, something that was missing.
She threw her empty packet of puris into the gutter. A slight breeze blew in the scent of cardamom and woodsmoke, the pods of a semal tree were strewn on the ground, and next to the brougham was a coal brazier where an old man sat on his haunches, brewing coffee. She looked at him, and then she looked at the horse that was tied to the brougham. It was a dark velvety brown, rich as the coffee the old man was pouring into terra-cotta mugs, and though she and Gopichand had never owned a horse, she could sense in its presence something of their three acres: the swaying wheat, the undulant hills, the light of a small and welcoming fire. Just then the horse raised its head, from where it had been nibbling along the ground, and, gazing between its blinders, looked straight at Renu. They both blinked. Then the horse went back to its nibbling but Renu continued watching it. Its regal head, the tuft of hair between its ears, its wet nostrils, the blinders on the sides of each of its eyes. She wiped her hands against her shawl and wondered about the blinders. Why did they even put such things on a horse? No other animals were made to wear them, not that she could think of. So why a horse?
The driver of the brougham—chewing betel nut, a curling mustache bouncing above his blue uniform kurta as he did so—came out of the station and raised himself onto the seat. He pulled on the reins and the horse came to attention. Then he flicked them and the horse started up, clopping past Renu as it rounded away toward the exit. And then she saw it: the blinders were to focus the horse so it wouldn’t be distracted, to keep it from looking sideways, to give it a straight course, a goal, to give the horse—and at this Renu smiled—purpose. And that, she realized, was what she’d been missing at the camp, what she’d been waiting for all along: purpose. Because once you had purpose, Renu understood, standing in the dim winter’s morning light outside the Delhi train station, you had everything. You were a river knifing your way through a gorge of sheer rock and red cliff; everything you needed was inside of you. And not hunger, not fatigue, not the lack of money or means or even success, could sway the truly purposed. That too she understood.