by Dipika Rai
After that, every night her father-in-law tried to climb on her again. Every night he was stopped by her mother-in-law. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘You’re only entitled to the first taste. She belongs to Seeta Ram now.’
His father was dying to get inside her, but her husband wasn’t sure how to do it. Her father-in-law took care of that too. He took Seeta Ram to the gambling tents and bought him his own prostitute for one whole hour. It was jiggery from then on. Every night . . .
‘The girls say the first time is the hardest . . . that there’s blood . . . Amma, is that true?’ Mamta speaks through the modest security of her chunni pinched between her teeth.
Lata Bai squeezes Mamta to her breast. ‘The best day of my marriage was when I became pregnant with you . . . I remember it exactly . . . it happened when your bapu’s mother went back to her own village to meet her sister and secretly sell her gold bangles to buy a transistor radio she’d had her eye on for some time . . .’
Lata Bai went to bathe at the river when her husband and mother-in-law left for the tonga stand. She’d calculated everything perfectly. Forty minutes there and forty minutes back, half an hour maximum for chit-chat, that added up to one hour and fifty minutes. Just to be on the safe side she would come back after two and a half hours, her husband would surely be home by then. The cicadas almost always started their song around five thirty in the evening. That’s when she would lazily wander home, after the insects sang their first movement.
It was the last tonga fare that had decided Lata Bai’s fate. The tongawala refused to start the journey without his complement of ten. The cost of feeding those bulls alone would amount to four passenger fares. Then there were two fares for emergencies, one fare for his food and a visit to his favourite prostitute. That left him with three fares of profit. That added up to one fare each for his sons and one for his wife and daughter. Less than that and it wasn’t worth his while.
Seeta Ram and his mother were still sweating buckets under their banyan, waiting for the tenth passenger when Lata Bai meandered back home, humming a little, still hot and damp under her ghaghra with water dripping off her hair, leaving a wet patch in the centre of her back. All this time, her father-in-law searched the house for her. He looked in the fields: ‘Come out, little mouse. Come out, little mouse. I’m going to get you,’ he said softly.
She didn’t see him, still holding on to her song and happiness. It was only when he stepped up behind her and lifted her off her feet that she knew she’d been caught in a trap from which she wouldn’t get out till the hunter was well and truly done with her.
That time she said nothing, she didn’t scream, just turned her head away and closed her eyes tight enough to see bright green dots behind her lids so she wouldn’t have to look at her father-in-law’s distorted features lurking above her own. He’d raped her twice, or was it thrice? Like he would never have enough of her teenage body. Her body, with its newly sprouted breasts as small as plums, a tiny waist and a bottom as hard as a teenage boy. After he was done, he’d stuffed a piece of brown sugar into her mouth. She’d spat it out on her mother-in-law’s pillow.
He’d filled her body with his semen and one of those sperms made its way to her awakening ovaries. That’s how Mamta came to be.
Then Seeta Ram came back. The whole world was still in order. The house was exactly as he’d left it. His wife was peeling potatoes from their field. There was washing hanging out to dry, and drips from the oil lamp staining the altar. It really was just another day. The kind of day he’d got used to.
He wasn’t disappointed with his wife. She’s a good woman, he thought, looking at her working with her chunni pulled low over her head. Then he saw the wet patch on the back of her blouse and felt something rush up from inside and grab his throat. Her knife flicked little potato peels on the floor. Her bangles jangled. Her feet stuck out under her ghaghra. She’d wiggled her toes, a spot of sparkle played on her toe ring. He was by her side in a second. He took the knife out of her hand. Caught her by the wrist and led her to the cow shed. She followed, a little like a tethered cow herself. ‘I have to show her the new calf, it looked sickly this morning,’ he’d said to his father over his shoulder.
His father smiled. ‘Of course you do.’
Seeta Ram bedded his wife in the cow shed, his seed mixing with his father’s inside her. That time too, Lata Bai said nothing, just shut her eyes to see those little green spots again.
Her father-in-law managed to rape her five more times. At first Lata Bai just stared at her mother-in-law with intense eyes as deep as drought wells, but the older woman refused to understand. So she didn’t keep quiet during the sixth rape, but screamed and screamed so that the world might hear her. The world didn’t hear her, but the person she most wanted to did . . .
‘Your bapu’s mother didn’t buy the transistor radio. Instead she got your bapu his own field, and that’s how we came upriver to live here in Gopalpur.’ At least that last rape hadn’t been in vain.
Lata Bai holds on to her daughter’s eyes for a long time. ‘My life changed for the better after I moved here with your bapu . . . we made this house ourselves,’ she says, falsely recalling her own early months as wedded bliss. ‘Remember, the first months are the best, enjoy them. You build so much together, lay a foundation for yourself and your children,’ she says convincingly. In truth it wasn’t until months after Mamta was born that they’d gathered enough clay from the riverbed and wood from the forest and begged a stack of hay from their neighbour’s field to build their hut. The hut hasn’t changed much, it is still just one large room where the family cooks, sleeps and dreams.
‘But you will also have to work hard,’ she needlessly warns her industrious daughter, ‘maybe even harder than you do here. There will be only two of you there, here we are five . . . But I know you will do whatever you have to. You have never shirked work. And believe me, you will be rewarded, just as I was . . .
‘Our first wheat was marvellous, each stalk fat with grain without a single telltale black powdery ear that could ruin the whole crop. It was such a good time to bring a baby into the world, Mamta. Fat wheat dancing over my head, a hut to live in, and not a rupee in debt. And then you appeared, just before the wheat turned golden. A beautiful plump baby girl.’
Lata Bai looks away, she can remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. She’d rushed home with her new baby. ‘Can you hear me?’ she’d cried. ‘Can you hear me? Our baby’s come. Our baby’s here,’ she’d shouted again and again. Seeta Ram came running from the latrine, washing his hands quickly in the ditch. Lata Bai had held the baby out to him. Even wrinkled up and bruised from birth, she thought Mamta was a beauty. ‘She’s beautiful, no?’
Seeta Ram had jerked back from his wife as if he’d been stung. ‘You called me this loud for a girl? Do you want us to celebrate and tell the whole world of this baby girl? God, did you have to give me a girl?’ he’d said, and walked out of the house leaving Lata Bai standing holding Mamta out to him as if she was a temple offering.
Girl or otherwise, that’s when Seeta Ram became ‘Mamta’s father’. That’s right, from that day to this, Seeta Ram has been called Mamta’s father and nothing else by his wife. ‘Arey-oh, Mamta’s father, lunch is ready,’ she shouts at noon, and then again, ‘Arey-oh, Mamta’s father, dinner.’ Every day it’s Mamta’s father this and Mamta’s father that. Each time his wife calls him Mamta’s father, Seeta Ram thinks she is deliberately punishing him for Mamta’s sake; he never blames custom that ordains the link between the father’s name and his first-born’s.
That evening the hijras came. They saw the baby was a girl and blessed it for free. They hadn’t the heart to ask the new mother of a daughter for money. ‘Devi has blessed you,’ said the eunuchs, looking back at Lata Bai, sharing in her sorrow as only other women could. ‘She will be lucky. She has the mark.’ Of course the mark had to be a blessing, just like accidental bird droppings on one’s finest clothes. Yes, Lata Bai had seen i
t too, a red birthmark tucked away in her daughter’s hair.
‘At least we can be thankful that the hijras won’t come today. They know we have nothing,’ says the mother.
‘Yes, and probably they won’t show up at my wedding either,’ says Mamta ruefully. ‘At last Bapu can be glad, he won’t have to look at my ugly face much longer,’ she adds.
‘Uffo,’ Lata Bai replies in half-agreement. Ugly-face-talk before the wedding is fitting, because any kind of praise is inauspicious. There is always someone listening, people willing to spoil your plans. She places a dot of lampblack behind Mamta’s ear to take the ‘perfect’ out of her beauty, more as a courtesy to her daughter than anything else. They both know Mamta’s beauty isn’t perfect, the red birthmark dangles above her eyebrow like a sign of disapproval from God.
‘I shall put the henna leaves to dry as soon as the rain stops,’ says Mamta. ‘Just imagine, beautiful red henna patterns all the way to my shoulders and up to my knees . . . hai,’ she sighs.
Her mother shakes her head, but says nothing. She is going to be married after all. Another six days and she’ll be gone. Thank you, Devi. That should put an end to the village sniggers: ‘Arey, Lata Bai, how is it that you got your younger daughter married before your elder one?’ . . . ‘Arey, Lata Bai, have you had an offer for Mamta yet?’ Even those guised as concern: ‘Arey, Lata Bai, what can a mother do but love her daughter, good, bad, beautiful or ugly?’ And the pitying, this-is-destiny ones: ‘Don’t worry, someone will come for her. You just wait and see. After all, girls are someone else’s gardens. We mothers only borrow them for a time.’
Lata Bai has woken Mamta and Sneha early and ushered them out of the hut. They must be quick today, bringing the water from the well, cooking two days’ food that won’t spoil with keeping, repairing the roof and collecting the dung pats. At last, mid-morning she packs some dried chapattis and spicy baked potato skins in some ficus leaves for their journey. They will travel light, the only thing of value they carry is a bottle of homemade chilli pickle for her father.
‘Okay, we are ready,’ says Lata Bai to Seeta Ram when he comes home for lunch. ‘I am taking Mamta and Shanti,’ she adds, quickly placing his tray at his feet. Her husband winces, the name Shanti is too new, too disappointing, too female.
‘So what about Sneha?’ he says, pulling Prem and Mohit to one side of the hut, separating the females from the males as if in some fiercely competitive game. ‘Take the girls, the boys are staying with me.’
Lata Bai cradles Shanti and leaves without looking back at the house. The women walk towards the tonga stand under a flowing ficus tree, an hour away. She hides the baby deeper inside her pallav to spare her the sunlight that can crisp skin faster than an open flame. It beats down on them like a pounding stick, knocking all the energy out of their stride. The Red Ruins glimmer in the distance. Two girls are praying at the shrine. Lata Bai walks faster, lifting her hand in acknowledgement, but not her head.
‘Who are they?’
‘Must be some girls from the village, come to pray for sons.’
‘When I’m married, I will come here to pray for sons too. I wish I was a boy. Bapu says to wait and see, my husband will sort me out well and good. I think he’s waiting for that.’ In Seeta Ram’s eyes Mamta has no right to exist at all, but since she does, she has to prove herself day after day, working harder than the boys, eating nothing that might be noticed, and being silently present. Like the extra baby section in an orange, not missed if it isn’t there, but swallowed whole if it is, without releasing any of its flavour into the mouth.
‘I won’t let my husband rule over me. Husbands aren’t kings, you know.’
‘Look here, Mamta,’ Lata Bai takes hold of her daughter’s shoulders tight and hard, ‘you will not survive a day with that attitude. For now, work sincerely at home and stay out of your bapu’s way. That’s the best and safest thing for you to do. Pray to Devi every night that your husband is kind to you . . .’
‘. . . and that he won’t beat you or send you back to us in disgrace,’ adds Sneha, who has learned the lesson of womanhood much faster and better than her elder sister.
‘Huh. Small mouth, big talk,’ says Mamta.
Under the appointed tree, Lata Bai opens her blouse to suckle Shanti. ‘Sneha, you better go home. Nani hasn’t room for us all. You can visit her any time, let Mamta have her attention, she is going away for good. I promise I’ll take you next winter.’
‘Next winter! But Nani might be dead next winter!’
‘Sneha, back to the house! If you start walking now, you’ll be there before sunset,’ says Lata Bai, brushing aside Sneha’s tears.
‘Stay out of Bapu’s way and he won’t even notice you are back,’ says Mamta viciously.
* * *
They arrive early in the morning, to the smell of home fires.
‘Arey, Lata, what’s happened to this girl of yours? Look at her hair, it is orange,’ says the grandmother, tugging at Mamta’s oily plait.
‘Oho, what am I to do, he won’t give her food. Each time I say give her food he says, “Am I made of money? Do you think we live in the Big House? Throw some more oil into her hair, it’ll get black in no time at all.” Then he says, “Look at her huge belly, is that the belly of a starving child?”’ Of course they all know that a distended belly means starvation. How many children have they seen die holding their ball-bellies in their hands? But Mamta’s father creates his own mirage, an image that suits his ends. He neither minds nor cares if she lives or dies.
‘Come. Come here. Now you will have more to eat. You need meat on your bones, good body fat before you are married. We don’t want your husband thinking we cheated him, do we?’ says Mamta’s grandmother, putting their hands in red clay and plastering their handprints on the mud walls of her house. ‘In case I never see you again, your hands will hold me as I ride Yamraj’s bull to my next life.’
‘I won’t let Yamraj take you any time soon, Nani. You can’t go before you’ve told us all the stories.’
‘Look at this girl of yours, Lata, to be married soon, and still she wants to hear only stories.’
‘Why do you think I brought her here, Amma?’ laughs Lata Bai. ‘For your stories . . . and your food, of course. Hai, I am exhausted, her ears are never satisfied.’
‘Come, see your bapu, Lata. Not that he’ll know you.’
The women enter the hut. Lata Bai touches her father’s feet. He is lying on the charpoy, loosely tied to the rope bed with strips of sari material.
‘Namaste, Bapu.’
‘Who?’ The man’s eyes seem to float in their sockets, moving from his daughter to his granddaughter’s face. Lata Bai kneels by his side and runs her fingers over his feet.
‘It’s Lata, I’m here,’ she says.
‘Who?’ He asks no one in particular.
The grandmother replies. Her frustration reaches into her gullet and pulls her voice out of her throat, catapulting it to a high pitch: ‘Your daughter is here!’
‘Sh, sh, Amma, sh, he’s not deaf. Bapu, it’s Lata.’ The husband and father lies on the charpoy, useless to the two women who depend on him. ‘You remember me, don’t you? It’s Lata.’ An unconscious thought flashes through her mind which makes complete sense of the situation. Men, you can’t count on them, even if your life depends on it, and still, she looks on with eyes full of love for her father.
‘Bapu, we’re here now. Don’t worry. You can come out to greet us whenever you are ready.’ Of course by the ‘you’ Lata Bai means his inner self, for her mother has no intention of freeing her senile husband to wander off and leave her a virtual widow. Her mother takes him to the outhouse herself and walks him round and round the yard like a cow threshing wheat. Some evenings, she oils his hair, or massages his feet, or clips his toenails, whatever is dictated by her mental calendar built up over six years of care and feeding.
‘Leave it, Lata, he can’t change. Not even though you are here.’
‘So what’s wrong with him, Nani?’
‘Oh, he’s been like that for years; I just hope he has a few more left in him. I don’t want to survive your grandfather. At least he’s given me a good life. Now just look at him . . . doesn’t know who I am. I’m afraid one day he’ll wander away and then the villagers will think him dead. And then your mother’s brothers will come to take this land away from me.’
‘Why? You saved them in the drought.’
‘Yes, I did. I confused Death into thinking my boys were girls by making them wear their dead sisters’ clothes. I painted their eyes with kohl and put bangles on their wrists, so Yamraj spared their lives. I did my duty, child, but no one cares for the past, least of all sons. Just look at that Pavan, threw his mother out of the hut the instant she became a widow and when she refused to leave, he dragged her out by her hair. When you are rejected by your own blood, what will other people do but shun you as well.’
‘Oh, Nani, no one will throw you out. You can come live with Amma if they do.’
Her grandmother just smiles at the naïveté of the offer given with love. Of course she could never go to Lata Bai’s house. Not even to visit, let alone to live. That would be the one thing that would disgrace her daughter like no other. Since Lata Bai has been married her mother has only been to see her once, and that time she stayed in the back of Saraswati Stores with the stinking fertiliser that burned her eyes and gave her headaches. She met her daughter at the well, and refused all her presents and food during her stay so she would not be a burden to her.
‘Nani, story. Tell us about the dry season, when all my aunts died.’ Mamta has always been a long-story girl; in that department, she was born mature.
‘Just listen to my granddaughter. Cooing like a pigeon. All the time she wants to hear only that story. I try and tell her about our gods, but she only wants to hear about us humans.’
‘Mamta, you cannot know the world by peeping through a keyhole. Always the same old stories,’ says Lata Bai.