by Meera Syal
As Mala stacked the pots and plates, she wondered why the price of women like her, her sister, even her mother, had gone down instead of up. After all, they were running out of girls, everyone could see it. One glance at the children in the village school confirmed it, sitting with Master-ji under the peepul tree in their too-white uniforms with their dusty slates: twenty-three boys, ten girls, Mala had counted them. She had stopped counting the bodies she found on her stolen solitary walks, abandoned in dried-up wells or washed up on the riverbank or hidden like death presents in thorn bushes, the hours-old baby girls still with the stump of their mother’s cord on their tiny bellies, their mouths sometimes packed with sand or dirt, or their eyes and skin bleached and pinched with whatever poison they were given instead of Mama’s milk.
Each time, she remembered her own almost-baby curled up in its rocky riverside cradle, the fleeting glimpse of him, her, she would never know. Would it have mattered? Of course, to everyone else.
‘Munda hai!’ the cockerel-proud cry would have gone around the village. ‘It’s a boy!’ Bee-ji would have limped her way around personally to each and every house, scattering sweetmeats as she went, puffed out with pride as if she’d given birth to the grandson all by herself. Other men would back-slap her husband, that special big-man slap with growls and head cuffing, the secret signs that men use when they want to remind each other that they are the best and the most special and always will be. Other women would come with food and false smiles – at least, those with no sons, faces as green as unripe wheat. Well done, you! Lucky you, theklo, the pressure is off now. Healthy son, duty done. No wonder mothers lined their boy babies’ eyes with kohl as soon as they could open them, tied black thread around their chubby wrists to ward off all the evil eyes jealous at their good fortune. The inky line around the eyelid, the dark bracelet, all for show: a visible imperfection on their perfect baby to stop the gods or anyone else from taking him away. To be fair, many mothers did the same for their daughters also. But there would be fewer sweetmeats given out, the crowing would be quieter, getting more muted with each subsequent daughter until you ended up like Jinder. Five daughters, and still they kept trying for the longed-for boy, Jinder getting weaker and sadder with each birth until the sixth one killed her. Another girl. Their father drifted around the village like an embarrassed ghost, treated like a king at home by the six daughters he knew he could never afford to marry off to anyone decent. His was the cleanest house in the village, the one whose shelves groaned with home-pickled vegetables and hand-baked buttery biscuits, whose frontage exploded into noisy blossom each spring, whose gate was always open and greedy for any passing visitor. They hung from the doorway like wedding garlands, those six beautiful girls, always smiling, keeping themselves busy, polishing their small prison till it shone. Because wasn’t that what it was? Mala knew it, so did they. Ripe for the picking and withering on the stalk, one by one, the eldest gradually appearing less often, smiling less, followed by the next sister and then the next, as they realized that no amount of smiling and cooking could change the system that had remained in place for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Girls cost money, no matter what they may give you back in kind.
All around the area, engagement offers were taking place earlier and earlier, boys’ families wanting to reserve the best girls, like booking a train ticket early, to save having to travel too far away to find one later on. On the riverbank, the women had swapped hushed stories of the girls that ended up being kidnapped and defiled, soiled by the thief so no one else would want them anyway, like dogs pissing on their territory.
With all this going on, Mala’s mother had reassured her two daughters, ‘It will be like that year the bees started dying. Honey cost as much as gold! Remember? It will be the same with girls – less to buy, more expensive, more special. You will see.’
But she had been wrong. Mala could see that even though their numbers went down, somehow their price got lower. And so she was still finding the bad investments dumped in the bushes, to save their parents the price of a crippling dowry. Maybe better than letting them grow up and get married into one of those snake-eyed families who would torment them for years or burn them in an ‘unfortunate kitchen accident’, the daughters-in-law who were never forgiven for not bringing a fridge freezer or shiny motorcycle into their new joint family home.
But Mala knew that it was not like this everywhere, that beyond her dust-defended village there were glimmers of change, thanks to a story she had spotted in one of Pogle sahib’s discarded newspapers. She had been carefully collecting them before he threw them away, telling him she liked to keep the TV pages for Bee-ji. He had no idea she took away the English newspaper also. Not even Ram knew she could read and write English so well, top of her class every time. Mala’s father had wanted to send her to college, even though he knew there would be snorting all around. Waste of time and money, giving that one even longer words to be big-mouth-bai-sharam with! But Mala’s father knew who she was. ‘Thithuli,’ he called her, a butterfly, too witty-flitty to settle, wanting to taste every passing blossom before the sunset. The only time he had ever shouted at her mother was when he had opened the rusty trunk looking for candles and found all the silk suits and embroidered linen she had put aside over the years for Mala’s dowry, layered like a sweet silk pastry. ‘You sold your earrings for this?’ he had roared, lion-like, tearing the tissue paper and flinging it around their heads. Mala had caught a flake on her tongue, thinking it might taste like snow.
‘Look at her!’ He had grabbed his wife and turned her round to see Mala skipping with her mouth open like a frog catching flies. ‘She’s a child. You are already writing her future? And shutting it up in a box?’
Then he had locked the trunk and told Mala he would put money aside for her for college if she worked hard and came top in every subject.
But later on, she had had to break open the trunk and sell everything inside to pay for his funeral. As she had unwrapped each intricately patterned suit, the few pieces of simple jewellery, Mala realized that gold is worth nothing unless someone spots its glitter in the mud and digs it out to clean it up.
It was the photograph in the newspaper that had first caught her eye, a while ago. It was of a young woman, pretty enough, smiling shyly at the world. But it was the image of crowds of women around her that had moved Mala to rescue the page from the mouth of a knock-kneed baby goat and have a better look. Her name was Nisha, that much she could remember now, that pretty-enough woman, but what she had done! That was what had drawn all those crowds of women to her door, faces open to her like sunflowers, drinking her in. Just days before that photograph was taken, this is what had happened: Nisha, a nice middle-class girl from Delhi, was standing in her red-and-gold bridal sari, waiting to take her seven steps around the holy fire with her respectable, handsome, government-job-with-pension husband, when he and his vulture parents had asked for more money. Just like that, just before the ceremony, when, of course, many lakhs of rupees had been handed over already. But they knew, this government-job-with-pension boy and his family, that this was the perfect moment for blackmail: that they could demand anything, with all the gold-bedecked guests watching and waiting and three video cameras recording the whole tamasha. More money, another car, whatever it cost to stop them from calling off the wedding, for wouldn’t the public shame and humiliation dumped upon this girl mean she would never get the chance to marry again? Apparently, Nisha’s papa tried to plead with them, these people whom he had thought would become his family too, whom he had believed would love and cherish his daughter, as he had all his life. He told them he had given them all he could afford. That is when the boy’s father hit him, full in the face. And then Nisha, the pretty-enough girl, calmly asked for her cellphone and called the police to arrest her government-job-with-pension almost-husband and his very surprised family. Because – and this is the paragraph that Mala had to read again and again, just to make sure she understood the English perfectly
– apparently it is illegal to demand dowry from a girl’s family any more. Against the law, written down and everything. But in the same way that doing a U-turn on a motorway to avoid a cow or driving the wrong way down a one-way street is also illegal, but everyone turns a blind eye and no one gets arrested, because the police would be arresting people all day long and have no time to do the important things like catching murderers, everyone still asks for dowry. At least where Mala lives. Because no one thinks anyone would be foolish or barefaced enough to call the police. Like Nisha did. No wonder she became a superwoman, an ‘international heroine’, said the newspaper, with tributes and wedding proposals coming to her from all over the world. Which also meant, Mala had realized, while squatting over the latrine reading the newspaper as if it was some tip-top dangerous secret book, that there were men out there who thought Nisha was a heroine also. Mala’s insides churned with confusion. She rearranged her sari and hid the newspaper clipping in the lid of a masala tin.
She remembered that woman now, as she snapped the plastic lid on to the dented tin of ghee and returned it to its shelf – Nisha from New Delhi. She realized it was not the impossibility of sex that would keep her awake tonight, it was the possibility of a different life just beyond her reach, out there in the big cities where an ordinary woman could finally say no and someone might listen, and things might slowly-slowly change.
That’s what Mala thought had happened to Seema. That she had gone to Delhi to make her own hard choice and undergo irreversible change; that Seema, or her husband, had arranged to have her unborn daughter sucked out of her, all nice and neatly. She knew that in the cities they had machines that could tell you whether you were carrying a future prince or a girl worth less than gold or honey. Better than going through the whole nine months praying and hoping, only to give birth to disappointment and the dull realization that you would become a birth-giver and a murderer all on the same day. Yes, this is what must have happened, nothing else could explain Seema’s strange behaviour, and very soon she, Mala, was determined to know everything.
She felt Ram’s eyes upon her as she moved around. Flecks of curd were caught in the tips of his moustache, and she glimpsed flashes of pink tongue, all baby-soft, as he chomped and swallowed.
‘Can’t you wait till I finish?’ he asked. ‘What’s the hurry?’
Mala avoided his gaze, already on her way to the tap again. ‘Bee-ji wants to go for a walk.’
Ram glanced over at Bee-ji, who was snoring buffalo breaths in front of the TV. Mala knew there was hardly any point in lying, he would eventually find out where she was going anyway. But she found herself enjoying the confusion on his face, enough to stop him mid-chew.
‘Well, she asked me before. About a walk. So I will go anyway.’ Mala clattered a pan to show she meant business.
‘On your own?’
‘Why? You got anything in mind to keep me here?’
Then she looked at him properly. His confusion drooped into shame and she knew she had won.
‘You know how to make up Bee-ji’s bed, don’t you?’ Mala said as she walked past her almost-new husband and wrapped herself in the ancient velvet shawl of the night.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘SO, NOT SO much of a glue baby, more like a middle finger in the face of mortality, maybe?’
Lydia lit up another herbal cigarette and blew out a cloud of what smelled like smouldering tyres on a dungheap.
‘Do you smoke when you have proper patients?’ Shyama asked irritably, paddling her hands in front of her face.
‘Clients, actually. And of course not!’ tutted Lydia, struggling with the sash window until it finally creaked upwards with a wooden groan. ‘And they’re not allowed to smoke either. Or eat or drink anything other than water. It becomes displacement activity. But as I’m giving you the benefit of my insight for free, you may have to, as our cousins across the pond say, suck it up.’
‘Could you at least smoke a proper fag then? These healthy ones make me retch.’ Shyama coughed, adjusting her position on the faded brocade couch. ‘You haven’t answered my question yet.’
Lydia smiled, unfurling herself on the window-sill. There was something feline about her slanted playful eyes, her bendy androgynous body, the kind Shyama always envied. She’d have loved to have someone call her lithe, gamine even, be one of those women who could go bra-less without looking like a camel-smuggler, wear cigarette pants and a simple white shirt, pausing merely to muss her cropped hair and spritz herself with Chanel. A quick glance at the women in her family told her this would be genetically impossible. ‘Cankles’ featured prominently amongst the various India-based matriarchs; at least she’d escaped those, but even her much smaller, shorter mother had once had the solid legs and cushioned hips of work-horse women. They had clearly been designed to walk long distances and bear heavy loads, possibly carrying the luggage of the irritating gamine brigade skipping far ahead with their pert, unfettered breasts. I’m an ox, Shyama thought, from an old culture built for survival and endurance. Lydia’s a sleek weak European cat. And no wonder she had an amazing body, she’d never endured the irreparable car crash of childbirth. Thus Lydia and her adoring husband, Keith, were free to spend their considerable double income on exotic holidays, theatre and concerts, and, in Lydia’s case, a personal Pilates trainer who visited her at home thrice weekly.
‘Shyama, do you think Toby will leave you if you can’t give him a baby?’
‘No, I don’t. Stop doing that weird look, I really don’t.’
‘What weird look?’
‘You know, your I’m-hearing-a-lot-of-denial-right-now-in-the-room look that you do on your patients.’
‘Clients. They’re not ill.’
‘Clients, customers, instant karma purchasers, whatever. He knew how old I was when we got together. It’s not a deal-breaker or anything.’
Lydia raised an eyebrow.
‘See, now you’re doing the eyebrow thing!’ Shyama yelled.
‘What eyebrow thing?’
‘The I’m-letting-you-speak-only-so-I-can-say-Really?-in-a-faintly-sarcastic-way-afterwards eyebrow thing.’
‘Really?’
Shyama threw a cushion at Lydia’s head. She batted it away in one graceful arm sweep and still managed to take a drag of her cigarette at the same time.
They both cracked then, big unashamed belly laughs which rolled back the years until they were students again, drunk and lazy-limbed on saggy mattresses, candles sputtering in cheap wine bottles, swapping embellished stories like Scheherazade trying to hold back the dawn. Shyama gulped for air, her sides aching; it was a while since she had laughed out loud. It felt like she’d had a workout but without having to wash her hair afterwards.
‘Now I know what the Laughing Guru was on about.’ She sighed, wiping her eyes.
‘You’ve made that up.’ Lydia sighed back, resettling herself on the window-sill before stubbing out the cigarette on the brickwork outside.
‘I swear, I saw him on Juhu Beach, years ago now. He believes – or believed, I have no idea if he’s still around – that laughing is as good for you as meditation. Better, in fact. It purifies the soul, apparently. He gets his followers to stand in a circle and they all just guffaw their way to nirvana.’
‘What happens if you don’t feel like laughing at that particular moment?’
‘Someone tells a dirty joke, they get out the holy custard pies, I don’t know. It looked like fun for the first ten minutes, quite infectious really. And then …’ Shyama dredged up the memory, sunlit and salty-tasting. ‘Then it looked quite creepy. Thirty-odd people laughing to order, not allowed to stop until he said so. I had a similar feeling when I visited an all-year-round Christmas shop. “Where every day is Christmas.” The elf behind the counter looked clinically depressed.’
‘Too much of anything, however pleasurable or exciting, will eventually bore or depress us,’ Lydia mused. ‘One of the major reasons people come and lie on my couch is to be abl
e to cope with some life-changing event. And yet, change is essential for our growth and understanding of what pain and pleasure are. It’s all relative. So, for example, if you hadn’t married your first husband …’
‘I wouldn’t have properly appreciated the many talents of Toby Toy Boy?’
‘Exactly. But don’t mix up appreciation with obligation. You don’t owe him a baby as a thank-you for sticking around an old bag like you.’
‘I know that too.’
‘Then why?’ Lydia paused delicately. You’re forty-eight, Shyams …’