Rukshana lights Padma’s candle. Padma takes it and prays: “Please, someone. Anyone. Vishnu, Siva, Parvati—whoever is out there. Stop these bulldozers. Because if you don’t, then my father will leave. And if he leaves, then I have to stay. Because who will take care of my mother and my brothers? How can I leave if he doesn’t stay behind?”
Padma lights Deepa’s candle. Deepa takes it and prays: “Vishnu, Shiva, whoever you are and wherever you are. I’m getting married. I don’t want to, but I don’t have a choice. So, now that I’ve accepted your will and everything, can you make sure the boy turns into a good man? Maybe becomes someone like my father? Someone I can handle, please.”
Padma helps Deepa light Banu’s candle, but Banu is too busy looking at the renovations put in by the local leader. Instead of praying, she thinks: “This roof might fall at the next rain. If we added a few frets, it would be much stronger. Maybe I can do that at my house too.” After a minute, she adds, “I mean, maybe I should’ve done it at my house. Maybe then we’d still have a roof.”
Joy takes our candles from us, one by one. Lights their bottoms so the wax becomes liquid, like glue. Sticks them onto the table in a neat line. The rest of us shut our eyes against the heat of other people’s wishes. As though wanting is only allowed in the dark.
Finally, Joy lights her own candle, closes her eyes, and prays: “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Father, we both know I’m a woman. So can’t you make me one? If you’re going to take away my home—my neighborhood, my friends, my house—can you at least make my body a place I want to stay?”
Joy is the girl you can’t miss. Eyes large as a calf’s, long-lashed and velvet. Hips like palm fronds that billow and sway. Hair black and glittery, like a strip torn off of midnight’s double-color sky.
Joy. The girl of your dreams. Our unofficial queen.
Now, that is. Back in fourth standard, Joy wasn’t Joy at all.
She was Anand.
Anand was never like his brothers. Grew his hair long enough to pin it back with garlands of orange and white jasmine. Made perfectly round chappatis copying the movements of his mother’s quick, sure wrists. Stole his mother’s kohl and painted his eyes like a film star’s. (A 1970s film star, of course. Not one of these tasteless girls you see now, with their bare stomachs spread across the billboards on Mahatma Gandhi road.)
At school, we girls don’t care much about what Anand thinks he is or isn’t. Even with his braids and his makeup, Anand is much more sensible than Yousef or Vihaan or any of the other boys we know. Besides, he’s promised that after he learns how to do threading, he’ll sculpt all of our eyebrows for free.
In the mornings, when we’re walking to school, Yousef runs behind us and pulls the ribbons tied around Anand’s plaits. Won’t give them back unless Anand catches him.
“Idiot,” Anand says, government-blue ribbon safely back in his hands.
“If you’re going to be a girl like us, then you better get used to it,” Rukshana says.
“I’m not going to be a girl like you,” Anand says. “I already am a girl like you. Just in the wrong shape.”
“Yousef seems to like your shape just fine,” Rukshana says.
Anand’s mother, Selvi Aunty, is not like the rest of our mothers. Selvi Aunty is from a district in Tamil Nadu that we always misspell on our geography tests. Tirunelveli? Tiruppur? Tiruchirappalli? A place where people speak a language as cratered as the studs they wear on both sides of their noses.
Anand doesn’t have a father—or, at least, a father who’s around to protect the house and yell at his wife and do all the other things that fathers are supposed to do. Unlike our fathers, though, Anand’s father did not abandon Selvi Aunty for a peg of liquor or a younger woman. Anand’s father died in a construction accident, which, after the insurance payment, left Selvi Aunty with two precious things: money and dignity.
But here is the biggest difference of all: Selvi Aunty gave birth to no daughters and four sons.
No one criticizes her lazy womb. No one blames her unclean habits, her unpure heart. No one whispers that her husband is a saint for putting up with this useless lady uselessly bringing more and more useless girls into the useless world.
Selvi Aunty knows that by the standards of Heaven, she is lucky. Mostly, she is grateful. But sometimes, secretly, she wishes she was just a bit unlucky. Not unlucky enough to be married to a drunk, or to be unemployed, or homeless.
Just unlucky enough to have a daughter.
So when Anand learns how to blow the skin off the milk in one perfect breath, to plait his growing hair into coconut-oiled ropes, to keep his face still, his eyes forward, ignoring catcalls and marriage proposals and accidental-on-purpose touches, Selvi Aunty knows she should stop him. She knows she should remind him that he is a boy who will one day be a man who will one day be married to a woman he may or may not abandon. Should stop the quiet notes of speculation that she recognizes as the prelude to a symphony of pain.
But she can’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, the gods (and goddesses) have heard her wish. Maybe, just maybe, she will be lucky one more time.
“Anand is running wild,” our mothers say. “Selvi better get him under control before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?” we ask.
“You’ll understand when you’re older,” they say. Which is what adults say when there’s nothing to understand at all.
Anand is the opposite of wild. He is careful. Deliberate. We see him watching us, measuring, memorizing. The way our hips move when we walk. The way we unleash anger, hold back tears. The unwritten rules of our lives.
All the things the rest of us dread, hate, flee? Anand chases them like Bollywood dreams.
As if the lock that binds us is the one that sets Anand free.
Locks are funny like that.
If Anand is any kind of wild—and we’re not saying he is—he’s wild like one of those birds rich people keep in cages. The ones that fling themselves against the bars until the door flies open. Or until they break their necks.
Wild like something rare and beautiful and fearless and desperate. Something trapped.
Fourth standard is an election year. A local leader with a fat mustache starts building a community hall. Tilted walls, leaky roof. Stuck together with sand stolen from the banks of the rivers where our families once farmed.
While it’s being built, our mothers tell us not to go inside. So naturally we do, sneaking in after they catch the early buses to work. Anand follows us.
“Hello!” Rukshana shouts. Back comes her voice, “Hello hello hello.”
“Who’s there?” Deepa yells. Back comes her voice, “There there there.”
Then we all start. Singing songs in Kannada, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam. Chanting rhymes we learned in school. Imitating our aunts and teachers and grandmothers. Our echoes tangle and catch and knit themselves into a fabric of sound.
“Which one is mine?” Deepa asks.
“You can’t own an echo,” Banu says.
“You can own anything.” Rukshana rubs her fingers together, wiggles her eyebrows like a shopkeeper. “At the right price.”
“Forget the price. That’s just philosophy,” Deepa says. “I made it, so it’s mine.”
“Our mothers made us, but we’re not theirs,” Rukshana says. “We belong to whoever we marry.”
She’s trying to be funny, but none of us laugh.
“So what you’re saying is,” Anand says, “that girls can be bought, but echoes can’t?”
“Yes,” Deepa says. “That’s exactly what we’re saying.”
“You want to be a girl?” Rukshana asks Anand. Like she’s just remembered he’s here.
“I don’t want to be a girl,” Anand said, straightening the skirt he’s started wearing to school. “I am a girl. I already told you that.”
The next day, the monsoon begins. The community hall collapses, caves in like wet newspaper. At least t
here was nothing inside, the grown-ups say. A few plastic chairs, maybe. Some pots to catch the leaks. Nothing worth anything.
“Nothing except our echoes,” Anand says.
We pretend we don’t hear him.
Not long after the election (which the local leader wins) a man in a black robe comes to Heaven.
“Swarga,” he says, reading the broken yellow sign outside our slum, tapping the Kannada letters.
“Swargahalli, actually,” Banu’s ajji tells him. “The sign’s just split in half.”
“Ah, I see,” the man says, nodding. “But still and all. This is a place named after the Hindu heaven.”
“Are there other kinds of heaven?” Neelamma Aunty asks.
“Oh yes. Yes, there are many kinds. Much kinder kinds,” the man says. “Kinds that require just one rebirth.”
“What kind of rebirth?” Fatima Aunty says. Straightens her hijab just so he knows that whatever he’s about to say, she won’t believe him.
“Jesus’s kind,” he says. “Mother Mary’s kind.”
The next day the community hall that has no working walls (so it isn’t really a hall) and no interested people (so it isn’t really a community) is reborn with a big blue cross, a brand-new roof. A sign saying God’s Love Prayer Hall in five different languages. Letters crowded and pushed up against each other, like they’re elbowing for space.
Selvi Aunty sneaks into the community hall after she knows the rest of our mothers have left for work. On her way inside, she passes a truck full of heavy wooden benches. The man in the robes—who, it turns out, is a priest—is helping some workers unload them.
When the priest sees Selvi Aunty, he stops and says, “Welcome, sister.” He wipes the sweat off his forehead with the back of his rolled-up shirt sleeve.
Selvi Aunty likes that. It makes him seem less godly. More human.
“You Christians have holidays?” she asks.
“Christmas and Easter and St. Mary’s feast,” he says. “We have prayers to say and hymns to sing. We have salvation. We have comfort. We have joy.”
“What about schools and colleges?”
“Schools and colleges we have. Scholarships too.”
“Reservations?” Selvi Aunty asks. “Special quotas for university, for jobs? For my sons, I’m asking. It’s too late for me.”
“That and all we have,” the man says, smiling his purse-full-of-paisa smile. “That is no problem. No problem at all.”
“I see,” Selvi Aunty says.
The priest asks, delicately, “Do your children have reservations now, sister?”
“We are SC,” Selvi Aunty says. “That’s what you’re asking, no?”
“Ah, Scheduled Caste,” he says. “I see. Well, sister, caste is one thing we Christians don’t have. At least not at this church. After rebirth you won’t be any caste at all.”
When Selvi Aunty doesn’t say anything, the priest asks, “Are you interested in joining the flock, sister?”
Yes, Selvi Aunty thinks to herself, definitely. But to the priest, she says, “Chee! I only came to see what all the fuss was about.”
When Selvi Aunty was a teenager, her cousin eloped with a Brahmin girl. Selvi Aunty had seen the girl at a function once, sitting with the family that owned the land that Selvi Aunty and her family farmed. Diamonds dripped from the girl’s ears, wrists, nose. Rubies and emeralds sparkled along the center parting of her hair. Even her heavy silk sari was embroidered with gold.
“It’s all a bit over,” Selvi Aunty’s mother had said. But Selvi Aunty knew she was just jealous.
The night the two ran off, Selvi Aunty’s father woke their family and pushed them out the door and into the paddy fields, urging them to be as silent as possible. They sloshed through the puddles, bent and frightened, their footsteps muffled by the distant shouts of angry landowning men, their breathing choked by the smoke coming off of her cousin’s burning home. For hours, they hid in the muggy night, swatting mosquitoes and watching their neighbor’s house smolder. Even though they must have been too far away for it, Selvi Aunty remembers the heat against her skin, the curses flying off of the arsonists’ high-caste tongues. After sunrise, when the noise died down and they were finally able to go home, the air tasted burnt and broken and defeated. It tasted, Selvi Aunty thought, like hate.
Before breakfast, the whole village knew that the boy’s house was a pile of ash. That his parents and his brother and his twin sisters were nowhere to be found. Side by side, crouched over the paddy fields, the women whispered what they knew.
“If you go through the ashes, you’ll find the bones,” they said. “No question.”
But when the police made inquiries, no one said anything.
Selvi Aunty tried to ask her mother about it. But her father interrupted and told her to be quiet. To focus on being grateful that this time, it was only the one house. Warned her that if she ever tried “something like those children did,” he would murder her himself.
To his wife, he said, “We need to get this girl married before she makes any stupid mistakes.”
“He only wants to protect you,” Selvi Aunty’s mother told her later. But Selvi Aunty knew her father was only interested in protecting himself.
In Bangalore, Selvi Aunty’s neighbors tell her that caste doesn’t matter. Just see how we’re all living in the same place, together, all kinds of communities and languages and religions. That would never happen in your village, would it?
Selvi Aunty knows they are wrong. Notices how these same open-minded neighbors keep a separate cup for her in the corner of their kitchens, separate mats for her to sit on, all to save themselves from her pollution. How social workers speak to her tenderly about overcoming the “backwardness” of her “community.” How when there’s a theft or a murder or a rape in the area, the police come to the Dalit houses first. Make their false arrests. File their false reports.
You don’t have to light a match to burn a family’s life to the ground.
At the water pump, our mothers confer.
“They say that priest has fixed the hall nicely,” Neelamma Aunty says. “Tin roof and all. Have you seen?”
“Why should I bother?” Fatima Aunty asks. “I’ve got my religion. I’m not out shopping for another one.”
“People like that have come before,” Banu’s ajji says. Groans when she lifts the full drum to her hip. “All of them leave. This one will go soon too. Just watch.” She’s older than even our mothers are. So when she says things like that, they believe her.
“What about you, Selvi?” Neelamma Aunty asks, taking the drum from Banu’s ajji before lifting up her own. “No interest?”
“No interest,” Selvi Aunty says.
They’re all lying, of course. Even we girls know that much. How could they not be interested? Strange men don’t come to Heaven every day. Especially strange men with big blue crosses and purses-full-of-paisa smiles.
Selvi Aunty knows about conversion. Back in the village, her cousin-sister eloped with a Muslim boy. Accepted Islam before they ran away. She still writes to Selvi Aunty now and then. Turns out they did well for themselves. That husband of hers got a computer science job and a flat with a water purifier, a working lift. Both of their children—one son, one daughter—go to college abroad.
Which just goes to show something. Doesn’t it?
Then there was Selvi Aunty’s grandmother’s sister. That would make her what? A great-aunt. After years and years of trying and failing and trying and failing to conceive, the Virgin Mary came to her in a dream. Told her to eat a bowl of cashew nuts under a full moon.
“Plenty of ghee, the blessed Virgin told me,” the great-aunt said later.
Six months after her divinely ordained feast, she conceived. Twin boys, no less. Now she wears a cross around her neck and goes to church on Thursdays and Sundays. Still keeps black stone statuettes of Ganesha and Mariamma in her kitchen cupboard, right next to her statue of the Holy Mother.
Then t
here was Selvi Aunty’s youngest brother, the one who was able to study the longest. The first time he came home from university, he announced he was an atheist. Which, if you think about it, is another kind of conversion.
“It’s all in here,” her brother said, waving a red-spined paperback that smelled like wet fingerprints. The cover had a black-and-white photograph of a man with a long, tangled beard. “It’s by a man called Periyar. A genius, this man. He’s opened my eyes to caste oppression.”
“Hinduism is ancient,” Selvi Aunty’s father said, echoing something a Brahmin priest had recently said at a puja. “Its wisdom is timeless.”
“What kind of wisdom keeps you cowering in the paddy fields like wild animals in the middle of the night?”
“Why do you come home and start trouble?”
“Start trouble?” her mother said. “There’s already been trouble. He just wants to cause more.”
Then, even though Selvi Aunty was only sitting in the corner, cataloging questions she wanted to ask once her parents left, her brother pointed to her and said, “See how this sister of mine struggles. What kind of religion allows such injustice? Periyar says women deserve equal rights.”
When he heard that, Selvi Aunty’s father sent her to bring water from the next village (her family wasn’t allowed to use the local well). She hoped this new version of her brother might offer to go in her place. Or at least come with her and tell her more about all that he’d gone away to learn. Instead, he asked their mother to make him another cup of coffee.
By the time Selvi Aunty got back, a barrel of water on each hip, her brother was gone.
But forget politics, religion, romance. Forget money and jobs, marriage and murder. Selvi Aunty does not need to be pregnant, to please a forbidden suitor. Is not political, exactly, although she feels she could be in the right company.
Above all, Selvi Aunty is a survivor. She is raising four boys—well, three boys, at least—without a husband. Boys who are clothed, fed, and in school. She is doing just fine.
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