He’ll bring me flowers for my hair . . .’
She sings into the baby’s ear. It is the song that the boys from across the river use to taunt her. Delivered by Ramu, the words, sung to the same tune, are much harsher. But singing it to Shanti, she takes the bitterness out of it, much as she does with the wild cucumbers, rubbing one cut end against the other to bring out the poison, as foamy as a madman’s spit.
‘You are not married yet, get back in the field.’ Her father has returned earlier than usual.
Mamta drops Shanti in her swing, and rushes out, forgetting to give it one push before she leaves. The abandoned baby starts to cry. But it has learned not to cry long; no one will come.
Mohit and Sneha are beating the dust out of the reed mats. Prem had hung them up in the Babul tree before he left for the Big House in the early-morning dark. He’d stopped Mamta from helping him: ‘Your hands are already shredded,’ he’d said, ‘save them to massage oil into your husband’s hair.’ For an instant she feels the tips of her fingers on a strange skull of black hair, soft and light, and a timorous shyness envelops her like diaphanous silk.
‘Mamta, come play,’ says her sister. The word ‘play’ sits uncomfortably with her. She is so old that she feels no right to their game, invented to sweeten their work. There is such a gap between them. Their youth makes her feel older than she is.
‘Stop it, you two. Come on. We have to finish here and then help Amma bring water from the well. We have to make lots of tea. Prem is bringing fresh milk today and he is going to try and get a big pat of butter too.’
The golden cry of the koyal calls to them. The children recede into the dust. After a while, they are barely visible from their hut.
Seeta Ram extracts the contracts from beneath his wife’s green sari in the tin trunk. The paper creaks accusingly as he bends the pages open, one by one. He cannot read, but the bureaucratic text still speaks to him. Why did he do it? Because he had a brand-new baby daughter? Because he hoped the crop would be good this year? Because of destiny? Because of nothing? No, he did it to get Mamta off his hands. He can’t come close to her without feeling a deep rage. For her and what she stands for. And for what she has made him do.
He will never look at those contracts again once she leaves, he tells himself. But the sturdy thumbprint in the right-hand corner tells him another story. He knows he might have given away more than he bargained for. He thinks of Daku Manmohan. Lucky bastard. First he lives off the fat of the land, then off the fat of the government. Lucky motherfucker.
The baby whimpers uselessly in its swing while staring at the unfamiliar face. He doesn’t feel any urge to pick her up. She starts whimpering again. Resentment fills his belly, then his lungs and lurches towards his throat, like rising froth on boiling milk.
‘That’s done,’ Lata Bai comes in wiping her hands on her sari pallav. She’s cooked the daal well and is satisfied. ‘How many is he bringing with him?’ she asks about the wedding party. ‘Do you think Jivkant will come?’
Jivkant was born when Mamta was two years old. Lata Bai had prayed for a boy and Devi had answered her prayers. The birth of a son changed his mother’s fate. Had he been born a girl, Seeta Ram would undoubtedly have taken a new wife, letting Lata Bai find her own way in the world. She had chosen the Red Ruins to have her second baby, far away from the house, for she’d decided that, if she produced another girl, it would be a stillborn birth. It happened very quickly. She hardly had time to smooth Mamta’s freshly washed blanket under her hips as the boy appeared, bright and fat, just like a boy should be. Her heart had leaped out of her body to dance with the pale lemon clouds overhead. She’d clutched him to her breast, coaxing her nipple into his mouth. Through her watery happiness the damaged electric poles danced as they did in the heart of summer, and her whole field had shimmered and sparkled. Still aching, she’d run towards the house, shouting, ‘A boy, a boy. Mamta’s father, you hear? You have a boy. Mamta’s father, come see your boy.’
The hijras arrived promptly. They must have plucked the news of his birth, achieved almost silently close to the Red Ruins, from the wind. This time they conducted themselves differently than the time they had come to bless Mamta. There was a lilt to their song, and they danced for hours in front of the house, wiggling their hips still much too stiffly to be mistaken for true women. Seeta Ram had circled their heads three times with rupee notes without getting annoyed, such was the extent of his happiness. Eventually he chased them off with curses as one always has to.
Jivkant was her husband’s from the start. She took no credit for the baby, it was an obligation fulfilled, a duty completed.
A distant train whistle makes the air quiver. Husband and wife look up. The wife runs to the door. It is a train whistle that’ll bring her son home. She has forgotten the disquiet she feels. She is anxious to have her progeny close.
‘I’m sure he can write now. The first in the family,’ she says.
‘What for would he learn to write?’ The father cannot see a life beyond the farm for himself or his children.
‘Perhaps Prem will get a chance to learn. And then Mohit.’
‘From whom, the Big House?’ he mocks her.
‘I know the Big House gives nothing away.’ She is more perspicacious than him. ‘But Prem could learn from one of Lala Ram’s twins after he gets home from work.’ She is also more optimistic than him.
‘Leave it,’ he says. ‘Reading and writing is not for us.’
‘I wish Jivkant would come,’ she says. ‘The widow Kamla has arranged Mamta’s henna ceremony.’
It is the women’s time before the wedding; laughing, talking openly about their men and completely comfortable in each other’s company.
Lata Bai undresses Mamta. Kamla helps her, pulling her clothes off her eagerly. ‘Arey, Kamla, be gentle. I am not in a hurry to send my daughter off.’ The mother looks into her daughter’s eyes and cracks her knuckles against her temples. ‘Be happy, my daughter, be happy.’
Mamta’s heart is gripped by love. A stone of tears lodges in her gullet. She swallows painfully, but doesn’t let the tears fall. She hugs her mother. Lata Bai doesn’t undo her arms this time. ‘Now remember, there will be no running home to me over the slightest problem. You will have to learn to sort things out for yourself in your husband’s house.’ Practical advice, the best salve for a sentimental heart, sounds just right for a young bride but not for someone well past her prime.
‘Oho, Lata Bai, of course she will. She’s not a child, you know. Look at her. She’s a grown woman. Surely you know all this. Right, Mamta? Right?’ Kamla will not stop till she has extracted the embarrassment to the surface on the bride-to-be’s face, just as she has the pigment from the henna leaves. Lata Bai looks away from her unfortunate daughter. Kamla gives the henna another determined stir. She has mixed the powder herself, equal parts leaf dust and okra mucus. She tests the consistency delicately on the back of her hand like she might unproved rice custard. The henna feels as slimy as an oiled snake. Perfect. She quickly rubs the paste off.
‘Don’t want to get my hands yellow like a bride’s again, now, do I?’
Kamla guffaws at her own joke. Lata Bai abandons her uneasiness and joins in the laughter, encouraging Mamta to do the same. It is unthinkable that the widow Kamla’s hands will ever be decorated again. She isn’t entitled to any kind of adornment, having shamefully outlived her husband. Now she stays dressed in one of her two white saris, next to the outhouse on her son’s farm. She makes sure her head is closely shaved and sometimes one can see her bald grey-green scalp peek out from under her sari pallav. It is because she is the only skilled midwife in these parts that she has a home at all. Cursed and thought to bring bad luck, the last three widows were chased out of town. Two went to beg at strangers’ doors, one preferred to stay, and lies very still on the temple steps. She lets her hair grow and fall down her back, but no one cares. In the old days she would have flung herself on her husband’s funeral pyre.
‘No