slipped her sari off her little shoulder and spread it between her hands. “I want this much!”
Her daughter’s chest was flat and her small nipples dimpled inwards. Bhagya had an urge to hold her. She cleaned her fingers and reaching forward, swung the child to her lap. “Don’t worry; he’ll fill your lap with mangoes and almond taffy,” she said. “But will you share it with him,” she teased, “or will you gobble it all up yourself?”
Chuyia, dazzled by the unsustainable images of abundance her mother conjured up, nodded shyly and buried her face in Bhagya’s soft bosom.
Bhagya got up when the mustard oil in the karahi began to smoke. She dropped a pinch of salt and turmeric into the oil and stirred the onions into it.
“Let me do that,” Chuyia said.
“No, you’ll burn yourself.”
“But I want to help you cook,” Chuyia importuned. “I want to help you.”
To keep her daughter away from the wok, Bhagya gave her a steel platter half-filled with lentils. “Here; remove the grit and small stones from the daal if you must help.”
But this didn’t conform with Chuyia’s idea of cooking. After a short while, she announced, “Amma, I’ve cleaned the daal,” and put the steel platter aside.
Bhagya looked up from the potatoes she was peeling. “Either you put your heart into what you’re doing, or you don’t do it at all.”
“Then don’t tell me to clean daal. I can’t put my heart into lentils!”
“Hai, what a rude girl you’ve become,” said Bhagya, taken aback. Not for the first time she thought, the child is old for her years. “If you talk back to your mother-in-law like this, she will shame me for not bringing you up properly,” she said aloud, dramatically smacking her head to convey the humiliation that lay in store for her.
“I’ll tell her, ‘Don’t shame my mother,’” said Chuyia heartlessly. She climbed on a stool and reached for the clay pot of mishti-doi that Bhagya had made with rich milk from their cow, which had just calved. “It’s empty,” she wailed.
“There was only a little left. Your brothers must have eaten it.”
“Amma, I want mishti-doi. Please make some, please, please,” whined Chuyia.
Bhagya flung an arm out and thwacked Chuyia, catching her on her thigh. “Go play outside before I lose my temper and thrash you.”
Chuyia stepped out of her mother’s reach and, holding her hands behind her back, obdurately shook her head. “There is no one to play with.”
Bhagya made a small cone with a scrap of paper and got up to fill it with roasted gram. “Here, feed your dolls this,” she said, pushing Chuyia out the door.
Chuyia called Tun-tun, but he wasn’t around. Munching on the roasted chickpeas, Chuyia crossed their yard to the thatched hut. A tangle of mossy branches weighed down the roof, and the small yard in front was overgrown with weeds. Chuyia pried open the door that hung crookedly from its hinges. It was dark inside the hut, and the cooler air held the sweet odours of damp earth and vegetation that had taken root in the earth floor.
Chuyia dragged the doll’s house, a rough plywood crate the size of two shoeboxes, to the centre of the room and, in the light that came from a sagging slit of skylight, examined its contents. She picked up the chipped clay dolls, the faded outlines of their stiff, glazed arms barely discernable against their torsos, and wiped them with her sari. She talked to her dolls as she tipped the contents of her toy box and lined up the miniature cooking utensils in front of a brick, which served as a make-believe stove. “You must be hungry; I’ll cook you turnips,” she told the dolls, pulling out some spongy weeds growing through the cracks of the floor. She squished them and collected the pulp in a tiny karahi. She added the few remaining chickpeas from the paper cone to the mess and stirred it with a minuscule ladle.
Chuyia force-fed her dolls with the food she had prepared and, when the green slime stained their faces, scolded them for being dirty. She used the same words and tone of voice Bhagya used, except she kept her voice hushed, lest someone should intrude on her imagined world and break the spell of make-believe she had conjured up.
Tun-tun’s shrill little barks returned her to reality and filled her heart with love. Although he sounded less puppyish now, his voice still broke at the higher octaves. Abandoning her dolls Chuyia went outside to greet the now-brawny little fellow. Before long, they both wandered off into the jungle.
Tun-tun kept within calling distance as Chuyia foraged for wild berries and leechees. After a while, she lay down on a bed of yellow leaves fallen from a thorn tree, and Tun-tun, placing his forelegs on her chest, pinned her down and gazed at her for all the world like a conquering lion. He licked her face. Chuyia pushed him away, and, after chasing a squirrel up a tree, he settled down beside her to keep watch.
High above, the thorn tree was in blossom, and the fragrance from its flowers mingled with the other wind-borne scents of the forest. A tailor bird was stitching its nest in the fork of a dried branch, and, at a small distance from her, a pair of canaries sat swinging on creepers that hung down from a jackfruit tree. Birds hopped among the branches of trees, making the leaves tremble and filling the forest with birdsong. The squirrels played hide-and-seek around tree trunks. Closer to the ground, her ears picked up the rustle of fecund vegetation and of unseen insects inhabiting it. All of Chuyia’s senses became steeped in the forest’s wild beauty—her pulse slowed to match its deep green rhythm, and her heart was at peace.
A flurry of activity overtook their household. Huge colanders of rice and lentils simmered on wood fires in the backyard. Small boxes filled with sweet laddoos, and smeared with turmeric and red kum-kum to mark the auspicious nature of the occasion, were sent to neighbours. Marquees were set up, palm leaf mats spread on the ground, and the guests were served food on washed banana leaves.
Mohan and Prasad were packed off to a neighbour’s house. Chuyia slept with Bhagya.
The day before the wedding, women gathered around the sweet tulsi bushes in their yard to sing songs. Chuyia was excited by all the activity centred on her, but some of the more doleful songs about the bride’s sorrow at leaving her parents’ house made her anxious. “I don’t want to leave you and baba,” she cried, clinging to Bhagya’s sari. “I don’t want to leave Mohan bhaiya and Prasad bhaiya or Tun-tun. I will have no one to play with,” she said, weeping bitterly.
This behaviour was not only expected of her, it was considered commendable.
Some of the women, remembering their own weddings, shed copious tears, saying, “Hai, poor little thing. It is never easy to leave your parents’ house. She has no idea of the troubles that lie ahead for her.”
Hearing them, Chuyia howled louder and clung closer to her mother. When this had gone on for some time and the women were suitably impressed, Bhagya took her hysterical and bewildered daughter to one side. Wiping her tears, she said, “Don’t worry. You won’t go to your husband’s house for a long, long time. You can play with your brothers all you want until then.”
“Can I take my brothers with me?” Chuyia asked.
Bhagya smiled. “No, you can’t take them.”
“Can I take Tun-tun?”
Bhagya pretended to mull over the question. “Okay. We will give him to you as part of your dowry,” she said. “We will also give you the cow so that you will have plenty of milk and mishti-doi in your husband’s house.”