talk on an empty stomach,” Bhagya said. She held the edge of her sari between her lips so that her face was all but covered. “Eat something first,” she said.
Somnath put a few morsels of rice and plantain curry into his mouth to please her, but he couldn’t swallow any more. He sat back, despondently laying his head against the wall. “Hira Lal may be dying,” he said. He shut his eyes. “Chuyia’s mother-in-law wishes for her son to die at the banks of the Ganges so he can liberate his soul and attain moksha. Hira Lal’s wife must be at his side. It is the moral thing to do.”
“Of course,” mumbled Bhagya, sitting stiff, as if she were frozen.
“I will go with them, of course.”
Bhagya’s rigid body suddenly sank as if it were not only her head but her whole despondent frame that bowed in acquiescence and defeat before her daughter’s fate. There was nothing they could say or do in the face of her karma.
“The bullock-cart will be here at dawn,” Somnath said gently. “Get Chuyia ready.”
Bhagya packed a small tin trunk with Chuyia’s favourite skirts and saris, thinking these might be the last days her daughter could wear the bright colours she loved. She placed two squares of almond-fudge mithai in a small tin box. If her fate so decreed, such treats would be forbidden to Chuyia.
Later that night, Bhagya allowed her worries and fears to surface. She and Somnath both knew that if Hira Lal managed to recover, Chuyia would be allowed to return home; but if he didn’t recover she would be a widow and she would never return to them. Somnath, though numbed with sorrow, was resigned to fulfilling his and his daughter’s proper duty to the sick man and his family. Bhagya’s thoughts tormented her all night. She knew that in Brahmin culture, once widowed, a woman was deprived of her useful function in society—that of reproducing and fulfilling her duties to her husband. She ceased to exist as a person; she was no longer either daughter or daughter-in-law. There was no place for her in the community, and she was viewed as a threat to society. A woman’s sexuality and fertility, which was so valuable to her husband in his lifetime, was converted upon his death into a potential danger to the morality of the community. Bhagya’s heart was filled with dread.
Just before Chuyia left, Bhagya lightly slid the kohl applicator between her daughter’s sleepy eyelids. Let her daughter look beautiful—she was not a widow yet.
ON THE SECOND DAY of their journey by bullock-cart, Somnath awakened Chuyia before dawn. His voice was sombre, gravelly from staying up. “Bitya, change out of your night clothes and roll up your mat.” They needed more room to tend to the sick man in their tiny shelter beneath the awning.
Chuyia quickly changed into the brightest colours she could pick out from the tin trunk in the dim light of the oil lamp. She cast a furtive glance at Hira Lal but he was obscured by the shadows cast by her mother-in-law, who was fanning him.
Somnath gave her a long piece of sugar cane, and, delighted by the treat, Chuyia groped her way past the diffused hump of Hira Lal’s legs to her narrow perch at the rear of the cart and dangled her feet over the edge. The dawn breeze stirred in her hair and spread it about her in a dark tangle as she dug her teeth into the juicy flesh of the sugar cane. Hira Lal’s foot stuck out from under a dirty blue coverlet, and the husk she spat out landed on the arch of his foot and slid down to his ankle. Her head lolling with the movement of the cart, Chuyia drowsily watched the husk cling to the sick man’s skin. After a while, she reached over and flicked it off the inert foot. For want of anything better to do, she followed the slow progression of their journey on the deserted road by the trail of white, chewed-out husks she was now careful to spit out as far as she could.
The sun was beginning to rise and already its rays inflamed an oval patch of forest in the distance, while the rest of the forest retained its dark silhouette. As Chuyia swung her feet back and forth, the silver bells encircling her tiny ankles jingled to the rhythm of the cart and she was scarcely aware of Hira Lal’s feet as they knocked against her thigh with every dip and turn of the cart.
The dirt road they travelled was slightly elevated, and, between the jungle thickets and the open country, the undergrowth was covered with a trellis of creepers and pierced here and there with coconut trees and banana groves. They overtook a stocky villager with brass pots balanced from a pole slung across his shoulder. Struck by the vibrant colours of Chuyia’s red blouse and peacock-blue skirt, the man smiled at the comely apparition the girl made so early in the morning. He noticed the red glass bangles circling her wrists and the smudged mark on her forehead, and concluded that the girl was on her way to her bridegroom’s village.
Chuyia, welcoming a diversion, returned his smile and, leaning forward, asked, “What do you have in those pots?”
“Milk,” answered the man. “Do you want some?”
Chuyia shook her head, “No,” and held out the sugar cane. “You can have it,” she offered.
The man laughed, touched by her gesture. “No, child. It’s yours. You eat it,” he said. His eyes moved from the girl to the murky figures beneath the awning, and he called out a cheerful greeting. But the passengers, hidden by their own long shadows, remained silent.
Turning on his perch behind the bullocks, the young driver returned the villager’s greeting and explained, “The travellers are nursing a very sick man, bhaiya.” His swarthy skin was black from the sun, and he wore a white sleeveless vest open at the chest. “They barely talk—his mother is already grieving. That’s his wife.” He jerked his head back to indicate Chuyia.
The villager stopped in his tracks. A curious composite of horror and compassion veiled his eyes, as he turned them again to the girl.
“May Bhagwan show them mercy,” he said and mumbled a prayer after the receding cart.
As the bullock-cart plodded along the dirt road, Chuyia absently followed the deep ruts its wheels left in the red earth. She had little idea of what she was doing or where she was going. She knew the man they called her husband was sick, and that she was on a journey with him and her dour mother-in-law. So long as baba was there to look after her, she felt secure.
Chuyia’s attention shifted from the road to the occupants of the bullock cart, and she now became aware of Hira Lal’s feet flopping against her. She grew irritated and tried to move away from the contact, but the wooden post at her end of the cart did not allow her the space. Almost hypnotized, she gazed at them: they were large, longer even than Somnath’s, and the way the big toes stuck out amused her. But the soles were pale, and not as rough and cracked as her father’s. Her husband’s feet were accustomed to wearing shoes, she thought, with an unfamiliar touch of pride, and unexpectedly she wanted to claim her husband, to draw the attention of this man who slept all the time and did not play with her. Chuyia quietly lifted the blue sheet and ran a finger down Hira Lal’s leg and ankle, and tickled the sole of his foot. Hira Lal’s foot twitched slightly. She repeated the action, and so absorbed was she in the game that she didn’t notice her father clear his throat in warning.
As if to coax Hira Lal awake, Chuyia, suddenly impatient, rubbed the stick of sugar cane hard against the sole of his foot, and when his leg jumped up reflexively she burst into giggles.
Almost at once a sharp blow struck her head. She turned around, startled. Angered by her inappropriate conduct, Hira Lal’s mother had whacked her head with her fan. Chuyia looked at her mother-in-law out of the corner of her eyes, which held the same mildly mocking expression that so infuriated Bhagya. Ignoring the sour old woman, who reminded her of their spiteful neighbour with the fruit orchards, Chuyia calmly bit into her sugar cane as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
Chuyia leaned forward to see what lay ahead. There was a bend in the road, and all at once a luxuriant growth of large-leaved water lilies billowed to one side of her like the waves of a green ocean. Here and there, little orange buds thrust up their heads to the sky. Chuyia’s senses, attuned to the hues and wonders of nature, quickened