in an attempt to placate her, he added, “Our little mouse will remain with us until she comes of age. She will play with her friends, have a normal childhood.”
“Ishh, Bhagwan: may she never come of age!” Bhagya spat out the words.
“Don’t speak such ill-omened words,” he said uneasily, shaking his head reprovingly. “A girl is destined to leave her parents’ home early or she will bring disgrace to it. She is safe and happy only in her husband’s care.”
“She is safe and happy enough in our care.”
“In the Brahmanical tradition,” said Somnath, shifting into the soothing and at the same time authoritative mode he adopted when speaking to his clients, “a woman is recognized as a person only when she is one with her husband. Only then does she become a sumangali, an auspicious woman, and a saubhagyavati, a fortunate woman.” And, as if recalling a passage from a holy book, he half-closed his lids to add, “A woman’s body is a site for conflict between a demonic stri-svavahava, which is her lustful aspect, and her stri-dharma, which is her womanly duty.”
Bhagya jerked her head up so that her sari fell from her hair and stared at him. “And you think that man will be able to satisfy her stri-svavahava? By the time her womanhood blooms, he’ll be old and spent.”
Somnath was shocked. Although he well knew his wife’s passionate nature and discreetly relished it, her lust was contained within the parameters sanctioned by marriage. But to hear her speak so crudely about his daughter’s sexuality violated the principles upon which his ideas of sanctity were based. The Brahmin elders were right: women were dangerous. They sapped a man’s strength and stood between him and salvation. He leaned forward to stare at the woman confronting him.
The hard glint in her husband’s eyes pierced Bhagya like an arrow hurled by the God Arjuna; he had never looked at her this way before. Frozen with the weight of a hoary tradition that brooked no deviation, his look chilled her blood.
“You are the wife and daughter of Brahmin priests; surely you are aware of our traditions,” he said. “Outside of marriage the wife has no recognized existence in our tradition. A woman’s role in life is to get married and have sons. That is why she is created: to have sons! That is all!”
Bhagya, overwhelmed by her husband’s fury, knew she had overstepped her bounds. She dropped her eyes. Her husband was right; his words bore the cumulative wisdom of gods and ancient sages, and who was she to challenge that august pantheon? A girl carried within her the seeds of dishonour, and the burden of responsibility was to be borne by her parents until she was married. “I am sorry,” she said humbly, duly chastened. “It’s just that I hadn’t thought about her marriage. She scampers all about the place like her namesake, Little Mouse. I need time to get used to the idea of her absence from our house. It will be as you say—you are her father.”
Bhagya carried the kitchen lamp into the children’s bedroom. Her sons Prasad and Mohan were asleep on the thin mattress on their hard bed. She sat down on the edge of Chuyia’s cot and held the earthenware lamp so that its light bathed her daughter’s face in a coppery glow. Her curling eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks, and her face was full and round like the moon that had arisen and now shone through the window. Her mouth was an inlaid bud in the moon of her face. Impulsively, she bent to lightly kiss the sweetness on her daughter’s lips. The wash-worn rag that served as Chuyia’s tiny sari had ridden up her thighs, and, with her sturdy, rounded limbs, she looked like one of Krishna’s cherubic gopis.
Bhagya was not given to looking at her daughter so closely. She often gazed upon her sons as they slept. She covertly observed them when they were absorbed in school work or having the extra portion of food she had saved for them, and then her heart brimmed over with love and the special pride that was her due as mother of sons. She fretted about them because they were pale, and their thin limbs and stalk-like necks gave them an appearance of fragility. Bhagya never worried about her robust daughter and, scolding her for her playful and wilful ways, plied her sturdy little body with work—fetch the water, carry the firewood, sweep the yard, feed the cow.
Bhagya pried loose a strand of hair from Chuyia’s neck, and with her sari patted dry the moisture that had formed in the crease where her neck joined her collarbone. Chuyia’s hair, which already fell to her waist, spread about her in a velvet tangle of curls. Bhagya knew she must have looked like this at Chuyia’s age. Then why did she not lavish on her the affection and attention she lavished on her sons? Feel the same surge of love and pride for her daughter? Was it because her heart knew that a daughter was only a guest and never belonged to the house into which she was born? As she looked down at her daughter’s baby face, Bhagya’s eyes became moist and she was swept by a wave of tenderness and pity she had not allowed herself to feel before. She kissed her daughter’s forehead and brushed her eyelids with her lips.
All at once the girl opened huge eyes, and in the lamplight they appeared clear and luminous with understanding, as if the child had grasped the complexity and paradox of her mother’s emotions. Bhagya stroked her daughter’s cheeks. She whispered, “Go to sleep, my little mouse.” The girl’s heavy lids slowly sheathed her eyes and, as if the taut skin of her eyelids were insufficient to cover them, left milky crescents beneath her eyelashes. Flesh of my flesh, the beautiful fruit of my womb: her gaze lingered on her daughter’s face.
Bhagya sat up, suddenly filled with a guilty sense of foreboding; a mother’s unbridled love would surely attract nazar to her child. Bhagya snapped her fingers thrice in quick succession to ward off the evil eye. She drew her sari over her bowed head and, folding her hands, prayed to Shashthi, the goddess of children, to watch over her sleeping daughter.
BHAGYA HAD RECITED HER morning prayers by the time the boys left for school. As she watered the holy basil bushes, Somnath, in white dhoti and shirt, armed with his basket of sacred texts and the caste-marks on his forehead, came looking for her.
“Accha, I’m going,” he said by way of farewell.
Bhagya covered her head. “Bring plantain. If you can, some fish for the children.”
Somnath nodded confidently. “I’m owed quite a bit.”
“Our neighbour said a holy man has come from far away. His name is Gandhi. Get his picture if you can for my prayer nook.”
“Yes, people are talking about him; they call him bapu Gandhi,” Somnath said. “He wants us to weave our own cloth—the English sarkar thinks he is a troublemaker—but I hear he is a good man. He says all religions are true. He wants people to unite in their struggle against the English’s raj. I’ll look for his picture in the bazaar.” And then Somnath set off for far-flung houses to collect the meagre tithes that were his due as a Brahmin.
Chuyia helped her mother pick up her brothers’ soiled clothes for the wash and rolled up the bedding. She went to the back of the house to lay out the feed and fill the water bucket for the cow and its wobbly-legged calf. When she returned, she found her mother reclining by the window and chanting from the Mahabharata. Bhagya often did this before preparing her midday meal. Chuyia promptly covered her head with her sari and snuggled up to her mother, intent on listening to the passionate stories of the gods and goddesses. Bhagya arranged her sari to accommodate Chuyia and began to read out from the tattered copy of the Mahabharata.
A covey of parrots, the sudden whir from their wings startling them, streaked greenly past their window on the way to the neighbour’s orchard. Chuyia didn’t mind sharing the fruit with the parrots: in any case, they would forage among the higher branches she couldn’t reach.
After the sacred text had been put away, Chuyia followed her mother into the kitchen. She prattled away about the doings of the deities as Bhagya, sitting on the palm leaf mat on the floor, sliced onions and prepared the spinach. Bhagya answered her questions distractedly. Chuyia watched her mother rinse the spinach. “Why don’t you cook fish? I’m tired of spinach,” she said. “Radha’s ma cooks fish every