by Alka Joshi
She was wearing one of the frocks Kanta had ordered for her, a lighter-than-a-feather chiffon with a slim-fitting bodice. Kanta said, “It’s an exact copy of what Madhubala wore in Mr. and Mrs. 55. I had the tailor weave gold chains into the waist, just like the dress in the movie.”
Radha’s breasts were straining against the fabric. She grimaced now and then, as if the binding were too tight. Her hips, which had been slim as a boy’s when I first met her, swayed as she walked. I watched the faces of the guests and was shocked to see the men taking notice, their eyes following the movement of her buttocks. She was only thirteen! But when I turned to look at her, I had to admit she seemed far older.
I watched the holy assistants circle the main room and the courtyard three times with red thread, starting from the east, while the pandit sprinkled holy water around the area. Then he lowered a clay container filled with grain and red flowers into the pit Malik had dug in the southeast corner of the courtyard. Now that we had fed the gods and asked them to watch over the house and protect us from evil intentions, the house, and its inhabitants, were safe from harm.
* * *
Until a move-in ceremony was finished, the house had to be free of all our possessions, so the driver of the camel cart had waited patiently with our carriers and trunks in front of the house. After the guests left, Malik’s friends (who had also been invited to the move-in festivities) carried everything inside the house. I told Malik he looked tired and should go home; Radha and I would clean up. Pleased that the ceremony had been such a success (the pandit stayed three hours), Malik left with his pals (and the leftover sweets).
Eager to settle in, I began unpacking the first trunk and stacking our clothes on the built-in shelves. I asked Radha to organize our kitchen. She bent over the other trunk, turned and bolted out of the room. I could hear her retching in the privy. When she returned, I asked if she’d eaten something that didn’t agree with her.
She shook her head and headed for the charpoy. “If I can just lie down for a few minutes...” Within seconds, she was asleep.
Poor thing. Her days were so full now that she often nodded off at dinner. I decided to finish arranging our clothes. When that was done, I started to set up the kitchen, pulling out pots, stainless steel plates, cups and glasses from the trunk. The carriers stuffed with odds and ends would have to wait until tomorrow. Satisfied, I glanced around the room.
Radha still had not stirred. I walked to the cot in the corner of the room to admire my sleeping sister. The Madhubala dress stretched across her rounded hips. Her hair gleamed with coconut oil. Her skin glowed. She didn’t look sick; she looked peaceful, content. Perhaps I should make her some ginger and honey water. It always worked wonders for women who suffered from nausea early in their pregnancy.
The word started as a tingling in my ear, slid down my throat and snaked into my spine. Radha was nauseous. Her breasts were tender. She was always tired. I remembered her telling me she had already started her menses. Could she be pregnant?
Whom had she been with? She went to a girl’s school—she didn’t know any boys. Malik was too young. There was Manu, Kanta’s husband, but I couldn’t imagine he would take advantage of her. Mr. Iyengar? Baju? Who?
The answer landed on my heart like a thousand-pound Brahma bull.
* * *
I reached the Pink City Bazaar. The air reeked of stale cooking oil, rotting vegetables, diesel exhaust.
I found Malik sitting on a low wall across from his favorite chaat stall, sharing a Red and White with his friends (English cigarettes were more expensive than Indian beedis, and ever since he’d started going to the palace, Malik’s tastes had become more refined).
He was describing to his friends some dish Chef had prepared for him the last time he was at the maharinis’ palace. When he noticed me, he stopped midsentence.
I must have resembled a cheetah on the prowl—wild, dangerous. One side of my hair had come loose from my bun. My sari was wrinkled from unpacking, bending, squatting, rearranging. My eyes blazed with anger.
Malik jumped off the wall and gave the almost-finished Red and White to another urchin. “Auntie-Boss?” he said.
“Can you take me to Hari?”
* * *
We zigzagged down narrow streets, Malik stopping at a tea stall or a paan stand to ask the proprietors if they had seen Hari. The chai-wallas and their customers stared at me. I stared back. We rushed past a woman in the Refugee Market who’d set up shop at the edge of the street. She was sitting on a piece of cotton cloth, her shoe repair tools lined up neatly. She eyed my sandals and said, “Ji, your straps are coming loose.”
We came to a nondescript building that, like the others, had been decorated decades earlier in pink plaster. Shops took up the bottom floor. In one, a man patched a large inner tube. In another, a tailor haggled with a customer while his two male assistants, bent over tiny sewing machines, worked in the faint light of a bare bulb. Next came a busy lassi vendor. Men loitered in front of his shop, talking and laughing, carelessly discarding their empty clay tumblers in the ditch by the road.
Malik turned into a dark passageway. I followed. We climbed a flight of stairs to a dimly lit, narrow landing. Malik moved quietly, peering inside the door of each room. At last, he turned and nodded at me.
In the room, two young men played cards on the wooden floor. They looked up when I entered. There was no window, and the air was fetid. The walls were uneven where chunks of plaster had fallen off. The only furniture in the room was a charpoy, on which a third man was sleeping. Hari. The strings of the cot were so stretched his body hung only an inch or two above the rough wood floor.
I felt a sharp pain in my chest just before I lunged at him. Out came the anger I hadn’t been able to summon the first time I’d encountered him in Jaipur. I punched his arms. I slapped his ears. I pounded his shoulders. If I could have broken his skull with my bare hands, I would have.
Hari put his arms around his head to protect himself, turned over on his back and cried, “Arré!”
“Maderchod!” I screamed. “Salla kutta!” Obscenities I’d only heard men use.
The other men had frozen in midplay. Malik yelled at them to leave, waving his arms at them, as if shooing away pigeons. They got to their feet and went through the open door, leaving their cards behind. They turned to gawk, but Malik rushed at them. He followed them out and pulled the door closed behind him.
Hari managed to roll over and sit up. He tried to grab my arms, but my anger had given me the strength of Shiva. I freed one arm from his grasp and slapped his head again and again with the flat of my hand.
I was shouting as loudly as my lungs would allow; I didn’t care what the neighbors or the lassi drinkers thought. “She’s a child! She’s like your sister! You would do that to your sister? Bastard! Donkey’s ass! Worthless piece of shit!”
Hari scrabbled out of bed and lost his balance, upsetting the cot. He crab-walked backward to the wall. I followed, kicking, smacking, pummeling. I felt a dull throbbing in my hands and scanned the room to see if there was something else I could hit him with. In that instant, Hari stood and grabbed me, pinning me against the wall.
“Stop!” he shouted as he held my arms against my sides. “Have you gone mad?”
I saw terror in his eyes.
“What’s got into you?” His forehead was bleeding and red welts were rising on his forehead and cheeks.
He was holding me so tightly I couldn’t free my arms no matter how hard I tried. We panted like dogs fighting over a piece of meat. I spat at him before he saw it coming, and spittle dribbled down his cheek.
He slapped me with such force a tooth snagged the inside of my cheek and I tasted blood.
“Buss!” he growled. Enough!
I couldn’t stand the thought of Radha’s flesh against his skin, the sweaty stench of him on her. Radha, thirteen. Still a
child, barely old enough to know what men expected from a woman. I was responsible. If I’d stayed with him, as a good wife would have, Hari would have never claimed Radha for himself. He wouldn’t have soiled her. Now she was carrying his child.
I let myself slide down the wall. I pulled my knees to my chin, hugged them with my arms, rocked back and forth. I shut my eyes. I wailed. What a mess I’d made of my life, my parents’ life, my sister’s! If I hadn’t been so selfish, this would not have happened. My sister would not have been sullied. My mother-in-law would not have died without me to comfort her. My parents would not have been humiliated. And for what? So I could live a life of my own? How self-centered I had been!
Malik opened the door and stood, small and frightened. “Auntie-Boss?”
When I didn’t answer, he came to me and shook my shoulders. “Auntie-Boss. It’s me.” He said it over and over until I opened my eyes and saw how terrified he was. His swagger was gone, his shoulders hunched in fear. Why had I brought him to this miserable place?
“Please,” I said, “go home.”
His eyes became hard, and he shook his head no. Then he left the room, closing the door behind him. I should have known he wouldn’t leave me as easily as I had left my family. He would stay with me all night if he had to.
Hari picked up the charpoy, straightened it and sat, all the while keeping a wary eye on me. “Why are you here?”
His forehead was bleeding. His hair had grown long, hanging unevenly around his ears. He’d let his beard grow, too, a sparse, patchy growth that make him look like a Kashmiri nomad. His clothes were cheap but clean, his sandals new.
Which of us deserved more blame for what I was about to ask? “How long have you been lying down with Radha?”
He sat up straighter. His bug eyes widened. “Why would you think that?”
“How long?”
“I would never—she’s a child!”
“I believed you when I saw you with that little girl. I thought you were helping the women here. But you were lying then, and you’re lying still!”
“I never touched your sister!” He looked away, then rubbed his hands together. “She offered herself, but—”
“Offered herself?”
Hari’s lower lip was turning purple; he touched it gently with his tongue. “When she came to me, in my village, she said she would give me money if I took her to you. I didn’t believe her. So she said she’d let me do what I wanted with her.” He stuck out his chin, defiant. “I could have—but I didn’t. I wouldn’t.”
“How did she get pregnant, then?”
His mouth fell open in disbelief.
“She’ll start showing soon enough.”
He shook his head. “No!”
“Yes!”
He got up and came to me, squatted, gripped my arms. “Lakshmi, it wasn’t me.” If he were lying, he’d be covering the scar on his chin.
I searched my memory: Radha when I first saw her with her messy pigtail; Radha welcoming me home with dal batti and subji; Radha in the yard, watering the camellias and jasmine, as she’d promised Mrs. Iyengar she’d do; Radha and Malik playing fivestones on the floor of our room.
My memories grew hazy about the time I started working at the palace; since that day I’d seen Radha less, and only for brief periods. If she wasn’t at school, or at Kanta’s house, where had she been?
I frowned. “She had bruises when she first arrived here.”
Hari returned to the charpoy, and sat. He put a finger to his forehead, which now was weeping blood. He winced. “We didn’t take the train. I used your money to pay debts. We rode on lorries, farm wagons.” He swallowed. “One night, we were on a truck carrying sheep. When the driver stopped to relieve himself, I did the same. When I returned to the truck, he was trying to—” Hari glanced at me, quickly, before looking away. “But I stopped him. Nothing happened. Radha was safe.”
I covered my eyes with my hand. All my fault. I could hear men chatting, laughing, outside.
For a long moment, neither of us said a word.
Then: “Will you take her child? Like you took ours?” he asked.
I took my hand away and looked at him. “What?”
“You took our children away. Why?” His lips trembled.
I swallowed hard. “What children?”
Tears filled his eyes. “Maa knew all along what you were doing.” He pressed his palms together. “How could you?”
“You’re talking foolishness.”
“Our children were gifts from Bhagwan.”
I fought to keep from shouting. Gifts from God?
During the day, I would take the tonics, broths, seeds and concoctions that saas fed me to increase fertility. But while she and my husband slept, I’d prepare the brew that kept me childless for the two years of our marriage. The moment my breasts felt tender and I couldn’t keep food down, I would drink my saas’s cotton root bark tea. Relief came only after the bleeding started—when I knew my pregnancy was over.
His mother was the one who had opened my eyes. How could I explain that to him?
Day after day, I worked alongside her to heal women—most were children still, twenty years old or younger, bodies weak from too many births, too many of them rough. Their days were filled with worry about how to feed their brood; at night they prayed their husbands would come home from labor too tired to add to their troubles. One day Saasuji taught me to prepare the contraceptive tea. And I realized that cotton root bark could change a woman’s life: she could choose for herself.
That was what I wanted: a life that could fulfill me in a way that children wouldn’t. From that day, I hoarded all the knowledge my mother-in-law could give me. Let her be the rolling pin that shapes a ball of chappati. Almost overnight, my world grew large with possibility.
Hari stood, began pacing. “I thought you’d left me for another man. I thought...all kinds of things. I worried you’d been hurt. You might be lying in a ditch. You might be sick, or injured. I looked everywhere for you. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t work. And Maa.” He looked at me, his eyes filled with pain. “She was never the same. Not after you left.”
I closed my eyes. I could imagine my mother-in-law as if she were standing in the room with us, neat and trim in her widow’s sari and her round eyeglasses. Always gentle, always kind. I’m sorry, Saasuji.
I wiped roughly at my eyes, my nose. “You didn’t deserve your mother,” I said to Hari.
All at once, his eyes were aflame. “My mother always took your side. When we realized you were gone for good, she went to her jar and found you’d taken all the money and her herb pot. I thought she’d be angry, but she said, ‘Shabash.’ She thought I hadn’t heard her congratulating you, but I had. My Maa chose you!”
His tears were real; he wiped them with his palms.
It had never occurred to me that his mother had hoped I’d use the money. We never spoke about the beatings Hari gave me for being barren. Rarely had Hari hit me in the face, and my sari covered the bruises on my body. Only now was I remembering that when she treated women with a swollen face, she’d insist I prepare the poultice. Had she been showing me how to heal myself?
“You left me huddled on the floor with bruises every time you learned that my menses had come.” I could still remember how frightened I’d felt. “One day, I figured you’d go too far.”
He winced. “I’ve—I’ve tried to make amends.”
Well, this was a surprise. “How? By following me around town and taking my money?”
He started to speak, then stopped. Gingerly, he touched his forehead, feeling the bump there. “I help women who need help.”
“The pleasure girls?”
He heard the skepticism in my voice and shook his head. “You don’t believe me. That’s fine. I wouldn’t have believed me either ten years ago. Except...Maa tau
ght me what she taught you, after you left. And I understood, at last, why those women sought her out. She was their last hope.”
He must have seen the shock on my face. He sighed.
“See, I knew about her sachets. It made me angry that men were being deprived of their children. Then you started helping her. And one night—you didn’t know—but I saw you drinking her tea. I was so...angry...and ashamed that you didn’t want my children. Then you...left, and Maa got ill.”
He stopped, passed a hand over his eyes. “A woman came to her for help. She was...bleeding from her womb.” He looked away. “Her husband had thrust a—a broom handle there because she had laughed at another man’s joke. She had lost so much blood...she was half-dead. Maa told me what to do, where to harvest the herbs we needed, how to relieve the woman’s pain.”
My breathing had become shallow. I could see the scene that Hari described so clearly before me. I’d seen similar ones while working with his mother. The urgency. The plaintive cries of the women. Their brutal wounds.
Hari rubbed his hands together. “She revived. But then came the infection. I did everything as Maa instructed. But the woman died, anyway.” He swallowed. “She was only sixteen, Lakshmi. I thought of you then. I didn’t want to, but I thought of how I had hurt you. How many times... And I was...ashamed. Little by little, I began helping Maa. The women. The children. I saw so much—pain, misery, hunger.” He ran his hand through his hair.
I leaned my head against the wall. I didn’t want to believe him. I closed my eyes so I could hear the truth in his words.
“When I first came here, I did go to the Pleasure District. I was lonely. Especially after I realized Radha had lied to me about what was in your letter.”
I opened my eyes, puzzled.
