The Good Girls

by Sonia Faleiro

  ‘They shouldn’t be out in public with a mobile phone,’ Rajiv Kumar said, speaking in Braj Bhasha, the language of these parts. ‘Who knows who they’re talking to?’ Although the fields adjoined the village, the walking distance from the Shakya house to the orchard was ten minutes or more. The orchard wasn’t even visible from the house, which was located in a spiderweb of lanes. Rajiv Kumar’s implication was clear. The girls chose that particular time because they were alone, they chose that place because it was secluded. To remove any doubt, he used the word ‘chakkar’ to indicate there was something crooked about all this, something off balance. ‘The girls in your family are romancing someone,’ he said.

  Nazru agreed that it didn’t look good.

  ‘You should let their parents know,’ Rajiv Kumar said.

  A few days passed, and Rajiv Kumar again saw the girls talking on the phone. He again sought out Nazru who explained that a complaint could backfire. The girls’ parents might accuse him of slander. Rumours were butterflies, they might say. If word got around, who would marry Padma? Who would have Lalli?

  Nazru understood that it was one thing for Rajiv Kumar to talk. It was another for a relative, a first cousin no less, to level an accusation of such grave seriousness. And there was the other matter to consider, which was that he depended on the family. Everyone in the village struggled, but he had an asthmatic father to care for and a brother people called crazy. The Shakyas sometimes hired him to work their land. If things got truly difficult, they could be counted on to come through with cash.

  So Nazru said nothing – but mindful of his duty, he started to watch the girls.

  His behaviour didn’t go unnoticed.

  ‘He ogles us,’ Padma said to a friend with disgust.

  It was while Nazru was keeping watch that he came across the spindly bobblehead boy. Katra village was small and Nazru knew everyone who lived there – but he didn’t know this boy. The boy was grazing his buffaloes so he couldn’t have come from far. It was natural to assume that he was a Yadav from the hamlet next door.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Nazru shouted.

  ‘Pappu.’

  The young man’s name, in fact, was Darvesh Yadav. He was sharp-nosed with a shock of very black hair. People called him Pappu because he was small, like a boy. Pappu wore an oversized shirt and trousers, a hoop in his ear and rubber slippers on his feet.

  Although his face was imprinted with apprehension, Pappu’s life was more secure than most in the hamlet of Jati. His father was a watermelon farmer who had accumulated enough savings to build one of the few brick houses in a settlement of shacks. Pappu’s mother doted on him, her youngest child. Although his parents’ lives revolved around the sandy riverbank home of their crop, they didn’t stop their children from finding work elsewhere during the off season – picking through garbage for recyclables or hefting bricks on construction sites, even as far away as Delhi.

  And because of this, Pappu had seen a world outside the one his parents were rooted to: a world in which roads were crammed with cars, and not farm animals, where there were soaring buildings and ambitious men and women doing more than just the one thing in the one way it had always been done – a modern India where the burdens and entrapments that had kept generations of his family collecting cow dung could be swept away and forgotten. And although Pappu didn’t know anyone who had left the village for good, this new world was full of promise. Freedom was close.

  But Pappu, although he was nearly twenty, could only write his name. And he was expected to help support his family. They had a deal, father and son – as long as Pappu contributed financially, he could do as he pleased in his free time.

  Nazru wasn’t having it.

  ‘If your animals eat all my grass,’ he shouted, ‘what will my animals eat? Don’t you come here again!’

  2 forbade unmarried women from using phones: indiatoday.in/india/north/story/up-panchayat-bans-love-marriages-bars-women-from-using-mobile-phones-109131-2012-07-12

  3 married within their caste: thehindu.com/data/just-5-per-cent-of-indian-marriages-are-intercaste/article6591502.ece

  4 Twenty-eight cases were reported in the country: pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1540824; hindustantimes.com/india-news/792-spike-in-honour-killing-cases-up-tops-the-list-govt-in-parliament/story-x0IfcFpfAljYi15yQtP0YP.html

  5 accused of killing his daughter: Jim Yardley, ‘In India, Castes, Honour and Killings Intertwine’, New York Times, 10 July 2010, nytimes.com/2010/07/10/world/asia/10honor.html

  Lalli’s Father Buys a Phone

  Cousin Manju was twelve and skinny, with the radiant smile and point-blank manner of all the Shakya women. She lived with her family in Noida, a heavily polluted industrial city some hours away from Katra village, in an overcrowded tenement with shared bathrooms. The walls of the building shook when trucks rumbled past.

  When Lalli’s father, Sohan Lal, phoned to invite her for the school holidays she was thrilled. It was mango season. And she’d get to see her first cousin, whom she fondly called ‘meri wali didi’ – my sister. Her uncle said he’d be away with his wife and youngest son on a pilgrimage. ‘Lalli will be alone.’

  It was understood that Manju, although she was younger than Lalli, would look out for the older girl.

  Before leaving, Sohan Lal went to buy a new phone from Keshav Communications, which was located in the bazaar, down the road from the cycle puncture repairman and opposite a snack shop that served Coca-Cola out of an icebox. Waiting at the door, sweat beading on his face, was Yogendra Singh, Sohan Lal’s cousin. He was a plain-speaking young man with a rough beard, dressed – like all the village men – in a collared shirt and sturdy trousers made from a pale fabric, which better endured the heat.

  All day long customers streamed into Keshav’s. They browsed his affordable range of Made in China phones, some of which had features that weren’t readily available even in name-brand handsets. Then, because they didn’t have Internet access, they asked Keshav to download the latest Bollywood songs by sideloading them from his desktop computer to their phones via USB. Most didn’t have power either, so they also paid a few rupees to charge their phones.

  As they waited, customers enjoyed the cool breeze from the whirring fan, gazing at the neatly ordered shelves stacked with boxes of cellophane-wrapped products. Keshav was a modern entrepreneur and the village boys admired him.

  This afternoon there weren’t very many clients vying for his attention – but even if there had been, Keshav would have served the newcomers first. Sohan Lal’s cousin was Keshav’s landlord’s son – and according to the social hierarchies of the village, this made him the equivalent of Keshav’s boss’s son.

  Sohan Lal wanted a handset with a long battery life. He was going on a pilgrimage, he said. It was time to get his youngest boy’s hair tonsured and to pay respect to the mother goddess.

  Keshav brought out a handful of phones from under the glass counter. Sohan Lal browsed them carefully, but it was his cousin who did most of the talking, asking about this feature and that. They settled on a shiny black phone with a gold and black keypad. Then Sohan Lal asked to buy a SIM card. But when told to provide proof of identity, which was the law, he said he wasn’t carrying any. His cousin looked on enquiringly.

  Twenty-year-old Keshav made a quick set of calculations in his head. It was only here in Katra that he could afford to run his own business. He paid 500 rupees a month in rent, a good deal. He was in debt to his uncle who had helped set him up and he owed it to his widowed mother to keep things going.

  It didn’t matter, Keshav assured the men. He pulled out a copy of another customer’s identity card and entered the details in Sohan Lal’s bill of sale. Then, because Sohan Lal couldn’t write, he forged a signature on his behalf. What was more likely, he thought, the police appearing at his doorstep or his landlord’s son getting
angry with him for refusing to do as he was told?

  Keshav knew the villagers had identity cards which they used to purchase subsidised food grains and to vote, but he also knew that these precious items were kept securely at home. He often did such favours and had never yet been caught. He had no reason to believe this time would be any different.

  Sohan Lal didn’t take his new phone on pilgrimage. Instead, he gave it to his niece Padma. Although it’s unlikely she knew it at the time, the device had a feature that made it especially popular with nosy parents. It could record calls. The conversations were then saved on the phone.

  Cousin Manju Observes Something Strange

  Some years ago, the Shakya family stopped getting along. The men blamed the women, accusing them of submitting to small-hearted squabbles. The house, which stretched across a quarter acre of land, was now split into three parts demarcated by low mud walls.

  Thereafter, each of the families cooked meals in their own kitchens, drew water from their own handpumps and housed their black-bellied buffaloes and white-skinned goats in separate shelters. If they had used toilets, they would have built three. But they squatted in the fields, as most everyone else did, because paying for something that could be had for free was wasteful.

  They were still a joint family, the Shakyas insisted. The courtyard was for everyone to bask in, all eighteen of them, and the dogs too. A parent of one child was the parent of all the others. Padma called Siya Devi ‘badi-ma’, elder mother, and to Siya Devi her niece Padma was ‘hamari bachchi’, our girl. Sohan Lal, the oldest of the brothers at forty-seven, was the head of the household. His two younger brothers, who were in their thirties, deferred to him on important decisions. Being men, they spent their days outside the confines of the house. The women mostly stayed in. They cooked for the men, ate after the men and sat lower than them. If the men settled on the charpoy, the wives made do on the floor.

  But a little space and some autonomy improved the quality of one’s life, the Shakyas said, and so did some education. The Shakya parents were illiterate, but they sent their boys and girls to the school near the orchard. The girls were typically pulled out after the eighth class, when school was no longer free nor compulsory. Then they were married off. For their safety, the Shakyas said, for social acceptability. When she could read and write, a woman exuded sheen; she attracted a better quality of husband.

  Every morning at harvest time, Jeevan Lal and his wife Sunita Devi went to their mint plot. They left Padma in the care of her grandmother with whom they shared a dark little room partitioned into two by a bed sheet hooked to some nails. The elderly woman was whispers and bones in a widow’s white sari. Although she shared a close bond with her granddaughter, and was, in fact, largely responsible for her well-being, it was inevitable that Padma would drift off to see her cousin in the room next door.

  Lalli had two elder siblings, Phoolan Devi and Virender, but they no longer lived at home. In the absence of her parents – Sohan Lal and Siya Devi, who had taken their youngest child Avnesh on pilgrimage with them – the teenaged girl looked out for herself, her brother Parvesh, their animals and home.

  At the other end of the courtyard the third Shakya man, round-bellied Ram Babu, and his ringing-voiced wife, Guddo, shepherded several of their young towards their taro patch. They wouldn’t return until it was time for the evening prayers, which they performed before a shrine indoors.

  The children left behind were unsupervised. The day cracked open. In, out, in, out, they went.

  When Manju’s father learned of this much later, he was outraged. ‘Ghar pe koi nahin tha,’ he said. There was no one at home. ‘They were children!’

  Then there was the awkward matter, which was that the older girls didn’t want little Manju around. ‘We’re going to cut mint,’ Lalli would call out as the teenagers rushed off. ‘What will you come for?’

  Padma, the older one, ignored her. Later, Manju would explain, ‘She never asked about me. When I tried to make conversation she would reply, “what does it matter to you?” ’

  When the girls returned, they were even less inclined to talk. They routinely performed hard physical labour, so it couldn’t be fatigue. And while they acted like she was invisible, they kept up a steady stream of conversation between themselves. ‘No big deal,’ Manju grumbled.

  She observed that Padma’s father didn’t much care for this behaviour either. When he came in from the fields and saw the teenagers sitting side by side, he acted annoyed. ‘Yes, yes,’ he muttered, ‘keep wasting time.’

  But if anything, all the girls did was work.

  As the sun climbed, Padma and Lalli sat before their respective family hearths, lighting dung cakes into a flaring heap. They heated oil and kneaded dough. They returned to the fields with roti sabzi for the family members still toiling. They trudged back home to scrub the dishes with wood ash for soap. Off they went with their goats. Back they came to milk the buffaloes. They swept the courtyard. They washed the clothes. They jerked the heavy galvanised steel handle of the water pump up and down, up and down, to fill a bucket of water to wash themselves. They prepared dinner. They swept the courtyard one more time. Then they did something. Then they did something else.

  Crows cawed piercingly and the sun radiated fire-like. In the sickening heat, the pyramids of garbage filled the air with a rotting smell. Grit settled on clothes, faces, tongues and feet. The Shakya girls carried on.

  Cousin Manju was accustomed to chores. She wasn’t yet a teenager, but it was her job to cook dinner every night. Her father had bought her a footstool so she could reach the stove. But when she was done, she would switch on the air cooler. She’d listen to music on a mobile phone. She could even leave the room as long as she went no further than the front steps. Aunties said hello. Boys grinned. Her girlfriends, out roaming with elder sisters, stopped by to gossip about impossible homework and dreaded teachers.

  On weekends her father took them for ice cream. They went window shopping. They chatted and laughed and sometimes they squabbled like pigeons fighting over a handful of grain – and that was okay too.

  What did her cousins do when they were done with one set of chores? There was nothing fun for a girl in the village. The day was a thousand years long.

  Padma was sitting at home. Very soon she would be deposited at the threshold of a new family, as a bride to a man she had never seen. In two years, it would be Lalli’s turn.

  The difference in their lives, it seemed to the younger girl, was that she was made to work hard so that she would one day make a good wife. But the older girls worked like they were already wives and mothers. The burdens placed on them appeared to her extreme. She was convinced ‘there was no time for them to think.’

  Swatting flies in the house, Manju decided that enough was enough. One afternoon, when the older girls left for the fields, she followed. That day, and the next, she observed a pattern that struck her as odd.

  It was the teenagers’ job to cut the mint growing in the three family plots, which covered nearly an acre of land. But the only plot they ever visited was the one that belonged to Padma’s father, immediately adjacent to the orchard.

  ‘Every day you come here and only here,’ she said. ‘Kyun?’ Why?

  ‘Be quiet,’ Lalli snapped.

  Later, Manju saw Lalli filling a diary with poems. She saw Padma secretly dabbing on lipstick.

  Every night after dinner, the children stepped out one last time to squat in the fields. Padma and Lalli waited for the younger girl to choose a spot, but then scooted elsewhere. Manju felt hurt. There were wriggling snakes. And jackals. And what if some boy flashed his phone in her face? ‘Let’s go!’ she would whine, looking warily around as she knotted her salwar.

  Padma and Lalli were never ready.

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ they would say, virtually in unison, their laughter tinkling in the darkness. ‘There’s
plenty of time.’

  Nazru Sees It Too

  Nazru lived in an elephant-eared taro plot near the orchard. Inside the tiny brick room, his father sat upright on a charpoy, wheezing heavily into his shrivelled chest. Some nights when the asthmatic old man injected himself with medication to clear his passageways, he was knocked senseless. Nazru’s teenaged brother, who was named after an old-time Bollywood star, was ‘weak in the head’ according to their father’s diagnosis and encouraged to keep to himself. An older brother had fled to another state where he had ended up as a moulder in the even more unforgiving world of a brick kiln, with his wife by his side and their five children running around in the beating sun. His mother tried to keep the family from coming apart, but Nazru was forever getting into scrapes.

  One night he heard bandits rummaging about in a neighbour’s house and instead of staying away, as others did in such circumstances, he confronted the men. They shot him in the arm. Another time he killed a neighbour’s goat. There was no logic to his actions, as least not any that he articulated to people’s satisfaction. Asked a simple and direct question, he laughed brayingly, hee-haw, hee-haw. The villagers made him apologise to the owner of the dead goat and pay restitution. Time and again they counselled him, ‘apne kaam se kaam rakho.’ Mind your own business.

  How could he?

  There was nothing for a young man in the village. Sometimes he gathered friends for a drink, sometimes to smoke weed. He’d once gone for a drive in a car, but he didn’t remember very much because it was the time he’d been shot and was being rushed to the hospital. He was too old to hang around the teenagers who stared at their phones, and too immature to socialise with men his own age who were married and had children.

  Some people thought they had him pegged. ‘Dar naam ka cheez usko nahin hai.’ He isn’t afraid of anything. Others, who saw him rustling about on one of his evening excursions, knew he was just nosy.