The Dowry Bride

by Shobhan Bantwal

  Shocked at his comments, Chandramma had given him a good tongue-lashing. “No dowry! Ree, are you totally mad or what? Our Suresh is a bank officer. Our family is well known in the state. We are too good for that girl with only a bachelor’s degree and no career. Those Shastrys have no social standing; they should consider themselves blessed to have people like us associated with them. For giving their daughter a good home and husband, they should kiss our feet, no?” As always, Vinayak had retreated in defeat.

  Chandramma had won another battle. She always did.

  Recently, Chandramma had resorted to drastic measures to get the dowry money. She had no conscience. She had even stooped to murder. It made Vinayak sick to his stomach to think of the horror of it all. He was convinced that his wife had a mental illness of some sort. He had read about sociopaths and psychopaths—for all practical purposes they seemed like ordinary people, but their minds were twisted. Was Chandramma one of those mental cases? She had grown up in an affectionate and affluent home. There was no explanation other than insanity for the hostility and greed she exhibited.

  All he could do now was pray that some day Chandramma would recognize her evil ways and atone for her sins. They had indeed been lucky to have such a wonderful daughter-in-law. Why couldn’t his wife have seen that, for God’s sake?

  A sense of urgency to make up for his own sins had begun to creep up on him slowly, silently. It had started to become more evident since the previous year, when he had visited his doctor to be treated for bronchitis. His tired and weakened lungs were beginning to do something strange again. Having fought tuberculosis in his youth, he was resigned to the fact that it would probably show up again sometime during his life.

  After looking at the X-rays his doctor had said it was serious—most likely lung cancer. “To be hundred percent sure we have to do a biopsy, Mr. Ramnath,” he had said grimly.

  Vinayak was not surprised that his lungs had deteriorated further. His persistent cough had become worse in recent months, convincing him that he was dying. But he had made it clear that he didn’t want to be treated. “No biopsy. I have lived long enough, doctor. I am grateful to God for giving me this much after my tuberculosis.”

  “But that is ridiculous,” the astonished doctor had scolded him. “You have to start appropriate treatment immediately.”

  Vinayak had shaken his head. “No! If it is cancer, I don’t want to know. Just treat the pain when it starts, if it starts.” The doctor had reluctantly yielded to his wishes, but not without issuing dire warnings about the horrors of cancer.

  What would be the point in resorting to expensive treatment anyway, Vinayak had argued with himself. He had read about the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation, about how the treatment was often worse than the disease. He had no one to worry over his health, hold his hand, soothe his aches and sit beside him in the hospital. His wife and children were not warm, kind-hearted individuals. They were likely to be glad to see him die quickly. He did not want to wake up in a hospital bed and see Chandramma’s face, blatantly telling him to hurry up and die so she could have his money.

  No, it was not worth it, he had assured himself. He would rather die sooner than later.

  Returning his attention to the present, Vinayak realized it was time to go home. Rising from his chair, he stretched. He was tired. Lately he tired easily. It probably had to do with that wretched cancer, or whatever it was that had invaded his lungs. Then he bid goodnight to the other staff and headed for the bus stop.

  As he sat in the cramped bus on his way home, Vinayak began to experience that strange sense of unease combined with guilt again. Megha’s disappearance was mostly his fault. He had failed in his duty towards her.

  How long before the police figured it all out and ended up on his doorstep? And how long before the cancer killed him off? Meanwhile Vinayak prayed for a quick and silent heart attack.

  Chapter 14

  Chandramma Ramnath was a woman on a mission. She strode down the decaying alley with the purposeful air of one who knew exactly where she was headed. Although not entirely sure if she was going in the right direction, she managed to move with relative ease, navigating around the filthy little urchins playing a game of street cricket, the mangy dogs lying on the footpath, the old beggar woman holding out her gnarled hands for alms, and the stinking rubbish strewn around. The discarded banana peels were particularly dangerous and she took care not to step on any. She hitched up the folds of her sari so the hem would not touch the ground.

  “Ugh! This neighborhood is filthier than I had imagined,” she murmured under her breath, a pinched look about her face. The street was not paved and there was red dust everywhere, including on her sari. She would have to take it to the dry-cleaners the next day. Open sewers flanking the alley emitted a foul odor. Her stomach was beginning to protest.

  The other pedestrians stared at her for a moment then moved out of her way. Chandramma knew she looked out of place in this neighborhood with her silk sari and expensive jewelry, and her focused behavior. The low-class women here had their cheap saris covering their heads and walked with their eyes downcast.

  She came to a stop, pulled a piece of paper from her black leather handbag and studied it for a moment, a crease appearing on her brow. Then she slipped it back into her bag and glanced at the building that stood before her: a three-story tenement grayed with age and black lines of mold streaking the front from years of monsoon rain coursing down. Faded and darned clothes and saris hung on lines on the balconies outside each crumbling flat.

  Why wasn’t she told the building was a dirty little hole in the worst part of town? Chandramma let out an indignant sigh. She would have to have a serious talk with her friend who had recommended this place. But it was too late to turn back now. She might as well get her errand over with before she changed her mind.

  After a brief second of hesitation she lifted the hem of her sari even higher and began to climb the steep wooden staircase with great care, one hand tightly clutching the flimsy handrail for support. “God only knows why that man lives in this bloody awful dump!” She grimaced at the ominous groaning of each stair as she set a stout foot over it.

  Reaching the second floor, she stopped to catch her breath. She was wheezing from the long trek through the winding alleys and up two flights of stairs. Perspiration broke out on her skin. Ignoring the discomforts of the moment, she walked down the narrow passage, trying to read the numbers on the doors and the names of each flat’s occupants.

  She let out a sigh of relief when she found the flat with the crudely handwritten number 10. The name on the door: Pandit Haridas.

  Finally! It had not been easy finding this elusive man. The rickshaw driver had driven her round and round the area a few times before she had ordered him to stop his vehicle and alighted, giving him a solid piece of her mind and only eighty percent of the fare he had demanded. The idiot drove a rickshaw for a living and didn’t know the addresses around town. How asinine was that?

  After that she had wandered some distance, looking for the address without any luck. So she asked a group of rather nasty-looking men loitering in the area for directions. They had clearly been drinking cheap liquor—she had smelled it around them. For one breathless moment she had felt a sharp stab of fear right in her ribs. The men looked dangerous! But with no one else about other than beggars, she had no choice but to ask the lesser of the two evils for help, the gangster-types. “Could you please tell me where Bhujle Chawl is?” she had asked politely. Chawl was a word for tenement.

  The gang’s leader, a stocky man with a greasy, movie-star puff of black hair, and dressed in tight brown pants and a cheap T-shirt, had moved forward, his arms folded across his chest. He had the audacity to raise an eyebrow and look her in the eye. “How much you giving, bai?”

  “What do you mean?” He had the nerve to ask for money just to tell her where a miserable chawl was? Her breath had hitched when he started eyeing her jewelry with a speculative g
leam in his eyes. Thief! But she had managed to hold his alcohol-reddened gaze for a long time, not flinching for a single moment. “That depends on whether you give me correct directions.” She had pulled out a ten-rupee note and waved it in the air.

  He had frowned at her. “Only ten? Not even enough for one beedi packet, bai.”

  On a whim she had waved the note before a mild-looking fellow standing behind the leader, wearing tattered clothes, his thin face looking hungry enough to snatch the money. Miraculously it had worked; she had wormed the information out of that idiot with an additional five rupees. She had taught the damned leader, that rabid mongrel in the tight pants, exactly who was master! Apparently the chawl was only a short distance from there. She had just wasted fifteen rupees for nothing!

  As she started to walk away the men had jeered at her back. “Arre, yeh aurat hai ke rakshasi?” Hey, is that a woman or a she-demon? Her temper erupting, she had nearly turned around and gone after them to beat the shit out of the mocking bastards. But she could not afford to take on half a dozen drunken brutes in a street brawl. They would pulverize her and take her belongings. She was forced to suppress her rage, hold her head high and keep marching. The familiar tears of humiliation had started to sting her eyes, but she had squelched those, too. Damn, damn, damn!

  Well, desperate problems required desperate measures. If she weren’t so frantic she wouldn’t be in this horrible neighborhood to begin with. Apart from those thugs it was probably filled with prostitutes, pimps, and God knew what other kind of vermin that respectable women like her should not even think about.

  In the end, she had managed to find the nameless alley and the chawl. She didn’t even want to contemplate how she was going to find her way out of this ghetto and return home. Mr. Haridas had come highly recommended by one of her friends and Chandramma had tracked him down. That was all that mattered right this minute.

  She knocked firmly on the door. There was no answer. After a harder knock the door opened a crack and part of a face appeared behind it. A low, gruff male voice asked, “Yes?”

  “I’m Mrs. Ramnath. I want to talk to Pandit Haridas.”

  “What you want Pandit for?” The man refused to open the door any more than three inches or so. All Chandramma could see was a snub nose that stood on a level with her chest. The semi-darkness of the room behind him made it impossible to see beyond the nose.

  Rumblings of anger started building up inside her once again. She had not come all this way for some strange little man to cross-examine her. She gave him her most intimidating glower. “I need to consult the Pandit. Now, is he here or not?”

  The man opened the door wider. “I am Pandit Haridas. Why you not telling me you want to consult, huh?” The man clenched his teeth as if in irritation.

  “You didn’t give me a chance,” Chandramma retorted. What an odd little fellow he was. And so annoying!

  The rest of the man’s face was visible now and most of his body. Chandramma started to have grave doubts about her visit. Despite the gruff voice the man was no bigger than a dwarf. He wore a saffron colored lungi and a matching pullover shirt with no sleeves. His complexion was an unhealthy shade of white, almost albino skin. He had a large forehead and thick pink lips. Small gray eyes the color of wood smoke looked at her with mocking suspicion. He didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

  A slight chill settled around her. Had she made a mistake in coming here?

  Nonetheless she raised a haughty brow at Pandit Haridas. “If you don’t tell me you are the Pandit, how can I mention what business I have?” When she noticed his sly eyes travel to her handbag she clutched it close to her chest. She would be damned if she’d let some stunted albino rob her blind. If she had managed to thwart an entire gang of thugs earlier, she could easily handle this one. She’d pound the dwarf into chutney if he dared to come anywhere near her handbag. “Mrs. Rajan gave me your name,” she informed him.

  “Humph.”

  The little man was rude and humorless, Chandramma decided. She couldn’t quite see how her wise friend had recommended such a man. But now that she was here she might as well see what he had to say. At the worst, she would be out of fifty rupees or thereabouts if she was lucky. “Mrs. Shambavi Rajan? You do know her, no?” She put on her most tart tone. It almost always managed to get her what she wanted.

  “Okay, okay, if you know Mrs. Rajan, then come inside,” the man said with some reluctance and motioned her to enter his flat.

  Chandramma took one step inside and breathed in revulsion at the clutter and grime inside the room. It was dark and dank. She couldn’t see a window or a ray of natural light anywhere. A small lamp with a low-watt bulb was all there was to illuminate the place. She had heard somewhere that albinos could not tolerate light. The place smelled of grease and sweat and…oh heavens…sour milk. Didn’t the man ever clean his clothes or his dishes?

  It appeared that the dwarf was unmarried and lived alone. No woman would live in a filthy hole like this. When he asked Chandramma to sit down she looked around for suitable furniture. There were only two easy chairs. She chose the cleaner one and sank into it. She would have preferred to stand, but she was tired and the dwarf might feel insulted. And if he felt slighted, he might get rid of her before she could state her business.

  “So, what you want to consult about, huh? My fee is three hundred rupees for half hour.” The man sat in the other chair and joined his short hands in his lap, his fingers resembling baby bananas. His chubby feet didn’t quite reach the floor.

  Well, the dwarf was obviously greedy. Chandramma would rather die than pay someone that kind of money. The other day she had put out two hundred rupees and the stupid family astrologer had told her practically nothing of use. All he had provided was a character analysis on Suresh. She knew her son better than anyone else—she didn’t need an astrologer to tell her that her son was weak and needed her to guide him. On top of that the astrologer had gone and told her husband about her private consultation. Consequently, Vinayak had asked her probing questions and treated her like a common criminal. That was the reason she had to find this other little man and stoop to coming into this shady neighborhood. She couldn’t afford to have her husband find out about her activities. He had this annoying, self-righteous way about him that made her feel defensive.

  She warily eyed the Pandit once again. The man had the nerve to quote such atrocious fees! With those rates he should have been living in cleaner and more decent quarters at the very least. She would have to do some quick bargaining. “One hundred rupees I will give you—no more. If you cannot give a reading, I will have to go,” she informed him with an imperious lift of a brow.

  Pandit Haridas studied the Ramnath woman for a long minute, his shrewd eyes taking in the quality silk sari in a shade of sea-blue, the leather chappals encasing her feet, the gold bangles on her thick wrists and the diamonds in her ears. “People are paying four and five hundred for my service, Mrs. Ramnath. I am giving discount for you because you are friend of Mrs. Rajan. Three hundred rupees—I am giving best service for you.” To soften the harshness of his tone he offered her a tiny smile—a token of compromise.

  She sighed and settled back in the chair, making its wood frame groan. “All right, three hundred, but you will perform complete services, forty-five minutes,” she countered. “What do you have to say?”

  Knowing when to seal a good bargain, Haridas nodded. “Okay, for Mrs. Rajan’s friend, I do complete service.”

  The woman dug out a sheet of paper from her handbag and offered it to him. “My son’s horoscope. I want you to study it and tell me what I should do about him.”

  Pandit Haridas turned the lamp towards him and put on a pair of glasses, the frame held together with cellophane tape over the bridge. The illumination from the light bulb was barely enough to read by, but he always managed somehow. It was all his eyes could endure, and it was nice and cheap to maintain.

  As he studied the horoscope he made odd grunting
and groaning sounds, a trick that generally managed to make his customers uneasy. Some of those sounds didn’t sound positive, but they served a purpose. They sent a message: this was a difficult horoscope and he would need to invest more time and effort into it.

  Haridas noticed the woman glance at her wristwatch a few times. “Is the horoscope that bad?” she finally asked, a frown settling over her face.

  Managing to cover up his smile, Haridas nodded. He had been reading the horoscope for several minutes. The clock was ticking. His little act never failed to work. The fat woman looked thoroughly worried about her precious son’s future.

  After a long while, Haridas looked up and peeled off his glasses. “Your son is already married, is he not?”

  The Ramnath woman cleared her throat and glanced away. “Yes…yes he is.”

  “Then what are you wanting to know, Mrs. Ramnath? About his job? His health?”

  “Yes…and…about his wife and…”

  “And what, Mrs. Ramnath?” Haridas was enjoying himself immensely. Putting this disagreeable woman on the spot was more fun than he had anticipated.

  “Oh…future children…of course.”

  “Of course.” By asking about Suresh’s career Haridas had obviously made it a bit easier for the woman to introduce the delicate subject that she had probably been obsessing about. Almost all his clients had delicate subjects to discuss. They didn’t exactly come to this neighborhood for anything simple or ordinary.

  “Career is okay. He might be getting a promotion in about one year, but only if I perform some holy rituals.” He remembered to throw that in—the all-important holy rituals. “Marriage is also good, but I am getting some feeling that you are not satisfied, no?” He leaned forward, focusing on the woman with narrowed eyes. He felt a sense of smug satisfaction when he saw the embarrassed flush blooming over what he considered an ugly face. A mean and ugly face.