by Amita Trasi
I thought I had mustered enough courage to tell Amma about my decision, and I stood outside the bedroom eager to let her know. Amma lay on the cot, coughing, looking outside the windows with pained eyes that had a layer of black beneath them. Her body looked so shriveled under the blanket. She didn’t look like my Amma at all. I decided not to let Amma know about my decision. It was better that way.
I had never seen Sakubai so pleased.
“You will find a special place in heaven for saving your mother,” she said, taking me in her arms for the first time in my life.
It all happened so quickly after that, I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t feel real. Madam arrived from Bombay, her jasmine flowers fell from her hair as she walked up to our house, and her red lips danced with delight as she spoke to me. “If you hadn’t agreed you would still have to do it. Nobody was going to wait for you to make up your mind. You are born to do this,” she said as she patted my head.
Over the next few days, Sakubai and Madam sat on our mud floor drawing up plans, making long lists of items, of errands to run, offerings to be made, things to be bought. But as they worked together, the silent tug of war between them was apparent. Madam wanted to finish the ceremony as quickly as possible, without much fuss, while Sakubai, who believed in the traditions of our ancestors, wanted everything to be done according to the right rituals.
“What is the need to spend so much money?” Madam asked.
Sakubai glared at her. “If we are dedicating Mukta we will do it properly, spending all the money we can. What do you care about how much money we borrow anyway? She will earn it back for you, won’t she?”
Madam shrugged, “Have it your way then. Mukta will repay this debt for a long time.”
The priest arrived in his white silk dhoti and sat cross-legged on our mud floor. Madam and Sakubai sat across from him as he consulted chart after chart and came up with an auspicious date that would bring great fortune to this village.
“This is the day,” said Madam, spitting out her paan, the red stain spreading on our floor. “This is the day we will dedicate the girl.”
The ceremony was to take place on the auspicious day—a full moon day—which was in three days. Sakubai explained that a bus would take us to the temple.
“What about Amma?” I asked.
“What about her?”
“How will we take her with us?”
“We are not taking her with us. A lower caste woman from the village will come by to look after her while we are away,” Sakubai said and limped back to her room.
I wasn’t very happy leaving Amma behind and not telling her where we were disappearing to, and I told Sakubai I thought we should let Amma know in case she got worried. But Sakubai said Amma would get better because of what I was doing, and by the time we were back, she would be her smiling, usual self. I nodded and immediately pictured the Amma I once knew, before she had fallen ill, both of us working together in the kitchen, life going back to the way it was before all this happened.
It was a Tuesday—an auspicious day to worship Goddess Yellamma. We started early. Sakubai and I took a dip in a holy pond nearby. Sakubai draped me in a sari, twirling it around me many times, arranging the end of it on my shoulders and pleating the rest of it around my waist.
“Pay attention. This is the way you will have to dress from now on. You can’t wear childish clothes anymore,” she said.
Then she lined my eyes with kajal and smeared red on my lips. She painted my face with a cream paste, then propped a mirror against the wall in front of me, looking approvingly at my reflection. When I looked, I was taken aback. The face staring back at me wasn’t mine.
“How beautiful you look,” Sakubai said, curling her fingers and cracking her knuckles on her head for good luck.
When I stepped out, a group of devdasis who had arrived from the neighboring village applauded and said, “what a lovely girl.” The bullock cart stood outside the hut, loaded with the items required for the ceremony. Madam had already joined the group of senior devdasis and advised them that it was appropriate for all the girls who were to be dedicated to walk half a kilometer to the temple, and so we began walking barefoot. Until then, I hadn’t realized there were other girls. I looked around and searched the faces that would participate in this ceremony with me. There were five other girls walking beside me, three of them younger than me, about eight years old. I wondered, since they were young, if they would be able to understand the great task ahead of them—to be devoted to the Goddess and be blessed by her. How foolish I was! When I think of those unaware faces now, I see myself in them, not knowing what life I was leading myself into. They walked unwittingly beside their mothers like I walked beside Sakubai. The older girls knew what was happening; their faces were soaked with tears and a shriek or a sob would emerge from them now and again. The senior devdasis played the tanpura and sang songs like the ones Sakubai often sang at home, but the music failed to fill me today, failed to quiet my fear.
The temple was at an elevation; the road to it went uphill, and Sakubai complained that at her age climbing was difficult. We thronged a narrow street lined with houses on both sides, and people watched us from their windows, gathering outside their homes to get a glimpse of us. There were many shops outside the temple; the shopkeepers were yelling away, encouraging passersby to buy the neatly stacked coconuts, the colorful bangles, and the plantain leaves. There were women wandering outside the temple, trying to sell us braided orange and yellow marigold garlands.
“Here we are,” the devdasis announced; the noise and chaos of their instruments and their singing stopped momentarily.
The shopkeepers stared at us. Some of the younger girls cried for water, but Madam admonished all of them. All girls to be dedicated were supposed to be fasting, so we hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since morning. As Madam explained this, the eight-year-olds cried even louder and had to be carried inside the temple. The moment we climbed the steps of the temple, we were in the presence of the Goddess. I truly felt that the Goddess would be there for me; she would certainly make Amma all right.
I could smell the premises—clean, purified with water and cow dung, different colors merging in a design on the floor—a beautiful rangoli. Sweets and fruits had been arranged for the feast after the ceremony, and my stomach growled for them.
The priest who entered the temple had a shaved head with three bands of white on his forehead; a rudraksha mala dangled on his bare chest. He sat before a large pit of fire and threw oil into it, making it leap up in flames, then chanted verses nobody there seemed to understand. Madam announced I would be the first girl to be dedicated and asked me to sit in front of the fire opposite the priest. Four senior devdasis sat in the four corners surrounding us, each holding a kalash in her hands. Each of these four pots contained plantain leaves, coconuts, and betel nut leaves. Many of the devdasis sang and played the tanpura so loudly I could hardly hear the priest. As they tied a single thread around the four pots in the four corners of the room, chanting mantras as they circled the room, enveloping us, I remember feeling like I was sitting in a boat floating in a river that was taking me from one corner of my life to another.
Everybody stood up and threw turmeric in the air, which fell on us thick and plentiful, yelling, “Udheyo! Udheyo! Rise Up to the Mother!”
I scanned the crowd searching for my Amma even though I knew she wasn’t there. How I missed her! Then the priest tied the mutku around my neck, the necklace that bound me to the temple, to the Goddess.
The priest asked Sakubai, “Are you willing to dedicate your granddaughter to the Goddess?”
Sakubai nodded. “Yes,” she said just as easily as I had expected she would, without a second thought.
Then the priest addressed me, while leaning forward and planting a red tilak on my forehead. “You cannot marry any man. You are married to the deity and only after worshipping her will you be able to have a meal. You have to fast two days a week and oblige any man
who comes to you. If he beats you, you must not retaliate.”
He repeated this with the other five girls and the hours drifted in the chaos of the music and the mantras. When it was over, Sakubai came to me and said, “You made your mother proud. You are a devdasi like the rest of us.”
That night, as Madam, Sakubai, and I left for home, I tried to climb the bus in my sari but stumbled over it until one of the devdasis lifted me and put me on the bus. When I fidgeted with my necklace, Sakubai slapped my hand and said, “You will get used to it.”
As the bus ambled down the road, Sakubai brought out an apple and a sweet, and I gulped it down ravenously—the only meal I’d had that day. Along the way, we changed our mode of transport to a bullock cart for our journey back to our house. I became impatient at the thought of Amma standing by the door, waiting for me, healthy, happy, and smiling. I imagined I would run into her arms and let her know how sorry I was for not letting her know why we had left without her. I truly believed that was the way the Goddess worked. I didn’t think for a moment that any of these thoughts, these simple desires, were foolish. I was about to ask Sakubai if she was expecting it too, if she was waiting to see Amma the way I was, when the bullock cart took a wrong turn. Instead of taking us to the outskirts, it advanced straight towards another village. I was about to point that out to Sakubai, but she gave me a look which meant I had to be very quiet—which also meant it wasn’t a wrong turn at all, and Sakubai knew where we were heading.
Squinting in the darkness, I could make out that this village was different than mine. We stopped outside a mansion with guards outside the gates who stopped our bullock cart, asked for our names, and immediately opened the gates as if they were expecting us. The courtyard around this mansion had yellow lights pouring over the garden, flowers swaying in the night breeze, and a light ripple in the pond that stood in the middle. We climbed the stone steps that led to an iron door where a servant was waiting for us. This mansion was bigger than the zamindar’s mansion in our village. The servant asked all three of us to wait in the living room. A chandelier glimmered above us; photos of well-groomed rajahs and their queens adorned the long walls that surrounded us, and the ceiling seemed as if it were built halfway into the sky.
Sakubai asked me to behave at this zamindar’s house. She asked me to join my hands and say a namaskar as soon as he appeared, and all three of us squatted on the tiled floor, waiting. A stocky man who caressed his belly like a pregnant woman appeared through one of the doors, waved to Madam, then walked outside with her. They spoke in whispers. The zamindar’s voice was stern and Madam’s a bit nervous, but even in her nervousness, she was adept at negotiating. They haggled about money, with her going higher and him preferring to stay closer to what he had initially offered. I hadn’t understood most of the conversation I heard that day.
“. . . but I am giving you a virgin,” Madam said.
“I can have others . . . ”
“But it is a reasonable price.”
I tried to let my thoughts wander, but they bounced off the high ceiling back to Amma. I whispered to Sakubai, telling her Amma was waiting for us.
“Shh . . . ” she said, glaring at me.
Madam called out to Sakubai, and they walked to the corner.
“I don’t know . . . shouldn’t we wait till she is older?” There was confusion in Sakubai’s voice.
“Sakubai, if you are caught up in rituals, we will have to wait two or three years. Do you want the money or not?”
Sakubai took a deep breath and nodded. She led me to a room. “Sit here and I will be back,” she told me.
I had no idea why I was supposed to wait in this room by myself, so I held onto Sakubai’s hand, not letting go, until she knocked my hand away and left the room. The room was spacious with an antique bed in the corner whose headboard had a gold carving embedded in it. I sat on the bed and looked at the chest of drawers; a table with a mirror balanced on it stared back at me. A certain anxiety crept upon me. I decided to leave the room, but just then the stocky man who was chatting with Madam entered and closed the doors behind him. He stood near the entrance for some time looking at me, then lit a cigarette and blew smoke as he walked towards me. Even in my fear I remembered what Sakubai told me to do. I folded my arms and greeted him, bowing my head slightly. “Namaskar,” I mumbled. I didn’t know whether he heard me because he did not smile at me. He tipped my chin towards him with his hands, scrutinized my face with his drowsy eyes, and said this had to be done so the Goddess could bless his family.
Without another word the man began unbuttoning his shirt and loosening his belt— shedding his clothes one by one and flinging them onto the chair. I slid under the bed and hid there, trying unsuccessfully not to cry. Everything was quiet for a while until his large, hairy hands reached for me, grabbed me, and dumped me on the bed. He said, “Look, don’t cry. You are unnecessarily making things difficult for yourself.”
I screamed for Sakubai, but he cupped his hand over my mouth. I whimpered under his firm grip, became quiet for a minute, and when he seemed convinced I wouldn’t squirm anymore, he let go of me and tried to explain to me that this had to be done. Instinctively, I scrambled for safety in the corner and cowered under the table the mirror was balanced on. I told him I didn’t want to be here and begged him to let me go back.
“Amma is waiting for me,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me.
He laughed as he grabbed my wrist in his hand. “You will get used to this.”
I tried to loosen his grip with my other hand, but he pulled me out from under the table towards him—his breath smelling of garlic and cigarettes—with a force that shook the table, toppling the mirror. As it came crashing down, I could see myself in it—shattered into a million pieces.
It all happened so quickly—I was just like that river in my village, moving along because it had nowhere else to go.
-MUKTA
Seven
I did not know how long I had cried, how long the pain below had lasted, how much longer it would last. Most of what I remember was my face wet with tears, thinking this was my punishment for not letting Amma know.
“Now, now,” the man had said. “All girls cry their first time.” He was putting his shirt back on and tightening the belt over his stomach.
For a while I lay there watching the ceiling, as bare as my skin. Even when the man opened the windows to let sunlight in, I could not move towards its warmth. When he left, Madam was waiting outside the door. I could see her spreading her palm as soon as he set foot outside the room. He thrust a few notes in her hand; she tucked them away in her blouse before waving to Sakubai who entered the room and covered me with a white bed sheet that blotted the blood from the bed.
“Come, my dear girl,” she said lovingly, softly, unlike her usual self. “This has happened to all of us.” Then she pulled my blouse over my head. “Can you walk?” I nodded and walked slowly towards the door. I don’t think I knew what was happening to me; I had found a way out of my body and was watching myself move.
Sakubai loaded me in a bullock cart, and we headed home. I didn’t notice the familiar farms calling out to me, didn’t hear the swish of the trees. I realized later that this journey was the one where I had begun to lose the smells of my childhood. All I really remember is waking up to the sound of commotion, and I might have gone back to sleep had it not been the strangely familiar voice drifting to us.
The clouds loomed large and dark when we reached the village square where villagers had gathered around a woman outside the temple, spewing insults at some villagers. “All you upper castes are responsible for allowing us to rot. All of you use her name—Goddess Yellamma—as if she were the one making us do this. You destroyed my daughter, too.”
It was Amma. She stood there, her hands trembling from sickness, her agony spread on her tired face. I wanted to jump from the bullock cart and run to her, but Sakubai held me back. I watched the villagers grow desperate in their anger.
“You cannot talk about us in that manner. You are insulting our traditions. The Goddess will curse the entire village,” one said.
Above us, the sky thundered and flashes of lightning sparkled. Amma yelled profanities I had never heard her utter in my life. I could see the anger spreading like wildfire, each villager saying something that lit a flame in another.
“You whore . . . you cannot insult us . . . you cannot speak against the Goddess . . . ”
One of them brought his lathi down on Amma’s back, and in one blow she was crawling on the floor. Their backs were to me so I could only see their hands rise, their lathis coming down with a thud. I must have started walking because I remember nudging people to make my way through the crowd. I saw her lying there in a pool of blood. I lay down next to her. She looked at me, smiling through the pain, and held my hand. It began to drizzle; small drops of rain fell one by one on our faces, the sky weeping for us. The rain quickened its pace and fell so hard and strong it blurred everything around me. I remember watching how it mingled with the blood, trickling down into a steady reddish stream. My eyes closed, and I was enveloped in darkness.
My eyes opened to the whirring of a ceiling fan above me, the yellow lights on the wall staring down at me. I found myself in somebody else’s house in the village. There was a feeling of unbearable pain in my body, a sense of numbness as an old man’s face hovered over me, his bushy eyebrows raised in concern, his tiny eyes looking down at me. His hands, wrinkled with experience, quivered as he reached out to caress my hair.
“You must take this medicine,” he said, repeating it twice before I understood what he was trying to tell me.
I was trying to piece every hazy bit of memory together—Amma lying on the floor, the pool of blood, the rain. I tried to speak, but the man put a finger on his lips and said, “Shh . . . shh . . . you shouldn’t speak. I am the doctor, and you must do as the doctor says.”
