by Dipika Rai
The empty box of sweets has become her memory box. In it she has a dried garland of jasmine flowers from her wedding, a photograph of her and her mother taken by Rajiv of the Times of India, and a lock of Shanti’s hair (it used to hold Lucky Sister’s gold earrings, but her husband asked for them the day he brought her home). Her mother had pressed that photo into her hand just as she was about to get into the tonga. It was such an act of sacrifice. No one else would have simply given their picture away to their daughter to take to another’s home. They would have hung their photo on their door together with the mirror, or put it under their pillow like her bapu did his.
‘Amma.’ She jumps. The little girl looks directly into her own eyes. How can she get used to being called Amma when nothing has ever grown in her womb?
‘What is it?’ Her voice has the same bullying tone as her husband’s.
‘Am . . . ma . . .’ the girl is not sure of their relationship ‘. . . can you help?’ She holds out a ribbon. It is an old ribbon. It might have been red once, but it is now brown.
‘You stole it?’ It is merely a question to establish context, not to accord blame. Mamta’s morals do not recognise stealing as wrong.
‘No.’ Even the child knows the ribbon isn’t worth stealing. ‘I found it in the dung.’
‘Uh.’ Mamta takes the ribbon and starts braiding it into her fingers. ‘I’m not your mother.’
‘But Bapu says that you are our new mother and that we have to listen carefully to what you say, because you will live with us till you die.’
‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘Can you put it in my hair?’
‘This ribbon that’s rotted in the cow’s stomach for God knows how long, and you want me to put it in your hair?’ Suddenly Mamta starts to laugh. ‘This ribbon from a cow’s stomach . . . ha, ha.’ Her laughter fills the house. It has no care who hears it. Like incense it races through her mouth and out of the door. It takes on new tones and lilts, it wafts and wanders, runs and hides, shines through and declares itself. The child looks on in amazement.
‘Make a chapatti,
bake a chapatti, Give one to your father, give one to your mother,
One for your sister and one for your brother,
Then what’s left? One burned and dry,
Give it to the little girl to make her cry.’
Nonsense words of a nursery rhyme filled with sense. Rhymes such as these have served generations of children, reconciling them to their place in the world. Mamta aims to hurt, but she might in fact be doing her stepdaughter a service. The girl sees nothing sinister in the words. She smiles. The rhythm has play to it.
‘You are older than my amma.’
‘Older than your mother, am I? Well, I am not your mother,’ she says, pressing a tiny shell into the clay above the fireplace. The Tree of Life – the most commonly used pattern in these parts, is emerging quite nicely. This place may fill her with dread, but an unconscious part accepts it as the only home she will ever know. There is nothing odd in her impulse to decorate the walls of her hut, a place that has so far brought her no joy. She is one of those people with boundless patience and it is these people who can coax beauty from nothing.
The girl comes to help with her own ideas, carefully placing a twig in the border of wet clay. Mamta slaps her wrist. She will not be helped. ‘Do something else.’ The child stays, back to the wall, slowly sliding into a squat. Watching.
Mamta presses in another shell. Then she looks back over her shoulder. The child is still there, back to the wall. After the third shell, her annoyance gives way to indifference. Let her watch if she wants; why should she care?
‘Amma . . .’ Each time the stepdaughter tries conversation, Mamta’s hand goes still. It’s a signal for the little girl to stop talking.
‘Bring in the clothes,’ snaps Mamta. It has started raining.
When it rains, Mamta has to press her husband’s legs because his bones ache with the damp. If she doesn’t do it just right, he kicks her with the top of his foot, which causes him even greater discomfort, so he kicks her again, this time with the heel. She doesn’t mind the kicking too much, but she hates it when he grabs her arm and gets on top of her. Her mind makes comforting patterns: a saffron-scented world, leather slippers outside her hut, laughing into quiet eyes . . . but it can’t make the leap to warm hands on her shoulders. It takes her husband forever to finish and roll off. Immediately he is disgusted by her and tells her to get out of the hut. Now she leaves of her own accord when he finishes. The lemons she brought from her mother’s home are brittle and dry on the outside, but they still have some juice left and she washes herself after each intercourse to prevent the itching she’s sure will follow.
She watches the rain.
Helpful rain. Life-giving rain. Beautiful rain. Bountiful rain. Thank you, Devi. Jai ho Devi, Devi jai ho. The rain is her ally. It is her time of stillness. She prays daily to Devi to send her rain, not so much for the crops, but for herself, so she might sit outside in safe solitude and dream a destiny. In her dreams she is leaving on a tonga with red in her middle parting and a ring on her second toe, clasping the hand of her husband, but it is a different hand, and she sees leather slippers walking in time with her own.
Concealing rain. Peaceful rain.
The soiled clouds unfurl overhead. The girl drags in the washing. Mamta checks it, crushing each piece into a rosette. She is a good washer, able to remove the most stubborn stain. Goat droppings mixed with lime will get any stain out of white clothes when rinsed in running water. She folds each article carefully, and puts her husband’s startlingly white kurta on the blue shelf above the straw mattress. They work quietly, their combined industry pushes them closer.
‘Babooji namaste, chole khao saste, pani peo thanda, sir mein maro danda.’ The girl shares a nursery rhyme of her own.
Mamta’s husband is a farmer who tills another’s lands. She has yet to meet the owners. They will come at the end of the year like they’ve done so for the last eight years to collect their dues. In the meanwhile, he answers to a bunch of white-kurta-clad moustached men who arrive in a tonga with sticks. So far Mamta has seen them only once. The men stood outside her door the whole time and watched the family drag out four sacks of wheat. That was the first time she’d seen her husband afraid, cowering in a corner like a wet cat, emerging from the hut only when called. One of the men had poked a sack with an iron spike and caught the cascading grain in his palm. He’d blown into it to check that there was no chaff mixed in, then the men loaded the wheat into the tonga and left. It was after one such meeting, during which the men had found chaff in the wheat, that Mamta’s husband had knocked his first wife to the ground so hard that she’d never quite recovered. She had a lingering stomach infection, which he had caused to bleed earlier than it would have on its own accord. She would have died from it anyway; it’s not something you can pin on Mamta’s husband.
‘Amma.’ The girl won’t let Mamta out of her sight. She refuses to be satisfied with nursery rhymes, historic words; she demands something more personal from her. With the same glee with which a child might tease an animal, Mamta retrieves her memory box from under the bedding, takes out the garland and presses it to the girl’s nose, and then immediately pulls it away, leaving her gasping for more.
‘Show me. Show me!’ She jumps to grasp the brown garland of jasmine, smelling equally of damp and perfume. Mamta pulls it so far out of reach that it is a jump the girl cannot make. She gives up and sits, her back to the wall. Staring.
‘Do you know this flower’s story?’ Mamta’s engaged. ‘It used to be a girl. A girl who prayed so faithfully to Shiva that he made her into a flower and gave her the boon of perfume, fresh or dry.’ Mamta injects her mother’s intonations into a story she’s heard many times. ‘That’s why it smells so strong. My mother told me that.’ The young girl looks on with disbelief.
‘Why would a god want to make a girl a flower?’
�
��Why not?’ There is a big difference between the two girls. It doesn’t occur to the younger one that the gods would ever waste their time fulfilling a girl’s wishes, whereas the older one, whose mother allowed her to experience a little of girlhood, owns the hidden gift of a powerful imagination. An imagination that may have lost its sauce and become not much more than a hazy palimpsest beneath her new fearful portrait, but it is one she can resurrect with the gentlest attention.
The stepdaughter reaches out, caressing the long-dead jasmine blossoms dangling from Mamta’s fingers.
‘Give it here.’ Mamta snatches the garland from the girl’s hand and puts it back in the memory box. ‘Don’t go getting any ideas. This box is mine. Don’t you go near it! Touch it and I’ll break your arm. And don’t call me Amma, I’m not your mother.’
‘Show me that other thing.’
‘This? This is a photo,’ she says. ‘Of me and my amma.’
‘Can I see?’ The girl has no idea what it might be.
‘No!’ Mamta peers at the photo. Her face, tucked just below her mother’s right ear, looks back at her. By some gift of light, her birth-mark came through as a shadow in the portrait. She certainly looks presentable, almost beautiful. She changes her mind, and hands the photo to the girl.
‘Aeee, what a picture. Who painted it?’
‘You stupid girl, it isn’t painted by someone, it is painted by a machine.’
‘A machine? Can I have one too?’
Mamta snatches the picture back from the little hand. She looks at the photo again, satisfied by the even colour on her forehead. ‘It was taken before my wedding. It was grand. Sahibji L-lokend . . .’ she trips at the name ‘. . . from the Big House brought so many sweets that we couldn’t even finish them.’ She sinks into a familiar pleasurable aching memory.
‘Really?’
‘Re . . . ally,’ she mimics her stepdaughter’s high pitch. ‘Do you think I’m lying?’
‘And that, what’s that?’ The younger girl pokes the hair with a diffident finger.
‘My sister’s hair.’ Mamta’s thoughts shift to her old home longingly, each of her senses replete with its memory. Her mother’s touch, Shanti’s smell, Mohit and Sneha’s voices screaming at each other, Prem’s stolen butter pats from the Big House, but nothing of her father.
‘It’s so soft. Just like mine.’
Mamta packs the box and puts it away under the bedding. ‘If I catch you touching it, I will thrash you. Remember that.’
Most people’s lives are measured and marked by some major happening: the loss of a fortune, the birth of a child, winning a lottery. But here, in Barigaon, where the slow plodding tedium of trying to stay unnoticed is Mamta’s main preoccupation, life happens in the small things. In small innocent things which might happen to harbour a tiny bacterium of deviation.
‘Why n-no lamp today?’
‘There’s no oil.’
‘So what happenned to it?’ She can smell the alcohol on his breath. The sharp astringent smell hasn’t gone stale yet. It is a different smell in the morning. The evening’s smell is better, almost clean.
‘There’s been only a drip for a week.’
‘How dare you c-c-criticise me! On-nly a drip of oil in-ndeed. I’ll sh-sh-show you a drip of oil.’ The drink makes him stutter.
The slap damages her eardrum and sends her spinning to the other end of the hut. The blow takes her by complete surprise. Almost as much surprise as the rumours of eviction had taken her husband. The zamindar wants his land back, they said. In return for the land, the landlord would release people like him from bondage, they said. But a man in bondage is sometimes a secure man. He is a man who curses his luck and attacks his fate, but when fate sets him free he is paralysed by the insecurity of leaving the only life he knows. Mamta’s husband is this type of man.
There are others like him. Other terrified men who might also have to give up their lands and indentured lives. But why now? It is uncertain, but they’ve heard that each village has to set up a shelter for the families of surrendering bandits. It is a terrific scheme that has been engineered by Gopalpur’s zamindar’s youngest son named Loken, Lekhen, Lokend or something like that. Mamta’s husband has no idea that his wife will recognise the name Lokend Bhai. In fact it is a name she will never forget. It belongs to those leather slippers who brought permanent sweetness into her life in a gold and red box. She can trace every detail of his face when she thinks of him. The name isn’t mentioned in Mamta’s presence and that one quirk of circumstance will change her whole life.
She picks herself up. Her stepdaughter and son are hiding outside. The son has very little interest in what his father does to his new bride, but the daughter is, for the first time in her life, afraid for another person. She didn’t feel this much for her real mother.
‘N-n-no oil, n-n-no land. You un-nlucky, evil woman. It’s because of you. Brought you in–n-nto my house and n-n-now look what’s happened. They s-s-said don’t take the witch with the mark, but I did-n’t listen. I was s-s-so s-s-sad for my little children. They n-n-need a mother I s-s-said. They n-n-need a mother! And n-n-now you’ve done it. What they s-s-said was true. N-n-no wonder God marked you from the s-s-start. I should have s-s-seen it right away.’ Each word is accompanied by a blow. It is a dance, he hits her to a beat. Word – blow, word – blow, word – blow . . . Fretful spit is spraying from his mouth. The stepson is now in the hut. He too surveys his surroundings. Mamta is still in a huddle on the floor and the stepdaughter is outside, just behind the door, trembling. It’s her turn next. She knows where she stands in the family hierarchy. When her father is done with his wife, almost a perfect stranger to him, he will start on his daughter.
The fear is thick as smoke, and then just as suddenly it’s gone, gone with the man who stumbles out of his house without a backward look, dragging an indistinct trail of drunken curses behind him.
Mamta’s mouth is bleeding. One of her teeth has come loose. She hasn’t said a word, she is still, she has forgotten to breathe. If she lets go, her pee will run down her legs in an uncontrollable river of fright. Her birthmark is glowing red, engorged.
The words are lurking on her stepdaughter’s tongue, but she hasn’t the courage to spit them out, instead she puts out her hand. Mamta turns her head away sharply, expecting another slap from human contact. The stepson walks round his stepmother as if she were a dirty thing to be avoided. He believes she is unlucky.
Mamta runs her tongue along the inside of her mouth, and spits out a piece of broken tooth. Her eyelid is torn. The stepdaughter pokes it with a tender finger. She takes Mamta’s head and puts it against her bony chest, blowing every so often on her damaged eye. Bruised and battered, Mamta is sure that her husband will kill her the next time. She too is starting to believe that she is an evil unclean thing, a thing to be despised. She tries to think of something soft, but she cannot recall the softness of her mother’s touch. She tries to think of something kind, but she cannot recall that unknown face. This time, the moment is too real to tolerate her dreams. At last, her battered eye releases a tear. Her stepdaughter wipes it away with her hand, leaving a streak of black. The kindness is even more painful than the beating, and Mamta wraps herself up in her sari, leaving not a chink for a peephole.
‘Babooji namaste, chole khao saste, pani peo thanda, sir mein maro danda, Babooji namaste, chole khao saste, pani peo thanda, sir mein maro danda, Babooji namaste . . .’ the girl sings of a city gentleman eating cheap chickpeas, drinking cold water and being hit on the head with a stick. Her nursery rhyme makes about as much sense as the beating her stepmother just received. She rocks Mamta back and forth to the lisping tempo, and Mamta sinks into a quiet memory of unknown eyes.
The evening has turned cold. A thick fog starts to accumulate.
Her husband returns the next afternoon calmer than before. He smells of stale vomit. A little drink puts him in a bad mood, but a lot makes him mellow. The drink of last night is still with him. His
eyes are red as chillies and burning every bit as much. He has put his fight aside for the sake of his sickened body.
He’d passed out in the field of makeshift tents where the men mingle after sunset in the glow of a single lightbulb burning with electricity purloined from electric poles with bits of wire joined together in innumerable places. The men often don’t talk amongst themselves. For so many people, the field of tents is curiously silent – until the betting begins.
Wives have a vague idea of that place; only two dared to follow their husbands there, but they are old now and never speak of what happened. As for the rest of the wives, they pretend the tents don’t exist, and the new ones like Mamta truly know nothing of the place. The only women who hang about the edges of the tents are the ones that work there. Prostitutes, young and old.
Last night the tents were thronging with others like him. He didn’t bet, but uncharacteristically bought a whole bottle. The bootlegger opened his book to a fresh page lined neatly in blue. In the leftmost column he wrote Mamta’s husband’s name and in the far most column a number. There would be no dispute over the number and date written in the book. He would have to come up with the money on the appointed day.
He doesn’t look Mamta in the eye or touch the tea or salted chapattis she’s made. The mother and stepdaughter had spent all early morning picking wild bitter spinach for the man. He doesn’t taste the vegetable. The daughter slyly eats most of it before the son can get to it. Mamta unrolls his bedding, leads him to it and he sinks into the turned straw, a deadweight.
She douses the fire, which has started to smoke. Her newly patterned wall glimmers through the miasma in and out of her vision. Her ribs hurt from the evening before and she winces when she lifts her arm. The two girls literally dragged the water pot from the well that morning. They managed to bring only one instead of the usual two. More than half of it they’ve hidden in a bush behind the house for the man.
