by Dipika Rai
During her third summer in the city, her husband manages to suppress his shame and borrow enough money to come looking for her in Gopalpur. ‘If I catch her, she’s a dead woman. Six sacks of wheat are what I want from your family. And mind that it’s good wheat, not some worm-eaten grain full of chaff.’
‘We will give you news if she turns up,’ says Prem.
‘Let her just set foot in this region, I will break her neck. I don’t want her back, I just want the wheat.’
‘Where are we to get wheat for you? Look at the fields, fallow. The Big House takes all our produce,’ he lies. ‘Can’t give you wheat, can’t even give you chaff.’
‘Then you better start giving me some information. Tell me where she is.’
‘I don’t know where she is, but I will try my best to find out.’ The conversation reaches an impasse, the man has to accept crumbs. ‘But only if you promise to keep it quiet.’
‘Keep it quiet! As if! She has disgraced Gopalpur. I will tell that fellow from Saraswati Stores what your sister has done and then the whole world will come to know. She is a runaway, no one can save her now. Not your bapu, not your amma.’
‘So what did you do to her?’ Prem has assessed the situation shrewdly. His time protecting Daku Manmohan has been well spent.
‘You pet dog! You dare to question me? Your sister is a bitch, a worse she-dog I never saw in my life. I clothed her, fed her, and what did she do to me? How did she repay me?’ For all his blustering, Mamta’s husband has to leave unsatisfied. He came to find her and his money, failing which he would have settled for some wheat, but things went worse than he expected. He is leaving empty-handed. He dare not talk about the stolen money, or about what he did to Mamta. Cut out her flesh and sold it, and she had the audacity to steal his money and run. Bitch!
All of Gopalpur eventually hears the news. Seeta Ram is told under the banyan tree. ‘That she-devil, born to disgrace us, born to strip us naked. Your bloody daughter, a runaway. She left her husband. If I catch her, I will kill her. For me she is already dead. Dead. Dead. He should find her and slice the nose off her face. A runaway!’ He assaults Lata Bai with his words.
Lata Bai has no defence. Her words are dry and dusty, a hindrance like the Gopalpur wind. She is furious, but for a different reason. Seeta Ram’s anger is guided by under-the-banyan-tree rules, but Lata Bai’s stems from the disappointment of disgrace. By running away Mamta has made her own rules. She has betrayed not just herself and her mother, but all womankind. Lata Bai has no option but to be equally murderously indignant with her daughter.
‘All this time I thought your sister was in the city with her husband’s consent. She won’t last, with her husband and her bapu out to kill her, she won’t last, and it will be her own fault,’ she tells her remaining children.
‘Amma, have you ever thought that she might have had a good reason to run away?’ Prem can still hear the desperation in his sister’s voice. You must tell no one. No one.
‘A good reason to run away! Do you think I never had a good reason to run away? To leave all this –’ she sweeps her arms across the horizon, encompassing and rejecting her home at the same time. ‘Don’t you think other women have a good reason to run away?’ She is condescending, speaking to him from her position of the stronger sex. What does he know of endurance, or reasons to run away? He is a man, a weak man. ‘But that doesn’t mean we do it. Duty, Prem. Duty!’ Duty is the one thing that’s been dinned into their heads generation upon generation. Earthly duty, karmic duty, divine duty. It is the one (and possibly the only explanation) that justifies many things in their lives, including their place in the divine order – the caste system. People are picked for a duty and their skills are honed over generations for that duty alone; that’s why there are whole communities of mathematicians who can multiply six-digit numbers together in their heads from a very early age; and weavers whose early warp and weft acrobatics led to the unknown invention of the computer in far-off lands across the seas; and sea-children born with permanently bowed legs for their forefathers seldom having walked on land.
‘Duty, she should have done her duty. We are born to perform a duty, no matter how disagreeable. To run away from your duty is to spit on our divine teachings. I deserved more for all I taught her.’ Mamta’s running away is a personal insult to her mother. ‘Your bapu was right, I spoilt her. She should have stayed. She was married before Devi, and now to disgrace us like this . . . you with Daku Manmohan, Mohit . . . and now Mamta deserting her family. What did I do in my past lives to deserve this? You children won’t be satisfied till we are drummed out of this village with shame biting our backs!’ She is surprised at herself, at how much she disapproves. She is in the unfortunate position of being the one who understands but cannot accept.
Prem holds his tongue, not because he agrees with his mother, but because there is no use in prolonging the disgrace through discussion. His mother presses Mamta’s letters into his hands. ‘I foolishly saved these. There won’t be any more coming. Go, burn these letters, I have no use for them.’
The next time Lata Bai goes to Saraswati Stores Lala Ram asks after Mamta. ‘Any news of your girl? How come her husband came here looking for her?’ The only reason Lala Ram doesn’t know the whole story is because he was too busy to attend the under-the-banyan-tree meeting. But he will come to know, if not today, then tomorrow. But not from her.
It is all becoming clear to her, the reason Mamta hid her own name, because she was a fugitive, a runaway, just like Sharma’s wife, raped and shit-smeared. Worse even than Sharma’s wife, because she got away without any retribution.
The mother has no choice but to cash the money order to pay the postman to write a final letter to Chinta D-Susa, parting with five rupees.
Chinta D-Susa,
Namaste!
I know everything. Your people told Prem everything. Go back where you belong. Nothing can come of living in a big city like Begumpet. Why did you leave? Your mother is so ashamed of you, shirking your duty and deserting your family.
The words are uncharacteristic of Lata Bai. Never before has she openly blamed one of her children for her own discomfort.
Go back, the money we can do without.
‘Lata Bai, are you sure you want to write this? If your cow is giving milk, why not drink it, Lata Bai?’ She wants to kick the postman in the shins, and tell him it is none of his business, it is a matter between mother and daughter. Instead she demurely says, ‘You won’t understand, Postmanji.’
Everything has changed here. As you know, Mohit has gone to join Jivkant, and we haven’t heard from the two of them. Shanti is dead. She wants to twist the knife. Why should she spare Mamta the sorrow when Mamta didn’t spare her the disgrace? We are still looking for someone for Sneha. Every day it gets harder to marry off my daughter. There are no offers for her, and now things are worse than ever. Lata Bai knows no one will marry into the family of a runaway wife.
And Prem, he is still the important man working at the Big House, looking after a murdering bandit. Mamta’s bapu is sick and I am also sick, not in my body, but in my spirit. You must go back now. It is your duty. Remember the gods, remember Devi. This is my last letter to you. Go home.
Never write to me again. Never send us money again. We will not be cashing any more money orders.
For the sake of your mother, for the sake of Devi. Go Home. Lata Bai
This time it isn’t for lack of courage that she doesn’t sign Amma, but for the shame it’ll bring her family.
The letter leaves the postman more disappointed than confused. He can see his own milking cow dry up before his eyes.
‘Why is your mother saying all this?’
She can’t bring herself to tell Cynthia the whole truth, the beatings, the kidney. She deserves it for deserting her stepdaughter, no? She left her behind, so her own mother is abandoning her now. Love for love.
‘It’s all right, Cynthiaji, don’t worry about it, it’s all righ
t.’ Another debt repaid, her mother’s very words. Words of consolation when anything bad happened to her. Oh, Mamta, consider it another debt repaid.
But it is the deserting your family part that hurts her most, even more than her mother’s diatribe. Yes, she is a deserter. In the two years she’s been in Begumpet, she has managed to bury her guilt and pain under hard work and the frantic pace of the city, but she has been waiting, listening behind the door all this time for blame to show its face. And here it is, from her own mother. From that one corner from which it was least expected. It had to happen. Life was becoming too good. It was time to learn a lesson. She blames her complacency. How did she ever think herself lucky, or privileged? Maker of her own destiny?
‘Read it to me again,’ she says, ‘one last time, please, Cynthiaji.’ She never wants to forget the words. She wants to hurt as much as Lata Bai, to pay off her debt well.
It is only in the second reading that she understands the words Shanti is dead, and realises that she has no grief left in her for her baby sister’s passing.
Chapter 12
ASMARA DIDI DISCOVERED HIS BODY on the floor. He had slipped as he had tried to reach for the chess set. She sent a telegram to Lokend:
Bapu expired. Come home.
Ram Singh stands in the doorway greeting all the mourners with a pretence of humility, completely in command. Even Asmara Didi must take her cues from him. She has taken all morning to prepare the body.
Lokend is unchanged, calm, in white as usual. Raja runs back and forth across his shoulders eliciting suppressed laughter from the crowd. Singh Sahib’s body lies on the raised divan bed in the public downstairs, his face whitened with flour. Asmara Didi put the final touches to his lips with a borrowed lipstick, the colour of ripe tomatoes, with not a very steady hand. His head is ringed with rose petals, enough to ensure that she will not make her delicious rose jam this year.
Asmara Didi wants Singh Sahib’s funeral to be filled with music because he considered music to be the greatest of all arts. She has hired a rudali to coax the tears from watching eyes. An accomplished singer, she is a professional mourner who will leave nothing to chance. She starts slow and easy, swaying to her lament. Her tears for sale, she may never cry for herself, and if she does, she will be considered tainted and no one will hire her again.
She is a good rudali, but she cannot bring Ram Singh and Lokend to tears. They both feel no grief for their dead father; one’s estrangement shields him, while the other’s spirituality protects him.
The whole village is here to pay its last respects, even though they held him responsible for their debts. They join in the prayers the minute they arrive, dovetailing into exactly the correct place in the Gayatri Mantra.
Asmara Didi is the only one thoroughly altered by the death. On this one occasion, the words of the Bhagvat Gita that held her like a life raft through her husband’s untimely death – this dweller in the body is invulnerable; therefore you should not grieve for any creature – have let her down. Singh Sahib was more than an employer to her.
The tears glisten on her cheeks like jewels reflecting the sunlight. Her pallav blows off her head, and for some time she is lost, unconcerned with the fact that people might openly stare at her face. Then she turns her back on the mourners to fuss over Singh Sahib’s body. Her hands float softly over the corpse’s face as she adjusts a wisp of hair, then to the shoulders to straighten the sheet and all the way down to the toes. Her hands linger on the toes a long while, then she pulls herself together, rises, and goes into the kitchen to supervise the tea for the mourners.
The mourners coagulate into groups defined precisely by caste and sex. The upper castes stay in the house closest to the body, while the lower castes spill out over the veranda on to the steps and into the dust of Gopalpur to share the shade of the mango tree with the jeep. Many are already asleep in spite of the hymns and the rudali’s chest-beating, because it isn’t often that they get a break from the fields this early in the day.
Asmara Didi brings the upper-caste visitors endless cups of tea in Bibiji’s good china cups, the ones with the shiny gold rim and flowers on the outside and inside. For the others, tea is served in earthenware cups which are destroyed straight after use. Some have never tasted such tea, thick with sugar, and flavoured with cardamom and clove. They hang about all day, sipping from the earthenware till the cups all but dissolve in their hands.
Wisps of grass seed are floating in the wind. The men know the signs well, their superstitions are based on long years of observation. Come the wisps of grass seed, they start lashing down their roofs. They believe the roofs will float away to follow the seeds on their adventures, but really it is because the seeds herald a change in temperature, forcing a change in air pressure and therefore the winds.
Ram Singh stands to one side hardly participating in his father’s last rites. His shaven head hasn’t dulled his good looks.
He idly rotates his feet to ease the tension in his ankles – left, right, left, right – and fixes his younger brother with a stare, but looks through him to a life beyond his father. Of course Lokend will leave Gopalpur. What is there for him here? He’d left the Big House in spirit years ago. The whole estate is now conclusively in his hands. The elder brother sighs, deeply satisfied. Stilled in his impartial haste, for the first time he can ignore the world that has so plagued him; it is as if someone has switched off the tinning sound in his head after years of cacophony. There is no one to shout ‘Honour before Life’ at him any more.
Lokend seeks out Prem over the head of the priest and beckons to him. The boy understands and wades through the crowd, treading on fingers and toes, his ears burning with anxiety. He plucks Raja off Lokend’s shoulder and stuffs him into his own kurta and runs off. The silent tableau bears testimony to their friendship.
In the group of farmers one voice whispers, ‘My boy, that’s my son,’ with great pride. This is the first time Seeta Ram has seen exactly how close Prem really is to the members of the Big House.
Suddenly there is silence so strong that Asmara Didi urges the rudali to cry some more. The rudali smiles inwardly, extra tears mean an additional fifty rupees for her. The tabla player taps his fingers faster and harder against the twin drums at his feet, until the sound of the clay gourd resonates with his breath, and the sharper sound of the wooden gourd flutters with his pulse. The rudali sings on.
At last Lata Bai feels the tears on her cheeks. First for Shanti, the baby who gave her so much pain at birth and then left her holding nothing. Then for Mamta, the runaway daughter who gave her so much pleasure as a young girl, but has now destabilised her so thoroughly that she honestly doesn’t understand what she is feeling.
She is glad she stands apart from her husband. Tears in front of her husband for something as frivolous as sorrow? He would think them a resource wasted. Sneha sneaks a sideways glance at her mother. Her daughter’s instinct has forewarned her to be discreet. Her mother’s tears make her afraid for herself. Is there something there that might make her cry too?
Prem returns holding Daku Manmohan’s hand, but he dare not show affection in his grip. Daku Manmohan is unrecognisably changed since the day he surrendered in front of Saraswati Stores. Luckily, few make the connection. The boy drags the bandit behind him like a man chained. The bandit understands the boundaries of their relationship. He follows. There is no strain on either’s arm. Once again Seeta Ram says, ‘That’s my son.’
The bandit and boy join the outer circle of retainers, family and friends. Lokend beckons them closer, Daku Manmohan advances and stands by the corpse of the zamindar. The boy is no longer in the picture, not even standing on the border, he is outside the frame.
The farmers may not have reacted to the bandit in their midst, but Ram Singh will not tolerate him. ‘Get rid of this man, he has no right to be here,’ he whispers viciously. The boy runs back to grab Daku Manmohan’s hand, and tries to escape with his ward to the outer edges of the circle. But he is
cornered by Ram Singh.
‘Out, out. Get out, you murderer!’ As the words leave Ram Singh’s lips, the crowd recognises Daku Manmohan.
The tittering starts on the women’s side, chased by gruff dis belief on the men’s. ‘That’s my boy. Fearless chap. My boy Prem,’ a father’s voice once again praises his son.
‘Your son with that bandit? If that motherfucker was my son I would have beaten the skin off him.’ Now the father is unsure of what to say. Seeta Ram is in a precarious position. In the weight of the crowd pressing round him he once again recognises the under-the-banyan-tree rules.
‘Get back in your cell.’
‘Ram Bhaia, he will, he will . . .’ Lokend is firm as he smoothes the ruffled tone of the proceedings. ‘Let him conduct the last rites. Bapu wanted him to do it. Please, respect my father,’ he says loudly to those gathered. ‘You have come here to bury Zamindar Singh, this man was his friend. This is a sacred time for us all.’
Coincidently, the rudali is in her most dramatic trance, swaying and singing, her long hair thrashing to the floor with each salutation. The tabla plays faster. Her drama might save them all, the farmers are mesmerised by the creature, at once repulsive and eerie. Lokend decides to cut short the formalities and light the pyre straightaway, even though most people have not had time to pay their respects.
The Big House’s servants move their employer’s body from the divan and lay it over the bier, sticking out of the flat packed earth like some giant bird’s nest. The rudali shrieks, ‘Hai, hai,’ letting loose a thick stream of ersatz tears. ‘Hai, hai,’ cry the mourners, whipped by the fake sadness into a more real frenzy. Every pore of Gopalpur opens to accept the sound of sorrow. ‘Hai, hai,’ say the people. ‘Hai, hai,’ the land replies.
