Someone Else’s Garden
DIPIKA RAI
For Indira so she might remember
&
Shaan and Tara so they might know
Contents
The Sky is for Dreaming
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Monsoon Darkness
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Love is a River
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
The Smell of Wet Earth
Chapter 22
Glossary
BEHIND THE SCENES
‘SOMETHING SPLENDID’ - A Word from the Author
‘LEARN THE TRUTH’ - Things to Think About
‘OPENED WITH EXPECTATION’ - What to Read Next
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Sky is for Dreaming
Chapter 1
PEOPLE ARE DEFINED BY WHAT THEY love and what they hate.
Lata Bai loves the sound of a cycle’s bell. She loves the rain. She hates having yet another baby.
She neither knows nor cares that somewhere the world has celebrated a new millennium, she only knows that another baby will make it seven in all. This time, after the first three weeks, she’ll give it to Sneha, her youngest daughter to look after. It really should be Mamta’s turn, but, with her getting married soon, her mind should be on other things. Mamta’s father was too hasty with her. He is determined to marry her off soon after the baby is born: as soon as Lata Bai can look after the marriage preparations, is how he puts it. Almost twenty, so old and still unmarried, Mamta’s very presence serves as a reminder of his failure.
Lata Bai’s face contorts with the first birth pains. After six children, she can tell exactly when it starts and when it will finish. Only her first had taken her by surprise, but she was strong then at fifteen, and had managed just fine, cutting the cord with her husband’s betel-leaf knife. She’d even cooked his meal that very evening.
‘When?’ Mamta is excited, almost too excited about her impending wedding; her world consists almost entirely of whens. She helps her mother change into her oldest sari, one she can cut into rags for the forty-day bleeds.
‘Soon,’ says Lata Bai, taking off her only bangle, more precious than anything else she owns, and hiding it in the pot of ash she saves both for her bath and her utensils. ‘Shsh,’ she says, ‘tell no one. Just in case I die, my spirit will know where to look for it. And don’t you dare pinch it!’
Lata Bai extracts her daughter’s wedding sari from the tin trunk. Luckily Seeta Ram bought it last week, and she can deliver the baby on its crisp, clean wrapping. She peels the noisy brown paper away carefully. Mamta tries to rub her hand over the precious material but her mother slaps it away and returns the sari to the tin trunk.
‘Shall I come?’ asks Mamta.
‘No, I must do this alone,’ she says. Mamta watches her mother from the doorway cautiously. She knows what is to come – another baby. ‘This is what will happen to you once you’re married,’ says Lata Bai, using the opportunity to impart a lesson.
The thought of babies makes Mamta smile.
The same thought of babies makes Lata Bai grimace. Most women have the widow Kamla helping them, but not her. After doing her first, then second, and third all the way to the sixth herself, why waste money on an expensive midwife now? The paper rustling in her hand, she rushes to her mustard field and into the misty grey cloud that has slipped from the sky to settle close to the earth where the sun has forgotten to fall. Oh, Devi, give me a boy. She prays to the goddess of her clan – Devi, universal female energy, absolute divinity.
She knows her destination. With distance in her eyes she lurches away from her house towards her lucky patch of ground (the same place where she found her golden bangle, the one she’s hidden in the ash). The baby’s water is running down her legs. It won’t be long now.
Careful not to crush the paper, she lies down, the furrow her pillow. Devi, give me a boy. She prays aloud: Jai ho Devi, Devi jai ho. No one hears her.
It was always a different colour.
With her first it was the green of young wheat. Green everywhere. With her second it was yellow. Then there was another green, one gold, one white, one purple, and now again yellow.
All she can see is yellow. Dancing above her head, in her mouth, in her hair. Yellow in her ears, her toes, and, with her sari pushed up all the way to her waist, yellow on her big swollen belly. Even yellow in her navel and all the way inside her. All the way to the baby.
She knows this field intimately, suddenly in flower with the first rain. Jai ho Devi, Devi jai ho. She’s worked it for how long? Much longer than twenty years. So long she doesn’t remember. She has laughed in it and cried in it. Hidden in it and rejoiced in it. She’s had all her babies in it and played with all her babies in it. It is her history. The field has watched her through her life. It watches her now. Its soul reaches out to her and its arms protect her. She feels the field’s love pour over her. It sinks in through her pores and mixes with her blood, feeding every atavistic part of her with its generosity. Her field. She’d die without it.
She feels another pang.
At first she is like a cricket on its back, her arms and legs waving to the clouds above. Then she forces herself to be still. She knows she has to open like a flower. The more she holds, the more it’ll hurt. But the baby doesn’t come. Each time her body asks, she pushes, yet the baby doesn’t come. She thinks of the bangle in the ash. Why won’t the baby come? Should she shout for help? Who will hear her? Her life is pouring out of her. Great big rushes of blood. Every drop of blood that comes out of her dredges up another memory from her deepest being.
How was it? With her first, green, soon-to-be-married Mamta?
How green Mamta had hurt her coming out with a fat blob of blood. Mamta, her first born, who loves running in the wind. She loves to lie alone on the hay and hates the red birthmark over her eye.
With her second, yellow, Jivkant, it was over even before she knew it had started. Jivkant, already a man, disappeared on a train somewhere. Jivkant the cruel one.