‘You should be concentrating on your work: go collect the dung, go finish the washing, go pick the berries, collect the spinach . . . do something useful instead of following me around! You are going to be a wife and mother soon, stop wasting your time.’
‘Come on, Amma, I have only a week left, then I’ll be gone and I . . . I might never come back, just like Ragini.’
‘Your sister married up. It’s not easy for her to come back.’
‘So will I have a pukka house too?’
‘Oho, stop dreaming dreams, they will get you nowhere. Now go gather the dung.’ Lata Bai knows all about dreaming dreams. She had her own dreams before she was married to Seeta Ram at eight.
‘Okay, okay. I’ll do it. Amma, but first tell me, what was it like?’
Lata Bai looks into Mamta’s eyes ringed with lashes, two bright big moons of excitement. What should I say? It was frightening . . . painful . . . it snatched my childhood from me.
‘You got married after the drought, and then . . .’ Mamta starts her mother’s story for her, but she is fishing in muddy waters, there is no bite. Lata Bai looks away, remembering . . .
‘What, Amma? Tell me . . .’ Mamta puts her arms around her mother’s waist.
‘No more of this hugging baby business,’ says Lata Bai in exactly the same tone her own mother had used on her, unlocking her arms and making distance between them. ‘You are a woman now. Soon you will have your own children to look after, you won’t be able to keep running home to me.’
‘My own children? Will they be just like my Ladli dolly?’ Mamta had made Ladli dolly herself when she was seven, with rags and tree cotton, embroidering her eyes, nose, mouth, and covering her head with bright red string hair.
‘Oh, grow up, you’ll be sorry if you don’t.’ But in fact it is Lata Bai who is sorry as soon as those words leave her lips. At once she pulls Mamta’s arms round her again and says, ‘Yes, yes, they’ll be just like your Ladli dolly.’
The thought of children makes Mamta so happy and so scared. She knows children come only after jiggery. And jiggery hurts like anything. She’s seen dogs do it, cows do it, cats do it, and it looks awful. How will she ever do it?
‘Do you like Bapu?’ she asks her mother.
‘What sort of a question is that? I am a wife and a mother.’
‘No, I mean do you like Bapu like the heroes like the heroines in the films?’
‘So when have you seen a film?’
‘Oh, Amma, you know what I mean. Do you think he will be as handsome as Guru Dutt?’
‘Maybe.’ Lata Bai hasn’t met the prospective groom. The marriage was arranged exclusively by Seeta Ram. I hope he checked on the family. Hai, Mamta, I hope your fate is better than mine.
‘Amma, what will I have to do? How did you do it?’ This is the first time Mamta has asked her mother questions about babies and sex.
‘Do what?’
‘You know, have all of us.’
Lata Bai sees a disconcerting calm in her daughter’s face, an acceptance that she never had a chance to own as a young bride. ‘Mamta, you’ll get to know all about it by and by.’ That’s what her own mother had said to her, hadn’t she? You’ll get to know all about it by and by. And she was right. She did get to know all about it by and by . . .
When Lata Bai turned twelve, Seeta Ram came with the tongawala to collect his bride. They rode back to her husband’s house bouncing in a bullock cart all the way. Her father-in-law was so kind to her that first day. He dandled her on his knee all day and gave her sweets to eat. That night her father-in-law got on top of her, opened her legs to the ceiling and brought his fat body all the way inside her, till she thought she would choke on it. She’d screamed with the blood and pain. But only once. Her mother-in-law shouted, ‘Quiet! Do you want to wake the dead?’ from behind the curtain.
Her eyes were red from sorrow and shame the next day. ‘Sorry,’ her husband said to her, ‘he gets the first taste. That’s our custom.’
The first taste of a twelve-year-old girl. That was the last time her husband ever said sorry to her.
After that, every night her father-in-law tried to climb on her again. Every night he was stopped by her mother-in-law. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘You’re only entitled to the first taste. She belongs to Seeta Ram now.’
His father was dying to get inside her, but her husband wasn’t sure how to do it. Her father-in-law took care of that too. He took Seeta Ram to the gambling tents and bought him his own prostitute for one whole hour. It was jiggery from then on. Every night . . .
‘The girls say the first time is the hardest . . . that there’s blood . . . Amma, is that true?’ Mamta speaks through the modest security of her chunni pinched between her teeth.
Lata Bai squeezes Mamta to her breast. ‘The best day of my marriage was when I became pregnant with you . . . I remember it exactly . . . it happened when your bapu’s mother went back to her own village to meet her sister and secretly sell her gold bangles to buy a transistor radio she’d had her eye on for some time . . .’
Lata Bai went to bathe at the river when her husband and mother-in-law left for the tonga stand. She’d calculated everything perfectly. Forty minutes there and forty minutes back, half an hour maximum for chit-chat, that added up to one hour and fifty minutes. Just to be on the safe side she would come back after two and a half hours, her husband would surely be home by then. The cicadas almost always started their song around five thirty in the evening. That’s when she would lazily wander home, after the insects sang their first movement.
It was the last tonga fare that had decided Lata Bai’s fate. The tongawala refused to start the journey without his complement of ten. The cost of feeding those bulls alone would amount to four passenger fares. Then there were two fares for emergencies, one fare for his food and a visit to his favourite prostitute. That left him with three fares of profit. That added up to one fare each for his sons and one for his wife and daughter. Less than that and it wasn’t worth his while.
Seeta Ram and his mother were still sweating buckets under their banyan, waiting for the tenth passenger when Lata Bai meandered back home, humming a little, still hot and damp under her ghaghra with water dripping off her hair, leaving a wet patch in the centre of her back. All this time, her father-in-law searched the house for her. He looked in the fields: ‘Come out, little mouse. Come out, little mouse. I’m going to get you,’ he said softly.
She didn’t see him, still holding on to her song and happiness. It was only when he stepped up behind her and lifted her off her feet that she knew she’d been caught in a trap from which she wouldn’t get out till the hunter was well and truly done with her.
That time she said nothing, she didn’t scream, just turned her head away and closed her eyes tight enough to see bright green dots behind her lids so she wouldn’t have to look at her father-in-law’s distorted features lurking above her own. He’d raped her twice, or was it thrice? Like he would never have enough of her teenage body. Her body, with its newly sprouted breasts as small as plums, a tiny waist and a bottom as hard as a teenage boy. After he was done, he’d stuffed a piece of brown sugar into her mouth. She’d spat it out on her mother-in-law’s pillow.
He’d filled her body with his semen and one of those sperms made its way to her awakening ovaries. That’s how Mamta came to be.
Then Seeta Ram came back. The whole world was still in order. The house was exactly as he’d left it. His wife was peeling potatoes from their field. There was washing hanging out to dry, and drips from the oil lamp