His father smiled. ‘Of course you do.’
Seeta Ram bedded his wife in the cow shed, his seed mixing with his father’s inside her. That time too, Lata Bai said nothing, just shut her eyes to see those little green spots again.
Her father-in-law managed to rape her five more times. At first Lata Bai just stared at her mother-in-law with intense eyes as deep as drought wells, but the older woman refused to understand. So she didn’t keep quiet during the sixth rape, but screamed and screamed so that the world might hear her. The world didn’t hear her, but the person she most wanted to did . . .
‘Your bapu’s mother didn’t buy the transistor radio. Instead she got your bapu his own field, and that’s how we came upriver to live here in Gopalpur.’ At least that last rape hadn’t been in vain.
Lata Bai holds on to her daughter’s eyes for a long time. ‘My life changed for the better after I moved here with your bapu . . . we made this house ourselves,’ she says, falsely recalling her own early months as wedded bliss. ‘Remember, the first months are the best, enjoy them. You build so much together, lay a foundation for yourself and your children,’ she says convincingly. In truth it wasn’t until months after Mamta was born that they’d gathered enough clay from the riverbed and wood from the forest and begged a stack of hay from their neighbour’s field to build their hut. The hut hasn’t changed much, it is still just one large room where the family cooks, sleeps and dreams.
‘But you will also have to work hard,’ she needlessly warns her industrious daughter, ‘maybe even harder than you do here. There will be only two of you there, here we are five . . . But I know you will do whatever you have to. You have never shirked work. And believe me, you will be rewarded, just as I was . . .
‘Our first wheat was marvellous, each stalk fat with grain without a single telltale black powdery ear that could ruin the whole crop. It was such a good time to bring a baby into the world, Mamta. Fat wheat dancing over my head, a hut to live in, and not a rupee in debt. And then you appeared, just before the wheat turned golden. A beautiful plump baby girl.’
Lata Bai looks away, she can remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. She’d rushed home with her new baby. ‘Can you hear me?’ she’d cried. ‘Can you hear me? Our baby’s come. Our baby’s here,’ she’d shouted again and again. Seeta Ram came running from the latrine, washing his hands quickly in the ditch. Lata Bai had held the baby out to him. Even wrinkled up and bruised from birth, she thought Mamta was a beauty. ‘She’s beautiful, no?’
Seeta Ram had jerked back from his wife as if he’d been stung. ‘You called me this loud for a girl? Do you want us to celebrate and tell the whole world of this baby girl? God, did you have to give me a girl?’ he’d said, and walked out of the house leaving Lata Bai standing holding Mamta out to him as if she was a temple offering.
Girl or otherwise, that’s when Seeta Ram became ‘Mamta’s father’. That’s right, from that day to this, Seeta Ram has been called Mamta’s father and nothing else by his wife. ‘Arey-oh, Mamta’s father, lunch is ready,’ she shouts at noon, and then again, ‘Arey-oh, Mamta’s father, dinner.’ Every day it’s Mamta’s father this and Mamta’s father that. Each time his wife calls him Mamta’s father, Seeta Ram thinks she is deliberately punishing him for Mamta’s sake; he never blames custom that ordains the link between the father’s name and his first-born’s.
That evening the hijras came. They saw the baby was a girl and blessed it for free. They hadn’t the heart to ask the new mother of a daughter for money. ‘Devi has blessed you,’ said the eunuchs, looking back at Lata Bai, sharing in her sorrow as only other women could. ‘She will be lucky. She has the mark.’ Of course the mark had to be a blessing, just like accidental bird droppings on one’s finest clothes. Yes, Lata Bai had seen it too, a red birthmark tucked away in her daughter’s hair.
‘At least we can be thankful that the hijras won’t come today. They know we have nothing,’ says the mother.
‘Yes, and probably they won’t show up at my wedding either,’ says Mamta ruefully. ‘At last Bapu can be glad, he won’t have to look at my ugly face much longer,’ she adds.
‘Uffo,’ Lata Bai replies in half-agreement. Ugly-face-talk before the wedding is fitting, because any kind of praise is inauspicious. There is always someone listening, people willing to spoil your plans. She places a dot of lampblack behind Mamta’s ear to take the ‘perfect’ out of her beauty, more as a courtesy to her daughter than anything else. They both know Mamta’s beauty isn’t perfect, the red birthmark dangles above her eyebrow like a sign of disapproval from God.
‘I shall put the henna leaves to dry as soon as the rain stops,’ says Mamta. ‘Just imagine, beautiful red henna patterns all the way to my shoulders and up to my knees . . . hai,’ she sighs.
Her mother shakes her head, but says nothing. She is going to be married after all. Another six days and she’ll be gone. Thank you, Devi. That should put an end to the village sniggers: ‘Arey, Lata Bai, how is it that you got your younger daughter married before your elder one?’ . . . ‘Arey, Lata Bai, have you had an offer for Mamta yet?’ Even those guised as concern: ‘Arey, Lata Bai, what can a mother do but love her daughter, good, bad, beautiful or ugly?’ And the pitying, this-is-destiny ones: ‘Don’t worry, someone will come for her. You just wait and see. After all, girls are someone else’s gardens. We mothers only borrow them for a time.’
Lata Bai has woken Mamta and Sneha early and ushered them out of the hut. They must be quick today, bringing the water from the well, cooking two days’ food that won’t spoil with keeping, repairing the roof and collecting the dung pats. At last, mid-morning she packs some dried chapattis and spicy baked potato skins in some ficus leaves for their journey. They will travel light, the only thing of value they carry is a bottle of homemade chilli pickle for her father.
‘Okay, we are ready,’ says Lata Bai to Seeta Ram when he comes home for lunch. ‘I am taking Mamta and Shanti,’ she adds, quickly placing his tray at his feet. Her husband winces, the name Shanti is too new, too disappointing, too female.
‘So what about Sneha?’ he says, pulling Prem and Mohit to one side of the hut, separating the females from the males as if in some fiercely competitive game. ‘Take the girls, the boys are staying with me.’
Lata Bai cradles Shanti and leaves without looking back at the house. The women walk towards the tonga stand under a flowing ficus tree, an hour away. She hides the baby deeper inside her pallav to spare her the sunlight that can crisp skin faster than an open flame. It beats down on them like a pounding stick, knocking all the energy out of their stride. The Red Ruins glimmer in the distance. Two girls are praying at the shrine. Lata Bai walks faster, lifting her hand in acknowledgement, but not her head.
‘Who are they?’
‘Must be some girls from the village, come to pray for sons.’
‘When I’m married, I will come here to pray for sons too. I wish I was a boy. Bapu says to wait and see, my husband will sort me out well and good. I think he’s waiting for that.’ In Seeta Ram’s eyes Mamta has no right to exist at all, but since she does, she has to prove herself day after day, working harder than the boys, eating nothing that might be noticed, and being silently present. Like the extra baby section in an orange, not missed if it isn’t there, but swallowed whole if it is, without releasing any of its flavour into the mouth.
‘I won’t let my husband rule over me. Husbands aren’t kings, you know.’
‘Look