She was only fifteen, she was engaged to be married and she was going to die at any moment.
Round the bend of the river and out of sight, she could hear village boys playing. From the sudden splash and laughing shriek she thought they must be hanging from the branch of an overhanging tree and dropping feet first, head first, bottom first, into the water as she and Pandu had done as recently as two years ago. The water buffaloes did not mind the boys’ shouts. They only flinched from Koonty’s screams.
Squatting low in the water, because this position seemed the least agonising, she gripped her arms around her knees and braced her body. Tilting her head back she could just see through the mango orchards and beyond the lake the great house that would have been hers if she had lived to be married. The Hatibari. Fifty windows reflecting the river. Stone lions larger than life-size on each corner of the roof. Her father was inside at this moment, preparing lists of wedding guests with the zamindar. He would never hear Koonty. The boys round the corner heard her. Laughed and shouted back. They thought she was laughing too, joining with them in their fun.
Ever since she was little she had kept coming here, though since she was soon to marry him and become a respectable wife, she no longer played on the water with Pandu. Koonty had been sitting here earlier in the year when she had first seen Suriya, the Sun God.
‘Keep away from the waterside,’ her mother kept warning. ‘That is the place from which trouble can come.’ For who can control water, who can put an impenetrable fence through a sacred river? The rest of the property was almost unassailable. The river was its only weakness in spite of the watchman who patrolled its banks. In the old days they had put up a brick wall seven feet high all along the bank but the first monsoon had washed it away so that not a brick was left standing and the bamboo water fence had to be replaced several times a year.
Koonty always sent the watchman away when she wanted to sit here. ‘If I see someone coming I will shout for you.’ She was going to be the new young mistress of the Hatibari. He did as she told him. But when she had seen a man come swimming into the Hatibari water she had not shouted for the watchman. She had kept perfectly silent the evening the Sun God came.
Koonty had first heard he was visiting their village from Boodi Ayah. Boodi had returned with the day’s food shopping, gasping and babbling with the excitement.
‘Dilip Baswani has come to the village.’
When the family looked blank she said, ‘The actor who plays the part of the Sun God in the film of the Mahabharata.’
Koonty had stared at the young woman in disbelief. ‘Dilip the glorious? There in our village? I must go and see him.’ With her parents she had seen the film five times in Calcutta.
‘He is making speeches in the tea shop. He is standing for the election,’ said Boodi Ayah. ‘I saw him with my own eyes.’
Dilip Baswani, dressed entirely in gold, had ridden into the village on a golden motorbike. His goggles were golden, he shone with gold leather and wore a plastic golden helmet.
‘He is even more beautiful than in the film, Koonty Missie. His skin looks soft as silk and his eyes are the colour of honey.’ The ayah’s excitement became so great that a cone of fresh ladies’ fingers fell from her arms and she nearly dropped the eggs.
‘Take that stuff on to the big house where they are waiting for it and stop filling my daughter’s mind with ideas,’ said Koonty’s mother sternly.
‘When can I go to hear him?’ cried Koonty. ‘I think we should go this very minute in case it is too late and he is gone.’
Koonty’s mother became stern. ‘You are only fifteen years old and about to become the wife of the young zamindar. How can you be seen among the ordinary people? A girl in your situation must stay modestly at home.’
‘What harm can it do for me only to go there and listen?’ Koonty had begged. ‘Boodi Ayah could come with me.’
‘That silly woman will be useless in such a mob,’ snapped the mother. ‘It is all her fault, with her foolish chatter, that you are so eager to see this man who is nothing but a C-grade film actor. Also a thousand people from fifty villages will be there to hear him. What will your husband-to-be’s family think if they hear you have been mingling amongst all kinds of untouchable people and gawping at a trashy film star?’
So Koonty had sat by the river instead, felt sad, cross, wished she was there among the village crowd which she could hear faintly from down the water. She imagined how impressed the girls at school would have been if she had told them she had actually seen Dilip Baswani with her own eyes like Boodi Ayah. His voice, drifting over the water, did not even sound the same as it did at the cinema.
All the girls at her school were deeply in love with one Mahabharata character or another. Koonty’s passion was Arjuna and she had a lurid poster of the actor in her bedroom.
‘Is this all you modern girls have to talk about? Cheap films and their cheaper stars. If you want to know these stories you should read the original texts,’ Koonty’s mother would reprimand.
‘Oh, Ma, what an old fuddy-duddy you are.’
In the evening she had gone back to the river just in case the Sun God started talking to the villagers again. As she sat there she had heard a commotion on the water, excited shouts, cries of awe, as though a thousand people were gathered there watching something wonderful.
‘Come and look, brother,’ she could hear one person cry to another. ‘It is the Sun God himself, here in our river.’
She heard later how the shout had spread over the countryside. People had leapt from bullock carts and run to see. Buses stopped and disgorged their passengers. The village streets emptied, shopkeepers hastily boarded up and ran to the waterside, labourers dropped their spades and rushed. Children flooded out of the school and raced their excited teacher to the river.
As the Sun God swam, he became surrounded by a hundred boys, dog-paddling alongside, and the crowds that gathered on the banks became ten deep. Trees on the waterside began cracking under the weight of people who had climbed them to catch a sight of the swimming film star and every house and hut that overlooked the water had people scrambling to the rooftops, trying to see him. Only the people of the Hatibari had remained inside, though from its upper windows could be seen the faces of the zamindar’s servants craning there, trying to get a peep but not wanting to risk the wrath of their employers by gawping openly.
Dilip Baswani swam as fast as he could, trying, hopelessly, to shake off the mob of village boys, till ahead of him he saw the bamboo barricade cutting into the water like a fence, beyond which were trees and a domed roof. This must be the border of the Hatibari estate, he thought, the great house the villagers had told him about. Private property onto which they would not dare follow him, but onto which he, the zamindar’s future MLA, would surely be welcome. He entered the stockade and felt gratified to see the mob of boys fall back. Inside he found himself gratefully alone.
He turned a bend and looked with pleasure onto groomed grassy banks planted with flowering shrubs and free of crowds. Then he saw one lone figure sitting, feet in the water, watching him, a young girl with untidy hair and a muddy sari.
She stared with sparkling eyes, her mouth rounded in an O of amazement.
‘Hello,’ he said, but the girl just stared at him in silence.
A servant girl from the Hatibari, but pretty enough, he thought. And the age he liked.
‘What’s your name, dear?’ he asked as he scrambled out of the water. But Koonty’s lips seemed to have got stuck in their gasp of surprise.
‘I need a little rest,’ he said. ‘There are such crowds everywhere else. I don’t expect the zamindar will mind if I get my breath back here.’ He stood looking down at her, smiling. Charming, he thought.
He was not wearing a golden helmet, a gold leather jacket, gleaming goggles. He wore