Later he told her mother, ‘She was trying to rescue a kitten, I think, though I can’t get her to talk about it.’ He felt he was doing well, impressing the mother with what an understanding husband he was going to be. ‘I heard something. A sound of mewing in the water.’
‘She was always very kind to animals,’ said Koonty’s mother and secretly thought that perhaps the zamindar’s family would be satisfied with a smaller dowry, now that they had discovered what a compassionate bride they were getting. ‘She would sacrifice herself for some small creature.’
Later the young zamindar presented Koonty with a kitten, but at the sight of the furry mewling thing she began to cry and thrust it from her. ‘Take it away. I don’t even want to look at it.’
2 A LITTLE SUIT OF SHINING ARMOUR
Bowed with drops of toil and languor, low, a chariot driver came, Loosely held his scanty garment and a staff upheld his frame. Karna now a crowned monarch to the humble Suta fled, As a son unto a father reverentially bowed his head.
The Emperor Aurangzeb suffered from a carbuncle until an East India Company official called Job Charnock found a physician who managed to cure it. As a reward, Job was granted a tract of land eighty miles up the Hoogly river by the Nawab of Bengal and there he founded the city of Calcutta.
By the end of the eighteenth century Calcutta was the capital of the East India Company’s government, with an opulent and lively social life and opportunities for making a quick fortune for a lucky few. To this day, throughout the town, grand Western-style buildings, now crumbling, point back to its imperial past.
Dolly, her impoverished parents’ eleventh child, was born in the house where once William Hickey had dined with his face covered with blood, because he had become ‘sadly intoxicated’ at a previous get-together and had fallen while dismounting from his phaeton.
At the time of Dolly’s birth, more than a hundred families were living in considerable squalor and poverty in Hickey’s one-time grand residence. But because the new baby was born in the year of India’s independence her parents said, ‘Perhaps the goddess is going to bless us at last even though this is only a female child.’ For this reason, when she was old enough, they sent Dolly to the local school although their other daughters had never been give such an opportunity.
Each evening Dolly would come home and as she helped her mother pick through the rice for stones or roll the chupatties she would chatter joyfully about the things she had learnt that day. ‘We did fractions,’ she would announce, as she crushed the spices on the great thick slab of stone. Splashing water from the brass jar onto the seeds and pods and barks, she would heave the heavy stone roller over the top. Rolling, splashing, crushing she would tell her mother, ‘Did you know that the Moguls ruled India before the British and that this is the first time for ages that we Indians have been free?’ Or, as she stirred the great pan of simmering milk, keeping the iron spoon going to stop the milk boiling over or burning at the bottom, she would tell her mother about trade winds, or magnetism.
Sometimes the father would say worriedly, ‘Do you think all this education is spoiling her? Perhaps she is getting too much of it and won’t be able to find a husband.’
‘She is not neglecting her domestic duties,’ said the mother.
Later, after her parents and her ten siblings slept, Dolly sat by the light of a kerosene lamp and did her homework. She was determined to do well. She planned one day to live in a proper house, not a room in the bustee. If she passed her exams and got a good job, when she was grown up her children would have a bed each and they would eat mutton curry every day. Sometimes one of the babies would wake and cry, disturbing her. Then she would take it on her knee and joggle it on one arm while going on with her writing.
‘My teacher says I will certainly get into university. He is sure I will get a scholarship,’ she told her parents.
Her father’s face was stern, her mother’s anxious. ‘What? What?’ cried Dolly, suddenly afraid.
‘All this education is not needed for a woman,’ said her father.
‘There are better things for a woman to do with her life than to study,’ said her mother.
They had found Dolly a husband.
‘But I don’t want a husband,’ wailed the girl. ‘I am only thirteen. I’m too young to get married.’
‘I was married at ten,’ said her mother.
Dolly pinched lips and refrained from saying, ‘I don’t want my life to be like yours.’ Instead she said, ‘Baba, Ma, please. I am doing so well at school and if I get into university I will get a good job. I will become a teacher, maybe.’
‘How long will this take?’ asked her father.
‘Four years. Five years.’ Dolly was shivering.
‘We cannot go on feeding so many,’ said Dolly’s father. ‘We cannot spend all this on one when there are so many others who have a need. Anyway you are only a girl and the money must be spent on the boys.’
‘I could earn some money from teaching now, maybe,’ pleaded Dolly.
‘Teach who? In this village?’ Her father was scornful. ‘Who can afford to pay a young ignorant girl to teach them? Anyway there is a school that costs nothing already. And after you have finished university you will be too old for marriage.’
‘You can go on studying after you are married. There will be nothing to stop you then. You will be living in a company compound with all kinds of facilities. There will be many opportunities open to you there,’ her mother consoled her. ‘As it is we have to make a great sacrifice for your marriage. There is the big expense of the wedding feast and also the dowry. A large amount of our savings will have to be spent.’
Cheered by the thought of going on with her schooling after marriage, and eventually going to university after all, Dolly agreed.
The young bridegroom, Adhiratha, was twenty-seven years old and a company car driver. ‘He even has a pension,’ her father told Dolly. ‘You are very lucky for you will be provided for all your life. Even after he retires. You will not be poor when you are old like your mother and me.’
‘In fact we need a daughter with such a husband or how will we survive in our old age?’ said Dolly’s mother.
Dolly laughed at the thought of caring for her parents, not being able to imagine such a role reversal.
‘He is everything nice,’ said Dolly’s mother, showing her daughter a photo of Adhiratha. She was happy to see the girl smiling again.
The picture showed a pleasant-looking young man with a thin face, a large moustache and glasses.
‘He looks clever,’ said Dolly. She was quite excited now, longing to meet the man, with whom she thought she had fallen in love already. As a Hindu wife-to-be, and therefore required to respect the husband, as was the tradition she did not use his name even in her mind.
‘He has a sensitive face,’ she thought and the ‘He’ to which she referred was now the central person of her life. All other ‘he’s’ she thought, must go by some other