sent back to your family. What did you say before you left? ‘Amma, look for your money order at Lala Ram’s shop every month.’ ‘Maybe he can’t get leave, but what stops him from sending us money? He had one of Lala Ram’s twins write down the address for him, not once, but twice, one for his pocket and a back-up for his satchel. The day he left, I put a red tilak on his brow and fanned the flames of the oil lamp towards his bowed head. Your father had tears in his eyes and Prem ran behind him all the way to the waiting tonga. But he left without looking back at us, twirling his moustache. He was so eager to go. I went to Lala Ram’s shop every month for a whole year, sometimes twice, sometimes thrice a month.’
At first Lala Ram would give her some brown sugar – for the children – he’d say. Then later, when he saw her approaching, he would go into the back, reluctant to deal with her expectation and disappointment. Finally, he started shooing her away from a distance, saying, ‘Go away, he maybe lost . . . dead . . . the city swallows them up.’
I know my son isn’t dead or lost. If anyone could make it in the city, it would be Jivkant. So where are those promised money orders?
Her husband has prepared his verbal offence carefully. He will let loose his tirade upon his son as soon as he sees him. There will be no ‘When will you help us? After we are dead?’ or ‘Look at your mother, her eyes swollen from crying every night.’ No, he will appeal to his intellect, because he knows, sure as the red birthmark on Mamta’s forehead, that his son has learned the most useless skill of all – to read and write – and is now an educated man.
‘Even if he does show up at the last minute, he won’t bring any money with him. Of that I’m sure,’ says the mother, still hoping she is wrong, but armouring herself against disappointment by pointing out the worst.
‘Leave it. It may be a man’s country, Lata Bai, but you will get joy only from the girls,’ counters Kamla. ‘Why, even the men see the dependability in our sex. Just see how they organise their lives so that they can be looked after by a woman. Have you seen one in our village that isn’t married? Have you seen one widowed father who hasn’t got a daughter or a daughter-in-law looking after him? I tell you, we were better off when our country was looked after by a woman Prime Minister. Poor thing, murdered like that, and her sons too. Just look at us now, under this big man Atal Bihari Vajpayee, bandits running wild as weeds. I might have to shave my head as a concession to the men, but it is only because our sex has the true power.’ Kamla’s features have long acquired that androgynous look of so many women who are forbidden from celebrating their femaleness.
‘What power, Didi? They keep us pregnant from year to year. I say to Mamta’s father, the country is moving into a new era. Our children aren’t dying like they used to because of the government’s survival drops. I tell you, those things have magic in them. There hasn’t been one curled leg in Gopalpur since the drought. Remember how bad it used to be? The legs of girls, and even boys, used to just wither and die at the slightest sign of unseasonable rain. Remember?’ Sickness in the family was the most debilitating thing of all. With each waking minute accounted for, there was never any time to look after the sick, especially when it required collecting special herbs and plants and supplicating the gods. Who had the time to make poultice after poultice or check on a fever? None but the old and the discarded, who more often than not perished together with their patients. But things have changed with the city mobile clinics making sporadic forays into the villages, bringing medicines, cures and vaccinations. ‘You’ve seen the change? Whenever those doctor-vans come from the city, I go to the Big House for my dose. To tell you the truth, I have more faith in them than in Asmara Didi, though Mamta’s father will say that is blasphemy. I can tell it to you straight, their medicines work better than hers. Why can’t we use those things that stop the babies from coming?’
The mobile clinics not only bring polio drops for the children but birth control pills and IUDs for the women. Though the women know not to couple in the middle of their cycle, because that is the most blessed time, no one understands the nature of pills. To take one every night to stop a baby from happening sounds too much like magic. IUDs they accept, but it is a brave woman who has an IUD inserted without the knowledge of her husband. Recently the van brought Nirodh condoms. Nirodh, the sheath to a happy life, that’s what the advertisement says, that is what Lata Bai believes.
‘My husband refuses. He says . . .’ she lowers her voice and cups her hand to her mouth, pouring her words directly into the older, more experienced, woman’s ears, ‘he says it isn’t natural that there should be something between a man and woman when they are, they are . . . you know what. It’s not satisfying, like smelling the smoke from another’s hookah.’ She raises her voice back up again: ‘He has a third ear that hears those thoughts before I have them. Look at me, a new baby only weeks old, and I am marrying off my first daughter. My second daughter has children older than mine. Now what’s the sense in that? Weren’t six children enough? I think it’s because we have no other form of entertainment, but to, to . . .’
‘Is it that? Or is it because our religion demands it?’
‘When it suits us, we follow the letter of our religion. We all aspire to emulate the myths, should we all have a hundred sons, just like the Kaurav clan then?’
‘I agree with you, Lata Bai, but someone has to think about such things to want to change them. I was lucky I only had sons, three sons, and then my husband died. That Seeta Ram of yours sees his friends having one child after another. He thinks, more children . . . more hands to work the fields . . . a better crop, he doesn’t see them as mouths to feed. What do you expect from that husband of yours, then?’
‘Nothing, I suppose,’ says Lata Bai, suddenly realising that her husband is a weak man, whose inaction will continue to cost her dearly, just as it did when she first married him and was repeatedly raped by his father. But in fact Lata Bai is wrong, Seeta Ram is not just a weak man, he is a cruel man; a cruel man whose brutality isn’t deliberate, but stems from something as innocuous as an unquestioning nature. And therefore it is the worst kind of cruelty, that can’t be shut off at will. Where the wind blows, Seeta Ram will follow. He will never be one to change anything.
‘Still, Lata Bai, if you really look at it, seven children in twenty years is nothing. You have to consider yourself lucky that you aren’t like your Seeta Ram’s cousin’s wife, married fifteen years with fourteen children to show for it, five of them already dead, one stupid in the head and one not able to walk. At least yours are healthy.’
‘Yes, I suppose they are healthy, for the most part. Though Mamta’s hair has been getting more orange these last few months, and Sneha’s getting that big belly on her matchstick legs.’
‘Oho, come now, now’s not the time to talk of this,’ says Kamla, putting an arm around her friend’s despondent shoulders.
But Lata Bai is a train, off and running. ‘No, she should know how to protect herself.’ She shakes with humourless laughter. ‘What protection can there be against a man who wants to couple? Eh, daughter, if after sex you start itching down there, make sure you wash with lemon juice and neem tea. But if you start making pimples and fainting, then you have to find some government doctor man to help you – that’s if your husband will allow you to go to one. The pimpling disease has no cure, though you can try Asmara Didi’s prescription – drinking your own piss.’
Mamta listens intently while pretending not to, gelled solid by equal parts embarrassment and fear.
‘Lata Bai! Does she have to know all this?’
‘Yes! Yes, she does. I am her only defence. You know how it was with poor Lalita.’ All the women of Gopalpur are familiar with Lalita’s story, though the men hardly discuss it at all. ‘Now you listen to me, Mamta: it’s our place
