Having asked for Devi’s help, it is now Lata Bai’s duty to show that she deserves it. What better way to show she deserves it than in receiving it? She must be renewed. She gropes for her husband’s knife. Her blind hand flicks this way and that above her head. At last, the feel of metal.
She looks at the knife. It is sharp. Sharp enough to cut the cord that unites mother and baby. Certainly sharp enough to kill. When does a female baby become a human being? At conception? At birth? At five? At puberty? At marriage? Never? When her parents can offer her a life?
The baby isn’t anything yet. Just blue and red and white. The white birth cream she should save. Take it off this girl and give it to the one who is getting married. It makes the skin soft. She holds the knife tight in her hand. She shifts, sending the baby rolling down the furrow, trailing cord. Grains of mud stick to the girl baby like black sesame seeds on a stick of caramel. She is on her elbows. The baby is crying – an open-mouthed full-throated cry, producing less than a trembling bleat. She can see right down the pink of her throat. What do they say about human babies? They are the most helpless creatures in the world. Calves walk within seconds of their birth. Turtle babies manage to rush to the sea and never forget where they were born. Snake babies fight with their siblings for survival. Bee babies eat their way out of their prisons. And human babies? What about howling helpless human babies? Useless-helpless-howling-human girl babies? She rolls after it, bringing the knife down swiftly and sharply.
For the rest of the world it may be the new millennium, but in Gopalpur time is static. Here the land lives quietly under the hills that rise from its dust, suddenly at ease with the sky, but shying away from the earth. The hills snare the rain that feeds the Chambal River that runs through the plains like a molten braid of silver.
It is impossible to piece together the story of these people’s lives from what the eye can see. There is nothing personal in the surroundings, except soil squares in different colours which announce the farmers’ crop choices for the season. Gopalpur belongs to a shifting land of mud and dust. The villagers must rebuild their homes of reed and packed dung each time the wind has finished toying with them. The most permanent material here is wood, saved for ploughs, their most important need.
Why do they continue to live in this hostile land of hardship and starvation? Where would they go? To leave somewhere there has to be a contemplation of a different life, an image of different scenery. None of them has ever sensed such a thing. That is the obvious explanation. But the truth is, offered a better life they wouldn’t move. It is because Gopalpur defines them as people. It makes sense of their existence and strengthens it with a homogenous experience. There is velocity in such experience, it is that which metamorphoses the present into the future. None of these people is chasing time, their future is not moving away from them, their future is moving closer. Towards them. Here time is not a force, it is a flow, not always benevolent, but nevertheless a flow.
The shadows lie low and long. They reach over the pale outline of the mountains like birds of prey and search out the woman who walks with difficulty, clutching her belly with one hand and a bundle of what looks like mustard plants in the other.
Lata Bai is grateful for the shadows. Her body is still cold, and there is no respite from the sandpaper wind.
The shame of a female birth has propelled her in the wrong direction, away from her house. How long has she been walking? A row of renegade bitter mustard, breaking away from some field to find a life on sandy soil of unploughed land, is her only guide.
She limps past the Red Ruins, planted on land too rocky for crops. The sandstone wall blushes like a shy bride beneath the veil of leaves and vines etched into stone like delicate embroidery on muslin. Superstition has been its saviour. There is the legend of the ghost shimmering in the lone window. No one dares take away one stone from the Red Ruins. If I had a house like this I would return from the dead to look after it too. Lata Bai can see the faint outline of dark brown fingerprints plastered all over the wall, even enough to form a pattern. Everyone knows they are the hand marks of the bandit girls, abducted from their families and raped, only to fall in love with their captors. They say they come to this wall at night to break their bangles in a secret ritual when their husbands die, leaving bloody fingerprints as proof of their grief. An offering lovingly placed at the base of the wall withers accusingly under Lata Bai’s careless feet.
She feels a cramp which pushes her into the ground. Oh, Devi, all this for a girl. The wind urges her forward. It knows its destination, having returned once again just before winter like a diligent relative on a family visit. Where it comes from no one asks, it just appears on the far mountains, rolling down the sides like a conquering horde bringing with it dust. It is said that the dust of Gopalpur can drive people mad. Like darkness, it creeps into everything – every dip, every iron-crease, every eye, under every nail, in stiff broom hair, everything.
It is now blowing with that familiar abandon that will become a storm in no time. She must get home before the storm breaks. She turns around to face the wind. Then lowers her head as if in obeisance.
Lata Bai is careful not to crush another’s plants. She employs the sure tread of a peasant, and negotiates the furrows as lightly as her children play hopscotch – up, down, up, down – through the furrows, in between colours, yellows, golds and greens, thinking only of the next step.
Another cramp. She must get home. She pulls her sari low over her face. Her eyes become one with her bare feet. The gloating storm has no part of her. Her pain has distilled the untidy thoughts in her head into a single mission: keep walking.
No one sees her approach the hut. She can sense the lacy cracks that are about to spread decoratively on its packed mud walls. She must ask the girls to speed up the dung collection, it won’t be long before they will have to start plastering again. She cannot see the earthenware pots, but she knows they are there, melding with their surroundings. Outside there is no sign of her family, a father and four children, within. The children have been using the rope to skip again. It isn’t coiled in its usual place, but lies discarded by the brambles like a snake’s first skin. There is no smoke rising from her roof. Her daughters aren’t home. She is disappointed and then angry.
Her breasts are already aching with milk. She puts the mustard plants down and washes with yesterday’s well water before anyone sees her. She’s pleased to see two extra pots, at least the girls remembered to bring the water from the well. Before forty days, she really should be washing away from the house, taking her impurity with her. The dust has started to swirl in manic curtains of grittiness. She enters her hut. The storm keeps pace with her thoughts, raging outside as an equally nervous storm builds inside her body. Home at last she can experience her pain at leisure.
Another girl.
Seeta Ram, the father, loves picking his teeth. He loves polished shoes. He hates delayed meals. Today the meal is delayed. With one wife and four children still at home why is the meal delayed?
‘Lata, Lata. Food,’ he shouts, sitting cross-legged and placing his turban carefully on the floor beside him. He’s come home early to escape the storm.
‘Coming,’ she shouts back, annoyed that her daughters aren’t home.
Lata Bai claims her bangle from the ashes. For a minute she is frightened that someone else has found it first. But it’s the ash that’s the thief. Reluctant to part with its treasure, it has slipped the bangle a little deeper into the pot.
She still has difficulty walking. You give me a girl and all this pain too. She looks at the picture of Devi, incarnated as Lakshmi the goddess of wealth, hanging above the fire, her lower lip pouting, her chin crinkling like a piece of paper. The picture swings in the wind. Back and forth, back and forth, ticking
