of the goddess?’
‘Well, she should have provided some food for the child. How can she expect us to feed it?’ All the same he could not help creeping over and peeping curiously into the face of the little newborn baby.
‘Getting things from the gods is not like going shopping,’ Dolly ranted on. ‘You don’t just go and say “I would like two kilos of baby” as though you were buying onions. You don’t say “I want a couple of breastfuls of milk as well as a baby”. You just take what you get.’ The last of the tinsel was unravelled and then Dolly let out a scream of surprise for hanging round the little boy’s neck she had found a golden chain from which hung a disc. Taking it to the window she read the words ‘Koonty Pandava of the Hatibari of Hatipur’.
She turned to her husband, her eyes filled with amazement, and repeated the words to him. Her surprise now became touched with a tiny chill of fear which Adhiratha echoed by saying, ‘That is some other woman’s child.’
‘It is not. It is mine,’ cried Dolly hugging the baby against her body, and wishing the disc had been washed away in the water.
As she carried the new child to the water spurt, she felt terribly tempted to sell the piece of gold and then pretend it had never existed. She felt a scald of conflict. Without the disc the baby would have no identity but the one that she and Adhiratha gave it. Without that disc she and her husband were the baby’s parents. But on the other hand this piece of gold and the information it gave were the baby’s only possessions. She had no right to take them from him and one day the little child might need to know who he was.
She shook her head and tried to dash away the worrying thoughts that the disc aroused in her as she rubbed the mud from the baby’s body. When she got back into the room with the now spotless baby, Adhiratha was rushing round, hunting for something. He looked up, laughing, at the sight of her holding the child against her chest. The baby was making little whimpering sounds and nuzzling its lips into Dolly’s choli.
‘What have you lost?’ asked Dolly. The desperation of the baby was troubling her.
Triumphantly he held out his hands. ‘I knew I had some paise hidden in this pocket. I’ll go out now and buy some milk for her.’
‘For him,’ laughed Dolly. Happy tears began to run down her cheeks because she knew everything would be all right from now on. Holding the now howling baby in one arm, she reached up and kissed Adhiratha.
‘You don’t know how much I love you,’ she said. ‘You just don’t.’
‘I won’t be long,’ he said as he rushed out. ‘I expect there will be some left over at the khatal.’
The cattle stall in the centre of their area was owned by the landlord and his tenants bought milk for their households and businesses from there as well as using the dung for fuel.
Dolly stood at the open door looking down into the darkness of the stairway, till she heard at last the sound of his footsteps receding.
The baby went on crying for a little while and then, exhausted, fell asleep.
Dolly waited, thinking, ‘He is being a very long time. Perhaps there was no milk left at the khatal. Perhaps he has had to go to the house of the Gwala.’
An hour later she was still waiting. The baby woke up again and once more began crying. Where could Adhiratha be?
After another hour, in which Dolly started to panic and the baby’s desperation was unendurable, she decided the only hope was to go from room to room, and hut to hut begging milk from someone.
Adhiratha never came back. He was hit by a lorry and died on the spot. It was two days of numbing dread and misery before Dolly found out.
Sankha’s voice, Gandhiva’s accents, and the chariot’s booming sound, Filled the air like distant thunder, shook the firm and solid ground. Kuru’s soldiers fled in terror or they slumbered with the dead, And the rescued lowing cattle with their tails uplifted fled.
Shivarani Gupta, Koonty’s eldest sister, was so tall by the time she was thirteen that her father began to worry that she might never find a husband.
Shivarani laughed, called him an old silly and accused him of knowing nothing about the modern world in which, she said, tall women were the fashion.
By the time Shivarani was sixteen she was taller than ever and her father’s anxiety was greatly increased. As was her mother’s.
The Guptas lived on a modern bungalow on the Hatibari estate that had been built ten years earlier to house the estate manager. Meena Gupta, Shivarani’s mother, went once a week to Calcutta to meet her friends at the Calcutta Club where they ate miniature samosas, drank flowery orange pekoe and played mahjong. And there Meena Gupta poured out her worries.
‘Shivarani is growing like this sort of giraffe because of the genes of my husband’s family. My sister-in-law is nearly six feet tall and if my mother had known about her, she would have forbidden the marriage for everyone knows what difficulties come to families whose daughters are too large.’
Mrs Gupta’s Calcutta Club friends smiled with sympathy, thinking how dreadful it must be for someone as fair and small as Mrs Gupta to have a dark giantess for a daughter.
The Guptas began to approach suitable families, hoping for a match for their lanky daughter while she still possessed one marriageable asset, the bloom of youth.
Three times Shivarani was paraded, wearing her prettiest sari and Meena Gupta’s most costly jewels, before the parents of suitable boys. Three times the Gupta family heard no more of the matter until receiving an invitation to a wedding. The suitable boy was marrying a shorter fairer girl.
‘So many boys wanting to marry Shivarani,’ lied Mrs Gupta to her Cal Club friends. ‘Boy after boy, from good family after good family brought before her for approval and like princess in fairy tale, she rejects them. Eeny meeny miney mo.’
There followed insincere commiseration on the unreasonableness of nubile daughters. ‘We all have such a girl at home, don’t we know it.’ They knew that in reality it was the boy, or his family, who was rejecting Shivarani. But then what good family would marry a girl like that?
Someone said helpfully, ‘I have seen a product for lightening the skin being advertised. Perhaps you can purchase it in Sahib Singh’s.’
The suggestion made Mrs Gupta unreasonably cross. ‘And why should I require such stuff? Are you saying my daughter is black, Leela?’
‘Have another little samosa, Meena. Don’t pay attention to silly Leela,’ the friends tried to soothe.
Meena Gupta, silently blaming her husband for his outsize sister, nibbled her samosa through a veil of tears and vowed, though there was nothing to be done about the height, she would try to lighten Shivarani’s complexion the moment she got home.
After the third rejection Shivarani, her face red with her humiliation, her eyes red with tears, said she would not allow herself to be paraded any more. Her parents, frantic with worry, because what sort of life was there for a woman without
