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 name from this day on.
Adhiratha looked like the kind of person who would appreciate education and Dolly visualised the two of them discussing books together, or even both attending night school. After all he would not be wearing glasses if he was not an intellectual.
If Dolly had known then the real reason for the glasses, would her parents have continued to insist on the marriage? Would Dolly have felt afraid?
Dolly fell wildly in love with Adhiratha the moment she set eyes on him.
‘How glad I am,’ she thought after their wedding, as they sat together in a proper electric-lit room to eat their meal. The company bungalow was a pukka stone and mortar affair with running water and glass in the windows.
They could not stop smiling at each other across the table. Sometimes before the meal was eaten, with only a smile for a signal, the two of them would leap up, overturning chairs, spilling misti and rush for their bed with its new sheet and dunlopillo mattress that had been kept wrapped in its cellophane for protection.
In bed they would lie naked, sweating under the slow turning fan, and explore each other’s beautiful bodies all over again. Adhiratha would bury his face in Dolly’s thick black hair that smelled of the spices she had been cooking. He would kiss the softness of her neck and whisper, ‘I love you, Dolly, I love you Dolly, I love you Dolly.’
He went to work each day wearing his smart chauffeur cap and a pristine white uniform with the company logo embroidered on the pocket that had been lovingly starched and pressed by his little new wife.
After he had gone Dolly would sing as she dusted her house, washed up the dishes, and swept her yard. She remembered how she had quarrelled with her parents when they had tried to arrange her marriage but now she was so happy. Her heart sang with joy because she loved Adhiratha so much and because everything she wanted in the world had been given to her. A hundred times a day, as she swept and polished their bungalow and made special delicious things for her husband’s evening meal, Dolly would say to herself, ‘How lucky my parents insisted I got married to Adhiratha.’ They even had a little garden and Dolly would pick hibiscus, zinnias and canna lilies and arrange them in a jug, then blush with delight when Adhiratha came home and praised her artistry.
Dolly was invited to continue her education at the company school and when term began, each day she would walk across the compound to her class, crossing shady yards, under trees planted by the company, past beds of flowers. There she revelled in the company of girls of her own age and she and her friends would sometimes get a chance to go to the bioscope, then later imitate the accents and behaviour of Ashok Kumar, or swank around pretending to be Meena Kumari.
But no matter how much studying she did, nor how much fun she had with her friends in the day, when Adhiratha got home in the evening she was always there, ready with his evening meal. Her mother had taught her to cook. Her chupatties puffed out like footballs, her parathas were as thin and fine as silk, her kheers and paish the best on the company compound. When Adhiratha invited fellow workers to a meal they would marvel that so young a wife should turn out to be such a marvellous cook. Pulling her sari over her head in deference, she would serve out the food for them, while the young men teased her until she blushed. ‘Hey, Dolly, those chupatties will float up like balloons if you make them any lighter.’ ‘Hey, Dolly. I think I will throw away my own wife and take you home with me instead so that I can eat sag like you make every day.’
‘No you won’t, you swine,’ Adhiratha would josh back. ‘She’s mine. She’s the best thing in my life and I’m not giving her up for anyone.’
‘But when are you starting the baby?’ Dolly’s mother kept asking and patted Dolly’s stomach, which sounded hollowly empty.
‘We are waiting for a year. Till I take my exams,’ Dolly told her parents.
‘How modern,’ said the father. ‘Let us hope that the gods will not take offence.’
‘What do you mean?’ Dolly was startled.
‘They give us children when they decide. It is not up to you to make such decisions.’ He spoke fiercely. ‘Exams are not an excuse for delaying children.’
‘Oh, Baba, you don’t know anything,’ laughed the modern Dolly, amused by her parents’ silly superstitious and old-fashioned attitudes. ‘These days women don’t just have to fill the house with babies like they did
