Cousin Manju Observes Something Strange
Some years ago, the Shakya family stopped getting along. The men blamed the women, accusing them of submitting to small-hearted squabbles. The house, which stretched across a quarter acre of land, was now split into three parts demarcated by low mud walls.
Thereafter, each of the families cooked meals in their own kitchens, drew water from their own handpumps and housed their black-bellied buffaloes and white-skinned goats in separate shelters. If they had used toilets, they would have built three. But they squatted in the fields, as most everyone else did, because paying for something that could be had for free was wasteful.
They were still a joint family, the Shakyas insisted. The courtyard was for everyone to bask in, all eighteen of them, and the dogs too. A parent of one child was the parent of all the others. Padma called Siya Devi ‘badi-ma’, elder mother, and to Siya Devi her niece Padma was ‘hamari bachchi’, our girl. Sohan Lal, the oldest of the brothers at forty-seven, was the head of the household. His two younger brothers, who were in their thirties, deferred to him on important decisions. Being men, they spent their days outside the confines of the house. The women mostly stayed in. They cooked for the men, ate after the men and sat lower than them. If the men settled on the charpoy, the wives made do on the floor.
But a little space and some autonomy improved the quality of one’s life, the Shakyas said, and so did some education. The Shakya parents were illiterate, but they sent their boys and girls to the school near the orchard. The girls were typically pulled out after the eighth class, when school was no longer free nor compulsory. Then they were married off. For their safety, the Shakyas said, for social acceptability. When she could read and write, a woman exuded sheen; she attracted a better quality of husband.
Every morning at harvest time, Jeevan Lal and his wife Sunita Devi went to their mint plot. They left Padma in the care of her grandmother with whom they shared a dark little room partitioned into two by a bed sheet hooked to some nails. The elderly woman was whispers and bones in a widow’s white sari. Although she shared a close bond with her granddaughter, and was, in fact, largely responsible for her well-being, it was inevitable that Padma would drift off to see her cousin in the room next door.
Lalli had two elder siblings, Phoolan Devi and Virender, but they no longer lived at home. In the absence of her parents – Sohan Lal and Siya Devi, who had taken their youngest child Avnesh on pilgrimage with them – the teenaged girl looked out for herself, her brother Parvesh, their animals and home.
At the other end of the courtyard the third Shakya man, round-bellied Ram Babu, and his ringing-voiced wife, Guddo, shepherded several of their young towards their taro patch. They wouldn’t return until it was time for the evening prayers, which they performed before a shrine indoors.
The children left behind were unsupervised. The day cracked open. In, out, in, out, they went.
When Manju’s father learned of this much later, he was outraged. ‘Ghar pe koi nahin tha,’ he said. There was no one at home. ‘They were children!’
Then there was the awkward matter, which was that the older girls didn’t want little Manju around. ‘We’re going to cut mint,’ Lalli would call out as the teenagers rushed off. ‘What will you come for?’
Padma, the older one, ignored her. Later, Manju would explain, ‘She never asked about me. When I tried to make conversation she would reply, “what does it matter to you?” ’
When the girls returned, they were even less inclined to talk. They routinely performed hard physical labour, so it couldn’t be fatigue. And while they acted like she was invisible, they kept up a steady stream of conversation between themselves. ‘No big deal,’ Manju grumbled.
She observed that Padma’s father didn’t much care for this behaviour either. When he came in from the fields and saw the teenagers sitting side by side, he acted annoyed. ‘Yes, yes,’ he muttered, ‘keep wasting time.’
But if anything, all the girls did was work.
As the sun climbed, Padma and Lalli sat before their respective family hearths, lighting dung cakes into a flaring heap. They heated oil and kneaded dough. They returned to the fields with roti sabzi for the family members still toiling. They trudged back home to scrub the dishes with wood ash for soap. Off they went with their goats. Back they came to milk the buffaloes. They swept the courtyard. They washed the clothes. They jerked the heavy galvanised steel handle of the water pump up and down, up and down, to fill a bucket of water to wash themselves. They prepared dinner. They swept the courtyard one more time. Then they did something. Then they did something else.
Crows cawed piercingly and the sun radiated fire-like. In the sickening heat, the pyramids of garbage filled the air with a rotting smell. Grit settled on clothes, faces, tongues and feet. The Shakya girls carried on.
Cousin Manju was accustomed to chores. She wasn’t yet a teenager, but it was her job to cook dinner every night. Her father had bought her a footstool so she could reach the stove. But when she was done, she would switch on the air cooler. She’d listen to music on a mobile phone. She could even leave the room as long as she went no further than the front steps. Aunties said hello. Boys grinned. Her girlfriends, out roaming with elder sisters, stopped by to gossip about impossible homework and dreaded teachers.
On weekends her father took them for ice cream. They went window shopping. They chatted and laughed and sometimes they squabbled like pigeons fighting over a handful of grain – and that was okay too.
What did her cousins do when they were done with one set of chores? There was nothing fun for a girl in the village. The day was a thousand years long.
Padma was sitting at home. Very soon she would be deposited at the threshold of a new family, as a bride to a man she had never seen. In two years, it would be Lalli’s turn.
The difference in their lives, it seemed to the younger girl, was that she was made to work hard so that she would one day make a good wife. But the older girls worked like they were already wives and mothers. The burdens placed on them appeared to her extreme. She was convinced ‘there was no time for them to think.’
Swatting flies in the house, Manju decided that enough was enough. One afternoon, when the older girls left for the fields, she followed. That day, and the next, she observed a pattern that struck her as odd.
It was the teenagers’ job to cut the mint growing in the three family plots, which covered nearly an acre of land. But the only plot they ever visited was the one that belonged to Padma’s father, immediately adjacent to the orchard.
‘Every day you come here and only here,’ she said. ‘Kyun?’ Why?
‘Be quiet,’ Lalli snapped.
Later, Manju saw Lalli filling a diary with poems. She saw Padma secretly dabbing on lipstick.
Every night after dinner, the children stepped out one last time to squat in the fields. Padma and Lalli waited for the younger girl to choose a spot, but then scooted elsewhere. Manju felt hurt. There were wriggling snakes. And jackals. And what if some boy flashed his phone in her face? ‘Let’s go!’ she would whine, looking warily around as she knotted her salwar.
Padma and Lalli were never ready.
‘What’s the hurry?’ they would say, virtually in unison, their laughter tinkling
