them speak. The boys had nothing to say to him either.
They trooped out of the house sullen-faced, like their feet were made of cement.
The older two were good boys, neighbours later said. They stayed close to home. One loved his wife, the other worshipped books. The youngest, on the other hand, was ‘naughty’, as even his father admitted to those around him. ‘He liked to roam around,’ one of the Yadavs said.
But what did that even mean in Jati?
Pappu had no money, no bicycle and no place to go. The next-door village didn’t like his type. The Yadavs on his side had less than he did. There wasn’t even a snack shop where he could sit and order a handful of hot roasted gram. The riverbank offered welcome relief for many, away from the chatter of the household, but to him it represented toil. There was the fair, but that came once a year.
Even a naughty boy like him, what could he really get up to?
The Invisible Women
The women could do even less. If Veere’s wife, Jhalla Devi, stuck her head out the door, she went unacknowledged. If she lingered it was with the understanding that she’d better not open that mouth of hers.
The invisible woman preferred her own company anyway, usually in the ditch opposite the house. There she sat, patting and shaping dung cakes for fertiliser, disinfectant and fuel, in the one sari she wore day and night wrapped around her like a sack, its pallu pulled over her like a hood. Her glass bangles tinkled and her silver toe rings gleamed, but her face simmered with resentment.
The other Yadav woman didn’t even make it this far. Veere’s only daughter-in-law was so strictly regulated that her neighbours couldn’t say for sure what she looked like. In fact, Basanta was big-eyed and fleshy-lipped; an exhausted teenager with a scrawny one-year-old. Basanta cooked and cleaned for everyone. Early on she had even offered to help her mother-in-law pat dung, but Jhalla Devi had tilted up her pinched face and glared.
Now, when Basanta was done with every possible chore in the near-empty house, she dropped to the floor. Flies nibbled at the sweat that soaked through the thin fabric of her dirty sari blouse. They clustered around her daughter’s leaking bottom, settling on her rose gold earlobes. By late afternoon, when the breezes started up, Basanta shook herself and took her little one to the back of the house. The family plot spilled into the Katra fields, with not even a fence in between. Here, the bored new mother could amuse baby Shivani without being accused by her mother-in-law and the men of flaunting herself before strangers.
‘Look, a farmer, see, grazing goats; listen, boys, look, a kite, listen, birds, see, a well. Moo, baa, bow-wow.’
Straight ahead, at a distance covered in a few minutes on foot, was Ramnath’s orchard. That summer every one of his thirteen trees heaved richly with fruit. One was a fragrant-leafed fig tree; the others were mango.
Lalli Asks for a Memento
Lalli’s parents returned from their pilgrimage with presents of amulets and chains. Things went quiet for a while.
Then one magical afternoon, everyone was out. Padma and Lalli asked cousin Manju to open her suitcase. They went through her clothes carefully. The blouses were brightly coloured and made of a soft fabric. They slipped like water between the girls’ fingers. The jeans were very, very tight. Did Manju really wear such clothes? Could she even sit in them? Here in the village, she had been as boring as they, sticking to roomy salwar kameezes.
They decided to try on the clothes. They wriggled into the blouses and jeans and then turned to look. The same heart-shaped face, the same long hair. The solemn eyes. But the funny costumes pinched their bottoms and brought out the giggles.
‘You look smart,’ they said to each other when they had recovered their composure.
‘Yes, yes!’ shouted Siya Devi, walking through the door. ‘Show off your thighs!’ The jeans didn’t reveal the girls’ thighs; they only revealed that the girls had thighs. But it was more than Siya Devi allowed. She disparagingly referred to the outfits as ‘tiny clothes’, too provocative to wear, and ordered the children to change back into their salwar kameezes.
Later, perhaps to show her gratitude, Lalli drew her younger cousin aside. ‘Yaar,’ she said, ‘you’ll go away. We should get a photo taken together at the bazaar.’ Manju brought up the subject in a phone call to her mother who was back home in Noida. Her mother wasn’t keen, perhaps because money was tight. ‘What’s the hurry,’ she complained. ‘Are you dying sometime soon?’
But Manju was pleased to be acknowledged by her cousin. And it had felt nice to share her clothes. The girls weren’t allowed in the bazaar, but they weren’t watched all the time either. ‘We went!’ Manju said later. ‘Chori chupke!’ On the sly.
Out the door, down the lane. There it was, just ahead, a little bit further. They held hands, squeezed and then plunged forward.
The road was packed with rows of tiny, peering shops that looked like the eyes of a dragonfly. The Katra shopkeepers sat in their undershirts, surrounded by sacks of rice, animal feed and barrels of cooking oil. They chatted on their mobile phones and read the newspaper, only looking up when a customer stopped by. Some of their customers were young men who took selfies against the background of nice cars that happened to be parked there, but most reminded the girls of their fathers. There was something so familiar about the way these men retrieved the thin roll of notes from their shirt pockets, almost in slow motion, and the care with which they counted the change they got back. That look of dread was familiar too. Too much was going out, too little was coming in, everything was fragile.
There were too many men, the girls suddenly realised. They were shouting and laughing. They were roaring phat phat phat past in motorcycles. Into the shop, quickly now.
The flash went POP.
The girls blinked.
The Fair Comes to the Village
Everyone knew the fair had arrived because the music could be heard across the village and even in the fields. It was only devotional, for the annual event was organised by the local temple committee, but the Shakya girls were excited. They had never been to a mela. The highlight was a performance of the Ramlila, a theatrical enactment of the life of the Hindu god Ram, which culminated in the battle between Ram and his nemesis Ravana, the ten-headed demon king of Lanka.
That morning, 27 May, it was just the girls in the house, with the two mothers. Padma was frying slices of bottle gourd in a seasoning of salt and chilli powder. Over the wall, Siya Devi and Lalli made sure the buffaloes were fed, the courtyard was swept and an afternoon meal of curry and rotis prepared over the smoky outdoor fire. Siya Devi reminded her daughter to keep the food covered. ‘These brazen monkeys will steal every last roti if they can; given half a chance they will run off with the aate ka dabba.’
When Lalli picked up her sharp-tongued sickle to lend family members a hand with the harvest, Padma insisted on tagging along. Cousin Manju had succumbed to the heat and was asleep on a charpoy.
In the fields, the perspiring men had roped turbans around their heads. The women wore rubber slippers.
