Black Tongue

By Anjana Basu

“Women are not born witches. Life makes them turn that way. If you want the truth of what I say, look at the facts: there are no young witches, no child witches. All the women torn or hacked to pieces in the columns of the newspapers are old. Some of them are not even witches at all. Perhaps just women like me who discovered the gift of a black tongue when everything else had failed them. I didn't know I had a black tongue until all the pieces started falling into place. And not even then.

"We are not proud of our gifts. Pride is dangerous unless you have the strong-armed power to support it. A battalion of young men with smuggled machine guns whom you can let loose at night to make your predictions of disaster come true. Men who obey your commands without question or regret. Or a rich thakur husband with izzat four centuries long who can unleash death and destruction if one of his subjects just looks at him in the wrong way. A woman with a black tongue is nothing unless she has men behind her.

"Otherwise she exercises her gift in secret, utters the dread word in anger in the dark. A black curse whispered on a black night that goes straight from her mouth to God's ear.

"You have to have the gift, of course. A gift for hatred. I know that a woman taught me how to hate. She is the one who put the black into my tongue. She lives in the city, in a tall house with a tall husband and a son. She has a red Maruti as bright and shining as a tomato - no she had a shiny red Maruti. I used to drive in it once, twice, I've forgotten how many times. Had - the Maruti is gone now. I don't mean to say that things are different in the city. The difference is only on the surface - because you have witches and witch finders in the city too, though they don't always react in the same way there.

She had everything this woman, when I had nothing at all. And she took everything from me - my home, my future. And she left me my life. In a village that would have been enough to doom her - if I had been powerful enough. I would have summoned up a witch finder and said, 'She is a witch, she has cursed me.' But in those days I didn't know any of this. I sat in my place of exile and brought her face into my mind and thought of all the things that I wished her, one by one."

And so the story begins, from the mouth of Maya, who has learned how to hate and who has grown into a woman old in wisdom though still young in years. A woman who looks back on a time when she was just sixteen, street-smart and sulky, forced to leave the bright lights of the city for a village backwater because she has been witness to the forbidden.

It was another woman who taught her to hate—an unhappily married woman, supremely self-involved and obsessed with her husband. The woman’s former lover, on the fast track to political success, but still clinging to the memory of their youthful romance, now explodes back into her life, propelled by the force of Maya’s “curse.”

And then there’s Maya’s brother, a politician in the making, who understands corruption and violence and little else. His plan is to use blackmail as a shortcut to fortune—and Maya has handed him that opportunity.

Maya looks back on her life and thinks: All those people came together in my life more than twenty years ago. If I had known when I stepped out of the train into the country village where I was being sent “for my own good” what I know now, “I would have tied a pitcher round my neck and thrown myself into the nearest pond. But I didn't know—so the ponds around our village remained flat unsympathetic bodies of water, furred over with hyacinth leaves. Like the one in the city that began it all. If I stuck my tongue out at that sheet of water it would probably reflect black at me. But I don't.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Savvy Press
• Release date: Sep 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9780982606919

Anjana Basu

Anjana Basu works as an advertising consultant in Calcutta. She has had a book of short stories published by Orient Longman, India, the BBC has broadcast one of her short stories and her poems have featured in an anthology brought out by Penguin India. She has appeared in The Antigonish Review. The Edinburgh Review and The Saltzburg Review have also featured her work. In 2003, Harper Collins India brought out her novel Curses In Ivory. In 2004, she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in Scotland where she worked on her second novel, Black Tongue published by Roli in 2007. In 2010 her children's novel Chinku and the Wolfboy was published. Her translation work began with songs for Indian director Rituparno Ghosh's films and appeared in print in the American Dirty Goat 21.

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Prologue

Women are not born witches. Life makes them turn that way. If you want the truth of what I say, look at the facts: there are no young witches, no child witches. All the women torn or hacked to pieces in the columns of the newspapers are old. Some of them are not even witches at all. Perhaps just women like me who discovered the gift of a black tongue when everything else failed them. I didn’t know I had a black tongue until all the pieces started falling into place. And not even then.

We are not proud of our gifts. Pride is dangerous unless you have the strong-armed power to support it. A battalion of young men with smuggled machine guns whom you can let loose at night to make your predictions of disaster come true. Men who obey your commands without question or regret. Or a rich thakur husband with izzat four centuries old, who can unleash death and destruction if one of his subjects just looks at him in the wrong way. A woman with a black tongue is nothing unless she has men behind her.

Otherwise she exercises her gift in secret, utters the dreaded word in anger in the dark. A black curse whispered on a black night that goes straight from her mouth to God’s ear. If she does not do this, then the same dark night can bring her destruction. Actually why night? The burning noon can explode in flame and consume her. How many times have you read of women being stripped and dragged through the fields till the skin is raked off their bones and the blood spatters the growing corn? Ten men dragging a woman half their weight till the screaming thing they drag becomes nothing human or recognisable, not someone’s mother or wife or grandmother, just a thing that has to be killed.

And behind them, egging them on, is a witch-finder. She can be a she a powerful she with a tongue so black that it is hard to withstand its power. But her tongue she says is white and she uses it to protect. Nirmala Barui is one of them. Very pleasant for a witch- finder – she has kajal around her eyes, lips that she reddens with paan juice and a flower tucked in her sleek oiled hair. You can hire Nirmala to find you a witch if you pay her enough – I don’t know what she charges but her witch-finding has bought her a colour TV and her son-in-law a new lorry. She’s the most successful witch- finder in the whole of Midnapore, she says, and I believe her. We’ve drunk tea together often and she’s boasted of her accomplishments while showing me her new teacups. ‘It’s so easy. You just have to have the gift.’ The teacups had come to her from the money she got for hunting down a witch in Patharpratima. That one was seventy- five, a grandmother whose three grandchildren had died one after the other. The doctor said it was malnutrition, chicken pox, a virus, but everyone in the village knew better, it was witchcraft. However, the men said, let us be fair, let us have a trial. So they tied the old woman to a pole in the middle of the village in the burning Jesthya sun and sent for Nirmala.

I’m told her technique is very impressive, unlike that of many other witch-finders. She has to wait for the auspicious hour when she will cast the bones and blow the conch. I must be fair, she said, sitting at the foot of the pole along with the villagers, while the sun drew the life out of Nanibala. She cast the bones three times and got, she told me, the same answer. The old woman was undoubtedly a witch. So they left her tied to the pole for three days without food or water – no violence, Nirmala told them, do not raise your hands to her, who knows what will happen till the sun, that May sun, did the work for them.

Yes, you have to have the gift. A gift for hatred. I don’t know how Nirmala came by the gift or why she uses it against other women, but I do know that a woman taught me how to hate. She is the one who put the black into my tongue. Oh, a very different woman from all these. She lives in the city, in a tall house with a tall husband and a son. She has a red Maruti car as bright and shining as a tomato – no, she had a shiny red Maruti, I had sat in it once, twice, I’ve forgotten how many times. Had the Maruti is gone now. I don’t mean to say that things are different in the city. The difference is only on the surface – you have witches and witch-finders in the city too though they don’t always react in the same way there.

She had everything, this woman, while I had nothing at all. And she took everything from me – my home, my future. All she left me was my life. In a village that would have been enough to doom her – if I had been powerful enough. I would have summoned a witch-finder and said, ‘She is a witch, she has cursed me.’ But in those days I didn’t know any of this. I sat in my place of exile and brought her face into my mind and thought of all the things that I wished her, one by one.

This village, our desh, is a small two TV set village. When I got there, it only had one TV and the panchayat would meet under the banyan tree and debate how to collect money to build a meeting hall. When I climbed out of the train all those years ago, there was no one to meet me at the station and the station itself was just a shed in the middle of a wide flat plain with the sun beating down from a faded blue sky. The tracks stretched in both directions, running out of my sight – one set I knew crossed the border, the other went to the city where I no longer belonged.

The second TV set now is mine – earned after years of writing letters for the village and filling in for the village schoolmaster. Whatever letters leave the village leave it in my handwriting – love letters, mother sick letters, lies, truths, curses and all. It will continue to be that way until one of the children from the school is interested enough to take my place. I started writing those letters from the day I set foot in the village because that was the idea that lurched into my father’s head.

That was twenty years ago. If I had known when I stepped out of the train, that I was exiling myself for twenty years, I would have tied a pitcher round my neck and thrown myself into the nearest pond. But I didn’t know – so the ponds around our village remained flat unsympathetic bodies of water, furred over with hyacinth leaves. Twenty years. If I stick my tongue out at that sheet of water it would probably reflect black at me. But I don’t – someone might see and send word to Nirmala. You never know when someone might see.

Of course, I have been careful. The others who were accused had tidy little homes and money. They stood in someone’s way – a nephew, a son-in-law, a brother. I had nothing. My father is still alive – barely. If you come to my hut, you will see a sack lying in one corner of the porch, a large blackened leather sack and you will wonder what I keep in that sack and why it lies exposed to the open air in all weathers. You will wonder until the sack moves and groans. My father, always drunk, always looking for money to be more drunk.

When my mother was alive, she sent money – more after I came here, knowing that I would hide it away. That is the other thing I cannot forgive. The first time she came down we had to meet in secret because if Baba saw her he might turn violent. She sent me a message from the station through one of the other women who knew the whole situation and we sat under a tree and talked. ‘When can I go home?’ I asked.

She turned her face away. ‘I don’t know,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I told your Dada. He says that it is best you stay here.’

‘Here!’ My disgust took in the flat plain and cows with their hip bones sticking out like ploughshares. ‘To do what? Learn to plough?’

‘There are worse things,’ Ma answered. ‘If you had only studied as I told you.’ She sighed again. ‘I thought you were dead. We all thought you were dead!’

‘And I might as well be dead! That woman – I hope she’s miserable!’ The words welled out of me – a gush of hate – and spattered the blue cotton wool air. I almost expected the sky to turn black.

‘Omni boltey neyi,’ Ma said. ‘You shouldn’t talk like that.’

‘But she should pay.’

‘She will pay. Your Dada is seeing to that. It might mean that I will be able to send you more money.’ She told me what they were doing, though in snatches, hastily, looking over her shoulder. There were always people to carry word to Baba. ‘Aren’t you going to see him?’ I asked.

‘Not this time,’ she answered. ‘Here.’ She pushed a bundle of notes at me. ‘Bury it under a tree. Just make sure that your Baba doesn’t find it.’

The day I came to our desh was the day I uttered my first curse. And that was the day I started collecting and hiding the money. Not all of it because it would have made Baba suspicious, but bit by bit. I didn’t know I had uttered my first curse that night – I had a dream. I dreamt of a house surrounded by people carrying sticks and stones. And I saw her standing on the rooftop with her husband, drowning in that sea. When I woke up, my string bed shook and I heard the birds cawing and screaming outside. The earth had turned in its sleep and shaken the village. My bed shook once, twice, thrice. Then the birds settled again and the conch shells blew from the small temple. My rage had shaken the earth, I thought, and knew that the power was in me.

Nirmala told me, ‘I discovered my first witch when I was sixteen. Shaila, an old woman who had no family. I was plucking mangoes from her tree – you know, young green mangoes to eat with chillies,’ she licked her lips with her fat red paan-stained tongue, ‘and the woman came out screaming and throwing stones. I climbed down the tree as fast as I could and started to run. Believe me, my way was clear, but my foot turned and I fell on those hard green mangoes and was bruised all over. What would you call that if not witchcraft?’

‘And then?’ I asked.

‘I fixed her. She overreached herself. Too many people were dying all around her place, in her fields. Four years later I threw a fit by the tubewell and said she had bewitched me.’

‘You have the illness that causes fits?’ I asked, meaning epilepsy.

She laughed pityingly. ‘It’s easy to throw fits. You rub soap in your eyes and chew some of it so that you foam at the mouth – a bar of soap for washing.’ She had thrown a fit and thrashed around on the ground screaming. ‘I screamed her name over and over again.’ She looked at me with her sly small eyes. ‘It’s so easy.’ Was that what I should have done? Chewed a bar of soap and rolled around? Not that that occurred to me when I was going to her house. ‘What happened to the woman?’ ‘She was a witch – what do you expect happened to her?’ Shaila was denounced and stripped. Her son-inlaw had given Nirmala her best sari and told the village that she should be cherished. ‘They said the goodness ran so strongly in me that it could not tolerate the presence of evil.’ She looked at me consideringly. ‘You never know – it might run strongly in you as well.’ ‘How do I know whether it does?’ ‘You ask your dreams. You walk in the fields and let the wind talk to you. And you pray – you always do puja for guidance.’ That I would have guessed – her two- room brick hut reeked of incense and husks of coconut shells rolled on the ground outside, brown coconuts, the symbol of human sacrifice. ‘Prayers to Ma Kali, queen of the night.’ She dropped her voice, ‘And of course you must learn some spells of your own, so you can combat theirs. Nothing too complicated and it must be done secretly, very secretly.’ She sat back and laughed, her cheeks pushing up and creasing her eyes shut. ‘But be careful or people will think you are a witch!’ ‘Why are you telling me this?’ I asked. ‘Because you’re the village letter-writer – you know everyone’s secrets. And because if you tell anyone that I said this I will denounce you as a witch. And no one will believe that you are not. It’s so easy!’ The power ran through me as she sat there and I thought, ‘shall I call out my tongue, shall I let its blackness out to mar her life as she has marred hundreds of others?’ But the anger was not there. I did not hate the woman as I had hated the other one. ‘You’re safe,’ I told her. ‘I wouldn’t have said anything anyway.’

I walked out of her home hearing her self-satisfied laugh. She was rich – that pukka house must have cost her a lakh or more. How much money had she made for all those men for whom she had hunted out witches? Chillies and coconuts could be used for good as well as evil. Chillies burnt to blind the eyes of evil and coconuts used to trap the human soul. I didn’t know any of that when I began my cursing, I ran her name round and round in my head. I traced it with my finger on the running water so that it would ebb away. I wrote it on the pond side in mud as black as my hair and trampled it flat.

The other girls wondered what I was doing and then I realised that I had to be careful. Especially after the first ‘daini’ call spread like wildfire through our village. I saw the woman being dragged out of her hut before I knew what was happening. She was a young woman who was having an affair with the carpenter. Even I, new as I was to the village, had heard about the affair with the carpenter – they met in the farthest field where the palash trees grew thick and showered the grass with their flame flowers in summer. Even her husband knew – he could not have helped it. Finally, he was the one who denounced her. ‘Who is she?’ I asked, ‘what’s happening?’

‘She’s a witch, a daini. Come, come, let’s look!’ What was there to do beyond wash clothes, run through the household chores, write letters for other people and make sure my father ate something through all the liquid that he consumed? We ran after the men, listening to the screams and watching like we watched the monkey man and the chhau dancers. No one thought of lifting a hand to protest – and in any case, we were only women. What could we have done? But, I thought as I ran, if something like that can happen to a woman who is not a witch, it could happen to me – and I am a witch. So I honed my tongue and mind in secret, waiting for my mother’s visits to tell me whether my hatred had struck.

one

AMRITA

Afterwards, it was as if their life had drowned trailing in the weeds – though she didn’t realise that till the last bubble had floated to the surface. She wasn’t aware that it had surfaced the requisite three times before that. She’d seen the six feet of her husband trailing even longer through her life, floating eerily in a sub-aqueous haze always within reach. As far as she was concerned, she had a supportive husband, a small bright son, what a lovely boy they always said when they saw him, and all the things that make for social wifely success. That one unfortunate morning could be dismissed as an aberration, a crow had suddenly flown straight in through the window of a moving car. A crow had in fact once flown into their car; all ruffled black feathers and sharp stabbing beak. She had cowered in the back seat until the driver had muffled it in a red duster and bundled it out into the Kolkata breeze where it belonged. She had thought it was an omen, someone was going to die, except no one did that day or the next.

Things like that were what the less privileged classes often did simply because they were less privileged. Like crows making sudden bombing raids and finding themselves out of depth. In fact, she told her friends, it made quite a case for education and social uplift and all those causes that her family had fought for over the years until the year the Party finally triumphed in West Bengal. If she were more able she would have taken up the banner herself with her own hands and led the red flame of revolution through their ranks until her fervour ignited the whole state, if not the entire country. Why should students subject themselves to the whims and fancies of examiners, burn the midnight oil and dream of fine futures, only to have their hopes dashed? Especially women, who needed the empowerment that education would give them.

Her indication made her voice her voice wave up and down like a banner. Her reed thin, frail body would quiver and her aquiline nose take on the edge of a scimitar. Her friends, Ruma and Susmita, would hasten to pull the banner down before the wind snatched it away from them. They were good flag bearers with steady hands. Excitement, they said, was not good for her at all. The doctor had said that when they had released her from the jail hospital – though they usually left out the word jail when they brought the subject round to doctors and hospitals. ‘You don’t understand!’ she persisted. ‘It’s because of people like us that these things happen! We are callous, we don’t care!’ There was no disagreement with that, they said. It was just that all excitement was hardly good for her health. ‘But these cases!’ she cried, her voice beginning to shrill, like a clarion call to battle. ‘These cases are on the rise!’ No one could deny that they were. There was one in the paper laid out in black and white across the coffee table. It was not a very big news item, these things never were, just about an inch of column space, and anyone else would have missed it. Ruma’s eyes flicked at Susmita and the two exchanged a moment of perfect understanding. Susmita picked up the paper and folded it. The movements of her hands were as precise as those of a nurse folding a linen sheet. One two three. The neat black and white rectangle was put on top of the bookcase out of sight and ostensibly out of reach. Susmita sat down again in exactly the same place from which she had risen. Her lips were folded neatly, like the newspaper. ‘Has the driver gone to get Rahul from school, Meeta?’ she asked folding and unfolding the newspaper lips. ‘It’s almost one.’

And the conversation steered towards Rahul and how his teacher said he dreamed in class and drove his imaginary Maruti Esteem with a persistent drone, remarkable in a three year old.

Drowning the flame of liberation in an excess of honey. Meeta tried once or twice to revive the subject but neither of her friends chose to pick up on it. Well, she thought, it was a sign of how right things were that everyone was trying to protect her.

When her friends were gone and Rahul had been chased around the dining table by his father and settled in her lap to be thumped to sleep – that was one of the things she insisted on doing, she said it settled her, though Rahul could be fractious with his, ‘Mama, I don’t want’ – she took the paper down from the bookshelf again and found the news item – ‘Student Left Hanging Over Results’. A thirteen year old who had failed to pass from class seven to class eight had been found hanging in her bedroom. Her parents had broken down the door when she hadn’t opened it in the morning. One of the examiners had promised the girl that she would certainly pass.

Sly black and white eyes that she always saw as eyes of no colour, like a photograph. And an ink blotch on her middle finger that would never quite go away, no matter how much lemon juice she scrubbed it with. She would come every day neatly dressed in her one good frock. Arka hadn’t wanted the girl at all, but she had insisted. Mridula Di had said that if they each took up the cause of one poor student and helped him or her to study, they would go a long way towards solving the country’s illiteracy problem. ‘After all, if we don’t help the lower classes, who will?’ Arka had just stared at her when she said that, with something like a red glow lighting up the brazier behind his eyes. And then he’d left the room. Even though he didn’t argue with her – he never argued with her, why was that – the enormity of what she had said lingered. She was, after all, the granddaughter of one of the most distinguished Marxist poets in Bengal. So one morning when he was shaving he said, ‘If you think you can do some good this way, go ahead.’

She wondered what he shaved every morning. What did men with beards have to shave. ‘What do you mean by – think I can do some good? Of course I can do some good. If you think I can’t teach a thirteen-something girl English ...’ Rahul was at that moment busily trying to throw the shaving cream out of the window. He was standing on tiptoe trying to reach the ledge, grinning at them, ‘Shall I throw it?’ And waving the tube tantalisingly. Arka telescoped his six-foot-long body and scooped the tube out of harm’s way.

‘Well you don’t seem to be too good at stopping Rahul from throwing things out of the window.’ But he laughed when he said it. She picked Rahul up and buried her face in his shoulder. ‘And she can help me with Rahul, play with him in between.’ Arka didn’t seem to understand what she was feeling. As he stretched his lathered cheek in the mirror again he said, ‘If you stayed at home more, you might be able to get him to listen. But you can’t do that.’

No, she couldn’t. Modern women did not spend their time chained to their husbands and sons. They had to prove their worth as equal contributing human beings. Her grandfather had told her over and over again, ‘I spoilt your mother. I encouraged her in her destructive path.’ She had no memory of her mother so she had no blueprint of what mothers were supposed to be. Instead there had been her grandmother with the worry threads lining her forehead and the grey spinning its dusty cobweb over her hair. Her Dida had been out of her chair and running at Dadu’s slightest word. ‘A man respects a woman who is his equal,’ her grandfather had declared at one of his Sunday morning gatherings. The old revolutionary had given darshan every Sunday morning sitting upright on his bench in the garden, haloed by the dusty winter sun as he declaimed his poems. Their home had bred theory and revolution – though the revolutions very often died by the time the first cups of tea were passed around.

Those Sunday evenings were the stuff of legend, part of the fabric of a younger, hungry Calcutta where intellect was taken for granted and genius inevitable. They were fuelled by Dida’s kitchen, an endless stream of servants carrying the endless rounds of tea, with the pakoras and biscuits following soon afterwards in quick succession. When the servants ceased to be so available or even so obliging, Meeta had been pressed into service first with the biscuits, which were unbreakable, and then, as she grew older, with the tea.

She had caused an admiring murmur in the Red ranks.

‘Reminds me of your daughter, SD,’ one of the older ones had rumbled, an assembly speaker or judge. ‘Beautiful eyes.’

‘At least if nothing else comes of it,’ Dida had muttered, handing her the tea tray, ‘one of these old rascals will have a suitable grandson.’ She had bridled at that and repeated Dadu’s, ‘A man respects a woman who is his equal,’ like a parrot. ‘Then they should be here carrying their tea out. Not you,’ Dida had retorted.

But then, who was making the tea? She looked at Dida the way a doe looks wonderingly at a flash of orange and black in the bushes and thought, ‘I will never jump out of chairs for my husband the way you do.’

From those days had come her determination to be more than a decoration on her husband’s arm. She would be a woman equal in every way, no matter what that equality cost her. The old men at her Dadu’s had brought young men with them. Arka on one sunlit evening, drawn by the strength of a legend that he did not know was already fading. He had been allowed in because he had once taken a photograph that had captured the violent days of the ’70s so brilliantly that it had been flashed across several international newsmagazines. In a time when men and women were disappearing overnight, the photograph had set down the essence of police brutality in black and white. Dadu had even shown it to her murmuring, ‘Brilliant, simply brilliant.’ A man cringing in front of a descending police baton – it could have been anywhere, anytime. They had it framed now on their drawing room wall and sometimes she stopped to stare at it when she was looking for answers to their marriage.

When her grandfather praised him in front of the others, Arka declared, an unrevolutionary humour in his eyes, that he had given up the risky business. He flirted with her delicately, so delicately that it was like the brush of a butterfly’s wing. And their fingers flitted fleetingly together under cover of the tea tray. ‘He has a good job,’ said Dida.

‘And he has a sensitive soul,’ that was Dadu.

Well, passion and poetry never lasted, though what they left in their wake, she thought, was more solid. Arka was always supportive, no matter what she did. All except in the matter of someone to look after their son.

It was agreed that the girl would come every afternoon, after lunch. Under Meeta’s watchful eye, she tidied up the mezzanine room off the stairs which would be their study room. Rahul seemed to take to her, and hovered around the room with his slate, scribbling on the walls until she shooed him away. The girl knitted her brows over her copybook and wrote and rewrote. Studies didn’t seem to come naturally to her at all. Apart from that Arka had insisted that they give her a glass of milk and some biscuits after her studies. Which was fine except that she was fumble-fingered.

‘Well, she’s a child after all,’ Arka said evenly after the girl had broken two glasses in quick succession.

‘Not that much of a child.’

Apart from being clumsy, she stole. Oh, small things like clips and biscuits but Meeta could tell that they were missing. An orange, when in summer oranges were so expensive and Rahul would drink no other juice. ‘How could she possibly be stealing oranges?’ Arka demanded. ‘Do you bring her upstairs?’

‘Well, she goes up sometimes to play with Rahul.’

‘Yes, but you can’t accuse her of stealing oranges. You’re the one who volunteered to teach her. Are you sure you didn’t count wrong? You know you forget sometimes.’

The girl would occasionally come up to wish him, ‘Good evening, Dada.’ And Arka would offer her tea and ask her how her lessons were going. ‘You mustn’t let Didi scold you too much,’ he would joke. That was most often on the days when she had been specially inattentive at her lessons and had sat trying to do a simple mathematical problem over and over again until Meeta thought that ‘If Rakesh has four apples and wants to divide them among five friends’ would grate against her teeth and she had to clench her hands tightly in her lap to stop them from flying out of their own accord against the girl’s cheek. After the girl had left she would melt into tears at the slightest thing that Arka said, or pick quarrels. She cried now.

Arka had no defence against tears. It was not that they moved him but just that he did not know what to do when a woman cried.

Tears had been her greatest weapons at her grandparents’ – Dadu was not proof against them and whenever she cried he surrendered. ‘Anything, anything. Just stop her crying! Yes my darling, yes, a new sari, a new perfume, just don’t cry any more.’ Arka never brought her saris or perfume. Instead, whenever she cried, his face would turn as black as his beard with rage and silence and very soon he could be heard leaving the house. He would return hours later. That made her angrier. His defence was passive resistance – once joking, he told her, ‘But I’m a revolutionary. When confrontation can’t get me what I want, I disappear.’

‘But I thought you said you believed in change through violence!’ she had exclaimed half-laughing. ‘That’s why you took those pictures.’

‘I believe in change,’ he said. ‘Any kind. And Gandhian works very well on the home front.’ It was a joke – he had taken her hand and kissed it lightly and handed it back to her as if it was as fragile as a butterfly. But it wasn’t a joke any more. He treated her like a doll. A doll to be respected and listened to but certainly a doll. The matter of the girl proved it. She looked at her hard as she stood there, cringing, in the corner of the room. She had bought a new frock, a very ‘phrock’ frock, and there were ribbons to match in her hair. ‘If your daughter paid more attention to her studies, instead of her clothes, she would do very well,’ she told the girl’s mother when she met her on the road. They lived in the bustee under the bridge by the railway lines. The girl’s mother did part-time domestic work in some houses nearby. But she wanted her daughter to go to school, to do well. ‘I don’t want her to be a servant like me,’ she had said.

The girl’s father was an alcoholic. He had come once to the Jodhpur Park Mahila Samiti, looking for his wife and they had to call the durwan to chase him away. He knew Meeta was teaching his daughter because he had marked her with his rolling white eye. She felt tainted by his touch and shuddered inwardly. ‘No wonder the mother doesn’t want her daughter to be a servant,’ Ruma observed with what Meeta felt was unnecessary sanctimoniousness. She had taken on an easier task. She was putting her maidservant’s son through school – she didn’t have to see him at all.

The weapons against servitude were bright cheap ribbons and new frocks. That new frock was short, barely skimming brown knees. And it was moulded a little too closely over the breasts – yes she had breasts already, though she claimed she was only thirteen. ‘That dress is far too small for you!’ she’d forgotten the oranges, chasing the battle flag of the short dress. ‘You’re not a child any more.’

The girl’s sly eyes had flickered towards the door. ‘The master’s not home, so don’t expect him to come in and rescue you!’

‘Boudi, the dress shrank when I washed it ...’

‘Lies again! You’re a liar! And don’t look at me with that stupid face – I’ll slap you!’

‘Women should be liberated,’ she said it to herself again as she read the paper, clinging to the thought. The mob had battered the gates but had been unable to break them down. Then they had smashed the windshield of the red car that stood outside. They knew the car well. It had come to their bustee to pick the girl up and drop her off often enough. A road swarming with men howling for her blood – her blood, not Arka’s. In all her life she had never known she could have been so hated. And by the very masses that her Dadu had fought for, written and preached about.

After he had recovered from the shock, Arka had called the police. They had come and dispersed the men with blows of their fat truncheons. And then the inspector had come up and spoken to them and instead of saying everything was all right, that it was a stupid hysterical girl’s fault, they had arrested her. She had collapsed shivering into Arka’s arms and he had held her for all the time it took for the police ambulance to come.

Luckily he had been home – it was a Saturday, two days before Rahul’s third birthday. A whole lifetime after those missing oranges and that tight dress.

two

AMRITA

Birthdays were becoming more and more competitive. Nowadays the children usually held them at clubs with a magician thrown in – look how much more money my daddy makes than your daddy. Arka had resisted club membership with a passion. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I didn’t want to own a car – the company made me buy one. But I’m certainly not joining a club to please anyone.’ There she had agreed with him. Clubs, after all, were meant to be