First Love

By Brinda Charry

'Brinda Charry is the real thing, a master at the top of her game. Her work engages the human condition and the personal with an intensity and authority that can only be explained by literary grace.' - Arthur R. Flowers When a new family moves in next door, a young girl finds herself falling in love for the first time ever. As she jealously attempts to keep the object of her love to herself, she moves deeper into a web of imagination and deceit and further away from the innocence of childhood. The warmth and intimacy of this moving tale also enriches 'Mallika', the story of a little boy and girl who are fascinated with their neighbour, a eunuch; 'The Secret', the escapades of a middle-aged bachelor who yearns for some excitement in his life and finds it in marriage; 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin', an unusual take on the popular folktale, and the other stories in this unforgettable collection from southern India.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jul 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9789351362456

Brinda Charry

Brinda Charry teaches Renaissance literature and fiction writing at Keene State College, New Hampshire. She has written two novels, The Hottest Day of the Year (2002) and Naked in the Wind, which won the first India Plaza Golden Quill Critics Choice Award in 2008. Brinda has also won the Katha Award for Creative Fiction two times and prizes in the Asian Age, BBC World service, Commonwealth Broadcasting Association and Hindu-Picador short story competitions.

Book preview

mallika

mallika

My brother’s back was bony. I could feel the long, knobby sharpness of his spine and the swaying bones of his ribcage beneath my feet. He will fall any minute now, I thought, and I would be left clinging to the rickety wall, my legs kicking madly in midair.

But Ramu held on long enough for me to see what was happening on the other side.

Then, ‘C’m on, Gayathri! It’s my turn—you’re trying to cheat or what?’ he gasped.

It was only when he threatened to straighten up that I jumped off his back onto the ground.

‘What did you see...? Was she having a bath...?’ he asked me impatiently.

I was too stunned to say anything. I silently bent over and, placing my dusty hands on my scarred knees, I let Ramu climb onto my back and peep over the wall.

It was my sister Gayathri’s idea that we watch Mallika have her bath. ‘Let’s do it when amma’s asleep,’ she urged. ‘I can’t understand why you’re so nervous!’

Every afternoon at three o’clock, after we got back from school and while our mother was still asleep and before the milkman came to our place to milk the buffaloes, we would hear Mallika’s bangles jingling in the backyard adjoining our own, and the splash and gurgle of water choking its way down a hair-clogged drain. Then there would be silence, and the sharp smell of cheap soap would hang over the two backyards. There was no danger of us being caught by anyone. Even the two young men who’d moved recently into the house behind ours and had employed Mallika to cook their meals and wash their clothes would be away at work.

That’s why I agreed, as I almost always did, to another of my big-sister’s madcap schemes, and allowed her to clamber onto my back that day to watch Mallika.

For a long time we were puzzled by what we saw, and discussed it on the way to and from school. Our house was too small to talk about such things—Get back to your studies, you want to fail again in Maths or what?

Till we couldn’t bear it any more—and told our mother in whispers—about the hot afternoon, the cement wall, the bangles and sari and long hair... but a man’s genitals, amma...?

Ramu had been told to keep away from Mallika.

‘Why?’ we chorused. ‘Why? What can she do to him?’

‘I told you, didn’t I, that Mallika is—different?’ my mother said (a eunuch, that’s what she’d told us earlier). ‘She might kidnap Ramu and make him like her.’

So I stood fierce guard over my younger brother. Though once or twice, I caught him lingering longer than necessary at the gate of the house where Mallika lived.

Then our old milkman died and we hired Kumaran to milk our cows. Every evening he would whistle as he sauntered into the cowshed where large-eyed Lakshmi and Meenakshi, the two buffaloes, waited for him. The muscles on his arms bulged and glistened beneath his black skin and his buttocks were firm under his lungi.

‘Why don’t you put on a shirt?’ my mother would ask. Perhaps she was worried about me. But I was only twelve years old then and it was Ramu who found Kumaran handsome—Ramu with his smooth, slim, milk-pale thighs.

Mallika must have heard Kumaran’s voice and caught a glimpse of him over the wall. She took to passing by our house every evening with the ends of her pink-and-green, or yellow-and-blue nylon sari falling off her shoulder to reveal her strange, in-between chest. Kumaran and his friends would squat on the pavement and whistle at her swaying hips.

‘What man?’ she would stop and croon, her voice low and husky. ‘What’s there to laugh about?’

She soon began to linger long enough to talk to the men. Ramu and I would watch from the last doorstep. The long spirals of beedi smoke ascended and disappeared into the dusk, and Mallika laughed over Kumaran’s ribald stories—we didn’t understand them yet.

Gayathri noticed, much before I did, that Kumaran had begun to meet Mallika regularly, once in a while carelessly tossing a strand of jasmine into her lap—‘Here, take,’ he’d say and her eyes would light up. Kumaran would saunter around the yard whistling while she squatted on the floor, chewing betel leaves, looking up at him admiringly. She also cooked his meals for him—huge plates of rice, chicken and spicy vegetables.

They spent the nights together, sometimes in the little room at the back of the house where she worked, sometimes in our cowshed—only the two buffaloes and Gayathri and I knew that. ‘What do they do in there? But what do they do in there?’ I asked again and again in an agony of bewilderment, but even Gayathri who knew everything it seemed, even Gayathri could not tell me.

I knew that Kumaran asked Mallika for money far too often. ‘Come on—one rupee for a coffee and beedi!’ Or ‘How about two rupees for the cinema?’ or again, ‘Fifty rupees to pay back Mani the cash he lent me.’

She would hand him the money quietly, sometimes— only sometimes—saying, ‘How much money you spend...!’ But also taking care to tousle his hair just in case he was offended. She began washing clothes at two more houses, and for extra money, would sometimes give the men she worked for an oil massage, her big man’s hands kneading and pummeling their shining backs as they lay stretched on string cots in their backyard. But Kumaran didn’t approve of that so she quit and began washing clothes at yet another house.

My mother was furious with Kumaran. ‘What if you decide to go back to your village? What will Mallika do then?’ she asked. But Kumaran only laughed.

One afternoon, I heard him asking Mallika for five hundred rupees. I expressed my shock to Gayathri. ‘Five hundred! He knows how poor she is!’ I exclaimed. ‘How selfish can he be?’

Gayathri shrugged. ‘It can’t be helped. A lot of people are like that, you know.’ She didn’t seem to feel sorry for Mallika.

One evening, Ramu and I accompanied Kumaran and Mallika to the cinema. Ramu wondered if they really wanted us to go with them but I didn’t see why we shouldn’t. After the darkness of the theatre, the streets we stepped into seemed unreal. Ramu blinked shortsightedly and looked lost—that’s the way he always was after a movie. It irritated me, and if other people were around, I would feel slightly ashamed of him.

That day Kumaran and Mallika took us through the narrow lanes behind the slaughter-house, where others like Mallika lived. The little shops were lit by flickering kerosene lanterns. We heard low catcalls and whistles from the dark doorways, and Kumaran laughed and walked slower.

They soon surrounded us, the bolder ones touching Kumaran’s shoulders and thighs, the others standing at the fringes of the circle laughing coyly, adjusting their hair and saris. Mallika beamed with pride as they teased her. Their low, rumbling voices were loud in the silence, and when Ramu spoke, his voice was shrill and ridiculous. But they patted his curly head and caressed his cheeks. He stood there, holding Mallika’s hand, glowing with happiness.

I stayed in the darkness, completely ignored. One of the older ones gave me a sweet to suck on the way home.

One afternoon when Gayathri was asleep in the white pool of sunshine on the floor of our sitting room, I left the house and went to Mallika. She was sitting on her doorstep, quietly smoking a beedi. She never did that when Kumaran or any of the other men were around. She looked sad that day.

‘You won’t tell me what the matter is?’ I asked and she looked at me and smiled.

‘Sit down,’ she said, and pulled me into her lap.

My mother had told me to be careful of Mallika. But her sari was soft, a transparent blue covered with small yellow flowers. When she ran her fingers through my hair, the rainbow and gold of her glass bangles were close to my eyes. Her hands pressed gently into my hot scalp. Mallika’s face grew large and hazy and gentle... like the moon... Somewhere in the nearby streets, I could hear the other boys playing.

I woke up, maybe an hour later, and ran home with one of her bangles in my pocket. I wondered whether I should tell Gayathri. But the door of our house was shut. Amma had probably gone to the bazaar but where was Gayathri? I peeped through the round hole that someone had drilled through our front door. It was a little higher than my head and I had to stand on tiptoe.

Gayathri’s legs in my shorts were long, lean and covered with fine dark hair. She swaggered up and down our sitting room and rested on a pile of rolled-up bedding, her legs slightly apart and her arms hanging casually at her sides. Her skirt and blouse lay in a pile near the mirror. Our mother would be furious with her for wearing boy’s clothes.

‘Gayathri!’ I called out in love and admiration. ‘Gayathri!!’ She looked like the senior boys in school; she even had a light brown fuzz on her upper lip.

‘Gayathri, I can see you! Open the door for me!’

She swung around furiously and the checks on her shirt became bigger and clearer as she approached the door. She pushed something through the hole. At first, I thought it was her finger. But it was a short wooden stick. She thrust it straight into my eye. I could hear her small, angry sobs on the other side of the door: How dare you spy on me? How dare you...?

But I could only feel the warm blood flowing out of my eye and burning down my cheek and I called out for my mother.

I didn’t care when they beat me for hurting Ramu and for trying on his clothes.

‘Why did you wear your brother’s clothes? Have you forgotten you’re a girl?’ my father asked, angry and bewildered.

‘You nearly blinded him,’ my mother hissed. ‘Our only son.’

Ramu lay there in the corner, one eye bandaged and the long eyelashes of the other curling against the whiteness of his cheek.

There was no need for them to have made such a fuss. The bandages were off in three weeks and though I refused to talk to Ramu, he wanted us to be friends. He had no one else to play with. The other boys found him boring.

I was too busy that summer to notice Mallika. I tried to teach Ramu to fly kites and Kumaran taught me to milk Lakshmi and Meenakshi. I liked the feel of their pink, yielding udders under my fingers and the dull ache it left in my upper arms and shoulders at night.

I don’t know what the insect was called but it had transparent blue wings. I knelt on the pavement in front of our house, watching it. It lay in a small round coin of spittle, heavy with stickiness, thin pale-yellow threads holding it down. Poor thing, I thought and ran in to fetch a broomstick.

‘What’s wrong with you? Playing with filth!’ Gayathri scolded.

‘Look, I’ve saved it!’ I said triumphantly. The insect lay just outside the pool, one wing torn.

‘You’re mad, Ramu! It’s going to die anyway.’ She swept it off the pavement with one careless kick. ‘Come and see what’s happening in Mallika’s house.’ She grabbed my arm and ran, not even giving me a minute to look back to check whether my insect was still alive.

Mallika was cowering near the washing stone in the backyard, her broad shoulders squeezed into the narrow space between the stone and the wall. Kumaran was also there, scowling defiantly, with two men from his village. The three of them were standing around Mallika.

‘What are they doing to her, Gayathri?’ I asked.

‘Kumaran is going to get married,’ she said. ‘That’s why Mallika is upset.’

The tears were flowing down Mallika’s close-shaven cheeks, her big-boned face was wet. She reached out and touched Kumaran’s feet with her fingertips.

‘Don’t go,’ she begged. He stepped back with a look of distaste.

‘All that’s over now,’ he said. ‘Are you mad to think I could marry you?’

The men laughed.

One them bent down and thrust a clenched fist beneath Mallika’s nose.

‘And don’t you try anything, you bastard,’ he said. ‘Or you’ll have me to answer to.’

‘The girl is his uncle’s daughter,’ Kumaran murmured to Gayathri and me. The two men then moved away, laughing. Kumaran grinned and winked at us on his way out of the yard.

At first I thought it was a lost animal. But the sound came from near the washing stone. Mallika had hidden her face in her arms and her moans were low, hoarse and broken.

‘That’s what happens to people who live in in-between worlds,’ my mother told my father that night. Both Ramu and I were listening.

By the time Kumaran came back with Santhi, his plump, glittering bride, by the time my mother, who had been angry with Kumaran, forgave him, and by the time she persuaded my father to give them fifty rupees as a gift, Mallika had disappeared.

Everyone on the street envied Kumaran for the big luxuriant moustache he had started to grow after his marriage.

‘Only my first-born son will be allowed to touch it,’ he’d say and his wife would smile shyly.

All that was more than six years ago. Gayathri is nearly eighteen, I’m in high school, and Kumaran’s son is over four years old now.

‘Poor child! He has a mango-head,’ my mother sometimes says.

‘Please, amma! He has Down’s Syndrome, you mean,’ I correct her sternly.

We stare at the sunken old man’s body and the wizened little head. Kumaran couldn’t believe that such a son had been born to him.

It is about midday when I hear a noise from the street. I am oiling my new bicycle in the hallway and go out to see what the matter is.

Santhi is weeping and beating her breast. ‘Why is she crying?’ I ask.

A small crowd has collected in the street. I am now taller than many of the men and they respect me because I do well