The House of Hidden Mothers (9 page)

Landing at Heathrow airport in 1962, during one of the harshest winters on record, when the entire country was snowbound and blizzard-beset for two months, he knew he had left part of his heart behind. It had fractured as he touched his mother's feet in farewell, splintered as they took off into bleached-white skies; fragments had been sucked into the aeroplane's vents and released into the air above Delhi, where they would find their way back to the ground-floor flat in the old city and land like tinkling glass in the open courtyard by the spreading tulsi plant. And yet, heart cracked and teeth chattering, as he stepped out into the icy maw of his new country, it felt like finally reaching the shore. He practised the smile which froze on his face and stayed there. It fooled everyone, and most of the time he believed it too.

As he climbed back into bed next to his beloved wife, he shut out the whispers of regret and the missed opportunities, the suspicion that their kindness could have been read as weakness, that his belief in justice might turn out in the end to be a childish fantasy.

Shyama, in bed next to Toby on the other side of the garden, rubbed liniment into his twisted muscles and silenced regrets of her own, the wistful scenario of having met this man when she was younger, when they would have had more choices. But now the idea of an unnamed, unborn child hummed between them like electricity, and later on they would lie together talking it all through, all spark and hope again.

MALA WAITED UNTIL
dusk, just as the red bled into blue, then black-blue, like the bruises she pinched on her own thighs in the dustbowl of her marriage bed. She hurried through her daal, finishing before Ram, who sat chewing like a patient goat, mouth open, champ-chump.

Mala started clearing up around him, sealing the lids on the clay pots of yoghurt and pickle, shaking the basket of crumbs far from the door to lead the ants away, taking the pans to the tap which spewed out just enough water to get them clean. Mala scrubbed and sighed, remembering how proud they used to be of having their own tap. One in every home in the village! Pogle sahib boasted, telling anyone who would listen. Now he and everyone else felt a little poorer, and a little more foolish for their pride, because of Seema and her hot-and-cold-running house. These two rooms and small courtyard had felt world enough to Mala when she was brought here after the wedding. Lucky girl, everyone had said, no father, hardly any dowry, and a man only five miles from your village agrees to take you off your widowed mother's curse-carrying hands. And only ten years older than you. You could have ended up like Madhu or Sona, those teenagers tied to bandy-legged, one-toothed greybeards. Mala had smiled dutifully, lowered her eyes and replied, yes, I am lucky, but she thought to herself, my mother had to sell half the little land my father left to seal the match. And even when I was listening in from the kitchen, his family were dropping hints, like crumbs on the cushions, about claiming the other half also! Mala's mother had managed to brush them aside gently, reminding his family that she still had one more girl to marry off, and they had let her off. If only they could have seen Mala herself, the blushing virgin bride-to-be, on the other side of the paint-flaked door, her one good vegetable knife in her hand, ready to run in and make a masala mix of their guts if they lifted one more claw towards her father's fields. Or that's how Mala had imagined she would have reacted in the Technicolor movie in her own head.

As Mala stacked the pots and plates, she wondered why the price of women like her, her sister, even her mother, had gone down instead of up. After all, they were running out of girls, everyone could see it. One glance at the children in the village school confirmed it, sitting with Master-ji under the peepul tree in their too-white uniforms with their dusty slates: twenty-three boys, ten girls, Mala had counted them. She had stopped counting the bodies she found on her stolen solitary walks, abandoned in dried-up wells or washed up on the riverbank or hidden like death presents in thorn bushes, the hours-old baby girls still with the stump of their mother's cord on their tiny bellies, their mouths sometimes packed with sand or dirt, or their eyes and skin bleached and pinched with whatever poison they were given instead of Mama's milk.

Each time, she remembered her own almost-baby curled up in its rocky riverside cradle, the fleeting glimpse of him, her, she would never know. Would it have mattered? Of course, to everyone else.

‘
Munda hai!
' the cockerel-proud cry would have gone around the village. ‘It's a boy!' Bee-ji would have limped her way around personally to each and every house, scattering sweetmeats as she went, puffed out with pride as if she'd given birth to the grandson all by herself. Other men would back-slap her husband, that special big-man slap with growls and head cuffing, the secret signs that men use when they want to remind each other that they are the best and the most special and always will be. Other women would come with food and false smiles – at least, those with no sons, faces as green as unripe wheat. Well done, you! Lucky you,
theklo
, the pressure is off now. Healthy son, duty done. No wonder mothers lined their boy babies' eyes with kohl as soon as they could open them, tied black thread around their chubby wrists to ward off all the evil eyes jealous at their good fortune. The inky line around the eyelid, the dark bracelet, all for show: a visible imperfection on their perfect baby to stop the gods or anyone else from taking him away. To be fair, many mothers did the same for their daughters also. But there would be fewer sweetmeats given out, the crowing would be quieter, getting more muted with each subsequent daughter until you ended up like Jinder. Five daughters, and still they kept trying for the longed-for boy, Jinder getting weaker and sadder with each birth until the sixth one killed her. Another girl. Their father drifted around the village like an embarrassed ghost, treated like a king at home by the six daughters he knew he could never afford to marry off to anyone decent. His was the cleanest house in the village, the one whose shelves groaned with home-pickled vegetables and hand-baked buttery biscuits, whose frontage exploded into noisy blossom each spring, whose gate was always open and greedy for any passing visitor. They hung from the doorway like wedding garlands, those six beautiful girls, always smiling, keeping themselves busy, polishing their small prison till it shone. Because wasn't that what it was? Mala knew it, so did they. Ripe for the picking and withering on the stalk, one by one, the eldest gradually appearing less often, smiling less, followed by the next sister and then the next, as they realized that no amount of smiling and cooking could change the system that had remained in place for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Girls cost money, no matter what they may give you back in kind.

All around the area, engagement offers were taking place earlier and earlier, boys' families wanting to reserve the best girls, like booking a train ticket early, to save having to travel too far away to find one later on. On the riverbank, the women had swapped hushed stories of the girls that ended up being kidnapped and defiled, soiled by the thief so no one else would want them anyway, like dogs pissing on their territory.

With all this going on, Mala's mother had reassured her two daughters, ‘It will be like that year the bees started dying. Honey cost as much as gold! Remember? It will be the same with girls – less to buy, more expensive, more special. You will see.'

But she had been wrong. Mala could see that even though their numbers went down, somehow their price got lower. And so she was still finding the bad investments dumped in the bushes, to save their parents the price of a crippling dowry. Maybe better than letting them grow up and get married into one of those snake-eyed families who would torment them for years or burn them in an ‘unfortunate kitchen accident', the daughters-in-law who were never forgiven for not bringing a fridge freezer or shiny motorcycle into their new joint family home.

But Mala knew that it was not like this everywhere, that beyond her dust-defended village there were glimmers of change, thanks to a story she had spotted in one of Pogle sahib's discarded newspapers. She had been carefully collecting them before he threw them away, telling him she liked to keep the TV pages for Bee-ji. He had no idea she took away the English newspaper also. Not even Ram knew she could read and write English so well, top of her class every time. Mala's father had wanted to send her to college, even though he knew there would be snorting all around. Waste of time and money, giving that one even longer words to be big-mouth-
bai-sharam
with! But Mala's father knew who she was. ‘
Thithuli
,' he called her, a butterfly, too witty-flitty to settle, wanting to taste every passing blossom before the sunset. The only time he had ever shouted at her mother was when he had opened the rusty trunk looking for candles and found all the silk suits and embroidered linen she had put aside over the years for Mala's dowry, layered like a sweet silk pastry. ‘You sold your earrings for this?' he had roared, lion-like, tearing the tissue paper and flinging it around their heads. Mala had caught a flake on her tongue, thinking it might taste like snow.

‘Look at her!' He had grabbed his wife and turned her round to see Mala skipping with her mouth open like a frog catching flies. ‘She's a child. You are already writing her future? And shutting it up in a box?'

Then he had locked the trunk and told Mala he would put money aside for her for college if she worked hard and came top in every subject.

But later on, she had had to break open the trunk and sell everything inside to pay for his funeral. As she had unwrapped each intricately patterned suit, the few pieces of simple jewellery, Mala realized that gold is worth nothing unless someone spots its glitter in the mud and digs it out to clean it up.

It was the photograph in the newspaper that had first caught her eye, a while ago. It was of a young woman, pretty enough, smiling shyly at the world. But it was the image of crowds of women around her that had moved Mala to rescue the page from the mouth of a knock-kneed baby goat and have a better look. Her name was Nisha, that much she could remember now, that pretty-enough woman, but what she had done! That was what had drawn all those crowds of women to her door, faces open to her like sunflowers, drinking her in. Just days before that photograph was taken, this is what had happened: Nisha, a nice middle-class girl from Delhi, was standing in her red-and-gold bridal sari, waiting to take her seven steps around the holy fire with her respectable, handsome, government-job-with-pension husband, when he and his vulture parents had asked for more money. Just like that, just before the ceremony, when, of course, many lakhs of rupees had been handed over already. But they knew, this government-job-with-pension boy and his family, that this was the perfect moment for blackmail: that they could demand anything, with all the gold-bedecked guests watching and waiting and three video cameras recording the whole
tamasha
. More money, another car, whatever it cost to stop them from calling off the wedding, for wouldn't the public shame and humiliation dumped upon this girl mean she would never get the chance to marry again? Apparently, Nisha's papa tried to plead with them, these people whom he had thought would become his family too, whom he had believed would love and cherish his daughter, as he had all his life. He told them he had given them all he could afford. That is when the boy's father hit him, full in the face. And then Nisha, the pretty-enough girl, calmly asked for her cellphone and called the police to arrest her government-job-with-pension almost-husband and his very surprised family. Because – and this is the paragraph that Mala had to read again and again, just to make sure she understood the English perfectly – apparently it is illegal to demand dowry from a girl's family any more. Against the law, written down and everything. But in the same way that doing a U-turn on a motorway to avoid a cow or driving the wrong way down a one-way street is also illegal, but everyone turns a blind eye and no one gets arrested, because the police would be arresting people all day long and have no time to do the important things like catching murderers, everyone still asks for dowry. At least where Mala lives. Because no one thinks anyone would be foolish or barefaced enough to call the police. Like Nisha did. No wonder she became a superwoman, an ‘international heroine', said the newspaper, with tributes and wedding proposals coming to her from all over the world. Which also meant, Mala had realized, while squatting over the latrine reading the newspaper as if it was some tip-top dangerous secret book, that there were
men
out there who thought Nisha was a heroine also. Mala's insides churned with confusion. She rearranged her sari and hid the newspaper clipping in the lid of a masala tin.

She remembered that woman now, as she snapped the plastic lid on to the dented tin of ghee and returned it to its shelf – Nisha from New Delhi. She realized it was not the impossibility of sex that would keep her awake tonight, it was the possibility of a different life just beyond her reach, out there in the big cities where an ordinary woman could finally say no and someone might listen, and things might slowly-slowly change.