The Bandit Queens (11)
But being both penniless and impudent naturally led to very few offers of marriage. Saloni’s older sisters were wed to men in far villages, older men who’d lost their first wives and didn’t demand dowries—much like the premenarchal Phoolan had been given to that thirty-three-year-old pervert.
It was neither a secret nor a surprise that Saloni’s dominant aspiration in life was money. Not bungalow-car-big-city money—Saloni was ambitious but not greedy; she steeped her dreams in practicality. She wanted the normal-not-abject poverty the rest of the village didn’t think to appreciate. They sighed about the rising cost of rice, but could still buy and eat the damn rice. The kind of money that allowed for declining a food based on taste or mood; the kind of comfort where it didn’t occur to her to ask the price of a staple.
Every morning her father walked to the lorries, where he and seven other men spent the day filling a truck with rocks in exchange for twenty rupees. Her eventual husband—she said during hot nights when they’d sleep on Geeta’s terrace with the stars sprinkled above them—needn’t have Ambani-level wealth with crores of rupees, but he needed to have (or have ready access to) a leg up. Saloni realized back while Geeta was still struggling with basic sums from the third row of their shared school bench, that a head start made all the difference. You could be smart—like her father, like her—and still have no means to get even half a step further in life. You could be smart and still break your back for coins that disappeared directly into your children’s bellies as they scratched their plates.
And so, Saloni committed her early teens to scheming. The gifts the boys gave—the cheap knickknacks that crumbled in her rucksack or the erasers shaped like fruit that erased nothing, including her hunger—were useless. No, what she required was a bit of money to secure a dowry and therefore a boy. You’ve got to spend money to make money, she told Geeta, whose opinion differed.
“All the boys love you, but you’ll know ‘the one’ when he’s willing to tell his parents not to take a dowry. At least one will stand up for you. I’m certain. You just have to ask.”
Saloni laughed and bumped Geeta’s shoulder with her own. “Don’t be na?ve, Geeta.”
“You don’t think any of them want you more than they want a bit of money?”
“Maybe,” she said. “But not enough to stand up to their mummy-daddy.”
Geeta twirled her earring stud within its piercing. “I just don’t believe that’s true.”
“Because you love me,” Saloni said. “You see me in a way no one else does.” She poked out her tongue. “And because you’re a duffer.”
Saloni’s attempts to cure her penury more often than not involved a reluctant Geeta. Like when they’d tried selling test papers and discovered one needed correct answers in order to ensure repeat business. Or when Saloni struck a deal with a frippery vendor to turn his hideous goods en vogue, and by the time they posed for the class photo, one would’ve assumed the shoddy butterfly clips glued to all the girls’ heads were an element of their regulation uniform.
Hair clips turned into jewelry to impress the other girls, which turned into lipstick and rouge to impress the boys and, with that hormonal tide turn, Saloni realized she’d overlooked half of the available market: boys. Thus began the short-lived matchmaking era, which ended in Saloni dope-slapping boys, shouting, “I’m a matchmaker, moron, not a whore.”
There was also the fake raffle, the eyeliner that gave the gift of pink eye, the public phone service that was just Saloni’s cheap mobile and gave everyone the idea to purchase their own cheap mobiles, and the communal tiffin trial, which was shockingly successful among the older women. That is, until they realized they could arrange it themselves and cut her out.
Geeta couldn’t assemble the linearity of these schemes—what age, what year (they’d been deeply unconcerned about time in those days). But she knew that they must’ve been around nineteen when Geeta’s parents informed her that a boy and his parents would be visiting to meet Geeta. She was getting married, she told Saloni, and her excitement and terror mingled into a soup of nausea. If he was truly repugnant, or some thirty-three-year-old relic, she would be able to say no; she knew that because she knew her gentle, indulgent parents. She was their only child and they gave her all they could, including an education.
When she recognized Ramesh crossing her parents’ threshold (right foot first as he was, she’d soon find, didactically superstitious) she was neither pleasantly nor unpleasantly surprised. She was just surprised. She’d seen him around; he caned chairs and fixed other broken items. But here he was, in her living room, taking a biscuit from her proffered tray and vying for eye contact. It was an attempt to reassure or relax her. But tradition and values—sanskaar—were not to be ignored. She refused to look at him because his parents were looking at her. Just as they watched her pour the tea and would, in half an hour, inspect how she prepared the papadam.
Geeta’s own parents were betrothed after her mother did not burn the papadam. Her paternal grandparents had heard whispers of a girl of suitable caste and color, and called upon Geeta’s mother’s home to verify these qualifications. Once seated, they partook of the usual tea and biscuits, but the visit’s real motive was, of course, the papadam performance.
While Geeta’s father sat, his plate full, a bolster pillow uncomfortably lodged above the small of his back, her mother was outside, partaking in neither the chai she’d prepared nor the biscuits she’d selected that morning. His parents stood, watching as Geeta’s mother, perched on two bricks, rotated and flipped the disc over the clay chulha stove, taking care to sacrifice her fingertips before the papadam. The ends curled and yellowed like a love letter set ablaze. Once they saw that she did not singe a single seed or grain, the matter was settled. They nodded above her bent head: she was patient enough to serve as a daughter-in-law.