The Bandit Queens (6)
The festival of Navratri had ended in late September; for nine dance-filled nights, the village had celebrated various goddesses. Although she never attended any of the garba dance parties, Geeta’s favorite story was of the goddess Durga’s triumph over Mahishasura, a power-drunk demon with the head of a buffalo. He’d been granted a boon that he could not be killed by any man, god or animal. Various gods tried to defeat Mahishasura to no avail. Desperate, they combined their powers to create Durga. She set off on her tiger and confronted Mahishasura, who arrogantly offered to marry her instead. After fifteen days of fighting, Durga beheaded him. It tickled Geeta: never send a god to do a goddess’s job.
She passed the local school. It’d been orange when she’d attended, but the sun had since blanched it into a pale yellow. Tobacco stains the color of rust streaked the walls; kids and men often held spitting contests behind the building. Government slogans, for a clean India or encouraging only two children per family, were stenciled in neat bubble letters on walls. Others were less official: sloppy red warnings against love jihad or Bihari migrant workers stealing jobs. In a village with two Muslim families and zero migrant workers, Geeta found these warnings absurd.
Now a few children played kabaddi in the dirt yard, which made Geeta think of Farah yet again. One team’s raider sucked in a deep breath before invading the other half of the makeshift court as he chanted, “Kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi.” The raider was meant to tag the other team’s defenders and make it back home without being tackled, all in a single breath. Geeta was already late, but still paused as a dispute arose.
“You inhaled!” a girl shouted to the raider. She and the other defenders were in a W formation, holding hands. In a village this cramped, Geeta should’ve known the girl and her mother, but couldn’t place either of their names. If she herself had been a mother, impelled into the bullshit rotation of teacher conferences and game-day events, she’d have memorized which offspring belonged to which woman.
“Did not!”
“Did too!” The girl broke the chain and pushed the raider, who fell back into the dust. She was taller than the other kids and, in her mien, Geeta saw an incipient Saloni. Which was why, when Geeta should have been buying groceries, she yelled through the gate:
“Oi!”
The girl swiveled her head. “What?”
The other players nervously divided their gazes between the churel and the bully.
“Leave him alone.”
“Or what? You’ll boil my bones into soup? I’d love to see you try.”
Geeta’s brow arched. She was accustomed to children’s deferential terror, not their sass. Before leaving, she muttered the names of a few fruits in Sanskrit, which sounded ominous enough to elicit some gasps, though not from the bully.
Away from the school, the evening was unusually quiet. Not one of the four Amin children, who often escaped the hot confines of their shanty to play kabaddi or make deliveries for pocket change, was anywhere to be found. Geeta passed their home, a cube of tin. Three bricks and a large stone weighed the roof down. A rumor she’d heard last week returned to her: the Amins were building a four-bedroom house.
Geeta respected the widowed Mrs. Amin. She, like Geeta, was one of those women who was About the Work. Mrs. Amin’s husband had been a farmer; when the rains failed, he’d succumbed to loan sharks to buy seeds and fertilizer. But the rains failed again that year, and the next. One morning he poured pesticides in the chai his wife prepared, mistakenly believing the government would grant her a compensatory sum. She received only his debts. So Mrs. Amin, after removing her nose ring, used her microloan to start selling homemade sweets, and now she couldn’t cook or fry fast enough. She’d even pulled her eldest daughter out of school to help meet the demand.
Geeta would’ve preferred to be in Mrs. Amin’s microloan group, with other women who moved their hands rather than their mouths. Women unlike Saloni, who’d only joined the microloan because she couldn’t bear not being the nucleus of anything—even a labor circle. It was this same cocktail of anxiety and arrogance that’d prompted Saloni to turn on Geeta when Geeta’s family arranged her engagement with Ramesh’s.
Geeta would’ve bet five months of loan payments that Saloni had never actually wanted Ramesh. Wanting to be wanted was simply her nature. But Ramesh—not even particularly handsome what with his pocked skin and crowded teeth—hadn’t wanted her. He’d married Geeta and after he vanished, Saloni hadn’t offered a single word or food item of support, instead ensuring that the rumors kept churning. It’d’ve been so easy for Geeta to just slip some rat poison in his tea, na? What else could it be, just the two of them in that house. And I know for a fact she’s a perfect liar—she used to cheat from my exams, you know.
All that venom from a girl who’d practically been her sister for the first nineteen years of their lives. Two halves of a gram seed, they’d shared food and clothes and secrets, they’d cheated from each other’s papers and lied beautifully in unison about the same. As Geeta’s father had said dryly, Nakal ko bhi akal ki zarurat hai. Even to copy, you need some brains. Saloni had preferred Geeta’s small home and tired parents to her own small home and tired parents, but this did not parlay Geeta into the alpha. Beautiful Saloni (whose comeliness masked the true viciousness in her humor) was far more suited for the politics of childhood; it was her caprice alone that determined which girl they’d be ostracizing to tears that week, which boys were cute, which film hero was in and which song was out. Geeta was happy to follow, content in her safe, undemanding beta role. Until her wedding to Ramesh was announced. Then, quick as a shot, Saloni changed the rules, pointing the barrel of her weaponized popularity at her oldest friend’s stunned head.