The Bandit Queens (78)

Khushi wagged her mobile. “My eldest is on his way. He took the scooter today for his tuitions. He goes to school nearby.”

“Why doesn’t he go to the school at home?” Saloni asked.

Khushi shook her head. “He did once, long time back, but the teacher just had him cleaning toilets. I mean, I sent him to school so he doesn’t have to clean toilets. Ay-ya, I should’ve charged the school for the labor, but he was five—didn’t do a great job. Anyway, let it be. This school is much better—he’s studying to be a dissectionist. A lot fancier than ‘corpse collector,’ na?”

Geeta felt Saloni’s incredulity matching her own. This woman had enough money to buy officers, better teachers and a scooter. Khushi must have known their minds because she smiled. “I meant what I said, about my house being bigger than yours, Geetaben. When you do the ‘dirty work’ no one else wants to, you get to charge whatever the hell you want.” She continued, “Don’t get me wrong. If someone is poor, I only charge what they can afford. Everyone deserves last rites. But others…” She shrugged. “Well, I never forget a face. Even when they’re dead, I can recognize someone straightaway. And when pyre time comes for that fat cop’s mother…” Khushi trailed off, simply rubbing two fingers against her thumb in a universal semiotic indicating paise.

Saloni snorted so loudly, Geeta pinched her. “What?” Saloni whined, rubbing her elbow. “She’s funny.” To Khushi she said, “He deserves it. Gouge the pig, I say.”

A scooter pulled up. Khushi’s son’s feet patted the ground as he slowed. “Mom,” he said.

Khushi rolled her eyes at the women. “?‘Mom,’?” she aped, her face distorted. “Before he studied here, it used to be ‘Ma.’?”

“Joys of motherhood, am I right?” Saloni said.

“Yeah. Rewarding.”

“Mom.” Khushi’s son was more embarrassed than impatient, but as Khushi hefted herself onto the pillion, she said: “I’m coming, I’m coming, give your old mother a break. You didn’t exactly arrive in five minutes either, you know.”

They left in a plume of dust. Saloni backed up her husband’s scooter, curving it out into the road. While Geeta mounted as Khushi had, Saloni pulled on long gloves and wound a scarf across the lower half of her face and over her head like a dacoit.

“Ready?” she asked, her voice muffled.

“Ready,” Geeta said into her friend’s ear. They could talk while driving so long as Geeta kept her head close to Saloni’s and they both shouted.

“Did that happen when we were in school? I don’t remember Dalit kids cleaning toilets. I remember Payal, though.”

“Who?” Saloni turned her head so her words weren’t snatched by the wind. “I remember them in class—they always sat in the back. On those gunny bags, though, not at the desks.”

“Shitty.”

“We weren’t as bad as other places, you know, with the beatings and the shit-eating and stuff. They kept to themselves; we kept to ourselves.”

Grit from the road hit Geeta’s eyes and she closed them as they watered. Wind whisked the moisture away. “That’s our best defense? That we’re ‘not that bad’?”

“Listen, I’m Brahmin and I grew up with way less than Khushi’s sons. And my duffer brothers were so proud. They could’ve died of starvation, but at least they’d have died ‘unpolluted Brahmins.’ Never mind that we ate whatever we could get our hands on, meat, too. ‘Unpolluted’ my left tit! Forget caste, Geeta, money is power. And Khushi has it.”

“They kept her outside the police station, shoeless; how is that power?”

Saloni’s staticky groan was aggrieved, as though Geeta was pouring the fault on her head alone. “What can we do? We can’t even get them to update the census data in our town, and you wanna change two thousand years of ‘tradition’? Obviously, abusing them is wrong. That’s why it’s just easier to, you know, keep quiet, understand and accept it.”

Saloni tried to park near a passport photo shop, under a faded red Airtel sign. A guard in a blue uniform waved her away. She dismissed him with a comparable hand motion. He pulled a face but returned to his chair in the shade. Saloni peeled her arms and head bare, then locked the cloths in the storage space beneath the pillion.

Geeta said, “Like how husbands will hit us and we should keep quiet, understand and accept it? Is that also ‘tradition’?”

“Geeta…” They walked up the chipped steps toward the salon. Saloni gave her name and indicated Geeta should also sit with her behind a curtain.

“Wait, let me finish. I’ve been thinking about this since this whole mess began. If Ramesh hit you, that would be unacceptable. But he hit me, so it’s marriage. Darshan tried to rape me, so I was justified in attacking him. But if he’d tried to rape Preity, that would’ve also just been marriage. Khushi is Dalit, so she can’t sit with us or eat with us, and she can only do one job; her sons can get a degree, but they, too, can only do one job. And—”

Geeta quieted when a girl in a kurta top ducked into their side of the drawn curtain. She wore those skinny jeans Geeta often saw on the youths, but they were a misnomer here, baggy and voluminous around the girl’s twig thighs. White buds plugged her ears, twin wires draping down her front and disappearing to her pocket, which housed her mobile phone. Thin strains of a recent rap song filled their cordoned world. Geeta heard on repeat: “Lungi dance, lungi dance, lungi dance.” Without so much as a hello, the girl took Saloni’s arm and began smearing wax with the apathetic practice of a medical professional.