The Bandit Queens (95)
TWENTY-SEVEN
Winter caught hold and while the village’s denizens, aglow with Diwali celebrations, didn’t much notice, the cattle did. The November days still offered warmth, but the nights bore a desert chill. The nomadic herders came from Rajasthan, as they did every winter, sheep and goats in slow tow, and negotiated their annual contract with the panchayat to use the grounds on the village outskirts.
Geeta walked to their camp, dispatched by Ramesh to buy milk for the busy tea stand. He was working alone over the holiday while the owner celebrated with relatives in Ahmedabad. At the camp, the Rabari men had taken the cattle grazing, but the women remained, tending a fire and organizing the manure they’d collected that morning into cow pies for sale. When they saw Geeta approach, one stood from her squatting position and wiped her hands on her skirt. Stacks of thick white bangles decorated her upper arms, forming a funnel: the top bangles wider, tapering smaller and smaller as they neared her slim elbows. Her neck and hands were tattooed with neat rows of tiny, repeated symbols: a circle, a “Y,” a star, an arrow, a diamond. At the base of her throat, a dark green ? was nestled between her clavicles. Rabari women began godna—burying the needle—at a young age, starting with their hands and feet. Geeta idly wondered when Lakha had begun, and whether her tattoos now were a source of happy memories, or just an unwelcome reminder of what she’d lost.
As a child, Geeta had heard classmates saying the Rabari tattooed their women to make them unappealing and therefore safe from other, preying tribes and castes. When she’d asked her mother for verification, her mother had said the Rabari had no permanent home to store possessions; everything they valued or needed, they carried as they traveled. Tattoos were weightless jewelry that could never be left behind or stolen or misplaced. Geeta still did not know if either, both or neither of the explanations were true, but now the idea of certain jewelry—like a wedding necklace—being indelible disturbed her.
When Geeta greeted, “Ram Ram,” the woman nodded. Geeta requested milk and the woman asked which kind. “Goat? Camel?” Ramesh had not specified and Geeta did not care.
“Whichever,” she said.
Each corner of the woman’s eyes housed a tiny chevron tattoo. They wrinkled as the woman smiled, and Geeta got the feeling that she was being lightly mocked. And why shouldn’t she be? She was an idiot who’d learned little in the five years she’d spent scrabbling a life together. Even before Ramesh had left, her existence was a travesty: latched to a man who not only gobbled her birthright and beat her (the side effects of most marriages), but who’d dressed his theft as love, worn the skin of a somewhat principled man. For so long she had categorized Ramesh’s love as ragged and defective, too late she realized it was no kind of love at all.
As the woman poured milk into a steel container, Geeta watched her strong, decorated hands work. The words flew from Geeta’s mouth like trapped birds: “Do you know a Lakha, by chance? She’s about our age, lives with her son in Kohra.”
The woman did not stop pouring, though her brows lifted. “Family name?”
“Er—” Geeta hazarded a guess. “Rabari?”
Taking no umbrage, the woman nodded. “Not sure, but I’ll ask around.”
After thanking her, Geeta left with a promise to return the vessel shortly.
To say Geeta was moving through these five days of Diwali on autopilot would not be strictly true. For the past week, bouts of rage toward Ramesh or regret over her parents’ sacrifices seized her at inopportune times. While Ramesh couldn’t see her hostility, he could certainly hear it in her voice. His puzzled response was to be unctuously kind, which only exacerbated Geeta’s fury. Then she’d check herself with a reminder that she was meant to feign ignorance, lest Ramesh get suspicious about their plan (what the plan was exactly, Geeta did not know; that was within Saloni’s purview). So she’d overcorrect, dousing Ramesh in abrupt sugar-kindness as he reeled from her labile mood. The result was that they were risibly generous with each other, dividing chores (No no, let me, I insist.) and sharing food (No no, you, please, I couldn’t possibly.) with a solicitousness that bordered on maniacal. Desperate for a reprieve, she suggested he visit his family; Diwali was, after all, a time to release resentment and forgive wrongs. Ramesh demurred, citing her forgiveness as an embarrassment of undeserved riches already.
The amount of bullshit that fell from that fucker’s mouth could fertilize half of India.
He was, she observed, comfortable. In his position in the community and in her home. So comfortable that now he was angling for a position in her bed. He’d made a few tentative comments about intimacy and being closer to her, which Geeta deflected. Last night, however, he’d grown frustrated, grumbling from his charpoy, “I’m getting tired of begging here.”
Soon, Geeta’d soothed herself, curling her body into a comma away from him. Soon this odious imbecile would be plucked from her life like a wiry chin hair.
Soon, she reminded herself now as she carried the container of milk. Soon she’d burn his charpoy and his clothes and cane. Soon Bandit would return indoors. Today was the second day of the festival. Tomorrow would be Diwali and the following night, Saloni’s annual New Year’s party. Then, they’d set to work disposing of Ramesh.
Perhaps Geeta should have studied the change in herself, marveled at how she went from protesting to promulgating murder, compared the woman who’d agonized over Darshan’s blood to the woman who now salivated for Ramesh’s. Perhaps she should have been, if not censorious, then at least curious as to the shift on her sliding morality scale. But instead, it simply felt long overdue.