Tell A Thousand Lies (3 page)

“But who will provide for her when I am gone? Who will help her in her old age, I ask you?”

But the village elders had done their duty by the poor widow. They had dispensed the best possible advice. Having no answers to Ammamma’s questions, they joined the palms of their hands in farewell and took leave.

Ammamma was angry, but Lakshmi
garu
believed their advice to be sound. “Pullamma is like a palm tree, bending over with her height. Hurts my neck to look up at her. That mole below her nose. And dark like anything. Be realistic. Where will you get a groom tall enough for her? And more importantly, how will you find enough dowry to take her off your hands?”

After daily discourses by Lakshmi
garu
on the rightness of this course of action, this began to make perfect sense to all concerned – me included. There was no question that Lata and Malli stood better chances of making good matches than I. Lata had inherited our mother’s delicate build and flashing cat eyes, while Malli was blessed with a combination of Ammamma’s and our father’s best features.

I got the leftovers.

I resigned myself to my fate.

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Though the village elders and Lakshmi
garu
had given up on my marital prospects, Ammamma hadn’t. Not until the day of Malli’s bride viewing, anyway.

Ammamma worried about what would happen to me after she passed away. What protection would I have in society without a husband? What respect? Without the sanctity of the wedding
pustela
taadu
around my neck, I would be excluded from everything a married woman was entitled to – the festivals, the social functions, the right to hold my head high in society.

I shuddered to think I might end up like
Shantamma
, that old hag who squatted by her front door all day, shaking clenched fists at the children who giggled at her as they passed by.

The village elders had told Ammamma often enough that a girl was someone else’s property, her father’s home being a transitional place for her. Tradition decreed the role of a girl’s birth family was to nurture her, get her married, and send her off to her husband’s home. It would be many years before it occurred to me that if my birth home was not mine, and my married home was my in-laws’, which was the house I could expect to claim?

><

“Malli, I don’t worry about,” Ammamma said to her friend, Lakshmi
garu
, as she oiled my hair under the warm winter sun. She sat behind me on a straw mat in the middle of our courtyard. “Lata is also pretty enough. It is only this one.” She thumped the back of my head with the flat of her palm, causing my head to hit my upraised knee.

“Ammamma!” It made me weary, this endless marriage-prospects discussion in our women-only household.

Ammamma massaged my head so vigorously, my teeth rattled.

“Like the other problems in my cursed life weren’t enough, I made the blunder of sending this one and Lata to school all the way to 12
^th
class. Just because that fool of a headmaster was after my blood.”

“And look where it got you,” Lakshmi
garu
said.

“Fanciful notions,” Ammamma said. “He isn’t the one with overeducated, unmarried girls on his hands.”

I tried to keep my sigh inaudible.

Lata looked up from her book.

Malli continued weaving the jasmines into a garland.

Lakshmi
garu
settled on another mat, straw tray in hand. She peered intently at the rice, picking out stones. “These ration shop fellows, such cheats they are, Seetamma. Must be adding at least a quarter kilo of stones to each bag of rice.”

I leaned back against Ammamma’s knee and slowly closed my eyes, breathing in the odour of Parachute coconut hair oil. I must have lurched forward because it caused Ammamma to pull hard on my hair.

“
Ow
,” I yelped.

Ammamma was too steamed to notice my distress. “Lata passed her 12
^th
class in distinction,” she said, stressing the word ‘distinction’ like it was deserving of particular disgust. “Can you believe it?”

Lata made a face.

I felt a tug of satisfaction. I might have passed 12
^th
class, too,
but at least I had the good sense not to do well.

Ammamma continued, “With such good marks, how am I to find her a suitable groom, I ask you?”

“At least Malli was smart enough not to study too much,” Lakshmi
garu
said.

A smile hovered on Malli’s perfectly shaped lips.

Ammamma nodded with grim satisfaction. Malli had failed her 6
^th
class, then refused to return to school. That suited Ammamma just fine.

“Maybe I can hide Lata’s education,” Ammamma said. From the family of the prospective groom, she meant.

“But you can’t hide Pullamma’s appearance.”

Ammamma dropped her head in her hands. “True enough.”

I considered Lakshmi
garu
’s boxy face and protruding eyes, trying to ignore the hurt
. Would marriage make my lack of looks irrelevant, too?

“A little dowry will get the other two good enough grooms,” Lakshmi
garu
said. “They are pretty enough. But this one…” She inspected my face, one feature at a time, face devoid of hope.

In spite of myself, I laughed. Lakshmi
garu
could be such a drama queen.

Ammamma set aside the bottle of hair oil and nudged me to a sitting position. She started to braid, each pull on the hair jerking my head backward.

Lakshmi
garu
went back to her rice picking. “If you had a husband or a son, even a grandson to support you...”

“Such is my fate, Lakshmi,” Ammamma said, slapping her forehead with the palm of her hand. “People are already asking me to give Lata in marriage. If I can’t get this one married off” – thump on my back for emphasis – “how long will I be able to keep a younger granddaughter at home?”

My sister, Lata, was a whole minute younger than me.

“Who will accept her then,
hanh
?” Ammamma continued in agitation. “Headmaster
garu
keeps reminding me
gov’ment
has set eighteen years as legal marriage age for girls. Already past puberty, my granddaughters are. Is
gov’ment
going to pay the larger dowries if I delay their marriages, I ask you?”

The women shared a look of commiseration.

Shaking my head, I turned my face to the sun.

Ammamma whacked the side of my head. “The winter sun will make you darker.” She bent down and kissed my forehead in remorse, her pale cheeks pink from the warming rays of the sun.

Lakshmi
garu
cocked her head and considered me for a moment, winter sun glinting off the powered smoothness of her mud brown face. Pursing her lips she said, “Nothing will make this one pretty. But at least use one of those fairness creams. I saw on TV if you use it regularly, the girl will become fair and marriage proposals will start pouring in like anything.”

Ammamma snorted as she put a rubber band at the end of my braid. “Looting people is what they are doing. I tried and tried with that cream, but did it make her fair? On the Lord of the Seven Hills, I tell you, we’ve had to watch every
paisa
because of that cursed cream. Not to mention the money wasted on all those concoctions that quack in the village palmed off on me.” For having taken the Lord’s name in vain, Ammamma turned eastward and raised the joined palms of her hands in supplication. Not wanting to take chances, she also crossed her hands at her wrists and gave her cheeks gentle slaps. Then she held my face in her hands and sighed. “Oh Child! Why were you cursed with the colour of your wretched grandfather?”

Our grandfather, the wretched one, had been as dark as the underside of my best friend’s sooty kerosene stove. For him, skin colour wasn’t an issue; he had been able to marry the fair-skinned Ammamma, hadn’t he?

Ammamma continued, “Why couldn’t you have been fair like me, or pretty like your sisters? By now you would have been married off into a family with one tractor and two motorcycles, and lording over ten cows.”

“And heavy with your first child, too,” Lakshmi
garu
added.

Wearying of this dog-chase-tail discussion, I threaded my fingers through the looped string in my hands and pushed it up for my grandmother to see. “Look Ammamma! I made a bridge.”

Ammamma bent down and kissed my cheek. “How I shudder to think of this foolish child’s future.”

Chapter 3

Path of a Friendship

I
might have shared parents with Malli and Lata, but Chinni was the sister of my heart.

The twinkly eyed Chinni, short, plump and pretty, her skin the colour of rice husk – and I dark, and tall like a bent-over palm tree – were fondly referred to as milk and coffee, both for the fact that we were always together, as well for the contrasting colours of our skin.

Chinni, Lata and I were in the same class, but it was my best friend I walked to school with, in our matching uniforms of blue pinafores, almost-white shirts and red-ribbons braided into our pigtails. Chinni and I sat cross-legged on the cemented floor of our classroom, sharing a slate, alternating the use of a slim piece of chalk and dreaming up ways to distract our Master.

“I am convinced you have a usable brain tucked away somewhere, Pullamma,” our Master said on a daily basis, clutching at his head in despair, causing Chinni and me to burst into giggles.
“Always dreaming up some mischief or the other. If only you would dust it out, and put it to good use.”

But who cared? Of what use was education to girls? Would it help with cooking, or getting up to fill municipal water in the middle of the night, or dealing with mothers-in-law? We giggled and gossiped in the back row, while Lata settled up front and worked her way to the top of the class.

Our classroom was poorly lit by an overhead bulb hanging off a long, frayed electrical cord. Garden lizards darted between the cracks in the mud walls, flicking tongues, swallowing insects and providing entertainment to the class. Occasionally, after the boys had chased some poor lizard all over class, the frightened creature would make its escape, leaving behind its tail. Chinni and I stood with the boys, examining the detached tail as it writhed on the ground, while the rest of the girls squealed. Privately we thought they were a pretty silly bunch.

Chinni and I lived for such disruptions to our class. If our elders hadn’t made us go to school, mainly to get us out of the way of their daily chores, we might have spent our time in more such pleasurable pursuits.

Another thing we looked forward to were the power cuts which inevitably followed rising temperatures. When the fan in our classroom shuddered to a halt, our headmaster ordered us out under the cool of the large
raavi
tree. Classes resumed, with our teacher writing on a small, portable blackboard. Many times, Chinni and I would slowly lean against the tree and wink at each other. The other children clapped their mouths at the sight of us winking, horrified at our boldness. When they started to giggle, our Master would turn around, the glare in his rheumy eyes prompting us to sit up straight. The children would laugh. Too babyish for words; but it was the best we could come up with, given what we had to play with.

To pray for frequent power cuts, Chinni and I stopped at the
Durga
temple before heading off to school each morning, placing a flower at the altar to bribe the Goddess. The rest of the day was spent waiting for that escape to the
raavi
tree.

This was more than Lata could bear. “Pullamma,” she said, “pray for something good. Brains, perhaps. No more mischief in class, I’m warning you. I want to do well in the exams.”

Chinni made faces behind Lata’s back. “I’m going to be a lady doctor,” she mimicked my sister in a sing song voice. “I am going to be a lady Prime Minister.”

Then she and I ran giggling, fleeing to escape Lata’s wrath.

As we got to higher classes, our headmaster began to nurture high hopes for Lata. We didn’t have any doctor in the village, let alone a lady one, so he thought it would be wonderful if she were the first. Lata had no problem with that. All she talked about was how she would walk around the village, stethoscope around her neck, tending to the sick and the powerful, the rich and the needy. When we giggled at her pomposity, Lata tossed her long braid over her shoulder, and stalked off.