The Stolen Girl (7 page)

V
ani wakes
as usual when their neighbour Charu’s cock crows intermittently and Dodo butts his head against the kitchen door, wanting breakfast, whining all the while, a funeral dirge. Her da’s snores erupting in fits and snorts every so often travel down to Vani from the wooden bench, which he tops with blankets and old saris and has used as a bed ever since the floor became too much for his complaining back to handle. Her ma lies beside Vani, mouth slightly open, lips twitching in a half-smile.

In the years to come, Vani will look back often on this moment, and she will wish with all her heart that she had held on to it for longer, savoured it, relished the succour, the comfort of being bracketed by the soft, warm commas of her parents’ bodies, instead of wanting to get up, get on with her life, impatient in the way only a child can be.

As if she can sense that Vani is awake, her ma stirs and then, yawning, smiles down at Vani, her eyes crinkling, affording Vani a glimpse into the dark cave of her mouth, her red tonsils, her spotted pinkish-white tongue.

‘So, you know what to do today?’ Ma whispers, so as not to wake Da.

Vani’s parents are attending a wedding in the village across the river. They will be late back. Vani is to go to Charu’s after school and wait for them.

‘Yes, Ma,’ Vani sighs and her ma puts a warm finger smelling of sleep to Vani’s lips.

‘Shh…You’ll wake Da. He doesn’t have to work today. Let him sleep.’

Later, Vani will try to recall what sari her ma was wearing that morning. Somehow it will be of utmost importance to her to remember that one fact. She will wish with all her heart that she had taken the time to notice.

Her mother turns to her, brushes the hair off Vani’s face and smiles down at her, but Vani impatiently swipes her hand away. She wants the day to start. It is going to be exciting, different. She is looking forward to it.

And so, she stands and stretches. Dodo scratches the kitchen door. Suprabhatam Bhajans start playing in Charu’s house, the tinny sound drifting in through the open windows on air scented with night jasmine and a hint of rain.

Da’s snores sputter to a halt and he opens his eyes, sees Vani looming over him, and smiles. ‘Up already?’ he asks.

She is their only child. Everyone in the village bemoans this cruel twist of fate. They wail to Vani’s parents, ‘You should have had a son to carry on the family name,’ and her parents bristle, pull Vani close, their voices sharp and designed to discourage further chat as they say, ‘We would have Vani over a son any day.’

‘Your daughter is the one who stays by you; you lose a son to his wife,’ her mother is fond of telling anyone who will listen.

Their little family is happy; they are content even though they don’t have much. Vani’s father ploughs other people’s fields, coaxes other people’s crops to grow for a living. His burning ambition is to own a field one day. He is a quiet, softly-spoken man, a rarity in their village where they are all so loud, where they compete with each other to be heard. He loves Vani and he loves her mother and is not afraid to show it, again unlike the other men who hit their wives and children regularly, yelling at them at the slightest provocation.

That morning, as her da wakes and smiles bleary-eyed at her, Vani hears the thoo of Charu spitting just outside their house. Charu stands beneath the coconut tree which demarcates their compound from hers every morning, scrubbing her teeth with mango leaves.

‘So do you want dosa or idli for breakfast today?’ Ma asks, but Vani’s reply – masala dosa – is drowned by a scuffle outside. A sharp scream. Dodo’s frantic barks. The agitated rustling of leaves. A swish and a thud.

‘Aiyyo Devare,’ Charu’s anguished voice drifts in above the wails of the Suprabhatam Bhajans. ‘Aiyyo, I have been bitten by a snake! Help!’

Charu must have stumbled into that nest of leaves underneath the guava tree, the favourite haunt of the snake that resides there, snuggling in the wet mulch. She must have inadvertently stepped on it, it must have struck.

Ma runs outside, closely followed by Da who is frantically knotting his lungi, Vani hot on their heels. Charu is prone amongst the leaves, sobbing, holding her leg, bent at the knee, the snake long gone. Da carries Charu inside and Ma rushes down the hill in her nightie, unkempt morning hair flying behind her, a brown dot amongst the emerald fields, to fetch Dhooma, who owns a rickshaw, to convey Charu to the hospital in Udupi.

Her ma and da hurriedly wave Vani off to school, telling her to stay with Nagappa’s wife until they return home from the wedding, if Charu is still at the hospital when school is finished. They carry an ashen-faced Charu up to the waiting rickshaw and Vani skips off amongst the fields, waving a quick goodbye, not even bothering to note the colour of her mother’s sari, her father’s lungi.

When she goes to collect her tiffin box for lunch, Sister Carmelita comes for her. Like all the village offspring, Vani attends the local convent school, the only school for miles around, operated on the charity of the nuns. Sister Carmelita’s face is grave, her eyes struggle to keep a lid on the emotion that is threatening to erupt out of them and explode onto her visage. Vani’s giggling, shoving classmates go silent, wondering who is to be called up. Sister Carmelita’s eyes shine, they glisten, and for a brief minute, the leather-skinned, pimpled nun looks almost beautiful. Sister’s voice is as soft as Vani’s mother’s arms when she says, ‘Here, Vani, come with me.’

Fear makes a stranglehold of Vani’s chest and she frantically goes through her movements of the morning, wondering what she has done wrong. She does not want to be in trouble with the nuns, nobody does. It means whacks with a wooden ruler on naked palms, instantly sprouting blisters, and kneeling on cold cement floors for the better part of the day, subjecting bare knees to torture, and reciting Hail Marys and Our Fathers from the worn prayer book – never mind that you are a Hindu.

Vani hops to keep in step beside Sister Carmelita, her mind taking an inventory of her sins of that morning. During Kannada lesson, she was told off for talking but so were Dinesh and Radhika. Is it the compass she ‘borrowed’ from Sunaina without asking perhaps? She was planning to give it back that afternoon. She watches the nun’s long strides eating up the ground, her habit whispering around her legs, swish, swish, almost like the sound a cane makes as it whooshes through the air just before it comes into contact with flesh. Vani bites her lip and tastes rust, the black roiling flavour of dread. Salty sobs threaten.

Together, Vani and Sister Carmelita enter the nun’s hallowed office where pupils are allowed only if they have done something very good or very bad, and there stand Father Vincent
and
Mother Rita grouped in front of the statue of the Holy Family, their faces sombre. Now Vani
knows
she has done something horrible. The tears she has been holding back explode, ignoring the admonishment from her sensible self that she is too old for them, and they cascade down her face in briny gashes.

‘Does she know?’ Mother Rita asks, her voice loud in the heavy grey silence.

‘I didn’t tell her,’ Sister Carmelita whispers.

Mother Rita comes round the barricade of the table, kneels beside Vani and envelops her shuddering body in her arms. ‘Why are you crying?’ she asks softly.

‘I was going to give the compass back,’ Vani gulps out between sobs.

‘Oh, darling, it’s not about the compass,’ Mother Rita whispers, sitting herself down right there on the floor with a creaking of knees and a swooshing of voluminous skirts. ‘You have done nothing wrong,’ she says, smoothing Vani’s hair.

And Mother Rita holds Vani in the nest of her arms as she imparts the news that is to change Vani’s life forever in a voice weary beyond words, and after, Vani will always associate these things – the musty aroma of sweat and mothballs, the hefty arms encircling her, the taste of salt and the memory of a borrowed compass, Mother Rita’s rosary, the harness of the beads, the sharp ends of the cross poking into Vani’s cheeks as she holds Vani’s rocking body, as she sobs right along with Vani – with unfathomable, unendurable grief.

Afterwards there is a conference. All the elders of the village meet to decide Vani’s fate. She is not aware of this. She is suffering nightmares from having been taken to look at the bloated, fish-nibbled bodies that she is told are her parents. She yells and screams so much that she is not taken to the cremation. But she can imagine how it happens. She can see it in her mind’s eye. So clear. Even though she does not attend.

She sees the crematorium nestling snug beside the river that stole her parents, the expanse of calm sapphire giving no indication of the carnage it perpetrated just days before. Two wooden pyres, side by side, flanked by the desolate huddle of villagers. The swollen effigies that masquerade as Vani’s ma and da sandwiched between the stacks of wood that make up her parents’ last bed on this earth. She sees the chief village elder, Nagappa, walking towards the pyre, pouring kerosene over the two mounds. A match is struck, and doused instantly in the brisk wind that has started up. Nagappa strikes another match, which flickers but does not die. He holds it to a stick whose mouth is tied with white cloth smothered in kerosene. A flash, staining the air golden yellow as the stick catches fire.

It is evening, that hour just before twilight, the sky the dusky pink of newborn skin. Gulls circle. Crows cackle. The air smells of death and sorrow, of wasted lives and abandoned hope. A cloud obscures the setting sun, a sudden shadow cast on the mourning crowd swathed in the white of woe.

A breeze roils the mud, it swirls red and accusing. It almost extinguishes the light. Before it can go out, Nagappa touches the makeshift torch to the twin pyres. They are alight almost at once, the flames licking and dancing, bright orange and gold. The pyres slowly disintegrate, auburn flames pirouetting towards the rainbow-hued sky now obscured by thick, blue-grey clouds. The mourners shiver as the clouds shed tears bemoaning lives plucked at their peak, a weak rain trying and failing to douse the flames. A dog barks somewhere, mournful, punctuating the eerie silence that has fallen over a village that is never quiet.

It is dusk when the villagers leave, in clumps of twos and threes, propping each other up, husks of exhausted grief, their white mundus flapping like ghosts, shimmering in the darkness, the sky the exact shade of the soggy mess of charred ash and the couple of half-burnt twigs which is all that remains of Vani’s parents.

While the villagers are at the cremation, Vani hides. Amongst her mother’s saris and her father’s clothes. Breathing in their smell, imagining their arms encircling her, the feeling of safety, of being anchored, cushioned by the opening and closing brackets of their bodies. She refuses to acknowledge that the bloated bodies the boatmen dragged out of the river, gorged on by fish, are her parents. They are coming back, they have promised. And so she hides from the truth, hides from herself. She breathes in the faint whiff of their smell which lingers in their clothes and she remembers, memories engulfing her, enveloping her, warming her.

Cremation – take the
M
away and it becomes creation. Years later, when she has learnt English and is proficient in it, she will wonder how those two words, life and death, could be separated by just one letter. Because it is that easy to lose someone, she supposes. Blink and they are gone. When you go to school, you have parents who love you, whose life revolves around you, and by lunchtime, you are an orphan.

Sitting among their things, she pictures their last moments. Chattering to the boatman – her mother was never silent. The boatman laughing, his smiling visage morphing into a grimace as the boat jerks suddenly and he falls backward from standing, almost losing his grip on the wooden paddle. The boat dizzying as it is trapped in the throes of a whirlpool, sucked into its spinning eddies. Turning and tossing like a little plaything. Vani’s parents’ eyes meeting, the distress in them. Both of them, thinking, at that minute of Vani. The smell of fear; feeling the years they will not live slipping through their hands; the sound of everything they have yet to experience reverberating in their ears. The flavour of water: as pure as lives unlived, as fresh as decades unsullied by experience. The taste of lost moments, of all that remains unsaid choking them as water floods into their mouth, as it insinuates everywhere, laying claim; the swirling vortex that will choke the breath out of them, dragging them into its depths, their last breath a desperate prayer for the daughter they have left at home.

Vani huddles into her mother’s saris and hopes it was quick. She wishes. She prays.

Afterwards, she is swaddled in myriad arms and learns to identify from the different shades of sweat, the textures of skin, the bones digging into her, which of the village matrons is holding her. She does not understand – or chooses not to – when they hit their heads and murmur, ‘Aiyyo, what to do with this one? They had nothing. The house is not theirs. They own not a pie.’

Vani knows, even though she wishes she didn’t, that although she is related to every single person in the village, none of them can afford to keep her. How will they provide for her when they struggle to provide for their own? How will they get her married, with whose dowry? She is a girl, a burden that even the most well-meaning do not want to shoulder.

And so, while they try and locate distant relatives, hoping to find someone who will assume responsibility for Vani, she shivers in a corner enduring the women cosseting her. She chokes on the rice gruel they feed her, trying to squeeze it down past the constriction in her throat, the swollen, nibbled bodies of her parents floating before her eyes. Whose idea was it that she should look at them, those bodies? She cannot remember. It is custom for loved ones to pay their respects. And, blindsided by grief, she obeyed custom – the disbelieving part of her wanting to prove everyone wrong by yelling jubilantly, ‘These are not my parents! You have made a mistake,’ – not knowing then that what she would see would taint the image of her parents that she carried within her, would haunt her for the rest of her life.