He stood, and the wood shavings fluttered from his dhoti like small brown moths. I’ve heard the English call these dhotis kilts, and I suppose they are similar. But unlike a kilt, a dhoti is white and worn without a shirt. Father left to change into pants and the long cotton shirt we call a kurta. When he returned, I was still staring at the half-finished bow he was making.
“Bartha,” he said aloud, letting me know the bow was for our neighbor, Partha. Father could speak when he was in a great hurry, but now that he was deaf, he had lost the ability to tell the difference between letters like p and b.
I still understood. I looked at the bow—which Father might have been making for me if I had been a boy—and tears filled my eyes.
“Afraid?” Father wrote.
“What if it’s another girl?” I traced.
“Then I will consider myself twice as blessed.”
It took twenty minutes to reach my aunt’s house at the other end of Barwa Sagar—where she lived with her husband and two young sons—and then return to ours. I watched through the latticed window as the rain now fell slantways through the streets. In our neighbor’s field, even the buffalo looked sorry for themselves; they had taken shelter under the trees, and their tails hung between their legs like wet rope.
When Aunt arrived, the bearers lowered her palanquin in our private courtyard, then opened its curtains. As soon as she stepped outside, she shielded herself from the eyes of the bearers by wrapping her dupatta—or scarf—around her head. Father escorted her to our door.
“Where is Dadi-ji?” Aunt asked when I greeted them. It occurred to me how similar she was to Mother: her tiny bones, her small lips. No one who saw them in a room together would fail to pick them out as sisters.
“The midwife needed Grandmother’s help,” I said. “She told me to stand here and wait for you.”
“Nothing bad has happened?” she whispered. But she needn’t have bothered; Father couldn’t hear her. People often forgot this.
“No.”
She hurried down the hall. After two knocks, a door opened and closed.
With so many people inside our house at one time, it should have been cheerful. Instead, I could feel anxiety building inside of me the same way you can feel the slow coming of a fever. Father must have felt the same way, because he went quietly back into his workshop, though I suspected he wasn’t interested in his work.
I remained in the hall and watched as our maid, Avani, poured mustard oil into each of our brass lamps. Then she lit them in the small stone niches along the wall. It may sound strange that a family as modest as ours should have had a maid, but this wasn’t uncommon back then, and still isn’t today. Unless a person belongs to the very lowest caste, they will likely employ someone to help with cooking and cleaning. The wealthier the family, the more maids they will have. In our case, we could only afford one.
Like most girls, our maid Avani had been married as soon as she turned ten, still young enough to be molded by her mother-in-law. Her husband, who was fifteen years older, was a kind man who allowed her to remain with her family until she came of an age to bear children. But three years later, when she went to live in her father-in-law’s house, her husband suddenly took ill and died. Now in India, despite British rule, there is still a terrible practice called sati. I suppose I could explain to you where this came from, and how our goddess Sati built her own funeral pyre and then walked into the flames for her husband, Lord Shiva, only to be reincarnated as his second wife, Parvati, but it wouldn’t help to explain this practice, since it has less to do with the goddess Sati and more to do with unwanted women. And so, every day, in every city in India, a woman can be found ascending the steps of her husband’s funeral pyre. Refusing to commit sati by burning in your husband’s flames brings dishonor to your family. But even worse than this, it brings great disrespect to your father-in-law’s house.
That Avani’s father-in-law—and her own father—were both against sati was highly unusual, especially at that time. Of course, it was understood that she could never marry again, and that all of the joys belonging to wives would never be hers, but at least she was alive.
Which is not to say that she had escaped a cruel fate entirely.
Many years later, I learned from Father that of all the families in Barwa Sagar, none were willing to employ Avani except ours. It was the only act of charity I’d ever heard of Grandmother performing—perhaps because she, too, had been saved from the flames when she was widowed. And for an unwanted woman whose family refuses to take her back into their home, where is there to go? Where can she work if no house will employ her?
At the time, I was unaware of these things. I simply knew that I liked watching Avani work—the way her dark braid swayed from side to side when she was lighting the lamps, and how her skin took on a deep amber glow in the flickering lights. She was feminine in a way I imagined I’d never be, with an older person’s knowledge that seemed unattainable to me as a child.
“Do you think it will be much longer?” I asked.