Meena rose from the cot, jutting out her hip and resting Abru on it.
“One more thing,” Smita said. “You understand that I will also be contacting your brothers, right?”
The younger woman blanched and looked visibly shaken. Smita frowned. Shannon had quoted the brothers in her stories. Then, she remembered. Of course. Meena was illiterate. She had never read any of Shannon’s articles about herself.
As if she had sensed the tension in her mother, Abru turned her head to gaze at her. Meena kissed the top of her daughter’s head absently. “You do as you wish,” she said stiffly. “That is not my concern.”
Smita rose from the cot, also.
Meena began to walk toward Ammi’s hut, then looked back. “You ask them why they did such evil. Why they stole the only sun in my sky. My brother Govind and I were close as children. He used to call me his tara, his little star.”
“So this enmity is recent? He turned on you because of your marriage?”
“Even before that. He said Radha and I cut his nose when we took the factory job. All the other men in the village mocked him because we earned more than he did. He kept our full wages, but this made him hate us even more.”
“I don’t understand—” Smita began, but Meena shook her head and went inside the hut with Abru, leaving Smita to trail in behind them.
Mohan and Ammi were laughing together, their heads almost touching. For some reason, the sight irritated Smita. “Ready?” she said, and from Mohan’s expression, she could tell he was startled by the sharpness of her tone.
“Okay, Ammi,” Mohan said as he got to his feet. “I will take your leave. But we will meet again, inshallah.”
“Inshallah, inshallah. You are welcome anytime, beta,” the older woman said in a simpering voice that set Smita’s teeth on edge.
“Bye, Meena,” Smita said quietly. “Be well.”
“Bye, Didi. God go with you.”
Chapter Eleven
My skin burns again, like it did in the hospital. Since the fire, I feel everything on my body’s surface. Smita left Ammi’s house ten minutes before, but still I felt her sympathy on my skin. How sweetly she caressed my Abru, as if she didn’t care that Abru, too, is cursed. Nobody in this small Muslim community of cobblers will send their children to play with my little one. It is as if we have become lepers, and they are worried that their children will catch our disease.
If Abdul had lived and I had died instead, Abru would have had a better life. She would have grown up without a mother’s love, but Ammi’s eyes would have remained soft when they fell on my daughter’s face. Abdul would have loved her twice as much, once for her own sake, and once because of his love for me. And she would have still had her uncle, Kabir, to give her rides on his back and to sing Hindi film songs to her at night.
Then, I remember that Abru is still having two uncles. The ones who killed her father.
They are still walking free, my brothers.
Even after half of Birwad saw them toss the match and watched as my Abdul was wrapped in flames. Even though they saw Govind yell at my brother-in-law for running toward me with the buckets of water to put out the flames from my body. Even after they heard Arvind and Govind threaten Kabir’s life if he helped me anymore.
The police did not come that night. Did Rupal pay them to stay away? In Birwad, we have a saying: “Thieves come when you don’t expect them; the police don’t come when you expect them.” Even if the police had shown up, they would have stood joking and laughing while my family screamed for help. Or maybe they would have burned the other Muslim homes in the main village. Why? Because most of the police are Hindus. Why? Because they are the police and who will stop them?
Kabir had borrowed a truck to drive me to the hospital. He left his own mother with her older son’s lifeless body, to save my life. After dropping me off at the hospital, he took off for Mumbai. Ammi received one letter from him before he was lost in the fog of that big city. Months later, when I finally came home from the hospital, my stomach swollen with child, Ammi spat in my face. I let the spit run down the melted half of my face, unable to feel it, unwilling to wipe it away in her presence.
Anjali told me that when the police said that they were unsuccessful in finding Abdul’s killers, they were not lying. When they wrote Unknown Persons on the first report, they were not lying. Because the people they interviewed for Abdul’s murder? They were sleeping peacefully in Gorpur, a village three kilometers from Birwad. When the police asked those Gorpurwallas what they were knowing about the burning, they told the truth—they knew nothing. This is how honest our police are in this desh.
But even after the police reopened the case and talked to the witnesses from Birwad, Ammi still refused to talk to them. They will never charge two Hindu men for the killing of a Muslim boy, she said. But she was wrong. Shannon put her story in the paper, and a few days later, both my brothers were arrested.
They spent fifteen days in the lockup. Then, something strange began to happen. One by one, all our neighbors changed their stories. One remembered staying home the night of the fire because his wife was sick. Another said he took his children to the cinema hall in a nearby village that night. Someone said his TV was playing so loud, he did not hear the rowdy procession of men march through the main village on their way to our home. Just before the police filed the charge sheet with the court, Govind and Arvind applied for the bail. Anjali protested; the charge was murder, she said. How can murderers walk free while a man lies buried in the ground, and a woman is so defaced that babies cry when they see her unfortunate face? But the judge allowed my brothers to post bail. This is our Hindustan, where killers walk free and their victims are prisoners in their home.
Someone else is in prison, also. My sister. Radha. Her jailer is her husband. Twenty-four years older than she is, with a face like a jackfruit, and one leg shorter than the other. A cripple.
Radha had helped me elope with Abdul. Govind was so furious, he married her off soon after I left home. No man her own age would marry her because of the shame I had brought upon the family. Only a cripple from a distant village, who needed a wife to wait on him like a servant, would agree to such a match.
My crime; Radha’s punishment.
Chapter Twelve
Mohan peppered Smita with questions as soon as they were back in the car, but she answered in monosyllables as she jotted down last-minute impressions in her notebook. She was beat, emotional, and in no mood for conversation. For the first time, she wished Nandini had accompanied her here instead of Mohan, because as a professional minder, she would have known to leave her alone. Mohan, however, seemed oblivious to her reluctance to chat. After a few more minutes of her noncommittal replies, he finally got the hint. “Is something wrong?” he asked. “Did I offend you in some way?”
“No,” she said, looking out the car window at the scenery around them. I hate this land, she thought. Everything about it is cruel and violent.
“Smita,” Mohan said, “what’s wrong, yaar?”
The fact was, she couldn’t explain this dark, nasty feeling that had grabbed hold of her. The only sun in my sky. That’s how Meena had described what her husband had meant to her. How did one survive such a loss?
“Smita?”
“What?” she snapped. “Can’t you see that I want to be left alone?”
Mohan’s jaw went slack. “I was just—”
“You were just what?” she demanded, then added before he could respond, “What were you and that old lady laughing and giggling about anyway?”
“That’s what you’re angry about?” Mohan sounded incredulous. “That I was cheering up an old woman who . . .”