Sold (2 page)
Most of the men his age leave home for months at a time, taking jobs at factories or on work crews far away. But no one, he says, will hire a one-armed man. And so he oils his hair, puts on his vest and a wristwatch that stopped telling time long ago, and goes up the hill each day to play cards, talk politics, and drink tea with the old men.
Ama says we are lucky we have a man at all. She says I am to honor and praise him, respect and thank him for taking us in after my father died.
And so I act the part of the dutiful daughter. I bring him his tea in the morning and rub his feet at night. I pretend I do not hear him joining in the laughter when the men at the tea shop joke about the difference between fathering a son and marrying off a daughter.
A son will always be a son, they say. But a girl is like a goat. Good as long as she gives you milk and butter. But not worth crying over when it’s time to make a stew.
At dawn, our hut, perched high on the mountainside, is already torched with sunlight, while the village below remains cloaked in the mountain’s long purple shadow until midmorning.
By midday, the tawny fields will be dotted with the cheerful dresses of the women, red as the poinsettias that lace the windy footpaths. Napping babies will sway in wicker baskets, and lizards will sun themselves outside their holes.
In the evening, the brilliant yellow pumpkin blossoms will close, drunk on sunshine, while the milky white jasmine will open their slender throats and sip the chill Himalayan air.
At night, low hearths will send up wispy curls of smoke fragrant with a dozen dinners, and darkness will clothe the land.
Except on nights when the moon is full. On those nights, the hillside and the valley below are bathed in a magical white light, the glow of the perpetual snows that blanket the mountaintops. On those nights I lie restless in the sleeping loft, wondering what the world is like beyond my mountain home.
At school there is a calendar, where my young, moonfaced teacher marks off the days with a red crayon.
On the mountain we mark time by women’s work and women’s woes.
In the cold months, the women climb high up the mountain’s spine to scavenge for firewood. They take food from their bowls, feed it to their children, and silence their own churning stomachs.
This is the season when the women bury the children who die of fever.
In the dry months, the women collect basketfuls of dung and pat them into cakes to harden in the sun, making precious fuel for the dinner fire. They tie rags around their children’s eyes to shield them from the dust blowing up from the empty riverbed.
This is the season when they bury the children who die from the coughing disease.
In the rainy months, they patch the crumbling mud walls of their huts and keep the fire going so that yesterday’s gruel can be stretched to make tomorrow’s dinner. They watch the river turn into a thundering beast. They pick leeches from their children’s feet and give them tea to ward off the loose bowel disease.
This is the season when they bury the children who cannot be carried to the doctor on the other side of that river.
In the cool months, they prepare special food for the festivals. They make rice beer for the men and listen to them argue politics. They teach the children who have survived the seasons to make back-to-school ink from the blue-black juice of the marking nut tree.
This is also the season when the women drink the blue-black juice of the marking nut tree to do away with the babies in their wombs—the ones who would be born only to be buried next season.
According to the number of notches in Ama’s wedding trunk, she is thirty-one and I am thirteen. If my baby brother lives through the festival season, Ama will carve a notch for him.
Four other babies were born between me and my brother. There are no notches for them.
Each of my cucumbers has a name.
There is the tiny one, Muthi, which means “size of a handful.” Muthi gets the first drink of the day.
Nearby is Yeti, the biggest one, named for the hairy snow monster. Yeti grows so fat, little Muthi cowers under a nearby leaf in fear and awe.
There is Ananta, the one shaped like a snake; and Bajai, the gnarled grandmother of the group; Vishnu, as sleek as rain; and Naazma, the ugly one, named for the headman’s wife.
There is one named for my hen and three for her chicks, one for Gita, and one for Ganesh, the elephant god, remover of obstacles.
I treat them all as my children.
But sometimes, if my water jug runs low, I scrimp a bit on Naazma.
I awoke today—before even the hen had begun to stir—aware of a change in myself.
For days I have sensed a ripening in my body, a tender, achy, feeling unlike anything I’ve felt before. And even before I go to the privy to check, I know that I have gotten my first blood.
Ama is delighted by my news and sets about making the arrangements for my confinement.
“You must stay out of sight for seven days,”
she says. “Even the sun cannot see you until you’ve been purified.”
Before the day can begin, Ama hurries me off to the goat shed, where I will spend the week shut away from the world.
“Don’t come out for any reason,” she says. “If you must use the privy, cover your face and head with your shawl.
“At night,” she says, “when your stepfather has gone out and the baby has gone to sleep, I will return. And then I will tell you everything you need to know.”
Before today, Ama says, you could run as free as a leaf in the wind.
Now, she says, you must carry yourself with modesty, bow your head in the presence of men, and cover yourself with your shawl.
Never look a man in the eye.
Never allow yourself to be alone with a man who is not family.
And never look at growing pumpkins or cucumbers when you are bleeding.
Otherwise they will rot.
Once you are married, she says, you must eat your meal only after your husband has had his fill. Then you may have what remains.
If he burps at the end of the meal, it is a sign that you have pleased him.
If he turns to you in the night, you must give yourself to him, in the hopes that you will bear him a son.
If you have a son, feed him at your breast until he is four.
If you have a daughter, feed her at your breast for just a season, so that your blood will start again and you can try once more to bear a son.
If your husband asks you to wash his feet, you must do as he says, then put a bit of the water in your mouth.
I ask Ama why. “Why,” I say, “must women suffer so?”
“This has always been our fate,” she says. “Simply to endure,” she says, “is to triumph.”
For seven days and seven nights, I lie in the darkness of the goat shed dreaming of my future. I bury my nose in Tali’s fur and breathe in the smell of her—sweet green shoots of grass, afternoon sun, and mountain dirt—and imagine my life with Krishna.
Ama says that I must wait until next year when she visits the astrologer to fix a date for our wedding. But I would go live with him in the mountains tomorrow if I could.
We could eat riverweed and drink snowmelt and sleep under the silver-white light of the mountain. And someday, we could hang a cloth from a tree branch and put our baby in it. And she would sleep with the bleating of the goats as her only lullaby.
Until then, I will content myself with watching him.
I was watching when he won a footrace against the fastest boy in the village. And I was there the day he put a lizard in the teacher’s teacup. I was at the village fountain when the other boys teased him for hauling water for his mother. And I was peeking out from around the corner of Bajai Sita’s store the time he smoked his first cigarette and he coughed until he cried.
Krishna is shy when he passes me in the village, his sleepy cat eyes fixed on the ground in front of his feet.
But I think, perhaps, that he has been watching me, too.
The wind that blows up from the plains is called the
loo.
It churns all day, hot and restless, throwing handfuls of dirt into the air and making the water in my mouth turn to mud.
It cries all night, too, blowing its feverish breath through the cracks in our walls, speaking its name again and again.
“Loo”
it wails, announcing itself all over the land.
“Looooooo
…”
The leaves on my cucumbers are edged in brown, and Ama and I must each make twenty trips down the mountain to the village spring, waiting our turn to bring water up to the rice paddy.
My stepfather dozes in the shade, wearing nothing but a loincloth, too hot even to climb the hill to his card game.
The baby wears nothing at all.
Even the lizards lie gasping in the heat.
Today the village headmen announced that they will ration water.
Tonight Ama and I scrub the cooking vessels clean with a mixture of earth and ash.
The rice plants are brown and parched, coated in dust. The wind rips the weakest of them out by the roots and tosses them off the mountainside.
Tali creeps over to the creek bed and rests her chin on the bank, her tongue searching for water that isn’t there.
The baby’s eyes are caked with dirt. He cries without fury. He cries without tears.
Today, like yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, the sky is deadly blue.
Today like each day before, the water in the rice paddy drops a little farther, and the plants hang their heads a little lower.
I watch as Ama makes an offering of marigold petals, red kumkum powder, and a few precious bits of rice to her goddess, praying for rain. But the only water that falls comes from Ama’s eyes.
I go back to mopping the baby’s face with a damp rag. As Ama goes past, I touch the hem of her skirt.
“Maybe tomorrow, Ama,” I say.
My stepfather rises from his cot. “If the rains don’t come soon,” he says to my mother, “you will have to sell your earrings.”
Yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that, Ama would have said, “Never.” She would have said, “Those are for Lakshmi. They are her dowry.”
But today she hangs her head like the paddy plants and says, “Maybe tomorrow.”
The next morning, I rise before the sun has climbed over the mountain and walk down to the village spring, my feet making tiny dust storms with each step.
When I get home, I notice that my stepfather’s cot is empty—he’s behind the hut, I expect, in the privy. Before he can return to start calling out orders, I sneak over to my garden plot, with the first of the day’s water for my thirsty cucumbers. I lift the leaf where Muthi likes to hide.
But all I see is a stem, looking surprised, lonely.
Ananta the snake, and even big fat Yeti are also missing, as are all the others.
I understand slowly, then all at once, that my stepfather has taken my cucumbers to Bajai Sita, the old trader woman, and sold them. I understand, too, why his cot is empty. Most likely, he has spent the night gambling—and losing—at the tea shop.
I know this is so when Ama comes out of the hut and does not meet my eye.
She takes the urn from my hands, pours the water over the few rice plants that remain. We strap the jugs to our backs, head down toward the spring, and do not speak of what is missing.
I smelled the rain before it fell.
I felt the air grow heavy like roti dough and saw the leaves of the eucalyptus tree turn their silvery undersides up to greet it.
The first few droplets vanished in the dust. Then bigger drops fell, fat and ripe, exploding the earth.
Ama came out of the house, pulling her shawl over her head. Then, slowly, she lifted the folds of fabric away from her brow and, like the leaves of the eucalyptus tree, raised her waiting face toward heaven.
I ran across the yard, released Tali from her wooden peg, and led her to the creek bed, her tongue unwilling to trust. Then, little by little, a trickle of muddy water came hopping down the gully.
Tali lapped and snuffled and snorted and sneezed and drank herself silly, her bony sides billowing with water.
I shut my eyes tight, letting the tears that had been gathering there finally spill down my cheeks, where they could hide inside the rain.
I awake the next day to a forgotten sound.
Even before the rest of us have stirred, Ama has spread pots and pitchers around the floor of the hut to catch the water seeping in through the gaps in our roof.
I climb down from the sleeping loft, stir the fire, and brew a new pot of tea from yesterday’s leaves, not daring to meet Ama’s eyes, each drip a reminder of the tin roof we don’t have.
Then the baby awakes. And with each drip
and
plink
and
plop
and
ping
he laughs and claps his hands.
Each drip new.
Each
plink
and
plop
and ping
fresh and strange and musical to his tiny ears.
Ama wipes her hands on her apron, looks up at our old roof with new eyes, and lifts the baby from his basket. She twirls him in the air, her skirts flying around her ankles the way the clouds swirl around the mountain cap—her laughter fresh and strange and musical to my ears.
That night, after my stepfather leaves for the tea shop and the baby falls asleep, Ama reaches behind a big urn for a smaller one. She feels around behind that urn for an even smaller one, reaches inside, and pulls out a handful of maize.
“I set this aside in the dry months,” she says, “for a night”—she gestures to the falling rain outside—“like tonight.”
