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.”
WAITING AND WATCHING
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.
ANNOUNCING THE DRY SEASON
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 …”
FIFTY DAYS WITHOUT RAIN
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.
MAKING DO
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.
SIXTY DAYS WITHOUT RAIN
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.
MAYBE TOMORROW
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.”
WHAT IS MISSING
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.
WHEN THE RAIN CAME
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.
STRANGE MUSIC
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.
MAYBE
That night, after my stepfather leaves for the tea shop and the baby fall
s 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.”
She pours the kernels into the skillet, sits back on her heels, and we watch as they burst into flower. I offer to share the little bowl of popcorn with her, but Ama has another surprise in store.
She unwinds the fabric at her waist and pulls out one of my stepfather’s precious cigarettes, and I see, in that moment, the mischievous girl she was at my age.
We sit together, each savoring our secret treats and dreaming of the days after the monsoon.
“The first thing well do,” I say, “is patch the roof.”
“No, child,” she says, solemnly blowing smoke in the air. “First, well offer thanks to the goddess. Then well mend the roof.”
She inhales. “Perhaps this year we can beg some new thatch from the landlord,” she says. “Maybe this year you can tie it down while I pat it fast with mud.”
Somehow, as she smokes her stolen cigarette and I eat my popcorn, she makes the job of thatching the roof sound like a joy.
“With the money from this year’s crop,” she says, “we may have enough to make you a new dress. Perhaps from that red-and-gold fabric you’ve been eyeing at Bajai Sita’s store.”
I lower my eyes, embarrassed and glad all at once.
“Maybe,” I say, “there will be enough to go to Bajai Sita and buy sugar for sweet cakes.”
“Maybe,” she says, “we can buy extra seed this year and plant the empty field behind the hut.”
“Maybe,” I say, “we can borrow Gita’s uncle’s water buffalo. I can drive the plow and you can spread the seed.”
We sit there in the flickering light of a shallow saucer of oil, already rich with harvest money.
As we linger over the last of our luxuries—Ama inhales her cigarette down to a stub, I wipe a stubborn last kernel from the bowl with my fingertip—we don’t say what we both know.
That the first thing we must do is pay the landlord.
And Gita’s uncle, who sold us last season’s seed.
And the headman’s wife, who would not trade cooking oil
for work.
And my teacher, who gave me her own pencil when she saw
I had none.
And the owner of the tea shop, who, my stepfather says,
cheats at cards.
Instead, we linger over a luxury that costs nothing: Imagining what may be.
WHAT THE MONSOON DOES
It doesn’t rain constantly during the monsoon.
There is usually a shower in the morning that leaves behind stripes of color in the sky.
And another in the afternoon that leaves the rice plants plump and drowsy.
But all night, there is a long, soaking rain that leaves the footpaths sloppy and hearts refreshed.
TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING
Eight days and nights and nothing but rain.
Curtains of rain that blind me, even on the short, familiar
path to the privy.
TRYING TO REMEMBER
The rain is so fierce, so relentless, so merciless, it finds every crack in our roof.
Ama and I pack the walls with scraps of cloth, but each day they melt a little more.
When there is a rare moment of sun, the women gather on the slope, shake their heads, and say this is the worst monsoon in years.
After several more days, when there is no sun at all, the village headmen gather in the tea shop and ask the holy man to say a special prayer to make it stop.
I wait at home, as the damp firewood sizzles and smokes, trying to keep the baby from catching a chill. He wrestles with the blanket, bored and cranky from days on end inside.
While I try to remember the days when the heat was so fierce, so relentless, so merciless, that we prayed for this rain.
WHAT DISASTER SOUNDS LIKE
When the night rain soaks the ground past the soaking point, when the earthen walls around the paddy melt away when the rice plants are sucked out of the earth one by one and washed down the slope, there should be a sound, a noise announcing that something is terribly wrong.
Instead there is a ghostly hush that tells us we have lost everything.
A BITTER HARVEST
I tell Ama not to weep, that surely there are a few stalks of rice left in our field. I run outside and splash through what remains of our paddy. With frantic hands I claw at the mud.
Finally, when I stand, my hands aching with emptiness, I see Gita’s family in the plot below ours. Gita’s father did not spend his afternoons in the tea shop; he spent his days building paddy walls that could stand up to the monsoon. Now he faces the swallow-tailed peak, his hands in a prayer of gratitude. His rice plants bow to the sun, his little boy splashes in the mud.
My stomach churns with something bitter. I do not know if it is hunger. Or envy.
THE PRICE OF A LOAN
My stepfather has been gone a week and a day. He said he was going to visit his brother two villages away to ask for a loan. But I wonder, when I see the owner of the tea shop looking at Ama with squinty coin eyes, if my stepfather has run away.
Ama has been gone since daybreak. She said she was going to the village to sell our hen and her chicks. But I wonder, when I picture Bajai Sita and her little lizard face, if Ama will get more than a pocketful of rice.
Ama and I can do without food, but the baby is beginning to grow listless. Now, as he whimpers in his basket, I wish for the noisy cries that I used to wish away.
I watch for Ama on the path below, and wonder what will be lost next.
Later, when I see her climbing the hill to our hut, I know.
It is the joyful noise of her earrings. And the proud set of her head.
HOW LONG THIS WILL LAST
Although the path to our hut has washed away, a parade of
people comes to the door.
First is the landlord.
He asks for my stepfather, but Ama says it is she who will
pay the rent this time. She unwinds her waistcloth, removes
a handful of rupee notes from her money pouch, and sends
him on his way.
Then comes Gita’s uncle. He looks at our paddy, our hut,
then at the baby and says he will take half of what we owe.
The headman’s wife is next. She says full payment is due, as
well as 50 rupees extra for interest.
I do not go to school, so I do not have to face my pretty,
moonfaced teacher empty-handed.
We eat rice and lentils with the money Ama got for her earrings. The baby eats curds and fruit and grows fat and feisty again. One night, Ama makes sweet cakes with Bajai Sita’s sugar. My stomach complains a bit, unaccustomed to such richness, but I don’t let on to Ama, who watches me but does not eat.
We are, in the evenings as we sit by lamplight, happy.
I wonder, though, how long it will be before the owner of the tea shop knocks on our door.
Or how many nights until my stepfather comes home with another debt to repay.
Or, if he never returns, how long until the money in Ama’s waistcloth runs out.
STRANGER
A strange man is climbing toward our hut. He is wearing a city coat and a triangle hat, high on one side and low on the other, like the one the landlord wears on rent day.
The women at the spring have talked of government men who hand out money to people who sign papers.
I will read the words for Ama and show her where to sign. Then we won’t have to worry about anything.
Suddenly, though, I am afraid. I have never spoken to a city man. So I run inside and peek at him through the window.
Ama is bent over in the field. She straightens up, sees the man, and walks toward him. Then she kneels and touches her brow
to his feet.
I see then that this stranger is my stepfather in a big’ shoulders city coat and a hat that sits on his head like a lopsided mountain peak.
Ama stands and goes to the fire to bring him some lentils. She puts a finger to her lip as she goes past me.
“Even a man who gambles away what little we have on a fancy hat and a new coat,” she says, “is better than no man at all.”
FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS
On the first day of the festival, we honor the crows. We put out offerings of rice because crows are the messengers for the lord of death.
On the second day we honor the dogs. We dot their foreheads with red powder and place marigold garlands around their necks because dogs are the guides to the land of the dead.
And on the third day, we clean our homes top to bottom. We put out dozens of tiny oil lamps at dusk to welcome the goddess Lakshmi, my namesake, who will circle the earth and bestow wealth and blessings on the humble and the pure.
Our family has no grain to spare for the crow and nothing for the stray dog, save a kick from my stepfather’s sandal.
Still, Ama says we must prepare for Lakshmi’s arrival. Ama sweeps every corner of our hut and sets the blankets out to air. Then she twists tiny bits of rag into wicks and places them in shallow clay saucers, each with a drop of oil.
When my chores are done, I sit out in the sun in front of our hut and string a necklace of marigolds. We have no dog, so I make the garland for Tali. But when I go to place the wreath over her head, she shrinks away. I scratch the place between her ears just the way she likes. Then, as her head droops with contentment, I slip the garland around her neck.
She sniffs and sneezes and shakes her head from side to side. Then she bends low, her ear to the ground, and tries to wriggle out of it. Finally, she gets to her feet, and with one grand, impatient toss of her head, she throws the garland in the dirt. And eats it.