goons had gone away without doing us any harm. My loose bun came undone and my hair flew around my face. Someone came and plucked my glasses off and threw them aside. The girls exclaimed, “Without her glasses, Maya Mam looks exactly like a film star!” Beena and Mitu gestured with their hands to show me the steps, teaching me how to dance the way they did – shoulder shrugs, hip wiggles, hands that sliced the air like blades. Our clothes were drenched in sweat by the time we stopped, and I was breathless and buzzing with happiness.
It was only a few hours later that Beena tore up from the valley below to the clearing outside their hut, which I could see from my house. Her teeth were bared and her mouth gaped in a silent scream. Her clothes were half-ripped off her shoulders, revealing yellow, frayed bra-straps. Her mother, scrubbing a pan with sand outside their hut, looked up, and Mitu started up from the stairs on which she had been sitting and day-dreaming. Beena squatted in the middle of the courtyard speaking with her hands to her mother and sister, too fast and frantic for me to try making sense of it. Her talk was mute shadow play, her cries more terrifying for being noiseless. When she had finished, the mother swooped at Beena and pulled her head by a handful of her hair. She slapped her again and again, on her face, or wherever her hands could reach. Mitu tried to prise them apart, but her mother was too strong for her. Beena managed to bend, picked up a handful of dust and flung it into her mother’s eyes, then scrambled away as her mother’s face warped with pain and her hands flew to her streaming eyes.
I had no way of reading their gestures and could not tell what was wrong, but as I looked on in horror, I heard Ama’s voice at my ear. “Beena says she was coming back from the bazaar through the forest, and a man molested her. She says it was one of the men from Nainital who came to the factory today. He had been ogling her in the afternoon also, she says, when she was serving them tea. Her mother says it’s her fault, she wears tight clothes and goes wandering in the market, and giggles at boys.”
Ama turned back to the spectacle with a grin, and said, “That Beena’s a wildcat. Just look how they’re fighting, mother and daughter.” She cackled and stuffed some tobacco into her mouth. “It’s like watching a T.V. with the sound off. Whenever they fight, I run out to see.”
She noticed the disgust on my face and said, “Why are you so worried? Nothing happened to the girl. She’s very tough. She bit his cheek, and kicked him in the stomach and he ran away. And the mother is a loose woman anyway, she doesn’t care, really.”
“I’m going to take her to the police,” I said. “She has to report it right away. They can catch the man before he disappears.”
“Teacher-ni,” Ama said in a resigned voice. “Lati will never let you take her daughter to the police, and Beena won’t go. It’ll just add to their troubles. The less this news travels, the better for the girl.” She assumed her knowing expression and said, “There is so much I don’t talk about. If I revealed all the secrets I’ve digested and stored in my stomach, half this hillside’s people would have to go and drown themselves in a pail of water.” She gave me a long, pregnant look.
* * *
That night I dreamed my familiar dream of the dead lake at Roopkund; only this time, Beena’s and Mitu’s heads had joined the other skulls and they were scratching with their dead nails at an ice floe, trying to escape the water. I woke in a sweat and saw that the branch of a tree had stooped so close to one of my windows that I could see its black claws tapping the glass pane as the wind gathered and buffeted the trees. The house creaked and muttered, and the first drops of rain quickly turned into a steady drumming on the roof. The wind-chime I had hung on my peach tree tinkled with such insistence that I wanted to run out into the rain and pull it off to stop the noise. All the happiness of the afternoon had disappeared, as if it