came outside she rambled on about the flowers on the cucumber vine, how her beans were being eaten by pests and about Puran’s deer, which had disappeared for two hours the day before, driving him to distraction. I was growing weary of waiting for her to come to the point, when she looked skyward as if she were going to talk about the rains and said, “Do you know about Gappu Dhobi’s younger Bahu?”
I only knew Gappu, our local washerman. “You mean that pretty girl who grazes his cows with a baby strapped to her back in a shawl?” I said. I knew her more as a cowherd than as Gappu’s daughter-in-law.
“Yes, yes, the same one. That baby … now that baby is not by her husband. Her husband died years ago, when she was very young, just like you. Her child from that marriage is about twelve now. Just days after the husband died, this girl – everyone calls her Gudiya, because she looks like a glass doll – she took up with the fellow’s brother. That man had an eye on her even when the husband was alive, and when the husband died, the brother – they call him Vikki – he barely waited till the ashes had cooled when he began to seduce his sister-in-law. Before they could change the sheet, the next man was in her bed. I am not making this up, the older sister-in-law told me – you know that woman who is at the public water tap every day gossiping about the universe as though she’s got nothing else to do?”
“So it was good in the end, wasn’t it?” I said. “The girl seems happily married now.”
“Aah – but they are not married, you see!” Ama said with a cackling laugh. “No, no, Vikki is too shrewd for that. Gudiya’s husband was a peon in a Gormint office in Haldwani. When he died, Gudiya started getting a fat pension – I’ve heard it is two thousand rupees now. You think this Vikki would let himself lose that? Oh no. He knows only widows get the pension. So he just took Gudiya to a temple and told her, ‘Now before God we are married, but if any Gormint babu asks, you must say you are a widow.’ And every year she goes to State Bank and has to put her thumb print on a paper to swear she has not married. Then they release her pension for the next year. Even the bank babus know it’s a lie, but what can they do?”
“So what?” I said. “Everyone breaks laws.”
“How do you trust a man so greedy he wants his wife to be called a widow? Now you look at our Diwan Sahib. He’s old, he has that house and money, just wait and see, there’ll be vultures circling him till he dies. People who haven’t cared a bit for him. All these years, who looked after him? You did, I did, Himmat did. But you wait and see what happens. Old men without children start sprouting relatives faster than weeds after rain. It’s not easy knowing who to trust. And women alone? We never know when – did I tell you about that girl in our village? She put her hand into the tin to measure out rice like every other day and before you knew it she was screaming and writhing on the floor and there was a snake – as thick as my arm – who had her hand its mouth.”
Veer and Ama disliked each other equally, I realised. One evening a discussion about Puran’s deer exploded into a nasty argument when Veer insisted that Diwan Sahib get rid of Ama and her family. “What purpose does it serve,” Veer demanded to know, “to waste all that space for some peasants to turn it into a squalid slum and for their cattle to breed dirt and flies and destroy every inch of the garden?”
Later, when I tried to calm him down, he said, “You don’t know a thing about that woman and her damned family. I’ve seen them here since I was a kid. They were all over the place, as if they owned it. There was that drunk of a son. He bullied me when I came for holidays, he stole from my uncle, he beat his wife to death here – ten feet from your cottage – how would you have liked that? The police came, there was a real