holding a stick and talking at the tin shed they had in front of their cottage. Someone was babbling and crying inside the shed; occasionally I heard a loud, unfamiliar, agitated voice, neither fully male nor female. The single, naked light bulb they had outside, hanging from a tree branch, swung in the breeze, making shadows leap and subside. There was something so eerie about the scene that I felt afraid of the dark corners of my own little house.
The next morning I asked Ama, “What was happening at your house yesterday?”
“I called the Ohjha,” she said, looking combative in advance. “I needed him.”
Ama did call the Ohjha now and then to exorcise evil spirits from her cows or rid them of spells she thought malicious neighbours had cast on them. Not even the plainest evidence would make her see he was a charlatan. The Ohjha usually came in the afternoon, performed his rituals, sat on a stool in the courtyard smoking and drinking tea, and after pocketing some of Ama’s money, bemoaned his failing bijniss. Once he was gone, Ama invariably reported miraculous change. He had not saved Gouri Joshi, she admitted that, but that was his only failure, and it had happened because the cow’s time had come: Gouri’s enemy had been Death itself.
“You called the Ohjha?” I said, “For the cows?”
“No,” she said. “Not for the cows.”
She shooed a hen away, bent to poke at something in the earth. She told me of a little boy who had fallen into an open manhole on Mall Road and come out covered in muck. She observed that while Diwan Sahib’s blood relatives were never there when needed, I was looking after the old man like a daughter. And talking of daughters, had I noticed how shamelessly Janaki’s teenaged girl had gone off for a ride on that Muslim boy’s motorbike? Everyone knew they had a thing going between them, but Janaki was too doped to care.
She did not meet my eyes when at last she said: “I called the Ohjha for Charu. Here I am, trying everything to fix a match for her and she makes things go wrong. She is in the clutches of a bad spirit.” She saw the look on my face and her voice rose. “You think I’m a foolish old woman to believe in evil spirits.” She shook her stick towards the flat grey sky to our north. The high peaks were lost in the monsoon mist. “If you told a stranger that there are actually big snow peaks where that sky is,” she said, “would he believe you? What can he see but an ordinary, everyday sky that he can find anywhere? But you and I know the peaks are there. We are surrounded by things we don’t know and can’t understand.” She looked at me in triumph and set her stick down. “You city people think you know everything.” This was a phrase she liked using because it never failed to infuriate me.
“That’s different,” I said. “If Charu doesn’t want to marry, it’s for a real reason, not because of bad spirits.” Charu’s simple, unspiritual reason for turning away prospective grooms almost escaped my lips. I knew Ama suspected enough without any encouragement from me, and that this had added urgency to her efforts. Kundan Singh, a cook from the unknown east and of some indeterminate caste, would have struck her as anything but suitable. She was tapping clan networks, sizing up prospective grooms: most of these she rejected, either because the man’s family would ask an exorbitant dowry, or because the man was too old, or unemployed and without prospects, or had “bad habits”. I had been given reports from time to time in tones of contempt.
“They say he is about to get a Gormint job, but I know better than to believe it.” Or, “They said he runs a restaurant in Almora. Lachman drove there to see. There’s nothing, only a straw-roofed tea-shack by the road, with two bricks to sit on and one burned pan to boil tea.”
None of these dead-loss grooms had reached the point when their relatives were allowed to have a look at Charu; I had seen the process a couple of times, a troop of the prospective groom’s family sizing up a girl as horse dealers might a horse. Ama had told me stories of her own long-ago ordeals when she had been similarly displayed. “Must not show a girl to too many families, that