The Good Girls. Sonia Faleiro

heated oil and kneaded dough. They returned to the fields with roti sabzi for the family members still toiling. They trudged back home to scrub the dishes with wood ash for soap. Off they went with their goats. Back they came to milk the buffaloes. They swept the courtyard. They washed the clothes. They jerked the heavy galvanised steel handle of the water pump up and down, up and down, to fill a bucket of water to wash themselves. They prepared dinner. They swept the courtyard one more time. Then they did something. Then they did something else.

      Crows cawed piercingly and the sun radiated fire-like. In the sickening heat, the pyramids of garbage filled the air with a rotting smell. Grit settled on clothes, faces, tongues and feet. The Shakya girls carried on.

      Cousin Manju was accustomed to chores. She wasn’t yet a teenager, but it was her job to cook dinner every night. Her father had bought her a footstool so she could reach the stove. But when she was done, she would switch on the air cooler. She’d listen to music on a mobile phone. She could even leave the room as long as she went no further than the front steps. Aunties said hello. Boys grinned. Her girlfriends, out roaming with elder sisters, stopped by to gossip about impossible homework and dreaded teachers.

      On weekends her father took them for ice cream. They went window shopping. They chatted and laughed and sometimes they squabbled like pigeons fighting over a handful of grain – and that was okay too.

      What did her cousins do when they were done with one set of chores? There was nothing fun for a girl in the village. The day was a thousand years long.

      Padma was sitting at home. Very soon she would be deposited at the threshold of a new family, as a bride to a man she had never seen. In two years, it would be Lalli’s turn.

      The difference in their lives, it seemed to the younger girl, was that she was made to work hard so that she would one day make a good wife. But the older girls worked like they were already wives and mothers. The burdens placed on them appeared to her extreme. She was convinced ‘there was no time for them to think.’

      Swatting flies in the house, Manju decided that enough was enough. One afternoon, when the older girls left for the fields, she followed. That day, and the next, she observed a pattern that struck her as odd.

      It was the teenagers’ job to cut the mint growing in the three family plots, which covered nearly an acre of land. But the only plot they ever visited was the one that belonged to Padma’s father, immediately adjacent to the orchard.

      ‘Every day you come here and only here,’ she said. ‘Kyun?’ Why?

      ‘Be quiet,’ Lalli snapped.

      Later, Manju saw Lalli filling a diary with poems. She saw Padma secretly dabbing on lipstick.

      Every night after dinner, the children stepped out one last time to squat in the fields. Padma and Lalli waited for the younger girl to choose a spot, but then scooted elsewhere. Manju felt hurt. There were wriggling snakes. And jackals. And what if some boy flashed his phone in her face? ‘Let’s go!’ she would whine, looking warily around as she knotted her salwar.

      Padma and Lalli were never ready.

      ‘What’s the hurry?’ they would say, virtually in unison, their laughter tinkling in the darkness. ‘There’s plenty of time.’

      Nazru Sees It Too

      Nazru lived in an elephant-eared taro plot near the orchard. Inside the tiny brick room, his father sat upright on a charpoy, wheezing heavily into his shrivelled chest. Some nights when the asthmatic old man injected himself with medication to clear his passageways, he was knocked senseless. Nazru’s teenaged brother, who was named after an old-time Bollywood star, was ‘weak in the head’ according to their father’s diagnosis and encouraged to keep to himself. An older brother had fled to another state where he had ended up as a moulder in the even more unforgiving world of a brick kiln, with his wife by his side and their five children running around in the beating sun. His mother tried to keep the family from coming apart, but Nazru was forever getting into scrapes.

      One night he heard bandits rummaging about in a neighbour’s house and instead of staying away, as others did in such circumstances, he confronted the men. They shot him in the arm. Another time he killed a neighbour’s goat. There was no logic to his actions, as least not any that he articulated to people’s satisfaction. Asked a simple and direct question, he laughed brayingly, hee-haw, hee-haw. The villagers made him apologise to the owner of the dead goat and pay restitution. Time and again they counselled him, ‘apne kaam se kaam rakho.’ Mind your own business.

      How could he?

      There was nothing for a young man in the village. Sometimes he gathered friends for a drink, sometimes to smoke weed. He’d once gone for a drive in a car, but he didn’t remember very much because it was the time he’d been shot and was being rushed to the hospital. He was too old to hang around the teenagers who stared at their phones, and too immature to socialise with men his own age who were married and had children.

      Some people thought they had him pegged. ‘Dar naam ka cheez usko nahin hai.’ He isn’t afraid of anything. Others, who saw him rustling about on one of his evening excursions, knew he was just nosy.

      By their early twenties, Katra boys were embedded in that stage of Hindu life known as grihastha, becoming a householder, maintaining a home and raising a family. Nazru was considered odd, but he was hard-working. With one brother gone, another ill and his father bedridden, the burden of feeding everyone – while tending to their only buffalo and all the tobacco – fell to him. He did what was needed. Why then was he still unmarried?

      Debating the causes behind twenty-six-year-old Nazru’s bachelorhood became a preoccupation among the villagers who found him annoying. Someone claimed that he was having an affair with a neighbour’s wife. When the neighbour was away, it was said, Nazru slipped into his wife’s bed. Someone else said that he was involved with several men’s wives. A third person claimed that Nazru carried pictures of underage girls in his wallet, making him sound like a pervert.

      Close relatives rubbished the rumours. He was not a pervert, the poor boy, he was a hijra, they said. They had come to this conclusion having seen him squat to urinate. The rumours grew and grew, and so the question was put to Nazru’s father. ‘My son,’ said the withered old fellow, ‘is neither a man nor a woman.’

      And so Nazru was left to do as he pleased. Every night after dinner, he set off. Animals, squatting women, teenagers being teenagers – no one was safe from the flashing light of Nazru’s Made in China torch.

      ‘I saw Padma and Pappu,’ he said later. The pair were in his wheat field. ‘They were signalling to each other.’

      Nazru saw them together again, and then a third time. ‘I didn’t like it,’ he said. ‘This sort of behaviour could destroy the reputation of our entire family.’

      Unspeakable Things

      Reputation was skin. And the residents of the next-door hamlet of Jati couldn’t shed theirs. Their reputation grew not so much out of things they said and did, as by stereotyped impressions of their Yadav caste.

      Like the Shakyas, the Yadavs came under a broad category known as ‘Other Backward Classes’. The OBCs were low-caste groups that upper-caste groups had systematically kept back. Once forcibly confined to agrarian jobs, Yadavs in Uttar Pradesh were not even allowed to sit on a charpoy occupied by a high-caste Brahmin. After India became independent they were the supposed beneficiaries of affirmative action policies.

The Shakyas and the Yadavs should have found common cause, except that now the Yadavs were politically powerful. The community, which made up an estimated 9 per cent of the population in the state of Uttar Pradesh, always voted strategically, in a bloc. Their leaders formed political alliances with other low-caste groups. And the Yadav-run Samajwadi Party employed the tactics of patronage politics ­– they were