The kitchen heat had taken its toll on Bhaggan.
“You take a nap on the charpoy under the shahtoot tree, and I’ll finish the meal and serve it to Saffiya,” I offered.
Maria didn’t agree with my suggestion. She wanted to return to my story.
“But what about how you found Tara on the train, covered in flies?”
I gave Maria a sharp look to remind her to be content that I was trying to convince Amman Bhaggan to leave the kitchen and let her pound her sticky little fists into the dough for the rotis that night.
“What about your own poor mother?” Amman Bhaggan responded. “When she married your father, everyone thought that all the children would be like him—mute. But look at you. You can’t stop talking.”
Maria’s father, Isaac, cleaned his surroundings in silence. He trimmed the plants and gutted the grass with a finesse unparalleled among the servants. Then he swept the front yard in the morning and watered it in the evening.
After every cleaning, he soaped himself at the stream that ran behind the house, washed the dust-colored vest and sarong he had just removed, and replaced it with a replica. He then pulled a broken toothcomb from under a rock and straightened his tawny hair.
I would spot him from the kitchen window and pretend not to look, hoping I would see his private parts, but I never did. One day, I thought he stared back at me, but the window screen was too clogged with fly gunk. There was no way he could have seen me.
Isaac’s wife, Jannat, swept inside the house and washed the clothes. Maria and I helped hang the clothes to dry, and when we had filled the line—Bibi Saffiya’s undergarments underneath, covered by the shalwar kameezes, alongside the dopattas—to its capacity, we would cover the bushes with the washed bedsheets. Sometimes the dust on the leaves would mark the clothes. Then Maria and I would hold the corners of each sheet and stretch our arms as far and high as we could, dropping them with all the force we could muster, to dislodge the dust particles.
Jannat then ironed the washed clothes and left them in piles. Sometimes she piled them so high that the tower of washed clothes would sag to one side and I would separate them into smaller, more manageable ones.
This routine was soon disrupted when Maria was around three or maybe four years old, after her baby brothers died suddenly and Jannat started acting crazy. She’d forget to check the heat of the iron before ironing Bibi Saffiya’s silk clothes, which would wrinkle and stick to the bottom of the metal, leaving a dirty brown smudge. Instead of cleaning the iron, she would rub the dark smudges of burn onto the lighter clothes. Bibi Saffiya couldn’t stand this. She ordered Jannat to stop ironing, and I took over.
But that evening in the kitchen, Amman Bhaggan was not ready to relinquish her responsibilities with the dough. She refused my offer to finish the cooking. That’s how she was. She complained, but, unlike Jannat, she never gave up her job. Instead, she kneaded the dough while she continued with Maria’s story:
“Stella had just started walking when we found Tara and brought her home. Your sister was never like you, Maria. And then she got the leg-shortening sickness, and we thought she would die. After she recovered, she wasn’t worth anything anymore. She couldn’t wash or iron.”
Bhaggan wiped her brow with her dopatta, added more water to the dough, and continued kneading it and telling her story.
“That’s why Bibi taught her how to embroider. Now she spends her time embroidering bursts of flowers everywhere—”
Maria interrupted again—“If my brothers had lived, my amman would not have gone crazy”—explaining to us why her mother took no part in helping her sister.
We sat silently.
The village women talked about Jannat. They whispered stories about her born but unbirthed children—how she had thrown them into the canal, and how you could hear their cries if you walked along the banks at night. Amman Bhaggan told me not to listen to them, because they were all lies.
One winter night the previous year, Amman Bhaggan’s son, Taaj, dared me to walk by the canal at night. I took Maria with me, even though I wasn’t really scared. We stood on the canal bank in the moonlight. The water was black and bottomless. We looked into the water and saw two faces staring back at us. After a few seconds, I recognized them. The elder one smiled in recognition; the eyes of the younger one reflected our terror, which intensified as we heard the cries of a baby.
Maria squeezed my hand till it hurt, but I stayed silent. The painful cry of a drowned baby arose from the bush beside us. I bent down, and Maria continued to hold tight. Three baby kittens whimpered, waiting for their mother. Maria pulled at my hand, forcing me to follow her gaze. The mother stood a few feet away from us, eyes glinting, a dead rodent hanging from her mouth. I turned immediately and dragged Maria back home. Taaj was waiting for us, but we said nothing to him.
I looked at Maria, wondering if she remembered that night.
“But you, chatterbox—your mother wanted Tara to be your choti amman, a little mother to you.”
This was one of Bhaggan’s made-up stories. The reality was that Jannat didn’t want a second daughter, and even though she could have fed Maria, she didn’t want to. I carried her around on my hip, pretending I was like the other village women, only they carried one baby on their hip and another on their back as they busied themselves in the fields. But I didn’t work on the farm. I worked in Bibi Saffiya’s home.
Amman Bhaggan said I had been a good little mother to Maria, even though only five years had passed since they had found me on the train.
As always, the story ended with my beginning.
She returned to the kitchen business as easily as she had been distracted from it, calling out to Maria, “Is Jannat coming or not? Look, a dust storm has started, and then it will begin to rain and the kitchen will be a muddy mess. Go, my daughter— tell your mother to come soon, or both of us will have to answer to Bibi.”