‘He came to your rooms last night while I was still in blood-purdah,’ Huriya noted. She poked Ramita’s arm. ‘So did it happen?’
‘He only came to check on my room. He didn’t stay. Look, we’re coming to another village.’
Huriya peered out the window. ‘Another primitive dump, like all the others. Do you think he can even manage it?’
‘Huriya!’
‘All right! You’re just being very dull, that’s all.’
She counted back the days. She had married on the eleventh. They had left the ceremony early, and her last sight of her family home was of it all lit up, the whole neighbourhood there, everyone partying feverishly. She had been petrified of the consummation, but Meiros
had retired to another room, leaving Ramita and Huriya in a bare room furnished with nothing but sleeping pallets. Huriya slept, but Ramita lay awake for hours, dreading his tap at the door. But he never came, and she was left feeling hollow and strangely unfulfilled, the test she had been preparing herself for still hanging over her. She slept at last, and woke up bleeding.
‘You menstruate in the Full Moon,’ Meiros observed when she told him next morning, ‘so you will be fertile as the moon waxes, the second week of each month.’ It was Shanivaar, Sabbadai in his tongue, the weekly holy day, and he let Klein take her and Huriya to a nearby temple. By the time they got back, the wagons were almost packed. Huriya was full of cheer. ‘We are leaving soon, Jos says!’ ‘Jos’ was Captain Klein, apparently. Huriya was fascinated by his bear-like frame and shaven skull. Ramita thought him repulsive.
Amidst the bustle of packing, her parents arrived with her clothes and possessions, and Huriya’s things too. They didn’t come to much, even with the gifts from the wedding. They exchanged gossip about the festivities, who had said what to whom, who had got rolling drunk. Father spoke of finding a new house, right beside the river. One with marble floors. It sounded unreal.
Father was obviously pleased that his dutiful daughter had achieved this new wealth for the family, but not all was well. He was worried about Jai. ‘He went off after you left and has not come back,’ he admitted.
‘He spoke loudly about how the Amteh faith is more manly than the Omali. I don’t like it,’ her mother said. ‘They are young and foolish boys, he and Kazim. Who knows what they will do?’
Ramita spent a few precious minutes more with her parents, chatting of inconsequential things that would be nothing to do with their future lives. ‘I pray for you both, all the time,’ Mother whispered to Ramita, her eyes wet. ‘I will miss you every moment. Don’t let that horrible man mistreat you, Mita.’
Horrible man or not, they bowed low to Meiros when he arrived back from some errand, and words of gratitude tumbled out of them in torrents. Ramita felt embarrassed, but she cried when they left.
‘We leave now,’ Meiros told them, and so they did. That had been five days ago, and their small caravan had been rocking and jolting and bouncing their way north ever since. They had two carriages, one for the girls and one for Meiros, and two wagons for supplies. The men clattered alongside on horseback. Carriages were a nightmare, Ramita decided, uncomfortable and nauseating. After a couple of days of throwing up the morning meal they had decided to forgo breakfast entirely; instead they stuck to fluids and fell on the evening meal ravenously.
They had been allowed to attend temple in a squalid village yesterday, where the local children had perched everywhere and stared, like a flock of crows waiting for something to die. Tonight Meiros had promised them better; they would stay at the haveli of an acquaintance of his.
Meiros’ acquaintance turned out to be a raja, the sort of man an Ankesharan could never have aspired to meet. He lived in a palace with one hundred acres of gardens. Lean-tos were propped against the outside walls for the gardeners. Outside the walls there was no drainage and the stench was awful, yet inside the garden walls was a paradise of verdant lawns, marble fountains and statuary, birch trees swaying in the soft breezes. The raja was a portly man with huge waxed moustaches that curled in complete circles. ‘Welcome, welcome, thrice welcome, Lord Meiros,’ he cried, holding out his hands in welcome. ‘My heart trembles to greet so august a personage.’ He bowed and scraped as he walked backwards, leading them towards his palace, his eight wives openly gaping. Ramita wrapped her shawl tighter about her as she walked behind her husband. Meiros was wearing his cowled robes, and he tapped the ground with his heavy black staff at every step. Huriya was a step behind Ramita, peering about with no sense of decorum.
Introductions went on for ever, until at last the girls were taken by the wives into the women’s palace. The walls were whitewashed, then painted with intricate floral patterns in red and green. Every arch was curved and fluted into pretty designs. But the paint was
peeling and the corners were dirty. She glimpsed unused fountains with dirty ponds. ‘Times are difficult,’ the head wife, a plump, imperious woman, remarked as she took them to a suite of rooms overlooking a courtyard full of flowerbeds, filed with winter-blooms. A peacock strutted outside.
Huriya leaped for joy as soon as they were left unattended. ‘Separate rooms,’ she cried. ‘A night without your snoring – this is the life!’
‘A night without your farting,’ Ramita countered. ‘Bliss!’
They wagged tongues at each other and slammed the adjoining doors, laughing.
Servants showed them the baths and they pulled out their bathing salwars. It felt strange to change into the voluminous shifts in front of the servants, for neither of them had ever been attended upon before, but the water was warm and scented, and roses floated on the surface. The eight wives crowded into the waters around them, asking all about Baranasi and the road north. Huriya did most of the talking, spinning a concoction of fantasy about Ramita and her.
Eventually the chief wife spoke, ‘Are all noblewomen of the south so dark-skinned?’ she asked frankly. All the raja’s wives were fair, and plump too, in stark contrast to the two girls, who had the sun-blackened skin of the marketplace, and who felt positively skeletal beside them.
‘Oh yes,’ Huriya answered them, to cover Ramita’s confusion. ‘We Baranasi are known for our dark skin – but everyone knows the fairest-skinned women are from the north,’ she added, making the eight wives coo self-importantly. Huriya set about describing an elaborate palace where she and Ramita had lived until her marriage to the Rondian magus. She spoke of saree-length fashions in the Baranasi court as if she were an intimate of the emir. She gossiped airily about fictional court ladies, while Ramita just nodded and agreed that yes, it was just so. It was like a game.
‘So,’ the chief wife gave Ramita a conspiratorial wink, ‘your husband, he is very old … Can he still stiffen his tool when required?’
Huriya giggled uncontrollably while Ramita’s face burned and she contemplated sinking beneath the waters and drowning herself.
They spent several days at the raja’s palace, enjoying the rich food and the entertainments: an endless variety of musicians and dancers and jugglers and fire-eaters. One man had a dancing bear – but it was scarred and timid, and Meiros clicked his tongue in disapproval and it was sent away. They viewed the menagerie, where brilliant birds sang overhead while jewel-coloured snakes slithered into the shadows. Tigers endlessly paced foetid cages and a painted, pampered elephant left droppings the size of a man’s head in the dirt at their feet. They came away fascinated and appalled.
Meiros had a long, intent conversation with the raja, then summoned Ramita to be inspected. The raja praised her beauty, though his palpable fear of Meiros made his opinion meaningless. He said something in a low voice to Meiros, something full of assurances and promises, and the mage looked pleased as he ushered her away. ‘Your name will be known to the mughal’s vizier within days,’ he whispered to her. ‘Vizier Hanook has promised his friendship to you, Wife.’
Why would the mughal’s chief advisor have any interest in me? Wives are just for breeding. They are unimportant
–
and I am the least of all wives
…
Meiros read her thoughts in that unnerving way he had. ‘Wife, you are Lady Meiros now, and Vizier Hanook will be grateful of your friendship.’
Grateful of my friendship? Parvasi save us!
She spent dinner in a daze.
After dinner, dancers filed into the room: dervishes of Lokistan. Ululating madly, spinning like tops in a torrent of colour and sound, they were captivating, and the girls clapped and cheered and stomped their feet. The raja’s wives, catching the girls’ excitement, yelled and stamped their approval too. Afterward one of the younger ones whispered to Ramita, ‘Normally we have to be quiet, but with you here, raja could not risk offending your husband by telling us to remain silent.’ She smiled softly. ‘That was such fun.’ She looked fourteen and was four months pregnant.
‘Good night, Huriya!’ Ramita kissed her friend on both cheeks as they parted outside their rooms. ‘This has been the best day so far.’
Huriya grinned back at her. ‘You are smiling, Mita. That’s good. It makes me smile too. We are going to be so happy in the north. You’ll see.’
She woke to a cold hand on her shoulder and almost screamed as another hand came around her mouth, stifling her cry. The waning moon poured its light through the thin curtains, showing her the cowled figure that held her. ‘Shhhh.’ Her husband. She felt a clutch of dread pull at her guts.
‘Quiet, girl. I won’t hurt you,’ he rasped. She could smell alcohol like a cloud about the cowl. He pulled the hood back, so that the moonlight illuminated his lined face. It made him appear older still, deepening the furrows, brightening the ridges.
‘I thought …’ She trailed off.
I thought I was safe until my fertile week
.
His voice was sympathetic, almost introspective, and she couldn’t tell if he were talking to himself or her. ‘It is wrong to leave these things undone. They grow to appear insurmountable obstacles if we do not confront them. They assume a greater importance than they warrant. It is not such a big matter.’
He handed her a small vial. ‘Apply this oil. It will ease matters.’ His hand shook, whether from age or uncertainty, she could not tell. Taking it mutely she turned away, knelt and hitched up her nightdress. Her skin felt clammy in the night air. She unstopped the vial and felt a soft, fragrant slickness on her fingers. Trying not to shudder, she reached between her legs and smeared the oil on the lips of her yoni. She felt him move fully onto the bed and turned in alarm.
‘Do not look at me,’ he whispered. ‘Stay where you are.’ She felt those cold hands on her thighs, pushing up her nightdress, baring her to him. His weight settled behind her and he manhandled her legs apart. She winced as his fingers touched her genitals, a bony digit prodding inside her, spreading the oil. She buried her head in the pillow to stifle herself: this was her duty. She heard him spit, and then a wet, rubbing sound. She waited and waited, trembling,
her buttocks going cold, until at last she heard him grunt, then sigh. She nearly cried out as she felt the tip of his member against her yoni lips, pushing through her folds until she felt a tearing that made her grit her teeth. The penetration went deeper and his hips, cold as his hands on her flesh, clapped against her buttocks. She held her breath, tense and frightened, as his groin jerked in and out, once, twice, a dozen times, and then he gasped and she felt a hot wetness inside. He sagged against her slightly for a moment. When he pulled himself out, she fell forward onto her belly, fighting tears.
He sighed regretfully. ‘I am sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I am not the man I was.’ He retreated to the end of the bed as she curled into a foetal bundle, looking away from him. ‘See, girl: it’s not so bad.’ He pulled down his robes and stood painfully: just a pale ghost of a man, drifting away. Gone.
A few seconds later Huriya bounded in and perched on the end of the bed. She watched Ramita piss semen and urine into the slop-bucket with unflinching eyes. ‘So, how was it?’
The next stop was not a village at all, but a major city. Gradually the farmhouses were infiltrated by closer-packed, squalid lean-tos and poorly constructed hovels: the jhuggis that surrounded all the big towns. The stench of faeces and rotting food filled the air, smoke dirtied the sky and myriad voices assailed them as they fought their way through the dirty streets. ‘This is Kankritipur,’ a boy shouted in response to Huriya’s call as he chased a chicken around their carriage. Then he jumped on the footpad and peered in the window hole. ‘Pretty ladies, chapatti money,’ he begged cheerily. Ramita pressed a few copper coins into his hand. He looked slightly hurt and put out his hand again.
‘Imp, that’s enough,’ snapped Huriya, and he waggled his tongue rudely and jumped down, laughing. Another face replaced his, a filthy-faced girl with half her teeth missing, miming an eating gesture. ‘No mamma, no papa. Please, beautiful ladies.’
Huriya rolled her eyes. ‘
Chod!
We’re going to have every beggar in the city hanging off the footplate at this rate.’
They wound slowly through the squalor until they passed through the city gates, where soldiers beat the beggars until they dropped off the carriages like ticks from a dog. They moved from that desperate chaos into a richer, more frenzied pandemonium. Tiny shops lined the streets and men and women called their wares at the very tops of their voices, marketing through sheer volume. Woven shawls, supari leaves, sarees, scarves, knives, roots and leaves; cardamom from Teshwallabad, ginger from the south, even Imuna water from Baranasi, sold in tiny flasks for holy rites. The soldiers rode close by and Klein shouted angrily as faces constantly pressed into the windows, beggars with missing limbs or hideous diseases, young girls with babies at the teat.
Just when it felt like it would never end, they swung into the courtyard of the guest-house and relative quiet descended. They stumbled from the carriages, almost dazed. ‘What a dreadful city!’ exclaimed Huriya, not noticing or caring that the staff all stared at her with narrowing faces. ‘What a stinking shit-hole!’