Rebel Queen (4 page)

We moved into the front room to eat rice and lentils, then the priest finished interpreting my sister’s Janam Kundli, which was favorable.

“Tell me,” he said as he was about to leave. It was only Grandmother and me at the door. “What arrangements has your son made for this girl?” He looked down at me, and I immediately looked away, so he wouldn’t think I was shameless.

“Now that there’s two of them, there’s no money for a dowry fortune,” Grandmother said, “if that’s what you mean.”

“She’s already eight, is that right?”

“Nine,” Grandmother corrected.

“And very pretty. But if there’s no money for a dowry—”

“We are dedicating her to the temple,” Grandmother said. “She will become a devadasi.”

At the time, I had no idea what a devadasi was, except that it meant “god’s servant.” Now, of course, I can understand the horror on the priest’s face when she said this, since a devadasi is really no different from a prostitute. Many years later, I came across an English translation of a poem written in the fifteenth century about devadasis, “sacred servants of god”:

I’m not like the others. You may enter my house.

But only if you have the money

To step across the threshold of my main door, it’ll cost you a hundred in gold. For two hundred you can see my bedroom, my bed of silk, and climb into it.

But only if you have the money

To sit by my side and to put your hand boldly into my sari: that will cost ten thousand. And seventy thousand will get you a touch of my full round breasts.

But only if you have the money

Three crores to bring your mouth close to mine, touch my lips and kiss.

To hug me tight, to touch my place of love, and get to total union, listen well, you must bathe me in a shower of gold.

But only if you have the money

The priest stared at her for a moment, and his mouth opened and shut, as if he had lost the words he’d meant to say. “Does her father know this?”

“Not yet. But it’s the sensible thing to do with two girls and no heir.”

The priest looked at her in a way that would be of great comfort later on when I was able to think back on these events with a clearer mind. I wasn’t the only one who recognized Grandmother’s cruelty.

Late that afternoon, Father found me in the garden, twisting the wildflowers into a crown the way Mother had taught me. He sat on the grass and waited for me to offer him my hand, but I had nothing to say. Finally, he took my hand in his.

“Someday,” he wrote on the flat on my palm, “when Dadi-ji and I are both gone, you will be the only one who is be able to tell Anuja what her mother was like.”

Tears obscured my vision, but I could sense that this wasn’t the time to cry.

“Do you still have empty pages in the diary I gave you?”

I nodded.

“Perhaps you can list all of the wonderful things you remember about your mother. Before you forget.”

I was still writing that list when he left with our neighbor, Shivaji, to arrange for Mother’s cremation. I watched from my bedroom window as they crossed the rice paddies together; anyone who saw them would have thought they were still soldiers. It was something in the way that they walked; tall, muscular men with shoulders like oxen. Aunt said there was nothing bigger in Barwa Sagar than Shivaji. I didn’t know if this was true, but I could certainly believe it of his wide mustache, which he waxed and curled
at both ends. With his long dark hair, Shivaji reminded me of a character in
The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.

“Get dressed,” Grandmother said from the door, although I hadn’t heard her approach. “We’re leaving.”

Before Mother’s death, the excitement of leaving our house would have prompted me to ask where we were going, but now I simply rose and put on my sandals. There was no question of whether or not to change into a colorful sari.

I met Grandmother at the door; a palanquin had been arranged and she waited for me to climb inside it, then followed behind me and yanked the curtain shut. I have never enjoyed dark, enclosed spaces, but there was no other way of traveling. Women were to be neither seen nor heard, and so we lived like shadows outside of our homes.

If I had been riding with anyone else, I would have peeked out from behind the curtain to see what was happening as we moved along the streets. Instead, I sat huddled against the wooden boards, wondering where we were going.

“Sit straight, and don’t speak when we arrive.”

When I didn’t reply, Grandmother became irritated.

“You may think my son loves you, but don’t confuse love with duty.”

I thought she should take her own advice, since I felt certain that Father couldn’t possibly love anyone as cruel as Grandmother, but I continued to keep my silence, which irritated Dadi-ji even more.

“I hope you’re listening to me,
beti
, because what I’m about to say I’m not going to repeat. There is nothing special or different about you. You’re going to live, and cry, and suffer the same way that every woman suffers. And where we’re going,” she warned, “the mind won’t be very useful.”

She didn’t say anything more, and I didn’t try to puzzle out what she meant. I was too young to have understood anyway, even if she had explained it to me.

When I heard the deep bellowing of conch shells, I knew where we were. There is nothing else like the sound of a temple; the trumpeting shells, the trickling fountain water, the ringing bells.

“The Temple of Annapurna,” one of the palanquin bearers shouted, and we were lowered to the ground. When I stepped outside, I saw that we were in a high-walled courtyard with a dozen other women who were paying their bearers for transportation. Grandmother paid our men from a purse she carried tucked into the waist of her white sari; then we left our sandals on the smooth marble floor and climbed fifteen steps to Annapurna’s temple.

I had never been to this temple before, so everything looked foreign and new. Not just the elaborate bronze lamps that illuminated our way to the top, even though it was daylight, but the giant metal pots housing sacred tulsi plants and the colored cages housing jewel-toned parrots. Someone had spent a great deal of money ensuring the temple was well maintained. The marble steps were clean, and fresh incense burned from costly hanging censers where the image of the goddess Annapurna resided.

Since there are three hundred and thirty million gods in our religion, it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that I had never heard of Annapurna. Of course, when people hear this number, they think that Hindus go around making up gods at whim. But in the Hindu religion, there is really only one god—Lord Brahma—and all of the other gods and goddesses are merely aspects of Brahma himself. Take Durga, for instance, who is the warrior goddess of female power. She represents Brahma’s ability to meet any challenge. Or Shiva, the Destroyer, who illustrates Brahma’s power to take as well as give. On a day-to-day basis, only a few gods really feature in our lives,
and they’re the ones we pray to every morning for guidance: Durga, Rama, Lakshmi, Krishna, Buddha, Saraswati, Ganesh. Few Hindus know the names of more than a dozen or so aspects of Brahma.

When we reached the top, I bowed, as everyone else was doing, then took a few moments to stare into the golden face of Annapurna, crowned with yellow and orange carnations.

“We’re not here for prayer,” Grandmother said. “Remember what I told you. Keep silent.”

I looked to my left and saw a skinny priest walking toward us. He was dressed in a very peculiar fashion, with red and white beads around his neck and thick clusters of them on his wrists and feet. But it was the unusual crown of neem leaves in his hair that caught my attention. I found myself staring at them even when I should have been looking away. He pressed his hands together in a respectful gesture of namaste, and I realized how young he was. No more than twenty or twenty-five.

“You returned,” he said. He sounded surprised, though not as surprised as I was. I had no idea when Grandmother might have visited this temple before. But the days after Mother’s death had passed by in a haze; it was entirely possible that she had left the house without my noticing.

“And this must be the girl,” he said. There was something uncomfortable about the way his smile remained in place while his eyes looked me up and down. “She’s thin.”

“Yes, but she’s only nine.”

He nodded thoughtfully, then circled around me and stopped when we were once again face-to-face. “She’s very pretty. With a face like hers, you’d think she’d find a good husband. Why is her father agreeing to this?”

“It doesn’t matter why. How much is the goddess willing to pay?”

He raised his eyebrows. “That all depends. Is she a virgin?”

“Of course. She was raised in my house.”

A group of women passed us and bowed very low to the priest, giggling as they went by. Their glass bangles made music on their arms, and they were dressed in the most exquisite saris I had ever seen—silk trimmed with elaborate beadwork of silver and gold. The fabrics rippled as they moved, and I longed to reach out and brush my fingertips against them.

“Three thousand rupees,” the priest said after the women passed.

“You do realize she’s not some Dalit. This child is a Kshatriya.”

“If she was a Dalit, we would not be having this discussion. This temple serves the richest men in Barwa Sagar.”

“And a girl like this will have them coming all the way from Jhansi. You think I don’t know what kind of men pay for a girl who speaks English as well as Hindi? Her customers will be rich British soldiers.”

I couldn’t imagine why I would ever have customers. Perhaps the temple wanted me as a translator. Grandmother said that this was a place where my mind wouldn’t be very useful, and what could be more boring than translating letters for soldiers?

“Five thousand, and that’s it.”

“Fifteen thousand.”

The man’s smile vanished. “You forget we’re in Barwa Sagar. Not Jhansi.”

“And you forget that I can easily dedicate her to the Temple of Durga down the street.”

They stared at each other, but what the priest didn’t know was that Grandmother could be as immovable as stone. Finally, the priest let out his breath and said, “Thirteen. But that’s the highest we’ve ever paid for a devadasi.”

It was one of the few times I ever saw Grandmother’s smile reach her eyes. She grabbed my hand and started walking.

“Where are you going?” The priest’s voice rose. “I thought we had a deal?”

“The child lost her mother and the funeral is tomorrow. I’ll return with her next week.”

“But—”

Grandmother turned around. “I know you’re very eager, and I assure you—you produce the money, and I’ll produce the girl. But she’s not coming until next week.”

The priest stared down at me, and if I live to be a hundred years, I will never forget his look. If you have ever had the opportunity to visit a zoo, then perhaps you’ve also seen the lions being fed: that fierce, untamable flash of their eyes. Well, this is the look the priest had as we left. No man, either before or since, has ever dared to stare at me in that way, and all the way home I tried to make sense of it.

When the palanquin stopped in the courtyard before our house, Grandmother pushed her cheek next to mine so that when she spoke, I could feel her breath on my ear. “We didn’t go
anywhere
today. We’ll surprise your father with the good news next week.”

But Father came home that evening looking so worn that keeping my silence made me feel like a traitor. I don’t know how Grandmother convinced the milk nurse and Avani to keep quiet about our trip, but she had her ways. After all, their employment—and really, their lives—were in her hands. Only a very foolish woman would jeopardize her own well-being to tattle about a trip to a temple. For me, it was much harder. I couldn’t stop thinking about the skinny priest in his neem-leaf crown, circling me like
a cat. What did he expect from me? And why had those women been giggling when they went by?

These questions kept me awake all that night into the morning.

T
here are only a few times in an Indian woman’s life when she’s allowed to break purdah, and funerals are one of them. That evening, our family and friends gathered on the banks of the river Sindh. A black scar in the sand marked the place where other funeral pyres had been built, and we watched as the men piled new wood on this spot. I’ve heard some women say that if they break purdah, they feel dread and shame. But even though I was attending my own mother’s funeral and my body was raw with grief, I also felt an overwhelming sense of freedom. I watched the geese make formations in the sky, their bodies silhouetted against the purple dusk, and I wondered: is this what it is like to be a man? I stood at the edge of the river while a soft wind pulled at my braid. Then I closed my eyes, trying to imagine having this kind of freedom every day.

But when the funeral pyre was complete, I felt as cold and insignificant as the grains of sand beneath my feet. I cried as the priest arranged Mother’s body, feet to the south, so her spirit would know to walk in the direction of the dead. As the fire began to burn, I thought: would Grandmother have taken me to the temple if Mother had been alive? Somehow I knew the answer was no.