Girlhood

Bali lives two houses away from mine. There is an old white house right in front of hers. I visited its backyard once and got convinced it’s haunted.

I am seven or eight. I do not yet have the notion of how oxygen works. Bali’s father has brought a little while rabbit from somewhere. It is cute as a button. It has its own cage. We watch it play as I am visiting her. She shows me its burrow that her father has dug up in the front portion of her house. This space is her father’s workshop. I am fascinated by the burrow. I ask her, does it really live in there? And why does it need the cage? It sleeps in there in the nights, she tells me, and the cage is there for the daytime. This cage has been there forever. It has been our dollhouse countless times or else our little kitchenette while we play house. It is an old, battered and fading mesh cage, traditionally used to store food. We put the rabbit in the hole in the ground because I wanted to see it live there. She shows me how they cover the hole up with a lid or else it might jump out.

I am back the next day to play with the beautiful rabbit but the entire household is under an eerie silence. Everyone is mad at us. I can feel the indignation radiating from Bali’s mother towards me but she says not a word. I ask Bali, where is the rabbit? She tells me, my father has gone to bury it. It died because we closed up the hole. It couldn’t get air. I am left lifeless. I feel like I should be punished. I feel like a murderer; horrified. It had red eyes. When Bali’s father comes back from having buried it in the nearest garbage dump of our village, he is a defeated man. He can not even look at me. It is considered a bad omen when an animal dies inside your home. More so if it’s a white rabbit as they are considered a good omen; the harbinger of prosperity and peace in the household. I think I have brought in bad luck to the family by murdering it in their home.

A few weeks later, Bali has two more rabbits. I feel like she doesn’t let me snuggle them too much. Which means she doesn’t let me touch them at all. We take the rabbits to the old white house because the house still has people living in it. It serves as a school in the morning, with its adjoining rooms: just a row of faded white with verandahs in the front. I was a student of this haunted school too, for a day or two. That is when I got to see the backyard, with its big old trees and its litter of old pots and other junk sitting in the soggy mud. That is where the toilers were. In the village, people had something against having toilets inside the house. They would either build them in the back of the house our out of the house, like a shed. The fear originated from what lay beyond that backyard and our village will teach you to be scared of big trees with the stories of Djinns dwelling in them. I never had to pee again while I was there.

I ate Bali’s lunch. Bali brought lunch to her school which was ten feet away from her home. I thought it interesting. Knowing Bali, it must have been a thing of pride. Pride of possessing a lunchbox. The girl was fiercely proud. Scarcity would do that to you. It can also make you want more than your mere lot.

My mother used to love dressing me up in new frocks. One day I was wearing a new one. Bali came to my house to play. She was walking around the house, with her skirt pulled up. My mother asked her why. She said her underwear was new. She was showing off her new underwear. We could not have been more than four or five. Bali had a few months on me.

I ate Bali’s lunch and then ran home to have mine too. A habit I would find hard to shake all my life. No food is ever enough. The family who ran the school were the people who lived there, on and off. Sometimes Bali and I would babysit their infant. One night we had a sleepover there just because and I walked home alone in the dark morning to crawl in with my father as I got tired of the mosquitoes. And I found my father sleeping in the verandah on a cot. Our verandah had a fan so I finally fell asleep, no more bothered by mosquitoes or a strange place. One night we had a sleepover at Bali’s house because her eldest brother had rented a TV and a VCR for the day. We watched a few Bollywood movies. I tried to stay up for as long as I could. We all knew the TV would be gone in the morning. Granted my brother and I were only there because of the company. We had a TV at home of course. We had a VCR too, although it was at our city home then, where we had another TV. Bali’s family had rented it for the boarders of the white house school so that they can have a fun night watching TV. All of us kids fell asleep in that tiny space of that room. Come morning, I complained about a girl who was a kicker. Bali’s sister Babli, put me in my place by saying I did too and that most kinds did. She would know too. She was the person who stayed with my grandparents when we moved away to the city. And she and I had many a times shared beds when we visited our grandparents. She knew my home better than me. She took pride in it too. It was like her little kingdom. Just as it was my grandmother’s. We took the rabbits to the white house so they could eat the lawn grass.

We are sitting in the lawn and the rabbits are eating the grass. Green against white, they look beautiful as they play around. Bali is possessive of them both, guarding them like a ferocious mother against me. But she is quite happy, too.

Bali and my friendship is, warped. She was my best friend and my worst enemy. I hated her one day and couldn’t do without her the next.

She would take my toys away one day and we would be playing together again the next. Bali took from me, my slippers, my hammock that I used to jump rope with. My kitchen set, my Barbie’s beautiful little baby-pink heels, my ring. That’s the stuff I noticed went missing.

I told on her to my grandmother one evening when I could see her jumping rope with MY hammock on her porch which was visible from mine. Her guilt was confirmed when she went inside soon as she saw me.

Bali would keep these things, in her cage where I DID see them later on and claimed them back. I claimed back my kitchen set, my doll’s footwear. I claimed back my slippers ( I had so many) and sold them off for ice-cream one summer afternoon to the ice-cream man who exchanged junk for flavoured saccharine ice-cream. Just like that, I didn’t need them anymore. Ice-cream was far more important.

They were pretty and white with rainbow straps, like flip flops you’d want to wear on the beach.

I told on Bali. It hurt. Mostly, I felt indignant. My grandmother didn’t scold her, wasn’t punitive. She just told ME off. I didn’t understand. My grandmother knew I wasn’t able to understand. It will take a while.

The first train journey that I have the memory of, was taken by me with my grandmother. We were going to her home. Her home before she was married. I remember standing inside the buggy, tucked around her feet. I remember someone had come to drop us off to the train station. The train station is not too far from our home. We always walk to it. And our farm house is right across the train station as well. We would always go through the station to go to the farm. I remember walking on the railway tracks with my brother. We would stand on either side of our mother, who would be carrying a bag of fresh vegetables from the farm, trying to walk the tracks for the longest distance, holding onto her lest we fall. My grandmother’s relatives had gifted me a dress. Pink long skirt that touched the floor and a white blouse. For that entire year, I wore nothing else.

I would come home from school, put on my skirt and swirl around in our courtyard, not worrying about the heat. I would go up to our roof and dance in my skirt. I loved that skirt. Until I forgot about this skirt and saw another girl wearing it. I went on home all indignant at my mother, how could she give my favorite skirt away? My mother said that it wasn’t her decision. I cried like my universe had ended. My grandmother scolded me for being so attached to that skirt and never wearing anything else and having enough clothes and being a baby. But, I was. I was five.

The girl was the newest member of a house at the end of our street where a community of the third sex had lived for as long as I can remember. People came and went from this house, only temporarily calling it home. The oldest among them was a lady who was often spotted at the tea shop that was right in front of the house. We called her grandmother. My father called her auntie. This girl was doing the dishes at the tap that everyone had outside their homes when I spotted her. She certainly had a few years on me. But the skirt was unmistakably mine. I couldn’t even really be mad at her. And after a few days, I forgot to be mad at anybody at all.

The girls in my village had to be industrious and resourceful. And, they were. Around the time of Holi, the search for cow dung took these girls far and wide into the village. They spread out and they never could find enough cow dung. They had a certain unspoken competition between them. These girls sacrificed their afternoon naps and made thousands of dung cakes. People never refused them cow dung around Holi because everyone knew they were supposed to burn these dung cakes in the Holi ceremonial fire. But Pooja told me, we will barely burn about two hundred for that. Rest we will use as fuel for the cooking fire in the coming months.

Around Raksha Bandhan, these girls made Rakhis to be sold. Multiple colours of beads and beautiful designs. They would sit on the walls of their homes, because it was pleasantly windy there due to the neem trees and the score of cousins would while away the afternoons making Rakhis. Their mothers worked in other people's fields for the entire day before coming back home and making dinner. Their mothers used to bind the cloth for the Bandhej Print. A man used to come once a week to our street, and he used to collect already bound cloth and pay the ladies, while he brought new cloth to be bound. These ladies would chatter away at full speed with each other for hours, while binding the cloth together, at full speed. They used to stitch their own clothes and do their own knitting.

Bali’s mother had made me a tunic. Bali’s mother had made her a tunic actually but it turned out to be too big her for her so she very kindly offered it to me. I was fascinated like any child would be with the promise of something new. Bali bawled her eyes out. She didn’t want me to have it. It was hers. It was hers. I felt pity in my heart for her pain and didn’t want her tunic anymore. Auntie gave it to me anyway and told Bali off.

Lalita showed me how to use the gas stove properly for making chapatis. They rarely used their own. In my village, it was still the norm to do the cooking outside the kitchen on the mud stove using firewood, dung cakes and kerosene oil to get the fire going. Poonam would walk to the town centre to get ten rupees worth of kerosene oil for lamps and the cooking fire at home.

Lalita had a school friend, Muskaan. Muskaan was beautiful. I was fascinated with her quirks and beauty. How very much like me she was. How very much like us but she was fascinating because her family had a different religion. Muskaan had short hair. One day, Muskaan, Lalita, my brother and I were playing cards in my room. We had a few good games and all got thirsty. I opened the fridge, took a bottle out and passed it around. Everyone took a drink. Lalita told me to not put the bottle back in the fridge because Muskaan had touched it. She said, Muskaan is Muslim. I had seen her giving Muskaan a drink of water from her own hands so that she doesn’t have to touch the pitcher. It was a custom to use both your hands as a bowl and drink water. It was very satisfying. People would even hold the mug in one hand but use another hand curved into a ball and put it close to their mouths and drink water. I thought it was just a matter of convenience because my own grandmother was very particular about dirty hands around drinking water. The place where the drinking water was kept is considered sacred. Sometimes there would be jars of pickles kept there too. Figurines of various God and goddess were also kept there too, just to really hit the point home to the kids that don’t touch it. This is not a place to be dirtied.

Knitting seemed like magic to me. It was a proper science. I watched Bali’s big sister, Sanju do it with fascination. I was full of questions about where did she first learn it from. Where does one get the wool from. Where does the spikes come from. I remember when Sanju had just finished her school a few years before. Now she was having a shouting match with her mother while I was visiting to play with Bali. If you had let me study further too, I would have been a nurse by now, she was saying. I would be making decent money, help the family, she was saying because some classmate of her had gotten a job as a nurse. And her mother just said, I know. I know, I know. I didn’t know then.

Poonam was in my house one day. She asked me to help her with her homework. She was a few years ahead of me. But she went to the village school whereas I went to an English school in the city. She said she’s having trouble remembering the application for sick leave. And she wanted me to write the pronunciation of each word in Hindi underneath it. I was scandalized. She said her teacher approves of learning the language this way. I told her you are not helping yourself this way. I couldn’t understand how she could not know what the words sounded like and couldn’t understand the point of her being able to write it all down in the exam after memorizing the pronunciation in Hindi. I didn’t know any better. I did what she said and asked her to learn the language with me but she never came to me again with it. And I now realize why my mother fought for us to go to a good school and took a job in the city just to take us to school there everyday. Nobody in the family liked it or approved of it. But I remember how hard my mother tried to make it work in the village as well. She took us to all three English schools in the village. She was dissatisfied with all three. But I remember the entrance examinations like it was yesterday. After seeing the schools were struggling to cope, didn’t really have the advertised strength and classes, she decided it would best to admit us in school at the nearest town. It’s not like we didn’t have good schools nearby. It’s just that the really good ones were simply too expensive for my parents. Because they were boarding schools. My mother had worked for such schools and they weren’t that good as well. Just pricey and posh looking.

Pooja’s mother had gone to her family home and Pooja was growing tired of managing the home on her own. Impatiently she would call her everyday but she didn’t have a phone at their house so she would take turns visiting the people who did have telephones installed in their homes. She came to me one day and I was very surprised that she would not go to a public booth. My parents weren’t home also so I didn’t know how to go about it. I let her make the call. She first called the number and told them that her mother needs to be told that her daughter is calling. Her mother was also using a neighbour’s phone. Five minutes later she got a call back. She begged her mother to come back home. This happened a few times and I was irritated by this. I felt I was being used. I didn’t realize that it was alright to let her do this. I thought she was in the wrong and I was being wronged. I was a spoiled child who couldn’t see how good she had it even when the things stared her in the face.

My mother and I have stopped somewhere around the railway tracks. I ask her why. She says she needs a minute. She looks at my new white bellies. They are beautiful with black net design in the front. I am slightly annoyed that the dust is spoiling them but I don’t want to take them off either. My mother got them for me when we were visiting her family. I don’t remember the market trip but I remember that moment that I now recognize as my mother’s reluctance to step back into our house. Visiting her own family must have been like a respite, as I now see it in the eyes and the voices of my sisters and sister-in-laws. The physical manifestation of her actual hardship was something else to witness at that young an age. I only started seeing it this way a few months ago, when I realized what her hesitation could have been. I try to talk to my mother about it when I can. Happiness was not hers during those years she spent in our family home, before school and jobs finally took us towards the town. And a lot of people felt the break up of our family. And a lot of tears were shed in the hopes of keeping us. My father was decisive. So we moved.

I remember coming to the consciousness of my being in a strange place, a beautiful two story building made in the old style, painted sky blue and having colourful marble floor. I start walking towards a booming noice that is radiating in the house somewhere. I’m unsure of my steps like I have just learned to walk. My grandmother is singing along with a thorn of ladies sitting around her but the music is drowning them all out. Now I recognize the song. It would appear that my grandmother had taken me to a wedding ceremony. As I had started drifting from her reach, in my pursuit of the source of the music, she reached a hand out to me, still singing, until someone picked me up and deposited me in her lap, all safe and sound. I strongly suspect now that it was not someone’s house but a community home you could hire for just such occasions. At any rate, it was pretty and so was the music that my ears heard when I didn’t even understand what music was.

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