Sweetened Curd

‘Where is she from?’ Prakash asked his elder brother, as he entered the room. The girl lay slumped on the rough floor, barely conscious.

Her head lolled like a bobble-head toy. Behind the girl, sat the family’s maid. She pulled back the drooping head to secure the girl’s loose strands into a tight ponytail. They were in the room on the terrace. Built to store potatoes and millets in the low seasons, it would now accommodate the new arrival. Prakash looked around. It would have to be rid of rat and lizard droppings and dusty gunny sacks. Construction of the room had been left incomplete – brick walls, unpolished concrete floor, cut-outs for windows – he couldn’t remember why. Another of his elder brother’s whims.

‘From some place in the east, maybe Assam,’ his brother said, ‘look at the shape of her eyes.’ The maid pulled back the girl’s head again for Prakash to view the pale chubby face atop a skeletal body. Under tapering eyebrows, she had upturned eyes. A thin string of drool trickled from her parted mouth. The maid sneezed into the girl’s hair. Her eyes flickered. ‘Nineteen or twenty years old, I think,’ his brother offered. Sharp collar bones jutted from her faded and frayed pink blouse. ‘If she dissolves into the ground, only her shoulder bones will remain,’ the maid said. The plump-cheeked thin girl was Prakash’s new bride – the newest member of their family which consisted of, apart from him, his elder brother and the wife he had taken a year ago.

‘She bruises fast,’ his brother sniggered at the door. His eyes shone, even in the dim light, with the same delight as when a plate of ghee-laden moong daal halwa was served to him after dinner in the courtyard verandah. Prakash looked away. ‘What do you think, will she do?’ his brother asked.

‘Yes, what’s her name?’ His brother shrugged and left the room, licking his lips, ready for dinner. Prakash squatted in front of his new bride. Her skin was the colour of the pink flesh of winter guavas. He peered closer. Dark brown freckles, the size of pin pricks, dotted her face and travelled down her neck. A hazy fuzz stood on her arms. The room was nippy. ‘Feed her regularly,’ he said to the maid. ‘Clean the room, store the gunny bags in the front yard, get some blankets and fix a thick cardboard or thermocol there,’ pointing at the window hole in the wall. With the amount of treated leaves his brother had fed the girl, she would be in and out of consciousness for at least two days.

The maid set up a spare coir cot from the courtyard and hoisted the girl atop it. ‘She’s as light as a sack of plastic bags,’ she laughed. They pushed the cot to the wall, below the incomplete square window. His bride lay bundled on it, a mass of pink and pinker. ‘Tell me when she’s up.’ Prakash headed to the door.

The first time Prakash fucked her was three days after her arrival. Earlier that morning, the maid accosted him and his elder brother as they were about to leave for their kirana store in the central market. ‘Your bride seems ready to be deflowered. She has recovered, sits on the latrine on her own.’ In the evening, a wedding feast of spicy chicken curry, lentils, pooris, long grain rice, urad papad, cauliflower fritters, kala jamun and thrice distilled tharra was set up in their courtyard. Forty cousins, relatives and neighbours came and ate with him. You got an exotic one, they teased, ours are local. He gulped a misshapen kala jamun. In the far corner of the courtyard closest to the kitchen entrance, his bride sat shivering and cross legged on the floor, her face covered with the long-red pallu that was arranged in haste by the maid. In front of her was an untouched plate of the wedding food. Prakash’s little nieces and nephews nibbled on it.

After the last of the cousins departed with the leftover food and alcohol, Prakash climbed up to the terrace room, tightening the silver shawl around him. He plucked a drooping orange coloured marigold from one of the pots on the terrace parapet, twisting it in his fingers. A waxy dew had formed on the leaves. Somebody had affixed a bulb in the room. His bride lay on the cot with her back to the door. Prakash turned her body and entered. He couldn’t tell if she was asleep or awake. When he thrust his organ into her, her walls felt leathery and arid. Her ribcage jutted into his. As he left, his bride’s body curled towards the wall again. Prakash still didn’t know her name.

After a few days, she stopped eyeing him like a wounded animal each time he entered the room, or her. He spotted her shapely eyes moving around his body. Except for small involuntary moans, he had barely heard her speak.

It happened a few nights later. He had been called to his cousin’s farm, to help cultivate wheat before the winters turned too harsh. It would take four days, preparing the soil, swinging the seeds in a flyaway motion and continuously watering the vast stretch of land. Prakash wanted to tell his bride the evening he left, but he had to rush to board the last bus. The night he came back, he went to the terrace after dinner. At the door, her ears turned pink-red. On the cot, she guided his hand to her left nipple, as he dislodged her right breast from the faded green blouse. The red mole north of her right nipple moved as her breast heaved. The other women he had fucked kept their eyes shut or directed it to the ceiling fan with practiced groans. His bride, though, moaned. He suckled her lips as gently as he could. With his fingers intertwined with hers, he finished. After that night, he did not hurry downstairs to sleep in the font room. The thought of her pubescent giggle by the door, as she let him in, tugged at Prakash’s groin whenever he was away from her. In the quiet hours of the afternoon, if he managed to come home making some excuse to his brother at the kirana, he sneaked up to the terrace. On his way home from the shop in the evenings, if he was alone, he brought roasted winter chestnuts or aalu tikki chaat from the market which he fed her, later in the terrace room.

His brother had brought a total of nine brides into their community. Some he had collected during his travels to parts of rural Madhya Pradesh, others from the side roads off the highway closest to their village, where the women had been abandoned by agents after having been promised house-maid jobs. He was a local legend.

Prakash and his brother were at the Charan’s tea stop on their way to the kirana, when his brother recounted to Charan, ‘Her fair complexion was enough. I knew I had to bring her for Prakash before someone else took her.’

Prakash’s bride had arrived unconscious late in the evening, squeezed and cramped between his brother and their neighbour in the neighbour’s blue farm tractor. On the night of the wedding festivities, his brother narrated the conquest to every cousin and neighbour, in between swigs of alcohol. He called it ‘my best conquest to the day,’ even topping his own wife, whom he had taken for her grey eyes, from far-off Kutch. In her case, the trade was a pouch with four thousand rupees to his wife’s father and his VIP hard-back suit-case. Prakash’s sister-in-law spoke only when she was spoken to. She stayed put in the dark corners of the house.

‘I saw her at Mantri dhaba on the highway, where she worked as a cleaner,’ his brother said to Charan about Prakash’s bride, ‘bent to collect utensils from the floor. Her saree was hunched up. Such fair legs even that Titanic heroine doesn’t have,’ he scoffed into the teacup. ‘But the bitch bit my arm,’ he looked around at Prakash before pulling back the sleeve of his sweater. ‘See this.’ There was a fading maroon curve on his forearm. ‘It has been a week but her bite mark is still there. Only when I forced the leaves down her throat, could I manage to bring her. Prakash always wanted a milky one to bite.’ Charan sniggered.

‘What is your name,’ Prakash asked, on a chilly afternoon, as she wrapped her legs around his waist, under the thin fleece blanket. Sunlight through a linear tear in the thermocol window made a ripple on her pink cheek. He would have to leave soon for the shop. ‘It is whatever you want to call me. It doesn’t matter,’ she brushed the stray strands of hair off her round face and smiled, ‘I’ll be whatever you want me to be.’ She kissed his chin. He pinched her cheek hard and insisted. But she didn’t utter a word.

‘I will call you mishti,’ Prakash proclaimed the first time she fed him sweetened curd. When the household turned quiet after dinner and his elder brother snored in the courtyard, his bride sauntered downstairs to make sweetened curd. She vigorously mixed shaved rolls of jaggery with leftover curd, milk and cardamom powder. ‘We call it mitha doi or mishti doi. It is best when cold, better than ice-cream!’ she said, with that scrunched expression he had grown to register as gloom. ‘This one is warm. It is the season for palm jaggery in my village. The best mishti doi is from palm jaggery. It takes 8-10 hours from hanging the curds to drain the liquid, to setting the final mixture in a cool place overnight. It is set by the morning. When it’s ready, everybody fights over the biggest scoop.’ Her eyes glistened. ‘Why don’t you use the fridge in the courtyard,’ he asked. But Prakash knew. She ventured downstairs only in the still hours and sprinted back like a gazelle when she heard a human sound, her chest panting in her skeletal body. She ate with the old maid, who had taken a liking to her and carried her plate to the terrace. One day, Prakash sighed.

The sweetened curd was warm and runny, quite unlike granular kheer or lumpy halwa. Prakash smacked his lips throughout the day. That morning, she had licked dried curd from his chin. He wanted to stay with her a while, but the household would soon wake up and his brother would eye him angrily, yet again, for delaying them. He was running out of excuses.

‘Tell me more about your village,’ he said to her.

‘The ground is always brimming with water, but the floods are so bad, that we end up re-building our homes every year. Sometimes there are landslides. People are shifting to higher lands and cities for work, but there’s barely any. We have no education. I and my siblings left too, months ago.’ Prakash pulled her close.

A few days later, Prakash had the opportunity to close the shop in the afternoon and leave for home. It was one of the coldest days that season and there were no customers. His brother had left long ago, citing a pick-up. On his way home, when Prakash purchased four brass bangles with red dots, he suspected nothing. Red was her favourite. He planned to dangle the bangles in front of her excited eyes, but not give them to her unless she told him her name. Prakash climbed to the terrace. The door to her room was wide open. Nothing was in disarray, but the steel water tumbler had rolled on the floor, and stopped at a marigold pot the maid had placed inside. She was not on the terrace, or the bathroom at the far end either. His thigh muscle gave a gnawing pull.

Downstairs, his brother’s room was locked from within. With the red dotted bangles in his pant pockets, Prakash went back to the shop. He slept in the front room that night and the next. ‘You have to stop moping,’ his brother dug his fingers into Prakash’s arm and pulled him a few days later at the gates of their house, ‘I let you have her first, didn’t I? I found her for you. I didn’t touch her before you did. You are lucky you have a brother. Otherwise, your bride would have gone to that old fart of our eldest cousin Rajaji. His organs are diseased.’ That night, Prakash went to the terrace room. His bride had grown thinner still. She sat on the cot, with eyes as pink as her skin, peering at the door.

When he entered her, she looked at the ceiling. ‘It happens in every family where there is more than one brother,’ he turned her chin, ‘You are lucky I have a male sibling, otherwise my eldest cousin Rajaji would have taken you. He’s old and crazy. My brother is healthy and well built.’ Her face scrunched up. With a jerk of her palm, she pushed him out and switched on the bulb. ‘What are you doing?’ But Prakash didn’t have to ask; she was showing him the bite marks on her torso and thighs, and the angry maroon markings on her wrists. Her breasts were red, as if congealed blood lay beneath. Bruised and naked, his bride just stood there. It is a custom in our community, he tried again, but when she lifted her palm, he stopped. There was nothing more to say. Prakash left. This was her life now. She had to accept it, there was no other way, they all had after all – cousin’s wives, his sister-in-law, even his dead mother. It was customary in the community to share brides. The girl is being a drama queen, his elder brother was right.

The first time she attempted to run away, Prakash dragged her back to the terrace from the crossing in front of the neighbour’s house. She had run so swiftly towards the gates of the house that Prakash though it was a cat, from where he was resting in the front room. He gagged her screaming mouth with his gamcha and brought her back to her room. There were ridges on his hands where her teeth had sunk in during the struggle. ‘Take food for her regularly,’ he instructed the maid and secured a lock on the terrace room. On her next attempted escape, a week later, it was his brother who caught her, late in the night, when he was out to empty his bowels and saw a tiny figure reaching the gates. She screamed as his brother kicked her in the windy courtyard and upturned a pail of frozen water on her body. Afterwards, he locked himself with her in the terrace room. Prakash lay awake in the front room, counting his exhales. It wasn’t until two hours later that his brother came out.

‘Tell your bride to behave.’ They were on a crowded bus to the kirana. ‘The next time, I won’t be lenient. She’ll be killed. She is spoiling our reputation.’ Prakash decided to talk to her that night. He switched on the yellow bulb. She was on the floor with the back against the wall, with the same unfocused expression she had that first evening when she had arrived, three months ago.

‘I want to go back home,’ she had murmured in her medicine-induced sleep, a few weeks ago. She had fallen asleep in Prakash’s arms after popping a pain-killer tablet he had procured from the government pharmacy. She had twisted her ankle on her way to the kitchen to make him sweetened curd. It was only when Prakash made his way up that he saw her, teary, on the stairs. He carried her to the room. ‘I want to go back home,’ she mumbled again, before her breath on his chest became even. He shook the thought from his head. It was already noon.

He was heading for his bath, when it was discovered. The old maid ran down the stairs, crying, ‘The skeleton left, the skeleton ran away, she isn’t there.’ Prakash followed his brother upstairs. Everything was in place – cot by the wall, a steel water jug and a tumbler, a small carton under the cot that housed her possessions – three faded cotton sarees and a few trinkets she had collected. Except her, and the brass bangles he pushed into her wrists the previous night, everything was in place. Fuming, his brother held him by the neck, ‘This time, I will kill her.’ He prayed silently as his brother made phone calls on the landline. At the bus stop last night, Prakash had tightened his silver shawl around his bride’s shivering body and pressed a few notes into her palm. She must have crossed over to the nearest town. It had a railway station. He heard the timid coo of a koel as his brother stormed towards him. Prakash swallowed the memory of the runny sweetened curd.