Someone Else's Garden Read Online Free PDF Page A

kind of day he’d got used to.
    He wasn’t disappointed with his wife. She’s a good woman, he thought, looking at her working with her chunni pulled low over her head. Then he saw the wet patch on the back of her blouse and felt something rush up from inside and grab his throat. Her knife flicked little potato peels on the floor. Her bangles jangled. Her feet stuck out under her ghaghra. She’d wiggled her toes, a spot of sparkle played on her toe ring. He was by her side in a second. He took the knife out of her hand. Caught her by the wrist and led her to the cow shed. She followed, a little like a tethered cow herself. ‘I have to show her the new calf, it looked sickly this morning,’ he’d said to his father over his shoulder.
    His father smiled. ‘Of course you do.’
    Seeta Ram bedded his wife in the cow shed, his seed mixing with his father’s inside her. That time too, Lata Bai said nothing, just shut her eyes to see those little green spots again.
    Her father-in-law managed to rape her five more times. At first Lata Bai just stared at her mother-in-law with intense eyes as deep as drought wells, but the older woman refused to understand. So she didn’t keep quiet during the sixth rape, but screamed and screamed so that the world might hear her. The world didn’t hear her, but the person she most wanted to did . . .
    ‘Your bapu’s mother didn’t buy the transistor radio. Instead she got your bapu his own field, and that’s how we came upriver to live here in Gopalpur.’ At least that last rape hadn’t been in vain.
    Lata Bai holds on to her daughter’s eyes for a long time. ‘My life changed for the better after I moved here with your bapu . . . we made this house ourselves,’ she says, falsely recalling her own early months as wedded bliss. ‘Remember, the first months are the best, enjoy them. You build so much together, lay a foundation for yourself and your children,’ she says convincingly. In truth it wasn’t until months after Mamta was born that they’d gathered enough clay from the riverbed and wood from the forest and begged a stack of hay from their neighbour’s field to build their hut. The hut hasn’t changed much, it is still just one large room where the family cooks, sleeps and dreams.
    ‘But you will also have to work hard,’ she needlessly warns her industrious daughter, ‘maybe even harder than you do here. There will be only two of you there, here we are five . . . But I know you will do whatever you have to. You have never shirked work. And believe me, you will be rewarded, just as I was . . .
    ‘Our first wheat was marvellous, each stalk fat with grain without a single telltale black powdery ear that could ruin the whole crop. It was such a good time to bring a baby into the world, Mamta. Fat wheat dancing over my head, a hut to live in, and not a rupee in debt. And then you appeared, just before the wheat turned golden. A beautiful plump baby girl.’
    Lata Bai looks away, she can remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. She’d rushed home with her new baby. ‘Can you hear me?’ she’d cried. ‘Can you hear me? Our baby’s come. Our baby’s here,’ she’d shouted again and again. Seeta Ram came running from the latrine, washing his hands quickly in the ditch. Lata Bai had held the baby out to him. Even wrinkled up and bruised from birth, she thought Mamta was a beauty. ‘She’s beautiful, no?’
    Seeta Ram had jerked back from his wife as if he’d been stung. ‘You called me this loud for a girl? Do you want us to celebrate and tell the whole world of this baby girl? God, did you have to give me a girl?’ he’d said, and walked out of the house leaving Lata Bai standing holding Mamta out to him as if she was a temple offering.
    Girl or otherwise, that’s when Seeta Ram became ‘Mamta’s father’. That’s right, from that day to this, Seeta Ram has been called Mamta’s father and nothing else by his wife. ‘Arey-oh, Mamta’s father,