Revised from the original on May 29, 2022
Tea boiled to a rippled thin skin on top but Bhavna did not seem to notice. She stared at her daughter’s old hair band hanging from a wall hook in the kitchen as if seeing the tangled curly hair strands for the first time. The call with the police inspector in Ratara had ended three minutes ago, but Bhavna was still holding the feature mobile phone in her fist and cataloguing the items she was told to bring right away to Ratara Government Hospital. She did not know the extent of her daughter’s injuries, but from what the inspector said, Bhavna knew Uma did not have much time in this world. Uma, I am coming, she said as she reached for the head band. Please wait for me.
“Oye, have you died or what?” Bhavna’s mother-in-law shouted, entering the kitchen. “The tea has been boiling for so long. Who called?”
Bhavna rushed to pour water and milk into the now evaporated tea, stubbing her second toe on the steel trunk she had pushed to one corner of the mud-walled kitchen. The room was full of the smell of overboiled ginger tea and Bhavna thought of the charred smell of dead bodies being burnt on the side of Gomti river. She shook her head and slapped her forehead.
“Arre, who called?”
“No one,” Bhavna said. “Just Airtel company.” She refused to call out Uma’s name that October morning. If Bhavna had told her in-laws the truth about the girl’s body found in the rain by a passerby, the old man would have said, “You didn't listen to me all life. See what happens when you don't listen to the only man in the house.” Through the small window of the kitchen Bhavna listened to the morning call of the cuckoo from the neem tree and pretended that everything was just as usual.
She put the tea glass in front of her in-laws in the courtyard. Then she quickly went to the cowshed behind the kitchen and put fodder in front of Piku and Manasi, the two cows the family reared. Uma had given the calf the name Piku when she was born four years ago. Bhavna now watched mother and daughter gobble the fodder. She placed water pots in front of their mouth. “Eat well, Piku. You were hungry na?” Bhavna said as she rubbed her stomach gently. She sighed and thought about Uma. “Will your didi come back?” she whispered.
When Bhavna returned to the kitchen, she told her mother-in-law that she had given the food to the cows.
“Did you offer water, too, or just food?” the old woman shouted.
“Haan,” Bhavna said, while wrapping two rotis from last night and a pickle of red chillies in a newspaper. “The old woman doesn't let me breathe for a moment,” she said under her breath. She removed the bedding and pillow she had folded and placed on top of her steel trunk two hours ago when she got up to prepare for the day. She opened the trunk and took the money that she had saved from her work as a sweeper and tucked it inside her bra. She also took out the old plastic packet that contained her Adhaar card, Uma’s birth certificate, and her husband Manoj’s death certificate and placed it in her handbag, adjusting the broken zipper in the middle so that things would not fall out of the bag. Before leaving, she surveyed the one room house she shared with her in-laws and the courtyard outside. She watched as the old woman sipped tea, stopping only to kill lice in between her thumbs. The old man threw the last remains of the tea glass into the corner of the courtyard where a patch of dried grass was dying of thirst.
Wait for me, Uma.
She left the one-room house at 7:40 am, ten minutes earlier than normal, without saying a word to her in-laws as was the custom when she would go to work every morning. Bhavna was a sweeper of a one km stretch of National Highway 19. She was holding her daughter’s hair band in her hand. As she closed the tin door she overheard her mother-in-law say what a nasty woman she was. “God forbid Uma doesn’t go after her mother.”
Bhavna walked quickly to the bus station of Mainpuri. A country chicken was picking food from rubbish. Pigs were grunting in the mud. When she entered the Thakur neighborhood, Bhavna increased her pace of walking to avoid hearing another string of abuses hurled at her for taking the common path used by both Brahmins and Thakur families of Mainpuri village. The longer, circuitous path which went around the village was demarcated only for the caste of Bhavna and her likes. There were no trees to offer shade on this narrow path; the unwavering sun melted the asphalt. If she had taken the circuitous path, Bhavna would have missed the bus to Ratara. She would have missed Uma. Bhavna quickened her pace, pausing for a moment by the stump of the large gulmohar tree, cut down perhaps in the darkness of the night. This had been the only gulmohar tree of Mainpuri village. During summer, the flame of the red flowers touched the blue sky. Uma would often steal the fallen flowers and bring them home.
At Manipuri bus terminal, Bhavna took a window seat on the bus to Ratara. She removed her chappals and placed the pair in the narrow gap between her body and the sidewall of the bus. The soles had disintegrated into a half circle. It was Sunday morning, and yet the bus was crowded. Bhavna muffled a cough with her red dupatta as men, women and children with bags and jhola continued to board. Diwali was two weeks away. People were travelling to Allahabad, three hours from Mainpuri, for shopping. A mother and a little girl settled on the seat before her. The girl wore a purple frock and her curly hair was tied into two braids that fell by her ears. The girl was looking through the window and her mouth was tinged with an orange flavoured Pepsi stick that she sucked. When Uma was eight years of age, she went to the village kirana store and from a distance looked at all the new products that had arrived: the Lays chips and lozenges, the chewing gums, bhujia and biscuits. On that hot afternoon, a loo wind blew through Mainpuri. Uma waited for all customers to go.
“Oye girl, what do you want?” the upper caste shopkeeper had asked.
“The new Bhujia,” the girl said. “But I have no money.”
“Get money from home and I will give you,” he said. But Uma remained standing till it was time for the store to close for the afternoon. After a while, the shopkeeper threw the Bhujia packet to her. “Five rupees,” he said. “Tell your father to pay me later.” Uma had danced her way to Bhavna and narrated the incident. Bhavna scolded her headstrong daughter but paid back the shopkeeper the following week.
Umi, I will come to you soon.
The bus left at 9:37 am for Ratara and slumped along the muddy road. When the bus entered the outlying area of a town called Nimai Ganj two hours later, the conductor announced that a curfew was now in effect in Ratara and the bus would go no further. Bhavna could feel herself getting hot. It was only natural that her tuberculosis fever came and went. But who knew if it was the TB or worry over Uma causing the intense heat in her body. She watched as people who were traveling to Allahabad got down and took another bus. The girl in the purple frock and her mother were among them. Bhavna waited along with the other passengers for Ratara. The Nimai Ganj bus ticket agent told Bhavna that a mob had set fire to buses and police vehicles because there was some girl issue. He sat inside the solitary mesh ticket counter in front of a rotating table fan.
“Is there any other bus to Ratara?” Bhavna asked.
“What’s the hurry? If the curfew is lifted, you can take the evening bus to Ratara,” he said.
Bhavna sat on one of the benches and sorted out the tangled curly hair strands from Uma’s hair band. She had never seen a curfew in her life. But she heard it on the television news whenever police took over the streets during a Hindu-Muslim riot or protests over a boy-girl affair. She coughed into her dupatta and watched the sky turn from orange, to grey, to black. Bhavna hoped that by the time she arrived at Ratara Government Hospital, Uma would still be breathing.
The bus for Ratara finally came at 11:49 PM and left at forty-five minutes past midnight. Bhavna was now the only woman passenger on the bus. The driver told them that they would take a roundabout route to Ratara and arrive in the morning. The air in the bus was hot and Bhavna coughed throughout the ride. A man in a faded red shirt approached her past 2 o' clock in the night. His cheeks were pushed inwards, and he carried a smell of tannery. “Why do you cough so much? he said, taking out a bidi from his pocket. “Don’t you know people are sleeping? Saali kahika.” Fearing an attack, she quickly folded her dupatta and wrapped it around her face so that she would not annoy the man further. If it were Uma, she thought, she would have stood her ground without fear. At eleven years of age, Uma had abused two upper-caste girls in the school because they called her ‘kali ladki.’ “Where do you get so much anger? Eh?” her father had said. “Fighting with everyone. Will you let us live in peace or not?”
At 7:27, Bhavna got off the bus, jumped over a pothole filled with rain and took a cycle rickshaw.
“Hospital?” she asked.
“Thirty rupees.”
They crossed the rail line and entered the town. The two-way road was separated by a line of dwarfed Gulmohar trees that had shed flowers long back. Bhavna looked away. Gated four-storey houses lined the streets, and bougainvillea trees swelled from inside the walls. Women in orange vests were sweeping the road. Most shops remained closed even though the curfew was lifted last evening.
The rickshawwalla had a red gamcha on his shoulders. “Is your relative admitted to the hospital?” he asked.
Bhavna nodded. Thinking the rickshawwalla might have been lower-caste, too, Bhavna asked if he could ride fast.
“Yesterday there was curfew. A girl from Central College was raped. I did not get any passengers yesterday because of that harami. You are the first customer!”
Bhavna clutched the sides of the rickshaw with both hands and pressed down her feet on the frame opposite her to support herself as the rickshawwalla paddled faster on the potholed road. Police posts and vans from Ajkal News and Star Khabar channels were parked on the road to the government hospital. In September, Uma had applied to be a reporter at a weekly women-run newspaper. “I want to write about crimes against women in Ratara,” Uma told her family. The old man did not agree. “Don’t you dare anger the Thakurs. They can do anything to you,” he had shouted from the khatiya.
Whenever Uma was home and went out in Mainpuri to collect fodder, the boys of Thakurs would grab her hand, harass her. One afternoon, in early August, when rains were still falling on both Dalit and Thakur lands, Bhavna and Uma cut the grasses in a field close to their house. Four Thakur boys came up to them; two of them held Bhavna, and the other two grabbed Uma and began to slap her. Earlier that day, Uma and her girlfriends sat on a rock platform in the village where the Thakur boys usually sat and gossiped. That was their crime.
The old woman heard their cries and came running with a stick. “If you have balls, lay your hand on me instead of the little girl,” the old woman told the boys.
The tall boy with the most fair skin moved towards her. “If I had my way, I will not take a moment to finish you all.” Then he signaled the other boys to let go of the women. Before he left he warned them. “That place is not for women to sit at all, let alone, for girls of Bhangi caste. Next time, you will not have clothes on your body.”
After this incident, the old man had been persistent in saying Uma needed to get married, otherwise her character would be ruined and no man even of their caste would marry her. Bhavna had nodded in agreement even though she was married at 16 and moments of peace cracked rarely in their married life. After cleaning sewer, Manoj would drink, come after her like a rakhsash and she would let him do. Without a word. “If you get married in a good house,” Bhavna said, “may be they would allow you to study and work, who knows?” But after winning a scholarship that would take care of tuition and hostel fees of Central College of Ratara, Uma stopped listening to everyone in the family except her dadi.
“The girl tempted them,” the rickshawwalla said. He rang the bell to alert a few schoolboys who thought that with the curfew they could play cricket on an abandoned road. “I have a daughter around the same age as that girl. I lock her up after sundown.” After the boys moved aside, he passed through without knocking down the wicket.
“You talk a lot,” Bhavna said. “Ride faster.”
The large gates of houses on both sides of the road remained locked and no one came outside or went inside. There was not one woman to be seen on the road. Bhavna leaned sideways with the quick turns the rickshaw took, trying to support herself by holding onto the frame so that she did not fail. The sound of the rickshaw on the rough gravel covered Bhavna’s coughs. When it finally screeched to a stop before the hospital, she gave the fare to the rickshawwalla. He hesitated before he pointed and asked her to wipe the blood trace from her face. The time on her feature mobile phone was 7: 52.
There was no one in the reception area. She found a young boy sweeping the corridor of the hospital. It smelled of antiseptic and bleach.
“Do you know which bed number is Uma’s?”
He looked surprised, “Uma?”
“The girl who was admitted to the hospital yesterday?”
“Who?”
“The one police found on the road...assaulted?”
“You mean, raped? Ohh. She passed away this morning. The body is in the morgue.”
It was exactly eight on the hospital clock.
Bhavna turned back. Uma, couldn’t you have listened to me once? How could I have come without a bus? she shouted.
She had to walk through an alley covered with medical waste to get to the morgue. The boy followed her. The sewage water from the hospital formed a pool and shrubs grew surrounding it. Bhavna went inside the morgue and stood in front of a wire-mesh counter where a man sat at his desk reading a newspaper.
“I am Uma Singh’s mother,” Bhavna said behind her dupatta. It was 8:22. The man looked up and asked, “Whose?” The boy responded on her behalf “Arre, the girl from Central College.”
The man folded the newspaper hastily. “She passed away,” he said, before disappearing inside. The once white room was grey now and its corners were stained with paan spit. A fan whirred with a creaking noise as if someone was pushing the blades.
The medical officer entered the office. He was wearing eyeglasses and a clean, ironed shirt. “Please come inside,” the officer said. The officer sat down behind a large table. Bhavna kept standing. He opened a red register, turned the pages with his saliva, and started writing down on a new page. He asked his clerk to inform the police officer.
“Have you come alone?” the medical officer asked.
Bhavna nodded.
“Where is the girl’s father?”
Manoj’s lifeless body was pulled out of a septic tank seven years back on another October morning. It was Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday. She had been sitting in the courtyard, combing twelve-year old Uma’s hair when the news arrived. Becoming a widow at 29 years of age made Bhavna feel like a dying bullock ploughing a dry field.
“He passed away many years ago,” Bhavna said to the officer. She took out her voter card, her daughter’s birth certificate and Manoj’s death certificate and placed them on the table and moved away.
“Didn’t you prevent her from going astray?”
Bhavna thought about the little girl with the large eyes and two curly hair braids who would follow her wherever she went, from the kitchen, to the outside bathroom. Bhavna would beat her, threaten her, but nothing could make her stop. Finally, Bhavna tied her up at the window and Uma would make such a noise that her cry would echo even in the neighborhood of Thakurs.
Bhavna looked at him directly. “Can I see her?” she said.
“What will you do by seeing her? She is no more. You are her mother, and you won’t be able to control yourself.”
The man verified the documents one by one. Someone turned up the speed of the fan in the morgue, and it groaned like the wheels of a fast-moving bullock cart. Bhavna noticed outside the wire mesh counter a crowd gathered. She recognized the man in the dusty red shirt from the same bus she had travelled in from Mainpuri. He stood at the window with his raised arms holding the wire mesh, gaping at her. The rickshawwalla was at his side. The morgue clock was at nine.
“How will you take the body?” the medical officer asked.
“Whose body?” Bhavna asked.
The officer and his clerk stared at her. The clerk told her to sit down on the floor.
A reporter of Ajkal News waited patiently to thrust a mic in front of Bhavna’s face, to show the first reactions of the mother of the rape victim. The First Information Report stated that from her hospital bed, Uma had named three Thakur boys from her college in a complaint to police. Fear gripped Bhavna as she listened to the reporter. No one from Bhangi caste in Mainpuri or Ratara had ever accused Thakur of rape.
What did you do, Uma? How will we continue to live with the Thakurs in Mainpuri?
The boys had their turns one by one. Uma kicked them and bit into their arms so hard that when the police took them the next morning, all three were wearing slings. She was dragged from the car and left on the road, barely conscious.
Bhavna thought of Uma and remained standing. “I can pay for the hearse,” she finally said.
She tried to shut her ears as the reporter talked about her daughter, how she was late returning for her college hostel’s curfew time of 8:00. She had been watching the film Lipstick under my Burkha on Saturday. It was raining. Uma told the police in the hospital that she had waited for an auto under the extended cover of a government office, but none came by. The rain intensified and she considered walking since it was already 7:52. The police had asked Uma, “How can you be sure it was 7:52 and not 7:55?” “Girls who live in hostels check the watch minute by minute, because our lives depend on it,'' she said from her elevated hospital bed. “A minute late, you are thrown out of the hostel.”
When Uma was fourteen, her grandfather had asked her to stop high school because it involved a two-kilometre walk by the neighborhoods of Thakur. Uma said, “I would carry a stick and a knife. Dare they come near me!”
“How will you fight all those four-five boys?”
“I can’t stop school because of the boys.”
“Tell your daughter that these things don’t happen in our world,” the old man said to Bhavna. “What was the need to go to school if something happened to her on the way?”
The fact that Uma, a girl of lower-caste, accused the upper-caste Thakur boys of rape had never happened in the history of Ratara. It pulled the people out of their homes and installed them in front of the hospital like a magnet. When the Ajkal News reporter finished narrating the incident, the Star Khabar reporter asked how many more girls would be sacrificed before this plague would stop. When would the country wake up? she said. Everyday eighty-seven women reported rape in this country, meaning, one woman was raped every fifteen minutes. She read tweets of Meena Irani, a BJP politician, that parents should keep a vigilant watch on their daughters and teach them proper values. A Congress spokesperson, Sajani Singh said, these were stray incidents and not all men were like that. The Bollywood actress, Sangita Kapoor, posted that no country in the world was as safe for women as our country was because goddesses were worshipped in every house. With their satellite-vans and cameras, the New Delhi-based reporters made the mortuary center of Ratara into a spectacle.
The man in the dusty red shirt asked the Ajkal News reporter on live television if the police caught the boys. The reporter pushed him out of his live TV frame. But the rickshawwalla filled in the details. The police found the boys at the office of the councillor, because they thought that was the safest place to hide. When the police van ferried the three boys to the station at 9:44 Sunday morning, a mob followed it. It was a rally with cars, men with sticks, and a few women, too. People in the rally said the boys were protecting the girls while unknown thugs did it. Someone else said, these boys from respected houses were being framed without lack of evidence. It was a price they were paying for being upper caste. Everyone asked, what was Uma doing late into the night? Oh, she was into prostitution for pocket money because she came from a poor family. Yes, she was not from a respected family, everyone nodded in agreement. The mob set the police vehicles on fire, and the magistrate declared curfew at 11:30 Sunday morning.
“Sign here,” the medical officer said, showing her a blank space on the register. He had already written details of the dead person and her claimant.
Bhavna first pressed her thumb on the inkpad and then on the register. The officer turned pages for her, wherever she had to sign as proof that she was Uma’s mother. All the ID cards had her father’s name as legal guardian.
“You had to rein her,” the officer said, rubbing his forehead. As a mother, you are responsible for what happened to her.”
Bhavna finished putting her thumbprints on all places and stood back away from the table, upright. “She was my only child,” she said without a trace of fear. “Uma was the first person in our family to learn to read.”
“What can one do! This is the rule of the life here,” he said. “Will you agree to their settlement offer?” he asked, while turning the pages with his saliva and confirming whether all the required places had her thumbprint.
Bhavna knew the Thakurs would soon make their standard proposal to pay about Rs 5 lakhs, an out-of-the-court amount. Bhavna and her family would have to leave the village and move to a city where there would be no walls between Thakur or Bhangi. Her father-in-law would be interested in building a proper house with the money. What would her mother-in-law like to do? Bhavna thought she would decide on their way back to Mainpuri. She needed to know what Uma thought of it.
“Uma, you bring all this trouble. I can’t slap you now, but that doesn't mean that I am not angry with you. This is not right what you have done.”
The officer looked flushed. “The boys would spend their youth in prison when they could have made high paying careers,” he said. “They are good students, you know. Now that your daughter has died, there are murder charges, too. They might be hanged.”
The medical officer continued in his homily voice, “You are a poor woman. No one can bring your daughter back. But, at least, take the money and you will be able to live the rest of your life comfortably.”
Bhavna did not respond. When Manoj died, her father-in-law met with the local administrative office and told them that taking financial help from their son’s widow was not good for family pride, and out of sympathy for the old man, they disbursed Bhavna’s salary to him, instead. He then handed over less than a quarter of the money to his daughter-in- law for her monthly expenses.
When all the formalities were completed, the medical officer asked Bhavna to pay the mortuary van half before starting the journey, and the rest on reaching Mainpuri. He then rose from the chair, wiped his face with a handkerchief and put his glasses back on. When he looked at the crowd that now swelled and extended to the road, he whispered to Bhavna to wait till the night when the crowd would disperse, and it would be safe for her to travel in the van with the body. Bhavna had been desperately waiting to touch Uma’s face. Now her daughter was cold.
“I am fine,” she said as she let the red dupatta drop from her mouth for the first time.
Bhavna left the mortuary and went into the crowd. She took out money from her bra to give to the hearse driver as an advance payment. She touched her daughter’s face and head gently. But when she tried to push the hairband on Uma's hair, it refused to sit on the curls firmly. The waters from Bhavna's eyes reached her mouth as mother and daughter began the journey back home together. The hearse van passed a gulmohar tree on the way, and for a brief moment Bhavna thought she saw its surprising scarlet flowers curling into the October sky. She was reminded of the felled flowers Uma stole from the gulmohar tree before it was cut down. From the passenger seat of the van, Bhavna spit salt and shame in a small pool of blood onto the road as the van sped towards Mainpuri.
Contributor Notes
Arpita Chakrabarty is a 2021 Kweli Fellow. Her journalism has been published on Al Jazeera, The Indian Express, The Hindu, The Wire, People's Archive of Rural India, among others. She also works as a consultant in the intersection of gender, sexuality and technology with women and LGBTQ groups in India. Arpita began her MFA in Creative Writing at Cornell University in Fall 2021.
