Water. Bapsi Sidhwa
eyes. But her task accomplished, the aggrieved woman trudged off without a word of explanation or a backward glance. Chuyia realized with a stab of shock that she had ceased to matter to this woman.
The smashing of the bangles was the first of many rituals designed to mark Chuyia’s descent into widowhood. One of the hired women attending to their party led Chuyia through an arch in the wall and into a damp little room. Before Chuyia could protest, the woman pulled down her skirt and pulled her blouse up over her neck and, saying, “You can’t wear colours or stitched clothes,” threw them in a heap to one side. She hunkered down and in swift, sleight-of-hand motions removed the girl’s silver anklets and secreted them on her person. Chuyia stood naked as the day she was born, staring at the vibrant little red-and-blue heap her clothes made. The woman steered her beneath a spigot, and with her rough hands bathed her quickly and dried her with her discarded clothes. Chuyia’s skin erupted in goosebumps. Vulnerable and embarrassed, she stared at the woman in mute appeal.
“You are a young one, aren’t you?” said the woman staring at her perfectly made little body. “Here,” she said, holding out a white length of homespun cloth. “From now on you will have to wear what all widows wear. Come, I’ll tie the sari for you.”
She wound the cloth around Chuyia and draped it over one shoulder, leaving the other shoulder bare. The sari reached to just below Chuyia’s calves. The woman smoothed the cloth over Chuyia’s tight little buttocks and thighs, and pulled down the hem. Chuyia lowered her chin and glanced at her small bare shoulder, and the woman tut-tutted. “No blouse. I told you widows are not permitted to wear stitched cloth.”
Placing her hand on Chuyia’s back, she trotted the newly-minted widow out like a doll she had dressed up for all to see and gloried in their attention as the mildly-shocked mourners turned to stare sympathetically at the comely little widow.
The woman led Chuyia to one of the ghat’s barbers, a shaggy-haired, scruffy fellow with a fleshy lower lip, who squatted patiently on the steps to one side of Hira Lal’s pyre. There was genuine sadness on his face as he examined the child’s hair to decide how best to proceed. He had never tonsured such a young widow before. Chuyia turned her large sombre eyes on him, and he smiled at her kindly, then firmly turned her face forward. As he snipped off the first of her long tresses, the barber initiated the next ritual in Chuyia’s passage into widowhood.
Having lost all control over what was happening to her, Chuyia sat on the steps stoical and resigned. Deprived of sleep, disoriented by the change in location and the sweep of events she could not comprehend, she was in a daze.
The barber cut her hair in stages. He first cut it to a length of about three inches all over, then, with his swift-moving scissors, he clipped closer and closer to the scalp. With the confidence of a practised artisan, he held up the short tufts of her hair with one hand and, with his scissors, nimbly cropped her hair to within a centimetre of her scalp. Black hair littered Chuyia’s bare shoulder and her white sari. She kept her eyes tightly shut. Her fingers involuntarily tore at her sari as the barber held her firmly by the shoulder with one hand and ran his snipping scissors all over her scalp.
Somnath came and sat on the stone step below Chuyia. He had bathed and changed out of his grimy clothes. Resting his head on the palm of his hand, he watched the procedure covertly, through gaps in his fingers; there was an unaccustomed tremor in them, and his face held the cumulative sorrow of all fathers who had watched their young daughters go through this agonizing ritual. It was enforced by the belief that if the widow did not shave her head, every drop of water that fell upon the hair polluted the husband’s soul as many times as the number of hairs upon her head.
When there was nothing remaining but fine black stubble, the barber rubbed water all over Chuyia’s head. Then he took up a razor and began to drag it inch by inch over her scalp, turning her head gently to reach every area. He rolled up his shirt-sleeve and wiped the residue from the razor on his arm; it was soon covered with a black scum of hair. As the razor scraped across her scalp, Chuyia’s teeth were set on edge. Somnath noticed her toes curl, almost reflexively, in mute protest.
His wife had watched her sleeping daughter in the light of the moon and thought that she resembled the moon. Somnath, now looking at Chuyia’s round face and shorn head bathed in the glow from her husband’s pyre, thought she looked like the dawning sun. The fire outlined the edge of her high forehead and the full curve of her lips, her straight nose and her small chin. With her perfect small features and thick sweeping lashes, she looked unbearably beautiful. A drop of water, grey with stubble, made a trail down the side of her face and ended in the hollow at the base of her neck. Her head, now completely bare and pale, merged with her face to form a perfectly shaped orb.
Hira Lal’s pyre had burnt almost halfway down, and the flames darted here and there through the twigs. Out of the corner of his eyes, Somnath saw a man making pheras around the burning pyre. He was Hira Lal’s older son. He had never seen him before and he never saw him again.
Hira Lal’s body was cremated just before dawn. Their rituals at the ghats completed, the little group trudged through the narrow streets of Rawalpur. Holding a lantern, Hira Lal’s mother led the way down the dim alleyways. Chuyia walked silently behind her, clutching a small cloth bundle under one arm. Her feet were bare. Somnath followed closely behind Chuyia, holding a larger bundle and an umbrella with a silver handle. The sounds of roosters crowing and of dogs barking broke the silence. In the pre-dawn darkness, they passed a slightly open door; a slice of light fell through the slit, illuminating the cobbled street and an ancient, dilapidated wall. Chuyia, with the resilience of the very young, was again alive to the new stimuli and looked around her with inquisitive eyes. The walls were pockmarked with patches of brick that showed through the crumbled cement and flaking whitewash. Every instance of architecture appeared to be a crumbling, slowly disintegrating shell of once stalwart structures.
They continued up the cobbled streets until they came to an old building with stray patches of whitewash spared by the elements. A bicycle lay against a broken wall. Chuyia had never seen one before, and she turned to her father. His glance slid past her: it was no time for explanations. A tree grew out of the wall, its entwined willowy trunk crowned by patches of green. Hira Lal’s mother led them past it to a door with worn black paint. The walls on either side were marked with inverted swastikas, an ancient holy symbol. She walked up the steps and knocked.
A shadowy figure opened the door to reveal a dark hallway. Hira Lal’s mother gestured to them to remain outside, while she followed the figure in. Somnath and Chuyia sat on the front steps, placing their bundles at their sides. Chuyia looked around her, eyes wide with questions. She saw moving figures at the end of the hall where it was lighter, and against her father’s protests darted into the hallway and boldly walked down it.
Chuyia pressed a small hand to the wall of a parapet and peered over it into a courtyard. Barely two feet from where she stood, holding a string of wooden prayer beads between her fingers, a woman, who could as easily have been a man, sat on her haunches staring at her. She was very dark, and the thick white fuzz on her tonsured head made a stark contrast. Two ashen lines were drawn perpendicularly from the top of her forehead to a point between her eyebrows, giving her elongated face a fierce aspect. The woman acknowledged Chuyia’s presence with a slight nod that appeared to beckon her, as she continued to slowly rock back and forth on her haunches, counting her beads. A small plant sprouted from a crack at the base of a pillar near her. Chuyia vaguely registered the hectic chirrup of sparrows in the courtyard. The woman’s mouth was clamped in a sombre line, but her eyes were kind.
Chuyia, terrified by this frightening apparition, turned away and rushed back down the hall to her father, hurriedly saying, “Baba, let’s go home; Baba, let’s go home. I don’t like this place.”
Somnath pulled her down beside him on the step and said, “This is your home now, bitya.”
Chuyia’s face