He looks from Daddy to Mummy, to the embers of the fire, to the chicken curry.
“In our household,” Daddy says, “we have different rules. It doesn’t matter where you come from. We’re all human beings, and all humans are the same. Do you know what that means?”
Ajay says nothing.
“It means if anyone asks who you are and where you come from,” Daddy goes on, “you tell them this: I come from a Kshatriya household.”
Ajay lowers his eyes to the plate.
“Say it,” Daddy says, elongating the words. “I come from a Kshatriya household.”
Ajay looks to Mummy; she nods at him encouragingly.
“I live in a Kshatriya household,” he whispers.
“No,” Daddy says. “You come from one now, OK?”
Ajay nods. “I come from one.”
“Very good,” Daddy says, job done. “Now eat.”
He tries.
He makes a ball of rice and dal. Stares at it.
But he cannot lift it to his mouth.
He seems paralyzed.
“What’s wrong?” Daddy says, putting his spoon down pointedly.
“What’s wrong, child?” Mummy leans toward him so he can whisper in her ear.
After he speaks, she looks at Daddy with troubled eyes.
“He wants to know,” she says gently, “if he can eat down there”—she pauses and shifts her eyes—“on the floor.”
Daddy takes a long deliberate breath that communicates his feelings better than any words.
“I told you,” he says to Mummy.
“I know,” she replies.
“Very well,” he says to Ajay, switching back to Hindi. “Take one of the metal plates and go.”
Ajay jumps down from the table and fetches one of the cheap metal trays. He transfers the contents of his china plate and loads up some more chicken and hurries to the corner of the kitchen, where he sits cross-legged, with his back turned, stuffing his face. It’s more in one meal than he’s eaten in a week—he feels that his stomach will burst.
After dinner, when Mummy and Daddy are resting, he is charged with doing the washing-up. When everything is clean, Mummy shows him how to make warm milk with turmeric.
“The day starts at five,” Daddy says, as Ajay squats drinking his haldi doodh by the fire. The heat is hypnotic. He has the urge to lie down and sleep right there. But when it’s done, he’s given sandals and sent down the cold steps, shivering in the damp air, locking himself in the room, covering himself with as many blankets as he can find, lying in the grief-stricken dark, waiting for dawn.
5.
Winter is ending, spring is coming, the snow is clearing, and the cattle will be taken to graze again soon. At the farm he is shown the cows, taught how to give fodder to the animals and clean out their sheds, take them for milking, tie them up to graze. Every morning Ajay must run up and fetch two pitchers of milk for the house. The rest will be delivered by the farm workers for Ajay to process for ghee or bottle to be sold.
The work is hard and he’s always tired, but he eats three meals a day and no one abuses him or threatens to kill him. It’s a better life than any he’s ever hoped for or known. Each morning he has his glass of fresh milk and several hot rotis doused in the finest ghee. The lunches and dinners he makes, using recipes passed on from Mummy, are full of fresh vegetables, and the rice never runs out.
In his free moments, when no one is looking, Ajay loves to roll around the stepped garden, muddying himself in the grass, jumping from each small terrace down to the next, descending just like the house toward the valley floor, toward the wide and powerful river. Over and over, every week a little more meat on his bones, a few more words in his mouth, a laugh, a smile. Then the guilt comes, and he comforts himself with the lie Daddy taught him. His family are living well now because of him. He builds a vision of their day. His sacrifice has paved the way for their prosperity. He tells himself this over and over until he can’t remember the truth. He decides that he likes it here. He likes to run through the trees, to play with the farm dogs, to splash cold water on his face, to sit with Mummy beside the fire in the night. And he discovers something else: It gives him pleasure to please, it gives him pleasure to anticipate every possible need, not just Mummy’s and Daddy’s but everyone’s, the farm workers’, the animals’, the shopkeepers’ pleasure. Not just pleasure, not really, more like the stanching of a wound, more like the holding of a tide, a sacrifice, negating the trauma of his birth.
* * *