ELEVEN
Geeta stopped. As did her heart.
“Farahben?” he asked, and Geeta panted inelegantly. The sun eclipsed behind the officer’s head. The twins left.
“That’s me,” Farah said from the porch. She took her time locating and donning her sandals. Meanwhile, Geeta aged a decade. The cop greeted Farah, his notebook sandwiched between his pressed palms. “Namaskar.” Farah brought a cupped hand near her forehead. “Salaam.”
He looked at Geeta and then his notepad. “And you are?”
“Geeta.” Her damp palms met in a greeting. “Ram Ram.”
“Jai Shree Krishna,” he said. “You loaned Farahben and her husband money, yes?”
“Well, just Farah,” Geeta said, toying with her ear. “For our loan, the group’s.”
The officer nodded. “I see.” He made a note that Geeta knew would spell her doom. Then he ignored her. “I have some questions for you, Farahben. Can we speak in private?”
They walked away, leaving Geeta and her limp lungs. She looked around, her heart hyper and alone. Children were playing; people done with chores were drinking tea and reading papers, playing cards and smoking hookah. Though restless, she walked slowly, stalling. She passed a woman snapping neem twigs for teeth cleaning into a basket.
Near her home, two boys hovered over a dead dog. They were young but their proximity, not their curiosity, should have struck Geeta as odd, since no one here would touch a carcass; they’d summon a Dom—a subcaste of the Dalits—from the southern part of the village to drag away animals for tanning, or carry humans to their funeral pyres. But none of her thoughts were this organized. The dead dog hijacked her attention, which had previously been obsessing over what the cop was asking Farah. For a terrible moment, Geeta thought the body belonged to Bandit. But then the happy rascal bounded over, tail swishing as he barked. Relief sagged her shoulders. Her brain resumed. Geeta realized the barefoot boys weren’t inspecting the dog, but preparing to remove the carcass, signaling they were Doms. But they were quite young to be working.
Bandit raced to Geeta’s feet, yipping and jumping. Before Geeta could pet him, a woman approached to shoo him. She clapped her sandals together. “Hutt! Hutt!” She wore a sari, with the free end covering her head. Bandit did not heed her and she again smacked her chappals. Despite her nose ring, her wrists were bare.
“It’s okay!” Geeta said. “That’s my dog.”
The woman nodded once, slowly, while surveying Bandit. Her confusion was understandable; people didn’t voluntarily adopt extra mouths to feed. Animals were fed in exchange for utility. “Better that one than that one, I guess,” the woman said, pointing to the street dog on its side. Flies swarmed.
“Are you looking for someone?” Geeta asked. “I live right there, so I know everyone.”
“No, just here on business.” She still held her sandals.
“Oh, you work around here?”
She looked amused. “Not always, but I come when I’m called.”
Bandit wandered to survey his fallen compatriot, weaving around the boys’ legs and impeding their work.
Geeta called, “Bandit! Leave them alone!”
The younger child petted the dog.
“Oi!” the woman reprimanded the boy sharply. “No!”
“It’s okay. He won’t bite.”
“No. They’re my sons.” Which meant she was also a Dom, which meant she didn’t want to pollute Geeta’s things, dog included. “Yadav, I said no!”
During Geeta’s school days, the teacher always sat the Dalit students in the back, and they took their Midday Meal separately. Many parents were irritated by the panchayat’s ruling on Dalit integration, but the council insisted on complying with the law. Technically it was also illegal to ban Dalits from the wells and temples, but that segregation the council strictly followed. There’d been a girl in the third standard, a quiet girl with two braids whom Geeta would’ve considered part of their friend group; they all played together after their separate lunches and whenever she required water, one of the girls poured it for her since everyone knew she wasn’t permitted to touch the pump.
It never occurred to any of them that she was clever.
One day, the girl—Geeta couldn’t recall her name now, adding to her own guilt—received the highest marks on a math exam. This angered an upper-caste boy so much that he insisted she’d cheated, a theory the teacher readily investigated, seeing as how everyone knew “Harijans” didn’t have it in them to be sharp （such was their nature）。 The only hiccup was that there was zero evidence of her cheating, or even being able to since the school was short on textbooks and the girl, along with two other Dalit students, wasn’t given one. But this did not deter the boy, who started a ragging chant that they all—Geeta included—echoed. It must’ve been something about her being smelly, because Geeta recalled everyone pinching their noses.
That girl’s achievement mattered little; she—as Geeta herself would feel later in life—was only as successful as those around her allowed her to be. At playtime, it was understood that anyone who gave the cheating chuhra water would be next in line for the boy’s wrath. So, she waited near the pump in the heat, children blithely passing to drink their fill, until class resumed. Things slid back to normal after a few days but, by the fifth standard, the girl had dropped out.
Years later, Geeta knew that she hadn’t joined the chant out of any acute hate, but neither had she possessed enough compassion to abstain. Bystanders shoulder their own blame, and Geeta was now shamefully puzzled as to why a tiny act of bravery had been so beyond her.
“They can play,” Geeta said to the woman, guilt tearing her chest like Bandit pawing at dirt. If she were honest, she felt more remorse over how they’d treated that clever girl than the fact that she’d helped kill Samir; one hadn’t deserved it. “He really likes children.”
The woman looked at Geeta as she told her son, “It’s okay, Yadav.” She was likely about a decade older than Geeta, but her eyes already bore the blue rings that heralded cataracts. While not fat, she was a curvaceous woman, which her sari could not disguise.
“So you…” Geeta trailed off, looking between the boys and their mother. “I just assumed. Never seen a woman…you know.”
The business of corpses—collecting, preparing, burning—was reserved for Dalit men, specifically Doms. The villagers didn’t encounter many Dom women because they were usually housebound. Many Dalit families confined their daughters in purdah, where it was easier to shield them from upper-caste men’s concupiscences. Easier perhaps, but not completely effective; Geeta recalled the recent cases brought before the village panchayat—those poor girls assaulted at dawn while relieving themselves. Historically, Dom women tended to night soil, but here the villagers either went out in the fields or used their new plumbing, so there was little reason for the women to wander across the tacit line. Bigger areas like cities still forced the need for manual scavengers, which Geeta didn’t think about too often. But now, talking to this woman, Geeta felt ashamed of wanting things like refrigerators.