The police descended with their questions and unsubtle hints that they could be paid to focus on another case. Upon realizing Geeta had little to either her married or maiden name, they scampered away. The village, however, remained unconvinced of her clean chit, and gave her the wide berth bestowed to any social pariah. There were rumors she was a churel of old folklore: a witch roaming on reversed feet, targeting men for revenge, her twisted footprints ensuring they ran toward her rather than away.
To the village, she became a disease, her name a slur. She was, as the idiom went, “mixed with dirt.” To now say, with the acclimation five years afforded, that it had not been humiliating would be a lie. Once, early on, when she was still na?ve enough to believe not everything had changed with Ramesh’s defection, she’d paid a visit to her favorite second aunt, a spinster. After Geeta knocked on the green door, its paint flaking to piebald, a shower of rotting potato peels, tomato offal and eggshells, among other wet waste, tumbled over her. Geeta looked up to see her Deepa-aunty, her wrinkles and loathing framed by the second-story window, holding an empty pail and instructing Geeta to leave and take her shame with her.
She complied, while the neighbors tittered, her hair matted with tea dregs. On the walk home, for courage, she thought of the Bandit Queen, and the stories Geeta had compiled of her life from the radio and newspapers, though the accounts often contradicted each other. Born in 1963 as simply Phoolan Mallah, a Dalit girl in a small village, she’d been eleven when she vehemently protested her cousin’s theft of her family’s land. The cousin beat her unconscious with a brick. In order to send her away and out of trouble, her parents married her to a thirty-three-year-old man. He’d beaten and raped her, but when she ran away, the village sent her right back to him and his abusive second wife. When she was sixteen, the same diabolical cousin arranged for her to be thrown in jail for the first （but not last） time. She spent three days being beaten and raped in jail at her cousin’s behest. Soon after, she ran to or was kidnapped by—accounts varied—a gang of armed robbers known as dacoits. If Phoolan could not only survive but escape and exact savage revenge on her tormentors, then surely Geeta could walk home while people stared at the rancid rinds hanging from her neck.
Eventually, she taught herself to enjoy the perks of ostracism, as she imagined Phoolan would’ve done. The upsides of being a childless churel-cum-murderess: raucous kids never played kabaddi near her house （She’ll gobble you like a peeled banana!）， vendors rarely haggled with her （She can bankrupt you with one blink!）， some of Ramesh’s creditors even left her alone （She’ll curse your wife with nothing but stillborns!）。 Then the microfinancers came around, offering low-interest loans. City people were hell-bent on helping them—women only, please—acquire independence and income.
Hell yes, Geeta had thought, and signed her name. She’d first eaten her father’s salt, then her husband’s; it was time to eat her own. After Ramesh left, money’s importance had suddenly rivaled oxygen’s. With the first cash installment, she walked three hours to Kohra and bought beads and thread in bulk. She scavenged a wobbly desk and pinned a grainy photograph of the Bandit Queen above her workspace to remind her that if she was indeed “mixed with dirt,” then at least she was in fine company.
At first, sales were nil. Superstitious brides, it turned out, weren’t keen on wearing black magic wedding necklaces cursed by a self-made widow. But after two short-lived weddings where the brides were sent back to their natal homes, the village’s superstitions swung in her favor. If one did not petition a Geeta’s Designs mangalsutra, one’s marriage would last about as long as the bridal henna did.
She wasn’t respected here, but she was feared, and fear had been very kind to Geeta. Things were good, freedom was good, but Geeta had witnessed that survival was contingent upon two hard rules: 1） take on only one loan, and 2） spend it on the work. It was an easy trap to sign for multiple microloans and then buy a house or a television set. Poor, myopic Runi had taken on three loans for her tobacco-leaf-rolling business but had spent it on her son’s education instead. Then the money and her son were gone and, just like that, so was Runi.
Farah’s unwelcome visit had delayed Geeta’s planned errands. The sky darkened under twilight’s thumb as she closed her front door, but Geeta still needed vegetables and some grain to be ground. Her empty jute bag scratched the exposed strip of skin between where her sari blouse ended and her petticoat began. Purple and white onion sheddings lined the bag’s bottom. As she walked, she shook it upside down and the crispy skin trailed behind her, joining festival decorations that were now rubbish—tinsel, broken dandiya sticks in various colors, bright wrappers—on the dirt.
The festival of Navratri had ended in late September; for nine dance-filled nights, the village had celebrated various goddesses. Although she never attended any of the garba dance parties, Geeta’s favorite story was of the goddess Durga’s triumph over Mahishasura, a power-drunk demon with the head of a buffalo. He’d been granted a boon that he could not be killed by any man, god or animal. Various gods tried to defeat Mahishasura to no avail. Desperate, they combined their powers to create Durga. She set off on her tiger and confronted Mahishasura, who arrogantly offered to marry her instead. After fifteen days of fighting, Durga beheaded him. It tickled Geeta: never send a god to do a goddess’s job.
She passed the local school. It’d been orange when she’d attended, but the sun had since blanched it into a pale yellow. Tobacco stains the color of rust streaked the walls; kids and men often held spitting contests behind the building. Government slogans, for a clean India or encouraging only two children per family, were stenciled in neat bubble letters on walls. Others were less official: sloppy red warnings against love jihad or Bihari migrant workers stealing jobs. In a village with two Muslim families and zero migrant workers, Geeta found these warnings absurd.
Now a few children played kabaddi in the dirt yard, which made Geeta think of Farah yet again. One team’s raider sucked in a deep breath before invading the other half of the makeshift court as he chanted, “Kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi.” The raider was meant to tag the other team’s defenders and make it back home without being tackled, all in a single breath. Geeta was already late, but still paused as a dispute arose.
“You inhaled!” a girl shouted to the raider. She and the other defenders were in a W formation, holding hands. In a village this cramped, Geeta should’ve known the girl and her mother, but couldn’t place either of their names. If she herself had been a mother, impelled into the bullshit rotation of teacher conferences and game-day events, she’d have memorized which offspring belonged to which woman.
“Did not!”
“Did too!” The girl broke the chain and pushed the raider, who fell back into the dust. She was taller than the other kids and, in her mien, Geeta saw an incipient Saloni. Which was why, when Geeta should have been buying groceries, she yelled through the gate:
“Oi!”
The girl swiveled her head. “What?”
The other players nervously divided their gazes between the churel and the bully.