Farah’s eyes widened with naked, prurient interest. “Really? You two? When?”
Geeta’s noises of disgust mirrored Bada-Bhai’s, who dope-slapped her, umbrage pitching his voice higher. “I know why I’m saying ‘che, che,’ but why are you saying ‘che, che’？”
Geeta burned, not from the insult, but the mortification of being struck like a foolish child in need of reprimanding.
Bandit loudly sniffed out his lizard nemesis, who skittered up the wall and panted, resting out of reach. He barked at the wall, ears canted back. His tail thumped so orgiastically, it was a wonder he didn’t levitate. Geeta closed her eyes in parental shame. Two menacing men, one of whom wielded a gun, and her dog’s prioritized threat was a reptile.
“What’s its problem?” BB asked, jerking his chin toward Bandit.
“Just shoot it,” Ramesh said.
“No!” Geeta shouted. “Don’t you dare.”
But she needn’t have worried because BB looked equally appalled. “Are your brains scrambled?” he demanded of Ramesh. “I’m not shooting a dog.”
“What’s the big deal?”
“Shooting people makes me a don; killing dogs just makes me a psychopath.”
“Wow,” Saloni drawled. “Even the criminal holding three women hostage thinks your moral compass is fucked. Let that sink in for a second.”
Ramesh scowled. “Fat bitch. Did you actually birth children, or just eat them?”
They launched into respective invectives, each tirade drowning the other out. Saloni’s face reddened. Ramesh was so livid, his mustache nearly vibrated in tandem with Bandit’s tail.
“Listen, chutiya,” Saloni said, stamping her joined feet on the floor. “You don’t know! Everything changes after a baby, okay? You don’t even recognize your own body.” She calmed, her voice lowering as she addressed the room. “Did you know, when my son came out, he stretched everything so much, I now su-su a little each time I sneeze? And that brat can’t even be bothered to eat a vegetable for me.”
“What!” BB recoiled. “Che, che.”
At his vehemence, Farah nodded and joined in. “Me, too. But only after my second. I also pooped on him during birth.”
“O Ram,” Ramesh said, his face contorting into a dry retch.
Farah piled on. “And what about nursing? My kids just ruined my breasts. Like, absolute barbaad.”
“I don’t wanna hear this shit!” Ramesh threw his hands up, seeking an exit. But there was no corner of the small room where he couldn’t hear. Besides which, each time he shifted, Bandit—temporarily torn from the lizard—was at his ankles.
Geeta watched as the lizard, granted a reprieve from the dog, darted diagonally toward the ceiling. It moved above her head, then Saloni’s, and hovered over a rapt BB.
Saloni said, “Right? I remember back when my nipples pointed in the same direction.” Out of the corner of her eye, she studied BB’s reaction.
He did not disappoint. His wince was deep as he said, “Offo.”
Geeta blinked, no longer concerned with the lizard’s migration. “Wait, wait. They don’t just…go back to normal after you’re done?”
Farah chuckled, but Saloni’s laugh was a honking bray. She abruptly stopped. “Shit. I just peed a little.”
“No, Geeta,” Farah said with exaggerated patience. “Hardly anything goes back to normal. It’s all saggy boobs and sneeze-peeing and ungrateful children.”
BB was gobsmacked. “But what about the rewards? The joys of motherhood?”
Farah raised one shoulder before letting it fall. “Meh.”
“What! But it—it’s the best thing you could do with your life, correct?” He divided a look between them, his tone increasingly uncertain. “Being…a…mother?”
Saloni and Farah both shrugged. “Meh.”
BB’s voice dimmed. In fact, everything about him seemed to shrink. His face was woeful as he inquired: “So…you don’t love your kids?”
“Tauba tauba!”
Saloni’s vehemence was identical to Farah’s. “You shut your damn mouth, Chintu. My kids are my favorite fucking things in the world.”
“I’d kill for them. Happily.” Farah blinked. “Oh. I guess I already did.”
“But. But. You just said—”
Saloni gave him a look of reproach. “Things can be more than one thing, you know.”
“So what do you think I—”
Ramesh thumped the heel of his palm against his forehead. “BB, they’re manipulating you, yaar. Let me cut these bhosdas!”
Farah’s eyes saucered. “Hold on, cut?” She turned to Geeta and Saloni for clarification. “Cut? Cut what?”
“But there’s so many of them now,” BB whined. “What use do I have for three fingers?”
“Fingers!” Farah gasped. “But I make art!”
“Listen,” BB told Ramesh. “I can bribe the police to ignore the moonshine, but maiming half the village? I don’t have that kind of money. How about we scar the halkat randis, on their faces. A reminder, so they don’t mess with me. A message to others not to mess with me. That’s small enough to pay the cops off. I think.”
“Fine,” Ramesh said. “Do I just slash them?”
As the men conversed, Farah cried quietly, her chin wobbling. Saloni shushed Farah, but her panic was not only self-sustaining, it was contagious. Bandit grew increasingly hyper, alternating between jumping and humping furniture, which Geeta had thought she’d trained out of him. As Ramesh and BB workshopped various messages to carve onto the women’s faces, they raised their voices to be heard over both Bandit’s yips and Farah’s moans. “Ya’Allah,” she chanted, rocking back and forth on the charpoy.
“Farah! Shut up!” Saloni hissed.
“Why? Don’t you understand? Things are never going to be okay because for every Samir we handle, there are fifty others waiting. There’s no point in clawing forward a centimeter when they can blow us back ten kilometers anytime they want.”
“Farah, we are going to be okay,” Geeta lied. “Breathe. Kabaddi, remember?”
Farah nodded, whispering the mantra while she rocked.
“？‘BB’？” Bada-Bhai suggested loudly. “Like one on each cheek?”
Ramesh kicked Bandit away as he counseled BB, “I dunno if that has the power you want—considering how everyone misunderstands it.”
On this point even Saloni agreed with him. “It isn’t carved in stone and it shouldn’t be carved on our faces.”
“The name was your fucking idea!” BB screeched. “God, you’re an imbecile.”
“Kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi…”
Bandit—agitated by the mantra he’d heard often from a distressed Geeta, long weary of barking rather than biting, and still smarting from the lizard’s evasive tactics—focused instead on less adroit prey. His teeth sank into Ramesh’s ankle with a relish usually reserved for leftovers. Ramesh, who’d never held much capacity for pain, yawped in a cocktail of injury and terror, and shook his hijacked leg, hopping on the other for balance. But Bandit held fast, his eyes manic in a way Geeta had never witnessed, the black lining of his jaw glistening in the dim light. Ramesh tried to escape, stumbling until the far wall caught his back with a reverberating thump. There he slid to the floor, breath escaping his chest like a startled bat. The double impact dislodged the lizard perched on the ceiling. As it soared down, it neither flailed nor spasmed, as though serene in its prospects, confident the universe would provide a new home. And provide it did. Rather than tumbling the full eight feet from the ceiling, it instead found a soft respite midway through the pilgrimage, a dharamshala in the form of Bada-Bhai’s left shoulder.