Farah released a one-note noise of admonishment. “The cursing!”
“Tell me she’s not a nosy bitch.” When Farah opened her mouth, Geeta added, “And remember lying is a worse sin than cursing.”
Farah’s jaw clicked shut.
FOUR
Was it a boy? It’s usually a boy.
Farah’s perspicacity and Geeta’s ordinariness were not welcome realizations.
Yes, it was a boy. If you could call Ramesh—mustache at fifteen, when his family moved from a neighboring village, full beard in by twenty-two—a boy. Ramesh, like Geeta, was neither particularly good-looking nor gregarious. Had he been, his attention would’ve raised her suspicions. Had he been, he’d likely have been smitten with Saloni instead. But while all the boys were wild about what filled Saloni’s undergarments, their parents only cared about what filled her dowry, which was zero rupees and zero paise. （In an early school lesson, their economics teacher explained the custom of dowry. Saloni tried to correct him: the groom’s family pays to take the bride, after all, they’re gaining a whole entire person to help the household. The teacher laughed: no, the groom is paid to take the bride because she’s a liability, another mouth to feed. And, naturally, you can’t buy a person, that’s slavery. But, Saloni snapped back, if you sell one, that’s tradition? She was made to sit in rooster position for the remainder of the econ class.）
Saloni had grown up a severe brand of poor. Geeta’s family was ordinary poor: vegetables with rice or chapatis. In Saloni’s family, they rotated the days half of them wouldn’t eat, always favoring the boys. She was only sent to school due to the state’s Midday Meal Scheme, which offered a free lunch. Most afternoons, they went to Geeta’s home. Once, Geeta’s father brought from work rejected apples that would soon rot; they already suffered from dark spots that Geeta’s mother intended to carve. When she returned from the kitchen with a knife, however, Saloni had already eaten her apple, core and seeds and stem and all.
Geeta’s parents said nothing, but as they finished their apples, and Saloni saw the discarded, evidently inedible bits, her fair skin flushed. That night, Geeta’s parents insisted Saloni stay for dinner before walking home. In their nearly two decades of friendship, Saloni never invited Geeta to her home, and Geeta never asked.
In other parts of the world, Saloni’s nadir of poverty would have subjected her to bullying. But nearly everyone in their village practiced mild asceticism—most possessed simple clothes and two pairs of shoes. Chocolate and cake were rare; on Diwali, they passed around homemade sweets. Besides, while Saloni’s feet may have been bare, her other coffers were full: she was sharp and funny and high caste and, above all, beautiful. So, so beautiful with green-gold eyes that had bewildered her parents, high cheekbones and heart-shaped lips atop a delicately pointed chin. A beautiful child who spawned into a beautiful adolescent, Saloni wasted no time with acne or awkwardness. Like waves under the moon, their classmates bent to her will. Such was her social currency; everyone wanted to be near her, felt promoted by her presence.
But being both penniless and impudent naturally led to very few offers of marriage. Saloni’s older sisters were wed to men in far villages, older men who’d lost their first wives and didn’t demand dowries—much like the premenarchal Phoolan had been given to that thirty-three-year-old pervert.
It was neither a secret nor a surprise that Saloni’s dominant aspiration in life was money. Not bungalow-car-big-city money—Saloni was ambitious but not greedy; she steeped her dreams in practicality. She wanted the normal-not-abject poverty the rest of the village didn’t think to appreciate. They sighed about the rising cost of rice, but could still buy and eat the damn rice. The kind of money that allowed for declining a food based on taste or mood; the kind of comfort where it didn’t occur to her to ask the price of a staple.
Every morning her father walked to the lorries, where he and seven other men spent the day filling a truck with rocks in exchange for twenty rupees. Her eventual husband—she said during hot nights when they’d sleep on Geeta’s terrace with the stars sprinkled above them—needn’t have Ambani-level wealth with crores of rupees, but he needed to have （or have ready access to） a leg up. Saloni realized back while Geeta was still struggling with basic sums from the third row of their shared school bench, that a head start made all the difference. You could be smart—like her father, like her—and still have no means to get even half a step further in life. You could be smart and still break your back for coins that disappeared directly into your children’s bellies as they scratched their plates.
And so, Saloni committed her early teens to scheming. The gifts the boys gave—the cheap knickknacks that crumbled in her rucksack or the erasers shaped like fruit that erased nothing, including her hunger—were useless. No, what she required was a bit of money to secure a dowry and therefore a boy. You’ve got to spend money to make money, she told Geeta, whose opinion differed.
“All the boys love you, but you’ll know ‘the one’ when he’s willing to tell his parents not to take a dowry. At least one will stand up for you. I’m certain. You just have to ask.”
Saloni laughed and bumped Geeta’s shoulder with her own. “Don’t be na?ve, Geeta.”
“You don’t think any of them want you more than they want a bit of money?”
“Maybe,” she said. “But not enough to stand up to their mummy-daddy.”
Geeta twirled her earring stud within its piercing. “I just don’t believe that’s true.”
“Because you love me,” Saloni said. “You see me in a way no one else does.” She poked out her tongue. “And because you’re a duffer.”
Saloni’s attempts to cure her penury more often than not involved a reluctant Geeta. Like when they’d tried selling test papers and discovered one needed correct answers in order to ensure repeat business. Or when Saloni struck a deal with a frippery vendor to turn his hideous goods en vogue, and by the time they posed for the class photo, one would’ve assumed the shoddy butterfly clips glued to all the girls’ heads were an element of their regulation uniform.
Hair clips turned into jewelry to impress the other girls, which turned into lipstick and rouge to impress the boys and, with that hormonal tide turn, Saloni realized she’d overlooked half of the available market: boys. Thus began the short-lived matchmaking era, which ended in Saloni dope-slapping boys, shouting, “I’m a matchmaker, moron, not a whore.”
There was also the fake raffle, the eyeliner that gave the gift of pink eye, the public phone service that was just Saloni’s cheap mobile and gave everyone the idea to purchase their own cheap mobiles, and the communal tiffin trial, which was shockingly successful among the older women. That is, until they realized they could arrange it themselves and cut her out.
Geeta couldn’t assemble the linearity of these schemes—what age, what year （they’d been deeply unconcerned about time in those days）。 But she knew that they must’ve been around nineteen when Geeta’s parents informed her that a boy and his parents would be visiting to meet Geeta. She was getting married, she told Saloni, and her excitement and terror mingled into a soup of nausea. If he was truly repugnant, or some thirty-three-year-old relic, she would be able to say no; she knew that because she knew her gentle, indulgent parents. She was their only child and they gave her all they could, including an education.