Sakhri looked up at the sky and let out a long drawn sigh. The first morning light was beginning to brighten the horizon and she could already hear other women of the village make their way to the well two villages away. She was late, having been up most of the night, tossing and turning in her bed thinking of her husband’s loving caresses and animal vigor that had kept her awake in the past. She had lost her heart and soul to her husband on the very first night of their wedding.
Bhagat’s attentions had wavered. His newly wed wife’s
chuckles and moans carried through the thin walls of the mud house all night,
burning Sakhri’s insides, stifling her with impotent rage and finally lulling
her to an uncomfortable slumber in the wee hours. Even now, those thoughts
haunted her as she prepared to join the other women on the trek. Drinking water
had been scarce in the village for as long as she could remember, and with the
rains giving their village the slip for the third consecutive year, the women
had to walk to far off wells to collect drinking water for the family.
It was also the
reason Bhagat had gotten himself a new wife – an extra hand for fetching water
– whom Sakhri had despised from the moment she had set foot into the house. The
younger woman was etched with a lilting beauty that permitted her a bashfulness
not granted to big-boned women like herself. They were fated, like oxen, to be
burdened and worked all their life, with an occasional loving glance thrown at
them, or a rare night of rewarding affection.
Those nights had been absent for a year now.
Balancing the two pitchers on her head, Sakhri saw from the
corner of her eye Manju emerge from her room in the hut, stretching languidly
in the soft morning light.
Heavily pregnant, she had reduced her treks to the water
well in the past few weeks, and taken to resting in her room more. It meant double trips for Sakhri to the well
to fetch enough water for the people at home. Bhagat’s mother was old and
infirm, and his sister had been married off. Both he and his father had to tend
to the paddy fields they sharecropped with other men in the village. It fell on
Sakhri to shoulder most of the housework while Manju rested on the chatai in
her room.
“Did Your Highness sleep well?” Sakhri shot the first
arsenal of the day. She had lately resorted to jibes as her only way to get back at
the object of her husband’s current affections.
“Hardly, didi. He wouldn’t let me sleep all night!” Manju
shot back, her face emotionless. Her tongue was as sharp as her beauty, and she never let go of a
chance to get even with her husband’s other wife.
The two women had not been able to come to terms with each
other’s presence, and with the younger one about to bear a child to their
husband, she considered herself the undeclared queen of the household. The
first wife was pushed to a corner, with the housework being her only respite.
Sakhri actually looked forward to her morning treks to fetch
drinking water, when she would laugh and joke with the other women, and share
the pain of sharing husbands with other similar fated women. The village men
had taken to marrying more than once, just so they could have enough water for
drinking and bathing in the house.
“Aree O Sakhri! Are you going to join us or not?” called one
of the women from outside the hut.
“The witches from the other village are going to crowd the
well if you don’t hurry up!” admonished another, sticking her head through the
open door of the courtyard.
“Abhi aayi!” Sakhri adjusted the pitchers and picked up the
bucket in her hand.
To Manju, she shot a glare, “Are you coming or are you going
to put up your feet like the Queen herself and while away the morning?”
Manju hesitated for a while, and then told her to carry on.
She would join them later, she informed Sakhri.
“Don’t take all morning. The girls from the other village
are beginning to get rowdy these days. There’s too much pushing and shoving.
And we also have to feed the men when they come back at mid-day.”
Manju moved slowly, with one hand on her protruding belly,
and turned to go back into her room. She had left her dupatta inside.
“Black faced wretch! Her parents never taught her any
shame,” Sakhri grumbled as she made her way out of the mud house.
Outside, she saw no one, all the women having already made
their way out of the village, on the long journey to the well a few kilometers
away. The absence of rain had caused the only well in the village to dry up,
and the stream that flowed just outside the village was just parched earth now,
with wide cracks big enough to swallow small babies.
At the beginning of summer, a neta ji had visited their
village and promised daily tankers of drinking water to the village. Men and
women had all thronged the political meeting, hoping for their woes to be
solved by this man, who had all kind words and promises for them.
That had been before the elections. They had all pressed the
button by the symbol that the neta ji’s cohorts had furnished, but neither
tankers nor any of those people were seen after the elections. They had all
vanished; as if the wide cracks in the earth had engulfed them.
Sakhri quickened her steps. This was the only time when she
felt alive, when there was no competitor, younger and prettier than herself, no
one to remind her of how she had lost her husband to youth. She was glad to get
away from the house for a few hours, and on most days if she left early, she
could avoid Manju too. And with the younger woman reducing her outings of late,
Sakhri was beginning to feel happier while she was outside.
It didn’t matter to her that she had to balance two heavy
pitchers on her head and dangle a bucket from her hand as she made her way back
to the village under the parching, unrelenting sun. She had to be careful while
she walked, or water would spill from the containers as she walked. Some
nights, her shoulders and back would be pounding with pain and as she lay
awake, she would hear Manju’s muffled laughs and soft protests through the
walls.
She walked the distance by herself, having been left far
behind by the women of her village, and all the way she went cursing her souten
for having ruined her life, for having been born, for delaying her today in
fetching water.
She had once been pregnant and had felt her water break
while she was carrying water back home one day. She was walking alone that day
too, her heaviness slowing her down. The world swam in front of her eyes washing
her vision with shards of broken darkness before she felt her grip loosen on
the pitchers. The containers had come tumbling down, throwing her off balance,
and as she fell forward, towards her imminent irreplaceable loss, her only
regret had been that she had lost all the water she collected that day.
She would have bled to her death had a young neighbour not
spotted her writhing like a wounded eel. Even now she shivered a little every
time she passed the spot where she lay, more than a year back, in her own pool
of blood. The midwife at the village had informed her that she had lost her
chance to be a mother for the rest of her life, and to the combined misfortune
of water scarcity and childlessness she had lost her husband to another woman.
A wave of anger swelled in her heart now, against the
younger woman who had displaced her from her bed, from her husband’s heart, and
from being the queen of the household, reducing her to a mere caretaker. Many
nights Sakhri lay awake. She tossed and turned with a burning that she never
could identify. But her thoughts always went to Manju whose evil moans she
heard through the thin walls. When all went quiet in the middle of the night,
she thought longingly of her souten sharing her fate, lying under the
leafless tree, blood oozing out of her, as the parched earth drank in the
steady stream of liquid. She sometimes dreamt of Manju being sucked dry by the
sinewy branches of the leafless tree, while she stood there and watched. She
always woke up confused and thirsty, and it would be time to go fetch water.
She crossed the spot quickly, without looking at the tree
that stood like a skeleton in the vast, bald field.
The well was crowded, and the rowdy group from the other
village was already there. Sakhri’s friends took turns to draw the water from
the deep well while some of them got into an altercation with the women from
the other village.
Sakhri waited patiently. There was no way she could jump the
queue and fill her pitchers. She would have to wait for her turn, even if it
meant she would return alone. Manju was nowhere in sight and as she stood under
the strong sun, she couldn’t help but feel bitterness creep all over her. That
black faced wretch must be getting it on with her husband again, she thought
bitingly. The thought of the two of them together made her want to throw up,
but she bit her lip and held her bile.
When her turn at the well came, her friends had long since
left. There was still no sign of Manju.
The sun was beating down on her, and she washed her face and
neck with the water she drew from the well, drinking till her stomach hurt, and
filling the pitchers and bucket she had brought with her. Manju must have
stayed back at the hut and would take care of the meal. Sakhri upturned the
pail she had drawn up, drenching herself, a luxury she wouldn’t have allowed
herself on any other day. Her clothes would dry out in the sun before she
reached her village, so no one would know she had treated herself to a bath.
Feeling refreshed and content, she balanced the pitchers with a little
difficulty on her head and picked up the bucket to start her trek back to the
village.
The sun was glaring down on the earth now, but she was in no
hurry. Lunch would be taken care of, and there was enough water for cooking one
meal.
Sakhri ambled her way through the dusty path, careful of not
spilling too much of the precious liquid she was carrying. The air simmered
ahead of her, and there were mirages in the far distance. The sun had directed
all its wrath on the earth today.
She first dismissed the figure on the ground as a mirage and
then the mutt that strayed around the village in search of scraps of food. But
after a few more steps she could distinctly make out the figure of a woman
splayed on the ground. Two aluminum pitchers lay strewn beside her, and the
woman wasn’t moving.
A cold wave ran down Sakhri’s spine as she recognized the
skirt that was hitched high above the woman’s knee. She ran towards the figure
on the ground, and could now distinctly make out the earth that had turned red
from the blood oozing from under the woman’s skirt.
She had been lying there for quite some time. A couple of
flies hovered on her face and over the earth wet with blood.
A short cry escaped Sakhri’s throat as she watched Manju’s
lifeless face and frothing mouth. Blood had seeped through to the roots of the
leafless tree under which Manju lay, and the patch of earth around her finally
seemed content and wet.
The water-wife carefully lowered the pitchers and prepared to splash water on her souten’s face.
