Free Difficult Daughters by Manju Kapur

you can imagine the state I am in these days. To have your family still labour under the delusion that you are going to marry some clottish canal engineer agitates me greatly. Must this situation, so unfair to all, be allowed to continue? Think how unpleasant it will be for them to hear of your decision later rather than sooner. Of the canal engineer I say nothing. Anybody who digs in canals all day must have a soul as dull and uninspiring as the mud he deals in. What pain will he suffer? He does not even know you, has never tried to know you. For him, you are a woman that his family has arranged he should marry. For such men the individual is unimportant. It is the institution they are concerned with. If not you, then someone else.
I am sitting by the window in the sitting-room. I can see great rolls of cumulous clouds pile up in the sky outside. It is going to rain, the whole earth is waiting, joining a waiting lover in his mood. I feel one with it, because no matter what I see or do, there is some connection that can be traced to you. The koel is singing to its mate, a pair of squirrels are running up and down the jamun tree in the corner by the hedge. We too will one day be together. It is the faith I live by.
Till then, I am,
Ever your H.
     
    Virmati put these letters on the parapet and stared at them as they lay indecently side by side; the Professor’s crushed from hiding in her pocket, the fiancé’s with legitimate public folds. Quickly she tore up the latter and scattered the pieces over the wall. Wasn’t her future partner decided by the first touch of a man on her body? Even though in this case it meant humiliating her grandfather, who was publicly associated with female education, betraying her father who had allowed her to study further, and spoiling the marriage chances of her siblings.
    Virmati remembered, once upon a time, she had been quite happy to be engaged to someone her elders had chosen. Had she been able to follow the path they had so carefully planned for her, they would have seen to it that the transition into adulthood was as painless as possible. Now all that was over. Oh, why hadn’t she married sooner? But deaths in both families had made hers a two-year engagement. In those two years she had fallen against the grain, and whatever might be the consequences, she must continue her course.
    *
     
    ‘Mati?’
    ‘Yes?’
    Virmati found it difficult to broach her topic. Instead, she silently watched her mother work. Kasturi was sitting outside her room, in the veranda that ran along the side of the house. Before her, on the chattai, was a spinning-wheel, on which she was making thread from a pile of cotton. With long, careful movements, her left hand swung back and forth, pulling out the thread from the needle on the spindle. Her right hand slowly turned the wheel. Disturbed by her daughter’s unmoving eyes, Kasturi repeated, ‘Yes?’
    Virmati sat down on the floor and started playing with the cotton. She felt her mother’s inaccessibility even more because her hands could not join hers in their work.
    ‘What are you making?’ she finally asked.
    ‘I am getting this last khes ready for the beddings you will take with you.’
    ‘I don’t think I want so much bedding.’
    ‘It is not your job to decide how much bedding you want and don’t want. This is a question of marriage.’
    ‘Maybe we had better wait,’ said Virmati desperately, after a pause.
    Kasturi’s hand faltered in its steady movement, and lumps formed in the thread. Making an irritated tiching sound, she broke it off. ‘Are you out of your senses?’ she asked harshly. ‘Two years is not long enough for you?’
    ‘What is wrong with not wanting to marry?’ appealed Virmati, bringing the words out in the open where they wilted in the hostile atmosphere.
    Her mother could only stare. Virmati fidgeted, pulled more cotton apart. ‘Shakuntala Pehnji never married. Look at her,’ she said.
    ‘Shakuntala Pehnji did not