Free Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa Page A

button. It even feels like a finger.
    His sisters, Khatija and Parveen, barely two or three years older than us, already wear the responsible expressions of much older women. Like the other girls in the village, they affect the mannerisms and tone of their mother and adults. They are pretty girls, with large, serene eyes and a skin inclined to flush. Painfully shy of me, they are distressed—and perplexed—by the display of my twig-like legs beneath my short dress. (I don’t wear my calipers as much now.) They don’t know what to make of my cropped hair either. Busy with chores, baskets of grain stuck to their tiny hips, they scuttle about importantly.
    Every short while Ranna suspends play to run to his mother. Chidda is cooking at the clay hearth in their courtyard; she feeds her son and me scraps of chapatti dipped in buttermilk.
    Later in the blue winter afternoon a bunch of bearded Sikh peasants, their long hair wrapped in loose turbans or informally
displayed in topknots, visit Pir Pindo. They are from Derra Tek Singh, a neighboring village. The men of Pir Pindo—those who are not out working in the fields—come from their barns and courtyards and sit with the Sikhs in a thick circle beneath a huge sheesham in a patch of wild grass.
    The rough grass pricks my bottom and thighs. Ranna has sidled into his father’s lap. Prompted by Imam Din, he wears a buttonless shirt he has clearly outgrown. I sit between Dost Mohammad and Jagjeet Singh, a plump, smiling bowlegged Sikh priest, a granthi. Khatija and Parveen, looking like miniature women of eight and nine, their heads modestly covered, bring us piles of fragrant cornbread fried in butter and a steaming clay pot of spicy mustard-greens. I see the wisdom of their baggy shalwars and long kamizes as I fidget in the grass, tugging at my dress.
    The Sikh granthi, gray-bearded and benign, beckons the girls, and, sly eyes lowered, they come to him. He strokes their covered heads and says, in Punjabi, “May the True Guru bless you with long lives.” He draws them to him affectionately. “Every time I see you, you appear to have grown taller! We’ll have to think about arranging your marriages soon!” He leans across me and addresses Dost Mohammad. “Don’t you think it’s time their hands were painted yellow?”
    Jagjeet Singh has alluded to the henna-decorated hands of Muslim brides. The sisters duck their heads and hide their mouths in their veils. Ranna finds the suggestion outrageously funny. Slipping from his father’s lap, his belly button pointed at them like a jabbing finger. he jumps up and down. “Married women!” he chortles. “Ho! Ho! Married women!”
    Already practiced in the conduct they have absorbed from the village women, the girls try not to smile or giggle. They must have heard their mother and aunts (as I have), say: “Hasi to phasi ! Laugh (and), get laid!” I’m not sure what it means—and I’m sure they don’t either but they know that smiling before men can lead to disgrace.
    We have eaten and belched. The hookah, stoked with fresh tobacco, is being passed among the Muslim villagers. (Sikhs don’t
smoke.) In the sated lull the village mullah clears his throat. “My brothers,” he says. And as our eyes turn to him, running frail fingers through his silky white beard, he says, “I hear there is trouble in the cities ... Hindus are being murdered in Bengal... Muslims, in Bihar. It’s strange ... the English Sarkar can’t seem to do anything about it.”
    Now that he has started the ball rolling, the mullah raises his white eyebrows in a forehead that is almost translucent with age. He looks about him with anxious, questioning eyes.
    The village chaudhry— sitting by Imam Din and the mullah—says, “I don’t think it is because they can’t... I think it is because the Sarkar doesn’t want to!” He is a