The Stolen Girl by Renita D'Silva Page A

as lives unlived, as fresh as decades unsullied by experience. The taste of lost moments, of all that remains unsaid choking them as water floods into their mouth, as it insinuates everywhere, laying claim; the swirling vortex that will choke the breath out of them, dragging them into its depths, their last breath a desperate prayer for the daughter they have left at home.
    Vani huddles into her mother’s saris and hopes it was quick. She wishes. She prays.
    Afterwards, she is swaddled in myriad arms and learns to identify from the different shades of sweat, the textures of skin, the bones digging into her, which of the village matrons is holding her. She does not understand – or chooses not to – when they hit their heads and murmur, ‘Aiyyo, what to do with this one? They had nothing. The house is not theirs. They own not a pie.’
    Vani knows, even though she wishes she didn’t, that although she is related to every single person in the village, none of them can afford to keep her. How will they provide for her when they struggle to provide for their own? How will they get her married, with whose dowry? She is a girl, a burden that even the most well-meaning do not want to shoulder.
    And so, while they try and locate distant relatives, hoping to find someone who will assume responsibility for Vani, she shivers in a corner enduring the women cosseting her. She chokes on the rice gruel they feed her, trying to squeeze it down past the constriction in her throat, the swollen, nibbled bodies of her parents floating before her eyes. Whose idea was it that she should look at them, those bodies? She cannot remember. It is custom for loved ones to pay their respects. And, blindsided by grief, she obeyed custom – the disbelieving part of her wanting to prove everyone wrong by yelling jubilantly, ‘These are not my parents! You have made a mistake,’ – not knowing then that what she would see would taint the image of her parents that she carried within her, would haunt her for the rest of her life.
    She doesn’t think she can sleep. Yet she must do. For every morning she wakes as usual when Charu’s cock crows and Dodo butts his head against the kitchen door. For a blessed minute, she is stuck in that dreamy state between sleep and waking and all is well in her world. She fancies that she can hear Da’s snores, his mouth wide open, a welcome receptor, she’s always joked, for lizards which lose their balance on the woodlice ridden beams above. She imagines she can hear her ma’s soft breaths escape from between pursed lips, phut phut phut. Eyes still closed, she feels beside her for her ma’s comforting arm and is nudged instead by the twig-like shoulders of Aunt Shimy. And memory nudges in as dreams are chased away by her conscious self; wakefulness arrives and with it, sorrow. The heavy weight of it sitting tight on her chest, robbing her of breath. And even before she opens her eyes, shut tight to block out the honeyed light which inveigles under closed lids, a mellow turmeric glow warming her eyelids, she knows. Her ma and da are not here. She is alone, bereft.
    A month after their death, the village elders come visiting. They look grave and they arrive en masse, and she figures something has been decided. In a way, she is relieved. She knows that she cannot live like this. She does not want to live here, constantly bombarded by what was, haunted by the very last image of her parents floating in front of her eyes. She wants to go away. Far away from this place of her birth contaminated now by grief, steeped in loss.
    And so, when they tell her that they are sending her to Bangalore, that her distant relatives there have agreed to take her on as a servant, she is relieved.
    ‘You will be staying in a mansion,’ Nagappa, the chief village elder says, trying to sell her their plans for her future, not knowing that she has already made up her mind.
    The elders desperately want to feel that they are doing the right