Meera stood behind a row of restless relatives, fidgeting
with her bangles, waiting for the bride. Her eleven year old self was drowning
under layers of her mother’s heavily embroidered silk sari, the pleats threatening to fall apart any minute. She could
sense the anticipation in the air. It made her fingertips tingle. Notun Bou, they called her. The new wife.
Meera was barely two when her mother walked out of the house
on an otherwise ordinary sultry afternoon, carrying a small bag stuffed with
all her wedding jewellery, while she lay underneath the bed watching. She
wanted to hold her back, but couldn’t call out to her as she was in the midst
of a game of hide-and-seek and was afraid of being discovered. It was years
later when her brother told her why she had left. Apparently her mother had a
promise to keep - a promise she had made to another man; a promise far bigger
than the one she had made to her children when they were born. Meera had never
seen this man in her life, and since her mother never came back to the house,
she assumed that he was captivatingly handsome, someone who had leapt straight
out of a glossy magazine cover. Her grandmother, however, never believed that
she had left for love. She thought her son’s wife was a witch. Daini, she used to call her. The new bride was supposed to take her
place, and since Meera had been the only prominent female presence in the
Roychowdhury household for the past decade, she wasn’t sure how to respond to
this sudden and unseemly intrusion.
The house echoed with the sound of conch shells and fervent ululation
as the bride made her way past the doorway. The women in the house rushed to
welcome her with brass plates filled with trifles. They were supposed to be symbols
of good luck and prosperity, but to Meera they meant nothing. She peered over
shoulders, balancing herself painfully on her toes to catch a better glimpse of
her new stepmother. She was barely in her twenties, and beside her father, she
almost looked like a child. She was not very tall and was of slender built. Her
face looked as if it was carved out of a betel leaf; her chin precise, almost
to a point. Her skin was wheatish, and in the reflected incandescence of
several flickering oil lamps she looked radiant. Her almond eyes were drawn out
with kohl and her lips were pursed into a broken, tentative smile. While she
stood there decked from head to toe in gold, twitching with uncertainty, her
parting ablaze with a dash of vermillion, Meera realized she had never seen
anyone more beautiful. People whispered audibly about how a Goddess had just
made her way past the doors. If it wasn’t for a three year old child from her
previous marriage, who followed her into the house clutching a ragdoll, they
probably would not have hesitated to genuflect. While mother and daughter
walked into the house amidst all the celebration, Meera retracted to a
forgotten corner, grappling with her new found reality. She realized that she
could never compete with divinity. Life as she knew it, changed in that moment.
All she was left with was a raging inferno of hatred.
---------------------------
It was the last day of the autumn festivities and it was
time for the Goddess to return home. Meera was cooped up in her room for the last
ten days while the city lost itself in smoking dhunuchis and the rhythm of the dhak.
It was not that she did not want to venture out into the streets flaunting her
new clothes. But there was simply no point. No one noticed her anyway. They
were too caught up in complimenting her stepmother and fussing over her
wretched three-year old Mrin. Meera tried everything in her power to make them
leave. She would deliberately skip lunch and complain to her father in the
evening about how her stepmother intended to starve her. She would douse Mrin
with water in the middle of the night, waking up her mother in the process. She
would needlessly pick fights with her and later accuse her of name calling.
She would even hide the infant’s feeding bottle; her helpless wailing comforted
the sadist within her. But all her aggression wasted away in the face of her
stepmother’s unwavering patience. It only made Meera weaker in the eyes of her
father. So one day, she stopped bickering. Instead, she took refuge in passive
resistance.
Every year, on the last day of the festival, Meera would
visit the banks of the river to witness the immersion. It was a sort of Roychowdhury
tradition. She did not want to go this time, but her father would hear nothing
else. She did not speak to anyone on the way and once they reached, she stood alone
on one side, avoiding eye contact with the rest. She was hoping someone would
ask her what the matter was, but no one did. While she waited there, hundreds
of people made their way down the slippery stairs of the embankment, carrying
colossal clay images of the deity, precariously balanced on a few emaciated bamboo
poles. With every concerted step, the Goddess would wobble, her ten
outstretched arms waving in the wind, threatening to crush the lives out of the
very people who had gathered around her to bid adieu. Meera felt someone
tugging on her fingers. She looked down to see little Mrin standing next to
her, with her arm raised. Her tiny eyes had deep-seated fear in them. In that
moment, she felt oddly protective. She stopped battling her first instinct and
squeezed her palm reassuringly. Mrin smiled widely, revealing all of her four
milk teeth. Meera felt a heaviness leave her chest and she breathed in the cool
autumn air once again. Together, they looked down the ghat, as the Goddess hit the river, the water making its way up
the stairs. And as she sank helplessly, a horde of hungry street urchins
climbed onto her breast and ripped the jewels off her neck.
