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daughters, your amma’s sisters, just before the drought. That was lucky, because after that, no one would have come to claim them. You remember the drought, Lata. It was so bad that the earth cracked and split like chapped skin.
    ‘Hai, I wasn’t lucky with my daughters. My eldest simply disappeared after her wedding day. We suspected she was dead, because there was never any news. My second, who moved five miles away, came home three times with a huge gash on her head. Each time I gave her a paste of turmeric and sacred basil to bind on her wound and sent her back. After the third time, she stopped coming home too. My third daughter, Lucky Sister, married an engine driver. Everyone said lucky girl. She came home every other year with saris for everyone . . .’ The grandmother stops, even she can’t say the words. It was through well-side gossip that they learned the true story behind the saris and Lucky Sister’s happy marriage to a rich engine driver. Her rich engine driver husband put his own wife out to work, setting her up in a little hut behind the station. First it was just her husband’s friends who came to spend an hour or two with her, but later, she slept with anyone. Once she became established, she threw her pimping husband out of her house. Now she has six other girls working for her. No one in Lata Bai’s family speaks of Lucky Sister any more.
    ‘So what about my fourth auntie?’
    ‘Your fourth auntie was married at eight, like your amma.’
    ‘Yes, and like me, she too had to wait for her period to arrive before her husband claimed her,’ says Lata Bai.
    ‘Hai, so young. Imagine if . . .’ says Mamta, eyes wide.
    ‘Oho, it was a different time, that’s all,’ replies the grandmother.
    ‘A different time?’ Lata Bai laughs bitterly. ‘I suppose you could say that it was a different time.’
    ‘So? What? Do you blame me, Lata? Do you think I had any choice? Don’t you remember that damned drought? I can still remember the tiniest details . . . the sky a constant blue; the moon on its back, surrounded by a dance of stars, so still, so lifeless on scorching, murderous nights; the cicadas stopping mid-chirp and falling to the ground like dead leaves; the well water turning bitter; your bapu praying for rain; giving all our food to the priest who promised us rain; the rains not coming for six months; the crops drying up . . .’
    ‘Even so, you should have checked up on the family, on their customs . . .’
    ‘Yes, yes, we should have. I suppose you believe we could have. There were no marriage offers for you girls . . . Oh, Mamta, you should have seen it: all round us, girls were dying of hunger. Lata, how can you forget the pickled pea plants so easily?’
    ‘Yes, yes, the pickled pea plants . . .’ Lata Bai’s voice is flat, emotionless. ‘I haven’t forgotten. Amma pickled all the withering plants she could find, just pickled them right down to a soup in salt. That’s what we lived on: pickled pea plants. There were always heaped spoonfuls of green pickled soup for Bapu with a wheat dumpling or two . . . all three meals. Bapu reached a point when he couldn’t swallow any more salt. Just the sight of pickled pea shoots made him want to run outside and look for a drink of water. Salt goes with water. But there was no water . . .’ She can still remember the time her father threw his plate in her mother’s face, splattering her clothes with green pickle stains, blaming her for the drought, the salt and no water. Her mother scraped the stains off her clothes and put them back in the pickle jar again. Nothing was wasted. She stayed in those stained clothes till the end of the drought.
    ‘That’s when my sisters started to die . . . one by one.’
    ‘But not your amma, she was a survivor. Lata found food in anything . . .’
    ‘I would walk up and down the riverbank collecting anything I could eat. A fallen bird, a sparrow’s nest, lotus seeds, reeds, anything. Sometimes I’d