Rebel Queen Read Free Page A

on the other side of the door, then Grandmother said, “Go and tell your father to fetch your aunt.”
    Father’s workshop was my favorite room in our house. It had four windows facing onto the busy streets and the ceilings were as tall as our peepal tree. As soon as I approached, I could hear the sabjiwalla outside, pushing his cart past our neighbor’s fields despite the rain, and calling out the names of the vegetables he was selling: onions, tomatoes, cucumber, okra. If Mother was well, she would have been bargaining with him through the window, concealed behind the lattice in order to keep purdah.
    Inside, Father sat with his back to the door. Wood shavings covered the floor around him, making me think of orange peels, and the room was filled with the woodsy scent of teak. When Father was carving the image of a god, the air would be thick with incense; he would light a stick of sandalwood on our altar, then laya long jute mat across the floor as a place to work. But on the days when a villager placed an order for a weapon, the room smelled only of woods and earth.
    I approached him slowly, since Father didn’t like to be surprised. I suppose it’s the same with others who’ve lost their hearing.
    “Pita-ji,” I said when I was standing before him.
    He searched my face for some sign of distress, then his shoulders relaxed. He put aside the bow he was carving to offer me his palm.
    “Grandmother says to fetch Esha-Masi,” I traced above the calluses of his hand.
    “Now?”
    I nodded.
    He stood, and the wood shavings fluttered from his dhoti like small brown moths. I’ve heard the English call these dhotis kilts, and I suppose they are similar. But unlike a kilt, a dhoti is white and worn without a shirt. Father left to change into pants and the long cotton shirt we call a kurta. When he returned, I was still staring at the half-finished bow he was making.
    “Bartha,” he said aloud, letting me know the bow was for our neighbor, Partha. Father could speak when he was in a great hurry, but now that he was deaf, he had lost the ability to tell the difference between letters like p and b .
    I still understood. I looked at the bow—which Father might have been making for me if I had been a boy—and tears filled my eyes.
    “Afraid?” Father wrote.
    “What if it’s another girl?” I traced.
    “Then I will consider myself twice as blessed.”
    It took twenty minutes to reach my aunt’s house at the other end of Barwa Sagar—where she lived with her husband and twoyoung sons—and then return to ours. I watched through the latticed window as the rain now fell slantways through the streets. In our neighbor’s field, even the buffalo looked sorry for themselves; they had taken shelter under the trees, and their tails hung between their legs like wet rope.
    When Aunt arrived, the bearers lowered her palanquin in our private courtyard, then opened its curtains. As soon as she stepped outside, she shielded herself from the eyes of the bearers by wrapping her dupatta—or scarf—around her head. Father escorted her to our door.
    “Where is Dadi-ji?” Aunt asked when I greeted them. It occurred to me how similar she was to Mother: her tiny bones, her small lips. No one who saw them in a room together would fail to pick them out as sisters.
    “The midwife needed Grandmother’s help,” I said. “She told me to stand here and wait for you.”
    “Nothing bad has happened?” she whispered. But she needn’t have bothered; Father couldn’t hear her. People often forgot this.
    “No.”
    She hurried down the hall. After two knocks, a door opened and closed.
    With so many people inside our house at one time, it should have been cheerful. Instead, I could feel anxiety building inside of me the same way you can feel the slow coming of a fever. Father must have felt the same way, because he went quietly back into his workshop, though I suspected he wasn’t interested in his work.
    I remained in the hall and watched