Sample Chapters – Seetamma
Prologue
Kothapalli Village, 1944
“Stand straight,” my mother hissed. “Do you want them to think I raised a sack of rice?”
I stood straight. This was my third bride-viewing, and I knew better than to argue.
My name is Seetamma. My father said it was auspicious. My mother said it was heavy. In my forty-first year I would understand they were both right—but that is later, and later isn’t running away anywhere.
What matters now is 1944, a hired motor car, and a tahsildar who would not look up from the laddus.
Chapter One—The Bride-Viewing
Kothapalli Village, 1944
The walls were freshly whitewashed. My mother’s muggu covered the courtyard floor, the rice-flour lines so fine that visiting women bent down to look for a mistake and came up without one. Our cow had been washed twice on my mother’s orders and stood by the shed, wet and offended, refusing to look at any of us.
I wore silk. Jasmine in my hair, and so much gold that when I bent to touch the matchmaker’s feet for her blessing, I jingled like the temple bell.
“Remember,” my mother said, tucking a stray hair behind my ear. Her fingers rested there a moment. Then she pulled my braid straight to check its length. “Eyes down. If they ask you to sing, sing the short one.”
“Why the short one?”
“Because the long one shows you would like to be asked again. A bride who looks pleased to be anywhere has not yet learnt what to expect.”
I did not understand her then. I would, soon enough—though not, as it turned out, from her.
❧
The matchmaker had told everyone in three districts that I was the catch of the decade. Fair as fresh cream—this part she said loudly. Hair to her hips—louder still. When she came to the dowry, her voice dropped into the hush other people reserved for temples.
My father had prospered in paddy and groundnut. The Goddess had given him one child, and that too a daughter, so he had settled it in his own mind: I would go to my husband’s house so heavy with gold that no family in the Madras Presidency would dare look down their noses at us.
Proposals came from all sides. Landowners’ sons. A doctor’s nephew. A sixty-year-old widower sent word that his first wife’s jewellery would come to me untouched.
“What an honour,” my father told the widower’s emissary, both hands pressed together. “That such a family should think of us! Truly, we are not worthy.” He said it so many times, and with such feeling, that the emissary went home pleased with everyone. It was a month before the widower understood he had been refused.
That year I prayed the way I did everything, by bargaining. Durga Devi, if the next one is young—four coconuts. Young and responsible—eight. Nobody had yet taught me that terms must be set down precisely, the way the moneylender set them, in writing, with witnesses. The Goddess sent young. About responsible, she didn’t really say.
❧
The family that came that winter morning came not by bullock cart but by hired motor car. Ours was not a village that saw motor cars. By the time it crossed the tamarind grove, half of Kothapalli had found urgent work to do on our street.
The matchmaker came through the gate first—a thin woman, all eyes and no chin. “The car has passed the tamarind grove,” she announced, as though she had built the road herself. “Are we ready?”
“We have been ready since the day she was born,” my mother said.
“The rice payasam—”
“Thickening.”
“The laddus—”
“Covered and waiting.”
The matchmaker patted my cheek. “Fair like anything. Don’t worry, mother of Seetamma. This family will not go home empty-handed.”
My mother went limp with relief, which she immediately covered by finding fault with my braid.
❧
The groom’s grandmother came down from the motor car first—a small, upright woman who looked at our fresh whitewash for a long moment and said nothing at all.
“The journey,” she announced, to the street in general, “has finished my back entirely. In our village, the roads are better.”
“Amma,” I whispered.
My mother’s hand closed around my wrist.
Then came the father, then two uncles of identical girth, filling the gate side by side like furniture ordered without taking measurements. And then, finally, the groom.
I was not supposed to look. I looked.
❧
For two weeks the matchmaker had been polishing this man. A tahsildar! Twenty-two years old and already collecting taxes for the government—a salary that came every month like the full moon, rains or no rains. “A government job is a rock,” my father said with the solemnity of a man quoting the Bhagawad Gita. “Crops fail. Cattle die. The government endures.”
The tahsildar was tall. Broad-shouldered. Also—and here the matchmaker’s polishing ran out—dark. Dark as a tamarind seed. He sat with his eyes lowered, as though he were the one being viewed, and when the laddus came out, he watched the plate cross the room with the focused devotion most men reserved for God or land.
I told myself it did not matter. He was a man. A man could be dark as a moonless sky and still be a tahsildar, still be society’s rock. I was fourteen. I believed it the way I believed in the Goddess—completely, because everyone around me did.
I would believe it until the day I held a dark granddaughter and heard myself say the same words the world had given me.
❧
The groom’s aunt’s mother-in-law circled me like a woman inspecting a calf at market. She weighed my braid in her palm the way you test a rope before buying it. She asked me to walk to the tulasi plant and back. I walked. She watched.
“Avakaya,” she said. “Can you make it?”
“My mother’s pickle is famous in three villages,” I said.
“I asked about yours, no?”
Everyone laughed, carefully. I kept my eyes down. My hands did not shake.
Then she took my chin and turned my face to the light, this way, then that.
“Very fair,” she said, at last. “Let us hope the children take after her.”
The groom did not look up from the laddus.
❧
The negotiations moved outside, under the tamarind tree, where I could not go but could hear everything. My father’s voice rose and fell as he read out the dowry item by item: the teak cot, the Singer sewing machine, brass vessels in seven sizes. When he came to the paddy land, his voice slowed and turned formal, the way other men’s voices went when they spoke of their sons.
I sat in the kitchen and listened to my future being counted.
“She is asking for more,” my mother murmured, her ear tilted towards the tamarind tree.
“Of course she is asking for more.” Neighbour aunty raised an eyebrow as if to say why is this even in doubt. Shopkeeper aunty nodded in agreement.
Outside, the voices went on. From where I sat, I could see the brass vessels lined up along the kitchen wall. Seven. Plus one more in my mother’s room that she had not yet declared.
“Will Nanna offer the eighth vessel?” I whispered.
“Hush.”
“Amma. The eighth—”
“I heard you the first time.”
She was smiling, though. I knew that smile.
❧
Wedged against my side in the kitchen, where she had been since we were five, sat Kanakam. Her own marriage had been settled at Ugadi—a landowner’s son from a village a day’s journey away, a young man who had already made himself useful to the Congress people and the collectorate both, which everyone agreed showed foresight.
She could not say his name, of course, being his would-be, so she said everything else.
“He remembers every name in his village,” she whispered, while outside my father read out brass vessels. “Every farmer, every child. Even the servants. My father says a man who remembers names will go far.”
“Far to where?”
She pinched my arm. “Far means big ambitions, silly.”
Of all the predictions made in that kitchen—and there were many, between the payasam and the laddus—hers is the only one that came true entirely. He went far. He is going far still.
❧
When the groom’s family left, my mother held me by the shoulders and wept, and that was how I knew it was settled. In our house, joy and grief had always used the same door.
That night I lay on my mat and made the Goddess my last offer. Let him be what they say he is. Every Friday of my life, coconuts at your altar.
I kept that promise. Every Friday. Through the war years and the famine years, the wedding years and the funeral years. Let it be known that I kept my word.
❧
Two weeks later I was married. The wedding lasted five days. My father fed half the district. My husband sat beside me on the dais, looking handsome and solemn and saying nothing at all, which everyone agreed showed excellence of character.
“A government job is a rock,” my father reminded me, on the morning I left his house for mine.
He was right, in his way. My husband never once let go of anything he could lean on. It simply turned out that the rock he leaned on hardest, for the next twenty-six years, was me.
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