Prologue

      Good Days Are Coming Soon

      People called them Padma Lalli like they were one person.

      ‘Padma Lalli?’

      ‘Padma Lalli!’

      ‘Have you seen Padma Lalli?’

      At sixteen Padma was the older cousin by two years. She was small, only five feet, but even so she was bigger than Lalli by three inches. Padma had oval eyes, smooth skin and collarbones that popped. She had long black hair that she knew to pat down with water and tightly plait or else there would be words.

Lalli’s kameez hung from her frame like washing on the line. Round-shouldered and baby-faced, she was the quiet romantic who read poems out loud.1 Padma had dropped out of school, but Lalli told her father she wanted to study and get a job. And while it would please him to share the memory of this conversation, they had both known it would never happen. The school Lalli attended had a roof, but not enough rooms – many classes were conducted outside, in the dirt, and there were seven teachers for 400 pupils. But even if the school had been different, a girl’s destiny lay in the hands of her husband.

      School broke up one blazing afternoon in May, and all the children congregated in Ramnath’s orchard to shout, run and climb trees. Lalli hurried to Padma’s side. As the others pelted down green mangoes, the teenagers stood aloof. They were together always, apart from everyone.

      Some 3,000 people lived in Katra Sadatganj, an eye-blink of a village in the Budaun district of western Uttar Pradesh, crammed into less than one square mile of land. On harvest mornings, when it was time to cut the rabi crops, the entire village congregated in the fields. Women hitched their saris and men rolled up their trouser bottoms. By 8 a.m. the ground was tapestried with branches of tobacco, and freshly picked garlic bulbs filled the air with a biting fragrance.

      Even small children pitched in. They shooed the crows that swooped through the fields like great black fishing nets, they chased away the long-limbed rhesus monkeys that prowled lunch bundles for roti sabzi.

      That summer, temperatures climbed to 42 degrees Celsius. Amid whirlpools of dust, cobras slithered out of their holes, but the barefoot boys and girls paid no heed. The harvest was the one precious opportunity their families had to make money.

      Economic growth had improved incomes, and elections every five years brought promises of more. The day before the harvest, on 26 May, a charismatic new Prime Minister named Narendra Modi was sworn in with an irresistible slogan, ‘achhe din aane waale hain’. Good days are coming soon.

      As they waited, the majority of families in Katra went without electricity, gas, running water and toilets. They bought solar panels, they lowered buckets into wells. They gathered dung for cooking fuel. They squatted in the fields, pulling their knees up to their chest as they scrolled through their phones to pass the time.

      Some were carpenters and tailors; others worked as political fixers, marriage brokers, cycle puncture repairmen or tonga drivers. They sold vegetables, chickens and country liquor. They broke the law to mine sand from riverbanks. A few well-off families had tractors that they leased out. About a third of the men had a piece of land. It was just a few bighas, never quite an acre, but whatever it was, it was theirs.

      Land was security, from which everything flowed – it put dal in the katori, clothes on the back. Land was power. It attracted a good quality of bride who would bring a good dowry. This would increase their security and social standing. Above all, land was identity. It made them cultivators. Without it, the men were reduced to landless labourers. They were destined to go wherever there was work, for whatever they were offered. They could be compared to the Yadav cattle herders in the neighbouring hamlet of whom it was said, they are rooted to nothing and committed to no one.

      The men of Katra spent almost all day in the fields. The children studied here since the good school, which taught English, was near the orchard. In the evenings when the edges of the clouds softened and blurred and a cool breeze rippled through the crops, women came back down from the village to draw water and socialise. Boys teased the limping dogs, and the limping dogs chased rats. Girls huddled. The smell was heat, husks and buffalo droppings.

      After night hooded the fields men dragged their charpoys over and hunkered down under blankets, bamboo poles at the ready, same as farmers up and down the district this time of year. They would protect their harvest with their lives if they had to, whether from the gun-slinging bandits who came for motorbikes or the herds of nilgai who sought seeds and stems.

      Everything was here. Everything happened here. And so naturally it was here, in the fields, that the rumour started.

      1 The girls’ names have been changed in accordance with Indian law which requires that the identity of victims of certain crimes remain private.

       Rabi

      Spring, 2014