The Fair Comes to the Village

      Everyone knew the fair had arrived because the music could be heard across the village and even in the fields. It was only devotional, for the annual event was organised by the local temple committee, but the Shakya girls were excited. They had never been to a mela. The highlight was a performance of the Ramlila, a theatrical enactment of the life of the Hindu god Ram, which culminated in the battle between Ram and his nemesis Ravana, the ten-headed demon king of Lanka.

      That morning, 27 May, it was just the girls in the house, with the two mothers. Padma was frying slices of bottle gourd in a seasoning of salt and chilli powder. Over the wall, Siya Devi and Lalli made sure the buffaloes were fed, the courtyard was swept and an afternoon meal of curry and rotis prepared over the smoky outdoor fire. Siya Devi reminded her daughter to keep the food covered. ‘These brazen monkeys will steal every last roti if they can; given half a chance they will run off with the aate ka dabba.’

      When Lalli picked up her sharp-tongued sickle to lend family members a hand with the harvest, Padma insisted on tagging along. Cousin Manju had succumbed to the heat and was asleep on a charpoy.

      In the fields, the perspiring men had roped turbans around their heads. The women wore rubber slippers. The high temperature had turned the ground into a thousand pieces of glass. Padma wandered off with her goats.

      It had been a good year for the mint harvest, and Sohan Lal had more than thirty kilograms of fragrant green leaves bundled up and ready to go. He would sell the oil to a wholesaler in the bazaar, and that man would sell it on to factories that made toothpaste, tobacco, medicines and mouthwash. Sohan Lal’s mint would travel from Katra village across towns and cities in India and perhaps even go abroad.

      But first, the leaves had to be taken to the oil distillation machine sixteen kilometres away. A cousin with a tractor had agreed to help out, but there was still plenty to do. As Sohan Lal was stuffing some things into a polythene bag, he asked his daughter Lalli for assistance. Would she make a call on his behalf, he said, handing over his mobile phone. Sohan Lal had two sons still at home, but they were little. For now, Lalli, who was her mother’s right hand, was also her father’s.

      By this time, cousin Manju had recovered sufficiently to join the older girls out in the sun. Although they had never had much use for her, they now smilingly beckoned for her to join them in the shade of a mango tree. ‘Ask mummy to let us go to the fair,’ Lalli beseeched. ‘She’ll listen to you.’

      To no one’s surprise, Siya Devi said absolutely not.

      ‘Ladkiyan bahar nahin ghoomti,’ she scolded. Girls don’t wander about outside the house.

      Manju was on the threshold of adolescence, already familiar with the art of breaking down resistant parents. ‘Why, why, why?’ she wheedled. Why had she come to visit, if not to go to the fair? Her father had given her 500 rupees to spend.

      Siya Devi had little tolerance for such behaviour, but she was conflicted. Her husband always said girls didn’t go to the bazaar, what would they do there? But Lalli was her only daughter still living at home. She was such a good girl. She did everything she was asked to, immediately and devotedly. If it weren’t for her, Siya Devi would have no one to talk to.

      Soon Lalli would go away, to her husband’s home, and then what opportunity would Siya Devi have to spoil her little girl? Surely a quick outing after the day’s chores would do no harm.

      But Siya Devi’s mask didn’t drop, and Lalli would never know the loving thoughts that had crossed her mother’s mind.

      ‘Don’t eat or drink anything,’ Siya Devi said, sternly, for it wouldn’t do for girls to be seen enjoying themselves in a public place. ‘Whatever you want your father will buy for you later and you can have at home.’

      The excited girls took the advice in one ear and let it out the other. They locked the doors into the courtyard and took turns at the water pump. They washed their face and feet. Padma brushed her hair, and put on her green salwar kameez, a favourite gift from her maternal uncles. Lalli’s purple and red outfit hung inconspicuously over her frame.

      Sometime between 4 and 4.30 p.m. the three girls crossed the bazaar and joined the throng of villagers picking their way through the rubbish-strewn ground where the fair was set up. In the far distance, the Ganga gleamed like diamonds. Vendors in tarpaulin shacks showed off shirts and saris, bras and panties, glass bangles and bindis. Fluffy teddy bears, plastic flip phones and pellet guns. Kerchiefs for the heat, golden nose pins for special occasions. One vendor cried, ‘Watermelons! Watermelons!’ Another beckoned with hot jalebis. A barefoot man in a vest stirred a pot of spicy golgappa water. Children squealed with joy from the tippy-top of a clanking Ferris wheel.

      The cousins immediately saw familiar faces. There was Somwati, whose father had a vegetable stall at the fair. She’d brought along her little niece. With them was a neighbour, Rekha, who was surely a saint. Rekha was now fourteen – but she was only six when her mother died of cancer, and she was pulled out of school to cook and clean for her family of four. A disability prevented one of her brothers from walking, so the task of looking after him also fell to Rekha. If the demands placed on her seemed extreme, she never said so to her friends. The span of childhood was in the hands of fate.

      Shortly afterwards, Padma took cousin Manju aside and asked her to stay right there, not to move one inch. They would be back soon, she promised. But they took so long – at least fifteen minutes, as the younger girl later remembered – that she went in search of them.

      Although the fair was concentrated in a small area, it was swarming with people. Some farmers were coaxing a weighing machine up the embankment towards their taro crop, and the crowd surged forward to gape. It was possible that the men would slip, and the scales would fall and crush them. At first Manju wandered through the exclaiming people, but she quickly changed her mind. All she could make out was a sea of heads and backs.

      ‘If they don’t show up,’ she told herself. ‘I’ll go home.’

      Pappu entered the fair at around 5.45 p.m.

      As was often the case, he was the only one of the Yadav brothers with any time for recreational activities. After work Avdesh went straight to his wife and baby. At this moment he was cutting tobacco plants for a neighbour for some extra money. In fact, there was so much to do that he had taken Basanta along. Pappu’s other brother, Urvesh, was across the Ganga with their father. When he was done, the quiet young man would retrieve his tenth-class exercise books. Urvesh was twenty-one, an age at which better-off contemporaries were graduating college, but his days working in the watermelon patch left him worn out. He studied when he could.

      Pappu, at nineteen, had no plans to marry. Nor did he know what it meant to study. Someone had offered to teach him how to write his name, but ‘Darvesh’ proved tricky to spell; so ‘Pappu’ was all he knew.

      That evening, he and his companion Sannu Pandit, younger than Pappu by two years, settled on the bare ground, ready to watch the Ramlila.

      Manju found the teenaged girls near some stalls, examining their purchases – nail polish for Somwati and Rekha, a tube of cream for Padma. But the mood was weighted and sour. Her cousin Lalli looked upset, ‘as though she’d been in a fight’, she later remembered.

      Padma was cursing to herself.

      Manju was taken aback.

      ‘You took your time,’ she said lightly.

      ‘Keep quiet!’ Padma snapped. ‘Let’s go.’

      The moment passed for Manju, who enjoyed herself on the Ferris wheel while the others