The Bandit Queens (8)

Farah moved to sit on the floor in front of Geeta, who sat on her cot. “Well, how did you do it before? To Ramesh?”

“None of your damn business.”

“Fine.” Farah sighed. “So are you gonna come over to my place now or…?”

Geeta narrowed her eyes. “I said I’d help you, I didn’t say I’d do it for you.”

“But you’re smarter than me. You’ll do it right, I know you will. I’d just mess it up.”

Geeta scoffed. “If you used this much butter on your food, you wouldn’t be so scrawny.”

“Arre, yaar, it’s not like that. I’m just saying you’ve already killed one, another won’t make a difference.”

“Your chut husband, your murder.”

Farah again winced at Geeta’s language but followed her and her lantern out into the night. They avoided the open water channels, walking along the sides of their village’s common pathways, where garbage aggregated. Farah covered her nose and mouth with the free end of her sari. Her voice muffled and miserable, she asked, “What are we doing here?”

Geeta doubled over, her head closer to the ground as she squinted. “Looking for a plastic bag.”

“Why?”

Geeta modulated her voice as though it should’ve been obvious: “Tie his hands and feet while he’s sleeping and then put the bag on his head. Smother him. He dies. You remove your nose ring; I keep my money. Everyone is happy.”

“Smart.”

It was almost sweet, the way Farah looked at her. Like Geeta’s ideas were gold, like she could do no wrong. Despite herself, such adoration filled her with the desire to prove Farah’s faith was well placed and to perform as best she could. Geeta imagined this was what having a child would’ve been like.

“I know.”

“So, ah, is that how you did it?”

Geeta stiffened. She rolled her shoulders back to make her height more imposing. “If you want my help, you’ll stop chewing on my brains with your questions. What I did is none of your damn business.”

Farah looked chastised. She sucked her teeth, complaining, “Bey yaar, fine. What do I tell people? After, I mean?”

“Heart attack, he drank himself to death, anything you like. Just don’t let them do an autopsy.”

“Okay.” Farah drew out the word slowly. “But if you smothered Ramesh, why didn’t you just use a pillow? A plastic bag seems like a lot more work, you know?”

Geeta blinked. Dammit. That thought had not occurred to her. She covered her ignorance with ire. “I didn’t say I smothered Ramesh.”

Farah threw her hands up. “What? Then why are we here? Why not just do what we know works?”

“Oi! ‘Even to copy, you need some brains.’ Do you want my help or not?”

“What I want,” Farah sulked, “is your experience, not your experiment.”

“Forget it. Why should I break my head over your drama?”

“No! Sorry, okay?” She tugged on her earlobes in an earnest apology. “Let’s keep looking, na?”

They walked along the more trafficked areas, where the lines of compost and trash thickened. Geeta toed aside torn packets of mukhwas and wafers. A few meters away were the public toilets the government had recently installed. There were two, designated by helpful yellow and blue cartoons of a card deck’s king and queen. Though she used the squat toilets daily, it’d never occurred to Geeta before now just how silly the drawings were.

Geeta’s home didn’t have a pit latrine like many others did, but she still saw men take to the fields. Despite all the recent clamoring about open defecation and sanitation issues, it didn’t bother her; she’d grown up doing the same, they all had. Even those who had pit latrines declined to use them—after all, someone would eventually have to empty them and caste Hindus were quite touchy about polluting themselves by handling their own waste. Some tried to force such work onto local Dalits, an oppression that was technically illegal, though authorities rarely came around these parts to enforce the law.

But for women, the new installations, public and private alike, were wholly welcome. While men could take to the fields at their whim (Geeta had heard that in the West where there were clean facilities galore, men still su-su’d anywhere for the hell of it—nature of the beast and all), the women and girls could only make their deposits either at sunrise or sunset—otherwise they were inviting harassment. So they held it. Better to brave the scorpion than the horny farmer.

Around Geeta and Farah, the crickets’ song swelled. It was difficult to hear Farah as she ambled along another line of rubbish, her attempts half-hearted. After picking up and immediately dropping a bag of chips with carpenter ants inside, she asked, her voice carefully casual, “How come Ramesh’s body was never found?”

Acrid smoke filled the night air; the heat amplified the odor. Throughout the village, trash was being burned. “You’re beginning to sound like one of those gossipy bitches from the loan group.”

Farah cringed, but no longer from the stench. “Why do you curse so much?”

“Because you talk so much.”

“It’s not right for a woman to swear. And it doesn’t suit you.” After a few moments, she asked, “You and Ramesh—were you a love match or arranged?”