The First Four Hundred Words: 13 Men

The girls hurried through the forest, dragging the reptile behind them. The ground was moist from a sharp burst of unseasonable rain, and the bloodied carcass was soon coated with mud. It was a cold evening in January, but the girls were barefoot. They had bludgeoned their prey with bamboo sticks and were giddy with the anticipation of savoring the fresh meat. They argued logistics all the way home.

If they roasted the meat on an outdoor fire, as they wanted to, they would attract the envy of the entire village. They lived in Subalpur, a forested neck of land in a remote corner of Birbhum district, located some 117 miles north of Kolkata in West Bengal, India. Few of the people they knew could afford to eat more than once a day.

“Aren’t you alone tonight, Baby?” one of them said, turning to an older girl. They all knew that Baby lived with her mother, who was away visiting Baby’s brother in another village. “Why don’t we cook this fellow at your house?”

Twenty-year-old Baby was a fairly new addition to this group of friends. A few of them dismissed her as aloof, but others liked her because she was stylish. She wore salwar kameezes to work, same as all the girls, but she piled on glass bangles and oxidized silver chains, so her wiry little frame jangled playfully as she moved. Sweet-smelling flowers spilled out of her kinky, bunned hair.

But now she lagged behind the group, preoccupied. Baby was the only woman in Subalpur who owned a mobile phone—a no-brand device that she was always using to call or text someone. Some months earlier, the curious girls had confronted her about the texts. She was messaging a man, she told them, with a note of challenge in her voice. He was handsome, he was good to her. He even bought her groceries.

The girls knew Khaleque Sheikh, who lived in the nearby village of Chouhatta. He worked with them on the construction site where they were helping to build the area’s first high school. Out of trucks that arrived at the site, the young women hauled spires of bricks and mud in steel pans they balanced on their heads with practiced nimbleness. Then Khaleque and the other masons laid down the bricks in cement.

Baby looked up distractedly to answer the question about her house. “Oh no..."

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