The Bandit Queens

by Parini Shroff

Her fingers toyed with her ear. When she used to wear earrings, she would often check to make sure the backs were secure. The sharp but benign prick of the stud against her thumb had been reassuring. The habit lingered even after Ramesh vanished and she’d stopped wearing jewelry altogether—no nose ring, no bangles, no earrings.

Various endings to her abandoned sentence whipped around the room like detached lizard tails, all echoes of the gossip that had consumed their village on the heels of Ramesh’s disappearance.

Even failing their friendship, there was the undeniable truth that Saloni was stunning. There were film stars who’d claw her face if they knew she was roaming about, potential competition. If Geeta and Ramesh were ordinary mango people, Saloni was a goddamn custard apple.

Geeta’s hurt quickly cloaked itself in rage. “Because what—you’re beautiful? That’ll fade, you know. One day you’ll be old, grey and wrinkled. Maybe bald! Maybe fat! And nothing will change the fact that you can’t afford to get married anyway. So it doesn’t matter that he’s not good enough for you because he wouldn’t have you anyway. He wants me.” Saloni blinked. “I meant,” she said quietly, “that he’s not good enough for you.” Maybe that was true, maybe it was not. But it was too late. She’d already laughed. Everything after, in Geeta’s eyes, was a deliberate walk back, crafted and constructed, not genuine.

Eventually, through discovering her talents for jewelry making, salient truths emerged: There was a Geeta before Ramesh’s hands had found her, and that Geeta was still alive, and even if no one else was interested in knowing her, Geeta was.

But freedom, Geeta had once heard or read somewhere, is what a person does with what’s been done to her. Geeta used hers to start a business. It would never be a big business, that was a given, but it existed solely because of her talent and vision, which made her, according to the loan officer, an entrepreneur. All the French words in the world, however, didn’t cure the fact that she was only as successful as the men around her allowed her to be. As Samir was proving, a man didn’t even need to be your man to oppress you.

His crowning feature were his ears, foxlike with pink innards and far too big for his tiny face. His fur was dirty, his tail a nasty rope. She felt his warm skin give between each rib. As she placed him in her empty bag, he whimpered, tongue lolling. He offered no resistance to her foreign touch, curling into himself with a defeat that triggered Geeta’s simultaneous sympathy and rage.

“What do dogs eat?” The Gyan Vani radio segment talked about the wild; they didn’t offer tips on domesticating strays. Geeta set him down, but he cried out so she held him again. His warmth and weight, minimal though it was, was reassuring against her midsection. She felt maternal and needed; the feeling was not wholly repugnant. “Street dogs? Anything that’s not tied down.”

“I dunno.” He shrugged. “I was the youngest of twelve. My mother was having children well into her forties.” “Your father couldn’t leave her alone, eh?” “Well, no televisions back then, right?”

“Most feelings don’t last.” “That’s sad.” His half smile was quizzical. “Is it? I always thought it was reassuring. Like, knowing it’s all temporary lowers the stakes. You can let yourself go to the limits of it all, because it will pass.” “So love doesn’t stay? What about your kids?” “Love can stay. But that’s because it’s not a feeling.” She already disagreed with him but asked anyway, “What is it, then?” “It’s a commitment.” “Like an obligation?” “No, not in a bad way. I just mean it’s a choice you renew every day.”

But Raees was adroit in the art of dithering. He showered their guest with attention, avoiding his father’s unamused eyes completely.

Raees returned holding five strings. The speckled balloons still hovered near the low ceiling, but they were beginning to sag. The pastel skins puckered, no longer taut. For some awful, horrible, inopportune reason, Geeta thought of her breasts and how this was what she had to look forward to.

Geeta had assumed that each time Phoolan embarked on a new relationship, it was a purely strategic move, seeking protection rather than love. Each new man shielded her from the past’s consequences. Such circumstances could hardly spell choice. In a world where her vagina was a liability, was there even room for petty things like love? But maybe Phoolan had managed to separate Vikram from those before him, and exercise trust. Perhaps it wasn’t about power after all, but companionship.

Farah’s eldest daughter carried her baby brother, her nonexistent hip jutting to create a shelf for his small body. Her two younger sisters were crying, but she remained dry-eyed, her face a blank slate, and this was how Geeta recognized her from the playground. She wore the same vacant expression now as she had when she’d shoved Karem’s son.

When the sisters were sixteen, Priya’s spurned suitor tossed acid on the wrong sister. Preity’s face had healed with the help of an NGO devoted to such attacks, but the burns puckered dark islands across her face and neck, and one ear suffered enough damage to preclude earrings. Two years later, the man married Preity with her parents’ consent. Who else would have her?

Years later, Geeta knew that she hadn’t joined the chant out of any acute hate, but neither had she possessed enough compassion to abstain. Bystanders shoulder their own blame, and Geeta was now shamefully puzzled as to why a tiny act of bravery had been so beyond her.

Anger and guilt competed across Saloni’s face. Her lips pulled in, souring her beauty in a way Geeta recognized immediately. It was odd realizing that sixteen years later, they were the same people they’d always been.

Mosquitos formed halos overhead. After the summer swelter, October evenings were comfortable, and it would be many weeks still before winter nights necessitated shawls and balaclavas. With one foot, Geeta pushed the floor away, setting the swing into motion. Saloni lifted her feet so as to not impede. It was, Geeta, recognized, a tentative truce. They rocked in silence. The contrived breeze disturbed the mosquitos and the grey hair near their temples.

Saloni sat up straighter. Shoulders back, chin out. Geeta would have recognized the battle pose even if she hadn’t known Saloni their entire lives.

She’d wasted much of the late morning angling her chin before the armoire mirror, vying for maximum daylight to hunt and pluck the wiry chin hairs that had suddenly cropped up in the last year or so. Her tweezing hand was vicious as she fume-monologued all the criticisms she should’ve spat at Saloni: that Saloni could’ve used her social cachet for good, like defending Geeta and Runi, but she used her powers for evil instead; that she was selfish and ruthless; that she was no friend to women. Geeta had been revising this to “no ally” while uprooting a dark hair with a victorious flick when the knock came.

Even though she’d been expressly summoned, part of her had expected to be banished; similar to Mrs. Amin, who’d been widowed by the time her daughter wed and was banned by the other guests (Inauspicious, na? Why invite the evil eye?). The woman ran a business, she alone fed her kids and paid for her daughter’s dowry and the wedding to which she’d been denied entry. It was, Geeta felt, just another example of women living within the spaces that others defined.

Incredulity pitched Geeta’s voice higher. “What invites?” Preity raised a painted hand. “I invited you over for Navratri.” “And you never came to our Holi party.” Priya shrugged. “After a while we just stopped trying. It was clear you didn’t like us.” Geeta had assumed the invites were a perfunctory social convention at best, and a trap designed to humiliate her at worst. Memories of her walking back home from Deepa-aunty’s house, alone and covered in garbage, kept her in hiding long after Ramesh had disappeared. It was the same reason she’d refused to believe Arhaan today when he’d insisted his mother wanted Geeta at the party. Had she imprisoned herself, all the while nursing a sad anger and tricking herself into thinking she preferred it that way?

It wasn’t, Geeta mused while walking, so much that women loved their husbands and couldn’t live without them. It was that the outside world made life without them utter shit; you needed a man in the house in order to be left in peace. They didn’t really do much, but their simple pulse was a form of protection. Like pimps.

Geeta was not accustomed to men apologizing. Her father had never said sorry to either her or her mother. He hadn’t been a tyrant; it simply hadn’t been expected of him.

She giggled as she dried her hands. Part of the sound was genuine enjoyment, the other part was for his sake, contrived to show him she enjoyed him. Because she loved the moments—and strove to encourage them—when he was silly for her benefit, like her pleasure was a priority to him. Wasn’t that love? When a man was willing to be a fool for you?

“Fun? Everyone is up everyone’s butt here. If you fart in one corner of town, they smell what you had for dinner in the other.” Saloni’s nose wrinkled. “My, what an elegant metaphor, Geeta. Take a right. They’re usually near the water tower.”

People didn’t play games in these matters because it was fun, she realized, they did it because the alternative was to fling open your arms to rejection and say do with me what you will.

Something else occurred to her. “Girls either marry someone local or leave town. But not only were you an outsider, you moved here for her. Did you know beforehand? About her being Dalit?” “Yeah, I knew. And it didn’t matter to me. No, you’re looking at me like I was noble or selfless. Let me be clear. I didn’t care because I had nothing—no family left, no job, no proper home—and her parents offered me all of that in exchange for some safety and credibility. It sounds crude, but it was a deal of sorts. I guess most marriages are. After we married, our friendship happened quickly enough, then affection, and then came a time when I couldn’t remember not loving her.”

Her father bringing her a chocolate on her birthday, massaging her legs when she fell ill, slapping her mother for a domestic trifle that was more about his mood than her failing. Was it really so much easier to be a decent father than a decent husband?

She resented being put in a position where those were her choices: violence or violation. She didn’t want to be built to endure, a long-suffering saint tossed by the whims of men. She wanted, for once, not to be handed the short end of the stick by a system that expected gratitude in return.

Saloni peered around the girl down to Geeta, who perched on a stool so low that she might as well have sat on the tile. “Where is this andolan coming from, yaar?” “I don’t know,” Geeta confessed. She supposed she was agitated. Karem’s words floated to her, about kids not questioning injustices. But what about when adults didn’t either? If the women were able to help each other commit murder because they felt it was morally right, then why couldn’t they help others being wronged, too?

Geeta was no rebel; she’d never be one to bring the world to its knees. Phoolan Devi hadn’t either, but she’d brought some men to theirs, and her story had resonated with countless other women, including Geeta. She’d always regarded Phoolan’s life as delineated by gender: one woman against scores of men who constantly used her womanhood to dehumanize her, to grind her, literally, into the dirt. But Geeta now saw that caste had marked Phoolan’s story as much as, if not more than, gender had. She’d been born Phoolan Mallah, a Dalit and a woman, therefore twice-trodden. Even in a gang with no regard for civilization or law, caste reigned.

Over the years, loneliness had become a dead arm, useless and heavy but nonetheless hers, so she’d lugged it around, her other appendages pumping harder to compensate for the burden. Now it was as though that arm was working in tandem, finally helping rather than hindering.

Geeta glared at Farah, whose smile was all teeth. Not for the first time, Geeta marveled at the vast emotional gamut of women. Here sat Farah, repurposing her tenderness toward Amali and Khushi as a further foil for her savagery against Geeta. Geeta wasn’t offended so much as impressed. And it wasn’t just Farah, it was all of them: Saloni, the twins, Geeta herself. Their ranges, as women, were extreme. Men gravitated toward one side or the other and remained; Ramesh certainly had. Women splayed the far corners, their cruelty and kindness equally capacious.

Khushi laughed then and Geeta felt the relief like a cool breeze. She wanted Khushi’s approval with the same eager desperation that likely hindered it. Knowledge of this, however, did not equal the power to alter or mask her thirst.

It’d been many years since she’d thought of her personal sobriquet for Ramesh, longer since she’d had to use it. Early on, The Chut had revealed himself as a Baniya—though, now that Geeta had planted the scourge of casteism in Saloni’s mind, she figured stereotypes were also harmful. Fine. Early on, The Chut had revealed himself as a greedy, money-salivating miser, with the looks and morals of a male bedbug (a breed Saloni now unfortunately knew, courtesy of Geeta and her blasted radio program, was prone to something called traumatic insemination, an adjective Saloni also felt after image-searching on Arhaan’s computer).

No sooner had Geeta’s parents sent out the wedding invitations than The Chut & Co. (as Saloni dubbed him and his avaricious family of like-minded bedbugs) surged their dowry demands. The Chut swore his devotion to Geeta, lying about refusing a dowry; the Co. meanwhile gouged her parents for a scooter, gold jewelry, furniture, kitchen appliances, a television and an actual silver platter of cash to be presented by Geeta’s father. Their side was to be served first at every function, with food and drink of better quality than the bride’s side. Prostrated over a barrel of dishonor, Geeta’s parents relented on each demand—moving money, calling in debts and favors, signing over their house, taking on outrageous loans.

And, as she was to spend a lifetime with The Chut & Co., Geeta’s parents swore Saloni to secrecy. There was no sense, they said, in Geeta entering her marital home with resentment. This is what parents did for their children, Geeta’s mother assured Saloni as she removed her own wedding jewelry to be weighed and pawned. And they did it gladly. It wasn’t sacrifice, not when it was your child. Bullshit, Saloni had seethed. Bullshit. Parents’ dreams were too myopic—they clasped their hands and prayed to get through their daughter’s wedding. If we can just get her married, everything will be all right. No one bothered with the question Saloni found frantically obvious: if they were a pack of shameless extortionists pre-wedding, what kind of in-laws would they be afterward?

Saloni rolled her shoulders back. “If we’re gonna do this, I need a drink. Where’s that bottle Karem brought over?” “Cupboard,” Geeta said, gesturing vaguely. “Maybe he took it for his new cane?” “Yes, and maybe I’ll get thin by Diwali.” Saloni pointed at Farah. “You in?” Farah refused primly, with ample judgment. “I don’t drink. Plus, we have to meet Varunbhai soon, na?” “It’s not tharra, it’s actual rum.” “Ooh.” Farah perked up. “Okay then.”

Geeta sat very still, frozen and pallid under her brown skin, as Saloni spoke of the dowry. At one point, Farah, noticing Geeta’s gooseflesh, opened the door and whistled. No further invitation was necessary. Like an actor in a prompt corner waiting for his cue, Bandit burst through the doorway, heading straight for Geeta’s lap. She finally moved then, a small shift to hold him. She tolerated his eager tongue and damp nose, but her lack of enthusiasm was contagious and he soon settled on her lap, paws kneading her orange sari in comfort.

Saloni chimed in: “ ‘Darwaza tod do!’ ” She laughed with Farah. “So, you in?” Farah scoffed. “No! I have, like, seventy dresses to make; I don’t have time to kill another man. But, if you want my advice, you should wait until after Diwali. That’ll give everyone time to cool their brains and, you know, reevaluate.” Over Geeta’s bent head, Farah gave Saloni a pointed look, her eyebrows soaring to her hairline. “I won’t change my mind,” Geeta said into Bandit’s fur. Saloni cleared her throat. “After Diwali is better for me, too. All this party planning is killing me.”

As a child, Geeta had heard classmates saying the Rabari tattooed their women to make them unappealing and therefore safe from other, preying tribes and castes. When she’d asked her mother for verification, her mother had said the Rabari had no permanent home to store possessions; everything they valued or needed, they carried as they traveled. Tattoos were weightless jewelry that could never be left behind or stolen or misplaced. Geeta still did not know if either, both or neither of the explanations were true, but now the idea of certain jewelry—like a wedding necklace—being indelible disturbed her.

The amount of bullshit that fell from that fucker’s mouth could fertilize half of India.

While Sita was displeased at such inimical treatment, she loved Ram and wished to go home. Though she was a mere woman, she had the benefit of being privileged and wellborn, which Geeta likened to being the best player on a losing team (akin to how Khushi was the richest of the poor Dalits). Sita proved her purity by surviving a sacrificial fire. And lo! Ram’s pesky, chauvinistic doubts were assuaged!

Saloni groaned and clapped her palms over her ears. “Are you kidding me with this? For weeks, I’ve been chewing my own brains trying to not only convince my father-in-law to give a council seat to Khushiben, but also to convince him that it’s his idea. Then I chewed the sad leftovers of my brains to figure out how to do you-know-what to you-know-who. And now you wanna boycott Sita mid-Diwali? I swear, Geeta, you have more causes than I have pubic hairs.”

Geeta and Saloni had always assumed this was a cautionary tale written by men for men. Only a man would imagine retribution wrapped in lust rather than just painful death. Only a man would morph a wounded woman into a hideous monster. Only a man would then, for the sake of phallic pride, attribute her with shape-shifting powers, so that the creature he’d lain down with over and over again was deceptively gorgeous. But what if, Geeta thought as she stood frozen near her front door, desperately trying to think of a plan, the churel was a cautionary tale created by women for women? If the natural world afforded them no protection, then a supernatural story might. A way of terrifying men into considering a woman’s well-being from time to time.

He leaned against her wall in an affected air of nonchalance, arms crossed above his rice belly, one hand holding the revolver. Though his arms and legs were slim, he had the abdomen of a man who hadn’t yet learned to recalibrate his diet with age. He was still in his sandals—they all were—a rare event in an Indian home. It was as alien as the rest of this interaction.

His surprise dissolved into exasperation. “My mistress and my wife fight all the time. About everything! Food, clothes, the children, money, money, money. And my mother just makes it worse. The doctor says she’s going through ‘menopause’ and then I made the mistake of looking it up…” He trailed off with a shudder.

“Why are you here?” Geeta asked. “It hit me that Ramesh might not be blind. And I figured I should warn you.” Her eyes tracked the revolver, which moved back and forth across the room as BB anxiously paced. “A choice I now deeply regret.” “How did you know?” Ramesh asked, his curiosity genuine. “I was pretty convincing.” “Well, I was at the party and I fell asleep. Right on the sweets table. When I woke up, I realized that the other day, when we were here for Geeta, he called Saloni fat.” “So what?” BB said. “She is. No offense.” “I prefer voluptuous, but whatever.” Farah shook her head. “But how did he know? The last time he saw you, you were—” Saloni sniffed in self-satisfaction. “Devastatingly gorgeous.”

Geeta’s lips tugged up, but Saloni simply sighed. “Well, a weapon or something would’ve been useful. It’s like you’ve learned nothing from C.I.D..” “Well, hindsight is almost a bigger bitch than you.” Saloni sputter-laughed. “I’m the bitch? You tried to blackmail Geeta, not to mention you threatened to kill her.” Farah growled. “Ya’Allah, how long are you gonna bang that drum? I’m here, aren’t I? Let it go already.”