Night Work

despaired, as it was full of girls with university degrees and professional training, but his cousin pointed out that he had little choice, and it was worth the investment as a gamble. The three of them together decided on the wording.

Pretty young light-skinned village girl, hardworking, traditional, and respectful, no dowry but ideal for the right man.

Barot could see that even his cousin’s wife had grave doubts about the chances of a response, but she had to admit that the advert was honest, and that in a market bristling with nursing certificates and BA hon degrees, it had the advantage of its own simplicity. And Pramilla did have skin as light as a farmer’s daughter could hope for. Maybe, just maybe, there was a rich man out there (or another schoolteacher with radical ideas) who valued a cowlike, hardworking girl of a respectable caste over an educated potential troublemaker with her own money.

There was.

To everyone’s astonishment, three weeks later a letter came, on a piece of paper with a letterhead engraved on it, bearing a stamp from the United States of America.

They read it at the house of Barot’s cousin. The cousin’s wife read it to them, stumbling over the more unfamiliar English words and translating tentatively as she went.

The letter in its magnificent crisp typescript was from a man who called himself Peter Mehta. He was the Chief Executive Officer (a vastly impressive phrase) of a company with branches in Bombay, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (magic names all) whose business was not specified but was quite patently successful.

Mehta had seen Barot’s advertisement in the Marriages Offered section of the Delhi Post that was flown in to his office in San Francisco several days a week. He was looking for a bride for his younger brother, Laxman, acting as the family representative since their parents were both dead. Laxman was a boy of simple tastes, according to the letter, and both brothers preferred a traditional arranged marriage to the haphazard dangers of the American system. If the girl’s family was willing to have their daughter emigrate to America, would they please send a photograph, details of the girl’s life and accomplishments, and a signed letter from the village health worker to the effect that she was healthy and capable of bearing children.

The letter was couched in terms both more flowery and less direct than that, but all parties involved knew what was meant. She needed to be certified a virgin, she had to be shown to have the normal complement of eyes, ears, and teeth in a more or less pleasing arrangement, and they wanted something in writing that said who she was. Normally, a marriage broker or convenient uncle would take care of this, but the family seemed to have no relatives in the area, and they wanted assurance that their investment would reach them in an acceptable manner. Otherwise they would have to ship her home again, and the “no dowry” phrase had already established that Barot would be unable to reimburse them for the transportation costs.

Barot held the pristine white sheet of paper in his trembling, work-roughened fingers, examining the bold signature of the Chief Executive Officer as if it were the stamp of a god. Salvation was at hand; Pramilla was saved from the clutches of a freak or a wife-beater; he and his son would not starve. And America—unbelievable! The land of golden opportunity had opened up, reaching out to a dusty village in Rajasthan, for surely this would mean that when Pramilla’s brother was grown to be a man, her husband, this godlike Laxman Mehta who was younger brother to an American Chief Executive Officer named Peter, would reach out again to bring the boy into the fold of his extended family.

It was only the cousin’s wife who had doubts. Barot was from a good caste, granted, but the Mehtas were much higher. What did they want with a girl like Pramilla, when they could have someone both higher and with a degree? And San Francisco was so very far away, and Pramilla so young. Who knew this family of Mehtas? Was there no one here to speak for them?

But her protests, admittedly mild, went unheard, for Barot and his cousin and the entire village were filled with joy and excitement. Even Pramilla herself was speechless with the thrill of it (for she had known of the two other suitors hovering in the wings of her father’s vision, and had shuddered at both of them).

The photographer was summoned from the next town, arriving with his heavy ancient camera and a choice of three grubby saris for the occasion. Pramilla yearned for the white sari heavy with silver thread, but the cousin’s wife disapproved, saying it would make her look as if she could afford a dowry after all, and besides, the white would make her skin look much too dark even with rice powder. So she chose the sari with small sprigs of blue flowers on it, and dusted Pramilla’s face and arms with the powder, and pronounced herself satisfied with the result.

Pramilla was fourteen and a half years old, and looked twelve in the picture that landed on Peter Mehta’s desk two weeks later. He grunted, felt a brief regret that he was not himself in need of a luscious young bride, and passed it over to Laxman for approval—unnecessary, perhaps, but this was America after all, and there was no reason to be too medieval about this.

Laxman blushed and nodded, and the arrangements went ahead.

One thing the bride’s father had asked (with fawning trepidation in his ornate phrases, and at the firm suggestion of the cousin’s wife), and that was whether the wedding might not take place in India, preferably in Jaipur or, if that was not convenient, then Delhi—although the writer of the letter could fully understand if the Mehtas were to find this impossible, and it was only asked by the love Barot felt for this his last and most precious jewel of a daughter.

Actually, visa arrangements were vastly simpler if the wedding took place outside the United States and the bride could be introduced as a fait accompli. It would mean fiddling with the date on her birth certificate, but Peter knew a man in Pune who was good at that sort of thing. No, it would not be a problem, and would all in all be preferable to deal with the matter in India. He even sent three third-class rail tickets, so the bride’s family could accompany her.

It was a full, no-expenses-spared Hindu wedding, with shamiana tents in the garden of the second-best hotel in Delhi, a white horse for the groom and rented jewelry for the bride, music until the early hours, and even some fireworks to light up the neighborhood and wake the restless beggars sleeping at the hotel gates. Barot was frankly terrified by Peter Mehta and had to fight down a sudden impulse to thrust Pramilla into the arms of the Chief Executive Officer who would soon be her brother-in-law and run away, but his first view of the younger brother, Laxman, brought with it a wave of relief mixed heavily with guilt.

Relief because the lad was more than presentable, he was beautiful, long-lashed as a cow, slim as a young Krishna, and he looked not much older than his bride. He was older, Barot knew that, twice Pramilla’s age, but he looked very like a young boy, white-faced and plucking at the front of his white silk kurta pajamas—more like a farm boy than a hard-driving company director, and infinitely more suited to Pramilla. And Barot knew guilt because he suspected that Pramilla was not really being given the man she deserved, but an immature boy who might never become anything else. All through that long day and night the farmer kept casting glances at the boy who would take his daughter, and in the end he decided that there was definitely something wrong with him. Not greatly so—he wasn’t a drooling idiot by any means, just… slow.

His cousin’s wife, who had come with him instead of Barot’s young son, agreed with his assessment, and managed to take the young bride aside for a private conversation at which phrases such as “patience” and “a loving heart” and “you will need to be your husband’s backbone” played a part. The earnest advice confused Pramilla somewhat, but lodged in her heart, and her “auntie” assured herself that the child would find them there and remember them when the time came. She patted the child’s cold hand and told her to remember that even the great god Shiva was nothing without the energies of his wife, Shakti; as she put it: “Shiva is shava [corpse] without shakti” (shakti being, Kate remembered from Roz’s television panel, both the word for energy and the name of the goddess). Pramilla nodded dutifully and went back to take her place beside her pale, silent boy-husband.

The marriage might never have been consummated had Pramilla waited for Laxman to make the first move. Indeed, it was not consummated in the five days they spent in Delhi, waiting for Peter to finish his business and for the authorities to come through with her travel papers. But once on the airplane, sitting in the roaring, rattling, utterly foreign compartment surrounded by poisonous smells, incomprehensible voices, and a husband who, though exceedingly beautiful, acted nothing like the filmi husbands she had seen on the flickering screen in her village, or even her neighbors’ husbands, Pramilla Mehta watched in something close to terror as the sprawl of Delhi fell away beneath the wings of the plane, and the girl of not yet fifteen years began quietly to weep.

Had she plotted for days, she could not have come up with a better way of making the boy at her side cleave