Siddhu had been instructed to do exactly as he had wanted. His younger brother, too, ran out with him. Together, they caught hold of the goat and holding her by the ear, they brought her to their father, who positioned the baby’s mouth under the goat’s udders. In a minute, spouts of milk flowed into her mouth, giving her a new lease of life, as a fading lamp bursts into flame when it is replenished with oil. The girl’s face lit up. Perhaps, for the first time, today, her hunger had been sated. She began to play energetically in her father’s lap. Even the boys played enthusiastically with her.
From that day, Siddhu began to derive pleasure from a new form of entertainment. Boys are very fond of little children. If they chance upon a fledgling in its nest, they go up to look at it again and again. They will observe how the mother feeds its young ones—how the fledglings flap their wings and receive the grain in their beaks, chirping all the while. They will talk about it among themselves with a great deal of seriousness and take their friends over to the site. Siddhu was always on the watch now. No sooner would his mother go to cook food, or to bathe, than he would carry the girl out, get hold of the goat and position her mouth under its udders. Sometimes, he would manage to do this several times a day. He had tamed the goat by feeding it fodder and hay, so that it would come looking for food of its own accord, permit the baby to nurse on it and then go away. About a month passed like this; the girl grew healthy; her countenance blossomed like that of a boy; her eyes shone brightly. The innocent glow of her infancy attracted everybody’s attention.
Her mother was quite astonished to see the child’s health blossom. She didn’t say anything to anyone, but ruminated over the fact that the child no longer appeared as though she would die soon—in all likelihood, one of them would. Perhaps God tended the child Himself; that is why she grew healthier by the day; else she should have made her residence in his abode by now.3
However, the baby’s grandmother was far more concerned than her mother. She began to think that her daughter-in-law was feeding the baby well—that, in fact, she was nourishing a serpent. She would not even raise her eyes to look at the child. One day, she exclaimed, ‘You are very fond of the child—and why not? After all, you are the mother, aren’t you? If you don’t love her, who will?’
‘Ammaji, God knows that I do not feed her!’
‘But I do not forbid you from doing so. Why should I sin needlessly by preventing you from feeding her? After all, I will not be affected!’
‘Now, if you are not willing to believe me, what can I do?’
‘Do you think I am silly to believe that she is growing healthier by drinking air?’
‘God knows best, Amma, I too am quite surprised.’
Her daughter-in-law continued to express her innocence, but the aged mother-in-law’s fears were not assuaged. Instead, she imagined that her daughter-in-law believed that her worries were unjustified, that perhaps, she was holding a grudge against the baby. She began to wish to be afflicted by some malady in order to prove to these people that her fears were not fabricated. Or that some unforeseen evil would befall the people she loved more dearly than her own existence, only so that her misgivings would not be perceived as ill founded. Although she did not want anybody to die, she began to wish for someone to fall prey to some untoward incident, so as to make them conscious of the fact that what had happened was because they had not heeded her warning. The more the mother-in-law’s attitude of hostility became apparent, the more her daughter-in-law’s affection for the girl increased. She prayed fervently for that one year to pass without any unpleasant incident, so she could question her mother-in-law about the mythic belief. To some extent the girl’s innocent-looking face and to some extent her husband’s fatherly affection towards the child encouraged her to change her earlier negligence of the baby. It was quite a peculiar situation; she could neither express her love for her daughter wholeheartedly nor debunk the fallacy of the malevolent child in totality. She could neither laugh nor cry.
Two months passed this way, and no unseemly incident took place. By now, the aged mother-in-law had begun to suffer pangs of extreme anxiety. My daughter-in-law is not falling ill with fever even for a couple of days so that my suspicions are vindicated; neither does any older child fall off his toy car and nor is there any news of a death in my daughter-in-law’s family, she thought.
One day Damodar spoke to his mother without mincing his words, ‘Amma, this notion of the malevolent girl child is merely a delusion; aren’t there daughters born after three sons all over the world? Do all parents expire after their birth?’
Finally, his mother devised a strategy to justify the validity of her misgivings. One day when Damodar returned from school he found Amma lying unconscious on the bed; his wife had lit a coal fire in the brazier and was applying a warm fomentation on her chest. The doors and windows of the little
