a novel by Anita Rau Badami
EXCERPT
IT WAS LATE in the evening and Nimmo was just beginning to relax her guard when she heard the sound of scuffling feet outside, some yelling and then a knock on the door. She dropped her sewing and sat still. They were here. She had always known they would come one day, those men from her village who had made her mother moan like an animal in pain. She glanced across at Kamal, who looked petrified, and placed a finger on her lips. Shhh! She rose to her feet and pulled the girl after her to the inner room and the steel cupboard.
“Get inside,” she whispered. “Don’t make a noise.”
Kamal entered the cold metal cupboard reluctantly and sat down. Despite its size it was a tight space, and she had to make herself thin in order to fit in.
“Stay there till I come for you,” Nimmo whispered. She shut the door and locked it. She stuffed the key into a bowl full of other keys, coins and odds and ends. They would not think of looking for it there. Let them kill her if they wanted, but they would never get her daughter. She slipped into the kitchen and grabbed a heavy iron poker. Unlike her mother, she was prepared.
The banging on the door became louder and more insistent. There was the sound of glass breaking. The windowpane. Thank goodness for the iron grill. More banging, and then the door burst open, flinging the cot away and scattering the steel shelves ranged on it.
Nimmo glared at the intruders. She recognized some of them–there was the fellow from the ration shop who always cheated her on her sugar rations, there was that Doctor Jaikishen who prayed forty times a day and sold medicines made of sugar and wheat flour to his poor patients. And behind them all, hiding like the coward that he was, was Asha’s husband.
“What do you want?” Nimmo asked, holding the iron rod firmly in her hands.
“Where are your men?” one of the men asked.
Nimmo looked at Asha’s husband. “Why are you here, brother?” she asked.
He shifted his eyes away from her straight gaze. “You better tell them what they want to know. Otherwise I can’t say what will happen,” he mumbled.