Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan Read Free Book Online

treating them as if they were scorpions and might sting her. From then on if she caught me reading, she would call me lazy and set me to a task or send me off to the village on an errand. But no matter what Sass thought, the secrets in the books were now mine, and try as she might, she could not snatch them away.
    I still bowed to the household shrine each morning, but now I begged Krishna to find a way to let me escape. In my books I had read that as a child, Krishna was very mischievous. Now I became mischievous as well. The milk I churned would not turn into butter. The grain I ground for chapatis had bits of chaff that got between our teeth. In the garden I pulled up the potato plants and left the weeds. The dung cakes I made fell apart, so the fire went out. I put a dead frog in the water bottle. The bottle was brass, so no one noticed the frog until all the water had been drunk. I left the geese’s mess where Sass would step into it. I looked away when the bandicoot ate the mangoes.
    In one thing I was careful. I never spilled the salt, for my maa had told me in the next world you had to sweep up every grain of salt you spilled, and I didn’t want to waste my time doing that.
    “Why do you anger my maa?” Chandra asked. “She is like those little red ants that swarm all over you and bite and bite.”
    I knew what Chandra said was true, but I also knew that I could not crawl about like a beaten dog. I had heard about families that had murdered the widows of their sons to get rid of them. Though I knew Sass would never do such a thing, I believed she would surely kill my spirit with her spitefulness if I didn’t fight back.
    I would not let Sass’s scoldings touch me as they used to. She became smaller in my mind. I had the comfort of Chandra, for we were as sisters now, and each evening after my work was finished, my books were there to welcome me. In this way two years passed, and then whispering began in the house. Sass and Sassur spoke in low voices. Chandra began to wear a secret smile. One night she confided to me, “The gataka has found me a husband.”

five
     
     
    Soon Sass and Sassur consulted an astrologer, and Chandra was dancing with excitement. “The astrologer brought out his charts, and after much study he named January second as the most auspicious day.” She told me with great importance, “The gataka has done well for me. The bridegroom, Raman, is nineteen and has been to mission school. Already he has written to an uncle who has promised him a job working with computers.”
    “Computers!” I had heard of such a thing from my own baap. “One day they will have no need for scribes like myself,” he had complained. “They will put a machine in the marketplace instead. The machine will write the letters well enough, but the words the machine writes will have no elegance and no heart.”
    I told Chandra, “Your bridegroom must be very learned.” Though I was impressed, something was bothering me. “Chandra, how can you tell if you will love him?” I asked. “You have never seen him.” Though he was dead and I knew I should not think badly of him, I remembered how disappointed I had been in Hari.
    “I will learn to love him,” Chandra said. “I had never seen you before you came to our house, and I learned to love you.”
    “What if he isn’t good to you?”
    “If I am a good wife, he will be good to me.”
    I hoped Chandra was right, but I could not help remembering a stall in the bazaar where Chandra and I had sorted through a heap of mismatched earrings. We had looked through them hoping to find two that matched. What if it was as difficult to find two matching people?
    I wanted to be happy for Chandra, but I felt a sadness deep inside me. The wedding brought back all the memories of my own short marriage—all my excitement and pleasure and my hopes coming to nothing. Also, I knew how much I would miss Chandra. Now, when Sass scolded me all day long, I could bear it, for I