August 08, 2017

PodCastle 482: The Family Ghost

* Author : Rati Mehrotra

* Narrator : Kaushik Narasimhan

* Host : Graeme Dunlop

* Audio Producer : Pria Wood

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PodCastle 482: The Family Ghost is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG-13

The Family Ghost

By Rati Mehrotra

The day before she left for her husband’s village, Urmila got her dowry: a goat, two gold bangles, and the family ghost. The bangles were pretty and the goat would be useful, but what would she do with the ghost? Dirty, smelly old thing.

“Be quiet,” said her mother when she complained. “You’ll see. The ghost will be a valuable asset to you in your new life.”

“You just want to get rid of it,” said Urmila. “And you want to boast to your cousins that you gave me three things for my dowry. You’ve only given me two good things, and if I subtract the one bad thing, that leaves just one.”

Her mother grabbed her ear. “You’re not so old that I can’t give you a good thrashing.”

“Old enough to get married, aren’t I?” shot back Urmila. She twisted from her mother’s grasp and ran to the shade of the banyan tree outside to sulk.

Urmila hadn’t wanted to get married, of course. What she wanted was to go to school and learn things and become clever, like the city girls she sometimes glimpsed on the television set belonging to a friend.

But the Bijpuri village elementary school was only until Grade 6, and after the age of thirteen, Urmila had stopped going. There was no point; she already knew more than the alcoholic schoolmaster did, who spent most afternoons slumped on his desk, occasionally rousing himself to shout at the rowdier elements of his class.

Still, she’d argued with her mother.

“I could live with Anoothie maasi in Lucknow and go to school with her daughters.” Anoothie was her mother’s cousin—one of the lucky ones who’d married a city boy.

“Anoothie has three girls of her own to look after,” her mother had replied. “I wouldn’t dream of saddling her with a fourth.”

“There are boarding schools for girls…”

“Are you crazy? They’re too expensive. Even if we sold all our land, it wouldn’t be enough.”

“Then I could just stay here with you and Papa and the boys!” cried Urmila. “I can milk the goats and make the cheese and cook the food. Why do you want to send me away?”

Her mother’s lined face had softened, just for an instant. “Because that’s the way it is. You’ll know when you have children of your own.”

And so they’d found a match for Urmila, a lean pock-marked young man called Rakesh who lived two villages away and was the son of a childhood friend of Urmila’s second cousin. He worked in a shop that his father owned and he had studied till Grade 10, a fact that rankled. Okay, he’d failed the tenth grade exam, but still. He’d had the opportunity to go to high school, something Urmila would never get.

The wedding day was a blur. Urmila didn’t have to do much—just sit and make faces at her bridegroom from the safety of her veil, while the priest droned incomprehensible Sanskrit shlokas about duty and loyalty and good behavior. Then there were sweets to eat, but Urmila barely tasted them. Drums and singing and dancing followed, but Urmila did not dance. She was glad when the wedding was over and the strangers went back to their own village.

In one week she would have to leave, too, but at least it gave her time to say goodbye to her friends. She visited all her favorite spots: the vast spreading banyan tree in the middle of their soybean field,

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