I sat there for a long, long time. Poor Santosh was unhappy and wanted a toilet. I asked the man but he shook his head. I thought perhaps he did not understand our language, so I pointed to Santosh and with my gestures showed what our son needed. He is five years old and he is a brave boy but I could see how scared he was there. But still this strange man would not show us the toilet. Has he never known a child?

Then poor Santosh, his face full of shame, relieved himself right there. Now the man was quite upset and he started scolding me. I cleaned as best as I could, but afterward there was a slight smell. He made a face—but the fault was his own.

Finally, he called in one of our people. This man spoke to me in Punjabi, but he had a strange way of pronouncing the words, and some of the words were completely different altogether, so the sum result was that I could only understand a portion of what he was saying. He must have been from some other district. Father of Santosh, you would have recognized his Punjabi language, and you would have known these strange words, because you have seen the world, you know how to do things that I do not know.

The white man would say something, looking straight at me, even though he knew that I would not understand, and our countryman would speak to me in his strange Punjabi, of which I understood only a part. He asked me if I knew how to read and write. I said that I do. I said that my father believed that even a woman should know these things. I said that not only myself but my husband knows how to read and write and he is a very prosperous farmer and making lots of money.

He asked me to prove our marriage. I showed him the paper, the one issued by the village panchayat, but he didn’t believe me. He asked why it did not have the king’s seal. I answered that in the village, we do not use it, although in Lyallpur proper it is used. He said that without the correct marriage paper I would have to prove that I could read, in English would be preferable, but Punjabi would suffice.