One year it was different. When Padma was five she grew ill, and for a week burned with fever, so high that her mother thought she would die. They called the doctor from the town, twenty miles away, but he could do nothing. Her parents went every day to the temple to pray. Padma recovered from the fever, but after that, her right leg began to grow weak; for a while she could not even stand. But she was a determined child. She forced herself to rise, stand, hobble along, although the muscles of the leg could barely support her. She began to walk with a limp. It was weeks later that the full scope of the tragedy became apparent: the leg would not return to its former strength; she would always walk that way.

Her father was a literate man, a follower of Ajit Singh. For the months that Padma lay weak and alert on her charpai, he taught her how to read and write. In her village, only three other girls and one woman had that knowledge. It came to her easily. Later, she wrote poetry, stories to entertain the younger children.

During the festivals by the river, Ram would watch as she sat with the other girls. At first, she needed a crutch to walk. Later, she refused it; she refused even the slender cane her mother and aunts told her to use, forcing it upon her. She walked with only a limp, a peculiar rhythm to her gait, and in this way, she could join in with all the children.

Other men had not wanted her. Although one’s eye was drawn to her form when she stood with a group of girls, although her face was round like the moon, her eyes as dark as a raven’s wings, her one defect led the villagers to believe there might be others: that she might not bear children. That she would bring misfortune upon her household. It was understandable that she would be given to Ram, and that Ram would accept her. Who else could he hope for when he had no father, when he had been raised on his uncle’s generosity in his mother’s village?

His mother did not like the match. His uncle was happy to have this bond with his friend, even though he would not have formed it through one of his own sons. At the Vaisakhi festival after the marriage had been settled, when the families gathered by the riverside, Ram could not meet Padma’s gaze. He had things he wanted to say to her, but now he found himself incapable.

It was not until their wedding night, when they sat together near the silent Persian wheel, that he had said, “Does it not disturb you that I have no father? That I do not know the people of my paternal village?”