Cover

Title Page

Dedication

For Olivia,

and all women of courage

Braid, v.

To form (three or more strands) into a braid;

to do up (the hair) by interweaving three or more strands

Epigraph

‘There is great mystery, Simone, in the forest of your hair.’

Remy de Gourmont

‘… a free woman is precisely the opposite of a light woman’.

Simone de Beauvoir

PROLOGUE

The beginning of a story. A new story, each time.

Coming to life, at my fingertips.

First, the frame.

A structure strong enough to support the whole.

Silk or cotton for the city, or the setting, as required.

Cotton is strong,

Silk is finer, more discreet.

I need a hammer and nails.

I need, above all, to proceed slowly, gently.

Next, the weaving.

The part I like best.

Before me, on the loom,

Three nylon threads are stretched.

Taking the strands from the skein,

Three by three;

Knotting them carefully, so they don’t break.

And then repeat.

Thousands of times over.

I love these solitary hours, these hours when my hands dance.

The strange ballet of my fingers.

They tell a story of intertwining strands.

This story is mine.

But does not belong to me.

Smita

A village in Badlapur, Uttar Pradesh, India

Smita wakes with a strange feeling. Urgent, gentle, new; butterflies in her stomach. Today is a day she will remember her whole life. Today, her daughter will go to school.

School, where Smita has never set foot. Here in Badlapur, people like her don’t go to school. Smita is a Dalit. Of those whom Mahatma Gandhi called Harijan, the Children of God. ‘The oppressed.’ Untouchable. Unworthy. A species apart, judged too impure to mix with others, rejected and separated, like the chaff from the wheat. Millions like Smita live outside the villages, outside society; on the margins of humanity.

Every morning, the ritual is the same. Like a scratched record playing the same hellish music over and over again. Smita wakes in the hut that is her home, beside the fields cultivated by the Jatts. She washes her face and hands in the water fetched the day before from the well set aside for her people. No question of using the other well, the one for the higher castes, though it is nearer, and easier to reach. People have died for less. Smita makes herself ready, does Lalita’s hair, kisses Nagarajan. Then she takes the rush basket that her mother carried before her. The very sight of it makes her retch. The hateful basket with its persistent, acrid, indelible smell, the thing she carries with her all day, her shameful burden. A punishment. A curse. For something she did in a past life. She must pay, atone for the sin. Because this life is no more important than the others that came before it, or the lives to come. It’s just one life among many, her mother would say. This is how life is – her life.