The Catherine Lim Collection (50 page)

“I don’t want to be married,” cried Bina and
now her large doll’s eyes were two limpid pools of terror, for she had heard
the whispers, after Khalidah’s wedding day, of how the girl had to be rushed,
torn and bleeding and hysterical, to the hospital. They were whispers only,
started by the women and ending with them, with no risk of their ever being
blown into a village controversy that would invariably involve the men: The men
did not want controversy to put an end to a highly lucrative practice by which
daughters converted into hard cash that in turn converted into immediate
businesses, motor cycles, dowries for other daughters, educational
opportunities for sons, food for the whole family for years to come. Bina, with
her astonishing beauty and promise of more beauty, was all these. Already a
courier, acting for a very wealthy Arab, had expressed interest, and the Arab
himself was coming to see with his own eyes, before the final offer.

The picture of Khalidah bleeding in ‘the
secret place’ swam into Bina’s mind with frightening vividness, blending with
the picture of a rag doll she had once, torn into two between the legs where
her sister had tried to wrench it away, so that the stuff inside its body
spilled out, making it limp and lifeless.

“I don’t want to be married!” The cry had
lost its defiance; it was now all frantic pleading, and the two interrogators
who had started it all, suddenly lost their nerve and turned to run away, just
in time to escape blame, for Bina’s mother appeared suddenly, looking very hot
and cross.

“So there you are!” she scolded. “I’ve been
looking everywhere for you. Where’s Ameena? Oh my God, she’s eating dirt. How
irresponsible you are, Bina! But quick, come home now. Quick!” She picked up
the baby and pushed Bina in the direction of home, all the time shrilly
scolding, “I told you, didn’t I, that today was the day, and you were not
supposed to go anywhere and get all hot and dirty. Look at you! They’ll be here
in half an hour, Father says. Oh child, why do you always give your mother so
much trouble?” The mother, 32, had the furrowed brow of an old woman.

In half an hour Bina was ready. The mother
smiled through her furrows of care to remark, “My child, God has given you so
much beauty. Thank God for his blessings.” She looked with pride at her
daughter standing docilely in front of her; bathed, scrubbed, talcumed, wearing
a new blouse and skirt, her hair properly oiled and coiled and decorated with a
cluster of fragrant jasmine, her large eyes kohled to immense dark and luminous
pools, and a little gold ring attached to her nose, she looked every inch the
Child Goddess.

Her father said, “$2,000, no less,” and
severely warned the mother, “and don’t you appear too eager.” He was a peanut
vendor, plying his trade in the dusty streets of the nearby town, saved from
despair by the sudden and tantalising prospect of large and immediate profits
that had nothing to do with peanuts. He watched the Arabs making their shrewd
reconnaissance surveys in his village and the villages around, their white
flowing robes hiding corrupt, corpulent flesh, and he prepared to match them,
skill for bargaining skill.

Looking at his daughter standing demurely
with her eyes on the ground, he mentally adjusted the asking price to make it
commensurate with her rare beauty, and looking at the prospective son-in-law, a
65-year-old Arab so corpulent he had to be helped, wheezing, in and out of the
chair, he adjusted the price further. The old man, slumped in the chair, his
soft dimpled hands folded tranquilly upon his enormous belly, looked at the
three girls ranged before him, their heads bowed, and, as everyone had
expected, instantly picked Bina, indicating his preference by a slight movement
of his forefinger.

“That one,” he rasped, “and tell her to look
up, I want to see her face,” upon which Bina’s father rapped out an order and
she looked up. The Arab frowned, the mother gasped and let out a little scream,
for they looked upon a contorted visage, eyes crossed horribly, mouth twisted
grotesquely, and, for good measure, one cheek smudged black by a quick upward
movement of the hand. The father shouted angrily, the mother ran up and shook
the features back into normality, at the same time scrubbing out the smudge
with one end of her sari. Bina, her stratagem of escape thus foiled, settled
back into mute sullenness.

The Arab laughed. “I like her spirit,” he
said, and laughed again, this time in anticipation of the pleasure from that
young, beautiful, vibrant body.

“She’s too thin,” he said, for he liked his
females both fair and plump. “Feed her well, I’ll be back in six months,” and
he got up to go, his huge bulk disengaged from the chair by three pairs of
helping hands. He threw some money at the father. “For her,” he said, “remember
to feed her well. I come again in six months.”

In six months he was back. Bina was two
inches taller, 10 pounds heavier. She stood before him, dressed in a pink satin
blouse and red satin skirt, a veil over her head, radiating so much health and
beauty that he was almost moved to tears.

The wedding was fixed for the following
week. It was one of the most memorable events in the village for its
lavishness, for the old Arab, thoroughly pleased with the bride whom he was
going to take home with him the next day, spared no expense. At the wedding,
fathers compared daughter prices: none matched Bina’s and her father was
pronounced the luckiest man and her mother the luckiest woman, for from the
abundance accruing to the father (who was able to pay the deposit for a sweets
business) was allowed her a gold nose ornament which she proudly wore for all
the neighbours to see.

At the wedding, the bride, all the time she
was sitting down and looking at her hands spread demurely on her knees, thought
feverishly about what else she might do, having failed in the Ugly Face ploy.
She kept thinking of Khalidah and the rag doll and went cold in her terror.

In the hotel room where their trunks were
packed in readiness for the flight the next morning, she stood in a corner,
still in her bridal clothes, staring miserably at him, the tears flowing
freely. He, sitting in a chair, watched her, his face creased with extravagant
good humour.

“Come, little one. Do not be afraid,” he
rasped. “Come. Do not cry.”

She continued standing in her corner, the
kohl causing little runnels of black down her cheeks. The sight of the girl, in
her bridal finery, her small taut body poised for flight but held still by his
mesmerizing power of proprietorship as he sat facing her, stirred his long
dormant body to level after level of unexpected energy, surprising himself so
that the excitation was both of flesh and spirit. He was monitoring his own
bodily stirrings, as much as hers as she began to fidget in her corner, and was
intrigued by both. He would wait a while longer, for waiting yielded immense
dividends of pleasure.

So with languorous ease, he watched her from
his chair, realising that this was the first time he had the chance for a long,
uninterrupted and unobstructed view of her budding beauty: he watched her
mouth, young and red and just now splendid in its tremulousness, her breasts
which he thought, with self-congratulatory warmth, were the result of the good
plentiful food he had ordered, her arms and her thighs, nurtured to the same
firm, smooth, shiny roundness by the food.

He held out his hand gently to her and said,
laughing, “Come, my little wife. Come to me, your husband.”

“You can’t sleep with me. I’ve got a
disease!” cried Bina suddenly.

“Eh, what did you say?” cried the old Arab,
delighted by this first attempt at communication by the child.

“You can’t sleep with me because I’ve got
leprosy, like Abu’s woman,” said Bina.

The Arab, puzzled, said, “Eh, you what?” and
Bina, in a rush of hope, exclaimed breathlessly, “I’ve got leprosy! When a
woman has leprosy, she cannot sleep with a man. Abu slept with a woman who had
leprosy all over her body, but he did not know and he – ” she dismissed from
her mind the picture of Old Abu, strong and healthy in his 60th year and
replaced it with that of a corpse, “died, because no doctor could cure him.”

The Arab, smiling through this charming
recital, said, when she had stopped speaking and was panting and twisting a
corner of her bridal veil in her extreme nervousness, “Ah, so you have leprosy,
my dear. But how is it you look so pretty, my dear?”

“It’s all over my body, where you can’t see
it,” cried Bina desperately.

“Ah, show it to me then!” cried her husband.
“Show your pretty leprosy to me!”

By now the combined effects of the
child-like banter, the sense of complete possession and privacy afforded by the
locked hotel room, and the stimulus of the girl’s mention of her own body,
brought about such an excess of pure animal energy that he sprang up from his
chair, totally unaided, rushed upon her and dragged her to the bed. She hit out
wildly, kicked, flailed, but he pinned her down easily with his whiskery face,
his breath, his corpulence, silencing her at last with a stern, “Now stop that,
or I shall tell your father.” His soft dimpled hands were incapable of beating
or slapping, so he threatened punishment from others acting on his behalf,
whether fathers or guards. She quietened down and lay still, pinned under him,
her eyes staring wildly.

“That’s better,” he grunted and proceeded to
undress her, first the blouse and the vest under it, gaping in awe at the
small, firm breasts, the nipples erect in terror, not expectation.

“Ah!” he rasped, and he ‘ah’ed’ all the way
down, as his fingers, trembling with joy, undid the belt, the skirt and last of
all the underpants. Like the glutton that saves the best for the last, he
ignored the prize and instead began nuzzling upwards, beginning with the girl’s
belly, smooth as cream, and working the hoary bristles and wet old mouth towards
her midriff, her breasts, her neck and finally her mouth. The girl, sick with
fear, did nothing and said nothing, only making little noises like a small
trapped animal, but at the moment when, in a brutal roar of release, he plunged
into her and broke her, she screamed in the extremity of the pain and fear, her
cry mixing with his in a simultaneous climax of man’s doing and woman’s
receiving. If she had received a hundred scorpions, Bina would not have
screamed in greater agony.

“Sssh, there now, not so much noise,” panted
the husband, and he rolled off her and settled beside her on the bed, a
mountain of soft flesh, quivering in contentment. He lay for a while, then
raised himself on his elbow to peer into her face and slap it lightly with his
fingers, saying, “There, there, you’re all right, wake up,” for she had
fainted.

He lay for a long while, his whole person
suffused by a delicious ease. Never had he felt so fulfilled. If he were not so
out of breath, he would have got up to do a celebratory jig, so happy was he.
To think he had believed his ability was lost forever! No doctor was now
needed, only this young, beautiful bride he was going to take home with him.
The vision of limbs, firm, supple, luscious, interlaced with his, multiplied in
an endlessly stretching vista of pleasure down the years. He was to die,
literally, in the throes of his lust, his huge, inert bulk pulled away from the
poor little whimpering body under it by his two guards who had heard the
child’s cries for help. But it was not Bina; it was another Indian girl brought
over from another village, after a few years of his lying low. For what had
happened was that Bina, in the plane to her new home, had plucked up enough
courage, when her husband had fallen asleep, to tug at the hand of the air
stewardess and draw attention to her plight. Her Ugly Face ploy and Leprosy
ploy having failed, this third attempt at self-rescue worked. The stewardess
swung into a high drama of rescue, and the story made headlines around the
world: ‘Child Bride Rescued’, ‘Girl, 11, sold in Marriage to 65-year-old Man’,
‘The $2,000 Child Bride’. Highly embarrassed, the authorities did the needful –
the girl was put into state custody; the Arab was disgraced, warned and sent
home; the stewardess was commended and promoted and a team of Government
officials descended upon Bina’s village to ‘investigate’ and write a report,
sending fathers and marriage middlemen into hiding. Three people offered to
adopt Bina, including the air stewardess and a well-known Indian feminist; her
father, terrified by the publicity, tearfully offered to return every cent of
the money to have his daughter back. But it was in the state interest to have
Bina in state custody, and everything was promised to ‘restore her dignity as a
female and give her a proper education’.

The Child Bride Affair, as it was called
died out after a while and was forgotten altogether in the new interest
generated by an event in another part of the world, the United States of
America, where a remarkable series of Senate hearings was set up to investigate
accusations of sexual harassment made by a woman against the President’s
nominee for Supreme Court Judge. With or without the ‘Judge Thomas Affair’, as
it was called, the ‘Child Bride Affair’ would have died a natural death; as it
turned out, it was easily consigned to oblivion by the authorities’ regretful
reminder that they could do nothing about such things since no formal
complaints had been lodged. Hence ‘such things’ continued, and after a few
years of lying low, the old Arab, unable to forget the extraordinary effect
young bodies had on his, continued his search in the Indian villages and was
able to take back not one, but several young girls, ending with the one on whom
literally, as was earlier mentioned, he died in his last act of love. After
Bina, he had had no more trouble, through the simple precaution of dispensing
larger sums of bride money and enjoining, very sternly, upon the parents, the
necessity of warning their daughters to shut up in planes, on pain of ‘serious
harm’ to their families if they ‘misbehaved’.