Kumud was sure she would die that night. The pain was excruciating, crushing her tight, tight, tight. So tight that she was afraid to move, afraid to cry, afraid to breathe. They had fallen upon her with everything they could find and beaten her black and blue. And her back! She bit her lips to stifle a scream. Mejo Thakur had kicked her with his booted foot. His hunting boot with the iron studs that she had cleaned only that morning. She shivered and pulled her saree close, wincing. The night was cold, and the cheap saree threadbare.

It would be better to die, she decided. It was very easy to die. In her eleven years, she had seen many people die. Her grandmother had died last year, then two of the girls she played with, then her mother had died in childbed—only six months ago. The child had died too. That’s when her father sent her away. To her husband’s house in the city. But last month, he had died as well.

Lightning flashed, tearing the darkness apart. The kalboishakhi had started. Let it rain, she prayed, let the summer storm drown me. Let lightning strike me dead; they said I was wicked. The first drops touched her cheeks, filling her nose with the scent of wet earth. If she died, she could meet her mother. And –

“Tumi ke? Who are you?”

She shrank back, terrified, as the dark shadow loomed, then stilled. Of course, Jomraaj, the god of death, had arrived. Tall and menacing, his voice was darker than the night. He had come to take her away. She sighed and closed her eyes.

When she awoke, the room was full of light. Her eyes hurt, so she closed them again as a voice exclaimed, “Oh! You are awake!”

She squinted to see better and made out faintly – very faintly – a face bending over her own. An eager face, framed with soft curls, brow furrowed by a tiny frown of concern.

“You’re awake,” the girl said again. “How do you feel?” She moved away without waiting for an answer and came back with a glass of water. “Drink this; you’ll feel better. Can you get up?”

Gently, she raised Kumud and held the glass to her lips. After the first tentative sips, Kumud drank greedily, as if her parched throat couldn’t have enough. The girl waited patiently for her to finish. Then, as Kumud made to lie back, she said, “No, don’t lie down yet. Sit up for a while.” With brisk efficiency, she arranged the pillows behind Kumud’s back and helped her straighten up with a surprisingly firm hand.

“Now,” she perched at the edge of the bed, “tell me your name.”

Bit by bit, Kumud opened her eyes. It was the girl she had seen earlier, about the same age as herself, with a simple striped saree wound around her slender figure. She leaned forward with a welcoming smile.

“Ki holo? Who are you? What is your name?” she clucked at Kumud’s silence.

“My name is Bidhumukhi; what’s yours?”

“Kumud,” the girl on the bed croaked, at last. “Kumud – Kumudini.”

“Kumudini. Hmm. And what were you doing alone on the streets at night?”

The memories flooded back like a physical blow. “I – I –” She struggled to run, to be free of the covers, and immediately the pain became real, squeezing her to death. Her ribs, her back, her throat.

Then she saw the shadow again. Filling the doorway with its dark, silent presence. The god of death had returned because she had eluded him once. She screamed and fainted.

It took Kumud more than a week to sit up on her own and yet another to walk. After that first day, Bidhumukhi asked no more questions but talked instead of herself. She lived in this house with her parents and her younger brother, Satish. When he was a baby, Satish had fallen on his head. That injury had left him weak; his arms and legs didn’t work as well as they ought to. He needed almost everything done for him. They changed his clothes, combed his hair, and even fed him like a baby.

“But I like doing it,” Bidhumukhi declared. “I like looking after him and Mamoni.”

“Is your mother also ill?” asked Kumud. The world outside her door was still unexplored.

The smile vanished from Bidhumukhi’s face. “Mamoni is pining, has been pining ever since we came to the city. It’s been two, almost three years, since Babamoshai brought us to Calcutta, but Mamoni still misses our village.”

They had come to Calcutta from Magurkhanda, their far-off village in Bikrampur, near Dhaka. First by boat and then by bullock cart, till they reached Goalundo Ghat, where the Padma and the Brahmaputra fall into each other. Then a steamer took them across the river, where they could finally board a train to Calcutta. To the station called Sealdaha, which had thick columns like tree trunks holding up its grey, sloping roof. That had been her first ride in a railway carriage, and her eyes sparkled as she described her journey.

The clanking, the smoke and the little grits of dirt and soot that blew into one’s eyes as the train tore through the countryside. The giant engine, with its round black face and stout funnel, belching out a thick grey column of smoke. The noisy, hurried journey through fields full of waving green and muddy swamps had finally ended when at last they had chugged into the great station with its dirty platforms and tin sheds. It was the first time that any of them had left their village – except Babamoshai, of course – and even Satish had forgotten his troubles in the excitement.

“And now we are city people,” Bidhumukhi finished, “and we haven’t been back to the village at all.”

Kumud had been drinking in the story eagerly, forgetting, like Satish, her troubles for once. But at the mention of the village, she remembered her own and tried to change the subject.

“Your father works here?”

“You saw him that first day,” Bidhumukhi’s smile was full of mischief. “You saw him and screamed and fainted. He hasn’t been back to see you. He was afraid you would faint again.”

Kumud clapped her hands to her mouth, “I thought – I thought –” she gulped. “I thought he was your husband,” she lied.

“My husband?” Bidhumukhi’s laugh rang out, clear and sparkling like a village stream. “I have no husband.”

“Are you a widow? Like me?” Kumud asked hesitantly. “But your saree is coloured and your hair is long. And –”

Bidhumukhi giggled again. “No, you silly girl. I’m not married.”

“Not married yet! How old are you?”

“Twelve. Oh, oh –” At the look of horror on Kumud’s face, Bidumukhi fell on the bed in a fit of mirth, laughing till she cried, and so infectious was the sound that Kumud couldn’t help but join in.

Kumud discovered that Bidhumukhi’s family was unlike any other she had encountered in her short life. Bidhumukhi was the mistress of the house, running it as smoothly as any middle-aged matron. She looked after her invalids, kept an eye on the servants and gladly received the daily stream of visitors who came to see her father.

It had been her father, Dwarkanath Babu, who had rescued Kumud on that fateful night. And brought her home to be nursed back to health. They saw very little of him. All hours of the day and night were given to work, meals lying untouched on his desk, day after day. Then Bidhumukhi would give him one of her scolds, and he would listen as sheepishly as a schoolboy caught in mischief and eat his dinner. But for all his preoccupation, he never forgot his daughter’s lessons.

To Kumud’s amazement, Bidhumukhi could read and write. Her father had also taught her all sorts of bewildering subjects from big, fat books so that she could talk to him as an equal. And if that were not enough, a memshaheb came regularly to teach her ingreji. English! The language of the shahebs. A brown memshaheb, dressed in clothes Kumud had never seen before. “A gown,” said Bidhumukhi, grinning at Kumud’s bewilderment. No wonder she was unmarried with all her learning. Her husband would die immediately with such a wife, maybe even before the wedding.

Excerpted with permission from The School for Bad Girls, Madhurima Vidyarthi, Duckbill.