Girl Who Wanted Bangles

The Girl Who Wanted Bangles

I think my grandmother gets more and more senile as time passes. She talks of grand structures built with sturdy baked materials and burned brick. She says that the floors were beautifully decorated with such materials. Sitting on our dirt floor, we wondered why such extravagance was needed. We think Grandma tells such stories to irritate our parents, especially our mother. According to Grandma, there was never a shortage of food growing up. Fixed portions of food were allocated to her family in the large granaries on top of citadels. These were large structures that had several luxuries and facilities. She says she ate fish and shrimp almost every week and sometimes daily.

My mother got sick of hearing about all the fancy food and meals Grandma ate. She thought these were tall tales created to spite her and complain about her cooking. "Go back to your home near Sindhu if you can't stand it here!" I often heard her yell. "I would, the first second I could if my home was still there. Why else would I sit here and tolerate all your blathering?"

My dad was also getting sick of Grandma. She complained about the lack of food to him as well when he had been toiling in the fields all day to make sure we wouldn't starve when the river decided to flood or when the weather got colder. Our next meal wasn't always guaranteed. Hearing Grandma talk about all the riches and surplus she lived in always drew him mad, but unlike Mom, he would simply clench his fist slightly and sit there trying to ignore her. When the roof leaked, she would talk again about the sturdy structures she was used to instead of our mud hut with a straw roof. She lived in a two-story house. There was a well in the courtyard. There were rooms for sleeping, a separate kitchen, and a separate bathroom. How could there be such a large house? But this was just an average house during her time.

The bathroom was what she bragged about most. We had to walk a few miles to get water from the riverbed and go to some secluded areas for our business, but Grandma did all these things at home. At first, I was grossed out, but according to her, the house didn't stink because there were covered pipes all around the city to carry waste and water away. As annoyed as my parents were hearing her story of riches and luxury, we children loved to listen to her. We thought she was simply fantasizing about the world of the gods because there was no way in a hundred years that all this would ever be possible.

"Old people are like that," a neighborhood aunt often said while I sat with her picking grains from the field, "My father-in-law tells similar tales. They have nothing better to do sitting all day with no one to talk to. They must think of something to distract themselves from the pain in their joints." She was right, but there seemed to be something more to it as well.

The crops were not doing well this year. The land was just terrible. The river was drying up and becoming more salty. Last year, there was too much water, and floods destroyed all our saplings. "We might have to move somewhere else," my father sighed. Whenever he said this, I could hear Grandma sniffling in the corner of the room, wiping away tears in her eyes. It seemed like she left her wonderful home near the Sindhu River for some similar reason or perhaps worse catastrophe. She never told us what really happened. She would only tell us the story of the girl who wanted bangles:

In the vast city of Mohenjo-Daro, there was a ceremony annually at the top of the citadel where there was a Great Bath. Grandma was too young when she lived there to understand the details of the ritual. It had something to do with respecting Mother Sindhu, the goddess of the Indus River. That year there were a few merchants from far away. They came from a city called Uruk and carried around cylindrical seals. Among them was a beautiful group of girls. The people of Uruk grabbed everyone's attention with their exotic looks and unique fashion, but they were more captivated by the people in the city. They loved the elaborate headdresses and beaded jewelry. One girl, in particular, was fascinated by the bangles the women wore. She wanted to buy a similar pair, but all the stores were sold out. They had to wait for traders to arrive from Kalibangan to restock.