Prologue: 1917
You Refused to be Born

You knew that if you let the world open on you, you would only have an endless hope to contend with. Frieda, you were the second child. You had refused to be born. ‘Frieda refused to be born.’ Everyone said. You stubbornly resisted the pressure of the uterus. When her water broke, the Mother was inundated with a powerful tsunami of pain that hit her in tides. She was walking by the river with the foetus clung to the roots of her womb. An unbearable pain was tearing her apart down the middle. She fell into the river debilitated by the pain. She swallowed so much water that it got into your cavities, Frieda. Even today if you stand against the sun, you become translucent, with endless water coursing your organs.

The Gypsy, who was searching for his lost lover with a sunburst on her breast, was on the banks of this river called Narmada. He, of bronze skin and taut muscles, saw the Mother’s agony and jumped in. He floated the Mother with his powerful left arm under her lower back and put his right hand inside her vagina and pulled the baby by her hair. Despite all the resistance, you came floating to the surface. Tenaciously you clenched your soft pink puckered lips and buoyed up easily, refusing to breathe, turning blue. He lifted you, still connected to the Mother through a vascular pink cord and slapped your round, dimpled bottoms. You screamed indignantly as the blood rushed under the surface of the skin on the bottoms marking his finger. The waters rose in the river to lift you up while the Mother drowned. He then dived to bring the Mother up. He put you on the Mother’s breasts and pulled both the tired mother and child to the shore.

The Mother decided she cannot love you. She almost died twice giving birth. A belief, that you will be the cause of her death, made its home in the Mother’s heart. And the Mother never did love you, Frieda, for the rest of her life. Every mischief of yours as a child affirmed the Mother’s belief and your every submission confirmed the Mother’s suspicion. Your mother was an Anglo-Indian with a British father and an Indian mother, and your father was a Hindu orphan converted to Christianity by the priests in the orphanage. They had met at the bishop’s estate where she worked as a housekeeper, and he supervised the gardeners. The Mother had seven daughters: Hannah, Frieda, Sarah, Mara, Tamara, Anna, Noa. . .all biblical names except yours, Frieda. Each time a child had been born in the family, the English priest would come and randomly open a page in the Bible and announce the name. The parents accepted it gracefully as a blessing. For the second daughter, he had already visited the house three times and you had refused to be born, stuck inside the Mother’s cavities like a tumour. When he visited the fourth time, he was without a Bible and so he named you Frieda after his German grandmother, whom he remembered as stubborn, proud, and strict. It was also the first name that came to his mind when he saw you.

Hannah was the eldest and had been the source of your mother’s strength. She was four years older than you, Frieda. And the Mother would abandon you in Hannah’s care most of the time as she looked after the home, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of a husband, who though docile, demanded her complete attention when he was home. The Mother was pregnant again when you were just three months old. And then came a slew of more babies in the next seven years, all girls. Frieda, you grew close to Hannah since those early days and this special bond lasted your entire lives even after the arrival of all the other sisters.

The seven sisters were all beautiful, each more than the other. However, Frieda, you had always been different, beginning with your name. Unloved by the Mother, you had grown up to be strong-willed and iron-hearted.