Summary
Giribala is an average-looking girl with striking eyes who is from a low caste. To marry, her father has to pay a bride-price, which he does to a young man named Aulchand. Aulchand tells her father he needs bamboo for his house because it burned down, and that he needs to leave her with her parents for a few days. He departs and does not return for a long time.
Bangshi Dhamali, a prestigious man in the area, tells Giri's father that he disapproves of Aulchand because the money he paid as the bride-price was not actually his—it was his nephew Channan’s, who then had to borrow money from other relatives to finally pay for his wedding. Furthermore, Bangshi says Aulchand sold the bamboo and did not actually build a house with it. Giri’s father is distressed, so Bangshi says he isn’t that bad of a man, but Giri’s father rues that Mohan, who brought the proposal to him, never said any of this.
After a year Aulchand comes back and brings gifts to preclude his new family from criticizing him. Giri’s mother weeps as she dresses her daughter and Giri listens silently. She has always heard the saying, “A daughter born, to husband or death, she's already gone.” She knows, at fourteen, her life of suffering is about to begin.
Aulchand tells his new wife he has a job at the house of the babu, and takes her to a “crumbling hovel” at the back of a large brick house. He tells her to go out and get twigs and start the rice. Giri protests that it is dark, but he does not care. A maid helps her out with a kerosene lamp. She cautions Giri about Aulchand, telling her to keep her silver in a safe place instead of near Aulchand.
Giri gets a job in the babu household for meals as her wage. She and Aulchand have nothing in common but their desire for a home of their own. However, they have all four of their children—Belarani, Poribala, Rajib (the only son), and Maruni—while living in the hovel. After Maruni Giri asks the doctor to sterilize her.
Aulchand now has the babu’s permission to use a small area of the estate for his own home, and has a small shack on it.
He is gone for a time and when he returns, he hears of Giri’s sterilization and beats her. She takes it silently. He finally asks her to go get bamboo from her father but she refuses, and says they can both work on the Panchayat road and earn money for their home. He sighs that if only they could mortgage or sell her silver trinkets.
Giri knows what he means; she has been hiding her silver in custody of the lady of the house, as well as her twenty-two rupees she’d saved from her years of hard work. She reminds Aulchand of the bamboo her father once gave him, and asks if he wants to see his own daughter married someday. Aulchand scoffs that a “daughter only means to raise a slave for others” and that Mohan had predicted a son for Giri’s fifth pregnancy but she made herself sterile and a “whore.” Giri grabs a knife and hisses that if he ever says things like that again, she will cut off the children’s heads as well as her own. Aulchand is scared of her, but a few days pass and once more “Mohan, his trick master, was his prompter.”
Mohan is a “vagabond” with a slick style gleaned from wandering in the city. He visits Aulchand and Giri reminds Aulchand of the life they used to have. He also tells him of a shortage of marriageable girls in Bihar so the Biharis are paying a lot of money for Bengali girls.
Giri forgets about this conversation but Aulchand never does. One day Giri decides to go visit her father to get help with how to get their sagging roof propped up. She takes the younger children and bids goodbye to Belarani, not knowing it will be the last time she ever sees her.
Giri’s mother is elated to see her own daughter again, but she laments what marriage has done to her. Giri stays there for several days, happy and restful. Her father offers her bamboo but she declines, not wanting to take anything from her loved ones.
Bangshi is also in the village and remarks upon how Giri’s health and appearance seem to have declined. He laments how Aulchand has not done well for himself and that he should have come to see him. Giri is filled with some hope that things might change, and feels a rush of compassion for her husband. She implores Bangshi to help her, and then asks if he knows a good boy for her daughter. He tells her of one who started a grocery store of his own, and she is excited.
Giri stays six days and is about to depart when Banghshi comes to the house in a frenzy. He says he heard that Aulchand and Mohan took Bela to Kandi town and married her to a strange man from Bihar. There were five girls in the same situation, the men’s addresses were false, and it was clearly a racket. Aulchand was last seen drinking and blubbering after his daughter.
Giri is devastated and wails in “pain and terror.” Her father and other people vow to help her find Bela. They cannot locate Mohan but they do find Aulchand, who seems full of real grief. They search local villages but find nothing. Bela is gone. The master of the house convinces them not to call the police because it will bring a lot of fuss and expense, and even Giri’s father eventually says this is “writing on the forehead that nobody could change” and “It’s as if the girl sacrificed her life to provide her father with money for a house.” Giri is “crazed with grief” and tells her father not to give Aulchand anything.
Giri realizes no one will worry about a girl child for very long and maybe she should not either; after all, her father gave her to a “subhuman husband.” Aulchand can see people are lightening up on him and accuses Giri of contributing to this situation by not bringing out her silver earlier and by getting sterilized. Giri seems to go “insane with grief and anger” and hits her head against the wall. People try to calm her and someone says a daughter is her father’s property until she is married.
Giri falls silent. She takes Pori to the babu’s house and says she will never be allowed to go anywhere with her father. She does not talk to Aulchand, which scares him. Yet over time she seems to accept things. The house remains undone. Maruni becomes a child and Rajib tends the babu’s cattle. Pori reminds Giri of Bela, which is very painful. Pori works hard in the babu’s household. Giri takes care of her but also spends the evenings roaming around the babu’s lands in despair. She keeps seeing her firstborn’s face and remembers how she always used to like to sleep next to her mother.
One day Giri takes the bus to her wage work in Kandi town. She encounters Bangshi Dhamali who again tells her he barely recognizes her. She says she is scared for her daughter. Bangshi is less moved and asks why she is still angry at Aulchand when he just made a mistake. He does have someone for Pori, a rickshaw driver who does not have land. Giri does not care how old he is or about the land as long as she can avoid what happened to Bela.
Bangshi sees Aulchand not long after and mentions the rickshaw plier, but Aulchand says he knows of his own rickshaw plier from a bigger place and for Bangshi not to worry about his boy anymore.
Aulchand then goes to Mohan. Mohan has been in business “procuring girls for whorehouses in the big cities,” as some of these men liked young girls. There has to be a show of marriage, though, to procure them. Over time the “grooms from Bihar looking for brides in Bengal” gig had become known, so now there are new tactics. The girls’ families barely talk or investigate since they like the high bride-price. Mohan is excelling at this even though he only got to fourth-grade in school.
Aulchand finds Mohan, and Mohan says he will not help him anymore and that he's afraid of Aulchand’s wife. Aulchand scoffs that she wants a rickshaw plier in a nearby town, and asks Mohan to find a better rickshaw plier in a big town. Mohan asks if he is trying to make up with his wife and Aulchand says yes. Mohan smiles and says he will not get involved but will just make the contact.
Mohan thinks; he has to be careful. He must have a rickshaw plier up front who will marry Pori and then pass her on. He tries to find someone.
Giri and Aulchand become a bit closer talking about Pori’s marriage.
Mohan finally tells Aulchand he has the man and he has everything they want. The man’s name is actually Panu and he had been in jail, but he says his name is Manohar Dhamali and he is a rickshaw plier.
The wedding is a family affair this time and Giri gives Pori her silver ornaments for her new sari. It is a lovely day, but the next day is the last day she ever sees Pori’s face.
Giri’s brother, Rajib, and Aulchand go to pay their respects to the new couple but do not return. When Giri opens the door to a knock late at night, she knows what has happened. Bangshi is there with Rajib. He tells her what happened and that Aulchand went to try and catch Mohan. Sympathetic neighbors join the group.
Aulchand comes home drunk and says he forced Mohan to give him the share of the money, which he feels he was owed. He yells at Giri for getting sterilized because they could have made more money from girls. Aulchand cries and falls asleep. Giri sends the crowd home and wonders what to do. She wishes she were dead. She recalls Bangshi saying Bela provided the roof and now Pori the walls.
The babu’s elderly aunt says it is not easy to be a girl’s mother, and she should just keep working because “one gets used to everything but hunger.”
Giri withdraws her money from the babu’s wife’s safekeeping. She looks at the home Aulchand is building. She’d always dreamed of something like this, but maybe it was too much; after all, her daughters became prostitutes. Of late she has seen Aulchand eyeing Maruni and she fears for her youngest daughter.
The next morning Aulchand discovers his wife and two children are gone. Giri left a message that she had decided to go away to work in other people’s homes and “if he ever came to town looking for her, she would put her neck on the rail line before a speeding train.”
People are shocked and wonder what kind of woman would leave her husband. They decide she is the problem. As for Giri, she only wishes she had done this sooner and protected Bela and Pori. Tears blur her vision but she keeps walking.
Analysis
“Giribala” contains many of the same themes as Devi’s other stories, such as gender discrimination, caste, marriage, and more, but it is one of the most trenchant when it comes to the theme of motherhood. Giri’s loss of her two daughters to prostitution masquerading as marriage is a devastating commentary on the sorrows mothers endure—especially when they have daughters.
The refrain in the story is "A daughter born, to husband or death, she's already gone," which succinctly states how Indian society treats its women. Giri’s mother knows what is in store for her daughter, and Giri too knows that marrying Aulchand is setting her up for a disappointing life: “She realized that her life in her own home and village was over, and her life of suffering was going to begin. Silently she wept for a while, as her mother tended to grooming her. Then she blew her nose, wiped her eyes, and asked her mother to remember to bring her home at the time of Durga puja and to feed the redbrown cow that was her charge, adding that she had chopped some hay for the cow, and to water her young jaba tree that was going to flower someday.”
Before she has children, Giri’s life with Aulchand is far from ideal, but it is manageable enough. Giri knows her husband is unscrupulous and unwise, but they do share the dream of having their own home and are working towards it. When Giri bears children and three of them are girls, however, she knows that the potential for suffering has increased exponentially and that she wants no more children—especially Aulchand’s, especially girls—so “she asked the doctor at the hospital, where she went for [Maruni’s] birth, to sterilize her.” Aulchand views her body as his property, so naturally he is quite angry when he finds out what she has done; after Pori is sold, he lambasts her for not having more daughters because he feels like the money from their bride-prices is due to him. Bangshi also articulates the idea that girls are commodities to be bought and sold or traded, commenting, “God must have willed that the walls come from one daughter and the roof from the other.”
Giri loves her children deeply, particularly her eldest, Bela, so it is beyond traumatizing to her when Aulchand and his friend Mohan arrange for Bela to be sold for a high bride-price to a man essentially looking for a prostitute. Though Giri seems to love her father, she realizes he also gave her away at age fourteen for a high bride-price; thus, the cycle is doomed to repeat for generations of girls.
Critic Mary Cappelli notes the larger social issues Devi seeks to explore with this narrative: “women’s reproductive bodies have become a political space of social activism and political resistance against a privileged patriarchal power structure that persistently subordinates women’s lives to years of injustice and gendered brutality and impoverishment. Devi’s ethnographic reportage of the sale of young girls into prostitution testifies to an entrenched history of gendered violence aimed at young pubescent girls.” Of course, Giri’s refusal to submit any longer to the patriarchy that took away her two daughters makes her anathema to her community: “People were so amazed, even stunned by this that they were left speechless. What happened to Bela and Pori was happening to many others these days. But leaving one's husband was quite another matter. What kind of woman would leave her husband of many years just like that? Now, they all felt certain that the really bad one was not Aulchand, but Giribala. And arriving at this conclusion seemed to produce some kind of relief for their troubled minds.” Cappelli analyzes this aspect of the story by writing, “[Devi] unmasks the deep-rooted institutional relations, which sustain female vulnerability and sexual subjugation . . . Here, rather than take action against a system that reifies and exploits their young daughters, the community has been indoctrinated into the patriarchal tradition of scapegoating the rebellious Giris of the system who refuse to service patriarchy’s sexual machinery. In this instance, Devi indicts the oppressive socio-political apparatuses at play within the community that bind women into their disposable second skin status.”
