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The silver spoon was missing. The spoon that Soma received from her mother when she got married was missing and Soma looked around the entire house.

“Where could it go?” she mumbled while looking under the small wooden temple in the room.

“Durga, Durga,” she screamed while moving the rug.

“Come down here quickly.”

Durga was busy drying clothes on the terrace. She quickly ran down thinking Soma had fallen down or some untoward incident has occurred.

“Have you seen the spoon?”

“Which spoon, Amma?”

“The silver one. It had that flower like design on it.”

“The bowl is there at the temple but the spoon is missing,” she added.

She looked towards Durga who was standing at the door. Sunrays falling on her dark skin from behind created a silhouette of her. Her hair was neatly plaited into two halves tied with red ribbons and she was wearing her usual cream coloured floral blouse and a long skirt.

“No Amma, I haven’t,” she smiled and her white teeth glowed against her complexion.

Soma used to get irritated by Durga’s habit of smiling all the time. She could never be serious. “Is this how a girl of fifteen years old is supposed to behave? Going around smiling like a mad woman?” she would say.

Durga had always been in the family or so it felt. She came here when she was merely eight years old. Mohan, Soma’s husband who worked in the construction business, had brought her as a help from a village he had gone for inspection for a road construction.

“She will help you with the household chores. Nihal is still very young and you haven’t been keeping very well yourself,” he said.

Durga knew how to cook. She could do all the house chores as if she had been trained for it right from her birth. Her father had come to drop her.

“Do as Amma says. Never answer back or upset her,” he said handing over the jute bag in which she had brought her two pairs of blouse and long skirt, a doll with barely any clothes on it, a comb, her red ribbons and a colourful liquid bindi maker.

Soma arranged for her to stay in the little room at the back of the house. The four walled space was a storage room and with a tin shed that often rattled when the winds blew hard. She removed all the broken furniture and gave her a cupboard to keep her clothes in and a cot with a mattress to sleep on. She even gave her an old trunk in which she could keep her valuables. Durga was always on her feet doing chores. She would be the first person to get up. Sweep the whole house, sprinkle water at the entrance and make Rangoli with rice flour. By then Soma would get up and go to the kitchen to make tea for herself and Mohan. Durga would then cut the vegetables and prepare the food. When she grew a little older, Soma even started asking her to go to the market to get groceries. Post finishing her chores, Durga would desperately wait for Nihal to come back from school. He was five years younger to her. They would often pluck jasmine from the neighbour’s creeper and fill Nihal’s dumper truck toy and run with it in the house. Only once in a year when the paddy was to be sown, she would go to her father’s place for around twenty days. By now Durga was a part of the family and it was hard for Soma to imagine a time without her being around. “The silver spoon is missing Durga. Tell me honestly have you seen it?”

“Amma, what will I do with your silver spoon?” Durga smiled again.

Soma did not believe her. Of lately she had started to doubt Durga. The ghee in the kitchen was missing and one day when she randomly went to her little room to look for something, she found her blue dupatta that she had been searching around for, wrapped and kept under her mattress. Since that day Soma had started suspecting Durga to be a thief. She had begun to double check her almirah lock and pick up all the change that Mohan used to carelessly leave around. She would put his wallet in the drawer in her room carefully every day.

“Can’t you keep it in the drawer? It is not safe to leave money out like this,” she would say to Mohan.

“Durga, I don’t believe you,” Coming back to the present, Soma responded.

“Look beta, the spoon was given to me by my mother. It is one of her last memories left with me. If you have taken it by mistake, give it back.”

The smile on Durga’s face had by now vanished.

“No Amma, why would I take it?”

“Why? What do you mean why? It is silver. It will bring a good amount of money if sold.”

“Amma check my room if you want. Why would I lie?”

Soma went to her room and went through all her clothes in the cupboard. She emptied her trunk. A half-empty jar of ghee and her red lipstick fell out from between her clothes. She picked up the lipstick and ghee and confronting her, said- “Do you still want me to believe you?’

Durga dropped her head in shame.

“But Amma, I did not take it.”

Soma stormed out of the room and went straight to Mohan who was busy reading his newspaper, and sipping tea.

“Durga stole the spoon and she is lying.” She said barging into the room.

“I am going to call the police.” she immediately realized that it was a stupid idea.

“I can’t allow that thief to live in my house anymore. Look how carelessly I leave things around. I trusted that stupid girl so much. How am I ever going to be at peace if she is there?” she said moving around in the room and checking her the locks of her almirah.

“Today the silver spoon has vanished, tomorrow she might take my jewellery and run away. She is old enough to even slit my throat while I am asleep What will I do then?”

“I should kick her out immediately before she causes any more damage,” she added.

“Where do you want her to go?” Mohan said folding his paper down.

“Where? What do you mean where? Back to her home! Doesn’t she have one, that bloody Ghee-Chor?”

“Let her go to her house and eat as much ghee as she wants.”

“But…” Mohan stopped midway.

Soma immediately realized what he was about to say.

“Is it safe to send her home?” he added

“That incident happened three years ago, and what can we do? We wanted to help but she told us that her father has asked her to be quiet about it, that it was a matter of her family’s reputation,” she said picking up the tea cup.

Every year when Durga used to go home for twenty days, Soma would desperately wait for her return. But three years ago she had returned after six days, Soma was surprised. She wasn’t her usual self. Something had happened. She hardly spoke for a couple of days. She did not even smile. She just went around doing her chores silently. After a lot of persuasion from Soma and Mohan, she finally revealed what had happened back at her place. On one of the nights when her baba had gone to guard the farms because of the cattle menace, her uncle who lived with them had sexually assaulted her. When she complained about this to her baba, she was told to keep quiet and not tell anybody about it as it would destroy her reputation and infuriate her uncle whose farms his father toiled to earn his bread. Mohan wanted to lodge a complaint at the police station but Durga pleaded not to as her baba would kill her if he came to know that she shared this incident with them. Soma asked Mohan not to discuss about this with anyone, it was the matter of her reputation and also, luckily, she said, the man did not rape her and so there was no point blowing it out of proportion by involving the police. “It has been three years since that incident and she is not my responsibility,” Soma said while searching for the spoon under the pillow and her bed.

She went to the other room and called up Durga’s father. She asked him to come and take her away. She did not tell him about the missing spoon. She knew that if she informed him about the theft, he would beat her to death.

“Your baba is going to come tomorrow to take you home. Pack your bags.”

“But Amma, I did not do anything”, she started to cry again. “I promise, I promise on the goddess Durga.” “At least be happy that I did not tell him about the spoon.”

“But Amma, I did not,” she sobbed.

“Stop crying like a child and go cut vegetables.”

“Put all that ghee you ate to some good use.”

Her father arrived the following day to take her away.

“I don’t need her help anymore, Narayan. I can do the work myself and she is now a grownup woman and it doesn’t feel right to keep her here anymore,” she said.

Durga left with her clothes in her jute bag. She left the jar of ghee and lipstick on the cot.

Mohan gave her some money and asked her father to take good care of her and to call him if she needed any help.

“The thief is gone,” she mumbled looking at Durga as she melted into the crowd. She went back to the kitchen to finish the dinner that she had already started to prepare.

Next morning she went to the tin shed room to looked around. The empty cupboard stood in one corner and the old trunk was strewn at its feet. She moved the cupboard a bit and few notebooks fell from the top inside the gap between the cupboard and the wall. She picked them up. Durga’s name was written on them. There were a few songs scribbled in it with a few drawings interspersing the writings. “That Ghee-chor knew how to write and draw,” she thought to herself. She tossed the books into a pile of discarded paper in the room.

Later that night she told Mohan to get the tin room dismantled so that she could use the area to grow flowers. She had always wanted to have a garden of her own but there was hardly any space for it. Moreover, the tin shed used to make a lot of noise even when the wind was a mild one.

Mohan agreed.

The very next day workers arrived and began tearing down the room.

“What to we do with these books and papers, madam?” one of them asked pointing at Durga’s books.

“Let them be there,” she said.

Jagan, the local kirana shop owner, walked in with some grocery that Soma had ordered for.

“Soma, I think this belongs to you,” he said pulling out a silver spoon from his pocket.

“Two days ago, Nihal turned up in the morning and had given me this spoon in exchange for marbles that he wanted. Kids you know, will bring anything for their toys” he laughed.

“I had been busy with some work that day and had forgotten about it until today.”

Soma took the spoon and while the workers tore down the room, she quietly went to her kitchen to make the dinner.

“I am not going to call her back,” she said as she put the spoon back in the almirah.

“But we have to say something to Nihal. He was the one who stole the spoon and tried to buy marbles,” Mohan said.

“He is just a kid. What does he know? Some stupid rascal from the neighbourhood must have asked him to do that. He is so gullible anyway. My son is not a thief,” she said and walked out of the room.

The tin room was pulled down and the space was cleared. Soma got a new maid who came in daily to help her with the cooking and cleaning.

She got the mud ploughed by a gardener and instructed him to burn all the papers and books and to mix the ash with the mud. It helped the plants to grow faster. Something she had read in a local magazine on gardening.

Durga’s notebook of songs and drawings were burnt and mixed in the soil. Little white roses bloomed White as pearl, like Durga’s teeth when she used to smile. Soma took care of the roses like her own child.

And one day after almost a year, Durga came to meet her.

She told her that her father had arranged her marriage with a man who and the bridegroom her uncle’s far off relative and worked for him in his fields. Durga now looked much older than her age. Her soft skin had creases that looked like wrinkles and she no longer smiled. She did not even look at Soma. She was dressed in her same old fashion. Soma congratulated her and asked her to wait. She came back to see Durga looking at her white roses. Soma plucked a rose and fastened one in her hair.

“When daughters get married, we always give them a farewell gift,” she said.

She took out a silver spoon that she had recently bought for Diwali from under her pallu and gave it to her.

“Keep it. It’s a gift,” she said.

Durga took the spoon and sat by the wall quietly with a white rose fastened to her jet-black oiled hair.