"Tchee tchee tchee!"
"You mala crows!"
"You mala prostitutes!"
"You mala widows!" (A terrible insult, ironically enough.)
"You scavenger widows!"
"You rotten widow-faces!"
"You rotten-faced widows!"
"Let there be funerals held for you!"
"May your mothers be widowed!"
"May someone light a fire in your mothers' wombs!"
"May your huts be demolished!"
"May your huts be set on fire!"
"May your arms and legs be paralyzed!"
"May your wombs be scalded!"
The women would go on and on, heaping abuse on the children for making them unclean. Then they had to race back to the pond to bathe and purify themselves again, and refill their pitchers with clean water.
If Papa had been on her own and got subjected to those brahmin curses, she would have wished she'd never been born. But when she was with ten of her friends the same curses had the opposite effect. They felt like blessings at their weddings. The women's impotent fury only made the girls giggle. One day they giggled so hard that one of them fell down, knocking down the girl next to her, who knocked down the one next to her. They all fell into a giggling heap and one of them accidentally bumped into the women who were standing around cursing them with red faces. The women turned back in a hysterical drove toward the pond to cleanse themselves.
From that day on, every time the gang of untouchable schoolgirls saw the brahmin widows on the road they would giggle and push each other.
"Hey what?" One girl would nudge another girl.
"Hey what, what?" she would reply and they would all begin to push each other until they or their shadows would pollute the women, doing it deliberately, for fun.
By and by the game developed further. The girls would send the women back to the pond and wait while they rebathed and refilled, ready to "accidentally" touch them again and send them back to the pond once more. One day the women spent the whole morning bathing, filling, spilling, cursing, bathing, filling, spilling, cursing....
Carey was bolder. He and his friends Nelson and Prasad would stand on the banks of the pond and wouldn't let the women out of the water for three or four hours.