And so there does, thought Neel, and you are one of them and I am not.

'Being unwilling to add further to your distress,' said the judge, 'it is sufficient to say that none of the applications made on your behalf have suggested a single proper ground for altering the course of the law. Recent precedent, in England as well as in this country, has established forgery to be a felony for which the forfeiture of property is an inadequate penalty: it carries the additional sanction of transportation beyond the seas for a term to be determined by the court. It is in keeping with these precedents that this court pronounces its sentence, which is that all your properties are to be seized and sold, to make good your debts, and that you yourself are to be transported to the penal settlement on the Mauritius Islands for a period of no less than seven years. So let it be recorded on this, the twentieth day of July, in the year of Our Lord, 1838…'

Soon, by virtue of his prodigious strength, Kalua became the most valued oarsman on the pulwar and he alone, among all the migrants, was allowed to take turns whenever the weather permitted. The privilege pleased him greatly, the strain of rowing being more than amply compensated by the rewards of being on deck, where he could watch the rain-freshened countryside going by. The names of the settlements on the banks made a great impression on him – Patna, Bakhtiyarpur, Teghra – and it became a game with him to compute the number of strokes that separated the next from the last. Occasionally, when some storied town or city came into view, Kalua would go down to let Deeti know: Barauni! Munger! The women's enclosure boasted more than its fair share of windows, being endowed with two, one on either bow. With each of Kalua's reports, Deeti and the others would prise the shutters briefly open to gaze upon the settlements as they approached.

Every day at sunset, the pulwar would stop for the night. Where the banks were dangerously unpeopled, it would drop anchor at midstream, but if they happened to be in the vicinity of some populous town, like Patna, Munger or Bhagalpur, then the boatmen would attach their moorings directly to the shore. The greatest treat of all was when the pulwar pulled up to the ghats of some busy town or river port: in the intervals between showers of rain the women would sit on deck, watching the townsfolk and laughing at the evermore-outlandish accents in which they spoke.

When the pulwar was under weigh, the women were permitted on deck only for the serving of the midday meal: at all other times, they were kept in seclusion, in their curtained enclosure between the bows. To spend three weeks in that small, dark and airless space should have been, by rights, an experience of near-unbearable tedium. Yet, strangely, it was anything but that: no two hours were the same and no two days alike. The close proximity, the dimness of the light, and the pounding drumbeat of the rain outside, created an atmosphere of urgent intimacy among the women; because they were all strangers to each other, everything that was said sounded new and surprising; even the most mundane of discussions could take unexpected twists and turns. It was astonishing, for example, to discover that in making mango-achar, some were accustomed to using fallen fruit while others would use none that were not freshly picked; no less was it surprising to learn that Heeru included heeng among the pickling spices and that Sarju omitted so essential an ingredient as kalonji. Each woman had always practised her own method in the belief that none other could possibly exist: it was bewildering at first, then funny, then exciting, to discover that the recipes varied with every household, family and village, and that each was considered unquestionable by its adherents. So absorbing was this subject that it kept them occupied from Ghoga to Pirpainti: and if so trivial a thing could generate so much talk, then what of such pressing matters as money and the marital bed?

As for stories, there was no end to them: two of the women, Ratna and Champa, were sisters, married to a pair of brothers whose lands were contracted to the opium factory and could no longer support them; rather than starve, they had decided to indenture themselves together – whatever happened in the future, they would at least have the consolation of a shared fate. Dookhanee was another married woman, travelling with her husband: having long endured the oppressions of a violently abusive mother-in-law, she considered it fortunate that her husband had joined in her escape.

Deeti, too, felt no constraint in speaking of the past, for she had already imagined, in fulsome detail, a history in which she had been Kalua's wife since the age of twelve, living with him and his cattle in his roadside bier. And if called upon to account for the decision to cross the Black Water, she would blame it all on the jealousies of the pehlwans and strongmen of Benares, who, unable to beat her husband in combat, had contrived to have him driven from the district.

To some of the stories, they returned again and again: the tale of Heeru's separation from her husband, for example, was told so many times that they all felt as though they had lived through it themselves. It had happened the previous year, at the start of the cold season, during the great cattle mela of Sonepur. Heeru had lost her firstborn and only child the month before and her husband had persuaded her that if she was ever to bear another son, she would need to do a puja at the temple of Hariharnath, during the fair.

Heeru knew, of course, that a great many people went to the mela, but she was not prepared for the multitudes that were assembled on the sand-flats of Sonepur: the dust raised by their feet was so thick as to make a moon of the midday sun, and as for cattle and other animals, there were so many that it seemed as if the river's banks would collapse under their weight. It took them a whole day to make their way to the gates of the temple and while they were waiting to enter, an elephant, brought there by a zemindar, ran suddenly amuck, scattering the crowd. Heeru and her husband ran in opposite directions, and afterwards, when she knew herself to be lost, she fell prey to one of her bouts of distracted forgetfulness. For hours she sat on the sand, staring at her fingernails, and when at last she bethought herself to go looking for her man, he was nowhere to be found: it was like searching for a grain of rice in an avalanche of sand. After two days of fruitless wandering, Heeru decided to make her way back to her village – but this was no easy matter for there was a distance of sixty kos to be covered, and that, too, through a stretch of country that was preyed upon by ruthless dacoits and murderous Thugs: for a woman to embark on that journey alone was to invite murder, or worse. She got as far as Revelganj and decided to wait until she encountered relatives or acquaintances who might agree to take her with them. Several months passed during which she sustained herself by begging, washing clothes and carting dust at a saltpetre mine. Then one day she saw someone she knew, a neighbour from the village; she rushed towards him, in delight, but when he recognized her, he fled, as if from a ghost. At length, when she managed to catch up with him, he told her that her husband had given her up for dead and married again; his new wife was already pregnant.

At first Heeru was determined to go back and reclaim her place in her home – but then she began to wonder. Why had her husband taken her to Sonepur in the first place? Had he perhaps intended to abandon her all along, seizing any opportunity that arose? Certainly he had berated and beaten her often enough in the past: what would he do if she returned to him now?