Her name was Sangita. She had been born in a village in North India to parents who farmed a small piece of land as their only means of sustenance. Growing up with her siblings, she began helping out the family in her early years, with education being a distant priority. She learned to cook, look after babies, till the land, harvest crops, draw water from a well, and everything else that 80% of the country's female workforce learned to do in the rural economy.
Her brother was born a year after her, and their younger sister another eighteen months later. Growing up, they lived in a mud-caked brick house which had just one room that was partitioned with a curtain. Their parents slept in the back and the siblings in front. There was a bathroom, little more than a hole in the ground, across from the mud packed courtyard on which hens, goats and two cows often rested in the shade of a large oak tree. They drew water from a bore well with a rusted hand-pump for all their washing and culinary needs. The cooking was done in the courtyard over a mud stove in one corner. They were poor but not on the brink of starvation.
Sangita, despite her lack of education, grew up smart and quick in a world dominated by the menfolk of her tiny village. By the time she was 19 years old, her body had blossomed and became increasingly difficult to hide despite the general modesty of her apparel. She knew she had a very beautiful face; large dark brown eyes and thick long hair that she braided into a pleat that fell down to her hips. She had a sharp jawline that accentuated the heart-shaped face, full lips that looked soft and delicate, and an elegant neck that merged with her rounded shoulders. Her enchanting looks had already begun to draw comments from passers by and relatives; something she was aware and innocently proud of.
Her breasts were already a firm 36 inches but she felt uncomfortable wearing the C-cup brassieres her mother had bought for her. Although they never had a full length mirror in their hovel, Sangita would run her hands all over her naked body when there was nobody in the house and she was changing clothes after a bath. She had seen pictures of Bollywood actresses and felt her figure was similar to many of them; the tapered waist and the swell of her hips. She was 5'4" tall, her pubic hair and the tufts of hirsute growth in her armpits were considerable, and she often masturbated thinking of one of the boys from a neighbouring village she had once spied urinating in the open fields. That was the first and only time she had seen a human penis.
Sangita was also discovering her body and its erogenous zones; the large nipples that stood out hard from her dark brown areolas, the wetness of her cunt when she teased the inner labia, the way her clitoris protruded from under the clitoral hood when she stimulated herself. She knew about her hymen and the importance of keeping her virginity intact till her marriage. But that knowledge had never dissuaded her from probing her vagina; sometimes with her fingers and on occasion with a freshly washed cucumber. And at some stage she did in fact tear her hymen; she didn't talk to anyone about it and after some time chose not to dwell on the subject. Technically she was still a virgin as long as she hadn't had penetrative sex with a man.
Her first sexual encounter was with her sibling. It was the end of March and Sangita's brother had just completed his school exams. Their parents had taken the younger sister to a neighbouring village where their mother's uncle lived; they had to do some shopping at the nearby town and had planned to stay for three days. Sangita was staying back to cook and generally look after her brother.
The sun had set and dusk was turning to night; there was one solitary lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, lighting up the room where the two sat gossiping. They had an easy relationship, having grown up together and were as much friends as they were siblings. After dinner and washing up, they laid out their mattresses on the ground and sat next to each other, talking into the night enjoying the freedom of being left alone by the rest of their family. They were both wearing loose pyjamas and long shirts, also called a kurta, as they sat with their backs against a wall of the room.
"Do you think I am beautiful, Brother?" Sangita suddenly asked.
"What!?" He was so taken aback with the unexpectedness of her query that he simply gaped at her.
She didn't respond; just looked at him with an earnestness that convinced him that she was actually waiting for an answer.
When Sangita's brother realised that his sister was not being rhetorical, he said "Of course! Everybody thinks you're beautiful, Didi, and you know that." He had always called her Didi, the generic but still respectful term for an elder sister.
"I don't mean just my face. What about my body? Do you think I have a good figure?" she persevered.
"How would I know?" her brother replied, "I've never seen your body." That was a lie. He had found a hole in the brick wall of the common bathroom outside which the family used and had, on two separate occasions, taken the risk of being spotted while peering through. The first time was by chance, more than accident, when he was returning from school and had heard mug-fulls of water being poured inside the roofless lavatory and bath area. The walls were too high for him to peer over or even climb but he had been intrigued by who would be bathing that late in the day. Curiosity got the better of him as he side-stepped towards the back wall, adjacent to the mustard fields where the shimmering golden lustre danced in the late afternoon sunshine.
Careful not no make any noise with his footsteps, he had edged up to the wall and placed his eye almost flush against a hole in the brickwork. When he saw his sister ladling mugs of water out of a plastic bucket and pouring it over her head, he almost ran away in shock. His immediate reaction at that moment had been to snap his head backwards but the pull of his sister's nakedness was too strong for him to resist. She was hunched on the ground, squatting on her haunches, and pouring water over her shoulders and back, using the spare hand to wash away the soapy lather from her body.