Geeta

Geeta, a widowed jewelry maker, is the protagonist in The Bandit Queens. At the outset of the novel, Geeta feels isolated from the other villagers and the women in her loan group. After her husband disappeared, rumors that she killed him began to circulate and she was ostracized from the town’s social order. Without children or a husband, Geeta was considered a social pariah and called a churel, “a woman wronged” who would come back and “lure [men] to a hillside lair when her fangs drained them of all bodily fluids [or] hold them prisoner demanding repeated coitus until they withered” (296). When Farah, who believes Geeta killed Ramesh, asks the protagonist to kill her own husband, Geeta initially refuses. However, she learns that Samir is planning to use her to pay off his loans and agrees to the plan, resolute that she will not let another abusive...