The Years of Rice and Salt Read online

  This time the heavy stroke of the priest was successful, and all the shouting celebrants charged the body to make little balls of blood and dust, and throw them at each other, shrieking.

  An hour or two later the mood was entirely different. One of the old men started singing “The world is pain, its load past bearing”, and then the women took it up, for it was dangerous for the men to be heard questioning the Great Mother; even the women had to pretend to be wounded demons in the song:

  “Who is she that walks the fields as Death, She that fights and swoops as Death? A mother will not destroy her child, Her own flesh, creation’s joy, yet we see the Killer looking here then there . . .”

  Later, as night fell, the women went home and dressed in their best saris, and came back out and stood in two lines, and the boys and men shouted “Victory to the Great Goddess!” and the music began, wild and carefree, the whole crowd dancing and talking around the bonfire, looking beautiful and dangerous in their firelit finery.

  Then people from Dharwar turned up, and the dancing grew wild. Kokila’s father took her by the hand out of the line and introduced her to the parents of her intended. Apparently a reconciliation had been patched together for the sake of this formality. The father she had seen before, headman of Dharwar as he was, named Shastri; the mother she had never seen before, as the father had pretensions of purdah, though he was not really wealthy.

  The mother looked Kokila over with a sharp, not unfriendly eye, bindi paste running down between her eyebrows, face sweaty in the hot night. Possibly a decent mother-in-law. Then the son was produced: Gopal, third son of Shastri. Kokila nodded stiffly, looking aslant at him, not knowing what she felt. He was a thin-faced, intent-looking youth, perhaps nervous — she couldn’t tell. She was taller than he was. But that might change.

  They were swept back into their respective parties without exchanging a word. Nothing but that single nervous glance, and she did not see him again for three years. All the while, however, she knew they were destined to marry, and it was a good thing, as her affairs were therefore settled, and her father could stop worrying about her, and treat her without irritation.

  Over time she learned from the women’s gossip a bit more about the family she was going to join. Shastri was an unpopular headman. His latest offence was to have exiled a Dharwar blacksmith, for visiting a brother in the hills without asking his permission first. He had not called the panchayat together to discuss or approve this decision. He had never called the panchayat together, in fact, since inheriting the headman position from his deceased father a few years before. Why, people muttered, he and his eldest son ran Dharwar as if they were the zamindars of the place!

  Kokila took all this in without too much concern, and spent as much time as she could with Bihari, who was learning the herbs the dai used as medicines. Thus when they were out collecting firewood, Bihari was also inspecting the forest floor and finding plants to bring back — bittersweet in sunny patches, whiteroot in wet shade, castor bean under saal trees among their roots, and so on. Back at their hut Kokila helped grind the dried plants, or otherwise prepare them, using oils or spirits, for use by Insef in her midwifery, for the most part: to stimulate contractions, relax the womb, reduce pain, open the cervix, slow bleeding and so on. There were scores of source plants and animal parts that the dai wanted them to learn. “I’m old,” she would say, “I’m thirty-six, and my mother died at thirty. Her mother taught her the lore, and the dai who taught my grandmother was from a Dravidian village to the south, where names and even property were reckoned down through the women, and she taught my grandmother all the Dravidians know, and that goes back through all the dais of time to Saraswati, the goddess of learning herself, so we can’t let it go forgotten, you must learn it and teach your daughters, so that birthing is made as easy as it can be, poor things, and as many kept alive as possible.” People said of Insef that she had a centipede in her head (this was mostly an expression said of eccentrics, although in fact mothers searched your ears for them if you had been lying with your head on the grass, and sometimes rinsed out your ears with oil, for centipedes detest oil), and she often talked as fast as you ever heard anyone talk, rambling on and on, mostly to herself, but Kokila liked to hear her.

  And it took very little for Insef to convince Bihari of the importance of these things. She was a lively sweet girl with a good eye in the forest, a good memory for plants, and always a cheerful smile and a kind word for people. She was if anything too cheery and attractive, because in the year Kokila was to be married to Gopal, Shardul, his older brother, the eldest son of Shastri, soon to become Kokila’s brother-in-law — one of those in her husband’s family who would have the right to tell her what to do — he started looking at Bihari in an interested way, and after that, no matter what she did, he watched her. It couldn’t lead to any good, as Bihari was perhaps untouchable and therefore unmarriageable, and Insef did what she could to seclude her. But the festivals brought the single men and women together, and the daily life of the village afforded various glimpses and encounters as well. And Bihari was interested, anyway, even though she knew she was unmarriageable. She liked the idea of being normal, no matter how vehemently the dai warned her against it.

  The day came when Kokila was married to Gopal and moved to Dharwan. Her new mother-in-law turned out to be withdrawn and irritable, and Gopal himself was no prize. An anxious man with little to say, dominated by his parents, never reconciled with his father, he at first tried to lord it over Kokila the way they did over him, but without much conviction, particularly after she had snapped at him a few times. He was used to that, and quickly enough she had the upper hand. She didn’t much like him, and looked forward to dropping by to see Bihari and the dai in the forest. Really only the second son, Prithvi, seemed to her at all admirable in the headman’s family, and he left early every day and had as little to do with his family as he could, keeping quiet with a distant air.

  There was a lot of traffic between the two villages, more than Kokila had ever noticed before it became so important to her, and she made do — secretly taking a preparation that the dai had made for her, to keep from having a baby. She was fourteen years old but she wanted to wait.

  Before long things went bad. The dai got so crippled by her swollen joints that Bihari had to take over her work, and she was much more frequently seen in Dharwar. Meanwhile Shastri and Shardul were conspiring to make money by betraying their village, changing the tax assessment with the agent of the zamindar, shifting it to the zamindar’s great advantage, with Shastri skimming off some for himself. Basically they were colluding to change Dharwar over to the Muslim form of farm tax rather than the Hindu law. The Hindu law, which was a religious injunction and sacred, allowed a tax of no more than one-sixth of all produce, while the Muslim claim was to everything, with whatever the farmers kept being a matter of the pleasure of the zamindar. In practice this often meant little difference, but Muslim allowances varied for crops and circumstance, and this is where Shastri and Shardul were helping the zamindar, by calculating what more could be taken without starving the villagers. Kokila lay there at night with Gopal, and through the open doorway as he slept she heard Shastri and Shardul going over the possibilities.

  “Wheat and barley, two-fifths when naturally watered, three-tenths when watered by wheels.”

  “That sounds good. Then dates, vines, green crops and gardens, one-third.”

  “But summer crops one-fourth.”

  Eventually, to aid in this work, the zamindar gave Shardul the post of qanungo, assessor for the village; and he was already an awful man. And he still had an eye for Bihari. The night of the car festival he took her in the forest. From her account afterwards it was clear to Kokila that Bihari hadn’t completely minded it, she relished telling the details, “I was on my back in the mud, it was raining on my face and he was licking the rain off it, saying I love you I love you.”

  “But he won’t marry you,” Kokila pointed out,
worried. “And his brothers won’t like it if they hear about this.”

  “They won’t hear. And it was so passionate, Kokila, you have no idea.” She knew Kokila was not impressed by Gopal.

  “Yes yes. But it could lead to trouble. Is a few minutes’ passion worth that?”

  “It is, it is. Believe me.”

  For a while she was happy, and sang all the old love songs, especially one they used to sing together, an old one:

  “I like sleeping with somebody different,

  Often.

  It’s nicest when my husband is in a far country,

  Far away.

  And there’s rain in the streets at night and wind

  And nobody.”

  But Bihari got pregnant, despite Insef’s preparations. She tried to keep to herself, but with the dai crippled there were births that she had to attend, and so she went and her condition was noted, and people put together what they had seen or heard, and said that Shardul had got her with child. Then Prithvi’s wife was giving birth and Bihari went to help, and the baby, a boy, died a few minutes after it was born, and outside their house Shastri struck Bihari in the face, calling her a witch and a whore.

  All this Kokila heard about when she visited Prithvi’s house, from Prithvi’s wife, who said the birth had gone faster than anyone expected, and that she doubted Bihari had done anything bad. Kokila hurried off to the dai’s hut, and found the gnarled old woman puffing with effort between Bihari’s legs, trying to get the baby out. “She’s miscarrying,” she told Kokila. So Kokila took over and did what the dai told her to, forgetting her own family until night fell, when she remembered and exclaimed, “I have to go!” and Bihari whispered, “Go. It will be all right.”

  Kokila rushed home through the forest to Dharwar, where her mother-in-law slapped her, but perhaps just to pre-empt Gopal, who punched her hard in the arm and forbade her to return to the forest or Sivapur ever again, a ludicrous command given the realities of their life, and she almost said ‘How will I fetch your water then?” but bit her lip and rubbed her arm, looking daggers at them, until she judged they were as frightened as they could get without beating her, after which she glared like Kali at the floor instead, and cleaned up after their impromptu dinner, which had been hobbled by her absence. They could not even eat without her. This fury was the thing she would remember for ever.

  Before dawn next morning she slipped out with the water jugs and hurried through the wet grey forest, leaves scattered at every level from the ground to the high canopy overhead, and arrived at the dai’s hut frightened and breathing hard.

  Bihari was dead. The baby was dead, Bihari was dead, even the old woman lay stretched on her pallet, gasping with the pain of her exertions, looking as if she too might expire and leave this world at any minute. “They went an hour ago,” she said. “The baby should have lived, I don’t know what happened. Bihari bled too much. I tried to stop it but I couldn’t reach.”

  “Teach me a poison.”

  “What?”

  “Teach me a good poison to use. I know you know them. Teach me the strongest one you know, right now.”

  The old woman turned her head to the wall, weeping. Kokila pulled her around roughly and shouted, “Teach me!”

  The old woman looked over at the two bodies under a spread sari, but there was no one else there to be alarmed. Kokila began to raise a hand to threaten her, then stopped herself. “Please,” she begged. “I have to know.”

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Not as dangerous as sticking a knife in Shastri.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll stab him if you don’t tell me, and they’ll burn me on a bonfire.”

  “They’ll do that if you poison him.”

  “No one will know.”

  “They’ll think I did it.”

  “Everyone knows you can’t move.”

  “That won’t matter. Or they’ll think you did it.”

  “I’ll do it cleverly, believe me. I’ll be at my parents’.”

  “It won’t matter. They’ll blame us anyway. And Shardul is as bad as Shastri, or worse.”

  “Tell me.”

  The old woman looked into her face for a time. Then she rolled over, opened her sewing basket. She showed Kokila a small dried plant, then some berries. “This is water hemlock. These are castor bean seeds. Grind the hemlock leaves to a paste, add seeds to the paste just before you place it. It’s bitter, but you don’t need much. A pinch in spicy food will kill without any taste. But it looks like poisoning afterwards, I warn you. It’s not like being sick.”

  So Kokila watched and made her plan. Shastri and Shardul continued their work for the zamindar, gaining new enemies every month. And it was rumoured Shardul had raped another girl in the forest, the night of Gaurl Hunnime, the woman’s festival when mud images of Siva and Parvati are worshipped.

  Meanwhile Kokila had learned every detail of their routine. Shastri and Shardul ate a leisurely breakfast, and then Shastri heard cases at the pavilion between his house and the well, while Shardul did accounting beside the house. In the heat of midday they napped and received visitors on the verandah facing north into the forest. In the afternoons of most days they ate a small meal while lying on couches, like little zamindars, then walked with Gopal or one or two associates to that day’s market, where they ‘did business’ until the sun was low.

  They returned to the village drunk or drinking, stumbling cheerfully through the dusk to their home and dinner. It was as steady a routine as any in the village.

  So Kokila considered her plans while spending some of her firewood walks on the hunt for water hemlock and castor beans. These grew in the dankest parts of the forest, where it shaded into swamp, and hid every manner of dangerous creature, from mosquito to tiger. But at midday all such pests were resting; indeed in the hot months everything alive seemed sleeping at midday, even the drooping plants. Insects buzzed sleepily in the sleepy silence, and the two poison plants glowed in the dim light like little green lanterns. A prayer to Kali and she plucked them out, while she was bleeding, and pulled apart a bean pod for the seeds, and tucked them in the band of her sari, and hid them for the night in the forest near the defecation grounds, the day before the Durga Puja. That night she did not sleep at all, except for during short dreams, in which Bihari came to her and told her not to be sad. “Bad things happen in every life,” Bihari said. “No anger.” There was more but on waking it all slipped away, and Kokila went to her hiding place and found the plant parts and ground the hemlock leaves furiously together in a gourd with a stone, then cast the stone and gourd away in beds of ferns. With the paste on a leaf in her hand she went to Shastri’s house, and waited until their afternoon nap, a day that seemed to last for ever; then put the little seeds in the paste, and smeared a tiny dab of the paste inside the doughballs made for Shastri and Shardul’s afternoon snack. Then she ran from the house and through the forest, her heart taking flight like a deer ahead of her — too like a deer, in that she ran wild with the thrill of what she had done, and fell into an unseen deer snare, set by a man from Shadrapur. By the time he found her, stunned and just starting to struggle in the lines, with some of the paste still on her fingers, and took her to Dharwar, Shastri and Shardul were dead, and Prithvi was the new headman of the village, and Kokila was declared a witch and poisoner and killed on the spot.

  TWO

  Back in the Bardo

  Back in the bardo Kokila and Bihari sat next to each other on the black floor of the universe, waiting their turn for judgment.

  “You’re not getting it,” said Bihari — also Bold, and Bel, and Borondi, and many, many other incarnations before, back to her original birth in the dawn of this Kali-yuga, this age of destruction, fourth of the four ages, when as a new soul she had spun out of the Void, an eruption of Being out of Non-being, a miracle inexplicable by natural law and indicative of the existence of some higher realm, a realm above that even of the deva gods who now sat on the
dais looking down at them. The realm that they all sought instinctively to return to.

  Bihari continued: “The dharma is a matter that can’t be short-changed, you have to work at it step by step, doing what you can in each given situation. You can’t leap up to heaven.”

  “I shit on all that,” Kokila said, making a rude gesture at the gods. She was still so angry she could spit, and terrified too, weeping and wiping her nose on the back of her hand, “I’ll be damned if I cooperate in such a horrible thing.”

  “Yes, you will! That’s why we keep almost losing you. That’s why you never recognize your jati when you’re in the world, why you keep doing your own family harm. We rise and fall together.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  Now Shastri was being judged, kneeling with his hands together in supplication.

  “He’d better be sent to hell!” Kokila shouted at the black god. “The lowest nastiest level of hell!”

  Bihari shook her head. “It’s step by step, as I said. Little steps up and down. And it’s you they’re likely to judge down, after what you did.”

  “It was justice!” Kokila exclaimed with vehement bitterness. “I took justice into my own hands because no one else would do it! And I would do it again, too.” She shouted up at the black god: “Justice, damn it!”

  “Shh!” Bihari said urgently. “You’ll get your turn. You don’t want to be sent back as an animal.”

  Kokila glared at her. “We are animals already, and don’t you forget it.” She took a slap at Bihari’s arm and her hand went right through Bihari’s which somewhat deflated her point. They were in the realm of souls, there was no denying it. “Forget these gods,” she snarled, “it’s justice we need! I’ll bring the revolt right into the bardo itself if that’s what it takes!”

  “First things first,” Bihari’s said. “One step at a time. just try to recognize your jati, and take care of them first. Then on from there.”