The Year of Rice and Salt Read online

  But we're yellow! Kyu said, looking at his hand. And Bold was as yellow as a flower.

  That means we must try again. We try and try again, life after life, until we achieve Buddha wisdom, and are released at last. Or some then choose to return to the human world, to help others along their way to release. Those are called bodhisattvas. You could be one of those, Kyu. I can see it inside you. Listen to me now. Soon you'll run for it. Things will chase you, and you'll hide. In a house, a cave, a jungle, a lotus blossom. These are all wombs. You'll want to stay in your hiding place, to escape the terrors of the bardo. That way lies preta, and you will become a ghost. You must emerge again to have any hope. Choose your womb door without any feelings of attraction or repulsion. Looks can be deceiving. Go as you see fit. Follow the heart. Try helping other spirits first, as if you were a bodhisattva already.

  I don't know how!

  Learn. Pay attention and learn. You must follow, or lose the jati for good.

  Then they were attacked by huge male lions, manes already matted with blood, roaring angrily. Bold took off in one direction and Kyu in another. Kyu ran and ran, the lion on his heels. He dodged through two trees and onto a path. The lion ran on and lost him.

  To the east he saw a lake, adorned with black and white swans. To the west, a lake with horses standing in it; to the south, a scattering of pagodas; to the north a lake with a castle in it. He moved south towards the pagodas, feeling vaguely that this would have been Bold's choice; feeling also that Bold and the rest of his jati were already there, in one of the temples waiting for him.

  He reached the pagodas. He wandered from one building to the next, looking in doorways, shocked by visions of crowds in disarray, fighting or fleeing from hyena headed guards and wardens; a hell of a village, each possible future catastrophic, terrifying. Death's home town.

  A long time passed in this horrible search, and then he was looking through the gates of a temple at his jati, his cohort, Bold and all the rest of them, Shen, I li Dem his mother, Zheng He, Psin, all of them immediately known to him – oh, he thought, of course. They were naked and bloodied, but putting on the gear of war nevertheless. Then hyenas howled, and Kyu fled through the raw yellow light of morning, through trees into the protection of elephant grass. The hyenas prowled between the huge tufts of grass, and he pressed through the knife edges of one broken down clump to take refuge inside it.

  For a long time he cowered in the grass, until the hyenas went away, also the cries of his jati as they looked for him, telling him to stick with them. He hid there through a long night of awful sounds, creatures being killed and eaten; but he was safe; and morning came again. He decided to venture forth, and found the way out was closed. The knife edged grass blades had grown, and were like long swords caging him, even pressing in on him, cutting him as they grew. Ah, he realized; this is a womb. I've chosen one without trying to, without listening to Bold's advice, separated from my family, unaware and in fear. The worst kind of choosing.

  And yet to stay here would be to become a hungry ghost. He would have to submit. He would have to be born again. He groaned at the thought, cursed himself for a fool. Try to have a little more presence of mind next time, he thought, a little more courage! It would not be easy, the bardo was a scary place. But now, when it was too late, he decided he had to try. Next time!

  And so he re entered the human realm. What happened to him and to his companions that time around, it is not our task to tell. Gone, gone, gone altogether beyond! All hail!

  One. The Cuckoo in the Village

  What happens is that sometimes there is a confusion, and the reincarnating soul enters into a womb already occupied. Then there are two souls in the same baby, and a fight breaks out. Mothers can feel that kind, the babies that thrash around inside, wrestling themselves. Then they're born and the shock of that ejection stills them for a while, they're fully occupied learning to breathe and otherwise coming to grips with this world. After that the fight between the two souls for the possession of the one body recommences. That's colic.

  A baby suffering colic will cry out as if struck, arch its back in pain, even writhe in agony, for many of its waking hours. This should be no surprise, two souls are struggling within it, and so for weeks the baby cries all the time, its guts twisted by the conflict. Nothing can ease its distress. It's not a situation that can last for long, it's too much for any little body to bear. In most cases the cuckoo soul drives out the original, and then the body finally calms down. Or sometimes the first soul successfully drives out the cuckoo and is restored to itself. Or else, in rare cases, neither one is strong enough to drive the other out, and the colic finally subsides but the baby grows up a divided person, confused, erratic, unreliable, prone to insanity.

  Kokila was born at midnight, and the dai pulled her out and said, 'It's a girl, poor thing.' Her mother Zaneeta hugged the little creature to her breast, saying, 'We will love you anyway.'

  She was a week old when the colic struck. She spat up her mother's milk and cried inconsolably all through the nights. Very quickly Zaneeta forgot what the cheerful new babe had been like, a kind of placid grub at her breast sucking, gurgling amazedly at the world. Under the assault of the colic she screamed, cried, moaned, writhed. It was painful to see it. Zaneeta could do nothing but hold her, hands under her stomach as it banded with cramping muscles, letting her hang face downwards from Zaneeta's hip. Something about this posture, perhaps just the effort of keeping her head upright, quieted Kokila. But it did not always work, and never for long. Then the writhing and screams began again, until Zaneeta was near distraction. She had to keep her husband Rajit fed and her two older daughters as well, and having borne three daughters in a row she was already out of Rajit's favour, and the babe was intolerable. Zaneeta tried sleeping with her out in the women's ground, but the menstruating women, while sympathetic, did not appreciate the noise. They enjoyed getting out of the home away with the girls, and it was not a place for babies. So Zaneeta was driven to sleeping with Kokila out against the side of their family's house, where they both dozed fitfully between bouts of crying.

  This went on for a couple of months, and then it ended. Afterwards the baby had a different look in her eye. The dai who had delivered her, Insef, checked her pulse and her irises and her urine, and declared that a different soul had indeed taken over the body, but that this was not really important – it happened to many babies, and could be an improvement, as usually in colic battles the stronger soul won out.

  But after all that internal violence, Zaneeta regarded Kokila with trepi dation, and all through her infancy and childhood Kokila looked back at her, and at the rest of the world, with a kind of black wild look, as if she were uncertain where she was or what she was doing there. A confused and often angry little girl, in fact, although clever in manipu lating others, quick to caress or to yell, and very beautiful. She was strong, too, and quick, and by the time she was five she was more help than harm around the home. By then Zaneeta had had two more children, the younger of them a son, the sun of their lives, all thanks to Ganesh and Kartik, and with all the work there was to be done she appreciated Kokila's self reliance and quick abilities.

  Naturally the new son, jahan, was the centre of the household, and Kokila only the most capable of Zaneeta's daughters, absorbed in the business of her childhood and youth, not particularly well known to Zaneeta compared to Rajit and jahan, whom naturally she had to study in depth.

  So Kokila was free to follow her own thoughts for a few years. Insef often said that childhood was the best time in a woman's life, because as a girl she was somewhat free of men, and mostly just another worker around the house and in the fields. But the dai was old, and cynical about love and marriage, having seen their results so often turn bad, for herself and for others. Kokila was no more inclined to listen to her than to anyone else. To tell the truth she didn't seem to listen much to anybody. She watched everyone with that startled wary look you see on animals you come upon sudden
ly in the forest, and spoke little. She seemed to enjoy going off to do the daily work. She stayed silent and observant around her father, and the other children of the village didn't interest her, except for one girl, who had been found abandoned as an infant, one morning in the women's ground. This foundling Insef was raising to be the dai after her. Insef had named her Bihari, and often Kokila went to the dai's hut and took Bihari with her on her morning round of chores, not talking to her very much more than she did to anyone else, but pointing things out to her, and most of all, bothering to bring her along in the first place, which surprised Zaneeta. The foundling was nothing unusual, after all, just a little girl like all the rest. It was another of Kokila's mysteries.

  In the months before monsoon, the work for Kokila and all the rest of them got harder for several weeks on end. Wake in the morning and stoke the fire. Cross the cool village, the air not yet dusty. Pick up Bihari at the dai's little hut in the woods. Downstream to the defecation grounds, wash afterwards, then back through the village to pick up the water jars and head upstream. Past the laundry pools, where women were already congregating, and on to the watering hole. Fill up and hump the big heavy jars back home, stopping several times to rest. Then off into the forest to forage for firewood. This could take most of the morning. Then back to the fields west of the village, where her father and his brothers had some land, to sow pulse of wheat and barley. They put it in over a few weeks, so that it would ripen through the long harvest month. This week's row was weak, the tops small, but Kokila thrust them in the ploughed earth without thought, then in the heat of the day sat with the other women and girls, mixing grain and water to make a pasty dough, throwing chapatis, cooking some of them. After that she went out to their cow. A few rhythmic downward tugs of her finger in its rectum started a spill of dung that she collected warm in her hands, slapped into patties with some straw for drying, and put on the stoneand turf wall bordering her father's field. After that she took some dried dung cakes by the house, put one on the fire, went out to the stream to wash her hands and the dirty clothes: four saris, dhotis, wraps. Then back to the house in the waning light of the day, the heat and dust making everything golden in the slant air, to the hearth in the central room of their house, to cook chapatis and daal bhat on the little clay stove next to the firepit.

  Some time after dark Rajit would come home, and Zaneeta and the girls would surround him with care, and after he had eaten the daal bhat and chapatis he would relax and tell Zaneeta something about his day, as long as it had not gone too badly. If it had, he wouldn't speak of it. But usually he told them something of his juggling of land and cattle deals. The village families used marginal pastures as securities for new animals, or vice versa, and brokering trade in calves and kids and pasture rights was what her father did, mostly between Yelapur and Sivapur. Then also he was always making marriage arrangements for his daughters, a bad business as he had so many of them, but he made up dowries when he could, and had no hesitation in marrying them down. Had no choice, really.

  So the evening would end and they slept on rush mattresses unrolled for the night on the floor, by the fire for warmth if it was cool, for the smoke's protection from mosquitos if it was warm. Another night would pass.

  One evening after dinner, a few days before Durga Puja marked the end of the harvest, her father told her mother that he had arranged a possible marriage for Kokila, whose turn it was, to a man from Dharwar, the market village just the other side of Sivapur. The prospective husband was a Lingayat, like Rajit's family and most of Yelapur, and the third son of Dharwar's headman. He had quarrelled with his father, however, and this left him unable to ask Rajit for much of a dowry. Probably he was unmarriageable in Dharwar, Kokila guessed, but she was excited anyway. Zaneeta seemed pleased, and said she would look the candidate over during the Durga Puja.

  Ordinary life was pegged to whichever festival was coming next, and the festivals all had different natures, colouring the feel of the days leading up to them. Thus the Car Festival of Krishna takes place in the monsoon, and its colour and gaiety stand in contrast to the lowering grey overhead; boys blow their palm leaf trumpets as if to hold off the rain by the blast of their breath, and everyone would go crazy from the noise if the blowing itself didn't reduce the trumpets quickly to palm leaves again. Then the Swing Festival of Krishna takes place at the end of monsoon, and the fair associated with it is full of stalls selling superfluous things like sitars and drums, or silks, or embroidered caps, or chairs and tables and cabinets. The time for the ld shifts through the year, making it seem a very human event somehow, free of the earth and its gods, and during it all the Muslims come to Sivapur to watch their elephant parade.

  Then Durga Puja marks the harvest, the grand climax of the year, honouring the mother goddess and all her works.

  So the women gathered on the first day, and mixed a batch of vermilion bindi paste, while drinking some of the dai's fiery chang, and they scattered after that, painted and giggling, following the Muslim drummers in the opening parade, shouting 'To the victory of Mother Durga!' The goddess's slant eyed statue, made of clay and dressed in coloured pith and gilding, looked faintly Tibetan. Placed around it were similarly dressed statues of Laksmi and Saraswati, and her sons Ganesh and Kartik. Two goats were tethered in turn to a sacrificial post before these statues and decapitated, the bleeding heads staring up from the dust.

  The sacrifice of the buffalo was an even greater matter; a special priest came from Bbadrapur, with a big scimitar sharpened for the occasion. This was important, for if the blade didn't make it all the way through the buffalo's big neck, it meant that the goddess was displeased and had refused the offering. Boys spent the morning rubbing the skin on the top of its neck with ghee, to soften it.

  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 u
npopular 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.