Choice, page 22
In the second house in Majharsharif, Sabita sits with the bonti positioned securely under one foot, scaling and gutting a pile of pabda fish. Her mind plays a series of situations combining these elements: Gauri has run away; the children have lost her or lost control of her; the children are lost too looking for her; Gauri has been stolen by powerful people from whom she will find it impossible to retrieve her; the people who have given them the cow will arrive any day now to ask for the money that she is worth. Boüdi passes by and says, ‘Keep the fish whole, don’t cut off their heads.’
Sabita says, ‘All right. Achha, Boüdi, can I take the entrails home? We can’t afford fish, but we cook and eat the innards when we can get them. Patka, we call the dish. If you’re going to throw away the innards, that is.’
‘Yes, of course, take it with you.’
Then Sabita finds herself saying, ‘My boy and girl will love it. I think they haven’t eaten all day, save maybe for some panta in the morning. And the poor children will have roamed around in this killing sun all day –’ then she stops herself, not knowing how those words had occurred to her.
She hurries, as much as she can, on the walk home. Will she see Gauri and her children by the pond or will they have already gone back? It will be hours before the sun goes down. She should have bought some puffed rice and jaggery for them to take for their day out in the open. In the fields and woods beside the pond, she sees Gauri and four other cows, one of them a bull with huge curved horns ending on impossibly sharp points, sitting in the shade. The children are nowhere to be seen. There are crows and mynas making a racket up above in the trees. She calls out Sahadeb’s and Mira’s names, tentatively at first, then, as she walks into the colony of trees and bushes and undergrowth, hollering. Nothing. One girl, two, emerge from behind the trees, both holding bundles of kindling on their head with a raised arm. Sabita knows both of them – Parul and Mamoni. They live, like Sabita with her son and daughter, in the outermost scatter of huts at the edges of Nonapani. She asks, ‘Ei, did you see my boy and girl?’
They say, ‘No. But we haven’t been here long.’
Sabita is too irritated with her useless children to quiz them further. Those wretched puppies, you couldn’t ask them to do one little thing and breathe in peace that it would be done. You had to keep at them until you were foaming at the mouth. They were bloodsuckers, those children. The sudden hostility gives her, flagging at the end of the day, enough energy to think, ‘I’m here now, let me bring Gauri home.’ No sooner has she thought this than the presence of the bull and the three other cows asserts itself. Those horns. First, she calls out to Gauri, but the cow doesn’t give any indication that she has heard. Sabita moves closer, gingerly, step by step, approaching from Gauri’s rear, which is the end furthest from the bull.
‘Ei, Gauri, Gauri, tchu tchu tchu’ – as if she’s calling a cat – ‘Gauri, here, look, GAURI.’ All the while Sabita is far more alert to any possible movement on the bull’s part than on Gauri’s. Gauri is oblivious; not even the swish of her tail or a sideways movement of her head. Sabita repeats her calls, this time impatiently. Nothing. In a flash of inspiration, she looks for a fallen branch, finds one, strips it into a makeshift switch, and strikes Gauri gently on her rump. The skin where it is touched quivers, as if a darting creature in the flesh under it has been momentarily startled, but other than that Gauri continues to sit like a stone. Does Sabita need a stick, something more substantial to strike with so that Gauri can feel the impact and understand that something is being asked of her? Isn’t that how animals are kept in order or prevented from straying: a periodic impact of a stick on their bodies to remind them where to go? She has seen bullock carts being driven – the driver does not spare the animals the lash of his whip. Lured by the smell of the fish innards inside the plastic packet in her left hand, flies are beginning to form a cloud around her, and at least a dozen crows, and counting, are hopping around her, waiting for her to put it down on the ground. Half-heartedly, she hits Gauri again, a little bit harder; she cannot bring herself to use full force, but more out of fear than compassion – what if Gauri gets cross and stands up to kick her or attack with her growing horns? Miracle: Gauri gets up – it takes so long for her to do it, nimble these creatures are not – but the bull stands up too and advances towards Sabita. She drops her branch and runs pell-mell. When she has covered what she thinks is enough distance, she looks behind her: Gauri and the bull are still standing where they were, utterly uninterested in the human who enforced herself upon their world.
At home, Sabita finds both her children asleep. All the irritations of her day – the heat, the exhaustion, the manufactured scare, the unfinished business of bringing Gauri back, the sheer helplessness the cow’s presence has plunged her into – crystallize around this sight. She wishes she still had that switch from earlier, but, resourceful as ever, she grabs hold of the broom and begins to strike the sleeping children with it, shouting, ‘Burntface! Misborn! Nothing done, the cow still in the fields, the unun unlit, the yard unswept, and you’re sleeping like pigs. Get up, get up, or I’ll turn your bones and flesh black. Get up, go fetch Gauri.’
The children, barely awake, flee. Dazed with hunger and exhaustion, and still entangled in the net of sleep, they don’t quite understand what is being demanded of them, and when they work it out, they are no nearer to having any idea how to achieve it. They find themselves by the pond again. Sahadeb takes a while to discover the rope, which he left under a tree earlier in the day. He has no expectations of himself, and the thought of whether he may or may not be able to bring Gauri back home hasn’t crossed his mind. Taking Gauri to graze happened with ease, so if he assumes anything it is that leading her home will be a replication of that earlier action, but in the opposite direction.
Mira says, ‘Look, she’s looking at us. Do you think she’s recognized us?’
Sahadeb says, ‘Who knows?’
He approaches Gauri with the rope held out but cannot reach high enough to string it around her neck. Following her brother, Mira begins a steady patter of mostly meaningless words which she thinks will be soothing for Gauri. And who can tell, maybe the stream of repetitive sounds does comfort the cow, for she lowers her neck towards Sahadeb, as if asking for the halter to be put in place.
By the time the unun catches, Sabita’s anger has somewhat dissipated. She fans the flames, gets up to pick a small handful of purple-black chillies from her vegetable patch and some green stalks of onions and garlic, sets the rice to cook, opens the packet of fish entrails, which shrouds her immediately in a miasma, and as she carries on with her chores, she tears up. She blames the smoke, which, however, is blowing in the opposite direction. Eeesh, bechara, fatherless while having a father, she thinks, letting that sentiment carry the weight of the feeling of smallness inside her.
Mira comes bounding along, almost singing – ‘Ma, ma, we’ve brought Gauri back with us, she followed us like a good, golden girl.’
Sahadeb follows, holding one end of the rope, Gauri behind him.
Sabita, surprised at how quickly they’ve returned, asks, ‘Did you not have to coax and cajole? She followed you easily? What did you have to do?’
She divides the fish innards fry-up entirely between her children – the cooked dish has reduced to barely a couple of spoonfuls – and leaves nothing for herself. The long day’s abrasions begin to be soothed for her, or maybe she is just too tired. She gives Gauri her usual bowl of rice in its starchy cooking water. Her last thought before sleep takes her is this: the children are naturals at grazing Gauri, they can take charge of the whole thing now.
VII
‘O Sahadeb’s-ma,’ her neighbour, Mamoni’s-ma, says, ‘people from the town came and waited and waited and waited for you, then left. I sent them to see the children in the field. They’ll be able to tell you what those people wanted. They said it was something to do with your cow.’
Sabita has just returned from town. Before she has had a chance to have a cooling drink of water, Mamoni’s-ma arrives with this news. It is the tail end of summer; all day long the earth is scourged by the unforgiving sun, then at night, the earth, as if in revenge, sends the heat back out. It is difficult to say which is more punishing, the day or the night. She will just have to wait until Gauri and the children are back to find out what the city people wanted. That old fear, that they’ve come to ask for the cow’s price, shows its face again, but it’s a different face now – the apprehension now is that they’re going to take Gauri away because she hasn’t fed her enough, because she hasn’t looked after her properly, because her barn is just a chatai roof held up by four bamboo poles, asking to be undone with the first kalbaishakhi wind, which will come along any afternoon now, because she hasn’t grazed her properly because because.
An intense wave of anger for those people in fancy clothes almost topples her. She shrieks at Mamoni’s-ma, ‘Do they think I can sit at home all day, waiting for them to arrive at their whim? Will those whore’s eggs, those fuck-courtesans, give me a job when I lose my work in town for not showing up because I was waiting for those sister-fuckers?’
Her head reels and feels light and her vision becomes dark and swimmy for a moment. Mamoni’s-ma says, ‘What good will it do to give me a tongue lashing? I’m just passing on what they said.’ She leaves in a huff, muttering, ‘Never do anyone any good. That cow is your death wish, you burntface, mark my words.’
There is a commotion nearby: Gauri, Sahadeb, and Mira come into the yard followed, a few steps behind, by two women Sabita doesn’t know. The children’s faces look shrunken like thieves’. The woman in the red sari says, ‘This your mother?’, then turning to Sabita, ‘Your cow got into our garden and destroyed a banana tree. It ate most of the leaves –’
The other woman interrupts, ‘Not just the leaves, it ate all the banana flowers. There were four banana flowers, I counted yesterday, four nice, tight, big ones. Your cow ate them all. It didn’t spare a single one.’
The woman in the red sari takes in Sabita’s yard – the dark hut, the handkerchief-sized vegetable patch, the risible barn, the smoking unun, the rows of cow-dung cakes on every available surface and the muddy round stains left behind from where they had been picked – in one raking glance and says, ‘You don’t give your cow enough to eat?’, and lets the question hang in the air.
Sabita comes out of her daze. Her first response is to go on the offence. ‘The cow has eaten a few banana leaves, and you’re behaving as if she’s eaten your head. Well, what is she supposed to eat?’
Red Sari lashes back, ‘If you’re keen on giving your cow banana leaves, why don’t you plant your own tree? It ate our banana tree.’
The second woman adds, ‘The whole tree, leaves, flowers, trunk. It won’t grow back now.’
Red Sari ratchets it up: ‘You hardly have enough to eat yourselves and you’ve allowed yourself the vanity of a cow?’ She matches this with a bark-like laugh.
Now the second woman: ‘And what were your useless children doing? They’re supposed to keep the cow from getting up to such things.’
Sabita can see from the corner of her eye that her neighbours have all come out of their huts to take in the spectacle. She shouts back, ‘Get out! Get out of here immediately. Whores! Father-fuckers! Get out, otherwise I’ll use the broom to sweep you out. Build a wall around your fucking banana tree if you don’t want cows to get to it. Get out.’
The women, who had expected contrition from Sabita, or at least some embarrassment, back out, shouting retaliatory abuse. ‘Maidservant in profession, maidservant in language – all of a piece. You are the one who is a whore. Don’t think we don’t know what you go to that distant town for.’
They’re not done, having flung that bucket of mud. Their final words before they retreat are: ‘If we see that cow again, we are going to take it in our possession. Let’s see how you can release her then.’ With that, they are gone.
The spectators call out comments and advice: ‘Keep her tied up.’ ‘Eeesh, the poor cow, the grass is all singed to straw in this heat, she was hungry, that’s why she ate the banana leaves.’ ‘Teach your children how to hit the cow if it strays, then it’ll learn not to do it.’
Sabita’s face burns. The children have watched the confrontation in absolute silence, in fear of what awaits them. And it follows, as surely as the procession of months or seasons. Sabita turns to them. ‘Why did you not stop her?’
Sahadeb stammers, ‘We tried to, but she’s so big, we couldn’t physically steer her around. When I hit her hard with the stick, she kicked her back legs.’
This last addition is a lie, but Mira nods along, hoping her confirmation is going to save both of them.
Sabita attacks them first with a rubber slipper, then when that falls from her hand, she goes at them with her hands, fists, legs, finally resorting to the broom. ‘The shame, the shame,’ she pants as she goes about her business, ‘you’ve brought shame upon our heads. We can’t show our faces here. Why couldn’t you have stopped her?’ Thwack, thwack. ‘Tell me, why, why?’
The children, in between their wailing, try to repeat that Gauri is too big for them to control, besides, they don’t know how to manage a cow, they’ve never been taught, but they are too out of breath from the sobbing. The blows from the broom are especially difficult, delivering a stinging, burning, and cutting feeling all at the same time. Belatedly, it occurs to Sahadeb that telling their mother about the people who had come to see them when they were out grazing Gauri could distract her.
‘There were people . . . ’ he sobs and hiccups, ‘. . . people came . . . from town. Phone, they will bring you a phone.’
Sabita pauses; she had entirely forgotten about that. But stopping instantly would mean conceding to what Sahadeb has just said, and that would be a loss of face, so she continues for a few more blows then shouts, ‘Why didn’t you say that earlier?’
The storm has passed, the children know. In between catching his breath, sniffling, wiping snot and tears, Sahadeb says, ‘They asked me a lot of questions. I couldn’t answer most of them. They asked if you have a phone. They talked a lot among themselves, I didn’t understand what, but they mentioned grazing many times, and asked me what we give her to eat. What we eat. They’ll come again, they said. Soon.’
‘Phone? We can’t get enough rice in our bellies and they asked about phone?’ Sabita asks in the same tone of fury as before but now transferred to a different target.
‘They said they can call you beforehand so that you know they’re coming.’
Outside, the water from the rice has boiled over and partially extinguished the cooking fire. What still burns has scorched the rice. Gauri, her equanimity dented by the sounds from inside the hut, is waiting for everything to cool down before sticking her head inside the pot. They’ve forgotten to tie her to her post.
VIII
The monsoon rain pelts the earth in a watery version of the revenge the sun was extracting a month earlier. For nearly three hours, Sabita is strafed by it; it takes her longer to walk back because the rain slows her down. She looks like a drenched crow when she arrives home. She has only one other set of clothes. If the rain continues tomorrow, as it is certain to, she’ll get that set wet, while the soaking clothes that she’s wearing now will not have dried, and she’ll still have to hang out tomorrow’s clothes to dry. Worry eats away at her insides steadfastly; the only reliable thing in her life. During the rainy season, Mira lights the unun inside the hut, and this evening is no exception. But the sight that greets Sabita this evening is new: the chatai that served as the roof of Gauri’s shed has partially come off in the wind and rain and one side of it is lying curled on the mud while the other side is held aloft, just, attached to two poles. Gauri is standing at the entrance to their hut, her head inside, the rest of her sticking out. Sabita can hear the children inside trying to cajole and sweet-talk her into exiting.
‘She has smelled all the leaves you’ve chopped to cook for our meal,’ Sahadeb says to his sister accusingly.
‘No, no, she’s trying to come in to get away from the rain,’ Mira argues back. ‘The roof of her shed has blown over, can’t you see? Cows don’t like getting wet. Haven’t you seen them stand under the trees when it’s raining?’
Sahadeb cannot deny this. In fact, he remembers telling his mother about how whenever it started raining all the cows in the fields would gently, almost unnoticeably, gather under the trees for protection. One minute they were out in the open, the next they were all under trees; those with the densest canopies, he had noticed.
‘They don’t run for cover the minute it starts pouring,’ he had said, ‘but I couldn’t tell how they had all got there.’
Mira had added, ‘They know when it’s going to rain, so they take cover before it starts. Whenever they start to move under the trees, we know rain is going to come down shortly.’
Sabita cannot get inside now because Gauri is blocking the entrance. It isn’t possible for all three humans and a cow to fit inside their hut. Her husband isn’t here to fix the roof of the shed and Sahadeb is too small to do it. There is a puddle at her feet from all the water dripping off her clothes. Soon the compacted earth inside will turn to mud.
‘Get her out, get her out,’ Sabita says impatiently.
‘We can’t,’ the children say in unison.
‘One of you come out and give her something to eat in her shed,’ Sabita suggests.
