Choice, page 28
The next two months fall into this pattern of itinerant milk-selling and throwing out some of the evening’s yield frequently. But the pattern keeps shifting, always destabilizing Sabita’s life. Some regulars drop a day or two, leaving her with excess milk for which she cannot find a one-off buyer. Some switch time of delivery from morning to evening, or vice-versa, causing mayhem in stock management and supply. There are days when Sabita asks Mira not to milk Gauri in the afternoon. Gauri grows restless and irritable during those nights, often lowing at all hours, even trying to kick Mira at the dawn sessions. Pulak goes away for short intervals, three or four days, but doesn’t bring back any money on his return.
As Phalgun gives way to Chaitra and the heat becomes intolerable, one customer at Nekurgram complains, ‘The milk you gave us yesterday was curdled, we won’t pay you for this evening’s.’ Sabita has no way to dispute this, so she has to accept, with much grumbling, but a week later, as she and Sahadeb are walking back home at night with unsold milk, she catches a whiff of something sour from one of the pails. Yes, the milk has turned.
The milk begins to spoil with increasing frequency, and one day it happens to a half-bucket of milk they haven’t been able to sell in the morning. Sahadeb notices it first: ‘That smell is coming from the pail,’ he says. Hungry, thirsty, drenched with sweat, dreading the hour of walking still remaining in the skull-splitting heat, Sabita feels an uncohering, of something coming loose inside her. She flings the bucket into some bushes – the milk flies in a splattering arc, some falling on the earth, where it is immediately sucked up, leaving no trace, some on leaves, barely marking them white – and the thought of Gopal goes through her head: all this milk, which he could have drunk, which he was forcefully restrained from drinking, going to waste. Where is he now? She sits down and lets herself go: she weeps with abandon, as if this is the last liberating action allowed her before the endless labour of her days extinguishes her.
The income from the milk begins to go down so much from its early peak of selling to the sweetshop that Sabita and her family slide back to their old ways of pantaa in the daytime, sometimes only muri and gur, then something meagre cooked at night. Pulak taunts his wife: ‘You thought you were going to eat and live like a queen, didn’t you? Now you’re back to pantaa and muri.’ It’s as if even his own privation is nothing compared to the joy he gets from seeing Sabita’s dreams crushed. And crushed they are, she feels in every vein in her body, every beat of her heart: she is possessed by shame when she thinks of all the plans that she had dared to make – a cycle for Sahadeb, a brick house – and how everything has evaporated, as if someone is punishing her for such lofty dreams. She cannot shake off the thought that this is payback for the way they treated Gopal. In her mind, there is a cruel symmetry to it: they have deprived a calf, a holy creature, of its mother’s milk, and now the gods are using that very milk to punish her.
The rationing of Gauri’s food begins again, something Sabita never imagined that she would have to go back to. Sabita, old hand at stretching things to make them last longer, thinks she will be able to manage, but as Baishakh edges into dangerous Jyoishtho, when being in the sun for a few minutes can burn a hole in the middle of your head, Gauri’s food reduces to such an extent that it becomes imperative to take her out to graze. But graze where, when all the grass has long turned to straw, when all the cow wants to do is sit or stand in the shade?
One afternoon, Mira says, ‘Her milk is reducing. There’s nothing in her. Look, I’m pulling, like before, but nothing comes out.’
‘That’s because you’re giving her less to eat,’ Pulak says.
Sabita feels a strange mixture of relief and dismay. When she and Sahadeb were running around trying to find buyers for the milk, and having to throw some of the yield away either for lack of enough buyers or because the milk had spoiled, she had often prayed for Gauri’s udder to run dry, but now that her wish is being granted, she is brought face to face with the prospect of having to go back to work as a servant, pack off Mira to do the same. This cow is going to be the end of you, mark my words, both boüdis had said. The words ring loudly in her ears.
On a close evening, with Sabita fanning the unun, Mira mucking out Gauri’s barn and collecting dried fuel cakes, and Sahadeb doing, as usual, nothing at all, Pulak says, ‘I’ll take her out to graze,’ making Sabita nearly fall face down on the flames with shock.
‘Where will you take her?’ she asks calmly instead. ‘Fields and banks are all dry as tinder, empty of all life.’
‘I’ll find some place, I know places that are not obvious or easily visible. You think every cow in the world is kept inside during the summer? Sahadeb and Mira used to take her out in the height of summer last year, you said.’
Sabita does not trust herself to say yes in case he is playing some kind of a cruel joke on her and takes it all back the moment she lets the ‘yes’ escape her mouth.
For the first three or four days she asks where he takes Gauri. He is vague: he points in a random direction and says, ‘You won’t know it, it’s quite far away, you go past the jhil beyond Sukhmoti, then there is a stretch of paddies . . . it’s beyond that.’
‘Why don’t you take Sahadeb with you? He’ll get to know the way, so he can take Gauri there when you have to go away again on work.’
‘Naaah. It’s too far for children.’
Gauri’s milk production, however, doesn’t pick up. In fact, Sabita thinks the cow is losing weight, looking bonier by the day. On the tenth day of Pulak taking Gauri to graze, neither of them returns.
Sabita and her children look for Gauri in bushes, brakes, fields, copses, any open green expanse they can think of. They visit the former pastures, and Sahadeb looks out to what he thinks of as the other country, which would have been easy to cross over to now since the stream is dry. They separate, searching individually, then come back together, each hoping the other person will have found the cow. They begin to search from the first break of light to the point when they cannot even see each other standing close by in the darkness. They are at their wits’ end.
‘She has escaped and gone to find her calf.’
‘No, some Muslims have got hold of her and taken her to the other side. They’ll kill and eat her. Or maybe even Muslims here.’
‘Maybe she is hiding. We don’t give her enough to eat, so she’s cross with us, trying to teach us a lesson.’
‘We’ll have to report to the people who gave her to us . . . and what if they then ask us for the money?’
‘Best not to call them.’
‘But they may be able to send out more people to search, call the police. Do you remember, they took pictures of her and said that that was a new law, that all cows had to have their picture taken, have a number?’
‘The number will feed your ancestors’ ghosts! What good will a number do? If we can’t see her in front of our eyes, what will the number achieve?’
And so it goes, round and round. They call out her name in the open air, shouting to the skies, the trees, the dry earth, the stony banks, the singeing air around them. They cry out her name till they’re hoarse, till they think they’ve torn open the soft insides of their throats. In all these hours, no one calls out for Pulak or Baba, no one asks what has happened to the man.
XVIII
It is so dark that Pulak can see Gauri’s white form only when he concentrates. If he didn’t know where she was standing, he would take a few moments to establish her presence after taking his eyes away and returning them a minute or two later. He plays this game a few times just to pass the hours. Any minute now they are going to come and tell him to start moving. It will be done tonight. Tonight he will be paid in full. They’ve given him only five hundred rupees, half the rate, for taking Gauri over. The remaining fee and, most importantly, the money for the cow, of which he has been paid only a twentieth, has been promised him after he returns from the other side. He knows the price he has been offered for Gauri is half of what she would fetch if he could sell her on the open market, but that’s not a possibility – besides, she is not his to sell – so he has to settle for the cut-price offer. On top of that, the hefty fee for the middleman will have to come out of it. He had demurred about this, but the man had said, ‘You think it’s all for me? More than half will go to bribe the BSF who guard the border. Looking the other side while we do our deed is a costly act, bhai.’ Pulak wants to return tonight, or tomorrow night. In any case, that will have to be under cover of darkness since he is crossing at night, without handing his ID over to the BSF, so returning during ID-checking hours is going to be impossible. Someone will be at the fence, helping Pulak to cross over with Gauri; that’s what he has been promised.
When the call comes, it is not as a sound, but as a presence – of yet another nameless man, the one who is supposed to walk him part of the distance, ostensibly to show Pulak the way, although it’s a straight line northeast from where he is, about a couple of hours’ walk, one hour and a half if he were on his own, but he has a cow with him.
The man hands Pulak a pair of wire cutters as they begin their walk. The only thing the man says is, ‘There are very few dark areas near the fence now. Up north, at Murikhawa, they’ve turned night into day with very powerful lights. They’re like huge walls of lights. You walk in the direction that you’re walking until you see the man waiting for you. He will be waiting, and you won’t miss him. He knows you’re coming. Just follow your nose from this point.’ With that, he’s gone. It’s Pulak on his own now, and Gauri, until he is met by the man near the border.
The men Pulak had talked to when he was still sounding out his plans had said various things.
‘East, east, you need to go east.’
‘They’ve put a high barbed wire fence along the entire border. There are BSF guards in their sentry posts at regular intervals.’
‘Why does he have to do it himself? He should give it to a cattle smuggler.’
‘No, no, where there are rivers, it’s easy to cross. How can they put fences on water?’
‘Why do you think the BSF don’t know this? They are extra vigilant at those watery crossings.’
‘But there is no water now, or very little. The rivers are all shrunk to trickles. You can wade across in most places.’
‘Wade across Ichhamati and Mahananda? Have you gone mad? You’ll drown like a leaking boat, you fool. Even with this heat that we’ve been having, they’re still rivers, not your local nala.’
‘You’ve seen the rivers with your own eyes, huh, that you are speaking so confidently?’
‘But smuggling there always is. The BSF are in on all the rackets. In fact, they run the whole thing. They control it. You need to pay them off first.’
‘They catch only the naïve ones, crossing the border with a single cow, but the real smuggling gangs, with many people involved, and hundreds of cows, they run themselves. Shooting these solo smugglers is just a way of showing to the government that they’re doing their job. Behind that, it’s business as usual. I have heard many stories.’
‘He should take his papers with him. They shoot only Muslims because it’s Muslims who are the smugglers and the criminals. They all come over from the other side, seething like worms, swamping us, looking for work. But your friend is not a Muslim, he’ll be fine. But he must make sure to have his papers on him.’
Pulak had been careful to lie about his name, where he lived, the reason for his enquiries – he had maintained that he was asking on behalf of a friend. He had gathered the information from several people at different places, Chhatkhola, Nuagram, Bistarhaat, Najimbajaar, Chaporkhali, never engaging one man for a length of time that would seem anything more than casual, time-pass conversation, never lingering in any one place for more than a day. He knew what was at stake. If word got out, however unintentionally, to cow vigilantes, any number of whom patrolled the countryside, they would hunt down Pulak and lynch him. The downside of all this patchy and cautious information-gathering was that he had only anecdote, rumour, stories at several removes to go by, nothing very reliable. Still, it had led him in the right direction, to the place where he could try in a more purposive way, at the very least to somewhere where he wouldn’t stand out, would be one among many who were caught up, one way or another, in the business of moving cattle.
The idea had come to him while he was a day-labourer at a building site in Raipur. He had told one of the labourers that he owned a cow.
‘So why are you breaking your back working here? You must be wealthy to own a cow,’ the man had said.
Pulak had said nothing, choosing to let his silence be taken as modesty.
‘Do you know how much cows cost? If your cow gives ten to twelve litres of milk a day, you’ll get at least fifty thousand rupees for her. At the very least,’ the man had said.
The amount mentioned had stunned Pulak.
‘How do you know?’ he had asked.
‘I know people who are cattle farmers near Bhagalpur. Take my word for it, I know about these things.’
Fifty thousand rupees. With that money, Pulak could move his family away from Nonapani to somewhere better, live in a brick-and-cement house with a tin roof, maybe even a brick roof, send the children to school, not have his little daughter packed off to work as a live-in maidservant. Fifty thousand rupees. An arrow had gone through him. Everything could change; would change, he had begun to think. And once he had started thinking about how the money could change their lives, there had been no turning back. He was tired, he wanted to be liberated from this life of his. He wanted to liberate his wife and daughter from the lives they had. The cow, supposed to improve their lives, was sucking their blood out of them instead. Fifty thousand rupees. They would all be free.
He thought more and more about it, until there was nothing else he could think about. He spoke to some men here and there in different towns where he showed up for loose-change work and, like the unexpected statement about the price of a cow from the construction worker in Raipur, someone in Chhapainagar mentioned cattle-rustling across the border. Pulak’s ideas about leaving Nonapani with fifty thousand rupees for a better life elsewhere shifted and bent into something else. Two things, one old and one new, came together in his head into causality: he had found a way to sell the cow that would necessitate leaving Nonapani and going missing. Two birds with one stone. Liberation, finally. Freedom from being ground down to dust under the burden of responsibility, of the labour needed to provide for a family. He wanted to breathe again. The thoughts hardened into plans.
He has to cross a tar road before he can get to open ground. It feels to him as if a long time passes before he can even get to the road. Although dim and few and far between, there are lights along part of the road. The stretch appears to be without tea- or snack-stalls, small shops, huts. How can this be? In his few days here, there has been nowhere that hasn’t been populated: large stretches of paddies; cultivated plots of jute, wax gourd, mustard; closely huddled huts with dilapidated roofs; humans, hens, ducks, cows. He had been told to make his face familiar to the locals by taking Gauri out to graze every day. The earth was both parched and lush at the same time. The river, unlike what he had been told, looked too wide to swim across. The water was a greenish-yellow, still like a pond until you looked again or saw the wake left by boats crossing the river, to and fro, to and fro. And the BSF at every place, at checkpoints, trawling the settlements and villages, their spies everywhere – it was impossible to discern who was an informant, who a smuggler, who worked both sides, or if there were any stable sides at all in the first place, everyone playing everyone else in a forever-shifting, dangerous game, going wherever the hope of money took them. Pulak felt at once noticed and hidden; in a place where the people saw so many daily crossings, the numbers swelling and reducing like the tides in the river, he could have been both a transient face, one among many, seen and instantly forgotten, and a new face, eliciting intense curiosity and suspicion – who was he, friend or enemy? Which side did he belong to, this or the other? He gave his real name whenever anyone struck up a conversation with him or asked him questions: the cost of being taken for a Muslim was too high. Besides, if papers were demanded, a false name would put him in a potentially dangerous situation.
He is now much farther north than where he has been staying and grazing Gauri and biding his time. But where is the river? He climbs the gradient giving onto the road, pulling Gauri behind him. A small section of the other side is now visible in the gloomy illumination: an embankment leading down to what he supposes is open ground. Could the river be farther along, the fallow ground giving way to it? Gauri has to be pulled up the slope. As Pulak stops at the edge of the tar road, gathering up resolve to cross, he hears a large vehicle coming. There is no place to hide; he and Gauri are visible to all four quarters. There is a falling feeling from the bottom of his chest to the lowest point in his stomach. Pulak’s sphincter loosens then contracts again. He scrambles down the gradient, leaving Gauri still standing on the road. A truck goes by, its headlights turned off. What if Gauri decided to cross over to the other side on her own? What if she got hit by another oncoming vehicle? Before he can raise his head, he hears another truck coming. His heart, mouth, ears are all one, all pounding in unison. This truck passes too. Silence descends, then stretches over the night. He suddenly notices the sound of crickets – a steady, unchanging wall for a few minutes, then a slight flick in that sound-wall, as if a dent has been made in it, followed by a slightly different configuration of that wall, continuing in its monotone forever and forever. He raises his head above the embankment – Gauri is standing there with her back to him, facing the other side. Has she seen something? He reaches her, takes the rope, and almost pulls her down the slope on the other side, not considering that if the cow decides to be recalcitrant now, there is nothing he can do since she weighs much more than he does.
