Nectar in a Sieve (7 page)

We ate, finding it difficult to believe we did so. The good food lay rich, if uneasy, in our starved bellies.

Already the children were looking better, and at the sight of their faces, still pinched but content, a great weight lifted from me. Today we would eat and tomorrow, and for many weeks while the grain lasted. Then there was the fish, cleaned, dried and salted away, and before that was gone we should earn some more money; I would plant more vegetables... such dreams, delightful, orderly, satisfying, but of the stuff of dreams, wraithlike. And sleep, such sleep... deep and sweet and sound as I had not known for many nights; it claimed me even as I sat amid the rice husks and fish scales and drying salt.

CHAPTER VIII

KUNTHI'S two eldest sons were among the first in the village to start work at the tannery, and between them they brought home more than a man's wages.

"You see," said Kunthi. "The tannery is a boon to us. Have I not said so since it began? We are no longer a village either, but a growing town. Does it not do you good just to think of it?"

"Indeed no," said I, "for it is even as I said, and our money buys less and less. As for living in a town -- if town this is -- why, there is nothing I would fly from sooner if I could go back to the sweet quiet of village life. Now it is all noise and crowds everywhere, and rude young hooligans idling in the street and dirty bazaars and uncouth behaviour, and no man thinks of another but schemes only for his money."

"Words and words," said Kunthi. "Stupid words. No wonder they call us senseless peasant women; but I am not and never will be. There is no earth in my breeding."

"If there were you would be the better for it," said I wrathfully, "for then your values would be true."

Kunthi only shrugged her delicate shoulders and left us. She spent a lot of her time making unnecessary journeys into the town where, with her good looks and provocative body, she could be sure of admiration, and more, from the young men. At first the women said it and the men said they were jealous; then men too began to notice and remark on it and wonder why her husband did nothing. "Now if I were in his place," they said... but they had ordinary wives, not a woman with fire and beauty in her and the skill to use them: besides which, he was a quiet, dull man.

"Let her be," said Janaki. "She is a trollop, and is anxious only that there should be a supply of men."

Her voice held both anger and a bitter hopelessness: for a long time now her husband's shop had been doing badly. He was unable to compete with the other bigger shopkeepers whom the easy money to be had from the tanners had drawn to the new town.

A few days after our conversation the shop finally closed down. Nobody asked: "Where do you go from here?" They did not say, "What is to become of us?" We waited, and one day they came to bid us farewell, carrying their possessions, with their children trailing behind, all but the eldest, whom the tannery had claimed. Then they were gone, and the shopkeepers were glad that there was less competition, and the worker who moved into their hut was pleased to have a roof over his head, and we remembered them for a while and then took up our lives again.

It was a great sprawling growth, this tannery. It grew and flourished and spread. Not a month went by but somebody's land was swallowed up, another building appeared. Night and day the tanning went on. A never-ending line of carts brought the raw material in -- thousands of skins, goat, calf, lizard and snake skins – and took them away again tanned, dyed and finished. It seemed impossible that markets could be found for such quantities -- or that so many animals existed -- but so it was, incredibly.

The officials of the tannery had increased as well. Apart from the white man we had first seen -- who owned the tannery and lived by himself -- there were some nine or ten Muslims under him. They formed a little colony of their own, living midway between the town and open country in brick cottages with whitewashed walls and red-tiled roofs. The men worked hard, some of them until late at night, the women -- well, they were a queer lot, and their way of life was quite different from ours. What they did in their houses I do not know, for they employed servants to do the work; but they stayed mostly indoors, or if they went out at all they went veiled in bourkas. It was their religion, I was told: they would not appear before any man but their husband. Sometimes, when I caught sight of a figure in voluminous draperies swishing through the streets under a blazing sun, or of a face peering through a window or shutter, I felt desperately sorry for them, deprived of the ordinary pleasures of knowing warm sun and cool breeze upon their flesh, of walking out light and free, or of mixing with men and working beside them.

"They have their compensations," Kali said drily.

"It is an easy life, with no worry for the next meal and plenty always at hand. I would gladly wear a bourka and walk veiled for the rest of my life if I, too, could be sure of such things."

"For a year perhaps," I said, "not forever. Who could endure such a filtering of sunlight and fresh air as they do?"

"You chatter like a pair of monkeys," said Kali's husband, "with less sense. What use to talk of 'exchange' and so forth? Their life is theirs and yours is yours; neither change nor exchange is possible."

Once, and once only, I actually saw one of those women, close. I was taking a few vegetables to market when I saw her beckoning me to come indoors. I did so, and as soon as the door was closed the woman threw off her veil the better to select what she wanted. Her face was very pale, the bones small and fine. Her eyes were pale too, a curious light brown matching her silky hair. She took what she wanted and paid me. Her fingers, fair and slender, were laden with jewelled rings, any one of which would have fed us for a year. She smiled at me as I went out, then quickly lowered the veil again about her face. I never went there again. There was something about those closed doors and shuttered windows that struck coldly at me, used as I was to open fields and the sky and the unfettered sight of the sun.

CHAPTER IX

ONE morning I was pounding some red chillies into powder. Cho-chup! went the pestle into the mortar, crushing the brittle chillies and the seeds in them. Each time it fell, a fine red dust rose up, spreading a rich, acrid smell in the air. A pleasant smell, hot and pungent, which made my nostrils water and squirted the tears into my eyes, so that every few minutes I had to stop to wipe them. It was a fine, peaceful morning, not a sound from the tannery, which for one blessed day in the week closed down completely. Each time I paused I could hear sparrows twittering, and the thin, clear note of a mynah.

Into view on the horizon came two figures, moving very slowly. I went on with my pounding. The figures grew larger every time I looked up, and then when they were still a fair distance away I recognised my daughter. I had seen her only once since her marriage, and since then over a year had passed. Excited, I gathered up the chilli powder and put it away, rinsed my eyes, washed my face and came out. On the doorstep I traced out a colam, a pattern in white rice flour to welcome them.

They approached slowly, as if their feet were somehow weighted, not with the lightness which should have brought them quickly to my side. Something is wrong, I thought. Young people should not walk thus. And when I saw their faces the words of welcome I had ready died unuttered.

In silence Ira knelt at my feet. I raised her up quietly, with hammering heart. "Let us go in," I said. "You must be tired."

Ira entered obediently. Her husband stood stiffly outside. "Come," I said again, "sit and rest for a while. You have travelled a long way."

"Mother-in-law," he said, "I intend no discourtesy, but this is no ordinary visit. You gave me your daughter in marriage. I have brought her back to you. She is a barren woman."

"You have not been married long," I said with dry lips. "She may be as I was, she may yet conceive."

"I have waited five years," he replied. "She has not borne in her first blooming, who can say she will conceive later? I need sons."

I summoned Nathan from the fields. The tale was repeated, our son-in-law departed.

"I do not blame him," Nathan said. "He is justified, for a man needs children. He has been patient."

"Not patient enough," I said. "Not patient like you, beloved."

Ira was sitting with her face in her arms. She looked up as her father and I came in and her mouth moved a little, loosely, as if she had no control over her lips. She was lovely still, but strain and hopelessness had shadowed her eyes and lined her forehead. She seemed almost to back away as I went to her.

"Leave me alone, Mother. I have seen this coming for a long time. The reality is much easier to bear than the imaginings. At least now there is no more fear, no more necessity for lies and concealment."

"There should never have been," I said. "Are we not your parents? Did you think we would blame you for what is not your fault?"

"There are others," she replied. "Neighbours, women ... and I a failure, a woman who cannot even bear a child."

All this I had gone through -- the torment, the anxiety. Now the whole dreadful story was repeating itself, and it was my daughter this time.

"Hush," I said. "We are all in God's hands, and He is merciful."

My thoughts went to Kenny. He can help, I thought; surely he can do something. My crushed spirit revived a little.

About this time Arjun was in his early teens. He was tall for his age and older than his years. I had taught him the little I knew of reading and writing; now he could have taught me and most other people in the town. I do not know how he did it, for we could not afford to send him to school or to buy him books. Yet he always had a book or two by him, about which he grew vague if I asked questions, and spent many hours writing on scraps of paper he collected, or even, when he had none, on the bare earth. Secretly I was glad, for I saw my father in him, although sometimes my husband worried that he showed no inclination for the land; but when one day he told me he was going to work in the tannery I was acutely dismayed. It seemed it was going to be neither the one thing nor the other, neither land nor letters, which was to claim him.

"You are young," I attempted to dissuade him. "Besides, you are not of the caste of tanners. What will our relations say?"

"I do not know," he said. "I do not care. The important thing is to eat."

How heartless are the young! One would have thought from his words we had purposely starved him, when in fact of what there was he always got the biggest share after my husband.

"So," I said, "we do not do enough for you. These are fine words from an eldest son. They do not make good hearing."

"You do everything you can," he said. "It is not enough. I am tired of hunger and I am tired of seeing my brothers hungry. There is never enough, especially since Ira came to live with us."

"You would grudge your own sister a mouthful," I cried, "who eats half what I give her so that you boys can have the more!"

"The more reason for me to earn," rejoined Arjun. "I do not grudge food to her or to you. I am only concerned that there is so little."

He was right, of course. The harvests had been very poor, shop prices were higher than ever.

"Well," I said. "Go if you must. You speak like a man although you are a child still. But I do not know whether you can obtain work at the tannery. People say they have all the labour they want."

"Kunthi's son will help me," he replied. "He has promised."

I did not want to be indebted to Kunthi, or to her son. She was so different from us, sly and secretive, with a faintly contemptuous air about her which in her son was turned almost to insolence. He had inherited her looks too, and the knowledge of it lay in his bold eyes. A handsome, swaggering youth, not for my son.

"There is no need to go through him," I said with determination. "I will ask Kenny to help you. White men have power."

"Indeed they have," he said bitterly. "Over men, and events, and especially over women."

"What do you mean?" I said to him. "Speak with a plain tongue or not at all."

He looked at me obliquely with darkening eyes, but would say no more.

A few days later he began working at the tannery, and before long Thambi, my second son, had joined him. The two of them had been very close to each other from their earliest years, and it was not strange that Thambi should follow his brother. Nathan and I both tried to dissuade him, but without avail. My husband especially had been looking forward to the day when they would join him in working on the land; but Thambi only shook his head.

"If it were your land, or mine," he said, "I would work with you gladly. But what profit to labour for another and get so little in return? Far better to turn away from such injustice."