One Part Woman (4 page)

‘All right, Amma. We will come in the afternoon,’ he said and got ready to leave.

She said, ‘By then the pongal will be ready. Do come and eat with us.’

When he nodded and left the place, he saw that the children were playing with a monkey on one of the trees. Usually he lamented the need to do whatever prayer whoever recommended, but the thought of doing one for Pavatha truly filled his heart with peace.

The person who performed the prayers and rituals for Pavatha worked in a warehouse loading and unloading sacks of produce. He did not give any elaborate list of things to be prepared for the ceremony. Nor did he take any money. In addition to the usual things needed for the prayers, he asked Kali and Ponna to get red powder for about eight annas and to buy new cloth from the Mudaliyar store in a small street at the foot of the hill. And also a rooster for sacrifice. Ponna and her sister made the pongal.

The priest decorated Pavatha. She did not inspire fear in Kali like she had done the day before. Using a soft piece of cloth, the priest cleaned her gently. At that moment, the goddess could have been any woman from any of the local families lying on her back.

Kali and Muthu went to roam around the small forest. It was dense with neem and palai trees. There were also a few kondrai trees that had grown very tall and had their flowers hanging in bunches. The forest contained several paths, all
as narrow as the lines on one’s hands. You could reach the Pavatha shrine from any direction.

‘Machan,’ said Kali, addressing Muthu fondly, ‘please find a special spot in this forest too. It would be of use if we come again.’

Muthu laughed. ‘Do you think no one would have done that already?’ he said and pointed to what looked like a thick kasarali bush but had a clearing inside. They could see that men had been sitting there since a short while. There were some cards and a few empty bottles lying around.

‘Man always needs such spaces, mapillai!’ explained Muthu. ‘He wanders around looking for them. Some succeed; others keep looking. Then there are those who are fearful of going there even if they do manage to find such a place.’

Kali moved away towards Pavatha’s shrine. What he found there was not an ordinary woman lying on the ground. He saw a woman dressed in red, and with red splattered all over her; he saw a woman blazing with wrath. By applying a little red to her eyes, the priest had made them glow with great ire. Kali and Muthu were speechless. The priest performed the ritual in silence. All they could hear was the sound of bells. When the offerings were made, Muthu brought out a small bottle of arrack. The priest had not mentioned it, but Muthu somehow knew. The priest slashed the rooster and let the blood flow at Pavatha’s feet.

Once the cooking was done, they all ate. The rooster had been cooked in a gravy. Kali’s father-in-law did not come.
He never came to such events. So, it was only Kali, Ponna, his mother, mother-in-law, and his brother-in-law and his wife. But there was still a lot of food left over even after the priest had eaten. They had to finish all the food before they left. The priest went out of the forest and brought in a few beggars who lived in the pillared halls there. They were happy to have their plates filled with food.

When they finally climbed down the hill, Ponna felt very satisfied.

Kali visited the shrine whenever he was on the hillside. For several months, no one changed the cloth they had offered Pavatha. The priest had not taken even a penny from him. Kali felt that the curse of the tribal girl would have lifted by now.

Ponna, too, was full of hope after praying to Pavatha. Her expectations were heightened in the months that followed. After every twenty days, she prayed, ‘God, please fill my womb at least this month.’ Even if there was a day’s delay in her menstrual cycle, she was filled with excitement: ‘This is it!’ But if her cycle began the next day, the house looked as though someone had died in it. She didn’t eat properly and just lay around. Kali had to go to his mother for food. Even after cutting open a rooster and satiating Pavatha’s thirst for revenge, nothing changed.

Whenever he went to the temple, he stood at Pavatha’s feet.

‘Has your thirst been unquenched through the ages? It is not up to me to make you pull in your revenge-thirsty tongue. I am an ordinary man. For several births to come, I
will do what I can. Please save me from being the talk of the town. I am unable to answer everyone’s wretched questions. Ponna is wasting away. I am the one who is born in this useless lineage. Why are you avenging Ponna for that?’ Saying this, he broke down in front of her.

But nothing quenched Pavatha’s anger.

Sleep eluded Kali even after he had finished eating the snack. He lay on the cot in the cool shade of the portia tree, his eyes closed as he savoured the gentle breeze. He could hear the sounds of cooking from inside. After tossing and turning for a while, he sat up, and the cot creaked under him. The fast for the chariot festival and the snack that had followed—neither had given him any joy. Instead, his mind was flooded with all sorts of thoughts that confused him.

Kali thought he might feel better if he went out for a stroll into the forest with Muthu. Where was Muthu? Was it a workday in the fields? Muthu was good at finding or creating new secret spots—havens that were unknown to anyone else.

Kali remembered that the last time he visited, Muthu took him to the well. There was very little water in it.

‘How can we swim in this, machan?’ Kali asked.

‘You have known me for all these years, and yet how little you know me! Would I take you for a swim in this? Come,
come and see. You will be amazed,’ said Muthu, climbing down the stairs into the well.

It was a deep well. All rock. Kali wondered at the difficulty people must have faced in bursting so much rock and digging so deep. The steps went straight down, flattened out at a point into a landing, and then continued further down. Standing on that landing, Muthu looked up. In the light that streamed in, he could neither see anyone’s head nor its shadow. ‘Mapillai, be careful!’ he shouted. Then, reaching out and gripping a rock on the other side of the downward staircase, he suddenly vanished into a gap in the wall. Although Kali was very used to roughing it out, he hesitated to follow Muthu into the dark hole.

Muthu peeped out from the hole and said, ‘Hold on to that rock that is sticking out. Do you see that little groove wide enough just to place your foot there? Don’t be scared. Even if you fall, it will only be into the well. And there is water enough to not get hurt.’

Moving like an iguana that clutches tight even the smallest of surfaces, Kali entered the opening in the rock. Only then did he realize that it was not just a hole but a big cave with a rocky floor and a sand-plastered roof. Kovai creepers fell like a curtain, covering the entrance to the cave. Kali was amazed. Muthu had enough things stocked up there to throw a feast. Muthu started skinning the two white rats he had caught that day and brought hanging from a string on his waist. One was a male with swollen balls and the other was a female. Together, they’d make a decent amount of meat.

The cave had everything—a penknife, a stove made with small stones, an earthen pot, wood. There was even a little money stowed away. Muthu pounded some chillies and roasted the meat. How did he manage to get wood that burnt without smoke? Even if someone were drawing water from the well, they wouldn’t know anyone was down here in the cave. Kali stretched his legs and lay down. The tasty meat went well with the arrack. The little bit of gravy at the bottom was incredibly delicious. Kali poured it into the curve of his palm and slurped it down. They both drank, ate and slept there undisturbed for several hours and emerged only in the evening.

‘Only snakes use the holes in wells, don’t they?’ asked Kali.

‘I have calamus to ward off real snakes,’ replied Muthu. ‘Its fragrance repels them. And if we smoke samburani as soon as we finish eating, the smell of the meat won’t linger.’

Kali said, ‘No man can discover such a place. You are the snake!’

That place must still be a secret. If anyone found out, Muthu would immediately change his hideout. But who was going to climb down that well? Even if someone did, they would need extraordinary eyes to see past the screen of kovai creepers. How many hours would he have worked inside? Muthu’s work was better than even those of professional roof-layers. He had done such a perfect job.

It would be nice if he were here now.

Kali sat up. Seeing this, Ponna came running. ‘Maama, do you want water?’ He nodded. She ran in. Whenever
they were here, Ponna was more sensitive to each and every move of his and paid close attention to his every little need. Sometimes it looked like she was lost in some other work, but her mind was fully occupied with him.

Her mother once remarked, ‘As if you have some wonder of a husband that no one else has! Even if he moves his finger a little bit, you run and stand in front of him.’

‘That’s right. My husband is a wonder for me,’ she replied.

‘Let’s see if you still run around taking care of your husband after a child is born,’ said her mother.

‘Even if I give birth to ten children, he will always be my first child,’ she responded, brimming with pride.

‘It is all right to desire. But you are greedy. Maybe that’s what has put off even the gods,’ her mother said with a sigh.

The conversation ended there, and silence fell.

Now, when Ponna brought Kali an aluminium pitcher full of water, he drained it in a single gulp.

She laughed, ‘Were you this thirsty?’

He was about to say, ‘Yes, but it is definitely less than Pavatha’s thirst,’ but he stopped himself. Perhaps because that was the day the deity went back to the hill, all his thoughts revolved around that one event.

‘When is your brother coming?’ he said to her.

Ponna said, ‘He went somewhere in the morning and has not returned yet. But he’ll be here in time to eat. Today it’s your favourite: drumstick.’

Kali’s lips widened into a smile, but his heart was not in it; his mind was elsewhere. He felt that if he made Ponna lie
next to him, embraced her tightly and cushioned his head on her breasts, all his broodings would vanish. In the middle of the day, in the shadow of the tree … Why was his mind stuck on impossible things? He held her hand and gently rubbed it against his cheek. But then her mother called from inside. Had her sister-in-law been at home, there wouldn’t have been so much work for Ponna. But she, along with her child, had gone to her mother’s house. They had been invited to keep the fast there.

Kali kept looking at Ponna as she crossed the threshold and entered the house. The things she had done in the hope of getting a child! She would do whatever was asked of her. Everyone had been patient for six months after the wedding. But there had been innuendoes even before that. Then they started asking direct questions. The only way to save oneself was to conceive in the first month of marriage. Otherwise, the interrogation would begin in some form or another. His mother, who was patient for six months, started her treatments soon after that.

She kept a watch on Ponna’s menstrual cycle that month. As soon as it came to pass, she told Ponna to drink the juice of some shoots on the morning of the third day. She said forcefully, ‘Don’t eat anything else even by mistake. The juice will be bitter. You will have to close your eyes and swallow it.’ After that, Ponna got used to eating different shoots and drinking different potions. Her tongue became numb to all the bitterness. The goal was to beget a child, and she was ready to do anything to attain that goal. The bitterness of the
medication paled in comparison. But her mother-in-law’s medication didn’t go down all that easily.

Before Ponna woke up and stepped out, her mother-in-law was busy crushing a big bunch of tender neem leaves. It made Ponna retch. At her own parents’ home, she would throw a fit even when her mother made her take regular medicine. Her mother would yell, ‘Am I asking you to eat neem shoots?’ But now she was having to eat neem shoots for real. It made her very angry at her mother-in-law.

‘Should I put a child on her lap the month after the wedding? I can only drop a grinding stone into her lap. Can’t she be patient for a year or two? We are young. She is unable to see us enjoy a few good years without hassles like children. She can’t bear to see me happy.’

Kali smiled and said, ‘It is only neem juice, right? All the worms in your stomach will die.’

‘You mother wants a worm to crawl in my womb. And you are saying it will die. Are you two playing with me?’ And she punched him in his chest.

‘Ah, it feels like you are throwing flowers at me. Please punch me more, darling,’ he pleaded. But he didn’t say that she needn’t drink the bitter extract.

His mother extracted the juice out of the crushed neem shoots by filtering them through a pure white cloth. It gave very little juice. After repeating the process some three or four times, she got a quarter cup of the extract. She had somehow procured a measuring cup that was normally used in wedding rituals; she cleaned it and got it ready overnight.
She poured the neem extract into that vessel and closed the lid. She then asked Ponna to come after pouring water over herself fully clad in a sari. After that, Ponna had to stand, dripping wet, facing east in front of the house. Dawn was appearing, waving its raised hand to everyone. ‘Pray,’ she said to Ponna. She too prayed.

‘O you who are travelling west,’ she said, addressing the sun as she prayed out loud. ‘She is drinking this so that my lineage will perpetuate. Please let it grow,’ said her mother-in-law. Ponna murmured something to herself.

Kali’s mother had invited a white-sari-clad distant relative, a grandmother. She must have been a hundred years old, but other than her cataract-covered eyes, she looked fine. She had seven or eight children and a drove of grandchildren. Ponna’s mother-in-law too was a widow. But, for some reason, she was not supposed to hand over the earthen bowl of medicine to Ponna. To receive something from a woman in white is like receiving something from the goddess Amman herself. The old woman lifted the bowl above her head, prayed to the dawn and gave it to Ponna.

‘Don’t think about anything, dear one. Close your eyes and just gulp it down. The gods will open their eyes,’ she said. Ponna did as told.

Even though she drank it up very fast, it was bitter beyond belief. The vessel was heavy too. She retched and gagged, but didn’t stop drinking. When she was done, her mother-in-law put a handful of jaggery into her mouth. But the bitterness did not leave her palate for a week. No worm crawled in
her belly either. She was taken here and there, and was told that she was being given medicines to conceive. But nothing worked.

She had laughed once, whispering into Kali’s double-curve-studded ears, ‘If you had married a goat instead of me, it would have given birth to a litter by now for all the shoots she must have eaten.’

Stony-faced, he had replied, ‘I should have been born a male goat for that.’ Even now, thinking of that made her smile till her eyes welled up with tears.