The Blue Notebook (10 page)

The giant, with one swoop of his massive sword, severed the soldier’s head from his body. Blood shot out from the soldier’s neck, splattering over a village woman who was standing beside the ring. The queen silenced the astonished crowd. “Quiet!” she shouted. “Are there any other heroes in this town who wish to earn this chest of gold by killing my giant?” There was silence.

Meanwhile, the giant had taken out a short knife from his hip and was kneeling beside the dead soldier. He proceeded to cut the heart from the lifeless body. Holding the dripping organ in his hand, he smeared it across his chest so that it blended with the dried blood from previous challengers. He stood up and roared and raised the dismembered heart above his head in his blood-smeared fist. A huge cheer rose from the crowd. And then Puneet stepped into the ring.

There was immediate silence, broken by a thunderous laugh from the giant. “What, boy? Are you the sacrificial lamb?” The queen waved her hand and spoke to Puneet. “Boy what are you doing in the ring? Is this bloody carcass your father? Are you here to avenge him?” Puneet answered
the queen, “No, mighty queen. I am not his son. I am here to earn the chest of gold.” The queen laughed and said, “Do you not know that to earn this chest of gold, you have to kill my giant? He has hacked the heart out of a hundred men twice your size.” Puneet answered “Most noble queen, I accept
your challenge, but I ask one favor of you since I am not armed.” “Ask,” ‘said the queen. Two street dogs had entered the ring and were grazing on the soldier’s heartless carcass. Puneet said to the queen “May I please borrow
from you one gold coin? If I win the challenge, it will be mine, and if I lose it, you may take it from my dead hand.” The queen asked “What do
you have to offer as collateral?” She was amused by the beautiful boy whom she rather fancied for her own plaything. “This,” Puneet answered, holding up the bag of pebbles from his town. “It is some pebbles from my town.” The queen burst out laughing, along with the crowd. “For the sake of sport,” said the queen, “I accept your terms. Loan him one gold coin.”

Puneet carefully placed the bag of pebbles on the floor of the wooden ring in front of the queen and he received a single gold coin from one of the queen’s attendants. The remains of the soldier were dragged off and the ring was cleared. There was absolute silence as the small boy faced the giant. The giant growled in a voice that resembled thunder, “You are not even a snack for me. You are not even a mouthful.” Puneet responded, “Mighty warrior, I cannot fight you.” There were jeers from the crowd. The queen waved for silence. She was angered, for she enjoyed watching men dismembered before her. “Boy you agreed to fight. You have no choice.” Puneet answered “It is not that I am afraid to fight, Your Highness. It is that your beauty is so overpowering that I cannot fight while you are within my sight.” The queen loved flattery as all vain people do, and she smiled. “I cannot make myself less beautiful,” she said. Puneet answered, “Your Majesty, even if you were half as beautiful, your beauty would still blind even the keenest eye.” “What do you suggest?” asked the queen, who was enjoying this public exchange. The giant, on
the other hand, was becoming irritable, as he was eager for his snack. Puneet continued, “May I ask that the giant stand between me and you, so that I may fight bravely without your beauty blinding me?” The queen laughed and felt a woman’s desire for this beautiful young man. “Let it be so.” The boy and the giant switched positions and faced each other. The town square hushed to a painful silence. You could hear the buzz of the summer heat that scorched the back of Puneet’s neck.

“Fight now!” roared the giant, and stomped toward him. Puneet watched as the giant’s massive feet thumped on the wooden platform, approaching him step by step. Puneet waited without moving a muscle as the giant advanced. The moment that Puneet smelled the giant’s fetid breath, he spun the gold coin high in the air. The giant looked upward at the shining, spinning coin. As he did so, he was blinded for a moment by the sunlight that reflected off the coin, for this is why Puneet had switched fighting positions. Puneet, who knew the cycle of all life, understood that if the whole world balances upon a grain of rice, then so does a giant. As the giant was blinded by the coin, he lost his balance. Puneet sprang forward and pushed on the giant’s right knee with all his might. The giant wobbled and toppled backward, spinning his arms round and round as he fell. He landed on the wooden platform with such force that he shook the entire earth. The giant’s mighty head was the last part of his body to hit the platform, and when it did, it landed right on top of Puneet’s little bag of pebbles. The giant’s head split open like a melon and his brain spilled onto the ring’s floor like lassi. He was dead before the gold coin landed on the wooden ring.

There was stunned silence and then the town square erupted in screaming cheers.

“You see, my beloved students, the world is balanced upon a grain of rice.” Then the Master was silent.

The students, sitting in their orange robes, were taken aback by the story, for it was a very strange tale indeed. After a while, one student raised his hand and asked, “Honored Master, did Puneet then take the gold back to his village? Did he marry the queen and become the greatest ruler on earth as was his destiny?”

The great Master smiled. “No. It did not end like that.” The Master enjoyed a little silence before continuing. “After the giant fell, Puneet immediately grabbed the gigantic sword from the giant’s dead hand and thrust it straight through the neck of the queen.

“You see, my students, a queen who sells the death of her subjects for sport is not a queen. Her death was married to the death of the fallen soldier.”

Another student asked, “But what of Puneet’s family … what of the starving village, dear Master?”

The great Master looked into nothingness and answered, “After watching the queen die, Puneet closed his eyes and listened to the screams of his father and his mother and his brothers and his sisters and of the villagers crying for food. He could hear the cries of agony that are special for those dying of starvation. Puneet pushed his mind deeper, pushed aside his heart, and willed their deaths.”

There was a gasp from the students. One asked, “But how can that be, oh great Master?”

The Master waited for his students to settle their inner commotion so that they could listen. He waited with them for two days before answering. Eventually he said “What village loses three years of crops and does not either find new water or relocate to the valley? What father sends forth his son to save him? Puneet rose to the upper air and willed them all to die, for they had willed death upon themselves.”

The oldest of the students sat in the front row. He loved and was beloved of his Master. He asked, “Beloved Master. What is it that you will
of us?” The Master, who was the greatest of the great teachers and who was once a boy who had felled a giant with a single gold coin, answered, “To have no will at all.”

The end. Love, Batuk.

I learned to read and write at the missionary’s medical clinic, where I was sent when I was seven. The illness that landed me there was entirely my mother’s fault, at least according to Grandma.

As a little girl, I would find any excuse to go to the river, whether to fish with Grandpa, or play, or even wash clothes. I could always be found on the riverbank. It was strange because unlike my friends I hated to get wet! I liked to be next to the river, though. I was entranced by the music of the water and the dance that light played on it. I liked the sense of loneliness without being alone, for the water connected me to all life. I appreciate many years later that the Common Street is a river too; back and forth people flow, and containers, cars, and small buses. The flow never ceases to connect the world to me, to take me to it.

On the day in question—the air was wet and yet the sky a cloudless blue—I returned from the river in the early evening. As soon as I walked through the hut’s entrance and coughed, Grandma said to Mother, “I tell you not to let her sit by the river all the time. Now look at her, she’s sick.”

Grandma had the extraordinary gift of making even a simple
phrase sound like a tirade of disapproval directed toward my mother. For example, Grandma could say, “Pass the cake,” to which Mother would immediately respond, “What’s wrong with it?” Even if Grandma said, “Oh, nothing,” her words conveyed that Mother’s cake was no better than a mound of rotting flesh covered in icing. Grandma was very gifted in this regard. And so when Grandma directly accused Mother of deliberately trying to make me ill, Mother took the bait (as she always did). She spun round and snapped to Grandma, “I told Batuk not to sit by the river all day, but you know what she’s like, watching the lizards and talking to the grass. She is a fool, that one.” I coughed again but this time a little harder (I said that I have a taste for drama). “There, I told you!” Grandma said. “She isn’t a fool. She’s just simple. I would keep her on a rope.” I almost spoke back but let Grandma continue as I knew there was more fun to come. I was right. Grandma now turned up the volume and the shrillness of her voice box. “You are the idiot!” Grandma squealed at Mother. “You let her sit out all day—now look at her. Tell me, did I ever try to kill
you?
If I had treated you like you treat that little Batukee”—her pet name for me, which I loathed—“my mother would have beaten me with a stick.”

This was terrific sport, so I threw in a coughing fit that lasted a full minute (the drama of the sick). Grandma threw me a momentary glance of pity (or was it applause?) and angled the edges of her mouth downward in preparation for the kill. “If she dies,” spat Grandma, “you will rot in prison on your fat behind and guess who will have to take care of the rest of those dear children … and that poor spastic Navaj?” Grandma often claimed that Navaj was handicapped because
Mother had refused to drink Grandma’s special pregnancy tea. I thought I had better cough some more (curtain rises on the second act). Grandma, with venom seeping from her skin, continued, “I have already raised my family. Do you really think me strong enough to raise your family too? … Mind you … at least the children would survive through high school.” I then let rip the harshest cough a seven-year-old could muster. Grandma turned toward me with a mixture of pity and sheer delight in her eyes; I think she would only have been happier if I had dropped dead then and there. I watched the pity melt off her like butter in midday heat. She whipped her ever-intensifying glare back on Mother, took in a breath, and proclaimed, “She needs the doctor” (cough), “NOW!” (cough, cough). The odd thing was, I was actually extremely ill.

To her credit, Mother had learned well over the years. She simply deflected this shower of abuse at Father. Up until now Father had been silent, as he had been enjoying every second of the show. Mother screamed at him, “You heard her, you good-for-nothing drunk, get her to the doctor.”

There were three ways to get medical attention. One way was to send a message to the neighboring town for the doctor to come to us, but we could never afford this. Another way was to have Father gather whatever money he could, load me onto a cart pulled by the field ox, and off we would head to the town a few hours away where the doctor resided. When we eventually arrived there, we would trek to the doctor’s house and wait
an eternity before I was seen. The doctor’s consultation would last for moments before he pushed up his glasses and scribbled like an imbecile on a pad of paper. He would give his little drawing to the nurse, who subsequently would give Father a powder wrapped in a light, shiny brown paper sachet. The visit would conclude in a shouting match in which Father would explain that he had no more money “than this” and the nurse would insist that he’d better find some.

The third way to receive a medical cure was to head to the neighboring town just as I described but not actually go to the doctor. Father would take me out for a sherbet and then leave me on the ox-drawn cart at the market square for an hour while he visited his cousin. Once he returned, with his cousin’s lavender perfume on his shirt, we would head home, both of us happy. The sherbet must have contained some potent ingredients because I generally got better.