The Years of Rice and Salt (11 page)

And it took very little for Insef to convince Bihari of the importance of these things. She was a lively sweet girl with a good eye in the forest, a good memory for plants, and always a cheerful smile and a kind word for people. She was if anything too cheery and attractive, because in the year Kokila was to be married to Gopal, Shardul, his older brother, the eldest son of Shastri, soon to become Kokila's brother-in-law—one of those in her husband's family who would have the right to tell her what to do—started looking at Bihari in an interested way, and after that, no matter what she did, he watched her. It couldn't lead to any good, as Bihari was perhaps untouchable and therefore unmarriageable, and Insef did what she could to seclude her. But the festivals brought the single men and women together, and the daily life of the village afforded various glimpses and encounters as well. And Bihari was interested, anyway, even though she knew she was unmarriageable. She liked the idea of being normal, no matter how vehemently the dai warned her against it.

The day came when Kokila was married to Gopal and moved to Dharwan. Her new mother-in-law turned out to be withdrawn and irritable, and Gopal himself was no prize. An anxious man with little to say, dominated by his parents, never reconciled with his father, he at first tried to lord it over Kokila the way they did over him, but without much conviction, particularly after she snapped at him a few times. He was used to that, and quickly enough she had the upper hand. She didn't much like him, and looked forward to dropping by to see Bihari and the dai in the forest. Really only the second son, Prithvi, seemed to her at all admirable in the headman's family, and he left early every day and had as little to do with his family as he could, keeping quiet with a distant air.

There was a lot of traffic between the two villages, more than Kokila had ever noticed before it became so important to her, and she made do—secretly taking a preparation that the dai had made for her, to keep from having a baby. She was fourteen years old but she wanted to wait.

Before long things went bad. The dai got so crippled by her swollen joints that Bihari had to take over her work, and she was much more frequently seen in Dharwar. Meanwhile Shastri and Shardul were conspiring to make money by betraying their village, changing the tax assessment with the agent of the zamindar, shifting it to the zamindar's great advantage, with Shastri skimming off some for himself. Basically they were colluding to change Dharwar over to the Muslim form of farm tax rather than the Hindu law. The Hindu law, which was a religious injunction and sacred, allowed a tax of no more than one sixth of all produce, while the Muslim claim was to everything, with whatever the farmers kept being a matter of the pleasure of the zamindar. In practice this often meant little difference, but Muslim allowances varied for crops and circumstance, and this was where Shastri and Shardul were helping the zamindar, by calculating what more could be taken without starving the villagers. Kokila lay there at night with Gopal, and through the open doorway as he slept she heard Shastri and Shardul going over the possibilities.

“Wheat and barley, two fifths when naturally watered, three tenths when watered by wheels.”

“That sounds good. Then dates, vines, green crops, and gardens, one third.”

“But summer crops one fourth.”

Eventually, to aid in this work, the zamindar gave Shardul the post of qanungo, assessor for the village; and he was already an awful man. And he still had an eye for Bihari. The night of the car festival he took her in the forest. From her account afterward it was clear to Kokila that Bihari hadn't completely minded it, she relished telling the details, “I was on my back in the mud, it was raining on my face and he was licking the rain off it, saying ‘I love you I love you.' ”

“But he won't marry you,” Kokila pointed out, worried. “And his brothers won't like it if they hear about this.”

“They won't hear. And it was so passionate, Kokila, you have no idea.” She knew Kokila was not impressed by Gopal.

“Yes yes. But it could lead to trouble. Is a few minutes' passion worth that?”

“It is, it is. Believe me.”

For a while she was happy, and sang all the old love songs, especially one they used to sing together, an old one.

I like sleeping with somebody different,

Often.

It's nicest when my husband is in a far country,

Far away.

And there's rain in the streets at night and wind

And nobody.

But Bihari got pregnant, despite Insef's preparations. She tried to keep to herself, but with the dai crippled there were births that she had to attend, and so she went and her condition was noted, and people put together what they had seen or heard, and said that Shardul had gotten her with child. Then Prithvi's wife was giving birth and Bihari went to help, and the baby, a boy, died a few minutes after it was born, and outside their house Shastri struck Bihari in the face, calling her a witch and a whore.

All this Kokila heard about when she visited Prithvi's house, from Prithvi's wife, who said the birth had gone faster than anyone expected, and that she doubted Bihari had done anything bad. Kokila hurried off to the dai's hut, and found the gnarled old woman puffing with effort between Bihari's legs, trying to get the baby out. “She's miscarrying,” she told Kokila. So Kokila took over and did what the dai told her to, forgetting her own family until night fell, when she remembered and exclaimed, “I have to go!” and Bihari whispered, “Go. It will be all right.”

Kokila rushed home through the forest to Dharwar, where her mother-in-law slapped her, but perhaps just to preempt Gopal, who punched her hard in the arm and forbade her to return to the forest or Sivapur ever again, a ludicrous command given the realities of their life, and she almost said “How will I fetch your water then?” but bit her lip and rubbed her arm, looking daggers at them, until she judged they were as frightened as they could get without beating her, after which she glared like Kali at the floor instead, and cleaned up after their impromptu dinner, which had been hobbled by her absence. They could not even eat without her. This fury was the thing she would remember forever.

Before dawn next morning she slipped out with the water jugs and hurried through the wet gray forest, leaves scattered at every level from the ground to the high canopy overhead, and arrived at the dai's hut frightened and breathing hard.

Bihari was dead. The baby was dead, Bihari was dead, even the old woman lay stretched on her pallet, gasping with the pain of her exertions, looking like she too might expire and leave this world at any minute. “They went an hour ago,” she said. “The baby should have lived, I don't know what happened. Bihari bled too much. I tried to stop it but I couldn't reach.”

“Teach me a poison.”

“What?”

“Teach me a good poison to use. I know you know them. Teach me the strongest one you know, right now.”

The old woman turned her head to the wall, weeping. Kokila pulled her around roughly and shouted, “Teach me!”

The old woman looked over at the two bodies under a spread sari, but there was no one else there to be alarmed. Kokila began to raise a hand to threaten her, then stopped herself. “Please,” she begged. “I have to know.”

“It's too dangerous.”

“Not as dangerous as sticking a knife in Shastri.”

“No.”

“I'll stab him if you don't tell me, and they'll burn me on a bonfire.”

“They'll do that if you poison him.”

“No one will know.”

“They'll think I did it.”

“Everyone knows you can't move.”

“That won't matter. Or they'll think you did it.”

“I'll do it cleverly, believe me. I'll be at my parents'.”

“It won't matter. They'll blame us anyway. And Shardul is as bad as Shastri, or worse.”

“Tell me.”

The old woman looked into her face for a time. Then she rolled over, opened her sewing basket. She showed Kokila a small dried plant, then some berries. “This is water hemlock. These are castor bean seeds. Grind the hemlock leaves to a paste, add seeds to the paste just before you place it. It's bitter, but you don't need much. A pinch in spicy food will kill without any taste. But it looks like poisoning afterward, I warn you. It's not like being sick.”

So Kokila watched and made her plan. Shastri and Shardul continued their work for the zamindar, gaining new enemies every month. And it was rumored Shardul had raped another girl in the forest, the night of Gauri Hunnime, the woman's festival when mud images of Siva and Parvati are worshiped.

Meanwhile Kokila had learned every detail of their routine. Shastri and Shardul ate a leisurely breakfast, and then Shastri heard cases at the pavilion between his house and the well, while Shardul did accounting beside the house. In the heat of midday they napped and received visitors on the verandah facing north into the forest. In the afternoons of most days they ate a small meal while lying on couches, like little zamindars, then walked with Gopal or one or two associates to that day's market, where they “did business” until the sun was low. They returned to the village drunk or drinking, stumbling cheerfully through the dusk to their home and dinner. It was as steady a routine as any in the village.

So Kokila considered her plans while spending some of her firewood walks on the hunt for water hemlock and castor beans. These grew in the dankest parts of the forest, where it shaded into swamp, and hid every manner of dangerous creature, from mosquito to tiger. But at midday all such pests were resting; indeed, in the hot months everything alive seemed sleeping at midday, even the drooping plants. Insects buzzed sleepily in the sleepy silence, and the two poison plants glowed in the dim light like little green lanterns. A prayer to Kali and she plucked them out, while she was bleeding, and pulled apart a bean pod for the seeds, and tucked them in the band of her sari, and hid them for the night in the forest near the defecation grounds, the day before the Durga Puja. That night she did not sleep at all, except for short dreams, in which Bihari came to her and told her not to be sad. “Bad things happen in every life,” Bihari said. “No anger.” There was more but on waking it all slipped away, and Kokila went to her hiding place and found the plant parts and ground the hemlock leaves furiously together in a gourd with a stone, then cast the stone and gourd away in beds of ferns. With the paste on a leaf in her hand she went to Shastri's house, and waited until their afternoon nap, a day that seemed to last forever; then put the little seeds in the paste, and smeared a tiny dab of the paste inside the doughballs made for Shastri and Shardul's afternoon snack. Then she ran from the house and through the forest, her heart taking flight like a deer ahead of her—too much like a deer, in that she ran wild with the thrill of what she had done, and fell into an unseen deer snare, set by a man from Bhadrapur. By the time he found her, stunned and just starting to struggle in the lines, with some of the paste still on her fingers, and took her to Dharwar, Shastri and Shardul were dead, and Prithvi was the new headman of the village, and Kokila was declared a witch and poisoner and killed on the spot.

2
                                                                                                            

Back in the Bardo

Back in the bardo Kokila and Bihari sat next to each other on the black floor
of the universe, waiting their turn for judgment.

“You're not getting it,” said Bihari—also Bold, and Bel, and Borondi, and many, many other incarnations before, back to her original birth in the dawn of this Kali-yuga, this age of destruction, fourth of the four ages, when as a new soul she had spun out of the Void, an eruption of Being out of Nonbeing, a miracle inexplicable by natural law and indicative of the existence of some higher realm, a realm above that even of the deva gods who now sat on the dais looking down at them. The realm that they all sought instinctively to return to.

Bihari continued: “The dharma is a matter that can't be shortchanged, you have to work at it step by step, doing what you can in each given situation. You can't leap up to heaven.”

“I shit on all that,” Kokila said, making a rude gesture at the gods. She was still so mad she could spit, and terrified too, weeping and wiping her nose on the back of her hand, “I'll be damned if I cooperate in such a horrible thing.”

“Yes! you will! That's why we keep almost losing you. That's why you never recognize your jati when you're in the world, why you keep doing your own family harm. We rise and fall together.”

“I don't see why.”

Now Shastri was being judged, kneeling with his hands together in supplication.

“He'd better be sent to hell!” Kokila shouted at the black god. “The lowest, nastiest level of hell!”

Bihari shook her head. “It's step by step, like I said. Little steps up and down. And it's you they're likely to judge down, after what you did.”

“It was justice!” Kokila exclaimed with vehement bitterness. “I took justice into my own hands because no one else would do it! And I would do it again too.” She shouted up at the black god: “Justice, damn it!”

“Shh!” Bihari said urgently. “You'll get your turn. You don't want to be sent back as an animal.”

Kokila glared at her. “We are animals already, and don't you forget it.” She took a slap at Bihari's arm and her hand went right through Bihari, which somewhat deflated her point. They were in the realm of souls, there was no denying it. “Forget these gods,” she snarled, “it's justice we need! I'll bring the revolt right into the bardo itself if that's what it takes!”

“First things first,” Bihari said. “One step at a time. Just try to recognize your jati, and take care of them first. Then on from there.”

3
                                                                                                            

Tiger Mercy

Kya the tiger moved through elephant grass, stomach full and fur warm in the
sun. The grass was a green wall around her, pressing in on every side. Above her the grass tips waved in the breeze, crossing the blue of the sky. The grass grew in giant bunches, radiating out from their center and bending over at the tops, and though the clumps were very close, she made her way forward by finding the narrow breaks at the bottom between clumps, pushing through the fallen stalks. Eventually she came to the edge of the grass, bordering a parklike maidan, burned annually by humans to keep it clear. Here grazed great numbers of chital and other deer, wild pig, and antelopes, especially the nilghai.

This morning there stood a lone wapiti doe, nibbling grass. Kya could imitate the sound of a wapiti stag, and when she was in heat, she did it just to do it; but now she simply waited. The doe sensed something and leaped away. But a young gaur wandered into the clearing, dark chestnut in color, white socked. As it approached Kya lifted her left forepaw, straightened her tail back, and swayed slightly forward and back, getting her balance. Then she threw her tail up and leaped across the park in a series of twenty-foot bounds, roaring all the while. She hit the gaur and knocked it down, bit its neck until it died.

She ate.

Ba-loo-ah!

Her kol-bahl, a jackal that had been kicked out of his pack and was now following her around, showed his ugly face at the far end of the maidan, and barked again. She growled at him to leave, and he slunk back into the grass.

When she was full she got up and padded downhill. The kol-bahl and ravens would finish the gaur.

She came to the river that wound its way through this part of the country. The shallow expanse was studded with islands, each a little jungle under its canopy of sal and shisham trees, and several of these held nests of hers, in the matted undergrowth of brake and creepers, under tamarisk trees overhanging the warm sand on the banks of the stream. The tiger padded over pebbles to the water's edge, drank. She stepped in the river and stood, feeling the current push her fur downstream. The water was clear and warmed by the sun. In the sand at the stream's edge were pawprints of a number of animals, and in the grass their scents: wapiti and mouse deer, jackal and hyena, rhinoceros and gaur, pig and pangolin; the whole village, but none in sight. She waded across to one of her islands, lay in the smashed grass of her bed, in the shade. A nap. No cubs this year, no need to hunt for another day or two: Kya yawned hugely in her bed. She fell asleep in the silence that extends out from tigers in the jungle.

She dreamed that she was a little brown village girl. Her tail twitched as she felt again the heat of a cooking fire, the feel of sex face-to-face, the impact of witch-killing stones. A sleeping rumble, big fangs exposed. The fear of it woke her up and she stirred, trying to fall back into a different dream.

Noises pulled her back into the world. Birds and monkeys were talking about the arrival of people, coming in from the west, no doubt to the ford they used downstream. Kya rose quickly and splashed off the island, slipped into thickets of elephant grass backing the curve of the stream. People could be dangerous, especially in groups. Individually they were helpless, it was only a question of picking one's moment and attacking from behind. But groups of them could drive animals into traps or ambushes, and that had been the end of many tigers, left skinned and beheaded. Once she had seen a male tiger try to walk out a pole to some meat, slip on a slippery patch, and fall onto spikes hidden in leaves. People had arranged that.

But today, no drums, no shouts, no bells. And it was too late in the day for humans to hunt. More likely they were travelers. Kya slipped through the elephant grass unobtrusively, testing the air with ear and nose, and moving toward a long glade in the grass that would give her a view of their ford.

She settled down in a broken clump to watch them pass. She lay there with her eyes slitted.

There were other humans there, she saw, hiding as she was, scattered through the sal forest, lying in wait for the humans to arrive at the ford.

As she noticed this, a column of people reached the ford, and the hidden ones leaped out of their hiding places and screamed as they fired arrows at the others. A big hunt, it seemed. Kya settled down and watched more closely, ears flattened. She had come upon such a scene once before, and the number of humans killed had been surprising. It was where she had first tasted their flesh, as she had had twins to feed that summer. They were certainly the most dangerous beast in the jungle, aside from the elephant. They killed wantonly, like kol-bahl sometimes did. There would be meat left here afterward, no matter what else happened. Kya hunkered down and listened more than watched. Screams, cries, roars, shouts, trumpet blasts, death rattles; somewhat like the end of one of her hunts, only multiplied many times.

Eventually it grew quiet. The hunters left the scene. When they had been gone a long time, and the ordinary hush of the jungle had returned, Kya shifted onto her paws and looked around. The air reeked of blood, and her mouth watered. Dead bodies lay on both banks of the river, and were caught on snags against the banks of the stream, or had rolled into shallows. The tiger padded among them cautiously, pulled a large one into the shadows and ate some of it. But she was not very hungry. A noise caused her to slink swiftly back into the shadows, hair erect on her back, looking for the source of the sound, which had been a cracked branch. Now a footfall, over there. Ah. A human, still standing. A survivor.

Kya relaxed. Sated already, she approached the man out of no more than curiosity. He saw her and jumped backward, startling her; his body had done it without his volition. He stood there looking at her in the way hurt animals sometimes did, accepting their fate; only in this one's face there was also a little roll of the eyes, as if to say, What else could go wrong, or, Not this too. It was a gesture so like that of the girls she had watched gathering wood in the forest that she paused, unhungry. The hunters who had ambushed this man's group still occupied the trail to the nearest village. He would soon be caught and killed.

He expected her to do it. Humans were so sure of themselves, so sure they had the world figured out and were lords of it all. And with their monkey numbers and their arrows, so often they were right. This as much as anything was why she killed them when she did. They were a scrawny meal in all truth, which of course was not the main consideration—many a tiger had died trying to reach the tasty flesh of the porcupine—but humans tasted strange. With the things they ate, it was no surprise.

The confounding thing would be to help him; so she padded to his side. His teeth chattered with his trembling. He was no longer stunned, but holding his place on purpose. She nosed up one of his hands, rested it on her head between her ears. She held still until he stroked her head, then moved until he was stroking between her shoulders, and she was standing by his side, facing the same direction. Then very slowly she began to walk, indicating by her speed that he should come along. He did, hand stroking her back with every step.

She led him through the sal forest. Sunlight blinked through trees onto them. There was a sudden noise and clatter, then voices from the trail below, in the trees, and the hand clutched at her fur. She stopped and listened. Voices of the people-hunters. She growled, then coughed deeply, then gave a short roar.

Dead silence from below. In the absence of an organized beat, no human could find her up here. Sounds of them hurrying off came to her on the wind.

The way was now free. The man's hand was clenched in the fur between her shoulder blades. She turned her head and nuzzled his shoulder and he let go. He was more afraid of the other men than of her, which showed sense. He was like a helpless cub in some ways, but quick. Her own mother had held her by biting the same fold of skin between the shoulder blades that he had seized, and at the same pressure—as if he too had once been a tigress mother, and was making an unremembered appeal to her.

She walked the man slowly to the next ford, across it and along one of the deer trails. Wapiti were bigger than humans, and it was an easy trail. She took him to one of her entrances to the big nullah of the region, a steep and narrow ravine, so precipitous and cragbound that its floor was only accessible at a couple of points. This was one, and she led the man down to the ravine floor, then downstream toward a village where the people smelled much like he did. The man had to walk fast to match her gait, but she did not slow down. Only a few pools dotted the ravine floor, as it had been hot for a long time. Springs dripped over ferny rockfalls. As they padded and stumbled along she thought about it, and seemed to recall a hut, near the edge of the village she was headed for, that had smelled almost exactly like him. She led him through a dense grove of date palms filling the floor of the nullah, then still denser clumps of bamboo. Green coverts of jaman fruit bushes covered the sides of the ravine, mixed with the ber thorn bush, dotted with its acid orange fruit.

A gap in this fragrant shrubbery led her up and out of the nullah. She sniffed; a male tiger had been here recently, spraying the exit from the nullah to mark it as his. She growled, and the man clutched the fur between her shoulders again, held on for a help as she climbed the last pitch out.

Back in the forested hills flanking the nullah, angling uphill, she had to nudge him with her shoulder—he wanted to contour the slope, or go directly down to the village, not up and around to it. A few bumps from her and he gave that up, and followed her without resistance. Now he had a male tiger to avoid too, but he did not know that.

She led him through the ruins of an old hill fort, overgrown with bamboo, a place that humans avoided, and that she had made her lair several winters running. She had borne her cubs here, near the human village and among human ruins, to make them safer from male tigers. The man recognized the place, and calmed down. They continued on toward the backside of the village.

At his pace it was a long way. His body hung from his joints, and she saw how hard it must be to walk on two feet. Never a moment's rest, always balancing, falling forward and catching himself, as if always crossing a log over a creek. Shaky as a new cub, blind and wet.

But they reached the village margin, where a barley field rippled in the afternoon light, and stopped in the last elephant grass under the sal trees. The barley field had furrows of dirt into which people poured water, clever monkeys that they were, tiptoeing through life in their perpetual balancing act.

At the sight of the field, the exhausted creature looked up and around. He led the tiger now, around the field, and Kya followed him closer to the village than she would have dared in most situations, though the afternoon's mix of sun and shadow provided her maximum cover, rendering her nearly invisible to others, a mere mind-ripple in the landscape, if she moved quickly. But she had to keep to his faltering pace. It took a bit of boldness; but there were bold tigers and timid tigers, and she was one of the bold ones.

Finally she stopped. A hut lay before them, under a pipal tree. The man pointed it out to her. She sniffed; it was his home, sure enough. He whispered in his language, gave her a final squeeze expressing his gratitude, and then he was stumbling forward through the barley, in the last stages of exhaustion. When he reached the door there were cries from inside, and a woman and two children rushed out and hugged him. But then to the tiger's surprise an older man strode out heavily and beat him across the back, several heavy blows.

The tiger settled down to watch.

The older man refused to allow her refugee into the hut. The woman and children brought out food to him. Finally he curled up outside the door, on the ground, and slept.

Through the following days he remained in disfavor with the old man, though he fed at the house, and worked in the fields around it. Kya watched and saw the pattern of his life, strange as it was. It seemed also that he had forgotten her; or would not risk the jungle to come out and look for her. Or did not imagine she was still there, perhaps.

She was surprised, therefore, when he came out one dusk with his hands held before him, a bird carcass plucked and cooked, it appeared—even boned! He walked right to her, and greeted her very quietly and respectfully, holding out the offering. He was tentative, frightened; he did not know that when her whiskers were down she was feeling relaxed. The offered tidbit smelled of its own hot juices, and some other mix of scents—nutmeg, lavender. She took it gently in her mouth and let it cool, tasting it between her teeth as it dripped hot on her tongue. A very odd perfumed meat. She chewed it, growling a little purr-growl, and swallowed. He said his farewells and backed away, returning to the hut.

After that she came by from time to time in the lancing horizontal light of sunrise, when he was going off to work. After a while he usually came out with a gift for her, some scrap or morsel, nothing like the bird, but tastier than it had been, simple uncooked bits of meat; somehow he knew. He still slept outside the hut, and one cold night she slinked in and slept curled around him, till dawn grayed the skies. The monkeys in the trees were scandalized.

Then the old man beat him again, hard enough to make him bleed from one ear. Kya went off to her hill fort then, growling and making long scratches in the ground. The huge mahua tree on the hill was dropping its great weight of flowers, and she ate some of the fleshy, intoxicating petals. She returned to the village perimeter, and deliberately sniffed out the old man, and found him on the well-traveled road to the village west of theirs. He had met several other men there, and they talked for a long time, drinking fermented drinks and getting drunk. He laughed like her kol-bahl.

On his way home she struck him down and killed him with a bite to the neck. She ate part of his entrails, tasting again all the strange tastes; they ate such odd things that they ended up tasting peculiar themselves, rich and various. Not unlike the first offering her young man had brought out to her. An acquired taste; and perhaps she had acquired it.