A mouthful of sand

The summer is at its peak. Hot loo vaporises the beads of sweat before they trickle down. It’s almost noontime, and the sun is moving to its tortuous best. A little sand-swirl swings in its tiny typhonic trajectory. It is shifting towards her. She moves away, but then forgetting herself runs towards the infant asleep among crumpled soiled clothes put in a broad wicker basket under a tree. She has to take up the little one before the sand-swirl passes over it. She stalls the ill omen by a whisker. The baby is safe, she smiles at it.

Her already fatigued body groans with pain as a result of the effort. The child whimpers, she gets a frown, the littlest trace of it, but then effortlessly turns it into a smile. She is a mother after all. No child exists to make them perfectly angry. Under the shade of the mulberry tree, at the corner of the tiny agricultural plot of land, she sings a lullaby. Her song spreads over the red hot, yellowish tomatoes baking under the sun.

She sings well. It sounds an oddity against the background of rough Haryanvi outpours of farming retorts, abuses and crude diction, the famed ruff and gruff of the peasant dialect in this part of northern India. Their behaviour beats even their diction, by the way. The musicality gives a clue that she might not be a Haryanvi. Her looks stamp the truth even further. She is petite, dusky, round faced with delicate features. She has come from far, from a different world altogether.

The child is asleep again after suckling at the drops of her maternal affection. Nothing satisfies a mother more than giving something extra to her child. She now shades her eyes with the palm of her hand to look into the distance. The sandy path leading out of the village lying in the silvery blue distance is forlorn. The heat rising from the sand shakes the horizon like—she recalls it in a flash—the steam swaying over the cauldron on the fire pit at home.

He is nowhere to be seen, her husband, who is expected to bring her food. It was supposed to be a breakfast, but it’s now almost lunch time. She has worked on empty stomach for around five hours, taking just waters to subdue the guttural complaints of her empty stomach.

She isn’t feeling as bad as she should, given her position overall and particularly today. Her five month old son is around, almost as a saviour, casting a lifeful shadow like a tiny fluke of cloud, sheltering her from the fire of hunger, loneliness and self-pity. The breaks from work, to hold him, to sing songs, to breast feed him, to change his cloth diapers, are more comforting than even the rest under the mulberry’s dense shade.

She takes her dose of energy by looking at the sleeping child’s serene face. It’s as happy and calm as the face of the wealthiest person on the earth. After all, all of us are born with the same share of happiness. It’s another matter that it gets robbed off as we grow, making most of us poor and leaving just a few of us rich.  

She takes a few swigs of water. Immediately she feels fresh to start again. The sun is almost firing over the summer tomatoes. She is worried about the loo. It gives sunstrokes. If that happens, it will be worse for her child. She wants to keep herself safe, for it means keeping the child safe. Mother’s feverish milk isn’t good for the child’s health. But then she has to work, there is no option. After all, the daily outputs of 30-40 kg help her in running the household.

It does serve another purpose. Her husband beats her a bit less. It often is like this. Whenever she doesn’t bother him with money to buy the daily necessities to pull the rickety cart of their humble home, he sobers down so much as to only throw abuses, instead of the kicks he delivers in the other scenario. To avoid bothering him, and be lucky with abuses only without the incentive of kicks, she home delivers tomatoes within the village, at a price suitably lesser than the street hawkers, to tilt the deal in her favour.

Despite fighting it out day and night, with sweat, kicks and social scorn, she feels like she doesn’t exist at all. Not here at least. She is invisible, casteless and exists like a dirt-road side bush whom nobody sees particularly. But she exists in memories. Vivid memories of her small hamlet in Jharkhand flash over her lone self. That was the time when she lived. Now she just survives.    

She remembers that world. The flashes from there help her in meeting a present that is completely devoid of her past, and more poignantly, where she can’t think of future beyond the grasp of another day with her infant in her arms and the toddler holding her hand. It’s like dragging an ungrateful life like a stone tied to your foot. You are secretly eager to leave it behind and move on to get better luck in the next birth. Well, belief in rebirth is a big invisible blank cheque. It helps, man. You fill up your figure as you deem fit.

She works for some more time. The hunger has returned. The baby is scowling again. She offers her milk. It is pacified. Again the flashes from a world that was, reach her to provide solace, a replacement for bread: the greenery, the huts, the small hamlet, the stream nearby, the pond, and the tree. The big banyan in particular. She had grown playing hide and seek in its leafy green mess and aerial roots.

That was the world where she really lived. Here it is no life; in fact, there are so many occasions when she even wishes to be dead. But then even death repels those who look forward to it as a benefactor. It prefers to stay cruel and unwanted encroacher into destinies. That’s what makes death what it is.  

She recalls her mother’s wails as they brought father’s body. He had died in a coal mine collapse. To keep the day’s white for his brood of children, he had worked in coal mines near Rajhara town. Sakhui village, Padwa block, Palamu district, Jharkhand, she reads the line in her mind as many times as possible, regularly, lest she forget it.

It contains her roots. One shouldn’t forget one’s roots. She knows it well. That will be even worse than dying and make this living meaningless. She has written it on a paper and put it next to the silver earrings, her most valuable item on her bridal self. She gets worried about it. Has she lost it? That’s her back up because she doesn’t trust her mind now because it’s plagued with so many worries. After all, it is her domicile, her certificate of identity. She will write one more copy, she decides. It’s better to have two. It’s safe.

A quaint hamlet of 600 or so souls. Their faces loom large over her father’s body. Tribals, scheduled castes and Muslims, surviving at the fringes, in blackness, in soot, and die a black death. They had to put a lot of effort to wash the black from the corpse but had to given up, hoping that mother earth won’t differentiate among white, black or brown in offering sleep in its sandy womb. The burial had to be postponed for a few hours. The village head had gone to Daltonganj, the district city about 13 Km away. The coalmine labourer was buried outside the hamlet among the cluster of tiny earth-mounds that served as the cemetery.

She sees her world, vividly, as if she has hyperopia, disabling her to focus on the world nearby and taking her far-seeing eyes to peek into distances.

There is a solitary mango tree in the distance. There were so many around their village. She recalls the huge one by the pond. She had jumped from an overhanging branch into a group of frogs. She chuckles as the scene strike with vivacity.

The cool breeze blowing through Mahua trees sashays over hundreds of kilometres and calms her down and comforts her, listens to her plight, her loneliness. She laughs loudly as she recalls a drunken melee at a marriage in the village. The drink made of Mahua flowers is the poor villagers’ companion in celebration, just as are its wood, flowers and seeds. She closes her eyes and inhales the typical smell of Mahua. She isn’t that far from her home, she feels. The distance though is more than 1,000 km.

She has picked up a little bunch of lady fingers today to sell in the neighbourhood. Ramtorai, she picks up one and holds it. She says it loudly. They call it bhindi here. People cackle with laughter when she calls these ramtorai. It’s almost entertainment to them. Pumpkin is konhra there. But it’s Kaddu here. Cucumber is Kundri there. But it’s Kheera here. She has been learning fast. She wants them to laugh less at her.   

There were oranges and melons along the streams; at least, a thing of delight for the eyes, if not for the stomach. She finds the treeless monotony here intimidating. It’s an agricultural monolith propelled by mechanisation. It’s in the grasp of paddy and wheat monotony. Her husband owns just a little bit of land, so they are into vegetables to survive.

Hunger is terrible now. All efforts to not think of it are futile. Her mouth waters as she recalls the instrument of beating hunger back home.  It strikes her imagination: the corolla of Mahua flowers, a fleshy blossom, pale yellow coloured saviour when they hadn’t almost anything at home. So delicious, fresh, exciting, disagreeable, pungent and sweetish! A riot of sensations, a poor man’s delicacy.

The blossoms are dried under the sun to turn brown to be used later. It gives her goose-bumps as she recalls the blossoms springing from the ends of the smaller tree branches, in bunches from 20 to 30, approaching ripeness, swelling with juice, falling to the ground. And she and other children laying the first claim. She is smiling. The memory has driven away all the pains of life. The gathering of Mahua windfalls. Drying of the flowers on dung-coated earth. Gossips under Mahua tree. The oil-fried Mahua blossoms. The distillation of spirits from the dried blossoms. Well, that was life. None of it exists here.

Remembering the past means remembering herself. Although physically present here, nobody seems to bother that she exists. So she captures a piece of that world in her memory.

Mahua blossoms fall till June when the fruits ripe. We don’t shake the trees or break the fruits. It will not bear fruits if fruits are plucked by hand. We wait for their natural fall. The ripe fruit is about the size of a peach. It has three different skins and has a white nut or kernel inside. The fruit is used in three ways. The two outer skins are both eaten raw and cooked as vegetables. The dried inner skin is ground up into flour. Oil is extracted from the kernel which is used for cooking purposes and for fake-mixing with ghee.

The trail of thought comes clearly. It feels triumphant like a lesson crammed to the hilt in a nursery class. She is thankful to the God that despite the hard living, she has retained the memories of her land.

She recalls the pleasant, acidic taste of hair plum and the pinch of its thorny thicket. They used to jest that it was their apple, the poor man’s apple.

She isn’t new to agriculture. They had a little plot of arable land. Sanai was grown as green manure. The goats really liked it. She remembers the robust crops of maize and bora paddy. She helped her mother in her backbreaking toil in the tiny field. That world in the memories is more substantial than the one around her.                  

Then there was the storm which blew her away from the land of her dreams.

Her mother found it impossible to feed the multiple hungry mouths around her. Her sister’s husband stayed in Delhi, a fact of high esteem for anybody in that part. It doesn’t matter if that person spent nights on the pavement, and worked as a labourer during the day or even begged.

He was visiting their place and offered to help her by getting job to her eldest daughter in Delhi.

“I will make her life,” he proffered with a glint of hope in his yellowish eyes.

So she travelled with him to Delhi, the land of dreams, where everybody had money, even the poorest had big bucks in their wallet. She was scared of the bigness of things around her. Everything was in a mad rush. It was so noisy that she stated crying. The craziness of hurtling things and people held her in a tight grip.

It was a world squeezed in a tight fist by the railway line, between the railway stations of Azadpur and Subzi Mandi. It was so close to the railway line that the stinking air pushed by the trains left a clanking, steely storm day and night. Honking, clattering trains were the biggest facts of life, the facts which defined the world itself. These were tiny hutments and hovels, piled one upon another, encroaching by millimetres into each other, to leave no privacy, no space for anything you can relate to a human being.  Illegally constructed on the railway’s land, it stuck to the polluted, dirty neighbourhood like a leech that won’t go even if crushed to bloodied death. And there it drew the feeble chances of survival for countless unfortunates hiding there.

Everything related to life was in a miniature, except the human misery, which was bigger than the trains passing by. It was a black hole which had sucked the whole world into itself. A human swarm which buzzed mindlessly. There was everything, but it was squeezed so tight that it felt like you are standing in a crowd with no space even to scratch your bum. On top of that the incessant clatter of rails bore into your bones as the vibrations crept into your spine as you lay on the wood board to get what they mean by sleep.

From this hovel, he ran a business of arranging purchased brides, a business born of the ill-famed practice of female infanticide in north India, particularly in Haryana, where patriarchy demands a male heir, even from those who have hardy inherited anything and possess no education and skills of any kind to make a living themselves.

There is a significant chunk of marriageable age vagabonds in Haryana who are not eligible bachelors from any angle. They are from poor families, are almost illiterate, have low or no land-holding, and don’t exist anywhere in social standing. They come with the added qualifications of chronic drinking and smoking. But they need to have a bride; otherwise, their souls won’t rest in peace after death. And here comes the business of selling and purchasing brides.  

The unfortunate girl is taken as a sex slave cum servant by the incompetent drunkard, her best utility being an instrument of giving birth to a male heir so that the father can get moksha or liberation after his death.

She was bought for INR 75,000. A bit overpaid, many said.

That very day, someone in the neighbourhood bought a buffalo for INR 82,000. Quite underpaid, still many more said.

So she is the unpaid servant. About sex we need not say anything. About heirs, she has already started the prospects. But to fulfil the role of a mother to her children, who will have almost no inheritance except poverty and misery, she has to kill her present to salvage another day. Her partner, after all, spoils more than he earns in their shared life.

The baby is crying. She comes back to this current world. The shadows have lengthened. The memories have served her like lunch.

She sees two figures on the sandy path coming from the neighbouring village on the other side. So she had been looking in the wrong direction. He is coming from the other way. And lunch? Forget about that. She looks agitated. Even anger creeps in, strange though, given her petite, humbled, unassuming persona.

Her heart starts beating faster. Her breathing is more laboured. The hours-long toil on an empty stomach hadn’t been able to break her proud spirit. But the visuals, turning from vague signals to specific outlines, leave her jolted. Something seems to have snapped suddenly. She gasps for breath and almost falls down. Taking the baby in her arms she cries. 

“It’s that accursed woman. O he the filthy bag has...how can he?” she wipes her tear tears with the corner of her headcloth.

All the hard work in the field seems wasted. She has been fighting to make a home and he kicks at it with such impunity. Repeatedly. Not that she minds too much about the kicks he gives her after getting drunk. That doesn’t appear more than anything beyond the normal, acceptable routine of life. Even the talks and gossips of he having an affair with this woman is tolerable. But to be seen with her, his little sense of worth gets torn away.

She has been just a plaything to her husband. A purchased bride is more of a servant. Even with his low social standing and almost no reputation, he has been able to lord over her. After all, she is just a purchased bride, bought from the hut of misery like farmers trade in cattle. Her price is lower than a good, rotund, glossy black buffalo. No surprise that she occupies almost no place, no name, no dignity in the village.

Even the street urchins take her in casual stride like they do the beggars roaming around. She moves around totally invisible, like a ghost. People just see through her. The only fact known about her is that she is a lowly-placed Muslim from the poorest of a poor family and has been bought at a price lower than an average buffalo.

He is drunk and walks with a swag: an arrogance which seems to be drawn out of a feeling to insult and wound his wife by taking his torture one notch high, to a point where any woman, no matter if she is the gentlest or most aggressive, will feel the brutal pain of it. He seems to have run out of kicks and abuses. So here is the new method to torture his wife, to give her deeper cuts and injuries.

The two of them are walking on the field divide now, having left the sandy countryside path to reach their patch of land. She can now see the face of her husband’s companion. She feels something more painful than slaps and abuses. The other woman is hardly attractive than her, but is quite robust. Somebody’s wife from the so called low caste in the social hierarchy, she walks proudly with a Jat farmer, even though he is haggard, famished, hawkish, and even qualifies below many men from her own community. But then in a caste society, being born in a dominant caste takes precedence over most of the deficits own is born with and makes himself into after birth.

The other woman in her husband’s life!

Her soul burns. It is more insulting than that barrage of nasty legs and hands, and still fouler tongue. The other woman has a better social standing than hers in being a caste born. More importantly, she is not a purchased bride, bought like a buffalo at some cattle fair. The distance between them decreases. It arrives with more visuals now. The other woman has a proud, jibing, mocking look on her face.

A storm is building up in the otherwise unmoving waters of the little lake of her being. He has already started abusing her even before entering their field of tomatoes. Choicest abuses, redder, hotter than any tomato around. From the heap of rotten tomatoes, sorted out while packing in wicker baskets for selling, he picks up a handful and hurls at her. She turns around and crouches down to save her child from getting hit by the slimy, smelling projectiles. She can feel the rotten juice sticking to her kurta, the soft plops and hard hits.

She runs to lay the child at a safe distance. He expects her to take to her heels and is mocking, shouting at the top of his voice.

“Go and run to the hell hole you came from, you filthy bitch!”   

She has already given him a male heir, two in fact, the other one, almost three now, is with her forever prone to faint mother-in-law at their small, misery-personifying home back in the village. So he feels free. If she vanishes in thin air right now, he will be the happiest person for the riddance. 

To his mild surprise, he sees her coming to them now. “Bah, so she seems eager to get introduced to you.”

The other woman shamelessly titters. There have been historical injustices to her and her community. Any chance to humiliate a Jat’s wife is most welcome.

Her husband and the other woman are standing side by side. She forms the triangle at a distance. The man moves forward, raises his hand and slaps hard. It happens with effortless ease, no cause, no effect. She just stiffens her face, not showing any trace of pain, no tears, no howling. Perhaps this boldness is meant for the other woman, her way of dissent, her small effort in not showing them the effect they want to see. After all, a man strikes a woman to see basically the tell-tale effect of his brutish aggression.

He strikes on the other cheek. There is perfect silence. The hard skin of his fingers goes plop on the soft skin of her cheek. She is unmoved. He is feeling ravaged by anger. This rebelliousness is worse that she hitting back. In the grip of cheap liquor, he pauses as if thinking of devising some newer way to insult and humiliate her.

It fuels the mocking spirits in the other woman. She takes it on from the point her surprised lover has left. She catches the mutineer, who has rebelled not to cry, by her hair and raises the other one to smack her hard on the face. The uprooted girl’s small hand comes to life. Before the plumpy hand adds to her insult, her finger catches the soft, wavy wrist. The attacker’s bangles get crushed, puncturing her skin. There is blood. The injured woman shrieks with disbelieving anger and attacks.

To him it’s comical, the heavy woman attacking the small one. The uprooted woman defends well. He is enjoying the show from a distance.

“Fight, fight you bitches, give each other taste of nice blood,” he hollers and claps in enjoyment.

It’s a full on cat fight. They roll among tomatoes, crush many and get all earth smitten.

“I am his wife you slut!” her hair tangled, tomatoes crushed on her face, she yells with such force that the drunk man loses his disgusting sense of entertainment.

She has pinned down the woman who is almost double her size. The latter is panting, out of breath, her massive breasts heaving with the propensity to topple the small woman off her, beads of sweat surfacing profusely on the coarse skin of her face.

She raises her hand to strike, but it doesn’t come down. Hurting doesn’t come naturally to her. She has just defended herself.

Far away from her native place, with almost no possibility of ever meeting any of her relatives, she knows it takes a bit more to survive apart from the uncomplaining hard work and unquestioning acceptance of slaps and kicks by her husband.

She feels survival needs more. And survive she has to for her children. Perhaps survival requires a bit of honour as well. And honour she has salvaged. It feels better than having a bumper crop and a day without violence at home.

She lets go off the beaten opponent and walks up to her child. The moment she turns her face, tears burst out. She but doesn’t want to be seen weak and crying. She wipes her tears, making it look like she is cleaning her face of the mess it is in. She picks a sickle lying in a furrow on the way. Holding it in her hand she stands by the child.

“More than with you, your husband lies in my cot!” the other woman is heard yelling, the words meant to hurt her, to salvage some victory from the defeat.

They are moving back to the village they have come from. She knows he won’t be back at least today.

Far away from her village, with no chances of ever going back, and almost nonexistent chances of earning some honour in the society she has been cast into, she feels totally lost. There is a vacuum around. Her head is buzzing.

The child is crying. She offers it her empty breasts to suckle for satisfaction. She can barely walk, so cannot afford to waste the last ounces of remaining strength. She has to wind up things. She has to collect the uncrushed tomatoes, then she has to walk back home. She has to see how is her other son. It has to be done as soon as possible.