Jasoda Read online

  JASODA

  A Novel

  Kiran Nagarkar

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  A few thoughts as I say goodbye to Jasoda

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Jasoda did not know how much time it would take. Barely a quarter of the field had been done, the rest would have to wait. She untied the plough and let the oxen off.

  ‘Home,’ she said as she slapped Ram, the older of the two, on its bony rump. ‘Go home.’ It flicked its tail to get rid of some flies but didn’t move. ‘Home, I said go home.’

  The pain was getting unbearable. She walked unseeing, her foot stumbling in a furrow or coming up short against a ridge of upturned earth. The air rasped in her ear. She looked up. The sky was as colourless as the sun. In the distance, the heat was turning her first-born son Himmat and the dead peepal tree to vapour. She heard the tinkle of bells. The oxen had followed her.

  She took off her ghagra and lay down with her head resting on the long, exposed root of the tree. Himmat played with the string of her skirt. Before he could pull it right out, she snatched it from his hands, tied the two ends of the string and gave it back to him. She had been through her own and other women’s deliveries before and she knew there was no trick to them. The child would come when it felt like it, when the time was right.

  Her eyes were level with the furrows and she could see where the earth had been unyielding. A couple of hands away from her, large red ants wove in and out through the clods, carrying back with them the crumbs of the bajra rotis she had had for lunch two hours ago. She drew her legs up. There was no pattern or rhythm to the pain yet. When it twisted her, she picked up the dry, stony lumps of earth and crushed them to powder. The roots and ground under her were wet with her sweat. Himmat climbed over her and tried to get at her nipple. She ignored him. The baby was stuck just behind the mouth of her vagina. Her son was screaming now and forcing the edge of her blouse up. She slid her breast out and he held it in his hands. He had to work hard to get at the milk. Another couple of days and he would have plenty.

  The head slipped out. The neck was easy. Himmat had moved to the other nipple. The shoulders should have slid out by now but there must be some obstruction. She waited a while, then held the baby’s head in her hands and tried to force it out. Lakhan, the younger ox, was already licking the sticky bits of placenta that had dripped from the baby. Her hands slipped. She pushed hard. Her breath choked and she gagged.

  Her vagina tore open. She could not see the new-born yet. Its shoulders were working their way out. Putting her weight on the palms of her hands, she raised herself against the trunk of the peepal tree. The crusty bark raked the flesh of her naked back. She lay still, her eyes shut to tamp down the burning and laceration. Himmat’s hand had strayed over to the baby’s navel and was pulling at the umbilical cord. His arm obstructed her view. She disengaged it and thrust Himmat aside. The new-born made swift progress. Now she could see its sex.

  She brought her knees a little closer. The child rested between her thighs. Her legs and little feet would soon be out. Jasoda tightened her anal muscles. She squeezed her thighs together hard till her face swelled and the veins in her temples bulged out. She did not let go till the girl was still.

  PART ONE

  Jasoda liked to get up early and finish the household chores before the sun was out. The one cow they had was barely giving a litre of milk these days. Still, she had to be milked, fed and the shed cleaned. She was sweeping the yard when she saw the widower Siyaram. Sun, sandstorm, drought, he was on the road before six.

  Siyaram had got his daughter married twenty years ago. It was around the same time that his two sons had left the village to join their uncle’s cloth business in the town of Sarmoti some seventy miles away. The daughter used to come back to see her father the first couple of years but then she got pregnant and her visits became infrequent.

  Siyaram kept house and cooked his own meals. His dry lunch was tied to the end of his stick and rocked back and forth as he walked past.

  ‘Jai Ramji ki,’ he greeted Jasoda. She pulled her odhani further down over her face. Every day he went looking for firewood for his funeral pyre. No one knew where he went. There wasn’t a stick to be found even if you walked thirty or forty miles but most evenings he came back with a thin bundle of dry branches on his head. The village elders warned him that the wood was a fire hazard and would be the death of him, but he ignored them and kept stacking up the wood next to his bed, in the kitchen and the front room where he had entertained visitors when his wife was alive. ‘Better that than to die without a fire to purify your soul. What will it avail a man to have grown-up sons to do his last rites and no firewood to light his pyre?’

  Jasoda went into the kitchen, poured a bottle of water into the milk and put it on the kerosene stove to heat. The children would be up any minute now. It was the younger son, Pawan, who got up first and insisted on waking his elder brother. Himmat was a patient, quiet child who liked to sleep till late but after twenty minutes of Pawan pulling his hair, putting his fingers up his nostrils and prising open his eyelids, Himmat would lose his temper and hit back. Then Pawan would start howling. On the days when she was not in too much pain, his grandmother would pick him up. If that didn’t pacify him, Jasoda would slip her nipple into the boy’s mouth lest he woke up his father.

  Jasoda was combing her hair in front of the mirror on the kitchen wall when she saw the potter’s wife, two sons and daughter hurrying out of the village. Between them they carried seven empty pots. Two other women with their three children followed soon after Jasoda came out to the gate.

  ‘Has the water come?’

  ‘Not to our village but to Jalta.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  But the women had moved on. She got back into the house and finished plaiting her hair. The children were sleeping next to their grandmother. She went up the stairs and woke up Himmat and her ailing mother-in-law.

  ‘Put on your shirt, Himmat. We are going to fetch water from the tanker at Jalta.’

  ‘How do you know the tanker’s not come and gone already?’ Jasoda’s mother-in-law asked.

  ‘I don’t,’ Jasoda told the old lady. ‘It could just be a rumour started by some wiseacre in the village. Shall I not go? We barely have enough water for another two days.’

  ‘And what about the kerosene?’

  ‘I’ll go to the grocer’s after I get back.’

  ‘Just make sure you don’t return empty-handed.’

  Himmat and his mother came down to the kitchen. Jasoda handed her son a plastic pot.

  ‘Last time I carried only a bottle.’

  ‘You’ll be six years old next month. Time you pulled your weight.’

  ‘What about Pawan? He can carry at least one pot.’

  ‘He’s just a baby.’

  ‘He’s not. He’s two.’

  ‘Just one, Himmat. Can’t do a man’s work the way you can.’

  ‘Let’s take Father.’

  ‘He’s a busy man. He has work with His Highness.’

  She rolled an old piece of cloth into a bun and placed it on her head. Two brass pots now stood one on top of the other on the cloth platform and another fitted into the crook of her left arm.

  ‘My breakfast?’

  ‘I’ve packed some rotis and onions. You can eat them on the way.’

  The boy wanted to walk fast but Jasoda set an even pace. Her chappals had large crescents missing from the inner heels. Himmat was barefoot. They ran into women and children from the adjoining villages going in
the same direction. Jasoda greeted them without slowing down to start a conversation. Himmat had fallen behind. She called out to him but he didn’t hear her. A buffalo folded its legs and fell on its side. Its breath ebbed away slowly. The shadows of carrion birds whirled around her. Once they settled on the buffalo, they looked like calves suckling impatiently as they tore into the soft of its belly. Himmat threw a piece of the bajra roti he was eating at them. They ignored it. Jasoda whacked her son on the head.

  ‘You don’t want to eat the roti, give it to me. Not to those birds who’ve never had it so good.’

  ‘I want to save the buffalo.’

  ‘She’s long past it.’

  ‘Will they come and pick my eyes too?’

  ‘Not if you look sharp and stop lingering.’

  Himmat grabbed his mother’s little finger and got back into stride.

  ‘I don’t want to die.’

  ‘You won’t. At least not while I’m alive.’

  The road was flat and straight. Whenever they passed the carcass of a dead animal, Jasoda walked faster to avoid the stench. It took them the better part of an hour and forty minutes to traverse the four miles to Jalta. The water tanker had come and gone three days ago. The next one was due but no one knew when. Nobody was willing to move. They hadn’t walked all that way to return empty-handed. Jasoda squatted on the ground and wiped the sweat off her face, neck and arms with the edge of her odhani.

  ‘I’m thirsty,’ Himmat told her.

  ‘Let’s go.’ Jasoda got up quickly.

  ‘I want a drink.’

  ‘You’ll get it at home.’

  ‘I want it now.’

  She looked at the faces around her. ‘Try persuading them to part with even a little of their water.’

  He didn’t get up. She went on ahead. He hadn’t really expected her to dawdle because of him and he soon caught up with her. Neither his thirst nor his anger at his mother’s indifference had subsided. He overtook her and tried to put as much distance as he could between Jasoda and himself. It was a straight road and he was familiar with it, but this was the desert. What it lacked in humans, it more than made up for in phantoms and mirages.

  ‘Stay within sight, Himmat.’

  He started to run.

  ‘Stop, Himmat. If you don’t stop right now…’ She thought she saw something move on the eastern horizon. It was wispy, like the smoke from a joss stick. It spiralled upwards as if against its own will, unwound clockwise, then turned back upon its tail. It loitered, it flopped. Jasoda stood still. It had become translucent now, it billowed and went north-east in flurries, then lay listless. She had seen enough sandstorms to know they don’t let on where they are headed till late in the game. They’ll use every feint, any sleight of hand before they set course and sweep down. She knew this was a north-westerly. It would hurtle past Jalta, Rajwira, Piloti and everything else within a radius of twenty to thirty-five miles.

  There was a distance of at least two hundred yards separating mother and child now. She walked faster, almost a trot, without raising her hands to steady the pots on her head. ‘Himmat,’ she shouted. ‘Himmat.’

  The storm was beginning to sing now, a low, sinister hum. Something of the urgency in her tone must have communicated itself to the boy. He turned around and looked at her. She pointed to the east. The sand was no longer translucent and it had stopped twisting and curling around itself. The desert, as far as the eye could see, had been jangled and all the sand had come undone. The spiral hung there, suspended in mid-air, rasping and ricocheting. Himmat ran back to his mother. Jasoda turned the pots over and dug them into the earth till their necks and shoulders had disappeared. She would have liked to bury them fully but there was no time to do that. Mother and son crouched against the pots. Jasoda covered Himmat’s head and face with one end of her thick odhani and her own nose and eyes and hair with the rest. Himmat didn’t mind the ravaging violence of the storm, the suffocatingly tight shroud around his face and the steady intrusion of sand into his nostrils. It was the wind which turned the blood in his veins cold. It wept like thousands of dead children looking for their mothers, it yelped and cried dementedly, it spoke of a pain he couldn’t comprehend. Worst of all, it seemed to cry out to him. ‘Himmat,’ it said. ‘Himmat, you are mine. Come with me.’ He could no longer ignore it. He unravelled the odhani and got up to go. His mother pulled him down and pressed his head between her breasts.

  When the storm had exhausted itself, Jasoda made her son take off his clothes. She whipped his shirt and shorts in the air and then dusted him. She gently wiped the sand lodged behind his ears, in the soft ridges of his eyelids, between his toes and the creases in the skin of his testicles.

  ‘It’s my turn now,’ Himmat said and rubbed her face with his shirt. There was a shower of sand as he beat her skirt with his hands.

  ‘Let’s eat.’ She unpacked the rotis and tapped them on the palm of her hand till most of the sand had been dislodged. Next, she took out the onions from the cloth bag and smashed them with her fist. One would think there was no way the sand could have infiltrated their tightly laminated layers but she knew better. Sand was like water. It could slither and leak into anything. She peeled the frosty, glistening layers and wiped each one with the end of her odhani. They sat huddled together and ate silently. After the din and uproar of the storm, it was eerily quiet. The birds had not returned yet. Except for a horn or hoof, the skeletons and carcasses lay submerged under the sand.

  They went to the grocer’s despite Himmat’s protestations. There was no queue outside the shop. The bullock cart with the car tyres had delivered the kerosene in the morning and gone. Jasoda knew there was no point asking the grocer if there was any kerosene left but she could not face the prospect of going home empty-handed.

  ‘Just a few litres, Bhanwarlalji.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you slept through the storm. Try next week.’

  ‘Please, I beg you.’

  ‘Go home, Jasoda. Or ask your husband to get it from his close friend and companion.’ He laughed, showing his tobacco-stained teeth. ‘His Highness Prince Parbat Singh himself.’

  ‘Please, Bhanwarlalji, please look around. There is bound to be a litre or two somewhere in your shop.’

  ‘Where shall I look, Jasoda? In the folds of my dhoti?’ His hand went to his crotch and scratched his member. ‘Want to check it?’

  She returned home. The back of her husband’s hand caught her on the jaw. She staggered and fell back upon Himmat.

  ‘Wasted the whole day and what do you have to show for it? No water, no kerosene.’ Sangram Singh kicked her in the small of her back. ‘Get up. I’m late. Cook my meal fast.’

  ‘Sangram Singhji,’ someone called from the gate.

  ‘Who is it?’ Sangram Singh stepped out.

  From the kitchen window, Jasoda saw Savitri and Dulare stepping back, trying not to cast a shadow on her husband.

  ‘Namaste, Mai.’ Dulare bowed and greeted Jasoda.

  ‘Don’t stand gaping at the window,’ Sangram Singh berated his wife. ‘I told you I’m late. I want my lunch in five minutes.’

  Himmat went out.

  ‘Don’t come any nearer, Chhote Huzoor,’ Savitri told the boy.

  ‘Get back into the house.’ Sangram Singh slapped his son.

  Dulare leaned on his long stick, his withered left leg wound around the bamboo stick like a vine. ‘May God smile on you and your family, Huzoor.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Sangram Singh asked Savitri.

  She pulled her pallu lower over her face and pointed her chin at her husband. ‘He wished to see you.’

  Dulare dropped the stick and prostrated himself in front of Sangram Singh. He stretched his arms and joined the palms of his hands. His forehead touched the earth repeatedly.

  Sangram Singh looked bored. ‘Enough.’

  ‘Beg your forgiveness, Sahib, for disturbing…’

  ‘Get to the point.’

  ‘Ten years ru
nning there’s been a drought, Huzoor. You think it will break this year?’

  ‘Ask God that.’

  ‘But you are like God to me and my family.’

  ‘Stop wasting my time, I’m a busy man.’

  ‘It has to rain. Otherwise we’ll all die.’

  ‘You came all this way to tell me that?’

  ‘May I borrow Lakhan to till my land, Huzoor?’

  ‘How are you going to pay?’

  ‘I’ll mortgage my hut.’

  ‘Your father did that twenty years ago.’

  ‘We must have more than paid your debt by now, Huzoor.’

  ‘You trying to teach me arithmetic, Dulare? All you’ve been doing is paying the interest once in a while.’

  ‘All my father-in-law borrowed was seven hundred rupees,’ Savitri muttered under her breath.

  Dulare slapped his wife. ‘Don’t listen to her, Huzoor, she didn’t mean what she said.’

  ‘Better to cut your wife’s tongue before it grows longer than your debt.’

  ‘All I’ve got is the hut.’

  ‘You expect me to live in it?’

  ‘Please, Huzoor. For Savitri and…’ Dulare left the sentence unfinished.

  ‘The farm?’

  ‘Not the farm, Huzoor. I would like to leave something to my children.’

  ‘Where’s a barren man like you going to get children from? Rent them from the grocer’s?’ Sangram Singh laughed a dry, dusty laugh. ‘Seven days will cost you seventy rupees.’

  ‘Seventy rupees? That’s steep, very steep.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘No please, Huzoor, don’t shut the door on us.’

  ‘Himmat, tether Ram and bring him here.’

  ‘Not Ram, Huzoor, he’s far too old. Give me Lakhan.’

  ‘Go home, Dulare.’ There was a brittle, impatient edge to Sangram Singh’s voice as he turned to go inside his house.

  ‘I’ll take Ram.’

  It was a little after two in the night that Jasoda and her family were woken up. The screaming was so close and loud, Jasoda thought her younger son Pawan was having a nightmare. The children’s grandmother had stopped her nightlong moaning. Jasoda went over and bent down to see if her mother-in-law was still breathing.