Jasmine (5 page)

From his charpoy in the courtyard, Pitaji protested in soft grunts. “That Masterji fellow thinks you are a lotus blooming in cow dung?” or “Get firewood! Boil tea! Feed the chickens!” Mataji and I humored him because the mustached doctor had told us he had hypertension. I stayed in school.

The work at home didn’t slow me down. I
liked
doing chores. At dawn I pushed our Mazbi maidservant aside and boiled the milk myself—four times—because the maid had no clue to cleanliness and pasteurization. Just before dusk, the best hour for marketing, since vegetable vendors discounted what they hadn’t sold and what they couldn’t keep overnight, I’d go with neighborhood women and get my mother the best bargains. The women liked having me with them because I could add fast in my head, and because I always caught the lime and chillies vendor when he cheated them. In return, the crabbiest of the women taught me how to haggle prices down. She was a widow, and for herself she bought only half kilos of potatoes and onions (as a widow she should not have eaten onions); I knew even then I was witnessing permissible rebellion.

Dida, Pitaji’s mother, was the only one in the family to make a fuss about my staying on in school, but she spent most months of the year in an ashram in the holy city of Hardwar and didn’t torment us with visits too often. Her line was “You’re going to have to wear out your sandals getting rid of this one.” She spoke only to Pitaji. Sometimes she changed to “Some women think they own the world because their husbands are too lazy to beat them,” but Mataji just went about her cooking with her mouth zipped and her veiled head down.

The crisis came when Dida announced that she, through a pious and ailing woman living in the same
ashram, had finally located a passable groom willing to take me off their hands. I wasn’t quite thirteen then. The woman’s sister (Dida thought the sister lived in Ludhiana, but she would check it out) had a neighbor who owned almost two hundred acres of well-irrigated ground. The farmer was known to have four sons, one of whom was a widower with three children and needed a new wife to look after them.

Mataji and Dida could have been Sivaji and Aurangzeb out of Masterji’s book on Indian history. Their battle was fierce and wordless. The neighborhood sided with Dida on this one. The widower’s father was a rich man, and Mataji was a bitter woman with a mangled mind to hold up my chance at a comfortable life. Who did I think I was to turn down a once-in-a-lifetime bridegroom?

Masterji must have heard that he was likely to lose me to the Ludhiana widower. He biked all the way to our adobe compound one Sunday morning, his white beard rolled spiffily tight and his long hair tucked under a crisp chartreuse turban, to confront my father, the Lahori Hindu gentleman. He was even carrying a kirpan, which meant that for him this was a special occasion. Masterji was a Sikh. All Sikh men in our village, even the low-caste converted Mazbis, and quite a few of the older men, kept their hair and beards, but very few went around with their ceremonial daggers strapped to their chests all day long.

In school we Hindu girls had thought of Masterji as a
religious man, a pious Sikh, but very noncommunal, until pamphlets accusing him of being a bad Sikh—of smoking, for instance—started showing up in classrooms. At the time we assumed the posters were a prank. There was a new Sikh boys’ gang, the Khalsa Lions, who liked action. Khalsa means pure. As Lions of Purity, the gang dressed in white shirts and pajamas and indigo turbans, and all of them toted heavy kirpans on bandoliers. They had money to zigzag through the bazaar on scooters, but since they were, like Arvind-prar and Hari-prar, farmers’ sons, we assumed the money for scooters came from smuggling liquor and guns in and out of Pakistan. In villages close enough to the border, smuggling was not an unacceptable profession.

When Masterji unstraddled his bike, we noticed the damp red stain on the back of his turban. Tomato seeds still stuck to the stain. The Khalsa Lions had taken to hurling fruit and stones from their scooters.

The maidservant dragged the only chair we had—an old wooden one missing a slat—to where Pitaji and Dida were arguing, and went off to boil sweet milky tea for the men. Mataji and I stayed inside, out of sight, within hearing range.

We heard Pitaji say, “Hooligans! Now they’re throwing sticks and stones; next month they’ll throw bombs!”

“Good,” Mataji whispered. “They’re speaking in English. Dida will be less of a problem.”

Masterji had his game plan. “It isn’t like Lahore, is it? Lahore was Rome. But as we know from the great historian
Mr. Gibbon, where there is a rising there is also a falling. Hooligans who soar must also come down.”

My father, softened by the analogy, sighed. “We should have had our Nero to fiddle while we burned.” Masterji was also Lahori, where even the Sikhs, according to my father, were men of culture. Then he short-cut the preliminaries. “Masterji, you are here to tell me that there is a lotus blooming in the middle of all this filth, no?”

In Hasnapur the metaphorical and the literal converge. On the far side of the courtyard, by the buffalo enclosure, the maidservants pretty little girl was scooping up fresh dung, kneading it thick with straw chips, and patting them into cakes the size of her palms. She would slap the cakes down on the adobe walls of our kitchen enclosure and leave them to dry into fuel.

Masterji kept his eyes on the little girl working the buffalo dung. “An educator’s duty, sir, is not to burn the flower with the dung.”

“In this country”—Pitaji laughed—“we are having too many humans and not enough buffaloes.”

“Yes, yes,” Masterji agreed, too quickly, “in hot-weather countries Mother Nature is too fecund. That is why it is important that modern ladies go for secondary-school education and find themselves positions. They are not shackling themselves to wifehood and maternity first chance. Surely you know, sir, that in our modern society many bright ladies are finding positions?”

“Positions?” Pitaji demanded. “What do you mean, precisely? A lady working for strange men? Money changing hands?”

Pitaji’s face caricatured outrage. I thought for a minute that a tea stain would darken Masterji’s chartreuse turban.

“I am a reasonable man,” Pitaji said. “We are modern people. We let the girl decide.” Then he called to me to come. I ran. He held both my hands. “Masterji wants you to go to more school.” He loosened his grip, giving me the chance to break away. I stayed. He went on: “Masterji is wanting you to work in a bank. You can be steno. You have my blessing. He is wanting you to learn more English and also shorthand. You are wanting position of steno in the State Bank?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to be a steno. I don’t want to be a teller, either.”

My father looked stunned. He coddled my rough, scratched hands. He turned to Masterji, an ecstatic man. “You have heard it straight from the filly’s mouth, as it were, isn’t it? The girl refuses further education. The thing is that bright ladies are bearing bright sons, that is nature’s design.”

I didn’t pull my hands out of Pitaji’s palms as I said, “I want to be a doctor and set up my own clinic in a big town.” Like the mustached doctor in the bazaar clinic, I wanted to scrape off cataracts, fit plastic legs on stumps, work miracles.

My father gasped. “The girl is mad! I’ll write in the back of the dictionary: The girl is mad!”

Dida caught on for the first time. She said in Punjabi, “Blame the mother. Insanity has to come from somewhere. It’s the mother who is mad.”

All that day and deep into the night, we heard their
chorus. “The girl is mad. Her mother is mad. The whole country is mad. Kali Yuga has already come.”

And deeper into that night I heard the thwock of blows.

But in the morning Mataji said, “They’ve come around. Just make sure you ace your exams.” She smiled. She smiled so wide that the fresh split in her upper lip opened up and started bleeding again. When I said to Wylie once that my mother loved me so much she tried to kill me, or she would have killed herself, she pulled Duff, their daughter, a little closer to her.

8

O
NLY
the brick houses of rich traders like Potatoes-babu had toilets put up in courtyards. They were tiny thatch-walled privies on stilts. You squatted above a hole and heard the waste plop many feet below into a huge earthenware bowl full of lye. The walls crawled with roaches and spiders. At Vimla’s you could smell the lye from every room. I much preferred going to the fields with the neighborhood women. We went early, in pre-dawn dark, before the men woke, so they couldn’t spy on us. My mother never came with us. She was a modest and superior Lahori woman, so modest and superior that as a child I’d assumed her body was free of daily functions. For the neighborhood women, though, the latrine hour was the
most companionable time. They squatted in a row and gossiped. I liked to listen.

Three days after Masterji’s visit I trekked as usual with my favorite group along the banks of a nullah. Almost all of them were married, and listening to their jokes made me feel very adult. The pale sky hung low over paler eucalyptus. The wheat fields were parrot green and fenced in with brambly black branches of acacia. The clover patches could have been scatter rugs.

Our route cut across a treed lot where the Khalsa Lions hung out, hacking branches thick as staffs to beat people and knock them off their bikes and scooters. Sometimes they’d cut down whole trees and drag them across the only road, forcing motor traffic to stop. Then they’d threaten the passengers, sometimes robbing them. The good thing about the Khalsa Lions using that lot was that I could stop back afterward and gather up firewood from their discards. That day I found the biggest staff ever, stuck in a wreath of thorny brush. I had to crawl on cold stony ground, and of course thorns bloodied my arms, but the moment my fist closed over the head of the staff, I felt a buzz of power.

By the time I got to the fields, the adults were already squatting. Their brass pitchers of wash-up water gleamed in the dawn light. Spilled water crusted into ice wafers. I
waited till my favorite bush was deserted, and watched two paunchy, jovial women tickle each others bulbous behinds with leafy sprigs and grass. This was the “Ladies’ Hour.” Sober women became crude, lusty, raucous.

“Oh, snake, snake, I see a snake!”

“You saw a very skinny little snake last night. Arré, you woke up the same snake in my house!”

We knew each others secrets. I laughed as hard as the housewives.

“We’ve all seen Amrita’s skinny little snake. It sleeps all day in her house, then roams around at night…”

“That’s the snake I turned out of my house,” said a recent bride, emboldened.

I didn’t hear the rest of the taunt. I heard a growl, a kind of growling-and-stalking combination.

This dawn, as on many others, perverts from the village across the stream sat on their bank and ogled us. We knew they were there because the lit tips of their bidis floated like fireflies. We pretended they weren’t there. They wanted to look, that’s all; they never waded across, not even in the summer, when the sun dried up the stream like blotting paper.

The growl got louder, closer.

The men in our village weren’t saints. We had our incidents. Rape, ruin, shame. The women’s strategy was to stick together. Stragglers, beware. That morning I thought, Let it come. Let him pounce. I had the staff.

But that morning the enemy wasn’t human. First I saw only the head. A pink-skinned, nearly hairless, twitching
animal head. The head thrust itself through the bush, brambles stuck deep into its bleeding jowls.

Behind me women screamed. Water pots fell. Two women crawled, like crabs, loosened salwars around naked and frozen feet, toward the bank. Most were locked in a crouch. Fear stippled their naked haunches.

“Cowards!” I aimed my cry at the line of bidi smokers. “We know you are there! Please help us!”

The animal whipped its head back; the head was bloodied and monstrous. Then it started to drag itself noisily to the trash pit. A cow mulching garbage backed away. Peacocks hopped out of range. Only buzzards brooded from low-hanging trees; crows squawked.

“A mad dog!” I heard the women’s chorus. “Help! Please help!”

A dog, but not a dog. It was bigger than a pariah, much bigger than a jackal, almost the size of a wolf. But this one didn’t move like a wolf. It circled the pit, it sidled and snuck around like a jackal. A dog that dragged its hind legs. A dog that danced, jerkily, as it walked. The dog headed back for us. Its eyes glowed red, its slack jaws foamed.

I hated all dogs, distrusted their motives. I hated this dog because it had made terrified naked women crab-crawl.

The staff whacked brush.

The dog stopped twenty feet from me. It looked straight at me out of those red eyes. Then it spun on its front legs and squared off. Tremors raised pink ridges on its hairless sides. It stopped so close to me I could see flies stuck in the viscous drool. I knew it had come for me, not for the other
women. It had picked me as its enemy. I wasn’t ready to die. I’d seen a rabid man die horribly outside the mustached doctor’s clinic.

I let the dog inch so close I could feel a slimy vapor spray out of its muzzle. I let it crouch and growl its low, terrible, gullety growl. I took aim and waited for it to leap on me.

The staff crushed the dog’s snout while it was still in mid-leap. Spiny twigs hooked deep into its nostrils and split them open. I saw all this as I lay on the winter-hard ground.

The women helped me up. One of them poked the wounded animal with a twig. It lay on its back, its legs pumping outward like a turtle’s. My staff was still stuck deep into the snout, its bloody tip poking through an eye socket. Blood plumed its raw sides. I’d never seen that much blood. The women dragged the body to the nullah and let it float away.

They brought me home and made a fuss over me. Dida said, “All it means is that God doesn’t think you’re ready for salvation. Individual effort counts for nothing.” The next day, defeated, she left for her ashram.

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