One Part Woman (3 page)

In those times, the region around Tiruchengode was covered with forests. It was the Gounders who converted it into cultivable land. In the beginning, while they were engaged in this daunting task, they would also take their herds of cattle to graze in this area. Young men went daringly into the forest for this reason. Once, four such daring youths went herding their goats. In the heat of midday, they heard a female voice screaming in agony from within the forest.

There were many ghost stories about the forest. At first they thought it was the snare of Mohini who was said to bewitch young men. But the voice sounded steady and human, so they walked in its direction, although fearfully. It was autumn, and the trees had all shed their leaves and were standing bare. Only the neem and palm trees were lush, with their foliage still intact. Then they saw her sitting under a palm tree, wearing only a chequered wrap around her waist. Her breasts had freshly blossomed. She was a forest dweller, fourteen or fifteen years of age.

The boys knew that tribal people lived in the forest. Once in a while, they ventured into the town in tens or fifteens to barter things in exchange for what they needed. They were not an agrarian community. They ate roots, shoots and fruits. Millets were the only grains they accepted from the fields.

The girl was from that community. Some adolescent anger had made her leave her haven and reach the edge of the forest. She was determined to stay there until her people came looking for her. At first, the four men looked at her with sympathy. But it dawned on them that the girl was all alone, and they were soon overcome with the urge of youth. Even though she was a girl made strong by life in the forest, she could not fight the hard-work-forged strength of the four young men. She could do nothing. Not only did they ravish her, they also strangled her to death and rolled her into a ditch in the forest. They might have thought that that would ensure their safety. But on the third day, an unidentifiable fragrance of a tree rose from the pit where she lay, and spread all around. Her people followed the scent and eventually found her dead body.

The four men fled the town fearing the arrows of the tribal people. No one knew what happened to them. Many stories flourished. Some said they hanged themselves. Some even said they went away to a distant country and were happily married. Time went by; the forest was gradually uprooted and turned into cultivable land.

Once, during a famine, when a few people went westward herding their cattle, they were surprised to see their family
deity, Karia Kali, enshrined there. When they asked around about it, they were told that the goddess had been brought there by ancestors who came from distant lands. No one knew the name of that faraway place—it seemed that the ancestors had failed to mention it. Some people presumed that the ancestors being spoken about were, in fact, the same four young men who had fled the place ages ago. The descendants of those four men would thus be long-lost relatives with whom these people now reconnected.

But it was also believed that the tribal girl’s curse hounded even those families that dared to associate with them: ‘Pavatha, our goddess who resides up in that hill, will seek justice from those who did this to me. No girl child will ever be born in their families. Even the male children shall grow up to be impotent and die young.’

This curse of the tribal girl persisted till today. That was why no girl child had been born in this lineage. Even those that were born had died in a day or two. The men, too, had truncated lives.

Kali’s grandmother narrated all this and launched into a dirge. She lamented the fact that she could not keep the family secret from him. But she tried to bolster his faith: ‘Dear one, you have a good heart. You will have four or five children, and you will live to be a hundred.’

Kali wondered if he too would die young. But a little faith grew in his heart, that a child might actually be born, even if he would grow up to be impotent. Was childbirth getting delayed to postpone his early death? A child could
be born even when he was forty. And he might live to see it for eight or ten years. That was what had happened to his father and grandfather.

He did not remember his father’s face clearly. But there was one image that was etched in his mind, thanks to his mother’s periodic narration of it. His father had always suffered from severe abdominal pain. Toddy and arrack were his staple food. ‘My Kalimma’ was how he used to lovingly address Kali, and he took Kali on his shoulders wherever he went. It is likely that the way he addressed Kali expressed his sadness at not having a girl child. So Kali wondered if he too would have a male child and live to be fifty years or so. Wasn’t that enough?

As if she read his thoughts, Ponna ruffled his hair and pulled him close to her breast. When she heard what his grandmother had to share, she lamented her fate at having to marry into a family with so many curses weighing it down. But Kali’s suffering made her forget her own. She feared she might have to part with him soon. Other than the lack of a child they could call their own, there was nothing else missing in their lives. He fulfilled every wish of hers, perhaps because he had married her out of love.

The day he found out that his mother and his wife did not get along, he asked his mother to cook her own food. She made a scene, crying, ‘I gave birth to just one son, and I struggled so much to bring you up.’

He said, ‘I have not gone away anywhere. I am right here next door. And I take care of you in all other ways. What’s
the point in staying together when you two cannot get along? This might improve your relationship.’ And it happened just like he said. In fact, sometimes the two women even got together and turned on Kali, making it doubly hard for him. Now that they had been told the story of the tribal girl and her curse, both the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law were adamant that something had to be done in recompense. But as for what exactly needed to be done, they did not know.

Kali’s grandmother once said, ‘Pavatha still resides in the hill in Tiruchengode. It is enough if you make offerings of new clothes and pray to her. Gods cannot be angry with people for too long.’ The astrologer Nadar also agreed with her.

Kali had scaled the hill several times as a young boy. He had wandered around there with other boys. But he knew nothing about the temple. He only knew that Sengottayan and Ardhanareeswara took up either side of the hill. Every morning, before she had her food, his grandmother turned in the direction of the hill and prayed, ‘Sengottayan, Pavatha.’

He went up the hill and spoke to the Brahmin priest: ‘We need to conduct a prayer for Pavatha.’ The priest gave him an appraising look, and said, ‘Who told you to?’ Kali told him about his grandmother and the story she had narrated.

‘Pavatha is no one but Ardhanareeswara himself,’ sermonized the priest. ‘Only people who do not know that tell these stories. For hundreds of years, our family has been conducting rituals for the half-female god. Many saints have sung his praise, calling him “Mother God”, “One Part
Woman”, and so on. The male and female together make the world. To show that to us, the Lord stands here combined with the Goddess. In other temples, you would see separate shrines for Eeswaran and Ambal. But here they stand together as one. He has given her the left half of his body. It is only when we give half of ourselves—both body and mind—to the woman that we can be good husbands. Even though we are born male, we also have feminine qualities within us. Considering all this, elders have called him One Part Woman. There is no female without the male, and no male without the female. The world goes on only when they come together. Did you see the deity? The right side is Eeswaran; the left is Ambal. This is the only place where you get this vision. No matter how many names we address him by, they all refer to this Eeswaran. But the poor illiterate people call him Pavatha. Some people even say this is Kannagi. What can one say about such ignorance? We just have to keep quiet, assured that everything is Eeswaran.’

At the end of the conversation, Kali gave the priest the fifty rupees he had asked for. Buying new clothes for the deity was a separate responsibility. Ardhanareeswara is male and female fused into one. What great pleasure it is to stay as one, body to body, forever! Only god gets to enjoy such great pleasure. Kali had to buy two kinds of clothes.

All his in-laws came for the ceremony. It was a great crowd. The expenses were huge too. When the preparations for the ritual were on, they walked around the temple. There was a small dip in the hill between the temple and the peak of
the hill. This was a small forest with thorny bushes and trees that were perhaps several centuries old. The dense foliage reverberated with the furious chirping of a variety of birds. A long mountain rock formed a border around this little forest, lying like a giant serpent on guard. Kali was wonderstruck seeing such a forest at this altitude.

He and Muthu had played here as children. They would run up to the peak and touch the rock there. They’d leap around the slopes with the ease of wild goats and monkeys. But this forest had never before revealed itself as a separate entity to him. He had been one with it before. But as he grew older, he began seeing things as separate from himself. He now looked at the forest in great surprise.

Muthu must have felt the same way, for he said, ‘We have roamed inside this. But I have never seen it this way.’

They looked around for a path to enter the forest. Birds and animals had forged a warren of paths through the forest. En route to the rock at the peak, a narrow path branched off and led into this jungle. Muthu and Kali entered it in great delight. A mongoose, alarmed by this sudden human presence, ran and hid under a bush. The path led directly to a tree. When they looked to the other side of the tree, they saw a huge reclining figure. Fear seized Kali and, holding Muthu’s hand in a firm grip, he walked ahead.

It was an earthen goddess. Vermilion had been scattered all over her body, and her face was aglow with wrath. But there was a faint smile at the corners of her lips. He felt the smile revealed a defiance that said, ‘What can you do to me?’
When he stood at her feet, she appeared to be lying there with the full confidence that the entire land was hers. Her arms and legs were as big as the trunks of trees. She had a round face, and her wide-open eyes met his in an unwavering stare. Even when Kali averted his gaze, he could still feel her eyes boring deep into him. Trying to shake off the fear the forest had induced in them, he said, ‘What goddess is she?’

And they heard a voice: ‘She is Pavatha, our Mother, our goddess.’

For a moment, it felt as though the forest itself had spoken. But they turned to see that an elderly woman, carrying a pot, was walking down the narrow path towards the spot. She had two children with her. It was she who had answered Kali’s question.

Around the earthen goddess were small rocks planted firmly in the ground and laid out in a circle. Beside these, in a concealed spot, were three pots and bags. Kali gathered that the elderly woman had come to make an offering of rice porridge to the goddess. The woman’s ears were covered with jewellery.

‘Our Pavatha lies right here under the cool shade of the tree and with a stream nearby,’ she said. ‘But they try to keep her locked in the temple and pray. She roams freely around the forest. Can you confine her within walls? Our Mother lies right here, while they are just praying to plain rock.’

‘Where are you from, ma?’ asked Kali.

The children who had come with her started playing in the forest. They ran around, climbed the trees and jumped
from them. Their laughter and chatter sounded like birdsong. The woman replied as she proceeded to get things ready for cooking the pongal: ‘We are from the other bank, thambi. Ages ago, it was from here that we migrated. Even though we had to move away, seeking livelihood, our Mother refused to come. She told us very clearly that if we needed her we should come and see her here. So we come once a year like this, perform a ritual, offer pongal and eat. We have been told that our people used to live around this hill. When the forest was destroyed, they got scattered in different directions. Some people are able to visit during the chariot festival in the month of Vaigasi. That’s when they gather here. Otherwise, people like me only visit whenever we can. Now, some ten or fifteen of us have come. They have gone to the temple. But what do I have to see in the temple when my Mother lies here? So I came here to get this ready.’

It occurred to Kali that he too needed to pray and offer pongal to this goddess. This was Pavatha, the goddess who had claimed a space for herself in this spot between the red rocks of the mountains. Reclining on the earth, she had even made a forest around herself. She was the goddess whose wrath had been invoked ages ago by the tribal girl’s curse; she was still here, untouched by the ravages of time. He knelt at her feet. But then, shuddering at the thought that even a slight movement of her feet could hit him in the face, he backed off a little.

‘Who conducts the prayers to this goddess?’ he asked the old woman.

‘How can we let anyone else carry out the prayers for our goddess? We do it by ourselves. Some of our people live in this town, too. One of them comes and conducts the prayers once a week. Wherever we are, we save five rupees a year and send it to him,’ she said.

‘I want to have a prayer conducted, mother,’ he said.

‘Do it with pleasure. Come one afternoon—any afternoon. The priest will be here. Ask him and do whatever you need to do. Remember, you should keep a trident and cut open a rooster and offer its blood. Those are the important things. If you wish, you can also join me today to partake in these offerings.’

Kali was no longer keen on the prayers the Brahmin priest conducted in the temple on the hill. Nor did he care about the extra expenses. He was determined that it was Pavatha to whom he wanted to make the offerings. Whatever he earned working hard in the fields got spent in such prayers and offerings. But it didn’t matter. It was not as if he had children amongst whom to divide his earnings.