The Faith of Ashish (13 page)

"Are you all right?" Latha asked.

Sethu nodded, though she certainly didn't look all right." Come to my house and lie down," Latha said. "Virat and Ashish are away. You can rest for a bit."

"Did you hear what my husband Anup said when he saw that tribal savage with all his children trailing behind him?"

"No. What did he say?"

"First Hilmi said he regretted having so many children, and then Anup said, 'I shouldn't have so many children, either, but they happen. It is God's will.' "

Latha said nothing.

"I'm going to have another one," Sethu said.

Latha stared at her in surprise. "Is Anup angry with you?"

"He doesn't know. But I cannot wait any longer to tell him. Oh, Latha, we will have still another mouth to feed! Anup will be most displeased."

But before Latha could respond, Sethu brightened a bit. "But this one—I am certain this baby will be a boy. After four girls, the gods have to smile on me and give me a son."

"Yes," Latha said. "This one will be a fine, healthy baby boy."

"Anup blames me for all the daughters," Sethu said. "His family will fade away, he tells me, and it is my fault. The two of us will die working in the fields, he says, because we have no one to care for us in our old age. But now, finally, we will have a son who—"

"I like your daughters," Latha said. "They are kind and good workers too."

"They are a burden, is what. It will be very hard to get them all married. Where will we get the money to pay four dowries? Devi is now in her tenth year. I wish we could find a husband for her very soon."

Everyone whispered about the tribal family, but Hilmi and Jeeja didn't seem to hear them or to care. They stayed to themselves. They worked hard in the fields, but seldom spoke to anyone. The two older girls and the boys also went to the fields each day, even though the youngest boy could not have been more than eight years old.

"The tiger will take him next," the villagers whispered to one another.

The tiniest tribal girl stayed alone in the palm-frond hut all day long by herself. Ashish told his mother he never saw her come out.

On the night of the full moon, a cloudless evening particularly bright and clear, the men sat together and talked while the women clustered together around the well. To everyone's surprise, Hilmi came outside and sat down—but alone and a bit away from the other men. Jeeja crept out, too, though she hung back from everyone, including her husband, and hunkered down beside a tree where she could watch the others in her dark, suspicious way.

"You are a fisherman, then?" Virat called over to Hilmi.

Hilmi wobbled his head in the singular way of South Indians that meant yes. "From the far away waterways," he said.

"Do you have wheat fields there?" another man asked.

Hilmi moved a bit closer to the men. "Rice paddies," he said. "People call our land
Kuttand."

"Land of the short people?" Virat asked. "Look at you. You are small but not so very short."

Hilmi laughed and moved still closer to the circle of men. "It is because the men in my area are always standing up to their knees in water. Either they are working in rice paddies or standing in the water casting out their fishing nets. People on land only see them above their knees, so they look short."

"Why are you here?" Anup asked.

"Too little rain," Hilmi said. The lakes have dried up and the fish lie dead on the muddy bottom. When the rains come back and the rivers flow once more, we will have fish again. Then I will gladly go home and throw out my nets."

"And sit under the mango trees when the moon is full and talk about us?" another man asked with a laugh.

"I will sit in the sand, in the shadow of a coconut tree as it waves in the cool wind, and watch the night birds," Hilmi said. "I will think of you not at all."

In the cluster of women, Sethu hissed to whomever would listen, "Why did the landlord have to bring those savages here? Even polluted untouchable land is further polluted by their presence."

Latha shot a quick glance at Jeeja. Her black eyes, hard and guarded, fixed on the circle of women.

"Maybe more workers have already been taken by the tiger," another woman suggested. "Just because we don't know doesn't mean it isn't so."

"The landlord should not have brought them here!" Sethu insisted. "They are savages. They do not belong with us."

That night, when Hilmi went out to prop up his sagging hut, one of his neighbors crept up from behind and, with his knife glinting in the moonlight, lunged at Hilmi.

"I thought he was a thief," the neighbor insisted as he limped away, battered from the encounter. Hilmi, untouched, never turned around to look back at the treacherous neighbor he had beaten off.

T
he next morning, the same as every other morning, Hilmi and his family gathered a bit away from the other workers as they prepared to go to the fields. No one mentioned the knife attack. But Hilmi's family held close together, and Jeeja's eyes, deep and dark in her sunken face, were more watchful and suspicious than ever.

Already Ashish had begun his search for firewood. "You must be sure the other laborers see what a hard worker you are," Virat told his son. "When we leave for the fields and when we come back in the evening, those are the times you must pay particular attention and work hard."

But not only Ashish scrounged for the hard-to-find pieces of wood. The sun rose higher and higher in the sky, yet his pile of sticks didn't grow. Desperate, Ashish decided to do what both his father and mother had strictly forbidden. He decided to climb over the piled-up rocks that separated the outer edges of the courtyard from the beginnings of the thick woods. As he stood on top of the rocks, Little Girl called out to him.

"Ashish! The master landowner's servant came looking for my
amma.
I must go to the wheat fields to get her, but I'm scared to go by myself. Will you come with me? Please?"

"I'm supposed to find firewood," Ashish said doubtfully." My
appa
will be angry with me if I—"

"I know. But if you go with me, when we get back, I'll help you find wood." Little Girl's lower lip trembled. "
Please?"

So Ashish carried his meager stack of wood to the hut, then followed Little Girl to her hut and waited while she closed her little sister inside. "Stay here, Baby!" Little Girl ordered. Baby banged on the door and started to cry. "If you go out the door or make noise, I will come back and hit you hard!" Little Girl threatened.

Ashish and Little Girl ran to the edge of the settlement and headed down the pathway that led to the fields.

"Lidya's supposed to go get
Amma
when the master wants her," Little Girl said. "But the servant couldn't find Lidya anywhere."

"Why does the master landowner want your
amma?"

"Because a fancy lady is ready to have her baby. When fancy ladies have babies, they always call my
amma
to help."

Little Girl led Ashish past the grain storage sheds, then on toward the fields. "If we see the tiger, we must run back very, very fast," she said.

Ashish recognized the path. It was the same way his father had taken with him when they went to give his
chapati
to the bull. Fences fashioned from sharp thorn bushes surrounded the storage sheds and fields, and the path led between those thorny fences.

"I know what those prickles are for," Ashish said.

"What?"

"To keep the cows and the bull from eating up everything in the field. My
appa
told me so."

"Maybe they will keep the tiger from eating us too," Little Girl said.

Off to one side, a pool of water stood stagnant and muddy. Once the monsoon rains started, it would turn into a flowing stream. But before that time came, the sun would grow hotter and hotter, and the pool would dry completely into brick-hard clay. Ashish leapt off the path and squished his feet through the mud. Little Girl, laughing out loud, followed him.

"
Amma, Amma!"
Little Girl yelled when she saw her mother in the distance. "Come quickly! The master landlord's servant came for you!"

By the time the workers came in for the evening, Ashish stood proudly beside an impressive stack of firewood. He smiled through the praise and said nothing about Little Girl's help.

When Devi came in from her work in the master's garden, a fresh cabbage tucked under her arm, she found Little Girl and Baby waiting alone beside the cold fire pit.

"Where is Lidya? Why is she not cooking our evening meal?" Devi asked.

"She had to go with
Amma
to help a fancy lady have a baby," Little Girl told her.

Devi sighed. They could be gone all night. Maybe tomorrow and tomorrow night too.

"But I got wood all ready for the fire," Little Girl said.

Devi didn't answer. Her father would be hungry, so she hurried to start the evening meal. Every evening, Anup returned to the hut long after everyone else, but he was the first to sit down and eat his meal. Sethu ate next, and the girls last. That's how it was in every family—unless the family had sons, in which case the sons ate second, after the father. But always the girls ate last.

Untouchable women think nothing of working throughout their pregnancies. It's expected of them. Many give birth in the fields, wrap the baby in a
chaddar,
and get right back to work. Not women of the highest castes, though. No, no, for them a great deal of fuss is made over an upcoming birth. Special foods prepared . . . painstaking ministrations provided . . . gifts and treats lavished on them . . . anything they might fancy, they get. And when the baby is ready to come, they send for a midwife. Mammen Samuel Varghese's large extended household preferred Sethu.

When Sethu's midwifery duties were finished the following day, she headed directly back to the fields to resume work there.

"So, you are midwife for the landowner's family," Latha said as she stacked a bundle of wheat stalks and held them for Sethu to tie. "Do they pay you for your services?"

"Not always. Not if the baby is a boy." In answer to Latha's puzzled look, Sethu said, "Bringing a boy into the world is part of my job. But if the baby is a girl . . . and if they don't want a girl . . . I get rid of it for them. They pay me for that."

Latha stared at her friend. "You kill baby girls?"

"It's for the baby's own good."

"Sethu!"

"What kind of life is it to be a girl?" Sethu demanded. "What kind of life is it to be a woman?"

As he did every day at noon, Mammen Samuel Varghese took to his bed and rested through the hottest part of the day as his servant Babu waved a fan in an endless effort to stir up a cooling breeze over him. But in the late afternoon, when the sun ceased its relentless heat, Mammen Samuel called for his son Boban Joseph.

"Bring the horse and small cart," he ordered. "I want to inspect the progress of the wheat harvest."

But on its way to the harvested field, the cart passed alongside the farthest field where no harvesters had yet begun to work.

"Stop the cart!" Mammen Samuel ordered.

A barren patch stretched out to one side where a large, ragged swath had been chopped through the ripe field.

"What happened here?" Mammen Samuel roared in dismay.

"I don't know, Father," Boban Joseph said. "Maybe the tiger—"

Mammen Samuel hefted himself from the cart. He glared at the stubble left from the chopped-off stalks. Anger surged through him, and he ripped out a handful of the stubble. "Take me to Anup!" he ordered.

"But, Father, you haven't yet seen the harvested field."

"Now!" Mammen Samuel ordered.

Boban Joseph whipped the horse to a full trot and kept the poor animal trotting briskly all the way along the path between the thorn fences. They entered the settlement with the landowner bellowing, "Anup! An—up!"

Devi had just laid a bowl of rice and vegetables before her father, but Anup jumped up and ran to answer his master's call. Mammen Samuel held out the handful of chopped wheat stalks, clods of dirt still clinging to the roots. "These are from my fresh field! What is the meaning of this?"

Anup stared at the stalks. He fell to his knees before the landowner. "Thieves, Master. Thieves must have come in the night."

"Thieves! But what of the watchman?"

"No watchman stays through the night now, Master. For fear of the tiger."

"Tonight there
will
be a watchman!" Mammen Samuel ordered. "All night long. You see to it!"

"Yes, Master," Anup said. "I will have a man on the watchman's platform in the center of the field tonight."

"No, no," said Mammen Samuel. "I want the watchman to sleep on the ground and to move himself around to different parts of the fields during the night. I want the watchman's presence felt in every part of every field."

"It will be done, Master," Anup said.

For a long while after Mammen Samuel's cart had rolled back up the path between the thorn-bush fences, Anup stood alone. He unwound the
chaddar
turban from his head and mopped his face with it. With a sigh, he headed for Hilmi's hut.

Early the next morning, Ashish started his usual search for firewood. But already his most promising places had been picked clean. By midday, his stack consisted of nothing but a meager handful of twigs. Maybe Little Girl would help him. She always had good ideas for places to look. He went to her hut ready to call out for her when he heard cries coming from inside. Ashish knew that both Anup and Sethu had to be at work in the fields, and that Devi worked in the landlord's garden all day. He had just seen Lidya sweeping the main courtyard, so he knew she wasn't in the hut.

Ashish tiptoed to the door and pushed it open. Inside he saw the back of the master's big son, Boban Joseph. Devi, who was supposed to be working in the landlord's garden, huddled beside him. She pleaded with him to leave her alone. Boban Joseph shoved Devi, knocking her hard against the floor. She tried to push him away, but he made a fist and smashed it into her face.

"Devi?" Ashish whispered. "What are you doing?"

"Go away!" Boban Joseph ordered.

But Ashish suddenly felt as though his legs were made of solid wood. He told them to run away, but they wouldn't move. He had no choice but to stand and stare.

Boban Joseph kicked at Devi. He hit her again, then growled something that Ashish couldn't understand.

"Please, please, Ashish, go away!" Devi pleaded.

But Ashish could not. When the little boy didn't leave, Boban Joseph jumped up, shoved past him, and rushed out of the hut.

"Devi?" Ashish whispered.

"Go away!" Devi ordered.

That evening, when Latha went to get wood for the cook pit, she chided Ashish for the small pile he had collected. "You know what your
appa
told you," Latha said. "If you don't work hard enough, and collect enough wood, you will be sent to the fields." Usually when she said this, excuses and apologies tumbled out of Ashish's mouth, and promises to work harder tomorrow. But this time he bowed his head and said nothing.

"Well?" said Latha. "Have you no explanation? Were you so busy playing with Little Girl today that you could not do your work?"

Still the boy said nothing.

"You know what Sethu says. She says, 'A child who does not work can eat dirt.' Do you want to eat dirt?"

"The master landlord's big boy hurt Devi," Ashish whispered.

Latha set her water pot down. "What? How do you know this?"

"I saw him," Ashish said. At his mother's prodding, the boy told her everything that had happened.