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Authors: Gary Jennings

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“Very well.”
Rather sulkily, she covered herself again, and the numerous Malayu who had congregated behind nearby deckhouses and things dispersed again about their business.
“I will not,” Tofaa said stiffly, “enumerate the Hindu qualifications for beauty in the male, Marco-wallah, since you fall lamentably short of them. You are not even handsome. A handsome man’s eyebrows meet above the bridge of his nose, and his nose is long and pendulous. My dear late husband’s nose was as long as his royal pedigree. But as I say, I will not list your shortcomings. It would not be ladylike of me.”
“By all means, Tofaa, be ladylike.”
She may have been a beauty by Hindu standards—in truth, she was, as I later was often told by admiring Hindu men, openly envying me my companion—but I could think of no other people that would have judged her even passable, except possibly the Mien or the Bho. Despite Tofaa’s daily and highly visible and well-attended ablutions, she somehow never got quite clean. There was always that measle on her forehead, of course, and always a gray scurf about her ankles and a darker gray curd between her toes. But while I cannot say that the rest of her, from the measle down to the curd, was ever actually, in the Mien and Bho manner, encrusted, it
was
always just perceptibly dingy.
Back in Pagan, Hui-sheng had gone always barefoot in the Ava fashion, and Arùn had done so all her life, and even after a day of padding about the dusty city streets, their feet had always been, even before bath time, kissably clean and sweet. I honestly could not understand how Tofaa always managed to have such dirty feet, especially out here on the sea, where there was nothing to smirch them but fresh breezes and sparkling spindrift. It might have had something to do with the India-nut oil with which she coated all her exposed skin after each day’s washing. Her late dear husband had left her with very little in the way of personal possessions: not much but a leather flask of the nut oil and a leather bag that contained a quantity of wood chips. As her employer, I had voluntarily bought her a new wardrobe of the sari fabrics and other necessities. But she had regarded the leather containers as necessities, too, and brought them along. I had known that the oil of India-nut was to keep herself glistening in that unattractively greasy way. But I had no notion of what the wood chips were for—until one day, when she did not emerge from her cabin at mealtime, I tapped on her door and she bade me come in.
Tofaa was squatting in her immodest bathing position, and facing me, but her thicket was hidden by a small ceramic pot she was pressing to her crotch. Before I could make my excuses and step back out of the cabin, she calmly lifted the pot away from herself. It was the sort of pot used for brewing cha, and the spout of it came sliding, slick with secretions, out from among the hair. That would have been surprising enough, but even more so was the fact that the spout was emitting blue smoke. Tofaa had evidently put into the pot some of those wood chips, and set them smoldering, and stuck the smoking spout up inside herself. I had seen women play with themselves before, and with a variety of playthings, but never with
smoke,
and I told her so.
“Decent women do not play with themselves,” she said reprovingly. “That is what men are for. No, Marco-wallah, daintiness of the
inside
of one’s person is more to be desired than any merely exterior
appearance
of being clean. The application of nim-wood smoke is an age-old and cleanly practice of us fastidious Hindu women, and I do this for your sake, though little you appreciate it.”
I frankly saw little there to appreciate: a plump, greasy, dark-brown female squatting on the cabin floor, with her legs shamelessly apart, and the entrapped blue smoke oozing lazily up through her dense bush. I could have remarked that
some
exterior daintiness might have improved her chances of attracting someone nearer to her interior, but I chivalrously refrained.
“Nim-wood smoke is a preventive of unexpected pregnancy,” she went on. “It also makes the kaksha parts fragrant and tasty, should anyone happen to nuzzle or browse there. That is why I do this. Just in case you should sometime be overwhelmed by your brute passions, Marco-wallah, and seize me against my will, despite my pleas for mercy, and fling yourself upon me without giving me time to make ready, and force your rigid sthanu through my chaste but soft defenses, I take this precaution of administering the nim-wood smoke every day.”
“Tofaa, I wish you would stop.”
“You
want
me to?” Her eyes widened, and so must her yoni have done, for a voluminous puff of the blue smoke came suddenly up from there. “You
want
me to bear your children?”
“Gèsu. I want you to cease this everlasting preoccupation with matters below the waist. I engaged you to be my interpreter, and I am already shuddering for fear of what words you are likely to speak, ostensibly mine. But right now, Tofaa, our rice and goat meat are getting wet with salt spray. Come and put something in your other end.”
I really believed, at that time, that in choosing a Hindu woman for my translator in India, I had unfortunately chosen a particularly unlovely and witless and pathetic specimen. How she had come to be the consort of a king was beyond my comprehension, but I sympathized more than ever with that wretched man, and thought I better understood now why he had thrown away a kingdom and his life. But I have here recounted a few of Tofaa’s charmless attributes—only a few of them—and have repeated some of her fatuous garrulity—only some of it—by way of making her both visible and audible in all her awfulness. I do that because, on arriving in India, I discovered to my horror that Tofaa was
not
an anomaly. She was an unexceptional and purely typical adult Hindu female. From a crowd of Hindu women, whatever the assortment of classes, or jati, I could hardly have picked out Tofaa. Worse yet, I found the women to be immeasurably superior to the Hindu men.
In my journeying I had got acquainted with numerous other races and nations before visiting those of India. I had concluded that the Mien droppings of the Bho of To-Bhot had to be the lowest breed of mankind, and I had been mistaken. If the Mien represented humanity’s ground level, then the Hindus were its worm burrows. In some of those countries I had earlier inhabited or visited, I could not help seeing that some of the people despised and detested other people—for their different language or their lesser refinement or their lower class in society or their peculiar ways of life or their choice of religion. But in India I could not help seeing that
everybody
despised and detested everybody else, and for all those reasons.
Let me be as fair as I can. Let me say that I was in some small error from the start, in thinking of all Indians as Hindus. Tofaa informed me that “Hindu” was only a variant of the name “Indian,” and properly referred only to those Indians who practiced the Hindu religion of Sanatana Dharma, or Eternal Duty. Those preferred to be dignified by the name of “Brahmanists,” after the chief god (Brahma the Creator) of the three chief gods (the other two being Vishnu the Preserver and Siva the Destroyer) of their numberless multitude of gods. Other Hindus had picked out some lesser god from that mob—Varuna, Krishna, Hanuman, whoever—and gave more devotion to that one, and thereby rated themselves superior to the greater ruck of Hindus. Many others of the population had adopted the Muslim religion seeping in from the north and west. A very few Indians still practiced Buddhism. That religion, after originating in India and spreading afar, had almost died out in its homeland, possibly because it enjoined cleanliness. Still other Indians followed other religions or sects or cults: Jain, Sikh, Yoga, Zarduchi. In all their teeming diversity and jumble and overlap of faiths, however, the Indian people maintained one holy attribute in common: the adherents of every religion despised and detested the adherents of every other.
The Indians did not much like, either, to be lumped all together as “Indians.” They were a seething and still unmixed caldron of different races, or so they claimed. There were the Cholas, the Aryans, Sindi, Bhils, Bangali, Gonds … I do not know how many. The lighter brown Indians called themselves
white,
and claimed they were descended from fair-haired, pale-eyed ancestors who came from somewhere far to the north. If that was ever true, then there had since been so much intermingling that, over the centuries, the darker browns and blacks of the southern races had predominated—as mud does when poured into milk —and all the Indians were now but shades and tints of muddy brown. None was of any color worth boasting about, and the insignificant differences of hue served only as one more basis for their abhorring each other. The lighter brown ones could sneer at the darker brown, and they at the indisputably black.
Also, depending on their race, tribe, family lineage, place of original origin and place of current habitation, the Indians spoke
one hundred seventy-nine
different languages, hardly any two of them mutually comprehensible, and every one was deemed by its speakers the One True and Holy Tongue (though few of them ever bothered to learn to read and write it, if indeed it had a script or character or alphabet to be written in, which not many did), and the speakers of every True Tongue scorned and reviled those who spoke any False Tongue, which meant any of the one hundred and seventy-eight others.
Whatever their race, religion, tribe, or tongue,
all
the Indians spinelessly submitted to a social order imposed by the Brahmanists. That was the order of jati, which divided the people into four rigid classes and an overflow of discards. Jati having been first devised by some long-ago Brahman priests, their own descendants naturally constituted the highest class, called Brahman. Next were the descendants of long-ago warriors—
very
long ago, I surmised; I saw no man of the present day who could conceivably be imagined as a warrior—next, the descendants of long-ago merchants, and last the descendants of long-ago humble artisans. Those would have been the bottommost order, but there were also the discards, the paraiyar, or “untouchables,” who could claim no jati at all. A man or woman born into any of the jati could not associate with anyone born into a higher, and of course would not with anyone of a lower. Marriages and alliances and business transactions were done only between matching jati, so the classes were eternally perpetuated, and a person could no more ascend to a higher one than he could ascend to the clouds. Meanwhile, the paraiyar dared not even let their defiling shadow fall on anyone of jati.
No person in India—except, I suppose, a Hindu of the Brahman class—was pleased with the jati he found himself born into. Every lower-jati person I met was anxious to tell me how his forebears had, in the long-ago, occupied a much nobler class, and had been undeservedly debased through the influence or trickery or sorcery of some enemy. Nevertheless, all preened in the fact that they were of higher order than
somebody
else, even if only the vile paraiyar. And any of the paraiyar could always point derisively to some still more miserable paraiyar to whom
he
was superior. What was most contemptible about the jati order was not that it existed, and had existed for ages, but that all the people caught in its toils—not just Hindus, but every single soul in India—willingly let it go on existing. Any other people, with the least scintilla of courage and sense and self-respect would long ago have abolished it, or died trying. The Hindus never had even tried, and I saw no sign that they ever would.
It is not impossible that even a people as degenerate as the Bho and Mien may have improved in the years since I was last among them, and made something halfway decent of themselves and their country. But, from what travelers’ report I have had of India in these later years, nothing has changed there. To this day, if a Hindu ever feels bad about his being one of the dregs of humankind, he has only to look about for some other Hindu he feels better than, and he can feel good. And that satisfies him.
Since it would have been unwieldy for me to try to identify every person I met in India according to all his entitlements of race, religion, jati and language—one man might be simultaneously a Chola, a Jain, a Brahman and a Tamil-speaker—and since the whole population, in any event, was under the sway of the Hindu jati order, I continued to think indiscriminately of them all as Hindus, and to call them all Hindus, and I still do. If the fastidious Lady Tofaa considered that an improper or derogatory appellation I did not and do not care. I could think of numerous epithets more fitting and a lot worse.
 
THE Cholamandal was the most dreary and uninviting shore I ever sailed to. All along it, the sea and land merely and indistinctly blended, in coastal flats that were nothing but reedy, weedy, miasmal marshes created by a multitude of creeks and rivulets flowing sluggishly out from India’s distant interior. The merging of land and water was so gradual that vessels had to anchor three or four li out in the bay, where there was keel room. We made landfall off a village called Kuddalore, where we found a motley fleet of fishing and pearl-fishing boats already riding at anchor, with little dinghis ferrying their crewmen and cargoes back and forth from the anchorage to the almost invisible village far inland across the mud flats. Our captain adroitly maneuvered our qurqur among the fleet, while Tofaa leaned over the rail and peered at the Hindus aboard the other vessels and occasionally shouted queries at them.
“None of these,” she finally reported to me, “is the pearl-fisher boat that was at Akyab.”
“Well,” said the captain, also to me, “this Cholamandal pearl coast is a good three hundred farsakhs from north to south. Or, if you prefer, more than two thousand li. I hope you are not going to suggest that I cruise up and down its whole length.”
“No,” said Tofaa. “I think, Marco-wallah, we ought to go inland to the nearest Chola capital, which is Kumbakonam. Since all pearls are royal property, and go ultimately to the Raja, he can probably easiest direct us to the fisher we seek.”
“Very well,” I said, and to the captain, “If you will hail a dinghi to take us ashore, we will leave you here, and we thank you for the safe crossing. Salaam aleikum.”
While a scrawny little black dinghi-man rowed us across the brackish bay water, then poled us through the fetid marshes toward the distant Kuddalore, I asked Tofaa, “What is a Raja? A king, a Wang, what?”
“A king,” she said. “Two or three hundred years ago reigned the best and fiercest and wisest king the Chola kingdom ever had, and his name was King Rajaraja the Great. So ever since, in tribute to him and in hope of emulating him, the rulers of Chola—and most other Indian nations, as well—have taken his name as their title of majesty.”
Well, that was no uncommon sort of appropriation even in our Western world. Caesar had originally been a Roman family name, but became a title of office, and in the form of Kaiser remains so for the rulers of the more recent Holy Roman Empire, and in the form of Czar is used by the petty rulers of the many trivial Slavic nations. But I was to discover that the Hindu monarchs were not satisfied just to appropriate the former Raja’s name—that was not pretentious enough, all by itself—they had to elaborate and embroider upon it, to affect even more royalty and majesty.
Tofaa went on, “This Chola kingdom was formerly immense and great and unified. But the last high Raja died some years back, and it has since fragmented into numerous mandals—the Chola, the Chera, the Pandya—and their lesser Rajas are all contending for possession of the whole of the land.”
“They are welcome to it,” I grumbled, as we stepped onto the dock at Kuddalore. We might have been stepping from the Irawadi River into a Mien village. I need not describe Kuddalore further.
On that dock a group of men were jabbering and gesticulating, as they stood around a large wet object lying on the boards. I took a look at it and saw that it was evidently some fisherman’s catch. It was a dead fish, or at least it stunk like a fish, though I might better call it a sea creature, for it was bigger than I was, and like nothing I ever saw before. From midway down its body, it was definitely fishlike, terminating in a crescent fish tail. But it did not have fins or scales or gills. It was covered with a leathery skin, like that of a pork-fish, and the upper body was very curious. Instead of pork-fish flippers, it had stubby things like arms, ending in appendages like webbed paws. Even more remarkable, it had on its chest two immense but unmistakable
breasts
—very similar to Tofaa’s—and its head was vaguely like that of an extremely ugly cow.
“What in God’s name is it?” I asked. “If it were not so appallingly hideous, I should almost believe it a mermaid.”
“Only a fish,” said Tofaa. “We call it the duyong.”
“Then why all the fuss about a fish?”
“Some of the men are the crew of the boat that speared it and brought it in. The others are fishmongers who wish to buy portions of it to sell. The one well-dressed man is the village magistrate. He is demanding oaths and affidavits.”
“Whatever for?”
“It happens every time one is caught. Before the duyong is allowed to be sold, the fishermen must swear that none of them did surata with the duyong on their way to shore.”
“You mean … sexually coupled with it? With a
fish?”
“They always do, though they always swear they did not.” She shrugged and smiled indulgently. “You men.”
There would be many later occasions and reasons for me to resent and lament my being included in the gender that also included male Hindus, but that was the first time. I walked in a wide circle around the duyong and the men, and proceeded on along Kuddalore’s main street. All the plump women villagers wore the wrap-around sari which adequately covered most of their body dirt, except where the belly roll of flesh was exposed. The skinny men, having less to expose, exposed it, wearing nothing but a messily wound tulband and a loose, large, baggy diaper called a dhoti. The children wore nothing but the measle painted on the forehead.
“Is there a karwansarai?” I asked Tofaa. “Or whatever you call it, where we can take lodging while we make ready to journey on?”
“Dak bangla,” she said. “Traveler’s rest house. I will inquire.”
She abruptly reached out and seized the arm of a passing man, and snapped a question at him. He did not, as a man of any other country would have done, take offense at being so brazenly accosted by a mere woman. Instead, he almost quailed, and spoke meekly in response. Tofaa said something that sounded very nearly accusing, and he replied even more feebly. The conversation went back and forth like that, she almost snarling, he finally almost whimpering. I regarded them with amazement, and at last Tofaa reported the result.
“There is no dak bangla in Kuddalore. So few strangers ever come here, and fewer care to stay as long as a night. It is typical of the lowly Cholas. In my native Bangala, now, we would have been most hospitably received. However, the wretch offers us lodging in his own house.”
“Well, that is hospitable enough, certainly,” I said.
“He asks that we follow him there, and wait until he is inside for a few moments. Then we are to knock at the door and he will open it, and we are to request a bed and a meal, and he will rudely refuse us.”
“I do not understand.”
“It is usual. You will see.”
She spoke again to the man, and he went off at an anxious trot. We followed, picking our way among the pigs and fowl and infants and excrement and other litter on the streets. Considering what the residents of Kuddalore had to live in—no house being any more substantial or elegant than a hut of the Ava jungle Mien—I was rather grateful that there was
not
a dak bangla for us, since anything maintained only for the occasional transient would have had to be a sty indeed. Our host’s residence was not much more—built of mud bricks and plastered with cow dung—as we saw when we halted outside and he disappeared into the dark interior of it. After a brief wait, as commanded, Tofaa and I went up to the shack and she knocked on the rickety doorjamb. What happened thereafter I relate as Tofaa later translated it all to me.
The same man appeared in the doorway, and reared his head back to look down his nose at us. This time, Tofaa addressed him only in an obsequious mumble.
“What? Strangers?”
he bawled, loudly enough to have been heard down at the bayside dock. “Pilgrim wayfarers? No, indeed, not here! I do not care, woman, if you
are
of Brahman jati! I do not give shelter to just any caller, and I do not allow my wife—”
He not only broke off in mid-bellow, he totally vanished, whisking sideways beyond the door opening, as a meaty brown-black arm thrust him aside. A meaty brown-black woman appeared in his place, and smiled out at us, and she said, syrup sweetly:
“Wayfarers, are you? And seeking a bed and a meal? Well, do come in. Pay no heed to this worm of a husband. In his speech, but in his speech alone, he plays the great lord. Come in, come in, do.”
So Tofaa and I lugged our packs inside the house and were shown the bedchamber in which to stow them. The cow-dung-plastered room was entirely occupied by four beds, somewhat like the hindora bed I had encountered in other places, but not quite as good. A hindora was a pallet hung on ropes from a ceiling, but this kind, called a palang, was no more than a sort of slit cloth tube, like a sack opened lengthwise, roped at each end to the walls and swinging free in between. Two of the palangs held a swarm of naked brown-black children, but the woman swept them away as unceremoniously as she had done her husband, and made it plain that Tofaa and I would sleep there in the same room with her and him.
We went back to the other of the hut’s two rooms, and the woman swept the children farther, outside onto the street, while she made a meal for us. When she handed us each a slab of wood, I recognized the food on it—or rather, I recognized that it was mostly the mucous kàri sauce I had, a long time ago, eaten in the Pai-Mir mountains. Kàri was the only native word I could remember from that long-ago journey in company with other men of the Chola race. As I remembered, those other brown-black men had shown at least a trifle more manly spirit than my present host. But then, they had had no Chola women with them.
This man and I, since we could not converse, simply squatted together and ate our unappetizing meal and occasionally nodded companionably to each other. I must have seemed as much a flattened and trampled zerbino as he was, both of us mute and mousily nibbling, while the two women chattered vociferously, trading comments—as Tofaa later informed me—on the general worthlessness of men.
“It is well said,” remarked the woman of the house, “that a man is a man only when he is filled with angry passion, when he bears no vexation submissively. But is there anything more contemptibly pitiful”—she waved her food slab to indicate her husband—“than a weak man being angry?”
“It is well said,” Tofaa volunteered, “that a small pond is easily filled, and the forepaws of a mouse, and likewise a man of no account is easily satisfied.”
“I was first married to this one’s brother,” said the woman. “When I was widowed, when my husband’s fellow fishermen brought him home dead—crushed on the very deck, they said, by a newly caught duyong flailing about—I should have behaved like a proper sati, and thrown myself on his funeral pyre. But I was still young, and childless, so the village sadhu urged me to marry this brother of my husband, and have children to carry on the family line. Ah, well, I was still young.”
“It is well said,” Tofaa remarked, with a salacious giggle, “that a woman never grows old below the girdle.”
“True, indeed!” said the woman, with a lubricous giggle. “It is also well said: A fire cannot be laid with too many logs, nor a woman with too many sthanu.”
They both giggled lasciviously for a time. Then Tofaa said, waving her food slab to indicate the children swarming on the doorstep, “At least he is fruitful.”
“So is a rabbit,” grunted the woman. “It is well said: A man whose life and deeds are not outstanding above those of his fellows, he does but add to the heap.”
I finally got tired of seeming submissively to share my host’s cowed silence. In an attempt to make some communication with him, I indicated my still-heaped food slab and made insincere lip-smackings, as if I had enjoyed the slop, and then made gestures of asking what was the meat under the kàri. He comprehended, and told me what it was, and I realized that I did know one other word of the native language:
“Duyong.”
I got up and left the hut to inhale deeply of the evening air. It reeked of smoke and fish and garbage and fish and unwashed people and fish and pukey children, but it helped some. I kept on walking the Kuddalore streets, both of them, until well after dark, and returned to the hut to find all the children asleep on the front-room floor, among the detritus of our used food slabs, and the adults all asleep, fully dressed, in their palangs. With some difficulty at first try, I got into mine, and found it more comfortable than it had appeared, and fell asleep. But I was awakened at some dark hour, by scuffling noises, and determined that the man had climbed into his wife’s palang and was noisily doing surata, though she kept snarling and hissing something at him. Tofaa had waked and heard it, too, and later told me what the wife had been saying:
“You are only brother to my late husband, remember, even after all these years. As the sadhu commanded, you are forbidden to enjoy yourself while performing your seed function. No passion, do you hear?
Do not enjoy yourself!
”
I had by now rather come to the opinion that I had at last found the true homeland of the Amazons, and the source of all the legends about them. One of the legends was that they kept only some rather vestigial men about, to impregnate them when it was necessary to make more Amazons.

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