LODA
ASK FOR THE well-rounded tale, and tell me, do real stories ever have a distinct beginning, middle or end? Almost always, a bit, here or there, is vague, if not missing altogether, whitewashed off the memory of the narrator. Was it 1947 or '46, did she wear black or blue? Was the house on the westside of town or the east? Yes...they did marry eventually...but...did they have three children or two? A boy first or a girl, or was it the other way round?
In between preparations for the midday meal, grandmother would christen the child who got lost in the forest, Hari. No! You would shout petulantly. Call him Gopal! This was your way of adding your own to the tale. So, story after story, would have Gopal as its invincible hero.
Grandmother's siesta time came after the grandchildren had been fed, the leftovers distributed among the servants, the utensils cleaned out and left to dry on wire-racks. She would then withdraw into her cavernous room, draw the thick curtains to shut off midafternoon's heat and light and spread herself out on her four-poster bed. We would lie all about her, some of us at odd tangents to her body. She would protest, plead tiredness, then relent. We would draw the tale out of her as if pulling out her innards. While Gopal went slithering down precipices or clambering atop pinnacles, battling daityas or hurling himself at tigers, her speech would begin to slur, her voice taper off, her eyes shut down and a snore would escape her nostrils. The youngest would prise open an eyelid and give her a good shake. What next? we would ask.
The tale would flare up again. Arbitrarily she would choose to let a big black bear prepare to pounce on Gopal. Not a bear...Bears are good...It must be a snake, we would decide. And the tale-river would change its course, ever so slightly, taking care not to wreak much havoc. Gopal would slash off the hood of a big black cobra and we would remain dreamy, quiet.
Then, there were times when she would stem the rush of words … Why did the aachari make off with your brother, we had asked. Now, she would act the deaf-mute. Slicing firm red tomatoes she was all concentration. Three deep vertical furrows appeared like a trident shaped caste-mark on her forehead where the skin bunched up between the brows. Her gaze penetrated every object in its path—air, tomato, kitchen work-slab. She was looking at things but not really be looking at anything. It was the look of a person in deep thought—mind all made up. She was privy to a far-off vision which was all hers, and only hers, where we would never be allowed entry. And we understood, that this story, grandmother chose not to tell us.
JAYA IS NOW sixteen, hot on boys, and very confused at the moment. She's just got back from school and wishes to know why grandmother, and now she, have to be standing at the door-sill, out in the midday heat. The door-sill happens to interpose itself between the courtyard and the street. A heavy wood door, its arch and panels ornate with carving, has a short while ago been shut on grandmother's face. Grandmother's face betrays no emotion. She smiles at passers-by and if someone shows an inclination toward inquisitiveness she says firmly that she's here because she wishes to take in the street-scene.
An hour later, these two are as much a part of a small-town street as the utility poles and the striplights, the letter-box across, the storm drain with its grille-cover missing at irregular intervals, the signposts and the seasonally flowering trees.
Jaya has by now finished the food left over in her lunch-box; she's drunk up all the water in her bottle. Grandmother has not offered up an explanation and Jaya isn't going to ask.
By and by, Jaya will find out that grandmother has loaned five hundred bucks to her brother.
"I know that he'll never return the money but I've given it to him all the same. Your grandfather is angry...it isn't my money, you see...he's locked me out."
Is this the pressure of my blood rushing into my capillaries, threatening to blow up my brains? Am I all that angry? Shouldn't I hit her head against that door and finish this off once and for all?”What are you going to do about it?”Jaya hears herself ask the old woman.
"We'll have to wait it out", is the matter of fact reply.
Jaya sits down on the steps that form a concrete bridge over the storm drain between the door-sill and the street. She puts down her school bag a step higher, rests her head on it and decides to sleep. When she awakens, all the insentient inhabitants of the street are where they have always been—each in its alloted place. Not a single thing has encroached upon another's space. Jaya marvels at this unvoiced mutual respect. If it seems as if a thickly leafed branch is trying to infringe upon the territorial rights of a billboard advertising a brand of soap, it's only because of her faulty line of vision.
It's around three in the afternoon. The sun is very bright; it’s like a hard rain of light. Since it happens to be late February, the two haven't by now collapsed of sunstroke. Grandmother has seen her stir.”Shouldn't we break down the door or at least yell out to him?"
"It's no use."
"How can you take this?"
"We were told different stories when we were young. The advantages of...keeping one's mouth shut..."
"You look tired, grandmother."
"Perhaps. But I'll manage this once again."
Jaya rummages in her satchel and comes up with a fiver. She's gone a short while and returns with a paper bag full of peanuts.
Each nutshell is different from another in shape and size. Some shells encase three nuts, others only two, and a few have three finely-veined flutes which means four well-formed nuts in their russet, papery sheaths. Jaya recalls what Romi told her the other day. Romi is a student of English. She had said that Chaucer describes a Summoner who would eat and drink and cry out as if he were wood. In the fourteenth century 'wood' also meant 'mad'. Is that why 'nutty' in slang meant 'soft in the head', 'silly'?
There's a great deal of crackling and chewing as the two of them sitting on the steps deal with the problem of passing time.
"Those huge brass and copper pots that your mother now uses as drawing room decorations...We went down to the river, before dawn, to fill them up. There were no clocks and watches. We guessed at the time. It would be quite a chat-show. All the young women gathering there anytime between three and four in the morning. We would bathe, wash clothes, fill up our pots. The round smooth boulders would be silver, the sand silver, the river silver...Once, we couldn't place a young bride. We thought she was from a neighbouring village. Later, we found out she was a aachari...”
"I've forgotten what an aachari is.”
"A fairy...an enchantress...The ghost of an unmarried girl. She carries away men to her grotto."
"You know that I don't believe a word of this! Are you trying to tell me that you actually saw a ghost?"
"Not once but twice—both women."
"It seems,all ghosts are women."
"Well, most of them."
"Why? Why do women become ghosts?"
"They have deep dissatisfactions."
"Who was this other ghost?
"A chap from your grandfather's village—he married a ghost. They even had a child. A boy. Actually, it was this fellow's brother who was about to be married but, he upped and died. There was a big shindy. It's inauspicious if someone kicks the bucket before a sacramental ceremony. In this case, it was the groom-to-be himself. The family was at a loose end. They coerced the younger brother of the dead man to agree to the marriage."
"And he agreed?"
"It was common practise those days. I guess it didn't matter. The bride and the groom never met; never set eyes on each other till the actual wedding."
"So?"
"Your grandfather's elder brother was invited to accompany the marriage party from Tehri to Mussoorie where the wedding would take place. I'm talking of the late thirties...I must have been fourteen or fifteen then...newly married. I'd been brought from Badhani to live in Tehri with your grandfather's family. You know, in those days hill-people walked from one settlement to another. There was no motor-road linking Tehri and Mussoorie."
"So the British built the road."
"No! Tehri did not succumb to the British! Narendra Shah, the Raja of Tehri had the road built in the nineteen-sixties. The legendary Maharana Pratap was the ancestor of our Rajja. Our Rajas are still around. A big bungalow on Bhagwan Dass Road, somewhere near Connaught Place in Delhi. Manavendra Shah is a B.J.P. M.P. I'm told."
THE OLD LADY then describes graphically the fanfare with which the wedding party sets off. The young women accompany it to the edge of town. They go with it over the river's sandy plain, across the little tributary called a gaad and see the men off on the path that would take them through Kaphalpani, Kaodia, Kanataal, Dhanolti, and Jhalki to Mussoorie. The party would halt for the night at Kaddukhaal or Dhanolti where there were padaos—huge thatched huts where people could rent utensils, cook, eat and rest.
The marriage party couldn't make it to a padao before dark. They had no option but to halt for the night a few miles off Kaddukhaal; set up camp in a clearing in the thick stand of cedar above the road.
MR. BISWAS ZIPS past on his bicycle, brakes, makes a U-turn and comes down the road toward them—grinning. He enquires of grandfather's health, granny's son in the Army, etc. and Jaya gives him a once-over. She notices the fifth button on his shirt-front stretched to bursting point over his belly; the grime rings on his cuffs and collar; a centimeter of stitching come undone just over the right armpit where the cloth parts opening a window to a tiny patch of deep brown skin. As he leaves, she can hear grandmother ask where she was before Biswas's forced entry into the narrative.
"The night in the forest,”mutters Jaya.
"Yes. You should hear Shambhuji relate this part since he is our family eye-witness. He'll tell you of how they met with another group of men, women and children. Not a single member of this group talked. They communicated by gesturing. Gopal fell in love with her here."
"A tall fire had been built to keep bears and leopards at bay. Both groups decided to share the fire. Shambhuji usually gets very poetic at this point. His eyes mist as he describes the circle of pale firelight whose circumference shifted constantly with the vagaries of the wind. As a flame leapt up, Gopal noticed a young girl staring at him. The next instant, as the flame died, she was enveloped in darkness. Her liquid eyes initiated an inexplicable chemistry. Each time a flame danced, they held onto each other's gazes."
"Gopal decided to marry her then and there. No one succeeded in talking him out of it. They were married that night by the priest accompanying our wedding party. She was very beautiful...We envied her...We mocked her for being mute...It was our way of getting even..."
"Were you actually jealous of her grandmother, or did you behave like the rest because of peer pressure?"
"I don't know child. We didn't get much time to think...we didn't know how to think...we weren't encouraged to think..."
"Which village was she from?"
"I don't know. No one from her village ever came to see her. Neither did she ever express the desire to go see her folks. While delivering her child, neither a gasp nor a groan escaped her lips. The baby was born dead. Large head, deformed feet. We never heard her weep."
"And Gopal? Didn't it bother him that she could not speak?"
"Gopal was very, very happy with her. His mother and unmarried sister just couldn't take this. They would harass his wife continually - hide her clothes, lock her up in her room, misplace the utensils. We would stand around and watch the fun...enjoy ourselves."
"One morning there was a big hue and cry. She had disappeared. The previous day, Gopal had left for town on some errand. The mother-in-law and sister-in-law had hidden the grinding stone from her. She went looking for it. When she gesticulated, desperately trying to explain exactly what she was looking for, the women pretended that they couldn't understand. Finally, she uttered the word loda loud and clear and crumpled into a heap of bones."
"Bullshit ! Did you see the bones?"
"No. According to the mother-in-law, by the time they could recover their wits the bones too had melted into thin air."
Jaya reads the time off her watch. Four-thirty. Time for grandfather's game of rummy. She can see Joshiji, one of grandfather's cronies, walking down the road. When he comes up to them grandmother spiels off that Jaya and she have just got back from a stroll and have found the door shut.
"Yell out to him, Murlidhar. I think he's in the toilet...I can hear it flushing...That's why he can't hear us calling."
The strong wooden door is rattled several times and a loud male baritone urges that it be opened up at once—which it is. Without a word, they step over the door-sill into the courtyard.
Smita Agarwal is a poet. Her book of poems Wish-granting Words has been published by Ravi Dayal Publisher, New Delhi, 2002. She is a professor of English, University of Allahabad, U.P., India. Her hobby is Hindustani music and her songs are available on beatofindia.com and youtube.com.
Buy Wish Granting Words here.
Words ...
all you can do is choose them
or choose
to remain silent. Or, you never
had a choice.
-Adrienne Rich, 'North American Time,' 1983
all you can do is choose them
or choose
to remain silent. Or, you never
had a choice.
-Adrienne Rich, 'North American Time,' 1983
ASK FOR THE well-rounded tale, and tell me, do real stories ever have a distinct beginning, middle or end? Almost always, a bit, here or there, is vague, if not missing altogether, whitewashed off the memory of the narrator. Was it 1947 or '46, did she wear black or blue? Was the house on the westside of town or the east? Yes...they did marry eventually...but...did they have three children or two? A boy first or a girl, or was it the other way round?
In between preparations for the midday meal, grandmother would christen the child who got lost in the forest, Hari. No! You would shout petulantly. Call him Gopal! This was your way of adding your own to the tale. So, story after story, would have Gopal as its invincible hero.
Grandmother's siesta time came after the grandchildren had been fed, the leftovers distributed among the servants, the utensils cleaned out and left to dry on wire-racks. She would then withdraw into her cavernous room, draw the thick curtains to shut off midafternoon's heat and light and spread herself out on her four-poster bed. We would lie all about her, some of us at odd tangents to her body. She would protest, plead tiredness, then relent. We would draw the tale out of her as if pulling out her innards. While Gopal went slithering down precipices or clambering atop pinnacles, battling daityas or hurling himself at tigers, her speech would begin to slur, her voice taper off, her eyes shut down and a snore would escape her nostrils. The youngest would prise open an eyelid and give her a good shake. What next? we would ask.
The tale would flare up again. Arbitrarily she would choose to let a big black bear prepare to pounce on Gopal. Not a bear...Bears are good...It must be a snake, we would decide. And the tale-river would change its course, ever so slightly, taking care not to wreak much havoc. Gopal would slash off the hood of a big black cobra and we would remain dreamy, quiet.
Then, there were times when she would stem the rush of words … Why did the aachari make off with your brother, we had asked. Now, she would act the deaf-mute. Slicing firm red tomatoes she was all concentration. Three deep vertical furrows appeared like a trident shaped caste-mark on her forehead where the skin bunched up between the brows. Her gaze penetrated every object in its path—air, tomato, kitchen work-slab. She was looking at things but not really be looking at anything. It was the look of a person in deep thought—mind all made up. She was privy to a far-off vision which was all hers, and only hers, where we would never be allowed entry. And we understood, that this story, grandmother chose not to tell us.
JAYA IS NOW sixteen, hot on boys, and very confused at the moment. She's just got back from school and wishes to know why grandmother, and now she, have to be standing at the door-sill, out in the midday heat. The door-sill happens to interpose itself between the courtyard and the street. A heavy wood door, its arch and panels ornate with carving, has a short while ago been shut on grandmother's face. Grandmother's face betrays no emotion. She smiles at passers-by and if someone shows an inclination toward inquisitiveness she says firmly that she's here because she wishes to take in the street-scene.
An hour later, these two are as much a part of a small-town street as the utility poles and the striplights, the letter-box across, the storm drain with its grille-cover missing at irregular intervals, the signposts and the seasonally flowering trees.
Jaya has by now finished the food left over in her lunch-box; she's drunk up all the water in her bottle. Grandmother has not offered up an explanation and Jaya isn't going to ask.
By and by, Jaya will find out that grandmother has loaned five hundred bucks to her brother.
"I know that he'll never return the money but I've given it to him all the same. Your grandfather is angry...it isn't my money, you see...he's locked me out."
Is this the pressure of my blood rushing into my capillaries, threatening to blow up my brains? Am I all that angry? Shouldn't I hit her head against that door and finish this off once and for all?”What are you going to do about it?”Jaya hears herself ask the old woman.
"We'll have to wait it out", is the matter of fact reply.
Jaya sits down on the steps that form a concrete bridge over the storm drain between the door-sill and the street. She puts down her school bag a step higher, rests her head on it and decides to sleep. When she awakens, all the insentient inhabitants of the street are where they have always been—each in its alloted place. Not a single thing has encroached upon another's space. Jaya marvels at this unvoiced mutual respect. If it seems as if a thickly leafed branch is trying to infringe upon the territorial rights of a billboard advertising a brand of soap, it's only because of her faulty line of vision.
It's around three in the afternoon. The sun is very bright; it’s like a hard rain of light. Since it happens to be late February, the two haven't by now collapsed of sunstroke. Grandmother has seen her stir.”Shouldn't we break down the door or at least yell out to him?"
"It's no use."
"How can you take this?"
"We were told different stories when we were young. The advantages of...keeping one's mouth shut..."
"You look tired, grandmother."
"Perhaps. But I'll manage this once again."
Jaya rummages in her satchel and comes up with a fiver. She's gone a short while and returns with a paper bag full of peanuts.
Each nutshell is different from another in shape and size. Some shells encase three nuts, others only two, and a few have three finely-veined flutes which means four well-formed nuts in their russet, papery sheaths. Jaya recalls what Romi told her the other day. Romi is a student of English. She had said that Chaucer describes a Summoner who would eat and drink and cry out as if he were wood. In the fourteenth century 'wood' also meant 'mad'. Is that why 'nutty' in slang meant 'soft in the head', 'silly'?
There's a great deal of crackling and chewing as the two of them sitting on the steps deal with the problem of passing time.
"Those huge brass and copper pots that your mother now uses as drawing room decorations...We went down to the river, before dawn, to fill them up. There were no clocks and watches. We guessed at the time. It would be quite a chat-show. All the young women gathering there anytime between three and four in the morning. We would bathe, wash clothes, fill up our pots. The round smooth boulders would be silver, the sand silver, the river silver...Once, we couldn't place a young bride. We thought she was from a neighbouring village. Later, we found out she was a aachari...”
"I've forgotten what an aachari is.”
"A fairy...an enchantress...The ghost of an unmarried girl. She carries away men to her grotto."
"You know that I don't believe a word of this! Are you trying to tell me that you actually saw a ghost?"
"Not once but twice—both women."
"It seems,all ghosts are women."
"Well, most of them."
"Why? Why do women become ghosts?"
"They have deep dissatisfactions."
"Who was this other ghost?
"A chap from your grandfather's village—he married a ghost. They even had a child. A boy. Actually, it was this fellow's brother who was about to be married but, he upped and died. There was a big shindy. It's inauspicious if someone kicks the bucket before a sacramental ceremony. In this case, it was the groom-to-be himself. The family was at a loose end. They coerced the younger brother of the dead man to agree to the marriage."
"And he agreed?"
"It was common practise those days. I guess it didn't matter. The bride and the groom never met; never set eyes on each other till the actual wedding."
"So?"
"Your grandfather's elder brother was invited to accompany the marriage party from Tehri to Mussoorie where the wedding would take place. I'm talking of the late thirties...I must have been fourteen or fifteen then...newly married. I'd been brought from Badhani to live in Tehri with your grandfather's family. You know, in those days hill-people walked from one settlement to another. There was no motor-road linking Tehri and Mussoorie."
"So the British built the road."
"No! Tehri did not succumb to the British! Narendra Shah, the Raja of Tehri had the road built in the nineteen-sixties. The legendary Maharana Pratap was the ancestor of our Rajja. Our Rajas are still around. A big bungalow on Bhagwan Dass Road, somewhere near Connaught Place in Delhi. Manavendra Shah is a B.J.P. M.P. I'm told."
THE OLD LADY then describes graphically the fanfare with which the wedding party sets off. The young women accompany it to the edge of town. They go with it over the river's sandy plain, across the little tributary called a gaad and see the men off on the path that would take them through Kaphalpani, Kaodia, Kanataal, Dhanolti, and Jhalki to Mussoorie. The party would halt for the night at Kaddukhaal or Dhanolti where there were padaos—huge thatched huts where people could rent utensils, cook, eat and rest.
The marriage party couldn't make it to a padao before dark. They had no option but to halt for the night a few miles off Kaddukhaal; set up camp in a clearing in the thick stand of cedar above the road.
MR. BISWAS ZIPS past on his bicycle, brakes, makes a U-turn and comes down the road toward them—grinning. He enquires of grandfather's health, granny's son in the Army, etc. and Jaya gives him a once-over. She notices the fifth button on his shirt-front stretched to bursting point over his belly; the grime rings on his cuffs and collar; a centimeter of stitching come undone just over the right armpit where the cloth parts opening a window to a tiny patch of deep brown skin. As he leaves, she can hear grandmother ask where she was before Biswas's forced entry into the narrative.
"The night in the forest,”mutters Jaya.
"Yes. You should hear Shambhuji relate this part since he is our family eye-witness. He'll tell you of how they met with another group of men, women and children. Not a single member of this group talked. They communicated by gesturing. Gopal fell in love with her here."
"A tall fire had been built to keep bears and leopards at bay. Both groups decided to share the fire. Shambhuji usually gets very poetic at this point. His eyes mist as he describes the circle of pale firelight whose circumference shifted constantly with the vagaries of the wind. As a flame leapt up, Gopal noticed a young girl staring at him. The next instant, as the flame died, she was enveloped in darkness. Her liquid eyes initiated an inexplicable chemistry. Each time a flame danced, they held onto each other's gazes."
"Gopal decided to marry her then and there. No one succeeded in talking him out of it. They were married that night by the priest accompanying our wedding party. She was very beautiful...We envied her...We mocked her for being mute...It was our way of getting even..."
"Were you actually jealous of her grandmother, or did you behave like the rest because of peer pressure?"
"I don't know child. We didn't get much time to think...we didn't know how to think...we weren't encouraged to think..."
"Which village was she from?"
"I don't know. No one from her village ever came to see her. Neither did she ever express the desire to go see her folks. While delivering her child, neither a gasp nor a groan escaped her lips. The baby was born dead. Large head, deformed feet. We never heard her weep."
"And Gopal? Didn't it bother him that she could not speak?"
"Gopal was very, very happy with her. His mother and unmarried sister just couldn't take this. They would harass his wife continually - hide her clothes, lock her up in her room, misplace the utensils. We would stand around and watch the fun...enjoy ourselves."
"One morning there was a big hue and cry. She had disappeared. The previous day, Gopal had left for town on some errand. The mother-in-law and sister-in-law had hidden the grinding stone from her. She went looking for it. When she gesticulated, desperately trying to explain exactly what she was looking for, the women pretended that they couldn't understand. Finally, she uttered the word loda loud and clear and crumpled into a heap of bones."
"Bullshit ! Did you see the bones?"
"No. According to the mother-in-law, by the time they could recover their wits the bones too had melted into thin air."
Jaya reads the time off her watch. Four-thirty. Time for grandfather's game of rummy. She can see Joshiji, one of grandfather's cronies, walking down the road. When he comes up to them grandmother spiels off that Jaya and she have just got back from a stroll and have found the door shut.
"Yell out to him, Murlidhar. I think he's in the toilet...I can hear it flushing...That's why he can't hear us calling."
The strong wooden door is rattled several times and a loud male baritone urges that it be opened up at once—which it is. Without a word, they step over the door-sill into the courtyard.
Smita Agarwal is a poet. Her book of poems Wish-granting Words has been published by Ravi Dayal Publisher, New Delhi, 2002. She is a professor of English, University of Allahabad, U.P., India. Her hobby is Hindustani music and her songs are available on beatofindia.com and youtube.com.Buy Wish Granting Words here.
