Mountains Painted with Turmeric

by Lil Bahadur Chettri

  “I’m not taking anything. My brother gave me some money to buy clothes. I have to look for a skirt.”

  “Right, don’t be slow! I’ll be along very soon.”

  Thuli’s pitcher was full, and she carried it off up the hill. Jhuma got dressed and began to scrub her pots.

  Jhuma and Thuli set out in good time. Up by the copse of alder trees, Moté Karki was dragging three stout khasi goats up the slope.37 Jhuma and Thuli hurried to catch up with him.

  “Karki daju’s having such a struggle to get his goats to market,” said Thuli. “The market will have upped and gone by the time he gets there!”

  “Come on, come on,” Karki urged his goats, then he looked at the girls. “Ay, what market will we ever reach? Lu, lu! Drive them up from behind, Thuli. They’re giving me a lot of grief; they just refuse to walk.”

  Thuli picked up a little stick and began to hit the goats with it, and they quickened their pace a little.

  “At last the great bulls walk to meet their end!” Karki heaved a long sigh.

  “He’ll have to give me half his profits now that I’ve helped him so much,” laughed Thuli. “It looks as if you’ve decided to empty the village and drive everyone’s goats to market!”

  “I don’t steal them from their pens, you know!” Karki retorted. “You people come and ask me to buy them from you, so what are you telling me now?”

  Jhuma had not spoken all this time: she did not talk to Karki very much. Karki, too, behaved most respectfully toward her and never teased her or joked with her. Jhuma gestured to Thuli and said, “Let’s go on, Thuli, we’ve stopped for long enough. Karki will bring them along slowly.”

  Jhuma and Thuli went on ahead. “Keep going!” Thuli shouted to Karki.

  “All right! See you at the market this evening!” Karki went back to shouting at his goats.

  Karki was very fat, so he had the nickname Moté, “Fatty.” His practice was simply to buy goats from the village and sell them for some small profit at the market. He also owned a fair amount of khet and bari land.38 His parents had died when he was young, and he had no brothers or sisters. Nor had he married, so he had neither worries nor sorrows. He had accumulated a little money, but he was not one of those who become so avaricious that they would kill to earn more. “Wealth is what’s left over after food and clothes have been bought”: this was his maxim. He helped out everyone in the village with chores from time to time, and he was hugely popular among the women of the village. He thoroughly enjoyed joining in and helping them with jobs such as threshing, setting up looms to weave rugs, cleaning and sorting vegetables, and so on. So, if there was a job to be done the village women would think of him. If someone had cooked something a little special they would send out for Karki. Karki did not often cook for himself. He would eat, or be persuaded to eat, wherever there was a gathering in the village. Although his face was not particularly handsome or cheerful, Karki’s heart was pure. He wished no one ill, and he was drawn to Jhuma because of her loveliness and simplicity. Many different kinds of feelings for Jhuma played in him, and he truly loved her from his heart. But he had not yet revealed this to her; neither had he been able to broach the subject with her brother. It was only to one or two close friends that he had said, “If they let me I’d marry her, that Kanchi from down the hill.”39

  Karki behaved shyly with Jhuma because of this, but from a distance he did all he could to make her happy. Seeing that Karki was shy, Jhuma behaved shyly with him, too, and did not speak to him very often. If she had to say anything, she spoke well of him. “Karki’s a useful man,” she would say, but otherwise she took very little notice of him.

  10

  A cold breeze blew toward Jhuma and Thuli as they drew near to the Sunday market. Soon they could hear a vague murmur of voices coming from the far side of the ridge, and as they crested the hill they began to see the people who were attending it.

  A lot higher up and farther away, huge white boulders could be seen in the middle of a sparse stretch of forest. There was a long stretch of pasture, higher in the middle and dropping away at both sides. It was on this hilltop that all the villages had their grand bazaar. The paths came from all around—east, west, north, and south—and all came together at this spot.40

  Once they had arrived, Thuli sat down to one side of the path and spread out her stall of soybeans. Jhuma walked off, saying, “I’ll just have a look around, I’ll be back soon.”

  Because Dasain was near, everything cost double its normal price. Cloth that usually cost eight annas a foot couldn’t even be touched for less than twelve annas. Jhuma wandered past many stalls. Cloth and saris had been brought to the market to be sold for various sums, but the prices were terribly sharp. There was no question of paying less than a rupee per foot, even for something ordinary, and she would need ten feet for a sari. Eventually, she just bought an ordinary red embroidered skirt for eight rupees. She had just taken it from the stallkeeper and was about to walk away when her eyes met those of someone she knew. Pleasure and shyness rose and sank in her heart, because before her she saw the soldier, who was watching her intently. Her heart beat more quickly, and her feet would not carry her forward. But she did not have the nerve to turn and run away, so she just stood there, rooted to the spot. Meanwhile the soldier took two steps forward and asked her, “What’s the matter, don’t you recognize me?”

  At last a little courage entered her. Raising her head a little, she replied, “Yes, of course, why wouldn’t I?”

  “Are you well?” was the soldier’s second question.

  Jhuma fumbled for a reply for ages. Perhaps it was because she had not understood his question properly. After a while she just said, “Yes.”

  Then the soldier said, “I suppose you’ve come to do some shopping, have you? But there’s nothing here like the things you can get in a real bazaar.”41

  The veil of Jhuma’s shyness had been drawn well aside by now, and she felt wholly confident. She looked at the soldier and said, “You’ll have searched around like you did on recruit,42 but this is hardly the same! They say that in Mungalan there are brilliant things to see!”

  “Ay, what tales I could tell you of that!” The soldier took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. “There are electric lights so bright it seems like the sun is shining in the night. And the shops aren’t out on open hillsides like this! The bazaar stretches as far as you can see—proper big roads with cars, trams, and rickshaws running along them. You don’t have to walk a step, a rickshaw will always run you along. That’s how it is there. I was fed up when I realized how things were here.”

  Jhuma was very surprised by what he said. She could not understand much of it, either. The little mind of this innocent girl, who had never left her village, tried to picture it. “What’s it like, Mungalan?” She pondered over this for a while.

  “Let’s go and talk down in that dip,” said the soldier. “All this market noise is deafening me.”

  Jhuma did not object, and the pair of them walked away from the bazaar toward a nearby hollow. When the sounds of the market were in the distance they sat down in a corner of the field. For a moment neither spoke. Now that he found Jhuma beside him, the soldier’s spirits were flying high. He stared without blinking at her loveliness. Finding him staring at her, Jhuma was gripped by her natural shyness again. She began to find the silence unbearable, and so she reopened the conversation.

  “When do you go back to Mungalan?”

  “Who knows?” the soldier answered casually, his contemplation interrupted. “I’ll stay two or three months, I suppose. I’ve been granted some leave.”

  Again there was silence between them for a long while. The soldier wanted to ask her something, but he hesitated. Then he plucked up his courage and asked her, “Are you married yet?”

  The question made Jhuma blush. She turned her head away and looked at the ground. Then in a small voice she said, “There’s no sindur in my hair, and I’m not wearing a bead
necklace, can’t you see?”43

  The soldier hesitated, then put on a cheerful expression. “Oh! I hadn’t thought of that!”

  “I really want to ask you something,” the soldier said after a pause. “Will you be naraz?”44

  Jhuma looked at him. “What’s naraz? I can’t understand the things you say!”

  The soldier chuckled. “What I mean is, will you be angry?” He used the formal pronoun.

  “Why should I be? Ask me! But in our village people don’t address people younger than themselves as tapai. I feel very odd when you call me tapai.”

  “So how should I address you?”

  “Use timi of course! I am younger than you.”

  “Oh, accha, from now on I’ll call you timi.”45

  The conversation faltered, but then Jhuma revived it. “What was it you wanted to ask? You didn’t ask it, did you?”

  “Well, I’ve been trying to decide whether to ask you or not.… Jhuma, after I first saw you I couldn’t forget you. I’ve seen you so many times in my dreams. Will you come with me to Mugalan?”

  Jhuma did not pay much attention to the rest of what he had said, because his final words, “Will you come with me to Mugalan?” had had such an effect on her. She was engrossed in her vision of golden Mugalan. But soon she recalled her situation, her place and time. A picture of the poverty of her home danced before her eyes. “Who’s going to let me go to Mugalan?” she said sadly. “Why would a little corpse like me ever have such good fortune?”

  The soldier felt a little hope enter him. “Ay, it can be arranged, you know! You only have to want it!”

  Their conversation was interrupted by the sound of loud shouts from the bazaar, and they walked back together. Two drunks had begun a quarrel, and a crowd had gathered around them to watch the fun. The soldier bought a fine shawl, folded a comb and some thread inside it, and placed it in Jhuma’s hand. She protested and tried to refuse to take it, but he insisted, and eventually she had to accept. As they parted, the soldier asked her, “When will we meet again?”

  “Won’t you come to ride the swing at Dasain? Everyone from your village does. We’ll meet then,” said Jhuma.46

  “Fine,” said the soldier.

  Moté Karki had sold his goats and was coming toward them. When he saw Jhuma talking to a soldier he had not seen before he was curious, but he turned away without speaking to them. Jhuma took her leave of the soldier and went back to Thuli.

  11

  There are streams to either side; between them a high ridge rises, and from the two ravines the “kulululu” sound of the running water that bursts from sources higher up can be heard. These streams bring life to the khet fields in the valley below. Directly beyond the ridge, at a distance of three furlongs, a ritual is to be performed at a sacrificial site.47 On the rock a buffalo bull will be sacrificed on the eighth day of Dasain. Here and there on the ridge there are a few alder trees and ordinary ferns, bitter-leaves,48 shrubs, and bushes. In the middle a rotary swing has been erected; this is shared by the three or four villages that lie on the hillsides that drop away from the ridge.

  The full moon is shining as bright as the sun; the only thing it lacks is warmth. The whitewashed houses on the far hillside are clearly visible. There is a lot of noise around the swing:

  “Yes, Kancha, come here and have a go, won’t you?”

  “Ay, Jethi, get down now, you’ve been around lots of times!”

  “She’s going to fall on her head, see how she’s trembling?”

  Everyone is engrossed in the fun. But Jhuma and the soldier are a little way from the noisy crowd, sitting under an alder tree and enjoying the beauty of the full moon. So far they have not been able to express all their feelings. Jhuma is more afraid than shy. Guilt, a sense of sin, and her fear of her brother force her to bundle up her emotions inside her. And she is a village girl: what right does she have to make an independent expression of her affection? Her overriding duty is to massage the legs of the man with whose shawl her guardians bind her.49 But why does the soldier hesitate? Why do his lips tremble whenever he is about to say something? Is it so unpleasant for him to express to his beloved the love that is boiling up in his heart?

  The autumn could not bear to see the moon smiling like this, unveiled. The clouds drew a thin veil over it so that its face was covered. The soldier gathered all his courage and slowly took hold of Jhuma’s hand. This was the first time he had touched her. Jhuma started and looked apprehensively at him, but the soldier had no time to consider Jhuma’s feelings. Slowly, he moved closer to her. She shifted away a little, trying not to let him notice. “Jhuma,” he said in a tremulous voice, “Jhuma, will you marry me?”

  The question came out of his mouth, but he did not know what he was saying. The sensation he was experiencing, if it had come out in words, would have been expressed quite differently. As soon as he asked his question, Jhuma turned her face from him and moved a little farther away. Slowly she removed her hand from his. An apprehensive expression appeared clearly on her face, mixed with worry and fear. It was not because the soldier’s question had frightened her. It was because for some reason she saw in it the cloudy water of a dirty stream, rather than the pure water of a waterfall. She felt that she wanted to escape from this situation. She stood up and looked at the soldier. Then she said gravely, “It doesn’t matter what I say, you’d have to go and talk to my daju.”

  The soldier was put out by the change in Jhuma’s mood and by her answer to his question. But right away he grasped the situation. “What’s the matter? Are you angry or something?”

  “Why should I be angry? It is very late, and my friends are getting ready to leave. I am going now.”

  The soldier did not object, and he stood up, too. He told Jhuma that he would come the next day, then set off for home by himself. Jhuma rejoined her party. They were still keen to continue playing on the swing, and they were all taken up with their game.

  When they had finished with the swing and were climbing back up the hill, the second stage of the night was already passing. Karki was walking behind Jhuma. He came up beside her and said, “Sister, I didn’t see you riding on the swing even once tonight!”

  “Oh, who needs to ride on the swing? There’s no point in it! I only came because my friend was so keen to.”

  “Are you too scared to?”

  “Scared? What of? I just don’t want to ride on the swing, it’s pointless!”

  “Kanchi, who’s that soldier? I’ve been seeing him talking to you ever since the other day.” Karki spoke slowly, in a sorrowful, helpless voice.

  Jhuma was cross with Karki for asking this. She found it intolerable. “What! Did you come just to see who I was talking to? Do you lose your caste just from chatting to someone?”

  “Why are you so angry?” Karki said meekly. “I didn’t say there was anything wrong with chatting, I just asked you who the man was.”

  Karki’s humility made Jhuma ashamed of her harsh reaction. This was the first time in her life she had ever spoken sharply to him. Mortified, she told him, “He lives in Limbugaon, he says. He stayed a night in our house on his way home from the army.”

  “Don’t mix with him so much,” said Karki. “It doesn’t do to trust these soldier corpses.” The words burst out of his mouth although he tried to stop them.

  “Chi! How suspicious you are, Karki daju! He’s not that kind of soldier; he’s like a god although he’s only a man. If you don’t believe me, just talk to him tomorrow and you’ll find out!” Jhuma blurted this out. Karki was alarmed by Jhuma’s trust in the soldier, but he kept his feelings to himself.

  12

  Winter strode slowly up like a blemished incarnation, determined to ruin the whole lovely garden that autumn had prepared. A cold wind had begun to blow in the mornings, and it was increasingly rare for the sun to appear before midday. Dhané had fed his buffalo and oxen, and he was sitting on the wall of the stall, smoking tobacco from a bamboo pipe. Suddenly he noticed
some people approaching in the distance. He was so alarmed, it was as if the ground, the wall, the cow pens, everything was spinning around him. It was the old baidar and the mukhiya, and they were approaching with several other villagers. Dhané climbed down, welcomed the visitors, and seated them in a suitable place at the house.

  The mukhiya addressed Dhané: “Jetha, you took something from the moneylender, then you did not know what you had to do. This, this, how can this be? Count out Baidar Saheb’s money complete with the interest right now. Otherwise your stall will be emptied of livestock, in accordance with the agreement.”

  “Well now, Mukhiya ba,” Dhané said desperately, “I haven’t refused to pay. But what can I do if I am unable to pay? Please just give me two months’ grace. Once the buffalo has borne her calf I’ll pay back the money even if I have to beg and search for it.”

  “What’s this you’re telling me now? There’s an agreement between you and Baidar Saheb in this regard, in this regard, and now here he is before you. You will have to persuade him. If he agrees, there’s no matter we can’t come to an agreement on.”

  “No, no, Mukhiya Saheb, by Hariram!” the baidar protested. “Why are you chewing it over like this? When I’m losing out, there should be a proper judgment! Hariram, how long is it since he took the buffalo home? The loan was agreed for a six-month term, but now it’s the fourth day of Phagun, which means that soon it will have been a whole year. He hasn’t paid Hariram’s interest off properly, nor does he send his people to work for me when he should. Now what more can I say as I look at his face? Hariram’s agreement is right here in front of the council. You must get my money paid back to me today! If you don’t, I’ll take the animals from his stall.”

  Up until this point Dobaté Sahinla had been sitting there with his legs crossed, listening to the conversation.50 When he heard what the baidar said, he raised himself up onto his haunches and addressed his words to Dhané’s gloomy face. “I think you should pay attention. Baidar ba has much to say, and all of it is right. How is it if you take from the moneylender and then don’t behave properly? Even if he can’t pay back the loan, Jetha should pay the interest on it. If one debtor behaves like this, how can the rest of us approach the moneylender for a loan when we need to? If one behaves like this, won’t the way be closed to others?”