She began to sing softly to herself the ancient and haunting melodies, the love songs of Radha calling Krishna to her bower.
And he was coming to her. Through the prisms of rain she saw the blurred shape emerge from the forest and held her breath, waiting.
But it was only Annie. And Prem.
She greeted them dreamily, reluctant to leave her private world, but translucent and generous in its afterglow
“Come in, come in. You are so wet. You must have some tea .”
“No, no. This isn’t a social call, Yashoda. This is urgent. There may be trouble from Shivaraman Nair. Prem overheard some labourers talking.”
“How can that concern me?” Yashoda asked from within the magic circle of her secret.
“Someone has been seen bathing … at night,” Prem said, embarrassed and awkward. “In the pond. You were … it is said a woman was … It is being told to Shivaraman Nair.”
Yashoda had a sensation of being hit violently and suddenly. Of being winded. Of shattering. It vanished into thin air, that beautiful fragile bubble of love in whose permanence she had so ludicrously, so wantonly, allowed herself to believe. Abruptly the golden light within her was extinguished. She felt safety and happiness leave her like an ebbing tide.
Lord Krishna had turned away his face and she felt the chill of his frown. She was not as his beloved Radha, but as the evil Kaliya whom the Lord trampled beneath his feet. Kaliya, that serpent of overweening pride and rebellious arrogance. Yashoda writhed, snake-like, in shame and fear.
“Come back to the house with us,” Annie said gently, conscious of Yashoda’s anguish. “We re not leaving you here alone. David will speak to Shivaraman Nair, You and I could leave for Madras immediately, if we need to. We can stay there as long as it’s necessary.”
Yashoda felt exhausted, as though she had arrived at the end of a long and dizzying downward slide from a mountain peak that had been exhilarating, Himalayan, but fraught always with the terrors of falling. It seemed to her that it required immense energy to shake her head, to tell Annie no, it was too late. She had fallen back into the world of stern uncles. There was no escaping. She had always been part of that world too, and she had violated its terms. For great sins there were great penalties. Only by submitting to the will of her relatives, to the ancient expiatory laws of Manu, could she hope to erase her wrongdoing, to preserve herself from sliding back still further into some lesser and unhappier life in her next birth.
Annie pleaded, scolded, became exasperated.
Prem reasoned. “Shivaraman Nair cares only about his wealth and reputation. He will punish you for no other reason than offended pride. You do not owe him obedience. Even my professor, and he is a Brahmin, a Brahmin, even he says that justice is greater than the laws of caste and family.”
But Yashoda was unreachable, locked inside her shame and fear and loss, the ravaging underside of her euphoria.
“Go away, go away, go away,” she murmured, sitting on the wooden floor and rocking herself like a mother by her son’s funeral pyre, like a pond lily battered and torn by the rains.
They will come and take me away to Palghat, she thought, sitting waiting on her porch, passive, her legs folded in the lotus position. I will work as a drudge in the house of my mother-in-law. They will take my jewellery and I will wear drab cotton. I have been as vain and as foolish as the peacock and now I will become my own shadow, brown and unnoticeable as the peahen. No one will speak to me. In a mountain village in the Ghats I will live and die in silent disgrace, the subject of warning tales to children.
None of this mattered. It fell from her as easily as rainwater slid from thatch, irrelevant beside the awesome impossibility of love.
And yet, she thought, I have known it. This once I have felt the great passion that all the poets sing of. It is something. It can never be taken from me. It is worth everything.
The rain slackened like a weary peon who has run many miles on his master’s business, faltered, paused for a brief respite. In the stillness Yashoda waited, rocking herself slowly, looking towards the forest which sighed and dripped and gurgled.
When it happened it was quiet and orderly. A small group of women, Jati and Mrs Shivaraman Nair and several older relatives, emerged from the trees with slow dignity, imposing in their moral authority.
They surrounded Yashoda who sat motionless as a sunyasin in meditation. They sent away her servant, who was old and frightened, who whimpered as she limped away through the forest.
They removed all her jewellery. She watched, impassive, as the bangles and rings were smashed with rocks.
Then the oldest of the women withdrew from the folds of her sari a long-handled razor. Yashoda gave an involuntary cry of dismay. “Oh please!” she begged. “Oh please! Not that! Jati, Jati, my cousin ….”
But Jati joined the other women in pinioning her arms, holding her down.
Yashoda felt the insolent scrape of the razor on her scalp. She sat perfectly still, her eyes dilated and dry, as her lustrous black hair fell from her like a dark rain.
34
A foolish hope, Juliet knew, as she spread the sodden sheets over the coir rope between the bamboo poles. Foolish to think they would dry in the hour or so before the rain began again. Better really to leave them spread over the chairs and wait for the fans to come on, but at least this way they would get a little sun, smell a little better. She could have done with an airing herself.
She grimaced as she wrestled with the heavy sheets. From the roof she could see along the irrigation ditches to the rice paddy. She could see Prabhakaran running along the levees, flapping his arms oddly like the irritable crows she kept scaring off with the flick of a wet towel. Shivaraman Nair has sent him to get more grass for the cows, she thought. And he is stealing a moment to play some private game.
They saw so little of him now. He was always away on his courier business. She hurried down from the roof, calling to the children, and they walked out through the grove to meet him.
When they reached the edge of the paddy they could see him more clearly, skipping his way between the terraces.
Something was wrong. Juliet could see now that the odd and erratic movements were not those of play. He appeared to be injured. They began to run as his weird cries reached them.
Precariously balancing on the narrow levee, Juliet folded him in her arms, terrified. He was sobbing and twitching convulsively, hysterically shrieking incoherently
“Hush, hush, hush!” Juliet begged. “What is it?.”
The storm of his weeping increased.
“Come!” he sobbed. “Come and see!”
And they followed him across the paddy and through the forest.
“Oh my god!” Juliet moaned, stricken, when she saw Yashoda sitting still and trance-like on her porch. “How could they, how could they?”
In a state of deep but controlled and deadly calm anger, David walked up through the grove to the Nair house.
Anand, agitated and despairing, came to meet him.
“I know, I know, Professor David. I also am most upset and angry. I was not informed. It was kept from me. I thought only that she would be sent to Palghat. My father and I … we have quarrelled … he is in a rage because I have argued with him and accused him. He has ordered me from the house.”
David nodded curtly and brushed past him.
The meeting with Shivaraman Nair was one of mutual hostility, formality and chilly politeness.
“I know you are a man of religious and moral insight,” David began. “In the temple, I saw that your spirit was large and generous. This action was not worthy of you. It violates your own principles of justice.”
“You are a scholar, Professor David. You know that for us wrong actions must be expiated according to the laws of Manu. The penalty for fornication is severe.”
“Fornication?”
“It has been proven. My daughter Jati has seen it.”
“Seen what?”
“She has seen the man who brought you here after the bus accident. He has arrived in his car at night. Though you and your family were not at home, he has not left again for two hours.”
It was as though a blow had been struck, and David reeled with disbelief.
But it could not possibly be true.
“You consider that proof? That is hearsay, mere speculation.”
“It is sufficient. A woman’s duty is to keep herself free of public speculation. Gandhi himself, Professor David, on his own ashram, commanded the head of a young woman to be shaven. Though she herself had done no wrong, she had by her carnal beauty caused lust and impurity to enter the thoughts of the young male disciples. Gandhi himself has seen the need to curb the carnal power of woman.”
David stared at him, stunned. He is angry at his own sexual disturbance, he thought. He is shamed by his own bondage to the power of her beauty.
Oh! he realized. As I am! As I am! He felt the kindred hidden spring in the intensity of his own anger. There had been a gross violation of his private aesthetic pleasure. Of a remembered moment in time when he had been held bewitched in the aura of her presence, when he had combed her hair.
He felt disoriented, implicated.
Oh god, he thought wretchedly. She gave herself into my protection and I have failed her. I should have handled it differently. Yet what should I, could I, have done?
An age ago he had sent a letter to her father. There had never been a reply. Had her father frowned on foreign interference? Or had the letter never reached him?
He said coldly: “I am sending a cable to her father in Cochin. If any further harm should come to her …” It infuriated him that he was not in any position to formulate an effective threat.
“There will be nothing further,” Shivaraman Nair said. “Expiation has been made.”
They made namaskaram with frigid formality.
35
Prabhakaran had been sitting in silence beside Yashoda for several hours. She had passively refused to be moved. She had brushed away with nervous and abstracted gestures the entreaties and suggestions of Juliet. When Professor David came, she had covered her head and face with her sari. She did not speak. She seemed suspended, floating, in a state of almost catatonic indifference.
The boy had hesitantly touched her, stroked her hand. She had made no sign so he had left his hand there in compassionate contact, not moving. Hours had passed.
The rain had begun again, sealing them in their solitude, in their cave behind the waterfall that hurled itself from the eaves.
Yashoda shivered a little from the dampness and Prabhakaran went inside her house to look for a shawl. He draped it around her shoulders and sat down again beside her, taking his flute and putting it to his lips.
He played of ancient sadnesses, of burning and impossible loves. He played of a child’s longing for a mother, of the adoration of a boy beginning to be a man. He sounded the notes of beauty and pain, the long haunting cadences of memory.
At last he saw her tears and felt the faint stirring of movement in her. He touched her hand again and she opened her arms to him. They wept together, his head on her mothering shoulder, his hand caressing the smooth bare kernel of her head with infinite filial tenderness.
It was then that his formless and inarticulate grief began to harden around a seed of purpose. He left her to go to the house of his master.
Shivaraman Nair’s anger filled the house as heavily as the clouds of cloying incense that drifted about the brass puja lamp.
His wife and daughter hovered nervously out of sight in the kitchen. Anand had gone to stay with a friend at the university.
First his son. And then Professor David in intolerable questioning of his moral authority. And now a servant, a peon, a mere slip of boy whom he had saved from village starvation, a sweeper whom he had fed and clothed! This nothing, this pariah, this scum on the surface of earth had dared to look him in the eyes, to accuse him of unjust and private revenge!
Truly the world was in chaos. All proper boundaries were in dissolution. He was almost choking on his rage.
And his kinswoman! He dared not even think of her. When her face came unbidden to his memory, he was alarmed by the violent trembling of his body. Now that punishment had taken place he did not want to see that face. He would have her sent quickly to her father. He would never see her again.
Ritual purgation was indeed called for, to cleanse the family, to preserve society. His correct action within the family would be followed by his participation in tomorrow’s arat festival, the ritual cleansing of the kingdom itself, the bathing of the temple deities by the Maharajah.
He was leaving the house to meet with the city and temple officials, to join in preparations for the civic and religious rituals of the next day, when the delegation of Harijan labourers forestalled him.
“Hah!” he said with bitter and explosive scorn when he had heard their story. Now he was to be shamed by Untouchables, by the pickers of his own rice! “Hah! Your story does not surprise me! Anything can be expected of that woman! You are quite correct. She is a female devil, a yakshi. She has been punished, she will be further punished.”
And in raging contempt he flung a handful of silver rupees on the ground in front of them.
As he walked away from their wild scrabbling he spat on the swept sand of his courtyard.
He would, after all, have her sent to Palghat. There could be no compromise.
36
“I know you both blame me,” Annie said, pacing back and forth.
David sighed. “No, we don’t. In any case this barbarity had nothing to do with —”
“All the same they wouldn’t have been so prone to be outraged if I hadn’t … I wish you did blame me. I might be able to feel a bit indignant instead of sick with guilt.” She had bought a packet of Indian cigarettes and was chain-smoking. “What I can’t bear is her abject submissiveness. She consented to it! How could she do that, how could she?”
“There’s nothing we can do until her father comes. I’m sure he will when he gets my cable. And in the meantime no one’s going to harm her. Shivaraman Nair promised.”
David waited outside the house in the forest until Prabhakaran reappeared.
“Professor David, she does not want to see you.”
David went to the closed door and called through it.
“Yashoda!”
There was no answer. He turned the handle, rattling it purposely, and pushed the door slightly open. There was a startled cry, a rushing movement, and the weight of her body slamming it shut again.
“Yashoda,” he said gently, his forehead pressed against the weathered wood. “I have cabled your father. I want to talk to you.”
Silence.
He applied gentle but steady pressure to the door.
“No, no, no!” she sobbed through the opening. “I beg you, Professor David, I beg you. I would rather die than have you see me like this.”
He stopped pushing but the door remained ajar, the fingers of her right hand clenched around its edge. He traced the outline of her fingers gently and her grip relaxed a little.
“Your father will come to take you home, Yashoda.”
“No! I will not go! Can I let my father see me like this? Even for him it will be disgrace. I will go to Palghat.”
“You will not be sent to Palghat. Shivaraman Nair has promised.”
“Yes, I will be sent. I will ask to go. I do not want anyone to see me ever again.”
His fingers followed the curve of her hand and wrist, caressing, like a father with a wounded child. He reached in behind the door. She did not move.
“Yashoda,” he whispered. “You have the most beautiful face in India. Nothing can change that. Nothing. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
He stroked her arm, his shoulder curving through the door opening. She did not move.
“May I come in?”
“Oh Professor David,” she faltered. She came to life n
ow, taking his hand in both of hers, holding it against her cheek, out of sight behind the door. “You are very kind, Professor David, and I am loving you. But you do not understand. I am so tired, so tired. There is too much danger living between your world and the old world. I do not want to try any more. Please go away.”
“This is called shock, Yashoda. It’s natural to feel this way now. But it will go away. You will be happy again, I promise you. Even though you think it’s impossible right now. I don’t want to bother you. I’ll go away now. But you must send Prabhakaran if you need me.”
He pulled her hand gently through the doorway and kissed it.
“I want to talk to her father,” David told Juliet. “Its impossible to say enough in a cable. I’m going to try to telephone him from the Trivandrum post office.”
They all walked to Shasta Junction, the children trailing wearily behind. But the taxis had gone to the arat festival and they hitched a ride on a buffalo cart, jolting along dustily and uncomfortably. It would have been faster, but more tiring, to walk.
When they reached the post office, it was closed for arat.
“We might as well stay and watch the procession,” David said gloomily. “It will take us hours to get back anyway.”
The crowds began to surge forward onto the street where the sweepers and water bearers were still running along sprinkling sand and water. The burning strip of potholed blacktop had to be cooled for the feet of His Highness the Maharajah of Travancore. It had not rained for three hours and already the ground was searing to the touch. Thousands of umbrellas were hooked over arms, hanging black and folded like bats in temple niches, waiting for the rain.
Police with lathis ran to and fro, beating people back from the roadway with indiscriminate blows as the elephants, fabulously decorated, lumbered gracefully by at the head of the cavalcade. In the midst of the festive chaos, a tiny wrinkled white-haired old man walked alone. Barefoot and bare-chested, he carried a naked sword vertically in his hands.
The Ivory Swing Page 21
