One Part Woman

by Murugan, Perumal

‘Oh! You think I am torturing you?’ And she would get furious. But when she said, ‘Maama, won’t I ever get pregnant?’ his heart would melt and he would rush to comfort her.

  ‘Why not, dear? You are only twenty-eight now. You were sixteen when I married you. And you look just the same. Women are giving birth right till they are forty and forty-five. We are not that old.’ Their hearts swung between faith and resignation.

  Neither of them had had their birth charts made. If he asked his mother about the time of his birth, she would lament, ‘I struggled for two days after my water broke. Who took care of me? The midwife somehow saved both our lives. I prayed to Karia Kali. That’s why I named you Kaliyannan. I don’t even remember if it was the month of Maasi or Panguni. Do you think we are royalty to have the time and day of birth noted down? What’s the use of a birth chart for someone who rolls in the dust? Even if you rub yourself with oil before rolling, you will have to be content with whatever sticks to you.’

  Ponna, too, did not have the details of her birth written down. So they both showed their hands to palmists everywhere and had to be content with what they were told. Whenever she went to the market, Ponna would go to have her card read by a parrot. She had been to every astrologer in the area who picked cards using a parrot. They all predicted good tidings. Not even once was a bad card drawn. During fairs, there were even those who made predictions by drawing lines. Some used large pearls, others had pebbles piled up. It didn’t cost too much—perhaps one or two rupees. All of them predicted good things. If she mentioned that she’d been married for over ten years, they would say, ‘You will get it late, but you will get it for sure.’

  In hard times, all threads of faith would come together.

  FOUR

  Kali was wiping his hands after finishing the hot pakodas and sweetened rice cakes when Ponna brought another plate of snacks and a mug of water. Whenever they came here for a feast, they claimed this space under the tree. Night or day, this was where they stayed. The house was a secluded one in the middle of the fields, so there were no intrusions. If it started drizzling, he moved to the porch. But he never went inside the house, which was comprised only of one big room. Apart from Muthu, his wife and child, this space was also shared by Kali’s father-in-law and mother-in-law. His father-in-law, too, would keep to the porch and the cattle enclosure. Even Muthu would only enter the house at night to sleep.

  ‘Have you taken the blessing money for the festival?’ Kali asked Ponna.

  ‘Like that’s the only thing lacking in my life. If I had one child each in my arms, on my waist and in my womb, I would demand it rightfully from my father and brother. Now, if they give it to me, I will take it. If they don’t, I will not ask.’

  They hadn’t been to the temple chariot festival for two years. Before that, it used to be an elaborate affair with a new sari, dhoti, towel, and so on. They were even gifted up to ten or twenty rupees as money to offer to the gods. It was not that Kali had come to expect any of this as a matter of routine. But he was only trying to make conversation and wanted to know her thoughts.

  Holding her hand affectionately, Kali made her sit on the cot. The cloth covering her bosom slipped slightly as she sat down. Kali’s eyes penetrated the fabric. Quickly pulling it back in place, she said, ‘Look where your eyes stray in the middle of the day!’

  He replied, taking mock offence, ‘If I can’t see them, then what are they for?’

  ‘Hey, Ponna!’ came her mother’s yell, ‘Come here now and attend to the lentils. How many things can I handle at once?’

  ‘The old hag is not able to do anything on her own,’ Ponna said as she got up. Seeing the brightness on his face, she laughed, reached for the knot in his hair and undid it before running into the house.

  She had great fondness for the little knot of hair on his head. She often untied it and played with his locks, often by braiding them. ‘Your hair is thicker than mine, maama,’ she’d say. ‘But there is no little petal of a hand that could hold this and climb up your shoulders.’

  She managed to connect anything to the subject of children. It was not a worry she could keep hidden within herself. Even if she did, people would come to know anyway. She had no other thought besides trying to pre-empt other people’s questions about this.

  Last year, avoiding the fast, Kali took Ponna to see the chariot festival. It was the day the big chariot was taken around. People from the villages around Tiruchengode were swarming the streets. When you are in a crowd, your spirits are somehow lifted. When they were surveying the shops, he heard someone call out, ‘Hey, Kali, are you well?’

  Bommidi Mani was smiling from the other side of the crowd. It had been several years since he left the village. He had settled down on his own land in Bommidi. He shouted from where he stood, ‘Do you have children?’ Kali went pale. Even though the crowd carried on as before, he felt as if everyone had turned to look at him. Thankfully, Ponna was inside the bangle shop.

  Embarrassed, he gestured a no. Mani smacked himself on the head to express his sympathy with Kali’s fate and said, ‘Get married again.’ Kali had to smile it away and vanish into the crowd. It annoyed Kali that though they might have a million things wrong with their own lives, people found great pleasure in poking and prodding other people’s miseries. Couldn’t they even remember they were in a public place? What kind of pride comes from knowing that the other person does not have what one has? Does everyone have everything? Isn’t there always something lacking?

  Someone or the other always appeared to remind him of it. ‘I may or may not have children. What is it to you? Shut up and leave!’ he felt like yelling. But he never could. What stopped him from reciprocating their rudeness? Ponna was able to give cheeky retorts. He could not.

  His mother believed that going to Kallipalayam Nadar was the solution to every problem. The man would make his predictions only once a week when, after finishing his routine task of climbing palm trees, he would come to a little shrine under a tree in the forest. This would be at around ten in the morning. The ritual was simple. It was important to cut open a lemon—this signified a sacrifice. He would then divide a cluster of beads into two sets, taking the bunch on the right-hand side in both his hands and shaking them. He would then proceed to arrange them in pairs. If a single bead remained, things would be in one’s favour. But if they all paired up, it was cause for worry. Every time Kali and Ponna had been to him so far, they had always drawn a single, unpaired bead. So Nadar believed that they would definitely be blessed with a child.

  ‘There is some curse that you have inherited. Everything will be all right if we find out what that is and make offerings for appeasement,’ he said once.

  Kali’s mother did not know what curse it was. ‘Why should you suffer for what some dog might have done?’ she cried. But something occurred to her after she thought about it for a few days. She remembered an incident. It was from the time of Kali’s great-grandfather, Nachimuthu Gounder.

  One year, the yield of castor seeds was high in his fields, and he would invariably carry a sack or two to the market every week. One particular week, he took two sacks and unloaded them under a tamarind tree. The Chettiyar merchant, who normally bought the castor seeds, was there as usual, sitting with his men and his measuring mugs. In those days, one padi of castor seeds fetched only an anna. It was great luck if a sack fetched you five rupees.

  When Nachimuthu Gounder unloaded his sacks of castor seeds, a cart loaded with sacks arrived from Pazhayapalayam. It was clearly from a bigger farm, but they had no one to unload the sacks.

  Chettiyar said, ‘Gounder, please help with unloading these. I’ll get you paid for it.’

  Nachimuthu Gounder did the task obligingly. But in the end the numbers did not tally. ‘There were fourteen sacks,’ said the driver of the cart. There were only thirteen on the ground.

  And, curiously, the two sacks that Nachimuthu Gounder had brought as his own had now grown to three. Chettiyar noticed that and remarked,
‘I thought you had only two.’

  If Gounder had said, ‘I unloaded one here by mistake,’ the issue might have ended there. Instead, he swore that he had brought three sacks. The driver of the cart from Pazhayapalayam was not going to leave the matter there. So it went to the temple.

  All unresolved issues went to the Tiruchengode Murugan temple. Halfway up the hill, on the sixtieth step, Murugan stands carved on the rock. There is even a belief that long ago this was the main temple on the hill. When the hill was covered with dense forest, the dwellers made this deity. This original god still made sure truth prevailed. Once the sixty steps of truth began, people bent down in obeisance on every step. Even though steps have been carved up to the top of the hill and another, bigger temple has sprouted there, this Murugan on the sixtieth step is the original god.

  Every step had a stone lamp. Whenever there was a matter to be settled in the temple, the plaintiff filled each lamp with oil and lit them. The defendant was made to snuff out each lamp and arrive at Murugan’s feet and swear that he or she did not do what they had been accused of. Nachimuthu Gounder put out all sixty lamps. Thinking of Murugan as just an image scratched on a rock, he swore at his feet. For just a sack of castor seeds, for a meagre five rupees, he perjured in front of a god.

  They say that soon after this incident, Gounder lost his mind and wandered all over town. Apparently, he pulled everyone by the hand saying, ‘Come, let’s go to the Murugan on the sixtieth step.’ No one knew what happened to him once he left the village and started wandering the streets of Tiruchengode. Kali’s grandfather was his only child. His father, too, had been his grandfather’s only child. They both died young. Amma narrated all this and started crying.

  Seeking redemption from this curse, Kali and Ponna scaled the hill. For sixty days, they lit the sixty lamps and cast themselves at the feet of Murugan, pleading for his blessings. The entire castor seed yield from that year became the oil in those lamps. But even that was not enough. So they bought more, took some in alms, and continued to fill those lamps. They even tried pacifying Murugan’s anger by smearing oil on the deity’s body.

  They would leave in their cart at dusk. By the time they would tether the bulls at the foot of the hill, having requested the flower vendor to keep an eye on them, and climb and reach the sixtieth step, the day would have ended. The priest would be waiting for them. Kali filled the lamps with oil, and Ponna lighted them. The priest bathed Murugan every day in castor oil. The belief was that only castor oil could appease a century-long wrath. When they finished the rituals and climbed down the hill, the town would have gone to bed. But nothing could placate Murugan.

  Kali’s grandmother, however, had another explanation. She took umbrage at her daughter-in-law’s story of the family curse. ‘Was it your mother who came as the Chettiyar who bought the castor seeds?’ she said. ‘Who knows which dog stole the sack? She is unloading that crime on my family. No one has ever told me this story. Your mother must have stayed up many nights to come up with it. What does she know? She can’t even count! She came into the family so much later. But never mind. You lit the lamps for god. Only good can come out of it.’

  But until the day she died, his grandmother was worried about the perpetuation of her lineage. She sent the young couple to any temple festival anywhere, saying, ‘Go and beg for alms.’ They did all of that, but nothing came of it.

  Furthermore, Kali’s grandmother had a different story to tell—one that competed with his mother’s theory of their current predicament. He thought they were vying with each other to narrate stories of curses and retribution. He lamented his fate that he had to do anything they asked him to do. He feared that if he refused, Ponna would unleash her tirade. She would behave as if doing that one thing would finally ensure childbirth. Such was the case with his grandmother’s story too. But this one didn’t walk its talk either.

  FIVE

  In those times, the region around Tiruchengode was covered with forests. It was the Gounders who converted it into cultivable land. In the beginning, while they were engaged in this daunting task, they would also take their herds of cattle to graze in this area. Young men went daringly into the forest for this reason. Once, four such daring youths went herding their goats. In the heat of midday, they heard a female voice screaming in agony from within the forest.

  There were many ghost stories about the forest. At first they thought it was the snare of Mohini who was said to bewitch young men. But the voice sounded steady and human, so they walked in its direction, although fearfully. It was autumn, and the trees had all shed their leaves and were standing bare. Only the neem and palm trees were lush, with their foliage still intact. Then they saw her sitting under a palm tree, wearing only a chequered wrap around her waist. Her breasts had freshly blossomed. She was a forest dweller, fourteen or fifteen years of age.

  The boys knew that tribal people lived in the forest. Once in a while, they ventured into the town in tens or fifteens to barter things in exchange for what they needed. They were not an agrarian community. They ate roots, shoots and fruits. Millets were the only grains they accepted from the fields.

  The girl was from that community. Some adolescent anger had made her leave her haven and reach the edge of the forest. She was determined to stay there until her people came looking for her. At first, the four men looked at her with sympathy. But it dawned on them that the girl was all alone, and they were soon overcome with the urge of youth. Even though she was a girl made strong by life in the forest, she could not fight the hard-work-forged strength of the four young men. She could do nothing. Not only did they ravish her, they also strangled her to death and rolled her into a ditch in the forest. They might have thought that that would ensure their safety. But on the third day, an unidentifiable fragrance of a tree rose from the pit where she lay, and spread all around. Her people followed the scent and eventually found her dead body.

  The four men fled the town fearing the arrows of the tribal people. No one knew what happened to them. Many stories flourished. Some said they hanged themselves. Some even said they went away to a distant country and were happily married. Time went by; the forest was gradually uprooted and turned into cultivable land.

  Once, during a famine, when a few people went westward herding their cattle, they were surprised to see their family deity, Karia Kali, enshrined there. When they asked around about it, they were told that the goddess had been brought there by ancestors who came from distant lands. No one knew the name of that faraway place—it seemed that the ancestors had failed to mention it. Some people presumed that the ancestors being spoken about were, in fact, the same four young men who had fled the place ages ago. The descendants of those four men would thus be long-lost relatives with whom these people now reconnected.

  But it was also believed that the tribal girl’s curse hounded even those families that dared to associate with them: ‘Pavatha, our goddess who resides up in that hill, will seek justice from those who did this to me. No girl child will ever be born in their families. Even the male children shall grow up to be impotent and die young.’

  This curse of the tribal girl persisted till today. That was why no girl child had been born in this lineage. Even those that were born had died in a day or two. The men, too, had truncated lives.

  Kali’s grandmother narrated all this and launched into a dirge. She lamented the fact that she could not keep the family secret from him. But she tried to bolster his faith: ‘Dear one, you have a good heart. You will have four or five children, and you will live to be a hundred.’

  Kali wondered if he too would die young. But a little faith grew in his heart, that a child might actually be born, even if he would grow up to be impotent. Was childbirth getting delayed to postpone his early death? A child could be born even when he was forty. And he might live to see it for eight or ten years. That was what had happened to his father and grandfather.

  He did not remember his father’s face clearly. But there was one image t
hat was etched in his mind, thanks to his mother’s periodic narration of it. His father had always suffered from severe abdominal pain. Toddy and arrack were his staple food. ‘My Kalimma’ was how he used to lovingly address Kali, and he took Kali on his shoulders wherever he went. It is likely that the way he addressed Kali expressed his sadness at not having a girl child. So Kali wondered if he too would have a male child and live to be fifty years or so. Wasn’t that enough?

  As if she read his thoughts, Ponna ruffled his hair and pulled him close to her breast. When she heard what his grandmother had to share, she lamented her fate at having to marry into a family with so many curses weighing it down. But Kali’s suffering made her forget her own. She feared she might have to part with him soon. Other than the lack of a child they could call their own, there was nothing else missing in their lives. He fulfilled every wish of hers, perhaps because he had married her out of love.

  The day he found out that his mother and his wife did not get along, he asked his mother to cook her own food. She made a scene, crying, ‘I gave birth to just one son, and I struggled so much to bring you up.’

  He said, ‘I have not gone away anywhere. I am right here next door. And I take care of you in all other ways. What’s the point in staying together when you two cannot get along? This might improve your relationship.’ And it happened just like he said. In fact, sometimes the two women even got together and turned on Kali, making it doubly hard for him. Now that they had been told the story of the tribal girl and her curse, both the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law were adamant that something had to be done in recompense. But as for what exactly needed to be done, they did not know.

  Kali’s grandmother once said, ‘Pavatha still resides in the hill in Tiruchengode. It is enough if you make offerings of new clothes and pray to her. Gods cannot be angry with people for too long.’ The astrologer Nadar also agreed with her.