One Part Woman
Page 17
Kali had been very happy to see that Uncle Nallupayyan had come bringing that feast. He had come at the right time, because Kali was very tired after all the work. He drank the arrack and took bites of the meat. It was a good chicken dish that had been made by adding just the right amount of green chilli.
‘Uncle, looks like you have learned to make excellent chicken gravy and fry it!’ said Kali.
‘Oh, I can’t do such things,’ said Uncle. ‘I can’t sit still in one place even for a little while. Then where am I going to have the patience to cook and fry? My brothers’ wives bring me these things.’ And he laughed, adding, ‘You keep saying we need an heir to what wealth we save, don’t you? But what’s the use of having a child? Even those parents who have four or five children have been left to take care of themselves. They all die alone. But I won’t die that way. See, when you have children, it is the unspoken understanding that they are going to inherit whatever you leave behind. But in my case, no one knows what I will do with my stuff, where it will go. So everyone trips over each other wanting to take care of me. The other day, I said, just for the sake of it, that since I didn’t know who was going to take care of me, I was planning to write my property off to the Sengottayan and Pavatha temples and then go to die in some monastery somewhere. Since then, I am sent a big portion of whatever is cooked in my brothers’ homes! Today, they made meat in both houses, and the farm boy and I could not finish eating it all. So I brought it here thinking you might like it.’
Apparently, Uncle Nallupayyan’s sisters-in-law were vying with one another to take care of him. They were pampering him: ‘Is the meat enough, maama?’ or ‘Shall I bring you more gravy?’
‘Everything comes to where I am sitting,’ Uncle continued. ‘I don’t have to move anywhere. Do people who have children get treated this way? Don’t worry. In the future, you will get all this attention too.’ Saying this, he cheered Kali up.
Whenever he was talking to Uncle Nallupayyan, Kali forgot the pain of being childless and found an excitement about life. He even felt convinced it was good not to have children. But very soon some other small matter would come to the fore, tease him, rekindle his yearning for a child and laugh at his plight. Kali felt that however much Uncle Nallupayyan rationalized it, his plight was not great either. Uncle might have met several women in the market. He might have enjoyed the pleasures of coitus several times. All this was fine if it was just once in a while. But wasn’t it sad if the dog had to dip its tongue in the cattle’s water pot every time it felt hungry?
For instance, could Uncle Nallupayyan have ever experienced the kind of late-night urge that Kali was experiencing now, the one propelled by thoughts of Ponna’s body? How many kinds of urges had he felt since morning! Could Uncle ever feel the certainty that he could go home and quench his yearning? It was Ponna who made Kali aware of the secret nuances of the body. Just a slight movement of her eyes made his body toss and struggle. Even without a touch, she could make his body hers. If she touched him, his body became the two-sided drum, the kind that was played during theatrical performances. When she touched him with just a finger, his body-drum reverberated with a certain sound. If she held him with a hand, it made another distinct sound. And when she held him with both her hands, his body completely lost its control. When her touches progressed, his body moved with the increasing intensity of a body responding to a drum’s rise to a crescendo.
His mother might have given birth to him and raised him, but her control over him was limited. Nothing compared to the power his wife wielded over him. It was for Ponna that he left behind his circle of friends and relatives and confined himself to the barnyard. She said, ‘I will go if you want me to.’ That didn’t mean, ‘I will go.’ It meant, ‘I will do anything for you.’ Giving up everything was the only price he had to pay to have her rest in the palm of his hand, to nestle in the hold of his fist. Thinking of her, his body acquired speed. Not minding the mild dizziness, he walked on.
Pathways that meandered through fields with no farmsteads led the way for him. Even from a distance, he could see his portia tree shaped like an umbrella of shadows. The wind had died. The tree looked like darkness itself. Would she open the door if he just gently tapped on it like he did at home? Or would she have gone to sleep after expecting him all night? On nights when he failed her expectation to go to her, she stayed awake. In the morning, she would burn him with her anger. The frenzy of her agitated body was too much for him to bear.
The cot under the portia tree lay bare. He walked towards the door. A large iron lock hung on the latch. For a minute, he thought she had just hung the lock outside and latched the door from the inside. So he tried pushing the latch. It was chain-locked on the outside. All his intoxication wore off. He tried pushing the lock around. Was she teasing him? But why play with him at this time of the night and that too at his father-in-law’s place? He leaned against the door and looked across the front yard. The bullocks were not there. Nor was the cart.
His lips murmured, ‘She has cheated you, she has cheated you.
He banged his head against the door. His topknot came undone and rolled down to his nape.
‘You whore!’ he shouted. ‘Have you really gone? Have you gone despite my saying no?’ Only the dog echoed his shout in a single bark. The hens that had climbed the portia tree rustled their feathers and marked their presence. ‘All of you have gotten together and cheated me,’ he cried.
His sobbing stopped gradually.
Suddenly, he got up like a man possessed. He opened the full bottle of arrack in his hand and drank it down in one gulp. He didn’t stop for air even once. Holding the bottle in his hand, he started walking. His hair, now loosened completely, lashed like a whip across his back. He wobbled along slowly all the way back to his home.
When he reached his barnyard at dawn, his dog came running to him and showed him its affection by curling its body and getting between his feet. But he kicked it off. It screamed in pain and ran away. Under the portia tree, the cattle were munching on fodder. He sat on the rock under the tree. He drank some more of the arrack. When he yelled, ‘You whore! You have cheated me!’ he was breathless. ‘You will not be happy. You have cheated me, you whore …’
He slid down to the ground. The rope running from the corn stacks pressed against his back. He looked above. The branches of the portia tree had spread themselves across the sky.
G A P P A A.ORG
THE BEGINNING
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HAMISH HAMILTON
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First published in Tamil as Maadhurbaagan by Kalachuvadu Publications, Tamil Nadu 2010
Copyright © Perumal Murugan 2010
Translation copyright © Aniruddhan Vasudevan 2013
Cover photograph © Getty Images
G A P P A A .ORG
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-670-08651-1
This digital edition published in 2013.
e-ISBN: 978-9-351-18585-7