This bit about dharma must have engrossed me.
‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘But to live such a dharma of the householder, things have to be saved from thieves. We have to pelt stones at those who steal.’
‘Poor Sainla-daju guards his maize field all day long. He watches over it even on Sundays,’ Maya said. ‘If the monkeys get half a second they pillage the entire harvest.’ She tried to look up at Sainla Newar’s cornfield, but the walls of our fields blocked her sight.
‘His fields are at the edge of the forest. They’ll enter our fields only after finishing with his.’ I had nothing to worry about.
‘Sanbir’s father really must have finished planting saplings. Our children have gone there, too.’ She had spotted them. I, too, saw flashes of green and white.
‘And the boy went there without a shirt on his back!’
‘We planted trees, but you brought too many champak saplings,’ Maya said.
‘There are champaks that don’t flower. They make good fodder,’ I said. ‘We should be planting lots of tussare cuttings around this season. They do grow, don’t they?’
‘What is the point in growing tussare? It isn’t a winter fodder—it sheds leaves before that. It is green in monsoon, but there is plenty of green grass around then. For fodder, gogun is the best.’
‘Gogun is best.’
‘Gogun also adorns the field.’
A gogun tree nodded above us, eavesdropping. Its thick canopy blocked out the blue of the sky above.
‘Tell me, what in particular is beautiful about the gogun?’ I asked, examining the tree.
‘The foliage is impressively dense—isn’t that what makes it beautiful?’ I also answered my own question.
‘The red rib that grows from the base to the tip of the leaf, see—on every leaf—that’s what I like about it.’
Many a moment passed.
‘Look over there,’ I pointed towards the slopes of Sikkim. ‘Denzong is just over that peak. Look! Clouds! How they swirl there! How pretty!’
Maya rested her frailty against me and looked in that direction.
‘Tell me, how would I phrase it if I wrote it into a story?’
‘How would I know?’
‘The mountain gathers a brood of clouds in its lap… No, that doesn’t work, does it?’
‘No, it doesn’t.’ Maya laughed.
‘The clouds seek to seep into the rocks and hide forever,’ I said out of stubbornness.
‘Like the Dali painting?’ she asked. ‘We saw it the other day?’
I forfeited the enterprise.
We watched other families’ lands farther afield. Terraces cut like waves of water, terraces of grass and earth.
‘How many clumps of bamboo do we have?’ I asked suddenly.
‘Twenty.’
‘There are twenty-eight clumps of pareng alone. Twenty-nine with the one I brought last year—the one with the small, fluttery leaves.’
‘Did it take root?’
‘Why wouldn’t it?’
‘I had really liked the bamboo in Phulbari, with the square stems, one culm green and another yellow. I liked that.’
‘The one by the pond?’
Maya laughed.
‘I’ll bring that for you.’
‘I had showed it to you last year,’ Maya spoke with disappointment, but with hope in her heart.
‘No good comes out of planting fig. Any big storm snaps the branches off, breaks the trunk itself. Only the two plants in the hollow have done well.’
‘Renuka’s mother isn’t any more since yesterday either,’ I continued. ‘The children cry with such heartrending wails when it is time to take away the body. I am terrified of that moment’s crying.’
I paused, lost in thought.
‘Of course the children will cry,’ Maya said.
‘The children cry fiercely on that day, while the husband silently endures it all. But the children begin to forget as the days pass, and with every passing day they begin to laugh a little more, and in a while they entirely forget to cry because their whole life stands before them in wait, carrying with it bundles of hopes and desires. But the husband who didn’t cry on the day remembers his wife when somebody else gives him his food in the evening, he remembers her when he prepares to go to bed, and when he wakes in the morning he remembers again that she is gone, and he remembers her while he is busy at work outside and he remembers her when he enters their home and sits down to rest. He continues to be startled by this realization as long as he lives.’
‘Now he lives only out of the compulsion of life itself.’ This, too, I added.
The sun was splashed over the tea estates across the valley, a sunlight where all shades of green were lit bright.
Narrow roads, ruts of walking paths descended from a mess of houses; a line zigged and zagged and encircled a clump of eight or ten trees before entering it—the village’s water spring must have been there. Another path climbed upward from the village into the forest, to gather firewood; torrents of white monsoon descended, slicing through the estate in three places. Foamy stitches of a creek also rushed down the hill, and the bigger river below shook the base of the mountains. There was a place in the forest where a waterfall fell into another waterfall; I searched for it after the rains every year.
‘If you keep searching, you can see water falling from there.’ She also pointed to the same place.
And, if you waited, as if in a stupor, water did slush forth to fall slowly. Joy swept up.
I went close and said, ‘We have a good harvest of soybeans in the fields this year. Our maize is the best. We don’t have any marigold but our potatoes have revived.’
‘You’re a white-collar man, and I am ill,’ Maya said. I looked at her face, blushing on this day with a sheen of sweat. She had tired of contemplating the graveness of life, and now she teased me. ‘Trying to cut a bunch of these knotwoods or a handful of wood sorrel could bring upon a fever… Or the rain could catch me by the door for half a minute and I could die.’
‘“Chamey’s wife Gaunthali had a sharp tongue. Even when one spoke to her sincerely she found reasons to quarrel,”’ I recited.
Maya laughed. My accusation was excessive, and she laughed because she couldn’t parry the bit that was beyond the reasonable. That was her weakness. I pitied her.
As we watched, a hole-riddled, expansive net of fog swirled straight up and spread out above us.
‘Don’t sit in the cold too long. Let’s go,’ I said.
‘I feel hot,’ she said.
I stood first, then she took my arm to stand up.
‘Look, your acidanthera there has flowered too.’ On the edge of a lower terrace danced two pairs of white blossoms rising from slender green stems; the breeze carried a sharp streak of its fragrance.
‘I have planted pretty cypress trees.’ I surveyed the field. ‘The pear tree over there has grown tall. The wild pear will start giving fruit next year. That tree is of large mulberries—don’t let anybody cut it down.’
We were walking back along the edge of the terraces. We started by brushing aside the drooping leaves of the broom grass and losing our way among the maize grown taller than us.
‘Wait, I’ll pick some ears of maize,’ Maya stopped to search for ripe ears. I reached above her and broke off a couple.
When we had climbed a bit I said, ‘Receive your blessings. If you want to keep me pleased, always make me a chutney of this.’ An enticing bush of timur peppercorns flourished with tiny red thorns all over its stems and leaves.
‘Oh, your fancies…’
‘What is for the curry today?’ I asked.
‘Cauliflower. I’ll send Deshpad later to pick one.’
‘Aren’t we eating chicken?’
‘Which one?’
‘That one-eyed spotted rooster.’
‘Kill it.’
She was walking ahead of me, carrying the maize in her shawl. I turned her around and said, ‘We are a grand prince a
nd his princess. We had come to see how our subjects fared, to gauge and experience their joys and sorrows. We have spent twelve long years in disguise and assessed everything. We can no longer endure this life. Let us return to our royal palace.’
Maya laughed, softly.
‘I was going to say something,’ she said, ‘but I won’t. Let it be.’
When we reached the yard, Madhu, Alpana and other children had returned, had drawn hop-scotch tiles and were playing. I stole our youngest daughter’s turn and hopped through the boxes.
‘Am I right?’
I shut my eyes. It was quiet, and I waited for somebody to answer.
Kheer
I hadn’t understood the incident at the time, and I had failed to imagine that perhaps it contained a meaning. The incident—let’s call it an incident—had transpired thus:
Although I had encountered repeatedly in short stories and novels—and, later, written in my own works—descriptions of the Teesta’s muted roar, I’d never really had the opportunity to listen to the song of the Teesta to my heart’s content. I had heard from folks who toiled along its banks in the months of monsoon and winter about how the Teesta sighed long smothering sighs at noon and at midnight. However, the hurried stops on the bridge to look upriver and downriver and briefly listen to the Teesta during my rushed travels to Kalimpong and Gangtok had left my hunger and thirst for the Teesta’s song unsated. Traces of innumerable pasts drawn on the slumbering sands above the blue-green expanse of water that brought to mind the word ‘immense’; reeds and the jungles along the banks swaying, fanned by a breeze, and, within that imagined picture, I would recollect, folded within the roar of Teesta’s song, a separate lapping of waves and distinct gurgles and murmurs…
It was for this reason that I had made up my mind to spend the night by the Teesta on my way home from Gangtok.
Perhaps because the rooms in the Dak Bungalow were being repaired, the room given to me had also been recently given a wash of lime and therefore was disconcertingly bright and white, the odour of the whitewash pervasive. The workers engaged in repairing the Dak Bungalow—the carpenters and plasterers, painters and coolies—were staying in the adjacent room, and they make up the plot of this story. They were making it a day of celebrations, and so they were congregated in the room, eagerly talking over each other. Some were cooking, and that was at the heart of their conversation: they were cooking kheer.
I detest conversations about food. But left without a choice, I continued listening to them. Outdoors was the stunned brightness of an afternoon. By the time I looked out after spreading the bedding on the cot, a different hue of light—as if suddenly a lot more of the evening had intruded—poured through the innermost leaves and branches of trees.
‘If you really want kheer, you need two litres of milk for every quarter kilo of rice,’ said an assertive voice that suggested a face with deep-set eyes. ‘For our rice we need about ten litres. How much did you use?’
‘How much would it be? Just the four litres…’
‘And you’re making a four-litre-milk kheer in a place like Teesta? Shame!’ the voice from earlier said. ‘Kheer made with four litres of milk!’ he added, as if the point he was making was a black rag riddled with holes which he was showing everyone.
‘If you really want to make kheer you need many more ingredients,’ an older voice boomed. ‘You don’t have the right kind of rice to begin with. You need the nooniya strain, fine and smooth…’
‘Even the aluwa rice is unaffordable here,’ said a voice that perhaps belonged to a reserved man. ‘And then they pass off local hill rice as Rangoon aluwa.’
‘That trash looks just like the bayerni rice from the hills,’ another chimed in helpfully.
‘I meant, if we really had everything we needed and really wanted to have kheer,’ the older voice marched on, ‘Nooniya rice, aged, even better if it is the black nooniya—it is fragrant—cook it in ten or twelve litres of undiluted milk. You’ll need fifteen litres if you use the diluted sort. By the time the five extra litres of water evaporate, the rice breaks up and becomes a paste—mush. But if your milk is thick as a fist the rice grains keep their shape, it becomes the best kind of kheer. The mushy kind sticks to the pot and burns, it will smell burnt to whoever eats last…’
‘Taste like cleaning teeth with charcoal,’ perhaps somebody else said something similar, but I didn’t hear him clearly.
In a while, another voice boiled over from another corner, ‘As if it is enough to have just the milk! You need pistachios, raisins, walnuts, cinnamon, coconut, bay leaves, cloves. Cook it at just the right, low heat. Add the raisins at the very end. Too early, and they burst open.’
‘What happens if you add all of that?’ an enthusiastic, young voice asked.
‘Flavour!’ ‘For fragrance!’ ‘Gives you power!’ All other voices clamoured at him.
‘Don’t get used to it,’ a voice continued, as if to deliver the dregs of a collective contempt, ‘or you’ll wander in your dreams, searching for kheer. That’ll be the only comfort you’ll get.’
‘If you cook kheer here in that way, its aroma will hit somebody walking on the road way over there,’ another added.
And, just then, I put some effort into trying to smell their kheer, but I couldn’t manage the faintest whiff of it.
‘Your kheer! We can’t smell it sitting right here,’ the old man also added.
‘When I said let’s not scrimp on anything, let’s eat some great kheer, you refused money,’ came a response in protest. ‘Be it by earning it, or through theft, or with leaving debts unpaid, a man should eat well, a man must be able to eat well and live.’
Everybody went silent.
I found that I too was attending to that sudden silence. I rose defiantly and began pacing about in the room. This declaration of my presence acted as a catalyst, as if a large boulder had fallen into the stream of their conversation and forced it into a new direction.
‘It’s not enough just to get everything together—you have to have the skills to cook,’ a man started, his voice tepid as pale steam.
‘There’s no point in eating kheer willy-nilly, whenever you feel like. It has to be at the right time, under the right conditions,’ another added.
‘It is hard, then, to eat kheer,’ a third voice lamented bitterly. ‘Impossible!’
I looked out, barely able to suppress my laughter. All seemed ordinary. The dark trees of dusk stood at attention.
‘Keep stirring, or even this piddling bit of kheer will burn.’
‘It must be ready now.’
‘It’s done! Yes!’
‘Cooked enough, yes.’
With grunts of ‘Yes, it’s cooked, definitely’, etc., the pot was taken off the fire. I imagined men shifting away, perhaps a few picking and occupying favoured spots.
As they ate, someone asked, ‘Something smells, doesn’t it?’
‘It does.’
‘It is the firewood. I’ve been noticing it for some time now,’ someone else said.
In cycles, doubt died, resurrected.
‘It isn’t sweet enough,’ somebody said, walked a few paces to fetch the sugar and sprinkle it over his share.
‘If you really want decent kheer,’ the same voice which had cooked up the conversation initially spoke through mouthfuls, ‘it isn’t sugar you should use, but molasses. Gives it colour.’
‘And not molasses of sugarcane, but the layered, clean molasses of the toddy-palm—only then is the kheer genuinely luscious,’ a second voice supplied immediate editorial correction. ‘Who would eat kheer with sugarcane molasses! Disgusting!’
‘What is this talk about eating? You get some kheer after so many days and you can’t stop talking about it. I am embarrassed for you.’ The man who said this must have aimed to have me hear him and lighten his own shame.
And soon, they busied themselves with eating.
‘Nothing but sweetened rice and milk,’ when the man with the deep voice
spoke, everybody burst into laughter. The skilled cook continued to laugh for the longest. And, as he stopped and started abruptly to chortle, his comrades also joined in the laughter.
I understand the significance of that incident now, four years after that evening. The kheer that they cooked is representative of life: our hearts are full of ideals dictating to us that life ought to be lived in a certain manner, that life should be put to work in our service in specific ways, or that a particular sort of utility must be wringed from it, but the errors, absences, insufficiencies and ruinations in the lives that we live in reality colour our experience of life to resemble their kheer, which was but merely a satire aimed at the ideal of kheer.
Can life ever be like the Teesta which, without prejudice to where or how it flows, always remains an ideal?
Journey of an Ideal
To send the daughter to school every day—she asks me to adjust her belt, she goes to school, and all of this is life, and life is merely this. Perhaps I will never accomplish great deeds, but I am capable of tightening the belt on my daughter’s frock; and that of which I am capable is the whole of life. The tasks that can be accomplished within this day’s length—there is no need to look to the future—potato and maize seeds necessary for the coming year’s sowing: only these are life and its ingredients. Man has adulterated life with a surfeit of elements and made it into poison.
I was attempting to identify the direction from which this desperate, angst-ridden thought had jogged casually into my mind.
Mysteries fall into our lives and fill it with a sweet ache; such mysteries that confront our existence in the sudden paleness of an evening, or in the wakefulness of the hours past midnight when in the rain-hours it begins to drizzle. Without these, life would be no more than a blank brightness. I, too, have purchased mysteries. The tattoo of rain on the roof, the nightlong drip-drip of rainwater from the eaves to the ground are dear to me. And, somehow, when the feriwal comes around in the night to blow his horn, I wake up; the feriwal blows his horn again, without strain, and walks around the house, chanting in a deep voice words that I don’t comprehend. The dog in the house also remains quiet; to my ears, the feriwal’s heavy steps make it seem that he has walked far away. I am still straining to hear his calls.
Long Night of Storm Page 13
