The Story of a Goat

by Perumal Murugan

  ‘Speak softly, sir. The regime has ears on all sides.’

  ‘There’s an old saying that the regime is deaf.’

  ‘It’s deaf only when we speak about our problems. When we talk about the regime, its ears are quite sharp.’

  Their chatter went on for a long time.

  6

  WHEN THE OFFICERS finally arrived and the piercing of ears was about to begin, shouts rang out that a man at the back of the queue had fainted. An officer came rushing to the spot.

  ‘Wretched dogs. They put nothing in their bellies before they come here early in the morning and stand in the queue. Then they collapse in a faint, holding up our work. It happens all the time. Take him and put him in the shade, give him some water. If anyone faints from now on, tell them their goats won’t get their ears pierced today; they will have to come back next week,’ the officer instructed his assistants. They carried the man away. It was rumoured that an old man had fainted like this last week and eventually died.

  Those standing in the queue took out water, gruel or food from their baskets and poured it down their gullet to quench their hunger. They covered their heads to shield themselves from the sun, the men with their towels and the women using the free end of their saris. Even a brief fainting spell would ruin their chance of getting the job done and they would have to come back again the next week. Policemen turned up every now and then and restored order to the queue using their sticks. ‘Stand in the queue, stand in the queue,’ was their steady refrain.

  The sheep owners had an issue with this process. Each sheep had only one lamb, but goats kept arriving with up to five kids each. Till all the five kids of a goat had got their ears pierced, a sheep owner with a single lamb had to wait. ‘Everyone can get only one kid’s ear pierced at a time. If the work has to be done for another kid, they have to stand in the queue again,’ they insisted. The goat owners opposed this vehemently. ‘If you want, make your sheep have a litter of three or four,’ they retorted. If the goat owners had to return to the queue every time they had to get a kid’s ear pierced, they might have to stand for a whole month. The dispute escalated into fisticuffs. The policemen turned up immediately and tried to mediate. Those who did not obey their instructions received a couple of blows.

  An officer came out, stood in front of the crowd and declared in a loud voice: ‘All of you must cooperate with the government. It’s an individual who stands in the queue. He may have as many kids with him as he likes. There is no law to restrict that number. Unless everyone adjusts to the rules, our work can’t proceed smoothly.’

  He also announced that the regime was examining a proposal to have a separate queue for goat owners; they should desist from fighting until that came to pass. ‘If anybody kicks up a row, I am going to stop work,’ he warned the crowd. Even the low murmurs died down immediately and there was complete silence in the compound.

  The old woman minded the kids with due vigilance. She had prior experience of being here, several times. It was while standing in the queue that she could meet a few people and chat with them about sundry matters, past and present. Else, she was left to languish alone on a deserted farm with no one for company.

  The queue began to move. The old woman let the kids feed at the nanny goat’s udder. Poonachi also got two mouthfuls of milk. When she was pregnant, this nanny goat had allowed Poonachi to sleep beside her. After delivering two kids of her own, she wouldn’t let Poonachi come anywhere near. Like any other mother goat, she pushed her away. Poonachi could not understand this. Taking the old woman’s fingers for teats, she would suck on them. The old woman would offer them to her with a laugh, saying, ‘There is honey in my fingers, baby. Suck on them nicely and drink up.’

  The old woman grew nervous when it was finally her turn. The assistant examined the ear-piercing done previously for the nanny goat. He tried to read the number embedded in it using a magnifying glass. Nothing was visible. It was all black.

  ‘What’s the number of this goat, ayah?’ he asked the old woman.

  ‘I don’t know about number and all, sami,’ she told him.

  ‘You let her graze in all kinds of places. The number gets worn out and erased. You people bring us no end of trouble,’ he complained.

  ‘Sami, whatever you inscribe now, please do it in such a way that we can see it clearly,’ said the old woman.

  ‘Look at her cheek! Are you saying that what we inscribe is not clear?’

  ‘No, sami. You are the government. Why would I speak a single word against you? You are the one who is in trouble because you can’t read the number. That’s why I said it,’ the old woman explained humbly.

  ‘In whose name is she registered?’ The assistant asked her and noted it down. Then he took out a big register, verified the name and read out a number. The officer looked at the register and said, ‘When was the last time she had a litter before this one?’

  ‘Last year, sami,’ replied the old woman.

  ‘How many kids in that litter?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Three, sami.’

  ‘How did it become three this time?’

  ‘It’s not in our hands, is it? It’s what Mesayyan chooses to give us.’

  ‘Both the male kids are white. This one is black.’

  ‘The males take after the mother; the female after the father.’

  ‘In which village did you mate her with the buck? Whose buck was he? Was he black, too? Do you have his number?’ He flung question after question at her.

  ‘So many bucks come to the pasture, sami. How can we tell which one mated with her?’ said the old woman.

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that. But the next time you come here, you have to give me the number of the buck who has fathered this kid,’ said the officer in a stern voice.

  They pierced the ears of both the male kids. The kids wailed furiously. The old woman handed over Poonachi as the third. ‘What’s this? Why have you brought a kitten here? Is it really a goat’s kid?’ asked the officer.

  ‘It’s a female, sami. It was the last in the litter. It’s very weak. I am hoping I’ll be able to save it somehow,’ replied the old woman politely.

  ‘Oho,’ said the assistant. He lifted Poonachi and pierced her left earlobe with a thick, long needle, then put a hoop through it. The ear started bleeding. Poonachi cried out in pain.

  ‘Look here, sami. Why not do it gently?’ The old woman’s tone was a bit harsh.

  ‘Hmm … the way you’re talking is not proper, is it? Oho, this kid doesn’t look like it was delivered by that nanny goat. Let’s see the mother feed her,’ said the officer.

  ‘It is the nanny goat’s kid, sami. I saw her cry out in pain and talked out of turn, sami. Don’t mind it, sami. Please forgive, sami.’ The old woman paid obeisance, gathered all her possessions in a hurry and got away quickly, escaping by a whisker.

  Poonachi felt as if a boulder was suspended from her left ear. When she tried to flap her ear, drops of blood scattered. Leaving the queue, the old woman went and sat in the shade of a tree. The two male kids had no problem with their ears. Even if they flapped them, there was no bleeding. Their ears had been pierced at the correct spot. In Poonachi’s case, the needle had struck a vein in her ear, causing it to bleed. The old woman plucked a leaf from a plant nearby and pressed it on the wound. The bleeding seemed to be under control.

  ‘The poor kid has gone through so much. What a bunch of ruffians they are. They didn’t even care that she’s a newborn and stabbed her so hard in the ear. May their fingers be deformed by leprosy and wither away,’ the old woman cursed.

  7

  POONACHI CAME DOWN with a fever the same night. Her body was burning up. Her lips were scorched by the heat. Her lashes were gummed together. The blood from the wound had dried and crusted over. When the old woman laid her palm on the kid’s body, it was scalding hot. It was normal for goat kids to come down with fever after getting their ears pierced. But she had never
encountered such a high fever before.

  The old man came over, lifted one of Poonachi’s earlobes and looked. Hanging down like leaves with a light curl at the tip, Poonachi’s ears made her look beautiful. Examining the earlobe while he stroked it gently, he noticed that the ear-piercing needle had plunged slightly away from the correct spot. It had damaged a nerve. So, that explained the high fever. If a goat owner caused even the slightest problem, the man in charge of piercing showed off his intelligence in this way. Some kids even died from the brute force of his stab. For others, it was a long time before the wound healed eventually.

  ‘Di, you wretched old thing, did you pick a quarrel with that dog? See how he has punctured a nerve! Why don’t you stay out of trouble?’ the old man yelled at her. She rushed over to Poonachi and looked at the kid’s earlobe. Pus dripped continuously from the wound. The kid had slumped weakly to the ground.

  ‘I said nothing at all. I just asked him to be careful with the needle,’ the old woman said.

  ‘Folks like us can survive only if we hold our tongue. Even when they hit us on the back, we should only mumble to ourselves. We shouldn’t even breathe if our neighbours can hear us. You’ve survived all these years, yet you don’t know even this much.’

  ‘If you knew everything, you could have taken the kid there, couldn’t you? You were scared and hid yourself, and now you have the nerve to talk?’

  They argued for a long time, neither conceding to the other. While they talked, the old woman brought different kinds of leaves and squeezed the juice on Poonachi’s wound. Whenever she felt a burning sensation, Poonachi raised her head slightly and cried out. The old woman brought warm water and gave it to Poonachi through the tip of an earthen lamp, as if feeding a baby. She thought Poonachi’s time would be up soon, but she couldn’t give up on her, could she? She also believed that Poonachi couldn’t die since she had taken a vow of supplication to Mesayyan, her god.

  The kid did manage to survive. But the wound refused to heal quickly. It festered and bled. The old woman kept trying different cures using sundry leaves and herbs. The wound filled with pus and dripped constantly. If she even touched Poonachi’s ear, the kid cried out in agony. The old woman had never heard a more plaintive cry. It gave her the shivers. She squeezed the pus out, washed the wound with lukewarm water and bandaged it with leaves. It became one of her daily tasks.

  ‘If some dog passing by on the trail gives him something, should he take it and bring it home? Why couldn’t he keep his wits about him? Now he has dumped her on me and gone off to sleep in the fields.’ Even as she cursed her husband, the old woman did everything she could to take care of Poonachi.

  The pus dried up only after a month. Slowly, the wound scabbed over. During that entire month, Poonachi never left the old woman’s side. She would follow the woman while she cooked and swept the house. When she was eating, Poonachi stood next to her.

  ‘This is not for you. I’ll give you something else,’ the old woman would say affectionately. True to her word, she would drain the water in which oilcake had been soaked overnight, warm it up slightly, pour it into a bottle and feed Poonachi through the attached tube.

  Poonachi liked the taste of oilcake water. Taking the old woman’s hand for a mother goat’s udder, she bumped against it as she drank. ‘It will flow even without your bumping, kannu. Drink up,’ the old woman would say.

  8

  FOR THE OLD woman, raising Poonachi was like looking after a baby in her old age. The void in her home in the wake of her daughter’s departure after marriage was being filled by the kid. These days she hardly quarrelled with the old man. She served him food with love. The old man, too, spoke a couple of sweet words to her while eating. At night, Poonachi slept beside the old woman on her cot. She learnt to jump off the bed and go outside the shed whenever she wanted to pee or shit. ‘The kid is so disciplined!’ the old woman marvelled each time.

  When the goats that went out daily for grazing returned home at dusk, Poonachi would go up to them. Kalli’s three kids had grown quite big now. They were tethered at night, and scarcely took notice of Poonachi. Even if she went near them, they blessed her with their snouts and sent her away. Semmi’s two kids, however, would always come running to play with Poonachi. Both were bucks. One would butt Poonachi in the face; the other would butt her from behind. Poonachi would crouch, put her head down and scoot away. Without Poonachi in the middle, the two heads would bang into each other. The bucks did their best to avoid this, and Poonachi would pull back at the right moment to make it happen – this was a favourite game for all three. Once in a rare while, Poonachi would win. On those days, she would spill over with joy. She would run straight to the old woman and rub her face against her shins. ‘Such a gloater she is!’ the old woman would laugh.

  Now and again, Poonachi would get to suckle a few mouthfuls of milk from Semmi. After starting Poonachi on oilcake water, the old woman didn’t bother much about feeding her milk. If there was something left over from the milk she drew from Kalli for the old man, she would pour it in a bottle and give it to Poonachi. While suckling her kids, Semmi would stand still, as though lost in a trance, head tilted upward and eyes closed, her mouth working away. At such times, Poonachi would try to compete with Semmi’s kids. Trying to suckle too fast, they would lose hold of a teat. Poonachi would sneak in during that interval and grab one. She would get to drink a couple of mouthfuls of the delicious nectar. Meanwhile, the kid who had let go of the teat would push Poonachi aside and grab it back. In this way, Poonachi learnt to feed by stealth.

  Even so, her health did not improve. She still looked like a malnourished baby. Her body had gained a little weight, but the hair on her skin hung in matted strands. Her swollen belly stuck out like a fist. Her eyes were pallid and lifeless. She moved about with difficulty. However, as her ear wound dried up, she regained some strength and vitality. Slowly she began to nibble at blades of grass, one at a time. The old woman got her used to it. She plucked tender leaves from a gulmohur tree and fed them to Poonachi. The bitter taste didn’t agree with the kid’s palate. But the old woman didn’t give up. She pushed the leaves gently between Poonachi’s teeth. Once she started chewing, she learned to like the taste. In the same way, the old woman got her used to different types of leaves and grass as well. Kiluva leaves and scotch grass were Poonachi’s favourites. Whenever they were available, she ate heartily. This was how Poonachi passed the first two months of her life.

  Around the beginning of the third month, she went out to graze with the other goats. Driving the goats to the pasture and grazing them was the old man’s job. As soon as dawn broke, he would sweep and clean the floor of the cattle shed. It wasn’t a huge area: the droppings of two goats and five or six kids, along with two big lumps of dung from a lone buffalo calf were all he had to deal with. There was just enough to fill a couple of baskets. He would gather the whole lot and dump it in the compost pit. Then he would lay out some dry stalks or a little grass for the buffalo calf, who would eagerly devour the feed. Expecting that they would also get something to eat, the goats would cry at him.

  Whenever the old woman went to work in other people’s fields, she brought home some unripe babul fruit, thistle leaves and hariyali grass, which she stored carefully. Her husband would put some of it in a basket and keep it at the centre of the hut where the goats were tethered. Five or six heads would butt the basket. The lucky ones managed to get something.

  Poonachi kept away from the fracas. Since she wasn’t tied up like the other goats, she was free to move around. She could go and eat whatever she fancied, whenever she wanted. The old woman didn’t object. This puny kid was not going to eat up very much, was she? If Poonachi stood next to her while she was eating, she would give the kid a fistful of her own food. If, on a rare day, there was cooked rice, Poonachi devoured it with relish. If not, she would pick at the curry leaves and discarded chilli skins and come away. To prevent her from putting her mouth into their food, the old woma
n kept every pot in the house tightly covered with a cloth.

  After laying out the feed for the goats, the old man would tighten his loincloth and set out for the fields. No one knew where he went or what he did, but he always came back with a foot-long neem twig stuck in his mouth. He would keep chewing on it even after coming home. Finally he would rinse his mouth, wash his face and sit down to eat. The goats that had been awaiting his arrival would keep looking at him once he was home. Wherever he happened to go, their heads would turn in that direction. Now and again, a cry would be heard. Kalli’s kids were in robust health, and they would tug at their rope and bleat in excitement. The old man scarcely paid them any attention. It was the old woman who would shout at them to keep quiet.

  In the morning, the old man ate only mashed rice. As he pulped the rice, Poonachi would sidle up to him. The old man would then be reminded of his own childhood. He would pretend to be oblivious to Poonachi’s presence. After waiting for some time, the kid would position herself directly in front of him. Still he would not look at her. She would bite his hand. He would snatch it free. She would try to put her snout in the rice pot. He would raise his hand as if to hit her, then bring it down slowly and pat her on the mouth. Poonachi would pretend to writhe in pain and raise a plaintive cry. The old woman was sure to hear it. While carrying on with her work, she would say, ‘Yov, the poor kid is crying. Why can’t you give her a little? If you eat with a hungry kid watching, you will die of stomach ache.’

  He would immediately take a small bit of the raw onion that accompanied the rice and hold it out to Poonachi. She would take it in her wide open mouth and run to the hut, then stand in front of the other goats and chew the onion. Poonachi loved the pungent taste of onion caressing her tongue. Even after she had eaten the bit, she would continue chewing with nothing in her mouth. The nanny goats and their kids would stare at her with a glint of envy in their eyes. Poonachi would then perform a leap. In that leap was the boastful question: ‘Do you all know the taste of an onion?’