Nectar in a Sieve, Page 2

  When she saw I would not go, she grew still and lay like a log, not a murmur from her, but the sweat forcing itself up in oily drops on her throat and temples.

  Kunthi was lying in an exhausted sleep, with her baby beside her, before I went home. It was a whole day since I had left. Nathan was waiting for me and he said crossly: "You look like a corpse. Whatever possessed you to stay so long?"

  "Blame the midwife," I said. "She could not be found. Or blame Kunthi's son. He took a long time."

  I was tired and my voice was on edge.

  "Well, so long as you don't forget you are pregnant," he said shortly and turned away. It was the first time I had seen him angry. Tears came pricking at my eyeballs. I sat down to stop my head from spinning, and after a while the pain went. He means well, I thought. He is anxious only about our child. Better that he should worry than that he should not.

  From then on, I began to take more care of myself, leaving more and more of the work to Nathan. Sowing time was at hand and there was plenty to be done in the fields: dams of clay to be built to ensure proper irrigation of the paddy terraces; the previous year's stubble to be lifted; rushes and weeds to be destroyed; then the transplanting. All this meant stooping, and Nathan would not hear of it.

  With the leisure I now had I took up writing again. It was my father who taught me to read and write. People said he did it because he wanted his children to be one cut above the rest; perhaps so, but I am certain that he also knew that it would be a solace to me in affliction, a joy amid tranquillity. So he taught his six children, myself the youngest by ten years, with the patience he brought to all things. "Practise hard," he would say, watching me busy with slate and pencil. "For who knows what dowry there will be for you when you are ready!" And I, with only the thistledown of childish care upon me, would listen lightly and take up my pencil again.

  "What use," my mother said, "that a girl should be learned! Much good will it do her when she has lusty sons and a husband to look after. Look at me, am I any worse that I cannot spell my name, so long as I know it? Is not my house clean and sweet, are not my children well fed and cared for?" My father laughed and said, "Indeed they are," and did not pursue the matter; nor did he give up his teaching.

  When my child is ready, I thought now, I will teach him too; and I practised harder than ever lest my fingers should lose their skill. When Janaki, recovered from her sickness, came to see me, she marvelled that I could write; but Kali, who had come too, was scornful of the strange symbols which had no meaning for her and dismissed it as a foible of pregnancy.

  "You will forget all about such nonsense when your child is born," she said. "Besides, there will be others and your hands will be full. Look at me, do I have one spare minute to myself?"

  "How is it then," I asked, forgetting myself, "that you are here now -- yes, and I have seen you in the village too -- if you have so much to occupy you? As for my children, it is for them that I practise writing and reading, so that I can teach them when the time is ripe."

  Kali sniffed, but she was good-natured and did not take offence.

  Nathan used to come and sit beside me when I was writing. The first time he came to see what I was up to, he sat in silence with his brows drawn together and meeting; but after some watching he went away, and when he came back his face was clear.

  "It is well," he said, stroking my hair. "You are clever, Ruku, as I have said before."

  I think it cost him a good deal to say what he did, and he never varied his attitude once. That was typical of my husband: when he had worked things out for himself he would follow his conclusions at whatever cost to himself. I am sure it could not have been easy for him to see his wife more learned than he himself was, for Nathan alas could not even write his name; yet not once did he assert his rights and forbid me my pleasure, as lesser men might have done.

  Now that I did not work in the fields I spent most of my time tending my small garden: the beans, the brinjals, the chillies and the pumpkin vine which had been the first to grow under my hand. And their growth to me was constant wonder -- from the time the seed split and the first green shoots broke through, to the time when the young buds and fruit began to form. I was young and fanciful then, and it seemed to me not that they grew as I did, unconsciously, but that each of the dry, hard pellets I held in my palm had within it the very secret of life itself, curled tightly within, under leaf after protective leaf for safekeeping, fragile, vanishing with the first touch or sight. With each tender seedling that unfurled its small green leaf to my eager gaze, my excitement would rise and mount; winged, wondrous.

  "You will get used to it," Nathan said. "After many sowings and harvestings you will not notice these things." There have been many sowings and harvestings, but the wonder has not departed.

  I was tying the bean tendrils to the wire fence I had built when I saw a quiver in the leaves of the pumpkins. The fruit is ripening, I thought, the birds are already here. Or perhaps mice. Leaving the beans I went to look, stooping to part the leaves with my hand.

  Why did not the snake strike at once?

  Was the cobra surprised into stillness that a human should dare to touch it? My hands recoiled from the coldness of serpent flesh, my nails clawed at my palms, the leaves I had parted moved back to cover it. For a moment my legs remained stiffly planted beside the pumpkins, then the blood came racing to my limbs again, and I ran from the spot screeching with fear and not looking behind me.

  Nathan came rushing to me, almost knocking me over, caught and shook me.

  "What is it, what is it?" he shouted roughly.

  "A snake," I whispered, bereft of voice and breath. "A cobra. I touched it."

  He looked at me as if I were mad.

  "Go in and stay there," he said. I wanted only to fall at his feet in my terror, to beg him not to leave me alone, but he was staring at me unrelenting. At last I went, cowed, but with the waters of panic receding.

  "The snake had not stirred," Nathan said as he came back. He had cut it to pieces with his scythe and buried the remains so that I should not be upset.

  "Yet you have lived long enough to learn to disregard them," he said. "Are they not found everywhere -- tree snakes, water snakes and land snakes? You only need to be careful and they pass you by."

  "True," I said, shamefaced yet rallying. "But it is one thing to see a snake and another to touch it. I have never touched one before."

  "Nor again," Nathan said, grinning. "I have never seen you fly as fast as you did, child and all."

  I lowered my eyes, abashed. I was getting very awkward in my movements. I reallsed I must have looked like a water buffalo, running in such a frenzy.

  "Never mind," said Nathan gently. "It will soon be over now."

  He was right. Whether from fright, or the running, my baby was born a few days later, a month too soon but healthy for all that. Kali came as soon as she knew, and the midwife some hours later but in good time to deliver the child. They placed it in my arms when I had recovered a little from the birth, in silence. I uncovered the small form, beautiful, strong, but quite plain, a girl's body.

  I turned away and, despite myself, the tears came, tears of weakness and disappointment; for what woman wants a girl for her first-born? They took the child from me.

  Kali said: "Never mind. There will be many later on. You have plenty of time."

  It is so easy to be comforting when your own wishes have come true. Kali had three sons already, she could afford to sympathise.

  When I recall all the help Kali gave me with my first child, I am ashamed that I ever had such thoughts: my only excuse is that thoughts come of their own accord, although afterwards we can chase them away. As I had done for Kunthi, so Kali did for me -- but much more: sweeping and cleaning, washing and cooking. She even took pains to water the garden, and one morning I saw her tending the pumpkin vine, which was overladen with blossom. In that moment a cold horror came on me again: my hands grew clammy, and I could feel once more the serpe
nt's touch. I shrieked at her then, and she came running, her face frightened at the wildness in my voice.

  "Whatever is wrong?" she gasped, running to my side. The baby had awakened and was crying loudly, so that she had to yell. I was so pleased to see her whole, I could not speak for relief. At last I told her, shakily, about the cobra, and, rather ashamed by now of making such a fuss, I exaggerated a little, making the snake enormous of its kind, and the danger more deadly than it had been.

  Women can sometimes be more soothing than men: so now Kali. "Poor thing," she said. "No wonder you are terrified. Anyone would be. But it is a pity your husband killed the snake, since cobras are sacred."

  "She is a fool," Nathan said contemptuously when I told him. "What would she have me do -- worship it while it dug its fangs in my wife? Go now -- forget it."

  I think I did, although once or twice when I saw the thickness of the pumpkin vines I wondered nervously what might lie concealed there; and then I would take up knife and shovel to clear away the tangle; but when I drew near and saw the broad glossy leaves and curling green tendrils I could not bring myself to do it; and now I am glad I did not, for that same vine yielded to me richly, pumpkin after pumpkin of a size and colour that I never saw elsewhere.

  We called our daughter Irawaddy, after one of the great rivers of Asia, for of all things water was most precious to us; but it was too long a name for the tiny little thing she was, and soon she became Ira. Nathan at first paid scant attention to her: he had wanted a son to continue his line and walk beside him on the land, not a puling infant who would take with her a dowry and leave nothing but a memory behind; but soon she stopped being a puling infant, and when at the age of ten months she called him "Apa," which means father, he began to take a lively interest in her.

  She was a fair child, lovely and dimpled, with soft, gleaming hair. I do not know where she got her looks: not from me, nor from Nathan, but there it was; and not only we but other people noticed and remarked on it. I myself did not know how I could have produced so beautiful a child, and I was proud of her and glad, even when people pretended to disbelieve that I could be her mother. "Here is a marvel indeed," they would say, and make comparisons with ordinary parents who sometimes bore a child of matchless brilliance; or with a devout couple who had brought forth a wretch. I preferred to think the plain have their rewards, and this was mine.

  "She is like you," Nathan would say to me as he surveyed her, but he was the only one who thought so.

  Before long she was crawling all over the place, following her father into the fields, trailing me as I went about my work, and very soon she began to walk.

  "You must not allow it so early," Kali said to me ominously, "or her legs will bend like hoops." And at first I listened to her and whenever I saw Ira trying to stand up or walk, I would rush forward and pick her up; but soon there was no stopping her. I should have been at it the whole time otherwise, and I had other things to do. Sowing time was at hand, and I was out all day with Nathan planting the paddy in the drained fields. Corn had to be sown too, the land was ready. My husband ploughed it, steadying the plough behind the two bullocks while I came behind, strewing the seed to either side and sprinkling the earth over from the basket at my hip.

  When that was done, it was time for our hut to be thatched. It had stood up well to sun and wind, but after the monsoon rains several small patches showed wear and it was as well to get things done in good time. Nathan cut fronds from the coconut palm that grew by our hut and dried them for me, together we twisted the fibre and bound the palms, shaping them to the roof and strengthening the whole with clay.

  Ira was no trouble at all. She would sit happily playing by herself in the sun, chuckling at the birds or at anything else she could see, including her fond parents; or if it was hot and she grew fretful I would hang a cloth from a branch and put her in it, and she would go to sleep without any further bother. My mother, especially, grew very fond of her and came to see us often, although it meant travelling several hours in a bullock cart, which is very tiring when one is no longer young. Sometimes I would go to see my parents, but seldom, since there was so much to be done in my own home; and my mother, knowing this, did not reproach me for the long intervals between my visits.

  CHAPTER III

  "Do not worry," they said. "You will be putting lines in your face." They still say it, but the lines are already there and they are silent about that. Kali said it, and I knew she was thinking of her own brood. Kunthi said it, and in her eyes lay the knowledge of her own children. Janaki said, morosely, she wished it could happen to her; a child each year was no fun. Only Nathan did not say it to me, for he was worried too, and knew better. We did not talk about it, it was always with us: a chill fear that Ira was to be our only child.

  My mother, whenever I paid her a visit, would make me accompany her to a temple, and together we would pray and pray before the deity, imploring for help until we were giddy. But the Gods have other things to do: they cannot attend to the pleas of every suppliant who dares to raise his cares to heaven. And so the years rolled by and still we had only one child, and that a daughter.

  When Ira was nearing six, my mother was afflicted with consumption, and was soon so feeble that she could not rise from her bed. Yet in the midst of her pain she could still think of me, and one day she beckoned me near and placed in my hand a small stone lingam, symbol of fertility.

  "Wear it," she said. "You will yet bear many sons. I see them, and what the dying see will come to pass . . . be assured, this is no illusion."

  "Rest easy," I said. "You will recover."

  She did not -- no one expected she would -- but she lingered for a long time. In her last months my father sent for the new doctor who had settled in the village. Nobody knew where he came from or who paid him, but there he was, and people spoke well of him, though he was a foreigner. As for my father, he would have called in the Devil himself to spare my mother any suffering. So it was in a house of sorrow that I first met Kennington, whom people called Kenny. He was tall and gaunt, with a pale skin and sunken eyes the colour of a kingfisher's wing, neither blue nor green. I had never seen a white man so close before, and so I looked my fill.

  "When you have done with staring," he said coldly, "perhaps you will take me to your mother."

  I started, for I had not realised I was goggling at him. Startled, too, that he should have spoken in our tongue.

  "I will show you," I said, stumbling in my confusion.

  My mother knew no man could save her and she did not expect miracles. Between her and this man, young though he was, lay mutual understanding and respect, one for the other. He told her no lies, and she trusted him. He came often, sometimes even when he was not summoned; and his presence, as much as the powders and pills he made her take, gave my mother her ease. When she died it was in the same way, without a struggle, so that although we grieved for her our hearts were not torn by her suffering.

  Before I left for my village, I told him that for what he had done there could be no repayment. "Remember only," I said, "that my home is yours, and all in it."

  He thanked me gravely, and as I turned to go he raised a hand to stop me.

  "There is a look about you," he said. "It lies in your eyes and the mark is on your face. What is it?"

  "Would you not grieve too," I said, "if the woman who gave you birth was no more than a handful of dust?"

  "It is not that alone. The hurt is of longer standing. Why do you lie?"

  I looked up and his eyes were on me. Surely, I thought, my mother has told him, for he knows; but as if he guessed my thoughts he shook his head. "No, I do not know. Tell me."

  I held back. He was a foreigner, and although I no longer stood in awe of him, still the secret had been long locked up in my breast and would not come out easily.

  "I have no sons," I said at last, heavily. "Only one child, a girl."

  Once I had started the words flowed, I could not stop myself. "Why should it be?" I
cried. "What have we done that we must be punished? Am I not clean and healthy? Have I not borne a girl so fair, people turn to gaze when she passes?"

  "That does not seem to help you much," he said shortly. I waited. If he wishes to help me he can, I thought, so much faith had I in him. My heart was thumping out a prayer.

  "Come and see me," he said at last. "It is possible I may be able to do something. . . . Remember, I do not promise."

  My fears came crowding upon me again. I had never been to this kind of doctor; he suddenly became terrifying.

  "You are an ignorant fool," he said roughly. "I will not harm you."

  I slunk away, frightened of I know not what. I placed even more faith in the charm my mother had given me, wearing it constantly between my breasts. Nothing happened. At last I went again to him, begging him to do what he could. He did not even remind me of the past.