by Rich Horton
I did not know if I would make a good queen, but I was starting to see what needed to be done, how to restore the economy of my country. It would take a while, but these things always did. Slowly, Winter would regain its former reputation and independence from the IMF.
All right, I texted. If you can figure out how to get here, come find me.
Would Kay make it to my palace of white stone veined with quartz, or get lost along the way among the snows? If he made it, would I choose him or Edrik, who was after all a prince? I didn’t know, but today I was the Queen of Winter, and I had more important things to think about.
For a moment, I stood among the quince trees, whose white blossoms looked like snow on the branches and fell like snow to the ground. Outside, a dusting of snow fell from the roof, like blossoms blown by the wind. Then, I turned and walked into my palace, where my future, whatever it was, awaited me.
And Now His Lordship is Laughing
by Shiv Ramdas
When the first breeze of the morning whistles over the green tips of the paddy-stalks to kiss the tawny jute thatching of the bungalow roof, Apa is already out on the verandah. It’s still dark but that doesn’t matter, it’s been more than twoscore years since she’s needed light to work by. All she needs is the jute and her tools. Needle and twine, knife and lime, all have their place and in Apa’s hands that place is to give form to thought. Beneath those hands the strands strain, first to oppose her coaxing, and then, bit by bit, to obey her bidding. Once or twice, a sharp fibre-edge pricks her finger and she silently shakes the droplets of blood aside with practiced ease, careful not to let any spill on the jute, even as the material in her grasp twists in apology.
Before the rosy arms of the sun reach out from the dark to embrace Midnapore in another new day, she’s already been at work for several hours. Her deft, callused fingers move quickly, expertly, back and forth, one fold up, another stitch down. As she works, she hums her shukro-sangeet, a song of thanks to the jute, for what it has been and what it will be. No matter how many times she works and weaves it, Apa never ceases to wonder at the miracle of this material, the most special, versatile crop there is. You can wear it, build with it, eat it and feed with it; there’s almost nothing in which you can’t use it. And it grows everywhere, Bengal’s ubiquitous treasure. Yet, despite what people say, jute has no magic, no mystery or secrets; what you ask of it is what it gives. Even if it does carry memories; each generation of crop remembering what its parents have done, so each fresh time you mould it, it proves easier than the last. All you need is enough of yourself to put into it, and the knowledge that both you and the jute are in this together, not master and dasa, but two friends working side by side.
By the time Nilesh comes out onto the verandah to stand behind her, the golden strands in her grasp have already begun to take the shape they will spend the rest of their existence in. A small hand reaches out, tapping her on the shoulder, and Apa turns, to be met by a pair of accusing black eyes.
“You said I could help!”
“I said if you finished your milk you could help.”
“But Grandma, I did!”
He holds out his hand, brandishing a tumbler, then overturns it. A solitary white drop clings to the rim, then falls free, landing on the verandah floor.
“See? See?”
Apa laughs. “All right then. Sit down next to me, and go through all these jute bits I have dropped. I need you to find the two biggest ones and set them aside.”
He beams, plonking himself down beside her with a loud thud.
“Be careful! You’ll hurt yourself!”
He giggles but doesn’t answer, rummaging through the discarded scraps of jute, the pink tip of his tongue peeping out from the side of his mouth, brow scrunched up in concentration. Silence falls over the verandah for a while, punctuated only by Nilesh’s periodic exclamations and grunts. Apa pays them little heed: the jute demands all her attention. She sits there, head bent down, sunbeams dancing off her silvery hair, hands still flashing first one way, then another, as the fibres she holds in her fingers come together as only Apa can make them. And as she finishes, the final fibrous form resting in her lap, Nilesh leaps to his feet, handing her two pieces of jute.
“These were the biggest ones, Apa.”
“Thank you, Nilesh. Yes, these are exactly what I need.”
“What is it? What doll have you made today?”
“Patience, patience.”
She twists the scraps around the doll’s waist, using the very tip of the knife to shape them. Then a dab of lime to hold them in place.
Nilesh’s eyes widen. “It’s wearing a dhoti now! I made the dhoti!”
He claps delightedly, and then squeals as the doll claps along with him.
“It’s a hattali’r putul! A clapping doll!”
She smiles. “No, it’s a Nilesh Putul.”
“It’s me? It’s for me?”
She smiles again. “Yes and yes. Do you like it?”
He leans forward, planting a big, sloppy kiss on her weathered cheek, and then does a little dance, whooping excitedly. A slight frown creases her brow as she watches him; his eagerness for everything doll-related is a bittersweet reminder of what used to be. Where once it was common for children to gather gawking at her while she worked, or for villagers to stop by the house and ask her about taking on so-and-so as an apprentice, it’s now been years since anyone has. Today’s young people have other things they want to do with their lives, things that do not require them to spend decades hunched over with needle in hand, nor pay ever-increasing levies and taxes. Apa sighs. But then there’s Nilesh, always so eager to help her in her work. Perhaps he will be the exception, and when he’s old enough she’ll teach him the craft, and maybe the art of Midnapore dollweaving will outlive her after all.
He’s still dancing away happily even as the doll kicks its feet in perfect unison with his. Apa watches them both, her heart now sowing fields without a thought for the reaping.
Until the sound of hoofbeats rends the air, growing louder as the horse trots down the path towards the bungalow verandah. Now they see him, the uniformed Englishman sitting upright in the saddle. Apa keeps her eyes on him all the way, her new creation now held tightly in her hands.
“Nilesh. Go inside. Hurry, now.”
“But why, Apa?” he protests. “I want to hear what he says too!”
Apa half-turns, fixing the boy with her eye. “I said, now.”
He darts back inside, as anyone would have, because no one in Midnapore disobeys Apa. As the horse draws to a halt, the old woman rises to her feet.
The Englishman dismounts, flicks the sweat from his brow, and stands before the verandah.
“Matriarch of Midnapore. Captain Frederick Bolton, of the Calcutta Presidency Battalion.”
He sounds like most of his countrymen, flat-toned and steady. She often wonders how the English have come by their belief that the inability to emote is a virtue. It seems so unnatural.
“I remember you.”
She speaks in English, because it hurts her ears to hear them try to speak Bangla. Although more often than not, what they speak is Hindi in what they think is a Bengali accent.
“I come as the emissary of His Grace, Sir John Arthur Herbert, Governor of Bengal, Representative of Her Gracious Majesty Victoria, Queen of India and the Empire.”
“What do you want this time?”
He smiles. “Oh, you know what His Grace wishes for. He’s asked you for it on more than one occasion. One of your dolls for Her Ladyship. “
“No.”
“I would urge you to reconsider.”
“There is nothing to reconsider. Your master is, as you say, Governor of Bengal. He can have almost any toy he wants.”
“What he wants is one of yours. His Grace says he has never seen another dollmaker whose work compares to yours. None of the others have your magic.”
“He might have seen many more of us if he hadn’t made it a
point to drive so many out of work with duties and levies every time the wind changes and those schools where you tell our children how backward our ways are. And I have no magic. I am but a means to an end.”
“Come now, His Grace is willing to be generous.”
She gestures at the thick paddy and jute fields encircling the bungalow, green and lush, gently swaying in the summer breeze.
“Look around you, Captain. I have no need of his generosity.”
“I strongly recommend you do not choose this path. Your Governor is not a man used to being denied. Especially by a native. See, you even hold a doll as we speak. All you need to do is simply hand it to me, and you can name your price.”
“My putuls are not for sale. I give them to those whom I choose, and I do not choose those who demand them at the point of a bayonet. Be off with you.”
He sighs. “I fear you may come to regret this, Matriarch. ”
“All of Midnapore, nay, all of Bengal regrets the day your kind came here. What is one more regret? If you turn your horse around, you will find the path leads back just as surely as it led you here. I would urge you to take it.”
She could swear she sees his eyes blaze, but just as suddenly, the anger is gone and he’s taking a deep breath. Had she imagined it? When he speaks, his voice is even.
“I will convey your message to His Grace.”
With that, he leaps back on his horse and gallops away.
Apa stands erect, watching until man and horse are out of sight, vanished among the towering crops on either side of the road. He might be gone, but the dark cloud of his unspoken promise still lingers. An additional crease lines her already-wrinkled brow; she twists the jute doll in her hands.
For as she well knows, just like jute, the white man has a long memory, and unlike the jute, he does not mind the blood.
• • •
Under the relentless gaze of the sun, the scorched earth shimmers. Through the haze, the shriveled, blackened stumps of what had been the jute-field protrude upwards. From the verandah, Apa stares unblinkingly at them. As she watches, a charred wisp dances off one, carried by the breeze to fall in the burnt, dried-out remains of what had been one of the paddy plots. Next to it, a host of flies buzz above something lying there. A dead bullock, or, more likely, a person. The British have already taken all the bullocks, right after they took all the rice. Every last grain.
It’s been almost four days since she lost Nilesh. Mercifully, he’d stopped crying towards the end, so for the last couple of days he’d just lain there, hands over his bloated belly, eyes staring sightlessly at something in the distance that nobody else could see. For a brief, interminable while, she’d wondered what he’d felt during those final days, but she knows the answer now. Nothing.
Despite what Apa had always thought starvation would be like, the hunger isn’t even the worst part. The pangs don’t last as long as one would imagine; by the fourth day they’re almost entirely gone. It isn’t even the weakness, terrible as that is. No, it’s the lethargy, the constant feeling that nothing matters, not food, not movement, not brushing away the flies circling overhead and settling on one, unwilling to even afford one the dignity of being truly dead before they move in. It’s the sense of lying there, waiting to shut down, but being unable to do even that, as the mind refuses to accept what the body is telling it, that this journey has come to an end. Time comes and goes in strange, fluid stretches; a leaf taking hours to fall to the ground, the span between sunrise and sunset vanishing in the time it takes to blink. Blinking is the one thing that seems unchanged, as though her brain has a special rapport with the eyelids that it never developed with the rest of her body. What is strangest of all is thought itself. Her mind doesn’t seem foggy. Thoughts appear with what feels like increased clarity, even as she watches her body wasting away, as though her brain is cannibalising the rest of her to feed itself.
As if on cue, a fly buzzes around her head, coming to settle on her nose. She blinks to drive it off, but it ignores her efforts. It’s there to stay, welcome or not. Must be British. She thinks about brushing it away, but her limbs are heavy and belong to someone else, and it doesn’t seem that important anyway. She blinks again, and in the instant her eyes are shut, she hears a sound, no, a series of sounds, words, coming from very far away. She opens her eyes again on the other side of the blink, and the man comes into focus.
He’s in front of the verandah, still astride his horse, moving his mouth, making the sounds. He looks familiar. Can it be, yes, it is indeed him, the British soldier who keeps coming here unbidden, like one of those flies. What’s his name again? Bol, Ball, something like that. What does it matter? Behind him, also on horseback, three more men. They don’t matter either. Maybe if she shuts her eyes again they’ll go away.
She closes them, and then she feels hands, one pulling her head backwards, the other forcing her mouth open, tipping something into her mouth. A steady stream of something, thin, yet mushy. She chokes, deep racking retches, spluttering the food back out, looking up through watering eyes. Two of the men are crouched over her, one holding her, the other holding a spoon and a bowl of watery-looking rice gruel. Spoon Man is wiping the regurgitations off the unhappy expression on his face. He looks back at his companions. The familiar-looking soldier says something to his men. The feeder grimaces and she feels rough hands grab her head again, tilting it backwards, as the spoon closes in once again.
• • •
She sits on the verandah, cross-legged, ignoring the soldier beside her, waiting for the other one to come with the evening bowl of gruel. They no longer feed her now that she’s strong enough to do it for herself, but at least one of them hovers nearby at all times. At first she’s unable to keep any food down, as though her stomach now considers rice a foreign object it wants nothing to do with, but they persist, and slowly, her body has learnt how to eat again. She still doesn’t know why: they haven’t said a word to her since. They do, however, talk to each other. From listening, she learns that one is called Willis, the other McKissic, that someone called Sir Winston has ordered the governor to take all the rice, and it is happening all over Bengal.
Every so often, slowly, gingerly, she runs her tongue along the inside of her gums, wincing a bit. Her teeth and mouth hurt all the time now, why she doesn’t know. From the force-feeding? Or maybe that’s merely the part of her that was being eaten from the inside out when the soldiers returned to the bungalow.
The sun is lower than usual when McKissic returns with the gruel, and this time he isn’t alone. Four more mounted soldiers accompany him, and riding at their head is that captain again. With an effort, Apa recalls his name. Bolton. He reins in his horse, dismounts, and stands before the verandah, riding crop still in one hand. He jerks his head at one of the other men. This individual crouches down over Apa and proceeds to hold her wrist, then touch her neck, look in her mouth, and run a hand over her still-distended belly as she sits there silently. Finally, he stands up.
“She’ll be fine.”
“Strong enough for the job?”
“I’d venture to say so, yes.”
“Excellent. Thank you, Doctor.” Bolton looks at Apa. “I told you no good would come of your defiance. It’s a good thing I got here in time, isn’t it?”
He smiles at her, waiting for a response, while she stares back at him, stony-faced. For a slow, long time, silence spreads its wings over the verandah. Until eventually, the captain cracks.
“His Grace is, however, still willing to be generous. He offers you a bargain. Food for you and whatever others are yet alive here.”
Others, he says. How long has it been now since Agni took her Nilesh? She isn’t even sure any more. All she remembers is how small, how frail he’d looked on the pyre. How hard it had been just to force the doll she’d made for him into his tiny, stiff hands before she’d lit the flame. Fire had been his protector, doing what she no longer has the strength to. It had made sure that nobody would attempt
to strip the corpse of its clothes, as she heard has been happening all over Midnapore. Clothes are fibre and fibre can be food. She’s also heard news of even worse horrors: children attempting to eat their deceased parents, parents their dead children. And even worse, whispers that, in some places, there are those who aren’t even waiting for others to die. Then, silence, no news of anything for days before she too had fallen into the starvation-stupor. That had been the one good thing about it, the inability to think of Nilesh, all the others she’ll never see again, about any of it.
Despite her best efforts, the tear burns its way out, dangling on the rim of her eye for a moment, before it falls to the dusty verandah floor with a loud plop. She looks up at his hateful face.
“There are no others here.”
“What a pity.”
Her face must be showing some of what she’s thinking, because he immediately goes on.
“Look, don’t blame me for this. I’m just doing my job here.”
“Just . . . doing your job.”
“Yes and what’s more, I’m trying to help you here. As is the Governor. We’re on your side, you know. Think about it. Food and drink for you, and in return, all His Grace asks is that you give him something in return. A doll for her Ladyship.”
She feels a stirring within her, a white-hot core of rage in her belly, growing, spreading outwards.