Dhané was fuming, but he understood the position he was in, and he spoke humbly. “If you consider that this could also happen to you tomorrow you wouldn’t talk down to me like that, Sahinla dai. But when a deer is running downhill even a calf will chase it …” His throat was choked with misery and anger.
Dobaté Sahinla was poor himself and indebted to several moneylenders. But he took the greatest pleasure in getting together with the rich men and tormenting neighbors who were poor like him—neighbors who worked every day, whether they were happy or sad. He wasn’t alone in this either. Perhaps that’s the nature of humankind: people always try to look at things from their own point of view, not from others’. If something bad happens to a man, he weeps and wails and tries to gain others’ sympathy. If no one shows him any sympathy, he grows angry. But if something bad happens to someone else, he takes a kind of pleasure in it, although he makes a display of his sympathy. With one voice, the council judged in the baidar’s favor and authorized him to take away Dhané’s oxen and buffalo. The news that Dhané had failed to pay the baidar his money and that the council had authorized the baidar to confiscate Dhané’s livestock spread quickly to every house in the village. People came from up hill and down dale to watch the show of Dhané being dispossessed. From their faces it was clear that they all had the deepest sympathy for Dhané, but they were still waiting keenly for the moment when his oxen and buffalo were untethered and led away. Perhaps if this had been canceled they would all have been disappointed. Perhaps they would have felt that they had been deprived of an entertaining spectacle.
At last the moment arrived for the baidar to remove the tethers from the animals’ necks, and after this had been done two of his herdsmen drove them forward. Unable to hold back her tears, Maina ran into the house. Dhané thought of falling at the baidar’s feet and grasping his legs to beg for a few days’ grace, but the Dhané who was proud prevailed over the Dhané who was poor. His self-respect could not submit to his poverty. So he just stood there in silence.
13
Dhané sat beside the fire he had lit beside his vegetable patch, lost in who knows what thoughts. His son sat there, too, but when the smoke billowed up from the fresh maize stalks on the fire and got into his eyes he began to cry. The sound interrupted Dhané’s train of thought.
“What happened, child? Is it the smoke? Wait just a minute! I’ll chase this damned smoke away!” Dhané threw some soy pods into the fire and began to blow on it. The fire flared up, and he moved his son a little farther away. For a second he looked pensively at his son’s vest, which was torn at both shoulders. He had not noticed that before now. He felt angry with Maina. “Why didn’t she tell me about his vest? She could have mended it herself, it’s only torn in two places. How stupid she is!” He decided that today he would use the rupee he had with him to buy two feet of homespun and get a new vest made for his son.
Maina appeared beside Dhané, carrying a bowl of maize, soybeans, and mustard seeds, which she set before him. “Look at the state of the boy’s vest in this cold wind, and I have to point out to you that it’s torn!” Dhané looked up and saw that Maina’s blouse was in a far worse condition. Their eyes met, and then two miserable people understood each other’s feelings. Maina put on a more cheerful expression and said, “I’ll mend it right now. Come, babu, let’s go inside.”
She headed for the house, taking her son with her. Dhané began to pick up the maize and count the kernels as if he were finding it difficult to put them into his mouth, just like a person who is going to bathe in the Ganges in Magh and has reached its banks but finds it hard to enter the water.51 He was sitting disconsolately over his first fistful of maize when Moté Karki came up behind him and coughed.
“Hey, daju, you’ll burn right up! Dozing off there beside the fire, were you?” Karki sat down beside him.
Dhané looked up at Karki. “Where are you going so early in the morning? And have you gone blind? You’ve put your hat on inside out!”
“What, inside out, is it? That’s what my corpse clothes are like, yes, they look exactly the same whether they’re inside out or not!” Karki turned his hat right side out.
“There now, have some maize. I was having trouble finishing it, and now you’ve arrived, so that’s good.” Dhané pushed the bowl toward Karki.
“Oh, so I’ve turned up to help you out with the maize! Who roasted it? Bhaujyu, I suppose?”52 Karki threw some soybean husks on the fire and warmed his hands over the flames.
“Yes, of course she did. Who else in this village would come and roast maize for us?”
“Oh, in that case I’ll certainly have some. The sweetest food comes from Bhaujyu’s hands!” Karki picked out some maize and chewed it. For a moment they both sat and ate in silence, then Karki asked, “Tell me, how are things these days?”
“Well, how might they be, Jetha?” Dhané heaved a long sigh. “The Sahu53 took away my plowing oxen. Last year I stupidly went groveling to the baidar, and now I’ve lost the only oxen I had. This year my little patch of land is going to have to stay fallow. I don’t know whether we’ll get by on what I can borrow from others.”
“That serf wouldn’t let you keep your oxen? He’s a real housebreaker, that baidar! But what’s done is done. Now you should buy a plow, even if you have to borrow the money to buy it.”
“Who’s going to trust me enough to lend me money now? Before, I had oxen, and so they would lend money to me with them as security. Now I can only borrow if I pledge this house as security. And if I borrow, I don’t know what I can repay the loan with. My own fields aren’t enough even to feed us. What would I use to pay off the interest, never mind the main debt? If I could rent some fields it might be possible, but the land owners can’t stand the sight of me, so who would rent me their fields?”
“Ay, now that you mention rented fields I have just remembered that Luintel said he was giving up those fields of Nandé’s this year.”
“Giving them up? But those are really lovely fields, you know, and the rent is low!”
“He says he will, and why wouldn’t he? He can’t even cope with his own fields. Last year he was blind with greed. He has so much land already, but he’s so greedy he rented more. He couldn’t even get the harvesting done properly.”
“Well, even if he does give them up, what good is that to me without oxen to plow them? And why would Nandé give them to me?”
“Oh, you obviously don’t know Nandé. If he felt like it, he wouldn’t be slow to throw down the money for a pair of oxen as well.”
“Would he really? Or perhaps, if you have some money, you could help me out instead, Jetha. Should I sign the house over to you?”
“Chi! How untrusting you are, daju! If I did have any money, would I just have stood by as you suffered? You know how it is with me. If I lent you money, I would not need to worry about whether or not it came back to me. But all my money is loaned already, what can I do?”
“So speak to Nandé, would you? If you tell him, he’ll believe you, no matter what. I must rent his fields from him, and I hope he’ll put up the money for the oxen, too.”
“Nandé dai is like this: I’ll speak to his wife first; she always listens to me. If I tell her to speak to Nandé, he never refuses her anything.”
“Right, Jetha, do it however you like. Otherwise, oh God, these children of mine will be lost!”
“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll get around the old woman, no matter what. You just make arrangements to go down to the valley to plant your seeds as soon as Baisakh arrives.54 Getting the fields and the oxen will be my responsibility.” Karki got up and stretched himself. “Right, I’m off. I’ll come again after I have spoken with her.”
“That’s fine. And I have to set up feeding posts for the goats. If I cut them fodder, they eat it all up right there; if I let them out, there’s no one to tend them.” Dhané went down the hill. Karki went inside Dhané’s house, calling “Bhaujyu, how are things with you?”
14
Up above, a great garland of mountains is spread out across the skyline. At its feet there lies a broad expanse of level land. Lights flicker like fireflies from the little huts on the mountainsides. The tall grasses and the boughs of the chilaune trees that grow on some low hills to the left of the mountains bow down, as if to welcome those who dwell below. At the edge of these hills there is a broad open meadow filled with thatch grass. Amid the grass there are a few tall pines, some bhorla creepers, and some huge chilaune trees.55 This meadow is a grazing ground for the livestock that is brought down from the high pastures in winter to manure the fields.
At the edge of the meadow, the grass has been cut back, and four huts have been built; they stand in silence, each about half a furlong from the next. Seen from these huts, the water-filled rice fields in the distance look like white rocks in the moonlight. Three of the huts have walls made from branches and leaves and roofs of bamboo matting. When it is time to sow the seeds in Baisakh the farmers carry matting, cane ropes, and bamboo beams down to the valley. They cut branches, leaves, poles, and thatch from the nearby forest and build huts where they can stay while they are planting the seeds. After threshing time in Mangsir,56 when the grain is being carried away, the huts are demolished, and the farmers return to their homes, taking the bamboo matting with them.
Only one of the huts is a permanent structure. It is longer than the others, and it has walls of wooden planking and a roof of thatch. Inside, it is divided into three separate rooms. One, on the outer side, is used as a kitchen. There is a cooking hearth to one side of the room, and along with the ordinary pots and pans of brass and bronze there is also a very large copper pitcher and two fifteen-mana wooden milk containers. A large butter churn and churning stick stand beside them. In the middle of the central room there is a fireplace, and around it earthen platforms have been built up to serve as beds. A straw mat is spread out on each of these for the hired laborers to sleep on. Nandé Dhakal the Sahu or his family sleep in the third room when they come to inspect the fields. In this room there are two piles of blankets.
Next to the hut there is a long cow pen. Its sides and roof are both made of bamboo matting. This hut is closed off at one end by the field boundary and open at the other. Here is a tethered buffalo that is milked for the Sahu, a pair of plowing oxen, and the Sahu’s horse.
A moonlit night in the middle of Jeth.57 The moon’s light filters faintly through some thin clouds. The door of the hut is made of leafy boughs; it opens, and a wisp of smoke drifts out and disappears. Then, with a two-foot staff in one hand and a stub of tobacco wrapped in a bhorla leaf in the other, Dhané Basnet comes outside, coughs, and walks away.
15
Nandé Dhakal was very irritated when Luintel gave up tilling his fields. Nowadays, hardly anyone was willing to cultivate fields on a crop-sharing rental basis. Anyone who did come forward was invariably a vagabond with neither oxen to plow it nor food to eat. And so far, no one at all had come to ask him for the fields. Nandé was afraid that no crop would be grown on them this year. Then Luintel would be able to laugh. “I gave them up,” he would mock. “And then who would come to plant a crop in Nandé’s fields? Look, they’re lying fallow!” Even if it meant buying a pair of oxen, Nandé was willing to let the fields to someone else in order to strike a blow to Luintel’s pride.
One day, Nandé was pouring out his anger at Luintel to his wife. “Those fields produced so much rice the serf didn’t know what to do with it all! He said he would plant them, and I rented them to him instead of to others who were planting their fields. I rented them to him, and the serf gave them up after a year! He’s crazy!”
This singing of Luintel’s praises might have gone on for much longer if Karki had not appeared in the doorway. After he had come in and they had talked a little about this and that, the old man went out onto the roof. Karki spoke humbly to the old woman and steered the conversation smoothly toward his suggestion that Dhané might be given the fields. The old woman told Karki to wait a minute and went up to speak to Nandé. Very soon she came back down the ladder and told Karki to fetch Dhané.
Soon, Karki and Dhané came face to face with Nandé. Nandé agreed to give Dhané the fields and was also willing to lend him the money to buy oxen and meet household expenses, with Dhané’s house and land pledged as security on the loan. Once they had agreed that the fields would be cultivated that year and had signed the agreement, Dhané bade Nandé farewell and came outside with Karki. His feelings were a mixture of joy and dismay—joy at getting the fields and the money, too, and dismay at having to pledge his house and land. Now that he had obtained some fields, Dhané, like the other farmers, built a hut down in the valley and lived there most of the time after the seed had been bought and sown. Now the time had come for him to begin to transplant the seedlings into the fields. This he would start to do the very next day, and tonight there was no sleep in his eyes. Tomorrow Maina and Jhuma would come to help with the planting. But if the fields were not filled with water tonight there would be no planting tomorrow. There were many big fields there, but they were served by only two irrigation channels that came down from the hills above.
Everyone is busily planting their fields. They don’t let the water into each other’s fields even for a second: someone else comes and closes it off immediately, and there are constant battles over the channels. Today it is Dhané’s turn to divert the water into his fields, but if he does not stand over the channel someone else takes advantage, and so Dhané has to keep going back. He went to look a little while ago and then went back to rest a while in his hut; now he is on his way out again. He is worried that, if someone shuts off the water tonight, tomorrow the soil will be dry and the fields will not be planted. And if they are not planted tomorrow he will have to wait for a week before it is his turn for the water again.58
16
Dhané was walking toward his fields from the far side of the valley, expecting to hear the sound of water running down the channel in the distance, but he was surprised that even as he reached the edge of the fields he could hear no sound at all. At the irrigation ditch, he stopped: there was no water in it. Only two of the terraces had filled, and a third was barely damp. “Who has shut off the water?” he thought and continued down the side of the channel. A little way off, the channel branched off into Nandé’s fields. Dhané saw that the water going to his own fields had been shut off and turned into those fields instead. He looked all around carefully, and a little way off in the pale moonlight he saw a person dozing, squatting down under a homespun cloak. He crept up from behind and reached the person’s side without his knowing. Dhané took a good look: it was Sané Gharti, the Sahu’s plowman.59 When Dhané gently tugged Sané’s cloak, he jumped up in a fright to see Dhané standing behind him.
“You know I’m planting tomorrow, so why did you shut off my water, eh?” Dhané said in a threatening tone of voice.
“Is there any need to waste water on that useless radish patch in the marsh? The Sahu’s fields have had no water since they were first planted.”
“Do the marshy fields need water, you ask? Didn’t you know, you serf? Didn’t you know it was my turn today? When your turn comes you will probably irrigate your fields all night.”
“What do you mean, ‘turn’? This is all borrowed from the Sahu: the fields, the ditches. Other people only get a turn after the Sahu’s fields are full.”
“Will you go and talk like this when it’s time for me to pay him his share of the crop? This serf lives on the Sahu’s scraps, and he talks high and mighty like this!”
“Don’t call me ‘serf’! I don’t owe you my living! Do you think I’ll act on your orders? I came to divert the water on the orders of the Sahu’s son.”
“What name should I give to a sponger, then? We’ll see how your Sahu’s son is going to collect my rent this time!”
“Until you got the fields you waggled your head all meekly in front of the Sahu, like a dog wagging its tail.
‘Give me the fields,’ you said. ‘Buy me some oxen,’ you said. But now you start speaking rudely about that same Sahu’s son. They’ll just take your fields away, so don’t shoot your mouth off!”
Dhané could not put up with this. By nature he was not a person who put up with other people’s taunts very well. So he gave Sané Gharti a slap on the face.
“That’s for you, serf! Do you think a sponger like you can say whatever he likes to me?” Dhané landed a couple more blows on his back. Sané Gharti was still young, and he was no match for Dhané. Dhané’s hard blows made him whimper.
“You think I’m not your equal, don’t you! But watch out, you’ll find out in the end when the Sahu’s son strips you of all your pride! You humbled yourself and laid your hat at his feet, and just because you got some fields in the end your success has gone to your head and your feet aren’t on the ground! If he doesn’t take the fields back tomorrow, I am not my father’s son!”
Off he went back to his hut, muttering all sorts of things as he went. “Go on then, go and tell your tales, drag out whatever you can!” Dhané told him, as he reached the channel and turned the water into his own fields. Once it had filled up the first terrace, he used a stick to make dents in two or three places on the terrace rims so that the water would flow down to the other terraces. Then he went up and washed the mud from his arms and legs. The moon was sinking in the west as he returned wearily to his hut.
Mountains Painted with Turmeric Page 5