by Tom Robbins
It was then that she realized that it was the odor of the incense that had intrigued her all along, only now the smells filled in the fantasies that heretofore had been mere outlines, smeary contours scrawled in ghost chalk. Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere—the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.
The day of Kudra's fifteenth natal anniversary began like any other, with a predawn bath in the river, followed by prayers to Kali and an offering of clarified butter in the courtyard cookfire. By first light, she had served breakfast to her father, brother, and one-legged uncle and was already washing the curds that would be the principal dish at the noontide meal. She was bent over the curd jars when, from the workshop, her father called for her, just as she hoped he would.
“Honored father.” She bowed to him, searching out of the corner of her eye for some fresh basket of bosmellia bark, opopanox resin, nutmeg, or patchouli, for she had heard unfamiliar voices in the shop and suspected there had been a delivery. Nothing new was in evidence, but that was all right, she'd be content just to shave some sandalwood chips as she had several days before. The coarse-grained sandalwood was so tough it made her arms ache to chip it, but with each laborious push of the rasp, it propelled a zephyr of warm, clean, forest air past her nose, an invisible vapor that sang to her of the pad of the tiger's paw upon dry leaves, upon fallen parrot nests and dark Madras moss.
“Kudra,” said her father, “I have good news. Praise Shiva.”
Another merchandising trip, perhaps? Her imagination galloped about the room astride a sandalwood broom.
“The parents of a respectable man were just here. We have arranged for you to marry him, come the monsoons. Praise Shiva.”
The broom crashed to the hard clay floor. Kudra began to cry. Her tears did not upset her father. He had expected them to flow. Every Hindu girl wept and wailed about her marriage, from its announcement through the wedding and into the honeymoon. It was fitting that a bride-to-be weep. Marriage meant that she must leave her father's home to live with her husband's family, who would treat her like a servant if she was lucky, like monkey shit if she was not. It was the way life was. Kudra's mother had bawled. Now it was Kudra's turn. Tradition and continuity were the flours from which the social loaf was baked; feeding the culture, pleasing the gods.
“Father, I am not ready . . .” blubbered Kudra.
“Eh? Of course, you are ready. If you were not thinking about catching a husband, why would you fix yourself up in this way? Praise Shiva.”
The incense merchant was referring to the crimson lac with which she had began to fresco her heavy eyelids, the sandalwood paste that she finger-painted over her body in sinuous designs, the jasmine-scented unguents that these days lent her cheeks the glow of butter lamps at dawn. How could she make him understand that what appealed to her was the aroma of these substances, that what she sought to catch was not a man but the strange and wondrous images that the aromas conjured?
Teardrops spurted. “I—I—I want to work with you, I—I want to work here with you.” Teardrops spewed.
That hit her father where he lived. The fact was, Kudra was better help than her brother, better than her gimpy uncle, certainly better than the lazy Sudra laborers whom he had started to employ. She was diligent and cheerful, and she had a feeling for the incense, not just an enthusiasm but a rapport. It was partly on her account that his business was prospering. Still, she was a girl, and everybody knew that girls were hotter than mongooses and certain to lose their virginity at the faintest hint of an opportunity. The way this one's breasts were inflating, the way her eyes had popped when she got a look at the erotic friezes at Khujaras, it was only wise to bind her to a husband before disaster struck.
“Do not worry, my little patchouli drop. Your betrothed's family has a very fine business, praise Shiva, and is said to be shorthanded in the shop.”
That proved to be the case. But her husband's family did not make incense. It made rope.
Rope. The gods have a great sense of humor, don't they? If you lack the iron and the fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. The dull and prosaic will be granted adventures that will dice their central nervous systems like an onion, romantic dreamers will end up in the rope yard. You may protest that it is too much to ask of an uneducated fifteen-year-old girl that she defy her family, her society, her weighty cultural and religious heritage in order to pursue a dream that she doesn't really understand. Of course it is asking too much. The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.
So it was rope for Kudra. Rope drab in color, rope harsh in texture, rope utilitarian in design, rope barren in smell. In late summer, she would accompany others of the caste into the streaming hills to chop the fibrous stalks of bhabar grass. The rest of the year, when she wasn't busy with household duties, she sat on the ground next to her husband, combing fiber into ribbons, spinning ribbons into yarn, twisting yarn into strands, and braiding strands into rope. Rope to keep the cow from deserting the farmer, rope to prevent the riverboat from running away to sea, rope to teach the individual stick of firewood the strategy of the bundle, rope to hold a young wife to a bedpost, an oven, a lurid panoply of gods.
In the streets of Calcutta, she had seen a fakir make a rope rear up like a cobra. Uncoiling from a basket with a dancing motion, the rope rose until its end was higher than the treetops, whereupon the fakir shinnied up it and disappeared in the sky. Now, as yard after yard, mile after mile, of rope wound through her blistered fingers, she strained to exert some influence over it, tried her best to will it skyward so that she might climb it, stopping periodically to wave good-bye to her mother-in-law, and cast her lot with the clouds.
Alas, the rope moved strictly horizontally, and then only when physically forced. Conditioned as she was, Kudra probably wouldn't have climbed the rope, anyhow, let's face it. Besides, she had established a couple of escape routes that allowed her to ascend above the world of in-laws and bhabar fiber. One was scent. Her father kept her supplied with natural aromatics, which she turned into oils and essences to lavish upon her body. Whether she was loading the rope cart, carrying out slops, or scraping cow dung from her mother-in-law's shoes, Kudra was enveloped in a portable fog of fragrance, entwined with a rope of perfume up which she could shinny and partially, at least, disappear. Since it was traditional among Hindus that one way to Shiva was through the nose, and since in India there was no such thing as too much piety, her in-laws could not object, although sometimes they fell into coughing fits when she passed by. As for Navin, her husband, he may have been publicly embarrassed by his bride's excesses, but in private he was enflamed. Navin's prurient reaction to the smells of his wife widened her second avenue of escape: sex.
Kudra took to the marriage bed the way a water buffalo takes to a mud wallow. Like any conscientious merchant-caste groom, Navin had studied the Kama Sutra, the Hindu love manual. Since he was thirty when they were wed, twice the age of his bride, he had had time to learn it by heart, and indeed he was well acquainted, in theory if not in practice, with the eight kinds of embrace (four mild, four hot), the four parts of the body that the handbook taught might be individually embraced, the three ways of kissing an innocent maiden, and the four angles from which it might be accomplished; the sixteen ways of kissing a wife (including the moderate kiss, the pressed kiss, the soft one, the contracted one, the clasping one, and the “kiss of the hungry donkey"); the eight kinds of love bites, the eight kinds of scratch marks that might be left on the body (the Kama Sutra eve
n described how a lover's nails should ideally be manicured), the eight stages of oral intercourse, the nine ways of moving the penis inside the vagina, and the forty varieties of sound that might be uttered the while (including thundering, weeping, cooing; words of praise, pain, and prohibition; and the sounds of the dove, the cuckoo, the green pigeon, the parrot, the sparrow, the flamingo, the duck, and the quail), as well as more than thirty coital positions, with names such as “the fixing of a spike” and “the place where four roads meet.” If all that education, aspects of which smacked of arithmetic, ornithology, carpentry, and animal husbandry, suggests that Navin was overqualified for the job of satisfying a teenage virgin, well, it must be recorded that at no time did Kudra complain of overkill. If she was not his equal in technique, she compensated in fragrance and enthusiasm, and night after night they dissolved their rope burns and fatigue in the salty flux and radiant slime of the glad-hearted fuck.
It is hardly surprising that the couple had four children in five years. They might have had still more had not the mother-in-law decided that the house was becoming too crowded and introduced Kudra to pennyroyal's application as an oral contraceptive.
Kudra loved her babies. One day, a dozen years into the marriage, she came to love her husband, as well. It happened on the morning after the festival of Mahashivaratri—the Great Night of Shiva—when, weakened by fasting and loosened by a kind of spiritual hangover, Navin revealed to Kudra that he adored horses and that during his youth had entertained the impossible dream of miraculously transcending Vaisya, the merchant caste, and ascending to Kshatriya, the warrior caste, so that he might ride. The admission of his ridiculous longing shamed him, but Kudra was touched to learn that, like her, Navin had a blasphemous desire locked away in his breast. It made them partners in a new, more intimate sense, and whenever she thought about his secret, she would reach across the rope bin to pat him tenderly. She did not share her own hidden dream because she didn't know how to articulate it. She only knew that it made her restless, that it smelled good, and that it was always there.
About a month after Navin's disclosure, a column of warriors paid a call at the rope shop to order some fancy, customized bridles, braided with bells and tassels, for their steeds. Kudra drew the leader aside and charmed him into offering Navin a ride.
“Oh, no, no, I could never,” protested Navin.
“Go ahead,” Kudra urged. “This is your chance. Just as far as the temple and back.”
The army officer, who had his eye on Kudra's ripe hips, helped Navin aboard and gave the big horse a whack that sent it off at a gallop. Navin, terrified, leaned too far forward and sailed off into a rock pile. His head split like a milk bowl, sending forbidden ambition, mixed with blood and brain, trickling into the public light.
During the next few days, Kudra seriously considered joining Navin's corpse on the pyre. It was not because she blamed herself for his demise—guilt is a neurotic emotion that Christianity was to exploit to fullest economic and political advantage; Hinduism was healthier in that regard—but because face to face with widowhood, she learned that her mother's dire description of it was, if anything, understated.
From the moment of her mate's death, a widow was under the tutelage of her sons, even if, as in Kudra's case, the sons were mere boys. She could never remarry, and were she to engage in illicit sexual activities, the Brahmans would administer to her a whipping that would expose the white of her bones. Prohibited from returning to her parents, she must remain with her husband's family, and while she would be expected to perform household chores from dawn to dusk, she could never attend the family festivals that played so big a part in Hindu life, for a widow's gloom would bring bad luck to everyone present. For all intents and purposes, a widow was an ascetic, shaving her head, sleeping on the ground, eating only one meal a day and that without honey, wine, or salt. She could wear neither colored garments nor ornaments, she could not use perfumes.
The ban on perfumes was, for Kudra, the final straw. She found herself nodding in agreement when a delegation of village Brahmans enumerated for her the spiritual advantages of suttee. When the priests left, she ran after them to inquire how long they thought it might take for her to be reincarnated. Not wishing to interrupt their conversation, she followed them silently down the dusty road and overheard them speculating about the worth of her jewelry. Upon suttee, her personal belongings would, by law, go to the Brahmans. One priest was of the opinion that Navin, like any good merchant-class husband, had lavished gold and silver ornaments upon his wife, and that they could scarcely afford to let Kudra forgo the funeral fire.
Kudra felt her entrails turn on an axle of lead. The Sanskrit alphabet, heavy-footed and squirmy, snag itself out in her belly; a cobra's tongue swam across the waters of her eyes. As the landscape blurred before her, she could see with pristine clarity the widow in smoking sari being pulled from the riverbank and dragged, screaming, back to the pyre. And she remembered then her promise to the pale-skinned stranger that such a fate would never be hers.
That night, the eve of cremation, after the household was fast asleep, she dressed herself in her nephew's clothing. She laid out her jewelry for the Brahmans, so that they might be less inclined to pursue her. She wrapped some flat cakes, rice balls, and coins in a silk scarf. Then she undid the package and added a hairbrush and several ivory vials of perfume. Then she unknotted the scarf a second time and, without consciously thinking why, put in a small pouch of pennyroyal. As warm vanilla moonlight creamed through the windows, she knelt before her crude little personal shrine, offered a bowl of ghee to the goddess Kali and begged for forgiveness. She knelt before Navin's casket and begged the same. She kissed each of her children in his sleep. Keeping to the shadows, she slipped from the house, stopping in the yard only long enough to kick with all of her might a flabbergasted basket of rope.
“So you ran away from death,” said Alobar. He was obviously pleased. Kudra's flight brought back memories of the two times he had ducked the swipe of the Reaper's sickle. It meant that he and this woman had something in common, something revolutionary and scandalous that bound them together out on the edge of behavior where the bond is tightest and sweetest.
“No,” said Kudra. “I did not run away from death. How can a person run away from death? And why would a person want to? Death is release. I did not flee death but the corruption of the Brahmans.”
“Nonsense! Do you mean to tell me that had the Brahmans been interested in your eternal soul instead of your bangles, you would have dived into the flames?”
“Well . . . I have much fear of flames.”
“Suppose they had wanted you to drown yourself, then. Would you have gone to water more gladly than to fire?”
“Yes. No. Oh, I do not know! Drowning is not such a good way to die.”
“What is a good way to die?”
“In your sleep, I suppose. When you are old and your children are grown.”
“Oh? Old and in your sleep? After a lifetime of hard work and ill treatment? And how old is old? Is it ever old enough? You could have accepted the painful life of the widow and died unappreciated in your sleep at the age of forty, you could have chosen that instead of the fire, that option was open to you, but you ran away from that, as well.”
“You are shaming me. Do you bid me return?”
Alobar put his hand on her shoulder. It was the softest thing he had touched in years. The heat of her flesh, wafting through her boy's jacket, caused fish eggs of perspiration to pop out on his palm. “Not in the least,” he said. “I merely want you to admit that you do not wish to die. You want to live and, what is more, you want to live decently and happily, you want to live a life that you yourself have chosen. Admit that, now, and you shall be rewarded.”
Kudra eyed his fingers suspiciously. They were kneading her shoulder and seemed to be of a mind to migrate south. “And what is to be my reward?”
Sensing her mistrust, he removed his hand. “The comfort and prot
ection of a kindred spirit.”
“How can you protect me? Can you not see, I am certain to be reincarnated as a spider for what I have done. A spider or a flea or a worm.” She shuddered.
“All the more reason to live a long, enjoyable life while you are still human.”
“NowI shall probably have to endure a hundred more lifetimes before I reach nirvana and gain my final release.”
“What difference does it make if you live a million more lifetimes? At least, you can enjoy this one.”
“To believe in the reality and permanence of the fleeting everyday world is foolish.”
“Then why are you here and not in the ash heap at the cemetery?”
“Perhaps because I am a foolish woman.”
“Good.” Alobar smiled. “My own foolishness could use some company.”
Kudra smiled, too. She didn't mean to smile. It just happened. The smile was an embarrassment to her, as if she had belched or broken wind. She tried to drive the smile away with thoughts of her sorrowful experiences, her disgraceful behavior, her insecure situation, but this was one smile that didn't scare easily, it hung in there like a tenant who knows his rights and refuses to be evicted. Finally, Kudra turned away, but Alobar could see her smiling through the back of her head.
“What is your name again?” Alobar moved closer to her.
“Kudra.” The word swam out through her smile like a blowfish swimming through a crack in a reef.
“Mine is Alobar.” He slipped his arm around her and cupped her left breast. It was heavy and jiggled in his hand as if it were full of liquid. Melon water. Or beet juice. “The grass is soft here, Kudra.”