The Years of Rice and Salt

by Robinson, Kim Stanley

  In the months before monsoon, the work for Kokila and all the rest of them got harder for several weeks on end. Wake in the morning and stoke the fire. Cross the cool village, the air not yet dusty. Pick up Bihari at the dai's little hut in the woods. Downstream to the defecation grounds, wash afterwards, then back through the village to pick up the water jars and head upstream. Past the laundry pools, where women were already congregating, and on to the watering hole. Fill up and hump the big heavy jars back home, stopping several times to rest. Then off into the forest to forage for firewood. This could take most of the morning. Then back to the fields west of the village, where her father and his brothers had some land, to sow pulse of wheat and barley. They put it in over a few weeks, so that it would ripen through the long harvest month. This week's row was weak, the tops small, but Kokila thrust them in the ploughed earth without thought, then in the heat of the day sat with the other women and girls, mixing grain and water to make a pasty

  dough, throwing chapatis, cooking some of them. After that she went out to their cow. A few rhythmic downward tugs of her finger in its rectum started a spill of dung that she collected warm in her hands, slapped into patties with some straw for drying, and put on the stoneand‑turf wall bordering her father's field. After that she took some dried dung cakes by the house, put one on the fire, went out to the stream to wash her hands and the dirty clothes: four saris, dhotis, wraps. Then back to the house in the waning light of the day, the heat and dust making everything golden in the slant air, to the hearth in the central room of their house, to cook chapatis and daal bhat on the little clay stove next to the firepit.

  Some time after dark Rajit would come home, and Zaneeta and the girls would surround him with care, and after he had eaten the daal bhat and chapatis he would relax and tell Zaneeta something about his day, as long as it had not gone too badly. If it had, he wouldn't speak of it. But usually he told them something of his juggling of land and cattle deals. The village families used marginal pastures as securities for new animals, or vice versa, and brokering trade in calves and kids and pasture rights was what her father did, mostly between Yelapur and Sivapur. Then also he was always making marriage arrangements for his daughters, a bad business as he had so many of them, but he made up dowries when he could, and had no hesitation in marrying them down. Had no choice, really.

  So the evening would end and they slept on rush mattresses unrolled for the night on the floor, by the fire for warmth if it was cool, for the smoke's protection from mosquitos if it was warm. Another night would pass.

  One evening after dinner, a few days before Durga Puja marked the end of the harvest, her father told her mother that he had arranged a possible marriage for Kokila, whose turn it was, to a man from Dharwar, the market village just the other side of Sivapur. The prospective husband was a Lingayat, like Rajit's family and most of Yelapur, and the third son of Dharwar's headman. He had quarrelled with his father, however, and this left him unable to ask Rajit for much of a dowry. Probably he was unmarriageable in Dharwar, Kokila guessed, but she was excited anyway. Zaneeta seemed pleased, and said she would look the candidate over during the Durga Puja.

  Ordinary life was pegged to whichever festival was coming next, and the festivals all had different natures, colouring the feel of the days leading up to them. Thus the Car Festival of Krishna takes place in the monsoon, and its colour and gaiety stand in contrast to the lowering grey overhead; boys blow their palm‑leaf trumpets as if to hold off the rain by the blast of their breath, and everyone would go crazy from the noise if the blowing itself didn't reduce the trumpets quickly to palm leaves again. Then the Swing Festival of Krishna takes place at the end of monsoon, and the fair associated with it is full of stalls selling superfluous things like sitars and drums, or silks, or embroidered caps, or chairs and tables and cabinets. The time for the ld shifts through the year, making it seem a very human event somehow, free of the earth and its gods, and during it all the Muslims come to Sivapur to watch their elephant parade.

  Then Durga Puja marks the harvest, the grand climax of the year, honouring the mother goddess and all her works.

  So the women gathered on the first day, and mixed a batch of vermilion bindi paste, while drinking some of the dai's fiery chang, and they scattered after that, painted and giggling, following the Muslim drummers in the opening parade, shouting 'To the victory of Mother Durga!' The goddess's slant‑eyed statue, made of clay and dressed in coloured pith and gilding, looked faintly Tibetan. Placed around it were similarly dressed statues of Laksmi and Saraswati, and her sons Ganesh and Kartik. Two goats were tethered in turn to a sacrificial post before these statues and decapitated, the bleeding heads staring up from the dust.

  The sacrifice of the buffalo was an even greater matter; a special priest came from Bbadrapur, with a big scimitar sharpened for the occasion. This was important, for if the blade didn't make it all the way through the buffalo's big neck, it meant that the goddess was displeased and had refused the offering. Boys spent the morning rubbing the skin on the top of its neck with ghee, to soften it.

  This time the heavy stroke of the priest was successful, and all the shouting celebrants charged the body to make little balls of blood and dust, and throw them at each other, shrieking.

  An hour or two later the mood was entirely different. One of the old men started singing 'The world is pain, its load past bearing', and then

  the women took it up, for it was dangerous for the men to be heard questioning the Great Mother; even the women had to pretend to be wounded demons in the song:

  'Who is she that walks the fields as Death, She that fights and swoops as Death? A mother will not destroy her child, Her own flesh, creation's joy, yet we see the Killer looking here then there . . .'

  Later, as night fell, the women went home and dressed in their best saris, and came back out and stood in two lines, and the boys and men shouted 'Victory to the Great Goddess!' and the music began, wild and carefree, the whole crowd dancing and talking around the bonfire, looking beautiful and dangerous in their firelit finery.

  Then people from Dharwar turned up, and the dancing grew wild. Kokila's father took her by the hand out of the line and introduced her to the parents of her intended. Apparently a reconciliation had been patched together for the sake of this formality. The father she had seen before, headman of Dharwar as he was, named Shastri; the mother she had never seen before, as the father had pretensions of purdah, though he was not really wealthy.

  The mother looked Kokila over with a sharp, not unfriendly eye, bindi paste running down between her eyebrows, face sweaty in the hot night. Possibly a decent mother‑in‑law. Then the son was produced: Gopal, third son of Shastri. Kokila nodded stiffly, looking aslant at him, not knowing what she felt. He was a thin‑faced, intent‑looking youth, perhaps nervous ‑ she couldn't tell. She was taller than he was. But that might change.

  They were swept back into their respective parties without exchanging a word. Nothing but that single nervous glance, and she did not see him again for three years. All the while, however, she knew they were destined to marry, and it was a good thing, as her affairs were therefore settled, and her father could stop worrying about her, and treat her without irritation.

  Over time she learned from the women's gossip a bit more about the family she was going to join. Shastri was an unpopular headman. His latest offence was to have exiled a Dharwar blacksmith, for visiting a brother in the hills without asking his permission first. He had not called the panchayat together to discuss or approve this decision. He had never called the panchayat together, in fact, since inheriting the headman

  position from his deceased father a few years before. Why, people muttered, he and his eldest son ran Dharwar as if they were the zamindars of the place!

  Kokila took all this in without too much concern, and spent as much time as she could with Bihari, who was learning the herbs the dai used as medicines. Thus when they were out collecting firewood, Bihari was
also inspecting the forest floor and finding plants to bring back ‑ bittersweet in sunny patches, whiteroot in wet shade, castor bean under saal trees among their roots, and so on. Back at their hut Kokila helped grind the dried plants, or otherwise prepare them, using oils or spirits, for use by Insef in her midwifery, for the most part: to stimulate contractions, relax the womb, reduce pain, open the cervix, slow bleeding and so on. There were scores of source plants and animal parts that the dai wanted them to learn. 'I'm old,' she would say, 'I'm thirty‑six, and my mother died at thirty. Her mother taught her the lore, and the dai who taught my grandmother was from a Dravidian village to the south, where names and even property were reckoned down through the women, and she taught my grandmother all the Dravidians know, and that goes back through all the dais of time to Saraswati, the goddess of learning herself, so we can't let it go forgotten, you must learn it and teach your daughters, so that birthing is made as easy as it can be, poor things, and as many kept alive as possible.' People said of Insef that she had a centipede in her head (this was mostly an expression said of eccentrics, although in fact mothers searched your ears for them if you had been lying with your head on the grass, and sometimes rinsed out your ears with oil, for centipedes detest oil), and she often talked as fast as you ever heard anyone talk, rambling on and on, mostly to herself, but Kokila liked to hear her.

  And it took very little for Insef to convince Bihari of the importance of these things. She was a lively sweet girl with a good eye in the forest, a good memory for plants, and always a cheerful smile and a kind word for people. She was if anything too cheery and attractive, because in the year Kokila was to be married to Gopal, Shardul, his older brother, the eldest son of Shastri, soon to become Kokila's brother‑in‑law ‑ one of those in her husband's family who would have the right to tell her what to do ‑ he started looking at Bihari in an interested way, and after that, no matter what she did, he watched her. It couldn't lead to any

  good, as Bihari was perhaps untouchable and therefore unmarriageable, and Insef did what she could to seclude her. But the festivals brought the single men and women together, and the daily life of the village afforded various glimpses and encounters as well. And Bihari was inter~ ested, anyway, even though she knew she was unmarriageable. She liked the idea of being normal, no matter how vehemently the dai warned her against it.

  The day came when Kokila was married to Gopal and moved to Dharwan. Her new mother‑in‑law turned out to be withdrawn and irritable, and Gopal himself was no prize. An anxious man with little to say, dominated by his parents, never reconciled with his father, he at first tried to lord it over Kokila the way they did over him, but without much conviction, particularly after she had snapped at him a few times. He was used to that, and quickly enough she had the upper hand. She didn't much like him, and looked forward to dropping by to see Bihari and the dai in the forest. Really only the second son, Prithvi, seemed to her at all admirable in the headman's family, and he left early every day and had as little to do with his family as he could, keeping quiet with a distant air.

  There was a lot of traffic between the two villages, more than Kokila had ever noticed before it became so important to her, and she made do ‑ secretly taking a preparation that the dai had made for her, to keep from having a baby. She was fourteen years old but she wanted to wait.

  Before long things went bad. The dai got so crippled by her swollen joints that Bihari had to take over her work, and she was much more frequently seen in Dharwar. Meanwhile Shastri and Shardul were conspiring to make money by betraying their village, changing the tax assessment with the agent of the zamindar, shifting it to the zamindar's great advantage, with Shastri skimming off some for himself. Basically they were colluding to change Dharwar over to the Muslim form of farm tax rather than the Hindu law. The Hindu law, which was a religious injunction and sacred, allowed a tax of no more than one‑sixth of all produce, while the Muslim claim was to everything, with whatever the farmers kept being a matter of the pleasure of the zamindar. In practice this often meant little difference, but Muslim allowances varied for crops and circumstance, and this is where Shastri and Shardul were helping the zamindar, by calculating what more could be taken without

  starving the villagers. Kokila lay there at night with Gopal, and through the open doorway as he slept she heard Shastri and Shardul going over the possibilities.

  'Wheat and barley, two‑fifths when naturally watered, three‑tenths when watered by wheels.'

  'That sounds good. Then dates, vines, green crops and gardens, onethird.'

  'But summer crops one‑fourth.'

  Eventually, to aid in this work, the zamindar gave Shardul the post of qanungo, assessor for the village; and he was already an awful man. And he still had an eye for Bihari. The night of the car festival he took her in the forest. From her account afterwards it was clear to Kokila that Bihari hadn't completely minded it, she relished telling the details, 'I was on my back in the mud, it was raining on my face and he was licking the rain off it, saying 1 love you 1 love you.'

  'But he won't marry you,' Kokila pointed out, worried. 'And his brothers won't like it if they hear about this.'

  'They won't hear. And it was so passionate, Kokila, you have no idea.' She knew Kokila was not impressed by Gopal.

  'Yes yes. But it could lead to trouble. Is a few minutes' passion worth that?'

  'It is, it is. Believe me.'

  For a while she was happy, and sang all the old love songs, especially one they used to sing together, an old one:

  'I like sleeping with somebody different, Often. It's nicest when my husband is in a far country, Far away. And there's rain in the streets at night and wind And nobody.'

  But Bihari got pregnant, despite Insef's preparations. She tried to keep to herself, but with the dai crippled there were births that she had to attend, and so she went and her condition was noted, and people put together what they had seen or heard, and said that Shardul had got her with child. Then Prithvi's wife was giving birth and Bihari went to

  help, and the baby, a boy, died a few minutes after it was born, and outside their house Shastri struck Bihari in the face, calling her a witch and a whore.

  All this Kokila heard about when she visited Prithvi's house, from Prithvi's wife, who said the birth had gone faster than anyone expected, and that she doubted Bihari had done anything bad. Kokila hurried off to the dai's hut, and found the gnarled old woman puffing with effort between Bihari's legs, trying to get the baby out. 'She's miscarrying,' she told Kokila. So Kokila took over and did what the dai told her to, forgetting her own family until night fell, when she remembered and exclaimed, 'I have to go!' and Bihari whispered, 'Go. It will be all right.'

  Kokila rushed home through the forest to Dharwar, where her mother‑in‑law slapped her, but perhaps just to pre‑empt Gopal, who punched her hard in the arm and forbade her to return to the forest or Sivapur ever again, a ludicrous command given the realities of their life, and she almost said 'How will 1 fetch your water then?' but bit her lip and rubbed her arm, looking daggers at them, until she judged they were as frightened as they could get without beating her, after which she glared like Kali at the floor instead, and cleaned up after their impromptu dinner, which had been hobbled by her absence. They could not even cat without her. This fury was the thing she would remember for ever.

  Before dawn next morning she slipped out with the water jugs and hurried through the wet grey forest, leaves scattered at every level from the ground to the high canopy overhead, and arrived at the dai's hut frightened and breathing hard.

  Bihari was dead. The baby was dead, Bihari was dead, even the old woman lay stretched on her pallet, gasping with the pain of her exertions, looking as if she too might expire and leave this world at any minute. 'They went an hour ago,' she said. 'The baby should have lived, I don't know what happened. Bihari bled too much. 1 tried to stop it but 1 couldn't reach.'

  'Teach me a poison.'

  'What?'
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  'Teach me a good poison to use. 1 know you know them. Teach me the strongest one you know, right now.'

  The old woman turned her head to the wall, weeping. Kokila pulled her around roughly and shouted, 'Teach me!'

  The old woman looked over at the two bodies under a spread sari, but there was no one else there to be alarmed. Kokila began to raise a hand to threaten her, then stopped herself. 'Please,' she begged. 'I have to know.'

  'It's too dangerous.'

  'Not as dangerous as sticking a knife in Shastri.'

  'No.'

  'I'll stab him if you don't tell me, and they'll burn me on a bonfire.'

  'They'll do that if you poison him.'

  'No one will know.'

  'They'll think 1 did it.'

  'Everyone knows you can't move.'

  'That won't matter. Or they'll think you did it.'

  'I'll do it cleverly, believe me. I'll be at my parents'.'

  'It won't matter. They'll blame us anyway. And Shardul is as bad as Shastri, or worse.'

  'Tell me.'

  The old woman looked into her face for a time. Then she rolled over, opened her sewing basket. She showed Kokila a small dried plant, then some berries. 'This is water hemlock. These are castor bean seeds. Grind the hemlock leaves to a paste, add seeds to the paste just before you place it. It's bitter, but you don't need much. A pinch in spicy food will kill without any taste. But it looks like poisoning afterwards, I warn you. It's not like being sick.'