Pooja did not know I dissuaded the dogs from howling and barking near her home at night, but she did know I saw all that went on in Tuldara. Her redundant confession was a sign of trust.
“It was dirty, and it didn’t have a home. I have a home, and it didn’t, and I wanted it to feel welcome.” She leaned down and whispered a correction: “Him.”
Although she had been initially hesitant, I heard in her voice the confidence that I would not judge her for her actions, not as her parents did. I could not scold her, not as her parents did.
Some days she brought the dog to me. His name was Kut-Kut.
#
I sit at the threshold of the village, a guardian. Everything within the borders of Tuldara is my entire world, and I remain just outside it, an observer and caretaker. My reach extends no further than the hazy demarcation dividing Tuldara from the rest of India, the rest of the world. I cannot see it. I cannot know it. I cannot speak to it. I know I must have many sisters and yet I have never spoken to one. What are their villages like? Surely more full of life than mine, now.
You stand now in the aura of Tuldara, having only begun to enter. Don’t look behind you. My perception reaches as far as your sight, and I promise you are safe. Nothing is behind you. Come closer. Don’t be afraid.
#
As Pooja grew older, she traded her Limca for Thums Up, the off-white, sweet lemon-lime for the dark, acidic cola. She still offered it to me, though I sensed it was in jest. She had begun to question, as children do in their teenage years. “How are you?” became “Are you?” I was. I was, and she was, but only one could offer proof of existence, a tangible effect on the world with a clear attribution.
“Tuldaramma,” she said, “I don’t know whether you’re there.”
It hurt to hear those words. I had heard them from so many children before, but hearing them from Pooja was different. I had convinced myself she would not say them.
“I am here,” I could not say, “and I love you.”
“I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” she said, looking at the ground, “but they bought me a new bicycle. It has a basket and a bell! I’m going to ring the bell all the time the way everyone honks their horn all the time.” She tilted her head up, smiling at me with a glint in her eye. “Like it’ll make them go faster.”
She exaggerated her bell-ringing plans. Right before she left the village, she would stop ringing the bell, and as she crossed the threshold, she would ring it twice in quick succession. Just for me.
#
I am the dirt. I am the air. I am the darkness itself. I permeate every facet of Tuldara from the columns outside Bhulabhai’s residence to Lalitaben’s rotting corpse. I am every particle of dust, I am the quiet, I am the swing no longer creaking.
I am not the stars. The stars are their own realm.
The bark of a dog startles you. Pay him no mind. Kut-Kut merely yearns for his playmate, as I do. I kept him to keep me company.
Will you keep me company too? It has been so long since I have received any knowledge of the world beyond Tuldara. You can tell me so many things. Tell me about my sister. Tell me about the village that gave her life, the villagers that still thrive.
Tell me I have not been alone.
#
As she became a young adult, Pooja came to accept me into her heart once again, believing in me because she chose to, not because she had no choice. Her devotion felt stronger now, backed by such conviction. She never asked me for anything, even then. Perhaps she understood that her parents cared enough for her that she had my blessing, always. Or perhaps she sensed that I had desired a friend since before she was the merest flicker of an idea.
“Kinjal and I walked through the wheat fields today,” she said. I knew, of course, having felt them pass through the long, yellow stalks, laughing and saying more than the words they spoke.
Hers, playfully defiant: “Short girl like me with hair like this?”
His, warmly confident: “No problem finding a husband.”
She rode a scooter now, and she never wore a helmet. I could not protect her when she left the boundaries of Tuldara, and the road held deadly curves. Several of my people had fallen throughout the years. Yet I could tell her nothing. That reckless girl. Our love flowed in both directions but our dialogue only in one.
#
Your eyes narrow; your forehead creases. You also wear no helmet, despite coming down those curves on a motorcycle. Worry not, girl. Pooja did not die. That is not how she was taken from me.
#
His name was Ranjit. A bold, strapping young man, with a booming voice, a model suitor to any sensible mother. His family had been deemed compatible with her family, though I had no say in the matter. Pooja’s parents had come to me, but, as their daughter often did, they spoke for their own benefit, aware that I knew nothing of this boy from another village. Likewise, my sister knew nothing of Pooja, and yet she conspired with this boy’s parents, feeding them lies to steal my—
No, no, she could not have done so. She had no role in this.
Kinjal, too, had no say in the matter. Yet now he said nothing, curled up in Satishbhai’s hay loft, staring at the unfeeling wood of the roof.
The people of Tuldara approved of this boy. They welcomed him into our village. Pooja accepted him. Not as she had accepted me as an adult but as she had as a child. Because it was the single option presented to her.
In the early morning before the village woke, she cried to me. She had not cried to me since she was a girl, and now as a woman she spoke to me in tears, a wordless monologue. What began as a paroxysm of grief gave way to controlled sobs, brave sniffles as she steeled her resolve.
Tears welled up in her eyes as she prayed to me one final time that evening. As he took her hand and led her past the boundaries of Tuldara, my connection to Pooja severed and I lamented that I was unable to cry.
#
The people of the village are mine from the first day they arrive. The men are mine forever. No matter where they go, no matter how far they venture, they may always return to me. Tuldara never leaves them. The women, however, remain mine only until the day a man takes them away.
A woman who leaves with a man no longer belongs to me: she belongs to the goddess of his village. Not all villages have a goddess; some have a god, and some have no one. But she will worship whomever he does. Our history is tossed away as she forges a new relationship, and I am no longer obliged to listen to her prayers. In truth, I cannot. Even our one-way communication would be a luxury.
You are not mine. I do not know you. You have come because you have heard the stories. You have left your home to witness this haunted village.
There are no ghosts here but me, I assure you. You, who are not mine. Not yet.
#
It was only one mosquito at first. Disease vectors fall under my domain, and I expressed my grief the only way I could. I awakened a single mosquito, made it malarial. I knew Pooja could not stay with me forever. The women always left. The men brought me new women, strangers. But centuries, millennia had passed, and I wished for a new arrangement. For the first time, someone had treated me not as a force of nature but as a confidante. The village had betrayed me by allowing her to leave.
Every morning that Pooja did not come to me and tell me a new story, I awakened a new mosquito.
Pooja’s parents fell ill within a week, and they came to me, laid a garland in front of the murti, prayed for me to cure them of this malady. I had that power. But I chose not to use it. They could not take away my choice as they had Pooja’s.
I felt their agony, however. The convulsions, the sudden coldness, the bursts of heat, the nausea, the crippling fatigue. I had no body, but they were my people and their pain was mine. I could not cry for that either.
I could not communicate with other villages, and so neither could the villagers. Although it was not my intention, my isolation was so strong that it
carried over into their realm. The borders were sealed, fused shut by my pain. Pooja did not know what I had done to her home. To her family.
The bodies began to fall, and they continued to fall. Mercifully, they died in their own houses, with the exception of Sukhooben, whose habit of wandering the village unattended left her body in the middle of the road. Hers was the only one not safe from the crows.
I spared the buffaloes, the dogs, the crows. They had done me no wrong.
The stench of rot and feces grew, and I let it remain. I could preserve life and I could take life. I could also preserve death. This was what I had done, and I would wallow in it.
#
It bothers you as well. You hold your nose between two lithe fingers to keep the stench out, but it will not work. The odor is more than smell; it is miasma, a weight that hangs in the air. A colossal absence of life, loss in return for my loss.
You pull your hand from your face, and clarity comes over me. Your nose is familiar. Thin, with a crooked bridge. Your eyes have her sparkle as well. I have not seen those eyes in many years. I welcome their curious gaze.
She was happy, then. For all her protests, she made a life with that stranger, a life I could not witness. She begat life that begat life, and here you stand, a living memory of the reason for this village’s demise.
You are so beautiful. You do not deserve to enter here. To be defiled by what I have done to your origin.
What have I done? It was foolish, spiteful. You are the last vestige of Tuldara, as I have destroyed its history and its future. I have profaned the name of gramadevi; no all-mother am I. The scriptures warn of the dangers of attachment. Perhaps I was meant to be a reminder. I served that purpose admirably.
Now I implore you not to cross the threshold. Tuldara is unsalvageable, as is its goddess. There is no place for you here. Behind this archway lies only death.
Please. No.
But my pleas do not reach you. Your silence has communicated more to me than I will ever be able to communicate to you. I have told my story but taught you nothing.
And so you step into Tuldara, across the line that Pooja once crossed.
And you are mine.
BEER AND PENNIES
Richard Dansky
The Devil's Tramping Ground is a well-known spot in North Carolina. The spot is a barren circle located in the middle of the forest. For three hundred years, locals have claimed that that the Devil walks the perimeter of the circle every night, plotting ways to destroy humankind. This circle is said to be perfectly round, and is forty feet across. The Devil does his planning at night, and in the daytime leaves to carry out his plan. Some say the circle is bare simply because it's too close to the devil's malevolent self. Other say the ground is scorched because of the heat from the devil's cloven hooves.
Any spot of ground so frequently visited by the Devil must exhibit some sinister side effects. Officially, the circle is a camping ground, with a firepit in the center, but according to legend no one can spend the whole night in the circle. People who try to keep a vigil see something that they cannot describe, and they go insane. Dogs won't enter the circle, not even for a Scooby Snack. Any object placed in the circle is expelled from it by morning by invisible forces. Some say all this is due to an ancient Indian curse, and some claim it's the site of a UFO landing. But most people stick with the story of the Devil, who paces through the night thinking of horrible, horrible things.
As it happens, a number of people have found that the Devil's Tramping Ground may not live up to its centuries of hype. The circle has shrunk considerably since it's 40-foot days, and visitors frequently find litter in the circle that seems to have been left there let alone overnight. Dogs like the circle just fine. Perhaps there was never anything wrong with the circle. Or perhaps the Devil has moved on.
But stories like this have a life beyond fact. The image of the Devil pacing and muttering and plotting through the night is so much more resonant and horrifying and seductive than the image of people hanging out in a circle of dirt and drinking beer while telling scary stories. And if it is true that the Devil walks the woods of North Carolina, even if he only walks those woods some of the time…would you want to know? What's the price of truth?
***
It was a week after Jimmy died that I called up the Devil.
Waited for him to call himself up, truth be told. I wouldn’t have known how to call up the Devil, save in the usual way: living a damn fool life and then dying. The lucky ones lived long enough to find Jesus before they grew too old for the revival to take. The unlucky wrapped themselves around trees or smeared themselves across embankments; they drowned swimming after that one beer they oughtn’t have had, or used the gun in a lawman’s hand for suicide.
So I’d been told, anyway. The folks I’d known went more for quiet desperation and slow disintegration, and the only devils in their lives wore their own skins.
#
Jimmy and I had gone out to the Devil’s Tramping Ground on a Monday night, that being when it was less likely to be occupied by local kids sneaking cheap beers and huffing paint in the woods. It had a legend, the Tramping Ground did—nothing would grow there, and anything left on that bare patch of ground in the Carolina woods overnight would get tossed out by some invisible force by morning.
The older folks, they had another part to the story. They said it was the Devil who’d clear things out of that circle of dirt and sand. That he’d show up there ‘round midnight when the mood took him, and walk round and round planning mischief for mankind. That’s why nothing would grow there, they said. The Devil ground it all underfoot.
Jimmy thought this was all bullcrap, of course, and in those days I followed where Jimmy led. He had some idiot idea about making a video of us doing some kind of investigation of the place, then putting it up online. What was supposed to happen next, he never got around to telling me, but he seemed pretty sure it would make us famous and then rich, though maybe not in that order.
I went along with it because I always went along with what Jimmy did. It's what you did when Jimmy was around. He came up with some pants-on-head crazy idea, you spent half an hour arguing against it, and the next thing you knew you were walking backwards across a train trestle at midnight ‘cause Jimmy thought it might be a hoot. And you swore you were never, ever going to go along with another one of Jimmy’s idiot plans again.
At least, not until he cooked up the next one.
And the next one, and the one after that, until we stood on the edge of the clearing in the woods where the Devil’s Tramping Ground lay.
It wasn’t much to look at, truth be told. Just a flat sandy circle in a clearing in the woods. Burned out fire pit in the center, logs for sitting on around the edge. Nothing grew inside those logs, while outside scrubby grass and sickly weeds spread into the woods. Empty tallboys littered the place, a sure sign of recent visitation. But of the Devil, there was no sign.
“That’s it?” I asked.
Jimmy nodded. “That’s it. Just a circle of dirt people been telling stories about for a hundred years.”
“We came all the way out here and it’s just a circle of dirt?” I stalked after Jimmy, who did a fine job of ignoring me as he set up his camera.
“You can leave,” he finally said. “Me, I’m going to sit here tonight with some thinking juice and the best technology Sony has to offer, and I’m gonna try and see if there’s more to this here “circle-of-dirt” than just dirt. You can join me if you’d like.” And he sat down on one of the logs, and patted the log beside him, and damned if I didn’t sit down, too.
“Atta boy,” he said when I did. “Now bust open the cooler and get a couple of beers. It’s gonna be a long night.”
And I did, and we sat and waited, and drank beers in the dark until morning.
Except, of course, neither of us made it ’til morning. I dropped off around four thirty, when Jimmy was already snoring like a drunk pig
and the sky hadn’t quite decided to start thinking about maybe getting light. We got woken up around ten, when a couple of tourists came walking up the trail hollering about how they thought they’d found the place. Jimmy checked the camera while I kept them occupied, but the look on his face told the story.
Nothing.
“Well, we got what we came for,” I said after the tourists—two fat guys who said they were writers and their skinny, bored wives—had gone back to their car. “Now we going home?”
“Just for a little bit,” Jimmy said, fiddling with the camera some more. “See this? Camera stopped recording for a couple of minutes right after we dropped off.”
“Maybe that was ‘cause we fell asleep.”
He ignored me. “I wanna go home, get a wash and a change of clothes and some more beer, then come on back and try a little something.”
I could feel the hackles on the back of my neck standing up. “Jimmy, something tells me this is gonna be a real bad idea.”
Grinning, he shook his head. “Ain’t gonna be nothing. Safe as can be. You’ll see.” And he headed back down the same trail to where we’d left Jimmy’s truck, and I hurried to follow him.
We were back by five that night, plenty of time to set up the camera again and start a fire in that pit. We made supper and drank a few more beers, and then Jimmy got up to show me his bright idea.
Which, it turned, was a penny, and he tossed to me.
“What the hell is this?” I asked.
“A penny,” he said. “Ain’t you never seen one?”
“I’ve seen one, but I don’t know why you got one here. You want penny slots, you got to go all the way to Cherokee.”
“Naw,” he said, and took the penny back. “You know the legend, right? Anything you leave in the circle overnight, the Devil tosses out. So I’m gonna leave this penny here, right near the fire, and I’m gonna leave the camera pointed at it all night. The Devil picks it up, we’ll see it.”
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