A Lonely Harvest

by Perumal Murugan

  Whenever Kali had drawn water to irrigate a particular channel, he had used that as a chance to draw water for the hut and the enclosure as well and also filled the tubs. After his death, it was the two women, the in-laws, who drew some water by hand. It was the hardest of all the tasks. If they filled up both the vats, it would last them for two days. Now Vallayi too came running with two pots. Ponna was waiting for the water to come flowing down the channel—and it did, looking like little snakes moving, twining around each other. Ponna walked closer to the brinjal bed and scooped some water in her hand. It was red, mixed with the soil. She drank a mouthful, splashed some on her face. Kali was in the very water itself, smiling and saying, ‘What is it, girl?’ And she responded teasingly, ‘Oh, so you deigned to speak a word to me. How very generous of you!’

  With a quiet, steady smile, Kali flowed into the bed. Flattening down the soil that had been raked and piled, he slowly filled up the brinjal bed. He stood over the roots and sank into them. Ponna could not even hear Muthu shouting to ask if the bed was fully watered.

  All that filled her eyes was the sight of Kali filling up the channel so completely that it looked like its banks would submerge.

  EIGHT

  ‘Shall I take these two bulls home with me?’ Muthu said to Seerayi. ‘How many things will you take care of here? I can always bring them here to work when you need them.’

  She didn’t say anything in response and instead quietly pointed at Ponna. But Muthu hesitated to talk to Ponna. And although she had listened to this exchange, Ponna did not say anything either.

  Muthu spent a few minutes confused about what to do next, but then said, ‘All right. Let them be here for now. We can see about it later,’ and got ready to leave. Seerayi tried to stop him, saying, ‘Spend the night here. Leave in the morning.’ But he could not even think of staying in the barnyard where there was no Kali any more. It would be like lying down on a bed of thorns. Even worse was this silence from Ponna who once used to talk incessantly, like the patter of rain on a thatched roof. When even he could not accept Kali’s death, how could she? ‘No, Atthai,’ he said, addressing her like he would address a paternal aunt. ‘I have some work back home. I will come back after two or three days. Then we can water the brinjal bed again.’ He turned and walked on briskly towards his village.

  In the shed stood two bulls, a milch cow, a pregnant one and four heifers of various sizes—a total of eight. All of them were of the same breed—all offspring of the heifer Ponna had brought with her after her wedding. The animal had been pregnant when it first came here, and yielded a heifer calf within ten days of its arrival. Ponna let the calf drink plenty of milk and took good care of it. They only needed enough milk to make some curd for the house. Kali had been particular about curd—he never ate a single meal without it, and if it was even a little sour, he wouldn’t eat it. He also didn’t touch the curd if it was too watery and curdled. All he needed was good curd, nothing else. She made curd for him in different bowls. In the mornings, he’d mix them with the leftovers and drink up the blend.

  Once she mixed some of the thick part from the curdled batch with the good curd, but he found out as soon as he tasted the first mouthful. ‘What is this, my dear? There is no curd. You poured in the split curd, didn’t you?’

  ‘So you figured that out?’ she responded. ‘You should’ve been born in the priestly class. Then you could have eaten creamy curd for every meal. Not this broken curd. Maybe you let the cows graze on fresh grass yesterday. That is perhaps why the milk was a bit watery and the cream was not thick enough.’

  He went ahead and drank it, saying, ‘Even priestly classes get milk from us. Are we not fortunate enough to drink good creamy curd?’ And as he wiped his mouth clean and got ready to go out, he added, ‘Don’t do this tomorrow. Then I will ask loudly so that the entire village can hear, “Whom are you saving for? Do we have children?” And you shouldn’t get upset then.’

  That made her angry. ‘Say it!’ she yelled. ‘Try saying it! Call me a barren woman too if you want to. You have said it now, what does it matter if you say it tomorrow or not!’

  He ran grinning as if he didn’t hear her at all. Seeing him run away made her also smile.

  He never added salt to the curd he ate. Referring to that particular habit, she once said to him, ‘Only if you add salt will you learn some shame and pride. You just grin shamelessly no matter who says what. It could be your wife, or your mother, or any of the dogs in the village. Shameless fellow.’

  He then explained, ‘Try eating curd without salt. That’s when you can really taste the curd. If you add salt, it is the salt you will taste. That’s the taste of one thing mixing with another. We should also reject what the village people say just like we reject salt from curd. That’s when we will know our own taste.’

  She retorted, ‘Then why do you mix rice and curd?’

  He replied playfully, ‘Hey, my dear! We should only mix things that can be mixed. Like you and I have mixed, see. If we mix things that shouldn’t be mixed, that’d be like mating cows and goats. They will die!’

  ‘No matter what we are actually talking about, you manage to bring up this topic!’ she said with mock disgust.

  Keeping Kali’s fondness for curd in mind, she had made sure there was always a cow ready to be milked. Whatever was left after the needs of the calf and the house were met, she’d sell to anyone who asked for it. But all houses had cows. So there was enough milk for her to curdle and churn butter out of it the next day. If she went to Karattur once every ten or fifteen days, she could sell the butter in the Priests’ Street market there. In the Tuesday market, they would buy it by weight.

  Both the bullocks they now had had yielded two bulls at the same time. Kali had ensured their quality by checking the curl of the hair on their forehead. He raised them well, castrated them and used them as bullocks.

  ‘In all these years, it is only now that I have got the right pair of bullocks. They work so well together. Whether they are working on the plough or at the well, they totally understand each other and move so well. And when I tie them to the cart, it moves like a palanquin. I should use them to fetch sand from the lake and spread it all over the field. It might even be a good idea to fetch four cartloads of manure from Karattur.’ In this way he would often list his plans. He took great care of the bullocks. ‘This is the good luck you brought with you, my dear. See how the cowshed is full, and so is the milk pot.’

  And she’d say immediately, ‘It is only my womb that is still empty.’

  ‘That is all you have to say,’ he would reply. ‘From now on, when I am talking about happy things, you shouldn’t say something that ruins it.’

  Sridevi, that lucky heifer whom Ponna had brought with her, had died only last year. The cow had yielded one calf every year and filled up the cowshed. She had grown very old and was unable to even chew the millet feed because of the little twigs that would poke the inside of her mouth, making it bleed. Kali then started parsing out the maize stalks, cutting them into smaller pieces, and feeding Sridevi with care. He gathered soft grass for this old cow. He took care of her as if she was a little child. When she mooed in heat for a bull, he’d scold, ‘You still want that. You can’t even eat for your own body. Do you think you can nurture another life?’ He didn’t let her mate with a bull in her old age, but nevertheless, he was prompted to ask, ‘How do these cows and sheep manage to give birth even when they are so old? Doesn’t it stop like it does for us?’ By then, he had spent several years with sheep and cattle, but it was only Sridevi who provoked that question from him.

  Ponna had replied, ‘Only if women give birth would you still keep them in the family. Only if sheep and cows give birth would you still keep them in the shed. Otherwise, you’d sell them for meat. That’s why god has created it all this way. If women didn’t stop being able to give birth after a certain age, wouldn’t you men torment us?’

  He said, ‘All right then, you leave the house now.
If cows don’t yield calves, we sell them and get new ones, right? We can do the same with women too.’

  ‘Sell this Sridevi,’ she quipped. ‘I will go with her.’

  He couldn’t say anything in response to that. One rainy morning, they saw the old cow lying dead. Kali mourned this death, saying, ‘It had died quietly in the night so that we wouldn’t have to witness and suffer over its death. Even humans are not so considerate.’ When people came asking to buy meat from this cow, he refused. When someone said they could at least remove the skin and then bury the carcass, he didn’t agree to that either. He said, ‘This cow died working hard for us. Let it become manure to the same field,’ and he dug a pit in the field and buried her right there.

  When Sridevi died, all relatives came by to commiserate. Everyone from the village showed up too. For nearly a week, not much work got done in the field. The three of them spent their time telling Sridevi’s story to all the visitors. When they told everyone what a fine breed of milk cow she was and how many calves she had yielded, people said, ‘Please save me a calf from the next yield.’ Many of them thought they could get a calf for free. Then there were others who thought they could get one for a pittance. Ponna did not speak much to the visitors. It was Kali and Seerayi who sang the cow’s praises endlessly. ‘Ever since she came here, Sridevi did not disappoint us even for a year. After yielding a calf, she’d be in heat again in just two months. And even when she got pregnant, she never stopped giving milk. Not a single calf wilted away. We’d stop milking her only when we noticed it was the kind of milk that came from pregnant cows. That’s how much the cow gave us,’ Seerayi said to everyone.

  Had Ponna said the same thing, people would surely have remarked, ‘God gave you a cow that never failed to yield a calf—couldn’t he also have given you a child?’ And that would have angered Ponna. In order to avoid such an exchange, Ponna just said a few words of welcome to the visitors and went away under the pretext of some work.

  And now her brother was asking to take away the bullocks. With the bullocks gone, the cattle shed would look bereft. Just as the house had become an all-woman space after Kali’s death, the cattle shed too would just have females if the bullocks were taken away. So she decided the bullocks would remain, no matter what. It was true that keeping them meant more expenses; they’d consume two pots of water and four bundles of cattle feed. But having the bullocks here was like having Kali here. Even if she thought he had gone away, she couldn’t let him leave.

  Ponna had resolved to keep him hostage in each and every little thing there.

  NINE

  Her mother and mother-in-law brought in the cows grazing in the field one by one and went about tethering them within the enclosure. Ponna could see it all from where she was seated. She could hear the sounds of the sleep being herded back. Birds were making a ruckus in the trees. One or two of them flew in and settled on the portia tree. They were crows. Kali might come even as a crow. His spirit was definitely hovering around here—and wouldn’t be able to let go of everything so easily. He had always been so very fond of this enclosure. He could even tell, offhand, how many kovai on the creeper growing on the fence were ripe and how many were still new and unripe. How could someone who loved everything so much just drop it all and go away so easily?

  There was no scale in the world that could measure the love he had for her. But he could express it. In a slight touch, in a single kiss. In just a single word, he’d manage to express the entirety of his affection. Where could he go bearing all that affection? He’d perhaps turn into a bird and sit on a branch of the portia tree and watch everything. He’d be in the gaze of the chameleon that moved on the fence. He could be glimpsed in the rebellious nods of the calf. His voice would be heard in the grunt of the sheep. He’d lie on the ground. His arms would reach out from within the brinjal patch. He had not gone anywhere. In fact, he was fully and completely right there.

  Ponna was sitting on the flat stone that lay in front of the hut. He could be in that stone too. They had found that stone while ploughing the field. They had been sowing groundnuts. He drove the plough and she did the furrowing. As the plough moved along, pushing under the earth, suddenly its curved end got caught in something. The bullocks had to stop, as the ropes pulled them backwards with a jerk. He made the bullocks move back and tried to pull up the ploughshare from the ground. It wouldn’t budge easily. It was stuck resolutely to something. No matter how hard he pulled, he couldn’t draw it above the ground. He had to release the bullocks from the plough. The soil was wet, so he brought a spade and dug in a wide arc. The edge of the ploughshare was stuck inside a stone. At first he thought he could remove the stone and release the plough from it. But as he kept digging, he saw that the stone was a large one. He used a crowbar to pry away the plough from the stone. They were amazed at the size of the stone and wondered how it might have got there. They ploughed and sowed around it. But the very next day he went back to the field to turn the stone over. He dug around it and pulled up and rolled over the stone. It was broad like someone’s chest. It looked wide like a ribcage. Once he rolled it over, it left a large pit on the ground. A person could stand inside it. Three could sit. He got down into the pit. It was just sand all the way down.

  He said, ‘I wonder if my ancestors have left some treasure here, but there seems to be nothing.’ He laughed.

  ‘Dig properly and look more carefully,’ suggested Ponna. She thought there might be something hidden there.

  Kali laughed and said, ‘Let us show this to your brother tomorrow. We can offer him half of anything we find.’

  He could not move the stone by himself. Ponna helped him. But it was still a difficult job. So he went and fetched Muthu that very afternoon. They used two crowbars, one on each side, prised the stone out of the ground and brought it all the way to the barnyard. They laid it in front of the hut, and secured it firmly in place with the necessary support on both sides. Three people could freely sit on it as if they were sitting on a veranda. One person could lie down on it comfortably. Muthu jumped into the pit and looked about thoroughly, but he could find nothing.

  ‘We won’t find any treasure in such a pit, Mapillai. It is where people stored grains in the olden days for safekeeping. Let us push some soil into it and close it up. Otherwise, some idiot might run and tell the authorities,’ Muthu said.

  ‘But we found nothing here,’ reasoned Kali. ‘So what if someone informed the revenue authorities? Are they going to behead us? Let them come and look at it if they want to.’

  But Muthu scared him, saying, ‘If you just lie about in the barnyard, how can you know what goes on in the world? Apparently, last year, they found a pit like this one in Kaikkaranoor. A kinsman who didn’t like the fellow whose land the pit was in went and told the authorities that the man had found a pot of gold in it. The revenue officer came right away along with his retinue. And with them came a white man carrying a camera box. The owner of the land tried his best to explain, but the revenue officer simply wouldn’t listen. The white man stood here and there and took photos from all angles. The entire village was terrorized by this. Apparently, only after the farmer fell at the white man’s feet did the white man ask the revenue officer what the whole thing was about. And once the officer had explained the situation, the white man had laughed and said that they could not find anything in that pit because it was of the kind dug in olden days to store grain. And he asked them to leave the farmer alone. But the man had to still spend ten rupees to get rid of the officer and his retinue. Ten rupees is not a small amount, is it? The earnings from an entire harvest. We don’t need that kind of trouble. Come, let us throw in some groundnuts into it and close the pit.’

  And that’s what Kali and Muthu had done. Kali had then washed the stone. It was black granite. Later, he had used a chisel to smoothen the rough parts of its surface.

  Kali was definitely there in all these things. He wouldn’t go away. Ponna sat thinking about him, when her mother called.
There was some water boiling in the large copper vessel in the corner. Her mother asked her to have a wash. ‘You have done so much work since morning. You will feel very sore later. Go wash yourself with some warm water,’ she said. It was Kali who had made a little bathroom in a corner of the enclosure for Ponna. He had tied thatched screens together so that she could have a little privacy.

  There was a priest family in Karattur to whom Ponna usually sold the butter she made. They had a little piece of land at the back of the house. An ancestor of theirs had had a good garden there sometime in the past. They had told Ponna that they wanted to have a garden there again. They needed help with getting the land ready, and also needed someone to bring the saplings and seeds to be planted there. When Ponna told Kali about this, he assured her that he would personally go and take care of it all.

  It took him only three days. On the first day, he pulled out the weeds and got the place ready. The compound was nicely fenced in. The next day, he strategized where the saplings ought to be planted and accordingly dug out pits in all those places. He also dug out a water channel so that the garden could be irrigated by the water drawn from the well. On the third day, he planted the saplings and watered them. In one corner, he planted a drumstick stalk and covered its end with some cow dung. In another corner, he had dug a hole for a coconut tree. He put in a coconut and closed the hole. In the rest of the garden, he planted flowering plants and sowed seeds for the vegetables they preferred. The garden flourished in just a month’s time. The owners were very satisfied. The woman of the house gave Kali ten rupees for that job. Kali took that money to Natesar, who had his jewellery shop in the same street, and got a pair of earrings made for Ponna. The earrings were shaped like mangoes. She proudly showed them off to everyone.