Even Seerayi had not told Ponna that her family was arriving that day. All sorts of gifts came in their bullock cart. It was the ninth month of Ponna’s pregnancy. If Kali had been alive, they would have thrown a feast for the entire village and taken Ponna back home with them with all fanfare. But that was not possible under the circumstances. Also, if they had expressed their wish to come and treat Ponna to a feast, they knew she would object. That was why they came without telling her in advance. Seerayi was immensely happy about all this. She had wanted this for Ponna, but she had not known how to talk to her about this. Ponna never went anywhere beyond the barnyard and the fields. Vengayi and Seerayi were her only sources of contact with the outside world. If someone from the village paid a visit, Ponna chatted with them. Also, Thorattu Paatti and Noni Kizhavi, two elderly women from the village, paid a visit at least once a week. Ponna always listened eagerly to their chatter, but she never spoke much herself.
The two elderly women advised her on what she could eat. If she had any doubts, she asked them. Out of Ponna’s earshot, they said to Seerayi, ‘If your son was alive, the in-laws would come to throw a feast and pack food for their way back home with Ponna. Unfortunately, given the circumstances, that is not to be.’ But what could Seerayi say in response to that? Ponna too thought about it, but she did not feel like a feast at this point. It was kind enough of them to come and visit regularly. She had heard that Muthu was telling everyone: ‘You should see the way Ponna runs the farm affairs there. Even a man can’t work so efficiently.’ She felt satisfied just hearing that. But when the entire family showed up one morning in the bullock cart, she did not know what to say. She said gently to her sister-in-law, Poovayi, ‘What was the need for all this? You have brought all these gifts as if all was well and I am giving birth to this child in happiness.’
‘It does not matter, Ponna,’ said Poovayi. ‘The very fact that you are having a child is cause for happiness.’ And then she carried on with her work.
Muthu and Ponna’s father went over to the fields. Vengayi was removing grass from the water channels. Muthu said to her laughingly, ‘Are you and your landlady done with the task of picking stones?’
Vengayi laughed too. ‘No, saami. We are still picking them out and piling them up here. She says she wants to build a stone wall all around the fields like a fortress.’
Ponna’s father said, ‘I won’t be surprised if you do it.’
They felt a certain contentment as they walked around the fields. And when they returned to the barnyard, some spicy vadai awaited them, ready to be eaten. And not just that—there were rice cakes too, and three varieties of rice dishes: tamarind rice, tomato rice and curd rice. Ponna had planted a plantain next to the spot where they washed their hands. They took leaves from that tree to use as plates.
Ponna’s face looked pale, and there was some swelling in her feet. Her mother said to her, ‘Ponnu, you need to take better care of your health. If you carry on like this, you won’t even have the energy to push the child out. Just come home with us. We will cook whatever you want to eat. You can have a good, safe delivery and then return here.’ Poovayi echoed the same sentiments. Ponna did not say anything in response, but her smile conveyed to them that she was not going to leave this place. Her eyes were fixed on the portia tree. The place where they had cut the branch from the tree had gone dark, and mushrooms had sprouted there. In her heart, Ponna felt sad that Kali was not alive to enjoy the feast. But she took little portions of each of the dishes made, and placed them on a tile she had kept on the kizhuvai tree behind the hut. She always kept a handful there of whatever food she made. Some crows always came to eat that food. On that day too the crows came. Only after she heard the crows did she help herself to some food.
Vallayi asked her, ‘All right, then shall I come and stay here with you? If you need something in the night, your mother-in-law may not be able to handle things on her own.’
Ponna said to her, ‘It is enough if you come in the month of Margazhi. Vengayi is here in the afternoons. At night, a few old women come over and stay here talking until it dawns the next day. There is nothing to worry about. The midwife too comes. We have also told the midwife not to travel too far from the village. She says the moment the belly stops dropping, she will be able to tell when the baby will be born.’
That day, Ponna’s family left only at dusk. Ponna gave Vengayi portions from the various dishes cooked that day. ‘Take these for your children. Tell me one thing. You have given birth to three children. So tell me honestly, does it hurt a lot while giving birth?’
Vengayi laughed, saying, ‘It will hurt, yes, but it won’t hurt a lot.’
How much was the difference between hurting and hurting a lot?
TWENTY-EIGHT
Once the month of Margazhi began, Ponna stopped going to the fields. She confined herself to the barnyard. She had a view of the fields from there, but there was not really much to see. Everything just lay spread about. The leaves on the brinjal plants had ripened to a rich yellow. As for the chilli plants, only the stalks remained. All the harvesting had been done and the produce was safely kept in the house. ‘It is your turn now,’ Ponna said often, placing her hand over her stomach. These days, she had started panting even if she walked a little distance. But then, she was also not able to just sit around doing nothing. She needed to engage herself in some task. So she continued to do all the cooking.
Seerayi too was active. Once she finished cleaning the floor of the cattle shed, she took the cattle out and left them tethered in the pasture for grazing. And once she stepped out of the barnyard for a particular task, she also got other things done, like gathering and bringing back a bundle of dried leaves of the castor bean plant. The sheep liked to eat the leaves of this plant when they ripened and fell. Seerayi brought these in little bundles and piled them up. In the months of Panguni and Chithirai, when the sun would scorch and dry out the pastures, they could feed these leaves to the sheep who would eat with relish without wasting a single leaf.
From the barnyard, Ponna had a clear view of the shrine. As per her instructions, Vengayi brought more stones and stacked them around the shrine. On its east side, the shrine now had a stone wall that was nearly waist high. Ponna told Vengayi that once the wall was completed on three sides, they must have an arched entrance built on the front side.
The palai plant had now grown quite tall. Next to it, a neem tree was coming up on its own. She had asked them to let it grow and not cut it down. If both grew into big trees, they would cast a lovely shade over the shrine. That year, she did not offer pongal at the shrine. Everyone told her to do it the next year onward, once the child was born. And she agreed to that. But she went every evening without fail and lit a lamp at the shrine. She carried a cup of oil and walked to the shrine at that time of the evening when the day had ended but some of its light still lingered like a shadow. Seerayi ranted to Vengayi, ‘Lighting the lamp every day requires pots and pots of oil. Even that may not be enough. Do you think we can afford that? Why can’t she light the lamp every Friday and on special occasions? Has anyone ever lit the lamp for Karunchaami every day? There are people who think of the deity only when they are offering pongal, and they go look for him in the overgrown grass and behind the rocks only then. But here she has built a proper temple for him.’ However, she never said anything directly to Ponna.
The midwife placed her hand on Ponna’s belly and told her that the child would be born in fifteen days, and since the belly was quite big and Ponna had some difficulty breathing, she said it must be a boy. But she added, ‘They say even god cannot predict the blessing of rain and child. We just make educated guesses with the symptoms we observe.’ Ponna’s mind was on the midwife’s words while she made dosai using ragi batter in which some karuppatti had been mixed. She made two dosais for Seerayi and two for herself. And as she sat on the flat stone outside the hut, eating the dosais, she heard Nallayyan’s voice. She also heard another voice, a woman’s. Seera
yi grew apprehensive, wondering if Nallayyan was bringing one of his women there. It was indeed a woman who came with Nallayyan, but it was only Thorattu Paatti from the village.
Seerayi said to the old woman, ‘You could have come earlier when there was still some daylight, couldn’t you? Why are you coming now in the dark? If you trip and fall somewhere, who will answer your grandchildren?’
Thorattu Paatti walked over and sat down on the cot, replying, ‘Well, if I fall, I will hopefully just die. But death does not seem to come so quickly for me.’
And Seerayi said, ‘It wouldn’t be a problem if you die as soon as you fall down. But if you break an arm or a leg, who will care for you? Who will clean up your pee and shit?’
‘That’s true,’ agreed Thorattu Paatti.
‘Paatti, where did you find Uncle?’ Ponna interjected, turning their attention towards Nallayyan. ‘I thought he had left the country and gone away for good.’
Seerayi addressed him now and said, ‘That’s right, brother-in-law. I haven’t seen you in six months. I wondered if your brother carried out his threat and killed and buried you in the ragi fields. I asked him about you a couple of times when I ran into him. He only said, “That motherfucker must be roaming around somewhere, up to no good, that wretched dog!” How could I respond to that!’
Thorattu Paatti now expressed her doubts. ‘Whenever I ask them about your brother’s wife, they say she is still at her parents’ village. But I wondered if you took her with you when you ran away from here. Apparently, these days, people are even marrying outside their caste—and then they run to the big cities and try to make a life there.’
Nallayyan laughed. ‘You old women! Here you are in the countryside, gazing at crows and sparrows, but you actually know a lot about what is happening in the outside world. If someone’s wife and someone’s husband get together, do you think the village lets them be? So they have to leave, even if it means sailing away across the ocean. I think if two people fit well with each other, like mortar and pestle, people should just let them be. But I am not young any more—am I?—to run away with a woman and start a new life somewhere. Even when I was young, I was too lazy to do any hard work. There is no way I can take on the responsibility to feed and take care of a woman.’
Then he told them what had happened. He said he had grown very fearful living in his own house. Even if he heard the sound of a lizard running, he wondered if it was his brother and nephews coming to attack him; he would look through the gap between the doors to make sure. He had travelled so much, spent time in various places with all sorts of people, but he had never experienced this kind of fear before, he said. How long could he live in fear? So the very next day, he sold off his cattle and sheep. He gave some money to his farmhand, and let him go. Then he went away. He was returning now after six months.
‘Before I went away,’ he said, ‘I had sowed maize in my field. I don’t know what they did, whether they let it be grazed to death or if they harvested it and kept it all for themselves. Now there is not a sheaf to be spotted in the field. The borders are broken, the fields are barren, and they have left it lying like a cremation ground. It may not be their land, but they are farmers too, aren’t they? Don’t they know this is not how you treat a field, no matter whose it is? You may not like a person, but you cannot take it out on their land.’
Paatti responded, ‘It is hard enough to take care of one’s own fields. What do you expect? You just dropped everything and ran away, and you expect others to take good care of your field and keep it in perfect shape? You can’t blame anyone. Especially if you were not willing to labour hard and work the fields yourself. Anyway, where were you these six months?’
Never before had Nallayyan had a problem finding someplace to go. But this time, he said, he could not figure out where to go. He spent a night at a rest house on the way to Mangoor. A group of mendicants were staying there, and he learnt from them that they were undertaking a pilgrimage to a hundred and eight temples. He joined them. They walked long distances every day. When they couldn’t walk any further, they would take shelter in a public rest house or some such place. And whatever food they got in their begging bowls, they shared and ate. If they got any kambu or ragi grains as alms, they sold them in the markets. Whenever they arrived at a temple, they got at least one free meal. The only thing they did not sell, but safely put away, was the rice they got in alms. On days they did not find any food from their usual sources, they cooked and ate the rice.
Nallayyan said, ‘We needed very little. An ochre-coloured dhoti and a towel. And an alms bowl. That was all. If we held the bowl in front of people, they dropped something into it without turning us away. There were even people who fell at our feet for blessings, you know. This was how I survived for six months. How many temples we visited! All of us have only been to the temple in Karattur, and we think that is a big temple. You should go to the temples in the Chola country. Those kings have built such massive temples, each one taking up several acres. People there tell you that such-and-such a king built this one and so-and-so king built that one, and so on. Also, in those parts, people don’t eat the kind of nonsense we eat here, all this kambu meal, ragi gruel, samai meal. They eat only sparkling-white paddy rice. Even a day labourer eats rice there! In these six months, I learnt a new way to make a living. All I need to do is push my alms bowl towards people. I can fill my stomach.’
Hearing all this made Thorattu Paatti very angry. She asked, ‘You are born to a farmer. How can you beg for your food? And you call that a living? Nallayyan, in our community, we might go hungry and tie a wet cloth over our tummies to suppress the feeling of hunger, but we don’t accept food we have not worked for and earned. Did your mother really bear you for a farmer?’ Ponna felt very uncomfortable at this turn in the conversation. She quietly removed herself from there and went and lay down inside the hut. But she could still hear their voices.
‘How do I know whom my mother slept with to give birth to me?’ quipped Nallayyan. ‘It is possible that even she didn’t know. Let’s say a woman sleeps with ten men. Will she be able to tell which one of them is the father of the child she gives birth to? Also, do all farmers conduct their lives the way you have just described? There are men in this caste who send their own wives to other men.’ His rage mounted as he spoke further. ‘Taking to the alms bowl is not an easy task. You need to be able to beg, hold your hand out to ask. Do you think it is easy to get used to that? If a man starts thinking about the fact that he is a farmer, that he has land and fields, that he has come from a good family, and that all this is beneath him, he cannot bring himself to beg. He has to cast away all that. He has to understand that he is nothing, that he is not as significant as even a strand of hair. And these other things like pride, honour, shame, respect, prestige, relatives, wealth, comfort—he has to shed everything. That’s the fact. People are all the same. We can hold our hand out to beg from anyone. We can accept food from anyone. Who are you? What have you accomplished on this earth? You have tilled the land all your life, but what have you got to show for it? Your entire life has gone by. And it is the land that is going to consume you. Now, it is going to be ten months since Kali died. Not even his bones remain. Then why do you have this meaningless pride? Will you be able to give up everything? It is a big thing to do. Only a really exalted person will be able to do that. I tried to give up everything, but I couldn’t. I still have all sorts of useless stuff in my heart and mind. I don’t know when I can sweep all of them away for good.’
‘What has happened to him?’ murmured Seerayi. ‘Why does he speak like a fool?’
TWENTY-NINE
Nallayyan continued with his story. Apparently, his youngest brother’s wife then went to live with her eldest daughter in Ookkur, about ten miles from Aattur. They had canal irrigation in those parts, so there was a lot of work to do in the fields. But she ran away from there two or three times and came looking for Nallayyan. Seeing how bereft his house and cattle shed looked,
and how dusty and littered it was, she wept. The farmhand was not there, so she had no way of finding out what had happened. Her husband and sons then chased her away, and she walked all the way back to her daughter’s home in Ookkur. So now, if Nallayyan went to live in his own house, she might get wind of that and come running to him again. But Nallayyan seemed not to be thinking much about her.
‘I regret taking my share of the inheritance,’ he mused. ‘This is the only thing that ties me down now. I am unable to just let go of everything. Nor am I able to make a living with it. I am really confused. Selling it off does not sound like a practical solution. I have three and a quarter acres. It will fetch me about seven hundred rupees. But where will I keep that money? I cannot carry it as I wander around, can I? I sleep on the roadside, I sleep in rest houses, sometimes I sleep under tamarind trees. Will I be able to sleep if I carry that much money on me wherever I go? Moreover, if I start spending the money even little by little, how long will it last? If I get too used to having cash in my hand and spending it at will, then that will spoil me. One option is to lend it and live on the interest it fetches. But whom do I see about that? Everyone wants money, but later they might completely deny that they took any money from you. What do I do? Tell me, sister-in-law! Sometimes I think I should just bestow it upon these wretched dogs. If I die, run over by a vehicle, people might consider me an orphan and simply do away with my corpse. But if I continue to live and suffer various ailments before I die, only if I have a little money would anyone be willing to care for me. I don’t know what to do.’
Thorattu Paatti said, ‘This is exactly why one needs a family. Does a family man have to worry about these things, tell me? I don’t have any children. I have no wealth in my name. After my husband died, I came to live at my brother’s home. At that time, my in-laws gave me fifty rupees. I kept it for myself. To this day, I have spent my time doing whatever work I can do. Now my brother has a son and a grandson, and it is this grandson who feeds me nowadays. I still do whatever work I am able to do. If I did not have a family, do you think I would have managed to survive? Tell me, Nallayyan.’
A Lonely Harvest Page 17