Homeless Bird

by Gloria Whelan

  I sometimes looked into Hari’s room. The bugs had dried up and fallen to the floor. The butterflies had lost their color. His room was now used to store flour and lentils. A stray cat often slept there. It would gaze at me with its sly brown eyes just as Hari had done. One of Hari’s schoolbooks still lay on the trunk. No one touched the book, and day by day the dust grew on it. Though I could not read, I sometimes opened the book and looked at the words. They were words that Hari had known.

  I thought it would be a fine thing to have a book of my own. No one seemed to want it, and I began to think of asking for it, wondering if such a request would be met with a new round of scoldings. One evening I gathered my courage and went to Sassur. I blurted out, “May I have Hari’s schoolbook?”

  Sassur always seemed surprised to find I was still there. After staring at me for a moment, he said, “It would fetch only a rupee or two in the marketplace. Take it. But what will you do with it? Can you read?”

  I shook my head. “I thought if I turned the pages over and over, I might learn.”

  I expected Sassur to laugh at my foolishness. Instead he gave me a long look. For the first time since Hari’s death I saw his smile. “Say nothing to your sass, but come to me each evening when she is talking in the courtyard with the neighbor women. I’ll help you to learn to read and write.”

  That night I could not keep the happy news to myself. “Chandra,” I whispered, “your baap is going to teach me to read. You can learn as well.”

  Chandra shook her head. “I could never learn such things.”

  “Yes, you could.”

  “I have no need. My parents are looking for a husband for me.”

  After that I went each evening to my sassur. He showed me how each word is a little package of letters. He was clever with a pencil. For each letter he drew a picture of some creature, a hawk or a pig, and printed its name below the letter. When I had all the letters, he drew a railway. The engine pulled several words, so that now I had a sentence. Page by page I learned the secrets in the book. What was even more exciting, Sassur told me there were many books, each one with a story in it. As the months went on, he gave me some of those other books to read. Chandra and I were not allowed oil to light our room at night. In order to read the books, I had to take them with me, hidden in my sari, when I went to wash the clothes in the river. I hurried to finish the washing so I would have a little time with my book.

  I looked forward to those walks to the river, for I was walking away from Sass and her scolding. It was June and hot summer now. The dry bamboo leaves rattled in the wind. Puffs of dust exploded with my every step. Along the road I saw women winnowing baskets of threshed grain in the wind, the clouds of chaff flying off in the breeze. The mustard fields were golden with blossoms and smelled fragrant when I walked by them. In this dry season only a trickle of muddy water remained in the river. Though I rubbed the clothes on the stones to get them clean, the clothes sometimes looked even dirtier when I was finished.

  Still, I loved the river. Sometimes a tiny silver fish would leap from the water after a fly. Hawks circled overhead. Bright-green dragonflies wove in and out of the reeds. A kingfisher perched on a peepul tree, its red breast like a tongue of fire. I washed the dust off my bare feet and splashed the water over me for the coolness. I thought of how Hari had splashed me in the Ganges. I wondered what my life would have been like as Hari’s wife. I knew that Hari had been spoiled and would not have been easy to live with, yet I was sure I would have been happier than I was now.

  There were days at the river when I did not pick up my book but only daydreamed like Chandra. I imagined myself returning to my village, to my maa and baap and my brothers. I wanted to picture welcoming looks on their faces when they saw me come back to them in my widow’s sari. As hard as I tried, I could not put such looks on their faces, nor could I feel their welcoming embraces. Instead I saw them all lined up in the courtyard, frowning and cross. I heard them order me back to the home of my husband’s parents. “It is where you belong now,” they would surely say.

  Sometimes I would picture myself running away, selling my earrings to get a railway ticket to Varanasi. I thought of the excitement of the city. But what would I do for a living, and where could I stay? I remembered all the families living on the streets. Though I turned these things over and over in my head, I did not see how I could escape.

  As the summer days grew hotter and hotter, Chandra and I would stand in the courtyard every afternoon, looking up at the sky, waiting for the rains to cool us. One day just as we had given up hope, huge gray clouds, large and clumsy as elephants, came rolling in. A moment later a million pails of water emptied on us. Holding hands, we danced and danced, tipping our heads up and opening our mouths. Our clothes clung to us, and under our feet the dry dust of the courtyard softened into mud and squeezed up between our toes.

  Even Sass forgot her scolding and stood a little apart in the courtyard letting the rain fall on her as if it were washing away some of her sorrow.

  Now that the monsoon had come, everything was damp. The quilts on our beds and the clothes in our chest were limp and smelled of mildew. Overnight our sandals turned green with mold. In every room water dripped down from the ceiling, so when we had a hard rain outside, it was like a small rain shower inside. The mud-brick walls of the house became even thinner. A part of the roof caved in.

  Overnight the wilting wheat and millet fields turned green. Mosquitoes bred in the little pools along the roadside. We could not walk very far without snakes for company. They were everywhere, hanging from the mango tree and crawling under our charpoys so that we were afraid to sleep. Sassur had to come to our room with a big branch and beat the invading snakes to death.

  Though we were refreshed by the rain, there were still scoldings from Sass. Either I did not rub the clothes hard enough to get them clean or I rubbed them so hard they were worn thin. One day she accused me of putting too much water in the rice, so that it was like gruel. The next day she said I did not put in enough water, and the rice was dry as dust. If I answered back, I was impudent. If I kept silent, I was sullen. I saw that no matter how hard I worked, I could never please her.

  At the end of summer Krishna’s birthday was celebrated. It was a national holiday, and Sassur took Chandra and me into the village to see the fireworks. The colors exploded like handfuls of petals tossed into the sky. There were trained monkeys and clever starlings that had been taught to talk. There was a man who rode a bicycle on a tightrope and a snake charmer whose cobra was so old and lazy, it could not be coaxed from its basket and had to be tumbled out. Sassur gave us a few coins to buy a cone of spun sugar. We each ate half and laughed at how our faces were sticky all over with pink sugar.

  Though Sassur was kind to me and had taught me to read, I could not turn to him for help. He left early in the morning for school and came home with papers to correct. He was paid very little for his teaching and often appeared troubled.

  “Is the teaching very hard?” I once asked him.

  “The teaching would be nothing, but my students are rude and disrespectful. They hide my glasses so that I cannot see the lesson. Last week they put a scorpion on my desk.”

  “How can that be? They should be grateful to you.”

  He smiled at me. “Ah, Koly, I only wish my students were as anxious to learn as you are.”

  Sassur suffered from more than the students’ tricks. When he was home, Sass was always complaining about how poor they were and how others were better off. I think Sassur was as miserable as I was.

  The only time my sassur seemed to come alive was when he had a book in his hand. Now that I could read, he often took out a book of poems by the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. The book had a fine leather cover with its title in gold letters. The inside covers had fancy colored paper on them. The most impressive thing was Tagore’s own signature in the book.

  “He signed the book for my baap,” Sassur said. “My baap went to hear him
give a reading of his poems. The book has been handed down from son to son, but now…” He sighed, and I knew he was thinking of Hari, so I began to read aloud to Sassur from my favorite poem. It was about a flock of birds flying day and night through the skies. Among them was one homeless bird, always flying on to somewhere else.

  One day Sass caught us at our reading. She was very angry.

  “What are you teaching that girl?” she cried. “It is no wonder she forgets to do her work.”

  Sass was suspicious of books, treating them as if they were scorpions and might sting her. From then on if she caught me reading, she would call me lazy and set me to a task or send me off to the village on an errand. But no matter what Sass thought, the secrets in the books were now mine, and try as she might, she could not snatch them away.

  I still bowed to the household shrine each morning, but now I begged Krishna to find a way to let me escape. In my books I had read that as a child, Krishna was very mischievous. Now I became mischievous as well. The milk I churned would not turn into butter. The grain I ground for chapatis had bits of chaff that got between our teeth. In the garden I pulled up the potato plants and left the weeds. The dung cakes I made fell apart, so the fire went out. I put a dead frog in the water bottle. The bottle was brass, so no one noticed the frog until all the water had been drunk. I left the geese’s mess where Sass would step into it. I looked away when the bandicoot ate the mangoes.

  In one thing I was careful. I never spilled the salt, for my maa had told me in the next world you had to sweep up every grain of salt you spilled, and I didn’t want to waste my time doing that.

  “Why do you anger my maa?” Chandra asked. “She is like those little red ants that swarm all over you and bite and bite.”

  I knew what Chandra said was true, but I also knew that I could not crawl about like a beaten dog. I had heard about families that had murdered the widows of their sons to get rid of them. Though I knew Sass would never do such a thing, I believed she would surely kill my spirit with her spitefulness if I didn’t fight back.

  I would not let Sass’s scoldings touch me as they used to. She became smaller in my mind. I had the comfort of Chandra, for we were as sisters now, and each evening after my work was finished, my books were there to welcome me. In this way two years passed, and then whispering began in the house. Sass and Sassur spoke in low voices. Chandra began to wear a secret smile. One night she confided to me, “The gataka has found me a husband.”

  five

  Soon Sass and Sassur consulted an astrologer, and Chandra was dancing with excitement. “The astrologer brought out his charts, and after much study he named January second as the most auspicious day.” She told me with great importance, “The gataka has done well for me. The bridegroom, Raman, is nineteen and has been to mission school. Already he has written to an uncle who has promised him a job working with computers.”

  “Computers!” I had heard of such a thing from my own baap. “One day they will have no need for scribes like myself,” he had complained. “They will put a machine in the marketplace instead. The machine will write the letters well enough, but the words the machine writes will have no elegance and no heart.”

  I told Chandra, “Your bridegroom must be very learned.” Though I was impressed, something was bothering me. “Chandra, how can you tell if you will love him?” I asked. “You have never seen him.” Though he was dead and I knew I should not think badly of him, I remembered how disappointed I had been in Hari.

  “I will learn to love him,” Chandra said. “I had never seen you before you came to our house, and I learned to love you.”

  “What if he isn’t good to you?”

  “If I am a good wife, he will be good to me.”

  I hoped Chandra was right, but I could not help remembering a stall in the bazaar where Chandra and I had sorted through a heap of mismatched earrings. We had looked through them hoping to find two that matched. What if it was as difficult to find two matching people?

  I wanted to be happy for Chandra, but I felt a sadness deep inside me. The wedding brought back all the memories of my own short marriage—all my excitement and pleasure and my hopes coming to nothing. Also, I knew how much I would miss Chandra. Now, when Sass scolded me all day long, I could bear it, for I knew I could whisper my complaints into Chandra’s ear in the evening. Soon there would be no one to comfort me.

  As Chandra’s wedding approached, Sass came to me one day. “We have no money for a new sari for Chandra,” she said. “She must have your wedding sari. You need nothing but your widow’s sari.”

  I longed to say that I did not want to spend the rest of my life dressed as a widow, but I knew Sass would be scandalized by such words. So I watched Chandra try on my sari and said nothing. With her womanly figure, her smiles, and her bright eyes, she looked very lovely.

  “Chandra must have your silver earrings as well,” Sass said.

  Stubbornly I shook my head. I would not give up the earrings. As long as I had them, I could keep my dream of running away. I knew that if I simply refused, Sass would find a way to make me give them up. So I lied. “I have lost them,” I said.

  “I don’t believe you!” Sass screamed. “You are an evil girl! All these days we have put a roof over your head and fed you. This is how you repay us, with selfishness.”

  I should have kept quiet, but I could not. “I have worked for my food,” I said, “harder than anyone.”

  Sass squinted her eyes as she always did when she was very, very angry. In a harsh voice she said, “You do not know the meaning of work. You idle about with your daydreams and your foolish books and your stitching. I will see to it that from now on you do indeed earn your keep.”

  That evening, when I should have been asleep, I crept out to the courtyard. I did not want to spoil Chandra’s happiness with my misery. As I sat thinking of whether I ought to give in and hand over the earrings, I heard Sass complain of me to Sassur. “She is a wicked girl not to give Chandra her earrings. I am sure she still has them. I have searched their room but I can’t find them. It was an inauspicious day when that girl came into our house.”

  “She is not a bad girl,” Sassur said in a weary voice. “Think of what her life is like with Hari gone. She has nothing to look forward to. Remember that without her dowry we would never have had the money to go to Varanasi, and her widow’s pension these two years has added to Chandra’s dowry.”

  His last words were like a slap. Widow’s pension? I didn’t wait to hear more but hurried in to Chandra, who was already asleep. I shook her awake. “Chandra, is it true? Did they take my widow’s pension for your dowry?”

  Chandra sat up in bed and gave me a surprised look. “Didn’t you know?” She looked frightened. “You wouldn’t take the pension back, would you? If you do, I’ll have no husband.”

  I was very angry, but not so angry that I would ruin Chandra’s happiness. I shook my head. I did not blame Chandra for taking what was rightfully mine, but I knew I would not have done the same to her. I was more determined than ever to keep the silver earrings. They would buy me a railway ticket. The pension might go with me to keep me from starving.

  It took me all night to work up my courage, but in the morning I went to Sass. Clenching my hands behind me, I took a deep breath and said in a weaker voice than I would have wished, “The next time the envelope comes from the government, it is to be handed over to me.”

  For just a moment Sass looked frightened, but then she quickly said, “If you are speaking of the few rupees you are sent each month, do not think they are due you. They hardly pay for your keep.” She gave me a triumphant look. “If it were not for our son, you would not be a widow. So there would be no rupees at all for you.” She marched out of the room.

  Defeated, I stood looking after her. She was like a great boulder shutting me into a cave. I could not move her, and I could not get around her.

  Despite my anger at Sass I longed to give Chandra something for her wedding.
“I wish I had money to buy you a gift,” I told her.

  Chandra thought for a moment. “Would you make me a quilt?” she asked. “I could take it with me, and if I became homesick, I could bring it out to remind me of you. Put in all the things we have done together.”

  “Your maa is angry with me over the earrings and would never give me cloth for the quilt or money to buy thread.”

  I was wrong. When Chandra went to her, Sass said, “It would not be such a bad thing if your dowry were to include a quilt. Let her make one if it doesn’t keep her from her tasks.”

  I stitched a picture of our little room, the two of us sitting cross-legged on our charpoys with large smiles on our faces. There we were dancing in the rain. There was the river where we went to wash the clothes and the kingfisher that watched us from a tree. There we were sitting together in front of the village television set. I stitched the colors of the fireworks exploding into the sky on Lord Krishna’s birthday and the two of us covered with red powder at the celebration of Holi. I embroidered us having our baths at the well. I put in Sass chatting with her friends in the courtyard and Sassur reading from Tagore’s book of poems. I even put in the cow and the bandicoot. In a moment of mischief I made the border of blossoms from the mango tree. Sass could not scold me for stealing those blossoms, for they were all mine.

  I had to squeeze in the time for the quilt, for there was much to do to prepare for the wedding. The courtyard where the wedding was to take place had to be carefully swept and a ceremonial fire readied. The walls had to be ornamented with a mixture of rice flour and water, which I dribbled through my fingers. I went to the village to buy firewood and food for the wedding feast. I peeled mangoes and chopped cucumbers and onions and mixed the turmeric and coriander for the curry.

  I had to do the stitching of the quilt early in the morning or in the evening when the light was poor, so I went about with a frown from squinting. When at last the quilt was completed, Chandra exclaimed, “Koly, it’s beautiful!” and hugged it to her. Though she tried, even Sass could find no fault with it.