Wild Boar in the Cane Field

by Anniqua Rana

  “Every morning, after her husband left their room, I was overwhelmed by the oppressive odor of overripe fruit that he emitted. That’s when she started carrying cardamom to chew on, to reduce her nausea. I would help her bathe and perfume her with the ittar of roses and chamelis, making the room tolerable again.

  “By midafternoon, when she left the room, her sisters-in-law had plenty to complain about on their visits every Thursday as they returned from the farmers’ market. They were married to two brothers and lived down the street.

  “‘Look at the princess without a kingdom. Who is she, anyway, leaving her room when the day is nearly over? We spend our mornings cooking and cleaning, and even in the evenings we find time to sew and knit to stay productive, but she does nothing!’ condemned the elder one.

  “The younger would just criticize her looks: ‘a princess with a flat nose and joined eyebrows.’

  “They cooked the day’s meals early to avoid the afternoon heat and couldn’t imagine how Saffiya stayed in her room all morning, letting me, her maidservant, organize the house.”

  Bhaggan continued, “She looked through them all as if she hadn’t heard a word. Even with her husband, she remained silent. She confided in me that she couldn’t stand his existence, but may I die if I ever told anyone how much she detested that time. Her father would never have let her return to the village, so she endured her husband as long as he lived. Thankfully for her, it was not for long.

  “‘Why should I answer to anyone?’ she would say to me when we returned to her room. ‘My father owns ten times more land than their brother.’

  “‘Let them bark,’ Saffiya would say.

  “Of course, we both knew that her husband already had two children with his first wife. All of them had died many years earlier, but we never mentioned it. The day we arrived, I hid the photo that sat on the mantelpiece. The mournful eyes of the family long dead would be a bad omen for poor Saffiya. How would I know that her fate was already written in the blackest ink?”

  It had been some time, and the pile of peeled garlic was finally larger than the unpeeled one. The aroma emanating from the pots suggested our work was nearly done, but Bhaggan continued.

  “She never told me what happened during the five months when I left for the birth of Taaj, my second prince. Both Sultan and Baby Taaj stayed with their grandmother because I had to return to Bibi Saffiya. By then, her husband had already started to die. Within that year, he was gone.”

  She rolled her eyes toward heaven, as if to indicate that was where he must have gone, but shook her head as she began to admonish his sisters.

  “They suspected I had brought a taveez, a death wish, from Saffiya’s father. I suppose they thought I wanted Saffiya to be free to control the family fortune. I only wish I had that kind of power. Plus, Saffiya’s father was a healer, not a killer. He would never have given me a potion for death. He was not like some of the other healers, who practiced black magic. And anyway, without a child, a son, which was never conceived, her husband’s death would mean nothing to Saffiya, who was happier the day they buried him than when he brought her home in the bridal palanquin.

  “They buried him in the graveyard behind the house, beside his first wife and two babies.”

  Realizing that the food would soon be ready to serve and the kitchen needed to be cleaned, Bhaggan turned to me, expecting me to help.

  “Where is that bastard Maria? How long does it take to call her mother?”

  “I’ve been standing here behind the door, and you didn’t even notice.” Maria swung open the kitchen door and wrapped her arms around Amman Bhaggan, half climbing on her sweaty back as she hunched over the cooking pots.

  “Ai hai, you’ll push me into the fire.” Bhaggan didn’t even look back at the girl but tried to shoo her away.

  Amman Bhaggan covered her hand with the corner of her dopatta and pulled aside the lid on the lentil pot, leaning forward to dip the wooden spoon into the bubbling cauldron and pour a spoonful of cooked lentils into her leathered hand. Then she sucked at the scalding splatter. She poured another spoonful, licked her palm again, and wiped her nose with her dopatta. Then, without looking at us, she opened the first pot, pulled out a tender piece of goat meat, and chewed it to the bone. She then turned the bone around to slurp out the last piece of marrow.

  Keeping her hazel eyes on the pot, she took out another piece of meat, tore it in two, and gave Maria and me each a piece.

  “That’s enough, now. I have to start with the roti before Bibi Saffiya says the evening prayers. Her temperature rises the second she’s hungry. You’d think all her prayers would give her some patience.”

  Bhaggan’s praise for Saffiya was always short-lived, so I wasn’t surprised that her tone had already changed.

  “Amman Bhaggan, I’ll knead the dough for you,” Maria insisted. I raised my eyebrow as I looked up at her. Both of us knew the likelihood of Bhaggan’s allowing her to do this.

  “Daughter of an owl. You’ll get me thrown out of the house. I don’t know where your hands have been. Your mother cleans the kitchen, and your father empties the sewers. If Bibi Saffiya catches you touching her food, she’ll throw me in the gutter for your parents to scour.”

  “Let her do it, Amman.” I could always convince her. “And I’ll massage your head for you.”

  “I should have had a daughter like you,” she said.

  I stood up, shaking the garlic peels stuck to the front of my kameez, and added them neatly to the pile in front of me, careful not to add to the disarray of the kitchen and to demonstrate the truth in her statement. I liked to prove that she was right and I was the daughter whom anyone would hope for.

  “If only my man had lived a few more years. Every time he looked at me, I got pregnant. A year after Taaj, Maalik was born. I was three times lucky with my sons. The village folk cast an evil eye on my happy marriage. My husband wouldn’t have let me die in this kitchen. He had made the payment for a plot of land, for a house with three rooms and a veranda. He promised me that.

  “The morning the black magic of the villagers killed my husband, he met Saffiya. He gave her some money. I saw him open our tin case and count large rupee notes. When he saw I had noticed, he hid them from me. He knew I would worry.”

  I had heard about the money business with Saffiya, but I couldn’t understand how someone so rich would have cheated someone like Bhaggan of her money. Why had Saffiya not returned the money that Bhaggan’s husband had given her for the plot? Why would she have let her name be tarnished?

  “Even last week, I was going to confront Saffiya, to ask her about the money. But you mention money, and the gases go to her head and bring devastating pain to her muscles. I have cared for her all my life. If I complain now, she will say I am disloyal. But I tell you girls, without a man, your life is pointless. No respect if your man dies.”

  Bhaggan turned around to look at Maria. “Did your mother say she’d come? I’m surrounded by incompetents and impotents.”

  Wailing Babies

  The kitchen heat had taken its toll on Bhaggan.

  “You take a nap on the charpoy under the shahtoot tree, and I’ll finish the meal and serve it to Saffiya,” I offered.

  Maria didn’t agree with my suggestion. She wanted to return to my story.

  “But what about how you found Tara on the train, covered in flies?”

  I gave Maria a sharp look to remind her to be content that I was trying to convince Amman Bhaggan to leave the kitchen and let her pound her sticky little fists into the dough for the rotis that night.

  “What about your own poor mother?” Amman Bhaggan responded. “When she married your father, everyone thought that all the children would be like him—mute. But look at you. You can’t stop talking.”

  Maria’s father, Isaac, cleaned his surroundings in silence. He trimmed the plants and gutted the grass with a finesse unparalleled among the servants. Then he swept the front yard in the morning and watered it in the
evening.

  After every cleaning, he soaped himself at the stream that ran behind the house, washed the dust-colored vest and sarong he had just removed, and replaced it with a replica. He then pulled a broken toothcomb from under a rock and straightened his tawny hair.

  I would spot him from the kitchen window and pretend not to look, hoping I would see his private parts, but I never did. One day, I thought he stared back at me, but the window screen was too clogged with fly gunk. There was no way he could have seen me.

  Isaac’s wife, Jannat, swept inside the house and washed the clothes. Maria and I helped hang the clothes to dry, and when we had filled the line—Bibi Saffiya’s undergarments underneath, covered by the shalwar kameezes, alongside the dopattas—to its capacity, we would cover the bushes with the washed bedsheets. Sometimes the dust on the leaves would mark the clothes. Then Maria and I would hold the corners of each sheet and stretch our arms as far and high as we could, dropping them with all the force we could muster, to dislodge the dust particles.

  Jannat then ironed the washed clothes and left them in piles. Sometimes she piled them so high that the tower of washed clothes would sag to one side and I would separate them into smaller, more manageable ones.

  This routine was soon disrupted when Maria was around three or maybe four years old, after her baby brothers died suddenly and Jannat started acting crazy. She’d forget to check the heat of the iron before ironing Bibi Saffiya’s silk clothes, which would wrinkle and stick to the bottom of the metal, leaving a dirty brown smudge. Instead of cleaning the iron, she would rub the dark smudges of burn onto the lighter clothes. Bibi Saffiya couldn’t stand this. She ordered Jannat to stop ironing, and I took over.

  But that evening in the kitchen, Amman Bhaggan was not ready to relinquish her responsibilities with the dough. She refused my offer to finish the cooking. That’s how she was. She complained, but, unlike Jannat, she never gave up her job. Instead, she kneaded the dough while she continued with Maria’s story:

  “Stella had just started walking when we found Tara and brought her home. Your sister was never like you, Maria. And then she got the leg-shortening sickness, and we thought she would die. After she recovered, she wasn’t worth anything anymore. She couldn’t wash or iron.”

  Bhaggan wiped her brow with her dopatta, added more water to the dough, and continued kneading it and telling her story.

  “That’s why Bibi taught her how to embroider. Now she spends her time embroidering bursts of flowers everywhere—”

  Maria interrupted again—“If my brothers had lived, my amman would not have gone crazy”—explaining to us why her mother took no part in helping her sister.

  We sat silently.

  The village women talked about Jannat. They whispered stories about her born but unbirthed children—how she had thrown them into the canal, and how you could hear their cries if you walked along the banks at night. Amman Bhaggan told me not to listen to them, because they were all lies.

  One winter night the previous year, Amman Bhaggan’s son, Taaj, dared me to walk by the canal at night. I took Maria with me, even though I wasn’t really scared. We stood on the canal bank in the moonlight. The water was black and bottomless. We looked into the water and saw two faces staring back at us. After a few seconds, I recognized them. The elder one smiled in recognition; the eyes of the younger one reflected our terror, which intensified as we heard the cries of a baby.

  Maria squeezed my hand till it hurt, but I stayed silent. The painful cry of a drowned baby arose from the bush beside us. I bent down, and Maria continued to hold tight. Three baby kittens whimpered, waiting for their mother. Maria pulled at my hand, forcing me to follow her gaze. The mother stood a few feet away from us, eyes glinting, a dead rodent hanging from her mouth. I turned immediately and dragged Maria back home. Taaj was waiting for us, but we said nothing to him.

  I looked at Maria, wondering if she remembered that night.

  “But you, chatterbox—your mother wanted Tara to be your choti amman, a little mother to you.”

  This was one of Bhaggan’s made-up stories. The reality was that Jannat didn’t want a second daughter, and even though she could have fed Maria, she didn’t want to. I carried her around on my hip, pretending I was like the other village women, only they carried one baby on their hip and another on their back as they busied themselves in the fields. But I didn’t work on the farm. I worked in Bibi Saffiya’s home.

  Amman Bhaggan said I had been a good little mother to Maria, even though only five years had passed since they had found me on the train.

  As always, the story ended with my beginning.

  She returned to the kitchen business as easily as she had been distracted from it, calling out to Maria, “Is Jannat coming or not? Look, a dust storm has started, and then it will begin to rain and the kitchen will be a muddy mess. Go, my daughter— tell your mother to come soon, or both of us will have to answer to Bibi.”

  Garden of Eden

  It rained that night, and Maria hugged me closer when thunder struck. She kept waking me up but managed to stay asleep herself.

  Maria and I both slept on the same charpoy in Amman Bhaggan’s room. I must have fallen asleep when it stopped raining, but when I woke, I could smell the watered soil and the chameli buds mixing with the stale odor of morning farts in the tight room that the three of us shared.

  “Where are you going?” Maria called to me from our charpoy, as soon as she realized I was no longer lying next to her.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Can I come?”

  She didn’t wait for my response and rolled off the charpoy to follow me. I could hear her bare feet squishing in the muddy puddle I’d just avoided.

  Aside from the two flat pillows and bedsheets trailing on the ground, the two charpoys on the veranda in front of our room were deserted. Amman Bhaggan’s three sons, Sultan, Taaj, and Maalik, slept there. They must have gone to the mosque for the early-morning prayers.

  It was cool out. No flies, at least not yet. The sun still hid under the cloudy horizon but would soon emerge to crumple the coolness into a steamy swamp of sweat.

  As always, I walked to the hand pump that spouted a cooling stream of metallic-tasting water. I splashed my face and rubbed the drool off my cheek. As I ran my wet hands over my hair to straighten it, I could detect the stench of garlic still under my fingernails.

  Maria copied me, but I left her behind as soon as I was finished.

  “Bring me a needle from under Amman Bhaggan’s bed,” I ordered, without looking back at her. Bibi Saffiya softened when I made a chameli garland and brought it to her before breakfast. Sometimes she pinned it into her graying and thinning hair. Other times she wrapped it around her thickened wrist and covered the two twisted gold bangles, remnants from her marriage.

  Even though I had never witnessed garlands presented as a demonstration of love, I envied the movie actresses flitting across the black-and-white TV screen, dancing for their beloveds with garlands wrapped around their pulled-up hair or, even more tantalizing, dangling around their braids. I imagined myself dressed in a virginal white silk outfit, or in brash bridal red, my eyes lengthened with a swish of kohl. The contrasting white garland in my long black hair would sway as I danced through the shahtoot trees.

  I convinced myself. The garland would be for me. Forget Bibi Saffiya. And whom would I entice with the enchanting perfume of the morning buds? Taaj had looked at me the day before when I was brushing my hair. When I looked into the mirror, he was staring at me. I wanted to tell his mother but decided not to.

  But that would be too easy. I would cast my spell on Sultan. He would be entranced by the chameli aroma and my snakelike braid.

  Now I was more excited than I had been earlier. But I would have to make the garland before they all returned from the mosque.

  “If she wakes up?” Maria was always too concerned about getting into trouble.

  I didn’t know whether she was referri
ng to Bhaggan or Saffiya, but I didn’t care to answer. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her run back to the room. Chameli fragrance filled my nostrils, which were still struggling to recover from the garlic stench. I began wrenching off the buds from the bush farthest from the entrance of the house, frantic to work on the garland.

  When this house was first built, Saffiya’s father, the herbalist, planted bushes and trees for his hakim practice. Isaac’s father planted them, and now Isaac cared for them. That was what Bhaggan told us.

  Some plants were used for prevention, others for cures. Bibi Saffiya would tell me the benefits of the plants that her father planted when I massaged her in the early afternoons, before she took her nap. Marigolds, which grew uncontrollably in the garden, cured the intestines and diarrhea, which Maria always got when she ate too many of the tangerines from the garden. When Isaac had problems with his liver, Bibi Saffiya told him to drink marigold tea. I made it for him for a whole month. I gave the same tea to Bhaggan when she had worms. Her breath smelled vile that whole winter.

  Bibi Saffiya herself took two cloves of garlic, morning and evening, to cure her gas problems, which she’d had since I could remember, even though I would have liked to forget.

  The flower of Maryam helped with childbirth and monthly bleeding, but it didn’t grow in this climate, even though Bibi Saffiya’s father had attempted to plant it so many years ago.

  Every Thursday, Bibi Saffiya would summon Isaac, who walked silently behind her while she ordered him to trim here and add manure there, as if he needed her directions. But he listened dutifully, eyes down, as if following a trail of ants. He knew what he needed to do. Amman Bhaggan said he took better care of the plants than he did of his own children.

  I never saw Stella or Maria talk to him while he worked. I was the one who took him his meals, which he ate under the neem tree near the kitchen.