Wild Boar in the Cane Field

by Anniqua Rana

  Maria and I stood silently. We knew she didn’t care for our answer. My thoughts wandered to the previous week, when I had found a crumpled five-rupee note under Bibi Saffiya’s bed as I was straightening the covers. It was tied tight in the corner of my dopatta. Maria knew about it, but it seemed she’d either forgotten or wasn’t betraying my secret for the time being.

  “That’s enough, Amman,” Stella said softly.

  “Enough for whom? You don’t even want me to tell the truth. You’re all liars, and when I tell the truth, you tell me to be silent.”

  “We know the truth, Amman,” Stella persisted calmly. “We know that we’re of another faith. We know that we’re poor. And we know we must work for the rest of our lives. What else is there to know?”

  “Nothing. There’s nothing to know. Go! Both of you. All three of you. Maria, hold your sister’s hand so she doesn’t stumble. Take her to her corner in the big house. And keep that hero Sultan away from her. I’ve seen how he stares at her. Your father will kill him before I can get my hands on him.”

  Stella’s face turned orange as she looked down, embarrassed by her mother’s crassness.

  I twisted the chameli garland on my wrist, now wilting in the heat of the early morning. I wondered if Maria would tell her how Sultan had pinned it to my braid that morning. A few buds fell on the newly swept floor, and Stella looked at them. Was she thinking of pressing them in the notebook Sultan had given her?

  The thought upset me. I felt self-conscious and awkward. To build my confidence, I started rambling, saying the first thing that came to me: “Jannat khala, Bibi Saffiya will expect you to be early today.”

  “What’s the problem now? What’s happening today? I come early every day. Why should I come earlier? I washed the courtyard yesterday, and now my back is killing me. She thinks we’re animals. We don’t need to rest.”

  And then I remembered the conversation with Bhaggan from the previous night.

  “Amman Bhaggan said you might get paid today. She was paid yesterday, so she’s going to the shrine to give a deg of biryani, large enough to feed all the supplicants, a gift to the pir to pray for Sultan bhai to pass his eighth-grade exams.”

  Sultan’s name triggered another mouthful from Jannat.

  “That son of an owl. He’ll never pass his exams. She thinks he’ll save her from that hell of a kitchen. But her kismet is no better than mine. At least she lives in the house and doesn’t have to pay the electricity bill. I have a hundred expenses, and we all work, but nothing to my name. Tell Bhaggan I want to go, too. I have some prayers that have not yet been answered.”

  As I thought of the money I had taken from under Saffiya’s bed, I wondered what I would buy. Maybe a bottle of shampoo or a soap to entice Sultan away from Stella.

  As if she had read my thoughts, Stella caught my eye and I looked at her cloth bag, covered with practice embroidery stitches that she’d done using leftover multicolored threads.

  I had checked that bag once when she had gone to the bathroom. Inside was a red rag with five different-size needles pinned to it. One plastic pouch was filled with skeins of silk threads, and another one was filled with thicker cotton threads. Two small pairs of scissors were wrapped in a rubber band and had been slid into a side pocket. None of this had interested me then.

  “Here, let me take the bag,” I demanded. I wanted to see if Maria was right about the notebook she said Sultan had given her sister. I ran to pick it up and glanced inside when I did. The bag held more than embroidery materials. A heavier object weighed it down, and as I placed it on my shoulder, my fingers traced the straight lines of a cardboard-covered book at the bottom of the bag. I caressed it and then rushed ahead, not wanting to hold Stella’s hand as Maria helped her sister stumble toward the house.

  Wild Boar and Snakes

  The time of necessity is nearly on us! What took you so long?” Amman Bhaggan wanted to know.

  “Massi Zakia fainted, and we had to stay till she recovered.” This was a half-truth, but I was proud that it was not an outright lie.

  Amman Bhaggan rolled her eyes, then opened her mouth wide, revealing her half-rotten teeth. She let out a long, drawn-out yawn, followed by a tirade about not having had enough sleep the previous night, first because of the storm and then because of her fear of the boars.

  “They forgot to put castor oil outside the door last night, and I couldn’t sleep. The cat was crying—so ominous. Maybe it smelt the boar. And then this morning the kittens were gone. Good riddance, I would say. Maalik would have to throw them in the canal, like he did last time, when we couldn’t care for them.”

  Every night, Amman Bhaggan reminded her sons to pour castor oil near the courtyard doorway to keep the boar from breaking down the door, should they smell the goat waiting to be slaughtered on Eid day. Her tired eyes were more troubled than usual.

  “I shut my eyes for a few seconds, and the dead visited me, so I hurriedly recited a prayer to keep them at peace. You never know when an evil spirit will cast a spell on what we hold dear.”

  She knew firsthand the danger of boar coming too close to humans. “One year, when my uncle returned from the fields after cutting the cane, he was chased by a boar.” She repeated the story as if to forget what was troubling her. “The vile boar ran by Hajjan’s house. It stopped when it saw her sitting, preparing meat for the meal the next day. It could smell the fresh goat meat and decided to join her.”

  I didn’t remember having heard this gruesome story before. I wasn’t sure why it had just come to her.

  “It ate the meat and then took a bite of her,” she continued. “That’s how she lost her left foot.”

  Bhaggan gestured to me to take the wooden comb from her hands, and then shut her eyes, anticipating my running the softened bristles through her henna-dyed hair, and continued the story.

  “Years later, at her son’s wedding, Hajjan could barely carry the pitcher with his ceremonial bathwater, and she limped down the street. Everyone danced around her to the wedding drumbeat. Instead of singing praises of his garlanded rupee notes and his floral headdress, she swore at my uncle. But it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know why the boar had followed him.”

  There was always a prevention or a remedy for such a calamity.

  “Castor oil distracts wild boar. It smells of their own fat. I’ve seen them turn right round if they get even a whiff of it.”

  I’d seen Amman Bhaggan pass the castor oil bottle to her sons and then rub the oil from her palms on her scalp. It kept her alert, she said.

  She also vowed that her hair, her pride, stayed strong and beautiful because of the oil. Granted, the thick, dark mane now had a streak of an orange cascade from the henna she used to cool her scalp in the summers. Now a veillike scalp cover, it had been integral to her few years of married bliss.

  My combing had relaxed her. The twist in the story reflected her mood.

  “I had a thick braid and small feet, and that’s why Sultan’s father married me. He didn’t see me before we were married, but when his mother came to see me from the village close by, it didn’t take her long to convince him that I was the catch of our village.”

  I’d heard this story, like all the others, about her light eyes, how her future mother-in-law thought they might be a bad omen, but when her husband-to-be looked into them on the day they were married, he said they were the color of Himalayan acacia honey.

  “He said I had trapped him,” Bhaggan recounted, her eyes still shut, as if she needed to calm herself. “Little did I know that his entrapment would be for such a short time.”

  A rasp of sorrow caught at her voice. “My husband would serenade me at night, singing, ‘Oh, lover with light eyes, I will stay with you forever.’”

  Bhaggan sat quietly with her eyes closed, but the romance she memorialized was short-lived. She didn’t have to repeat what had happened next. I kept combing her hair.

  He didn’t stay with her forever. Forever for him was two year
s.

  The day he left, never to return, Amman Bhaggan placed two rotis covered with desi ghee in a red cotton cloth, along with a piece of his favorite gum-berry pickle, for him to eat in the fields.

  But this is where her love story took a horrendous turn. Tears welled up every time she told us about it. She took the corner of her dopatta and wiped her face.

  “I waited for him that night. Three days later, they brought back his body, bloated by the canal waters. It had been caught in the reeds and scared the women washing their clothes. Their screams reached the village, and Lal Mohammad, the snake charmer, came to see what had happened. Lal saw the snake wound around my man’s hand and went immediately to the canal’s edge to urge it out of hiding.”

  But, as if it knew what was in store for it, the snake remained hidden.

  So Bhaggan and her mother-in-law both wailed over his body. They tore the dopattas off their heads and screamed to the heavens to avenge their sorrow—one for a young son and the other for her lover. Bhaggan broke her glass bangles and began her iddat, the required days of seclusion after her husband’s death to ensure she was not pregnant.

  It was difficult to imagine Amman Bhaggan as a young woman in love. I shut my eyes and thought back into her memory.

  In the one-room hut, they had been ardent lovers and she had indeed conceived their third child the night before he left on his last journey.

  I imagined how it would have been in that time before morning, as the last stars lit the night and the maulvi prepared himself for the morning prayers.

  I re-created a memory that she had never described, but it was lovely nonetheless, and I imagined it could have been true.

  He would have turned around and looked at his sleeping wife, and she, when she awoke, would have looked directly at him. Her acacia honey–colored eyes would have lit up their corner of the room. In quick silence, they would have fulfilled their passions, and then, wrapped in each other’s arms, fallen asleep again.

  The next morning, she would have known that they had made another baby but would have to wait a month to confirm it. The confirmation came only after her husband’s death. And as she sat in iddat, the four lunar months and ten days of required mourning for her husband, she realized she would be bearing this child of extreme love and great sorrow. Maalik, the youngest.

  Salt in the Millstone

  Unlike the maulvi and Bibi Saffiya, Amman Bhaggan did not pursue peace in the five daily prayers. She searched for it in the courtyard of the shrine of Sain Makhianwala, where she returned in times of necessity, in times of sorrow, and in times of joy, which penetrated her life as often as a fly finding its way through the mesh food cover and Bibi Saffiya’s swatter.

  That morning, while I combed her hair, she told me of her dreams for her two other sons, which were dependent on Sultan’s success. He worked hard, she reminded me, as the wooden comb scratched a scab behind her ear. She wiped away the drop of blood with her dopatta, not letting it deter her from completing her vision. Sultan would pass his exams and get a job as a teacher or a policeman in the city, and he would take them all with him. We didn’t know anyone who had those jobs, but I joined her imagined life of comfort in the city.

  All three lives depended on Sultan’s triumph in school. Maybe Bhaggan knew what I knew: that the struggle in class was a burden for him. That the salt crushed at the millstone had it easier than her son, straining to read and write under the lamplight. She must have thought that voicing her hopes as reality would give them strength to flourish.

  Her visits to the shrine filled the void that her dead husband had left. The shrine replaced the one who had promised her a life of comfort and love. She told me of some of her visits, and others I imagined. She told me about the crowds, the aromatic smells of street food, and the communal kitchen, but what fascinated me most was the toys she described: cloth dolls; brightly colored trucks and buses, like the ones on the road; toy horses and cattle; and tiny kitchen utensils. I felt my face relax into a smile as I thought of how much I would enjoy such treats.

  “Daughter, do you see any lice?” Bhaggan distracted me from my daydream.

  “The itch has been driving me crazy. It might just be prickly heat.” She sighed. I parted her hair to check and told her that it was clear—no lice, no prickly heat spots—but that didn’t pull her out of her despondency.

  As I pulled at her hair to braid it, she told me about a time before Maalik, her youngest, was born. Bhaggan went to the shrine of Sain Makhianwala to give an offering of a chicken because Sultan had been scorched with fever for three nights. He complained that he couldn’t eat because his throat was scratchy.

  Not knowing what to do, she asked her mother-in-law, whose own five children had died before they could celebrate their first Eid. Bhaggan’s husband, the only surviving child, was taken to the shrine every year to ward off evil. His mother’s efforts to give him a long life included letting a section of his hair grow longer than the rest. She dressed him in girls’ clothes and even got him a silver ankle bracelet. And it worked. He lived longer than the rest.

  Bhaggan shared her mother-in-law’s suspicions about why the baby Sultan would not recover.

  “It’s an evil eye on my son’s laughing, playing household, I’m telling you. Amman Hajjan, the witch, left small bundles of paper with black magic. She’s done it before, and now she wants my whole family to perish.”

  Like her late mother-in-law, Bhaggan was desperate to know the reason for her family’s ill fortune, but she knew it wasn’t the old hag Amman Hajjan, who sold candy, tobacco, and trinkets from the corner of her room outside her son’s home. Why would she try to kill her customers?

  Bhaggan chose not to take a chance with her baby, Sultan, and went to the shrine early on a Thursday, a day when prayers became pronounced, more likely to be heard. As with any other problem, Baby Sultan’s fever would be reduced by an offering at the shrine. She told me how she had bought four rupees’ worth of sugar balls and threw them energetically on the shrine and then watched the beggars scramble to pick them up.

  She also took a white chicken and had it slaughtered and cooked at the communal kitchen, for more blessings to be bestowed on her sick son. The sugar balls reinforced the strength of the chicken meat and created balance that would stabilize her life. Having accomplished all this in one morning, Bhaggan went home to continue her work in the kitchen.

  She had cooked the meal earlier and returned to bake roti in the tandoor. She remembered the event from eleven years ago as if it were yesterday. Her anger toward her mistress was also aroused with the same intensity as she had felt back then.

  “Do you know what Saffiya said?” She did not wait for me to respond; Saffiya’s words were engraved in her mind. “She said, ‘Where were you, Bhaggan? I waited for my massage before my bath, but you never came. People usually say when they’re not coming.’”

  Bhaggan ranted about how offended she was. About how first her man had been bitten by a snake, and then her baby, Sultan, not even three, shaking with fever and a sore throat, and how her beeji, her dead man’s mother, said she should go to the shrine to pay her respects and present a chicken. And that the only one she could afford was a farm-raised one, instead of a desi one. A desi one, she told Saffiya, would have more power for her poor Sultan. Saffiya should have understood all this. She knew Taaj, her second son, was still being breastfed when another baby had begun to grow inside her. Her name was Bhaggan, the blessed one, but her life was cursed to the core.

  Bhaggan’s anger at Saffiya from so long ago had not receded. It boiled over to that morning as I combed her hair.

  “I told her, and, like a nervous cat, she scratched at a pole. You know what she said?” Bhaggan continued, and, again, I didn’t have to answer. “She said I should have told her. She would have sent me to the hakim in the city. She told me to give her her meal and have some faith in the higher powers. She would send me to the hakim who was her father’s friend— may his soul rest in pe
ace, and may he be sent to the highest levels of heaven. There was no one else like him around here. I don’t know how he had such a daughter like Saffiya. Despite being such a great landlord, he went out of his way to help all the poor people in the village.”

  I don’t know if Amman Bhaggan told me about this, but I could imagine Bibi Saffiya grunting as she reached under her pillow for her green cloth wallet.

  “Here, take ten rupees and take the baby in the tonga tomorrow morning. My father’s friend the hakim will give you some powerful medication to cure the baby immediately. Just go after my massage, because you know I can’t really do anything all day if I miss it.”

  Saffiya would have then lain back on the charpoy that she rarely left, and Bhaggan would have automatically started to massage Saffiya before her mistress began to complain about her aches and pains.

  “My back is killing me, and my digestion is also terrible. The gas has gone into my muscles and is causing me great pain. I’ll go to the hakim, too, but once the car has been serviced. I still need to find some time to go.”

  Bhaggan would have taken the ten-rupee note and tied it in the corner of her dopatta. But before she could leave, Saffiya would have reminded her to prepare the next meal. “And, Bhaggan, bring some tea for me at five o’clock. Warm the milk on gas, not on the dung fire.”

  Bhaggan’s anger toward Saffiya didn’t last long. Her devotion to Saffiya mystified me. She never questioned their relationship long enough to leave her.

  But that was all so long ago. Before I came, or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was my imagination.

  For her firstborn, Sultan, the one I had tried to entice with a chameli garland that morning, Amman Bhaggan had many dreams. The dream of the moment was to see him pass his eighth-grade exams. And she would do everything in her means to accomplish this, even if it meant feeding the beggars at the shrine of Sain Makhianwala.

  The morning after Maria and I returned from Jannat’s house to help Stella to her usual embroidery spot in the rooms inside, after I had combed her hair, Amman Bhaggan reminded me.