Wild Boar in the Cane Field

by Anniqua Rana

  “No, my daughter,” he said. “Women are not allowed inside the building. Stay here and pray. You will be heard.”

  Bhaggan and Sultan placed their meat pots on the floor, and we all stood with our hands held high and prayed as hard as we could. I also wasn’t sure how I would get a family and a home with just one prayer. But I prayed anyway.

  We didn’t linger. We handed our meat offering to the cooks, whose outdoor cooking area was on one side of the shrine, and returned soon after, excited about our new pairing of dolls that we would spend many hours marrying and divorcing. We were so engrossed in the pleasure of our new toys that the journey home seemed uneventful.

  THE SECOND VISIT to the shrine came a year later. Amman Bhaggan had been unwell for a few months. None of Bibi Saffiya’s herbal remedies had any impact. She had even gone to a local dispensary to get energy pills, but she continued to burn with fever. Her breathing was unsteady, and her whole body ached. I spent hours massaging her, but nothing seemed to work.

  She decided to go to the shrine for a night of prayer as a last resort, and since she was delirious and unsteady, she took me with her.

  This time, I was more confident. I knew where to stand for the bus and stretched out my hand aggressively for it to stop. I held Amman Bhaggan’s hand as she stepped into the bus, and I even pushed one of the men standing near our seat, who kept falling on me when the bus swerved.

  We arrived after the sun had set and the evening prayer time was almost over. I pushed our way to the shrine entrance and found a clearing for us to sit and rest.

  I remembered that the maulvi had cautioned me last time about how women and girls were not allowed to enter the building, for fear of impurities that they might bring with them, so we stood near the archway facing the grave and prayed.

  My prayers were slower this time. They were the same as before—a home, a family, and, if I were very lucky, a loving mother—but I knew it would take a long time for all those prayers to be heard.

  Amman Bhaggan had a lot more to ask. She started by mumbling prayers for her dead parents and then for her dead husband. The blessings on the dead would strengthen the prayers for her health.

  She started with a mumble, and then tears rolled down her pockmarked cheeks. I couldn’t help but start crying myself. Her pleas became more frantic and louder. She wanted to see her dead mother again in her glory in paradise. She wanted all her own sins to be washed away and all her miseries to be drowned. She wanted Bibi Saffiya to return the money that her husband had given her as a down payment for a lot of land. She wanted her sons to be as faithful and true to her as her husband had been. She wanted sons for her sons so they could continue the family lineage for years to come. She wanted each son to have one wife, or two, if he chose, and for the wife or wives to be caring and loving to her grandchildren, as she had been to her sons.

  At the climax, she prayed that she would die with her sons and grandsons around her, so they could all lift her body, wrapped in the white death sheet, and take her to her next life, so she could transcend and join her parents in paradise.

  I was weeping uncontrollably with her, and, exhausted, we sat in silence for some time. After a while, I could smell the evening meal being cooked in the same outdoor kitchens where we had left the meat we had brought during our previous visit. The aroma of freshly baked roti comforted me in these unfamiliar surroundings. A wealthy landowner must have had a good crop that year, or maybe he had found a second wife or given birth to another son, and the supplicants at the shrine were benefiting from the offerings.

  I left Bhaggan and returned with a stainless-steel plate of steaming chicken and two rotis. I ate hungrily, but Bhaggan’s appetite still had not returned, so we threw the leftovers to the dogs that sat staring at us from a distance.

  We sat in contented silence when the drumbeats began. First one, then another holy man, a fakir, stood up to dance in frenzied circles around the drums. I had not noticed them earlier that evening, but, one after another, men with long, gaudily patched, tattered green shirts and unruly, tangled hair began twirling to the drumbeat.

  The tempo increased, and a female fakir joined the others. Her hair, like theirs, was an uncombed mess, unwashed and matted. She inched toward the center of the dancing men, circling faster and faster, leaving the drumbeat behind, controlling the others with a dizzying force.

  The spinning dervish hypnotized us all. I looked away to gain some control. But Amman Bhaggan chose to drown herself in the circling frenzy. Her eyes had whitened, like those of the fakirs. She stood up, and her feet began to move in time to the drumbeat.

  “Allah hoo, Allah hoo,” she repeated.

  I wasn’t sure if I should join in or stay seated. I decided to stay where I sat. The frenzy both scared and fascinated me. I’m not sure how long it lasted. The drumbeat, the chant, the feet, the dance, the heat. We were all hypnotized.

  The female fakir continued to lead the dancers as they now circled the drummers, who dropped their heads but continued the beat in a trance.

  And then, one by one, the dancers collapsed in small heaps of silence. The flies that had been aroused by the vibrating sound and movement settled in mounds on the fallen dancers, obscuring them.

  Dolls’ Wedding

  Taaj and Malik never returned with the cane from the cane field that afternoon, so Maria and I decided to marry our dolls under the shahtoot trees while we waited for the others to return and the sun to recede.

  Most of our afternoon activities were innocent childhood explorations that the adults frowned upon, so we waited until obligatory naps during the hottest time of the day silenced the house. Then we danced among the trees like movie heroines or ate mouthwatering sour, unripe mangoes or loquats from the surrounding orchards, secure that Saffiya and Bhaggan would never know.

  Sometimes Taaj and Maalik joined us, but other times, Maria and I placed a charpoy in the shade of the shahtoot tree to catch the intermittent warm breezes as we played with our dolls. We made make-believe homes and make-believe schoolrooms. Worlds parallel to our reality. Worlds the way we wanted them.

  That afternoon, Maria and I prepared for our dolls’ wedding by mixing henna in a bowl and making dotted designs on our hands to cool ourselves off. We hummed wedding songs and sat the two limp dolls on the charpoy next to us.

  Before Bhaggan returned, we decided to play the part of the wedding that the village women joked about—the part that no one ever saw, after the wedding guests had all left and the bride and the groom were alone. Bhaggan would have words to say if she ever found out. She would probably even beat us with slippers. But I didn’t care.

  Maria spoke up, surprising me with her knowledge: “Amman makes moaning sounds at night when she lies next to my father.”

  “How would you know? You sleep with me.” As always, I questioned her credibility.

  “Remember the time Amman Bhaggan was unwell and you spent the whole night tending to her? Amman Bhaggan told me to sleep at home with Stella that night.”

  How could I have forgotten? I had been afraid that Bhaggan would not live through the night and that I would be left alone.

  “Stella told me to keep my head under the blanket because it was so cold. But it wasn’t really cold. And then I farted.” She looked at me and laughed.

  I continued, straightening the bride doll’s clothes, covering her face with her tinseled scarlet dopatta. The groom doll’s face was covered with four grimy strings of gold thread. I folded the cloth dolls, seating them close together, and then propped them up with rolled fabric.

  “Well, do you want to know what happened?”

  I didn’t want to appear too eager, so I remained silent at Maria’s question.

  “Only if you want to.” Maria knew she had caught my attention, so she continued.

  “Amman and Abba were sleeping on the charpoy in the other corner of the room. I could hear Amman making strange noises. Abba was on top of her, like this.”

  Most villa
gers had two-room homes, one for sleeping and the other for visitors. Jannat and Isaac had a one-room mud house, with three charpoys on each wall.

  Other villagers piled the tin storage boxes in their second room and covered them with crochet and embroidered clothes. None of Stella’s embroidered clothes ever found their way to her parents’ home, so the boxes filled with clothes donated by Saffiya, which included some old sweaters and a threadbare gray coat, hid under the charpoys in embarrassment. And on one wall, a chipped blue-and-white vase and a framed picture of a woman with a tiny baby sat on a shelf.

  Taking the groom doll from his perch, Maria placed him on top of the bride doll, toppling them both. With her other hand, she covered her mouth, stifling a giggle. I frowned for her benefit, and for any grown-ups who might have seen us. I didn’t know if she was telling the truth, but I sensed this was not just her imagination.

  Taaj had once thrown a rock at two stray village dogs, and they had yelped away. When I’d asked him why he had done that, he’d laughed and said they were doing what men and women did in bed. I hadn’t believed him, and he’d wanted to tell me more, but Amman Bhaggan had called me away.

  I didn’t want to believe Maria knew more about this than I did.

  Dried brown henna crumbled from Maria’s hands onto her doll’s blood-red bridal outfit made of scraps of shiny materials from Bibi Saffiya’s sewing basket. I couldn’t stop staring at the dolls.

  “Nothing will happen if you keep looking!” Maria was enjoying her supremacy, so I decided to build up my confidence and respond as if I knew what we were talking about. I knew babies came after a wedding, and I knew if it was a boy, the celebrations would be greater than those for a girl. I knew when a man got too close to a woman, a baby appeared sometime after.

  “If the dolls have a baby, it’s mine,” I said.

  “You’ll have to wait for the baby.” Maria took pleasure in knowing more than I did about such matters.

  “Not me,” I declared. Nothing I was saying made much sense, but I wasn’t going to let Maria have the upper hand. Whatever I did, I would keep my ignorance hidden. I knew women were responsible for bearing children. Wasn’t that what Zakia complained about to Saffiya and Bhaggan?

  The dolls lay in a pile of crumpled roses and marigolds that we had plucked to decorate their marriage bed. Between the crushed rose petals and the marigolds were sprinkles of henna. I pulled the yellow petals from a marigold and chewed on the bud. Maria did the same with the rose. We looked at each other, not sure what to do next.

  I wasn’t having fun anymore and needed to pee, but was too lazy to go to the fields, so I ordered Maria to look away.

  I pulled down my shalwar and relieved myself on the parched ground near the tree.

  Maria wrinkled her nose. “Oof, Tara.”

  “What did you expect? That’s how it smells.”

  “What?”

  “When a baby is made.” I was tired of Maria’s knowing all the answers. And for now, I added, “It’s how your mother smells.” Bhaggan had mentioned that Jannat smelled of urine, even though I wasn’t sure why.

  “That’s because she’s unwell,” Maria said.

  “No, it’s because she keeps having babies.”

  “Not my mother. Your mother …” She stopped short. Maria was a better person than I. She knew when she was being hurtful and apologized immediately. “That’s not what I meant.”

  I pretended to be offended by the reference to my nonexistent mother. Everyone knew I didn’t have one. Maria had heard it from Bhaggan many times, and also from Saffiya. Bibi Saffiya told the story of how she had found me. Her version was not the same as Bhaggan’s. In her version, Saffiya seemed more saintly.

  “It must have been divine intervention,” Saffiya was fond of saying. “I had just finished my afternoon prayers and was saying the salaam at the end, when I looked to the right and then the left, and saw the bundle of clothes on the seat opposite. It had been left by the young woman who got off the train immediately after I began my prayers. She was covered from head to toe in a burka. She looked like a town girl. Her burka, you know, it was decorated in the fashion of town folk. Overdone, if you ask me. Not like us village folk, who keep our wealth hidden.”

  My mother had been a woman of consequence. Otherwise, why would she have been on a train and wearing an embellished burka? Not a village woman, not like the rest.

  “I thought she had gotten off the train to get something to eat, but when the train started to move, I realized the woman wasn’t planning to return. I looked out the window, but she was nowhere to be seen. Then the bundle moved. No one else in the train. Just me and Bhaggan. It was as if I were getting a sign from above.”

  Was I a sign from God? Was that why I was special?

  “But the train had already started moving, and when Bhaggan picked up the cloth, she saw this little rascal. I named her Tara, Star. Did you know I named Jannat’s daughter Stella? Their names have the same meaning. You know how names can make the future? How else would they both be able to anticipate a bright future?”

  Was this true? I thought. If Stella and I had the same name, would our destinies also be the same?

  “Tara didn’t cry. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her cry. She was like that the day we found her,” Saffiya ended.

  “Never cried,” Amman Bhaggan chimed in. “Someone would have sat on her, and she wouldn’t have made a sound.”

  I took pride in having never cried in front of anyone. Even when my mother had left me on the train. My scowl and laughter were renowned, but I had never cried in front of anyone, and no one would ever make me.

  Maria had belittled the mother I had never known, but I would never cry.

  “Of course you had a mother before they found you.” Maria was now embarrassed and spoke nonsense.

  But I would not forgive her easily. My response, about her beginnings, would reflect my pain. I looked directly at her and spoke calmly, adjusting Bhaggan’s version of Maria’s birth to reveal how I felt about her now.

  “I was there when you came out of your mother. She screamed and I watched as I sat in the window. And they stuffed her dopatta in her mouth. And then Hamida’s mother told her to shut up or she would wake the whole village. But everyone was already waiting in the courtyard. Waiting to see if she would have a boy or another girl. It was just before the early-morning prayer, and they thought they were waiting for a boy, but then you came and they started beating their breasts like Shia on the tenth of Muharram. You were small and dark and ugly. And they hoped you would die. But Amman Bhaggan came in and hid you away under her bed. And she kept you hidden for a whole year, until you were too big to die!”

  Maria looked back at me, tears streaming down her grubby cheeks.

  “You’re lying,” she cried. “You always tell lies. Amman told me not to play with you. She said you’re the devil. You do magic and cast the evil eye on everyone.”

  “Get lost! I never asked for your doll. You wanted to marry her to mine.” I kicked the copulating dolls onto the dampened patch I had just created. I covered my head with my dopatta and ran past Maria.

  The Cane Fields

  The dolls’ wedding was a disaster, but the afternoon was nearly over. This time, Bhaggan believed her offering at the shrine would ensure Sultan’s success. The previous two times, he had failed his exams because of the evil eye. One of the village women might have been envious of Sultan’s accomplishments, and so they had cast a spell causing him to fail. She should have gone to the shrine earlier, instead of burning red chilies on the open fire to ward off the evil eye.

  The effort was tiring, but the reward would be great. Mother and son returned victorious, confident that blessings had accompanied them home.

  “My beautiful daughter, bring me some water before I faint.”

  Maria and I trailed after Amman Bhaggan, looking expectantly at the bundle she carried under her left arm. She used her dopatta to wipe the sweat from the back of her neck,
then stumbled and lurched in search of her space on the peerhi in the kitchen.

  Maria showed her concern in the best way she could, by rubbing Bhaggan’s feet, while I ran to get her some water.

  “They’re swollen like loaves of bread,” she said, as she pulled off Bhaggan’s slippers and wiped the dust off her feet with her dopatta.

  I cleaned the steel glass with my dopatta as I squatted in front of the pitcher. It took me a couple of tries before I could fill the glass with the tepid water. Some spilled on the floor as I tipped the pitcher toward me.

  “Careful—you’ll have to fill the pitcher with sweet water if you keep watering the kitchen floor like that.” Bhaggan’s exhaustion didn’t stop her from chastising me. “And get a lump of ice from the freezer, but make sure you fill up the trays to make ice cubes for Bibi Saffiya before dinnertime.”

  I returned with the water and massaged her back while Maria rubbed her feet, and she continued.

  “If this trip doesn’t save my life, it will kill me, but Sain Makhianwala heard my request. I asked for your Sultan bhai to pass his exams and then become an officer in the government and get a good salary to pay for the house that his father was going to buy. You know, the one my husband gave Saffiya the down payment for.”

  She gulped the water and then chewed on the ice and blessed us both.

  “May you find a husband as good as mine. But may he have a much longer life. You are better than daughters I might have had.”

  Bhaggan’s wishes flew over the head of Maria, who looked up from her perch below as she shifted herself to a comfortable squat. “But what about the dolls, Amman?”

  Playing at dolls’ weddings seemed like a waste of time now. I wished Maria would grow up.

  Before she could answer, I made a suggestion that would appeal to Bhaggan and show her how grown-up I was, compared with Maria.

  “Shall I make some tea for you first? There’s some leftover milk in the fridge, and it still has the cream on top.”