Homeless Bird Read online

  I had looked forward to helping prepare Chandra on her wedding day, but Sass sent me away. “It is not proper,” she said. “Only those women who are not widowed and have borne a male child are privileged to help.”

  I knew this was the custom; still, I had hoped I might at least be allowed in the room to enjoy the ceremonies. I had to be content with a peek at Chandra when the women were finished with her. Seeing her in my wedding sari, her eyes darkened with kohl, her cheeks and lips rouged, and designs painted on her forehead, was like seeing myself again as I had been almost three years before. For Chandra’s sake I smiled and told her how beautiful she looked, as indeed she did. Inside I was miserable and did not know how I would ever be happy again. My life seemed to be over. What was there to look forward to but years and years of slaving away?

  When the day for the wedding came, Chandra and I hid by the window so that we could get a glimpse of the bridegroom. Led by his male relatives, Raman arrived on a horse covered with a cloth embroidered with small, round mirrors. The mirrors glittered as he rode along, so he looked like he was arriving on a shaft of sunlight. He was tall, with a great deal of wavy black hair and a small mustache.

  “The mustache is like a mouse’s tail,” I said, giggling.

  “It is not!” Chandra said. “It’s a fine mustache.”

  We stretched our heads out the window to get a better view. Just then the bridegroom looked our way. I saw a slight smile hurry across his face as he saw us, and I began to believe Chandra’s marriage might be a good one.

  Sassur greeted the bridegroom with the required perfumed water and mixture of honey and curds. The guests arrived: all the relatives who lived within a day’s drive, Sassur’s fellow teachers, the women who gossiped with Sass in the courtyard and their husbands and children, the relatives and friends of the bridegroom who came to see how well or how poorly the parents of the bridegroom had done in their choice.

  How different this wedding was from mine. Instead of a frightened gawky girl and a young and doomed bridegroom, there were a handsome young man and a happy and beautiful bride. The ceremony was soon over, and the feasting began. A tali was brought out piled with boiled ducks’ eggs, crisply fried pooris, dal, rice, curries, chapatis, mango chutney, and many kinds of sweets. The food was served first to the men and then to the women guests, and last I ate with the women who had been hired to help with the cooking and serving. I did not mind being last, for I had prepared much of the food and sampled it whenever Sass’s back was turned.

  At last it was time for Chandra to go to the home of her bridegroom. She embraced her maa and baap. She threw her arms around me. “Koly,” she whispered, “I will miss you most of all.” With her face pressed against mine, I could not tell whether the tears I felt on my cheeks were hers or mine.

  As I watched Chandra and her bridegroom leave for his home, I felt my last bit of happiness disappearing.

  six

  Sass was as sorry as I was to see Chandra go. She wept, moaning, “I have lost my daughter forever.” Sassur disappeared into his room and took down the book of Tagore’s poems, but each time I looked into the room, I saw that no page had been turned. I had no one to talk with now but the little green lizards that crept up my wall.

  My pension was lost to me, and I did not know how far my earrings might take me. It seemed that I must stay where I was forever. I hoped that if I worked very hard, and did exactly as I was told, Sass might begin to look kindly upon me. I hoped that someday she might love me as she loved Chandra, or if not so much as that, at least a little. I was sorry for the times in the past when I had been mischievous. I began to rise earlier in the morning, so early the stars were still in the sky and the snakes at the edge of the courtyard were still twined into sleepy coils waiting for the sun to warm them. Each morning I made my puja at the kitchen shrine, careful to present an offering of fruit or a few scattered flower petals. I plastered the chula, the small stove on which we cooked, with fresh mud. I set the fire, waiting until everyone was up to light it so that no fuel would be wasted. I soaked the rice before boiling it and stirred it so that it was fluffy and the grains did not stick together. I ground the spices to a fine powder with the stone roller and churned the milk carefully. I swept the courtyard morning and afternoon.

  When I saw Sass sitting by herself, a sad look on her face, I said, “Let me comb your hair and braid it for you.” It was something that Chandra used to do for her maa.

  “No. You are too clumsy. If you have time on your hands, there are pots to scrub.”

  It was that way with everything I asked to do for her. It was no better with Sassur. He had troubles of his own. The school where he taught now had electricity. Computers had been installed, and more and more responsibility was taken away from Sassur, who knew nothing about such things. When he came home in the evenings, he went to his room and closed the door. We could hear him chanting his prayers hour after hour. He would not come out for meals but took only a handful of cold rice and a chapati or two. He grew thinner, his cheeks more hollow, his neck scrawnier.

  I saw that there was a bowl of rice ready for Sassur when his chanting was finished. I even offered to read some of Tagore’s poems to him, but he merely shook his head. “My son is dead, my daughter is far away, and I am laughed at by my students. What is left for me? One day I will walk off across the fields, and you will see no more of me.”

  If Sass tried to tell him of problems in the house, he would silently climb up onto the roof of the house, pull the ladder up after himself, and resume his chants.

  When I found I could no longer talk to Sassur, I looked about for something to care for. If no one would love me, I could at least love something. A pariah dog would slink into the courtyard from time to time in search of a morsel of food. Now I began to save a bit of our dinner for the dog. Its dirty yellow fur was mangy. Its eyes were red and watery. There were sores on its back, and one foot was lame. Still, it was clever enough never to appear when Sass was about. Soon it was following me to the river where I washed the clothes. I would bathe its sores and pet it until it lost its wary look. When it curled up next to me, I could feel its warmth. Instead of slinking about and hiding in corners, it began to appear openly in the courtyard.

  One afternoon Sass caught me giving the dog a bit of chapati smeared with dal. “What are you doing, girl?” she scolded. “We hardly have enough for ourselves, and you throw our food to the dogs. What can you be thinking of?” She started to chase the dog away.

  At that moment a gosling waddled close to the dog, who had been cringing in a corner of the courtyard. The dog closed its teeth over the unfortunate gosling’s neck. Sass ran after the dog with a stick, landing several blows. Still the dog would not let go. As it disappeared around a bend, we could still hear the squawking of the gosling. After that the dog knew better than to return.

  So I tamed the bandicoot. It was an ugly animal with a pointed snout, tiny eyes, and large pointed ears. From its head to its long ratty tail it was nearly two feet long. Unlike the foolish dog, it never showed itself in the courtyard when others were there, but would come only to me. It crawled out from under the veranda on its belly and crept carefully up to me to take the bit of food I had saved from my meal. It sat hunched next to me, munching slowly as if it wanted to make the morsel last. When the food was gone, it would lick its whiskers and crawl back under the veranda. I was glad enough for the bandicoot’s company, but I did not think I wanted to spend my life sweeping goose droppings from the courtyard and talking to a rat.

  It was on the way to the village where Sass sent me to buy some chilis and a paper of cumin that the idea came to me. I ran the rest of the way to the village so that I should have a few extra minutes there. When I reached the village, I made my way to the office where we had been given the papers that brought my pension. Through the open door I could see the man who had given us the papers to sign, but his very dark suit and very white shirt frightened me away. Twice more when I was in th
e village, I went to look into the office, and twice more I hurried away, too timid to speak to a man dressed so formally. Then one evening I saw the same man walking past our house. He had taken off his suit and shirt and was wearing a simple kurta pajama. Under his arm he carried his suit and shirt, carefully folded so that they would stay fresh.

  The next day I stood bravely by his door while others went into his office and left. Finally he looked up. “Why are you staring at me, girl? What do you want?”

  I crept into his office and stood respectfully at his desk. “Sir, my sass brought me here to sign some papers to say I was a widow and to get a pension.”

  “Yes,” he said impatiently, “what of that? Are you not getting your pension?”

  “My sass is getting it. She takes the envelope.”

  He frowned. “How that is arranged in your family is not for me to say. The pension comes. That is all that concerns this office.”

  “What if I came here each month to your office and the pension were to be handed to me?”

  “Certainly not. That is not how it is done. The pension is mailed.”

  I took a deep breath. “What if I moved to another place?”

  “Have you come here to tell me you are moving?”

  “No, sir. I only want to know what would happen if I did.”

  “You are wasting my time with ‘if, if, if.’”

  “Please, just tell me. What would happen if I moved away?”

  “Then you must go to the office in that new place and tell them you are there.”

  “And the pension would come to me there?”

  “Yes, yes, yes. Now leave me in peace.”

  I hurried back through the marketplace, past the man with the trained monkey on a chain and the stall where birds were imprisoned in tiny cages. In one of the cages was a mynah bird that had been blinded to make it sing. I shuddered, feeling no better off than the chained monkey and the miserable birds. I knew I had to find a way to escape. I could write to my maa and baap, but what could I say that would not bring shame and sorrow to them?

  I began to make plans. I doubted that I could live on the pension alone, but my silver earrings would help until I could find a job of some sort. But who would hire me? In the city I would be seen as the poor country girl I was, shrouded in a widow’s sari and with no proper schooling. And where would I live? How long would the money from my earrings last? With all these questions I did not think to run away today or tomorrow, but as long as I had the thought of someday, I could stand Sass’s scolding. To leave would take courage, and of that I did not have much.

  As long as I stayed with my sass and sassur, I at least had a place to sleep and food to eat, though food seemed to be getting scarcer. As Sassur ate less, Sass became more stingy. She kept the keys to the cupboard knotted in her sari, all but counting the grains of rice. Some days I was so hungry, I felt dizzy. Worse than my hunger was the lack of happiness in the house. Even the bandicoot sensed it. After a while he would no longer come out from under the veranda, even for the bit of food I could spare him.

  Then suddenly my world changed once more. Late in the afternoon of a day when the sun was like a circle of fire in the sky, Sassur came home early from school. This had never happened before. He went into his room and lay down on his charpoy. Minutes later I heard Sass screaming. Sassur had quietly died.

  seven

  Chandra was called home. It had been over a year since her wedding. She no longer looked like a young girl. She wore a handsome sari. It was white, out of respect for her father’s death, but unlike my white sari, Chandra’s was made of fine muslin. Her hair was caught up in a complicated twist, and there were gold bangles on her arms. And the toenails sticking out of her sandals were painted! After embracing her mother and shedding many tears, she put her arms around me. “Koly, how I have missed you. There is no time now, but tonight after the funeral we’ll talk the sun up.”

  This time there was no money for a funeral in Varanasi. Sassur’s thumbs were tied together to show that he could no longer work, and his big toes were also tied together so that his ghost could not return. He was carried on his charpoy to an empty place in one of the fields to be cremated. As I watched, I thought of how he had said, “One day I will walk off across the fields, and you will see no more of me.”

  Three fires were lit nearby, and the men of the town chanted during the cremation until his spirit had left his body and a holy man announced that Sassur was dead.

  After the funeral, as we walked back to the house, each of us was given seven pebbles. We had to drop the small stones, one by one. It is known that a spirit is poor at counting but loves to count anyhow. Sassur’s spirit would occupy itself with counting the pebbles and would not follow us home. I whispered to Chandra as we dropped our tiny stones that I did not believe her baap would wish to return.

  Chandra had been lucky. That night as we sat up and talked, she told me of her new life. “My sass is not well and spends her day lying on her charpoy in the courtyard talking with her friends about her poor health. Each day she has a new symptom. The running of the house is left to me with no interference, and there is a servant to help with the hard work. We had electricity put into the house so that my husband could bring home a computer from his workplace. He sits before it and touches the keys, and he can make colored pictures.” She looked shyly at me. “Koly, if only I had listened to you and learned to read, I could know some of what comes up on the screen. There are words in every language and from everywhere. My baap was wrong to dislike those machines. They are magic.

  “And because of the electricity we have a television. You remember how we went to the village to see the television? But there my baap was right. Such things you see on the American programs! Very improper!” She whispered what some of the things were, and we giggled until Sass poked her head into our room to shame us, reminding us that a funeral had taken place that day.

  In the three days we had together, Chandra was treated as a guest. While I went about my usual tasks, she spent most of the day in the courtyard with Sass, so Sass could brag about Chandra’s good fortune to the neighbor women. It was only in the evenings that we could whisper to each other. I told her how I had talked with the man in the village about my pension. “One day I will run away,” I said.

  “No. You must never do that. Where would you go, and who would take care of you?”

  I knew that Chandra was never one to think of taking care of herself, so I said no more. Still, seeing how happy she was, I began to think more often of whether one day I might be happy as well.

  At the end of the week Chandra returned to her husband’s home and our life went on, but without Sassur nothing was the same. Sass did not even have the energy to scold me when I let the ghee boil over into the fire or forgot to sweep the courtyard. As the months went by, her sad moods drove away her friends, and the courtyard was now empty in the afternoons. She sat all day long staring at nothing. Her hair was untidy and her sari soiled. Often I caught her looking at me in a strange way.

  I was sorry for her. We might have been a comfort to each other, and once I even said, “Now we are both widows.”

  Sass drew herself up. “What do you say? Do you have a daughter who has married well? Or a son who died in the holy city of Varanasi? We are not the same.”

  After Sassur’s death there was no more money coming from the school. Her widow’s pension hardly bought our food. The brass bowls, Sass’s best sari, and her silver bangles were all carried to the moneylender in the village. On the days Sass returned from the moneylender, she would stare and stare at me. I tried to keep out of her sight and to eat as little as possible, but I think if she could have snapped her fingers and made me disappear, I would surely have been gone.

  Often she asked about my silver earrings, still sure I had hidden them. I only shook my head. I tried to be as silent and invisible as the little chameleons in the courtyard, but when I saw her take down Sassur’s book of Tagore’s poems w
ith his signature, I begged her not to sell it.

  “We cannot eat the book, and the moneylender will give me a good sum. My husband always said it was valuable.” She wrapped the book carelessly in a bit of cloth and set off for the village. I stood in the road and watched until I could bear it no longer. I ran after her, my feet sending up little clouds of dust.

  “If I find my silver earrings and give them to you, will you give me the book?” I asked.

  Sass’s eyes flashed. “So you have lied to me all along!” she screeched. Then she thrust the book at me. “Take it and give me the earrings at once.”

  As soon as I pried out the brick and held the earrings in my hand, I saw what a foolish thing I had done, but it was too late. I knew I could not bear to see the book that meant so much to Sassur sold. So it was my earrings that Sass carried to the village to sell, and with them my last hope.

  One day a letter came. Sass would not show it to me but took it to the village for the scribe to read to her. When she returned, Sass was smiling. “It is from my younger brother. He lives in Delhi, and he will take me in. He says he needs someone to look after his children and help with the housework.”

  In a small voice I asked, “What will happen to me?”

  Sass gave me a sly look. “Oh, you will come as well. No doubt he will find something for you to do. Now I must sell the cow and the house to get money for our trip.”

  The house with its melting mud walls and skimpy square of land brought little. Sass did better with the cow, but I was sorry to see her go, for many times when I had milked her, I had whispered my worries to her. I helped to drive the cow to the village, but when it came time for Sass to buy the railway tickets, she sent me home. “There is no need for you to come along,” she said.