Several times I thought of going to Kenny, and twice I did go. He would have helped us, of that I am sure, but each time I was told he had gone away. . . the townsfolk had not seen him for many weeks. I would have gone again and again, but I had not my full strength; it was no longer easy to walk to the town and back. We might have borrowed from Biswas, but there was nothing left to pledge; in any event, we would not have been able even to pay the interest he demanded.
Seven days went by and seven precious portions of rice were eaten. On the eighth day Kunthi came as I was cooking the rice water.
I had not set eyes on her for a considerable time -- not since the day I had seen her in her nakedness; and she had changed so much I scarcely recognised her. I gazed at her hardly believing. The skin of her face was stiff and shiny as if from overstretching, elsewhere it showed folds and wrinkles. Under her faded sari her breasts hung loose; gone was the tense suppleness that had been her pride and her power. Of her former beauty not a vestige remained. Well, I thought. All women come to it sooner or later: she has come off perhaps worse than most.
"Sit and rest awhile," I said. "What brings you hither?"
She made no answer, but walked to the pot on the fire and looked in.
"You eat well," she said. "Better than most."
"Not well. We eat, that is all."
"You still have your husband?"
"Why, yes," I said staring at her, not quite taking her meaning. "Why do you ask?"
She shrugged. "I have lost mine. I wondered how you had fared."
Poor thing, I thought. She has suffered. I looked at her pityingly.
"I do not want your pity," she said savagely, "nor does my husband. He is alive and well -- he is living with another."
I thought of her husband, slow, sturdy, dependable, rather like an ox, and I could not believe it of him; then I thought of Kunthi as I had once seen her, with painted mouth and scented thighs that had held so many men, and I wondered if after all these years he had not at last found out about her. Perhaps the truth has been forced upon him, I thought, looking at her with suspicion, and I gazed again upon that ravaged beauty.
"Stare your fill," she said scornfully. "You always lacked graces, Rukmani."
I averted my eyes hastily. I hardly knew what to say.
"I have come," she continued, "not to be seen, or to see you, but for a meal. I have not eaten for a long time."
I went to the pot and stirred it, scooped out a little, placed it in a bowl, handed it to her. She swallowed it quickly and put the bowl down.
"I must have some rice too. I cannot come every day. . . as it is I have waited a long time to make sure you were alone."
"There is no rice to be given away," I said. "I must think of my husband and children. These are not times of plenty."
"Nevertheless," she replied, "I will have some. The damage will never be repaired while I hunger. There is no life for me until I am whole again."
She is mad, I thought. She believes what she says; does not realise there is no going back for her.
"Listen," I said, "there is none, or very little. Drink our rice water, come here daily, but do not ask for rice. I have a daughter and sons, even as you have, to consider. What I have belongs to us all. Can you not go to your sons?"
"My sons," she said, looking at me speculatively, "are not mine alone." Seeing my bewilderment she added, "They have wives. I would never approach them now."
"What are sons for --" I began.
"Not to beg from," she interrupted with a flicker of contempt. "I can look after myself; but first the bloom must come back."
I was mute: I had said all there was to say and now there was nothing more.
"Well," she said, breaking the silence, and with an edge to her voice. "How much longer have I to wait?"
She came close to me and put her face near mine. I saw the grey, drawn flesh and the hooded eyes, deep sunken in their sockets, and I made to turn away but she held me.
"I have not so much patience," she said. "I will have the rice now or your husband shall hear that his wife is not as virtuous as he believes -- or she pretends."
"He believes what is true," I said with anger. "I do not pretend."
"Perhaps he has not seen what I have seen," she said, and there was menace in her voice and threat in the words. "Comings and goings in the twilight, and soft speech, and gifts of milk and honey such as men make to the women they have known."
"Stop," I howled at her, and put my hands to my ears. Thoughts kept hurtling through my head like frenzied squirrels in a new-forged cage. With sudden clarity I recalled my daughter's looks that far-off day when I had gone to Kenny; my son's words: "Such men have power, especially over women"; remembered my own foolish silences. I closed my eyes and sank down. She came and sat by me.
"Which is it to be? Which is it to be?. . ."
Her words were hammering at my brain, the horrible syllables were beating the air around me, the whole place was full of their sound.
I need you, I cried to myself, Nathan, my husband. I cannot take the risk, because there is a risk since she is clever and I am not. In your anger or your jealousy, or even because you are not yourself after these long strained months, you may believe what she says and what she means. Because I have deceived you and cannot deny all she proclaims, you may believe the more. I will kill her first, I thought, and the desire was strong. I felt myself shaking. I raised my hands to my eyes and there was a quivering redness there. Then I heard a cry, whether of bird or child or my own tortured self I do not know, and the redness cleared. I felt the water oozing through my closed eyes, through my closed fingers. I took my hands away, and there was Kunthi waiting by my side with the patience of one who knows what power she wields, patient, like a vulture.
The ration of seven days to Kunthi, and eight already eaten. There is still enough for nine days, I thought, not with comfort but with desolation, and hatred came welling up again for her who had deprived me of the grain, and contempt for myself who had relinquished it.
I waited a long time that night before going out, for fear that Kunthi might be watching. There is nothing she would not do, I thought, lying there in the darkness. I must wait, and walk with care, and return unseen. I will match my wits against hers, I thought cunningly, lying and listening to uneasy slumber about me, and I will yet win; clever though she is, she shall not have all. . . . I rose at last and went out softly, and looked about me, and went quickly to the hole I had dug, and clawed away the earth until I saw the bundle, white under the starlight. I squatted down, crooning silently, untied it, ran my fingers through the grain; and I knew then there was no more than a handful left -- a day's supply, no more, not the nine days' suppy I had looked to find.
My stomach lurched, blood came pounding to my head, I felt myself going dizzy. Who could have known, who had done this to me? I heard a voice moaning and it was mine and the sound was terrifying, for I had not meant to speak. I looked about me wildly, seeking to see even in that darkness. Nothing in sight, not a sound except my own loud heart beats. I dug my nails into my palms, striving for calm, trying to think. Who could have done this? Kunthi? -- but she only knew of the granary, not this other hiding place. My own family? No, I thought with despair, thrusting aside the small core of suspicion each time it formed. Surely not. Who else? Who?
A long time passed; when at last I rose, my limbs were stiff and prickling, and darkness had given way to the first grey beginnings of dawn.
Nathan was not in the hut when I went back: I saw him sitting beside the paddy fields as he often did when he could not sleep. The boys were still asleep, the two older ones side by side, Kuti squeezed close to Ira and she with her arm thrown across him. I shook her by the shoulder, and Kuti woke first and began to cry. I picked him up and took him outside and left him there, and when I went back the others were awake. I looked at the three faces and I thought bitterly. One of them has done this to me. . . . Which one? Which one? I thought, questioning, look
ing at the three faces as if to read their thoughts; but there was nothing to see save alarm; they shrank a little from my vehemence.
"I must know," I shouted. "I must know who has done this thing."
They looked at me as if I had lost my senses. Ira said timidly, "We would not take what belonged to us all."
"Tell me I am imagining the loss," I stormed at her, "or that I myself have eaten it."
They stared at me in silence, amazed. Outside Kuti was bawling. Attracted by his cries, Nathan had come up, now he called to me.
"See to the child," he said frowning. "Can you not hear him? He will choke."
"So much the better," I said. "It will be one mouth less to feed."
"You are ill," he said. "You do not know what you are saying." He picked up the child, soothing him in his arms, and then gave him to Ira.
"My heart is sick," I said. "I have been robbed, and by one of my own children, of rice, which above all things is most precious."
"Is that what you have said to them?"
I nodded. I saw his face wither.
"I took it," he said at last.
"You? My husband? I do not believe it!"
"It is true."
Silence fell like a shroud. I listened to it locked in my own brooding bitterness. Then it was rent by a sound so raw, so painful, that my nerves began screaming in response. I looked up and it was Nathan. His face was working, from his throat came those dry hideous sobs.
"Not for myself," he was muttering, trying to control his treacherous voice, "for another. I took it for another. There was no other way. I hoped you would not notice. I had to do it."
I went to him. I did not want to know any more why he had done it or for whom, it was no longer important; but he was still speaking: it was as if he could not stop.
" Kunthi took it all, I swear it. She forced me, I did not want you to know."
Presently he was quiet.
"She has a strange power, this woman," I said, half to myself.
"Not strange," Nathan said. "I am the father of her sons. She would have told you, and I was weak."
Disbelief first; disillusionment; anger, reproach, pain. To find out, after so many years, in such a cruel way. Kali's words: "She has fire in her body, men burn before and after." My husband was of those men. He had known her not once but twice; he had gone back to give her a second son. And between, how many times, I thought, bleak of spirit, while her husband in his impotence and I in my innocence did nothing.
"It was a long time ago," Nathan said. "I was very young, and she a skilful woman.
"The first time was before our marriage," he said.
"One did not see the evil for the beauty," he said.
At last I made an effort and roused myself.
"It is as you say a long time ago," I said wearily. "That she is evil and powerful I know myself. Let it rest."
It became possible for me to speak as well. I told him of her earlier visit and the grain she had extorted from me also; and it seemed to me that a new peace came to us then, freed at last from the necessity for lies and concealment and deceit, with the fear of betrayal lifted from us, and with the power we ourselves had given her wrested finally from Kunthi.
Now that the last of the rice was gone it was in a sense a relief: no amount of scheming and paring would make it go any further: the last grain had been eaten.
Thereafter we fed on whatever we could find: the soft ripe fruit of the prickly pear; a sweet potato or two, blackened and half-rotten, thrown away by some more prosperous hand; sometimes a crab that Nathan managed to catch near the river. Early and late my sons roamed the countryside, returning with a few bamboo shoots, a stick of sugar cane left in some deserted field, or a piece of coconut picked from the gutter in the town. For these they must have ranged widely, for other farmers and their families, in like plight to ourselves, were also out searching for food; and for every edible plant or root there was a struggle -- a desperate competition that made enemies of friends and put an end to humanity.
It was not enough. Sometimes from sheer rebellion we ate grass, although it always resulted in stomach cramps and violent retching. For hunger is a curious thing: at first it is with you all the time, waking and sleeping and in your dreams, and your belly cries out insistently, and there is a gnawing and a pain as if your very vitals were being devoured, and you must stop it at any cost, and you buy a moment's respite even while you know and fear the sequel. Then the pain is no longer sharp but dull, and this too is with you always, so that you think of food many times a day and each time a terrible sickness assails you, and because you know this you try to avoid the thought, but you cannot, it is with you. Then that too is gone, all pain, all desire, only a great emptiness is left, like the sky, like a well in drought, and it is now that the strength drains from your limbs, and you try to rise and find you cannot, or to swallow water and your throat is powerless, and both the swallow and the effort of retaining the liquid tax you to the uttermost.
"It will not be long before the harvest," Nathan would murmur, and I would agree with him, stifling the query whether our strength would last till then, saying, "Ah yes, not long now; only a little time before the grain is ripe."
It happened to me too, but I could not see myself, only what happened to others: saw their flesh melt away and their skin sag and sink between their jutting bones, saw their eyes retreat into their skulls, saw their ribs curve out from under the skin; and what withered the young bore doubly hard on the old and they were emaciated twice over.
But of us all Kuti suffered the most. He had never been a healthy child; now he was constantly ailing. At first he asked for rice water and cried because there was none, but later he gave up asking and merely cried. Even in his sleep he whimpered, twisting and turning endlessly, permitting no one to rest. Ira was gentlest with him, and tirelessly patient, nursing him in her skinny arms and giving him most of what came to her. But more often than not he turned away, unable to take the rough food we offered, and then she would hold him against her and give him her breast, and he would pull at the parched teat and be soothed, and for a while his thin wailing would die away.
CHAPTER XV
ONE day Raja went out as usual and did not come back. At dusk they brought his body home slung between two men, one at the head and one at the feet. There was a small trickle of blood running from his mouth, fresh and still bright red, and more blood from a cut in his head, dark and congealed here and matting his hair.
They laid him on the ground. They bowed their heads and shuffled their feet and spoke in low voices and then they went away. It was real; yet it seemed a nightmare, it could not be true that my son lay dead before me. Thus my thoughts, dazed and confused, injecting pain where there was numbness; and my mind, furtively touching the edges of realisation, then fleeing from it in terror.
He had been caught, they said; something about money. What had my son to do with money, who had not a pie of his own! He was not very strong, they told me. They merely laid hands on him, and he fell. As if I did not know how thin and brittle he had grown! But why should others lay hands on him? They told me, but the sense of their words escaped. They told me, but
I could not remember. They repeated themselves again and again, but I kept forgetting. I heard Ira begin to sing a low dirge; she was rocking gently back and forth, and she was crying.
"What are you crying for?" I said. "You have little enough strength, without dissolving it in tears."
She looked at me stupidly, and away, and down at her brother. Her sorrow flowed to me; the numbness began to clear. I tried frantically to keep it -- I might as well have tried to imprison a cloud.
For this I have given you birth, my son, that you should lie in the end at my feet with ashes in your face and coldness in your limbs and yourself departed without trace, leaving this huddle of bones and flesh without meaning.
Already I think, the eyes must be closed, though death has glazed them, and I do so; the jaw must be tied, fo
r it is sagging, I put a bandage about it; the body must be washed and I wash it; and Ira comes to help and cleanses the mouth which I have forgotten to do. These things were you, now there is no connection whatever; the sorrow within me is not for this body which has suffered and in suffering has let slip the spirit, but for you, my son.
Nathan prepares the bier, I see him lifting the body on to it. Then he goes out, walking towards the town. At dawn the funeral drums begin, and soon after our friends and neighbours come. Granny first, though hardly able to walk; then Durgan; Kannan with his wife, bearing a few jasmine buds; and Kali, bringing with her a muslin cloth to cover the bier. They pay their respects in silence, and when the sun has risen, the men pick up the bier and depart; but the women stay behind, for this is the custom. All that morning the sound of the drums comes faintly to us, rising and falling, rising and falling with the wind; until at last a final beat comes quivering through the air and we strain our ears for the next, but this, this sound which has already gone, is the last.