Shining Hero

She was not having some terrible dream. This was true. She had had a baby. She had given birth to the Sun God’s child. She was finished now. Truly finished.

She had been worried at first. The things he asked her to do, the things he was doing to her did not seem modest. But he had reassured her. ‘You trust me, don’t you, my dear? You need not be afraid of me.’ He had spoken in his deep and husky voice and it had not come into her mind for a single moment not to trust him, any more than she would have mistrusted her father.

‘Lie like that, there, let me pull up your sari. Now open your legs a little. Good, good, that’s right.’ The doctor had talked to her like that when she had jumped out of the banyan tree, missed the river and sprained her ankle.

‘Are you sure?’ she had whispered and felt dazed with the deliciousness of his nearness, the feel of his skin, the smell of his foreign toilet water.

‘Yes, yes, my sweet. Quite sure. Now close your eyes.’ He had told her, ‘You needn’t worry about anything I do, for after all I am a god, aren’t I?’ Then he had laughed as though he had made a joke. His voice had been very rich and loving.

That evening she had taken down the poster of Arjuna and put up one of the Sun God instead.

He had told her not to worry, to trust him, but all the same she had given birth to his baby and now the young zamindar would not marry her. No one would. She would live lonely and ashamed for the rest of her life. Her parents would feel such shame that they would forbid her to go on living with them. She would not be able to live in the village either, for everyone would know. Koonty had earlier feared that she was dying. Now she was even more afraid of living.

As the water surged round her clothes and legs, carrying the blood away, she crouched numbly, gazed at the baby and felt chills of terror running through her. Her mother might have heard her earlier cries and at any moment come here to find her. She listened, her heart cracking against her ribs, for the sound of Boodi Ayah’s bare feet, Boodi sent to look for her.

‘The queen so pleased a rishi that he gave her a mantra which would evoke any god she wanted who would then, by his grace, produce in her a child.’ Koonty remembered that verse from the Mahabharata. She understood. She had pleased some rishi and her life was now destroyed because of it.

The baby began to let out little mewing cries and she hastily picked it up, the umbilical cord trailing, and tried to silence it. Its skin felt soft as silk. Softer than the Sun God’s skin. She pressed her knuckle against its mouth and at once, like the grip of a leech, its lips began sucking.

But after a moment it let go of the knuckle and began mewling again. She held it closer to her body and the baby started writhing. Her breasts had become tight and were spilling milk. She could feel it running warm down her ribs, over the place where her heart kept so loudly pounding.

To silence the baby, to stop the sound that would at any moment betray her, she pulled back her choli and held the child close. In a moment the baby had clamped upon the nipple and the only sound was a high-pitched grunt at every suck.

‘Hello, Baby God,’ she whispered, then pressing her face against the top of the head felt the soft fluff of newborn hair against her lips.

After a while the baby fell asleep. Koonty could not move. Her body was raw. Her legs felt weak. She sat there, the baby in her arms, and did not know what to do next, while the rose-ringed parakeets swooped among the trees, screaming. One extra loud bird cry startled the baby. It opened its eyes and Koonty saw that they were the colour of honey.

After that, sometimes the baby slept and sometimes fed but Koonty did not know what to do.

Night fell suddenly, the sun extinguished in a few fiery minutes. The bats came out. Fireflies began to dance among the silhouettes of trees. Behind her the lights came on in the Hatibari. She began to hear people calling her from the house. Never before had she stayed here after dark. Footsteps running over the paths. People calling, calling.

She held the baby tightly to her body, kept quite still and waited. She did not know what to do.

Her mother and Boodi Ayah were coming closer, shouting, ‘Koonty, Koonty, Koonty.’ Her mother was saying, ‘Sometimes she goes down there by the river, but she surely wouldn’t be there now, in the dark, when you have no idea who might be on the water.’

The household had been so absorbed in the news they had heard on the radio that they had not realised that Koonty was still outside. There was a fear of all-out war with Pakistan who had, that day, made an illegal military attempt to grab the Indian state of Kashmir. But now the worry about Koonty had made them forget about war and rush panicking around the estate, searching for the missing daughter.

Their voices came closer and Koonty gripped the child and felt dazed with fear. Then they began to move off again, their voices growing distant. ‘Perhaps she’s in the rose garden. Go and look there, Boodi.’

A little later, hurricane lamps and men’s voices. Her mother talking too loudly because she was afraid. ‘The only place left is the river. I am terrified that she has fallen in. Even though she can swim, this river is deceptive. The current can be very strong even for a healthy girl.’

The voice of the young zamindar. ‘Give me the lamp. I will go and look there.’ Her husband-to-be coming to where she sat with the Sun God’s baby in her lap. She could see, reflected in the river water, the swinging light approaching.

‘Koonty, Koonty,’ called the young man who was to marry her. He was getting very close. She could tell them that she had found the baby at the river’s edge. She could tell them it was a villager’s baby and she was only holding it for a moment. He was quite near now. At any moment he would see her sitting here. She could hear his panting breath. She could see his face gleaming in the lamplight. The young zamindar found her there, standing knee-deep in the river.

‘Why are you crying, Koonty? What’s the matter?’ Pandu kept asking her as he helped her back to the house. ‘You are shivering all over and wet from head to toe. Whatever have you been doing all this time? We have all been worried sick about you.’ He tried to hug her but she shook his arms off. ‘Come on, Miss Koonty,’ he whispered. ‘Tell your Pandu what’s the matter.’

After a while, when she only wept and would not speak he became angry. ‘You are hiding something. It’s those village boys, isn’t it? I heard them shouting. Have you been talking to them? I should have listened to your mother. She always said it was not proper for you to be roaming round the estate without a chaperone. She always said you’d turn out like your sister.’ All the way back to the Hatibari and even after they got inside, he kept on, sometimes trying to console her incomprehensible grief, sometimes raging against the suspected deception or infidelity. ‘You are going to be my wife. You should have some consideration. Don’t cry, my sweet. Here, wipe your face on the corner of my shawl.’

Later he told her mother, ‘She was trying to rescue a kitten, I think, though I can’t get her to talk about it.’ He felt he was doing well, impressing the mother with what an understanding husband he was going to be. ‘I heard something. A sound of mewing in the water.’

‘She was always very kind to animals,’ said Koonty’s mother and secretly thought that perhaps the zamindar’s family would be satisfied with a smaller dowry, now that they had discovered what a compassionate bride they were getting. ‘She would sacrifice herself for some small creature.’

Later the young zamindar presented Koonty with a kitten, but at the sight of the furry mewling thing she began to cry and thrust it from her. ‘Take it away. I don’t even want to look at it.’

2 A LITTLE SUIT OF SHINING ARMOUR

Bowed with drops of toil and languor, low, a chariot driver came, Loosely held his scanty garment and a staff upheld his frame. Karna now a crowned monarch to the humble Suta fled, As a son unto a father reverentially bowed his head.

The Emperor Aurangzeb suffered from a carbuncle until an East India Company official called Job Charnock found a physician who managed to cure it. As a reward, Job was granted a tract of land eighty miles up the Hoogly river by the Nawab of Bengal and there he founded the city of Calcutta.

By the end of the eighteenth century Calcutta was the capital of the East India Company’s government, with an opulent and lively social life and opportunities for making a quick fortune for a lucky few. To this day, throughout the town, grand Western-style buildings, now crumbling, point back to its imperial past.

Dolly, her impoverished parents’ eleventh child, was born in the house where once William Hickey had dined with his face covered with blood, because he had become ‘sadly intoxicated’ at a previous get-together and had fallen while dismounting from his phaeton.

At the time of Dolly’s birth, more than a hundred families were living in considerable squalor and poverty in Hickey’s one-time grand residence. But because the new baby was born in the year of India’s independence her parents said, ‘Perhaps the goddess is going to bless us at last even though this is only a female child.’ For this reason, when she was old enough, they sent Dolly to the local school although their other daughters had never been give such an opportunity.

Each evening Dolly would come home and as she helped her mother pick through the rice for stones or roll the chupatties she would chatter joyfully about the things she had learnt that day. ‘We did fractions,’ she would announce, as she crushed the spices on the great thick slab of stone. Splashing water from the brass jar onto the seeds and pods and barks, she would heave the heavy stone roller over the top. Rolling, splashing, crushing she would tell her mother, ‘Did you know that the Moguls ruled India before the British and that this is the first time for ages that we Indians have been free?’ Or, as she stirred the great pan of simmering milk, keeping the iron spoon going to stop the milk boiling over or burning at the bottom, she would tell her mother about trade winds, or magnetism.

Sometimes the father would say worriedly, ‘Do you think all this education is spoiling her? Perhaps she is getting too much of it and won’t be able to find a husband.’

‘She is not neglecting her domestic duties,’ said the mother.

Later, after her parents and her ten siblings slept, Dolly sat by the light of a kerosene lamp and did her homework. She was determined to do well. She planned one day to live in a proper house, not a room in the bustee. If she passed her exams and got a good job, when she was grown up her children would have a bed each and they would eat mutton curry every day. Sometimes one of the babies would wake and cry, disturbing her. Then she would take it on her knee and joggle it on one arm while going on with her writing.

‘My teacher says I will certainly get into university. He is sure I will get a scholarship,’ she told her parents.

Her father’s face was stern, her mother’s anxious. ‘What? What?’ cried Dolly, suddenly afraid.

‘All this education is not needed for a woman,’ said her father.

‘There are better things for a woman to do with her life than to study,’ said her mother.

They had found Dolly a husband.

‘But I don’t want a husband,’ wailed the girl. ‘I am only thirteen. I’m too young to get married.’

‘I was married at ten,’ said her mother.

Dolly pinched lips and refrained from saying, ‘I don’t want my life to be like yours.’ Instead she said, ‘Baba, Ma, please. I am doing so well at school and if I get into university I will get a good job. I will become a teacher, maybe.’

‘How long will this take?’ asked her father.

‘Four years. Five years.’ Dolly was shivering.

‘We cannot go on feeding so many,’ said Dolly’s father. ‘We cannot spend all this on one when there are so many others who have a need. Anyway you are only a girl and the money must be spent on the boys.’

‘I could earn some money from teaching now, maybe,’ pleaded Dolly.

‘Teach who? In this village?’ Her father was scornful. ‘Who can afford to pay a young ignorant girl to teach them? Anyway there is a school that costs nothing already. And after you have finished university you will be too old for marriage.’

‘You can go on studying after you are married. There will be nothing to stop you then. You will be living in a company compound with all kinds of facilities. There will be many opportunities open to you there,’ her mother consoled her. ‘As it is we have to make a great sacrifice for your marriage. There is the big expense of the wedding feast and also the dowry. A large amount of our savings will have to be spent.’

Cheered by the thought of going on with her schooling after marriage, and eventually going to university after all, Dolly agreed.

The young bridegroom, Adhiratha, was twenty-seven years old and a company car driver. ‘He even has a pension,’ her father told Dolly. ‘You are very lucky for you will be provided for all your life. Even after he retires. You will not be poor when you are old like your mother and me.’

‘In fact we need a daughter with such a husband or how will we survive in our old age?’ said Dolly’s mother.

Dolly laughed at the thought of caring for her parents, not being able to imagine such a role reversal.

‘He is everything nice,’ said Dolly’s mother, showing her daughter a photo of Adhiratha. She was happy to see the girl smiling again.

The picture showed a pleasant-looking young man with a thin face, a large moustache and glasses.

‘He looks clever,’ said Dolly. She was quite excited now, longing to meet the man, with whom she thought she had fallen in love already. As a Hindu wife-to-be, and therefore required to respect the husband, as was the tradition she did not use his name even in her mind.

‘He has a sensitive face,’ she thought and the ‘He’ to which she referred was now the central person of her life. All other ‘he’s’ she thought, must go by some other name from this day on.

Adhiratha looked like the kind of person who would appreciate education and Dolly visualised the two of them discussing books together, or even both attending night school. After all he would not be wearing glasses if he was not an intellectual.

If Dolly had known then the real reason for the glasses, would her parents have continued to insist on the marriage? Would Dolly have felt afraid?

Dolly fell wildly in love with Adhiratha the moment she set eyes on him.

‘How glad I am,’ she thought after their wedding, as they sat together in a proper electric-lit room to eat their meal. The company bungalow was a pukka stone and mortar affair with running water and glass in the windows.

They could not stop smiling at each other across the table. Sometimes before the meal was eaten, with only a smile for a signal, the two of them would leap up, overturning chairs, spilling misti and rush for their bed with its new sheet and dunlopillo mattress that had been kept wrapped in its cellophane for protection.

In bed they would lie naked, sweating under the slow turning fan, and explore each other’s beautiful bodies all over again. Adhiratha would bury his face in Dolly’s thick black hair that smelled of the spices she had been cooking. He would kiss the softness of her neck and whisper, ‘I love you, Dolly, I love you Dolly, I love you Dolly.’

He went to work each day wearing his smart chauffeur cap and a pristine white uniform with the company logo embroidered on the pocket that had been lovingly starched and pressed by his little new wife.

After he had gone Dolly would sing as she dusted her house, washed up the dishes, and swept her yard. She remembered how she had quarrelled with her parents when they had tried to arrange her marriage but now she was so happy. Her heart sang with joy because she loved Adhiratha so much and because everything she wanted in the world had been given to her. A hundred times a day, as she swept and polished their bungalow and made special delicious things for her husband’s evening meal, Dolly would say to herself, ‘How lucky my parents insisted I got married to Adhiratha.’ They even had a little garden and Dolly would pick hibiscus, zinnias and canna lilies and arrange them in a jug, then blush with delight when Adhiratha came home and praised her artistry.

Dolly was invited to continue her education at the company school and when term began, each day she would walk across the compound to her class, crossing shady yards, under trees planted by the company, past beds of flowers. There she revelled in the company of girls of her own age and she and her friends would sometimes get a chance to go to the bioscope, then later imitate the accents and behaviour of Ashok Kumar, or swank around pretending to be Meena Kumari.

But no matter how much studying she did, nor how much fun she had with her friends in the day, when Adhiratha got home in the evening she was always there, ready with his evening meal. Her mother had taught her to cook. Her chupatties puffed out like footballs, her parathas were as thin and fine as silk, her kheers and paish the best on the company compound. When Adhiratha invited fellow workers to a meal they would marvel that so young a wife should turn out to be such a marvellous cook. Pulling her sari over her head in deference, she would serve out the food for them, while the young men teased her until she blushed. ‘Hey, Dolly, those chupatties will float up like balloons if you make them any lighter.’ ‘Hey, Dolly. I think I will throw away my own wife and take you home with me instead so that I can eat sag like you make every day.’

‘No you won’t, you swine,’ Adhiratha would josh back. ‘She’s mine. She’s the best thing in my life and I’m not giving her up for anyone.’

‘But when are you starting the baby?’ Dolly’s mother kept asking and patted Dolly’s stomach, which sounded hollowly empty.

‘We are waiting for a year. Till I take my exams,’ Dolly told her parents.

‘How modern,’ said the father. ‘Let us hope that the gods will not take offence.’

‘What do you mean?’ Dolly was startled.

‘They give us children when they decide. It is not up to you to make such decisions.’ He spoke fiercely. ‘Exams are not an excuse for delaying children.’

‘Oh, Baba, you don’t know anything,’ laughed the modern Dolly, amused by her parents’ silly superstitious and old-fashioned attitudes. ‘These days women don’t just have to fill the house with babies like they did when you and Ma were young.’

‘But why take such risks?’ said the mother, trying to soothe the situation. ‘What difference will it make? Have the baby and when it comes, God will look after you. And look after the baby.’

‘I plan to look after my baby, myself,’ said the blasphemous, proud Dolly.

Soon after their marriage it was the time of the Durga Puja.

Goddess Durga is the giver of rice. She is the mother. But she is also yellow and terrible. She is Devi, one of the female aspects of the Absolute, that infinite, inert and creative Silence. Her serene and aloof expression does not change as she slays the demon who is trying to destroy the world. She shows no trace of rage or emotion because, for her, the deed, the Cosmos and her self are only illusions, only parts of the Cosmic dream. She rides a lion, holds weapons in her many arms, is cool as a dream and calm as an untroubled river. She is the inaccessible, the inevitable, for she knows that all this is an illusion. All this is Maya. And Durga is responsible for the illusion, she is the illusion and she is only playing at creation. Creation is the play of the gods, nothing to be really taken seriously. That is what her calm face says.

Each year great images are made of her all over Bengal. Wood armatures fifteen feet high are wrapped with straw, then covered with clay, which is modelled into the smallest detail. Lips rich with scarlet gloss, eyelids dark with lamp khol, fingernails manicured with crimson lacquer, her tiny waist belted in gold, her human hair glossed with resin. Her tinsel-trimmed sari glitters and her cut-glass jewels sparkle.

The puja lasts for four days, during which the images, which have taken so many months to sculpt, are worshipped by the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate, who present the goddesses with flowers, fruit, garlands and sweets. For Durga is very powerful and has it in her power to grant life to the dying, health to the sick, children to the infertile and husbands to the hideous. There is no one so rich and privileged that they never need her help.

There was much competition, at Durga Puja, among neighbourhoods and companies, but year after year Adhiratha’s employers always came out with the most beautiful image of the goddess and the most impressive shrine. The company shrine was an exact replica of a Hindu temple and as large. It was made of cotton material stretched over a bamboo frame which in the dark glowed with the light of a thousand multi-coloured electric bulbs. It was painted so realistically that people who saw it from a distance thought a new temple of brick and stone had sprung up overnight.

On the first Durga Puja after her marriage, Dolly made a dish of the milky sweets called shandesh. They were the shape of little fishes and she decorated them with foil of purest gold. When they were ready she put on her best sari and decorated her forehead with scarlet kumkum, then she walked across the compound to the shrine. There, many other people were making offerings to Durga. Some were prostrate on the ground before the goddess. Even the directors of this company had come with gifts for their goddess, for the company was thriving.

Dolly put the plate at the feet of the austere towering image, then, placing her palms together, knelt and bowed till her head touched the ground and said, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’

After the period of worship was over, Adhiratha was one of those given the honour of carrying the goddess to the holy river, where she would be ritually immersed. People cried out Durga’s praises as the gigantic figure, with her calm face and ornate attire, was jogged along the roads. Some people ran ahead of the procession and threw themselves in the goddess’s path as though she was the Juggernaut and they wished to be crushed to death by her.

At the river other Durgas were arriving, though none as large and lovely as that which Dolly’s new young husband and the other men were carrying.

The company had two long boats waiting, boards lashed between them to form a platform for the statue. It was hauled onto this, then held in place and steadied with poles and ropes.

Dolly and Adhiratha stood on the bank watching while the boat was punted to the centre of the river which was already bobbing with a hundred little boats and rafts carrying Durgas of every size.

There, with the lookers-on ululating and shouting holy praises, the goddess was tipped into the river. As she sank, people scooped up handfuls of water, that had become further blessed by contact with the deity, and threw it over their heads. And as the goddess disappeared from sight, men filled their mouths with petrol and, setting fire to it with cigarette lighters, blew great arcs of flame over the water.

Firecrackers were hurled from the banks and bridges. Little clay lamps burning oil were set bobbing away on the water like luminous ducklings. For a while the whole bubbling river was spattered with bursts and crackles of fire and the wild cries of the people calling out to the vanishing goddess.

Dolly took her exams and did well. She had been married for a year. In the evening when Adhiratha got home he told her, ‘They have promoted me. I am to become head driver and will get a raise of a hundred and fifty rupees a month.’

Dolly put her arms round him and hugged. She felt so happy she could not speak. Then she whispered something.