~Prawin Adhikari~
A child’s green shoe in the thorny shadows of a cactus hedge—wet, small, pitiably lonely without its pair—accused Janaki of slaughter. She crouched to hide from the world, but the wind caught her scent and blew it to the house where her husband laughed with his second wife. An angry afternoon sun boiled the sweat on her skin and the blood in her head, the veins in her eyes. The green shoe became a mortal enemy.
Sita, second wife of Janaki’s husband Ramji, saved a cob of roasted maize for Kush. Ramji slept on a straw mat under a mango tree before his threshold and dreamed of getting old, a lavish dying with his kinsmen watching in admiration. He had a son after all, large eyed and colored like a fierce rain cloud—the complexion of Krishnaji himself, who would perform the cremation rites to ensure a place in heaven for his parents.
A fortnight ago, Ramji had returned with three bundles of clothes. Janaki had stood awkward and defensive on the threshold, framed by the low door. Ramji felt he was invading Janaki’s home, as if he were a guest in his father’s house. But Kush galloped into the yard, a bamboo stick for his steed, and Ramji saw Janaki shrink away from the familial tableau. Sita found her husband hesitant, fidgeting in the yard, but Janaki dutifully reached for the bundle that Sita carried, and brought the bride home through the threshold. From the shadow of the cactus, Ramji appeared to Janaki pinned numerously, sitting peacefully under a mango tree, meshed in fleshy thorns, but there was no pain when Ramji laughed and called at Sita, his eyes filled with the sensuous back and hair of a prettier wife from the city.
The scent of corn roasting in an open hearth wafted out. An afternoon haze toyed with the senses. The corn that Janaki remembered was too burnt to serve to her husband, and too burnt to set aside for her husband’s favorite wife, but still a pleasure to a pair of large eyes and a mouthful of milk teeth that crept to her. Smoke from the hearth had stung her eyes and driven away the bee that frequented a flask where she kept all the sweetness that she possessed. Thinking of molasses reminded Janaki of her barrenness, and how little she knew of pleasing a child. This realization filled her throat with such urgency that it became a lifetime of penance in motherhood, her eyes filled with a mother’s love for Kush, and she gasped for breath, as a mother’s capacity for love suffocated her. Janaki wondered if Sita knew where she hid the wooden flask filled with Kush’s favorite treat.
“Don’t go out without your shoes,” Sita often cried after Kush as he bounded out at his father’s heels, to make late evening trips around the village, to men with who his father had raided mango orchards and flown kites. Janaki feared the lone shoe delicately caressed by the sun. Beads of sweat trickled down her face—those that entered her mouth were salty like life and its dull fullness, but those that entered her eyes were caustic accusations, prodding her to weaken. She clenched her jaws hard. The earth was too eager to swallow her, the sun too eager to melt her, for only moments ago the sun and the earth had conspired a triumphant conquest—swallowing, flooding, blinding—but she could give herself only in drops and not in a sudden flood. Floods are treacherous—they are too arrogant and indiscriminant to plead to, sweeping off everything in sight. A broken lifeless gray trunk, never initiated to a lovers’ embrace or a child’s play, is just as indifferently carried away by the foamy crests as are flesh dolls clothed in an eternity of motherly yearning.
“Don’t lose your shoes,” Sita chided Kush often, for the child forgot his shoes, just as he forgot that Janaki wasn’t his mother. He forgot everything and found his sunlit world wherever and whenever he found mirth. On Janaki’s back that hadn’t been touched by a man in twelve years, on her throat where no man whispered his love, Kush was doubly blessed with a second mother, the source of all sweetness in his perpetually sunlit world. Janaki clasped the little green shoe to her chest, nestled it against her berated breast, but no flood of love came over her. The enemy couldn’t be won over with motherly love.
Sita walked out with a cob of roasted corn for her husband, with cumin, rock salt, and dried chili ground together, a wife triumphant because her husband also had another wife who hadn’t had her good fortune—a husband’s lust and auspice to her claim, a son an avatar of Krishnaji himself, a delightful bundle of mischief. Janaki sank to the ground like an animal upon seeing Sita. A mother killed another. A mother had given birth to another, one innocent afternoon like this, but then the green shoe hadn’t lost its pair. Janaki touched the bow on the shoe—it had been tied by Sita—she disapproved of Janaki’s way of tying the laces.
Warm earth sank Janaki’s ankles; cactus thorns scratched her arm. A dry line on her skin turned red, little beads of blood glistened in a row. Ramji closed his eyes and filled his heart with the laughter of his son and the smell of his wife, and dreamed of his son’s initiation rites to be held in a few days. Ramji’s son, the villagers would proudly declare, was an image of Krishnaji himself. And would grow up to be no less illustrious, he would add immodestly. Sita’s brother would do his duty as the maternal uncle and chase after Kush once the priest told him to head towards Benares for education. “I will find you a teacher, nephew,” he would say before leading the child to have his head shaved. A father’s duty would be fulfilled—Kush would be a man in a world of men. How anxiously Ramji’s mother had waited for a son when Janaki had failed to conceive. Even after merely two months of marriage, Ramji’s mother had sent Janaki off on pilgrimages to the abodes of local goddesses. But that was twelve years ago, and Ramji was seventeen then. The shade of a mango tree became dark like the night after his mother’s death when he decided to leave his wife of six months and go off to the city, simply because it had been too awkward for a young lad to talk to his equally immature wife after such an enormous grief, forced together to share a fate and a bed, given the task of creating life, in the mundane everyday. Sita was an accident into Ramji’s life, but now she was the mother of his child.
Sita sat beside her husband and rubbed her feet with warm mustard oil. Ramji admired the sheen of golden light on her firm calves, the smell of roasted mustard oil and the briskness of Sita’s hands, but Janaki sobbed behind a cactus bush. That hearth where Sita made a fire and that house she filled with the smell of her city airs were Janaki’s world, wrenched away from her in exchange for a fortnight of playing mother in painful installments. Even through the nights when she lied on a mat outside her room with Kush clasped to her chest, listening to her husband who would not speak a word to her, whisper endlessly into Sita’s ears, Janaki felt nothing but love, endless love like the night’s song dripping softly from the mango leaves, endless like the waiting for dawn.
I smell of animals and grass and the earth, and your mother smells of the city, she once teased Kush because a sense of over indulgence immediately pounced upon her. But you smell of milk and my other mother smells of soap, he had replied, licking his palms, relishing the dark thick drops of molasses she dripped on his palm, once playfully on his nose, soliciting such laughter that she felt like a full vessel of life. Don’t bother me, your mother will be worried about you, Janaki had told Kush before heading off to the maize field by the river after the morning meal. I want to pick berries. Kush buried his face into her womb, clasping her dhoti with his sticky sweet palms. I will keep the birds away. I will pick stones to kill birds that steal our maize. On the way to the field, under a peepul tree smeared in vermillion, which reminded Janaki of life and therefore death and then afterlife, Janaki looked distrustfully at Kush and asked, “Will you cremate me when I die?” The child, not understanding death, frowned in apprehension. “Will you carry me to the cremation grounds?” she asked again. The pleasure of playing a mother was biting into her heart, becoming a habit. The child had cried, for the stones were painted red, glaring red, the trunk of the holy tree was knotted with worries and confessions and absolutions of sinners—a picture of the world that was too large for the child’s mind, and for once without sunlight.
Sita caught Janaki’s eyes when she stood up to walk into the house. Two wives, two mothers—each searched the other’s face. Ramji was still dreaming of his son and his wife when he remembered that he had two. Thinking of Janaki made him uneasy. In his discomfort Ramji did not realize that Sita had dropped her saucer of mustard oil. A hungry earth soaked up the spilled oil, but the air did not stir a single leaf on a thorn-berry bush by a maize field, littered with half eaten berries—arrogant declarations of a conqueror who would not return.
(Source : Suskera.com )
