Poor Rati! Her life was such a dark affair. Born of rich parents, she had hardly known what it was to do manual work. The prettiest among her sisters, she was the most loved in the family. Now her parents were dead, and her brother had never as much as written a card to her. Here, a slave of Beti, a casual wife of a husband with a mistress, her existence was worse than anything she had ever heard or known in all her town. Of what use was all the money her husband had? What for? She had to patch her sari almost every week, and she wore silver bangles instead of the gold ones she had in childhood. There was nothing to hope for, nothing to ask. She had even hung a coconut in Maruthi’s temple, with vows and prayers that her husband might turn kinder to her. But nothing had so far happened, nothing. Once or twice she had ideas of suicide, but it frightened her. To live alone like this was more comfortable. She bit her lips and determined she would live alone. One day her husband would turn back and come to her. If not, well, one has just to live — like Beti.
For some years, the ‘goddess’, as they call the epidemic of plague, used to make annual visits to Hyderpur. October or November would announce her, and processions of corpses would go every day in the streets, till the hot sun of March would fight a battle with her and dethrone her for the moment. During the time the goddess reigned, half the city would be empty. The whole countryside would be filled with little bamboo huts, where people retired for fear of being the chosen ones. Only the medical men, the big sahibs with their spacious and clean bungalows, the Banias and the crippled and the starving would stay in their haunted homes. From the time the sun beamed forth in the morning till he speedily sank away by the evening, the whole town would be busy. They said the goddess could work only at night. The camps would be practically empty except for the mothers and the aged. Then, hardly would the dusk throw her torn blanket over the town than the street would be a desert again. The dogs too had lessened in number. Now and again, however, a car rushed past as though in holy fear that the goddess might peep through it even for a moment, or a crowd of people would be seen following a corpse with shrieking and hell-moving cries. Only the stars hung in the sky full of purity and strength. They alone seemed to know life was eternal.
There was another place where life was unchanging. It was at the little gram shop. There everything went on as usual. And as many grain and grocery merchants had died in the city, the prices had gone up and Beti naturally profited by it. One sold milk at eight pice a pau instead of at six. Even rice had increased in price. In one month they had earned one and a half times what they made in such other seasons. Beti sat in her seat on the gram platform as though the goddess herself would be whisked away with her little fly-duster.
But it was not to be. The goddess had left them safe for two years, and now she was not going to let them go without her ransom. One night Rati had a maddening fever. Of course there was no doubt, it was plague. The next morning the municipal servant came and cleaned the house with tar and burned sulphur in the rat holes. At eleven the Municipal Inspector came and asked Beti to send her daughter-in-law to the Isolation Hospital. No, she would not go. Rati when asked began to weep. She would rather die in that house than in a hospital. The idea of the hospital horrified her. All that they did there, nobody knew. They cut you, pierced your flesh and did a million unholy things. Death were better. But by some strange power that Rati had developed, death seemed nothing to her. Not that it did not matter. But that it would not touch her. It would not. The will in her seemed stronger than any death. She knew she could not die. . But on the second day the fever increased. The bubo under the arm became bigger. And she was unconscious half of the time. But when she was awake she seemed so confident of her life that even the visiting doctor, who had been sent by the Plague Defence Committee, was struck by the fearlessness and confidence she showed. She had assured him she would not die. The goddess would not take her away.
It was the third day. Ananda, who had come to town to get some warm clothes from the deserted house, naturally went to see Beti and have his pice-worth of gram. Rati lay unconscious by the grocery, her eyes full of stagnant tears, her body stiff and uncovered, one hand upon her heaving breasts and the other upon the floor, her mouth wide open, with a crowd of buzzing flies, some that went in, some that flew around, and some that sat upon her palpitating nostrils, and amidst all this she moaned forth, raucous and breathless, ‘Mother, mother, mai. . Mai. . My mother, mai..’
Need it be said, Rati died the fourth day towards dawn and was burnt that very afternoon. She was gone. Her will seemed brittle before the fire that consumed her. Death was the victor.
Years later, when Ananda came back from the north, he passed by his favourite gram shop. It was still so familiar to him. Only they said Beti had died a few months ago of old age, and it was Venku who sat on the gram platform. Buying the usual pice-worth of gram, he gave a few grains to the parrot, that had survived all. ‘Mithu! Mithu!’ ‘Ram Ram. . Babu Ram. .’ ‘Pyari Mithu!’ ‘Ram Ram. . Babu Ram. . ’ In the street the dust rose — and fell.
JAVNI
Caste and caste and caste, you say,
What caste, pray, has he who knows God?
I had just arrived. My sister sat by me, talking to me about a thousand things — about my health, my studies, my future, about Mysore, about my younger sister — and I lay sipping the hot, hot coffee that seemed almost like nectar after a ten-mile cycle ride on one of those bare, dusty roads of Malkad. I half listened to her and half drowsed away, feeling comfort and freedom after nine wild months in a city. And when I finished my coffee, I asked my sister to go and get another cup; for I really felt like being alone, and also I wanted some more of that invigorating drink. When my sister was gone, I lay on the mat, flat on my face with my hands stretched at my sides. It seemed to me I was carried away by a flood of some sort, caressing, feathery and quiet. I slept. Suddenly, as if in a dream, I heard a door behind me creaking. But I did not move. The door did not open completely, and somebody seemed to be standing by the threshold afraid to come in. ‘Perhaps a neighbour,’ I said to myself vaguely, and in my drowsiness I muttered something, stretched out my hands, kicked my feet against the floor and slowly moved my head from one side to the other. The door creaked a little again, and the figure seemed to recede. ‘Lost!’ I said to myself. Perhaps I had sent a neighbour away. I was a little pained. But some deeper instinct told me that the figure was still there. Outside the carts rumbled over the paved street, and some crows cawed across the roof. A few sunbeams stealing through the tiles fell upon my back. I felt happy.