In a universe that was perceived as inherently divine, where sacred animals munched sacred plants in groves of sacred trees, where holy rivers spilled from the laps of mountains that were gods, to nurture life was a lovely and important thing. Kudra enjoyed taking care of babies, and the notion of making babies excited her in some vague, itchy way. At age eight, she already was versed in the art of baking flat bread, and she was fast learning the secrets of the curry pot, with its fury and perfume. Her true delight, however, came in the hours when necessity called her out of the kitchen and into the workshop, to assist in one way or another with the manufacture or marketing of incense. She liked mixing gums and balsams more than she liked mixing rice and lentils, she liked rasping sandalwood more than she liked mending clothes. She did not consider why. As she grew older and the incense trade grew alongside her, she began to spend as much time in the business as in the household, and it never occurred to her that a conflict might be sprouting, like one of the ritual barley seeds, in the moist soil of her heart.
When Kudra was twelve, she and her brother accompanied their father on an ambitious business trip. It was a journey of nearly four months, during which Calcutta, Delhi, Benares, and many smaller towns were visited in an attempt to crack Buddhist markets, for the Buddhists had begun to use incense in a greater volume than the Hindus along the Ganges. The trip left the girl gaga, goofy, tainted, transformed, her nose a busted hymen through which sperm of a thousand colors swam a hootchy-kootchy stroke into her cerebral lagoon. Now, whenever she smelled the gums, the balsams, and the special aromatics that arrived with merchants from afar, her head reeled with images of temples, shrines, palaces, fortresses, mysterious walls, tapestries, paintings, jewels, liquors, icons, drugs, dyes, meats, sweets, sweetmeats, silks, bolts and bolts of cotton cloth, ores, shiny metals, foodstuffs, spices, musical instruments, ivory daggers and ivory dolls, masks, bells, carvings, statues (ten times as tall as she!), lumber, leopards on leashes, peacocks, monkeys, white elephants with tattooed ears, horses, camels, princes, maharajah, conquerors, travelers (Turks with threatening mustaches and Greeks with skin as pale as the stranger who had befriended her at the funeral grounds), singers, fakirs, magicians, acrobats, prophets, scholars, monks, madmen, sages, saints, mystics, dreamers, prostitutes, dancers, fanatics, avatars, poets, thieves, warriors, snake charmers, pageants, parades, rituals, executions, weddings, seductions, concerts, new religions, strange philosophies, fevers, diseases, splendors and magnificences and things too fearsome to be recounted, all writhing, cascading, jumbling, mixing, splashing, and spinning; vast, complex, inexhaustible, forever.
It was then that she realized that it was the odor of the incense that had intrigued her all along, only now the smells filled in the fantasies that heretofore had been mere outlines, smeary contours scrawled in ghost chalk. Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere — the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.
The day of Kudra's fifteenth natal anniversary began like any other, with a predawn bath in the river, followed by prayers to Kali and an offering of clarified butter in the courtyard cookfire. By first light, she had served breakfast to her father, brother, and one-legged uncle and was already washing the curds that would be the principal dish at the noontide meal. She was bent over the curd jars when, from the workshop, her father called for her, just as she hoped he would.
“Honored father.” She bowed to him, searching out of the corner of her eye for some fresh basket of bosmellia bark, opopanox resin, nutmeg, or patchouli, for she had heard unfamiliar voices in the shop and suspected there had been a delivery. Nothing new was in evidence, but that was all right, she'd be content just to shave some sandalwood chips as she had several days before. The coarse-grained sandalwood was so tough it made her arms ache to chip it, but with each laborious push of the rasp, it propelled a zephyr of warm, clean, forest air past her nose, an invisible vapor that sang to her of the pad of the tiger's paw upon dry leaves, upon fallen parrot nests and dark Madras moss.
“Kudra,” said her father, “I have good news. Praise Shiva.”
Another merchandising trip, perhaps? Her imagination galloped about the room astride a sandalwood broom.
“The parents of a respectable man were just here. We have arranged for you to marry him, come the monsoons. Praise Shiva.”
The broom crashed to the hard clay floor. Kudra began to cry. Her tears did not upset her father. He had expected them to flow. Every Hindu girl wept and wailed about her marriage, from its announcement through the wedding and into the honeymoon. It was fitting that a bride-to-be weep. Marriage meant that she must leave her father's home to live with her husband's family, who would treat her like a servant if she was lucky, like monkey shit if she was not. It was the way life was. Kudra's mother had bawled. Now it was Kudra's turn. Tradition and continuity were the flours from which the social loaf was baked; feeding the culture, pleasing the gods.
“Father, I am not ready. .” blubbered Kudra.
“Eh? Of course, you are ready. If you were not thinking about catching a husband, why would you fix yourself up in this way? Praise Shiva.”
The incense merchant was referring to the crimson lac with which she had began to fresco her heavy eyelids, the sandalwood paste that she finger-painted over her body in sinuous designs, the jasmine-scented unguents that these days lent her cheeks the glow of butter lamps at dawn. How could she make him understand that what appealed to her was the aroma of these substances, that what she sought to catch was not a man but the strange and wondrous images that the aromas conjured?
Teardrops spurted. “I–I—I want to work with you, I–I want to work here with you.” Teardrops spewed.
That hit her father where he lived. The fact was, Kudra was better help than her brother, better than her gimpy uncle, certainly better than the lazy Sudra laborers whom he had started to employ. She was diligent and cheerful, and she had a feeling for the incense, not just an enthusiasm but a rapport. It was partly on her account that his business was prospering. Still, she was a girl, and everybody knew that girls were hotter than mongooses and certain to lose their virginity at the faintest hint of an opportunity. The way this one's breasts were inflating, the way her eyes had popped when she got a look at the erotic friezes at Khujaras, it was only wise to bind her to a husband before disaster struck.
“Do not worry, my little patchouli drop. Your betrothed's family has a very fine business, praise Shiva, and is said to be shorthanded in the shop.”
That proved to be the case. But her husband's family did not make incense. It made rope.
Rope. The gods have a great sense of humor, don't they? If you lack the iron and the fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. The dull and prosaic will be granted adventures that will dice their central nervous systems like an onion, romantic dreamers will end up in the rope yard. You may protest that it is too much to ask of an uneducated fifteen-year-old girl that she defy her family, her society, her weighty cultural and religious heritage in order to pursue a dream that she doesn't really understand. Of course it is asking too much. The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.