So it was rope for Kudra. Rope drab in color, rope harsh in texture, rope utilitarian in design, rope barren in smell. In late summer, she would accompany others of the caste into the streaming hills to chop the fibrous stalks of bhabar grass. The rest of the year, when she wasn't busy with household duties, she sat on the ground next to her husband, combing fiber into ribbons, spinning ribbons into yarn, twisting yarn into strands, and braiding strands into rope. Rope to keep the cow from deserting the farmer, rope to prevent the riverboat from running away to sea, rope to teach the individual stick of firewood the strategy of the bundle, rope to hold a young wife to a bedpost, an oven, a lurid panoply of gods.
In the streets of Calcutta, she had seen a fakir make a rope rear up like a cobra. Uncoiling from a basket with a dancing motion, the rope rose until its end was higher than the treetops, whereupon the fakir shinnied up it and disappeared in the sky. Now, as yard after yard, mile after mile, of rope wound through her blistered fingers, she strained to exert some influence over it, tried her best to will it skyward so that she might climb it, stopping periodically to wave good-bye to her mother-in-law, and cast her lot with the clouds.
Alas, the rope moved strictly horizontally, and then only when physically forced. Conditioned as she was, Kudra probably wouldn't have climbed the rope, anyhow, let's face it. Besides, she had established a couple of escape routes that allowed her to ascend above the world of in-laws and bhabar fiber. One was scent. Her father kept her supplied with natural aromatics, which she turned into oils and essences to lavish upon her body. Whether she was loading the rope cart, carrying out slops, or scraping cow dung from her mother-in-law's shoes, Kudra was enveloped in a portable fog of fragrance, entwined with a rope of perfume up which she could shinny and partially, at least, disappear. Since it was traditional among Hindus that one way to Shiva was through the nose, and since in India there was no such thing as too much piety, her in-laws could not object, although sometimes they fell into coughing fits when she passed by. As for Navin, her husband, he may have been publicly embarrassed by his bride's excesses, but in private he was enflamed. Navin's prurient reaction to the smells of his wife widened her second avenue of escape: sex.
Kudra took to the marriage bed the way a water buffalo takes to a mud wallow. Like any conscientious merchant-caste groom, Navin had studied the Kama Sutra, the Hindu love manual. Since he was thirty when they were wed, twice the age of his bride, he had had time to learn it by heart, and indeed he was well acquainted, in theory if not in practice, with the eight kinds of embrace (four mild, four hot), the four parts of the body that the handbook taught might be individually embraced, the three ways of kissing an innocent maiden, and the four angles from which it might be accomplished; the sixteen ways of kissing a wife (including the moderate kiss, the pressed kiss, the soft one, the contracted one, the clasping one, and the “kiss of the hungry donkey"); the eight kinds of love bites, the eight kinds of scratch marks that might be left on the body (the Kama Sutra even described how a lover's nails should ideally be manicured), the eight stages of oral intercourse, the nine ways of moving the penis inside the vagina, and the forty varieties of sound that might be uttered the while (including thundering, weeping, cooing; words of praise, pain, and prohibition; and the sounds of the dove, the cuckoo, the green pigeon, the parrot, the sparrow, the flamingo, the duck, and the quail), as well as more than thirty coital positions, with names such as “the fixing of a spike” and “the place where four roads meet.” If all that education, aspects of which smacked of arithmetic, ornithology, carpentry, and animal husbandry, suggests that Navin was overqualified for the job of satisfying a teenage virgin, well, it must be recorded that at no time did Kudra complain of overkill. If she was not his equal in technique, she compensated in fragrance and enthusiasm, and night after night they dissolved their rope burns and fatigue in the salty flux and radiant slime of the glad-hearted fuck.
It is hardly surprising that the couple had four children in five years. They might have had still more had not the mother-in-law decided that the house was becoming too crowded and introduced Kudra to pennyroyal's application as an oral contraceptive.
Kudra loved her babies. One day, a dozen years into the marriage, she came to love her husband, as well. It happened on the morning after the festival of Mahashivaratri — the Great Night of Shiva — when, weakened by fasting and loosened by a kind of spiritual hangover, Navin revealed to Kudra that he adored horses and that during his youth had entertained the impossible dream of miraculously transcending Vaisya, the merchant caste, and ascending to Kshatriya, the warrior caste, so that he might ride. The admission of his ridiculous longing shamed him, but Kudra was touched to learn that, like her, Navin had a blasphemous desire locked away in his breast. It made them partners in a new, more intimate sense, and whenever she thought about his secret, she would reach across the rope bin to pat him tenderly. She did not share her own hidden dream because she didn't know how to articulate it. She only knew that it made her restless, that it smelled good, and that it was always there.
About a month after Navin's disclosure, a column of warriors paid a call at the rope shop to order some fancy, customized bridles, braided with bells and tassels, for their steeds. Kudra drew the leader aside and charmed him into offering Navin a ride.
“Oh, no, no, I could never,” protested Navin.
“Go ahead,” Kudra urged. “This is your chance. Just as far as the temple and back.”
The army officer, who had his eye on Kudra's ripe hips, helped Navin aboard and gave the big horse a whack that sent it off at a gallop. Navin, terrified, leaned too far forward and sailed off into a rock pile. His head split like a milk bowl, sending forbidden ambition, mixed with blood and brain, trickling into the public light.
During the next few days, Kudra seriously considered joining Navin's corpse on the pyre. It was not because she blamed herself for his demise — guilt is a neurotic emotion that Christianity was to exploit to fullest economic and political advantage; Hinduism was healthier in that regard — but because face to face with widowhood, she learned that her mother's dire description of it was, if anything, understated.
From the moment of her mate's death, a widow was under the tutelage of her sons, even if, as in Kudra's case, the sons were mere boys. She could never remarry, and were she to engage in illicit sexual activities, the Brahmans would administer to her a whipping that would expose the white of her bones. Prohibited from returning to her parents, she must remain with her husband's family, and while she would be expected to perform household chores from dawn to dusk, she could never attend the family festivals that played so big a part in Hindu life, for a widow's gloom would bring bad luck to everyone present. For all intents and purposes, a widow was an ascetic, shaving her head, sleeping on the ground, eating only one meal a day and that without honey, wine, or salt. She could wear neither colored garments nor ornaments, she could not use perfumes.