Siva, Siva, Siva.
And when our breath was gone and our tongues dry, Ratna would say, ‘Now, I’ll tell you stories like Rangamma,’ and she told us of the women of Bombay who were beaten and beaten, and yet would not move till their brothers were freed, and the flag that they hoisted and the carts and the cars and the trains they stopped, and the wires that the white men sent to the Queen to free them, and the women of Sholapur who, hand in hand, had marched through the streets, for twenty-five of their men had been shot, and the policemen would not work and the soldiers guarded the streets, but the women said, ‘We are behind our men,’ and they cried, ‘Vandè Mataram!’ and they said, ‘Give us back our men!’ and not a tear they shed, for they worked for the Mahatma and the Mother. And so story after story she told us, of Chittagong and Lahore, of Dandi and Benares, and we each put our head against another’s shoulder and some snored, too, and dozed away, and Radhamma’s chill went down and the fever rose and we pressed closer and closer around her, and we put our sari-fringes and our bodice-cloths upon her, and the child lay upon Timmamma’s lap, white and quiet.
And we would be roused again and again with the champak-like light shining and wavering on the dark around Siva, and with the holiness of the sanctum within our hearts we lifted our voices and sang, and we forgot the Pariahs and the policemen and Moorthy and the Mahatma, and we felt as though we were some secret brotherhood in some Himalayan cave. And one by one we put our heads against a neighbour’s shoulder and tired and hungry we yawned back to sleep. But someone would be chanting away, and clapping away, and through half-wakened eyes Siva would be seen, staring and weird, and such terror would come over us that we would rub our eyes and sing again. Then the light went down and the sanctum’s hooded darkness thrust itself over us, and we woke each other up, and we banged the door, we kicked and screamed and moaned and we banged the solid door. And yet no voice ever came in reply, but only the squeaks of the bats and the swish of the twisting river. We slept and we banged and we slept and we kicked, and at last with the cawing of crows came a hurried step, and we woke each other up, and when the door opened we saw Pariah Rachanna’s wife Rachi at the threshold. She had heard the screamings and moanings through the sleepless night, and with dawn she had slipped to the patel’s house and the women gave her a key and she had jumped over Satamma’s wall and Temple Rangappa’s fence, and falling on the main street, she had rushed up to the temple and unlocked it. We slowly rose up on our clayey legs, and when the morning light threw itself upon us we felt as though a corpse had smiled upon a burning pyre.
How empty looked the Karwar road with Bhatta’s house burnt down!
Through the morning we ploughed back home.
That very morning we heard of Puttamma. She was in bed and ill and wailing. She had fits and fears and tearing angers. She asked for her child and pressed it to her heart and threw it over the bed, saying, ‘I am not your mother, the earth is your mother, your father is your father — I have sinned.’ The father, poor man, was ignorant of this, being in prison. But she said, ‘There he is, there, behind the sanctum door, and he will throw me into the well.’ But we said, ‘No, no, Puttamma, the gods will forgive you,’ but she broke into sobs, and her mother-in-law came and threw water over her face, and cooled her down. And when we went to the door and asked, ‘What happened, Nanjamma?’ Nanjamma told us of Pariah Siddayya who was in the lantana growth, and he had seen Puttamma and the policeman on her, and he had fallen upon the policeman and torn his moustache and banged and banged his head against a tree, and had brought Puttamma back from backyard to backyard, and men helped him in this backyard and that, for many were there that were hid in the lantana growth, and that was what we heard and saw, and that was how, when night came, rice and pickles and pancakes went up into the lantana growths. And when the beds were laid and the eyelids wanted to shut, we said, ‘Let them shut,’ for we knew our men were not far and their eyelids did not shut.
18
Three days later, when we were just beginning to say Ram-Ram after the rice had been thrown back into the rice granary, the cradle hung back to the roof, and the cauldron put back on the bath fire, and the gods put back in their sanctum, and all the houses washed and swept and adorned and sanctified, and when one by one our men were slipping in and then hurrying back to their jungle retreats, what should we see on that Saturday — for it was a Saturday — but one, two, three cars going up the Bebbur mound, one, two, three crawling cars going up the Bebbur mound like a marriage procession, and we all said, ‘Why, whose marriage now, when we are beating our mouths and crying?’ And we saw men in European clothes get down one by one under the dizzy sun, and soldier after soldier would go towards them and stand at a distance and salute them, and then the sahib-looking people went down the mound and by this paddy field and that, and they would lift this hand and point that way and lift that hand and point this way. Then more horns hooted from the Kenchamma hill, and this time they were open cars, open cars like those of the Skeffington Coffee Estate, and in them were Pariah-looking people, and we said, ‘They, too, bring their coolies.’ But something in us said, ‘Now things are going wrong,’ and Rachanna’s wife rushed to Madamma and Madamma went to see Seethamma and Vedamma, and Vedamma and Seethamma said, ‘Come, we’ll go and see Ratna, for she is our chief now.’
Then suddenly there was a drumbeat and we all rushed behind our doors and the drummer stood at the temple square with policemen on the left and policemen on the right, and he said something about the supreme Government and the no-taxer and the rebels, and then we heard the name of this field and that, and we put our ears against the door and we heard of Rangamma’s coconut field and Satanna’s triangular field and Pandit Venkateshia’s tank field and Bebbur field, and Seetharamu’s plantation field, and then, when he came to Rangè Gowda’s big field, we said, ‘Even the big field,’ and we knew there was nothing more to do; and we saw sand and water and empty stomachs, and suddenly we knew why these men had come in their cars, and why the cars were followed by open cars, and we all had tears in our eyes. And we rushed down the backyards and jumped over the hedges, and we met Satamma who was standing by her well, her bundle and children beside her; and she said the drummer was saying the village would be sacked again, and she said she had seen enough and she would go away to the town, and she said she had done nothing and she was not a Gandhi person, and it was all this Moorthy, this Moorthy who had brought all this misery upon us. And we asked, ‘Where will you go now? The policemen are not your uncle’s sons, are they? Come, Satamma, come, we will go to Ratna; for Ratna is our chief now and she will lead us out of it.’ But Satamma says, ‘What, to that bangled widow? She will lead us all to prostitution, and I am not going to have my daughters violated,’ and she said this and that and then she said, ‘All right, I’ll come,’ for she knew there were barricades and policemen at every footpath and cattle path. So we hurried this way and that to Sami’s house where Ratna now lived (for Rangamma’s house was under lock and seal), and we knock at the door and somebody comes and says, ‘Who is there?’ and I say, ‘The goat has two teats at the neck and two at the stomach and the stomach teats are we, Vandè Mataram,’ and they know it is us, and they open the door, and when we enter we find Nanjamma’s daughter, Seethu, and Post-office-house Lakshmi and Pandit Venkateshia’s daughter, Papamma, and Sata and Veta and Chandramma, and Rachanna’s wife and Madanna’s wife and many a Pariah woman, and Bangle-seller Ningamma is there too, and they are all looking at the hall door behind which somebody is surely speaking. And we all turn towards them and ask, ‘Who?’ and they whisper back, ‘Why, they!’—’Who are they?’—Why, the boys.’—’What boys? Moorthy?’—’No no, the Mahatma’s boys,’ and then like a flash came the idea. Yes, Moorthy had told us, hadn’t he? The city boys would come to our relief. And we all said, ‘Well, there are all these city people to help us,’ and we felt our hearts beat lighter, and when we heard the drummer beat the drum we felt nothing sinister could happen to us, now these boys were there, and they would win us back our harvests.