“I was first married to this one’s brother,” said the woman. “When I was widowed, when my husband’s fellow fishermen brought him home dead—crushed on the very deck, they said, by a newly caught duyong flailing about—I should have behaved like a proper sati, and thrown myself on his funeral pyre. But I was still young, and childless, so the village sadhu urged me to marry this brother of my husband, and have children to carry on the family line. Ah, well, I was still young.”
“It is well said,” Tofaa remarked, with a salacious giggle, “that a woman never grows old below the girdle.”
“True, indeed!” said the woman, with a lubricous giggle. “It is also well said: A fire cannot be laid with too many logs, nor a woman with too many sthanu.”
They both giggled lasciviously for a time. Then Tofaa said, waving her food slab to indicate the children swarming on the doorstep, “At least he is fruitful.”
“So is a rabbit,” grunted the woman. “It is well said: A man whose life and deeds are not outstanding above those of his fellows, he does but add to the heap.”
I finally got tired of seeming submissively to share my host’s cowed silence. In an attempt to make some communication with him, I indicated my still-heaped food slab and made insincere lip-smackings, as if I had enjoyed the slop, and then made gestures of asking what was the meat under the kàri. He comprehended, and told me what it was, and I realized that I did know one other word of the native language:
“Duyong.”
I got up and left the hut to inhale deeply of the evening air. It reeked of smoke and fish and garbage and fish and unwashed people and fish and pukey children, but it helped some. I kept on walking the Kuddalore streets, both of them, until well after dark, and returned to the hut to find all the children asleep on the front-room floor, among the detritus of our used food slabs, and the adults all asleep, fully dressed, in their palangs. With some difficulty at first try, I got into mine, and found it more comfortable than it had appeared, and fell asleep. But I was awakened at some dark hour, by scuffling noises, and determined that the man had climbed into his wife’s palang and was noisily doing surata, though she kept snarling and hissing something at him. Tofaa had waked and heard it, too, and later told me what the wife had been saying:
“You are only brother to my late husband, remember, even after all these years. As the sadhu commanded, you are forbidden to enjoy yourself while performing your seed function. No passion, do you hear? Do not enjoy yourself!”
I had by now rather come to the opinion that I had at last found the true homeland of the Amazons, and the source of all the legends about them. One of the legends was that they kept only some rather vestigial men about, to impregnate them when it was necessary to make more Amazons.
The next day, our host kindly went out and inquired among his neighbors and found one who was driving his ox cart to the next village inland, and would take me and Tofaa along. We thanked our host and his wife for their hospitality, and I gave the man a bit of silver in payment for our lodging, and his wife instantly snatched that for herself. Tofaa and I perched on the rear of the ox cart, and jostled a good deal as it lumbered off through the flat and feculent marshland. To pass the time, I asked her what that woman had meant when she spoke of sati.
“It is our old custom,” said Tofaa. “Sati means a faithful wife. When a man dies, if his widow is properly sati, she will fling herself on the pyre consuming his body, and die herself.”
“I see,” I said thoughtfully. Perhaps I had been wrong in thinking of the Hindu women as all being overbearing Amazons, of no uxorial qualities. “It is not entirely a grotesque idea. Almost winsome in a way. That a faithful wife accompanies her dear husband to the afterworld, wanting them to be together forever.”
“Well, not exactly,” said Tofaa. “It is well said: The highest hope of a woman is to die before her husband. That is because the plight of a widow is unthinkable. Her husband is probably worthless, but what does she do without one? So many females are constantly ripening to the marriageable age of eleven or twelve, what chance does a used and worn and not-young widow have of marrying again? Left alone and undefended and unsupported in the world, she is an object of uselessness, scorned and reviled. Our word for widow means literally a dead-woman-waiting-to-die. So, you see, she might as well jump in the fire and get it over with.”
That somewhat took the luster of lofty sentiment off the practice, but I remarked that still it took some courage, and was not devoid of a certain proud dignity.
“Well, actually,” said Tofaa, “the custom originated because some wives did plan to remarry, and had their next husbands already picked out, and so poisoned their current ones. The practice of sati-sacrifice was mandated by the rulers and religious leaders, just to avert those frequent murders of husbands. It was made the law that, if a man died for whatever reason, and his wife was not demonstrably innocent of causing his death, she was to leap onto the pyre, and if she did not, the dead man’s family were to throw her onto it. So it made wives think twice before poisoning their husbands, and even made them solicitous about keeping their men alive, when they fell ill or got old.”
I decided I had been mistaken. This was not the homeland of the Amazons. It was the homeland of the Harpies.
That latest opinion was not shaken by what next transpired. We got to the village of Panruti well after sunset and found it also lacking any dak bangla, and Tofaa again snatched at a man in the street, and we went through the same performance as yesterday. He went home, we followed him, he loudly refused us entrance and was immediately overridden by a blustering female. The only difference in this case was that the henpecked husband was quite young and the hen was not.
When I thanked her for inviting us in, and Tofaa translated my thank-you, it came out something of a stammer. “We are grateful to you and your … uh … husband? … son?”
“He was my son,” said the woman. “He is now my husband.” I must have gaped, or blinked, for she went on to explain. “When his father died, he was our only child, and he would soon have been of an age to inherit this house and all its contents, and I would then have been a dead-woman-waiting-to-die. So I bribed the local sadhu to marry me to the boy—he being too young and ignorant to object—and thereby maintained my share in the property. Unhappily, he has not been much of a husband. So far, he has sired on me only these three: my daughters, his sisters.” She indicated the slack-jawed and witless-looking brats sitting lumpishly about. “If they are all I have, their eventual husbands will inherit next. Unless I give the girls to be devadasi temple whores. Or perhaps, since they are woefully deficient in their mentality, I could donate them to the Holy Order of Crippled Mendicants. But they may be even too imbecile to make proper beggars. Anyway, I am naturally anxious, and naturally trying mightily every night, to produce another son, and so keep the family property in the direct family line.” Briskly, she set before us some wood slabs of kàri-sauced food. “Therefore, if you do not mind, we will all eat in a hurry, so he and I can get to our palang.”
And again that night I overheard the moist noises of surata going on in the same room, this time accompanied by urgent whispers, which Tofaa repeated to me the next morning—“Harder, son! You must strive harder!” I wondered whether the avaricious woman planned next to marry her grandson, but I did not really care, and I did not ask. Nor did I bother remarking to Tofaa that all she had told me during our voyage —regarding the Hindu religion’s concern about sin, and strictures against it, and dire punishments for it—seemed to have had little elevating effect on Hindu morality in general.