This story can have many beginnings – a thread unspooling and its bearer drawing further and further until she is out of sight and relegated to lores of mothers and grandmothers and their great-grandmothers. We can start with another “she” who bore children before her small body had shed the last of its own childhood, or with a “she” who spent her lonesome days in splendour, surrounded by the opulence of gilded boxes and silvered windows reflecting a queen in name but a pauper in affection. We can even start with a “he”, burdened with early resentment for responsibilities, stuffed as a toddler with preconceptions about those he loves and who nurture him.
This beginning of a “she” is the beginning of the moment with the mountain climbers in the remote forests and verdant valleys of the Himalayas. She is a young woman in her blossoming years who lies breathless on her cot in her family’s hut. The yearnings of a maiden have been discarded for the passionate embraces of lovers. It has only been six months since he arrived in their village – a slightly older boy with rippling muscles and bronze skin, which shimmers and blinds; drops of sweat like water from the trickling streams. He is a timber feller, and she often watches him from the cover of ancient deodars. He has seen her, but he is shy and reserved, averse to the possibility of futile pursuits. He works further and further towards the edge of the forest until he senses her presence between the trunks – which he will eventually axe – and no other person. He grips his axe harder, lets his muscles bulge and tense; he pictures her gasping at this shameless display, and much like her, he too lies uncomfortable, oppressed by the very need that he subdues.
But such beginnings rarely have early ends. She is emboldened by the performance she rightfully believes he affects just for her. She hops from bole to bole while he chops faster and faster, and one day, they meet in the clearing. The forest rests under a shroud of new snow and the English have retired to the warmer plains when the young lovers are married in a brief ceremony. The young man, unable to draw his face into a sombre acceptance of his matrimonial bind, beams at the good luck that has marked a new beginning in his birth charts. The young girl, now armed with the knowledge of domestic obedience, hoists her trousseau onto her shoulders and runs into the arms of her husband. The two begin their journey back to his village as soon as the rituals are over. Under a snug and luminous canopy of chir, they begin their new lives in a small house where his senile and widowed mother learns to ignore the passionate sentiments of the zealous couple.
She is a daughter of nature, as at ease kindling a fire from carefully preserved firewood at the height of moist winters as she is at picking out the right roots and flowers for medicine when the ground clears and bursts with infinite blooms. Her mother has taught her the ways of the mountains; she has committed to mind the sharp, winding leaves of the yew and the deep pains that they relieve for her frail mother-in-law; she dries and prepares the stalk of the sweet flag, fished out from the humid cover of the forest, for her neighbour’s man, who violently coughs through the night. She nibbles at the smooth surfaces of berries dropped from the thick beaks of barbets and follows the merry trails of honey birds.
Her days in the lap of the forest she loves, which seems to caress her with contentment, at first make the villagers marvel. They admire and supplicate. However, when a few years pass and nature does not reward her with its abundance, eyes widen with questions and whispers begin to follow her. On cold nights, her husband embraces her lovingly, sometimes wiping her tears with gentle kisses. After seven years, they are still young, but the man gives up hope – not with a broken heart or after locking away his dreams, but rather with love for the woman whose care and affection never wane.
She is, however, not one to be easily swayed by the bilious murmurs of others. Her mother, though now gone some years, had taught her to run and grab what she desired. ‘Nature is abundant and gives enough to everyone,’ her mother would say. She has grasped in her willowy fist the eternal love of a good man. She has built herself a house that stands the furies of nature. She cannot accept that she is barren. From her forays into the forest and the hoard of knowledge that her mother has passed on about its wonders, she believes there is a cure for their predicament.
Beyond their home of towering chir, there is a forest of bhanj, and somewhere in the nearby sprawling village, she has heard of a woman who prepares concoctions to relieve the ills of the womb. Her journey is to be no more than five days long – passing by the village where she had once resided, now denuded of its cover; the outpost of the timber company abandoned; a thundering river that froths at the edges and only passable by a new metal bridge; thicker woods that were known to home mauling beasts and angry bears. She says goodbye to her husband, letting her hand slip from his grasp, to instead hold that of nature, which she believes will convey her safely to the woman near the bhanj forest.
It is fifty-four days before she returns home. Her grieving husband has travelled to the medicine woman five times in these months, axed down the thickest parts of the forest and sent many men into others. His mother, who loved her like her own daughter and wouldn’t eat unless served by her, has died of a broken heart. But she arrives, untouched and unscathed, from the spot she left. Her red sari reflects the early morning light like a sheet of gems. Her feet, though bare, are soft and uncalloused. She only smiles at the villagers who gawk at her, and giggles at the women and children who scream and run away from the ghost risen from the dead. She does not wait to decipher the shock on her husband’s face before gingerly grabbing his unmoving hand and leading him into their home.
This beginning of “he” is the beginning of The Narrator, the haunted grounds where the first part of her story unfolds. He is Bablu Nath Mehta, an unfortunate name if there ever was one. Born into a rich family of diamond traders, his ancestors had shaken hands with the white overlords early on. Bablu Nath, as a young child, spends his days running around the grounds of his family estate, brandishing a stick that fills the servants with the fear of the devil. They often watch him whittle away at the ends of small branches snapped off the wasting and diseased trunks of laburnum that line the cobbled driveway. Dulari, the hunchbacked leader of the maids, yanks his arm when she catches him immobilising a small puppy with a knobby knee with his hand around its muzzle. He is about to impale the rear end of the puppy with his rotting bayonet when Dulari pulls him off the dog. It belatedly snaps at him before dashing beyond a wall of oleander on uncertain feet, propelled by its whimpers and cries.
Dulari is given leave the next hour but at least Bablu Nath does not whittle again and does not dare approach dogs for life. Bablu Nath is not a cruel child – he likes to bite the end of his mother’s sari by way of apology because he is uneasy at her angry slight of him; he walks behind his father on the rare days he is at home, repeating the difficult Latin names of the flora of their estate because he likes the rumble of laughter that shakes the older man’s chest. But he has seen Dulari’s husband perform a similar manoeuvre on the other maids in the Mehta’s employ and his pliable mind concedes to the curiosity of performing such an action himself. He expects the puppy not to wail or scream – like Bijauri and Anju – and its howls from beyond the bushes fill him with a lifelong dread. In those days, however, Bablu Nath has much to see and many years of subconscious absorption ahead of him, so such germinal moments soon recede into the depths of his mind.
Excerpted with permission from The Fantastic Affair of Despair, Doorva Devarshi, Pan Macmillan India.
