Trial by Silence Page 6

  But the visits stopped. Kali then said to her one day, ‘You have performed some trick and have put an end to my uncles’ visits.’ Ponna knew that Kali too was not happy about their just dropping by to stuff themselves. She said to him, ‘I asked why they couldn’t bring a chicken with them. Then I asked them to wait till I grow some rice in our fields for them to eat.’ Kali burst out laughing. Those relationships pretty much ended at that point. Seerayi was quite unhappy about that at first, but she soon came to feel that it was good in a way that those visits had stopped.

  And now, Ponna had thrown a handful of earth at her own father’s house and broken her ties with them. Would she change her mind and reunite with her family? Besides, once the severing was done in this way, with god as witness, it was not easy to take it back. Since Ponna had invoked the goddess Kooli, both families would have to go together to the temple, offer pongal and arrange for a ritual wash for the deity. Only then would the curse end. Until that came to pass, the families could not accept even a glass of water from each other’s houses. And they were not supposed to even talk to one another.

  Seerayi said to Ponna’s parents, ‘She did this in anger. Let us not stop talking to one another. Kooli is our goddess. She won’t harm us. All right, we shall let it be for a little while. Things will change. Time heals. We can resume our relations. We don’t have any other relatives besides you. Let us refrain from exchanges and visits for now. You were only trying to implement my idea. You had their well-being at heart. But those two asses don’t understand that now. Though they will, one day. Then she will have to come to you. It will happen. It is not like there are a thousand relatives vying with each other to invite these two to their homes. They only have you. They will have to come around. Don’t worry. We all acted together. Now let us hope things go well and a new life forms in Ponna’s womb. Everything will become all right then.’

  Seerayi did not ask Ponna about her decision. But she told Kali about it. She said to him, ‘They are her own family. Her own father’s home. She has cast them all away and has ritually severed her ties with them. If she was guilty in this matter, would she have done that?’

  But he said nothing in reply.

  ‘I might as well speak to rocks and sand and trees. What is the point in telling you anything? If you had any siblings, you would know what a painful situation this is. But you were born a singleton, you grew up alone, you live alone!’ And she started a lament:

  I don’t have a son

  I don’t have a daughter

  I have no one to call my own

  When I die, when I die

  I have no one to carry my body

  Wanting to express his irritation at this dirge, Kali picked up a club and hit the ox brutally on its back. He had never hit the animal before. The beast was utterly taken aback by this attack and ran around the cattle shed in fear. This sight brought to Seerayi’s mind the way Kali had beaten up Muthu. She stopped singing her dirge and numbly sat as Kali continued to hit the ox.

  NINE

  Ponna felt like everything sort of came undone the moment Kali called her a ‘whore’. She had nothing more to say to him. How could he call her that? ‘We have been married for twelve years. How can you not understand someone with whom you have spent so many years?’

  But Kali had used the word against her once before. In the early days of their marriage, Kali came to the house in the village for his dinner every night. And there he would spend some time with Ponna. Later in the night, he would wake up and return to the barnyard. Before leaving, he would wake Ponna up, so that she could latch the door. But this didn’t last long. He started spending his nights in the barnyard. And so Ponna would carry dinner for him there. On some nights, he asked her to stay over. At other times, he walked back to the house in the middle of the night and knocked on the door.

  Ponna now surmised that even on that night, the night of the festival, when he went out to drink with Muthu, he must have woken up in the middle of the night, thinking of her. In fact, she remembered that earlier that day, all his looks and comments had been very lustful. Had they been in their own barnyard, he would have taken her into the hut. There was no way of knowing when he would want her. On days when he got drunk, he definitely needed to be with her. It could be at any stage of intoxication. Sometimes he dozed off when he was drunk, but he woke up suddenly and came looking for her. No matter what hour of the night and how drunk he was, she never said no to him. He knew the days she was menstruating, because those were days of great sadness for them. On those days, she carried her clothes to the barnyard to wash. He looked at these clothes with much sorrow and yearning. It was hard to tell if he was sad because her menstruating meant she was not pregnant or because it meant he could not have sex with her. He had to sleep with her at least twice every week. Based on his actions and the slant of his talk during the day, Ponna would guess whether he would come to her that particular night. But there were also times when she was not able to guess right. He was very loving towards her, and he also treated her with importance, with great kindness.

  One day he asked her, ‘How come you never take the initiative and come to me first?’

  She said, ‘Women cannot do that, can they?’

  He replied, ‘But women too must need it, don’t they? You are not a piece of wood. I can tell by the way you are embracing me now how much you want me.’

  Later one night, he was lying on the cot after eating his dinner in the barnyard. She picked up the food carrier. ‘So I will get going then . . .’ she said meaningfully, dragging the end of her sentence.

  ‘All right, go,’ he said, and looked at her.

  She walked closer and sat down on the cot. Then she held his lips firmly in her hand and kissed him deeply. He embraced her and said, ‘Ah! You mean “get going” in this sense!’ That night, she had taken charge. At the end when she lay exhausted and happy, he embraced her tightly and whispered in her ear, ‘Where were you hiding all this desire all these days, you whore!’

  When she heard that word, she pushed him away. She was upset. He had tried his best to console her. ‘You can’t take these things literally. I said it endearingly, in a moment of passion.’

  ‘Still. How can you call me that?’ she said, and wept.

  He said, cajoling her, ‘When a husband and wife fight in the village, you know the sort of things they say. The husband calls his wife a whore who sleeps around. And the wife tells the husband he is the one who goes to prostitutes. But the very next day they are going about laughing and talking with each other. They said all those things just the day before, and the entire village heard that. But none of it matters the next day. I called you that with affection. Please don’t be so upset by it.’

  But she was not placated by his words. ‘All that is fine,’ she said. ‘But you called me that on the one day I initiated things.’

  He said, ‘You know how my grandmother affectionately addressed young women? “Ey, whore!” But it was said with love. And this was meant the same way.’

  But Ponna would not relent. ‘Old women say all sorts of things. We can’t go by that.’

  Then he found a better way to argue his case. ‘One day you said to me, “You motherfucker! Nothing will satisfy you. You need a body like a rock!” The other day you called me an ox that greedily munched its fodder from its basket. You have called me all sorts of things. Have I ever been upset with you for any of that?’ This consoled her a little. Then he said to her, ‘From now on, I won’t go to you until you call me.’ Ponna thought he might not be able to keep to his words for too long. She thought he would come to her at night and knock on the door. But he didn’t. That month when she washed and hung a piece of her sanitary cloth to dry, he asked sadly, ‘So it happened this month too?’

  And she replied, laughing, ‘Of course. It won’t come only if you come to me!’

  After that, she had to make the first move. He was very adamant, but he was also careful not to use that word again. Abashe
d, she was never again as forward and forceful as she had been that night. But there was a big difference between his use of that word on that night and his use of that word now. The first time he called her that, he was affectionate and commending her for expressing her desire. But when he called her that now, it was a slur. And he didn’t even have to say it out loud. He managed to communicate it to her with just the movement of his lips. No. He was saying it in his mind, but unbeknownst to himself, his lips betrayed his thought.

  Ponna would wonder: ‘Did I stand in the streets of Karattur, soliciting clients? Did I wave to men and invite them to sleep with me? Or did I go looking for other men at nights, like some women in the village secretly do? Have I ever gone anywhere without his knowledge? They all came up with the plan, they told me he had agreed to it, and they sent me there.’

  Even there, all faces appeared to her like Kali’s. She could not keep his face away from her mind and look afresh at the crowd. That was how strongly Kali’s face was imprinted in her mind. No other man’s face would stick in her mind. When she had once found out that Kali had been to this same festival night with Muthu sometime before she married him, he was able to console her. And that was because of the strength of her love for him. When we love someone, we become blind to their faults. Even if we do notice those faults, even if they are really big faults, we brush those aside easily, as if we are pushing aside our hair when it falls over our foreheads. How is it that Kali did not love her in that same way?

  Perhaps Kali wanted to brand her a whore so that he could now marry another woman? But if that was the case, why did he try to hang himself? He wanted Ponna to experience no one’s touch but his. She had realized that two years ago, the first time the topic of the temple festival came up. And it had been a frightening experience. It made her realize that it was easy to make Kali jealous and suspicious and that she had to be very careful with him. She was always able to tell his arrival at the house in the night by the sound of his footsteps. She could tell the sound of his footsteps apart from the sound of other people’s footsteps. He always placed both his feet firmly on the ground and distributed his weight equally between the two. Not everyone walked like that.

  Some nights she thought she heard his footsteps. And she was ready to hear his knock on the door. But nothing would happen. Then she would hear the sound of receding footsteps. She’d come running and open the door. But he wasn’t there. At other times, she wanted to quickly open the door when the footsteps stopped right outside the door. But what if it was not him? What if it was some other man who knew that her mother-in-law slept next door and Ponna was alone in this room? Someone who knew how to imitate the sound of Kali’s footsteps? She grew very confused.

  She even asked him once. ‘Maama, last night I thought I heard the sound of your footsteps. I thought of opening the door to check, but I was also scared. Then I told myself that it was perhaps a dream, and then I dozed off.’

  He laughed, saying, ‘It is your imagination.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me,’ she said. ‘I know the sound of your footsteps. You stopped right outside the door and went away.’

  ‘Are you mad? Why would I go all the way home and then just turn around? Was I going to some other woman’s house that I had to worry about her husband being home? If I had come to the door, I would’ve certainly knocked and spent time with you. You are imagining things. Maybe we should go to the temple and smear some holy ash on your forehead.’

  But her suspicions never went away. And all of this happened only after the topic of going to the temple festival was broached. She knew that he wanted her to be his and his alone, but still she ended up thinking that the desire for a child might have thawed his earlier reluctance. He too wanted a child very badly. It was true that the world around them was putting pressure on them, but independent of all that he too yearned for a child of his own. Whenever he saw children playing, he’d stop and watch, mesmerized. And Ponna believed that that yearning must have eventually made him agree to Seerayi’s plan. But she was wrong. What could she do now? How could she make him not see her as a whore?

  TEN

  He did not even touch the food Ponna cooked for him. She found that out only two days later.

  In the morning, she usually took some pap or ragi meal for him in a carrier. At night too she cooked pap or ragi meal but with some gravy. This was their long-standing pattern. On the rare occasion when she could make some special gravy dish, she cooked rice. On those days, she sent some food for her mother-in-law as well. But now, for some days since her return, Ponna did not cook anything.

  Seerayi scolded her. ‘If you two just hang about doing nothing, how can I manage anything? I am not young any more, am I? I cannot take on everything. I am really exhausted. That dog! He does not respond to anything, he has gone all mute on us, as if he has swallowed a crowbar or something! I don’t know what has come over him. But if you are going to be the same way, I cannot manage. Get up and light the stove. I cannot cook for three people on top of doing all the other chores.’

  In this manner, Seerayi compelled Ponna to get up and do things. And so Ponna cooked. She carried some food for Kali to the barnyard. But when she went there, she never made any effort to see if he was around. She just left the carrier in the usual spot inside the hut. The next day, however, she saw that he had not eaten the food she had left for him the previous day. She assumed that he might have got drunk the previous night and forgotten to eat, so she decided to empty the food into the wide-mouthed waste pot kept for these purposes. As she dropped the food into the pot, she realized that the pot was not empty. Reaching in to check what was there, she discovered two more balls of food in addition to the ones she had just put in. This was the food she had left for him the morning of the previous day. She did not say anything about this for two days, hoping things would change. But they remained the same. Finally, she said to Seerayi, ‘It looks like your son won’t eat food cooked by a whore. He just empties everything into the waste pot or into the dog’s bowl. From now on, you do the cooking and take the food to him. Let him eat out of his chaste mother’s hands.’

  Seerayi asked her, ‘Then what did he eat for two days?’

  Annoyed, Ponna replied, ‘Who knows? He must have eaten the crap lying around on the road.’

  That day, Seerayi carried food for Kali. She placed the carrier in the hut, and said, ‘Listen, apparently you did not eat the food she made, so she has said she is not cooking any more. I made this food. So please don’t stay hungry. Eat this and do at least a little work in the cattle enclosure. I have been doing back-breaking work here.’ Kali resumed eating that day. Gradually, Seerayi asked Ponna to do the cooking; but it was Seerayi who continued to take the food to Kali.

  Ponna, however, warned her: ‘This is a man who tried to hang himself because he thought everyone had fooled him. Now if he finds out I am the one cooking, he might accuse me again of cheating him. Then we might have to chop down another branch of the portia tree.’

  Seerayi said, ‘He won’t say that. And if he does, we will worry about it then. Let him open his mouth and say something in the first place.’ Then she added, ‘If you set right the brinjal patch, we can get a few vegetables. Then we can draw some water from the well and irrigate that patch. Can you do that, please?’ She hoped that if she slowly got Ponna and Kali engaged in these activities, they might move past their current predicament. As per Seerayi’s request, Ponna went to the fields to see about the brinjal patch. She was shocked at the state of the fields. She had been coming to the barnyard regularly, but she had not really stopped to linger at the fields. Everyone else’s fields were all lush and fertile, with ragi and groundnuts thriving on them. But theirs were lying uncared for—and this left her shaken. If Kali just lay about in the barn, nothing would get done. Once the month of Aadi began and they got the first bout of rains, they should at least sow maize.

  The brinjal patch was right next to the well. Just a single row. Two years ago, when Kali
took one of the cows to Pazhaiyur for mating, he saw people planting brinjal in a field there. He brought some thirteen saplings back with him. They were not very hopeful about two or three of these which were really tiny. He had planted them right next to the well, since that way it would be easier to water them even in summer. It was a wide patch. While planting them, he had asked Ponna to leave a large gap between the plants. When she asked why, he only said, ‘Just do it the way I tell you to.’ Only later, when the plants grew big, did she realize why he had said that. This particular type of brinjal was called ‘cat’s head’ brinjal. Each vegetable was as big as a cat’s head. If she cooked just one brinjal, it was enough for all of them to eat. And it was really fresh and fragrant. So Ponna cooked it in various ways. She also shared the brinjals with people who visited them. Their brinjals became quite famous throughout the village, and many people started showing up just to get some.

  There were also people who decided to help themselves to the vegetable without asking. So Ponna decided to sell them for one kaasu each. But no one felt like paying for it. ‘One kaasu for a brinjal?’ they would exclaim. ‘Ponna is greedy!’ Since people stopped coming for the brinjals, there was a lot left on the plants one week. Ponna harvested them and carried them in a basket to the Thursday market. And since she was selling them only for one kaasu per vegetable, they were all sold out quickly. She got a total of eight annas from that sale, which she spent happily at the same market. After that, Ponna became known in the village as the woman who sold brinjals in the market. That was because, until then, most houses had just one or two brinjal plants near their drains. Whatever grew on these plants, they used for their domestic consumption. Sometimes they might grow brinjal alongside water channels. But until then no one had allotted an entire bed for brinjals and grown so many.