Trial by Silence Page 7

  For a few weeks, Ponna went to the market carrying her basketful of brinjals. Seeing her do that, some people tried to grow their own brinjals, but none of them could tend to the plants the way Kali did. Kali took great care to make sure worms didn’t attack the plants. He would carefully make sure the aphid did not take over the leaves. To prevent that from happening, Kali took some ashes from the stove and sprinkled them on the leaves of the brinjal plants. He made sure the ashes also coated the underside of the leaves. Those plants produced fruits last year and this year as well. They were still healthy and strong. He had done another thing last year. He had used two vegetables from these plants to extract seeds. To do this, he had left those two brinjals on the plant until they ripened and shrivelled. Then he plucked and dried them and extracted the seeds. This year, his plan was to plant an entire square measure of brinjals. If they had indeed done that, they might have made enough money to cover all their purchases at the Thursday market. Had he been in a good frame of mind, Kali would not have left the plants unattended. He would have tended to them and made them thrive. Now Ponna could not bear to look at the state of those plants. Even Kali would be shocked if he looked at them now. How could she make him see? It didn’t look like she would be able to accomplish that anytime soon.

  Ponna worked on the brinjal bed for two days. She removed all the stalks that had dried up on top and just left the main stem and the healthy branches intact. She then plucked away all the leaves. The plants were now reduced to just the stem and stalks. She turned the soil near the roots by poking with a spade, and also mixed some dried dung manure in the soil. On the third day, she drew water from the well and irrigated the brinjal patch. It took nearly ten pots of water. Since she watered it late in the evening, the water did not evaporate soon but stayed stagnant in the water channel. After that, she just used two pots of water every day and made sure the bed was always moist. Within a week, the main stems started turning green again and even sprouted a few shoots. This work on the brinjal plants now set a routine for Ponna to go and work in the fields every day. She used the rest of her time there to do some weeding. After that, the fields looked like they were ready for action.

  Despite all this, she still felt odd and unwelcome at the barnyard. Somehow she came to feel that she no longer had any relationship with that place. Everything there was his. If she touched anything there, he might get upset. He might not say anything, but he would glower at her. And she felt that his scowls had the power to reduce her to ashes. Besides, she did not carry food for him any more either. So she did not have much to do in the barnyard. She went straight to the part of the fields where the well was. If she needed to take a break, she would sit in the shade of the palai tree there. She had weeded out about ten bales of kolunji plants and set them on the rock. Someone had told her that there were people in Veyyur who would buy them for a price. But she was not sure she had the strength to take them all the way to Veyyur. Seerayi gave her an idea. They could ask Kaaraan’s daughter-in-law Vengayi to do the job, and they could give her half the profits.

  From under the shade of the palai tree, she had a good view of the barnyard. She could see the entrance to the hut and the tops of bales stacked up outside. And from there the portia tree looked like a demoness. In the alley on the other side of the fence, she could sense the movement of the cows grazing. The sheep enclosure was inside the barn. In this season, it would be a better idea to place it outside, especially since one would then no longer have the additional job of clearing out the refuse. Besides, sheep droppings made for good manure. Whenever this train of thought led Ponna to wonder if those happy days in the barnyard would ever return, she grew sad and started crying.

  Kali liked to set his cot in the vacant spot on the north side of the hut. Visitors to the barnyard could not spot him easily there. Walking in past the gate, one would first see the portia tree. If one walked past the cattle floor and the bales of produce stacked in the shade of the tree, one would reach the hut. Beyond that was the concealed spot where Kali liked to lie on the cot. On moonlit nights, Kali used to feel particularly aroused and lust after his wife. He wouldn’t let her out of his sight for even a minute. Lying on the cot, he would hold her in his embrace, huddling close to her as if he were a child. And he would go to sleep in that position. Even a slight movement from her would wake him up. Then he would pull her even closer. Ponna too loved embracing him that way. When she asked him, ‘What do you do on nights when I am not here?’ he replied, ‘I go to sleep thinking of you. I imagine that you are here on this cot with me. That is all I need.’

  Will this barnyard turn into just a place of memories for her?

  ELEVEN

  Even though Kali could not bring himself to look at Ponna’s face, his mind kept conjuring it involuntarily. But along with that came another face, a face he could not recognize. It did not look like any of the faces he was familiar with. And this face didn’t just show up in his mind and go away. It did things. It rubbed itself against Ponna’s face. It bit her lips. It pulled away and looked at her naked body. At that point, he could not bear it any more, and slapped himself hard on his cheeks. It produced in him a rage to destroy the face that had usurped his rightful place. He also could not gather the courage to imagine the look on Ponna’s face when he destroyed that other face. Would she look happy and relieved? Or would her face be twisted in disgust?

  Kali was intimately familiar with every inch of Ponna’s body. He did not even know his own body that well. There was one little lash on Ponna’s eyelids that was thick and slanting away from the other eyelashes. He sometimes held it between his lips and tugged at it. She once said to him, ‘Let me know if you want me to remove it.’

  But he replied, ‘It is my most favourite piece of hair, let me tell you.’ He also liked to play with her tongue by keeping his finger on it. She would pull it in at his touch, and he would ask her to bring it out again. ‘It feels soft, like touching a snail,’ he said once.

  ‘See, now the snail is going into its shell!’ she said, and closed her mouth.

  He loved the fine lines on her lips. He once counted them and said, ‘Fourteen.’

  She said, ‘You are crazy.’

  And he agreed. ‘Yes, indeed I am.’

  Now he wondered if the other face might have enjoyed biting those lips, or if it might have tasted the mild sweetness of her saliva.

  Whenever such thoughts took over, he felt the urge to hang himself on the portia tree again. At such moments, it took a while for the rage to subside. He reminded himself of his mother’s words to help contain his anger. Sometimes he felt it would be a lot better if he could just forget Ponna’s face. Yes, that would help. It would give him a lot of peace. But how? Could he simply command his mind to do that? Would it listen to him? There was no greater enemy than one’s own mind. It pretended to listen and understand, but then it went ahead and did just the opposite. If he asked it to forget her face, it said yes. But the next moment it presented to him an enlarged version of her face, as if projecting it on a movie screen. That would ensure he would never forget her face. There was no point in trusting one’s mind.

  He also wondered how things would be if he had not come to know at all about Ponna’s visit to the temple festival. He even tried to pretend that he did not know. But whenever he said to himself, ‘She didn’t go, she didn’t go,’ his mind echoed, ‘She went, she went.’ It was true that Ponna came running to him as soon as she heard that he had tried to kill himself. She had even severed her ties with her own family. But when she came to him, couldn’t she have said, ‘Maama, it is true that I went to the festival. But I only went there to take in the sights. Do you think I am capable of thinking of any other man?’ That might have given him some relief, helped him look her in the face again. But that was not what happened. She actually confirmed that she had been with another man. She mentioned everyone who was to blame for this, but she did not say it did not happen. She could have even said in so many words that s
he did go. But unless she also said that she did not want to do it at all, that she had no desire to be part of this religious matter, it wouldn’t mean anything to him.

  She had managed to discern that he now thought of her as a whore. She was very astute that way. Kali was a man of few words. He kept most things to himself. But she knew him well enough to read his mind. However, if that was really the case, how could she not have known how deeply he felt about that particular matter? Evidently, she had desired to kiss another face. She had clearly been eager to experience the touch of another body, to take that inside herself.

  His mother told him she knew Kali had gone to the same festival before he got married. But if she had asked him not to go, he would have obeyed her, wouldn’t he? Until now, he had never disobeyed her. She had lost her husband at a young age, and she had raised him all on her own. Kali had given her his promise, and that was why he had not tried to kill himself again. Why didn’t his mother tell him long ago that she knew of his visits to the festival? Why did she wait all these years? Only because he was a man and he could do whatever he wanted. Would she have kept quiet about it had it been her unmarried daughter who had gone to the festival? His mother had suggested a second marriage to him. Why didn’t she make the same suggestion to Ponna?

  Kali had been afraid Muthu might refuse to let him marry his sister. They were great friends and had done some questionable things together. So Kali worried that Muthu would judge him as unworthy of marrying Ponna. But Muthu said, ‘I don’t think I have any right to comment on that. This is all quite a part of how boys grow up. No one takes that seriously. As for my sister, she has a sharp tongue, but she is a good woman. She is very capable, she can even run a big family. All I ask is that you stay faithful to her once you marry her. I know you will, but I still want to tell you.’ Kali had kept that promise he made to Muthu. He had not violated it even once.

  Muthu had once taken Kali to Chinnapallam to drink some good arrack. As they sat around drinking, a man there said, ‘They live nearby. We just need to send a word. Someone will come. The kind you want. Let me know, I can make arrangements.’

  Muthu was very keen. He asked Kali, ‘What do you say? Do you want to try poratta here today?’ Muthu was, in fact, alluding to a previous conversation he had had with Kali in which he had once said, ‘I am tired of eating home-cooked food. My tongue has gone numb. I hear there is a new dish in the shops now. They call it poratta. Do you want to go try it?’ At the time Kali had replied. ‘What? Puraa kari? You mean pigeon meat?’ And Muthu had said, ‘No, no, poratta.’ They never did try that new dish. But they kept alluding to it in subsequent conversations.

  Kali declined the offer. He said, ‘Ponna is enough for me. I don’t need to go anywhere else,’ and returned home. Muthu ran after him, feeling happy. He said, ‘Well, we have clearly married off Ponna to a good man.’ That made Kali wonder if Muthu had been testing him.

  Once he married Ponna, no other woman’s body tempted him. That was the truth. Then what was the point in his mother bringing up his earlier visits to the festival night? Didn’t she know how faithful he had been to Ponna? And they thought he didn’t know it was Ponna’s food he was still eating. It was true that he did not want to eat anything she cooked. Only if you like a person will you also like the things they do. Initially he had resolved to himself that he wouldn’t eat food cooked by her. He stayed hungry for a few days and only drank toddy. Then his mother started bringing over the food she made. But gradually he noticed a change in the taste of the food. He had tasted his mother’s cooking since he was a child. Wouldn’t he be able to tell the difference? Besides, he was observing Ponna carefully tending to the brinjal plants. He may not have stepped outside the barn, but he still knew she was working on the brinjal patch. And soon he was served all these brinjal dishes. He knew it was all Ponna’s excellent cooking.

  Ponna knew how to cook brinjals with coconut. Even his mother could not do it so well. No one could. One day she made brinjal with dried fish. It was incredibly tasty. It went very well with the pap she served. He licked it all clean. In the past two years, Ponna had got Kali hooked to the taste of brinjal. Now he wondered if she was using brinjal as a sort of message of peace. He was putting up with all this only for his mother’s sake. She was working so hard. She was at that age where she should just do a few chores and spend her time chatting and relaxing. He did not want to make her life even harder. Otherwise he would have flung that brinjal dish away.

  He was thinking of leaving the fields fallow indefinitely. And also about selling off the cattle and just shutting himself up in the barn. But his mother wouldn’t let him do that. His mother and wife were working together now. Though there was a time when they were like snake and mongoose.

  Sometime ago, when Ponna’s behaviour had put an end to visits from Kali’s uncles and their families, Seerayi came to hate Ponna. ‘She behaves as if she has brought a ton of wealth,’ she complained to Kali. ‘We have got a few chickens here. So what if my brothers come and eat them? What do we lose? I can always raise more chickens.’

  But now the two women were close. He could see it all from the barn. They sometimes sat in the shade of the palai tree by the well, chatting away. Seerayi kept nagging him: ‘Sow maize. If you sell the sheep and cattle, what will you do for a living? You haven’t planted ragi, you have not sown kambu. Now we have to buy everything. She has broken all ties with her family, so we cannot ask them for provisions either. The three of us have to survive. Everyone in the village is asking why you have not planted anything. I don’t know what to tell them. They want to know what the problem is between you and Ponna. They even seem to know we have broken relations with your in-laws. I don’t know how these people find out everything.’

  And so he relented and sowed maize. It had been two months since he had done anything. He stepped out to the fields. He did two rounds of ploughing and planted white maize in all the fields. They had now started to grow.

  TWELVE

  Every night, Ponna hoped Kali would come to her. During the day, she sometimes took a nap in the shade of the palai tree. That afternoon nap sometimes made it difficult for her to fall asleep at night. Porasa’s children from next door often came by to play at Seerayi’s place. They were quite noisy, climbing over the raised porch, jumping from there on to the ground, and running out. Everyone in the village retired to bed once the seven o’clock siren sounded at the Karattur factory. Also, this was the season to work in the fields. People had a lot to do during the day: weeding, cutting grass, taking sheep and cattle to the pastures for grazing, and so on. The maize had been sown in Kali’s fields by now. For their meals every day, Ponna had to wake up early and pound kambu millets. Or she needed to crush ragi grains and make a pap. And since nakkiri greens were abundantly available in this season, they also cooked those.

  The village grew very quiet early in the night. The crows went to roost on the trees lining the streets. Ponna could hear women calling out to their husbands and children for dinner. She could also hear people calling out to their dogs to come and eat the food they kept in bowls. Then the whimpering sounds of the infants would slowly fade. Finally, the barking of the dogs would come to an end. After that, there was only the buzzing of night insects. But that too would diminish soon. Then she would hear the hooting of hungry owls from the wild palmyra trees on the outskirts of the village. And then even those sounds would slowly end. But Ponna’s mind alone could never settle in peace at night. It listened keenly to all sounds. In particular, her ears were expectant for the sound of footsteps. Her mind and ears worked together, alert for the faintest noise. And even though her body was tired, her eyes were wide awake.

  Ponna constantly chided herself for her pathetic state. He called you a whore, but here you are, yearning for him. Do you have even an ounce of pride or self-respect or shame? Sometimes she even said these things out loud to herself. That house had a large room, a veranda with a sloping roof, a raised platform out front and a
small inner yard. In that spacious room were a lot of cooking pots, Ponna’s cot and a vessel to cook rice. This was Ponna’s space. Seerayi was right on the other side of the wall, in the veranda area. Kali had made this arrangement at a time in the past when the two women couldn’t get along. But when this new situation arose, Seerayi moved her cot into the large room and kept Ponna company at night. But she could not fall asleep there. She was far too accustomed to her spot on the veranda. Earlier, Seerayi was able to fall asleep anywhere, but now she was not able to sleep even in the barn. She could catch a wink only in that one spot she had grown used to. As for Ponna, she fell asleep only in the early hours of the morning. So she slept very little.

  Ponna said, ‘Atthai, why are you troubling yourself, trying to keep an eye on me? I am not stupid like your son. The way I think about it is that somehow I have been born as this particular person. I have to live this life. So I won’t do anything to myself. Don’t worry. You go back to the veranda and sleep peacefully.’

  That gave Seerayi some comfort and she went back to her usual spot. But sometimes in the night, she would hear Ponna scolding herself. In those moments, she would call out, ‘What happened, Ponna?’ And Ponna would reply, ‘Nothing. I heard a rat.’ Rats did show up no matter how well you maintained the house. They would scamper around, running and making noises. Sometimes, in their ruckus, little roof tiles would shift and crumble. Ponna thought her mind too was as noisy as that.