THE GRAMADEVI’S LAMENT

Sunil Patel

 

Sunil Patel's story "Gramadevi" is told from the viewpoint of the spirit that guards a village. Sunil learned about gramadevi's from his grandmother. She told him two things that were crucial for his story—gramadevi from other villages cannot talk to each other, and when a woman marries and leaves her village, she worships her new home's Gramadevi and no longer "belongs" to the gramadevi of her childhood.

 

The tradition of the gramadevi as practiced in the state of Orissa in Eastern India comes from a folk religion that predates Hinduism. In this belief system, a village is only possible when the goddess is felt in some location. Anything will serve as the location as long as it is specific (a tree or rock, for instance). This spot marks the boundary of the village. The gramadevi represents peace, order, justice, and protection. She is particularly careful to ensure that the village endures across generations; by making sure that people successfully procreate and that their children survive into adulthood.

 

In the Oriya culture, the village depends on the gramadevi, and she is always present and always female. Unlike more grandiosely supernatural deities, the gramadevi cares for her villagers in practical terms, and sometimes she is seen walking around the village in the form of an old woman. Villagers can communicate directly with her in their dreams. Periodically, a prophet called the kalisi manifests the gramadevi and makes predictions for the coming year.

 

The gramadevi brings health, but sometimes she brings sickness and death as well. In the Oriya tradition, illnesses and other disasters are seen as the will of the gramadevi.

 

***

The pungent scent of corpses fills the air, anathema to human nostrils like yours. Though I have none, tonight I choose to be assailed by the smell. Underneath the rusty corrugated metal roof of R-53 lies Bhikhabhai, who once tended cattle. Flies gather around his thick mustache as they often plagued his cows’ tails. His simple home is as empty as the rest of the village of Tuldara. The village is quiet but for the buzzing of flies and the occasional bay of a water buffalo. I could interpret it as a paean, but it is not the prayer I have missed for decades. It was the people who believed in me, not the animals.

Let me tell you about Pooja.

#

Pooja had a laugh like the clinking of bottles, a toast before a wedding. Darker than any other child in the village, wearing the silliest T-shirts imported by her cousins in America, she was three feet of joy. As her father had been a sullen child, I presumed she took after her mother, whom I met as a radiant young woman, newly married and newly mine. Pooja’s parents brought the girl to me many times, but it was five years until she came to me on her own. Her eyes lit up at our first unsupervised encounter, whereas my eyes, carved into a small marble figurine with the contours of a face, could do nothing. Towering over me, she shouted, as if afraid her words would not reach me otherwise.

“Tulda-ma!” she said, mangling my name. “I had the ball and I wouldn’t give Kinjal the ball and he said to give it and I didn’t give it so he hit me in the nose and it hurt.” She rubbed the crook in her nose, still sore. To my surprise, she asked nothing of me. No wish for revenge, no command to pester him with mosquitoes or poison his parents’ crops. And then she ended with three words I had never heard before:

“Tame kem cho?”

How are you?

#

I am Tuldaramma. I am the gramadevi. I am the village spirit, the all-mother, the protector. I am malady and remedy, blight and blessing. In the pantheon of gods I am paramount, prayed to before all others. I am everything to these people. They are everything to me.

They were.

#

Pooja believed in me like no one else did. Her parents, devoted though they were, feared me, adorning me with turmeric and vermilion and bringing me betel leaves and garlands of flowers as tokens of appeasement.

“O Tuldaramma,” they chanted, “you are great, and you are powerful. May you continue to offer the village your grace.”

To their credit, they never asked after their own welfare. Only Pooja’s. They prayed for rain in time of drought, as if I reigned over the weather. Though I knew that a well-nourished wheat field would benefit Pooja, I could do nothing. When rain came, however, their harvest was more bountiful than anyone else’s.

But Pooja worshipped me with the true innocence of a child, dismissing my divinity and coming to me every morning with a new story to tell. Running into Satishmama’s house and up the stairs to his hay loft during Hide and Seek. The vulgarities uttered by men discussing the latest cricket game. A curious kiss on the cheek from the boy who had once hit her.

“It was gross,” she said, scrunching up her face.

A thousand stories she told me, yet I could tell her none myself.

Sometimes she would offer me a sip of her Limca. I was familiar with the drink, the sweetness of sugarcane melding with a flavor neither lemon nor lime, entirely of the world of man. I could taste what she tasted when I chose. She did not know that. To her, I was a white marble murti at the entrance to the village, lifeless as a stone, and she offered me soda.

#

Rows of houses stand across from each other, an exercise in contrasts. On the left, R-32 is a majestic abode with a welcoming porch swing hanging from a rusty metal chain, now forever still. Three stone columns stand in front, the green paint flaking away. Inside, the floor is made of marble. R-32 has a toilet, a luxury.

And across from it, R-55 is a tiny, narrow home with a television no bigger than a newborn child. Crosshatching logs form the foundation of the roof. The maid lies dead on the tiled floor of the kitchen, eternally heating the water for the morning shower. Outside, a hole in the ground for shit and piss marks the entrance to the fields.

My village lies on the spectrum between opulence and squalor. Perhaps yours does as well. Where have you come from? You will find that nothing here compares favorably to your home. Not anymore.

Yet I welcome you.

#

One day Pooja’s parents came to me with a request. “O Tuldaramma, please keep Pooja from playing with the dogs.” The stray, mangy dogs that wandered the village attracted the children with their sad eyes. “They’re so filthy and they carry diseases.” I knew they were right, having cultivated the diseases myself, but I would never let my Pooja become infected.

Pooja was silent the next morning, as if she knew her parents had given me their side of the story. But she took a deep breath and launched into her tale. “I only hugged one dog.”

Pooja did not know I dissuaded the dogs from howling and barking near her home at night, but she did know I saw all that went on in Tuldara. Her redundant confession was a sign of trust.

“It was dirty, and it didn’t have a home. I have a home, and it didn’t, and I wanted it to feel welcome.” She leaned down and whispered a correction: “Him.”

Although she had been initially hesitant, I heard in her voice the confidence that I would not judge her for her actions, not as her parents did. I could not scold her, not as her parents did.

Some days she brought the dog to me. His name was Kut-Kut.

#

I sit at the threshold of the village, a guardian. Everything within the borders of Tuldara is my entire world, and I remain just outside it, an observer and caretaker. My reach extends no further than the hazy demarcation dividing Tuldara from the rest of India, the rest of the world. I cannot see it. I cannot know it. I cannot speak to it. I know I must have many sisters and yet I have never spoken to one. What are their villages like? Surely more full of life than mine, now.

You stand now in the aura of Tuldara, having only begun to enter. Don’t look behind you. My perception reaches as far as your sight, and I promise you are safe. Nothing is behind you. Come closer. Don’t be afraid.

#

As Pooja grew older, she traded her Limca for Thums Up, the off-white, sweet lemon-lime for the dark, acidic cola. She still offered it to me, though I sensed it was in jest. She had begun to question, as children do in their teenage years. “How are you?” became “Are you?” I was. I was, and she was, but only one could offer proof of existence, a tangible effect on the world with a clear attribution.

“Tuldaramma,” she said, “I don’t know whether you’re there.”

It hurt to hear those words. I had heard them from so many children before, but hearing them from Pooja was different. I had convinced myself she would not say them.

“I am here,” I could not say, “and I love you.”

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” she said, looking at the ground, “but they bought me a new bicycle. It has a basket and a bell! I’m going to ring the bell all the time the way everyone honks their horn all the time.” She tilted her head up, smiling at me with a glint in her eye. “Like it’ll make them go faster.”

She exaggerated her bell-ringing plans. Right before she left the village, she would stop ringing the bell, and as she crossed the threshold, she would ring it twice in quick succession. Just for me.

#

I am the dirt. I am the air. I am the darkness itself. I permeate every facet of Tuldara from the columns outside Bhulabhai’s residence to Lalitaben’s rotting corpse. I am every particle of dust, I am the quiet, I am the swing no longer creaking.

I am not the stars. The stars are their own realm.

The bark of a dog startles you. Pay him no mind. Kut-Kut merely yearns for his playmate, as I do. I kept him to keep me company.

Will you keep me company too? It has been so long since I have received any knowledge of the world beyond Tuldara. You can tell me so many things. Tell me about my sister. Tell me about the village that gave her life, the villagers that still thrive.

Tell me I have not been alone.

#

As she became a young adult, Pooja came to accept me into her heart once again, believing in me because she chose to, not because she had no choice. Her devotion felt stronger now, backed by such conviction. She never asked me for anything, even then. Perhaps she understood that her parents cared enough for her that she had my blessing, always. Or perhaps she sensed that I had desired a friend since before she was the merest flicker of an idea.

“Kinjal and I walked through the wheat fields today,” she said. I knew, of course, having felt them pass through the long, yellow stalks, laughing and saying more than the words they spoke.

Hers, playfully defiant: “Short girl like me with hair like this?”

His, warmly confident: “No problem finding a husband.”

She rode a scooter now, and she never wore a helmet. I could not protect her when she left the boundaries of Tuldara, and the road held deadly curves. Several of my people had fallen throughout the years. Yet I could tell her nothing. That reckless girl. Our love flowed in both directions but our dialogue only in one.

#

Your eyes narrow; your forehead creases. You also wear no helmet, despite coming down those curves on a motorcycle. Worry not, girl. Pooja did not die. That is not how she was taken from me.

#

His name was Ranjit. A bold, strapping young man, with a booming voice, a model suitor to any sensible mother. His family had been deemed compatible with her family, though I had no say in the matter. Pooja’s parents had come to me, but, as their daughter often did, they spoke for their own benefit, aware that I knew nothing of this boy from another village. Likewise, my sister knew nothing of Pooja, and yet she conspired with this boy’s parents, feeding them lies to steal my—

No, no, she could not have done so. She had no role in this.

Kinjal, too, had no say in the matter. Yet now he said nothing, curled up in Satishbhai’s hay loft, staring at the unfeeling wood of the roof.

The people of Tuldara approved of this boy. They welcomed him into our village. Pooja accepted him. Not as she had accepted me as an adult but as she had as a child. Because it was the single option presented to her.

In the early morning before the village woke, she cried to me. She had not cried to me since she was a girl, and now as a woman she spoke to me in tears, a wordless monologue. What began as a paroxysm of grief gave way to controlled sobs, brave sniffles as she steeled her resolve.

Tears welled up in her eyes as she prayed to me one final time that evening. As he took her hand and led her past the boundaries of Tuldara, my connection to Pooja severed and I lamented that I was unable to cry.

#

The people of the village are mine from the first day they arrive. The men are mine forever. No matter where they go, no matter how far they venture, they may always return to me. Tuldara never leaves them. The women, however, remain mine only until the day a man takes them away.

A woman who leaves with a man no longer belongs to me: she belongs to the goddess of his village. Not all villages have a goddess; some have a god, and some have no one. But she will worship whomever he does. Our history is tossed away as she forges a new relationship, and I am no longer obliged to listen to her prayers. In truth, I cannot. Even our one-way communication would be a luxury.

You are not mine. I do not know you. You have come because you have heard the stories. You have left your home to witness this haunted village.

There are no ghosts here but me, I assure you. You, who are not mine. Not yet.

#

It was only one mosquito at first. Disease vectors fall under my domain, and I expressed my grief the only way I could. I awakened a single mosquito, made it malarial. I knew Pooja could not stay with me forever. The women always left. The men brought me new women, strangers. But centuries, millennia had passed, and I wished for a new arrangement. For the first time, someone had treated me not as a force of nature but as a confidante. The village had betrayed me by allowing her to leave.

Every morning that Pooja did not come to me and tell me a new story, I awakened a new mosquito.

Pooja’s parents fell ill within a week, and they came to me, laid a garland in front of the murti, prayed for me to cure them of this malady. I had that power. But I chose not to use it. They could not take away my choice as they had Pooja’s.

I felt their agony, however. The convulsions, the sudden coldness, the bursts of heat, the nausea, the crippling fatigue. I had no body, but they were my people and their pain was mine. I could not cry for that either.

I could not communicate with other villages, and so neither could the villagers. Although it was not my intention, my isolation was so strong that it carried over into their realm. The borders were sealed, fused shut by my pain. Pooja did not know what I had done to her home. To her family.

The bodies began to fall, and they continued to fall. Mercifully, they died in their own houses, with the exception of Sukhooben, whose habit of wandering the village unattended left her body in the middle of the road. Hers was the only one not safe from the crows.

I spared the buffaloes, the dogs, the crows. They had done me no wrong.

The stench of rot and feces grew, and I let it remain. I could preserve life and I could take life. I could also preserve death. This was what I had done, and I would wallow in it.

#

It bothers you as well. You hold your nose between two lithe fingers to keep the stench out, but it will not work. The odor is more than smell; it is miasma, a weight that hangs in the air. A colossal absence of life, loss in return for my loss.

You pull your hand from your face, and clarity comes over me. Your nose is familiar. Thin, with a crooked bridge. Your eyes have her sparkle as well. I have not seen those eyes in many years. I welcome their curious gaze.

She was happy, then. For all her protests, she made a life with that stranger, a life I could not witness. She begat life that begat life, and here you stand, a living memory of the reason for this village’s demise.

You are so beautiful. You do not deserve to enter here. To be defiled by what I have done to your origin.

What have I done? It was foolish, spiteful. You are the last vestige of Tuldara, as I have destroyed its history and its future. I have profaned the name of gramadevi; no all-mother am I. The scriptures warn of the dangers of attachment. Perhaps I was meant to be a reminder. I served that purpose admirably.

Now I implore you not to cross the threshold. Tuldara is unsalvageable, as is its goddess. There is no place for you here. Behind this archway lies only death.

Please. No.

But my pleas do not reach you. Your silence has communicated more to me than I will ever be able to communicate to you. I have told my story but taught you nothing.

And so you step into Tuldara, across the line that Pooja once crossed.

And you are mine.