The time of necessity is nearly on us! What took you so long?” Amman Bhaggan wanted to know.
“Massi Zakia fainted, and we had to stay till she recovered.” This was a half-truth, but I was proud that it was not an outright lie.
Amman Bhaggan rolled her eyes, then opened her mouth wide, revealing her half-rotten teeth. She let out a long, drawn-out yawn, followed by a tirade about not having had enough sleep the previous night, first because of the storm and then because of her fear of the boars.
“They forgot to put castor oil outside the door last night, and I couldn’t sleep. The cat was crying—so ominous. Maybe it smelt the boar. And then this morning the kittens were gone. Good riddance, I would say. Maalik would have to throw them in the canal, like he did last time, when we couldn’t care for them.”
Every night, Amman Bhaggan reminded her sons to pour castor oil near the courtyard doorway to keep the boar from breaking down the door, should they smell the goat waiting to be slaughtered on Eid day. Her tired eyes were more troubled than usual.
“I shut my eyes for a few seconds, and the dead visited me, so I hurriedly recited a prayer to keep them at peace. You never know when an evil spirit will cast a spell on what we hold dear.”
She knew firsthand the danger of boar coming too close to humans. “One year, when my uncle returned from the fields after cutting the cane, he was chased by a boar.” She repeated the story as if to forget what was troubling her. “The vile boar ran by Hajjan’s house. It stopped when it saw her sitting, preparing meat for the meal the next day. It could smell the fresh goat meat and decided to join her.”
I didn’t remember having heard this gruesome story before. I wasn’t sure why it had just come to her.
“It ate the meat and then took a bite of her,” she continued. “That’s how she lost her left foot.”
Bhaggan gestured to me to take the wooden comb from her hands, and then shut her eyes, anticipating my running the softened bristles through her henna-dyed hair, and continued the story.
“Years later, at her son’s wedding, Hajjan could barely carry the pitcher with his ceremonial bathwater, and she limped down the street. Everyone danced around her to the wedding drumbeat. Instead of singing praises of his garlanded rupee notes and his floral headdress, she swore at my uncle. But it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know why the boar had followed him.”
There was always a prevention or a remedy for such a calamity.
“Castor oil distracts wild boar. It smells of their own fat. I’ve seen them turn right round if they get even a whiff of it.”
I’d seen Amman Bhaggan pass the castor oil bottle to her sons and then rub the oil from her palms on her scalp. It kept her alert, she said.
She also vowed that her hair, her pride, stayed strong and beautiful because of the oil. Granted, the thick, dark mane now had a streak of an orange cascade from the henna she used to cool her scalp in the summers. Now a veillike scalp cover, it had been integral to her few years of married bliss.
My combing had relaxed her. The twist in the story reflected her mood.
“I had a thick braid and small feet, and that’s why Sultan’s father married me. He didn’t see me before we were married, but when his mother came to see me from the village close by, it didn’t take her long to convince him that I was the catch of our village.”
I’d heard this story, like all the others, about her light eyes, how her future mother-in-law thought they might be a bad omen, but when her husband-to-be looked into them on the day they were married, he said they were the color of Himalayan acacia honey.
“He said I had trapped him,” Bhaggan recounted, her eyes still shut, as if she needed to calm herself. “Little did I know that his entrapment would be for such a short time.”
A rasp of sorrow caught at her voice. “My husband would serenade me at night, singing, ‘Oh, lover with light eyes, I will stay with you forever.’”
Bhaggan sat quietly with her eyes closed, but the romance she memorialized was short-lived. She didn’t have to repeat what had happened next. I kept combing her hair.
He didn’t stay with her forever. Forever for him was two years.
The day he left, never to return, Amman Bhaggan placed two rotis covered with desi ghee in a red cotton cloth, along with a piece of his favorite gum-berry pickle, for him to eat in the fields.
But this is where her love story took a horrendous turn. Tears welled up every time she told us about it. She took the corner of her dopatta and wiped her face.
“I waited for him that night. Three days later, they brought back his body, bloated by the canal waters. It had been caught in the reeds and scared the women washing their clothes. Their screams reached the village, and Lal Mohammad, the snake charmer, came to see what had happened. Lal saw the snake wound around my man’s hand and went immediately to the canal’s edge to urge it out of hiding.”
But, as if it knew what was in store for it, the snake remained hidden.
So Bhaggan and her mother-in-law both wailed over his body. They tore the dopattas off their heads and screamed to the heavens to avenge their sorrow—one for a young son and the other for her lover. Bhaggan broke her glass bangles and began her iddat, the required days of seclusion after her husband’s death to ensure she was not pregnant.
It was difficult to imagine Amman Bhaggan as a young woman in love. I shut my eyes and thought back into her memory.
In the one-room hut, they had been ardent lovers and she had indeed conceived their third child the night before he left on his last journey.
I imagined how it would have been in that time before morning, as the last stars lit the night and the maulvi prepared himself for the morning prayers.
I re-created a memory that she had never described, but it was lovely nonetheless, and I imagined it could have been true.
He would have turned around and looked at his sleeping wife, and she, when she awoke, would have looked directly at him. Her acacia honey–colored eyes would have lit up their corner of the room. In quick silence, they would have fulfilled their passions, and then, wrapped in each other’s arms, fallen asleep again.
The next morning, she would have known that they had made another baby but would have to wait a month to confirm it. The confirmation came only after her husband’s death. And as she sat in iddat, the four lunar months and ten days of required mourning for her husband, she realized she would be bearing this child of extreme love and great sorrow. Maalik, the youngest.