Ma, Mother

The news was first shouted out and announced in the village by Babu’s Ma once it was morning. That was Helima Chachi. You could say that she raced from one hamlet to the next one within minutes.

Helima Chachi was from Thakuranidighi village. That was in the eastern part of Bankura district. She was known as ‘Akashvani Kolkata’ by everyone in the village! For the Thakuranidighi folk, that nickname was quite an appropriate one for her. Because it was she who delivered any kind of news pertaining to the village before anyone else, going from house to house.

As soon as it was morning, Helima Chachi was the first one to broadcast such news.She seemed to race from one hamlet to the next one, broadcasting the ‘breaking news’.

‘Khyapa’s Ma, you bitch,did you hear, our Bhondor’s wife has left and run away!’

‘O Ma! With whom, bitch?’

‘With that bastard, Lalu!’

Helima Chachi had a store of various kinds of news like this. After all, the womenfolk of the village waited for Helima Chachi for all such titbits. If the news broadcast from ‘Akashvani Kolkata’ was halted for even a couple of days, the domain of the women of the village who lived in the confinement of four walls would begin buzzing.

‘Can you tell me what’s happened? Why doesn’t the slut Helima Chachi announce anything anymore?’

‘Thebitch has become very arrogantnowadays!’

‘No dear, sister Helima has been down with a fever the last two days. She couldn’t step out.’

And then just two days after that, the news broadcast from ‘Akashvani Kolkata’ would resume.

‘Hear, bitches, hear, Buro’s wife grabbed her mother-in-law by the hair and hit her!’

‘What are you saying, bitch! She hit her mother-in-law?’

‘Yes, bitch. Poor Nasuba could not go outside and tell anyone out of shame. How could she say that my son’s wife hit me!’

‘What about Buro?’

‘Forget about that bastard parasite. That fellow is his wife’s lamb!’

Be that as it may, Helima Chachi’s news today was indeed juicy. The wife of the man known as ‘Bhondor’, from the Dom hamlet, going away with Lalu, was mouth-watering morning news indeed!

Shibu’s wife clicked her tongue and exclaimed: ‘Chhee! Ma! That barren woman finally ran away with that chit of a boy!’

A chit of a boy indeed! How old would Lalu be – just eighteen or twenty. And Bhondor’s wife? She had crossed thirty a long time ago. And in the village, at that age you were lumped together with old women.

So, there was a big hue and cry in the village about the girl called Khandi running away with Lalu. Some women came rushing from the nearby village as well. It was like after a stone struck a beehive.

The same thing on everyone’s lips: ‘With that chit of a boy, the slut…’

Potol’s second wife could not help blurting out: ‘If you were so keen to leave, you could have gone with someone older. But with Lalu …’

Who knows what else she would have said if Potol hadn’t admonished her!

It took time for the youths from the village who went out to work as masons to figure out what exactly this sudden and entirely unexpected piece of news meant. Ultimately, they swore at Lalu as they left the village.

‘The fucker couldn’t find any other woman but that old hag!’ And so much more.

But Bhondor, whose wife she was, was not agitated in the least bit. It was he who found out first at dawn, when he noticed that Khandi was not in bed. But actually, Bhondor had known that something like this would happen.

For a long time, he had been observing Lalu arriving at dusk every day and chatting with his wife, engaging in jokes and banter. Of course, Bhondor never warned his wife about it. Everyone in the village thought he was an idiot! After all, that was what ‘Bhondor’ meant!

Actually, Bhondor could never protest against anything. He was of an extremely peaceful nature. His gait and movements were slow. To tell the truth, Bhondor was indeed different. He was dark-skinned and not at all attractive in appearance. The old women of the village used to say that Bhondor was like this because of his father. Apparently, Bhondor entered his Ma’s womb after his father, Lebu, had become insane.There was a kind of crazy aspect to Bhondor’s disposition. He often muttered to himself!

But what about Khandi? Actually, notwithstanding her name, Khandi, she certainly wasn’t snub-nosed!

She had a sharp nose, a radiant complexion and a shapely body, her hair reaching below her waist, and with her large kohl-lined eyes, Khandi was really a beauty. Like the sloping vastness of the horizon, her expansive cheeks descended all the way to her chin. Her lips had the sharpness of a bamboo leaf. How wonderful her style of walking was! And being well-dressed all the time enhanced her physical beauty.

Khandi had been meeting Lalu in secret for a year.For three months before that they had exchanged messages of love conveyed through looks and glances. Lalu was in good health. He went around selling shawls and blankets in the winter season: he was an earning boy. That was the reason for Khandi’s attachment to the young boy. That attachment had its outcome four months ago.

The incident had taken place when Khandi had gone to the bamboo clump on the bank of the lake to squat to defecate. Lalu was hiding in the clump. It was from there that the story of give and take between the two of them began. Lalu had removed the date-thorn that had pierced Khandi’s back that day as he helped her put on her blouse, and after that he had gone home.

And then he appeared in Khandi’s bedroom one day in the full glare of the afternoon. Fortunately, Bhondor was not at home!

Just a week ago, when the Gajon festival concluded in the neighbouring village. Lalu had bought so many things for Khandi from the fair held there. Earrings, a nose ring, a necklace … And then, as a sequel to that, Lalu had run away with Khandi at dawn today. You could say that it was Khandi who ran away with Lalu.

Even before it was breakfast time, there were whispers in every household in the village. There had not been such a hue and cry even when Hari Boshtom’s son was caught with Dhanu Dom’s daughter in an alley…

However, some loudmouths praised Lalu, and said: ‘The fucker acted like a man!’

Needless to say, Bhondor paid no attention to all this; he simply went to harvest the winter paddy that had been planted on a sliver of land beside the canal.

A year went by.

The other day Babu’s Ma, Helima Chachi, shouted and informed the entire village: ‘Lalu and Khandi have returned!’

Hearing about the two of them after such a long time, people went running to Lalu’s ramshackle house and crowded around there. Everyone was stunned to see Khandi.

How did the barren slut get a boy!

Yes, that’s what everyone in the village believed – that Khandi was barren. That slur had circulated by word of mouth. And each time it was uttered, it sliced her insides, not gently, but as if with a sharp knife.

Bhondor and she had been a family for twelve or thirteen years. So many seasons had come and gone, so many wintry nights, so many rainy afternoons – and yet her lap had remained empty.

When Khandi lay down at night, she used to place her hand on her belly and try to discern – wasn’t there any stirring anywhere? No, there wasn’t. There was only stillness. And that stillness seemed to humiliate her anew every day.

After Bhondor had fallen asleep, Khandi used to furtively wipe the tears accumulated in the corner of her eye on her pillow. But those tears were not her own – they were given to her by the village community, through all the unspoken accusations conveyed through sneering gazes.

When she sat during the day with the womenfolk of the village, she used to heave a deep sigh in the pauses between the conversation.

‘That’s my fate! If only God…’

Khandi couldn’t complete the sentence. It used to get stuck in her throat. Sympathetic womenfolk, her neighbours, consoled her, some of them expressed regret, while the eyes of some gleamed with an invisible surge of curiosity – as if Khandi was an incomplete person.

After all, a barren woman was regarded as incomplete in the village community!

Whether she sat on the steps of the Shiva temple in the hamlet of the Dom community, or knocked her head in obeisance at the Pir’s dargah in the Muslim hamlet – nothing felt fulfilling. She used to wonder – what was her fault? Had she not wished so much? Prayed so much? And yet why did she feel so empty, such a void inside her breast?

Khandi suffered in silence. With no cry of distress, no complaint. She was simply a woman breaking down bit by bit every day, whose dreams of motherhood seemed to have forgotten how to breathe, crushed as they were between society’s mockery and pity.

But Khandi had confidence in her own fertility. She knew that if she lived with Bhondor, she would never become a ‘mother’. Actually, it was out of the desire to be a mother that she had chosen to sink so low in the eyes of the community. All she had wanted was to hear the soft cry, ‘Ma’!

Everyone in the village gaped wide-eyed as Khandi breastfed her baby under the concealment of her anchal. She had a radiant smile that spread across her face. And Lalu was arranging this and that in the room.

Bhondor slowly joined the crowd and observed Khandi through a gap between two spectators. He realised the depth of Khandi’s maternal emotions. And then he went away to the paddy field, with the sickle in his hand.