Leellann’s Story by Manisha Kulshreshtha

Krr…crunch…chrrr…The sound of a door opening in dawn makes even my cold body shiver. It makes the rats gnawing on my fingers scatter away. The dim yellow light of the bulb falls on me. Small gnats circle the bulb. Their chirrups are infinitely preferable in this suffocating room to the whispers of the dead bodies being wheeled in. The walls all around me are green in colour with the plaster falling off in places. And here I am, lying on this table. Someone’s cries can be heard coming from a distance. Those cries stop on reaching me. A silence spreads. An ancient face with a stinking mouth floats over me, constantly talking. He yanks the blood-stained sheet off my body…revealing my most intimate parts. A recognizable, hazy female figure who has her face covered shakes her head in negative, turns and walks out of the door. All that stays behind is a sob of recognition. An old male figure also pantomimes a no. Then the old man scratches his beard in confusion and covers my body till the face. A policeman knocks on my heels with his stick. The old man puts his sharp, heavy tools and pulls out a bottle of alcohol. I die another death. The old man’s irritating voice annoys me.

“You’d ask about drinking on duty? But this duty can be performed only after drinking, Sub Inspector Sahab. Look how they all denied that the body belongs to their kin. It possibly isn’t. But Sahab, it has to belong to someone. Even the dead body of young girls is a burden. Those Motherf…save on the cremation money, too. The smell is driving me mad. It has been 4-5 days since her death but nobody identifies her despite four girls from the neighbouring villages having been reported missing. Thankfully, it is the winters, otherwise it would have started decomposing by now. Doctor Sahab will come by 7 ’o clock…till then I have to keep her stomach cut open. Let me know if you want me to misplace something. The nurse and lady constable have put cotton in her and taken the nails and hair samples. That’s the most important thing. The doctor will only check for internal and external wounds.”

The sub-inspector without even glancing at me, spat in a corner and walked out. My number is 756, the same as my FIR number. Dead bodies don’t have names. What loved ones are left with are memories, not corpses. My crushed face has not registered in the memories of my people. They find my stiff and crooked waist, swollen stomach and chopped-off breasts horrifying. They turn away from my twisted bare remains and refuse to identify me. They cry outside, remembering my living form. The body they remember has a glowing wheatish complexion and big eyes. Hanging from the ears are big, gold-polished metal jhumkas and a big silver nose ring. My mother used to tell me, “You have a beautiful body. Your husband would really love you. He’ll look at your soul through your eyes.”

I don’t remember the exact moment when I turned into a corpse. I do remember that I reached here after crossing a river of hurdles. I died very slowly, after 15 hours of pain. If you want to listen to the voice of my soul, all you’ll hear are screams because my voice had been silenced. I am baiting your curiosity, ain’t I? But it is a good thing that I am not moaning any longer. I am quiet now. It is my wounded awareness that isn’t dying even after death. It is stuck somewhere here.

You can’t imagine how badly my spirit wanted to shrug off this pain and fly away. For you, all I am is a rotting carcass – disrobed publicly and mutilated. I am sure the compounder who had examined me can take a guess at that since he has performed post-mortem on many such dead bodies. He has seen it all – murdered, raped, accidents, poisoned. But when he saw me, he let out a cry – “Uff, this is too much. That motherf…should have done what you wanted to. Should have thrown her in the pond after that but what is this that you have done? If she didn’t give her consent, does that mean you’d you turn into the devil? You’ll get caught. You’ll surely get caught. Adivasi girls aren’t like before…that if you caught hold of them in the forests, they’d agree to go along in desperation…now they go to police stations…but can they change the ways of the world with some education? What am I doing amidst these distorted corpses after all my education? These sights have killed all my hungers…for food and the one below. Even hyenas don’t chew a face this way…even they show more courtesy. All scavengers eat are cadavers left behind by you and the doctor then turns it into an animal attack on paper.”

The short and fat compounder with his greying beard and yellowing smelly apron kept looking at me and mumbling. One of my eyes had burst out and the other one had swollen shut forever.

Then, cursing my culprits that they have increased his work, he came closer to me. I wanted to snatch the knife from his hand and cut myself open so that the solitary angry consciousness left in me could also escape. But my hand hung from the table like a cut branch. Ice had melted and turned the room muddy. The compounder hefted my body that had stiffened like a taut bow by pain around and sewed my cut chest closed. Then, with great tenderness he cut my body into two parts with a steel knife. He cut till the muscles of the stiffened dead skin under my navel. He pulled my spread thighs together and cleaned the blood clots and put my hanging hands on the table. Then, he put another clean, white sheet on me. He lit an incense stick in the room. God knows what he was thinking when he caressed my head and said, “You wretched woman! You should have run away…” I felt like leaning on the old man’s shoulder and cry my heart out one last time like a human being.

He finished his work and left the room to wait for the doctor outside. Robbing me off the world and light by closing the door behind. Now, I was all alone. I pressed the buttons of the burning wounds on my body again, trying to free myself. My flesh wanted me to fight for it. Don’t run away. But who’d listen to me? The doctor did not come. He took the report from the compounder over the phone and my dissected body lay there all night. The dry darkness of the room guarded my carcass. The rats had returned and tickled me by jumping on my chest. One rat playfully pulled at my small breast, which was actually quite big. They kept nibbling on me. When they also tired of this game, they returned to their holes to sleep. Then, the crickets descended, followed by the lizards that slithered down the walls to come near me. Why didn’t I fear them? Their pulpy brown skin? I had forgotten to fear because I am a corpse.

Please excuse me. Why would you be interested in my disgusting problems? You must want to know my story. My story starts the day salt mixed in the soil of earth, and road reached the jungles. I am nothing now but the duty of this corpse lying on melting ice to share this complaint with you. All I want to do is caution my society, not you. My hair doesn’t just hide thorns, twigs, scratches and deep wounds inflicted by a knife but embedded in my body is my desire to stay alive and the spreading need to annihilate this world.

My words are just shadows…The truth behind them is crueler, icier. You don’t believe me, right…just turn your gaze inwards and see unblinkingly around you. You’ll find many corpses that have been preyed upon, less by animals and more by scavengers. I don’t know when the ways of your world reached ours. There was no need for force on bodies in our world. When minds met, the need for bodies to meet seemed secondary. You abused our hospitality so ruthlessly that you devoured our crispy-crunchy flesh with your tea. You cut up our world of the jungles such that all there is left of it now are cut trees and bruised carcasses. Even birds don’t come here. Teak isn’t from the jungles. Birds can’t build their nests in them. I know the forests really well. I am a bona fide Bhil woman. I grew up in a Bhil family with two brothers and a sister. There was a time when even I had a beautiful name – Leellann. It sounds a little strange, doesn’t it? We Bhils keep such names. Leellann means the grace of the blue colour. I had just completed 19 and was running on 20. My father was a landless farmer. He always said how could we own land? The land owns us. The entire jungle is ours. My mother used to peel off the bark of the Kattha tree and sold it in the weekly open market. We were the four surviving siblings. My sister had been married twice…One was when he had asked for her hand in marriage. The second time she had eloped. My brothers were small. I am the only one to have been to a school. My brothers didn’t like studying so they joined our mother in harvesting Kattha and Mahua.      

I had been admitted to the Panchayat school at the behest of the Anganwadi didi. I was very good in sports. I had been the junior district champion in long jump. I passed Eighth standard but could not study beyond the Ninth. I don’t know whether I was beautiful or not but when sunshine fell on my dark skin, it shone like a brass tumbler.  My big black eyes used to dream. I was as agile as a wild deer and my body smelled like fresh grass. I wanted to see the outside world I had read about in my school books. The jungles were so dear to me then. All our mothers would only instill the fear of animals, not of men. Now even three-year-old girls aren’t sent alone to defecate in the open behind their houses. Every time I went with Ma to pick Kattha bark, I’d ask her about the world on the other side of the forests. She’d tell me about the nearest city. When Baba got the abscess on his back, they had both gone to the city to get it cut out. I’d go up till the wild ravine on the pretext of getting wild herbs. From there the road to the city was just a couple of miles away. Grazing goats would bleat to me and their careless young goatherds sitting nearby would try to find excuses to make conversation with me. I’d see them and shyly slither away.

Youth descended on me earlier than usual. Everybody accused me of having my head in the clouds. My heart seemed to be searching for something. There was a face in my mind. It was the face of the goatherd who never tried to bribe me with trinkets while chewing a blade of grass. He wore blue earrings and herded his goats on a motorcycle. I wanted to hop onto his bike and visit the city.

He’d whistle and his goats would follow his bike. He seemed like the King of the Jungle, Vanraj. I had met him in the winters and in the next spring eloped with him on the next “Bhagoriya”. My Vanraj did not have the money to pay my father or for the wedding. So, our parents decided that I return home. Vanraj promised that he’d sell four goats on the next animal fair in Kartik to make money. We’d meet in the jungle, talk at the river’s shore. We were both very attached to the forest. One day we slunk off to the city and sat under the blue lights of a cinema hall, holding hands. We returned only by dawn.

“Lellee, hold me tightly by the waist.”

“Why? Are you the hero of some film?” Vanraj deliberately braked hard and we started laughing loudly. We were on the muddy road of the jungle and the bike was jumping on the uneven path. I remember we had only gone a little way into the jungle when five boys on two bikes started chasing our bike. After harassing us for a while they pulled in front of us, blocking our way. There were big, rocky hills in the jungle. No one could tell what was happening behind them from the road. They took us between the hills and Vanraj recognized them. They were from the neighbouring village and knew Vanraj.

“So, Vanraj Bhai, where to?” He was the son of the head of the Panchayat of the neighbouring village. He had blocked Vanraj’s way.

“Just on my way to drop her off to her village.”

“Return our seven hundred rupees. Your one month has become three.” He caught hold of the motorcycle’s handle.

“One of the goats is about to mate, Bhai ji. I’ll return the money soon. Please let us go now. It is getting dark and then we have to go through the forest.”

“Ok, sod the money. Come drink Mahua with us. We’ll drop her off together.” Vanraj got incensed by this last comment.

“Bhai Ji, please let us off, it is getting late and I don’t drink Mahua anyway.” All of them jumped upon Vanraj while he tried to kickstart the motorcycle again. Both of us fell off the bike. The story after that can be found in any newspaper or TV.

Vanraj was groaning despite being unconscious. I was crying next to him. I saw the sky turning black from red. I could hear their coarse raucous laughter. After that a madness seemed to settle on them. One tore off my kurta. I had tried to run away but the forest’s thorns and hills had blocked my way. I fell on the kareel shrubs. And those emaciated, salivating, sweaty, effeminate boys who resembled hyenas walked up to me. I had also pushed them off in disgust, biting them. They were more in numbers and armed. They got angered when I bit and scratched them in self-defence. They punched my face and kicked me between the legs.

When I let out my first scream, the cowardly gods of the sky and jungle shut their iron doors. Yes, a few dozen bats did circle me as if trying to separate me from those rascals. A few vultures saw them circling from the hills. They leapt from a nearby hill startling the boys. One of them shouted to scare them away. His voice echoed in the ravine.

Nature harmonizes when it comes to the healthy desires of the flesh. This cruel union was one of teeth and nails, knives and kicks. It was almost as if avenging our residual pure humanity by burying into a helpless mass of meat. The emaciated shadows hovering over me were poking at my conscience with their abuses and bites on my breasts. These were demons who had not fed in a very long time. They were not satiated. After a while, my rebellious spirit died. By now, I was just a pained thigh, a torn vagina with the parts of jackals burying in it innumerable times. Hours later, all that remained of my body was pulpy flesh and vaginal blood. They ran away on seeing my blood but the Pradhan’s son returned. In memoriam of my corpse are the creepers with which he strangled me. My eyes popped out but I didn’t die. The moon swung like a pendulum in front of my eyes but I did not die. He took a flat stone and threw it on my face.

I don’t know how long I was unconscious for. I came to after a while and could not feel my body. My swollen body seemed to be made of rubber filled with air. I was scared of my blood till the time I was alive. The way it was flowing out, the grass and hill under me had turned red. Like wax melting out of a candle. I was burning with pain, yet the blood kept oozing out. My cut tongue had stuck to the roof of my mouth in fear but my spirit kept groaning…I pray that their fields burn, that girls disappear from the wombs of their women, that their women only give birth to stones!

I found relief only in unconsciousness. But my faint pulse kept running and I used my entire consciousness to listen to my heartbeats. My still eye kept silently staring at the thickness of the blood flowing out of my thighs, cut chest and skull. Gray blood with no colour. A corpse can’t see colours. Everything is black or white or grey. A few flies pointed me out to other flies on seeing me unmoving. At first, they were shocked to see me. Then they got to work.  Of cleaning and hunger. They even talked to each other about me. They probably tasted the violence embedded in my flesh. The flies could not find much blood to suck out of me and left soon.

The earth around me seemed to have been burned with local alcohol and smeared with blood. Haaye! The same creepers had strangled me whose flowers had once adorned my hair. The shards of my new, green bangles embedded in my skin. The spot in the forest where my slippers had fallen, a pack of wolves had come following the trail from there…I was still alive then. They kept sniffing me for a long time. Then, their female head came. She sniffed me and then went to the hill where I had been violated and then lifting her head up let out a long wail. The others just bowed their head silently and left. A snake crawled on me and hissed on the crushed grass. Trust me, I felt no fear of those wild animals. Spiders were knitting cobwebs on me. Trees dropped water on me. They dropped tears where the skin of nails had been bruised by the Mahua. My body was turning cold and the air in the forest kept whipping around me like a long-lost friend. I had used up all my senses to stay alive. The dark shadow of unconsciousness kept progressing over me. The blood running out of me was beginning to feel free. Pain was growing faint. My breaths were struggling against the cage of my chest like birds seeking flight. But my mind continued working.

“Where was Vanraj?”

“He must have gone to get the police. Hospital.”

“Maa and Bapu must be looking for me…I should wear the slippers lying there and leave.”

“I recognize their faces, Inspector Sahab. They were Jogsar village’s Narsingh, Munna, Rafiq and that rascal Jaishankar from my own village who was the last one to climb atop me when my eyes burst. I used to call him my brother.”

I lay there all night but nobody returned. Even the next day, nobody noticed me. On the third day when kites started circling me, the news of a naked corpse lying in the ravine spread in the neighbouring villages. The entire day, a gaggle of men kept coming and going to watch from a distance. They would take photos of my naked body on their mobile phones. The women could not muster the courage to come close. They watched at a distance from under their veils, making tsking sounds. The police didn’t come that night either. My corpse remained under the forest’s watch. An old man had taken off his worn-out turban and covered me with it. I don’t know why I felt that one of the faces in that moving crowd was of Vanraj’s!

My corpse remained tied up in a black polythene bag for two days in police custody. Nobody came. An old, eccentric woman came twice to identify me. She tried to find the tattoo for Suman on my hand but I was Leellann! I had to remain in the bag till my family arrived. After that, I was sent for post-mortem. Even there, my corpse waited two days for the doctor and family.

I had recognized the figure under the yellow light of that narrow, dark room. It was my mother under the veil and my father who couldn’t bear to see my face. Ma, how could you say that the corpse was not of your daughter’s? Are you angry that I didn’t tell you about visiting the city with Vanraj? How was I to know? Otherwise, I’d have told you to come looking for me in the jungle if I didn’t return by dawn. I understand that everything had become crooked, my face crushed by a stone. A layer of fungus covered my entire body after six days. My teeth had broken and my lips had sunk inside. There was nothing left of my nose. The fingers of one hand had been cut off. But the peacock tattooed on my right arm was still intact. Could you not see that? Did you not see the amulet you had tied above that tattoo? The one you had tied to keep me away from “troubles”. And that toe-ring sandal of yours that I had worn? It lay next to my corpse in the forest for a long while. Before I got here, the crowd visited me every day and whispered among themselves – “It is Leellann. Dhapu’s daughter.”

And Ma? Did you honestly not recognize me? It is true though. A corpse is no one’s daughter, the “daughter-spirit” in it having flown away. How could a body that had become formless like a mound of mud be anyone’s daughter? I can understand that you had also turned into a corpse inside when you refused to identify me. Do you know that my corpse had protested when you had shaken your head in negative? My sunken eye had wanted to pop out. The peacock tattoo under the amulet of my arm had unfurled its feathers, “Ma…please wait.” But you walked away crying with bapu’s hand in yours.

And Bapu, you? Who told you about Jaishankar being one of the five boys? The same Jaishankar who is the son of the landowner whose lands you till? What was the police officer telling you outside, “His name should not appear in the FIR…take something and wrap this up.” Did you “wrap this up” by not identifying me?

And Vanraj where did you go? Did you not come to identify me? My hero who preened on seeing me at fairs and such by twisting his moustache? Didn’t you always say – “Your parents have aptly named you Leellann. Your Leela is unique. Let alone money, now even if I have to lay down my life, I would, to get you from your father.”

All my senses had turned towards you when those villains had jumped on me. When I heard the motorcycle start, I thought you were coming to save me. But the sound only moved away. I didn’t stop fighting the pain but this sorrow debilitated me.

 The real quarrel had been between the boys and you. I just became the battlefield and you ran away from me.

My beating heart slowly turned into stone. The next night when I drew my last breath, I remembered nobody else but my pet dog “Lalu” who only ate from my hand. Had he been there, he would have definitely saved me. My eyes teared up in his memory and my spirit gushed out of my body screaming. Like a wild cat running out of a burning forest. When my spirit tired, it wrapped itself around a high tree from which many birds flew away screaming. The moon was returning after having traversed the sky.     

Now, even my runaway spirit can’t come to identify me. It has crossed the seven streams of pain. I don’t think she’ll ever return to these shores.

Nobody has come to take me. The police kept my rags. The moisture that had soaked hair, blood, nails, and my thighs that the police had been wiped off with cotton. That wad of cotton lay in the dustbin of this very room of post-mortem, which was later dug out by a dirty dog. Will somebody tell me later what happened those scoundrels?

Now, I lie on the table of first-year medical students. None of them is interested in my story. They are laughing at my crooked waist. My severed chest is amusing for them. One of these mischievous boys has put my left hand full of shattered bones on my waist. It seems like I am dancing. Did I tell you that I danced “Timli” to the big drums with my friends? All the boys and girls are laughing. I also want to burst out laughing. But no sound comes out of my hollowed cage. Only one girl is angry at them.

“My doctor father says that we should not insult a corpse.”

“Insult?” A laugh hidden deep inside my cage escapes. My corpse is laughing, my jaw opening in the light wind.