Pagli

The boys were not the only ones keeping an eye out on her. Their school was up on a hill and the binoculars gave the eighth graders an edge over the others watching. Even so, mornings were generally disappointing. All they caught on the ruins of the binocular’s round plastic rims was a flitting Pagli in a whorl of morning chores. At best, a snatch of her dark, bare ankles under the sari tied high. If they roved the binoculars to the village, they would find their mothers bent over, feeding the cows, the few left now that is, or pulling out the weeds in a patch of mustard or tomatoes. Such work awaited Pagli too, but she made it look like a dance. No task too burdensome for her, her feet never seemed to miss a step.

Those feet had danced at the village festivities until a year ago. The last one was at the birth of a son in a house of six girls. The village feasted for two days. Firecrackers such as the village had never seen, brought as they were from the city where the man of the house worked as a thekedar. The grandmothers led the jhumeila song in their shrill and rasping voices but as the dance gained tempo, the old women ran out of breath singing old songs which the young didn’t care for—the lyrics of the newer Bollywood songs now on their lips. At some point, Pagli broke free from the chain of women to whirl in a bewitching circle of her own. The men playing the dhol and the thali formed a ring around her when the women stepped back in bewilderment, their hands on their mouth until Pagli’s mother-in-law pulled her out of the trance. The boys were at the school that day and in the version that reached their ears, Pagli’s dance was no less vile than Manjulika’s in Bhoolbhulaiya. They got no time to relish or spice up the story, because the infant whose birth was being celebrated, died three days later having turned inexplicably blue in the night and breathed his last without even a wail. So swift a death was bound to raise suspicion of an evil eye, and it did not take long for the women to laser its source in Pagli. That was the last time Pagli was invited or perhaps she had stopped herself, her family now represented in such celebrations only by her surly mother-in-law.

The binoculars came into the boys’ possession few months after this tragedy. At school, the boys waited for the noon recess for the viewing. When Pagli would be out in her courtyard drying her long hair. Her dark oily skin, fresh after a bath. The boys watched her clap to summon the parrots that swooped on her outspread palm. The nape of her long neck as she watched the parrots in flight. Some days, the boys would spy her on the path that led to the river, with a clay pot balanced on her head. Whereupon they ran to the edge of the hill, from where they would find her hunched by the river. Even before the floods, her trek to the river was not free of danger, but the floods had unshackled the firmest of rocks. Who else but a Pagli would go down that path when the government had repaired the pipelines? The women in the village were not amused. “That’s where she meets her secret lover!” they claimed. But the boys had never seen anyone by her side. “Such is her mayajaal” they said knowingly, “that human eyes can’t spot him”. 

If the burans had been cleared, the boys would have had a better view of her. But there it lay since the floods. Not fully uprooted and heaved on the cracked boundary wall that separated Pagli’s house from the abandoned one next door. That tree was for the boys an open wound, a reminder of the floods. Three months had passed since that deluge which smashed through their village and swept away all that lay on its path. When the rains stopped, a hush fell upon the village. Most of those houses downstream were empty and no lives were lost, but the punishing waters lay bare what came in its way. Broken pieces of furniture, metal trunks wrenched open, medicine strips with empty eyes, chopped-off t-heads of chappals, batteries, an amputated catapult, cigarette packets and their angry warnings, a metal cap firm on a shattered liquor bottle, a green plastic comb. From where a neem lay uprooted, the boys teased out with their chappals, a soiled cloth doll and a red chunni— traces of a little girl’s life before she herself was uprooted for marriage to God-knows-Where.

Minutes before the flash flood, Pagli was at the riverside bathing her younger son. That the river rose in spate only after she reached home and had bolted her door to safety, confirmed the worst suspicions of the women in the village. Even before the flood, they wondered aloud why Pagli’s four-year-old-son never slipped out of her hands in the swift current, or catch so much as a cold in its icy waters that even adults were afraid to bathe in. Far less had taken the lives of their young. The flood removed any doubts. When it destroyed much of the village and left her house untouched save the boundary wall, the women were convinced that there was more to Pagli than her madness. The mothers were now frightful of even Pagli’s parrots, who it was told, did not just mimic human words but spoke their own thoughts and in their own tongues.

All this adult talk only served to inflame their fights for the binoculars and every moment with it turned into a pitched battle. 

When Pagli was shut out of view, the boys would train the binoculars back towards the school and on her older son who was in a grade junior to the boys. He skulked behind the walls, watching the boys watch her. If what they did upset him, he never let them know. Nor did he complain to Unniyal sir. So, the boys tried to shake the boy out. Not in the obvious ways like spray ink on his uniform with a careless swish of their pens. That would invite Unniyal sir’s cane, he was sure to split open the boys’ hides and make a public display of it. For, Alok’s father was the old teacher’s prized student and the champion of their dwindling school. The boys tried some other tricks. Like chits left on Alok’s seat that said, “Pagli ka beta pagal.” In the assembly hall, they poured water on his seat or inserted a pin between the slats of his stool. None of their pranks worked though, and they had to swallow their pride when the sneaky fellow wiped the seat with his white handkerchief and placed his large behind on it. The best the boys could do was to exclude him from their games, but he never asked to be part of them in the first place.

No harm ever came to Alok or to Pagli—she seemed to deflect it to the village instead, or why else would calamities befall them, for no fault of theirs? When Pagli was in earshot, her plait dangling from her swaying hips, the women chided her for her nude nostrils, without a nath like they wore. After the floods, they cursed her to her face. “Spare us, chudail!”, they cried. What would not they do to set her off! They could well have hoped for the kafal to fruit in winter instead. The women did not matter to Pagli. For that matter, not even her mother-in-law, as long as her husband remained ensnared and was happy to be no different from the parrots Pagli played with.

Pagli was not the only eccentric in the village. There was Gabriyal uncle, but his craziness was oddly endearing. The danger such men posed did not lurk in the shadows but was upfront and purposeful. Some nights, he would clamber up the peepal at the village temple to stay put for long, often days, and be fed by his family through meals sent up a claptrap pulley with coils of rope that remained permanently hung on the tree. Ghosts that dwelt on trees—the ones their mothers warned the boys about—never seemed to bother him. He was doing what a man must do, protect his village and its women, and the boys respected him for that. Their fathers and brothers were away for work in cities where they survived on fruits and vegetables that would not go down their throats, water that did not quench their thirst. And there, they worked for men who the boys imagined, wore gold chains on their dark necks on which they placed faces of the villains in the movies.

From atop the peepal, Gabriyal Uncle kept an eye on everyone. Of Pagli, he said that she came from a place dry as months-old roti place, which was why they stored water as if it were gold. That’s why, Gabriyal Uncle said, dozens of clay pots lined Pagli’s backyard. In their minds’ eye, the boys saw the clay pots painted in motifs of ghouls. Placed on their lids, they imagined, were heads of cherubic boys cut off from their tiny bodies putrefying inside the pots. 

It was another matter that on their visits to Pagli’s house, the boys found no trace of such pots. When her husband was home, the adults lined outside for his weighty signature on birth certificates and such others which were worthless but for the officer’s attestation. Although originally from their village, he had returned as the government’s agriculture officer. All the villagers grew was corn in their backyards and the villages were emptying out. But that seemed to pose no danger to his job. Instead, he got promoted to a post in Rameshnagar.

At his house, the boys waited on chairs laid out for this purpose, and Alok would hand them back the documents, duly signed. Pagli would serve water in steel glasses which the adults couldn’t accept due to restrictions of caste and purity. All this while, her mother-in-law sat on the charpoy, chatting with other women but with great restraint, such being Pagli’s hold on her husband. The waiting women, the boys’ mothers and grandmothers, would then refer to her not as Pagli but as Alok-ki-ma, thus exalting her, even if only temporarily, to the status of a mother in the village, no different from them. The boys then slipped out, one-by-one, to the forbidden parts of the house to be rewarded, like find Pagli humming a film song or in a playful mood with her younger son. Or feeding her parrot. Five minutes were deemed enough for such a detour.

On rare occasions, the agriculture officer himself stepped out, dressed in a white safari suit with a pen hooked on the lapel of its pocket, at which point the boys rose to their feet with folded hands. He exchanged pleasantries with the men, asking after their jobs in the city, which would be met with mumbles of hasty reassurance of general well-being. However meagre, this courtesy seemed unexpected to the villagers, for he was not one of them and not of the same blood. His father was a stonemason like generations before him, and the shack he grew up in, now abandoned, lay separate from the village and beyond the tail of the gul. This was the beginnings from where he had risen, as had his brother who was a government contractor and known to be close to the local MLA. “Kaljug,” the grandmothers of the village said grimly, “when the mongrels have a run over the land.” The mothers had no doubt that Pagli’s sons would excel in studies and why wouldn’t they, with such an educated father? Who was attentive and yet rightfully aloof, thus stamping his authority with his boys. Unlike the men in their own families, who worn-out with their toil in the cities, hungered for their children’s affections during their visits and could hardly discipline them.

To the boys, this myth of the agriculture officer, his hold on his family, seemed like a joke. They felt that they knew better. How could a man discipline his children when he couldn’t even hold his ground with his wife? What they caught on the binocular a week ago had changed their view of Pagli’s household. No longer was she a mad fool as they had earlier imagined. 

That morning, she was by the riverside, her hair a tangled skein like of a babool, body limp in a golden pool of daylight. A parrot glided towards her which she gathered on her palm to set it on the ground and then rolled over to lie on her stomach. The boy with the binoculars let out a deep sigh which set off a minor fracas which he quelled with a waving hand before he passed on the binoculars. A hush fell as the boys watched, one-by-one, Pagli pucker out her lips towards the parrot and stick her tongue to let it roll on the bird’s open beak. They gasped when the parrot extended a short, muscular tongue—they had no idea, until then, that a parrot has a tongue—a sight so shocking that when she rolled back to sit up, facing the river, the boys felt on their collective shoulders, the weight of the moment they had been made privy to. Although they could make no sense of it, they felt its danger. Pagli had crossed a line and needed to be reined in. Their mothers being women, couldn’t be trusted to contain this knowledge and if spun out of control, could usher unimaginable damage. It was time for them to act, nip it in its bud.

The boys crept up from behind the bushes to accost her on her return up the mud path. Caught off-guard, she recoiled and her eyes twitched, batting from side-to-side. Up so close, she didn’t seem indestructible at all. Her dark skin gleamed but her neck was thick and looked curdled on the edge of its flaps with powdery sweat. 

For a moment, there was a stand-off as the boys struggled to make an opening in the confrontation. As they gathered their wits, Pagli’s eyes softened and straightening her back, she braced herself and stomped her left foot on the ground. “Hupp!” she spat on the ground to silence them even before the boys spoke. The boy in front, the biggest among them, clumsily leapt a step back, struggling to regain balance.

“Hatto”, Pagli commanded in a gruff reprimand. She didn’t have to repeat herself and the boys parted to make way for her as she resumed her walk up the hill. 

She was an elder and the boys, not yet men, didn’t let go of their code of honour not to bring any physical harm to a woman, especially a mother. All they wanted to do was intimidate her, and in their view, they had achieved it. Except the boy in the front. He wouldn’t forget this afternoon and young as he was, barely fourteen, he knew that there would come another time, another opportunity when he and his band of friends, would be better prepared to deal with Pagli. But even he spent many a sleepless night, soaked in pangs of desire and let his imagination take him to places he would never with the mothers and sisters.

In the meanwhile, Pagli’s family thrived and in December, the villagers received the invitation cards for Alok’s uncle’s wedding. The boys watched Pagli’s house receive a fresh coat of white paint. Then they heard that using the MLA’s local funds, his contractor-brother-bridegroom would construct a handpump within Pagli’s compound. The cracked boundary wall was repaired, the fallen burans cleared off from it and as if, from the boys’ bleak memory. All this work notwithstanding, as their mothers bitterly noted, their more urgent needs. Some work continued while the family was away in Ramnagar, where the boys heard, the bride’s family had arranged a week-long wedding celebration.

Exams were scheduled to begin in a fortnight after which the school was to shut for the winter break. Alok returned to the village but there was no sight of Pagli, and the boys concluded that with the new handpump installed in the premises, she had no further excuse to make the trek to the river. During recess, they relentlessly searched for Pagli but she eluded capture in their binoculars. Even so, hanging on that bare thread of hope of Pagli— just her bare ankles would be enough— was now their way of being and they wouldn’t give up. Until word got around that Pagli was not at home and in fact, had run away. Disappeared on the day of the wedding with search parties sent around Ramnagar returning empty-handed. 

The boys decided to accost Alok on the next day and get the truth out from him. Back home, the boys were surprised that instead of being relieved that the village was now free of Pagli, all they heard from their mothers was mourning for the poor motherless boys. Pagli had gone too far, their mothers said, and she would not go unpunished. Not in their living memory did they remember a mother who had run away from her children to be with a lover. Did she not fear the wrath of God?

Next day was also the last day at school. Unniyal Sir had taken sick and while waiting for Alok to finish his exam, the boys distracted themselves by shooting marbles, when they heard the clanging of plates from the village below. Towering over a procession, with women pressed close around her, was a slender figure. “Oyoye”, screamed the boy with the binoculars, laughing with his hands on his stomach “ganji ho gayi”. The binoculars got hastily passed around. Pagli’s head was tonsured, her face blackened, and a garland of discarded slippers hung around her neck. After a few paces, the group came to a halt and a sister joined with a dhol which got the group dancing. They resumed the procession, banging plates, another sister hooted on a green plastic whistle, the atmosphere merry and festive as if it were a celebration. 

As the boys watched agape, Alok rushed past them, stumbling over a root of a fallen tree, screaming “Ma”, down the stone path towards his mother. The appearance of the boy put the group in a confusion, but a grandmother waved her hand signalling the women to continue. Alok threw himself into the middle of the group and wrapped Pagli’s feet with his arms, thrashing with his elbows against a sister who tried to wrench him free of his clasp on his mother. Pagli bent over to lift him and whatever her instructions to him were, he allowed himself to be peeled off her.

The pallu of Pagli’s sari was off her shoulder and hands grabbed the pleats to pull it off as well. Her back was now exposed and one of the sisters slit open Pagli’s blouse with a blade and pulled it out for display to the crowd. The dhol picked up pace, its powerful sound echoed through the hills and some of the boys watching from top, started dancing too. Someone pushed Pagli— was not that woman, Pagli’s mother-in-law? Another kicked her, and when she fell, more blows landed on her. Pagli fended off the hands pinning her down and stood up, tall and erect, her face turned up to the sky, her palm visored on her forehead. One of the boys spotted a nath on her right nostril—nath that they had never seen on Pagli before. 

Against her partial nakedness, the nath that caught the afternoon sun seemed like an invitation. A rock flew past in the direction of the procession, from the arm of the smallest of the boys, and they scrambled in search of more to follow suit. The boys were six on a perch that could hold no more than two which restricted their arm span. A catapult would have been ideal, but they had none. One boy took charge and the rest dismounted to ply him with the rocks. They had reason to trust him. He was the biggest, the one whose foot, Pagli had earlier spat at. He hadn’t forgotten the stamping of the foot, the claim of her foot on the hill, the mocking insult. The rocks now began to rain on the procession. The boy was good with his aim and when two rocks landed on Pagli, they yelped in celebration. Some mothers in the crowd turned back and the boys ducked behind the hill. 

And suddenly, a flock of parrots sprung from behind the roof of the school and fanning out, they circled the procession, swooping low. With their talons bared, like eagles turned green with rage. In panic, the mothers and sisters scampered to take cover, breaking the procession. The shrill bird calls rented the air, and they were joined by more parrots—fifty or were they hundred? — that flew in from all directions. Together, they formed rings in the air, so dense that they seemed to block the waning sun, now reduced to a thin streak of bleeding pink. Left alone on the empty gali, were Pagli and Alok, their eyes transfixed to the sky. 

Before the nightfall, the police arrived, led by Gabriyal uncle. The villagers waited for the dreaded knock behind the closed doors of the panchayat ghar. Inside was an ominous silence. A sister began to recant the events, as if to refresh their collective memory before the police will come in for questioning. Now the mothers looked accusingly at each other as they tried to isolate that one misstep that had summoned the parrots. Surely, their mothers had done no wrong in punishing her, now that she was caught. Was not Pagli to be blamed for bringing shame to this village of simple folk?

“Hupp!” a grandmother silenced the quibbling women. “Cowards all of you.” 

The women stared at the grandmother, unable to muster her conviction. Instead, the grandmother’s challenge cracked open their confusion. 

“Talk is cheap, oh mothers”, a mother cried, “Now we have her husband coming for us.” Uncle Gabriyal had brought the news that Alok’s father was on his way home. While their own men, the boys’ fathers were away and a madman had brought the police to their village.

“Only a mongrel follows a strayed bitch” the grandmother spat.

The women hung their heads low and one wailed, “Hai tauba.” 

If it were indeed true that the husband is unlikely to let the village off, the women cursed his disregard for the elders’ wishes, including his mother’s. His insouciance. Being the agriculture officer, the police would do his bidding. The boys sensed that this would shift the ground, leaving the women exposed. They were afraid and now, so were the boys. 

The boys nudged ajar the window to a gibbous moon framed in its wooden frame. The unexpected sight of the peeping moon stunned the mothers back to silence. Outside, the parrots had settled to a low hum as if mimicking Pagli’s song, inviolate and yet soaring, over the ravages on her body.