Once upon a time, when a flatbread made from jowar flour called the bhakri was an item of great value, when all your neighbours were distant or close relatives, when the king was a pawn, and people from strange terrains ruled your land with an iron fist, an elderly couple lived in a village somewhere south of the broken mountain range. The couple were so old that nobody who could have addressed them with their names was around, and their age had ossified into their epithets: Old Baba and Old Bai.
Not calling a thing by its name was a complex custom – even a life-preserving one – that people had been practising for thousands of years. Who could blame them? After witnessing invasions, plundering, diseases, droughts, and flooding, multifarious ways of surviving and failing at survival had been endured to arrive at the hopeful custom. A baby was named a stone; a field ready for harvest was referred to as wasteland; a beautiful woman was a witch, and a wise man a fool. When a person hailed their neighbour, they insulted them and simultaneously wished for their safety and well-being; when they kicked their dog and whipped their bull, they showed fondness towards the animals. It might seem that such contradictory ways would destroy ordinary exchange and make the business of living impossible. But the ordinary is resilient. When nothing else survives, the humdrum keeps going because it is fuelled by the human body and, in turn, the human body is fuelled by hunger.
Having unravelled the mystery of existence – to a certain extent, the elderly couple and their village of relatives lived from one day to the next in contentment. The only grievance that Old Bai nurtured towards her husband had to do with his feral temper, how in its throes, he bellowed and threatened to blow off the thatched roof of their hut. And to balance out matters, Old Baba also had one complaint about his beloved wife: he thought she was stubborn, and it was her rigidity that kept the leaky roof that needed replacing moored over their heads, no matter how deeply he thundered, how wildly he roared. It could be said that this was the secret of their long life together: They kept each other bound in happy contempt.
Late one morning, while the sun shone like an exquisite jewel, Old Baba walked home from his half-acre farmland. He gazed at the sky often, shielding his eyes with his hands, and when he thought he heard a bird peep, he stopped in amazement. Because he was more intent on what was above his head than what lay beneath his feet, he tripped and had a fall. It was a ripe moment for fury. His eyes bulged, his mouth puffed, his veins thumped. But then a doubt crept into his mind: what was this thing that had caused him to stumble? What had appeared, as if by sorcery, on this path that had been empty when he had trodden it at dawn? He squatted for a closer look. A gunny bag lay before him, with half a seer of jowar glistening through its open mouth. Dumbfounded, wide-eyed, Old Baba hastened home, clasping the treasure to his racing heart.
‘There are many ways in which one can die,’ Old Bai murmured as she lay dreaming inside her house, ‘each of those ways is momentous and yet lasts only a brief moment.’
Many years ago, when Old Bai had arrived in the village as a bride, she had felt neither the curiosity nor the trepidation that a young girl might have felt. She was sagacious and understood the rituals of this world and the one beyond. People consulted her on matters of crop rotations, medicinal herbs, the technique of spinning rough thread from jute fibres, and the proper rituals for welcoming a newborn or appeasing a dead ancestor. People thought Old Bai knew everything there was to know under the sun. People thought she had second sight.
‘But what use is wisdom?’ Old Bai said under the influence of sleep, ‘Life’s demands are incalculable and limitless. Who is to say my wisdom will tide us over this summer?’
When her husband bounded in from the door, she awoke with a start and said to him,
‘I had a magnificent dream, husband. Nothing good can come from it. It worries me no end.’
‘This is dreadful, indeed. Why should you have such a dream?’
‘I wouldn’t know, would I?’
‘I can’t disagree with you there. Who knows why something happens? It’s idiots who grapple with matters that cannot be understood and presume where presumptions cannot be made. If we had a son, I would put him to work on the farm, and if we had a daughter, you would put her to work in the house, and neither of them would have the time to engage in such studies. Nevertheless, woman, if you cannot tell me why, you can certainly tell me what you saw in your dream.’
‘Very well. I saw you were walking back from the farm, far too slowly for a man like yourself, and if that wasn’t bad enough, you stumbled and lay unmoving as if you were dead.’
‘I wouldn’t call this a good dream, woman. No, I can’t say I do.’
‘Don’t rush into finding solace where none is obtainable. Before you had plodded along that route, a spirit had taken the same path, stomping in a surly tread that is its penchant. Unknowingly, it let fall a gunny bag – in the stretch between your great-uncle’s farm and the acacia grove – and was gone before it realised the loss. That’s what I saw, and how can you not call this dream good?’
‘It’s a fine vision, indeed. But we need not worry. I did find something. See?’
Old Baba knelt, his joints crackling like firewood, and held the prize out to his wife.
‘No, I don’t see it. It was only a dream.’
‘Blind woman, will you trust your open eyes or closed?’
‘What do gaping eyes see? Only that which the shuttered ones have foretold. But now you are flying into your usual rages. It does not matter to me. I believe what I believe. But hand me the bag. If it’s a dream, I see no reason why we can’t enjoy a bhakri in it.’
‘You are a pig-headed woman. I curse the day I married you. I curse the day when I cursed you first.’
Old Bai took no notice of her husband. She poured the grain into a quern and began grinding. When that was done, she shoved twigs and sticks into the mud stove and fanned the flame. After that, Old Baba’s jabbering was lost in the wood smoke and the pat-pat-pat sound of Old Bai’s palms as she flattened the dough to turn it into bread.
The couple’s house was neither in the middle of the village nor at the periphery. It was a hut with a stunted door that required a person to hunch while entering, and narrow slits for windows where if a crow or two perched, it felt as if dusk had arrived too soon. Old Baba settled outside, resting his back against the clay-plastered wall, and thought about the crows that flocked within the boughs of the banyans and the pipals; how the birds straddled the village and the fields; how they were said to fly between the worlds of the living and the dead. But Old Baba hadn’t seen the crows for many days now. Where had those dark and mysterious travellers gone?
‘There might be many ways to die,’ Old Baba said to himself, ‘but there is only one way to live, and that way is slow, cyclical, and it goes through the stomach.’
Then Old Bai doused the cinders in the mud stove, and Old Baba hurried inside to sit across from his wife. Hastily, he began rifling through the heap of golden bhakris sitting pretty inside the cane basket.
‘Do not be greedy, husband. If you have found something mysterious in what I have cooked, be generous and share it with me.’
‘Wife, am I the selfish kind? When have I refused to share what fate has given me? What I see here is a puzzle: seven bhakris in the basket and two people to eat them. I will take four, and you can take the rest. It is fair because I was the one who found the grain.’
‘Your answer makes me believe that I should have the greater portion. I made the bhakris that could be eaten at all, and it was also I who saw the dream. And you must agree this is a dream.’
‘Stop, wife, I have been angry enough for one day. Besides, I am too famished to rail.’
‘To be honest, stubbornness is not easy on one’s body either. I am also weary.’
‘Let us settle the matter in another way. We will stake the one thing that is beloved to us.’
‘And what would that be, husband? If I were to answer for you, I would say it’s your unending fury.’
‘And if I were to do the same, I would say it’s your stubborn refusal to believe anything I say.’
‘Then there it is. Whoever speaks first – because it is bound to be an angry or unyielding word – gets three bhakris and the other gets four.’
With that, they fell silent.
Days passed, and at first the stillness between them persisted as if it were an unpassable divide. But then, without anyone realising it, the silence stopped being a chasm and turned into a river. It was an unusual river on which boats could have travelled without sails because it was downstream in both directions. Through this non-resistant channel, the natures of Old Baba and Old Bai gurgled across. The man turned obstinate while retaining his temper, and the woman became furiously stubborn.
In this way, the old belief of the land came true. Good had come from bad: A shared feeling, a kind of camaraderie, had arisen from strife. And bad had arisen from good: A sack of grain had led to starvation.
#
The young sepoy jumped off a train slowing around a curve, waved at his mates, and walked towards the great expanse before him. In his pack, he had a large handkerchief, a pencil, and a census register containing district and village names.
‘A man always has a village inside him,’ the sepoy thought, breathing in the chilly air of the countryside dawn, ‘even if he is in the employ of the army and must move from camp to camp under its command.’
The sepoy was strong, in good spirits, and capable of performing the bleak task assigned to him. He wrapped the handkerchief across his face and looked like a dacoit. By the time he had surveyed the first few villages, he had become used to the blazing sky, the sickening smells, the cracked farmland, the loose soil blowing in the air like an ethereal flag. The landscape did not unnerve him but added to his sense of being alive as if he were a lone leaf in a desert, a solitary bird in the sky. He was young enough to think he was immortal. In addition, he was an orphan which reinforced his faith in his invincibility – a man without origin and perhaps without an end?
He travelled relentlessly. If he came across a bullock cart, he rode it until the bullocks, too, reeling under the shock of the circumstance, gave up ferrying their burden. When there were no carts to ride, the young sepoy walked. He went through villages as if he were a string accumulating beads. He saw streets where no one ventured because there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do that would earn you a handful of grain. He gazed at farmlands that resembled deserts. He peeked into wells that looked like the gullet of hell.
The young sepoy might have had a village inside him, but he no longer possessed the village’s belief in the contrary. His rigorous army training had stamped out his faith in such things. His belief system now had to do with respect for certainty and reverence for procedure. What he saw around him, he called calamitous; what he saw, he noted in his register.
It was dusk when he arrived at the hut that was neither in the middle of the village nor at the end. He had been walking and working for weeks by then. He had been tireless; he had been diligent. But the moment he entered the hut, he felt an ancient realisation descend upon his body, the realisation of hunger.
Inside, a man and a woman lay prostrate like skeletons. A pan, a few dented plates, and a bowl sat on a shelf. In the corner, a quern receded in the shadows. The sepoy made a quick survey. It was a darkened house, and who was to say its gloom did not conceal hidden stores? The sepoy sprang into action. He rummaged through the shelves. He lifted the hand-stone off the quern, looking for grains trapped in the crevices. He thrust his hand in the corners and drew out rags of clothing, shards of clay pots, and tangles of decayed yarn. Disappointed, he became brutal. He approached the sleeping bodies, rolled them to the side, and was rewarded with a cane basket and a gunny bag. Heart pounding, he knelt to inspect his discovery. A long moment passed. Rivers turned into vapour, seeds shrivelled, chasms deepened, bridges collapsed, every breath became upstream. Then the sepoy, who looked like a dacoit but was only a cruel child, began whimpering with fatigue and hunger. He kept weeping but found no solace in his sorrow, no respite from his predicament. When he stepped outside the hut, the crows that were always present were alighting on the branches of distant trees. In the fading light of the day, still wailing, the boy opened his crinkled register and called the gunny bag empty and the things in the basket pebbles.
Nivedita Barve lives in Hyderabad, India, where she is working on a novel. Her short fiction has previously appeared in Joyland, Storgy Magazine, The BWW Bangalore Anthology, and The Bombay Review. In addition, she enjoys building games to explore the nature of space and interaction in virtual reality.