Anuradha Roy - The Folded Earth

The next morning I asked Ama, “What was happening at your house yesterday?”

“I called the Ohjha,” she said, looking combative in advance. “I needed him.”

Ama did call the Ohjha now and then to exorcise evil spirits from her cows or rid them of spells she thought malicious neighbours had cast on them. Not even the plainest evidence would make her see he was a charlatan. The Ohjha usually came in the afternoon, performed his rituals, sat on a stool in the courtyard smoking and drinking tea, and after pocketing some of Ama’s money, bemoaned his failing bijniss. Once he was gone, Ama invariably reported miraculous change. He had not saved Gouri Joshi, she admitted that, but that was his only failure, and it had happened because the cow’s time had come: Gouri’s enemy had been Death itself.

“You called the Ohjha?” I said, “For the cows?”

“No,” she said. “Not for the cows.”

She shooed a hen away, bent to poke at something in the earth. She told me of a little boy who had fallen into an open manhole on Mall Road and come out covered in muck. She observed that while Diwan Sahib’s blood relatives were never there when needed, I was looking after the old man like a daughter. And talking of daughters, had I noticed how shamelessly Janaki’s teenaged girl had gone off for a ride on that Muslim boy’s motorbike? Everyone knew they had a thing going between them, but Janaki was too doped to care.

She did not meet my eyes when at last she said: “I called the Ohjha for Charu. Here I am, trying everything to fix a match for her and she makes things go wrong. She is in the clutches of a bad spirit.” She saw the look on my face and her voice rose. “You think I’m a foolish old woman to believe in evil spirits.” She shook her stick towards the flat grey sky to our north. The high peaks were lost in the monsoon mist. “If you told a stranger that there are actually big snow peaks where that sky is,” she said, “would he believe you? What can he see but an ordinary, everyday sky that he can find anywhere? But you and I know the peaks are there. We are surrounded by things we don’t know and can’t understand.” She looked at me in triumph and set her stick down. “You city people think you know everything.” This was a phrase she liked using because it never failed to infuriate me.

“That’s different,” I said. “If Charu doesn’t want to marry, it’s for a real reason, not because of bad spirits.” Charu’s simple, unspiritual reason for turning away prospective grooms almost escaped my lips. I knew Ama suspected enough without any encouragement from me, and that this had added urgency to her efforts. Kundan Singh, a cook from the unknown east and of some indeterminate caste, would have struck her as anything but suitable. She was tapping clan networks, sizing up prospective grooms: most of these she rejected, either because the man’s family would ask an exorbitant dowry, or because the man was too old, or unemployed and without prospects, or had “bad habits”. I had been given reports from time to time in tones of contempt.

“They say he is about to get a Gormint job, but I know better than to believe it.” Or, “They said he runs a restaurant in Almora. Lachman drove there to see. There’s nothing, only a straw-roofed tea-shack by the road, with two bricks to sit on and one burned pan to boil tea.”

None of these dead-loss grooms had reached the point when their relatives were allowed to have a look at Charu; I had seen the process a couple of times, a troop of the prospective groom’s family sizing up a girl as horse dealers might a horse. Ama had told me stories of her own long-ago ordeals when she had been similarly displayed. “Must not show a girl to too many families, that is no good,” she had advised me in sage tones.

In the past few months, she had winnowed the list of possible grooms down to two. One was a clerk in a government office in Haldwani. She admitted he was dark-skinned, “But who looks at a prospective groom’s looks? It is his nature that matters, and this boy’s nature is good.” One symptom of his goodness was that he said he wanted no dowry. And her network said he had no bad habits: he did not smoke or drink, he did not chew tobacco, not even paan. An additional bonus was that his family was small, so Charu, as the daughter-in-law, would not be worked to the bone. There were only two sisters, parents, and one old granny who, she said, did not count because, “She’s halfway up there already, and seems in a hurry to reach.”

The boy Ama had in fact set her heart on was an assistant in a medicine factory in Bhimtal. People said he had excellent prospects; what was more he was younger than the government clerk who, Ama conceded, was perhaps a few years too old for Charu. Though the young man she favoured did have a considerable paunch, her view was that it showed he was from a family that could afford to eat two full meals every day. This second possibility was also fair-skinned, and from what I could see, a sharp dresser: he had sent a colour photograph of himself against the backdrop of a painted Taj Mahal, posing on a red Kawasaki motorbike that the studio used as a prop.

Charu had been unconcerned about this resolute quest for a groom; the talk of it had been going on so long that she had stopped paying attention. But when the families of these two prospects announced they would come to assess the future bride, and Ama agreed to the visits, Charu began to worry.

The families of the prospective grooms came on their inspection tours, a month apart from each other. Both times, Ama dug into her cash reserves and cooked up meals that by their standards were lavish. She had even thrust some money at me one day, saying, “When you come back from work, bring a cake with pink kireem from Bisht Bakery, the small size.” The Kawasaki groom’s family, being from Bhimtal, “was used to city things”, she said. Her homemade kheer would not sufficiently impress them.

The reason for calling the Ohjha was that all Ama’s efforts and expense had gone to waste. The Kawasaki sisters had gone away suspecting Charu was feeble-minded, and perhaps deaf. “That is how the wretch behaved with them!” Ama said. “They asked her simple questions and she kept staring at them as though she’s an idiot and she went on squawking, ‘What? What?’ like a parrot.” With the other groom’s family, Ama had spotted Charu working up a squint when she thought her grandmother was not looking. When asked to serve the Coca-Cola that had been bought for the guests, she had limped to and from the kitchen as though one of her legs were shorter than the other, and had spilled half a glass of the precious drink on the floor.

“These things take no time to spread, I won’t be able to find a single boy for her if she goes on this way,” Ama cried in anguish. “I know she wanted them to go away thinking she’s deaf and insane and a cripple. Tell me, what is wrong with her? Has she said anything to you? Doesn’t she care about her future? Doesn’t she care about my reputation?”

The Ohjha had said two or three sessions would be needed if the spirit was a vengeful and determined one, as he thought it was. He worked at night, when the evil spirits that possessed human beings were at their strongest, in a rickety shed made of corrugated iron sheets. The moment they saw a snake or a toad or a scorpion leave that shed they would know Charu was free of the possession, he had promised.

When I saw Charu the morning after the first exorcism, she looked red-eyed, as if she had not slept. Her hair was dishevelled and she dragged her feet as she herded the goats and cows to their grazing on the slopes below her home. But from far down the slope, as soon as she saw the postman appear and turn towards my cottage, she bounded up the hill. She was at my door less than a minute after the postman had left, chest heaving, panting for breath, bright-eyed, waiting for me to tell her there was a letter from Kundan.