The Day of the Vulture

By Raj Sharma

The dog woke him up, howling plaintively in the dark, as if mourning for someone dead. Its shrill voice broke through his sleep, then other canine voices joined and their long drawn out threnody ululated through the dawn. It made him uneasy and he took a little time to adjust himself to the new day.

The sun was leaping out of the east and birds hissed as a playful wind threw them off their perches. He rolled a bidi for himself from a tendu leaf and came out smoking. Dust and dead leaves swirled up in a vertical column, scaring a flock of parrots away. Yet a dove kept cooing unruffled from the top of a mango tree.

There used to be so many more trees in his childhood, Thaan Singh recalled.  But most of them had been cut down by the villagers themselves. When the corn bin in the house was empty, they ran to the jungle, brought back a head-load of wood and by selling it, fed themselves.

But while old trees were lopped down, new ones were never planted. Thus, through the years, the country became more and more bleak and denuded. Now just mangoes, mahuas and toddy palms remained, trees that offered them food, drink or cash.  Only in the hills way off were there some traces of a jungle still.

Smoking, he ambled towards the open country to move his bowels. A lone vulture was gliding overhead in slow, watchful circles. Maybe there is something dead down there, he thought. The offensive stench of rotting flesh came to him, indeed, after a little while. It was a dead cow, he saw from a distance.  Flies were buzzing over the corpse and maggots creeping. The bird kept moving in narrowing circles towards its prey. But he moved on, leaving the dead body to the greedy vulture.

In the dark, sooty interior of their hut, Amli was cooking the day’s meal when he got back.  The cramped space was filled with acrid smoke. She baked thick rotis of corn flour, then ground some chili sauce. That was all. They were lucky even to get two meals a day from the time she got a job. He himself worked erratically, whenever his poor health or fondness for liquor permitted.

She wore a ragged long skirt and a button-less blouse. The open front was carelessly tucked up with a safety pin, leaving her big breasts almost bare. She didn’t mind, nor did he bother, looking indifferently at her semi-nudity.

“How much did you get yesterday?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Why?”

“They said they would pay me on the coming Saturday.”

“Do we have enough money to eat till then?”

“Why should you bother?” she taunted. “You hardly eat.”

There was a bruise on her cheek where he’d hit her four days back.

He looked guiltily away, through the murky interior. The palm fronds were flapping gaily in the wind and the twin pots attached to the tree swung lightly.

Coming out, he climbed the tree. Taadi had collected in the pots overnight; he came down with one of them. Pouring it with a wooden ladle into a leaf cup, he drank it; then gave some to her. In the morning the viscous liquid had a sweet taste and smell, but by evening under the intense heat, it fermented and turned sour and intoxicating.

She left for work soon after and he walked towards the stream half a mile away. Like most Bhils he didn’t care much for bathing, but today it was the weekly market day, and he wanted to look spruce.

The stream was fast running dry. But in the middle there was a shallow pool of water still and he trudged through the pale brown sands to get there. Had the stream been closer to his farm, things might have been different, he sadly reflected. He might have had crops round the year. But it couldn’t be, and he had to be content with a single crop. That too was often meager and uncertain. His frustrations as a farmer had often driven him to drink.

The sun was high up by the time he got back. The long walk had made him hungry and going in, he took the coarse rotis in his bare hands and ate them with the pungent sauce. Then he drank the remaining taadi from the pot and tying up his turban, came out for the market.

The weekly market at Chandpur was slowly filling up. Most of the peddlers had arrived and were busy arranging their wares. The sellers of snacks and sweets were putting them in small piles costing a rupee each. The vegetable sellers did the same. None of them could afford to buy the proper weights and this indigenous device worked.

Many of his friends had come with their wives. Bhils liked to move around with their women.  It was more fun that way. Still, quite a few had come singly too. Their wives were off to work, like his.

But he knew that no married man would come to the market singly next week, for it would be Bhagoriya then. Folks already wore bright smiles and the hamlets throbbed to the beat of drums and the gyrations of dancing. It was all a rehearsal for the big event in the coming week.

He retired with friends of neighboring villages to gossip under a big tamarind tree. There had been a murder in a nearby village when a dacoit gang had attacked the village headman’s house at night. They had run off with whatever they could lay their hands on, and killed the headman’s son when he resisted the brigands.

Thaan Singh told them about his own village where Kelya had killed Welji by accident. The unlucky man had tried to sneak up his cousin’s toddy palm at night. Kelya hadn’t bothered to inquire in the dark who it was, but had just put an arrow into the intruder. He was sorry when he came to know, but by then the toddy thief was dead and he himself behind bars.

But the topic that interested them most was next week’s Bhagoriya. They expected it to be a good one, though perhaps not as crowded or colorful as some past ones had been. So many folks nowadays left their villages in search of work and only some of them could get back for their big festival. Those who were far away just couldn’t afford the long trip home. Still, much gaiety remained and they made the best of it.

It was past noon now and they dispersed as the market got into full swing. The grounds became crowded with village folk, come to buy and sell. Thaan Singh went to a potter to buy a pot for collecting taadi.  An additional pot would come in handy if guests visited him next week at Bhagoriya. A poor man, he had little else to offer them.

The mota saab had come to collect lagaan and taccavi and many of Thaan’s acquaintances were trying to slip away to avoid immediate payment. These land taxes and loan repayments were not very heavy, but most found it difficult to pay even that much. And those who had money were unwilling to pay on the eve of their major festival. Yet the patwaris remained busy looking for the evaders, to make them pay up.

“I’m lucky I don’t have to pay taxes,” Thaan naively reflected, little realizing the extent of his poverty. For his small two acre farm contained shallow, sandy soil which yielded only a meager harvest of corn.

He kept roaming idly till three when the market began to wind up. Folks left early, for wayside looting, even assault and murder were common. The crimes increased with the approach of summer when most people had nothing to eat and so got drunk on fermented taadi or liquor made from mahua and became violent.

Then just as he was about to leave, he saw Belo. He smiled and would’ve talked to her, but withdrew when he saw some older women approaching her.

Belo, a creeper. Indeed, she used to cling to him like one during their romance in the jungle four years back. But times change. Womenfolk change too, he bitterly reflected. She’d soon after fallen for Vestya, the son of the wealthy headman, and one day ran off with him and became his wife.

He’d missed her a lot in those days, till he found Amli. He saw Amli in a cousin’s marriage at Bhuria Amba.  The girls of the groom’s and bride’s parties were bandying songs as usual, and Amli was the group leader in the bride’s party. Teasingly she sang:

               Sisters, we are civilized folk
               moving about
               in trains and buses
               we hardly bother
               about these country louts
               footing it with the groom.
 
               Sisters, the  groom
               is a doddering old man  
               come crawling to our village
               in a creaky ox-cart;
               oh, we don’t care  much
               for the gray-haired groom.

The songs had gone on amidst much laughter till late in the night. Thaan was delighted with the girl. Soon after returning home he’d sent message to a friend, Ver Singh, to arrange a bhanjgeria. Ver had done the needful and Thaan had brought Amli home a year later, after paying the bride price.

Those were happy days, with Thaan feeling as if the whole world lay at his feet. His father had given him a small farm and after building his own little cottage on it, he had started living there with Amli, the girl of his dreams.

Three years had gone by since then, years which had changed many things. The first year had been the happiest one. He’d worked hard on his farm; the rains too were good. They had a good corn harvest that year, almost enough to last them till the next sowing.

But to have a little money in hand, they’d both gone off to Gujarat with some other villagers in late Poh.  After working for four months they’d saved nearly two thousand rupees and had felt quite well off.  They’d come back home in Jeth and he’d tilled the land for the new season.

But the second year had proved to be a bad one for crops.  The monsoon was niggardly and the harvest meager. All the prayers and offerings made by the villagers through the Badwa had been in vain.

There was little of the usual good cheer in the village that season. Folks looked harried and the annual exodus to the cities had started in Kaatak itself. There was nothing by way of food to hold them back.

Thaan Singh, down with jaundice, hadn’t been able to go. It was not till mid-winter that he was on his legs again. Even after that he was too weak to exert himself for a daylong job. Was it a daakan who lay behind it all, he wondered? He’d consulted the Badwa, but even the sacrifice of a goat had not set him right.  Desperate, he’d gone to a city doctor who’d cured him at last. But he was still convalescing and weak.

The old folks who had stayed behind in the village looked glum and irritable and he was much more so, having been sick too. His savings were gone and there was no food in the house.  A Bhil had a desperate remedy for such times: he took to drink. He could thus hope to forget the troubles which he was powerless to overcome. Thaan did the same, malingering and getting drunk, while his wife went out to work.

The government had initiated a drought relief program, but the place was too far away. Later, when relief work started nearer home, he’d   started working there with his wife.

But he was unlucky again. While lifting a heavy load, he lurched and fell, breaking his left leg. It was in plaster for nearly a month and it was another month and a half before he could walk properly. The prolonged confinement had debilitated him physically, it also shook his confidence.

He tried hard to keep up a façade of normality before his peers, though. He went to weekly markets, now and then, to show that everything was okay. But he would be irritable and exhausted by the time he got back home.

And he felt more insecure, gnawed as he was by new fears. He started believing that she pitied him now. Enfeebled bodily, what had he to offer to a buxom wench like her? He recalled a bawdy song he’d heard at his own wedding by the bride’s party:

                         
                         The over-ripe
                         mango sways
                         in the wind
                         and drops readily.
 
                         Sweet lady, your gray hubby’s
                         little thing is limp
                         throw him out
                         and marry me.

They’d all laughed at hearing the song, including himself.

But now he couldn’t. He was hardly a man any more, just a sot, he thought. Maybe she was looking for another partner to warm her bed, therefore. There were many sturdy youngsters on the site, and she was still young and desirable.

His jealousy was aroused when an acquaintance hinted that she might be carrying on with a young man from Ricchwi, a village someway off.  Thaan bullied and beat her when she returned, calling her a hot little bitch. But she retorted, asking him to prove his absurd allegations and threatened to leave him if he hit her again.

Angrily, he’d walked off to Bhima’s house, half a mile away. The Bhils often lived on farmsteads and a Bhil hamlet was often a scattered one, with houses way off from each other.

Bhima worked on the site too and called him a fool for suspecting his wife.  “Everyone likes her for she works hard,” he said tersely. “So don’t believe any wicked gossipmongers. Just go home and make it up with her.  She’s clean and good!”

He trusted Bhima, for the middle-aged farmer was honest and straightforward in his dealings. It was good to hear such words from his neighbor.

She won’t have looked him straight in the face had she been guilty, he thought.

The wind was ruffling the grass as he moved back home. A crashing sound in a nearby thicket startled him. He heard muffled animal groans and then saw a fox carrying a dangling, helpless rabbit in its jaws. The half-moon was high up in the sky and he walked on.

He again became alert as he heard low voices someway off.  Quickly, he stepped behind a bush to find out. He could vaguely make out two figures under a tree. Then he heard the low tinkling sound of female laughter. It was obviously a pair of lovers.

All his pent up anger had by now ebbed away. A new desire rose in him as he saw the clinging forms of lovers in the pale light. He felt hot and flushed with passion as he used to do in the first few months with her.

The wind rose suddenly, billowing through the leaves, raking up dust. A large cloud sailed into the sky and the light turned ashen. The leaves sighed and jackals started howling from a thicket in the west. But he moved ahead, imagining the pleasures of her sweet, young body. She slept with just a petticoat on, but he would even throw that away tonight. She was his, and he would take her like the ardent lover he once had been.

She lay huddled in a corner, fast asleep. His passion surged as he saw the vague outline of her bared breasts in the moonlit interior. He sidled up to her and began to fondle them. She stirred, then woke up and on seeing him, turned contemptuously away.

But tonight he won’t be denied. He seized her roughly in his arms, yet she thrashed about and wriggled out of his weak grip, her big breasts heaving.

“Go away,” she lashed out. “You mean nothing to me, you limp boozer!”

He felt crushed for a little while. She’d reminded him of his inability to perform in bed and she was right.

But the way she’d lashed out at him hurt his male vanity and he suddenly exploded in rage. Grabbing a stick, he hit her hard. He kept hitting, unmindful of her screams. “You dog!” she screamed, spitting on him. But he brought her down with a loud whack on her head.

His fury only doubled as she sank to the floor. “You bloody bitch! You would deny me your cunt! To your own husband! I’ll kill you!” he shouted, and seizing his sickle, he severed her throat. Then throwing the weapon away, he flung out of the house.

Clouds were massing in the sky and only a little light filtered through. He looked wildly at his blood-soaked hands. His mind was in a daze as he scurried ahead.

The clouds parted briefly and he crouched behind a bush, as if fearing to be found out. Then as the light dimmed, he staggered across the ghostly plain, towards the remnant of a jungle on the hills beyond.  Menacing shadows of trees loomed at back and the ground seemed to rock under his feet. He was flailing on blindly when suddenly he stumbled over a stump and lay spread-eagled on the earth. The dark heavens looked indifferently on.

 

A retired professor of English, Raj Sharma has worked at universities in India, the Middle East, and the USA. His published work includes ‘In My Arms’, a collection of short stories, and ‘April in the Alleghenies’ (Red Ochre Press), a chapbook of poems.
 
Author’s note: The story is set in the countryside of Jhabua, a district place in the author’s native state, Madhya Pradesh, in India. It is inhabited by Bhils, a community of tribal people. Starvation and crime are rampant in this poor farming community. He has written many articles on these people, having visited them frequently.

GLOSSARY

Badwa: a shaman

Bhagoriya: The biggest festival of Bhils, falling in the spring season (March). The elopement of girls with their lovers on this occasion is socially approved in this community.

Bhanjgeria: the go-between who arranges marriages of young couples

Bidi:  an indigenous cigarette

Daakan: a witch

Kaatak: Fall season (October)

Mahua: a tree whose flowers are used to make a strong indigenous liquor

Mota saab: the petty revenue official who collects land taxes and loan installments (lagaan and taccavi) from farmers.

Poh: mid-winter (December)

Taadi: indigenous liquor