The Faltering Pendulum

FROM neighbouring stalls in the Tuesday haat of the village she purchased by a barter of rags the two objects that were to make the motif of her life for months to come: three ripe pumpkin seeds embedded in the flesh of a sliced crescent piece, and a month-old goat youngling.

She, the rag-woman, shuffled along the village path at duskfall, the pumpkin slice clutched in one hand, the little white goat (black edges about the eyes, like marks of collyrium) in the crook of the other arm. The goat craned its neck, sniffing the eatable. A lolling tongue emerged. The woman slapped the narrow face with the bony back of her palm. "Have you no shame? Have you no feeling? Are you nothing but a fool goat?" She held her thin arms apart.

Even in that early hour she could see the vines grow out of the three pumpkin seeds, lithe-bodied vines outspread on reed thatch, with profuse gold-yellow flowers, and some flowers were mere ornament but others had in them the mother-urge of creating, and these bore fruit, the enormous fruit of the pumpkin growing out of a slip of a tender bright bloom. In a deep way it would be akin to her own inmost throb of fulfilment. The rag-woman eyed her new pet and gave it a long hard stare and said, "Are you nothing but a fool goat?"

Her white hair thinning at the top lay drawn at the back of her head, coiled up in a petty bun. Her short slight frame stooped a little with the burdens of age and a temper. While she had grown in years there had been no mellowing of the stuff of her life, lone. no kin to stay with her, no consolation save in rags. Those rags, collected from door to door, were more than her living. Each had a meaning and a story. A smell of life clung on to the cast-off clothes of man and woman. Each had its own individual smell of life. The rag-woman lived with the smells.They kindled a zest in her and fed her fancies. With the rags of people strewn about her on the mud floor of her shack, she projected herself, she spread out, among the people. Her aloneness was gone. She felt strangely soothed.

If only she could be rid of the core of temper, the hard nut inside her, that had made her scorned and laughed at. As she shuffled back from the market that day and drew close to the shadowed mango grove skirting the weavers' settlement, her furtive glance cast around and she addressed the inward nut, "Keep still. Do not toss about. Keep still."

"Baa-aa!" the goat cried, as though echoing the invocation.

"Baa-aa? What do you know about it, fool goat?"

"Moo-oo!" A soft pitying murmur, tremulous.

The woman drew her grey brows together, watchful, the wrinkled face intent. And the odd wish-thought hit her then: "He knows. He understands. No fool goat, this."

"How hold my temper against the young devils who will come dashing in a moment to pester me? What bones can put up with such harrowing?" she confided to her animal and her eyes had a hunted look while she hurried her feet, hoping to pass by unseen.

"Rag hag!" shot out the inevitable cry and the grinning face of a youngster peered from the dark of a tree-trunk screen.

"Keep still", she muttered, desperate, to the hard core of her temper. "Do not toss about." Her heart was beating wildly.

"Rag hag's got a puppy!" from another tree-trunk. And many voices all about lifted together: "Rag hag's got a puppy!"

"A goat, no puppy", said the woman, hoarse, with violent calm.

"Little white puppy. Rag hag's got a white puppy." A youngster sped out of cover and darted, hurtling close by the woman, with a big yell.

"A goat", shrilled the woman, fiercely turning round, holding the animal aloft for all to see. "Have maggots eaten your eyeballs?"

A second youngster dashed up with a yell. "Ho! Rag hag's puppy will not walk; it rides on her, the white puppy." And he too shot by, passing his friend who was now racing back like an excited colt.

"Your tongue will rot. Vultures will peck at your bones."

"Ho!" cried the boys with the thoughtless cruelty of youth. "Rag hag—mad hag!" And their mouths were hard, eyes ashine with mirth.

The woman, now utterly lost to reason, an abandoned flotsam on the sweeping tide of her fury, picked up a brickbat and flung it at the boys. "The womb that bore you will be deadwood." She dashed up crazily, fuming, throwing brickbats, the eyes in their deep sockets bulging fearfully.

So it went on for a minute, and then with one big shout of laughter and a final "Rag hag... mad hag!" the boys, having had their grand fun, melted away in the deep dusk of the orchard. The woman looked this way and that, hurtling her last brickbats. "Take this. Take more. Your skull will crack. Your mouths will spit blood. Take one more."

Spent, gasping, she resumed her walk and as the tossing nut of her temper lay still, she hung her head in utmost shame.

"You saw?" she murmured to her pet. "That angry thing rolled again in my belly."

"Mmm!" agreed the animal.

"You heard? My tongue cursed the children, this vile filthy tongue. May it be torn out from its root."

"Moo-oo!" came the bleat of sympathy.

He understood her! He felt for her. No fool goat. The rag-woman clasped the animal to her breast as if to fill an emptiness within. Her bleary eyes were wet. She felt soothed.

That was how the rag-woman started her new kinship with the goat youngling. She pattered to the animal all day long and revealed her suppressed heart. No one had ever cared to listen to her talk because of the temper in her and the keen edge of her tongue. Only the goat listened and answered in pity and listened again.

The three pumpkin seeds sprouted and the vines spread out. One died but the others grew fast. The rag-woman collected the black pellets of her animal's dung and cast them in her patch of earth to mingle with the soil and add their rich nurture to the growing vines. She hoped that the vines, fed on that dung, would imbibe some essential of the goat's being and would listen to the flow of her talk, and even if they could not answer with baa and maa, they would surely make response by the wag of a tendril, the swing of a leaf.

She was strangely close to the life of the vines, that lone despised woman of a remote Bengal village. For her they had a being. She could feel the rhythm of their growth and the movement of sap from rootlets deep in earth to the thrusting profusion of wide fresh-skinned leaves. She divided herself between her animal and her vines. Both had her in equal measure.

Then, one day, the blow fell.

The vines were in their first bloom. The rag-woman watched, athrill. Out of the sun-washed gold-yellow blooms fruit would come. Seeds—flowers—fruit—seeds, the complete life cycle, immutable. The first flowers came and went, fruitless. That often happened in the early stage and was not to be worried about. But it continued well beyond the normal span of time. New plump blooms burst forth every day, their profuse gold glittering in the hard sun. The blooms died. Not one pumpkin showed itself anywhere on the vines. The woman scanned the winding, twisted lengths every day with a flutter in her heart, peering under the clumps of leaves. In vain.

Barren! The two vines were barren!

The rag-woman, struck by the thought, stared aghast at the bright-flowered ones. She trembled and sank down on her knees and she knocked her head on the earth and grieved.

They were dead things, those vines. They had tricked her.

Some dream in her was shattered. For, she herself was a barren one. Widowed in middle age, not once had her womb-flower borne fruit in all the years when she had a husband. She was all deadwood inside. And she had entered the being of the young-limbed pumpkin vines, seeking some fulfilment. The vines had tricked her. It seemed that whatever she touched must become barren.

The temper in her tossed and rattled angrier than ever before, and her tongue renewed its razor edge.

Then it so happened that some folly came upon the goat one day and it grew reckless and flouted the woman, its mistress. She saw it calmly lopping up the leaves of the vine. "Keep off!" she cried, but the goat's answer was challenging and mockful. Later, the goat was nibbling the vine again. Once more the woman warned it and dragged it away. In a half-hour the persistent goat was again pillaging the vine. Now the woman's temper came, a swift fire-burst. "Dare you?" She clutched the goat's throat with the claw-like fingers of both hands. She pressed hard, gritting her gappy teeth in resistless fury, and pressed harder. "Dare you?" When her fingers loosened, the goat dropped limply on the mud floor. It was dead. The rag-woman had throttled her pet.

She shook the inert body. Alarmed, she called the animal by its name. She felt for its breath. Then she sat awhile in a daze. At last the tears began to pour down her sunken cheeks and she wailed out, "My goat, my goat!" The cry drew alarmed neighbours. They tried to revive the goat, splashing water on its face. Then they tried to soothe the woman and offered to buy her, helpless one, a new pet from the haat. But the woman beat her breast, knocked her head on the floor and kept on wailing, "My goat, my goat!"

The day passed. An hour before dusk a young girl came running to the grief-stricken woman as she lay in bed and called out excitedly, "The vines! Two little pumpkins, like ducks' eggs." All the village knew about the barren vines; this girl had seized the rare chance of the woman's preoccupation with her pain to explore on her own.

The rag-woman looked up in puzzlement and it was some time before the words found their mark. Then she jerked up to her feet. She did not wipe the wet on her cheeks. Weak-kneed, she tottered after the girl.

"Look –" the girl cried and in that instant the woman was transformed. She gripped the girl's up-lifted arm with a quick thrust of her hand. "Take heed, girl", she cried, her voice trembling. "Take heed not to point your finger at the younglings of pumpkin. Else, they will shrivel and fall. Growing, unripe things – fruit, flower-bud – all shrivel and die if pointed at. Nature's way. Take heed!"

And the girl nodded and closed her fingers tight lest, unwary, they pointed.

The goat had cleared up thick patches of leaves, and on a stripped tendril a tiny pumpkin hung. Another, a yard away. Oh, how could she have missed them?

Even in her deep anguish the rag-woman's tear-stained face beamed. The goat was dead, a white heap still lying on the mud floor. But the pumpkin vines had spring to fruitful life, after their long barren dead-aliveness. A balance was achieved. The faltering pendulum had regained its swing.