POORVA

(A Story)

BY L. S. RAMAMIRTHAM

(Rendered from Tamil)

She came to me a little while ago. With a smile that mocked, she came up from behind and, whispering my name softly in my ear, touched me on the shoulder.

“Poorva!” With a cry on my lips, I sprang up, only to find the darkness of the night enveloping me. I rubbed my eyes, wet with tears shed in sleep. I had just dreamed of her–she who, even while living, was of the texture that dreams are made of, and so in my dream was dreamier than a dream....

Somewhere, the hour strikes.

I know that sleep is denied me the rest of the night, taken up with the relentless play of memories swinging back and forth, back and forth...

The tale of Poorva begins sometime in the early hours of a cloudy morning, on the shore of the sea. The dark clouds massed and rolled against the horizon where the sea touched the sky.

I was pointing to the sea that was a sheet of blue glass beyond turbulence of the waves and saying to Poorva:

“Man discovers many things. He has perhaps discovered all that there is to be on this earth. Yet it is not in him to have gauged the sky and the sea fully. In the kingdom of the sea, there are things yet beyond his ken. Oh, the things yon would see on the sea-bed, if you could only find a way to walk into the depths of the fathoms and yet keep unhurt and alive!

“You know, it is nearly ten years now I am in the City. Yet the wonder of the sea has not ceased within me. How many come over here from distant parts, to look at the sights in the City. And, every time, there is always something new to be seen. But these stale, but not this ageless wonder of the sea! It stays new for me as ever...”

Poorva smiled. I warmed up. How I talk when I do talk!

“Did I–Did I tell you of the first time I came to the City? I ran away from home. In the village, when I was a boy, my granny gathered all the children together, to tell them a fairy tale:

‘Once there lived a prince who married a mermaid. It was thus he met her. It was mid-day when the sun blazes right over the top of your head; she had come from the sea and was basking on the shore. And he, tired and thirsty after the hunt, came by. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to quench his thirst. And then he saw her and she him, and they were filled with love of each other...’

“So the story goes on.

“But I remember butting in and asking: ‘Granny, wherefrom did the mermaid come ashore?”

‘From her palace in the sea-bed.’

‘Where is the sea?’

‘Far far away, in the City.’

‘How did she come ashore?’

My granny was getting sleepy. She droned: ‘The waves were her raft and her hands served as paddle.’

‘Boat? Paddle?? Waves???’

‘You brat; either you listen silently or go to sleep. No cross questions, hear?’

“I do not know what happened within me. The next day, I took fistfuls of coin from I knew where they were kept, poured them into my pockets and ran away from home. I wanted so badly to see the sea and the mermaid. As the Station Master was a friend of the family, I walked to the next station and boarded the train. I remember how, when the clerk wanted to know where I wanted to take ticket for, I said ‘The Sea!’

“And. so, I came to the City, to the land of the sea. I came to the sea, lay in the shadow of a boat, in the blaze of noon, waiting for the mermaid. The waves rose to their crests and foamed. Atop of the foam–Poorva! Poorva!!”

She was not listening, as she was engrossed in the actions of fisherman just a few feet away from us, fishing with a rod.

Just the three of us. With leisurely deliberation, he sticks a crab into the hook, casts the hook over the waters and waits, silent and motionless like in a trance, for the pull at the bait. Then he pulls, pulls and pulls, and at the end of the string struggles a silver creature. He unhooks it and shoves it into the small basket tied to his waist. A pattering sound comes from within.

Poorva all at once went over to him and said she would have a look inside the basket.

I hear him murmur: “But they look like Brahmins!” He obliges. Inside, two fish struggle for very life-breath, shutting and opening their jaws wide and swishing their tails. The beautiful eyes had gone wide and empty with the fast ebbing of life. The silver bodies pattering against each other and mouths gasping for very life….

Her eyes went hazy and her knees sagged under her. If I had not caught her in my arms, she would have fallen. Her lips brushed against my ear and, like the trembling of the wind, the words were soundless.

“I am two months with child...”

I stand staring at her body lying inert in my arms. The fisherman’s face convulses, idiotic with fright. A crab impaled on the hook in his hand claws the air ineffectively.

The silence around us roars louder than the sea. The waves rush and wash our feet.

The shadows of the night had begun to gather. She was reclining on an easy chair in the verandah. The breeze played about two wisps of hair on the forehead and stirred the folds of the saree on her bosom. Her eyes were closed. I tip toed silently up to her and called her softly by name. Was she sleeping or just thinking?

There is calm around us. The leaves rustle in the trees and the shrubs. I sit on my haunches on the short parapet rising above the verandah. I cannot understand her. She liked lying just like this.

Is it that she is chronically lazy?

No, I won’t say that. Once I was struck down with typhus. I tossed about in bed, unconscious and raving for twenty-one days. And the first thing I remembered, when my senses returned, was her ace bending over me, framed in loose hair falling in two billows on my chest, the sleepless eyes that had kept watch day and night staring at me, larger than life. from above, cheeks gone hollow with forgetfulness of food. The Doctor was also there, watching her with unease.

“Mister,” he was saying, “that woman is a goblin, she is no human. I am not sure you will be alive but for her...”

“Poorva, Poorva!…”

I may as well have been addressing the winds. My calls some times never reach her.

Deaf?

I would not say that either. For, one night, she woke me up in a hurry.

“What is it?” I yawned and stretched my limbs. I was drunken with sleep. She pulled my up-stretched hand down.

“There is a scorpion at your pillow.”

“You are a sort!” I grumbled. “You are dreaming. In this pitch dark, I cannot place myself, but you would, and that too a scorpion. Perhaps my lady will be pleased to tell me how many fingers I am holding up to her now!” And I held up two.

“Oh, this is not the time for your jokes!” she cried petulant.

I switched the light on, and sure, there it was at my pillow, the scorpion, poised to strike, dry and yellow as parchment! I fixed it with the first thing that came handy. “It beats me, I couldn’t have known it!” I wondered.

“It was just the sound of its landing that woke me up...” She drawled drowsily. Even as she was speaking, sleep had begun to steal over her.

“Poorva, why do you brood? What is it biting you?”

No, I cannot really understand why she should–or anybody for that matter. Nothing but calm and joy here. I planned it so. Our bungalow is in a suburb, in the middle of a garden with a compound all around. In front of the house rises a pomegranate tree, the fruit dangling red like lips kissed, Under the boughs lies a stone bench. Plants and flowers, of scent and beauty rare, cluster in front and in the backyard. At times during the evening, wafts in the wind a scent that makes you drunken with its sweetness but I am not able to place it. I once asked the gardener for its source; he thought it was probably from the neighbouring compound. But it was not there either this scent of unearthly sweetness.

Just a few yards away at the back of the house flows a rivulet picturesque in its course. The water turns marble in the moonlight. From far away comes the murmur of the sea, comforting like burthen of a lullaby.

Inside the house, books to suit every variation of mood and occasion wall up my room, littered with sofas, diwans and cushions. The floor is entirely lost under the coloured and embroidered rugs and tiger and deer skins. Is this a place for worry?

“Poorva, Poorva!…”

The only answer is that meaningless or meaning, unfathomable, intriguing smile.

I keep asking myself: “What did I fall in love with, her or her smile?”

The first time...

I had to go to the country in connection with the affairs of my estates which stretched in all far away places, known and unknown to me. In one of them, I met her. She was sitting at the foot of the well, elbows on knees and chin cupped in hands, watching with that childlike stare and enigmatic smile, a yellow beetle crawling with blind eyes and railing with tremendous efforts a small seed before it.

Ere I could ask her for some water, a tired voice called out from inside the house opposite.

“Poorva, Poorva, what are you doing?”

The girl swung the brass water-pot on to her hip and went in.

I had to stay in that village for a week. Her father’s was the only Brahmin house. So my henchman who was looking after my lands arranged for my lodging and food only there.

Her father had quite a family. Boys and girls, seven or eight of them of assorted ages. Though the village munsiff, he had no income to keep his face, for such was the poverty of the place. The children were always fighting, unmindful even of the strangers in their midst, scratching, shouting, slashing and biting at one another, driving the poor old man to the pial to sit there, head clenched in hands and praying to God that a plague might carry away his darlings.

And POorva, moving right about in the midst of this turbulence, silent and unruffled, and with her enigmatic smile, filled me with wonder.

While her brothers and sisters fought and rolled on the floor in fighting embrace, she would just sit there, calm like the centre of the storm, doing nothing either to stop the fight; or add to it, chin cupped its hand and dreaming. Although there, she was not there. What is it she could be dreaming about?

Her dreaminess and her posture became her and she intrigued me. I was by myself and my own lord. I sent word through my man to her father, who was just taken aback with my proposal.

“Does he–does he know?” he stuttered, “the gulf between us! Does he know every single pie of the expenses has to be borne by him–that I have nothing to give back in return, not even the cost of the saffron thread?”

“Why, man, do you worry? What man are you to bolt yourself so stupidly secure against the knock of Fortune at your doors?”

The old man and his wife burst into tears. Though they might love their daughter dearly, in their plight, it was a case of one less to look after.

It was the season of marriages, and an auspicious date was nearby. And so Poorva and I were wedded. It is a wonder now how it all happened so quick. On the very second night, my wife and I set out for home.

The train tore screeching into the night. There were just the two of us in the first-class compartment.

“Poorva!”

Her face slowly turned from the window. God, what a dazzling smile! Her chin dimpled. In my imagination, heightened by this exclusiveness of ours, in the lights and shadows thrown by the electric lamp within the carriage, she looked unearthly beautiful.

Say, what is it happens to a man after he is wedded? I don’t mean the economics of it, or the bearing of children or the responsibilities, the daily bickering–I mean the actual him. He is not the same he was, anyway. The wholeness of him slips away from him. He is split, and the woman takes unto herself the bigger slice of him, leaving him an incomplete wriggling piece. And does she give back anything of her in return? Will anybody answer this for me? That which she gets from the man is her fortress. Is there a dupe worse than the male?

The first days were charming with the newness of this calm of hers, and I was in the delirious joy of this giving away of me to her. She made such a delightful picture as she lay curled up in the sofa smiling. An open book lay on its face in her lap. Was she reading or day-dreaming?

We had not much to talk about, in common. I found out that she did not like to speak of her parents or of her life with them. After all, what pleasant memories can there be of a life born and bred in misery and poverty, of days of starvation too, of days in rags…She would not talk of those days that had known no tolerance or love, bereft of them due to the bitterness of poverty.

“But, why can’t you be happy here? You have got here everything, haven’t you?”

A smile, the smile would flicker on her lips.

“Why should you think I am not happy? If one is happy, what is one expected to do about it?”

Now, I understand what I had mistook for her calm was actually the shell in which she kept herself to herself. But this safeness of herself within herself–this inherent unwillingness to share herself with me infuriates and maddens me. Oh, I don’t know what I am talking about!–I am not possessive, but I feel thwarted. Anyway this is not what I bargained for. I find myself battering my head in vain against this invisible wall between me and her. I wanted a comrade, not a living iceberg about me. And yet I had lost myself in her. And as I could not have any of her in return for what I had lost of me to her, I could not bear this agony of feeling me losing more and more of me to her. Ere I took this woman unto me, I had so much to occupy me, and now!...

“Oh, you Poorva, what is coursing your veins, blood or ice!”

Her eyes open wide in bewilderment, and in her bewilderment she is more bewitching than ever.

“I don’t understand...” her lips murmur.

“Oh you can’t, you can’t!”

Do I?

I am a man who had seen a mirage, and running after it in the hope of catching it–getting thirstier–thirstier.

Oh, God, why are such of them?

Once, in the kitchen, while llooking and searching for something on the shelf she got stung by a scorpion that lurked there. Why wouldn’t she just scream? She sinks slowly to the floor, leaning against the wall, pressing hard with the other hand where it stung. I could feel the excruciating pain shooting up the arm. The sweat breaks on the white forehead. The face is twisted with pain, and the eyebrows twitch. But not for once does a wail or a curse escape her. I prop her on my shoulder, pass my hand lovingly on her hair, but she is in no need of my attentions. It is as if I am helping myself to ease the male protective feeling surging within me. What kind of a self control is this, anyway! Why can’t she just afford to lose this fight with herself, for me? What kind of an animal is this woman to be suffering such pain, so silently...

But now, as she lay in the easy chair, with the evening breeze playing on two wisps of hair at the forehead and on the folds of the saree on her bosom, I feel my heart go out to her. She has never been strong, and now she bears the burden of my seed within her.

I ask myself: “What is it to feel becoming a father in some months? Am I happy? Proud? I don’t know. But I feel a vague soothing to think that, with the coming of the child, I may regain that part of myself that I had lost to her. I wish it would be a girl, who, because she is of my seed, may likely have more consideration for me than her mother.

Her voice rippled into my thoughts. “Tell me, were there two fish in that fisherman’s basket, or three? I think there were just two. Did you notice how they struggled, the poor things! I couldn’t just bear it...”

“Don’t worry, Poorva. They are...”

She did not allow me to finish. “Look !...” She was pointing to the sky. There was fear in her voice.

I looked. Two stars were falling. They fell trailing in two separate curves of blazing sparks which converged into one, just before they reached the earth. They fell possibly in the river behind the bungalow.

I took her hand softly in mine. “Look at the green foliage¹ at the window!” I whispered half-jokingly, mainly to comfort her.

She heaved a sigh. What was her sadness?

The months of rain have come and the rains set in right earnest. The waters of the river now reached up to the compound wall. The rain poured as if the sky had cut loose. Wintry dark hung inside the house like a streaming black veil.

She is on the sofa just in front of me. Her arms, bosom and limbs have begun to gather shape and get rounded. Her face and body glow with a new kind of beauty which is so fascinating to watch even in its making. The sphinx smile is more entrancing than ever. She does not talk now, even as much as she used to. She is immersed in herself.

“Poorva” be cheery. Don’t brood and give way to fancies. Women should be particularly happy and cheerful during this period. For, then only would the progeny be healthy. You should be up and active...”

My exhortations fall on deaf ears.

Poorva, what is it you are wondering about? Your previous birth?

For the first time, I find a spark of interest flicker in her eyes in response to my random question out of sheer peevishness.

“What is it you are saying?”

And so there was yet something I could get her interested in. And in that I feel a vague pleasure. How silly can be the pleasures of man at times!

The raindrops trickle down the window-pane. In the misty vision afforded me, I see beyond,–the outline of the pomegranate tree, then the compound, then the curve of the cart-track as it mounted up a mound, then the cluster of the casuarina trees, then the tree-tops swinging rhythmically and wailing in the wind, and over them the rain-clouds hanging heavily and massing for another downpour. Further beyond, I hear the rumble of thunder like the hungry growl of a lion waked from sleep in its lair.

“I was talking of previous birth,” I hear myself saying. “Each one’s birth is ordained according to the fruits of the previous one, and so the cycle goes on. Perhaps it may even be possible to judge one’s previous birth on a study of one’s characteristics of the present birth. You call it what you will, evolution, karma, what not, still it is there…”

“Then, what do you think I was?”

“You!–” I laughed outright savagely. “Sure, I will tell you! You were a piece of rock, a block of stone. Perhaps a holy man came rested on you for a short while, and as you were blessed with his touch, so were you blessed with the human form. Mind you, just the human form, nothing more, nothing less–nothing else–”

“What about you?”

“Me! Oh, I was just my father!”

She looked perplexed.

“Don’t you understand? I am a posthumous child. When I was yet in my mother’s womb, the elders comforted her that her husband who died young would live again in me. And true enough, they say, I am the split image of my father, in manner of appearance, speech and gait. I am–”

The sentence remained unfinished. Thunder crashed on the roof and the room shook.

“Poorva!” I sprang to her, and took her in my arms. Close in its wake, followed another crash and, like the crash of a whip, flashed a stroke of lightning, lighting up the room in blinding glory for a split second that seemed an age, and then vanished, leaving us in a darkness more intense than before.

She was shivering in my arms. I patted her encouragingly. But I am not sure of the courage left in me then.

“How many of them? One? or two?”

“Does it matter?”

“I just wondered...”

The months advance.

Poorva, will you have me send for your parents? You would perhaps like to have your kid brother about you. Or perhaps you would like to go home–”

“No–No–No–”

Her emphatic refusal startled me. I had to leave it at that.

But there was a subtle change taking place in her. Outwardly she remained silent and uncommunicative as ever, but there was a new meaning to her silence. It was the purposeful watch of a listener, an eavesdropper who was listening with one ear to the wall, to the voice on the other side. It was the tense silence of the doctor listening to a pulse-beat. What was she listening to? To the very pulse-beat of the earth!

Oh, God, my hair is turning grey with worrying, worrying and loving, loving...

One day I was deep in the pages of a book. She was sitting in her usual place, hands folded over her belly which was getting bigger now.

“Hist!”

I stared, uncomprehending.

“Don’t you hear anything?”

I looked around me. “Rats?”

“I hear voices–Inside me–”

I guffawed.

“No, I do hear the voices.”

“Oh, the baby is already crying for the balloon, eh?”

There were suddenly tears of vexation in her eyes. “Can’t you be serious just for once?”

I sobered up. A pang of vague fear struck chill into my heart. I walked up to her and put a hand round her shoulders.

‘Poorva, let us go to the pictures tonight. There is a Chaplin film running. You don’t have to know the language to understand Chaplin.”

“Don’t change the subject, please–”

I know not what to say.

Oh, dash the cursed rain! Wouldn’t it ever stop! The way it drips into one’s very heart!

That night she moaned in bed. “What is it, Poorva?”

“I feel nausea...I feel like vomitting...”

I hear her stumbling towards the bathroom. What am I able to do to assuage her pain?

Am I able to take over to me any of it? No. Each has to bear his or her burden, and in that lies the terrible loneliness of man. Come to think, who is of use to anybody?

The days move slowly.

She has lost her sleep and is listless. So have I, and I too am tired.

The doctor has examined her and says he sees nothing to worry just now. But the uneasiness she feels in her womb has only increased. She is just seven months gone but she is already fully heavy.

She gasps for breath, and now and then a heavy sigh escapes her. It is no easy thing for one life to bear the burden of another.

“I am now always hearing a voice inside me, and every time a different voice. As if God is trying which soul he is going to put within my womb!”

“Oh, you little fool! To be fancying things over what I told you the other day!”

“Why shouldn’t I? I too feel the same way as you said. There is always an argument going on inside my womb. Is it between God and the soul?”

What is it this woman says? Is it the essence of the scriptures, or the rave of unreason?

“Poorva–these fancies, don’t let them run away with you. Look! I have got an idea! The first month of early spring commences in a couple of days. Let us open a new future, our future with it. We will both of us holiday in Kuttalam. Have you heard of the Kuttalam waterfalll? We will stand under it in the early morning and romp till noon and feel the water gushing and thumping into us, re-vitalising us. It will take all the nonsense and worry out of you, out of me. It will do good to us. And the lovely mornings and evenings..I love you, darling!”

But whom am I saying all this to? Me?

At the dead of night, all at once, her voice called out to me from her bed, strangely impelling in its washed-out clarity. 1 leapt up, my body all a-tingle.

“I think the time is come–”

Her voice was calm, but I could feel how hard she was trying to keep it so, with that infernal control of hers. I rush to the shed take the car out, I take it out in less than half the time I usually take, but I fee1 interminably long in taking it out.

Now, we are speeding in full gear to the hospital. It is just three miles to the place, but it seems as if I would never reach it. I have eaten up three hundred miles in a trice at far lesser speed on previous occasions.

She is leaning against me, her teeth ploughing the nether lip. How soft her body as it presses against me! We fly, pursued by a cloud of dust raised by the car. At this mid-hour of night, the river winding at the back of the bungalow glistens in the distance, a sheet of silver in the moonlight. I am feeling like bursting with the turmoil of feelings inside me, but the mind fails not to record the beauties of the way.

The holiday I had planned was just a couple of days away, a few hours back, but I now see how quick it has receded into infinite time. Oh, I don’t care. Now all that matters is the coming forth of the child and the easening of her burden.

“I feel a terrible fight going on within me–just as my father and mother fought with each other at home–just as my brothers and sisters fought–”

Is she raving? Ah, here at last we are! The hospital, the comforting Mother Hospital! I pull up at the portals. The nurses bustle and take her inside. A nurse comes back with my wife’s saree rolled up into a ball anrl throws it in the back seat of the car. The doctor smiles at me, rubbing his hands in barely veiled amusement.

“This is your first, isn’t it?”

I stalked the verandah up and down. It is all fun for these goats. What do they care?

Suddenly a scream rent the air. It was she. My stomach curdled. And so, Pain had triumphed after all! Then another, again yet another. Every time she screamed, I feel my heart cracking, criss cross, criss-cross...But relief also sweeps over me. Relief at the ‘triumph of Pain over her. And so, she is human after all, just like any of us, like me. And now when the child comes–

A nurse comes running out, face chalk-white.

“Doctor, doctor!–”

The doctor rushes in. Blindly I try to follow. “You silly!” He pushes me out.

I sit in the verandah, head clenched in hands. Out of the bedlam of words and voices breaking out inside, one word sorts itself out and emerges with the impact of a hammer.

“Hemorrhage...”

I suppose I just swooned away. I don’t remember much afterwards. When I came to, the doctor was shaking my shoulders.

“Pull yourself up, man–we couldn’t do anything about it. It was a goner. It was hopeless. It was twins dead in the womb. No operation could save her. Hopeless...” I don’t say anything. I don’t even feel like weeping. I had dried up within myself. I had died. I stare dry-eyed at the balled-up saree in the back seat.

Of dull orange colour, with a red border. My personal wedding present to her.

Grey dawn has begun to streak the sky.

And the tale of Poorva, too, ends...

¹ It is the popular feeling in the South that, to ward off the evil effects of seeing a star falling, one has to look at the green foliage nearest at sight.

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