Jasmine. Bharati Mukherjee

       8

      ONLY the brick houses of rich traders like Potatoes-babu had toilets put up in courtyards. They were tiny thatch-walled privies on stilts. You squatted above a hole and heard the waste plop many feet below into a huge earthenware bowl full of lye. The walls crawled with roaches and spiders. At Vimla’s you could smell the lye from every room. I much preferred going to the fields with the neighborhood women. We went early, in pre-dawn dark, before the men woke, so they couldn’t spy on us. My mother never came with us. She was a modest and superior Lahori woman, so modest and superior that as a child I’d assumed her body was free of daily functions. For the neighborhood women, though, the latrine hour was the most companionable time. They squatted in a row and gossiped. I liked to listen.

      Three days after Masterji’s visit I trekked as usual with my favorite group along the banks of a nullah. Almost all of them were married, and listening to their jokes made me feel very adult. The pale sky hung low over paler eucalyptus. The wheat fields were parrot green and fenced in with brambly black branches of acacia. The clover patches could have been scatter rugs.

      Our route cut across a treed lot where the Khalsa Lions hung out, hacking branches thick as staffs to beat people and knock them off their bikes and scooters. Sometimes they’d cut down whole trees and drag them across the only road, forcing motor traffic to stop. Then they’d threaten the passengers, sometimes robbing them. The good thing about the Khalsa Lions using that lot was that I could stop back afterward and gather up firewood from their discards. That day I found the biggest staff ever, stuck in a wreath of thorny brush. I had to crawl on cold stony ground, and of course thorns bloodied my arms, but the moment my fist closed over the head of the staff, I felt a buzz of power.

      By the time I got to the fields, the adults were already squatting. Their brass pitchers of wash-up water gleamed in the dawn light. Spilled water crusted into ice wafers. I waited till my favorite bush was deserted, and watched two paunchy, jovial women tickle each others bulbous behinds with leafy sprigs and grass. This was the “Ladies’ Hour.” Sober women became crude, lusty, raucous.

      “Oh, snake, snake, I see a snake!”

      “You saw a very skinny little snake last night. Arré, you woke up the same snake in my house!”

      We knew each others secrets. I laughed as hard as the housewives.

      “We’ve all seen Amrita’s skinny little snake. It sleeps all day in her house, then roams around at night…”

      “That’s the snake I turned out of my house,” said a recent bride, emboldened.

      I didn’t hear the rest of the taunt. I heard a growl, a kind of growling-and-stalking combination.

      This dawn, as on many others, perverts from the village across the stream sat on their bank and ogled us. We knew they were there because the lit tips of their bidis floated like fireflies. We pretended they weren’t there. They wanted to look, that’s all; they never waded across, not even in the summer, when the sun dried up the stream like blotting paper.

      The growl got louder, closer.

      The men in our village weren’t saints. We had our incidents. Rape, ruin, shame. The women’s strategy was to stick together. Stragglers, beware. That morning I thought, Let it come. Let him pounce. I had the staff.

      But that morning the enemy wasn’t human. First I saw only the head. A pink-skinned, nearly hairless, twitching animal head. The head thrust itself through the bush, brambles stuck deep into its bleeding jowls.

      Behind me women screamed. Water pots fell. Two women crawled, like crabs, loosened salwars around naked and frozen feet, toward the bank. Most were locked in a crouch. Fear stippled their naked haunches.

      “Cowards!” I aimed my cry at the line of bidi smokers. “We know you are there! Please help us!”

      The animal whipped its head back; the head was bloodied and monstrous. Then it started to drag itself noisily to the trash pit. A cow mulching garbage backed away. Peacocks hopped out of range. Only buzzards brooded from low-hanging trees; crows squawked.

      “A mad dog!” I heard the women’s chorus. “Help! Please help!”

      A dog, but not a dog. It was bigger than a pariah, much bigger than a jackal, almost the size of a wolf. But this one didn’t move like a wolf. It circled the pit, it sidled and snuck around like a jackal. A dog that dragged its hind legs. A dog that danced, jerkily, as it walked. The dog headed back for us. Its eyes glowed red, its slack jaws foamed.

      I hated all dogs, distrusted their motives. I hated this dog because it had made terrified naked women crab-crawl.

      The staff whacked brush.

      The dog stopped twenty feet from me. It looked straight at me out of those red eyes. Then it spun on its front legs and squared off. Tremors raised pink ridges on its hairless sides. It stopped so close to me I could see flies stuck in the viscous drool. I knew it had come for me, not for the other women. It had picked me as its enemy. I wasn’t ready to die. I’d seen a rabid man die horribly outside the mustached doctor’s clinic.

      I let the dog inch so close I could feel a slimy vapor spray out of its muzzle. I let it crouch and growl its low, terrible, gullety growl. I took aim and waited for it to leap on me.

      The staff crushed the dog’s snout while it was still in mid-leap. Spiny twigs hooked deep into its nostrils and split them open. I saw all this as I lay on the winter-hard ground.

      The women helped me up. One of them poked the wounded animal with a twig. It lay on its back, its legs pumping outward like a turtle’s. My staff was still stuck deep into the snout, its bloody tip poking through an eye socket. Blood plumed its raw sides. I’d never seen that much blood. The women dragged the body to the nullah and let it float away.

      They brought me home and made a fuss over me. Dida said, “All it means is that God doesn’t think you’re ready for salvation. Individual effort counts for nothing.” The next day, defeated, she left for her ashram.

       9

      PITAJI died the next May. He died horribly. He got off a bus in a village two hours west of us and was gored by a bull. He’d had the bus driver let him off in a country lane so he could take a shortcut through a field to a friend’s hut. The friend he’d gone to visit was another Lahori, someone he liked to play chess with. The horror was the suddenness. He used to say, lying on his charpoy in the courtyard, I can watch death coming from here. He’ll have to be a very sneaky fellow to catch me by surprise. I will die with my kurta buttoned and my glasses folded on my paper and all my prayers said. The bull attacked him from behind. He never saw it coming.

      The Lahori friend consoled my mother. “Why cry? Crying is selfish. We have no husbands, no wives, no fathers, no sons. Family life and family emotions are all illusions. The Lord lends us a body, gives us an assignment, and sends us down. When we get the job done, the Lord calls us home again for the next assignment.”

      I know that sounds soft. “Very, very, very Indian, Jassy”—that’s what Taylor used to say, back in Manhattan. “You don’t believe that, do you? You can’t, you’re more modern than that.”

      What it means is this: Grant the notion that there’s a God. Taylor agreed. For the sake of argument, then, if He’s God, His assignments are perhaps too vast for the human mind, even your very superior one, Taylor. Go on, he said, smiling his lopsided, I’m-amused-by-all-this smile. Then, I said, let’s make a bigger leap. Perhaps Pitajis life assignment was merely to crunch one small piece of gravel as he jumped out of the bus that morning, and once he did it, perhaps God took the form of a maddened bull, or God took the form of nettles that caused a perfectly harmless bull enough pain to charge. Perhaps my father’s assignment was to be just that: my father; to die in a freakish accident before he could marry me off so that I could be free to fall in love with Prakash. What if my father’s assignment was to hasten my eloping with Prakash, hasten my getting to New York! Maybe my