“You mean … sexually coupled with it? With a fish?”
“They always do, though they always swear they did not.” She shrugged and smiled indulgently. “You men.”
There would be many later occasions and reasons for me to resent and lament my being included in the gender that also included male Hindus, but that was the first time. I walked in a wide circle around the duyong and the men, and proceeded on along Kuddalore’s main street. All the plump women villagers wore the wrap-around sari which adequately covered most of their body dirt, except where the belly roll of flesh was exposed. The skinny men, having less to expose, exposed it, wearing nothing but a messily wound tulband and a loose, large, baggy diaper called a dhoti. The children wore nothing but the measle painted on the forehead.
“Is there a karwansarai?” I asked Tofaa. “Or whatever you call it, where we can take lodging while we make ready to journey on?”
“Dak bangla,” she said. “Traveler’s rest house. I will inquire.”
She abruptly reached out and seized the arm of a passing man, and snapped a question at him. He did not, as a man of any other country would have done, take offense at being so brazenly accosted by a mere woman. Instead, he almost quailed, and spoke meekly in response. Tofaa said something that sounded very nearly accusing, and he replied even more feebly. The conversation went back and forth like that, she almost snarling, he finally almost whimpering. I regarded them with amazement, and at last Tofaa reported the result.
“There is no dak bangla in Kuddalore. So few strangers ever come here, and fewer care to stay as long as a night. It is typical of the lowly Cholas. In my native Bangala, now, we would have been most hospitably received. However, the wretch offers us lodging in his own house.”
“Well, that is hospitable enough, certainly,” I said.
“He asks that we follow him there, and wait until he is inside for a few moments. Then we are to knock at the door and he will open it, and we are to request a bed and a meal, and he will rudely refuse us.”
“I do not understand.”
“It is usual. You will see.”
She spoke again to the man, and he went off at an anxious trot. We followed, picking our way among the pigs and fowl and infants and excrement and other litter on the streets. Considering what the residents of Kuddalore had to live in—no house being any more substantial or elegant than a hut of the Ava jungle Mien—I was rather grateful that there was nota dak bangla for us, since anything maintained only for the occasional transient would have had to be a sty indeed. Our host’s residence was not much more—built of mud bricks and plastered with cow dung—as we saw when we halted outside and he disappeared into the dark interior of it. After a brief wait, as commanded, Tofaa and I went up to the shack and she knocked on the rickety doorjamb. What happened thereafter I relate as Tofaa later translated it all to me.
The same man appeared in the doorway, and reared his head back to look down his nose at us. This time, Tofaa addressed him only in an obsequious mumble.
“What? Strangers?”he bawled, loudly enough to have been heard down at the bayside dock. “Pilgrim wayfarers? No, indeed, not here! I do not care, woman, if you areof Brahman jati! I do not give shelter to just any caller, and I do not allow my wife—”
He not only broke off in mid-bellow, he totally vanished, whisking sideways beyond the door opening, as a meaty brown-black arm thrust him aside. A meaty brown-black woman appeared in his place, and smiled out at us, and she said, syrup sweetly:
“Wayfarers, are you? And seeking a bed and a meal? Well, do come in. Pay no heed to this worm of a husband. In his speech, but in his speech alone, he plays the great lord. Come in, come in, do.”
So Tofaa and I lugged our packs inside the house and were shown the bedchamber in which to stow them. The cow-dung-plastered room was entirely occupied by four beds, somewhat like the hindora bed I had encountered in other places, but not quite as good. A hindora was a pallet hung on ropes from a ceiling, but this kind, called a palang, was no more than a sort of slit cloth tube, like a sack opened lengthwise, roped at each end to the walls and swinging free in between. Two of the palangs held a swarm of naked brown-black children, but the woman swept them away as unceremoniously as she had done her husband, and made it plain that Tofaa and I would sleep there in the same room with her and him.
We went back to the other of the hut’s two rooms, and the woman swept the children farther, outside onto the street, while she made a meal for us. When she handed us each a slab of wood, I recognized the food on it—or rather, I recognized that it was mostly the mucous kàri sauce I had, a long time ago, eaten in the Pai-Mir mountains. Kàri was the only native word I could remember from that long-ago journey in company with other men of the Chola race. As I remembered, those other brown-black men had shown at least a trifle more manly spirit than my present host. But then, they had had no Chola women with them.
This man and I, since we could not converse, simply squatted together and ate our unappetizing meal and occasionally nodded companionably to each other. I must have seemed as much a flattened and trampled zerbino as he was, both of us mute and mousily nibbling, while the two women chattered vociferously, trading comments—as Tofaa later informed me—on the general worthlessness of men.
“It is well said,” remarked the woman of the house, “that a man is a man only when he is filled with angry passion, when he bears no vexation submissively. But is there anything more contemptibly pitiful”—she waved her food slab to indicate her husband—“than a weak man being angry?”
“It is well said,” Tofaa volunteered, “that a small pond is easily filled, and the forepaws of a mouse, and likewise a man of no account is easily satisfied.”
“I was first married to this one’s brother,” said the woman. “When I was widowed, when my husband’s fellow fishermen brought him home dead—crushed on the very deck, they said, by a newly caught duyong flailing about—I should have behaved like a proper sati, and thrown myself on his funeral pyre. But I was still young, and childless, so the village sadhu urged me to marry this brother of my husband, and have children to carry on the family line. Ah, well, I was still young.”
“It is well said,” Tofaa remarked, with a salacious giggle, “that a woman never grows old below the girdle.”
“True, indeed!” said the woman, with a lubricous giggle. “It is also well said: A fire cannot be laid with too many logs, nor a woman with too many sthanu.”
They both giggled lasciviously for a time. Then Tofaa said, waving her food slab to indicate the children swarming on the doorstep, “At least he is fruitful.”
“So is a rabbit,” grunted the woman. “It is well said: A man whose life and deeds are not outstanding above those of his fellows, he does but add to the heap.”
I finally got tired of seeming submissively to share my host’s cowed silence. In an attempt to make some communication with him, I indicated my still-heaped food slab and made insincere lip-smackings, as if I had enjoyed the slop, and then made gestures of asking what was the meat under the kàri. He comprehended, and told me what it was, and I realized that I did know one other word of the native language:
“Duyong.”
I got up and left the hut to inhale deeply of the evening air. It reeked of smoke and fish and garbage and fish and unwashed people and fish and pukey children, but it helped some. I kept on walking the Kuddalore streets, both of them, until well after dark, and returned to the hut to find all the children asleep on the front-room floor, among the detritus of our used food slabs, and the adults all asleep, fully dressed, in their palangs. With some difficulty at first try, I got into mine, and found it more comfortable than it had appeared, and fell asleep. But I was awakened at some dark hour, by scuffling noises, and determined that the man had climbed into his wife’s palang and was noisily doing surata, though she kept snarling and hissing something at him. Tofaa had waked and heard it, too, and later told me what the wife had been saying: