“You are only brother to my late husband, remember, even after all these years. As the sadhu commanded, you are forbidden to enjoy yourself while performing your seed function. No passion, do you hear? Do not enjoy yourself!”
I had by now rather come to the opinion that I had at last found the true homeland of the Amazons, and the source of all the legends about them. One of the legends was that they kept only some rather vestigial men about, to impregnate them when it was necessary to make more Amazons.
The next day, our host kindly went out and inquired among his neighbors and found one who was driving his ox cart to the next village inland, and would take me and Tofaa along. We thanked our host and his wife for their hospitality, and I gave the man a bit of silver in payment for our lodging, and his wife instantly snatched that for herself. Tofaa and I perched on the rear of the ox cart, and jostled a good deal as it lumbered off through the flat and feculent marshland. To pass the time, I asked her what that woman had meant when she spoke of sati.
“It is our old custom,” said Tofaa. “Sati means a faithful wife. When a man dies, if his widow is properly sati, she will fling herself on the pyre consuming his body, and die herself.”
“I see,” I said thoughtfully. Perhaps I had been wrong in thinking of the Hindu women as all being overbearing Amazons, of no uxorial qualities. “It is not entirely a grotesque idea. Almost winsome in a way. That a faithful wife accompanies her dear husband to the afterworld, wanting them to be together forever.”
“Well, not exactly,” said Tofaa. “It is well said: The highest hope of a woman is to die beforeher husband. That is because the plight of a widow is unthinkable. Her husband is probably worthless, but what does she do without one? So many females are constantly ripening to the marriageable age of eleven or twelve, what chance does a used and worn and not-young widow have of marrying again? Left alone and undefended and unsupported in the world, she is an object of uselessness, scorned and reviled. Our word for widow means literally a dead-woman-waiting-to-die. So, you see, she might as well jump in the fire and get it over with.”
That somewhat took the luster of lofty sentiment off the practice, but I remarked that still it took some courage, and was not devoid of a certain proud dignity.
“Well, actually,” said Tofaa, “the custom originated because some wives didplan to remarry, and had their next husbands already picked out, and so poisoned their current ones. The practice of sati-sacrifice was mandated by the rulers and religious leaders, just to avert those frequent murders of husbands. It was made the law that, if a man died for whatever reason, and his wife was not demonstrably innocent of causing his death, she was to leap onto the pyre, and if she did not, the dead man’s family were to throw her onto it. So it made wives think twice before poisoning their husbands, and even made them solicitous about keepingtheir men alive, when they fell ill or got old.”
I decided I hadbeen mistaken. This was not the homeland of the Amazons. It was the homeland of the Harpies.
That latest opinion was not shaken by what next transpired. We got to the village of Panruti well after sunset and found it also lacking any dak bangla, and Tofaa again snatched at a man in the street, and we went through the same performance as yesterday. He went home, we followed him, he loudly refused us entrance and was immediately overridden by a blustering female. The only difference in this case was that the henpecked husband was quite young and the hen was not.
When I thanked her for inviting us in, and Tofaa translated my thank-you, it came out something of a stammer. “We are grateful to you and your … uh … husband? … son?”
“He was my son,” said the woman. “He is now my husband.” I must have gaped, or blinked, for she went on to explain. “When his father died, he was our only child, and he would soon have been of an age to inherit this house and all its contents, and I would then have been a dead-woman-waiting-to-die. So I bribed the local sadhu to marry me to the boy—he being too young and ignorant to object—and thereby maintained my share in the property. Unhappily, he has not been much of a husband. So far, he has sired on me only these three: my daughters, his sisters.” She indicated the slack-jawed and witless-looking brats sitting lumpishly about. “If they are all I have, their eventual husbands will inherit next. Unless I give the girls to be devadasi temple whores. Or perhaps, since they are woefully deficient in their mentality, I could donate them to the Holy Order of Crippled Mendicants. But they may be even too imbecile to make proper beggars. Anyway, I am naturally anxious, and naturally trying mightily every night, to produce another son, and so keep the family property in the direct family line.” Briskly, she set before us some wood slabs of kàri-sauced food. “Therefore, if you do not mind, we will all eat in a hurry, so he and I can get to our palang.”
And again that night I overheard the moist noises of surata going on in the same room, this time accompanied by urgent whispers, which Tofaa repeated to me the next morning—“Harder, son! You must strive harder!” I wondered whether the avaricious woman planned next to marry her grandson, but I did not really care, and I did not ask. Nor did I bother remarking to Tofaa that all she had told me during our voyage —regarding the Hindu religion’s concern about sin, and strictures against it, and dire punishments for it—seemed to have had little elevating effect on Hindu morality in general.
Our destination, the capital city called Kumbakonam, was not impossibly far from where we had landed on the coast. But no Hindu peasant had any riding mounts to sell us, and not many men were willing to take us for hire to the next village or town down the road—or more likely, their wives would not let them—so Tofaa and I had to proceed by exasperatingly slow stages, whenever we could find a carter or a drover going our way. We rode jouncing in ox carts, and splayed across the sharp spine ridges of oxen, and dragged along on stone sledges, and straddling the rumps of pack asses, and once or twice riding real saddle horses, and many times we just set out walking, which usually meant we had to sleep in the roadside hedgerows. That was no intolerable hardship for me, except that on every one of those nights Tofaa gigglingly pretended I was bedding us down in the wilderness only to rape her, and when I did no such thing, she grumbled long into the night about the ungallant way I was treating a nobly born Lady Gift of the Gods.
The last outlying village on our way had a name that was bigger than its total population—Jayamkondacholapuram—and was otherwise remarkable only for something that happened, while we were there, to diminish its populace even further. Tofaa and I were again squatting in a cow-dung hut and supping on some mystery substance disguised in kàri, when there arose a rumbling sound like distant thunder. Our host and hostess immediately sprang erect and shrieked in unison, “Aswamheda!” and ran out of the house, kicking aside several of their children littered about the floor.
“What is aswamheda?” I asked Tofaa.
“I have no idea. The word means only a running away.”
“Perhaps we ought to emulate our hosts and run away.”
So she and I stepped over the children and went out into the single village street. The rumbling was nearer now, and I could tell that it was a herd of animals coming at a gallop from somewhere to the south. All of the Jayamkondacholapuramites were runing away from the noise, in a panicked and headlong mob, heedlessly trampling under their feet the numerous very young and very old persons who fell down. Some of the more spry villagers climbed up trees or onto the thatched roofs of their dwellings.