Wild Boar in the Cane Field

by Anniqua Rana

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

One day, a baby girl, Tara, is found, abandoned and covered in flies. She is raised by two mothers in a community rife with rituals and superstition. As she grows, Tara pursues acceptance at all costs. Saffiya, her adoptive mother, and Bhaggan, Saffiya’s maidservant, are victims of the men in their community, and the two women, in turn, struggle and live short but complicated lives. The only way for the villagers to find solace is through the rituals of ancient belief systems. Tara lives in a village that could be any village in South Asia, and she dies, like many young women in the area, during childbirth. Her short life is dedicated to her efforts to find happiness, despite the fact that she has no hope of going to school or making any life choices in the feudal, patriarchal world in which she finds herself. Poignant and compelling, Wild Boar in the Cane Field depicts the tragedy that often characterizes the lives of those who live in South Asia—and demonstrates the heroism we are all capable of even in the face of traumatic realities.

Release date: September 17, 2019

Publisher: She Writes Press

Print pages: 256

Sample

In the Beginning My mothers found me a week after I was born. By then, I had lost a week’s worth of maternal love that I would never reclaim, no matter how hard I tried. My birth mother must have thought she had left me with enough love to last till Bibi Saffiya and Amman Bhaggan dis- covered me on the train, wrapped in rags and covered in flies. Bibi Saffiya isn’t my real mother, and neither is Bhaggan, but when one of them nearly sat on me in the ladies’ compartment on the train to the village in Punjab, they chose to pick me up and make me theirs. To most, that did not make either of them my mother, nor did it make me their daughter, but to Amman Bhaggan, that was all it took to belong. “I know you never believe me, but Bibi Saffiya cried when she saw you lying there, covered in flies. As if she had felt the pain of bringing you into this world and the joy of seeing your eyes look into hers. Now she is bitter and old and has no one to care for her, but then she was young and frail. Her husband had just died, and she and I were returning from the city on a hot summer day to her father’s village, banished from her dead husband’s home by his sisters, who blamed her for his death.” Even at twelve, as I sweated in the kitchen, finishing my chores, I chose not to believe her. Every time she told me the story, she adjusted it. Granted, they were only minor changes, but I noticed them. Bhaggan might not have realized, but I remembered details. In every telling, she had always been traveling with Saffiya when they found me, but sometimes it was summer and other times spring. The inconsistencies irritated me when I was younger, but now I chose to lose myself in my own thoughts. Bibi Saffiya, the sole owner of this village, was recognized for her enormous house, encircled by acres of land, which produced everything we needed for all of our meals. We never bought any food from the stores in the city. It was all grown, or made in the village. Saffiya was the only woman in the area who owned such extensive property without having to answer to a male relative. At least, that’s what Bhaggan told me. The garden surrounding her house was filled with oranges, bananas, pomegranates, lychees, and guavas. In the fields closer to the house, ginger, garlic, and onions were harvested from smaller patches. Buffalo, goats, and chicken closer to the house were protected from the evil eye of neighboring landowners and the slaughtering ax of roaming bandits. And on the distant periphery, all the way to the road to the city, crossing the large irrigation canal, stretched alfalfa, wheat, and cane fields. Despite my better judgment, I let myself pretend that I had been born to Saffiya. I imagined a prosperous life as her only daughter. I dreamed of inheriting the property and ordering my hordes of farmworkers to plant and harvest the crops, and to shoot clay pellets at sparrows when sweetened guavas en- ticed. When the neighboring farmers requested water from my tube wells and canals, I would charge them twice the rates and become even richer and more powerful. Like Saffiya, I would hire armed guards to deter cattle thieves and to shoot wild boar when the sugarcane ripened. Amman Bhaggan’s voice interrupted my daydreams, and her story continued, returning me to the kitchen. “Flies up your nostrils, on your eyes. Whirling like dervishes at a shrine. You didn’t cry. You lay there with your tiny fist clenching one of those wretched flies as if it were a rattle your mother had left you.” In the kitchen, Amman Bhaggan sat on her peerhi close to the clay stove, while Maria and I sat to the right on a long wooden pallet near the sole window, waiting for a breeze to dry our sweat-drenched clothes. I shifted away from Maria, and, as if by reflex, she moved closer. If Bibi Saffiya was like my mother, Maria was like a younger sister to me. Younger by five years. We had spent most of the past seven years together. We even slept on the same charpoy in Amman Bhaggan’s room. She was my shadow; her existence depended on mine. For reasons that I could not fathom, Maria was persistent in hearing the retelling of my story. For me, the narration was a reminder that I had no parents. No one behind, no one ahead. So Bibi Saffiya had made me her daughter. That meant nothing. But maybe Bibi Saffiya’s discovery of me on the train seemed more miraculous to Maria than her own, desolate story. Maria’s mother, Jannat, was crazy. She had killed her babies because they’d been born too early. At least, that was what everyone in the village said. Maria’s elder sister, Stella, was a year older than I but had been afflicted by a leg-shortening disease when she was still a baby. Amman Bhaggan, oblivious to the heat, continued my story as she threw the thinly sliced onions into the sizzling ghee. “Bibi Saffiya told me to pick up the baby and throw the rag out of the window.” The caramelizing onions sputtered in the heat. “I never challenged her. The flies exploded in a frenzy. The rag might have been your birth mother’s dopatta, but it was no cover for a baby. Your cord was still hanging off you like a piece of uncooked fat on cut meat. You were maybe a day or two old, or at the most a week.” Amman Bhaggan told many stories, but of all her stories, I hated mine the most. My birth story was not one of hope and love. It was not one of family anticipation. It was of desertion. The woman who had held me inside her body, close to her heart, for nine months had chosen to abandon me in a grimy carriage. Had she looked at my face and decided I was not pretty enough? Had she heard my cries and decided they were not sweet enough? Had she touched my tiny body and decided it wasn’t worth being covered with more than a rag? She had left me with flies as company. Granted, Bibi Saffiya and her trusted maid, Amman Bhaggan, had wrapped me up and saved me, but for what? For this life as a nobody? I sat in the kitchen filth, peeling a basketful of garlic to grind into paste for the biryani Bhaggan would cook the next day, to take as an offering to the shrine of Sain Makhianwala. I would try to hide the stench of garlic by rinsing my hands in lemon juice, but the odor, like my story, stayed with me. My own tattered dopatta, stretched over my nose and mouth, made it difficult to breathe. The kitchen was melting hot on that early evening. Amman Bhaggan’s recollection did little to relieve the oppressive present, as it only reminded me of my pitiful beginning. For the past twelve years, I had worked hard to demonstrate the terrible mistake my birth mother had made in disowning me on the train. I would have been the envy of any mother. I helped Bhaggan with all the kitchen work, organized Bibi Saffiya’s closet, color coordinating all her outfits, and cared for Maria, who was really a pest. I cleaned all the rooms and made the windows shine. The rotis I made in the tandoor were nearly as round as the ones that Amman Bhaggan made. In fact, just the other day, when the maulvi had stayed for dinner, instead of returning to eat with his wife at home, he had eaten a roti that I had made, and he hadn’t believed me when I told him I had cooked it. He had given me a coin and complimented me: “It tastes and looks just like the ones your Amman Bhaggan makes.” But Amman Bhaggan had ignored the maulvi’s praise of my cooking, and now she focused on how Saffiya had saved me. Maybe she thought it made me feel loved, but one day I would gather the courage to tell her the truth about how this story really made me feel. Not today. She was in a better mood, praising our mistress, even though her lifetime of servitude was quickly demolished to insults if Saffiya was unhappy with the meal. “Bibi Saffiya wanted to make you her daughter as soon as she saw you. She named you Tara. Like a tiny star amid the black flies.” I knew the praise was to keep me peeling the garlic, so she continued her sweet talk. “I wiped you clean, then took a small piece of cane sugar that I had hidden in a knot in my dopatta to stop me from coughing on the train. You sucked it as if you were six months old, not just a few days. Till the train reached the village station.” “You gave her the first sweet, so she’s like you,” Maria chimed in. Maria never knew her place. She liked to feign maturity beyond her seven years by referring to practices and superstitions that she had overheard the adults discuss, including Amman Bhaggan’s having given me my first sweet, my ghutti, which had the power to transfer her qualities, both good and bad. Maybe Maria was right. Like Amman Bhaggan, I could tell stories of Maria’s birth if I chose. I was there when she was born. I was very young, and my memories are unclear, but I remember a year later how I carried her around as if I, rather than Stella, the cripple, were her elder sister. Maria’s story isn’t happier than mine, but she had a mother, Jannat, who swept the rooms and washed clothes; she had a father, Isaac, the gardener, who kept all the fruit trees fruitful and did odd jobs cleaning the yard. Jannat and Isaac kept the inside and the outside of Saffiya’s house spotless. They worked every day, unless it was Easter or Christmas, and that was when I had to clean Bibi Saffiya’s room. Amman Bhaggan, like I, had little patience for Maria, but she was in a reminiscent mood and tempered her response. “I hope her fate is better than mine.” “Better than Bibi Saffiya’s, too?” I scowled at Maria. “Idiot.” My response to Maria’s comment snapped Amman Bhaggan back to the present. “Chawal,” she agreed. “How could it be better than Saffiya’s? No one knows Tara’s lineage. Bibi Saffiya is the daughter of the great healer Khan Shahzad, landowner, village owner. Daughter of an owl. Stop talking nonsense, and tell your mother to clean the kitchen after I’ve cooked this meal. Otherwise, she will no longer have a job or a roof over her. If my fate is bad, your mother’s is worse, and she needs to do her duty without being reminded.” Amman Bhaggan detested idleness and reminded everyone of his or her role in the housework routine. Life meant work to her, and death meant rest, so there was no need for rest until your time was up. Of all the servants in the house, Amman Bhaggan was closest to Bibi Saffiya, so no one questioned her orders. She was everyone’s amman, mother, and following her directions brought them all closer to paradise in this life and the next. Even Bibi Saffiya’s relatives showed respect by bestowing upon her the title kept sacred for their own mothers or aging women in the family. I don’t remember a time when everyone didn’t call her Amman, but then I also don’t remember a time when she wasn’t old. Maria glowed with the recognition of being needed for a chore, if only to call her mother from her shack, set at some distance from the main house. She stuck her toes into the only pair of slippers she could find, mine, crashed the screen door behind her, and began shouting for her mother before she had left the kitchen. “Amman, Amman, bring the broom and the bucket and the rag. Amman . . .” Maria’s screeching grated the silence she left behind. My feet were numb from sitting for hours. Garlic peels were in my hair and scattered all around me. Garlic stuck under my nails. Bhaggan concentrated on stirring the two pots on the dung and wood–fueled stoves. To her right was a smaller, recently clayed pot with goat meat and spinach for Bibi Saffiya, and to her left was a much larger steel pot, containing lentils. On one side of the pot were streaks of dried-up lentils from the previous three meals, embedded by the intense heat. Neither ashes nor dried hay could remove the stain. The pot would have to be covered with a thin layer of clay after this meal had been cooked. I reminded myself to take care of it before Amman Bhaggan noticed. Now, as she sat cooking the evening meal, Amman Bhaggan blew on the dung fire and sparks cascaded around the pot, some landing on the spinach and goat meat as she lifted the lid. Despite the heat, an even warmer cloud of steam ascended to the makeshift chimney. The sweetness of cardamom and cinnamon, wrapped in the warm salts of spinach, subdued the now-tender meat. To avoid Amman Bhaggan’s seeing the unwashed pot, I snatched the blowpipe from her hand and blew at the fire un- der the lentil pot. The ashes around the dung cake separated, unleashing the searing heat of buffalo dung. I coughed and eyed the pile of unpeeled garlic pods, and Amman Bhaggan started a new story, another one I knew well. At least it was no longer about me.