‘Sanskar’: Indira Goswami’s searing short story features in a new book on her work

It was a full moon night in the month of Aahar. Pitambar Mahajan put on his eri silk kurta and a Shantipuri dhoti. He completed the look with a shawl warped in eighty threads. For the first time in years, he carried the wood-framed mirror out in the open and inspected his face. He had shaved earlier in the morning.

In the clear light of the day, he now saw his face completely taken over by fine lines. Perhaps it was the sunlight that had made those fine lines so distinctly visible, he thought. He was kind of satisfied with his reflection in the mirror. As if those fine lines were a net and his face, a fish, one trapped in a fishing net.

After some time, he made for Damayanti’s place. Her house was close to the bridge on the Singra river, past a forest of teak trees. Just about four families from the Sattra reside here. It was because she lived in such a secluded area that Damayanti could carry on with the kind of life that she was leading, Pitambar Mahajan reflected.

The eastern sky was thronged by clouds that were the colour of mushrooms. Each one looked like a cannon. And the moon? As if it were a freshly-skinned deer. Someone had spread the deer’s polka-dotted skin over the sky. A deer freshly skinned! Abundantly fleshy...Sparkling! Pellucid! Ah!

In his mind’s eye the skinned deer slowly metamorphosed into Damayanti. Damayanti, stark naked. A pair of breasts like the protruding belly of a pregnant goat. Her skin was the colour of raw bamboo shoots, delicate and delicious. And her lips? Her lips were pink and luscious like a slice of guava.

Pitambar Mahajan could not keep gazing at the sky any longer. Today, the place wore an even more deserted look. It was the day of Jatra, the folk theatre performance, under the Sattra’s bokul tree. Damayanti had carefully chosen this day to invite him.

A pack of foxes let out a collective howl from the thorny bushes nearby. Pitambar Mahajan scurried towards Damayanti’s dhekhal, the room with the dheki for pounding rice.

Mahajan removed his shoes and took his seat in the veranda of her house. Somewhere kothal-champa flowers were blooming. A strong fragrance pervaded the air. Damayanti’s younger daughter was sleeping soundly on a cot that stood amidst the rice basket and heaps of ripe jackfruits. The seven- or-eight-year-old daughter was fighting through sleepiness to practise the Swarabarnas, the vowels, on her slate. A lantern with a cracked glass chimney burnt by her side.

Leaning against the decrepit wall of her dhekhal, Damayanti was eyeing Mahajan from head to toe. Now, with a gesture of her hands she called him closer. With her eyes she asked him to sit on the murha that was already placed there. On a sooty lamp stand, a tiny oil lamp was burning. Even in the muted glow of the lamp, Pitambar Mahajan could not muster courage to look at her.

He feared that one look at her will end everything.

Everything felt so surreal!

He feared that the woman sitting in front of him was no woman at all.

‘Have you brought some money?’

Mahajan was hurtled back to reality. He had not expected this to be the first thing Damayanti would ask.

‘Everything I own is yours!’ Saying this, Pitambar Mahajan handed out a string purse to her. She put the thing inside a khaloi that was hanging from a bamboo pole in the dhekhal. Lamp in her hand, she walked into a room as Mahajan’s eyes followed her. The sleep-ridden girl who was writing the vowels by the light of the lantern went to sleep next to her little sister. In a room where grain was stored there was another low-rise cot. It was presented to Damayanti’s husband for conducting the death rituals of the Adhikar Gosain’s younger brother.

Pitambar Mahajan followed Damayanti to the cot. After some time Damayanti pressed close to him.

Two months had passed since. One morning, as Damayanti was bathing by the river after Pitambar Mahajan had left her house, Krishnakanta said mockingly to her, ‘In the past too Brahmin boys from Dudhnoi to Bongora have visited you at night. I never saw you coming to the river for a bath after they left!’

Damayanti did not answer.

‘Is it because Mahajan is low-born?’

She did not answer. Still clad in wet robes she dashed towards the garbage pit and began to throw up. Krishnakanta stood there stupefied. For a brief moment, the priest was at his wit’s end. Then he took a step closer to Damayanti and said, ‘This must be Pitambar Mahajan’s child then?’

Damayanti held on to her silence.

‘This is great news! Great news indeed! Poor Pitambar! How he longed to be a father!’

Even then she did not answer.

‘I will go and inform Pitambar about it then’, Krishnakanta said. ‘Listen! Gandhiji had said that this discrimination on the basis of caste or creed will lead our people nowhere. Mahajan will exchange vows with you around the sacred fire. With the blessings of the village elders he will take you as wife. Let me tell you Damayanti, the villagers are seriously offended by your ways. The matter will be taken up by the Panchayat any day now. Let me be frank with you. You may not know it, but a fox had pulled out a three-month-old foetus discarded by you from where you had buried it and left it at the courtyard of the priest who bathes the Gosain’s idol. Do you have any idea how many cycles of ablution the priest had to go through?’

Damayanti leaned over and threw up again.

‘Don’t you mess things up this time! Despite knowing it all, Pitambar Mahajan has come forward to marry you. If you are not saved this time around, it will be a direct descent to hell, I swear by my sacred thread. Straight to hell!’

The priest Krishnakanta said to Pitambar Mahajan the best thing he had ever heard in his life, ‘If she does not abort the child this time...know that she will marry you, Mahajan’.

‘Samskara,’ by Indira Goswami, translated from the Assamese by Anindita Kar, excerpted with permission from Indira Goswami: Margins and Beyond, edited By Namrata Pathak and Dibyajyoti Sarma, Routledge.