Knowing that nobody really visits this page anymore, and also guessing that maybe only Maden still gets an automatic ping when this page is updated, here's a selection from my 'refabulation' of a Tharu folktale.
A little bit of the crow, a little of the child.
--
The king waited
for the world to settle down before shouting to his guards. ‘Bring the rice
flour,’ he commanded. ‘Draw the circle.’
Lizzie
was made to stand on the small circle drawn with flour.
‘Show
us how much you love your daughter,’ Adhipati said to Budhani and Korvin. ‘Pull
with all of your might – we need to believe in the strength of your love, don’t
we?’
Korvin
snatched at Lizzie, hooking his wing around her neck. ‘Mommy!’ Lizzie called,
reaching with one wing. Budhani tried to hold onto it with her beak, with a
foot. ‘Mommy,’ Lizzie gasped for breath under Korvin’s wing. Budhani pulled
harder – her baby was choking, suffocating, and calling out to her. ‘Mommy!’
Lizzie shrieked when Budhani’s beak dug into her flesh.
In
the heat of the tussle Budhani looked at Korvin and let out a cry of despair. Look at me, she wanted to say, see my
desperation. Have you no love left? I am the mother! Give me my baby!
But
Korvin snarled back, tightened his grip around Lizzie’s head. It was his pride
he pulled at, not his child.
Budhani
let go of Lizzie and turned away – she couldn’t look her daughter in the eye,
and it was too much cruelty to watch the sneer of victory on Korvin’s face. The
king was far away, separated from the world by his authority over it. Close at
hand was Dharmadhikari, relishing the tug of war for Lizzie.
‘Justice
has been served,’ he said. The world looked on aghast at Lizzie suddenly
sprawled on the floor, Korvin fenced between Lizzie and Budhani, and the king
shaking with suppressed laughter.
‘Sinner!’
Budhani flew at Dharmadhikari. ‘I shit on your book!’ She splattered a hateful
spray of feces on the man and his robes.
After
a moment of shock, Dharmadhikari swung the book at Budhani who was trying to
snatch out his eyes. ‘Madness!’ Dharmadhikari cried. ‘How dare you insult the
wisdom of the gods!’
‘You
are the pickled hatred of all men!’ Budhani replied.
Dharmadhikari
grabbed Budhani’s beak and tried to rip them apart. She cawed with all of her
might. Lizzie and the world raised hell, but Korvin and the king sat
motionless, as if hypnotized by the possibility of blood.
After
an age of pain and panic, Budhani heard the king say, ‘No murder in my court,
Dharmadhikari.’
Dharmadhikari
shook with anger and licked the froth that had gathered at the corners of his
mouth. ‘Know,’ he growled as he snapped off Budhani’s lower beak. ‘Your,’ he
growled as he broke off her upper beak. ‘Place,’ he screamed as he flung her
stunned body into the courtyard wall.
Budhani
tried to find her footing but was smashed down by the clothbound book flung at
her with all the strength in a habitual bully’s arm. Pages of the great book
cut sharp lines across her chest. Clumps of feather fell to the floor where
they mixed with her blood.
‘And
never question the great book!’ Dharmadhikari flung her out of the king’s great
house.
A cruel rain
lashed down, cold and heavy. Whiplashes of lightning seared the sky and
branches broke off trees to the buffet of Budhani’s wings. Her screams mixed
with the screeches of bamboo stalks rubbed together by the storm until they
erupted into fire, the wet green leaves curling and crumbling on the scarlet
tongues of an unseasonal conflagration.
Budhani
abandoned the instinctive caution that had made her avoid the brambles and
bluffs. There was no east or west in the shadow of the storm – there was only
the escape, farther with each flap of the wing, farther from wee Lizzie and the
nest where she had laughed, fed, hungered. A branch snapped and tossed by the
storm scraped off a few of her feathers.
When
the cold pelt of rain wrapped around her, Budhani forgot the pinprick sting of
quills being ripped off her back and sides. She was a mother who had been
chased away from her child. The crow with whom she had summered and nested,
with whom she had exchanged promises of for
life, had called her a murderous dam. In the garden of her mind, the unlit
corner began to breathe with a menace – Korvin’s words divided and multiplied
as they fell upon her from the abyss of the sky, one becoming many in how it
echoed with itself to make a crowd, but also remaining the only one in how it
never set aside the glum and sour blame that filled its heart.
And
more thorny branches in the undergrowth of the jungle scratched at Budhani,
clawing off her feathers, the great ones of wingtips and tail, the down that
sleeked her chest, until, in her blind rage, she threw herself headlong at the
knobbed and leather-smooth trunk of a simal tree.
Her
beak broke off. Blood now ran down her chest, plucked clean, bumps where quills
had been. She groaned and exhaled pain, and let it wrap its arms around her.
Grief pulled her down to the ground. A few stars peeped through from the storm now
abating, the clouds ringed in silver with the bask of a moon hiding just out of
sight. Budhani felt her heart tear in two, and tried to cry and holler, but
felt her anguish, too, tear into ribbons, some pulling her toward the comfort
of sudden and quieting oblivion while some others pulling her to scream, to
stay awake and fight.
Below
her, for miles and miles, beads of her blood fell to the earth and were
swallowed by the rain-soaked ground like seeds for a future fire.
And
Budhani tumbled and bounced off the trees and skidded along the slippery earth
to slump to a final rest outside a little hut at the edge of a village. A man
came to the door with an oil lamp and gave a startled cry.
‘Is
that a baby?’ the woman standing beside him whispered urgently.
Budhani
tried to scream, to warn them about coming too close, warn them against
mentioning her babies, warn the woman against motherhood, which had only just
now ripped out her heart and filled it with cold lead. She tried to scream.
Instead,
what came out was the wail of a newborn human. The rain had washed away the
blood clotting around the wound where her beak had been, and now the glistening
red flesh had become the toothless, helpless mouth of a babe. The man picked
her up, tenderly.
‘Look!’
he said to his wife.
‘A
newborn girl!’ she said.
The
man cradled Budhani in his arms. ‘She is the daughter we have been asking for!’
The Girl
Later,
in another hour, she felt the upward weight of their arms and the wide warmth
of affection as they cradled her between them. While the woman caressed the raw
split of her beak, the man blew cooling air across her brows. Budhani tried for
a moment to gather the strength to speak up, struggled to fill her lungs with
the air needed.
What
came out was just the wail of a newborn. Then she fell asleep again.
A
part of her mind awoke when something sweet and wet was pressed upon her broken
lips. She sputtered and spat out clots of blood. Her eyes were clouded with a
dull film that hid most of the world. Later, when she smelled the cool and
sweet wash of the liquid approaching her maw, she parted her mouth and cawed.
‘Poor
baby,’ the woman sang. ‘She is hungry.’
Again,
grief cloaked Budhani. She had fed babies; she had watched babies wilt with
hunger. She felt guilt and anguish; she felt a flaring of anger at the woman
for the kindness of sweet milk and unsought love.
Budhani
felt strength return to her wings and neck. She threw her legs about to see if
she could still grasp with them. If she could open her eyes, if she could find
her footing once again, if she could leap off a perch and flap her wings hard,
harder than ever before – Budhani told herself this – if she could fly out of
this long night into the bright blue day, she could return to Lizzie, she could
find a new nest and keep fighting for what remained of her family.
But fatigue pulled Budhani back into sleep before she could speak up.
Time slips forever forward, stubbornly, unyieldingly, cruelly. It carries away the truth of a moment in its snake-jaws. Days immediate to events in which the heart was splintered feel dense and sluggish. The desperation to awake from the dream-world overpowers the mind, but the here and the now return ceaselessly, stubbornly, unyieldingly, cruelly, like the tattoo of a war-drum beating onward through the desolation of a foreign land.
And
after a while, snippets of the past that had clung to the mind so far also slip
away. Some fall away abruptly, others foretell their absence. First the
drumbeat dulls, then it vanishes. For some, this forgetting is aid and rescue.
For others, to forget is to dissipate, to be unmade, a curse worse than death,
or even its bright mirror – life.
It
was such to Budhani. She had to never forget Dharmadhikari, who had condemned
her. She had desperately to never forget Lizzie, poor chick, orphaned even
though both parents still lived. She had to never forget the king who had
coolly sent her away from his house, bereft of justice and daughter.
And
she had to never forget Korvin, the mate whom she had loved once, and the crow
she wanted to hurt now.
Budhani cried one
morning after waking up in a swaddle of soft, old cotton clothes because she
remembered her home high up in the nesting tree. She remembered all at once the
four shiny eggs that had emerged from her, and the three faces that had chirped
their names, and the two she had pushed out of the nest, and the one she had
left behind. She remembered all at once the dew of the morning and the lazy
heat of the afternoon, the ruffle of a breeze and the sting of raindrops. And
she remembered the coziness of feeling crowded into a nook by others moving and
chatting and laughing all around her.
The
woman picked her up, looked at her mouth, looked into her eyes. ‘You have a
loud voice, don’t you?’ she whispered to Budhani. Her man stood behind her,
asked to hold Budhani. ‘No,’ the woman cooed. ‘She is all mine,’ she stepped
away.
No, Budhani said. I am nobody’s, and never will be, she said. Put me down, let me return to the sky, she said – except, no sound
came from her but the mewling of a hungry babe. The man and woman laughed.
Budhani
reached with a wing to hit the woman’s nose. The web between the splintered
bones in her wing had melted away, giving her five stubby claws. She scraped at
the woman’s nose, but instead of flinching away with fear the woman laughed
more. Budhani grabbed her nose.
‘Noo, noo, noo, noo, noo,’ the woman
sang. Her man came to stand behind her once more. They looked at Budhani with
eyes that slowly glazed over with fresh tears. ‘She is strong,’ the woman
whispered to her man, who first kissed the woman on the temple, then leaned
over her shoulder to kiss Budhani’s feeble hand.
‘Our
baby,’ he whispered.
Budhani
remembered her parents looking at her sometimes, in the old nest in the forest,
as she ate. She had once been the reason for warm tears to a pair of parents,
but the memory had dimmed and faded. She must have shared such a moment with
Korvin, in the first months of Egg and Mouse and Lizzie emerging into the
world. But that memory had now become fouled. Now, here, in the house of this
human pair, she had switched to the other side of that veil, and caused warm
tears of joy to cloud their eyes.
‘She
will grow up strong,’ the man said. ‘I can tell from her voice. She has come
home now, the daughter for whom we have been praying.’
‘And
she will laugh, soon,’ the woman said. Then she gurgled with a laugh that spoke
of a pain which she carried for long but was ready to forget.
In that moment, Budhani saw the possibility of one life slipping aside to make place for another. She drew the naked, branched palm of her new limb over her face and found it plucked smooth of feathers. In the pupil of her woman’s eyes was another person reflected – more an infant of the human race than a mother crow, more moved by curiosity than puzzlement.
Over the days
that followed her arrival at the house of the humans, Budhani suffered the
indignities of being bathed and oiled, sunned and fanned. The man and the woman
would talk among themselves as they picked and upturned her, wiped and bundled
her, fed and burped her. She cried through their urgent or lazy chatter about
what needed doing, who needed going where, why a neighbor was happy or upset.
She
cried for every moment she remembered – from when the ivory dome of her
eggshell asked to be tapped, right up to when her feathers and the feeling for
life had abandoned her in that stormy night. Or sometimes she leaned on their
shoulders and listened, letting their low voices lull her into sleep. By and
by, she even learned to enjoy the woman’s songs full of silly rhymes about
goats on swings and baby elephants getting into a tussle and asking for an older
sister to separate them.
One
morning, the man picked her up and whispered into her ear, ‘Call me Baba.’
Later
in the afternoon, the woman picked her up and whispered, ‘Call me Dai, my
little dove. Call me your mother.’
And
one day not long after, another man crept close to her and examined her face.
He was brown like a chestnut, wrinkled like the flesh of a walnut, tufted with
white hair on an otherwise shiny head. She looked defiantly back, tried to
shout a challenge.
‘She
gurgles and tries to talk back!’ the old man seemed astonished. ‘How old can
she be! Two months? Three?’
‘Uncle,’
Dai said, ‘she came to us already gurgling and crying.’
The
old man stuck a finger into Budhani’s mouth, and Budhani tried to bite it off.
‘She
has no teeth, but she is strong,’ the old man became puzzled, walked away to
the door. ‘From which direction did she drop?’
Baba
stepped out with the old man. They murmured outside while Dai gently rocked
Budhani back and forth. ‘Where did you come from, my dove?’ she asked.
‘It
isn’t unheard of, not entirely,’ the old man sat by the fire and told Dai and
Baba stories. He spoke of a drop of sweat that fell into the salty sea to
become a fearsome warrior. He spoke of a scream that became a hated demon. In a
faraway land, a sunbeam entered the ear of a child and birthed a baby boy who
had to be put on a reed basket gliding downriver. A god dreamed of itself and
became a flood of other gods battling each other’s inner demons. It wasn’t
unheard of, this sudden and surprising forming of a child or a god.
‘Sita
came from the earth,’ Baba added helpfully. ‘The king plowed his field, and she
came to him from the furrows.’
‘And
our child has come from the storm and the forest,’ Dai added with hope. The
husband and wife waited for the old man to begin nodding – slowly at first, but
with cheer and vigor when the weight of the idea convinced him. The old man
took Budhani into his arms.
‘Yes – that is your name, Budhani! We will call this your sixth week on earth,’ he said. ‘Budhani! Budhani! Budhani!’ he put his breath into her name and whispered it into her ears.
