ISSUE 37

Krishna has been a virgin wife for a year. She looks at the big man, her husband, lying next to her, spread out like spilled water. She didn’t imagine it would be so, she thinks, remembering their first private touch. It was deep in an AC 3-tier bogie of the Tirunelveli Express, somewhere between Villupuram and Trichy, when they held hands across the top berth as they tried to sleep to the sound of the train swaying on its tracks.

They were traveling from the sea to the mountains, like other honeymooning couples, for it was the year of the kurinji. To see the purple flower that bloomed once every decade, why, wouldn’t that seal any marital union? Lord Murugan had adorned the tribal girl Valli with a garland to consummate their romance. Hadn’t they spent many nights lying amidst the kurinji, wrapped in each other’s arms, consumed in the act of pleasure? But, the bloom was late. Some people said that there’d been too much rain that monsoon, others that there’d been too little. But what everyone agreed was that pollution was to blame.

There was not much at the hill station without the kurinji, so Krishna and Jagan walked around the lake every morning and spent their afternoons visiting strange nature formations named after dolphins and bears. And at night, they touched as newly-weds do, shy and careful with each other’s bodies. But then he would stop and play with her hair or stroke her face until, exhausted from the exercise and the chilly mountain air, they would fall asleep, arms and legs intertwined.

The night before they were to leave though, he didn’t touch her, not at all. He talked. He told her how the urge that men feel was something that he’d never had, even though his heart wanted to know it so much. And about how he, the eldest boy, had watched his four younger brothers become adult men and felt that the rite of passage had somehow skipped him. “No, if I’m honest with you,” he said, “it has never worked properly.”

The next morning, she told him, “I want to see everything, from Coimbatore to Kanyakumari,” so they took a jeep up to Anamudi peak and walked into a landscape of mist and fog. Krishna looked around her, squinting beyond hills and clouds, but she couldn’t see the winding ghat road making its way down past forests, rice fields, to the sea. She wanted to find the beautiful wholeness in things, but what she saw was a world broken up by regret. That’s when he held her hand, pulled her close to him, and said that he’d dream of this moment, of standing there with her and watching the world appear slowly below them. “In patches, like nothing is connected. But when the clouds lift and it all comes together, how beautiful!”

When she got engaged to Jagan, her college friends had teased her and called her Draupadi. “We are still waiting for our matches,” Anu had said. “But lucky you! You’ve found the Pandavas.” Five brothers, five men, and she, the first of the wives. At first, she had been shy with Jagan’s brothers, and they had treated her like a fragile thing. There was no eye contact, no accidental touching of hands when she handed them their coffees in the morning. But soon, an easy familiarity took over, and Krishna started feeling toward them what might be maternal affection, but these days she is not so sure, especially when she sees Hari, the youngest, with his yoga-sculpted body and his clean-featured face.

They spend dawn together, Krishna and Hari, on the terrace, he, springing up into handstands and drawing an imaginary bow back like a warrior, and she, collecting jasmine for the morning prayer. His face, when upside down, doesn’t sag into strangeness, and he breaks into a smile every time he catches her looking at him.

But it is not only Hari. She daydreams about the twins, Selvan and Mutthu, although she has trouble telling them apart. They like to tease her, asking her to guess which one is in front of her. “Tell me, Manni, who am I? What is my name?” But she looks at the face, the wide-set eyes, the strong jaw, and is so blinded by beauty that she has no clue. Why did God make two handsome boys and give them the same body, the same face? What a shame that this beauty is not doubled but merely reflected in the other, like a mirror? “I don’t know except that you both are troublemakers,” she says, wondering if she should take the impish earlobe between her finger and thumb and give it a good pinch, like how you would to a naughty boy, a very naughty boy.

Karthik, she thinks of because of sex. Physically, he is an inverted version of Jagan. His maleness is distilled into a thick, strong body covered with wire-mesh hair, and, as if to make up for his short stature, he holds out his chest like a pigeon. He seems pure in some way, ancestral, a god of our basest instincts: desire. In the middle of the night, it is Karthik that she invokes, wishing his presence to come into the room, to come between her body and her husband’s. It is wrong. But does she want him that way? No. When she turns to her big, flowy man, lying on his stomach, his sex slack, tucked between his thighs like a folded handkerchief, she would like simply an essence of Karthik, extracted from somewhere deep within his body. Just a drop, which she would squeeze onto her husband, and watch him swell to a polished black granite, her own lingam.

Although Krishna tries not to, she thinks a lot about sex. She thinks of the brothers doing it, doing it with modern girls who look nothing like her. Like in the movies, the couples sit together on Marina beach, their bare feet digging into sand, and look at fishing boats coming in with the day’s catch. And once darkness sets in, they find secret corners and, with the parapet wall casting a shadow upon their conjoined bodies, their kisses and sighs muffled by the high tide, make the beach their own private country.

Krishna has been to Marina beach many times. She remembers the spot where she once dug a hole so deep that she felt wet sand first, then a small puddle of seawater at the bottom. She knows the feel of the white breakers on her thighs so well that the waves visit her in her sleep. The first time she went to the beach with Jagan was after they were engaged. They walked far, from the Kannagi statue where had parked his scooter, to the Adyar estuary. Without realising where they were going, they stepped over plastic bags and discarded fish, as if beckoned by the mangrove-covered islands dotting the salty mouth of the river. He was a ghost-like presence next to her, asking her questions in his soft-spoken voice about her life up until that moment, and she told him all that she could, things she wouldn’t remember the next day. They didn’t hold hands, so she thought that maybe, when they were back to where they could smell roasting corn and see children in bare feet chasing the waves, they would play the game where you each dig two holes some distance apart and keep digging until one hand, grasping through sand, would find another gritty palm groping for gritty touch, the touch that would seal something physical between them. But by the time they’d walked back, the couples and hustlers were out, having laid claim to the beach, to the darkness, and the sea was no longer present except as an irrelevant hum, all but drowned out by the sound of evening traffic.

Jagan is a creature of water. His skin, broad open, is like the pad of a water lily. There are no dark corners or dimensions, just a wide, waxy canvas. She imagines dewdrops sliding off gleaming skin, his body absorbing the green, nourishing water in a well in some quiet temple courtyard. In a Sangam literature class that she took in college, the lecturer had brought in a water lily floating in a plastic bucket patterned with what Krishna thought was marble print but turned out to be streaks of lime scale and residual soap. During class, in the presence of the bucket that stank faintly of a damp bathroom, and to the sad echoes of the countless times a mug was dunked in and its contents poured over the bodies of men, women and children, they read a love poem of a village girl waiting for the sea to recede so she could walk across the lagoon to her lover. It was painfully fitting, watching the lone water lily lying there, waiting to be returned to wherever it had been plucked from. At the end of the class, the lily got passed around and that was when Krishna held the pad, more fascinated by it, by the way it lay limp, cupped in her palm, than with the bright magenta of the petals.

Up in the terrace, as she watches Hari, she wants to place the still-closed jasmine buds in his unruly hair, on his closed eyelids as he lies in savasana. A warrior corpse, forgotten in a forest-meadow. He wouldn’t notice, lulled into sleep by the flower’s heady smell, and she’d run away, gathering the silver tray and her damp towel, leaving behind no trace, as if she were running for shelter in the rain. Or, on early Sunday mornings when the whole family sit on the floor, waiting for their heads to be massaged, she wants to take cupped-hands full of coconut oil heating on the gas burner and do it herself. How she would work her hands upon the two-headed god, the sturdy skulls and the thick hair, until she would hear a heron wading through the paddy fields and feel a rare breeze sift through a palm frond.

And sometimes, she dreams of lying beneath the baking sun and her tongue tastes salt, not the salt of the sea or of tears, but of heat. Her lips are parched and there is no shade. Could she run to the hill in the horizon and find water in its caverns? When she gets there, she sees that the hill is a reclining Karthik. She climbs it nonetheless and knows why she was deceived. The rock-like muscles of his body are like ridges and buttresses with easy footholds everywhere, and her bare feet and hands find traction on hard sandstone. She doesn’t know why she climbs, for, after all, there would be no water, no space in that tight, compact structure, but she can’t stop. When she rests on the rippling plateau of his stomach, he takes off with her into the air, and, as they both soar into a cloudless sky, she finds buried deep in a hidden place a spring from which she drinks her fill.

Although she dreams every night of the brothers, Krishna prays only for her husband, the one husband. She prays to every god and goddess she can think of, to every landscape and every flower in her world, to take them – Karthik, her hill in the desert, Selvan and Mutthu with their scent of coconut groves and mischief, and sweet Hari, the warrior with jasmine in his hair. Take them all, but leave him, Jagan, the lily pad, the unsuspecting creature of sea water.

In the day time, she thinks of Draupadi, wife to five brothers yet also, strangely, a symbol of eternal chastity. Not a lover, but just a wife. But she, Krishna, wants to know their bodies, she wants to be inside them. When she brings in the men’s clothes from the terrace, they all blend into one another. She doesn’t shy away from handling the briefs, husband’s, other men’s, all the same they seem to her. She runs her hands inside the fabric, wondering what kind of a bulge the extra material is supposed to contain. Surely, they would be different from Jagan’s she thinks, imagining his nearly hairless genitals and miniature balls, a boy’s package really, and replacing that vision with Hari’s or Selvan’s or even Karthik’s, with hair, weight, mass.

She undresses. She unpins her sari pallu from her shoulder and lets it drop onto the floor. Then, she twirls round and round and watches the sari unravelling to her feet. As the excess fabric falls limp, her fingers unbutton her blouse, peeling back the cloth, damp with sweat, from her skin. The sari now lies curled on the tiles, and her petticoat, discarded, is a warm breathing animal. When she catches sight of her nakedness in the armoire mirror, she twirls again and again, dressing herself in men’s briefs, shirts, trousers, until she is transformed.

That is how Krishna leaves, as both men and woman, husbands and wife, brothers and sister-in-law. She wanders the streets, unaware, and unafraid, of the young men, so many of them sitting on parapets and smoking their bidis. A world of men, but isn’t she one of them, free to come and go as she pleases, free to roam?

In the midday sun, she sweats through her garments until there are large semi-circles of slick under her bound bosom, and her thighs feel the wetness as they rub against each other as she walks. She imagines her disguise unravelling and feels the wildfire of panic, of being found out and sent back home, dressed as she is in the mishmash of male clothing, of admitting to all sorts of shameful thoughts and living separate from her desire.

To fend off the fire in her skin, she wants to descend down to the Cooum, but finds the bank overrun by the kind of urban wildlife, unpredictable and dangerous, that finds foothold in the plastic and the sewerage that make up the fetid waterway. A rare breeze from the sea will have to suffice, and she remembers the shells under her feet, the discarded bowels of fish, and the dark outline of the mangroves from the time she waited for marriage, for her lily pad husband-to-be to hold her hand under sand and trace love into her palm. And that’s when she realises what she has to do: to travel away from the coast with its reminders of unfulfilled longing and find union in the mountains.

She takes a train from Egmore and travels into the distance, moving inland. Soon, the smell of the sea fades and she finds, around her, a vast tract of farmland, mango orchards and coconut groves. It’s like passing from one country to another, from salt to palm, from one feeling to another. She thinks of the twins, the luxurious hair fanning out like fronds, handsome faces ripe like paddy waiting to be harvested. But, before she knows it, the farmland rises into the hills. The train stops. She waits in the dark in a village at the foothills and smells jasmine buds opening in the night air. There are no thunderclouds, although it is the season, and the woods above her head, stretching into the hillside, invite her in, promising to muffle her footsteps. It is now she who is the warrior. Her feet fall on the dark ground as light as those of a forest bandit stepping through thickets of cassia and bamboo. Krishna’s journey is in a way complete. In trains stations and in bus station terminals, in tiffin shops and public toilets, in village maidans and forest paths, in the transitory world of traveling men, she has seen Jagan’s gentle eyes, Hari’s slim waist, the twins’ easy handsomeness, and Karthik’s muscular arms. Five brothers have appeared everywhere around her, and she has been both one of them and separate, a woman and a man, Draupadi and the Pandavas.

But before she can rejoice and go back to her new status as chaste wife of five brothers, what is that she sees in the distance, shimmering blue, nestled in the hills? She knows it would be a detour, but she needs to find a place to sleep. She keeps the blue haze in sight as she walks an hour, then two. There is no path, and she stumbles in the dark, fighting the twisted grass and dense undergrowth. When she finally reaches, the light around her is gone. But she knows she is amidst the kurinji, a near-perfect swathe carpeting a small dip in the hillside. The bloom is a year late, and she makes out that the flowers clinging to the dark branches are young, maybe just budded that week. She sniffs for honey, remembering a Sangam poem about how a tribal girl squeezes honey from the kurinji to take back to her ailing lover, but there is only the smell of the moist, black earth and, from beyond, the cold mountain air of the hills closing in around her. She lies here, thinking of Valli and Murugan, and other romances made in this very place, while the blossoms drip like wax from bushes overhead. It is a long road and she has to rest. The next morning, before she starts, she will pluck the flowers and weave a garland. She will take the kurinji to her husband Jagan, to lay on his chest, or to Mutthu and Selvan. The beautiful boys will wink at her, take her hands, and lead her away. Or she might give it to Karthik, the elemental man, and the thought of his hard body and trunk-like legs make her go still. Or no, it will have to be Hari who receives her flowers, the clear as dewdrop boy-warrior, lost in his yoga every morning, but not lost enough that he does not look up and flash her a smile. It has always been Hari. But first, before all that, she will sleep.