An Excerpt from "Il respiro del fiume"

An excerpt from “Il respiro del fiume” by Patrizia Poli

At four in the morning, the light is already sufficient in Benares to cross the city and reach one of the hundred ghats on the Ganges.

Wrapped in a faded sari, a slim figure, with knotted hair, a long bouncing braid and bare feet, slips out of the house and runs through the alleys of the old city. She pays no attention to the cow droppings and the filth that litters the streets, as is her habit on better days. She passes like the wind among the half-naked children, the lepers, the crippled beggars, the old men sitting on the sidewalk playing at hitting the spittoon.

She doesn’t even notice the dismal little temple of the monkey god Hanuman, stained with red dust like blood. She passes the obscure shops of sacred objects, in the heart of the chowk, the dense network of alleys behind the ghats immersed in the pungent smell of rose incense and jasmine votive necklaces. Panting, she joins the line of pilgrims descending towards the Manikarnika Ghat. On the last step, just above the water level, she pauses to catch her breath.

She looks around.

Majestic, surya is rising, and illuminates an immense desert space in the east. On the shore where she stands, on the other hand, seven kilometers of stairways, ramparts, temples and maharaja palaces strech. Along the sacred steps, the poorest crowd in the world performs ritual ablutions, prays, drinks the infected water. From the funeral pyres, the smoke continues to rise, sour, thick.

In the holiest hour of the day, the little girl also enters the river and is immersed up to her waist. She sprinkles water on the palms of her hands, facing the sun, then lights a small candle of camphor oil, places it on a leaf and entrusts it to the Ganges. All around, holy men in saffron robes slide their offerings into the river, symbolizing the light that dispels ignorance. An island of flames is caught in the current and floats towards the Indian Ocean. «Ganga mai ki jai! Praise be to Mother Ganga!»

The little girl also prays «Mother Ganga accept my offer.»

When all the prayers she knows are exhausted, it is already day, the sun burns and people seek shelter under straw umbrellas. Sannyasis remain motionless, in ecstasy, in communication with the sun.

In the middle of the river, boats glide full of tourists who take photographs of the holy men in prayer, of the people washing themselves and of the piles of wood with the dead burning in the open.

The little girl retraces her steps, pulls aside a discolored curtain and enters the house. Coming from the bright and crowded ghat, the room appears even more gloomy and dark. Beyond a row of rags hanging to dry, Urda, the neighbor who helps her mother, apostrophes her with a mouth full of betel «ah, you’re here, you shouldn’t have left just now». She is a thin woman, of indeterminate age, with tousled hair, without an incisor. Her husband took it off with a fist, before making her a widow. From the hole, right between her lips, the red juice of the paan drips down.

The little girl fearfully approaches the bed where her mother, Auda, lies in a pool of sweat on the dirty sheet. Her olive face is unrecognizable, her eyes, previously large, dark and moist, appear like the empty eye sockets of a skull. Her breath is a harsh rattle that tastes like vomit.

«Urdabhai?»

«Mmm…»

«Why does my mother do this?»

«Your mother is just trying to breathe.»

«Urdabhai?»

«Mmm…»

«Is my mother dying?»

The neighbor just sighs. She spits a stream of red saliva onto the floor.

«Urdabhai?»

«Mmm…»

«Will my mother recover?»

«Do you think she can get better? It’s best if you stay with her now.»

The little girl snuggles next to the charpoi. With a small uncertain hand, she lightly touches her mother’s shoulder. «Amma…»

The patient opens her eyelids which seem to have become paper, she tries to move her head in the direction of Urmilla’s voice but she can only stare at the ceiling. «Han…?»

«Do you hear me, amma?»

«Urmilla…»

«Amma…»

«Urmilla, where are you?»

«Here, I’m here, amma. Do you see me?»

«No, I don’t see you… There’s no light, it’s night.»

«No, amma, it’s not night, it’s morning! It’s five o’clock and I’ve been praying.»

«You did the right thing. I can’t go, I’m tired. And then, in this darkness. It’s so dark today.»

«Amma! It is not true! It’s not dark! It is not…»

«You know, Urmilla, I saw your baba. He came to see me…». A cough interrupts her. Urda approaches and wets her forehead with a cloth. «Poor thing, she is delirious.»

Another fit of whooping cough leaves the patient breathless. She suddenly stiffens, grits her teeth, rolls her eyes and grabs her daughter’s sari. «Urmilla!»

«Amma, please!»

Panting, exhausted, her thin chest heaving in long, labored sighs, Auda is silent, struggling to breathe, then she speaks again and this time her words sound less frantic, more lucid. «Urmilla, life has not been nice to me, but you are a good daughter.» She is silent again, she seems to doze off.

Maybe she doesn’t die. O Shiva! Oh, Lord of the world! Don’t let her die! Don’t let my mom die!

A few silent minutes pass, the patient’s breathing becomes harsher every moment. Around the charpoi the flies buzz, insistently. Urda moves about the room, shuffling. She touches an object, opens a piece of furniture, closes it, spits on the floor. The sounds of every morning come from the street: the bawling of children, the calls of exasperated mothers, the crying of newborns, the cries of channa vendors, of knife grinders, of tea bearers.

Half an hour later, Auda’s lips move again: «You are so beautiful, Ahmed…»

The little girl bends over her mother, terrified by her rigid body, by her rancid breath, by the rattle that has now become her breath. «Amma!»

Auda’s mouth opens, her nose becomes sharp, hissing: «Ahmed…»

«Amma! Amma!»

«Yes, janum, yes, Ahmed, my soul…»

The stretcher, woven from seven pieces of bamboo cane, is ready. The little girl spent the night building it, keeping watch over her mother’s body. With Urda’s help, she washed and shaved Auda’s cold body, marked her forehead with sandalwood powder, anointed her hair with oil, wove flower necklaces around her, and rubbed her teeth and lips with fragrant twigs. Finally, she dressed her in her most beautiful sari, the one that Auda used only for Diwhali.

It’s almost dawn now. Urda snores in a corner with her youngest nephew in her arms, a thin child, shaved bare, clad only in a belt and a bunch of anklets. With wide eyes, shining with kajal, the little one searches the dimly lit room.

Even the little girl’s head dangles on her chest. Her hands, however, still hold one of her mother’s feet. For hours she massaged it. She knows all the folds, all the bumps, from the small hardening under the big toe, to the callous reinforcement of the heel, due to the habit of walking barefoot.

The little girl’s head falls forward and she jerks, jumping. She resumes massaging the corpse’s feet, frantically, as if they were still sensitive.

Urda opens first one eye, then the other, then she yawns. «Stop it now, child. In an hour she’ll be burnt, what’s the use of your massages?»

«All daughters massage their mothers feet.»

«Yes, but of living mothers.»

The grandson extends a hand to the dead woman on the bed. «Auda!» he calls her.

«Auda is sleeping, leave her alone» scolds his grandmother. The little one raises his head, blows saliva bubbles with pursed lips. From time to time he casts puzzled glances at the motionless body. The old woman fidgets impatiently. «Come on, Urmilla, it’s nearly time. We have to put her on the stretcher.»

«Wait, Urda. Just a little more.»

«Look I have a lot to do! I can’t stay here all day! My grandchildren are hungry.»

«Only five minutes more, Urda.»

«Okay, but hurry up. She starts to smell.»

«It is not true! There’s no smell, it’s just the flowers!»

Urmilla bends down to kiss her mother’s feet, then her hands, then her head. She dips her index finger in the red powder and rubs the tilak on her forehead, where her own lips have discolored it a little. She adjusts the jasmine necklaces better and scatters more daisies on the red sheet that wraps her body.

«You spared no expense» comments Urda, mechanically swatting a louse on her nephew’s head.

«My mother had saved up money for her funeral. It was in a box.»

«It’s lucky the rats didn’t eat it. But you were right to take the best things for your mother’s cremation. One lives like a dog, at least one dies with dignity! Only that it would take a son. And if there is no son, a relative should do it and if there is no relative…»

«There is a relative, Urda.»

«Forget it, you know how things are.»

«No, I don’t know and I will go to him because I want to talk to him, but I have to cremate my mother first.»

«It’s not a good idea.»

«I have to decide this, not you.»

«Oh, sure! Of course! I said so, just to give you some advice. But you never listen to advice! But now you will do as I say. I’ll take you to the mission.»

«I don’t want to go. My mother wouldn’t approve.»

«Well, my child, you will have to learn to adapt from now on. Life is what it is. Your mother lived on poems, flowers, prayers. And what did she gain by it? Check it out now! Stone-dead!”

The little nephew stretches out a hand towards Auda, emits bubbles of satisfaction. «She’s dead, she’s dead!»

«I told you she sleeps! Well, my child, poems and prayers don’t fill the belly, begging fills the belly, prostitution fills the belly, looking for stuff along the railway fills the belly! But Auda didn’t. No! She couldn’t lower herself. Believe me, she was a dreamer, one with her head full of upper caste nonsense, Brahmanic nonsense.»

The little girl screams: «Leave my mother alone!»

«Okay, okay, don’t get mad at me, I was just trying to help you. After all, I loved you both. You are not a boy but you are still a good girl. Now, however, hurry up, it’s late.»

Urda pushes the child away and with difficulty she lifts her mum’s body. She drops it on the stretcher with a dull thud. Together, they tie Auda to the stretcher and begin to anoint every part of her body, of the shroud and of the bamboo canes, with ghee and camphor oil.

«That’s it» says Urda, «so the flames will immediately go up to the sky.»

They drag the litter out. The pink light of dawn hurts the little girl’s eyes, which cried and watched in the dark all night.

Before hoisting the stretcher, the carrier, who is waiting, wants to see the money. Urmilla opens her hand and shows a roll of rupees. The man nods and takes the load on board.

«So, child» Urda begins, then she stops. A hint of emotion can be guessed in her voice. «Say, are you sure you can do it?» she finally asks.

The little girl nods, then she climbs onto the cart, next to her mother’s body wrapped in the red cloth. Urda greets, picks up his nephew, then crosses the courtyard.

The carter hits the muzzle of the ox with his stick, the beast walks slowly, shaking its painted horns and garlanded neck at every step. The little girl, with one hand on her mother’s chest, is sitting stiffly on the rickety cart that runs along the Madampura Road, up to the Harishandra Ghat.

At the top of the ghat is a concrete space intended for pyres, with screens to protect people from the gusts of heat. The girl asks the attendant the price of the wood and the spices then she takes from her bosom her roll of rupees, thinned after payment of the carter.

The man points two rapacious eyes at her. «Females!» he repeats, spitting a jet of paan on the ground which nearly hits the little girl full in the chest. «Females! Where will we end up!» He grabs all the money and points to a pile of cheap wood.

«It’s bad wood!» the girl is indignant.

«Listen to her! With those four rupees you won’t expect a stack of sandalwood like the rich people?!»

The little girl is stubborn. «I gave you all the rupees I had; all the ones my mother had saved up for her funeral! My mother deserves the best, she was a brahmani!»

«Yes, and I am Rama!»

Without paying attention to him, the little girl rushes towards a pile of precious wood.

The man tries to stop her. «Hey! What are you doing?!»

«I want a piece of sandalwood to put in my mother’s mouth!»

The little girl carefully chooses a small piece of wood, pushes the shroud away from Auda’s face and forces the teeth clenched by rigor mortis. She introduces the wood into the mouth and closes it. «Here, amma, there it is.»

Auda looks like a wax statue. The little girl thinks it’s really the last time she sees her mother’s face and something stirs in her stomach. Her tears are burning pins that pierce her eyes. She struggles to hold them.

The man lifts the body and goes down to the river, immediately followed by a cow, ready to swallow the flowers that fall from the corpse. Auda is immersed in purifying water, anointed with ghee and hoisted on the pyre.

The little girl goes around the pyre five times, scatters water from a container which she then breaks, while the man waits impatiently and the people around look bewildered. On the concrete of the ghat are written the names of those cremated there. The little girl avoids looking at them because they are just too many.

The man hands her a flare. «Where will we end up» he repeats, «where will we end up if they now send girls to funerals and make them walk around the pyres as if they were boys. Do you even know what you have to do?»

The little girl nods.

«And do you think you can do it by yourself?»

Again the little girl confirms, but she trembles a little. She does her best to set the four corners of the pyre on fire. The greasy wood immediately catches fire, the flames lick the shroud, then envelop it. The body lights up, crackles, arches, seems to sit up. The little girl looks wide-eyed. She retreats to a corner, like a frightened animal, and she crouches on the concrete of the ghat. She watches all the time while her mother burns.

They taught her that one shouldn’t cry for those who die, because death is part of life and those who have lived without guilt are reborn purer. Yet she has a hard lump in her throat, and the tears are now overflowing. She sniffs, tastes salt and snot.

The man looks at her, twisting his mouth, shaking his head, muttering insults against those who allow females to behave like males instead of staying at home and thinking about getting married. So those tears have to be pushed back just like a boy would. In order not to cry, the little girl tries hard to think of how her mother was when she was well, of her sad smile, of her serious eyes, of her bare feet that slipped indifferently on the mud of life. Auda would not like her tears. Auda, before everything, put dignity.

However, now, Auda is down there, curling and bursting on the pyre, in that stench of burnt bones and smoke, mixed with the strong, damp smell of the river. And she won’t see her again, she won’t tell her anymore what the other girls at the fountain said, she won’t hear her hoarse voice again saying that she must never be afraid.

Instead, she is afraid, and fear is a black hole inside the belly, like when something you ate hurts. No, more, much more.

A few hours later, armed with iron tongs, an attendant collects the charred bones in an earthenware pot. He beckons her to come closer. She forces herself to get up, to move her knees numb from stillness. She approaches trembling to the smoking pyre.

The man shows her which is the skull. She looks at it, frightened, fascinated, with no more saliva in her mouth. That black, hot, wrinkled thing is what remains of her mother’s beautiful face.

«Hurry up! I have four more funerals this morning.»

The bamboo awl isn’t heavy, but she has to hold it with both hands, since they shake. She tightens her knuckles around the wood until they turn white, until she hurts herself. She concentrates, she aims.

She hits.

It’s a weak blow, the charred head barely moves, the awl slipping to one side.

The little girl tries again, she hits harder, so much to hurt her hands. This time the blackened head bobs, but that’s all.

«Oh Ram! Do you want to make it into meatballs?! Do you want to make the mince?»

The little girl swallows tears of shame. «I’m sorry» she apologizes, «I don’t…»

«Give it here!» The man snatches the awl from her hand. With two sharp blows he smashes Auda’s skull and frees her soul.

Later, with the vase of ashes pressed to her chest, the little girl descends the last step of the ghat, to reach the boat that will take her to the middle of the river, where she can scatter the ashes in the water. Her eyes are dry now, and she holds her head up.

She squeezes the vase tightly to her heart.