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Naturally, there was resentment in the village. The whispered insinuations, pointed slights, blameful glances- that I answered in indignant gurgles and babbles- were fuelled by my father’s true rumors. My father’s complaints were threefold: I killed his wife, I killed his crops, and I was a girl.
Even my grandmother suggested, whispering into my little ear in a singsong voice and breaking her customary silence, that I should bring back the rains. I would have done this to oblige her, but unfortunately, whatever power I yielded at my birth, whatever spell I had cast, was immovable. In my third year, after the sun shone without setting for a fortnight and the wells were lower than they were had been in a century, a general din brought an astrologer to the village.
For a preposterous fee, the one-eye browed astrologer promised a cure. He examined my feet and he examined the stars. He prayed to the gods and he ate all my supper. He furrowed his lip and curled his eyebrow impressively. Then he announced to an impatient, but obedient, throng that the answer was simple: I had to marry. The crowds were awed at this innovative suggestion. My first child, a son (he insisted, for an extra ten rupees), would agitate the rains from my womb. The astrologer then brought forward a matrimonial candidate, none other then: The Goat.
Of course, The Goat came from a respectful family of merchants, his father the local shopkeeper. His parents lived in denial of their son’s goat-like state, they mildly suspected that he was different, but generally accepted his receding chin, squinting eyes and goat goatee as a matter of course. I forget my husband’s actual name. It was no use remembering his inconsequential name when, clearly, calling him The Goat was much more practical and realistic.
Hence, in my third year of life, and the third year of drought, I was leashed to The Goat with my scarlet sawaar suit. My baby steps toddled behind his hoofs while he bleated and brayed his eternal devotion. I distinctly recall at one point, during the second rotation around the table, resolutely refusing to carry on. I had to be dragged the rest of the way through the ceremony. Thereafter, to my father’s house I returned, until such a time that I would reach womanhood, and give my husband his horned and hairy children.
I grew. Encountering the thick silk of marigolds, slick spines of feathers, sandpaper paws of beggars, sun licks across arm fuzz, forehead curry dew, grainy cow tongue, custard seed spittings, matted boar hair, foreign thorn pricks, gummy orange blessings, smooth banyan bark, tickling dancing flies, sleek plaited tresses, stringy guava pulp and various aches, throbs, stings and smarts. The Whip bruised me with word and hand. With every bruise my skin simmered with anger and shaded darker; the darker I became, the lighter the soil. It didn’t help that I occasionally hit back.
Inauspicious signs speckled my surroundings. My inherent aura haunted my shadows, my circles, my ripples, my moles and my breath. Destiny betrayed me first and karma castigated my spirit. This was treachery I anticipated, an assumption set forth after my angry red birth, but I never expected to my compliantly body follow suit. My trusted skin stretched, my contumacious bones spread, my tender chest sprouted. My body decided to cooperate with fate, stealing my childhood, propelling me closer and closer towards The Goat. With every passing moment my life edged closer to a confrontation with reality. A beating from The Whip or prurient relations with The Goat. Suffocating heat or drowning dank. Until one day I saw the answer beside a shrine, I recognized that nothing could save me from this life.
The dead vulture bathed in morning light beside the temple entrance. He was freshly departed and his beak was frozen in compliance. His cynical unblinking eyes wore an expression of expectation, knowledge that his peers would, after a decent interval, resort to cannibalism. Understandably his brother’s beaks would tear into his feast of feathered flesh, gouge out his grape eyes and tongue out his gizzards. If he had not died he would
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Morgan Whitfield
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