Parvati and the Snake, Alisa Alering, page 2/2
She began to whisper to the snake. She told it about her sister who had married and gone away to her new husband's village. Her sister had been very happy to be wed. She had rattled her bangles and looked smug, like she knew a great and special secret. After a year she came back. She had a baby girl in her arms and she was crying. The sister's stomach was still fat, but her arms and legs were thin. Tight muscles stood out on her neck, like the knotted sling of a charpoy's ropes. When their mother stepped out of their hut, the sister threw herself into the girl's arms, sobbing, crushing the wrinkled infant between them. It was only a momentary weakness. After that first night, when they got into bed together as they had always done, the sister wouldn't look at the girl, or speak to her. After a week the brother-in-law came for her and herded her down the village road like one of his cows. She hadn't seen her sister since.
She told the snake about Harjeet's fat lips. She said she knew she had to be married some day, but did it have to be now, and did it have to be Harjeet. The snake would drink the milk, blink its eyes, and she would fall asleep.
One night she woke to the sound of the earth splitting open. The snake was gone. She hid the saucer under her mattress and listened. There was a pounding outside, like the marching feet of two thousand soldiers. The rains were come at last. Wind rushed through the open windows and blew the dust of the parched floor into her eyes. Fat drops of rain splatted on the ground outside—and on her sleeping brothers. They leapt up hooting like a pack of hyenas, jumping up and down and hugging one another as the rain matted down the dust in their hair.
By morning, rivers were running down the dry ruts of the fields. Everyone smiled and sang as they tramped ankle deep in the soupy earth, hauling water. Mud sucked at her ankles like chains. Why had the snake not bitten her? She knew that it would not come back again. It was the drought that had brought it so close, the smell of the moisture on her breath.
She squatted in the garden, holding her skirts above the waterlogged ground, and counted out precious seeds to replace the plants that had died. There might yet be time for a harvest of beans before the snows. Plunging her finger her finger into the mud, she stuck the speckled seed fast in the hole, closing over the top with the edge of her thumb.
Harjeet's mother crashed out from between the corn rows, her chunni thrown over her face, mud splashed up to her thighs. She shrieked out wild sobs, and her face was terrible with grief. Not long after, her sons came out from the same rows, carrying Harjeet's body between them. He had been making repairs to the irrigation ditches, shoring up the sides. He had been bitten by a snake. He was already dead.
The girl believed it was wrong to celebrate death, even that of the wicked criminals hung outside the fort to bleed their lives onto its red stone walls in the summer sun. Those were monsters who had stolen and raped and struck down their fellow men. Still, the girl felt relief at Harjeet's death. Perhaps in her secret heart she felt even more.
Harjeet's mother saw the girl's face, saw it giving away her heart's truth. Witch, she called her, claiming that the girl had cursed Harjeet. That she had consorted with serpents and wished death on her beloved son. The mother's sister, Harjeet's aunt, spat at the girl's feet.
The girl did not know what she had done. She had talked to the snake, but what matter was there in that? She had no power. Guilt and confusion made a swelling in her brain. The girl fell into a desperate fever, from which she did not wake until the snows were gone and the earth was warming once again. In that cold time she knew no one, and her family feared she would die. She lay still, taking only milk and unspiced lentils.
When the girl recovered, Harjeet's mother's grief had settled back into her stomach. She didn't shout anymore or try to turn the other villagers against the girl. But if the girl met her on the footpath, Harjeet's mother would cross to the other side. She would never look her in the eye.
Two years later, the girl married a man from the market town. Her brother worked with him on the police force. He was a very elevated man. Did she like him better than Harjeet? A girl like her, with shame in her past, was very lucky to get him.
Alisa on Parvati and the Snake: This short piece was inspired by both my early absorption of traditional Western fairy tales ( I read "The Green Fairy Book" over and over as a child) and the cadences of North Indian folk literature that I have read more recently while learning Hindi.
One fine day this summer, Alisa found a snake dangling from the ceiling of her house in Indiana. After a cool inspection of the five rapt cat (and one astonished human) faces below the snake slithered back into the insulation and out of sight. Since then, Alisa always takes a nervous peek beneath her desk before she sticks her feet under it. Visit her embryonic (and mostly snake-free) blog at http://alisaword.wordpress.com.
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