But I couldn’t respond. My culture had taught me all the wrong things well. So I lay completely still, and gave no reaction at all. But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can’t be stilled.
I clenched my teeth against the stars. I closed my eyes. I surrendered to sleep. One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.
PRABAKER’S FATHER introduced me to Sunder village, but it was his mother who made me feel at home there. Her life enfolded mine within its triumph and sorrow, just as easily as her red shawl sometimes enswathed a crying child that passed the doorway of her house. Her story, told to me by many voices, month after month, became all the stories, even my own. And her love-her willingness to know the truth of my heart and to love me-changed the course of my life.
When I first met her, Rukhmabai Kharre was forty years old, and at the peak of her personal power and public prestige. She was a full head and shoulder taller than her husband, and that difference in height, combined with her ample, curvaceous figure, gave the false impression that she was something of an Amazon, whenever the couple stood together. Her black hair, gleaming with coconut oil, had never been cut, and the majestic rope of it reached to her knees. Her skin was tan brown. Her eyes were the colour of amber, set in rose gold. The whites of her eyes were pink, always, giving the impression that she’d just cried or was just about to cry. A wide gap between her front teeth gave an impish mischief to her smile, while the superb hook of her beaked nose endowed her serious expressions with an imposing authority. Her forehead was high and wide-it was Prabaker’s forehead, exactly-and the high curves of her cheekbones were the mountains from which her amber eyes studied the world. She had a ready wit, and a deep sympathy for the distress of others. She stood aloof from disputes between her neighbours until she was asked to give her opinion, and then hers was usually the last word. She was a woman to admire and to desire, but the message in her eye and her bearing was unmistakable: offend or disesteem her at your peril.
The force of her personality maintained a status in the village that was derived from Kishan’s ownership of land and her stewardship of their small personal fortune. Her marriage to Kishan had been arranged. As a shy sixteen-year-old, she’d peeped from behind a curtain to inspect her betrothed, seeing him then for the first and only time before the marriage. When I learned to speak her language well enough, she told me with disarming candour how disappointed she’d been when she’d scrutinised Kishan for the first time. He was short. His skin, tanned by farmer’s toil until it matched the dark brown earth itself, was darker than hers, and that had worried her. His hands were rough and his speech was coarse. His clothes were clean but drab. And he was illiterate. Her father was head of a village council, a
At the very moment of that distressing realisation, Kishan turned his head to stare directly at the hiding place, where she crouched behind the curtain. She was certain that he couldn’t see her, yet he stared as if he was looking into her eyes. Then he smiled. It was the biggest smile she’d ever seen. It was radiant, and suffused with an irrepressible good humour. She looked into that prodigious smile, and a strange feeling took hold of her. She smiled back at him, despite herself, and felt a rush of well-being, an indefinable but overwhelmingly sanguine cheerfulness.
When he looked away again, it was as if the room had darkened, and she understood that she’d begun to love him for the reassuring incandescence of his smile alone. She offered no protest when her father announced the marriage arrangement, and within two months of that first glimpse of Kishan’s magic smile she was wed, and pregnant with her first son, Prabaker.
