The Year of Rice and Salt

The old woman looked into her face for a time. Then she rolled over, opened her sewing basket. She showed Kokila a small dried plant, then some berries. 'This is water hemlock. These are castor bean seeds. Grind the hemlock leaves to a paste, add seeds to the paste just before you place it. It's bitter, but you don't need much. A pinch in spicy food will kill without any taste. But it looks like poisoning afterwards, I warn you. It's not like being sick.'

So Kokila watched and made her plan. Shastri and Shardul continued their work for the zamindar, gaining new enemies every month. And it was rumoured Shardul had raped another girl in the forest, the night of Gaurl Hunnime, the woman's festival when mud images of Siva and Parvati are worshipped.

Meanwhile Kokila had learned every detail of their routine. Shastri and Shardul ate a leisurely breakfast, and then Shastri heard cases at the pavilion between his house and the well, while Shardul did accounting beside the house. In the heat of midday they napped and received visitors on the verandah facing north into the forest. In the afternoons of most days they ate a small meal while lying on couches, like little zamindars, then walked with Gopal or one or two associates to that day's market, where they 'did business' until the sun was low.

They returned to the village drunk or drinking, stumbling cheerfully through the dusk to their home and dinner. It was as steady a routine as any in the village.

So Kokila considered her plans while spending some of her firewood walks on the hunt for water hemlock and castor beans. These grew in the dankest parts of the forest, where it shaded into swamp, and hid every manner of dangerous creature, from mosquito to tiger. But at midday all such pests were resting; indeed in the hot months everything alive seemed sleeping at midday, even the drooping plants. Insects buzzed sleepily in the sleepy silence, and the two poison plants glowed in the dim light like little green lanterns. A prayer to Kali and she plucked them out, while she was bleeding, and pulled apart a bean pod for the seeds, and tucked them in the band of her sari, and hid them for the night in the forest near the defecation grounds, the day before the Durga Puja. That night she did not sleep at all, except for during short dreams, in which Bihari came to her and told her not to be sad. 'Bad things happen in every life,' Bihari said. 'No anger.' There was more but on waking it all slipped away, and Kokila went to her hiding place and found the plant parts and ground the hemlock leaves furiously together in a gourd with a stone, then cast the stone and gourd away in beds of ferns. With the paste on a leaf in her hand she went to Shastri's house, and waited until their afternoon nap, a day that seemed to last for ever; then put the little seeds in the paste, and smeared a tiny dab of the paste inside the doughballs made for Shastri and Shardul's afternoon snack. Then she ran from the house and through the forest, her heart taking flight like a deer ahead of her – too like a deer, in that she ran wild with the thrill of what she had done, and fell into an unseen deer snare, set by a man from Bhadrapur. By the time he found her, stunned and just starting to struggle in the lines, with some of the paste still on her fingers, and took her to Dharwar, Shastri and Shardul were dead, and Prithvi was the new headman of the village, and Kokila was declared a witch and poisoner and killed on the spot.

Two. Back in the Bardo

Back in the bardo Kokila and Bihari sat next to each other on the black floor of the universe, waiting their turn for judgment.

' You're not getting it,' said Bihari – also Bold, and Bel, and Borondi, and many, many other incarnations before, back to her original birth in the dawn of this Kali-yuga, this age of destruction, fourth of the four ages, when as a new soul she had spun out of the Void, an eruption of Being out of Non being, a miracle inexplicable by natural law and indicative of the existence of some higher realm, a realm above that even of the deva gods who now sat on the dais looking down at them. The realm that they all sought instinctively to return to.

Bihari continued: 'The dharma is a matter that can't be short changed, you have to work at it step by step, doing what you can in each given situation. You can't leap up to heaven.'

'I shit on all that,' Kokila said, making a rude gesture at the gods. She was still so angry she could spit, and terrified too, weeping and wiping her nose on the back of her hand, 'I'll be damned if I cooperate in such a horrible thing.'

'Yes, you will! That's why we keep almost losing you. That's why you never recognize your jati when you're in the world, why you keep doing your own family harm. We rise and fall together.'

'I don't see why.'

Now Shastri was being judged, kneeling with his hands together in supplication.