For the Public Good
The charitable impulse is everywhere known. When I was that age, word among twelve year-olds on the Philly street was that the Mafia, mean as a sewer full of rats though it might be, did donate a portion of its take to good works. Look, we had stopped believing in Santa and we were searching, all right? Anyway, almost no one acquires his portion of wealth without using his elbows, which leads to insensitivity, resentment and guilt. In Nepal, when I lived there, eternity substituted cycles of rebirth for heaven and hell as the venue for chickens of consequence to come home to roost. Thus it was that a prosperous individual would sometimes endow the community with some donation toward the common good—a seed bull or ram, a well, perhaps way-stations for pilgrims, or a temple—to weigh against life’s smallness, vanity and selfishness in the scales of re-birth.
Dhanukha Panchayat, Bow Township, as it might be translated, derived its name from a fifty foot-long black stone which protruded from the ground, a yard high in the middle, covered in pock-marks as if it had been subject to great heat, as in a meteor or volcano, or perhaps it was iron ore and corrosion was to blame. In truth, nothing like it lay anywhere in the country round about for as far as either I or that great traveler, rumor, wandered, not even in the hills and mountains where I rambled on week-long expeditions.
Kishore (pronounced KISSorEE) kept a tea shop just across the way from the entrance. Business came by fits and starts, so he had plenty of time to indulge his loquacious streak, while stirring interminably at a big pan of milk and sugar, which he regularly reduced to solid sweets to accompany a glass of tea.
“Ramchandra ki dhanukh, haaah!” he assured me. “Ramchandra’s bow, indeed! It was like this. There was a tremendous dry spell in the country. No rain, none, for year after year. And the people had eaten all their stored grain. They ate the seed stores. Milk dried up in the goats and the cows and buffalo for lack of water when the streams disappeared. Men and women both went into the jungle and ate anything they could gather there—rabbits, deer, fruit, honey, roots in the ground.” His words came out in time with the slow sliding of his iron spatula across the bottom of the karai--a wok-shaped milk-pan fully a yard-wide. “But finally there were only leaves on the trees, so people ate those.” He swayed ruminatively to the paddle’s rhythm.
“Then the Brahmins said to king Janaki, ‘You must plow Prithvi, mother Earth, in order to restore fertility to the land or we will all perish.’”
The way in which a plow was made had changed little over the course of the several millennia that have made their slow way across India. A block of wood about six inches square and eighteen inches long was tapered in on the sides and down on the top to a blunt point. An erect, three-foot handle and a six-foot shaft slanting forward to hitch to the oxen’s yoke were mitered into the thick back. Along the sloping top, a metal rod was fixed with two large staples, projecting a little at the tip, to spare the wood by breaking the earth. In Janaki’s day, it would have been a brass point, and all modernity had been able to offer for change was substitution of a bit of harder steel for a bit of soft brass. Such a plow never reached deeper into the soil than four inches and only broke the earth without turning it.
The shop-keeper continued. “And King Janaki took a wooden plow with a golden tip and went out to plow the field.”
That the word for field was ket while the word for girl was khet added significance to Kishore’s story, easily lost in translation. The matter rested on the difference between the soft k, as in peek, versus a hard k, as in keep. The day after I arrived I had asked a man, pointing vaguely, “So, whose field is this?” to which he had replied, rather alarmed, “Why, that’s my wife.” That the plow was a code word used by sometimes crude but always discrete farmers for the male sex organ, brought the story well into the territory tilled so fruitfully by Sigmind Freud.
“Then came young Ramchandra.” Kishore smiled. This was the good part. “Ramchandra lifted the bow and strung it in one motion. He seized an arrow and, instead of aiming at the target which the king had set, he shot the arrow straight up, into the sky. Up, up it went, out of human sight, and all waited in anxious and hopeful anticipation, as a young woman will, who awaits a mate; as a king does, when seeking an heir to his throne; as a man does when waiting for an unseen arrow to strike from above. But the arrow was never seen to return to earth. Some say it landed in the mountains, where a spring broke forth which is the source of the river Ganges, some say the Brahamaputra, some say it is the River of the Arrow, which lucky pilgrims can find only by long devotion to the search and which blesses anything washed therein.
Pilgrims would come to the site to receive the blessing of Ram’s bow. They could peer over the wall for the price of the trouble, but if they entered the gate and sought the intercession of the priest, it was expected that they leave a small offering in remuneration. The priest, interestingly, was not Brahmin, but rather chhetri, of the warrior caste. He had been granted the position as a living by the absentee patron who had constructed the enclosure and small temple with a one-room dwelling for him and his wife adjacent to the stone of the bow.
From each side of town, a herd of cows had also been drawn to the market in search of discarded radishes and melon-rinds. This marked the point where the southern herd’s territory met the northern herd’s patch. The cows dispersed among the crowd; the bulls rather parted the crowd with their bulk. This was a population intimately familiar with cattle and their habits. They thought nothing of elbowing even the bulls away from the produce. The cattle, for their part, knew about how far they were allowed to push and for such a mixed gathering, it got on well enough.