Part 3 of 5 · 7 minBhogi

Bhogi starts before the sun. In Manubolu it started at four, with the sound of somebody dragging a broken cot into the street, and by five there was a fire at the corner of the second street as high as the pump, with old baskets and a cartwheel and a year of things nobody wanted going into it, and the whole village standing around in shawls.

Lasya came out in the Bhogi sari. It was the good one, green with a gold border, and she had done her hair. Lakshmamma was already at the fire in her everyday sari with her pallu tucked in, carrying a bundle of old palm fronds from the cattle shed. She looked at the green sari and said nothing, which Lasya had learned by now was a thing Lakshmamma said often.

Sravani took her by the hand and dragged her to the fire. For an hour it was good. The heat on her face, the sparks going up, the old men throwing in what the women handed them, Subbaiah putting a broken plough handle in with the care of a man burying something. Pramod found her in the crowd and stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders, and she leaned back into him, and the fire was the colour of the sari, and for that hour there was nobody in the world who could not light a stove.

Then the muggu.

Every house in the street had a muggu in front of it by seven, the big Sankranti kind, white lines and colour and a pumpkin flower in the middle. Lakshmamma had drawn hers at five, before the fire, while Lasya was asleep. Now the women of the street were walking from house to house looking at the muggus the way men look at bikes.

"Vadina, you draw," Sravani said. "I will fill."

"I cannot draw a muggu, Sravani."

"Everybody can draw a muggu."

Lasya could not. Her mother's house in Hyderabad had a flat in front of it, not a street, and a stencil for Diwali. She crouched with the rice flour in her fist and made a line that went where it wanted. Sravani laughed and took it from her and drew it herself, fast and sure, the lines closing into each other, and gave Lasya the colours. Lasya filled it in. She did that well; she had a good eye for colour, and when it was done it was the brightest muggu in the street.

The cousin aunt came past on her round and stopped in front of it.

"Lakshmamma, look at your daughter-in-law's muggu. Hyderabad girl, and she draws like this."

Lakshmamma was on the verandah with a broom. She looked at the muggu and said, plainly, because it was true, "Sravani drew it."

That was all. It was true. Sravani had drawn it. Lasya had only filled it, and in Manubolu filling is what children do. The aunt said "oh" and went on to the next house. Lasya stood at the edge of her own colours with the flour still on her fingers and felt it land, the one word, the way a slap lands a second after the hand.

Pramod was on the step. He had seen it land. He saw her face and he saw his mother's back and he saw the aunt going, and he said nothing, because it was the street and it was Bhogi and a man does not correct his mother in front of the street for a muggu. Lasya looked at him, and he was looking at the ground, and she read the silence the only way she could read it. He agreed.

Now listen to what happened with the Bhogi meal.

At ten Lakshmamma went to the temple with the other women, because on Bhogi the women go, and she would be an hour. The kitchen was empty. The stove was lit; she had left it lit, banked low with a husk.

Lasya went in and took the brown notebook out of the suitcase and opened it to pulihora. Her mother's pulihora. She had made it in Anthoor a dozen times, and Pramod ate it with his hands and did not speak till the plate was empty. She was going to make it here, on this stove, in this kitchen, and put it on the Bhogi table, and that would be that.

She did everything the notebook said. The tamarind, the peanuts, the curry leaves, the jaggery, the exact pinch of turmeric her mother had written and underlined. She put the rice on. On the gas stove in Anthoor the rice went on low and sat there. On this stove there was no low. There was the fire, and the fire was what it was, and nobody had told her that you pull the burning husk out to make it low, because why would anybody tell a woman with a cook.

The rice caught at the bottom. She smelled it before she knew what it was. By the time she had the vessel off, the bottom inch was black and the smell was in the roof.

She scraped the top into the big vessel and mixed the tamarind in and it looked like pulihora. It tasted like pulihora, with something under it.

Lakshmamma came back from the temple and stopped in the kitchen door. She smelled it. She did not say anything. She took the rice vessel to the back step and scraped the black out with a spoon, slowly, into the cattle feed, and washed the vessel, and put it back. Then she came to the table and took a helping of the pulihora, from the top, and ate it, and said nothing at all, and that was worse than a saying.

Pramod ate two helpings. He ate the way he ate her pulihora in Anthoor, with his hand, fast, and when he had finished the second plate he said, "It is good, Lasya," to the table.

"You are lying," Lasya said.

She said it in front of his mother. She had not meant to. It came out of the place where the stove saying and the muggu and the cook had been sitting for three days, and it came out loud. The table went quiet. Subbaiah looked at his plate. Sravani looked at her brother. Lakshmamma went on eating.

Pramod put his hand down. He did not say anything. He finished his water and got up and went out to the verandah.

That night he tried. He came into the inner room late, after the cots were out and his father was asleep on one of them, and sat on the edge of the bed.

"Lasya. What happened?"

"Ask your mother. She will tell you what I am."

"She did not say anything."

"That is what she says. She says nothing. She says sit, you are a guest. She says Sravani drew it. She says nothing, andi, and the whole street hears it."

He looked at her for a while. He did not know about the cook. He did not know about the wall, or the dabbas, or the aunt on the verandah. He knew his mother, who had never said a cruel thing in her life and had never said a kind one either, and he knew his wife, who said everything, and he did not know how to put the two of them in one room without being the thing between them. So he did the thing he did. He got up.

"Sleep," he said. "Talk you tonight."

"It is tonight."

"Tomorrow, then."

He went out to the verandah and lay down on the other cot, beside his father. Lasya lay in the inner room alone. Two cots, one inside and one out, for the first time since the wedding, and the buffaloes shifting in the dark, and the smell of burnt rice still somewhere in the roof.