What Death Returned

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I · The Warning

They sing about me at weddings now. I have heard it in the villages along the river, a girl’s thin voice carried over the paddy at dusk: Arunima who followed Death into the forest, Arunima who would not let go. The women weep at the part where I fall at Death’s feet. They laugh at the part where I trick him. And the bride sits under her red veil and is told, in a hundred ways, be like her. I have never corrected them. A song is a kind of mercy; it forgives by forgetting. But I am old now, older than I ever believed I would be, and the smoke of the burning ghats drifts up to my window most evenings, and I have begun to think a woman ought to say the true thing once before the river takes her. So I will say it here, to no one. No one is the only listener who has never lied to me. I was proud. Begin there. My father, Hayendra, king of the river country, prayed eighteen years for a child, and when I came at last, in the first red hour of a morning, he named me for that light, because it was the sun he had been praying to. From the first he looked at me as if I were a debt the heavens had paid. I was taught the Vedas beside my cousins’ tutors, I was taught to argue, and I learned very young that when I argued, I won. No prince came to ask for me. They said I was too radiant to approach, and my nurses repeated it as praise. I think now they meant too certain. A man can marry a fire. He cannot marry a fire that has already decided which way to burn. So my father did a strange thing. He gave me a golden chariot and two old ministers who coughed in the mornings, and he sent me out into the

world to choose a husband for myself. I went through the courts of kings and the hermitages of sages the way a jeweller goes through a bazaar, turning things over and setting them down. I was not cruel, only exact. This one laughed too loudly at his own jokes. That one spoke of his horses as if they were his sons, and of his sons as if they were horses. I wanted a man who did not need me to be smaller, and I had begun to believe there was no such man, when the chariot broke an axle on the border of a country that had lost its king and we were forced to stop in a forest I did not know. He was carrying wood. That is all, really. A young man in bark cloth with a bundle of sal branches on his shoulder, walking toward a hermitage where, I would learn, his blind father sat in the shade and waited to be read to. He was singing, badly. When he saw the chariot he stopped singing and was not embarrassed, only curious, and he came and looked at the broken axle with great seriousness and told the charioteer how to splint it with green bamboo. His hands had clay under the nails. Later I learned he had spent his boyhood shaping horses out of river mud, so many that the ascetics called him the painter of horses, and that he still made them for the hermit children and gave them away before they dried. His name was Ritam. Truth, it means. The old truth, the order that keeps the stars in their places. I have thought about that name for fifty years. I came home to the river country and stood in my father’s hall and said it aloud. Ritam, son of Tejsen, the exiled king. My father’s face did something complicated, because an exile is no great match. But it is the other face in the hall I remember. The wandering sage we called the Traveller had arrived that morning, his veena on his back, as he always seemed to arrive on mornings that would matter, and at the name he set down his cup. “Not that one,” he said.

My father asked why, and the Traveller told him. Ritam was generous as the rain, he said, patient as the earth, handsome as the moon in Kartika, learned, gentle, devoted to his parents. Every virtue a man could hold, he held. “He has one fault only,” said the Traveller, “and it cancels all the others. One year from today, he will die.” I remember the silence afterward with great exactness, the way one remembers the moment before a fall. A servant had been pouring water and stopped with the jar tilted, and a thin bright line of it went on falling into the basin, because no one had told it to stop. My father turned to me. “Choose again,” he said. “You heard him. Choose again, child. There is no shame in it.” And I said, as the song says I said, that a daughter is given once, a word is spoken once, a heart is chosen once. I said that whether his life was long or short, whether he had virtues or none, I had chosen him in my mind, and a thing done in the mind is done. It was a beautiful answer. My father wept and blessed me. The Traveller looked at me for a long moment with an expression I could not read then and can read very well now. It was pity, and it was not for Ritam. Here is what the song does not say. Standing in that hall, I was not only afraid. Beneath the fear, so deep I could pretend not to feel it, there was something like exhilaration. The gods had set a date. I had set my will against it. I remember thinking, almost in these words: we shall see which is the harder thing. And in the chariot going back to the forest, with the old ministers coughing and the wedding gifts rattling in their chests, I made the second decision, the one no one has ever sung about. I would not tell him. I told myself it was love. That a man should not have to live his last year beneath a falling sword. That I would carry it for both of us. All of that was true. But it was not the whole truth, and I knew it even then, the way one knows there is a stone in one’s sandal long before one stops to shake it out.

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II · The Secret Year

We were married in the forest, under a neem tree, with his blind father’s hand on our joined hands and his mother scattering rice that the sparrows took before it reached the ground. I gave away my jewels that same evening. I put on bark cloth like his and wove my hair into the plain braid of the hermitage women, and his mother watched me do it and said nothing, and I saw her decide to love me. That first night, after he slept, I took a length of cotton thread from my wedding garland and tied a single knot in it. I tied one every morning after. I kept the cord wound around my waist beneath my garment, where it lay against my skin like a second, secret pulse. Three hundred and sixty knots, give or take the days the moon confuses. I was a king’s daughter; I had been taught to count. I did not know yet that counting is a kind of prayer that answers itself. How do I tell you about that year? Everyone who has been happy thinks their happiness is unlike any other, and everyone is wrong, so I will only say what was particular. He woke before light, always, and went down to the stream, and came back with water on his eyelashes, and woke me by naming the birds that were calling. That is a barbet. That is a koel; he is lying, it is not spring yet. That one I do not know. We will find out. He read to his father in the afternoons, and when the old man fell asleep mid-verse Ritam would go on reading softly to the end of the passage, because, he said, words should not be left hanging in the air with no one to catch them. He made clay horses for the ascetics’ children and I learned to make them too, badly,

mine with legs like a heron’s, and he set mine beside his on the shelf of the hut as though they were equal. He was not a saint. The Traveller had made him sound like one, and I was relieved to find that he sulked when he lost at dice, that he was vain about his singing, which was terrible, that he could be distracted for an hour by an ant carrying a seed. I loved those things more than the virtues. The virtues belonged to the world. The faults were mine. And all the while, the knots. The worst of it was not the large moments. Against the large moments I had armed myself. The worst was how often he spoke of the future, as young men do, without thinking, the way one breathes. After the rains we should mend the roof properly. When Father’s eyes are worse we’ll move his mat nearer the door. When we are old, he said once, lying with his head on my stomach on a hot afternoon, when we are old I’ll still be the better singer, and you will have to pretend you never noticed. I laughed. I remember that I laughed. And I put my hand in his hair and felt, beneath my garment, the cord with its two hundred and some knots, and I thought: he is building a house on a river, plank by plank, and I am the only one who can see the water. Sometimes, at night, I came so close to telling him that the words stood in my mouth like a stone. I would rehearse them. Ritam, there is something the Traveller said. And then I would think of his face receiving it. I would think of him going down to the stream in the morning knowing, naming the birds knowing, and something in me would close like a hand. I have had fifty years to examine that hand. I said to myself that I was sparing him. But a man who does not know he is dying belongs entirely to the one who knows. Do you understand? Every day I gave him was a gift he did not know I was giving. Every tenderness of mine carried a meaning he could not read. I held the whole of his life in my lap like a sleeping child, and he did not even know he

was being held. There was a sweetness in that which I will not deny, and it was not a clean sweetness. It was the sweetness of a secret, which is to say, of power. Once, in the cold season, he woke in the night and found me sitting up, watching him. “Why do you look at me like that?” he asked. He was not frightened, only puzzled, still half in sleep. “Like what?” “As if I were going on a journey.” He reached for my wrist. “I’m not going anywhere, Arunima. Where would I go? Everything is here.” I lay down beside him. He was asleep again in moments, his breath in my hair. I did not sleep. I lay there and understood, for the first time, that I had not only hidden his death from him. I had hidden myself. The woman he loved did not exist. She was a woman with nothing to hide, who looked at him because she liked looking. The real one was counting. Four days before the last knot, I began my fast. Three days and three nights, standing, without food or water. The ascetics nodded their approval; such vows are honoured in the forest. His mother wept and begged me to sit. His father, who could not see me, kept asking what was wrong, as though he heard something in the air the rest of them could not. And Ritam sat on the ground at my feet through most of the third night, angry, frightened, bewildered, asking me why, and why now, and for whom. “For you,” I said, which was true, and told him nothing. On the morning of the last day, when he shouldered his axe to go into the forest for wood, I asked to go with him. I had never asked before. His mother looked at my face and let me go.

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III · The Forest

It was a bright day. I had expected something else, I think, a sky that understood. Instead there were butterflies over the stream and the smell of crushed wild ginger where we walked, and he was in good spirits because I had finally eaten, a handful of rice at dawn to break the fast, and he talked the whole way about a new horse he meant to make, a big one, for the courtyard of his father’s kingdom if they ever won it back. He climbed a tree to cut dry branches. I gathered fruit and did not look up at him. I could feel the morning passing through me like a thread through a needle. It was a little past noon when he came down and sat heavily on the ground. “My head,” he said, surprised. “Arunima, my head. As if someone were driving a spike through it.” He laughed a little, embarrassed. “I think I’ll lie down. Only for a moment.” I sat, and he put his head in my lap as he had a hundred times that year, and I laid my hand on his forehead. It was very hot, and then, under my palm, it was not. I will not tell you about that part. Everyone has a part they will not tell. When I looked up, there was a man standing on the path. He was taller than a man. He was dark, darker than shadow, as though shadow were only an imitation of him, and he wore red, the dull red of old blood or of the sky long after sunset, and in his hand was a loop of rope. His eyes were tired. That is the thing I have never heard in any song. They give him fire, they give him a buffalo and a voice like thunder. What I

saw was a face that had done the same work every hour since the first creature died, and expected to do it until the last, and had never once been thanked. “You can see me,” he said. It was not a question. “The fasting does that. And other things.” He regarded me with something like courtesy. “You know who I am.” “You are the lord of the southern road. You have come for my husband.” “I usually send my servants. But he was a good man, and you are a remarkable woman, and I was curious.” He knelt beside Ritam’s body and drew the loop gently through the air above his chest, and drew out of him something no larger than a thumb, a small bright figure, folded in on itself like a sleeping bird. He held it in his palm with great care. “There. Go home now, daughter of Hayendra. Perform the rites. You have done everything a wife can do.” He turned and walked south. I rose and followed him. The forest changed as we walked. The trees grew taller and greyer, the birdsong thinned and stopped, the light became the light of no particular hour. He did not look back for a long time. When he did, he sighed. “This is not a road for you.” “Wherever my husband is taken, I go. That is the law, as I was taught it.” “You were taught well. Turn back.” But I did not turn back. I talked. It is the thing I have always done best. I spoke to him of dharma, of the friendship the wise say is born between any two who walk seven steps together, and we had walked a great many more than seven. I said the company of the good is never fruitless. I said he was called the Lord of Justice, and that justice owed me a hearing. I praised him, and the praise was not false, because the nearer I came to him the more I saw the enormous patience in him, the weariness, and something that might once have been grief and had worn down over the

ages into simple duty. He was pleased. I could see it. No one talks to him. Everyone weeps or pleads; no one talks. “Ask a boon,” he said at last. “Anything except his life. And then go home.” So I asked for my father-in-law’s sight. Granted. I walked on. I asked for the old king’s lost kingdom. Granted. I walked on, and he said, almost fondly, “You are still here,” and I asked that my own father, who had no sons, should have a hundred. Granted. I walked on. And then, very carefully, the way a mason sets the last stone in an arch, I asked that I should bear a hundred sons to Ritam. “Granted,” said Death. And then he stopped on the path. The song says he was tricked. It says he spoke before he thought, and that I sprang the snare, and that he laughed and conceded, because the Lord of Justice cannot unsay a boon, and a woman cannot bear a dead man’s sons. That is not what happened. He stopped, and turned, and looked at me for a long while, and it was not the look of a man caught out. “Did you think I did not see it coming?” he asked. “I saw it four boons ago. I have been asked for everything, Arunima, by every kind of creature, since the beginning. I let you walk me into it.” “Why?” “Because you would not stop. Because I was curious what a person does with a thing like this once she has it.” He looked down at the small bright figure in his palm. “I will give him back. By the rules, you have earned it. But listen, because no one else will tell you. You asked for his father’s eyes. You asked for a kingdom. You asked for sons. Not once, on this whole road, did you ask what he wanted.” “He wants to live,” I said. “Everyone wants to live.” “Does he?” said Death, gently. “You did not look. He came with me without a word. He did not look back once. Not at the forest, not at the

hermitage, not at you.” He held out his hand. “Here. Take him. I can return what I took. I cannot return what he has seen.” He set the little bright thing in my cupped hands. It was weightless, and it was warm, and it did not move toward me. When I looked up the road was gone, and I was sitting on the forest floor with my husband’s head in my lap, and the light had gone gold and long, and somewhere a koel was calling, out of season.

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IV · The Return

He opened his eyes at dusk. “I slept so long,” he said. He looked at the sky, then at me, and I watched him gather himself from a great distance, the way a diver comes up through deep water. “I dreamed. There was a dark man. He was leading me somewhere.” “It was only a dream,” I said. That was the first lie of my second life with him. I had thought, I suppose, that the lies would end when the secret did. We walked home through the night forest with a burning branch for a torch. He leaned on me at first, and then did not need to. He was very quiet. Once he stopped and stood listening to the dark for so long that I touched his arm, and he started, and smiled at me, and said, “Forgive me. It’s so loud here. Have you ever noticed how loud everything is?” At the hermitage his father met us at the door, and his father could see. You know the rest, or the song’s version of it. Within a month messengers came from his father’s lost kingdom: the usurper had been overthrown by his own ministers, and they wanted their old king back. We left the forest on an elephant hung with silver bells. My father in the river country, an old man by then, had sons born to him one after another, as though the queen’s womb had been unlocked with a key. And I bore children, Ritam’s children, so many and so easily that the midwives began to make signs against the evil eye when I called for them. Everything was exactly as it had been granted. Nothing was left out. Death keeps his accounts.

And my husband was kind. I must say that first, because it is true, and because everything else I say will seem to contradict it. He was kind to me every day of his life. He was a good king, patient with petitioners, fair in judgment, loved in the markets. He held our children as tenderly as he had once held the clay horses. He never raised his voice to me. But he did not sing anymore. I noticed it in the second month. In the third I asked him, and he looked surprised, as though I had asked why he no longer did something he had done as a child. “Did I sing?” he said. “I suppose I did.” And he went back to the window, where he spent more and more of his evenings, watching the river. He had stopped being afraid of things. In the fifth year a cobra came into the nursery, and while the nurses screamed he crossed the room, lifted it on a staff, and carried it into the garden, and his face while he did it was perfectly calm. Not brave. Calm, the face of a man moving a cushion. Another time he fell from a horse and broke his collarbone and lay on the ground laughing softly, not at the pain, I think, but at how little it mattered. And he had stopped wanting things. That was harder to see, because it looked like contentment. He never asked for anything. He never made plans. The young man who could not stop saying when the rains come and when we are old had become a man who lived entirely inside the day he was in, who received each morning the way a guest receives a dish set before him: with thanks, without hunger. He loved me. I am certain of it. But he loved me the way one loves a lamp in a house one is leaving. Tenderly, and from the door. I tried to bring him back. That is the shameful part, or one of them. Having fetched his body out of Death’s own hand, I set about fetching the rest of him, as though he were a room I could refurnish. I arranged music in the evenings. I took him to the old forest, to the hermitage, to the stream where he used to name the birds. He came willingly. He named

them when I asked. His voice was perfectly pleasant, and nothing in it was his. Once, very late, when the children were asleep and the lamps were low, I asked him outright what he had seen. He was silent so long I thought he would not answer. Then he said, “Have you ever stood in the forest just after a long rain stops? Not the moment it stops. A little after. When the last drops have finished falling from the leaves, and nothing has begun yet. No birds. No wind. And you stand there and you understand that the noise was never the world. It was only the rain.” “And that is what it was like?” “No,” he said. “But it is the nearest thing.” “Do you miss it?” He turned and looked at me then, really looked, and for the first time in years I felt him looking from close by rather than from very far away. And in his eyes there was such compassion, such grief, that I understood the question had been cruel, and that he was sparing me the answer. “I’m here,” he said. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

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V · The Reckoning

He found the cord in our thirtieth year. I had kept it. I could not have told you why. It lay at the bottom of a sandalwood box among the things a queen does not wear: the bark cloth from the hermitage, a clay horse with heron’s legs, a lock of hair from a child we lost. I suppose it was a kind of evidence, and one keeps evidence even against oneself. Perhaps especially then. He was looking for something else, a letter. He found the cord and drew it out and held it to the window, and the knots ran down it like beads on a mala, and he counted them, because he too had been taught to count. I was standing in the doorway. I watched him reach the end. I watched him understand. He did not turn around for a long time. “From the beginning?” he said at last. “The Traveller told my father the day I chose you. One year.” “And you married me anyway.” “Yes.” “And you did not tell me.” “No.” He laid the cord across his knees and smoothed it with his thumb, knot by knot, the way his father used to read with his fingertips in the years before his eyes came back. “All that year,” he said. “Every time I said next year. Every time I talked about the roof. You were letting me talk.” “I wanted you to be happy.”

“I was happy.” He said it simply, without accusation, and it was worse than any accusation. “I was happier than I have ever been. And it was not real. It was a room you built around me, and I lived in it and thought it was the world.” I came and knelt before him. Over thirty years I had prepared a great many speeches for this moment, and I could not find one of them. “I could not give you your death,” I said. “I could not stand in that hut and hand it to you like a bowl of rice.” “No,” he said. “You kept it. You kept it for a year, and then, when it came, you spent it.” He looked at me. “Do you know what I remember from that road? I remember the quiet, and the dark man’s hand, which was not unkind. And I remember that I was not afraid. For the first time since I was a boy, I was not afraid of anything. I was going somewhere, and I did not have to carry anything, and it was all right.” His voice did not shake. “And then I heard you behind us. Arguing. You were so clever. You were winning. And I remember feeling, Arunima, the gods forgive me, I remember feeling ashamed for you.” I put my face against his knees. The cord was there against my cheek, its small hard knots. “Did you want to come back?” I asked. “Tell me the truth. You never lie. Tell me.” His hand came down onto my hair. It stayed there a long time. “I don’t know,” he said. “That is the truth. I came back. I have loved you every day since. I have loved the children. I have tried. Isn’t that enough? Why must you also know whether I wanted it?” Because I must know whether I saved you or only kept you, I thought, and did not say, because I already knew he could not tell me. He did not know either. That was the last thing Death had taken, and the one thing he had not offered to return: the knowledge, on either side, of what the other had truly wanted.

He did not leave me. Men in songs leave; he was not in a song. We lived twenty more years together, courteous and gentle with each other, sleeping side by side. He never spoke of the cord again. I never asked again. Sometimes in the evenings I would find him at the window with his hand open on the sill, palm upward, as though waiting for something very small to be set in it. He died at seventy-one, in his sleep, in the hot season. I was beside him. I woke in the night and the room held that quiet he had described, the quiet after the rain, and I knew before I touched him. I did not follow anyone that time. I sat with him until morning. I did not look toward the door to see who had come for him, whether servants or the master himself. I was afraid that if I looked, I would see Ritam going, and that he would not look back, and that this time, at last, I would let him. So that is the story. You may set it beside the song. They sing that I loved him past death. That is true. They sing that I would not let go. That is also true. I have spent fifty years trying to separate those two sentences, as one might try to separate two threads twisted into a single cord, and I cannot do it. I cannot find the place where the love ends and the not letting go begins. Perhaps there is no such place. Perhaps that is what love is, in creatures like us, and the gods knew it when they made us, and that is why Death is so tired. The girls are singing again down by the river. There will be a wedding tomorrow. I hope the bride is happy. I hope no one tells her anything.