.png)
Written by Tejaswinee Roychowdhury
(Twitter: @TejaswineeRC
Instagram: @tejaswineeroychowdhury
Website: linktr.ee/tejaswinee)
“Life is like the river, sometimes it sweeps you gently along and sometimes the rapids come out of nowhere.”
― Emma Smith
For as long as she could remember, Vani had two dreams: one, to see where the river went, and two, to marry a man far away from the valley, beyond the great mountains in the north.
Once she was wed, Vani believed that although the river headed east from her village, she could easily convince her new husband to take her anywhere in the world.
It would be just like when her mother convinced her father to buy her a sewing machine and get her a wholesale supplier of silk, cotton, zari, and threads, so she could briskly stitch cholis and ghagras and sell them to the villagers and the occasional tourist for a higher than an average
price.
Naturally, on a spring evening that smelled of camphor and rose incense from the puja ghar, when Vani learned that she was to wed a potter’s son from the village across the river, her face fell.
“But Ma, I can see that village from my window!
“There are good people in that village. It will feel just like home and you can come here anytime you like using the footbridge. It is what is best for you.”
Her mother then adjusted her ghunghat, picked up from the kitchen floor a bronze thali filled with expensive kaju barfi on one side and piping hot home-made laddoos on the other, and left with Vani’s little brother to distribute them to the neighbors as was the village custom for whenever a
wedding was arranged.
Alone in her bedroom overlooking the footbridge and the river, Vani wondered if the potter’s son would share her fervour.
Perhaps, she could still harbor a sliver of hope but the thrill of marriage had slipped away faster than the river water escaped through the gaps between her long and bony fingers.
It was a July wedding and it had been raining sporadically all week.
Despite the dark rain clouds threatening to pour down on the valley, two villages had crowded in one and soon they would take Vani and go crowd in another.
Maithili hummed to herself an old Hindi song as she circled Vani, pinning the red orni on her niece’s head to the red choli and the red ghagra, all three of which bore golden zaris from Vani’s mother’s collection which matched the gold jhumki earrings, necklaces, bangles, tikli, and of course the gold nath or nose ring, the most important jewellery of all.
Alternate white and red pearls were inserted into the top half of the ruby-studded nath ring which covered one-fourth of her face on the lower left.
Its weight watered Vani’s eyes but she powered through for she was told the nath was a symbol of her father’s status.
Vani had found the idea rather amusing because he could hardly be called wealthy, just an average merchant of stone idols.
But her mother had said, “It is not about wealth. Your father does have a good relationship with the panchayat and if the groom’s family doesn’t understand that we have status in this village then they will find petty excuses to treat you poorly.”
Maithili dragged across the room an old wooden stool with a velvet-lined cushion for a seat and put it behind Vani.
“Sit, I’m almost done,” she said. As she rummaged through her collection of bottled scents, she asked, “Why the long face? I thought you’d be happy to get married. It is what you always wanted.”
“But not to the potter’s son from the village across the river!”
“Oh, come now! That boy has a name — Raghunath.”
“A ridiculous name.” Vani stared at her reflection for a split second. “It is because of my scars, isn’t it?”
Maithili found the rose scent she was looking for.
“Of course not,” she assured, and with her henna-dipped fingers dabbed the scent on Vani’s neck and the inside of her wrists.
“Any boy would be a fool to turn away those beautiful honey eyes. Besides, the moon has scars too. She is loved regardless.”
"That’s only because no one has a choice! There is just one moon. But there is a carousel of girls to pick and choose from. And nobody likes one with scars!”
It was indeed because of her scars from the particularly nasty chickenpox many summers ago that it was so hard to find a husband for Vani in the first place.
Even buck-toothed Raghunath’s mother had demanded ten tolas of gold to agree to the wedding and had finally settled for eight.
But Vani didn’t know any of that and Maithili decided to keep it that
way. “Scars or no scars, Raghunath will love you and care for you,” she said.
“You stay put, I will come and get you once the baraati is here.”
Vani looked outside her window at the dark clouds hovering over the valley.
Perhaps, it was always a silly idea to get married and that too during the monsoon, she thought.
The river still went east, fiercer than usual, crashing over boulders and rushing over little flat stones with millions of years’ worth of layers in them.
Her grandmother used to say of the river, “Life is like this river’s flow; it can never halt and must keep going no matter the price.”
“You’re supposed to weep,” whispered Maithili.
“I’m not sad,” said Vani dryly. Shifting homes from one side of the river to the other just to live with new people wasn’t exactly what she considered tear-worthy.
"Must you always be so stubborn? Girls are supposed to weep during their vidaai as they are leaving their maike. Do it, people are watching!”
Vani rolled her eyes under her ghunghat.
Maithili refused to give up. “Look, just pretend like you’re Radha and you are leaving Krishna forever, and... good grief, at least sniff and make a sad face!”
But when Vani suppressed a snigger in response, she smacked her under the elbow.
“Lakhera-ji, the sky doesn’t look so good. We must leave for our village since we’re going on foot,” said Raghunath’s father to Vani’s.
He nodded and walked towards his daughter, his only daughter, far too young to step into the life of marriage, but his hands were tied by customs and village norms.
He embraced Vani and whispered in her ear, voice breaking, “Be well, my child.”
"Baba, you know I will only be across the river, right? I can come to visit all of you every day.”
He smiled. If only it were that simple.
With her henna-clad hands, Vani scooped up a handful of rice grains and a couple of two-rupee coins from the pallu of her aunt’s saree and threw it over her head and behind her.
It was a symbol of gratitude and love, and was supposed to pay her debts off to her parents for raising her, as if that was a debt that could be paid off at all.
She repeated it two more times, and the sleep-deprived band shook off their stupor.
Half of them started to blare their trumpets while the other half beat on their drums.
Soon, a snakelike procession engulfed the groom and his new bride to its belly and noisily slithered towards the edge of the village where the footbridge was.
Half the procession was on the footbridge when it started raining heavily as if heaven’s bored Gods had decided to empty freshwater seas over their heads.
Soaked and shivering, the band stopped playing. Men and women yelled and complained as they hurried towards their village; children laughed and infants wailed.
Raghunath took advantage of the commotion and their proximity under the large black trembling umbrella to steal a glance at his scar-faced bride.
He thought the scars were unfortunate, much like his large buck-teeth that always stood between himself and anyone he ever tried to befriend.
Vani, however, her ghunghat lifted for convenience, was invested in
managing her ghagra.
A clap of thunder from the west shook the souls of every last person, animal, and tree in the valley.
It was an unusual thunder, nothing like Vani had ever heard before.
Like the rising drum beats in the backdrop of five-year-old Banjara boys and girls walking the rope from one bamboo pole to another, the thunder rumbled on getting louder by the second.
Roaring water, almost as high as the mountains, rushed into the valley from where the two ranges converged.
Panic struck the procession and the footbridge swayed as people pushed and pulled to get themselves to safety.
Those at the south end of the footbridge scampered towards Vani’s village and those at the north end started running towards their own.
Raghunath grabbed his bride by her waist and pushed through the crowd towards his village.
Vani wailed as someone stomped on her left foot, but surrendered to the searing pain and clutched the chest of her husband’s sherwani as she limped alongside him.
They almost made it to the end of the footbridge; they believed that getting to land would save them as the large valley would spread the water out and lower its altitude.
But the untamed river struck the footbridge with the force and the rage of a starved monster suddenly uncaged, twisting and stretching it like an elastic band until the suspension cables snapped while mercilessly swallowing the valley and its two villages.
Where the quiet river took a sharp turn, a few men had built a large pyre with wood from the nearby trees.
On the pyre, lay the thirteen pale and stiff corpses the river had
brought earlier that day.
The men had taken the gold off a young bride for she would no longer need them, but they left a toe-ring on her punctured left foot for sending the dead with a bit of gold was customary and that was all the custom the men could afford or care for.
Not a tear shed, and not a chant uttered, strangers lit the pyre up; it was an act of kindness for the alternative was leaving them to the mercy of the crows circling above and cawing into the slate skies.
And if the men had stuck around to watch the dead rise in curling smoke, they might have heard one of them say, “So this is where the river goes."
About the Author:
Tejaswinee Roychowdhury is a Bengali-Indian lawyer, writer, poet, and occasional artist. Her fiction has been/will be published in Muse India, Misery Tourism, Alphabet Box, Borderless Journal, Kitaab, and Active Muse, among others. Currently, she's a fiction/screen/stage editor for The Storyteller's Refrain.
Social Media & Website:
Twitter: @TejaswineeRC
Instagram: @tejaswineeroychowdhury
Website: linktr.ee/tejaswinee