Pitras

 

It's the pitras, you see. You're supposed to prepare kheer, chapati, four different bhaajis, two or three different bhajis, kurdai, papad, wadas, अळू वडी, paatodya, kadhi and rashi-bhaat. Out of all this, four plates are prepared as offerings. The first is crushed, crumbled and mixed into a काला and toop is added to it so that when it is offered to the fire, it burns well. The second is taken to the terrace, where crows feast on it. The third is given to the cow (which Has to be one with a shoulder and you Have to wash her feet before you feed her), and the last is fed to a dog (any random dog will do).

The ancestors who toiled away in the lands off which you eat today and the women that worked with them, are the pitras. Microbeings that they are, they float down the skies to have a sniff of the offerings that burn with the cowdung and the wood and the toop at the southern door of the new house, or to have a lusty lick at the kheer through the cow's tongue, or to snatch greedily at the chapati as a canine, or to live their full goth fantasy as a crow.

"Pour five spoons of toop first," says Nana, and then eyeing the toop container, adds, "put three, rather - yes, three spoons, and then put in the ghaas wherever you see the fire - when you say 'swaaha,' Agni will open up his greedy mouth and that's when you must offer the mouthful - look, do this with your palm, like you're feeding a child. Say the names of all your ancestors, on the father's side and the mother's, and ask Agni to carry these smells to all your pitras - known or unknown - that they may then be satisfied. Om pitraaaay swaaha! Say it-"

Ajji tells me that there was once a time when the women would plaster the mud walls and the mud floors with cowdung, and the forefather-gods would descend the skies to come and sit in the pangat and share the food with their children and grandchildren. "That is what pitras were, you know, otherwise what is the meaning of us eating all this good food for no reason? It was for the gods in sky that we made them.

"But in some kirti," she says, "there was some woman many days ago who plastered the mud walls with castor oil. You know how we do it with cowdung - well, those days the houses used to be made of mud, and we women had to smear the walls and the floors with dung, but this woman did that with castor oil!" How she did that Ajji can't say and why she did that no one knows; Ajji says that her mother and her mother-in-law told her these stories, and they're both dead now (it's not in her nature to ask; hers has been a life spent in obeying).

Anyway, "So when the gods came down from the skies to feast, they'd slip and fall, and slip and fall! And so they could not sit and so they could not eat and so they were late to return to the God In The Sky. 'Where were you all,' said he in anger, 'look what the time is!'

'That woman down there,' they mumbled, 'used castor oil in plastering the walls and the floors, and so we couldn't sit, and so we couldn't eat.'

'So all of you came back hungry, then!" So exclaimed the God In The Sky, and from that day on, he never once let his children the pitras go down to see their own silly children, to sit in their homes and to share their food in a pangat.

"And so from that day on, we burn the good food with the toop and we feed the cow, the crow, and the dog, so that whatever form they may take, the forefather-gods may receive our food and bless us, and not bring a disaster upon our heads for the many ways in which we wrong them daily, in our ignorance."

...

You're supposed to offer food for the pitras more than once. It's about tithis and things, and each day is supposed to be reserved for some particular relation. We had them first at Mothekaka's house (whose Family Of Four lives in the first floor of the house that my Family Of Four has inherited) for बाळू, who was found floating in a basket in the river Girna by Shyamjibaba my great-grandfather, and who lived and died in our farms. Then we had them at Nana's house (which is new and prosperous and aesthetically pleasing) for my great-grandfather Shyamjibaba and Tolamaay his wife. Then we had them at our house (which is old and wretched) for Tryambakbaba my elder grandfather and Baayjamaay his wife. All these old old people have had many children, whose children and grandchildren all observe these pitras. To imagine, all my relations offering all that food on all these days to the ancestors that we more or less end up sharing one or two generations up! Great indeed is the hunger of the dead.

We don't have a special day for my younger grandfather Dhanjibaba because he has children of his own. The one child of Baayjamaay that grew to be a boy, they say, was killed by some outer mischief (बाहेरचं काहीतरी), and so she chose to love the children of her cousin my grandmother. She also chose to despise the four sons of my younger grandmother Kakuajji but these people don't much like to talk about that. And so the lands in which Tryambakbaba toiled went to us, and so we must return the upkaar upon our heads, and so, the good food with the toop, the kheer and the kadhi-kurdai, it all has to be done. Upkaar ties together parent and progeny, sets straight these families. Dues of gratitude go between relations and together, a caste worships the ghosts common to all its members.

The very act of growing up forces you to collect favours like souvenirs from one relative after the other. I'm beginning to wonder whether coming out will ever be with a head held high. In my dream, a banyan tree grows from our hall. It wrecks the tiles and breaks the roof, disappearing into the skies, and roots like swings reach down to greet the ground. In my room on my bed I am paralysed, and above me are the displeased faces of Baayjamaay and Tolamaay hanging upside down from a पारंबी. Old beady eyes stare expectantly at me, speaking in Ahirani of the impossibility of escape. Isn't it a terrible thing for the dead to starve?

I am twenty-one and I have forty more years to live, and perhaps half the number of men to love. I will eventually betray home and caste and never come back. Perhaps after I die, I will find many pockets of air in which to be, and perhaps, all the same, they'll keep for me a branch from which to descend, waiting for the pitras. It's nice to believe that sins burn with bodies, no?