Kichkandi
Mostly, I am a coin-sized dot on the ground. Children can erase me with a rub of their shoes and turn me to mud. My own son, Karu — when he walked around the village with a stick in his hand to beat grass, stones, mud, and trees with – sometimes washed me away with his worn-out slippers and I could do nothing but wail. Everyone has forgotten me. Even my son. Even my husband. Even I have forgotten myself, and some days I have to sit still for hours to recollect who I am.
One thing I remember from the days when I was alive is the kichkandi, probably because I am waiting to become one. The kichkandi is a wandering ghost of an unsatisfied woman, and she roams the world in search of something. She has her idiosyncrasies. For instance, she has a weakness for new houses and wants to be invited to live in them, so all houses under construction, and all new houses, are under the threat of the kichkandi. She haunts them with an indescribable smell that is sometimes seductive, sometimes repulsive. One could invite her in to get rid of her, but the kichkandi is greedy and will stay on until she finds a newer, a more appealing home. Sometimes she takes on the shape of the woman in the house – the daughter, the mother, the daughter-in-law – and inhabits it forever. People are wary and terrified of the kichkandi. She is, after all, a ghost, even though she wanders the streets as a woman. She wears diaphanous chiffon sarees and has long, soft hair. Her eyes are large and helpless. Her skin glows in the moonlight. She targets men on motorcycles because she likes to wrap herself around them the way creepers frame themselves around the trunks of trees. During the short motorcycle ride, the man falls in love with her. Sometimes he invites her into the house, but if he does not, she leans in and gently sucks his blood from the back of his neck. Her lips are like silk on the skin and the more she takes, the more the man loves. She sends the man quietly to his death. Death with the kichkandi is slow and languishing. It is a dream death. Death with the kichkandi is so exquisite, it makes life look vulgar and garish. When the kichkandi wraps herself around the man, the man wants to die. He wants to watch himself die, because the more he dies, the more the kichkandi glows under the moonlight and all he now wants is beauty.
I suppose I am meant to be a kichkandi, that gorgeous, magical witch, but so far I am little more than an insect. I cannot take on a form larger than a bee’s. In this insect size I can ride the wind or crawl upon lanes. I can become a tadpole and swim in puddles. I can move long distances and when I tire I can turn to my spider self, or into a seed and bury myself into the ground, or become a scorpion in a hole. Once, while in the spider form, I witnessed a woman who had grown afraid of life. We were by a village well and I was on a branch nodding over its mouth. The woman looked like a queen with her high brows and large, brown eyes, but she came in a villager’s red cotton saree, and she stared a long time at the depth of the well. I was confused by the woman’s sadness, then I was moved, and felt I had met some kin in her. I dipped lower down my spider thread and came close to her face. I waited breathlessly as the woman leaned upon the well’s wall. A flare went across her face as though it were reflecting fire. Her fingers twitched. I had never seen a creature so beautiful, so poised as she was at that moment when she climbed the walls of the well. My heart banged, then the woman let herself go. She flew into the water, arms flared, hair lifting away from her face. I smiled. What a lovely thing death is.
But the truth is, while I lived, I loved life. I loved it despite its obstacles, meanness and parsimony. What I want to remember most is how I died. What killed me, I wonder? Beautiful as the dying woman was, I could not have been her.
Even in death I like company and will often sit beside people on sidewalks or on benches. I inch up their legs and suck as quietly as I can. When I was still in the village I used to go for the children. If Karu was one of the children, I would sit on his slipper or his shirt and listen to his child-stories. It was through Karu that I kept in touch with what went on in my home, now that I no longer lived in it. It was through Karu that I heard of my replacement. “I have a new mother,” Karu said to his friends. The new mother, he said, made food for him and tidied up his clothes. Before my husband brought in the new mother, Karu spent many evenings without food, but now he was sometimes served his favourite fried potatoes wrapped in soft roties. I scoffed at Karu’s innocence. How easily deceived he was. The potatoes and roties were reserved for days when Girdhari, my husband, visited the village from the city where he worked as a taxi driver. When he came from the city, he came laden with gifts for the boy and asked after his school and his friends. He said he could not wait for Karu to grow up so he could take the boy with him. “You will like it,” he said. “I will take you for drives and teach you how to turn on the beast.” Because Karu seldom saw his father, he laughed at every joke his father made. While Girdhari stayed in the village his new wife fed my son kheer and puri, and when he left, she turned to the child and glared at him.
In the eight years that I lived with Girdhari he did not take me to the city once. I always wondered about the city. I wondered about the tall buildings and how they stayed upright despite the fact that every day the earth shifts beneath our feet. After my death I took the shape of a hitchhiker’s seed and, entangled in cotton and polyester, I followed my husband to the baffling world of criss-crossing roads and bridges that swam like serpents over the sea. I wanted to find a way to expose the step-mother before him. I wanted to protect my son. The first time I went to the city I stayed with Girdhari for days. I stayed in his taxi and I stayed in the small room he shared with three other men. It was exhilarating and disappointing at the same time. Our house in the village was so much bigger. There was so much more space in our village to move about. But I could see that in the city my husband ate better. He ate eggs or chicken almost every day. In the village, chicken was a meal of celebration.
Mostly, my husband drove his taxi in silence, responding mechanically to impersonal instructions of busy and distracted passengers. But there were times when he picked up familiar customers and smiled and chatted with them. There was a particular female passenger he was fond of and smiled broadly if he happened to spot her in her usual stop. Some days he waited for her to show up and in the wait let go of several profitable passengers he could have driven. Initially I thought he guarded romantic feelings for her, but I soon realised there was no romance here. It was simply that the woman was friendly and spoke to him with seeming interest and my husband sometimes traded money for her comfort. I liked listening to my husband talk to the woman. Mostly, they talked about homesickness, or discussed their shared and mystifying enjoyment of Mumbai. “Who knows what is good about this godforsaken city,” they said to each other, truly puzzled.
It was good, our rides, the sea outside the window, the rough roads crouched beneath houses that threatened to collapse any minute, red buses named BEST. There were sidewalks clogged with dog and human shit, and with people who had made homes of these sidewalks, but if one did not focus on the filth and poverty, if one concentrated only on getting from one destination to another, if one focused on conversations, it was good.
One day my husband clicked his tongue and shook his head. “I am not happy,” he said to the woman. “I cannot tell you the details, but I am not happy.”
“Why?” asked the woman, teasing him gently. “What makes you sad?”
“Life,” said Girdhari. “It’s a joke, sister. When what will happen, who is to say?”
“Your family is here or back at home?” the woman asked.
“Back, back,” said my husband. “What family, sister? I don’t know what to make of it.” He looked at her through the rear-view mirror. “This wife of mine, the one who is in the village with me, she is my second wife. My first wife is dead.”
“Oh,” said the woman.
Stuck on the underside of the passenger seat, I was beginning to doze off, but when my husband mentioned me, I woke up and crept closer to the rim of the seat.
“I don’t like to think of That-One,” he said, and for the rest of the journey he addressed me as That-One. “I don’t like to say good things about her. I like to recall only bad qualities.”
“Why?” asked the woman, as aghast as I was by this declaration.
“Why think of good things? Good things only make you sad.”
I was touched. I had expected something hurtful, something he had kept from me while I lived and could not let go of now that I was dead.
“She had no feelings,” he continued, suddenly turning vehement. “No feelings for anything. Now This-One, my second wife, This-One, she is full of feelings. Full of them. This-One,” he said, looking at the woman through the mirror again, “This-One is normal. She is not very beautiful or very smart. She is normal, so This-One has feelings. You have to be normal to have feelings.”
I frowned at this. I wished he would stop speaking. I did not want him to say anything that would embarrass either him or me.
“You know,” he said as he took a turn and left the sea behind, “That-One, she spoke English.” He caught the woman’s eyes and smiled. “She was very good at it too. If I had brought her to Mumbai with me, she would have been quite a madam, but those are not our village ways. Our village women don’t go about working like fisherwomen. Forgive me, madam,” he said, aware, suddenly, of who he was speaking with. “I am just stating our village ways. Of course, women in the city are very different.” The madam did not appreciate my husband’s comment and was quiet for too long, and my husband blundered on in his effort to soothe her. “That-One had drive. She wanted to know everything. She forced herself to learn English and was always reading from this magazine and that magazine. It was fantastic for my son. I have one son through her. Fantastic boy he is. You should hear the things he says. You would think he is an adult and not just a seven-year-old boy if you heard the way he can barter his way through with anyone. Complete chalu.” He smiled wide with pride. “Anyway,” he went on, “it’s not easy for him being without his real mother. This-One cannot tutor him. She cannot read and write, and now she is expecting her own children and that makes her more tired than ever. She is normal. Not smart like That-One. I was in Mumbai when That-One died,” he told the woman, “making money for her and she did not care one bit for my money. She wanted me to do better things with life.” By this time the madam had forgiven my husband and she smiled graciously when she paid his fare.
When I returned to the village I was hungry and tired and I was angry. My husband had spoken so highly of me with that woman, but where had the regard been when I was alive? When I was alive he rarely spoke to me. He came home during big festivals or during the harvest season and he was gruff and worldly. I sat with him after the household fell asleep and asked him about his troubles. He said driving tired him. He said the city was gruesome and cruel. I held his hand and said he really ought to complete his grade 12 examination. There were government jobs one could apply for with a degree, but he always beat me later and said I lectured too much and was too smart for my own good, so eventually I left him alone. He came home, he had sex with me, he left. And now that I was dead, he was singing my praises to strange women.
I was desperately lonely and wanted only to go home, so I crawled down the tree and went looking for my son. My son too had forgotten me but I loved him more and more every day. When I found him by the edge of the fields with his friends, I crept up his leg and sucked a little from his calf and his blood cooled my pain and hunger for a while. On most days I feasted on flies and worms, and on occasional human blood, but when the ache of separation hurt most, only my son sufficed. And it was while I was savouring Karu’s taste in my mouth that I heard about the mustard flowers.
“Small mummy has sprinkled mustard all over our house compound,” said Karu to his friends. “Under the guava tree also. It is to keep old mummy from coming back to us and eating us. But old mummy would not do that. She has gone far away and forgotten me.” I stilled at this. What did it mean, mustard? And what did Karu mean by saying I had forgotten him? Every day I wanted nothing more than to sleep beside him, holding him in my arms, smelling his hair and kissing his soft skin. I wanted nothing more than to fall asleep with his breath entering my lungs. I wanted to feed him and massage his hands and legs. I wanted to wash off dust and mud from his feet. I wanted to tell him about my day and coax out his secrets. I wanted to love him until he grew frightened and hid from me in cupboards and shelves. And the boy was talking about me having forgotten him. Silly child.
I hugged myself to my son and travelled back to the boundaries of my earthly home. Perhaps I would abandon the trees and fields after all. Perhaps I would go back to living in the house, watching over my son as he bathed and ate and did his school work. Perhaps the proximity would take away some of the longing. But when we got close to the house, something terrible came rushing toward me. Startled, I tried to scamper down my son’s leg but got caught in the folds of his trousers. An absurd and uncontrollable fear took over me then and I choked and suffocated. I could make no sense of what it was I was experiencing. All I knew was that my lungs burned and tightened around my body, and my limbs were growing dead and numb. Karu continued walking toward the house and the terrible thing grew larger and more pungent. And it was only after I saw the bright yellow flowers that I understood the meaning of mustard. The new wife had blocked me out. The fire of the mustard radiated in the air, blazing and pulsating toward me. I clung desperately to Karu, and I was filled with fear and pain, then suddenly, with more courage than I knew I had, I pushed against Karu’s skin and jumped off his body. I ran, trying to escape the burning heat. My body was scalded, and I cried out for my son. I wanted him not to enter the house, I wanted him to turn around and come to me, but nothing I did reached him. He went to his house and I ran up the nearest tree and clung to a branch.
For days after that I could not bring myself to come down the tree, but eventually I could not hold myself away from the fragrance of my child, and I climbed down. I walked to my son’s favourite playing place and went up my son’s limb, sobbing in relief. For several days thereafter, Karu returned home with blue-black bruises upon his shins and thighs. From my perch on the tree I watched Karu’s new mother shiver before these wounds. She grew pale with recognition. She recited quick prayers to ward me off. She had a litany of prayers to scare away a mother’s pain, a woman’s grief, a rival’s warning, and a witch’s lust and she muttered these prayers one after the other. She shrieked in horror and fussed after the boy. She swatted his head and scolded him with a voice trembling with emotion. “No shame,” she said. “Just a ruffian running naked everywhere. And now the witch has tasted your blood. Now she will not leave until she has dried you like a twig and killed us all.”
I too trembled with emotion. I could not understand what the woman meant when she said I would dry the boy like a twig. It was not possible. I only took from Karu what I needed to sustain myself, nothing more, and my need was not large.
I could not stand the new wife. I was disgusted by her frail arms and stringy hair, her voice always shrill with fear. When I was alive my arms had been sturdy and I had kept my hair pulled neatly back and tied in a whirling bun. I dreamed of the day I would become a kichkandi and kill her.
It took me a few trips to the city with my husband to see him as a story-teller, to understand that he was a very different man in Mumbai than he was in the village. In Mumbai he was garrulous and open. He had friends, and though his work was hard, he was proud and easy and filled with the desire to wake up the next morning. He had a story about me, one he liked to tell and one that set me on another kind of fire.
“Such an accomplished woman That-One was,” he told his roommate as they readied to fall asleep. “She kept our house so clean you could see your reflection on the floor. There was magic in her hand. And our son was flourishing. The poor boy is an orphan now. This-One, This-One, poor thing, is normal.”
“Is This-One a good fuck?” the roommate asked.
“As good as stone,” snorted my husband. “Oh, and That-One was a snake under me. Slithering, slithering.” He was quiet after this for a few seconds. “You know what is sad,” he eventually went on, “what is sad is that when That-One was alive, I could not stand her. She was always working, always putting things in the right place, speaking English like she was the Prime Minister. I just wanted to slap her. Her brother tells me her death is my fault, but no, her death is her parents’ fault. I was here when she died. How can her death be my fault? And now, and now that I have a wife whose heart is of gold, I can only think of That-One. I cannot love This-One because I finally love That-One. I couldn’t love That-One before because I had nothing to compare her with and I cannot love This-One now because I can only compare. Isn’t life a joke?”
I turned to a bug then and sucked from him, fast and painfully, ready for the swat of hand coming my way. When I had lived, I had never hit him back, and so I bit and sucked and made a mess on his back. Then I crawled out quickly and plastered myself to a dark corner.
In the city my husband visited temples with statues of deities in them and wept for my soul. In the city he replaced the image of flowers on his phone with my image and looked at it sadly. “What a conflict this life is,” he sighed. I cringed at the melodrama of it all and wondered, a hundred times, how I had ever tolerated this man.
At night, despite his newfound love for me, Girdhari discussed other women with his friends. “I saw a kichkandi once,” he said one night. “I was going through a forest and my taxi suddenly stopped. It was a moonlit night, warm and humid. It was going to rain. And then I saw her. She was like a pearl under the moon. And she looked so beautiful, so sad, my heart knotted inside my throat. I wanted nothing more than to run my hands over her. But did I step out? Did I touch her? Did I ask her to sit inside my car?” The others in the room shook their heads, but they also giggled. “No,” said my husband, giggling too. “I kept turning the key, kept hitting the accelerator until the car came to life and I raced off. When I finally turned to look for her, she was not there.” The men kept giggling and I wondered what it was they found funny.
That night, sitting on my husband’s back, I read his strange longings. Images of the kichkandi’s body, of her sorrow, which he imagined only he could alleviate, left him aching. Later at night, the men masturbated to the kichkandi’s image, perfect on their walls, and their breaths were quick and hot and hushed. My heart pounded. I too dreamed of the kichkandi.
Karu’s luck took a turn when his new mother got pregnant and developed a terrifying hate for him. Now, after our husband left the village to return to the city, she leapt at the boy and snarled. “It is you she wants, that mother of yours. It’s for you she is hunting. I feel her beyond the courtyard, waiting, waiting, and now she will eat my children. Get out of here, you devil’s spawn. Get out!” She thrashed Karu with the broom in her hand and my son wailed in bewildered pain. When Karu ate his meals, she stood akimbo before him. “Thinks the food is for free,” she taunted. “Thinks he will go to school and become a sahib.” I watched from my tree and shook with rage. My son’s hair was matted, his lips rough and cracked. He was losing weight and he had forgotten the lessons taught at school. His role in the house was reduced to helping the new wife with the menial jobs of filling water, chopping vegetables, and mopping the floors. His grandparents, who seemed to have lost all ability to speak, looked at him pitifully with large, empty eyes. “Mai, mai,” my son called out for me and all the while the acidity of the mustard leaves scorched my skin.
I wonder why I died. What killed me? I cannot remember. I remember working in the house, my veil pulled low to conceal my face when men were around, my saree hitched high for convenience when they weren’t. I remember sitting with my son to help him with his homework. I remember stirring the pot to see if there were pieces of vegetables drowned in the gravy. Then I remember nothing else. I must have fallen sick. Not his fault, he said. The fault of my brother, or my parents. I cannot remember. I feel an odd pain at not knowing. I wish I knew. I feel that if I knew I would be free and I try desperately to remember. I realise now that it is important to remember. If I could remember I would know if I am here for a reason, or if I can make a difference, or if tomorrow might be different. In not knowing, everything feels arbitrary – this pull to my child’s pain, this burning wind.
Karu swept the courtyard and he brought water into the house from the well. When he left the house I followed him around the village. I wanted to console him, to tell him everything ends. It ended for me, it would end for him, but I could not communicate and he never felt my presence. To him, I was only dead. And despite, or maybe because of the pain he suffered, he did actually begin to forget me. Perhaps I lived in his bones, but his heart and mind were ruled by his new mother. How tenderly he loved her. The more she thrashed him, the more he wanted her. How hard he worked to keep her happy. I prickled with hate. I wanted to chew her alive, but I could never reach her.
Then the new wife gave birth to twins and a few days before Karu turned eight he ran away from her house. I must have fallen asleep when he ran, because by the time I awoke the courtyard was empty and the new wife was in the courtyard with her babies. The three were drenched in oil and sleeping deeply on a mat. I waited for Karu to emerge from the house but he did not come. I waited all day for several days before I understood what had happened. And when I finally understood, a sudden and abrupt void opened up in me. I am hungry, I thought in panic, and hurried down the bark. I crawled desperately along the lanes, feeding on flies and worms but the hunger would not fill. I climbed upon boys and pulled out their blood but the thirst wouldn’t lessen.
In time, perhaps terrified of Girdhari’s return to the village, the new wife began a search too. For the first time, despite the twins, she left the house and wandered around the village, shouting Karu’s name. I chased fiercely. I dug myself into her skin and though her blood filled me with bitterness, I sucked and I spat, and I sucked and I spat. Bitch, I screeched, crying for my son. All over, her body broke out in little patches of blue. Her eyes sank. She trembled a little when she walked. She returned home fatigued after her search and collapsed upon the floor of her compound. I stayed out, unable to enter. She stayed on the floor and wept. She looked in my direction and muttered prayers. Forgive me, forgive me, she muttered. Spare my children. I will find him, spare my children. I climbed up my tree and knew I would kill her, and for once I could feel the delicious joy the kichkandi must feel when she hunts..
When Girdhari came home to see his new children, he thrashed the new wife. From my tree I could hear him cry, and I could hear her scream. Forgive me. Forgive me, she howled. The next morning Girdhari marched out and uprooted the mustard plants. He heaped them into a basket and took them away. “If you paid more attention to the children and less to all this nonsense, my Karu would still be here,” he wept, then he too stumbled about the village yelling for his son. I could see he had forgotten the twins, that he had begun to hate them, though he did not know that yet — that he secretly wished his new wife would die and leave him in peace. The new wife watched the empty compound with terrified, hallucinating eyes. How bare it was without the mustard bushes. She clutched her babies to herself and rocked on her haunches, chanting and muttering under her breath.
I live in the city now and scour the streets for Karu because all children, when they run, run to the city. So many abandoned children, so many who have run away, so many hopeful and battered, but none are my Karu.
My husband is determined and vigilant. He wants to pick passengers whose destinations will take him into unexpected alleys and corners. He hopes to find Karu suddenly, huddled in a corner, hungry perhaps, and frightened, but convinced that his father will find him. My husband does not speak much now, not even with the woman he enjoyed talking to before. He drives quietly, eyes focused on the road.
One night when the monsoon rains made the winding roads shift and vanish and come to view again, a woman appeared before my husband’s taxi. I was behind the passenger seat and when my husband braked to avoid hitting the woman, I skidded forward a little. The woman came up to the window and her breasts heaved with effort. She was liquid in the rain, shining and gleaming. Her friend had fallen off the rail and hurt herself badly, she said. “There is blood pouring from her head,” she said, her breath catching in her slender throat. “Please help,” she cried. She put her hand out in plea. Her fingers were long and beautiful. Her wrists were the necks of swans. I held my breath. The rain cleared and a beautiful moon rose behind her. My husband looked at the woman for some time then he slowly released the brake and took off. He intoned the names of the gods as he drove, and when he got home, he slid under the covers and came down with a fever. “I could see through her body,” he said to his friends, shivering, his teeth chattering. Then, after the fever wore off, he went back to where the woman had appeared and searched the area for Karu. She was the only passenger he had refused to drive that day and he came back to her spot, again and again, convinced he had missed his son that night. “Karu’s mother came to me and I did not recognise her,” he said to his friends, distraught. “And now my son must have died somewhere.”
Eventually I left my husband and took to the streets.
Sometimes I begin to feel I am not really destined to become a kichkandi. Perhaps, one has to be a different kind of a woman to become a kichkandi. Perhaps the souls of the rich and the beautiful become kichkandis. For those like me, it is spiders and bugs. In a way then, at least for me, there is no kickhandi. There is just me, my lost child and the street. I weave thin, silver threads with my saliva that tie poles and rods or branches to make nests with. I sit at the centre of my web, basking in the noisy sun, eight limbs stretched in eight directions, waiting. I wait for the next fly to fall in, but sometimes I wait for the awful loneliness to dissolve so I can be free. Mostly I don’t know what I wait for. At night I sleep amidst the lost children and when I get hungry I drink from them, just enough to keep me going.
I hope I will see the kichkandi one day, that I will be able to talk to her and she will help me find my Karu. Sometimes I think about that woman with the heaving breasts. I wonder if someone eventually stopped to help her dying friend. I wonder if she really was a woman or just another ghost out on the streets to trap stupid, simple men. It was too late in the night for a real woman to be out in it. And she was too good-looking to be a real woman.
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Released: September 15, 2022
Smriti Ravindra is a Mumbai based Nepali writer. She is a Fulbright scholar and holds an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Full Bio