When our Champa made her way along the ridges of the rice fields, the ends of her Maniabandhi sari spreading like wings, she did indeed resemble a swan. As for her age, it is our guess that she was about thirty. However, we heard, from her very own lips, that she was a twenty-one-day-old baby when Mangaraj married. She must then have been much, much younger. To describe the beauty of such a youthful woman, one ought to exercise a great deal of caution and wisdom; one should be very liberal and broad-minded.

Of late, along with many other foreign goods, something called “ruchi”—taste—has been imported into our land. If you do not know what ruchi refers to, you are done for—people will consider you a fool, uncouth and uncivilized. This we learned the other day, when we saw what happened to the literary reputation of Upendra Bhanja, the great eighteenth-century Oriya poet. The poor fellow had managed to survive only because of the good karma his parents had accumulated. The way some of our modern critics and writers hounded him—only God knows how he escaped! If such a great poet can be made to suffer like this, we see no hope for lesser mortals such as ourselves. So, with the blessings of our gurus and of the Brahmins, we have dared to compose a few lines according to modern ruchi. You may think us a pretender or an impostor, but here, in all humility, is a specimen: Her breasts are bare, and her smile full of mischief.

She gallops like a mare, and like a cat’s her eyes do glare, Copper is the color of her hair; never does she shrink from a brawl.

For a husband, she feels no need; she is at no man’s beck and call.

O beautiful woman! How graceful you look, dancing with a stranger.

O heavenly dancer! Now, compare that with this couplet by Upendra Bhanja, written in what nowadays would be described as bad ruchi: Her thighs like the trunk of a banana plant

And her buttocks smoother than a plateau …

We dare not proceed any further. Perhaps Bijuli will flash again.

So now you know: we can compose poems in good taste, but we dare not tell lies in broad daylight. We carried out a survey of the physical attributes of several women, including Miss Chemi Behera, in class five of Balipatna Girls School, and Miss S. M.

Ray—Miss Sasimukhi Ray—in a higher class of Bethune School.

None of these women have developed eyes like a cat’s in deference to modern ruchi, or have cared to resemble heroines of modern tasteful poems. So we will be considered crude and vul-gar if we compose a truthful picture, but at the same time we cannot keep from telling the truth.

It is said the great Kalidasa once suffered from writer’s block while composing Raghu Vamsa. He overcame it by thinking about his literary predecessors, which made it possible for him to write again. So this is exactly what we shall do as well. Kalidasa himself has left us a model based on which we can describe Champa’s charms. He wrote,

Tanvi šyama šikharidašana pakvabimbadharosthi.

We interpret the line as follows: tanu means body, and since Champa has a body, she is tanvi; shyama refers to a complexion that is neither black nor white, therefore Champa’s complexion can be called shyama; shikhari denotes a hill and dashana teeth: two of Champa’s front teeth jut out, and so she perfectly answers to shikhari dashana; pakva means ripe and bimba is a red fruit; ad-horosthi refers to the chin: Champa’s lips and chin are reddened from endlessly chewing betel leaves; she can thus be called pakva bimbadharosthi.

Kalidasa goes on,

Madhye ksama … stokanamra …†

“Her breasts are so full and heavy that they touch each other, making the lady stoop a little …” Since we have not had the opportunity of seeing the parts of Champa’s anatomy she keeps covered, we are absolutely unwilling to venture a description of them, even though old chap Kalidasa has himself provided us a model.

We wholeheartedly subscribe to the precept “Seeing is believing.” Nevertheless, we are duty-bound to describe those parts we have actually seen. The following lines have been composed in the pajjhati metrical scheme.

Her eyes are decorated with kajal,

Her mouth full of betel,

Senapati’s narrator deliberately mistranslates and misinterprets the original Sanskrit, thus putting its authority (both in aesthetic and social matters) into question.

Her body, massaged with oil and turmeric paste.

Draped in a sixteen-cubit sari,

She moves as fast as a she-dog.

Her hair has a top knot trimmed with flowers;

So heavy is she, one knows not

Whether she walks or runs.

Thick metal rings adorn her fingers.

Gesturing wildly she marches through the fields, Her jingling anklets striking terror in the hearts of villagers.

And thus, dear reader, ends our literary account of Champa’s beauty.

Chapter Seven

Goddess Budhi Mangala

O Goddess, in the form of a stone

You appear under a tree.

To you we always bow.

You, who ride clay elephants,

You, who bless barren women with children,

You, who cure dreaded diseases,

O Goddess Narayani, to you we bow.

At the western edge of Asura Pond, to the right of the path that runs between it and the village, there was a large, spreading banyan tree. Its main trunk was hard to make out; a tangle of twenty to twenty-five swollen prop roots covered half an acre of land. Its foliage was so dense the sun could not break through. Itwas an ancient tree. Village elders said that it had been the abode of Goddess Mangala since Satya Yuga, the Age of Truth. They had not seen any change in the tree since their childhood—it had grown neither larger nor smaller. Last year, on a moonless night, when a terrible storm blew down all the drumstick trees and banana plants in the village, not even a leaf from the banyan tree fell to the ground. Such is the power of the goddess! Four of its prop roots were like veritable tree trunks, and among these was constructed the shrine of the village deity, Goddess Budhi (Old Lady) Mangala. There were two acres and a half of debottara land in her name: her shrine occupied roughly half an acre, and the rest provided for the upkeep of the priest and the goddess. The priest was very highly regarded in the village, particularly by the women. The goddess frequently appeared to him in his dreams and talked to him about everything.

Everyone in the village brought the goddess the first fruits and vegetables from their gardens, such as bananas, brinjals, or pumpkins.

The goddess sat in the middle of a pucca platform.