The Anemic Songstress
Harvesting can’t begin till the song is sung, since the gods can’t go to sleep without hearing their song and crops cleaved from the nurturing embrace of the earth can’t be left lying around at the mercy of sleep-deprived gods. If they spit out even a raindrop in anger, it will birth fungus that will eat through the grains and shove the farmers deep into pits of debt. But Usha, the only one blessed with notes high enough to reach the gods, is nowhere to be found. The burden of searching her out, as usual, falls to me—her best friend. Hesitant at first, two painful kicks to my bum have me trotting off on my quest.
I track her down to the abandoned pump house—sitting on the floor, her kurta tucked above her exposed tummy, and in her lap a pot to catch the blood trickling down from her navel. We lock eyes through a crack in the wall. I could only practice till the third verse before the bleeding started and made me lose my melody. Do something, dear calf. I push my way in and go lie down, nudging up against her. She wraps my tail around her arm. I have eaten every red food to compensate for the loss of blood. I have spent hours beating granules out of pomegranates. I have chewed through muddy chunk after chunk of beetroot. Still, I can’t hold a note once I start bleeding. And this has worsened since I turned twenty last year. I want to give her a reassuring lick, but she hates wetness of any sort.
Her fevered stomach pulsing against my ear sets my mind racing. Once her bleeding stops, I nudge her up, forward, and toward the priest’s house on the village outskirts to meet his son, who I have heard has just returned from the city hoping to establish a big residential school. We find him sipping tea outside, a curved hat on his head making it look like he has grown horns. He hears Usha out and scoffs at her for believing old wizards’ tales. He says she’s anemic and simply consuming foods the color of blood is not going to help her; to gain the strength to sing unrestrained, she needs more iron to produce more blood, and the best sources of iron are black foods like liver. He then invites her in, but she excuses herself and we trundle off. Ignoring questions from passing farmers, we make it to the butcher’s. She instructs him to set aside fifty grams of liver for her every morning. He refuses to take any money.
I show up at the butcher’s the next day since Usha’s exhausted, and he ropes around my neck a pouch whose rusty smell immediately makes me dizzy. I somehow get it to her home and she fries up the liver in it with curry leaves and vinegar and wolfs everything down with stale rotis. Next day, the same. And the day after. On the fourth day, I can’t stand the stench and retch in the middle of the road. I still deliver the liver but leave before she starts cooking. I maintain this routine despite losing my appetite. After about two weeks, Usha shows me her palms, redder than before. Two days later, she doesn’t let me leave; bleeding from her navel, she leads me in, climbs onto her bed, and bursts into the most beatific paean I have ever heard. Minutes pass but the song doesn’t let up; rather, the crescendos keep rising and rising, with all the air inside wriggling out and the birds and dogs outside joining in. Usha gradually climbs down and hugs me breathless. Her tears of recovery nourish my gaunt frame.
The night before the rescheduled pre-harvest song, Usha visits me in my shed. If only maa hadn’t always been badgered with demands for a baby boy. If only she hadn’t feared losing me to girl disposers the moment she got some shut-eye. If only maa had been brave enough to let the umbilical cord be cut; she would have been here to watch me grow up normal. It was the leftover womb inside her that killed her and only then could mausis snip off our cord, calf, the delay leaving me with this chronically infected navel that bleeds whenever. I, who have never been allowed to suckle my mother, moo in commiseration. As long as my health improves and so does my singing, no one cares that I don’t stop bleeding. Why should I keep singing for those who only know how to use me? I will not sing tomorrow. I will not sing till these ungratefuls come up with a definitive cure. Anyway, the only one here with a scientific temper is the priest’s son. Maybe he can help me again. This time, she leads the way, and I blindly follow.
We again find the priest’s son outside his door, horned, sipping milk. He listens to Usha and replies that traditional knowledge can at times trump science. He points out that she has often offered songs to the gods above, but has never offered anything to the earth below, to the mother of all. And that every farmer, before ploughing, offers mother earth his favorite beer or wine to make up for the mutilation that is to follow. He suggests that, if she wants to stop bleeding, she should offer as compensation to mother earth a bucketful of blood of someone dear to her. She straightaway looks at me, while he slips her something shiny. She comes closer. I kneel down by the road. She caresses my forehead. I take the liberty of licking her wrist to assure her that I’m happy she will sing tomorrow. She breaks down on top of me, her curls a shroud. I lie on my side, accepting my fate, because harvesting can’t begin till the song is sung.
Subhravanu Das is an Indian writer living in Bhubaneswar. His work has been published in AAWW’s The Margins, Chestnut Review, Denver Quarterly, Vestal Review, among others, and included in Wigleaf’s Top 50 in 2022 and 2024 and in Best Small Fictions 2023.
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