Dogs And Old Women

Mashima, Auntie, lived in the Bengali quarter. Early each morning she left her small rented room with a bag of just-baked chapatis, made with flour bought from her monthly allowance. She stopped at the homes of several families in the quarter, Bengali Brahmans like herself, and collected a chapati or two from each. Thus armed, she would proceed slowly along the long lane running the length of the quarter. Her hungry companions would begin to follow, but Mashima was not yet ready for them and kept a steady pace. At Sonarpura crossing, she emerged from the network of lanes and crossed the main road to a well-known sweet shop, the Ocean of Milk. The owner was fond of Mashima and would give her sweet curds leftover from the previous day: "But they're not for humans, Mashima." Mashima reentered the lanes where her companions awaited her eagerly: they were all dogs. They followed behind her in a growing pack and growled furiously at any passerby who appeared in their dog's-eye view to threaten Mashima. When she reached her destination, a small clearing deep within the lanes where more dogs were waiting, Mashima sat down for a moment to catch her breath. Then she began her day's work, feeding the dogs of Varanasi.

Dogs were not beloved in the city. My friends the Banerjees, one of the Mashima's sources for chapatis, then had two pet dogs that they had trained; the family was considered eccentric. For Mr. Banerjee, a civil engineer who had insisted his wife attend graduate school against her initial wishes, and who then decided to raise his two daughters like sons so that they would always be self-sufficient, training purebred dogs was part of a consciously modernist fashioning of life and family. But for his neighbors, dogs were dirty—skulking in dank and odorous corners, barking incessantly at night, wandering over the cremation ghats, feeding on whatever they might find there—and not worth the effort. Chil-

dren in the quarter played with dogs, learning from their siblings and friends in early childhood to elicit yelps by hitting, kicking, and stoning them. Dogs were interstitial creatures, essential inhabitants of the space between households, and as such had no strong claims to domestic support.

Dogs, Mashima told me, were her children. She would talk to, scold, and comfort them. She was always enlarging her route, waxing ever more powerful in old age by including more lanes and more dogs. "She has no one," noted her neighbors, framing her as the pathetic kasivasi woman whom the professors at the Vasant College luncheon had once told me was the typical old person, the abject figure who comes to stand for the old age of others. She was a child widow, one who had lost her husband when she was fourteen and already the mother of a baby daughter. The daughter had been married for many years and lived in Calcutta. Mashima herself had lived in Calcutta until the early 1970s when she came to Kashi. She was now in her seventies. Her family was wealthy and, she told me, its members were cultured bhadralok . she had nephews in Canada and other foreign places and had met the filmmaker Satyajit Ray Some of her brothers and her daughter sent her small monthly remittances, and she received a Central Government pension (minus five rupees to the postman to guarantee its delivery). Altogether, it was enough to live simply and pay the rent, with some funds left over for the dogs. Still, Mashima described herself as a religious mendicant oblivious to gain and surviving off the daily kindnesses of others.

"Why not feed . . . the cows?" a neighbor who objected to the daily parade of dogs once suggested. Other people fed cows, Mashima responded, but dogs too had claims upon us. Dogs, she used to say, were also mendicants, like the old people of the city. But most neighbors to whom I recounted the story of the Dog Lady resisted the explicit connection of old people and dogs that Mashima put forth. Dogs did not explicitly anchor the discourse of old age in the quarter or in the other three neighborhoods. Others besides old women and dogs shared the interstice; the neighbor's comment about cows suggested a more meaningful association. Like the old, cows were in theory objects of veneration found throughout the sacred city. But in practice both cows and widows were obstacles that blocked one's path. Banarsis frequently recited a couplet on the things visitors trip over when they reach the holy city:

Rand, sanr, sirhi, sannyasi
Inse bache Seva to Kasi

Widow, bull, steps, sannyasi,
Avoiding these one can enjoy Kashi.^[1]

Varanasi was the city of holy things in painful excess—liberated renunciates, steps descending to the Ganga, auspicious animals, and pious old widows—but it was also the city of a cultivated insouciance and joie de vivre. Widows, classically inauspicious in Hindu India, did, like cows, steps, and holy men, become part of the

spiritual capital of Kashi as pilgrimage center. But for those who had to live in Varanasi everyday, the couplet suggested that life was more pleasurable to the extent that one avoided the claims of the pious and pure and their self-appointed protectors. The ambivalent image of widows in excess was perhaps more extreme in the temple town of Brindavin in western Uttar Pradesh, where a tout once accosted me and urged me to make a contribution to his family's temple where every night "ten thousand Bengali mothers" were fed. Fortified by my contribution, he promised, this gargantuan mass of widowed mothers would sing bhajans, hymns, to God, and garner me the resulting merit.

Mothers had to eat: thus the tour's claim upon me and the source of his not insignificant income. Mothers and cows were never of the interstice but belonged to someone and somewhere. Bhajan ashrams, homes for upper-caste Hindu widows where their voices could be collectivized and routinized as maternal blessing through the bhajan, transformed the threat of the individual widow's voice. Whatever limited resources such widow houses offered, old women who lacked even the slender protection of the domestication of their voice as bhajan were seldom heard as mothers. In the lanes of the old city, the voices of old kasivasi women were heard less as mothers than as madwomen. Mashima did not mind the children who taunted her and cried "pagli , she told me; she could talk back to them. The adults who made fun of her, who pulled at her clothes, or who accused her of being a witch and giving the dogs poison were less easily dismissible. She could talk back, but her Hindi was poor and in any case she tended to be misunderstood. As much as the conditions of mendicancy, this inability to make her voice heard as other than degraded or repetitive noise grounded Mashima's dog metaphor.

Like other elderly widows and old men of the quarter, Mashima spent the early mornings visiting friends and aiding those less mobile. The maintenance of these networks required considerable effort and mobility. The kasivasi was constantly between households as she worked to domesticate the interstice. As the Dog Lady, Mashima was the most vivid example of an interstitial elder I knew, because in domesticating the interstice she attempted to transform its most pathetic signs—alley dogs—into a family Her economic security, her Brahman and bhadralok status, and her personality all contributed to her fragile success. But most kasivasi widows, and other widows whose caste did not privilege kasivasi as a solution to the threat of destitution, were in danger of becoming Dog Ladies in a different sense, of being read through the interstice as embodiments of not only pathos but of a threatening bark and complete degradation. The genius in Mashima's eccentricity was in this: that she explicitly spoke of the condition of the kasivasi elderly in refusing the lure of the bovine and claiming kinship with dogs.

Though not self-consciously invoked by most old people, dogs were powerful signs of the interstice and were frequently juxtaposed with figures of interstitial old women. The juxtaposition was sometimes iconic, that is, dogs and old women

were associated because they appeared to share certain qualities. Thus on the occasion of the United Nations-sponsored "Elders' Day," an internationalist holiday locally advocated by groups like HelpAge India, the Times of India in 1988 commemorated the occasion with a large photograph of three old women clad in the white saris of widows and shown next to a sleeping dog, seemingly white in the picture (see photograph on p. 262). One of the widows has her back to us, the second has her mouth open, and the third is severely hunchbacked and holds a small cane. The sleeping dog was one more marginal white-clad figure in the gutter.^[2]

The Elder's Day image also conveyed a symbolic juxtaposition, that is, a connection between dogs and old women based upon particular cultural associations. In both classical Hindu and popular local narrative, dogs were one of several archetypical denizens of the ultimate dying spaces of the Hindu polis, the cremation ghats. In Varanasi, necropolis par excellence, the fierce form of Lord Shiva known as Bhairava was an important and powerfully transgressive deity and was closely associated with dogs.^[3] Each night, alongside the Ganga, dogs howled and barked in menacingly lupine cadences: Bhairava was wandering the lanes and ghats, seeking expiation for his sin, the death of Brahma, the old man of the gods. David White, in his essay "Dogs Die," examined the dog as hellhound in Vedic and other Indo-European traditions.^[4] In Varanasi, dogs signified degradation and putrescence as much as death: they not only frequented cremation grounds but ate what they could find there. To be "treated like a dog" thus conveyed a complex set of associations suggesting both iconic dependency and noise and symbolic pollution and threat.