Old Women And Madwomen

As the story goes, the king died and the queen lost her mind and the kingdom turned into a wasteland .
BHISHAM SAHNI, "RANI MEHTO "

Mashima recognized and could contain her dog-ness. She received family assistance and could afford to accept no cooked food for herself. She took chapatis—and in doing so maintained a social network—only for the dogs. By refusing food for herself and by transforming dogs into cows, she challenged what it meant to be old and dependent on the interstice. If dogs could be cows, then Mashima through her practice was not the abject aunt but the good mother, daily distributing the largesse of the Ocean of Milk.

Still, for most passersby she seemed pathetic. One neighbor was my friend Bijay, through whom I had first met Mashima. He told me that he knew that I was on the lookout for crazy old people. "She's been in the lane just outside my house every morning for years," he told me one morning, "I wouldn't have noticed that she was quite mad but for you." The powers of the imported gaze aside, however, many local kids didn't need me to tell them the Dog Lady was a mad old pagli . The frequency with which local children sought out and teased old women—calling

them madwomen—-was one of the masons the project of studying senility in Varanasi had evolved in the first place. In 1983 during an earlier stay in the Bengali quarter, I was sitting outside my rented room on Pandey Ghat while five or six children were playing nearby. A hunchbacked old woman wearing a dirty white sari appeared in the lane and quietly set about collecting some dung patties that were not her own from a wall on which they were drying. One of the children saw her, motioned to his friends, and the whole gang ran over, shouting "Pagli! pagli! " and pelting her with small stones. The woman began cursing the children. Strong and archaic curses from the frail old hunchback sounded funny to the kids, and they laughed and laughed. The pagli left off stealing dung patties and limped away.

Koki, the old Bengali widow who lived in the Ravindrapuri stairwell, was similarly an interstitial elder at high risk for becoming a pagli Though she called her stairwell home, Koki spent her days going from house to house and from institution to institution—visiting friends, receiving foodstuffs, going from the Ganga to the Durga temple. Continually on the road at a vigorous gait, Koki brooked no interruptions. Whenever I tried to talk to her in motion, she would tell me that she was busy: "Get lost!" Dogs and children were her other bêtes noirs. If a dog followed at her heels, Koki would turn and begin scolding it. Children, both those in the colony and from the slum across the road next to the abandoned cinema hall, would come running to watch the mad widow talk to dogs. Children found Koki—with her busy gait and sharp voice—a delight to mock and call pagli Koki, unlike genteel Mashima, would quickly let loose with a string of Bengali curses that few of the children could understand. The heteroglossia of the old voice—its incomprehensible and varying cadences of class, rural life, region, and level of education—added to the pleasures of its elicitation.

Years after the Bengali quarter stoning, I asked many of the younger brothers and sisters of the erstwhile Pandey Ghat gang what was the reason for stoning a pagli . The kids all said that you teased a pagli because of her voice. In particular, they hoped for the following sorts of things: galis, or abuses, often quite obscene and usually in the form of a curse; errors, which widows—often from distant regions of India, Bangladesh, and Nepal—made when they spoke quickly in Hindi or Bengali; and bakbak , or utter nonsense.

Paglis would curse, but their curses were empty and powerless. They were mad, but mad in the way usually only kids could see. Bijay and his neighbors saw Mashima as eccentric, but it took the transposed gaze of the ethnographic moment—"I wouldn't have noticed that she was quite mad but for you"—to transform pathos into pathology: Children, not yet mature enough to hear the familial body or its lack in the old voice, tended to hear its humor. Small children were sometimes frightened by such old women, and their older siblings and playmates might tease them with the threat that the old witch, like some lakarsunghva , would get them. But for most kids, most of the time, old women's voices were not threatening in Varanasi. The madness heard by children in old voices was gendered; there were also pagal, madmen, in the lanes of the quarter, but they were usually

far younger men. The old men or babas who wandered the interstices of the city were heard differently. And yet the 1996 lakarsunghva murders suggested that the hearing of interstitial voices in moments in which the familial and domestic appeared critically under attack could transform the usual scaffolding of gender and age in what rendered voices crazy, dangerous, and witchlike.