Secretly, Nagarajan dreams of being reincarnated as a rat, not the hairy, starving rats he catches with his bare hands in the fields, and grills over the fire each evening, but the sacred rats of the temple in Deshnoke, near the border with Pakistan, where his father took him once when he was a child. The temple’s feral brown rats numbered some twenty thousand. They are treated like gods, protected and fed by the local people, who bring them milk. The priest is responsible for their well-being; people bring them offerings from all over. Nagarajan remembers the story his father told him of the goddess Karminata: she had lost a child, and begged for it to be returned to her, but it had been reincarnated as a rat. The temple was built in homage to the lost son. Nagarajan’s days out in the fields hunting rodents had taught him to respect them, he felt a strange solidarity with them, like a law enforcer who respects the outlaw he has been pursuing his whole life. Besides, he tells himself, the creatures are just like him: hungry and struggling to survive. Yes, it would be sweet indeed to be reincarnated as a rat in the temple at Deshnoke, and to spend your life drinking milk. Sometimes, after a hard day’s work, the idea comforted him and helped him to sleep. A strange lullaby, indeed, but he didn’t care, it was his.

Smita has no desire to wait for the next life. It’s this life, here and now, that she wants, for herself and for Lalita. She reminds Nagarajan of the Dalit woman who has risen to the highest post in their state: Kumari Mayawati. An untouchable who has become a governor! They say she travels around by helicopter. She did not cower, she did not wait for death to deliver her from this life, she fought for herself and for all of them. Nagarajan becomes even angrier: Smita knows full well that nothing has changed, the woman who rose to prominence preaching the Dalits’ cause wants nothing more to do with them now. She has abandoned them. She flies through the air while they flounder in shit. That’s the truth! There is no one to lift them out of here, out of this life, this karma. Not Mayawati, not anyone else. Only death can free them. And while they wait, they will stay here in the village where they were born and have always lived. And with these words, delivered like the deadly swipes of a machete, Nagarajan leaves the hut.

So be it, says Smita to herself. If you do not want to come, I will leave without you.

Giulia

Palermo, Sicily

Now every living thing

has voice and blood.

Now earth and sky

are a deepened spasm

racked by hope,

overthrown by morning,

flooded by your step,

your dawn breathing.*