“Jena”
Ganges River, 1835
Despite being two hundred thousand square kilometers in size, the Thar Desert, also known as the Great Indian Desert, has only one river: the Luni. Jena never saw the Luni. Her entire life lived in the Thar, twenty-two years (all of them spent in the northwest corner, in what would one day become Pakistan), and she had only ever known water to come from small, murky wells, a few shallow saltwater lakes. Rain, too, she knew very little of. When she’d been a young girl, a lone man had emerged over the sand dunes, in the moonlight, riding a camel. That of course was not unusual, but what was unusual was how talkative this man had been. Jena had never known anyone so talkative. And so: Since Jena knew nothing of running water and nothing of talkative men, what did she know about? She knew the silence between her mother and father. She knew the greater silence of the desert. Or was the silence between her mother and father greater? She knew the buzzing of flies; she knew the exact contour, the precise dimensions of the quiet they left behind when they died.
That night, the man who’d come out of the moonlight settled himself outside their tent, on the rug, and after dinner had been eaten, and the tobacco was being smoked, he began to tell stories. Strange stories, fantastical stories. Stories that, even at the age of six, Jena was hard-pressed to believe. For instance, the man told of a creature, one of the stealthiest and most dangerous in the forest (What is a forest? Jena asked, for which she was shushed), that was spotted and strong enough to kill a man. Spotted how? Jena’s father asked. “Their fur is the color of these sand dunes,” the man said, “with black spots. But some of them have white fur, with black spots. But those,” he continued, “live in the snow.” Snow? Then he told the story of a camel that had died by drowning. Jena of course assumed the camel had drowned in sand, maybe during a sandstorm, but the man said no, it had drowned in water. Jena looked over at the man’s camel, drowsing alongside the tent. She tried to imagine it drowning but how could it? How could there be enough water in one place to drown such a big animal? Obviously, the man must be lying. Or exaggerating. Even Jena’s father seemed to think so, the way he was taking long, pensive drags of the pipe and nodding into the fire. When she looked at the man’s camel again, it had raised its head and was looking straight back at her. It had that smug look on its face that camels have. It seemed to be imagining her drowning. And as it did, it seemed to be saying, Jena, it will have to be you. Or it will have to be me. But one of us, sooner or later, will have to drown.
Jena, at the age of twenty-two, rarely thought about the man in the moonlight and the spotted creature and the camel drowning. She, like her parents before her and their parents before them, was a nomad. She and her husband had four children, five goats, and two camels. The last time she’d been pregnant, she’d ruptured something during labor and had hemorrhaged so much blood that the midwife had warned her against another pregnancy. Tell your husband, the midwife had said, Tell him to be careful from now on. Jena had looked up at the old woman, through a haze of rank blood and bloated flies and plundering weakness, and had known she never would.
During the fifth month of her next pregnancy, outside of Bikaner, Jena and her husband were joined by a man named Nasir. He and his camel were sitting under a khejri tree and when they passed by him, the man got up, coaxed his camel to its feet, and started to follow them. A hundred or so steps later, Jena’s husband stopped. He told Jena to mind the goats and the camels, and then he walked back to talk to the man. When he returned, he didn’t say anything, but that night, as Jena was preparing dinner, he told her the man would be joining them. Knowing her husband, Jena said, “What is he giving you in return?”
“Salt,” her husband said.
“Doesn’t he have a family?” she asked.
“Widower,” he replied.
After that, the man stayed with them. He sometimes walked with his camel behind them. At other times, he disappeared into the desert for an hour or two, or for an entire afternoon or evening, though when Jena woke up, she always found him asleep near their tent, wrapped tightly in his blanket against the desert cold. He spoke very little, hardly at all. In fact, she didn’t know the sound of his voice until the day—Jena’s husband had gone the night before to the market in a nearby village—she walked up the sand dune on which he was sleeping to give him his morning tea and some roti. The sun had not yet fully risen. Only the edges of the sand dunes, and the sky just above them, were beginning to brighten. Pinking, bluing, both at once, as if two birds were squabbling over the nest of sky. Jena set the plate of dry roti and the mug of tea down next to Nasir. She rose to leave. When she’d walked a few steps, she heard the sand shift, ever so slightly, and then she heard a voice say, “What is that tinkling?”
They both held their breath. What tinkling?
“Take a step,” he said. When she did, he said, “It’s your anklets.”
She laughed. She said, “I’ve gotten so used to them I don’t even hear them anymore.”
Not once did he look at her face, nor did he look at her ankles. In fact, it seemed to her he was talking to the wind, or the sand. The sky. When she was halfway down the sand dune, she heard him say, “You sound like water.”
She paused and then she walked back to the tent, where the children were beginning to stir. She looked at them, their sleeping faces, and thought again of the man who’d told her the stories of the spotted creature and the drowned camel. The memory of that night, when she’d been a girl and had been seated by a fire, listening intently, came back to her with a force so sudden and so fearsome that it nearly crumpled her to her knees. She walked back out of the tent. She looked at the horizon, the sun now risen, an orange ball mocking her life, mocking every one of the years since the man who’d told tales had stepped out of the moonlight. For she’d thought back then, back when she was six, or maybe a little after, that her life would be like that: Out of the wild duned desert there would emerge, on some moonlit nights, glimpses of other worlds—creatures that could not possibly exist, waters treacherously and tantalizingly deep—and that it would be these glimpses, these imagined worlds, that would give meaning to the rest. But it hadn’t been so. There had never been another teller of tales; only the days, one after another after another after another. Breathtaking in their monotony. And now here she stood, at the age of twenty-two, pregnant, with a husband, a tent, four children, five goats, two camels, and the same sun, rising and rising, setting and setting. And the same legions of flies crawling over every sweetness: her children’s faces, the cups of morning tea, the dreams she had dreamt without even knowing she’d been dreaming them.
In that moment, for some reason she could not understand, she looked down at her ankles. And then she looked up at the sand dune where Nasir was sleeping. But he had already drunk his tea and was gone.
Toward the beginning of her seventh month of pregnancy, Jena woke in the middle of the night and found the blanket beneath her sodden, nearly dripping. It took her only a moment; she knew what the wetness was. She turned to her husband. She was so faint she could hardly say his name loud enough to wake him. When she did, he dressed in the dark and woke the drowsy camel and then he set off for the nearest village to fetch the midwife. As she lay inside the tent, shivering in the soaked blankets, she heard her husband shout something to Nasir and then, a few moments later, she saw Nasir standing at the entrance to the tent. He stood for a long time, longer than she could keep her eyes open, and then he left. He returned, maybe minutes, maybe hours later. She wanted to speak, she wanted to say, I heard them too late. My anklets. I heard them too late and now I’ll never hear them again. But she couldn’t. The pain came in waves. He bent over her, a candle in his hand, perhaps to see if she was still breathing, and when he did, she felt above her the heat of his breath, his body. The cadence of his concern. So unlike her husband’s. So unlike anything she had ever known. And so, after many years, Jena saw it again: a glimpse of other worlds. She blinked. She closed her eyes. The ache that settled inside of her then was greater than the blood that was leaving her, and in the wake of this wasteland, she gathered all the strength she could muster, and she whispered to him, “Water.”
Nasir set the candle on the ground and rose to fetch the waterskin, but she raised her arm to stop him. She said, weakly, “No. Tell me more about water.”
He seated himself cross-legged beside her. So close that his leg was touching the side of her arm. And as if they had always been talking, as if he were simply continuing a story he’d always been telling her, he said, “There are two kinds of water. Still and running. Still water I know you’ve seen. But running? Have you seen running water?”
She shook her head no. But a moment later, despite the excruciating pain and the loss of blood, her eyes brightened. She said, “I’ve heard it though. My anklets. Do you remember my anklets?”
“Yes, yes, just like your anklets. Naughty, just like they are.” He laughed and then he said, “Water runs in different ways. Your anklets are trickling water. There’s rushing water, too, which is anything but naughty. It can be dangerous. Like a thousand chinkara, fleeing, stampeding.”
“Is it really like that? Could it drown a camel?”
“A camel? Why, it could drown this desert.”
They were quiet. The pain a fist, punching through her insides. Jena tried to imagine the desert, drenched now in starlight, gushing with water. All the dunes, with their graceful curves, and all the khejri trees and all the animals and all the insects and all the people and their belongings and all the villages and towns and all the mustard fields with their carpets of yellow flowers spilled on the ground like squandered sunlight. All the anklets. All of them. Underwater. “Have you seen the sea?” she asked.
“No,” he said, “but I’ve seen rivers.” “The Luni?”
“Yes. And the Ravi. And the Ganga. I saw the Ganga in full flood, just after the monsoons. Sweeping away trees like they were matchsticks. Entire villages like playthings. Brown as tea, the water. But deceptive in its power, its beauty. You can’t behold such a thing and ever be the same again.”
“Why?”
He looked at her then. Into her eyes. “Why,” he said. “Why, indeed?” And she looked back into his. And for the briefest moment, there was no pain. For the briefest moment, she thought she might be looking into depths deep enough to drown a camel. Into the depths of a forest teeming with spotted creatures, each of them full of stealth and danger and desire enough to kill a man. She looked away. She wanted to weep. She wanted her body to shun its sorrows. She wanted her baby to not die. A breeze entered the tent; the candle flickered. The children snored lightly. The desert beyond their tent, and the whole of the world beyond the desert, was nothing. Or, if it was not nothing, then it was a wheel, and they were its still and shining center.
With struggling breath, with perhaps the last of it, she said, “I want to see it one day.”
“What?”
“The Ganga.”
“You will.”
She grimaced and then smiled. Or maybe she smiled and then grimaced. She said, “Do I really sound like water?”
“No,” he said. “Water sounds like you.”
Jena’s husband wanted to leave her body to the vultures.
Nasir suggested she be cremated. “Why waste the wood,” her husband said, then he looked at him pointedly and said, “Why do you care?”
In the end, Nasir exchanged his camel for her ashes. He traveled on foot to Varanasi. He could’ve taken her ashes to a place on the Ganga that was closer—Haridwar, for instance—but he’d seen the Ganga for the first time in Varanasi, standing on the steps of Scindia Ghat, and he wanted to stand again on those steps with Jena. He wanted her to see the slowly sinking Shiva temple, its dome petaled like red salvia in the evening light; he wanted her to see the distant sandbank, the damp stone, and the radiance of a river that had no end. He wanted her to feel holiness as he had felt holiness.
When he arrived, the sky hung low with heavy clouds. The stone steps were damp. Puddled. There were only two worshippers, one in the water, hands clasped in prayer, and the other seated on the bottommost step, looking intently toward the river or maybe at the other bather. A couple with their small child shared a packet of yogurt rice and a bit of pickle, using a banana leaf for a plate. A barber, who’d set up a stand at the top of the ghat, was staring listlessly at a goat tied to a nearby post. Both eating something, strangely rhythmic in their chewing. Nasir set his pack down on one of the stone steps. He felt for the urn that held Jena’s ashes. He’d felt for it so often, had slept with it in his hands on so many nights, that he could map its surface as he had once mapped the caves and the mountains, the minerals and the monsoons of his wife’s body. To be children again, he thought, as he and his wife had once been. To feast before knowing the word famine.
He walked down to the bottom step. The seated worshipper eyed him—his dusty clothes, his bare feet, his weathered face, his sunburnt hair—and then turned away. Nasir took out the urn. He placed it on the warm, wet stone. The water, in the turgid, late afternoon light, was gray and swift. He looked at the Shiva temple. More askew than he remembered it, as if it were a sloop in a gusty wind. He’d heard once that the temple was sinking because the stone was too heavy and that eventually it would be completely submerged in the water. He tried to imagine it, the temple, its ornate carvings, slowly becoming sediment. But, of course, he couldn’t. Some things are too beautiful to imagine gone. But what he did know was the heaviness of stone. What he knew—he saw his dead wife, he saw Jena—was that each of us carries it within us, this heaviness, this stone.
He untied his dhoti. He picked up the urn.
He stepped into the river.
He walked until he was waist deep. He walked until he was chest deep.
He wanted to walk farther still. He felt the river tugging at him, urging him to walk farther still. But he’d too often entered the country of death. For a time, for a little while longer, he wanted to know another country.
He released her. He watched her float away.
She was now the river. Or, as he knew it to be, the river was now she.
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Excerpted from Indian Country by Shobha Rao. Copyright © 2025 by Shobha Rao. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Used with permission of the publisher.
