Pilla
Pilla was born in a hamlet of dry fields and thorn scrub on the Deccan plateau, where the land broke into stony ridges and shallow soils and where families watched the sky for the monsoon. The Satavahana kings held power along the trade routes to the western coast, and their agents and local headmen collected grain and labor dues. Traders moved between inland market towns and the ports with salt, cloth, and stamped coins. Pilla’s people spoke a Dravidian village speech and kept household and village rites for boundary spirits, ancestors, and fierce local goddesses, with a few Sanskrit blessing words that traveled with ritual specialists.
Her mother Rakki had already carried three pregnancies to the edge of birth and returned with empty arms. Kanni came first in 49 BC and died the day she arrived. Ponni followed in 47 BC and lasted no longer. In 46 BC a son, Malla, was born and died before his hair could be oiled. Rakki spoke of them in short phrases and counted them in offerings at the boundary stone. When Rakki’s fourth child arrived in 45 BC, the women worked fast. They smeared the floor with fresh cow dung, set a small lamp at the hearth, and tied a black thread at the infant’s wrist. Rakki whispered a few words she had been taught—“svasti, svasti”—without knowing their grammar, only their use. They named the child Pilla, a small, plain name that fit a house that did not reach for grandeur.
Kodan, her father, farmed a small plot without irrigation. He sowed millets and pulses when the first steady rains softened the ground, and he kept a few animals for dung and milk. In the cool mornings Pilla followed him to the field edge, carrying a water pot no bigger than her forearm. He set her to scare birds with stones and a sling cord. Rakki kept her close, checking the child’s skin for heat and her stools for signs of sickness, pressing neighbors for remedies and then falling back on what she trusted: neem smoke, bitter leaves, and offerings at the village boundary stone.
Aunt Periya, Rakki’s sister, crossed from a nearby settlement when she could. She brought news, shared seed, and sat with Rakki when the fever season returned. When Pilla was five, after a heavy rain that left water standing in hoof prints and borrow pits, two households near them lost adults to a shaking illness. Kodan burned damp trash at the edge of the yard to keep insects down. Rakki insisted the family eat only hot food for days. Pilla watched, learned, and repeated the rules out loud.
By eight she moved in the women’s orbit. She helped winnow, tossing grain from a flat basket so the chaff drifted away, and she learned to judge when the wind was right. She talked while she worked. She liked working in a group and the small jokes that came with it—teasing over who could keep a clay pot balanced on the hip without a hand, or who stole the first roasted millet from the pan. Soma, a neighbor girl a few years older, taught her a song used for steadying the hands during pounding. Pilla carried stories between work groups, repeating them with extra details, then worrying afterward that she had said too much.
The market road mattered even in their hamlet. As Pilla grew, she heard more talk of coins: a tax collector who demanded payment in stamped metal for part of the dues, a trader who offered a better rate if grain came measured in a standard basket rather than a household scoop. Kodan disliked those changes. He trusted grain and labor and the rules he already knew. Pilla listened closely anyway. When she was thirteen, she walked with Soma to a nearby market day, carrying a small bundle of dried pulses. She watched how men weighed salt and how cloth was measured against a reed. She counted with her fingers and corrected Soma’s quick mental sums, then spent the walk home replaying the exchanges, worrying over whether they had been cheated.
Marriage negotiations started when she was fourteen. Kodan and Rakki pressed for a match nearby; they had no surviving sons, and they wanted family close enough to help in bad years. Pilla disliked the talk and asked the same questions repeatedly—who would her husband’s people be, what would she bring, where would she sleep. Kodan answered once and then told her to stop circling the matter. The match was set with Korra, a young man from a neighboring cluster of houses, with land like theirs and a father who worked his own hands.
Periya died that year, before the wedding, taken by a fever that came late in the season. Rakki sat with her sister’s body and returned quieter than before. Pilla helped prepare food for the mourners and heard her mother repeat Periya’s name at the boundary stone each morning for days.
Pilla married Korra at fifteen. Women rubbed turmeric on her arms, combed her hair tight, and fed her sweetened rice as a send-off. She walked to Korra’s house with her head covered and her jaw clenched from holding back questions. Korra lived with his widowed mother, Velli, in a house like the one Pilla had left: packed-earth floor, thatch roof, a hearth in the corner. Korra had two brothers who had already married and built their own houses nearby. The first year settled into work. Pilla rose before full light, swept the yard, lit the hearth, and set gruel to cook. After sunrise she went to the field with Korra or with Velli, pulling weeds in lines, carrying bundles, and stacking stalks. She kept a habit of counting stores: how many baskets of millet remained, how many pots of pulse, how many coils of rope.
She wanted children and feared the attempt. A pregnancy ended early when she was seventeen; Rakki came over and sat with her, setting an offering of rice and flowers for a village goddess known for guarding mothers. When she was twenty, another pregnancy ended with a stillbirth. Pilla did not speak for days afterward except to give instructions for chores. She returned to pounding grain too soon and then lay awake, listening for sounds in the night yard. Korra did not strike her, but he showed his impatience in other ways: walking off mid-conversation, refusing to discuss seed choices, pushing her to attend festivals when she wanted to stay home. Velli told her to stop worrying so much, that worry itself could spoil a womb.
The years that followed brought more of the same. Pilla conceived again in her mid-twenties and lost the child before it quickened. She stopped counting after that. She worked the field, stored the grain, tended the hearth, and kept her fears to herself as much as she could. When a trader passing through suggested a new variety of pulse that grew faster in dry soil, she refused to try it. She trusted the seeds she knew. When Velli suggested a different remedy for Pilla’s cramping, she shook her head and returned to the bitter leaves and neem smoke her mother had used. The known ways felt safer, even when they failed.
She remained tied to the women’s groups. She could be sharp and funny with Soma, and she liked sitting near the threshing floor when the work was done, eating spiced lentils from a shared leaf. She saved the best pieces of roasted field rat for herself once and laughed at Soma’s outrage, then spent the evening worrying that someone had noticed. When ritual days came, she laid a small line of rice at the threshold, touched water to her forehead, and murmured the little Sanskrit words she knew in the same breath as local-language requests to ancestors and boundary spirits.
Velli died in 17 BC. She had grown frail over several seasons, coughing through the cold months and eating less each year. Pilla washed her body and helped carry her to the burning ground. Korra said little. The house felt emptier.
Her father Kodan died in 12 BC, during a dry year that left the fields cracked. He had gone to the field as always, then sat down in the shade and did not get up. Pilla was thirty-three. She walked to her childhood home and found Rakki sitting outside, staring at nothing. The funeral rites took two days. Pilla helped measure the grain for offerings, then stayed while neighbors came and went. Rakki was alone now, and in the years that followed Pilla walked over more often, carrying a pot of gruel or a handful of dried pulse, sitting with her mother while the light faded.
Korra died in 9 BC. A fever moved through the settlement after the rains. He stopped going to the field, then stopped eating. Pilla sat near him with water and thin gruel, asked the ritual elder Nandi for a protective rite, and stayed awake through the night. Korra’s body was carried out before sunrise.
She tried to hold the plot alone. She had no children to take up work, and Korra’s two brothers—who had their own families to feed—pressed their claims on the land their father had once farmed. They took back a portion of the field that had come through their side. What remained was barely enough. The next monsoon failed in 7 BC. Seed sprouted unevenly, then dried. Pilla borrowed from Eruvan, a better-off cultivator who lent grain for repayment at harvest with interest counted in extra baskets. The year after that the rains came late again and pests took what survived. Eruvan demanded his due. Pilla measured out grain with careful hands, refusing to cheat the measure even when her own stores shrank to almost nothing. To keep seed for the next sowing, she pledged part of the harvest and accepted terms that meant Eruvan could claim first pick of whatever grew. Each year the debt rolled forward.
By 5 BC she moved back to her mother’s house, only a short walk from where she had been born. Rakki was widowed and aging, and the two women shared what they had. They shared the field tasks they could still claim, relied on exchange labor at peak times, and took help from neighbors in return for food and future work promises. Pilla’s talkativeness served her then. She negotiated small swaps, passed messages, and kept the ties that brought a few extra hands at harvest. At the same time she worried openly, repeating worst outcomes until Rakki snapped at her to be quiet.
In her late forties and early fifties, Pilla spent more time close to home. She sorted grain, repaired baskets in uneven bursts, then left tasks half-finished until Rakki’s scolding drove her back. She kept an eye on the sky and on the water pits after the rains, warning younger women not to let children sleep near standing water. When Rakki’s joints stiffened, Pilla washed her, cooked for her, and carried her outside to sit in the shade during the hottest part of the day. At festivals she still went, talking with Soma and others, touching the boundary stone with wet fingers, placing a pinch of rice and a smear of turmeric, and repeating “svasti” under her breath as she turned back toward the houses.
Rakki died in 10 AD. She had been failing for months, eating little, sleeping badly, and complaining of pains in her joints. Pilla sat with her through the last night and watched her breathing slow. She buried her mother with the rites she had seen performed for Kodan and Velli and Korra and all the others. Then she was alone.
Pilla remained in the same hamlet, still tied to the small field rights that had not been taken, living on the edge of other households’ help. Soma brought her food sometimes. The next monsoon brought the familiar season of fevers. In 11 AD, during the weeks after the rains began, Pilla fell ill with a shaking fever and could not keep water down. Neighbors brought bitter decoctions and laid cool cloths on her skin, and Nandi marked a line of ash near the hearth. She died before the next market day.
Her body was washed, wrapped in cloth, and carried out beyond the settlement to the burning ground. A small offering of cooked rice and sesame was placed for her, and the fire was tended until the last embers settled.