Police and Society in Brazil
Wesley G. Skogan and Vicente Riccio
The chapters in this volume examine many aspects of the relationship between policing and society in Brazil. As will become clear, there are very tight linkages between many of the most important features of Brazilian life and the police and their problems. Crime is among the issues facing the police, but the list is much longer. In this essay, we describe this police-society nexus, and examine the possibilities for reform in Brazilian policing. Along the way, we point to specific chapters in this book that address the issues we raise, but in more detail. These chapters are based on research by experienced observers of the Brazilian scene, and much of what they report is presented here in English for the first time.
The first fact about Brazil is that it is very large. At 3.3 million square miles, it is slightly larger than the continental United States. In 2017, the population was just over 207 million, or about two-thirds that of the U.S. It features vast, rolling plains, semi-arid regions, jungle and mountains. Forty percent of the country falls in the Amazon region. The largest state in the area, Amazonas, is featured in several chapters of this book. But while the nation’s economy features large agricultural and forest products sectors, Brazil is an urban society. Most of its citizens (about 85%) live in cities. Even in Amazonas, more than 2 million people live in Manaus, its largest city, and they account for about half the state’s population. The largest Brazilian city, São Paulo, is home to 12 million people and is the country’s economic leader.
Like many physically large countries (ranging from India to Australia and the United States), Brazil has a federal system of governance. The constitution limits the powers of the national government and reserves a great deal of authority for its 26 states and the federal capital district. As we shall see, policing is one of those functions. Rio de Janeiro is another big city (6.4 million) that is featured in this book, but most of its policing is controlled by Rio de Janeiro State, which encompasses the city and its surrounding metropolitan area and includes an additional 12 million residents. There are another 15 cities in Brazil with populations above 1 million, and 24 of the 27 states have populations at least that large. São Paulo State is home to a total of 45 million residents.
Locally and nationally, Brazil has a multiparty political system, a vibrant mass media and a strong civil society, so many policies are hotly contested and fought out in elections at all levels of government. Voter turnout is compulsory, and thus high, at over 80%. There is currently a debate over the country’s very fragmented party system. The current party structure inhibits the formation of policy-oriented coalitions in the legislature. Executive branch policies, including those affecting the police and crime prevention, pass through the legislature only after difficult and often corrupt bargains are struck. Legislators themselves often dutifully represent powerful economic elites in their constituencies, especially in rural areas. The federal nature of Brazil also limits the reach of national policies, and bargaining has to take place downward as well if the states are to cooperate with national policy initiatives. One chapter of this book examines the national politics of police reform and the difficulties involved in promoting federal policies among the states.
But an important footnote to the fundamentally democratic character of contemporary Brazil is that in the not-too-distant past the nation passed through an authoritarian abyss that still affects the nature of its institutions, especially the police and the military. April 1964 began with a military coup that was politically aligned with the United States government. This ushered in a 21-year military dictatorship. During this period, most political and human rights were suspended, censorship was imposed and the elected national Congress was shut down. The army took general control of domestic society, and both branches of local policing in Brazil were converted into tools for political repression. Police shared information with army intelligence units. Even today, the Military Police branch of local policing is considered an auxiliary unit of the army, and its military identity is strong even at the state level. During the military dictatorship, thousands of people were tortured and many hundreds are known to have been killed, or they simply disappeared. Civilian rule was restored in 1985, but the overhang of this repressive period—and, until recently, some of those who did the repressing—has lingered on into the contemporary period. Before the military left power, an amnesty law was imposed that protected those in power
during the dictatorship period from prosecution, and their immunity was recognized following the handover.
Another feature of Brazil is that it is among the most unequal societies on earth. The gap between those at the very top and bottom of the income distribution is about five times as great as similar gaps in Northern Hemisphere industrial nations. This is despite the fact that economic inequality in Brazil was falling until its recent financial crisis. In Brazil, the richest 10% of households consistently received almost two-thirds of all household income, and they have done so for decades. In some years, the top 0.1% received as much as 15% of total national income (Souza and Medeiros 2015). In early 2017, the Financial Times estimated that the wage of Brazilian factory workers was US$2.70 per hour and that it was falling.1 Inequality spreads beyond income and wealth; other social cleavages are closely linked to them. For example, wage gaps are reflected in educational attainment. Differences in reading and math scores between students coming from households in the top and bottom income groups are larger than in other countries with similar levels of development. The United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) “Human Development Index” (HDI) assesses three quality-of-life dimensions across many countries: longevity, levels of education and gross national income per capita. In the last HDI global ranking, Brazil scored 75th. It ranked below nations with lower levels of GDP per capita because of violence, health and education issues linked to income inequality. The nation’s education, health and security services have not contributed much to a broad range of social inequalities among poorer and richer Brazilians. The country’s high violent crime death rate is emblematic of this, and it is discussed in several chapters in this book.
There is also a great deal of inequality among the states. The Brazilian National Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) is responsible for monitoring economic statistics. In a report issued in 2014, the IBGE reported GINI indices for the nation’s regions. This indicator rates the distribution of wealth in a society based on the difference in income between the poorest and the richest individuals. It ranges from 0 (an even distribution of wealth) to 1 (highly concentrated wealth). The results showed some progress toward a more equal distribution of wealth in many areas. The Northeast (the poorest region in the country) scored 0.563 in 2004 and 0.509 in 2013; the Southeast (a rich area) scored 0.531 in 2004 and 0.483 in 2013. However, the recession that began in Brazil in 2015 has brought any reduction in inequality across the country to a halt.
A big social fact about Brazil is that it is significantly a mixed-race society. This is deeply linked to the issue of inequality. Long a colony of Portugal, Brazil was a slave-holding country until 1888. Many slaves were imported from West Africa, and there was originally a substantial native population. In contemporary Brazil, the result has produced a very complex racial dynamic.
The 2010 census set the population at about 47% white. The remainder was divided among persons classifying themselves as “black” (8%), “yellow” (1%), or “indigenous” (fewer still), with the largest group (43%) classing themselves as mixed race, or “brown.” But all of these categories are situational and shifting, and each subsumes subtly defined subcategories that vary in significance from occasion to occasion. What these categories mean has been contested among Brazilians for almost two centuries. This includes vigorous debates over the role of class versus race in determining life chances in Brazil, a discussion that most recently has begun to feature statistical analyses weighing the significance of the two factors. However, for our purposes, there are two important facts about race. The first is that it overlaps sharply with inequality. The result is that where people live and how they live are clustered both economically and socially, and that clustering has a lot to do with crime. The second feature of race is that it overwhelms virtually every statistic produced by the criminal justice system. Victims, offenders and prisoners—and especially those in each of these categories who died—are overwhelmingly persons of color (Cano 2010).
Finally, several chapters in this volume consider the fate of Brazil’s favelas, or concentrated urban slums. Favelas are one of the places where poor people of color live, and their prevalence and visibility is another of the distinctive features of Brazilian society. Favelas are numerous. In Rio de Janeiro city, there are approximately 800 favelas, and in 2010, about 1.4 million of the city’s 6.4 million inhabitants lived there. Favelados are not just poor; they are isolated in many ways from mainstream society. Residents often live far from shops or transportation routes. Mostly, these communities have running water, but often there is no provision for the sewage they generate, so health is an endemic problem. Social services may be nonexistent. Electrical service can be sporadic, and there may be few if any streetlights. Few residents have formal claim to the places where they live, and homes are often patched together from cardboard, corrugated iron and scrap wood. The streets are mostly not paved, and buildings have been thrown up without attention to a conventional street grid.
Many favelas are governed not by the formal political system but by criminal gangs that dominate the territory. Governing gangs extort money from residents and the informal businesses that are located there, they fend off incursions by other gangs that want to set up shop, they conduct sometimes large-scale criminal enterprises from their home base, and they form alliances with politicians and corrupt police officials to secure these operations. In a modestly sized area, these gangs might number about 50 or 60 members. Some (but fewer) favelas are under the control of vigilante militia groups. They differ from criminal gangs largely in that they are made up of former or off-duty police officers and other security employees, and they are often under the influence of economic elites and their political allies. They also are
in the business of extracting protection money from local people and businesses, and they illegally resell electricity, cable television and other services to residents (see Magaloni, Franco and Melo 2015). No significant inroads into Brazil’s crime and policing problems will be made without directly confronting conditions in the favelas. (For a great deal more on favelas, see Jovchelovitch and Priego-Hernandez 2013.)
To be sure, it would also be a mistake to consider favelas as uniformly organized and disadvantaged. Preteceille and Valladares (1999) have questioned the “ideal type” that has been constructed regarding favelas. In fact, there is great diversity among and within them. There are “richer” and “poorer” favelas, and different levels of public services delivered in those areas. The incidence of crime also varies from place to place. The favelas in Rio de Janeiro (featured in several chapters of this book) have been a target of public policies since the 90s, with the Favela-Bairro program. It focused on paving the roads, building sidewalks and providing basic infrastructure in those areas. Some of these projects were supported by the Interamerican Development Bank and the World Bank. Understanding this diversity should be important in the design of public policies targeting these areas.
Crime and Policing in Brazil
Violence is endemic in Brazilian society. Most reports on crime in Brazil focus on homicide. These are used to compare Brazil to other countries, or to compare Brazilian cities to each other or over time, because body counts are seemingly the most reliable of the generally unreliable crime statistics produced by the country’s police forces. The absence of reliable statistics in Brazil presents a significant obstacle to developing and evaluating the effectiveness of security policies. There is also no equivalent to the National Crime Victimization Survey in the U.S. or the British Crime Survey. The most reliable source of information on violence are mortality data assembled by the Ministry of Health, and these provide the only basis for counting homicide in Brazil. However, there are problems even in that database. “Death by indeterminate causes” is the classification given to over 10% of fatalities registered in this database. Beyond homicide, there is also a lack of systematic information regarding drug dealing, rates of imprisonment and even police personnel (Cerqueira 2013).
Analyses of homicides on a national basis can be found in reports from the Ministry of Health Statistics that are published annually by Sangari Institute in partnership with Faculdade Latino-Americana de Ciências Sociais (LatinAmerican Faculty of Social Sciences). They produce the Mapa da Violência (Violence Map). This report analyzes data on homicides and other violent crimes. Each year the report includes a special focus on a specific issue. The
2016 report examined homicides by firearms and documented the spread of gun murders across the Brazilian states. The Northeast region (the poorest in the country) faced the largest increase in violence from 2004 to 2014; it went up an astonishing 124%. Other states showing major growth over this period included Rio Grande do Norte (237 gun homicides in 2004, 1,292 in 2014), Maranhão (up 367%), and Ceará (up 314%) (Waiselfisz 2016). An exception to this trend is the state of Pernambuco, where gun homicides dropped by 25%. This decrease may have been related to a program developed by the state called Pacto pela Vida (Pact for Life) that aimed to reduce levels of homicides in Pernambuco. This aimed at integrating the state’s police forces, public attorneys and the judiciary to curb the homicide rate. The participation of civil society was also essential to the program. The adoption of formal goals for the program and measures of its success were another salutary feature of the project. The initial results were very positive, and homicide levels began to decrease. Recently, critics have charged that Pacto pela Vida has been faltering and needs to regain the resources it needs to reduce violence and fear of crime in the area.2 However, Pernambuco continues to not follow the trend of seemingly intractable increases in violence that characterize many states in the poor Northeast.
The Southeast region in Brazil, which is the nation’s richest area, is composed of the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo. Collectively they have high rates of crime, but they too have witnessed a decrease in homicide. Over the same period we considered above, gun homicides there decreased by 36%. The largest decreases were in the states of São Paulo (down 54%) and Rio de Janeiro (down 42%). These decreases are important, because these are the largest Brazilian metropolitan areas. In general, the rise of violence has occurred in states that have lowered their levels of inequality the most in the last decade (Kahn 2013). In turn, rising crime rates can jeopardize other gains in quality of life that can be observed in Brazil. Chapters in this book address policies dealing with violence and measures to improve the quality of policing and police legitimacy.
Comparatively, Brazil ranks among the violent countries in the world. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (2014) most recent report rates nations by their homicide rates. They count “homicide related to other criminal activities; interpersonal homicide; and socio-political homicide” (The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2014, p. 11). This definition discounts deaths due to war or suicide, for example. Based on their calculations, the world homicide rate is 6.2 per 100,000. In Southern Africa and Central America, the aggregate homicide rate was just over 24 per 100,000, and in South America, Middle Africa, and the Caribbean, it varied between 16 and 23 per 100,000. According to the same report, Brazil stood number three on the list for South America, with a homicide rate of 25 per 100,000 inhabitants. Venezuela was number one by a wide margin, at 54 homicides per 100,000, followed by Colombia at 31 per 100,000. In Central America, Honduras scored
90 per 100,000, and El Salvador 41 per 100,000. Brazil as a whole does not reach these peaks, but its rate has been stable at a relatively high level.
In addition to homicide, other fearsome crimes are not reliably counted, but they are widely reported in the media and discussed in political debates. These include kidnapping, illegal weapons sales, extortion from business, all manner of drug crimes and robberies committed at roadblocks set up between airports and their city centers. Drugs have had a particularly toxic effect on Brazilian society, because the trade is dominated by powerful and violent street gangs. Shootouts between them and the police account for a significant portion of the police-involved killings that are registered each year.
As in many societies, it is those at the bottom of the economic and social ladder who bear the brunt of this violence. Chapter 7 in this volume, by Renato Sérgio de Lima and Jacqueline Sinhoretto, cites figures for inequalities in homicide. Young black males from 12 to 29 years of age are on average 2.6 times more likely to be murdered than young white males, and in some states of Brazil’s poverty-stricken Northeast, such as Paraíba and Pernambuco, they are 11 times more likely to be killed. Fatal shootings by police are just as racially disparate. As Chapter 9 documents, in 2011 police in the state of Minas Gerais were twice as likely to kill blacks as whites. This disparity ratio stood at a factor of three in São Paulo, and in Rio de Janeiro police killed blacks at almost four times the rate for whites.
Through 2015, crime had been trending downward in some Brazilian states and for the country as a whole. During the 1990s, Rio de Janeiro was one of the most violent cities on the planet. In the early 2000s, Rio faced about 3,500 homicides per year. This number dropped by about a third through 2008 and 2009, and then dropped significantly more over the next few years. By 2015, the homicide count had fallen to about 1,700 per year. The run-up to the 2016 Olympic Games boosted this total significantly. Homicides peaked earlier in São Paulo (in 1998), and then dropped steadily, to about 50% of its peak. Crime has fallen more in the wealthier areas of the country, which are concentrated in the south, and remain stubbornly high in the poor Northeast. But whatever the trend, the level of homicide in Brazil continues to keep it high on the list of the most violent societies.
An important feature of Brazilian policing is also its violence. The Military Police in particular usually patrol with heavy weapons, and they are quick to use them. They bring heavy weaponry plus armored vehicles and other military equipment to bear during encounters with the criminal gangs that control many of Brazil’s favelas. In the next section, we describe policing in those poor communities, and it frequently involves extensive violence. It is widely reported that police perform “extrajudicial” killings of suspects. As a result, the police shoot and wound or kill very large numbers of people. Official reports usually list these as deaths during confrontations or due to resistance to arrest. Fatal incidents involving the police are tracked by various human
rights groups, which analyze and report them independently. For example, the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety reports that between 2009 and 2015, Brazilian police killed an average of six persons per day, for a total of 17,688 people over that five-year period (Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública 2016). They report that during 2015, police killed 3,320 people, up from 2,212 three years before. In the state of Rio de Janeiro alone, police killed 563 people in 2014. On a fairly consistent basis, police killings account for about 20% of all homicides each year. Studies examining whom they shoot inevitably conclude that the victims of police violence are overwhelmingly poor racial minorities. Another facet of Brazilian violence is the victimization of police officers. More than 358 police officers were killed during 2014. Among this group, only 91 police officers were killed while they were on duty; the remaining 267 were murdered while they were off duty. Due to their low wages, many police officers work as private guards when they off duty, and this can be a risky assignment. Despite being illegal, this off-duty employment practice is tolerated by police commanders. The number of killings of police in Brazil while they are on duty is 110% higher than the number of police officers killed in the U.S. while they are on duty (41), in 2015 (Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública 2016).
Police are also widely reported to use torture. Torture is employed to extract information from prisoners, retaliate when criminal gangs injure an officer, deter opponents from seeking to harm officers or exact revenge on persons who were uncooperative or who disrespected them. Torture victims may well end up a subject for summary execution as well.3 Few of these actions result in any judicial review. More than one of the community-oriented policing projects that are described in the next section have blown up following allegations of police torture of residents and indiscriminant police shootings in retaliation for gang violence against them.
For all of this, by the few measures available, the Brazilian police and the criminal justice system are not particularly effective. There are few useful statistics on crime solution rates that could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of police forces and the criminal justice system as a whole. According to the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, the solution rate for homicide is below 15% of the cases registered. Only small states such Santa Catarina or the Federal District report better performance measures, with solution rates of 43% and 69%, respectively. In general, the police forces in Brazil do not solve complex cases or those linked to organized crime. The majority of cases solved in Brazil are those in which the perpetrator is easily known, such as in cases involving domestic homicide or disputes between rivals (FBSP 2013).
Another facet of policing in Brazil is corruption. Brazilian police are badly trained and very poorly paid, and many struggle to survive by working off-duty private security jobs or arranging to do paid work while they are on duty. In February 2017, police in the Brazilian state of Espírito Santo went on strike for ten days to protest their wages. Police routinely extract bribes
from ordinary citizens in exchange for overlooking offenses, including traffic infractions. Others work for the informal militias that were described earlier. Higher on the earnings scale, they may cooperate with drug traffickers or work with a drug gang in eradicating a rival group. Opportunities for collecting bribes are endemic, because the officers’ daily routines provide them access to corrupters, while their managers provide little in the way of supervision, and the organization generally ignores street-level corruption. At the upper echelons, there can be cozy relations between police leaders and local political and economic elites. This is especially true in poorer and more rural states. There, defenders of land rights and environmental activists can find themselves without protection. The public knows of all of this. Davis, Henderson and Merrick (2003) cite surveys from the 1990s indicating that people overwhelmingly believed that police were involved with organized crime and with informal death squads operating within the ranks, and that many Brazilians feared police as much as they feared crime. The Latinobarometro is a survey that is conducted yearly in all Latin American countries. For 2016, they report that the issue of corruption was second on the list of concerns of Brazilians, putting them close to Bolivia and Peru (Economist 2016). Together, these factors describe a toxic combination of police violence, corruption and ineffectiveness, combined with public cynicism. In a society that needs to build confidence in the police, they are most often viewed as corrupt and dangerous. Later sections of this chapter consider what could be done to address these issues.
Chapters in this book also examine some fundamental features of police organization in Brazil. The first is that there is not one body conducting routine policing, but two.4 Ordinary policing is divided between two distinct bodies: the Military Police and the Civil Police. The Military Police provide the routine street policing familiar to readers from many cultures. They stand by to respond to emergencies, engage in preventive patrol and respond to calls and other forms of complaint. They are organized along military lines and often patrol with heavy weapons. The Civil Police provide what in the Northern Hemisphere is known as “detective work.” They investigate crimes and prepare cases for prosecution when they are successfully concluded. Luis Flavio Sapori describes the historical origins of this distinction and some of its implications for practice in Chapter 2 of this volume. In Chapter 4, Eduardo Cerqueira Batitucci and colleagues describe the strong and distinct cultures that dominate each of them. These often impede the kind of routine cooperation that one might expect between policing agencies that share the task of keeping a jurisdiction safe. They frequently engage in turf wars, competing to take credit when trends look favorable, and their relationship is generally one of distrust. Their strong cultures and political connections have also shielded them from efforts to reform police operations, and have forestalled efforts in some states to merge the two into a single police service.
Wesley G. Skogan and Vicente Riccio
A further feature of both policing branches in Brazil is that there are deep divisions within them, between staff members in managerial positions and rank-and-file officers. In the Military Police, the two groups are recognized as “officers” and “soldiers.” Traditional military culture surrounding the division between officers and the enlisted ranks has been imported wholesale into policing as well. In the Civil Police, the split is between unit leaders and lowerlevel investigators and staff. Chapter 3 in this volume, by Vicente Riccio and colleagues, details the many negative organizational consequences that flow from the strict and impenetrable hierarchy of the Civil Police. Around the world, policing is organized into hierarchical bureaucracies, so these divisions are not a surprise. However, they take on added significance because there is essentially no possibility of advancement between the top and bottom ranks, in either organization. The division between management and street work is both hierarchical and social, based on educational requirements and thus the background of candidates. For the Civil Police, educational requirements to taking the top jobs are even written into the national constitution. Reports by Julita Lemgruber (2002) and chapters in this volume examine some of the pathologies of the resulting divisions between them. These splits undermine internal cohesion and morale, cut managers off from the daily life of street officers, discourage forward thinking among the bottom ranks and create two separate forces with their own cultures inside each of the branches.
A final feature of Brazilian policing is that its military character continues in important ways to resonate with the country’s relatively recent experience as an authoritarian dictatorship. During that period, officers policed the people; they were not a police that was of the people or for the people, which is the tradition of policing that follows the model of Robert Peel’s first London police force. Elisabeth Leeds (2007) concluded that, since the return of the country to civilian control, the policing sector has made the least progress toward becoming a truly democratic institution. Chapter 11 in this volume, by Vicente Riccio and his co-authors, described a police training program aimed at democratizing and humanizing the face of the Military Police. They found in their interviews that officers in the higher echelons of the Military Police still thought of themselves as a military rather than a civilian force. They did not see themselves as reflecting civilian society, which they saw as weak and in need of their strong arm.
Policing the Favelas
Several chapters of this book focus on policing in Rio de Janeiro’s favela communities by Military Police units. Favelas are places that concentrate all of the crime and policing problems we consider in this book. Residents are poor and isolated from many aspects of mainstream society. They are stigmatized
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ordinance of fate it so happened, that at that moment the King of that city was passing by on his elephant. So when she saw it, Shrí said to herself: There is my deliverance in the form of an elephant. And now I must sin a little, to save myself from greater guilt. Then she called to the mahout: Come nearer, O driver of the elephant: for I am anxious to taste the delight of riding on an elephant. And hearing this, the mahout looked at the King. And the King looked at the face of Shrí. And Shrí shot at the King a blue glance from her eye. And instantly the King lost his senses, and said to the mahout: Do as she bids thee. So the mahout brought the elephant under the window, and Shrí let herself fall from the window on to his back. And she caught hold of the King to save herself from falling, and the King almost fainted from excess of joy, and the nectar of her touch. And without losing a moment, he carried her off to his palace, as delighted as if he had conquered the whole earth. But the merchant, when he found that she had gone, abandoned the body in his despair.
Then as soon as they reached the palace, the King said to Shrí: What is thy name and family? Shrí said: I am a King's daughter from a far country, and my name is Shrí. Then said the King: Thou didst well to forsake that miserable trader for me. Should the lioness, forsooth! mate with the jackal? And now will I place thee, like a choice jewel, in the centre of my diadem, and thou shall be the very apex of the summit of my fortune[3]. Then said Shrí: King, do not speak thus. For I am the wife of another. And I fled to thee for refuge, and not for frivolity: for yonder merchant would have made me his wife by force. So do me justice, and let me go: for I may not be a wife to thee.
Then said the King: Thy dark blue eyes have utterly destroyed my sense of right and wrong, which are now mere words without meaning, impotent to hold me as is a lotus stalk to fetter that elephant which brought thee hither; and in vain dost thou talk to me of letting thee go: thou askest me for my life: for till I saw those unfathomable blue lakes which thou hast stolen to make thee eyes, I never lived. Only consent, and I will efface by my devotion the memory of thy husband, as the sun dries up a shallow pool. But Shrí said: Say not pool, but ocean, on which the sun shines for ever, yet never makes it any less: for such is my love to my husband. But the King paid no heed to her words, which entered at his ear, but never reached his
mind. For all his soul was in his eyes, feasting on the face of Shrí, which made him drunk like the juice of Soma[4].
Then seeing the state of the case, Shrí said to herself: Alas! I have escaped the lesser danger only to incur the greater, and become the prey of this unrighteous King. Now there is no help for me, save in stratagem, and the natural craft of woman. And she lifted up her lashes, and cast on the King a crooked glance, that almost deprived him of his reason. And she said, moving her bow-arched eyebrows, with a smile: Out upon the heart of woman, for it is soft as a flower, and averse to constancy! Leave me awhile, for I must consider this matter. And yet, stay not away too long, for thou art good to look upon, and well-fitted to be my husband, were I not already the wife of another man. But hearing this, the King was utterly bewildered, and doubted the testimony of his ears. And he thought: Now she will consent, after a little coaxing. And he looked at her as she stood smiling at him, bowing like a flower from the weight of her bosom and the slenderness of her waist, and laughed in his intoxication, befooled by the roundness of her limbs and the blueness of her eyes, and forgetting that the Creator made woman to be an instrument of delusion, with an exterior of honey and an interior of poison. And he left her to perform his kingly duties, intending to return without delay, and thinking the fruit of his birth attained.
But as soon as he was gone, Shrí summoned a chamberlain, and said to him: Take me to the Head Queen, and lose not a moment, or it will be the worse for thee. And that chamberlain trembled and obeyed her, for he feared her power, saying to himself: The King would throw his kingdom into the sea for a glance from her eye, and now my life is on her forefinger. So when Shrí came before the Queen, she said to her: Lady, thou art my sole refuge. Know, that the King thy husband found me to-day in the city, and stole me away, seeking to make me his wife. Now contrive my escape, for I am the wife of another, and I may not be his wife. And do it very quickly, for this is an opportunity which will never occur again. Then the Queen looked at her, and said to herself: She says well, and I must indeed send her away without losing a moment. For if she remains here, and becomes his wife, the King will abandon everything for her sake, and the state will go to ruin. Moreover, he will never again have anything to do with
me or any other of his queens: for her beauty is like a very feminine incarnation of the five arrows of the god of love.
So she summoned her confidential women; and they disguised Shrí as a dancing girl, and conveyed her secretly out of the palace without delay. But when the King returned, and found that she was gone, he became mad. And he put to death, of his retainers, everything that was male.
[1] See note, p. 21.
[2] As this might sound bizarre to the English reader, accustomed to the elaborate toilettes of western ladies, he should know, that nothing can be more simple than the dress of a Hindoo woman. A single long piece of stuff, wound like a petticoat round the waist, secured, and thrown over the head to form a veil, forms a garment that the Greeks might have envied. Nothing can surpass the taste, beauty, and grace of the way in which it follows and reveals without betraying the figure of its wearer.
[3] He plays on her name. The old Hindoo rájás had the same veneration for their royal fortune (Shrí) as the Romans for their Fors Fortuna.
[4] A play on her name, as a digit of the moon: Soma is the moon, and the famous intoxicant of the early Hindoos.
XIII.
The Light in Darkness
But Shrí, when she got out of the palace, instantly went out of the city by unfrequented paths, and entered the Great Forest. For she said to herself: If I remain in the city, I may fall again into the power of the King, or, it may be, of someone still worse. For alas! every man that sees me is blinded by
my eyes, and I shall not always find a door of escape from persecution. Moreover, to beauty without its guardian, wild beasts are less dangerous than men with souls through the influence of passion worse than those of beasts. Better far to be devoured by an animal, than become perforce the wife of another man.
So she went on through the forest for many days, supporting her life on roots and fruits and the water of the pools and streams. And she tore her clothes to pieces in the bushes, and pierced her feet with their thorns, leaving where she passed on the grass drops of blood, like rubies, mingled with the pearls of her tears that fell beside them, as often as she thought of her absent husband. And the deeper she went into the wood, the more her spirit sank, and the more her soul longed for the nectar of her husband's arms. Alas! the courage of women is but a pale and lunar image in the mirror of that of men, and vanishes in their absence. And at last there came a day when she was seized with panic, and a fear of unknown evil: and she sank down at the foot of a tree, and watered its roots with her tears.
Now it happened, that some Bhillas, hunting, by the decree of destiny, in the forest, came upon her track, and saw the drops of blood upon the leaves. And they followed them up, saying to themselves: Some wounded animal has passed this way. So as they came along, every now and then they stopped and listened. And suddenly, they heard the sound of the voice of a woman, weeping in the wood. Then full of astonishment, they proceeded in the direction of the sound: and all at once they saw Shrí, sitting under a tree, looking like an incarnation of Rati grieving for her husband, when burned by Maheshwara[1]. For her clothes were torn, and her hair was dishevelled, and her great eyes filled with tears resembled the petals of a blue lotus sparkling with drops of water cast upon them by the sporting of swans in a pool. So those wild Bhillas wondered when they saw her, and said to each other: What is this marvel of a dancing girl, so ragged and so beautiful, weeping alone in the wood? And then they went up to her and stood round her in a ring. And she looked in the midst of those black barbarians like a digit of the moon in the jaws of Ráhu. Then after a while the spell of her beauty entered and poisoned the hearts of those Bhillas, like one of their own arrows. And each one said secretly to himself: She shall be my wife. So they debated about her, and proposed to each other to draw lots for her.
But they could not agree about it, and fell to quarrelling, and it was as if a stone had been dropped into a nest of serpents.
Then one laid hands upon her, and then another, till she was nearly torn in pieces. And finally they came to blows, and fought for her over her body, filled by the frenzy begotten by her beauty, and the desire of exclusive possession[2]. And very soon they were all either dead or dying of wounds, for each was more eager to destroy another than to protect himself: and they lay all about her unable to move. Then Shrí, seizing her opportunity, and urged by terror, rose up and fled away from them, being sprinkled by their blood, mingled with her own, for she had received in the struggle a blow from a Bhilla that was meant for another. And she ran on, stumbling over roots and creepers in her haste, till she came at last to a forest pool. And there she lay down at the edge of the water and drank greedily; and afterwards washed her wound and stains, and bathed her feet, and overcome by weariness, fell asleep. Then the moon rose, and stole through the trees and kissed her with beams that trembled with admiration[3]; and the wild animals came down, one by one, to drink at the pool, and obedient to the commands of Triambaka, did her no harm, but licked her feet and hands as she lay.
Now, as fate would have it, this was the very pool, at which Umra-Singh had met with Ulupí, the daughter of the Daitya. And in course of the night, Ulupí came herself to the pool, to dance and sport according to her wont. And when she arrived, she saw Shrí, lying asleep by the pool. So she came and stood over her, and marvelled at the beauty of her limbs, even though her eyes were shut. And at last, out of curiosity, she touched her on the bosom with her finger, saying to herself: Is this an illusion, or is it a real woman, and is she dead or alive? But Shrí shuddered at her touch, for it suggested evil to her sleeping soul. And she opened her eyes, and their deep blue awoke the envy of the daughter of the Daitya, and astonished her even more than before.
Then they looked at each other, like light and darkness, and each wondered at the loveliness of the other, forgetful of her own. And at last Ulupí said: Who art thou, and what is thy name and family, and whence hast thou come to my pool, and why? Shrí said: I am a King's daughter, looking
for my husband, whom I lost, by the operation of crimes in a former birth, at the very moment that I found him again, after that he had returned to me from the Land of the Lotus of the Sun. But when Ulupí heard her, she was filled with sudden rage and malice. And she said to herself: Ha! so this is that absent lotus of the day, by reason of whom my beauty was scorned, and set at nought by the handsome stranger who saw me dancing by my pool. And instantly she started up, and assuming a terrific form, she gnashed at Shrí with teeth like saws, and made horrible grimaces at her, saying: Wretch, thou shalt never quit this wood, but wander for ever with thy accursed beauty among its trees, haunted and beset by hideous illusions till thou shalt long for death. Let thy absent husband save thee if he can. And she vanished with a peal of laughter, leaving Shrí fainting by the pool.
But Ulupí flew through the wood, and found Nightwalker, the old Wairágí, and told him all, and begged of him a boon, saying: Torment this miserable mortal woman, and deceive her with illusions for she has done me deadly injury. And Nightwalker rejoiced at the opportunity, for he remembered how Umra-Singh had defied him, and cut off his tongue in the wood. But he said: This is no easy matter, for we are forbidden by Pashupati to do her harm. But though I will do her no injury, I will delude this wandering wife of a vile husband, till she will desire to abandon the body of her own accord.
[1] See note, p. 9.
[2] ahamahamiká, 'each one saying I, I.'
[3] The Moon proper, in Sanskrit, is Lunus, not Luna.
Illusion
But Shrí, when she came to herself, sat weeping, and fearing for herself in the future: for she foreboded evil from the malicious pranks of the daughter of the Daitya. And yet she could not tell, how she could possibly have offended her, or deserved her anger. And as soon as day broke, she rose up, and began to go trembling through the wood, in which the shadows of night still hung among the trees, starting at the noise of the falling leaves, and yearning for emancipation from danger in the form of her husband's presence.
Then after a while, she stopped and listened: for she heard among the trees steps, as of one coming in her direction. And her heart beat violently, as if to say: Let me abandon thy body, and so escape the danger coming on thee. So she hid herself in a hollow tree, and peeped out in terror. And suddenly, strange! there in the dim twilight she saw her husband coming towards her, looking just as he did, when she left him in the palace at Indirálayá. And instantly she ran towards him, overcome by emotion and great surprise, and caught him in her arms, exclaiming: At last, at last, I have found thee again. And she wept aloud, and forgot in that moment all her sorrow; and she looked at him, and laughed for joy, and closed her eyes, as if, like the sun, the sight of him dimmed and overcame the faculty of vision. Then after a while, she opened them again, and started and shrieked, and her blood became ice, and her heart stopped. For he that held her in his arms was not her husband, but a hairy thing with hideous eyes, that resembled an incarnation of the brute in human shape; and it fastened those fearful eyes upon her own, and laughed and whined and panted like a beast with hot quick breath into her face. Then her senses abandoned her, like cowards, and she sank down to the earth in a swoon.
And when at length she revived, she looked, and saw that the sun was declining in the western quarter. But the moon had not yet risen, for it was the beginning of the dark half of the month. Then all at once memory came back to her, and she shook with agitation. And she said to herself: Was it a reality, or was it only an evil dream? Surely it was but a dream; for I am very weak and tired. And even now I cannot tell, whether I wake or sleep.
So she sat with her eyes closed; fearing to open them, lest she should see she knew not what among the shadows of the trees. And then the waning moon rose, and poured through the interstices of the leaves beams faint and pallid, as if sharing her own terror. And at last, unable to endure any longer the silence and the solitude, she rose up and began to move slowly, with hesitating steps, through the dark wood, not knowing where to go, yet not daring to stay where she was.
And suddenly, as she went, she looked before her, and there, in an open space, again she saw her husband, lying still under a tree. Instantly she stopped, and stood, balanced in the swing of vacillation. For the joy of reunion, and the desire of safety, and the fear of solitude drew her towards him like a threefold cord: while the memory of her deception, and the fear of illusion, and the anticipation of unknown danger, fixed her to the ground like roots. And she wavered and swayed on her feet, like a young shoot fanned by opposing breezes: while large tears fell from her eyes, like drops of camphor from a moonstone[1]. And as she stood there doubting whether he were dead or alive, for his face was wan in the light of the pallid moon, his eyes opened, and met her own. And he sprang up, and ran towards her, while she remained unable to stir, and took her in his arms, while she shrank from his embrace. And he exclaimed: The sight of thee has lifted me out of the mouth of death, for I had determined to abandon the body. And then he said again: Alas! and why, O thou of the lovely eyes, dost thou shrink from me? But Shrí remained silent, torn by suspicion, and shaken by the beating of her own heart. And ever and anon she raised her eyes, and looked at him in doubt. And then at last she said slowly: Art thou indeed my husband? is it really thyself and no one else? Then he said: What is thy question or thy doubt? Hast thou forgotten me already? Surely it is but a little while since I lost thee in the palace of Indirálayá. Then said Shrí, sighing: There came to me but now one who resembled thee in every feature, and deceived me: and even now, I shudder when I think of it, lest thou too should be another such as he.
Then he said: Dear, thou art weak, and a dream has deceived thee: but this time, it is no dream. Know that I am none other than myself, and thou art with me. Let me dispel thy terror with a kiss. And he bent down, and she raised her face with a smile, saying to herself: It was nothing but a dream.
But even as she touched his face, it changed, and became gigantic and misshapen, with a large tongue that hung out of lips that resembled those of a cow; and it broke out into loud laughter, and disappeared. But Shrí fell to the ground, as if menaced by the outstretched forefinger of death.
[1] The Hindoos have a superstition, illustrated in a previous page, that moonstones in the rays of the moon distil a sort of lunar syrup, nectar or camphor, supposed to be composed of the substance of the moon
XV.
The Dead of Night
So she lay, all night long: and when at length the day dawned, she came, though with difficulty, back to herself. And she tried to rise, but could not, for her limbs refused to do their duty. So she lay there, cold as snow, and shivering like the surface of a lake ruffled by the wind.
Then gradually the sun left his home in the eastern mountain, and ascended the sky. And warmed by his beams, a little of her strength returned: and after a while, she rose to her feet, which wandered away, and carried her where they would, until they brought her to another forest pool. And there she lay down, and leaned and drank of its water. And she looked into its mirror, and saw herself, slender and emaciated as the old moon, but pale and colourless as that moon at mid-day[1]. And her long hair fell down over her shoulder into the water. Then she bound up that wet hair into a knot, and remained all day by the pool, not endeavouring to go further: for she said to herself: Rather let me stay here to perish of hunger, or furnish myself food to some wild beast, than continue my journey through a wood filled with illusions worse than a hundred deaths. For they wear the guise of
a friend, and so finding entrance into my heart sting it like serpents, turning into poison the nectar of him whom most of all I long to see. Surely my sins in a former birth were terrible in their enormity: for I have suffered in this existence pain sufficient for many lives. And now I feel that I cannot long endure, for my strength is becoming exhausted. O that I could indeed find my husband, were it only to die in his arms!
So she sat by the pool, grieving like a female chakrawáka for her mate, while the sun made, like the enemy of Bali, but three steps over the sky. And when at last he sank, she also grew weary, and fell asleep on the edge of the pool. And in her dreams she saw her husband, and drank her fill of the nectar of his embraces. And then, in the dead of night, she awoke, and sat up, and looked, and lo! there in the moonlight she saw him again, silently sitting beside her. And she leaped to her feet in agony, and turned to fly, and screamed aloud. For there stood before her another husband on the other side. Then suddenly the whole wood was full of laughter. And her reason fled, and she became mad. And she exclaimed: Out on this wood, for it is full of husbands! And she began to run through the wood, shutting her eyes, and stopping her ears.
[1] The same idea is beautifully put by Butler in Hudibras, where he calls the sun's light on the moon a Mysterious veil, of brightness made, That's both her lustre and her shade.
Before Dawn
And now, by the decree of destiny, it so happened, that Umra-Singh, having wandered through the whole world looking for his wife, roaming up and down in the forest, was lying asleep in another place, close to that very pool. And suddenly he laughed in his sleep. For in his dreams he had found again the Land of the Lotus of the Sun. And he stood once more in the moonlit hall, beside the golden couch. Then slowly, slowly, he raised the pall, and looked long at the face of Shrí. But as he gazed, it became apeish, and stuck out at him a large red tongue. And he saw before him, not Shrí, but the old Wairágí. Then a shout of laughter rang in his ears, mingled with the voices of criers and the din of drums; and he started to his feet awake, with an icy sweat on his brow.
And as he stood there, doubting still, for the laughter in his waking ears, whether he woke or slept, he looked before him, and saw in the moonlight the figure of a woman, running towards him: and instantly he knew her to be Shrí. For out of the shadow of her floating hair her great eyes glittered in the moon like the blade of his own sword, and flashed into the night before her like lightning from a dark blue cloud. And he ran to meet her with a shout of joy. But Shrí, when she saw him coming, stopped short, and began to laugh like one possessed by a vampire. And crying: What, another! she turned and fled away from him faster than ever, covering her eyes with her hands. But Umra-Singh was so astonished, that he stood like a tree, rooted to the ground: saying to himself: Is it reality, or is it a dream? Yonder she flies from me in terror as if I were an enemy.
And then, seized with frenzy, he began to pursue her, calling aloud: Shrí! Shrí! So they ran through the wood in the moonlight, in and out of the trees, like a spotted panther and a black antelope. And suddenly, Shrí slipped and fell. And a tawny lion leaped out of the wood, before the eyes of UmraSingh, and stood over her as she lay. Then Umra-Singh turned white with fear, and uttered a groan. And in a moment he reached them as he ran, and struck at the lion, with all his force, a blow of his sword. Then lo! that phantom lion vanished, for he was but an illusion of the crafty Nightwalker. But the sword fell, sharp and true, on the shoulder of Shrí, and cut through to her heart.
Then Umra-Singh fell on his knees beside her with a wail, and took his darling in his arms, while her blood gushed out over him like a river, carrying away her life. And as his hot tears fell on her face like rain, Shrí opened her dying eyes: and instantly they were full of peace, for she knew that it was her husband at last. And she said slowly: Weep not for me, O my lord, for I have attained the emancipation of union with thee. All day long, I have sought thee: but I have found thee in the evening, before my sun goes down: that is enough.
