by Pratap Reddy
Before leaving for the station with Amma, he asked Ramya: “Would you like to come along, love?”
“Yes, yes!” Ramya said, so thrilled that one would think she was being taken to the zoo or the cinema.
A major railway station in India was a throbbing, living organism. It was awake 24/7. A continuous stream of people entered its immense portals, while waves of people poured out in batches. The roads leading to the station were always busy with cars, taxis, scooters, motorcycles, bicycles, auto-rickshaws, manpowered-rickshaws and what have you rushing up and down, trying to avoid jaywalkers who were swarming the place. The incredible clamour, within and without the station premises, had a festive ring to it. Little wonder then that Ramya associated going on vacation, or merely visiting the railway station, with joyous excitement.
She entered the station with bated breath. Holding her Daddy’s hand, she climbed the wide but short flight of stairs under the giant portico. But before she could savour the delights that awaited her, first Daddy had to join a queue — how slowly the line seemed to progress! — to buy a platform ticket for himself. Amma already had her sleeper-ticket which was bought much in advance. It was stashed away in her cloth-bag. Ramya was too young to need a platform ticket. At the entrance to the platform, Amma brought the fast-moving line to a complete standstill while she pulled out her bag, and burrowed into it to dig out her ticket to show it to the stationmaster. The size and colour of a biscuit, it was most likely wet and stained, having jostled for space with betel leaves, nut powder and lime paste. The station master grimaced and snipped a miniscule wedge off her ticket with a stainless-steel instrument that looked like a nail-clipper.
On the platform, there were vendors with carts and vendors with trays, selling toys, balloons, magazines, newspapers, snacks, soft drinks, tea, coffee, cigarettes, and paan. Regular shops and restaurants alternated with waiting rooms and toilets. Hanging over everything was a canopy of pungent odour, a combination of smells from toilets, antiseptic, smoke, and whatnot, unique to a railway station in India.
To Ramya, the most fascinating object in the station was the vending machine. The only one of its kind, it dispensed, for a small fee, a ticket-like card with your weight stamped on it. Ramya’s visit to the station was never complete without getting herself weighed, scraggy as she was.
Then there were the trains themselves, thundering into the station, or parked at the platform, huffing and puffing with irate impatience. The steam engines of old were the real stars — black, demonic beasts belching steam from every pore. Hungry fires raged in their bellies; Ramya would gaze with utter fascination, while the engineer fed them with shovel-loads of coal. (The magic disappeared when steam locomotives were displaced first by diesel and then electric ones, locomotives with no personality, almost indistinct from the coaches they hauled behind them.)
After the stationmaster’s frantic flag-waving, the whistle was blown. The train gave a lurch and, mustering its strength, heaved itself out of the station. Amma put her hand out the window and waved at Ramya as the train bore her away, slowly at first, then gaining so much speed that the carriages racing past became a blur.
During the summer holidays, Ramya took the same train with her mother or father to visit Amma. She lived in a small bungalow perched halfway up a hill. From the bedroom window, you could see a sliver of sea in the distance, grey and flecked with silver, sandwiched between unruffled blue sky and the ragged tops of coconut palms. The house was surrounded by fruit trees — mango, jackfruit and cashew — and wild undergrowth. In the forecourt was an ornamental urn built into the ground. It housed the sacred tulasi shrub. The housemaid watered the plant every day and drew geometric patterns with rice flour on the ground around the urn.
At the back of the house, there was a well with an ancient windlass. When Ramya was young she would like to peer into its smelly, mossy depths. She would drop a pebble, wait to hear the plop, then watch the silken ripples placidly spreading across the green-black surface.
Amma came out of the kitchen onto the verandah from time to time to check on Ramya. If she lingered near the well for too long, Amma yelled: “Don’t play near the well. Come back, it’s not safe!”
On one occasion, Amma said: “Do you know Niranjani who lives in the house beside the cycle repair shop? Her granddaughter was a year or two older than you. She used to come down for holidays from Delhi. She would do nothing but play near their well all day long, not paying heed to her grandmother’s warnings. One day do you know what happened?” Amma paused, partly to catch her breath and partly for dramatic effect. When Ramya shook her head, she went on: “A crocodile crawled out and dragged her in.”
“Dragged whom?” Ramya asked. “Niranjani-amma?”
“You little imp. You’re the limit!” Amma said.
There were not many children in the neighbourhood — the houses were few and far between in that part of the town. There was also the matter of caste: in those days, Ramya was not allowed to play with the half-clad children she sometimes saw running about in joyous abandon.
So she spent hour after hour leaning back on the cement seats on the veranda, reading books. When she was very young they were mostly fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm brothers; later, when Ramya was in middle school, she graduated to Enid Blyton. What a fantastic world Enid Blyton created for children! Secret Seven, Famous Five, The Five Find-Outers, the very names of the series evoked mystery and suspense. And then there were the school stories, set in invented institutions like St. Claire’s and Mallory Towers, humorous and exciting at the same time. No wonder Ramya devoured books, while bees serenaded the flowers in the gardens and butterflies flitted from bush to bush. Sometimes Amma would come to the verandah with a plate of juicy wedges of freshly sliced mangoes, or golden-yellow segments of jackfruit smeared with oil. The inside of a jackfruit is so waxy that if you didn’t apply cooking oil to the blade you wouldn’t be able to get the unbelievably sticky stuff off the knife.
Those were the blessed years when TV was restricted to large cities like Mumbai and Delhi, and neither Hyderabad nor Bengaluru, let alone rural areas, had coverage.
One day when Ramya was deep in a book, Amma said: “How much you read, Ramya! You’ll spoil your eyes if you go on like this. I wish you had more things to do here. Would you like to go up the hill in the evening?”
So the two did a spot of mountain-climbing of sorts, scaling the steep hillside at the back of the house. Ramya scrabbled up the slope, lightly hopping across screes, while Amma, carrying a jute bag, made slow, grunting progress behind her. The hillside was strewn with stones and boulders, and stunted trees and wind-flattened scrub grew here and there with heroic determination. Right at the top there were the remains of an old temple — a small, flat plinth of concrete, and a few low, crumbling stone walls. Years ago, gale-force winds from the sea had hurled themselves shoreward and blotted out the temple no sooner than it was built.
While Amma sat on the leftover stonework, Ramya pranced around, pretending to be the Queen of Jhansi, scything the bushes with a switch as if she were mowing down British troops. Soon she tired of her sanguinary sport, and decided to return to where Amma sat. On the way, she spotted a discarded cigarette pack on the ground, and with the magpie instinct of children she pounced on it. She was thrilled to see the brand name ‘Charminar’. The yellow sleeve had a picture of the most famous monument in Hyderabad. It gave her incredible pleasure to chance upon something that reminded her of her home many hundreds of miles away. With excited yelps, she ran to her grandmother with the crushed and weather-beaten cigarette pack in her hand.
“Look what I found!”
“Throw it away at once!” Amma said. “You’ll get all sorts of diseases if you touch dirty things. You’re a doctor’s daughter, and you should know better.”
Chastened, a disappointed Ramya threw away the empty cigarette pack, and wiping her hand on her skirt despite being a doctor’s daughter, sat down on a stone not too
far from Amma.
The distant sea from their new vantage point was a broad swathe of blue. Ramya saw the silhouette of a steamer, a seemingly stationary purple smudge on the horizon, but it was chugging to a port, a hundred miles up the coast.
“Don’t look so glum. See what I’ve brought for you,” Amma said, as she pulled out a thin bar of Cadbury’s milk chocolate, wrapped in its unmistakeable purple and silver foil.
When Ramya extended her hand, Amma said: “Not right away. You must have your lunch first.” She pulled out a newspaper-wrapped parcel from her bag.
Amma had made her special idlis — a batter of ground rice and lentils steam cooked in small containers made from jackfruit leaves. The idlis acquired a subtle taste and aroma from the leaves. All this was lost upon the seven-year-old Ramya, who was more of an unabashed gourmand, in spite of her much-remarked thinness, than a discerning gourmet.
“Do you come first in the class?” Amma asked, as they peeled away the leafy covering from the idlis.
“Never. There’s a girl called Prabha — she’s so good, nobody can ever beat her.”
“Maybe, but if you worked harder you could beat her?”
“She’s too good. She always gets hundred out of hundred in maths and science. I get more than her only in English.”
“I’m not surprised, seeing the number of books you read!”
“What about Mummy? Did she come first in the class?”
“No, she was good only at one subject.”
“Which one?”
“Moral Science,” Amma said with a sigh. “Come, let’s pack up. It’s time to go back home.”
On the way back, as they carefully picked their way around stones and boulders, Ramya saw a barefoot woman coming up the hill. She wore a loose robe of dull orange, and was thrumming a slender stringed instrument which was little more than a toy. Turning to look in their direction, she flashed a beatific smile. When Amma raised both her hands in a namaste, she nodded in a manner that could only be described as beneficent.
“Ammamma, who is she? Do you know her?”
“No, she’s a holy person, a wandering sadhvi. She must have been visiting the ashram.”
“What’s a sadhvi?”
“She’s a woman who gives up everything in life to attain her ambition.”
“What is her ambition?”
“To liberate her soul from mortal coils of life,” Amma said easily, as if living in the holy proximity of an ashram had honed her vocabulary in such matters. “She devotes herself only to the worship of God.”
“Like Mummy? Did she give up taking care of me for that reason?”
“Not exactly … Ramya you ask too many questions.”
“I don’t understand why the sadhvi has to give up everything.”
“You must sacrifice many things to achieve your goal. Success doesn’t come easily.”
Later in the evening, they sat on the cement seats in the verandah, talking. As the darkness advanced upon them with stealthy steps, Amma told Ramya about her mother and her little brother.
When Mummy was pregnant with her second baby, the gynaecologist warned her that it would be a difficult pregnancy as the placenta was located at an unsafe spot. The doctor counselled Mummy and Daddy to take adequate precautions. The lady doctor presumed that Daddy, being a doctor himself, would realize the implications, and be careful — like making Mummy take sufficient bed rest and restrict unnecessary movement.
One evening, a few months into her pregnancy, Mummy evinced a keen desire to see a Hindi film that featured her favourite hero, Rajendra Kumar. The film was running in a cinema hall called Minerva, which was housed on the second floor of an old imposing colonial building in Secunderabad. Daddy, not being a firm person (Amma’s emphasis), could never put his foot down and say no. Unwilling to displease Mummy, they went to see the film. As it was an old building with no elevators, Mummy had to climb the uncommonly long and steep flight of stairs. When she reached the top, she was slightly out of breath, but otherwise didn’t feel any discomfort. But halfway through the film, her abdomen started to hurt unbearably. When she mentioned it to Daddy, he decided they should leave at once. He took her hand and stumbled out of the semi-dark cinema hall. A trail of tiny droplets of blood followed Mummy out of the theatre. She had to make a slow, agonizing descent of those infernal stairs. Though Daddy rushed her to the hospital, driving his car at a speed he’d never done before and imperilling all the three lives, the doctors in casualty couldn’t save the child.
“Your Mummy blamed herself for her unborn son’s death, and was just not the same after that,” Amma said, After That, like Before Christ, or some such watershed occurrence.
“If the child wasn’t yet born, how do you know it was a boy or a girl?”
“Well … I suppose the doctors can know whether the child was a boy or a girl. Anyway, your Mummy and Daddy were very keen to have a baby boy.”
“Oh,” was all that little Ramya said.
Amma looked at Ramya and said in a sharp tone: “Now don’t you think for a minute that your parents didn’t want you. How much your Daddy adores you! I’ve never seen anyone pampering their child, whether boy or girl, the way your Daddy pampers you.”
“I suppose so.”
“As for your Mummy, she began to withdraw into a shell. She lost interest in the world around her, and immersed herself in religion.”
So that was Mummy’s backstory.
In the evenings, the two of them often attended the evening prayers at the nearby ashram. The ashram was the reason why her grandfather had moved here in the first place. The ashram and its environs were spotlessly clean and profuse with greenery. It was chockablock with fruit trees, and there were proper gardens laid out with flowers and vegetables. The produce from the garden was used in the shrine and the communal kitchen.
The prayer hall of the ashram was full of natural light and air which came in from the many wide-arched windows. Adorning the altar was a life-sized photograph of the guru seated on the floor with his legs properly folded, and his right hand held up, the open palm facing outward, the traditional gesture of benediction. His left hand dropped limply and innocently on his inner thigh, but it looked as if he was scratching his crotch. The picture, draped with a garland made from fresh flowers, was placed on a large luxurious cushion encased in a saffron silk cover. Two orange bolsters were thrown in for extra comfort.
Ramya and Amma, along with other devotees, sat on the straw mats on the stone floor facing the image of the long dead guru, and sang bhajans — devotional songs. One of the devotees played the harmonium, a musical instrument that was like a floor-top accordion. Another beat on the tablas, the Indian drums, and a few others struck the small cymbals. Sometimes, one of the musicians would humour Ramya by giving her a pair of cymbals, two brass hemispheres held together by a short length of thin rope, to clap together as they all sang with devout enthusiasm. The audience didn’t mind at all when Ramya’s playing refused to keep time with the hymns. As she grew up Ramya discovered that in life not everyone was so cheerfully forgiving — she had better keep time with others, or else …
Though Ramya was born in a city and grew up in the lap of luxury, she found living with Amma in her spartan and parsimonious house very pleasant. Away from the rough and tumble of the city, she had plenty of time on her hands: time to read books and above all time to be by herself, indulging in extravagant daydreams. Very early in life she learned to enjoy being alone, with nothing but the elements for company.
The sky was so different in the village. In the daytime it was a wide blue empty dome where silence seemed to echo. The nights were dark and thick, quivering with the noise of crickets, and the sky seemed so low that you felt you could reach out and pluck the stars.
The afternoon is deceptively bright — the temperature is minus fifteen. Ramya decides to go to a temple. She’s been feeling low for many weeks now, the surest sign of depression. Unable to connect with Renata, Ramya had plann
ed to consult her family doctor, and talk to him about her low spirits, hoping he could prescribe some convenient, sugar-coated pills, but changed her mind in the sudden whimsical way she has acquired.
A large dose of religion may have better therapeutic effect on her and maybe even uplift her spirits. More importantly, she also wants to buy a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, preferably with an English translation. She knows that the temple on Derry Road has a small shop attached to it where they sell, with a hefty mark-up, religious books and CDs along with utensils for worship like lamps, bells, incense, and incense-stands. And images of countless Hindu gods, though the collection was no match for what Mummy had in her puja room.
It’s not strictly true that she hasn’t visited a temple in a long time. She’d gone to see the new Swaminarayan temple that had cropped up north of Toronto near Finch and Highway 427. The Toronto Star had regularly carried features and news reports about the project. It had taken nearly two years to build the temple because traditional methods of construction, which disdained steel and concrete, were employed. Hundreds of blocks of stone were piled one on top of the other, Lego style. Each of these blocks was dressed and elaborately carved by hand before being shipped from India. The Prime Minister of Canada had inaugurated the temple, and the event was broadcast on all news channels.
So, on the occasion of “Doors Open Toronto,” when many landmark buildings in the city are thrown open to the public, she drove down to see the temple for herself, as one might go to see tourist spots like the CN Tower or Casa Loma. Ramya had to admit that the temple was quite a marvel of architecture, a gargantuan heap of shapely marble. It was a little too ornate for her taste. Ramya was more moved by the workmanship of the masons, a veritable prayer in stone, than by the actual spirituality of the place.
In the evening she and Ms. Peggy take Highway 10 to Derry. It’s past the rush hour, but the road still has considerable traffic. Progress is slow, and she wishes Missus Pegasus could fly like her male namesake in mythology. Maybe, the name wasn’t the best choice. She was never good at giving names. When she was ten she’d come up with name of Barghest for her pet dog — thanks to Atom Auntie’s eclectic and exhaustive choice of bedtime reading for Ramya.