by Sudha Murty
SUDHA MURTY
Here, There and Everywhere
Best-Loved Stories of Sudha Murty
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
1. A Tale of Many Tales
2. ‘Amma, What Is Your Duty?’
3. Honesty Comes from the Heart
4. The Red Rice Granary
5. Lazy Portado
6. A Life Unwritten
7. The Line of Separation
8. India, the Holy Land
9. Bonded by Bisleri
10. In India, the Worst of Both Worlds
11. How I Taught My Grandmother to Read
12. Rahman’s Avva
13. Cattle Class
14. The Old Man and His God
15. A Lesson in Life from a Beggar
16. May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Children
17. Food for Thought
18. Bombay to Bangalore
19. Miserable Success
20. How to Beat the Boys
21. Three Thousand Stitches
22. The Meaning of Philanthropy
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Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE
Sudha Murty is the chairperson of the Infosys Foundation and a bestselling author. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. She started her career as a development engineer and has also taught computer science at Bangalore University colleges. She is a columnist for English and Kannada dailies, with twenty-nine books and 200 titles to her credit. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. Among the awards she has received are the R.K. Narayan Award for Literature, the Padma Shri in 2006, the Attimabbe Award from the Government of Karnataka for excellence in Kannada literature in 2011 and, most recently, the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Crossword Book Awards in 2018. She has received seven honorary doctorates from universities in India.
To Shini.
You are my reflection in thoughts,
in deeds and in appearance.
Introduction
Often, I sense that there is a lot of myself in my stories, whether it is my friends or family or the people I meet. However, the experiences that I write about are mine. I cannot disassociate from myself while writing about them. This book contains some of my most cherished experiences that are like beautiful flowers to me and have been put together here as if to complete a garland. While most of the experiences are from previously published books, there are two new flowers: one that highlights my literary journey and the other that elaborates on the true meaning of philanthropy.
This book is dedicated to my brother Shrinivas. Writing about him is easy enough and yet so difficult. I look like him, think like him, read like him and eat like him. I have enjoyed his company since he was born—I was the second child and he was the fourth. I can spend hours with him without any boredom setting in.
Today, he is a renowned astrophysicist who has innumerable awards and distinguished accomplishments to his credit. His work is all Greek to me, just like mine is to him. I think he is extremely focused and absolutely impractical—he doesn’t care much about his appearance, social appropriateness, what others think of him, or even food for that matter. I am much more practical in my approach. In my journey, I have been an integral part of the administration of many organizations. But despite what may appear to be major differences, we are the best of friends.
When Shrinivas and I were children, we had decided to memorize a dictionary each during the summer holidays. Shrinivas was part of the first batch of a recently formed English-medium school in our locality. That school was Kendriya Vidyalaya. So, he chose to learn the English dictionary while I defaulted to the one in Kannada. At that time, the children in the family had been assigned the task of walking the family dog. At times, both of us did not want to take him out individually because we wanted to use that time to learn a few more words. After some thought, we decided to walk the dog together in an effort to recite the new words we had learnt and to avoid monotony. During our walks, we did more than what we had planned. I educated myself about madhyama yoga that my brother was learning in Sanskrit, and I spoke to him about trigonometry. I was surprised at the speed with which he learnt its concepts despite the fact that he was younger than me and that it was not even part of his syllabus at school. Other times, we loved to debate about our difference in opinion on various topics.
From the time that I can remember, Shrinivas has loved his three sisters equally. When he was sixteen, he had gone to Nagpur for a debate and won a cash prize. With that money, he bought one sari. He brought it back and gave it to the three of us, saying, ‘This is all that I could afford, and I want all of you to share this sari.’
Time has passed and our lives have changed. Still, the four of us are there for each other when things get rough and when happiness abounds.
My brother has been living in a different country for the past forty years, and we meet only annually. But we remain strongly connected and he continues to occupy a very special place in my heart. He is caring but not very expressive and lives in his bubble of science and astrophysics, along with stars, brown dwarfs, black holes and other entities. The only gift that I can really and truly give him is this book: a dear and precious part of me.
1
A Tale of Many Tales
Every person’s life is a unique story. Usually, the story becomes famous only after a person receives recognition in ways that matter to the world. If you peep into what lies deep inside, it is the changes he or she has gone through—subtle changes that the world may never understand.
Most people undertake an arduous journey full of highs and lows that helps them modify and create new perspectives, thus forming a better understanding of the world and realizing the fact that real passion is much more beautiful than the pinnacle of their accomplishments. Ironically, life appears to be barren and aimless to some achievers even after they reach a big goal.
Recently, I received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Crossword Books at Mumbai’s Royal Opera House. The categories were unravelled on stage one by one: fiction, non-fiction and children’s, among others. The jury members gave insights into their strategies and opinions, and my mind went back to the beginning of my literary journey.
I am not a student of literature; I did not pursue a degree in the subject. But literature has always fascinated me. I belong to a family of teachers where books are treasured and I was inclined towards books at a very young age.
I grew up in a village where the medium of communication was the local language—Kannada. Mine was a Kannada-medium school. Sometimes, a makeshift theatre under a tent would showcase Kannada movies. There were barely any radio stations either. After we finally did get a radio at home, it was monitored closely by the older members of the family who limited its use to Kannada programmes only. But as kids, we all have our ways. When the elders weren’t at home, I would listen to Radio Ceylon and one of its popular shows called Binaca Geetmala. I even recall Sri Lanka’s national anthem, Namo Namo Mata, which often played on that station. Other than that, there was no trace of English in my childhood but there was plenty of time to figure out my creative outlets.
My family frequently went for small day trips: temple visits, wedding-related events, picnics or a visit to a historical site.
As soon as we would return home and settle for the evening, my mother would insist, ‘Now sit and write about your day. You may not remember tomorrow what you have seen today, and writing is a wonderful exercise for your tiny fingers and young minds.’
I almost always resisted her instructions. Sitting in one place after
an exciting day didn’t sound like a lot of fun. So, I would respond, ‘I will write tomorrow.’
‘That’s fine. You can also have your dinner tomorrow then,’ my mother would say.
This is how I was forced to sit and write.
Once I began writing, I slowly but surely began to find it fun. I could play with combinations of the fifty-two letters in the Kannada alphabet and create meaningful words to express my feelings: joy, sadness, excitement and anything else that I felt. Before long, writing became a fond habit.
For many, many years, I wrote down my daily thoughts—at least twenty-five lines a day for two decades, not realizing that the process was inadvertently improving my expression and adding clarity to my ideas. For this, I owe gratitude to my first teacher, my mother.
As a teenager, I began writing with a tinge of seriousness, a lot of adventure and perhaps even a shade of romance. Modernity was the best thing there was, or so I thought.
I wrote about Mozart and submitted the article to a local newspaper. When it appeared on a Sunday, I was ecstatic. I took the newspaper to school and shared the article with my teachers and classmates. My friends looked at me with awe and I felt like I had really achieved something! It was very rare for women to get published in those days and, in that instant, I realized that I was possibly the only girl in school whose article had been picked up by a newspaper.
Later, I wrote a romantic story and sent it to the same newspaper. Days passed but I did not receive a reply. So, I sent a reminder to the editor with a prepaid stamped envelope, hoping that it would encourage him to reply. Still, there was nothing. Finally, I gathered all the courage that I could muster and went to meet the editor. As expected, it was a man since women editors and journalists were absolutely unheard of then. The editor looked at me and spoke gently, ‘My child, we cannot publish this article. A good piece of literature must use the right mix of reality and imagination. Experience, observation, introspection: these senses must be developed consciously. So don’t give up, but think about the feedback that I have given you today.’
As I sat and brooded over this, I understood that imagination in itself was only a shining thread and not a piece of beautiful cloth, that writing simply about facts or real issues could be dry and writing without creativity would be akin to reporting. The editor was right—a good mix of both aspects makes for interesting and impactful writing. It was a lesson that I have never forgotten and one that I practise even today!
My mother encouraged me. She said, ‘Don’t worry about getting published. Even if you don’t, don’t stop writing. I can promise you that when you look back and read your articles again after ten years, you will see the improvement in your expression.’
Motivated, I kept writing.
Later, when I submitted my articles to a local newspaper, some of them began to be published occasionally—like a pleasant shower during the summer. There was no financial compensation for these articles, and I didn’t expect any either. Getting my writing published felt like the biggest compensation!
The years flew by. I completed the tenth grade from my Kannada-medium school and joined an English-medium college.
In the old days, nobody cared about the plight of the teenagers who were switching from Kannada to English as a medium of instruction. There were many like me in the same rocky boat. To make it worse, it was the critical year where my academic performance would become the greatest factor in deciding whether I got admission to engineering or medical courses or not. Some of my peers were so aghast at the change in language that they changed their courses to study the arts—not because they really wanted to change their subjects, but because science was known to be tough and the arts course was thought to be easy, giving them a chance to do well while accommodating the change in language.
I was fifteen years old then and unable to write a single paragraph in English. Confused, I approached my mother. She said, ‘You love Kannada and writing in it, don’t you?’
I nodded.
‘Then don’t get scared now. English is just another language. You simply have to read more in English and start writing in it too until you get comfortable with the language.’
From that day on, I concentrated on reading English books and found it very challenging. But I persevered, unwilling to give up, and wrote at least one paragraph in English every day. My grandfather gifted me an English–Kannada dictionary for my birthday that year, which became my constant companion for years after that.
Luckily for me, mathematics, physics and chemistry do not require extensive English. I managed to do well and get admission to an engineering college. For a brief period, I stopped writing because of my schedule. Apart from the regular coursework, the engineering drawings were tough and the experiments tedious. Not to mention that I had to manage everything alone. There was barely any time to write.
The years flew by and I wrote less and less, but I read more and more. My inclination towards reading was augmented by my husband’s love for it. Since the day we met, he has been gifting me books and continues to do so even today. There is always a brief message on the first page of each gift: ‘To You, From Me’. We read some books together, especially biographies and humour. But I was also interested in other subjects such as history, technology and anthropology while Murthy was more motivated towards reading about communism and coding.
There was an inherent shortage of money but the desire to read more books remained as strong as ever. So, Murthy and I decided to set aside a budget of three hundred rupees a month to purchase books from the once-iconic Strand Book Stall. That was all that we could afford back then, and we would save this money by cutting down on expenses in other areas—we would travel only in crowded buses and local trains and cook and clean at home. That helped us save the money we needed for the books. But even then, this budget wasn’t enough for me. During those days, shopkeepers would frown at customers who spent a lot of time simply browsing through books. ‘Please don’t touch the books if you don’t intend to buy them because then they will start looking used and old and a potential customer will not want to buy them,’ they would say. So, I would stand at a distance and stare at the books with greedy eyes.
In 1979, I had very little money but a lot of spirit. So, off I went to America all alone with a backpack. One late evening in New York, two policemen flagged me down suspecting that I was carrying drugs in my obviously heavy bag. When they scanned my bag, all they found was what I was truly addicted to—curd rice! They were so surprised at their finding that I had to explain where I was from and the significance of curd rice in south India.
Many more of such daring incidents marked my journey. When I came back to India, I wrote about my adventures in Kannada, titled my writing ‘From beyond the Atlantic’, and kept it aside. The thought of publishing it never crossed my mind.
More than a year later, I was speaking to my father about my adventures and my writing when he suggested, ‘Why don’t you go ahead and publish this as a book? You already know how rare it is for young girls from our area to go backpacking to an unknown land. It is sure to be a unique book for that reason alone.’
I wasn’t prepared for that thought. Me: an author? When I thought of the word, I was usually reminded of people like Jerome K. Jerome, P.G. Wodehouse, V.S. Naipaul, Jean-Paul Sartre and Kannada writers such as Triveni and Bhyrappa. An author must be of that calibre, or so I thought. I felt silly and strange just at the thought that someone as ordinary as me was thinking of becoming an author.
I brooded over it for a few days until the feeling settled. Then I wondered: ‘Is there anything wrong in sending my manuscript to a publisher? The worst that could happen is that they would reject my work. But I am used to rejection, am I not?’
With bravado in my heart, I approached a popular Kannada publishing house called Manohara Grantha Mala, whose legendary founder G.B. Joshi was known for giving newcomers a break. Among the authors who had started out this way were Girish Karnad and M.K. Indir
a. I spoke hesitantly to Mr Joshi and gave him my manuscript, who said that he would contact me within two days. Forty-eight hours later, I was impatient and tense. My feelings at that time were somewhat similar to going through labour during a pregnancy. Finally, he informed me that he would publish my manuscript. He never spoke of royalty and I did not ask for it. That day, my family and I celebrated as if I had become a prominent author already. Nevertheless, it was a first. I was the first author in my family of seventy-five first and second cousins, aunts and uncles.
Much like a pregnancy, the book took ten months to reach the market. When I heard of this development, I took a bus from Hubli to Dharwad to accept my first brainchild from the publisher and received the first twenty copies with great affection. I was thrilled!
I wondered how I would distribute these copies among my big family. In the end, I gave a few copies to my parents-in-law, a few more to my friends and kept three with myself. The remaining copies were exhausted quickly. Some friends congratulated me and brought boxes of sweets. Others said with pride, ‘We had no clue that an engineer could turn into a writer too! We are very happy!’ A few remarked, ‘Even we would have written a book had we gone to America and returned. You need money to travel and write a book.’
The first book finally gave me the title of being an author and made me want more.
In 1979, when I was in Jamshedpur, then in Bihar, for two months, I found myself all alone in the company guest house. It was then that I conceived the idea for my next book. I came from a middle-class background and was quite fascinated by how rich women led their lives, especially those whose husbands were perpetually busy with business. I decided to use this fascination and some of my imagination for this novel.
I returned to Mumbai with the idea still lingering in my mind. When I ran the idea past Mr Murthy, he gave me a blank stare. ‘I can’t help you there, I’m afraid. I am neither rich nor am I a lady.’