“She didn’t want to go back to medical college . . .” He paused and then shook his head. “There’s nothing to say. She didn’t want to go, I made her go, and she killed herself. It was my fault.”
They went downstairs as they had the previous time and just like that time, Manjunath held on to her as they slept, trying to ward off his demons.
Kokila wondered if she should tell others the truth but this was Manjunath’s secret and until he said it was okay, she couldn’t tell anyone else about it. But Manjunath’s secret didn’t remain one for long. Dr. Vishnu Mohan and his wife, Saraswati, arrived the next day, somber and apologetic. Dr. Vishnu Mohan asked to speak with Manjunath in his room while Saraswati told everyone else what they had learned. Even Shanthi was huddled in the kitchen to listen to Saraswati and usually she stayed away from Tella Meda gossip.
“Manjunath’s wife phoned last night,” Saraswati said, wiping tears that were streaming down her cheeks. “She knows a relative’s friend . . . Anyway, his daughter, you know, the one he keeps talking about? The one who went to medical college? She was raped. She didn’t tell anyone except some of her friends.”
“Who raped her?” Subhadra asked.
“Some man, she wouldn’t say who. But he threatened that he would do it again if she told anyone and then he would kill her,” Saraswati explained. “All this has come out now, from those friends of hers.”
“Why didn’t they do anything to help her?” Chetana demanded. “If they knew, they—”
“Hush. So what happened to the girl?” Subhadra asked eagerly.
Kokila listened in silence, pretending to focus on chopping green beans for lunch.
“She came home for the Dussera holidays and told Manjunath that she didn’t want to go back. He thought she couldn’t handle the studies and was scared of failing exams, so he insisted that she go back. They had a big fight and Manjunath said that he didn’t have any respect for her if she wouldn’t go back and he was really harsh to her,” Saraswati said.
“Anyone would be,” Renuka said. “Medical college is difficult to get into. He did what any father would do.”
Everyone nodded and then focused their attention back on Saraswati to hear the rest of the sordid tale.
“She went back and ten days later hung herself from the ceiling fan of her dormitory room,” Saraswati finished.
“Oh, the poor man,” Shanthi said. “He’s blaming himself.”
“Well, he is a little to blame,” Renuka said thoughtfully.
Chetana snorted. “But you just said that he did what any father would do.”
“Well, first, he should just have gotten the girl married and not worried about medical school—-fool. Not that important, education,” Renuka said firmly.
“Was she pregnant?” Chetana asked.
Kokila was numb. Charvi was right, she thought, Manjunath carried a deep pain. Could there be a pain that was deeper than losing a child? And wouldn’t that pain be blinding in its intensity if the parent felt he was to blame? Just like Ramanandam who never got over Vidura leaving, never came to terms with losing him.
Saraswati nodded. “And now he won’t go home. He resigned from Andhra University and his wife wants to come here but he has written to her asking her to leave him alone. His older daughter has written to him but he doesn’t even respond. So they called us to see if we could help. Vishnu is talking to him. Maybe we can convince him to go home.”
All the women focused on Kokila and she sighed.
“He isn’t staying here because of me,” she said. “Nothing is happening between us, so don’t look at me.”
“He seems to be taken with you. Maybe you could talk to him,” Saraswati suggested, and Kokila shook her head.
“What should I say? He’s a grown man, I can’t tell him how to live his life,” she said. “And he is not taken with me. We just talk, we’re just friends.”
Manjunath came to her room that night after bhajan. He had spent the evening elsewhere and came to her saying he was hungry.
Kokila hurried to the kitchen, prepared a plate of cold food for him, and took it back to her room.
He sat quietly and ate everything: the rice, the leftover green bean curry from lunch, the sambhar with sweet potatoes, the slightly sour yogurt, and the mango pickle.
He drank half the glass of water, used the other half to wash his hands in the plate, and pushed the plate aside.
“They told you what happened,” he said.
Kokila nodded. “Dr. Vishnu Mohan’s wife can’t keep anything inside her.”
Manjunath laughed harshly. “My wife’s like that. She gossips all the time but has a clean heart, no malice.”
Kokila nodded again.
“I have a wife, Kokila,” he said, looking at her.
Kokila bit her upper lip, unsure of what to say, unsure also of what he was telling her.
“I love my wife. I love my daughters . . . both my daughters,” he said. “And I killed one of them.”
Kokila took his hand in hers. “No. It was fate. We can’t always choose to make the right decisions because we don’t know what the future holds.”
“I shouldn’t have forced her to go back,” Manjunath said, holding Kokila’s hand in both of his. “The pain is too much. I can’t bear it. Sometimes . . . sometimes I’m sure I’ll die of it.”
Kokila put her arm around him and pulled his head toward her. “Let me help,” she said, and kissed him tenderly on his mouth. He wrapped his arms tightly around her and kissed her back with desperation.
He was gone in the morning. His dinner plate was still in the corner where he had left it and her clothes were scattered by the bed. Kokila looked out of the window and judged the time to be around five. It was still early but the birds were singing softly, gearing up to chirp with more gusto.
It hurt her that he had left while she slept. He had sneaked away while she was sleeping, happy, in peace. She wished he had stayed, wished she could have woken up with him.
“I have a wife, Kokila,” he had said, and she knew that whatever they would share would be temporary. And as Charvi said, he was unable to recognize happiness right now. It would take years of healing before Manjunath would be a happy man again and even then, the wound of losing his daughter would never quite heal. It would bleed occasionally and would always be a part of him.
Maybe he had left before she woke up to protect her reputation, Kokila wondered, and that thought erased the hurt. Yes, he was chivalrous enough to think of that.
She hastily put on her sari and ran to the bathroom to take a quick bath.
Fresh, smelling of her jasmine soap, Kokila tied a towel around her wet hair, feeling shy and gauche as if she were a new bride. Already, Tella Meda was coming alive. Charvi must be taking a bath as well, Kokila thought, as she got ready for the morning puja. Subhadra would be up soon to bathe and then cook breakfast.
Puttamma would arrive shortly and start sweeping the courtyard and cleaning the bathrooms. It was just like every morning but there was something special about today.
Kokila’s silver anklets tinkled merrily, in tune with the swish of the gold baskets in her ears, as she walked up to the guest room where Manjunath was staying. She looked around to make sure no one was watching. She should wait for him to come out, she knew, but the temptation to see him and feel as she had the night before was too heavy. Like sweet molasses, it clung to her senses.
She knocked on the door and then tested the doorknob. It opened and she stepped in, a smile on her face, as she searched for Manjunath on the guest room bed.
His feet dangled on top of the bed, his tongue was sticking out, his eyes were wide and bulging. His neck fell forward in an odd angle as he hung on a rope from the ceiling fan. The rope was familiar; it was the clothesline from the courtyard that everyone used to hang their clothes.
But she had been so happy, she thought as her body froze, suddenly incapable of any movement. It isn’t fair, she almost cried out in indi
gnation. It isn’t fair.
She couldn’t avert her eyes from his hideously disfigured face. She wanted to look away, turn away so that she wouldn’t carry the image of him hanging lifelessly from the white ceiling fan, but even as she closed her eyes and tried to recollect the Manjunath from the night before, kissing her, suckling her breasts, touching her lips, she couldn’t. All she saw was him hanging, his dead face a parody of what it had been when filled with life.
1984 31 October 1984. Indira Gandhi, India’s four-time prime minister, was gunned down by two members of her personal security guard as she walked from her home to her office in New Delhi. She died after four hours of emergency surgery.
31 October 1984. Rajiv Gandhi, son of Indira Gandhi, was sworn in as prime minister of India by President Giani Zail Singh in New Delhi.
5 December 1984. Methyl isocyanate gas leaked out of a Union Carbide factory in Bhopal during the night. Casualities were extremely high.
Widows and Orphans
It didn’t seem appropriate to have a television in Tella Meda. Charvi didn’t like the idea at all. She didn’t mind the radio, but television? But the pressure to get a television was very high. Even the quiet Narayan Garu said he thought it would be nice to watch the news every evening, a Telugu movie once in a while. What would the harm be?
Finally the decision to buy a television was made, and then the argument began whether it should be a color TV or a black-and-white one. Chetana declared that if they wanted to buy a black-and-white TV, they needn’t buy one at all. If one couldn’t see the news anchor’s lipstick color, what was the point? So despite the expense, everyone at Tella Meda agreed it would be better to get a color TV.
Then another discussion emerged. Where would the television be housed? Definitely not the temple room, but where else could the TV be placed so that it would be in the open and for everyone’s use?
One of the three guest rooms with doors facing both the front garden and the inside verandah was suggested as the future TV room.
“No, no, no,” Kokila said the day before the television was supposed to arrive. The electrician had promised to have the antenna up and running the same day so that the television would start spouting images and sounds as quickly as possible.
“Why not?” Renuka demanded. “Why do we need three rooms for guests?”
“Because they make sure that we all have food to eat,” Kokila said angrily. Did no one realize how much juggling it took to maintain a house as big as Tella Meda? Everyone paid a minimal rent that barely covered food purchases for an entire month and there were other bills to pay: water, electricity, extra food purchases for the Sunday lunches and festival days. Puttamma had to be paid for cleaning the bathrooms and the courtyards, a job that no one offered to do. Now that Narayan Garu had become too old to work in the garden, Puttamma’s son from her first marriage, a thirteen-year-old boy, Balaji, came to remove the weeds, water the plants, and cut the grass. He wasn’t paid much but it was still an expense.
Ever so often a musical instrument would need to be replaced or fixed, a bulb would have to be replaced, the water pipes fixed, a door hinge repaired . . . the list was endless. And then there was Charvi, an expense all in herself with her increasing demands for special food and clothing. Guests came and usually left some money behind. But no big donations were coming into Tella Meda. Charvi was well known locally but not well known enough to have very wealthy people give thousands of rupees as they did to other, more popular ashrams.
“Oh come on, Kokila,” Chetana said. “It will be nice to have a TV. You’ll see.”
“Yes, Kokila Atha,” Bhanu pleaded. “All my friends have TV, I want TV too. This Sunday they’re showing that Krishna movie with—”
“It isn’t about movies,” Renuka interrupted, and glared at Bhanu. “This is about education also. They show a lot of educational programs on television. Saraswati says that she has learned a lot from TV.”
Kokila shook her head. “Find another place for it. A guest room is—”
“If we have extra guests, they can have my room,” Subhadra said superiorly. “Will that do?”
Kokila sighed. Everyone was in on this scheme and no matter what she said it would not matter. They were all blinded by the lights the television promised.
V. C. Ramarao had his own television company in Visakhapatnam. The company thrived on local sales, on people who couldn’t afford the twice-as-expensive BPL Sanyo, Samsung, and other brand-name television sets.
V. C. Ramarao’s wife, Rambha Devi, was a conservative woman who believed in saints and gurus, unlike her husband, who thought all religious people to be fraudulent. Rambha Devi, however, managed to get enough money out of her husband’s tight fists to donate to ashrams, sadhus, and the like by convincing him that ill luck would befall him if he wasn’t charitable.
Rambha Devi visited Tella Meda often and it was really her idea that a television be installed there. She thought she would be able to convince her husband to give a sixty-five-hundred-rupee color television set for free to the residents of Tella Meda. As superstitious as V. C. Ramarao was, he was no fool. He wasn’t about to just give away a good television for free. He agreed to give it for less than half the price and said he would throw in the installation for free.
Kokila grumbled about the three thousand rupees he was charging for the TV but admitted that the evenings would be a little less boring with the television showing movies and movie-song programs. Already, everyone was talking about the half-hour show on Monday evenings, Chitralahiri, which broadcast songs from old and new Telugu movies. It was one of the most popular television programs, in addition to Telugu dramas and Hindi serials, shown in the evening.
Rambha Devi came to stay at Tella Meda for a week to ensure that her husband didn’t skimp on the installation. She also wanted to make sure Charvi knew that it was Rambha Devi’s influence that had brought a color television into Tella Meda. And it was her husband’s television company that had provided the TV.
The way she talked about it, the television had walked all by itself from Visakhapatnam (thanks to her husband) and no one at Tella Meda had had to pay a paisa for it, Kokila thought bitterly.
“Still, it’s less than half the price,” Subhadra said when Kokila complained that Rambha Devi made it sound like they were getting the TV for free.
“It’s still three thousand rupees,” Kokila complained. “Do you know how long we had to save for that?”
Subhadra nodded. “Yes, yes, but still, the installation is free. And if the TV goes bad, they’ll even change it.”
“They have to. It has a two-year warranty,” said Kokila, now well versed in what came with a color television. She had spoken with the local TV shop owner and he told her that V. C. Ramarao’s TV was not that good and that’s why he was able to sell it for that price. The other color televisions cost thirteen thousand rupees or more.
“And do you know why his TVs are cheaper than others?” Kokila demanded shrewdly.
“Because he’s a good man trying not to cheat his customers?” Subhadra put in with a smile.
Kokila made a face. “All you can think about is that Krishna movie on Sunday. So it’s a total waste of time talking to you.”
No one was on Kokila’s side. Everyone wanted that television, even Shanthi, who was usually sensible, and they were all so grateful to Rambha Devi. It grated on Kokila’s nerves. She was the one who had juggled the Tella Meda finances to ensure they had enough money saved up and could therefore use that money to buy a TV but did anyone say thanks to her? Did anyone show her any gratitude? Everyone was flocking around Rambha Devi. Shanthi was stitching blouses for free, while Chetana was stitching sari falls, a cotton lining at the bottom edge of the sari, for free, and Subhadra was cooking all of Rambha Devi’s favorite foods. It was as if Rambha Devi ran the ashram. Kokila was resentful. She wished they didn’t have the money to afford the TV and wished that the subject had never come up.
But on the day t
hat the television was to be installed, there was a problem.
“I’m not lying. The money is not there.” How could they believe I’m lying? Kokila thought angrily. She was almost in tears, hysteria humming beneath her calm voice.
Rambha Devi pursed her lips. “My husband insisted that you pay something for the television. That is not unreasonable.”
“Kokila, I know you, you hid the money so that we couldn’t have the TV, didn’t you? You never wanted us to have the TV,” Renuka demanded, glaring at Kokila. Kokila felt a pang. It was true she didn’t want the TV, but she wouldn’t hide the money.
“Kokila never lies,” Subhadra snapped at Renuka. “Okay, where did you leave the money?”
Kokila swallowed the lump in her throat. Three thousand rupees ! How could it be gone? Who would take the money?
“Right here.” She pointed to the desk in Charvi’s room. They had all congregated there once the theft had been discovered. Charvi herself was out for her evening walk.
“I took it out of the safe and put it there so that I could give it to Rambha Devi as soon as she finished her bath . . . and then the milkman came for his money. I went to pay him. I came back . . . the money was gone,” Kokila said. “Look, I know the TV is important but . . . This has never happened before. I am always very careful with money.”
Rambha Devi obviously didn’t believe Kokila.
“My husband will never agree,” Rambha Devi said firmly. “You will have to give three thousand rupees somehow, otherwise no TV installation today.”
Bhanu’s eyes filled with tears. The television was sitting in the new TV room that had been set up with chairs and mats, ready for the Sunday night movie just two days away.
“I won’t ask the electrician to take the TV but he won’t fix the antenna until the money is here,” Rambha Devi said, sure that once she laid down her threat Kokila would find the allegedly stolen money.
“How could you do this?” Bhanu shrieked at Kokila, and ran away with Renuka following her.
Song of the Cuckoo Bird Page 24