Song of the Cuckoo Bird

by Amulya Malladi

  “He’s also a Muslim,” Meena said.

  “So what?” Padma said, and laughed. “I know it’s too late to say I’m sorry and I don’t know what I’d be saying I’m sorry for. But I wanted you to know that I’m glad you came for my wedding.”

  “I didn’t get a good EAMCET rank on purpose,” Meena said, tears filling her eyes suddenly. It was so terribly sad that two good friends had been driven apart by competition.

  “I hated you for it because it made me feel like a complete failure,” Padma confessed. “Now I’m getting married and I feel like I’m not too much of a failure.”

  “And now I’m a little jealous,” Meena admitted.

  “Why?”

  “Well, you’re going to America and you don’t have any struggles ahead of you. Asif and I have to finish medical school and then do our postgraduate studies and then find work. That is at least three, four years away,” Meena said.

  “But you’ll be a doctor and I will be just a wife,” Padma said. “I’m so scared of what will happen. What if . . . what if Manoj is not really a nice boy? What then?”

  “What do you mean? Amma said you’ve been talking to him for months now. You’d know if he wasn’t nice,” Meena said.

  Padma looked around to make sure no one was coming upstairs and would hear them. “I read this article in some magazine about how girls get married to boys in America and there the boys beat them and ill-treat them. And because they’re in a foreign country they are unable to do anything. I got so scared, but Amma found this match with great difficulty and she always wanted me to go to America. I know Manoj . . . at least I think I do, but I’m still scared.”

  “In America they have very good police, not like in India. There you can trust them,” Meena said. “There is this show on Star TV called Cops. You have to dial some number for police . . . like here you have 100, there they have 911, I think. Call them and tell them if he beats you and they’ll arrest him.”

  “I don’t want my husband to be thrown in jail,” Padma said.

  Meena raised her eyebrows. “You’d rather he hit you?”

  Padma sighed. “Okay, so what was that number I can call?”

  “911,” Meena said, and Padma repeated it. “But check to make sure that is the number.”

  “Okay,” Padma said. “One more thing—now that you’re going to be a doctor and all, you can tell me what to do about birth control. Amma says that medicines are bad and I should not take anything. What else is there? I know about condoms but magazines say they don’t work and men don’t like using them. I don’t want children right away. We don’t even know each other. I thought we’ll wait a little, get to know each other for a few years, and then have children.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with pills,” Meena said. “They’re actually good for you. They make your menses more regular and if you don’t want to have menses a month here and there you don’t even have to with the pill. I’ll give you a packet before I go and when you’re there go to a doctor and get more. If you’re not comfortable with pills, make him wear a condom. Before I started taking birth control pills, Asif used to wear them and he—” Meena stopped as she realized what she had revealed. It had never been her intention to tell anyone that she and Asif were having sex.

  “You’ve had sex?” Padma asked in a scandalized whisper.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” Meena said, panicked.

  “So,” Padma said, a smile wreathing her face, “tell me about it.”

  Meena looked around, mortified, and then grinned.

  And as Meena shyly described what it meant to be intimate with a man, the past four years fell away.

  1999 5 December 1999. India’s glamour scene was jubilant after Ms. India, Yukta Mookhey, was crowned Miss World.

  24 December 1999. Indian Airlines Flight 814, which was enroute from Kathmandu, Nepal to Delhi, India was hijacked and taken to Kandahar, Afghanistan.

  31 December 1999. Five hijackers, who had been holding 155 hostages on an Indian Airlines plane, left the plane with two Islamic clerics they demanded be freed.

  The Heart-Broken Goddess

  The world was excited.

  The old millennium was coming to an end; a new millennium was about to begin. There were posters everywhere about parties being organized to welcome the new year and millennium, and in the newspapers there were several millennium specials. What were the most pivotal moments of the millennium? Who was the man (or woman) of the millennium? Would India win the World Cup in cricket again in the next millennium?

  Bheemunipatnam got a computer center to mark the special year. Somehow Karthik seemed to know a lot about computers and spent most of his free time either playing cricket or in the computer center. He was so good with computers that Jeevan, the owner of the computer center, offered him a job maintaining the computers and helping newcomers learn how to operate them. When something went wrong with the dial-up connection, Jeevan called upon Karthik. When something went wrong with the printer, Jeevan relied on Karthik to fix the problem.

  For Karthik, who was just thirteen years old, earning money was a great kick. He gave his first paycheck to Kokila, who gave the money back to him and asked him to buy the new sneakers he had been wanting.

  As he was growing up, Kokila could feel the pinch of money increase. Bangaru’s thousand rupees were starting to mean less and less every month as costs rose. Kokila made some money working with Shanthi and Chetana in their new tailor shop but it was hardly enough.

  Shanthi and Chetana had opened a tailor shop in the town with Babu’s help. Since Meena had left Andhra Pradesh to do her postgraduate studies with Asif (to whom she was now openly engaged) in Bombay, Bhanu and Chetana had drawn closer. Chetana took care of Bhanu’s growing son and daughter while Bhanu pursued a degree at the Bheemunipatnam degree college. After watching Meena get a worthy education, Bhanu was inspired to get a B.A. She convinced Babu and took her metric and intermediate exams. Everyone including Bhanu was surprised at her tenacity.

  Babu, whose photo shop had grown into a large business, still loved his wife and took care of her as he had when he first married her. There were several servants in the house and Bhanu was driven to and from college by a driver in a brand-new Daewoo car (bought in Bhanu’s name) while Babu drove the old Maruti.

  He had offered a job to Kokila keeping some accounts but it was charity for a family member and Kokila knew it. She could not accept it. She made some money working for Shanthi and Chetana, but at fifty years of age, she was starting to worry about her future and Karthik’s. He was set on becoming an air force pilot and was already studying hard for the NDA entrance exams. He had become friends with a retired army colonel who had moved with his family to Bheemunipatnam. The colonel was a staunch devotee of Charvi and encouraged Karthik in his air force ambitions. They had bought a house close to Dr. Vishnu Mohan’s, which had been rented out after Dr. Vishnu Mohan passed away the previous winter. His widow, Saraswati, had left to live with her daughter in London.

  Everything, it seemed, had changed in Bheemunipatnam and even the world. Yet Kokila thought that Tella Meda was eerily still the same. It was the start of a new millennium and it seemed as if in the fifty years of her life, Kokila had achieved little. She still managed money at Tella Meda but her relationship with Charvi continued to be uneven. Most of the time, Kokila was sure that Charvi hated her, even now, for her relationship with Ramanandam. Other times, it seemed as if Charvi was grateful that Kokila was still at Tella Meda, a link to the past.

  Charvi was just fifty-eight years old but she looked much older and her body was starting to stall.

  “It’s betraying me,” she would tell Chetana, who still sat with her during morning puja sewing jasmine flowers into garlands. “This body won’t take me very far.”

  “You’ll outlive us all,” Chetana would say, and she believed it. Chetana could feel the pinch of age as well. Her back had started to hurt a few years ago and getting up from bed in the morning wa
s a chore. Once she had even had to ask Kokila to help her up. Meena said that it was the bed and promised to buy her a new one as soon as she took over Dr. Nageshwar Rao’s practice.

  “Is Meena coming for the winter holidays?” Charvi asked as she turned away, the puja finished. She needed to wear her glasses all the time now. She was the small old lady who hunched a little. Her hair had turned completely white and she didn’t tie it anymore as it was quite thin. It hung around her face and shoulders loosely and mingled with the whiteness of her white cotton saris.

  “No, she and Asif are going to his parents’ house,” Chetana said. “At least they’ve agreed to a marriage without her changing her religion. That is more than I had hoped for. And you have to admit Manikyam and her husband took it well.”

  “Is Manikyam still pestering you to ask me to talk to her?” Charvi asked astutely.

  “She’s dying, Charvi. Pancreatic cancer. She won’t live for more than maybe a year. Don’t you think it’s time you forgave her? I have, and her crimes were committed against me,” Chetana said. “I thought if I married Ravi, I’d leave Tella Meda and find my own life. I was so scared to be like Ambika that I rushed into marriage with a boy who was not a fit human being. I was young and foolish.”

  Charvi smiled. “I remember how vivacious you were. You still are. I used to worry about you, that you would grow up without love because Ambika gave you none.”

  “God knows what happened to her,” Chetana said, now unable to remember her mother’s face or anything else about her mother too clearly. “I saw her all those years ago, before I married Ravi. And then she was gone. I know Subhadra got letters for a while, but even Subhadra stopped keeping in touch with her.”

  “Poor Subhadra,” Charvi said. “Everyone seems to be getting closer to death, don’t you think?”

  “Subhadra is almost eighty,” Chetana said in amusement. “And she’s had diabetes for almost eight years now. She should’ve known better.”

  A few months ago they had found out that Subhadra had to have her leg amputated. She had gone into diabetic shock and gangrene developed in her right leg, which then had to be cut off at midthigh. The diabetic shock was the result of eating too many sweets during Ganesh Chaturthi. She and Chandra had come to visit Charvi early in the year for the Telugu New Year, and they both had seemed healthy, happy, and well taken care of by Chandra’s son and daughter-in-law. But within a few months everything had changed.

  “Without a leg, God knows how long she’ll last,” Charvi said, and then sighed. “I wonder when it will be my turn.”

  “Why do you talk of death so much?” Chetana asked.

  “Because my time is getting closer,” Charvi said. “I’m not scared, just aware of it.”

  “How long do you think I’ll live?” Chetana asked then, and Charvi turned her palms up in the air. “Lord Venkateshwara Swami only knows.”

  A week before the year 1999 became 2000, Charvi had a stroke.

  It happened while she was performing morning puja. Kokila was up that morning, along with Chetana, and just as Charvi closed the Bhagavad-Gita, her reading glasses slipped down her nose and she collapsed.

  Babu rushed Charvi to the hospital in his car, but by the time they reached the hospital, Charvi had lost all ability to move her right hand and right leg. Even the right side of her face was frozen, paralyzed.

  The Bheemunipatnam hospital used to be a small, dingy little place with few beds and fewer doctors, but with the influx of people in the small town, the hospital had become bigger and there were more doctors as well.

  However, it was suggested that Charvi be taken to King George Hospital in Visakhapatnam. Dr. Nageshwar Rao, who was consulted, suggested that Charvi would be better off in a private hospital than in a government one. Kokila was worried about money, but Manikyam said her husband said they would foot the bill. If Charvi was going to die, Manikyam hoped that she would forgive Manikyam for her ill-treatment of Chetana and Ravi all those years ago. So Charvi went to an exclusive private hospital.

  Shanthi took over the responsibilities at Tella Meda, while Kokila and Chetana lived with Manikyam and her husband as they took care of Charvi.

  “Ironic, isn’t it?” Chetana said as she looked at the opulent house from the inside for the first time in her life. “I wanted to come inside this house so much all those years ago and now that I am here, I feel nothing.”

  Kokila looked around the house and raised her eyebrows. “It’s a rich man’s house.”

  “What rich? One son died of toddy poisoning and the other son is lying in a hospital waiting to die because his liver has been eaten by alcohol,” Chetana said. “I look at my children and I’m happy because they’re leading productive lives.”

  “Do you think Charvi is going to die?” Kokila asked.

  “I hope so,” Chetana said pragmatically. “If she lives, she will be our responsibility and with half her body paralyzed, God knows how much work that will mean. And what’s left to live for? I can say I want to see my grandchildren grow up and you can say you want to see Karthik grow up. What can Charvi look forward to?”

  As she lay in the white hospital room, Charvi contemplated the same thing. She had no sensation in her right leg, her right hand, and the right side of her face. There were tubes everywhere.

  She had had a stroke, they said, and Charvi wasn’t sure what that really meant. She knew what a heart attack was but she didn’t know what this stroke thing meant. The doctor said something about blood not reaching her brain and part of her brain dying. That was why half her body was paralyzed.

  The embarrassment of it was crushing Charvi. She wanted to be in Tella Meda. She wanted to die there, not here with tubes all over and inside her. A small machine was keeping track of her heartbeat and as it beeped, Charvi wished it would all be over. There was really nothing to live for now.

  As she lay half eaten by a disease she wondered if the goddess inside her was also half-paralyzed. Had there ever been divinity inside her? Charvi had seriously believed for many years that she could cure people but when her own arthritis started to cause her considerable pain, she came to the conclusion she couldn’t cure anyone, especially herself. But she argued with herself, saying that no one could fight age. Her body was growing old and old bodies started to decay. That didn’t mean she wasn’t a goddess.

  She thought back to her father, and his first recognition of the goddess within her. Had he been right? She’d had her doubts from the start.

  Manikyam sat by her side, her expression vacant, her skin old and decaying, her hair as white as Charvi’s. She was dying too, Charvi thought. But then she was almost ten years older than Charvi.

  If Ramanandam had not annunciated Charvi as a goddess, would she have had a life like Manikyam’s? Would she have married, loved, had children and grandchildren?

  She wanted to talk to Manikyam, wanted to tell her that all was forgiven. But something within her stopped her. If she forgave Manikyam, it would be because she thought and believed she was dying and all of a sudden, Charvi didn’t want to die. She wanted to live. There was a spark within her that wanted to claim all of her and even though she understood the futility of her life, she couldn’t accept the darkness of death, not quite yet. And because she couldn’t, she didn’t call out to the staring Manikyam who was waiting to be forgiven.

  Shanthi telephoned Kokila every night and told her that everything at Tella Meda was fine, especially Karthik, who was busier than ever. He and his friends were having a millennium new year’s party. The party was to be held at the computer center and there was going to be loud music and whatever it was young boys these days were interested in.

  Kokila didn’t even remember how they had passed into the new year when they were young, but both Chetana and she agreed there had not been much noise. No party, no nothing. They always celebrated Ugadi, the Telugu New Year, but no one paid much attention to the calendar new year. That had obviously changed. The young people seemed to be learn
ing all sorts of Western things from TV and the Internet. Kokila wasn’t sure if that was a bad thing or a good thing. Chetana believed it was for the better. People were starting to have more fun in their lives, and that could never be a bad thing.

  Charvi’s condition deteriorated and the doctors declared that she would not get back the use of her right side. She was probably not going to live through the year either. Charvi refused to accept that and clung to the hope that her health would improve and she would be able to go back to Tella Meda.

  Lavanya was informed of Charvi’s declining health and she came to visit. In the past years, her beauty had faded and she had come to realize she had more in common with her “goddess” sister than she would admit. She didn’t have a family or a husband and she was living with a friend in a small town in coastal Tamil Nadu. The bitterness had left her and she didn’t blame Charvi for all the ills in the world anymore. Lavanya didn’t stay long at the hospital, but the sisters made up before Lavanya left.

  Charvi lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, talking to Kokila and Chetana about things that didn’t matter and spending many hours in drug-induced sleep. With half her face paralyzed her words came out slurred and sometimes she was barely coherent. She was slipping away, the doctors said, as parts of her body started to shut down one after the other.

  “I was in love once,” Charvi said to no one in particular. Kokila was in the hospital room with her, reading a magazine, and her head shot up immediately.

  “He was an American,” Charvi continued, a half-smile on her face, and it looked as if she was in a different time and place. “Mark Talbot. Remember, Kokila, he sent me that picture in black and white? I looked so beautiful. He never wrote, never came to visit, and I waited, every day. In the beginning I waited with a huge fountain of hope inside my heart and after some years I knew he wouldn’t come. I thought he was in love with me. Maybe he wasn’t.”

  Kokila didn’t know what to say. These were the ramblings of a dying woman.