The man looked embarrassed. “No, she was in our house all evening,” he said. “My wife had taken her inside. I am sorry, I didn’t know. I was on tour. Just got back and found her. Please forgive. My wife isn’t well. She didn’t harm the little one. Please forgive.” The relative who looked after his wife had gone to attend a wedding, he explained. Had she come back as originally planned by seven o’clock, the child would have been found earlier. But the storm had disrupted bus services, and the relative had decided to stay over at her cousin’s place.
“I am sorry for all the worry we have caused,” he said, backing off the verandah. “The child is unharmed.” He refused Nirmala’s offer of coffee. “No, I had to lock my wife in the room. She is very upset. I have to go and explain.”
Long, swaying walls of rain slapped against Sripathi’s body and soaked him despite the umbrella. The road had turned into a shallow river with debris hurtling in the flow. Sripathi had longed for this deluge, but it couldn’t have arrived at a worse moment. All the people on the road, the pavement dwellers and roadside vendors who might have noticed a small girl with long hair, wide eyes and two missing front teeth, were gone, disappeared into abandoned buildings or under plastic sheeting held down by bricks on piles of old kerosene drums. Strings of electric lights flickered brightly from the balconies of a few of the apartments lining the road. Far away, somebody had decided to celebrate Deepavali early, and Sripathi could hear the hiss and rattle of firecrackers. The smell of onions frying came to him from the cooking fires of the construction workers who lived in every building they made. How many different homes had they inhabited? Not one of them would have his own house to die in. At the thought of homes, Sripathi was reminded of the fact that very soon he, too, would have to find a way to pay his loans or sell Big House. A car rushed past and waves of dirty water washed over his legs. He grimaced and moved to the edge of the road hoping that he wouldn’t fall into the gutter. No longer was it possible to know where the gutter ended and the road began. A memory came to him suddenly. He had taken Maya and Arun for a magic show at Technology Hall. Maya was eight and Arun barely two. He did not own a vehicle then, and so they had taken a bus, although it was a fair distance from the bus stop to the house. Arun was too young to appreciate the talents of the great P.C. Sorcar, World-Famous Wizard, but Maya was enthralled, screaming with wonder each time the magician pulled off another trick. When they emerged from the show it was dark and pouring rain just like this. All along the beach they had travelled on the empty bus, watching as lightning slashed the brooding, Cimmerian sky. The sea was a pulsing roll of green fire, hurling itself at the shore, reaching its eager fingers towards the road. A high wind tossed sand against the windows, and the bus seemed to rock with the force of it. By the time they got off and started their long hike home, the road was flooded. Although cyclone warnings were in effect, and Sripathi had been reluctant to leave the safety of his house, especially with the children, he had already purchased the tickets and wasn’t going to let them go waste. Nirmala and Putti and Ammayya had gone to Tirupathi for the weekend.
Maya had trotted beside him, chattering excitedly about the magician, her hand clutched tightly in his. In his other arm he carried Arun. A truck had roared by and almost drowned Maya under the wash of dirty water swooshing up under its wheels. She had coughed and spluttered, scared by the unexpectedness of the drenching, and refusing to walk another step, had begged to be carried instead.
Even today he shuddered at the memory of that night. How he had staggered slowly down the road that usually seemed so brief and now stretched on endlessly. The children grew heavier and heavier, Maya riding piggyback, her arms choking tight around his neck, her plump legs sliding and holding, next slipping and grasping at his waist.
“Hold on,” he had shouted every time she seemed about to fall off. “Hold on! We are almost home.”
His arms ached with the weight of Arun’s body. Sripathi had waded through knee-deep water on the edge of the road, hoping that he wouldn’t slide into the invisible drain that waited, malevolent and stinking, beneath the surface.
“Appu, are we going to drown?” Maya had wailed and he had soothed her. “No, my sweet. No raja, Appu will take care of you.”
“For ever and ever?” she had demanded, as always making use of the moment to get as much as she could out of him, trying to seal the small uncertainties in her mind with assurances from him, her father.
“For ever and ever,” he had promised rashly. How could he have dared the future, challenged the mischievous gods with a statement as arrogant as that?
He passed a pair of caesalpinia trees guarding a familiar scrolled ironwork gate. Raju’s house. A light flickered in one of the front rooms. Those trees had provided many of the long, curving brown seed pods that Sripathi and Raju had used as swords in their boy-hood games, to re-enact ancient battles: Arjuna and the Kauravas, Lakshmana against a demon or two, Karna, Shivaji, Tipu Sultan. Kings and warriors and heroes, their boyish shouts rising into the dusty air and mingling with the memory of other voices, other children before them who had imagined themselves in the same games. It had all seemed so simple then, all problems solved with the swipe of a long brown seed pod. Sripathi staggered as another truck surged past, creating a strong wave of dirty water around his legs. Suddenly, he felt disoriented and weightless, as if he were floating down the dark road. He couldn’t remember where he was or what he was doing in the rain. He tried to compose a letter in his head to hold on to a fragment of consciousness. “Dear Editor,” he shouted, “dear, dear Editor.” He laughed wildly, unable to think of a single complaint to make against the small world that he inhabited. Two women passed him, and he caught at a soft, wet arm.
“Drunk fool,” she screamed, shaking off his hand and hitting him with her open umbrella. Her companion pulled her away and they hurried on, looking over their shoulders now and again.
“I am a fool,” agreed Sripathi, giggling helplessly. “But not drunk. No madam, I am a sober fool, and I am terribly, terribly sorry to have discombobulated you.”
He staggered and almost fell against a figure coming towards him.
“Appu?” said the figure, startling him. It was a short, thin man with glasses, carrying a torch and a bright yellow umbrella that leapt at the wind. He seemed familiar to Sripathi. “Appu, Nandana is home. She was in Mrs. Poorna’s house. She is okay.”
“Okay?” Sripathi echoed foolishly. Somehow standing here in the rain, in the dark with this man in front of him whose face he could barely see, the whole day seemed to dissolve into a swirl. A child had got lost. He had not found her. In fact, he thought completely exhausted, he, Sripathi Rao had been responsible for losing her.
“Okay?” he repeated to the man who now took his arm gently and led him down the lightless road.
“Yes, Appu, everything is okay,” said the man, sounding more and more like somebody Sripathi thought he might know.
“Maya is back? I told Nirmala she would come back,” said Sripathi confidentially. “She never believed me.”
He retained no memory of that walk down the road, no memory of Arun, only recollections of endless rain, trees full of swinging swords waiting to fall on his head and a nun who had looked kindly at him through the stained-glass windows of a building he had never seen.
“She is talking,” said Nirmala, as soon as Sripathi and Arun reached home. She had put Nandana to bed and was now excitedly pacing the living room. Gopala had also left, insisting that they wake him if they needed anything, regardless of the hour. Sripathi sank down on the floor of the verandah and tried to remove his shoes. He caught his foot and tugged ineffectually. Finally he gave up and just sat there, his head bent, his legs stuck out straight before him. “She is all right,” said Nirmala, assuming that he was merely exhausted. “Did you hear me, ree?”
“Who?” Sripathi raised his head and whispered.
“The child, who else?”
Sripathi looked eagerly at her. “Our
child is back?” he asked. “Is her husband with her? I hope you have made her favourite things for her. This is a happy event.” He beamed at Nirmala who gave him a baffled look.
“Why is he talking nonsense like this?” she asked Arun, who shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said, leading his father gently inside. “He was saying all sorts of things on the way back.”
In the living room, where the lights were considerably brighter than the one on the verandah, Nirmala saw how ghastly pale Sripathi was and how wild his eyes were. She touched his face and gasped. “He is burning with fever!” she exclaimed. “Oh God, what a day this has been.” She called Arun, who had just taken off his wet clothes, ordered him to go to the doctor’s house and beg him on bended knee to make a house call, pay him whatever he asked for. Then she led her husband upstairs to their room, stripped his wet clothes from his body as tenderly as she would a baby’s, feeling pity at the sight of his trembling form, the grey whorls of hair that worked their way down from his chest to his crotch, the shrunken scrotum. Was this the same man who had once carried her to bed in jest, his teeth gleaming strong and white in laughter as she shrieked in protest?
“Let’s pretend we are in a movie,” he had said, swinging her around, almost losing his balance in the process. “You are Vyjayanthimala and I am Sunil Dutt!”
So long ago that had been. Everything had turned topsy-turvy since then. Nirmala wiped him down with a dry towel, pushed him gently down on the bed and dressed him in pyjamas and kurta while he sat docile as a child.
She descended the stairs, slowly, slowly, to accommodate her reluctant knees that snapped and creaked as she moved, and waited for Arun to return with the doctor. If he agreed to make a house call in this weather. Nothing was certain these days, not even basic human goodness, she thought bitterly. The living room was dark. Putti was a huddled shadow on the same chair that had been occupied by Gopala an hour before, refusing to join her mother in bed until sleep had quietened her. She stared out of the open front door at the raindrops that briefly turned to gold when caught in the glow of the streetlights. Ammayya’s door was shut tight. She had retreated there when Munnuswamy and Gopala arrived, and now she fulminated behind the thick wood, her stick rat-tatting meanly on the sticky, damp floor.
19
WHAT - WHAT WILL HAPPEN
A CHILD’S LAUGH. The steady patter of rain. Gutters grumbling with the overflow. The whoosh of traffic. Gopinath Nayak singing. The Burmese Wife and her upstairs neighbour screaming at each other over another set of chopped saris. All through the week, Sripathi lay in bed and swam in the warm, familiar tide of sounds. He was not aware that the doctor had agreed to come that night and had left a prescription for his fever and restlessness. Several nights Sripathi had woken in a panic, still feeling the rain slapping against his face, dirty water swilling about his calves, wondering whether he, too, was dying alone on the street like his father. Then he had heard Nirmala’s soft, snuffling snores beside him, touched the curve of her back and slid back into sleep. At home, I am at home, he thought drowsily. He had no memory of the preceding few days. The last thing he remembered was his visit to Nandana’s school. Did they find the child? He lacked the energy to ask. Now he was awake at last, and free of the dark, churning tumult that had filled his mind since the death of his beloved daughter. In the dull afternoon light that struggled into the room through the ajar balcony door, he stared at the mouldy ceiling until his eyes drooped with the effort of staying open. Soft footsteps approached, but he didn’t open his eyes. Nirmala he recognized by the sound of her toe rings striking the floor, but he couldn’t decide who had come with her.
“Ajji, is he dead?” asked a hoarse young voice in a whisper. He felt Nandana’s breath splay over his face. So they had found her.
“Tchah, don’t say such things,” whispered Nirmala, touching Sripathi’s forehead. He liked the comfort of that touch. “Your grandfather is just asleep. See, no fever also.”
Her hand was replaced by a much smaller one. There was a brief silence as the two surveyed Sripathi.
“Why is he wearing that string?” asked Nandana. Sripathi jumped as a small, cold finger traced the path of his sacred thread across his chest. He was ticklish. He opened his eyes, unable to keep up the pretense of sleep any longer. Simultaneously, he realized that the child was speaking.
“Look-look, he is awake! Ajji,” said Nandana, stepping back from her close examination of Sripathi’s bare chest and the thread that cut across it, looping over his left shoulder and disappearing down his back. “Can I ask him about that thread?”
“Why not?” said Nirmala, relieved to see her husband awake.
“She can speak?” he asked, his own voice sounding strange to him.
“Yes, and whole day she has been going bada-bada-bada. Haven’t you, my mari?”
“I want to know why he is wearing a thread,” said Nandana, retreating behind Nirmala and peering at Sripathi.
“It’s to keep me tied together.” He tried out a small joke, slightly upset by the child’s wary gaze. She was afraid of him. He got a severe look from Nirmala.
“Okay,” he amended. For the first time since they had returned from Vancouver, he realized that he was talking to his grandchild without the pain of seeing her mother in her face, her eyes, her voice. “It is to scratch my back. And to remind me of my responsibilities. See, six threads.” He separated each of the threads in his jaanwaara with the tip of his index finger. “One each for you and your Ajji. For Ammayya and Putti and Arun and Maya.”
“What about my daddy?” demanded Nandana. “Why did you forget my daddy?”
“Okay then. Let’s leave Ajji out and make this one your daddy’s thread.”
“Tchah! Always joking and being foolish. Don’t listen to him, my darling. Come, let him sleep. I will tell you what that thread is for, and you tell me about your daddy.”
“You said you would show me pictures of my mom when she was my age.”
“Yes, yes, that also.”
“And the wedding sari with a thousand lotus flowers that you said you would give me when I grew up.”
“Yes, child, yes,” promised Nirmala.
The sari had been specially created for Nirmala’s grandmother’s wedding by a master weaver in Kanjeevaram. Somewhere among the fragile veins of gold and turquoise silk, among the two hundred cyan peacocks, three hundred magenta jasmine buds, the tangle of leaves, creepers and blossoms—somewhere in that grand outpouring of the weaver’s imagination was hidden a gold elephant for luck and for strength.
When she was a girl, Nirmala had stretched the seven yards of silk across her grandmother’s bedroom and searched for the elusive design. Her grandmother had never found it, and the sari had been passed on to her own mother and then to her. It lay there in her cupboard, wrapped carefully in tissue paper, with a slice of sandalwood in between. Every six months for years, she had shaken it out carefully—allowing the delicate smell of sandalwood to float out—folded it in a different way to prevent the gold thread from breaking and put it back in the cupboard.
“Yes,” she said again. “And we will look for the elephant hidden in that sari.”
Another cyclonic system followed on the heels of the one that had just passed and brought a heavier downpour. Now the people of Toturpuram, who had so longed for rain, cursed it with every breath. The water in the Big House compound, which had subsided a bit, began to lick again at the edges of the verandah. Brown and black worms, swept out of their holes in the earth, coiled and uncoiled like burning rubber on the damp tiles, and in the evening the house rustled with flying ants blindly hitting the light bulbs. By this time even the street urchins had stopped sailing their paper boats in the flooded streets. Instead they huddled under flapping plastic sheets, which were dubiously moored to the pavement with stones and bricks, wailing and fighting with each other. Hoardings crackled with the force of the gale. A small village nearby was swept away, all of its inhabitants killed ex
cept for an old woman in a mud hut. Miraculously alive, still surrounded by her chickens, a stray dog and a goat, she seemed blissfully unaware of the storm.
The schools had declared a holiday until further notice as the weather bureau had issued a severe storm warning. Some areas of the town were so heavily waterlogged that it was impossible to go anywhere at all. Fortunately for Nandana, there were the children in the apartment blocks to play with. Her escapades had made her a minor celebrity among them, and she was being constantly invited over. She was a heroine. She had ventured into the tunnel and survived. She had even been kidnapped by the crazy lady and come out of it unscathed. And she made the most of it, telling stories of the monsters that lurked in that dark tunnel, how they had threatened her and how she had thwarted them. However, she could not share with anyone the great empty feeling that had come to her in the lost girl’s small, mournful room—the understanding that her parents were dead. Now she trotted alongside Nirmala, eagerly chattering as if a dam had broken inside her. She was full of questions and comments: Why are there so many mosquitoes? Why does it scratch when they bite? I don’t like the taste of Indian milk. I like chocolate cake, but my daddy’s favourite was tiramisu. My mommy said that there are lots of ghosts in the back garden, especially under the mango tree. Why do you walk so slowly, Ajji? I want a kitten of my own, please. Only Ammayya was irritated by the constant sound of that childish voice. “Pah, like a fly in a bottle she is! I am getting a headache listening to her.” But the rest of the house was enchanted by her liveliness.
The morning when Sripathi’s fever broke, Nirmala decided to visit the Munnuswamys. She had made some fresh chakkuli to take to their house—a token of her gratitude for their support the night of Nandana’s disappearance. Carefully balancing the tray of crisp, golden rings, Nirmala put on her slippers and stepped gingerly off of the verandah and into the front yard, which seemed to have dissolved into a brownish swill. The water was deeper than she had expected and she almost lost her balance. She hitched up her sari with one hand and waded cautiously towards the partially opened gate through which water from the road gushed into the Big House compound.
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