A Girl & a River

by K R Usha

  The maharaja, according to Mylaraiah, was a perfect product of their partnership with the British. In many ways he felt His Highness had the kind of balance in his personal qualities which he himself had. Krishnarajendra Wodeyar had a powerful forehand on the tennis courts, worked up a lather at polo, rode straight to the hounds, and loved his horses and dogs. He could sit at the same table with the king of England and use a knife and fork, play the violin like them and yet he was a Sanskrit pandit and reputedly, the first thing he did on waking each morning was bathe in the Kaveri. Moreover, it was not as if he and his advisers were blind to the writing on the wall. The very year he came to power, he had instituted a representative assembly, which rightly was an association of landowners and merchants—all tax paying men, and there were two women too—and a legislative council, to which Mylaraiah hoped to be nominated soon. Of course, things would take time. Right then the assembly was just an advisory body, which met once a year. It was also true that its members were more interested in their annual outing to Mysore from their villages, but people had to be trained to become responsible. Only then could dominion status under the protective umbrella of the British be considered. Independence right then would be like letting a whole lot of monkeys loose in a ripe mango orchard.

  As Mylaraiah turned the corner, the government buildings came into sight and he stopped for a moment to look at the emblem on the flag hoisted above the district commissioner’s office, noting with approval how smartly the pennant fluttered in the breeze. And in the fitness of things, in the inner enclave of the office, on the entrance wall hung the portraits of the maharaja and his father—grave, worthy men whose figured silk galebands sat perfectly on their shoulders, the little peacock feather that protruded from their diadems relieving the gravity of their expression. Some days back Mylaraiah’s clerk had brought him a scurrilous pamphlet disguised as a newspaper—Mylaraiah usually did not bother with such gossip but this ‘article’ was being discussed in the lawyers’ association as well. The article had suggested slyly that perhaps the Union Jack should fly alongside the Ganda Bherunda, and the viceroy’s portrait be mounted alongside the maharaja’s and his father’s, for where would they be without the continuous kindness of the British.

  There was a list of the various acts of kindness of the British to the House of Mysore, beginning with their deftness in getting rid of the upstarts Hyder and Tipu in the eighteenth century. The British had taken it upon themselves to deal with the adventurers Hyder Ali and his son Tipu who had usurped the throne from the legitimate rulers, the Wodeyars. Hyder had been a mere foot soldier in the Mysore army and unlike the Wodeyars had not been meek and compliant. Father and son had fought the British when the British had still been the East India Company. However, it was only a matter of time before the British took over. The historic siege of Seringapatam proved to be the final arbiter; Mysore was lost to the British—Tipu slain, betrayed by his own men, his body heaped casually among those of the soldiers who had borne the first onslaught of the invading British army. A hundred years after the siege, when Mysore was neatly parcelled and trussed up, the prince of Wales had visited the state and had wanted to be shown the exact place where the wall of the Seringapatam fort had been breached by ‘our men’ and sealed the fate of Mysore. From the ramparts of the disused fort, he had surveyed the Kaveri, which flowed past and pointed to the bamboo at the water’s edge, whose roots had treacherously gained entry into the wall of the fort and had no doubt spread to its foundations. Nature too, the prince was supposed to have remarked, had willed a British victory.

  With Tipu gone and nature on their side, the British had pretty much done what they wanted. In less than a hundred years, they had restored, removed and re-restored the Wodeyars to the throne of a truncated Mysore.

  In the year 1868, there had been much joy in the kingdom of Mysore and quite a bit of the royal treasury had gone towards the purchase of rock sugar, which was freely distributed among the people. The pamphlet writer digressed here to recall that his grandmother’s house too had received a lump of the rock sugar, which had been treated almost on par with the idols of the gods. His grandmother had kept it safe in a copper vessel sealed with a lid. After several years of ruling the state themselves, the British had installed the rightful ruler, the infant Chamaraja Wodeyar, in the palace that year. Quite literally, his majesty had needed the protection of his British masters. So great was the rejoicing at the palace that evening that Commissioner Bowring had to cock his hat over the boy king’s face to protect him from the fusillade of flowers and the fountains of attar that his newly pledged subjects were showering on him. As a treat for the infant king, the chief commissioner took him to the Imperial assembly in Delhi when Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. Thirteen years later, when on coming of age the king had formally taken over the administration of the state, again everyone had marvelled at the good omen—a shower of rain just as the first royal durbar was about to begin! The state would receive a twenty-one gun salute at the Imperial durbar! Again, the maharaja would have the benefit of the ‘advice’ of a British resident and the ‘assistance’ of an English civil servant-secretary. It seemed to be in bad taste to mention that the annual subsidy to the British was raised by ten and a half lakh rupees, not counting the debt of eighty lakhs that already existed. In return for their many kindnesses, the maharaja had pledged his loyalty to Her Gracious Majesty the Empress of India—a woman who would not attend the Imperial assembly in her own honour in Delhi because she could not bear the thought of the heat and the insects.

  At that point in its litany of British ‘kindnesses’ to the state of Mysore, the article had stopped, promising another instalment of the same. The author had called himself ‘nobody’ and there were rumours that he was a high schoolteacher. For a moment, Mylaraiah wondered whether Narayana Rao could have written the article, for this was just the sort of rhetorical, pointless and completely disproportionate exercise that he would indulge in, and Narayana Rao too made much of being a child of history, but then he dismissed the suspicion. Though Narayana Rao dwelt on the past, it was always with an eye to the future, and he was more interested in immediate gains. Such a recounting of facts and figures was suggestive of a teacher of history. At the thought of Narayana Rao, a forceful tide rose up in Mylaraiah’s breast and he had to stop mid-stride, feel for an offending pebble on the footpath and kick it away. For Narayana Rao and he had a strange and longstanding kinship.

  Both Mylaraiah and Narayana Rao came from the same village and belonged to the same sub-caste as well, their families having known each other for generations. One of the earliest memories Mylaraiah had was of travelling in a bullock cart, squashed between his mother and Narayana Rao’s grandmother, on the way to the temple fair in the next village—the women and children of the two households had gone everywhere together. For years, Mylaraiah had escorted the younger Nani four miles each way to catch the bus to school in the next town, enduring him like a burr on his flanks for Narayana Rao was small, snivelling and always lagging behind. Even when he was quite grown up, his grandmother would hitch him on to her hip and feed him tuttus of mosaranna, standing in the porch for all to see. That was how Mylaraiah thought of him, a pair of skinny legs dangling from a girdle and a face with curd smeared all over it. No one had paid him much attention, he was one of a group of boys; no one really thought he’d amount to anything, either. But for all that he’d grown up to be a handsome lad and had gone on to study law from Bombay, just as Mylaraiah had from Mysore and after getting their degrees, they had apprenticed with the same lawyer in Mysore. Narayana Rao had returned from Bombay woollier than ever, and what was more, infected with the national cause. Though he had a good grasp over matters, during his entire apprenticeship, there was not a single case that Narayana Rao had seen through to the end, always tilting at windmills, more concerned with his vague notions of ‘justice’ rather than winning the case on hand. Or he would be ill, lying on his mattress in the corner of th
e hall that all the boys slept in. Finally, he had left in a huff over a minor matter, without completing his period of apprenticeship and set up a desultory practice by himself. No junior would stay with him for long and he did not have too many clients either. It was a good thing for Narayana Rao that the Congress had come along.

  It would have been such a relief to him if all that he had felt for Narayana Rao was contempt. But from the tip of his discoloured toenail, to his pious tuft, Narayana Rao gave off an innocent, if tired, worthiness like a creature battered but whose demons had been eventually laid to rest, a man who had emerged from a trial by fire with his limbs scorched perhaps, but with a heart of shining gold. At the thought of Narayana Rao, slurry demons rose in Mylaraiah’s gullet, like squirts of acid after a rich meal, hinting at the road not taken, at safe, cushy alternatives, at a less-than-full life.

  Moreover, there was Rukmini’s obvious admiration for the man. And the matter of the interchanged horoscopes, stupid and inconsequential now, but that too stuck to his mind like a burr, putting him sometimes into an annoyingly reflective frame of mind. Those many years back, as soon as the inauspicious month of Ashada was over, two proposals had arrived in the village simultaneously. Owing either to a rare oversight by the postal department or a quirk of fate, the two proposals had been interchanged, for the houses stood next to each other. The proposal that Rukmini’s father had sent was actually meant for the tall and handsome Narayana Rao. The man Rukmini had ended up with was the short and dark Mylaraiah. By the time the lapse was discovered, it was too late; the respective parties had spoken to each other and agreed to the ‘wrong’ proposals. How did it matter really, for there was little to choose between two eight-year old girls belonging to the same community, brought up under almost identical circumstances, when the horoscopes matched. That lapse was immaterial now and didn’t merit even a stray thought, but Mylaraiah could not help thinking sometimes, whether Rukmini ever speculated upon it.

  This time, had it not been for his intervention, Narayana Rao and his boys would still have been in jail for picketing the liquor shop. He had taken up the case reluctantly, prodded by his senior colleague and Rukmini.

  After his release from jail, Narayana Rao had come to see him. Which was surprising for in the normal course they rarely met; it was only when he wanted a donation that Narayana Rao would meet him. For they did not presume upon the familiarity of their youth; and familiarity it was, not friendship, for their paths had diverged too much for them to feel anything more than a general social kinship. This time, however, Mylaraiah had managed to get Narayana Rao and his boys’ jail sentence commuted to a fine. A part of the hefty sum he had paid himself. Mylaraiah had guessed from Narayana Rao’s awkward, tongue-tied overtures that he had come to thank him, though there had been nothing particularly respectful in his manner, for no doubt he thought Mylaraiah had only done what was his due.

  Shivaswamy had snatched Narayana Rao first, as soon as he entered the compound, and had kept him talking by the gate till it was almost time for Mylaraiah to leave for his chambers. He never did find out whether Narayana Rao’s coconut groves changed hands to enrich the Congress coffers, but after talking to Shivaswamy, Narayana Rao walked up into the verandah and into Mylaraiah’s office.

  As Mylaraiah had looked at the man across the table, unshaven and scruffy, in limp khadi, he had again felt the familiar impulse of anger and reluctant admiration towards him.

  ‘And what will you do now Narayana Rao?’ he had asked, a little brusquely.

  ‘Why, get back into the fray of course,’ Narayana Rao had said immediately, spreading his hands out in a helpless gesture, as if he was but a straw in the winds of fate, and that the nation, the state, the party and his boys, who waited outside the gate, were impatient for him to transact his business and get back to them, and of course, he did not expect Mylaraiah to understand his compulsions.

  It was anger that spurted then, all admiration gone. No more, Mylaraiah had decided right then, would he come to Narayana Rao’s rescue or to that of any Congressman, despite what Rukmini and the whole Bar Council said.

  ‘Do you know what you are doing, where you are headed? You are setting an example to a lot of young men. Surely your approach can be less hysterical …’

  ‘The decision was made for me long back,’ Narayana Rao had looked at him deliberately, ‘by an experience I cannot forget …’

  And then, Narayana Rao had mentioned the amaldar of their village.

  ‘Do you remember him?’

  The amaldar was one of the most enduring images of Mylaraiah’s childhood. He instantly recalled a distant cloud of dust advancing on the village path, which even as they watched, parted to reveal a blazing warrior on horseback, in khakis and sola topi, and flashing eyes that impaled the village shanbhogue and the patel and reduced them into genuflecting non-entities. The man would sit on a desk and chair set up under a tree, and as he went through the records, there would be a scramble to fan him and offer him food and drink. But he would eat and drink nothing and after bowing briefly to the village deity, he would ride off into another cloud of dust. Other than the sheer drama of the event what had impressed Mylaraiah was that the amaldar was powerful, he kept things in order and that he was a government official, and from there had begun his faith in all three. For Narayana Rao, who had cowered with terror at the thought of being trampled to death under the horse hooves, the man had been a rakshasa. And there was more.

  ‘Do you remember a man who came with him sometimes, an Englishman?’

  Mylaraiah had no memory of the Englishman but Narayana Rao could not forget him. One afternoon, the amaldar rode up to the village pond with the Englishman. A group of boys making their way home from school had been caught unawares. The others had fled as soon as they saw the horses advancing towards them, but Narayana Rao was left behind. The Englishman, as red as the amaldar’s brown, had studied him carefully, prodding him a little here and there with his whip, while the amaldar stood and watched. He had flicked at the bare feet covered with mud, the thin shanks exposed under the drawn-up dhoti, traced the outline of each rib that stood clear under the mul jubba, and coiled the sacred thread that showed at the neck round the tip of his whip. He had contemplated the cluster of khadi threads for some time, before shaking it off. And then his whip had travelled up Narayana Rao’s neck, up the swell of his freshly shaven head and had rested in a dry, abrasive clinch at the base of the tuft of hair that had been allowed to remain high up on the back of his head. He had lifted up the tuft questioningly and the amaldar’s teeth had gleamed in reply.

  At that time Narayana Rao had been happy to get away unscathed; it was only later, through his years at law college, and after reading Gandhi that he had understood the enormity of those few moments by the pond. Not a word had been said and nothing apparently had been done to him but an Englishman had been able to come up to him casually, inspect him as he would cattle or horseflesh that he intended to buy, and one of his own kind had joined the Englishman in the humiliation. The amaldar had been a Brahmin too and must have worn both a tuft and a sacred thread, at least at some time—and then the tragedy of his nation had become clear to him.

  Mylaraiah had heard out Narayana Rao without interrupting, irritated by the long emotional tale, suspecting from Narayana Rao’s practised air that this was not the first time he was relating the incident. To hold the entire English race hostage to the thoughtlessness of one Englishman and the entire Mysore Civil Service responsible for the arrogance of one lowly amaldar seemed ridiculous to him. Narayana Rao should have gone home and quietly cut the tuft off, which was what he himself and all right thinking men had done when they left the village. Why, he had taken off the sacred thread too. But Narayana Rao, despite his work among the harijans and his insistence that men of all castes should sit together and eat in his house, had clung to both his tuft and his thread.

  ‘Well, Nani,’ Mylaraiah had replied, ‘let me tell you a story. It may not be as
dramatic as yours but I want you to think about it. The other day I had an angry complainant …’

  The man wanted to register a case against a policeman who had caught him while he was ‘committing nuisance’ against the wall of the district commissioner’s office and had hauled him off to the police station. These ‘civilizing’ rules were new and had provoked a range of reactions—from bewilderment to indignation—from the public. The complainant had objected, not because he had been caught at a vulnerable moment but because the policeman, a Eurasian and therefore a mlechcha, had prodded him accidentally with his shoe while pulling him up from the ground by the collar. He was doubly polluted, he claimed—once by the touch of leather, the skin of a dead animal and the second time by the touch of an outcaste foreigner! Gandhi could fast himself senseless, Mylaraiah said, before he and his party could meld this vast, complex, ridiculous country without the glue of British intermediation.