by K R Usha
Five
1933
Rukmini sat with her first cup of coffee in the verandah, in the ghostly dawn, listening to the birdsong. Though it was the cawing of crows that was the loudest, she preferred it to a silent, pitch-black beginning to her day. The hall was full, mattresses spread from wall to wall, full of sleeping children. She counted the visitors on her fingers—two of her husband’s nephews; her sister-in-law who had begun to behave ‘strangely’ again and had been sent here to recuperate along with her three children; Bhagiratamma, her mother, who really didn’t count as a visitor because this was one of her homes; her cousin Shivaswamy, who had gone to sleep in his cups; and a cousin of her husband’s whom she’d not seen before and who would probably stay a long time. In summer, their house bustled like a market town. Even otherwise, they had a steady stream of visitors, but the traffic peaked between April and June. And Mylaraiah, her generous provider, made no distinction between his people and hers.
There were the many balancing acts that she had to perform. When Shivaswamy visited, she had to think of subtle ways of making it up to her husband. And there was the cook, Achamma, to be placated. When the press of visitors increased, Rukmini sent for extra help in the kitchen, usually a couple of burly male cooks from the local matha, to do the chopping and grinding and to serve the many batches that sat for lunch. Achamma considered it a slur on her ability and hated the intruders in her kitchen, especially as they were men and they in turn refused to acknowledge her ownership of it, taking orders only from the ‘ammavaru’ of the house. For the past few years a certain Somappa had been a regular in the kitchen. Of kingly demeanour and courteous mien, Rukmini had taken to him immediately. Achamma claimed that he stole; that he made off with a good part of the vegetables he chopped every day, being partial to tender green cabbage. Though Rukmini did not say so to Achamma, she privately agreed. And what was more he did it brazenly, under her very nose, and she was helpless about it. When Rukmini sat in the courtyard with her afternoon tea, he would go past her in a stately glide, his hands folded decorously under his overgarment, no doubt to avoid swinging them past the lady of the house. He knew very well that she could not ask him why his stomach was bulging unnaturally, for that would amount to asking him to take off his angavastra and reveal his bare torso to her.
Achamma also claimed that the new servant who cooked meat for the dogs—this being a Brahmin household, meat was bought almost surreptitiously by a manservant whose duty was primarily that, and cooked in a pail in one corner of the vast compound—was eating up most of it, which was why the dogs whined most of the time these days and were so listless.
Each day was unpredictable, but she did not mind it really; it added an extra dimension to her; one more way to use her boundless energy. To the many gods and goddesses whose names she recited in the course of the morning’s prayer—the gods of preservation and destruction, health, wealth and learning, she could well add Miss Butler’s name, ordainer of discipline, organization and common sense. That she could manage a household as unwieldy and mushrooming as hers she attributed in good measure to her London Mission School grounding. Nothing could faze her now. At every crisis, she thought of a practical solution, prodded undoubtedly by the sense of calm, the quietude that the principal of her old school, Miss Butler, had possessed. The girls had worshipped the ground that lady had walked on, and along with her practical qualities, had hoped for some of her intimidating presence, her ability to simultaneously inspire them and show them their place. To Miss Butler also she owed her love of reading and her ability to sit still, qualities, she was happy to note, her daughter Kaveri had inherited. The process had begun when the Wesleyan Reverend Rice, headmaster of Garret’s English School had taken her father under his wing, helped him through high school and gone on to find him his first job as an ‘English writer’ in the district commissioner’s office at the then unimaginable sum of rupees ten a month. Once he had been given a leg up, he had risen, from clerk to jamedar and then amaldar, acquired lands, a wife and a family whom he brought up in the shade of the Protestant Mission, never once feeling a mismatch between their ways and his. If anything, they had cut and shaped him like a diamond, so that his natural light would shine. And it had been the same with his children.
The first crisis that Rukmini had dealt with as mistress of an independent household was when she was fifteen, five years into her marriage and yet to have children. Her husband had returned from a visit to his father’s village, holding three of his younger sisters by the hand.
There had been an outbreak of plague in the village and his father had put up a camp to nurse the sick on his lands, personally supervising the arrangements. When the epidemic passed those who survived were sent home and the dead cremated. The camp was dismantled but soon, he himself had come down with bubonic plague, which swiftly turned pneumonic and before long, he had succumbed to it. Mylaraiah had had practically nothing to do with his father these last few years, since his father had taken on another ‘wife’ after his first wife, Mylaraiah’s mother, had died. But he was his father’s only son and had to perform the last rites. After the ceremonies were over, he had asked his three unmarried sisters, already showing signs of wear and tear, to collect their clothes and get ready. Mylaraiah had never believed, like his father, that his stepmother would be a mother to them.
‘This is their home now. They are our first children,’ he told his wife, and waited.
Rukmini, barely a few years older than the three tired, round-eyed girls who stood huddled around their brother, had looked at them and taken a deep breath.
‘Yes of course!’ she had said briskly. ‘What they need is a good bath. I’ll ask Ranga to get the wood fire going.’
That had set the tone of their marriage. Of the strengths and reserves he expected from her, the ability to read between the lines and the bounds she should not cross. When they were newly married and had set up home together, she had thought him quite stern. If she sang in the kitchen, laughed loudly, or even clapped her hands, he’d frown. Every morning, her husband would plait her long hair and set her a page to memorize from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury before setting off on his cycle to the lawyer’s office where he worked as an apprentice. After he left, she would cry for a bit, a little because she missed her mother, and a little because it would be evening till she saw him again, before getting into a panic about learning her poems or her tables for he took up her ‘homework’ religiously when he came back. However, she had acquitted herself well and had won his approval evening after evening, till all of Palgrave was done and she learnt to plait her own hair.
They were like paper kites in the sky, women, Rukmini thought. How high they flew and how long they stayed up depended on the slack they got from the men who flew them. Sometimes, they might not get off the ground at all.
The girls had grown up in the house, and she had looked upon them as her sisters. But when it came to whom they should marry and when, she had no part to play. When her husband had got them married off before they were even ten years old to two of his mother’s brothers, she had protested. She herself had been married when she was ten but had not left her parental home till she had ‘matured’ at twelve. After her marriage, her father had wanted her to stop going to school, but she had fought. Miss Butler’s influence had swung the balance. Rukmini continued at the London Mission School for two more years, till she completed middle school, faintly embarrassed by the thick gold chain that hung round her neck, which she hid by drawing the pallav of her sari round her shoulders.
‘And if we have a daughter,’ she had asked her husband, ‘will you do the same? Get her married off so soon?’
‘Of course not,’ he had laughed. ‘With my sisters, I have to do what my father would have done.’
At ten, as her father had bid her, she had walked seven times round the fire with an unsmiling stranger, a twenty-two year old law student from Bombay. Two years later, when he had completed his studies and set up as a
n apprentice, he had come to claim his bride and they had walked out together, man leading child by the hand. He had taken it upon himself to mould her into the kind of wife he wanted. I agree with Gandhi, he said, that women should not be restricted to child bearing and housekeeping. I cannot have an ignorant wife caught in the coils of domesticity. He had brought her books and insisted that she read the newspaper each day, had taken her with him to his club and taught her how to play tennis and encouraged her to go to the Samaja and ‘get involved with the outside world’. Over the years, he had grown into the habit of talking to her about his work, even going over knotty points of law with her and over the years too, she had come to know him more fully than he would ever know her. She admired his discriminating mind, the diligent, methodical way he set about tackling a problem, his single-mindedness when he wanted something, like the way he was working right then towards the government advocate’s post. Of her husband’s many qualities she wished she had, it was his seeming ability to partition his mind into different compartments, dealing with several things, giving each the time and attention it deserved and then putting it out of his mind, not carrying the detritus of feeling and uncertainty as she did.
Of course, he had wanted her to show just as much initiative as was convenient to him. In ten years, she had become just the wife he had wanted. She knew that he wished her to curb her enthusiasm for her interests outside the house, of which he was not a part and of which he sometimes did not wholly approve, including the powerful forehand drive she had cultivated on the tennis court, while all the other ladies played a demure backhand.
The mind, she discovered, was a strange thing; you could not stop it from unfurling. For a while she had stepped tentatively, looking to him for guidance and approval at every step, and then had taken wing. The Samaja was her first arena outside home, and she had made it what it was. All its successful schemes—the bank for women, the health and hygiene programmes and even the Khadi group had been introduced and nurtured by her. All along she had had to mind the fragile feelings of the others, especially the older members—she had to defer continuously to Umadevi or make her feel that all the ideas had been hers in the first place, and the fact that her husband did not like the appearance of her success, her consequence. Left to herself, she could have done better, for the schemes, the organizing, the minute stock taking came naturally to her. You are a clever little thing, her friend Dr King had often remarked. With the right training, you could have gone places.
For all that, she didn’t know a better man and couldn’t think of a better husband than Mylaraiah. After all, all he asked for was the household not to be neglected, and that she should be mindful of his position. He was a man of sterling qualities—good, quiet qualities. He would not cause her a single day’s worry, there would be no surprises, for theirs was a world of boundaries and limits. Only she wished both her children had not turned out dark and short-statured like him, neither was fair-complexioned like her, nor did they show any signs of growing taller. She had been married when she was ten, so there was no way of telling that in time, she would outgrow her husband.
The morning had not begun well for Kaveri. She had woken up late and had been the last in the queue for a bath. The wrong set of cousins had arrived first—her ‘peculiar’ aunt with her brood of whiny, snot-nosed children. Her other cousins, her father’s youngest sister’s children were still to come. There was just one week of school left before the holidays and she chafed to get over with it. She could not find the book she had been reading and was sure Setu had sneaked it off to read it first. The servant had ironed the wrong uniform. Today was Blue Birds’ day, and as class leader, she had to set an example to the others. She had got used to Miss Lazarus complimenting her on her impeccable uniform and shoes, and had given the servant an earful, after making sure her father was not within earshot. She knew, she would be late today.
Even as she had begun her bath she could hear the purohit bleating out to the children to come for the mangalarati and prasada. On Friday mornings, in place of the simple puja she did each day, Rukmini got the purohit to do an elaborate one, with all the attendant ritual. Kaveri and Setu waited for the prasada they got at the end of the drawn-out affair. They loved the ceremony that went with it, the deep silver cups brimming with panchamruta, and such was Achamma’s skill that she managed to turn the commonplace mix of milk, bananas, ghee, sugar and honey into food touched by the gods.
By the time Kaveri came out of her bath the mangalarati was over and so was most of the prasada.
‘Is this all I get? A measly bit of watery milk with a discoloured banana-piece floating in it? And where’s my silver cup?’
‘Amma,’ the purohit chided, ‘aren’t you going to do your puja first?’
She bent her head in shame and transferred her anger to the gods, tossing the akshate and the flowers, the vermilion and the turmeric in their direction with more force than she intended. Anyway, I was talking to Achamma, not you, she wanted to tell him.
‘Shrihari … Shrihari …’ he would not let it go at that and she felt her ears burn. ‘The lack of piety in the young these days …’
To tell the truth, he was miffed by the lack of piety in the whole household, particularly the casual way in which they treated him. He had no complaints about the dakshina he received, in no other house was he rewarded more handsomely. Rukminiamma, he noted with satisfaction, did not enter the kitchen till she had bathed and her ‘madi’ sari hung out to dry on a pole indoors, quite separate from the rest of the washing. The master of the house too read his designated pages from the Bhagavad Gita, in Sanskrit, each morning. But there was something in the brisk nod that Mylaraiah gave him when he saw him, and the gentle-but-firm tone that Rukminiamma used while talking to him that suggested that he was the first among servants, and prayer one of the morning’s ablutions.
Kaveri was still on the verandah struggling with her hair, her uniform unbuttoned and her shoes unbuckled, when she heard the welcome click of the gate and saw Dr King wheeling her bicycle in—which meant she would get a ride on the pillion till her school.
‘Morning Blue Bird!’
‘Good morning, Dr King,’ Kaveri said awkwardly, watching her toss her sola topi on one of the cane chairs and shake her fair hair loose. The combination of her white skin, now flushed red in the sun, blue eyes and ‘golden’ hair, still tended to leave Kaveri tongue-tied.
‘Dr King! You’ve come,’ Rukmini cried with obvious relief from the doorway. ‘She’s been quite impossible today …’
Dr King’s first name had been the matter of much speculation between Kaveri and her friend Kalyani. Kaveri was sure that the tantalizing ‘M’ that hovered respectfully behind the ‘King’ on the doctor’s name plate stood for Marjorie, and not Margaret as Kalyani insisted. Her curls and blue eyes bespoke a Marjorie; Margaret would have had black straight hair and a grave manner. Her mother didn’t know either, even though they went back a long way. The doctor had come home to deliver both Kaveri and Setu, and now would drop in obligingly, despite her hectic schedule, to look up any minor illness in the household.
Sometimes Dr King would come unannounced in the evenings after her day’s rounds, and Rukmini and she would sit in the garden. The doctor would then light up the first of the evening’s chain of Scissors cigarettes, fix it on to the long holder and start off.
‘Mrs M, I thought I’d had it with that man,’ she’d shake her head, and relate yet another skirmish she had had with an accounts superintendent who she insisted was refusing to give her funds for one of her schemes. ‘I have a good mind to take him to the village—you know the one where my tyres always get punctured on the road—and leave him there, in a thatched hut, without water and electricity and with snakes for company.’
Rukmini would sit back and breathe deep of the faintly tobacco scented air, drinking in every single detail of the doctor’s account. Sometimes she would ply her with questions—How did you know? What did you do then? What
were the signs? Have you used the wonder drug penicillin? What truly interested her were the difficult cases, the ones apparently beyond hope, where every diagnosis had failed, till a fortuitous combination of common sense, presence of mind and luck provided the answer in a flash. In her dreams, Rukmini saw her own waiting room full of such patients—a case of snake bite where she had but seconds to administer the crucial phial, a forager in the forest gored by a bison, who waited patiently with his torn and bloodied limb wrapped in a towel while she saved the boy who had been bitten by the snake, a woman with a mysterious ailment who dwindled even as Rukmini’s brain worked like lightning thinking of parallels—where had she encountered that peculiar pallor and shortness of breath before—there it was! Have you been eating peanuts, she would ask the woman triumphantly, knowing the answer even before the woman could nod weakly; and then she would laugh at herself for getting on like her children. Dr King’s instruments, the stethoscope with the worn ear pieces, the gleaming forceps and syringes, she viewed wistfully and when the doctor sailed out of the gate on her bicycle, Rukmini felt that part of her was setting off to whatever village or hamlet that was scheduled for a visit that day.