by K R Usha
Then there was the gossip. As the evening wore on and Dr King grew more relaxed, she’d start on an anecdote. ‘Did I tell you, Mrs M, about the time I was summoned in the middle of the night to the Prince of Baroda’s palace to attend to his Ranee …’ she would say, her face already quivering with laughter. ‘She turned out to be his dog.’
So she was with the Prince of Baroda before she joined the maharaja of Mysore, Rukmini would make a mental note, to fill up her trove of facts about Dr King—a game that she and her mother indulged in. It must be a man who caused her to leave, her mother said, she must have been crossed in love and you know what a big deal the parangis make out of love; Rukmini had laughed at her mother’s prosaic mind. The two of them would talk till it grew quite dark and the only thing that could be seen was the glowing end of Dr. King’s cigarette and the mosquitoes no longer let them sit outdoors.
Sometimes Rukmini marvelled that the person she should feel most kindred to, should be so removed from her—from a different country, a different race, a different life. They would always be ‘Dr King’ and ‘Mrs M’ to each other, and she would know nothing of the other’s personal circumstances except for what she chose to reveal. From the little that they knew, Rukmini and her mother had conjectured freely about Dr King’s family and fortunes. They knew she lived alone in the doctors’ quarters attached to the government hospital and it was only of late that she had given up an itinerant career to settle down. Before setting up her separate wing for women and children, Dr King had been more of a wandering doctor, a familiar figure on her cycle in the nearby villages. Her father had come to India to seek his fortune and had found it as an apothecary in Her Majesty’s Eleventh Bengal Regiment. He and his wife were buried in Calcutta’s Park Street cemetery and every year Dr King made a trip to Calcutta to see her brother who was in the army and to visit her parents’ grave. Occasionally she spoke of her two nieces.
‘When I came back from University College, London,’ Dr King said once, the only time she had made such a solemn and direct personal reference to herself, ‘I knew the soft life wasn’t for me—treating the ailments of the overeating and indulgent memsahibs of Calcutta or Madras, or even Bombay. And all the ceremony and the social set up … the first thing I did was to throw the Warrant of Precedence out of the window. I bought a bicycle instead and decided I would go where I want.’
It was this that appealed most to Rukmini—the romance of sailing halfway across the world and then setting off on a bicycle into the wilderness. It made her chafe sometimes, and she would be quick and impatient with her children for a while but then, before the slight feeling of regret could grow into real longing and then into discontent, it would die out, or drown in the hectic routine that claimed her. Or her eagle-eyed mother would jolt her out of it by listing their many relatives, women stunted by circumstance or by the sheer caprice of others, those who were not allowed to visit their parents, or had children every year till their wombs were worn out, or like her sister-in-law, driven to madness by indifference. Of course, Rukmini would have made a very good doctor, or lawyer, a good whatever-she-chose-to-put-her mind-to. Then, every time she waved the good doctor off down the driveway, watching her wobble away on the stony road she told herself that her daughter had her spirit, and she would make sure that she had the opportunity as well.
That morning, it was not just a routine duty visit to check her aunt’s blood pressure and pulse rate that had brought her here, Kaveri knew, but the promise of Achamma’s special summer curd-rice breakfast. The family found it amusing that the doctor liked the humble curd-rice so much, but Achamma could make even curd-rice taste like festival food. Of course, it was the incomparable maral-kanti rice, so named because the cooked grains resembled grains of luminous golden sand, grown in their fields, that Achamma cooked in a large pot and left to ferment overnight. The next morning she would turn the porridge-like mass over with a ladle, mix it with chunks of curd so thick that you could cut it with a knife, and serve it with dried-lime pickle.
‘Now, you are truly one of us, Dr King,’ Rukmini would tell her. ‘You can’t eat curd-rice and still be English.’
To which Dr King would reply, ‘I have never felt any different from you, curd-rice or not. I cannot imagine feeling more at home anywhere else.’
There were other staples from Achamma’s kitchen that Dr King enjoyed and whenever they were made, a ‘chit’ would be sent across to her and she would visit. Achamma would make her sit in the coffee room and serve her on a silver plate—a lady doctor who travelled all over the countryside on her bicycle saving lives, was worthy of such treatment.
But to Mrs Spencer, Rukmini’s other English friend, wife of the missionary from across the street, a mere saver of souls, Achamma would not extend the same distinction. Mrs Spencer was served strictly on porcelain. Achamma did not care for bone china; it struck her as strange that this cold material should be considered the hallmark of elegance among the mlechchas but she was thankful for it as it saved the household from defilement; she made sure that the tea set was kept far away from her cooking vessels. Mylaraiah was the legal advisor to the Mission and the Spencers dropped in occasionally. While Mr Spencer spoke to Mylaraiah in the office, his wife would take tea in the garden. Mrs Spencer wore flowered dresses and straw hats and was closer to Rukmini’s age than the older Dr King, but Rukmini’s relationship with her was more formal. Kaveri had never seen them laughing together, as her mother and Dr King did. For Mrs Spencer, Rukmini brought out her best tea set, Huntley and Palmer’s biscuits, and spoke of clematis and hollyhock. They had gardening in common and they both played tennis together—Mrs Spencer in a white skirt and Rukmini in her eight yard sari and canvas shoes. The two of them had introduced the annual flower show and the ‘Garden of the Year’ contest through the Samaja, which had caught the town’s fancy.
A dedicated doctor and a missionary’s wife would have had much in common, the least being that they were both English, Rukmini had thought bestowing on the English a homogeneity that they had bestowed on her kind. She was surprised that it was not so. Dr King also did not share Rukmini’s enthusiasm for missionaries in general. ‘I know your Mrs Spencer is a good soul and her embroidery and stitching classes are all very well. I will even go to her husband’s church on Sunday mornings,’ Dr King said, ‘but Mrs M, spare me her chatter about little Dick and her efforts to grow violets here, in this red soil, or is it larkspurs? Why can’t she stick to jasmine and have a bush full of flowers? There is no point trying to grow what is not suited to this place, and then moan that the plants keep dying.’ So Rukmini kept her two English friends apart and she carefully trod the delicate balance between the two.
As the wife of a missionary, Mrs Spencer also spoke of her work among the people––the Mission was almost a hundred years old and other than the carpentry workshop, they ran a boys’ orphanage, a girls’ tailoring school and several model farms. Of her ‘work’, Rukmini thoroughly approved, but would never have dreamt of including herself among the ‘people’. Even when Dr King told her amusing stories about the ‘natives’ she knew she was not one of them. Moreover, her childhood association with the Methodists had given her the comfort of being both—an honorary insider and a watchful outsider. She had drunk at that fount of Christian virtues—Miss Butler and the London Mission School—and imbibed their best, their discipline, their punctuality and dedication; also their ability to speak in low voices and close doors softly. In fact, in later years, when the possibility of their leaving became too strong to ignore, and the times too volatile for her liking, Rukmini would be heard remarking that she hoped the British would convert them all to Christianity before they left. That was not so much an assertion of her faith in the metaphysics or the spirit of the religion but in her belief in the essential immutability of things; that she belonged to a tradition that was truly eternal, and that the more things changed on the outside, the more they would remain the same on the inside.
When Mrs Sp
encer visited and sometimes even Dr King, both Bhagiratamma and Rukmini would be oddly watchful, particularly with Mrs Spencer, as if they had to be constantly on guard, like teenagers surreptitiously comparing heights and vital statistics. Anxious about whether they were coming up to measure on a purely imagined scale, where the advantage always lay with the other. Rukmini’s conversations with Mrs Spencer sometimes seemed more like a pitting of wits, despite their impeccable grace and good manners, and she felt the weight of living up to standards set by those who had no knowledge of her life, except as a measure of what not to live by. They are the conquerors, her cousin Shivaswamy would say baldly, so they rule the roost. But it wasn’t just that, Rukmini insisted. How many of their women would do the kind of work that Dr King was doing? Her own husband wouldn’t let her travel from home and go to the neighbouring villages, and here was this woman setting off nonchalantly on a bicycle, halfway across the world from her home, to serve the sick. Eventually, it had to do with the spirit of adventure, of curiosity, of a certain intellectual discipline and rigour, which had led them to conquer the world and rule it at their own terms.
‘Like I said,’ Dr King was folding up her stethoscope and putting it into her bag, ‘lots of rest and plenty of liquids—it will do her good to be with family. And you could order a good old vinaigrette from the Army and Navy Stores.’
‘So, Blue Bird,’ she said to Kaveri, ‘ready for a ride to school?’
Kaveri smiled at her and waited, her hand poised on the pillion. But Dr King could not resist one last anecdote. ‘Did I tell you that story about Lady Baden Powell, Mrs M? About her visit to Bombay?’
Lady Baden Powell, head of the Girl Guides movement, the counterpart to her husband’s Boy Scouts, on a visit to a Bombay school, was supposed to address the junior wing of the Girl Guides, known as Brownies. Mindful of the colour and sensibilities of their Indian adherents, the Brownies had been rechristened Blue Birds in India. The good Lady, clearly a mass of good intentions and nerves, anxious to avoid any faux pas with the word ‘brown’, had burst out before a congregation of blue with—‘Ah my little black birds!’
Both Dr King and Rukmini laughed. Kaveri could not see the joke and shuffled her feet impatiently.
‘Don’t,’ her mother said, ‘you’ll scuff your toes. Goodbye, Dr King. I’ll send word about how she is tomorrow.’
It wasn’t the most comfortable feeling, being jolted on a sharply metalled road on a tiny seat with not enough cushioning, but the wind in her face and hair, warm though it was, made up for it. Dr King cycled past the post office and the public library, and people on the footpath stopped to look at them. Kaveri preened and sat up straight, awash with the sense of well being that comes from having eaten well—Achamma had made some more panchamruta for her after giving her a scolding for being cheeky with the purohit, from being well shod—she stuck out her feet and contemplated her shoes, satisfied that they were shining and that she was the only one in school to possess the buttoned up kind, made to order specially for her from Stein of Commercial Street, and from being well dressed—her blue uniform was not the standard thick poplin hand out, but made of a soft, caressing material, though she wished she had on one of her silk dresses from Green’s. She wanted to stop one of the gawking passers-by and tell them that she had a flask of Ovaltine in her bag and a book that she loved, that the big house behind them was hers and what was more, it was the first in town to get electricity, and yes, this English doctor was her mother’s friend.
Would you like to be a doctor like Dr King, her mother would ask as she oiled and combed her hair. If you are good and do well in school, you can go to the hospital in Vellore, or even Madras to study medicine, become the first doctor in the family. It was a happy thought but Kaveri would rather be Toad of Toad Hall and buy herself a bright red motor car. The appurtenances were in place; she already had a mansion, and servants and friends who were faithful in that they were dull and looked to her for excitement. What she would really like to do was write stories—stories about kings and battles, ships and pirates, even some faintly moralistic ones like the ones they had in school—Florence Nightingale, or King Bruce and the Spider, or Daniel and the Lions, or even Punyakoti the Cow from her Kannada text. Already she had reams and reams of paper, pulled out from her old exercise books and stitched together, full of the imaginary exploits of Peter and Jane. Peter swam seas, climbed mountains, hacked through jungles, jumped into burning houses to rescue children and chased thieves who were bent upon stealing unnamed ‘treasures’, while Jane was good and kind and loving. Stories about Jane had little lessons at the end like ‘Don’t be greedy’ or ‘Don’t tell lies’. On the exhortation of Pushpa Miss, who happened to read one of her Peter and Jane stories, she had tried writing about Kamala and Timma, and had immediately been struck dumb. They were people like herself and she couldn’t think of any ‘stories’ to tell about them. With Timma, there always seemed to be a drought, not enough rice and cattle dying in the fields, while Kamala brought in an ailing mother, an aunt who was recovering from childbirth and a husband who was being cruel to her in some unfathomable way—variations of the conversations that Kaveri had overheard between her mother and grandmother. The minute she wrote the names Peter or Jane on paper, it was as if her pencil took wing, her imagination was set free, and life was no longer a burden.
By the time she reached school, the bell had rung. She ran down the carriageway of the Empress Girls’ School, built in the year of the golden jubilee of Queen Victoria, and the marble head of the queen curled its famous lip at her. She joined the flock of Blue Birds, and had to go to the very end of the row, not her usual place at the head of the line. Her leader’s speech, prepared so carefully, remained thrust in the pocket of her dress. Somebody else was giving the speech, stumbling through unrehearsed sentences. And it was not Kalyani, her best friend and deputy.
‘So ammavaru has finally arrived,’ someone said behind her.
‘Your perch has been taken, so stop fluttering, cropped crow …’
She turned round to glare at the offender but couldn’t tell who it was. Her short hair and vermilion-less forehead were grist to the mill about her ‘English’ ways.
‘Thinks she is a “parangi” just because she came riding on a cycle with one …’
There were two of them, Shanta and Nasreen Banu. ‘Crow yourself!’ she lunged, pulling hard at Shanta’s handy plaits and kicking the other in the shin. ‘Coward … afraid to show your face … better to ride on a cycle than to come in a covered cart like a sack of rice …’
Miss Lazarus clapped her hands. ‘Blue Birds! Are you actually fighting in the back there?’
Once the speech was over, the games began but Kaveri could not see Kalyani anywhere. It was not like Kalyani to miss games. Finally she spotted her sitting on the cement platform on the flag square, in the shade of the Ganda Bherunda that fluttered above her head.
‘I’ve been advised not to play for a few days. Complete rest …’ she said mysteriously.
‘Is it TB?’ Kaveri asked hopefully, having just read a melodramatic story where the husband and wife had coughed to death, leaving their children destitute.
‘No, Dr King has asked me to eat a lot of greens.’
‘Oh greens!’ Kaveri sniffed. She knew all about Dr King’s greens. The doctor and Rukmini had devised a board game of snakes and ladders where every time you ‘forgot to wash hands before meal’ you slid down a snake and when you had ‘two helpings of greens’ you climbed all the way up on a ladder.
‘No, really, she did. I have rice and soppina saaru in my dabba today.’
Kaveri looked at her with faint disgust, imagining the soppu slopping all over. No liquidy-stuff in my lunch box, she had decreed, no brown rivulets running down the sides of my dabba. Everyday she carried with her biscuits and two thick slices of sweet bread from Swami’s bakery with a wad of homemade butter in between and sometimes, as a treat, a flask of Ovaltine—adding to the jibes about her �
�English’ affectations.
Kalyani’s resolve was set. She wouldn’t join even in the last game before they closed. Kaveri too was distracted and got out at dodge ball, when everyday she was the last in the ring. But before the class dispersed for lunch, harmony was restored. Everyone, Shanta and Nasreen Banu included, was sitting around her and listening to her Lady Baden Powell joke.
That night, when the servants had made their beds and they were preparing to sleep, Kaveri asked her grandmother a ‘serious’ question.
Usually, Kaveri’s conversations with her grandmother were about who could throw an imaginary ball higher in the sky, she or her friends, which flower had the better smell, the rose or the something else or why the ash on an incense stick sometimes was a single long curl and sometimes scattered into powder. If she were reading a book, she would give her grandmother an impassioned account of every page. When Kaveri read a story, it was no longer make-believe, a figment of someone’s imagination but a life that she appropriated. She lived it completely, extrapolating further on the situations, sharpening the characters, giving them an extra edge, something more than their creator had given them. If the book turned out to be a favourite, members of the family would be given parts and bits of dialogue. Right then of course, they sailed on the river with Rat and Mole and picnicked on cold tongue and pickled gherkin—‘Cold tongue indeed!’ Bhagiratamma had said when she had been given a piece of papaya instead, ‘all I know of is sharp tongues!’ It would be nice, her granddaughter would say dreamily, to live on a river, to which Bhagiratamma would reply, but you are one Kaveri, and a great river too. It is all yours—the picnics, the quiet dips and gurgles in the valleys as well as the currents and the swift course and the falls through the hills. What do you want with a quiet, lapping river with toads and moles and rats when you can have the choicest crocodiles swimming in your waters and herds of elephants bathing on your banks?