by K R Usha
Savitramma had steadily declined to join the Samaja, despite everybody’s entreaties, including Umadevi’s. Your husband is so broad minded, he urges women to come out of their houses and work for social causes, Umadevi had said. ‘If both of us start serving society, what will happen to our home?’ Savitramma had smiled. ‘You know I just can’t count on him, he’s out of the house all the time, busy with his party activities, and when he does come home, it is always with a group of people. Sometimes I don’t see him for days together, except when I serve him his meal. And you know our household, every meal has a different set of people sitting down to it, there are so many people coming and going … Of course, he never stops me but I can serve the nation best by serving him.’
The demands made on Savitramma, everybody knew, were immense; for a woman without her willingness and her iron constitution, it would have been impossible. Like Rukmini’s household, there was a stream of visitors from the village the boys they had undertaken to feed, and a host of other semi-dependents. The committee meetings of the Congress and all the discussions were held in their house and Narayana Rao would suddenly announce that a group of volunteers was coming from Dharwar or wherever and that they would be staying with them. Many of the senior leaders were old, of indifferent health or plain fastidious. The women always stayed in Savitramma’s house. ‘All of them, men and women, they won’t dream of staying anywhere else and you know I can’t bear to turn my kitchen over to cooks or get food from a hotel,’ Savitramma had said and again Rukmini had flushed with embarrassment. ‘And with Gandhiji coming, I can expect a full contingent from the party. I’ll have so much to do—their food, you know the people from the north, Dharwar side, they have to have jowar rotis … to arrange for their baths I’ll have to get the woodfire going really early … of course, they all help, good people … but you know how it is. Even when he was in jail, I couldn’t go and see him. I just asked my brother-in-law to take the children …’
Moreover, Savitramma was deeply religious, observing all the routine fasts and ceremonies, undertaking several demanding ones voluntarily—many which Rukmini knew involved all-night pujas and cold water baths.
When the meeting broke up it was well past lunch time and Rukmini was happy with the outcome. Everything was arranged to the last detail and there had been no serious disagreements. If there had been a few sniggers in the back row she had ignored them. But when she made her way to the kitchen, she found that her husband had gone back to his chambers without his lunch.
It was implicit between Setu and his school friends that they would not visit each other at home. He may wait at the gate everyday, but Chapdi Kal knew better than to come in. He also knew that there was no question of Setu coming to his house in one of the back alleys of the market, where his father, a small merchant, traded. Sometimes, the boys played in the garden at the back of Setu’s house with his dogs, but the servants were at liberty to shoo the boys off when they wanted, and some of the older ones like Timrayee would even box their ears. Apart from mere shyness, the boys understood instinctively that the bounds of natural ability ended where social hierarchy began. So Chapdi Kal was mindful of the honour being done to him and the risk Setu was taking in inviting him home. There was something that Chapdi Kal just had to see, Setu said. Of course, they would go in by the back door. The servants were all right, but they had to watch out for the cook. If she caught them, she would make them take a bath.
It was a visit that satisfied Chapdi Kal to the full. If, as their text book told them, the ‘three sights’ had brought Gautama Buddha closer to enlightenment, the sights in Setu’s house, he would say, were no less revealing of the eternal mysteries.
At the back of the house after going through a maze of storerooms, they had come to the kitchen and on the floor of the kitchen, they had come across a huge man chopping what looked like a small round head on a wooden board. His fingers were blood stained.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Setu whispered, ‘that’s a beetroot. The English doctor says it is very good for health. Our cook too used to refuse to touch it in the beginning.’
And in the next room, which Setu called the coffee room, was the English doctor in the flesh, sitting cross-legged on a chair, eating off a silver plate. The cook, the one they had to watch out for, was heaping a pile of fried sandige onto the doctor’s plate. The few English men and women in the town were distant, hallowed figures to Chapdi Kal, best viewed from behind, and here was one, a doctor no less, eating majjige huli and aral sandige with her fingers, like everybody else.
‘You should see her eat mosaranna. Just loves it,’ Setu said. ‘She’s come to see my aunt, you know the one I told you about.’
Chapdi Kal was familiar with Setu’s aunt. The previous summer Setu and the other boys had got into trouble for their games involving the aunt’s six-month old baby. ‘Rocking the baby’, which was a competition to see who could rock the cradle fastest and highest came to an abrupt halt when the baby started choking and ‘Where is the baby?’, which had consisted of hiding the baby in ingenious places for the others to search, again had to be hastily terminated when Setu was caught trying to hide the bundle in the water tank.
This summer she had got better. Every day, Setu would come up with a new instalment of what his aunt did. Her performance by the river had been milked to the full. The milder diversions were her shrieks and groans and her constant licking of the lips, of which he did a good imitation. But she could quarrel spectacularly with the servants and had tried to run away twice already. She would lie in wait for Setu and accost him when he tried to sneak past her room. The past few days, she had kept asking him what he had done with her third trunk. She had tried different ways of getting the information out of him—one day she wheedled, the next, she was coy and the third, she demanded angrily that he return her property to her at once else she’d go to the police. Clearly, she thought she was travelling in a train and the others in the house were passengers travelling along with her. She would rock back and forth in her chair and say, ‘I can see two of my trunks on the top berth, but where is the third? The one my brother gave me, olive green with locks on the sides and a catch that fits perfectly’.
‘Go check with the ticket collector,’ Setu would shout and run past her.
Kaveri had reported similar accostings, but her aunt, by some quirk of her disturbed mind, spoke to her in Hindi. ‘Tell me girl,’ she’d say peremptorily, ‘can you understand the language people speak in these parts? I believe it’s something called Kannad.’
Bhagiratamma said it was because she was prevented by her husband from writing the Hindi Visharad exam she had set her heart on. As for the trunk, it was explained away as the baggage of an unhappy home life.
That afternoon, Chapdi Kal had to admit she made a magnificent sight. Dressed in a red silk sari, her thick hair askew, she sat on her bed and fixed the boys with a vacant, glittering eye, all the brighter in her ashen face. She had just stared at them silently and then had let off a medium-level shriek and her head had fallen backwards like a stone, and hit the wooden frame of the bed with a crack. The two of them had fled before they could be blamed for it, stopping only when they reached the cowsheds at the back.
‘That’s a fine madwoman you have,’ Chapdi Kal said enviously and Setu glowed with pride. ‘Is that what you wanted to show me?’
‘No,’ Setu said mysteriously. ‘But we must wait till there are no servants about.’
When the servants had gone, Setu led Chapdi Kal into one of the cowsheds.
‘Here, look!’
‘At what?’ There was nothing in the cowshed, no cows; just two goats and a kid.
‘These,’ Setu said in a hushed whisper, ‘are Gandhiji’s goats. Do you remember C.G.K. Sir telling us Gandhiji did not drink cow’s milk, only goat’s milk? Well, that’s why. And,’ Setu savoured the next bit of information even more, ‘do you know where they came from? From Anwar’s house, yes Komberghat Anwar’s house in Mohammedan Mohalla
.’
Chapdi Kal looked at the goats, trying to work up the right mix of reverence and awe that they deserved. He knew that it was a rare privilege to be associated with not one but two hallowed entities, and he marvelled at the quirk of fate that had brought the two—Komberghat Anwar and Gandhiji—together. But the goats chewed on, regardless. The white one, the one with a beard, stood sleepily amidst its plentiful droppings, while the black one, the one with the silky coat, was sitting down, her teats splayed beneath her.
‘When Gandhiji arrives tomorrow, Timrayee will milk them and take the milk to our school where Gandhiji is staying. After he leaves, the goats too will go back home … you can touch them if you like. They’re quite tame. The kid was quite frisky in the morning. Here, feed the big one a carrot.’ But the goats ignored them and soon the boys lost interest and went away to play with the dogs.
When Chapdi Kal left, with two tumblers of Achamma’s excellent payasa sitting warmly in his stomach, he was quite replete. But, he had to admit that neither Gandhiji’s goats, nor the Mysore hound were a patch on the madwoman.
Gandhi came in the first week of the new year and the day he arrived, there was panic in the house. To begin with the goats refused to cooperate and Timrayee had to be quite sharp with them. And then Achamma wondered whether the milk had to be boiled or sent fresh. Did one treat goat’s milk the same as cow’s milk? Should they send it as it was and would they boil it at the camp? The Congress volunteer who had been stationed in the verandah since the early hours of the morning did not know. Was it groundnuts soaked in milk or dates? Groundnuts, Rukmini said impatiently, she had clearly told Achamma to soak groundnuts in goat’s milk. She had said dates, Achamma maintained. They soaked both afresh, just in case.
How, Achamma muttered under her breath, a man who didn’t even dress properly—it was not as if he was the maharaja—could send the whole household spinning like a top, she could not understand. And what was wrong with cow’s milk? They had been drinking it since Lord Krishna’s time. It was all very well that he wanted to act like a poor man, but the poor would be only too happy to drink cow’s milk if they could afford it. And groundnuts!
When everything looked set, Achamma, in her excitement, dropped the thermos flask, the only one in the house. A new one could only be had from Bangalore. Now what were they to send the milk in?
‘Rukmini, bring out the silver akshaya patre,’ Bhagiratamma commanded.
‘Send milk in a silver container to Gandhi?’ Mylaraiah was aghast. ‘Do you want my name to be mud in this town?’
Even as Achamma was washing out the remnants of cod liver oil from a black, large mouthed bottle, Mylaraiah hit upon an idea.
‘Quick, get me a stool,’ he said, as he took off his coat and then reached for the electric light in the passageway. He unscrewed the milky white dome shading the bulb and blew the dust off. ‘Here Achamma, carry it with both hands and wash it well, and for heaven’s sake, don’t drop it.’
A lid was found to fit and the dome full of goat’s milk was dispatched with Timrayee and the volunteer in a tonga.
A little later, at the head of the road on which the office was situated, the women of the Samaja waited for him, led by Rukmini and Umadevi. As soon as he arrived, the Mahatma would be brought by the Congress Welcoming Committee to the Samaja, his first stop, where after spending half an hour, he would proceed to the town hall, with Rukmini joining Narayana Rao and the other eminent people of the town in the escorts’ party. They were there on the dot, and waited as the morning progressed from nine to ten o’ clock and ten to eleven o’ clock. But there was no sign of the Mahatma or Narayana Rao or anyone else, and the women waited in vain. Even their khadi garlands wilted and Kaveri flounced back home, refusing to wait anymore. When the Mahatma’s entourage finally swept into town, it was almost noon, a good three hours behind schedule. The first item to be cancelled from his itinerary was the half-hour promised to the women’s Samaja group—only nobody bothered to tell them that. It was almost time for lunch and the motor cars went on straight towards the town hall. Rukmini, was not in the escorts’ party. The women, many of whom had come from the neighbouring villages and had waited for hours, continued to sit in the Samaja hall, hoping for a glimpse of him. Rukmini came home late in the afternoon with a headache and a fever, the first of her many mysterious bouts of illness. Waiting for the Mahatma on an empty stomach and maintaining order among a group of noisy women had proved too much for her. If there had been word from Narayana Rao, some explanation, she would have borne it better. It is only to be expected, Mylaraiah said, not without a touch of malice. He is far too busy and you don’t really matter in his scheme of things.
‘I have already seen him,’ Setu announced when he came home in the afternoon, and lowering his voice he added, ‘He was sleeping!’ as if he had caught Gandhi out.
Setu’s school declared a holiday since Gandhi and his entourage were to be accommodated in the school. But the boys had swaggered around all morning in the grounds in mufti—though they were not allowed into the classrooms; just by being present in school when they were not supposed to be made them feel they were thumbing their noses at it. In the afternoon, Ramu, to show off his privileges as Narayana Rao’s son had made arrangements for his friends to peep at Gandhi. They had climbed onto a heap of rubble on the grounds next to the window to his room and peered in, each boy getting a maximum of two seconds. The Mahatma was taking a nap, fifteen minutes from 1.45 pm to 2 pm. When Setu’s turn came, he saw a small, bald man asleep on the floor, slack jawed, his dentures waiting in a bowl beside his mat, next to his spectacles.
It was Bhagiratamma, Kaveri, Setu, the servants and a couple of unidentifiable relatives, who went to listen to Gandhi in the high school grounds in the evening.
‘The crowd!’ Bhagiratamma exclaimed when she came home after the meeting. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen so many people before. The whole high school field was full. Wait,’ she fanned her face with the end of her sari, ‘let me wash my feet first.’
‘And so lively, I’ve rarely seen our people so avid … the only time I’ve seen such fervour is at the local Maramma jatres and at the chariot festivals. They were behaving as if God himself had come down to earth … I can quite believe he can get them to do anything … but the dust! Kaveri was coughing all the time.’
‘In! In to the bathroom! I’ve kept the water hot,’ Achamma was urging Setu, ‘Look at your feet.’
‘What did he say?’ Rukmini asked.
‘There he was, perched on the platform high above the crowd, so small and frail, poor man … but his skin, Rukmini, even in the twilight it was shining like copper … what will we do after he goes?’
‘Ayya, I didn’t let any of them enter from the front door. Right from the back door to the bachalmane I keep saying, but they are too excited to listen to me. I’ve got cauldrons of hot water ready … God knows who all they have touched …’
‘He spoke in Hindi, and Bhimappa, Nani’s clerk, kept translating, but he wasn’t quick enough, and moreover, we couldn’t hear him clearly …’
‘Well, my friend Ramu garlanded him and his father gave Gandhiji a purse full of money …’
‘He’s my friend Kalyani’s father too, and she too was supposed to garland him. Actually I was, but I refused,’ Kaveri cut in. ‘Well, Kalyani’s father gave Gandhiji a purse of one thousand rupees and you should have heard the crowd… like thunder.’
‘What Setu! Still with your slippers on!’ Achamma exclaimed, ‘All kinds of people would have been there …’
‘Achamma,’ Mylaraiah said, ‘the Mahatma is here especially to remind us about the brotherhood of man—he says that the arrogance of the upper castes and the way we treat the Harijans is what is weakening us. That is why the parangis find it so easy to rule over us.’
‘I’m sure he never said anything about bringing in the dust of a thousand strangers into the house,’ Achamma muttered mutinously.
‘The Gita says you m
ust treat other castes as you would like to be treated yourself …’
‘To each his own place, Ayya, and I would never refuse to wash my feet before entering anyone’s house.’
‘Wait, we haven’t told you what happened after the speech,’ Bhagiratamma said.
There had been a few anxious moments when the volunteers had moved between the rows, making collections and people had surged forward, anxious to put things into the collection bags. Bhagiratamma had caught the glint of coins, of silver plates and chambus, even the gleam of gold. For a few minutes, Bhagiratamma had been unable to see Setu in the crowd of arms extending towards the collection bag, but had then found him.
‘Lawyer Nanjunda Kole’s wife and her sister-in-law, Setu’s C.G.K. Sir’s wife, I saw them casually throw their gold bangles in. Nanjunda Kole’s wife can easily afford another pair but that other woman, her husband is just a schoolteacher. I don’t think she has another set to wear.’
It was only later in the night that Bhagiratamma noticed. Rukmini’s diamond earrings, with eight perfectly cut stones that flashed blue in the night, stones hand picked by her husband for his daughter, were gone. But she did not say anything to Rukmini about it.
Seven
1987
I cannot claim to have had an unhappy childhood, I was often lonely and the house, very silent. It was the minding-its-own-business sort of silence that fills up large houses inhabited by small families. But sometimes the silence would turn slightly prickly and brooding, as if any minute things would change and people would show their true colours. Yet, they loved me, the two of them, of that I am certain now.