by K R Usha
Father is a quiet man and he used to spend—still does—long hours away from home, presumably on work. He manages a factory which manufactures spare parts for the automobile industry, a factory that has been ailing for as long as I can remember. A cousin of his with whom I once got talking said something about his aborted career and family pressures weighing him down, but I don’t know. My father has a look of baffled sincerity that men of slightly prognathous aspect, who are also bespectacled and balding, sometimes acquire. It comes naturally to him to vacillate; that is his excuse for not really trying, his way of anticipating disappointment—if this doesn’t work out then the other alternative will do just as well. Left to himself, I suspect the only things he truly cares about are coffee and cricket. If we were to get down to particulars it would be the combination of Plantation A and Pea Berry from a certain coffee plantation in Chikmagalur in a 60:40 proportion, and the batting of G.R. Vishwanath. I would also admit to football. Once, to rile him, I said coffee used to be a cure for madness. Yes, he returned seriously, Mysore filter coffee could restore anyone’s sanity.
Mother, too, is a peaceable body, but there is a grit-in-the-eye quality to her presence—as if she has lived all along with the discomfort caused by a small speck, an irritant that does not so much impair the vision as make you blink and your eyes water. The only time I’ve seen her forget herself is when she is in the garden. We have a large, well laid-out garden and she tends to it herself. Her pastimes are undemanding—gardening and embroidery—things that engage gently, things that fill your hands but not your mind, things that will not talk back to you, like reading or music.
Simple tasks, like answering a telephone make her nervous. I get the feeling that whenever she lifts the receiver, she expects a bomb to go off at the other end. In retrospect, I would say that she is also not very maternal. As a child, I was left almost completely to the care of servants. The only thing that seems to have given her pleasure was oiling and combing my hair (I, of course have short hair now, a man’s crop). She would feel the bones of my head carefully and lovingly, like a blind person reading a text in Braille, and tell me how beautifully formed my head was. When I was young, I responded to her with the animal instinct of self-preservation, which makes you greedily suck at all things that sustain you. But when I grew older, I had no need of these services and I had to resist her attempts to bathe me long after it had grown to be an embarrassment. The trouble was she hadn’t much conversation, wanting only to be reassured that my school was good, I was doing well in studies and my teachers were kind to me. She put a premium on kindness—Are your teachers kind to you? Of course, I would say, baffled, how could they be otherwise. They were kind to all of us in a uniformly indifferent way, they gave us extra blankets when it grew too cold in the hills and made sure we were dry in the rains. She revealed nothing about herself, my mother. Once I asked her about her school and she said it was an okay school round the corner, very near her house and yes, she had had friends but it had been a new set every year, she said in a matter-of-fact way, as if she had no further need of such things.
I cannot claim to have minded the way things were and ached for them to be different; some of my parents’ insularity has rubbed off on me. I was brought up in the kind of comfort and security afforded by an old-Bangalore house—a large house painted in ‘gopi’ yellow, fronted by a closed, curved verandah, much like the side of a ship, a mirror-polished red oxide floor and windows with shutters opening inwards; a house with rattan and rosewood furniture and checked handloom bedspreads. I loved the house as a child and if I allow myself to admit it, I would say I still love it, in spite of everything. The house belongs to my mother, as I was told by that same cousin, and the information was supposed to mean something.
I studied in an exclusive residential school in Ooty, where I was sent when I was eight. That was the first time I suspected that there was a streak of wanton cruelty in their combined persona. It was not their sending me away to boarding school at such a tender age that I am talking about, but the way they did it. We drove up from Bangalore in a taxi—we were a very taxi family, we ordered one even to go shopping—and after a very hot drive it began to grow cooler and mother wrapped me up in a shawl. As the road began to curve steeply into hairpin bends, we had to keep stopping for her to be sick. It was dark and cold when we reached the huge stone building, which I thought was a fairy castle. It was, of course, my school. We spent that night in a cosy cottage with a fireplace and I was quite convinced that the cottage was to be our new home. They waved goodbye from the creeper-laden door the next morning but when I came back that evening, they were gone. I was led weeping into a large room full of beds lined side by side, like a hospital, and was sure they had been kidnapped, till the matron laughed at me and told me that they had gone home, and that she herself had seen them drive off quite happily. It took me days to recover from being abandoned like that and for some time I was sure I was an orphan, though my mother wrote soon after she went back. They must have thought that that way there would be no tears and tantrums or worse. But it was my first lesson in parental treachery, a lesson they were to reinforce in time.
But I recovered soon enough and I am told I showed signs of exemplary self-sufficiency, not asking to go home or see my parents. In other things too, I had none of that self-doubt that assailed so many of my classmates. Quite early, I knew what I wanted. Our library in school had large pictures of beautiful Gothic buildings, wood-panelled rooms full of books, and huge grounds lined with trees. When I sat in the library, the book in front of me unread, I would stare for hours at a particular picture of a milky sky, the ground covered with russet-coloured leaves and two girls sitting on a bench amidst those leaves, intent upon their books, not oblivious to the beauty of their surroundings as much as having absorbed it and become part of it. Even before I knew that these were posters advertising courses in foreign universities, I knew that was where I wanted to be. Right then I knew that I would, one day, refer to autumn as fall and I would see other shades of rust framing my window than the orange of the croton leaves that grew in pots in the garden at home. My plans took root throughout my schooling and college, which I sailed through, and for my research, I landed up like a homing pigeon one fall in the russet campus of the University of Chicago, in the physics department, one of the few to get a full scholarship in that year of 1982. I had picked the department with the largest number of Nobel laureates; things like that matter to me.
Once, when I was about twelve I think, my friend from school invited me home for the summer holidays. It was my first summer away from home—it was surprising how much I missed it and from the carefully casual expressions of my father and my mother, how much they had missed me. I did not spend another holiday away from home after that, but that’s not the point. It was on that holiday that I learnt what a noise families made, how incessantly they talked and what a terrible thing it was for all your grandparents to be dead.
‘Talk?’ my father said carelessly, ‘What do you want to talk about? You tell me. You talk.’
‘Do you want new clothes?’ my mother asked, looking frightened. ‘Shall we go shopping in Commercial Street?’ I could tell she was just waiting to get back to her compost heap in the backyard.
Rarely did we go out together, the three of us, Mother, Father and I. My parents didn’t speak much and hardly to each other. My father’s presence used to unsettle my mother, so much so that when she spoke she used her smile as a punctuation mark, a flexing of her lips when she paused in a sentence; she seemed not to know that it was a sign of happiness, an expression of pleasure, of joy. Mind you, he was always polite to her and had devised an over-civil form of address for her, only I suspect, to avoid calling her by name. As far as I can recall I was witness to just one ‘scene’. My father used to come home in the afternoon for his lunch and a brief nap before going off to work again and returning late in the evening or at night.
We had just sat down to lunch.
‘I don’t remember,’ my father said, pushing his plate aside and folding his hands across his chest, ‘asking for a mouse in my saaru.’ Only the muscle twitching under his right eye and the deliberation of his manner showed how angry he was.
It did look like a mouse, the clotted mass of tamarind pulp and curry leaves that sat upon his rice. My mother, all wrist and glass bangles, was in tears. Poor Mother, there was always something of the rustic in her, she hasn’t too much finesse.
Father occasionally displays the flashes of arrogance of those habituated to plenty. When the land reforms came, sometime in the seventies, every single bit of the land his family had owned went to the tenant farmers who bought him out at very low prices. And fair enough; they were the tillers of the land after all. But he still has a certain largesse of manner which comes naturally to him, especially with the servants. They adore him; he is a good baksheesh giver. Once, when one of our infrequent visitors brought us jackfruit—ten yellow segments in a plastic bag—Father said something about cartfuls of jackfruit rotting in the storeroom at home, filling the whole house with its overripe smell till their nostrils and the very pores of their skin were clogged with it, and the boys having jackfruit ripping competitions—who could rip the biggest one open at the first attempt and throw it the farthest.
But at my eager, ‘Tell me, tell me what else you did,’ he would say ‘Oh nothing,’ as if what he had said was a slip of the tongue, an admission that he regretted already.
There were times when my parents went out together—it was to pay a visit to someone or someplace, I could tell. Right in the morning, when I drank my milk at the table, I could tell from the way my mother’s shoulders were set that it was one of those days. Mother would lock herself up in her room—they have always had separate rooms—and Father would pace up and down in the garden, on the stairs and in the verandah and finally go into the room, and they would hold a fervid conversation in low voices. And finally he would lead her out, her face all blotchy, his, tired. When they returned, smelling strongly of floorwash, Mother would ask the servant if the water was hot and go immediately to take a bath and Father would sit still in his rattan chair facing the window and look out and smoke cigarettes till it grew dark, getting up only when the servant came in to switch on the lights.
There was a seesaw pattern to their relationship. Just as he was beginning to be civil to her and they would be listening to old film songs together in the evenings or going out for walks, the chill would set in and he would start ignoring her again—the pattern was connected to these visits they made together. He’s had a tough life, my mother would tell her cousin whenever my father was surly in her presence.
He was not always like this, my father. I remember, as a little girl, on Sundays he would take me out in his Morris Minor to South Parade. One winter morning comes back to me with all the clarity of bright early-December sunlight. Maybe I remember it because I caught a glimpse, a faint glimmer of how things would have been if they had been otherwise. My father wore a checked coat and his cap sat at a jaunty angle on his head. He is a natty dresser, my father. That much I will say for him. We walked down South Parade to a field at the far end and sat in a pavilion watching a game of cricket. While I sat on a bench, my father went right up to the fringe of the green. ‘Good shot!’ he’d cry out, or ‘Well played!’ and once, ‘Excellent line and length.’
So relaxed was he after the game that he hoisted me on his shoulders and basking in the admiring glances that we were getting, carried me all the way back to the car. We walked down the boulevard of South Parade and then stepped abruptly from the sunlit street into the darkened interiors of—a hotel! There were three aces on the door—the ace of hearts, spades and diamonds in red and black—and a uniformed doorman to open it for us. It took some time for the blackness to settle into grey shadows and then I saw the plush, satiny sofas, the tables covered in white cloths, the waiters in red hovering in readiness and I goosebumped all over in excitement and because of the air conditioning. One of the waiters pulled out a chair, hoisted me on to it and pushed it in till I was snug between the table and the chair, and smiled into my face, his moustaches dancing.
‘Beer,’ my father said, ‘and a soda for the young lady.’
A band played in the background. I remember the soft but harsh crooning of the saxophone and the heartbeat of the drums. The waiter came back with a tall glass of orange pop on a tray and every time I bent to drink out of it, tiny bubbles, as effervescent as my happiness, exploded in my nose. And that was not all. The waiter came back and set down a creamy ceramic plate with a huge slab of ice cream in front of me. It was in three colours—white, pink and green with a sprinkling of small brown nuts, and a small spoon, smaller than a tea spoon, on the side. I had never eaten striped ice cream before. I still see the perfect granularity of its texture, like earth turned over with a plough, the white end just beginning to melt at the edges. The handsome waiter had smiled at me and said, ‘Here, madam, just for you.’
Just then a woman wearing trousers and a blouse with full but transparent sleeves through which her arms glinted, stopped by my father’s chair and said in a tone of mingled disbelief and pleasure, ‘Setumadhav Rao! It can’t be!’
‘Hello Leela,’ my father said calmly.
‘So you still remember me. Weren’t you supposed to be at Oxford?’
‘That was a long time ago. Plans tend to change, you know. Here, meet my daughter.’
‘Of course, your daughter …’ She had stood looking uncertainly at both of us for a moment, trailing her nails across my cheek, flooding us with her perfume. That, I suppose, was my first encounter with glamour, with the feminine mystique. I was too young then to wonder how and when my father could have known such a woman, and now I am too indifferent to speculate.
But then the waiter came back and as my father turned to speak to him, her friends called from the table across the room.
‘We must meet sometime,’ she said and was gone.
Sometimes we would drive out of the city, turn on to a mud road and into a mofussil railway station, which had no name. There was just the one platform separated from the road by a fence made of black fish plates. The width of the platform scanned two stone benches and there was an old clock suspended from the iron scaffolding which held up the tin roof. We would sit on one of the benches and watch the single railway track in front of us, I do not remember ever seeing a train pass on the tracks or stop there. On the other bench sometimes, there would be a person or maybe two, carrying cloth bundles, who could have been vagrants or actual passengers. Nothing moved, not the stray dogs that slept on the platform, nor the flies in the tea stall and certainly not the masterful-looking clock. An old man in khaki shuffled past sometimes, carrying a green flag. He would salaam my father who would raise his pipe at him. We would sit there awhile in the silence, and while my father smoked his pipe I would lick a pink candy floss clean to the stick and then wash my face in the tiled sink near the entrance before going home.
Few friends or relatives visited us. When they did, my father would bear off all ‘his’ people to the club. My mother had a cousin who called on her sometimes, a woman who had joined a religious sect called the Brahma Kumaris who were single and wore only white. For a woman who was supposed to have withdrawn from the world, she was quite sharp. Even as my mother hustled her upstairs to the balcony adjoining her room, she would stop on the landing and give me a measured look. Once she chucked me under the chin and said, ‘She’s beginning to look exactly like your mother, isn’t she?’ Then she hesitated and said with a sigh, or what I imagined to be one, ‘How can she escape her genes, after all …’ and my mother’s answer to that was to urge her up the stairs faster.
Of my grandparents there was no obvious evidence—no garlanded sepia prints on the walls or the ubiquitous black and white studio prints framed on the dresser or in the showcase. Though the strangest of all was that there were no reminiscences. Neither my father nor my mot
her ever indulged in offhand remarks of the ‘I remember the time my mother …’ or ‘When I was young …’ kind. The only time my father formally recalled his parents was when he preformed their tithis year after year, assiduously. It was strange how on those two days the character of the house was completely transformed, making me suspect that another life lurked below the surface. The priests came early in the morning, my father bustled about dressed in a costume—a silk dhoti and angavastra, there were flowers and strong smells, and a delayed breakfast.
Once, when I was in high school, I got talking about family matters to that cousin of my father’s, an old codger named Chamu, whose father I believe had been ‘quite a rum bird’, a vet at the state-run stud farm. Chamu himself is supposed to have thrown his drink in his English employer’s face over a minor matter, I don’t remember what, and walked out of his job. Probably the state of well-being induced by my father’s best whisky had made him talkative that day.
‘Ah yes, your family …’ he stuck his lower lip out and nodded a few times. ‘Tragic really, the combination of the two, the unfortunate affliction of nerves and the typical Old Mysore failings … Setu … well, things can be rough sometimes but you have to take it … your family, well they couldn’t cope … your father did his best …’
I was alerted immediately. Your family, he said, not once but twice. I held back after that but I was clever about the rest.
‘What,’ I asked my father ‘do you mean by Old Mysore?’
‘The pre-Independence princely state of Mysore, ruled by the Wodeyars, distinct from the British-ruled presidencies like Bombay or Calcutta. The districts of Bangalore, Kolar, Tumkur, Mysore, Hassan, Kadur, Shimoga and Chitaldrug, and later, in 1956, it was expanded when districts from Bombay, Hyderabad, Madras and Coorg were added to it. It formed the kernel of present day Karnataka …’
‘And what are the Old Mysore failings …’ (The affliction of the nerves I disregarded.)