by K R Usha
‘Ah!’ he smiled, realizing it was not factual information I was after. ‘You could say, a certain lassitude, an inertia, a lack of striving, of ambition. Taking the safest way out … You could either call it an easy contentment or a bovine acceptance … yes, and a certain combination of obstinacy and pusillanimity, not being able to bite the bullet, to act when the chips are down … it’s a hangover from the old days—a feudal disposition. Have you been talking to Chamu? Don’t take him seriously. He thinks he’s full of coastal sharpness, just because his father is from Mangalore … the bounder …’
Bounder. That was the first time I had heard anyone outside the dictionary use it. As also blackguard—blagard! Ablutions, that’s another. Wherewithal, that’s another. Duffer, yet another. My father had no idea how I hungered after them, these words he used, these tangential slivers that lodged themselves in my heart, from which I had to piece together a whole. It would take me such a long time to do it. Not to mention how exhausting the process would be.
My mother and I share a secret. She didn’t ask me to keep it from my father but I knew I had to, instinctively. Some things you just know, even if you’re only ten. Especially if you’re ten years old. Like the rupee notes I’d see her slip into her cousin’s hand from the kitchen mantelpiece when she thought no one was looking.
One summer morning when I was home the first year from school, and so had all my mother’s attention, her cousin visited unexpectedly. I was experimenting with water colours, my paper and palette spread out on the dining table and my mother seated next to me, when we saw her cousin through the window, walking up the driveway. At first I thought it was my grandfather’s tithi—I don’t even know what he looked like for there isn’t a single photo of him—for on the anniversary of his death my mother’s cousin arrives early and furtively in the morning and secretes my mother away to an unknown place. Then Mother returns, quite wan and done in, late in the afternoon bracing herself for my father’s coldness. But from the way my mother half-rose from her chair and drew her breath in sharply, I knew that this was an unscheduled visit and my mother was not prepared for it. She met her at the front door and instead of inviting her in, they both stepped out into the garden. Whatever it was that her cousin had come about, it made my mother lose what little presence of mind she had for they held their whispered, violently gesticulating conversation just outside the window, under the sweltering sun, forgetting to move into one of the many shady bowers and nooks that my mother herself had created in the garden.
When she came back inside my mother looked at me and said, ‘I have to go out,’ and it was a measure of her agitation that she used the same supplicating, tentative, ready-to-be-refused tone with me as she did with my father. It put the demon of mischief into my head.
‘I want to come with you,’ I said.
‘No, you can’t,’ my mother said, her eyes widening, ‘it isn’t a place meant for children.’
‘You mean, they don’t allow children there,’ her cousin said, stepping in and nudging my mother. But my mother’s slip up had been enough to show me the way.
‘I want to come,’ I repeated.
‘There are doctors there,’ the cousin said threateningly—clearly she had had even less experience with children than my mother—‘with huge injections,’ she gestured from the middle of her forefinger to the inside of her elbow, ‘and they’ll poke you with it.’
‘I will come with you,’ I said, ignoring her and looking at my mother and to my own surprise, I began to cry.
Again, a whispered conversation and the cousin hissed, ‘What rubbish, I can’t go without you. Can’t you …’
‘No.’
‘But …’
‘All right,’ my mother said, admitting defeat. ‘What can I do,’ she said to her cousin, ‘I’m tired, I can’t keep on like this, I hope it will all end soon. Let her come if she wants to. She can stay in the garden and you can wait with her. But,’ she added raising her voice at me, ‘you must hold my hand and not talk.’
‘And no saying that you want to go home,’ the cousin added for good measure.
Once we were in the autorickshaw, except for her hand holding mine tightly, she forgot about me, I knew.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘What?’ my mother said absently. ‘Oh, to a hos … hot…’ It emerged eventually as ‘a hostel’. She could even have said, ‘a hotel’, I wasn’t sure.
I remember stepping out of the auto into a big compound full of large, spreading rain trees. It was late summer and the pink, spiky, soft flowers had been shed and the ground was covered with their brown fuzz and the black seed pods. We crunched across a gravelly cement driveway but there, before we could enter the garden on the other side, I stopped. A section of the driveway was paved, not in cement or even tar but with metal rods, smooth and rounded, and I was sure my foot would slip and get caught between the rods.
‘It’s a cow trap,’ my mother said impatiently, ‘to prevent stray cows from wandering in.’ But even as she said it, she and her cousin swung me across and I stepped into the garden on a high.
I still remember how the garden looked when we first entered, how commanding and symmetrical and beautiful it was, and how cool on that hot day. At the outer edge of the garden, all round its circumference, ran a ‘lover’s lane’, a cobblestoned walkway with protecting slats of stone on top from which trailed a creeper with yellow flowers. I made for it at once, attracted by the flowers which hung down in bunches like yellow grapes. Throughout the lover’s lane there were stone benches and people sat on them here and there with the desultory air of those whiling away their time, but they did not matter to me. I wouldn’t have given them a second look. After walking through the lane once round, jumping up at intervals to see if I could pluck the flowers, I went into the garden proper. There were large trees here too, with gnarled trunks, their branches totally leafless, stretching out into the sky. They reminded me of the so many raised arms clamouring to answer the teacher’s questions. There were shrubs between the trees, their leaves green and dusty, still to be shed, and multicoloured bougainvillea trailed everywhere.
Then I noticed the slide in one corner of the garden. It was a large cement slide painted brick red and there was a girl playing on it. But that didn’t bother me for the provider of the slide had been generous, and though there was just a single flight of steps to climb up, it branched off on the top into three slides. They must have expected a lot of children. But of course, the other girl would insist on crowding me and waiting her turn at my slide. I brushed past her without looking at her and set off sailing down as majestically as I could on a pitted surface, and let out a sharp yelp as soon as my bare thighs touched the heated cement surface. That was what she must have been waiting for, for I heard her laugh and clap as soon as I yelped, her laugh a peal of pure joy with no trace of malice in it. Then when it was her turn she sat with her knees in the air and her feet flat on the cement face and came down, her thighs unscorched. After that, there was nothing to it but to share my slide with her and soon we were taking turns, in assembly line fashion. Her nose and her lips, I noticed, were large and her eyes small in a biggish face, and her limbs, though short enough to be manageable seemed to get in the way when she climbed or walked. She was my height and I presumed she was my age too. After some time she did not climb up the slide again and waited for me to come to her and we wandered off into the lover’s lane. At the end of the lane we climbed up a little hillock of mud, stones and abandoned building material and there, without word or gesture, she led me through a broken-down tin door, into what must have once been a room, and sat down on the floor there as if that were her rightful place and I her guest. There were just four walls there with no roof, with termite’s nests built high in the corners and grass growing from the huge seams in the floor; and then I saw on the floor, amidst the rough granite slabs, a toilet bowl with a pipal tree growing out of it. The bowl, still white, was full of mud and the pipal was
a sapling, the leaves on top still a tender reticulate red, and there they stood, bowl and tree, more perfect than any of my mother’s elaborate flower arrangements.
As easily as we had wandered in we wandered out and then I noticed the building. Along one side of the garden, almost hidden by it, was the grey stone building that had come into view when we drove in. The blocks of stone, perfectly cut, fitted neatly together, the cement ridges between them still visible in some places. There were large windows running along the sides of the building with smaller semicircular ones poised on top of each rectangle. The finish and regularity of the façade and its length combined to give it a certain gravity and stateliness, as if it were the house of a statesman or a place of refinement like a library with leather-bound books or a theatre for classical music.
It was only when they stirred that I noticed them. There were two men standing against one of the windows and one of them beckoned to us. It was difficult to make them out till they came very close to the window and practically flattened themselves against it, for the windows had an intricate arrangement of shutters and bars. Other than the normal vertical bars and wooden shutters the windows were fitted with close grills, so close that you could only just poke a finger out of it, as the men were doing, and over the grills yet another layer of geometrically patterned bars. My friend took no notice of the men who were wagging their fingers furiously through the mesh and making rude sounds but led me to an entrance at the side of the building from where we had a clear view. There were several such rooms running on all sides of an open quadrangle, only they were separated from it by a massive grill which ran from floor to ceiling. From the garden you could not tell that such a place existed just on its fringes or that it was so crowded, for the men could come out of their rooms into the corridor formed by the grill, but they could not go beyond. I could see many of them standing against the grill, holding on to it, and though they stood quite close they did not look at each other or even speak. The whole place in effect was a massive cage and the men swarmed it, like animals straining against its bars. They all wore a uniform of sorts, a white round necked tunic and high pyjamas with dangling drawstrings and they were all close-cropped. There were four men, different looking from the ones in white, who wore blue uniforms and carried stout sticks, and patrolled the cage hitting the bars now and then. At the opposite end from where we stood, there was an opening in the cage and from time to time one or some men in white would go out escorted by a man in blue and wait on a stool at the end of that section of the corridor. We saw a thin chap, so thin that his tunic was falling off his shoulders, shuffle out and sit on the stool. A woman in a bright red sari, whom I remembered from the colour of her sari as one of the many figures sitting on a bench in the lover’s lane, tried to talk to him, at which he tried to bolt and was given a sharp crack with the stick by the man in blue, who shouted at him and brought him back into the cage. He came back meekly enough and went into his room, while the men around him jeered. Another group, holding hands but curiously unmindful of each other, locked in their own staring, stiffly shuffling worlds, was hustled out into the corridor by the men in blue to meet another crowd in mufti from the lover’s lane.
All of a sudden, in the section of the corridor closest to where we were standing, I saw my mother. I was so surprised that it took me several seconds to recognize her. She was leading one of those creatures by the elbow, a woman with close-cropped grey hair and a white dress that came below the knees, quite similar to what my friend was wearing. The woman was lurching across the floor in a manner peculiar to the people here, barefoot and vacant eyed, staring ahead but not looking where she was going. She would surely have fallen if it had not been for the hefty woman who was holding her by her other elbow, as my mother had barely laid two fingers on the woman’s elbow. They were out there in the corridor for a few seconds and then they turned into the room outside which we were standing and came close to the window. I saw the grey cement floor gleam for a moment when the door opened and the white frame of the metal bed onto which they hoisted her, I saw the dirt-blackened soles of her feet against the blue bedsheet, the cracked heels and the thick, curling toe-nails and then the hefty woman looked up and saw the two of us.
Even before I could turn to look at her, I heard my friend scream—more a howl of rage, which shook me up and left me deaf for a second. Two hefty women in blue saris had seized her by her arms and were bearing her off, kicking and screaming, while two heavyset men in blue shouted and made lunging motions at her with their lathis. Much to my amazement and satisfaction too, my friend did not go quietly and kicked the women quite a few times on their shins and even bit one of them on the knuckles, which made her let go but before my friend could run off they had caught her again, this time one of the men hoisting her up by the scruff of her neck.
‘She always manages to run off, that one, don’t know how she does it …’
My mother was standing beside me with her own hefty woman by her side. ‘The amount of trouble she gives us. Her family has abandoned her, rarely comes to visit. And we’re stuck with her. They may look as if they’re wasting away, many of them, but you wouldn’t believe the strength that they have …’ she looked meaningfully at my mother who looked at the ground. ‘Here, look at these bite marks, still not healed …’ she held her forearm out to be inspected but my mother continued to look at the ground. ‘Quite vicious they can be … I tell you, the things we have to do to fill our stomachs … our lives are in danger here.’ My mother felt in her purse and took out a currency note, which she handed to the woman, still not looking at her.
My mother took my hand and I led her to the lover’s lane, to the bench where her cousin sat dozing. ‘Oh you’re back,’ the cousin said, yawning. ‘She was playing and I nodded off. How was it?’
‘They want us to take her away, no place they say … so many more urgent cases waiting. I can’t imagine her at home,’ my mother shuddered violently. ‘I offered to pay more …’ She looked at her cousin, waiting for her to say something.
‘She is a gentle creature,’ the cousin said at last, with a catch in her voice, ‘always been …’ She started to say something in an agitated way, but checked herself. ‘What does he say, your husband?’
‘He leaves it to me, as always. If you can manage her, he says.’
‘Well,’ the cousin said tartly, ‘considering you manage everything, all the expenses from what she left you.’
Mother looked up sharply at her and she shut up.
In the auto, mother looked steadily into the distance. Once in a while she brushed away the loose strands of hair that escaped from her tight coil and got into her eyes, I thought. It was only when we reached home that I recognized the smell. That place had smelt of the floorwash that my parents reeked of everytime they returned from their trips out together, and now I knew where it was that they went.
That night they had a long conversation, serious and surprisingly peaceful, which went on till late, so much so that my mother neglected my tuck box the next morning. She looked more puffy and distracted than usual and they went out of their way not to look each other in the eye. That morning I left for school. In the taxi Father sat in front, my mother and I at the back. As usual, when the car started winding up the hills, we had to keep stopping for her to be sick. I came back again only in winter and in the manner of most childhood memories where the least important details replace the big things or occlude them, I only remembered playing on the slide with my quiet friend and her being carried off screaming and kicking by the hefty women. At that time, I did not wonder what my mother was doing there and who that woman was whom she did not want to bring home. Funnily enough, as with memories, I have mixed up the woman on the bed with my friend on the slide and for a long time I thought, they were the same person. I went back there after ten years, armed with a yellowed receipt and a fresh green slip establishing me as kin, not to look for her for she was dead by then, but as always to find out more about mysel
f, and as with everything I drew a blank. Maybe I had a faint hope that they would have made a mistake, or she would still be there chained to the white bed or to a drip hanging by the side of her bed, but she wasn’t. The place was almost deserted. They had moved all the remaining tunic clad figures out somewhere else where their condition would be less conspicuous, for these are modern, humane times.
Part II
Reaping the Whirlwind
Eight
1934
Of Gandhi, it was said that he could stir up a whirlwind with a single breath. Once he moved on, those he left behind had to reap the whirlwind, so one supposed. While no one could claim winds of that magnitude in their small town, he certainly stirred up the dust in the alleys. In the Mylaraiah household alone, a mild Sirocco—of displacement and comprehension—sprang up; in the future, it was to yield a hot harvest.
At the Empress Girls’ School, Miss Lazarus mentioned his visit in her morning address and at the Government Boys’ High School, C.G.K. Sir went into ecstasies over ‘our good fortune in seeing our leader in the flesh’, throwing all caution defiantly to the winds. Even in the classrooms the students discussed the evening’s meeting, which many of them had gone to. Kaveri was startled to find that the girls in class—ordinary girls—claimed Gandhi for their own. Given the fervent and familiar references to him in conversations at home, she had considered Gandhi some kind of home-grown pet. Between her family and the newspapers they subscribed to, she thought they owned Gandhi completely. But with Narayana Rao having been by Gandhi’s side throughout his visit, part of the Mahatma’s glory had spilled over on him, and what was more, his daughter Kalyani had begun to refer to Gandhi familiarly as ‘thatha’. The girls pressed round her and Kaveri’s descriptions of the glass dome full of goat’s milk seemed not to matter a whit.