A Girl & a River

by K R Usha

  ‘If we are to become fit to rule ourselves, we must stand united,’ Kalyani said softly, reflecting her father’s serious tone. ‘Which is why Gandhi thatha was here, to ask us to give up our notions of high caste and low caste and to give money to the poor.’

  ‘My brother says,’ Shanta began hotly—and Shanta had a twin claim on Gandhi—she was C.G.K. Sir’s daughter and the sister of the swayamsevak who had earned a scarred forehead while demonstrating outside the liquor shop. He had also been right up front, controlling the crowds on the evening of Gandhi’s visit. ‘My brother says, there is no point asking people to give to the poor what they have in excess. Do you think the landlords will part with their lands on their own? Their wealth must be forcibly taken from them and redistributed. The crowd should have stormed the courts and the records office and seized the files …’

  Kaveri recoiled with the instinct of a lawyer’s daughter at the thought of records and files being destroyed. ‘My father says,’ she countered coldly, ‘the minute the British leave the country, it will be the end. All our systems will collapse, the maharaja won’t know what to do and we will all be at each others’ throats … the poor will be worse off …’

  ‘Only slaves suck up to their masters,’ Shanta said knowingly, exchanging glances with Kalyani, ‘and imitate their ways and manners.’

  ‘My grandmother says, those who start off picketing liquor shops end up patronizing them!’ Kaveri tossed her short hair to effect and walked off with a rival gang of girls.

  The conversation was soon forgotten; they had repeated what they had heard their elders say. But that day if Kaveri came home feeling unsettled about the first-family status of the Mylaraiah household, Setu came home and announced self-importantly that he had joined a ‘youth movement’. C.G.K. Sir was mobilizing a band of boys to volunteer at camps, to be the invisible working hands necessary for mammoth meetings and rallies to go off smoothly, to attend to the many delegates who would assemble. We get to wear a white cap, same as the grown-ups, Setu said.

  There will be no holding back the rabble-rousers now, Mylaraiah said, clapping his hands wearily over his ears, or the fund of Gandhi-said-to-me stories. In this tide of new feeling, old slights were forgotten, snubs brushed aside. So, when Narayana Rao made a personal appeal to Umadevi and Rukmini, the Samaja was pressed into service once again to raise money for sewing machines and to devise schemes to train women in the villages to use them. We must not be petty, Umadevi urged Rukmini. So what if you didn’t get to sit on the podium with Gandhi. These things happen. Our work must come first, not our egos. Rukmini had to step out of her cosy khadi confines, Umadevi decreed. She wanted Rukmini to travel with her to the outlying villages to talk about the Samaja’s programmes, ‘Just once a week, that’s all. We need your organizing skills and your common sense, now when all our efforts are picking up momentum.’ There was nothing ‘political’ about it, Umadevi reassured her, her husband could not possibly object. ‘You can’t wash your hands of us so easily, you know,’ Umadevi said, ‘even if you want to.’

  It was an offer after Rukmini’s own heart but she had become wary after the ‘welcome committee’ and ‘escorts’ party’ debacle during Gandhi’s visit, deciding that she was not suited to the hurly-burly of public life after all; Umadevi was more adept at it, though she may not be as capable. Moreover, her husband would not like it. Already he was angry with her for having given away her diamond earrings without asking him. But she had not apologized. They were hers, a gift from her father. She knew that he thought she had given them away to impress Narayana Rao, which angered her. To reduce her best impulses and her heartfelt causes to passing fancies, showed how little he thought of her. Again, if she had to do the things she wanted, she would have to be tactful, she would have to ‘manage’ things so that the house would not be neglected. Mylaraiah’s career too was gravitating towards Bangalore and the high court. He had managed the plum catch, the cases concerning the European planters from Chikmagalur and there was another sensitive matter he was handling, the late Diwan Poornaiah’s estate, which was a severely complicated case. Shivaswamy had got him an introduction to Vishwanath Rao, the district judge and that seemed to have eased matters in his favour.

  There seemed to be no escaping the tide of nationalistic fervour. On his next visit, Shivaswamy claimed that he too, obliquely, had paid his own debt to the national movement. His son, the dashing and brilliant Srinivas, aka Chamu, one of the first metallurgists to emerge from Banaras Hindu University, had a much-envied job at the Kolar Gold Fields. That he had been hand-picked by the John Taylor of John Taylor and Sons, the engineering firm that was called in to mine the gold discovered at Kolar, had been much touted, as also that he hobnobbed with Englishmen as their equal. The story that was making the rounds was that Chamu had flung his glass of whisky in Lindsey Taylor’s face—Lindsey being John Taylor’s grandson—for having called a tardy waiter at the Kolar Gold Fields club a ‘nigger’. It was said that Chamu had roared off into the night on his 3.5 HP Douglas motorcycle with opposed twin cylinders, and driven all the way to Bangalore. He was seen again only after six months, at the Ooty races, where he turned up to back his favourite horse. It was the kind of apocryphal story that always gets built around wastrels, Mylaraiah said, and acquires new heroic dimensions in the telling and retelling. Much like the exploits of Narayana Rao.

  But few books of history or annals of accounts would ever recount how Gandhi’s legacy, Narayana Rao’s travails and the political fortunes of the Congress were played out in Mylaraiah’s backyard.

  Every time his father returned from a meeting or from jail, Ramu would bring armfuls of garlands and khadi buntings, and baskets of fruit for his friends. So long as Narayana Rao was in jail, there would be a steady stream of sweets. The one thing the jail manual allowed was for family members to meet the prisoners on ‘festivals’ and thanks to the generosity of the Panchanga, the traditional calendar, there was never a want of festivals and Savitramma would celebrate each one of them with the full complement of sweets. And whenever Savitramma sent a carrier to her husband, a bit of it would come their way as well. The previous year they had feasted on a variety of ‘undes’, as one of Narayana Rao’s fellow prisoners, a famous Congress activist from Bellary, had a baby while in jail, and Savitramma had taken it upon herself to supply her with the nourishing diet prescribed for nursing mothers, which included a lot of sticky ‘undes’.

  And there were stories. Narayana Rao would come home and relate his experiences, quite dispassionately, to his family and fellow-Congressmen and Ramu would listen to him open-mouthed, and transmit his father’s ‘stories’ to his friends, around which they would construct their games. Heads of ripe corn, row upon row, in Setu’s backyard, usually suffered in imitation of the satyagrahis chopping down the toddy-producing eechali trees.

  But this time Narayana Rao’s trangressions were not his alone, he also bore the burden of Gandhi’s visit and his sojourn in jail yielded the boys’ best games—Prison Riot and Caning the Prisoners.

  ‘I’ll be a lifer,’ Chapdi Kal said immediately.

  ‘And I, a habitual offender.’

  The prisoners in jail were divided into three categories. The satyagrahis were quite separate from the ‘lifers’ and the ‘habitual offenders’. The latter were those who were repeatedly imprisoned for small offences, while the former were the big men, murderers at the very least. As they were political prisoners, the satyagrahis were housed in separate barracks and enjoyed privileges that the other two categories did not—the prison authorities were more circumspect in dealing with them.

  It fell to the smallest and the irregulars to be the satyagrahis. In return for the free run of his compound, Setu was allowed to change sides at will and become whatever he wanted, which was what they all usually ended up doing. But none of the boys, not even Ramu, wanted to be a ‘satyagrahi’. All that the satyagrahis got to do was walk in single file from their barracks to the superintendent’s
office, thump the jail manual and ask for plates or mugs or brass vessels, or clean latrines, and if those were not granted, go on hunger strike. Other than the histrionics involved in fainting from hunger, there was nothing exciting here. Lifers and habitual offenders could shout and scream and hurl stones or their plates and mugs at each other, and when one was reserve police, ah bliss! one could swing the lathi to the heart’s content.

  It was the superintendent who had breadth enough for a full scale theatrical performance. Apart from strutting up and down before the quaking prisoners, he got to address the satyagrahis as ‘humbugs’, and when really incensed, as ‘scoundrels’, ‘fools’ and ‘rascals’. In truth, the superintendent reserved his venom especially for the satyagrahis as he held them responsible for all the trouble in his orderly jail, but he could not make free with them as he could with the others. It was they who had introduced the pernicious weapon of the hunger strike into the jail. The ‘system’ in the jail revolved around using the lifers to contain the habitual offenders—given the shortage of manpower, this was a system they had evolved and perfected and the smooth functioning of the jail depended on it. Having learnt of its efficacy from the satyagrahis, the lifers too went on a hunger strike to press their demands. The habitual offenders grew restive and there were ‘minor incidents’ in the barracks. The superintendent had to send for the reserve police to bolster the regular police force, which had grown nervous.

  ‘I’ll be the superintendent,’ Chapdi Kal would say when the game had progressed far enough, ‘and also the reserve police.’

  When things came to a boil in the habitual offenders’ barracks and the noise from there grew really deafening, the dreaded ‘danger bell’ in the tower rang—simulated by Setu ringing the brass bell that the priest used in the Friday morning pujas. The bell signalled a serious fight in the barracks or an escape attempt. This gave the reserve police license to swoop down on the barracks and thrash the habitual offenders and the lifers. At this point Chapdi Kal found his bastion stormed and all the boys switching from habitual offenders, lifers and satyagrahis to reserve police. Not only did this give the boys liberty to run amok in the corn field at the back but it also gave them the thrill of speaking in the pidgin Urdu which seemed to be the language of the police.

  ‘Udhar kaun ki jaata, maaro!’ they would shout with relish or, ‘Saab ki paas galata karta! Mooh much!’

  And finally, when order had been restored and the men herded back into their barracks, it was Chapdi Kal’s sole moment of glory. He would become the superintendent, thin-lipped with fury, and order the shikadi to be brought out—this, the shikadi whipping formed the grand finale of the boys’ game. The shikadi, a tall, heavy, three-legged stool, with a seat just broad enough for a man to stand on, would be brought out and placed in the centre of the quadrangle, in full view of the barracks. The men to be caned would be lined up outside the superintendent’s office. One by one they would be stripped, made to bend over the seat of the shikadi, and lashed into place with a leather belt so that they could not move or struggle. The whole process was precise and methodical. The prison doctor would first examine the men and certify their soundness to be whipped. A thin film of ointment would first be used to anoint the chosen prisoner’s bare buttocks, which would then be covered with a piece of muslin. The whip, as thick as a man’s little finger, usually lay soaking in a small tub in the superintendent’s office. The minimum was eight lashes and the superintendent was not known to go beyond thirty. Some men would break at the very first lash, some would start blubbering as the whip screamed through the air, while others like the legendary Kote Basappa from Chitradurga would shout ‘Bharat mata ki jai!’ or ‘Gandhi Mahatma ki jai!’ with every one of his lashes. The price of every lash was two paise and the man who administered the whipping seemed to believe in working hard for his money.

  Since none of the boys was ready to be whipped, they had to make do with a log of wood but they did manage to get a good whistling whip. For the first few weeks the boys played the game with gusto, then one afternoon in the middle of a ‘caning’ session, Ramu looked at the much lacerated log and suddenly announced that he did not want to play the game anymore.

  ‘In jail,’ Ramu said in a small, high-pitched voice, ‘they don’t whip a log of wood …’

  And the others sat round him, in a subdued circle of comprehension, their whips and iron rods of a second ago becoming twigs again.

  Perhaps it was the subliminal effect of C.G.K. Sir’s history classes, his son Shyam’s Youth Movement and its lectures and drills in the field everyday or simply the fact that they had outgrown them, but the summer after Gandhi’s visit saw the last of their prison games. They would not cane a satyagrahi again, even if he was a log of wood.

  It was to these new winds of change that Setu owed his father’s sudden affability, he knew.

  Sometimes, but very rarely, when his father set off on a walk and he happened to spot Setu in the garden, he would ask him to come along.

  ‘Want some hot peanuts?’ he’d ask without a break in his stride and Setu, unable to believe his good fortune, would go running inside for his slippers.

  That particular evening, his luck was so enormous that it almost brought on his stomach cramps. Even as they set off on the footpath, hand in hand, Setu was could feel his nervous joy turning into anxiety—that the walk would soon be over, the peanuts all eaten, the soda drunk, and his father would become remote and stern again. As soon as they turned left on the main road and walked alongside the Mission compound wall, Setu knew where they were headed. They would, as usual, buy their cone of peanuts and go into the railway station. There were two trains that passed through the station in the week, and neither of them was scheduled right then. But his father liked to sit on the wooden bench on the platform and watch the railway line. He would walk up and down the platform and watch the line disappearing into the distance on either side. And then would come a little speech, a soliloquy almost, on telegraph lines, the railways, the dams of Mysore, the feats of British engineering and systems—Setu had heard his father several times on these, his pet enthusiasms.

  That evening Mylaraiah stopped often to examine and to admire, and to point out to Setu, to actually tell him things and ask him questions. Look at that post office building there Setu, a hundred years old and still strong—as if he needed to be physically reassured of the tangibility of his town, that things were still the same.

  So charitable was Mylaraiah’s disposition that evening that Setu actually summoned up the courage to ask whether they could go see a film. ‘It’s Tarzan. Running in Shri Krishna …’

  ‘Why not,’ Mylaraiah said, smiling.

  When they came out of the railway station, his father hailed a tonga and as they clip-clopped towards Shri Krishna cinema, Setu could neither smell the grass-and-cowdung odour within the tonga nor feel the hard cane framework under the dirty coverlet, despite their being jolted quite briskly. And at the cinema, the manager himself came out and ushered them into the men’s section, rapping out a sharp order to his boys to bring out the special seats. It was only after the film started that they realized that they were not watching Tarzan but the latest Kannada film, Samsara Nauka. Setu looked anxiously at his father, loathe to leave, and his father smiled at him and settled down in his seat to go to sleep while Setu was sucked into the travails of the young couple who had married against the wishes of their families. As always Setu found himself torn between the young man who underwent one hardship after another, and his family. Setu’s instinct supported the grandfather, the figure of authority in the household who he knew must never be disobeyed and where all virtue and wisdom resided.

  But these sentimental considerations were put aside when Dikki Madhav Rao, his favourite villain came on to the screen. For there was a series of sub plots that involved the unmasking of vice parading as virtue, which seemed to be a great hit with the audience. Dikki Madhav Rao, in the guise of a teacher had a young gullible widow in his cl
utches. The very first word he was urging her to write was ‘prema’ and everyone knew where that would lead. And then came the line that had become the catchphrase of the film, which everyone in school right from Chapdi Kal to Pinjar Budda would throw at the games master. One of the other villains, a minor sidekick called out to Dikki just as he was beginning to entice the young widow—‘Ey Achari, Parama Chandali!’ and the gallery roared in approval.

  At this juncture Setu threw a surreptitious look at his father—even to him it seemed absurd that his father should be watching a film like this—Setu usually came with his sister, grandmother and Timrayee and together they all shed tears at the dramatic and vengeful situations that all the heroes and heroines seemed to be caught in. In fact he felt a little ashamed to be caught enjoying such a film by his father, but mercifully, Mylaraiah was fast asleep. At a critical point in the film, the Interval came, an attendant brought him an ice cream soda made and bottled by their own A.D. Swamy and Setu dislodged the marble stopper with a vigorous thump on its head, an act that gave him as much pleasure as drinking the soda. When Mylaraiah woke up he got up to leave. ‘Enough,’ he said, even as yet another convoluted turn in the young hero’s life was unfolding, for the film was more than three hours long, a hundred and eighty-five minutes to be precise. Setu had had his fill and was ready to leave too.

  ‘So, did you like it?’ his father asked as they came out into the twilight.

  Setu nodded groggily. The only other film he remembered having enjoyed so much was Hatimtai, which he had seen a long time back, a film where the handsome Hatim had had one fantastic adventure after another in pursuit of a beautiful maiden. That beautiful maidens were pursued by handsome men, that domestic travails were endless and the good were always punished before they were rewarded, were the three motifs of life Setu had come to understand. But the villains were always more impressive, more so the villains of theatre. Towering above all the villains of the screen as well as the theatre was Natabhayankara Gangadhara Rao of the Chamundeshwari Company of Mysore. He was known for his ferocious roars and Setu remembered screaming involuntarily when the man in his famous role as Duryodhana had bellowed at Arjuna.