A Girl & a River

by K R Usha

  Dr King told a story well and Rukmini found herself laughing at her jokes and impersonations and agreeing with her assessment and judgment of things. But now, even as she chuckled over the intellectual Calcuttan with Dr King, reading out aloud—‘bookstalls, where narrow-chested, near-sighted anemic Bengali students in native dress brood over fly-blown Russian pamphlets …’—she felt uneasy. Dr King and Mrs Spencer had read the book too and once the post mortem was done and the truth of things admitted, Rukmini waited for a placatory sign, for some attempt at locating the redeeming feature, at least a glossing over, which didn’t come. She felt herself growing disappointed, and then angry. The next time Dr King cracked a joke about ‘the natives’ she found she could not laugh.

  ‘Tell me,’ she asked Mrs Spencer, when she could no longer contain herself, ‘do you not get tired of doing good all the time. The burden of virtue must be very heavy …’

  ‘Virtue, Mrs M, is its own reward. Besides, I am doing just what fulfils me the most, serving my fellow men.’

  ‘But that comes from within you. Do you think you receive anything at all from them in return?’

  When you set off in your straw hat, she wanted to ask Mrs Spencer, do you ever see the welcoming blue sky, feel the breeze in your face, the red earth that crumbles underfoot and the trusting smiles that take you to their heart as one of their own or do you see only souls that have to be reclaimed and bodies healed by you? Do you get anything at all in return, do you allow yourself to see it and receive it, for to set out just to give also means setting out to condescend, convinced of your own superiority. A Mrs Spencer may burn with it while with a Dr King, it had settled more calmly, more unobtrusively, into the blood in her veins.

  ‘I look on everything as God’s work, Mrs M, and if I have His grace, it is all I need.’

  The mention of God shut Rukmini up immediately, and brought on the feeling of guilt and unworthiness that Mrs Spencer was so adept at inducing. It was one of the things she had to constantly guard against.

  Rukmini did not dispute the truth of what Mrs Spencer said, it was just that she was weary of the unrelentingly sharp gaze that gave no quarter, that looked only to find fault, to correct and to save. Of course, their devotion and single-mindedness were splendid but still, she felt the burden of their favours and chafed against their power even as she succumbed to it and was grateful for it. She grew weary sometimes, of having to be ever vigilant, of having always to come off the better to prove an imaginary point. In the early days, still flushed with his contact with the Mission, her father would come home and harangue her mother about many of her innocuous religious practices—her insistence that the flowers from the garden be used only for worship and not be arranged in vases and put on the many tables and ledges in the house and her habit of washing everything and leaving sundry objects dripping wet all the time, and Bhagiratamma would say that the missionaries had given them a questioning mind but taken away from them their capacity for faith, the habit of prayer, for simple fulfilling ritual. They have made us sceptical about our ways, and left us with nothing. Thank God we aren’t poor, Bhagiratamma would add, if not I can’t think what a few grains of rice would have induced us into doing.

  If Dr King felt a coolness in Rukmini’s manner post Katherine Mayo, she kept away, while Mrs Spencer put down Rukmini’s sudden flurry of volleys and drives on the tennis court, which trounced her, to a temporary lapse in Rukmini’s otherwise faultless manners.

  For Rukmini, the most telling passages in Katherine Mayo’s book were those about the men she had seen and met. The bits that she had surreptitiously re-read were Miss Mayo’s references to men, usually upper caste, in western dress and speaking faultless English, often scholarly or in positions of authority, who felt that marrying their daughters off as early as the age of nine or ten, was acceptable and even advisable. She could not help but reflect that she too had been married at ten to a man more than twice her age, and if her husband had his way, he would do the same by their daughter.

  Rukmini would not have thought that the challenge would come so soon and so close to her heart. Even as Narayana Rao went on his whirlwind tours of taluks and villages, Kaveri came home one day and announced that his daughter Kalyani would not be coming to school anymore.

  ‘She is getting married,’ Kaveri said, and the announcement had just the effect she intended.

  ‘Getting married!’ Bhagiratamma exclaimed, making her instinctive approval clear, and then adding with a guffaw, ‘That Nani is a good one. Preaching the Purana to the whole world but not practising it in his own backyard.’

  ‘It can’t be true!’ Rukmini said incredulously. ‘If it is, then this marriage must be stopped!’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Rukmini. You can’t stop a man from getting his daughter married. He is only doing his duty as prescribed by the shastras.’

  ‘Narayana Rao cannot throw away everything he stands for!’ Rukmini said, in genuine anguish.

  ‘Who said he’s throwing away anything he stands for. In fact, he believes more strongly than ever in his pet causes. Undoubtedly your Nani is a liberal man,’ Mylaraiah smiled a silky smile, ‘as you said, all hues of people come to his house and Savitramma cooks for all of them. He’s willing even go to jail for khadi and temperance and Gandhi—but this cuts very close to the bone. You can change your ideas but you can’t give up your customs. Remember, he still hangs on to this tuft and his thread …’ Mylaraiah caressed the back of his own tuftless head.

  Moreover, it turned out that Kalyani had already reached that much awaited and dreaded stage, puberty.

  ‘Amma,’ Kaveri asked, ‘what is that?’

  ‘Oh that!’ Rukmini said shortly, ‘You had better ask your grandmother.’

  That night, as they settled down to sleep, Bhagiratamma saw her granddaughter’s face puckering up in thought and forestalling her questions, she launched into a brisk explanation about the facts of ‘puberty’.

  ‘You mean,’ Kaveri said incredulously when Bhagiratamma had finished, ‘it will flow like that, like urine?’ She used the English word in the hope of distancing herself from the whole thing as much as she could. So improbable did it sound that Kaveri was certain it would never happen to her. It must be an infection that silly girls caught, like the poor who caught TB from living in congested places and spitting in the open. And trust Kalyani to go and catch it. ‘That’s why she has been acting so peculiar of late … refusing to play games and all that.’

  ‘It happens to all women. Cows too. It’s worse for them, they get it once in twenty-one days.’ That had made Kaveri laugh, but of course Bhagiratamma would not be let off so easily.

  ‘Is it a good thing or a bad thing?’ her granddaughter asked, looking her in the eye.

  ‘A good thing,’ Bhagiratamma said with a straight face. ‘It means you can get married and have children,’ and wondered whether that was good enough.

  Marriage, they had already gone over and Kaveri had come to understand that marriage was a natural state in the progression of one’s life. You wake up, drink your cocoa, bathe, go to school, come back, play, do your lessons, and somewhere you slip in marriage. It was something that happened to everyone but you never took it personally.

  ‘Just as you listen to your father now, you will listen to your husband,’ Bhagiratamma said casually.

  ‘And can I never come back home?’

  ‘Of course not, you goose. You will have a brand new home as well, and more people to call family. Then you will have children and they will have children and you will all live together, like we do.’

  Bhagiratamma usually did not allow her mind to dwell on the circumstances of her own married life. Dwelling on the past just made you more miserable, more dissatisfied with the present, which you hadn’t the power to change. But if she were to give a ‘brief sketch’ of it, as Kaveri was asked to in her English and Kannada language texts, she would have summed it all up in a few phrases. Widowed early but all her daughters married
before that thankfully; too many children lost in childbirth—all her sons taken except one; moving from one daughter’s house to the other as her son would not offer her a home but would only tell her that she was welcome anytime. Nevertheless, she could not think of an alternative. A life without these constraints lay outside the power of her imagination. This was the way things were. Within these bounds one must not lose one’s spark, the vital thing that made you more than animal.

  Looking at her granddaughter’s still-creased brow, she knew that she had not been wholly convincing with her answers. It tired her out now, trying to find honest but non-frightening answers for Kaveri’s questions. Of course, Rukmini herself would not talk to her daughter about these things. Like money, she thought marriage was out of bounds for children. Such abstract topics of conversation were useless, she said, even for adults. There had to be a context to frame them. Well, Bhagiratamma wanted to tell her, your daughter may not be old enough to talk about marriage, but she is old enough to get married all right, at least your husband thinks so. Bhagiratamma also knew that while Rukmini stoutly hung on to her beliefs, she did not mind her mother talking to her daughter about ‘these things’, and even hoped that she would.

  For a brief while, marriage became the standard insult between Kaveri and Setu. Amma, I can’t stand it, he keeps hiding my book when I’m halfway through it. Let’s get him married! Kaveri would say. Where is your sister? Rukmini would ask when she was in a hurry in the morning and Setu would shout gleefully, Gone to get married!

  Bhagiratamma and Mylaraiah traded stories about Narayana Rao and his family. Narayana Rao’s famous encounter with the Englishman made the rounds, Bhagiratamma quoted disapproving instances of his parents’ unrelenting orthodoxy. She had had the misfortune to wait with them, on one occasion, to meet the Sringeri Swami, pontiff of the matha to which both their families were affiliated. The Swami had called Narayana Rao’s parents to meet him immediately but had refused to see Bhagiratamma as she was not a traditional widow with a tonsured head. As if it made a difference, her hair was so thin and all grey anyway, Bhagiratamma said. Her son, then still a boy, too had been shooed away just as he had reached out with both hands for the prasada the Swami was holding out, as the man had spotted the leather belt holding up the child’s dhoti. Bhagiratamma was sure Narayana Rao’s parents had had a hand in it.

  But once Bhagiratamma learnt that the groom’s father was related to her and quite closely at that, she sang a different tune. Narayana Rao had done the right thing. Possibly, his parents had advised him. The groom was a law student, brilliant, people said, with wonderful prospects and his father, though a schoolteacher had plenty of lands and the family was well off. The wedding was to be in Nanjangud. No jewellery and certainly no dowry, Narayana Rao had said, no question of it.

  It grew on Rukmini, with a palpable urgency, that if anyone had the power to stop Kalyani’s marriage, it was she. She had heard that Savitramma was not very happy about the whole thing and surely, someone as enlightened as Narayana Rao could not be a willing party in getting his eleven-year-old daughter married. It must be his ferociously orthodox parents who had done it and he must have been too preoccupied with his work to pay much attention, she decided. For right then, Rukmini needed redemption. She had lost Dr King and her unshakable certainties to Katherine Mayo. Of course, they might meet again and giggle and gossip, but she could no longer escape the kind, practical, compassionate eye. They would continue to be friends, but she knew now that she had to count herself one among the ‘natives’, and that she would continuously speculate on Dr King’s motives. As Narayana Rao said, there were subtle forces at play here. They, especially people like her husband, were willing agents of their own subjugation. Giving to their masters virtues that the masters themselves had not perceived, till they were willed into possessing them. Mylaraiah’s much touted admiration of British systems was because they suited him, helped him keep his small world neat and orderly. At the same time, she was trying to take a more charitable view of Narayana Rao’s ‘large’ vision, after he had so casually denied her and the Samaja their audience with Gandhi. What mattered of course, she argued with herself, was that he still considered them a vital wing of his social reconstruction programme. If the Samaja had been rejuvenated, if she had felt a new spring in her step, it was because of him. She had felt the tip of the Englishman’s whip at the back of her own head and had sensed how it must have burnt its way into Narayana Rao’s very being. It had transformed him into a man ready to forsake everything he had, family and fortune. Here was a man whose vision embraced the whole world, who did his duty truly without an eye to the fruits of his labour, for what did he possibly stand to gain but a life of hardship, even if it redeemed his soul. And somewhere in her heart was a small kindling of hope that he thought well of her; she did not mean to be presumptuous but she had a strong feeling that she had some influence with him. He had expressed admiration for her work; he must have guessed at the source of its inspiration.

  She knew that she could not hope to speak to him alone, and was lucky to find both Savitramma and Narayana Rao at home, sitting together, poring over yellowing sheets of paper edged with haldi and kumkum, probably the horoscopes of the bride and the groom.

  ‘I have come to talk to both of you,’ Rukmini said, and Narayana Rao, who was preparing to go out of the room, returned.

  They heard her out without interrupting, right through her impassioned plea for ‘education’ and her eloquent and informed argument against ‘child marriage’, to her triumphant clincher that surely such staunch Gandhians as the two of them knew that Mahatma Gandhi too was against it.

  ‘Rukmini,’ Savitramma said after she had finished, ‘are you suggesting that we should call off our daughter’s wedding?’

  ‘No, I am just suggesting that you postpone it. Kalyani is too young. Surely, you can wait till she finishes school. Her mind and body must grow before she is burdened with domesticity …’

  ‘And why should domesticity be a burden? It is what every woman aspires to, the most fulfilling thing in a girl’s life …’ Savitramma interrupted, and Rukmini fell back at the fury in her voice.

  Recovering herself, Rukmini appealed to Narayana Rao. ‘When you spoke to the Samaja,’ she said, ‘you said women must be strong oaks like Draupadi, not delicate flowers like Sita … that husbands and wives must be partners in nation building …’

  It was only then that Rukmini realized that she had made a terrible mistake in coming. Narayana Rao had said nothing so far and was looking at her, not with reciprocal interest but in faint astonishment. Both husband and wife, she noticed, had remained standing, while she had been given the only chair in the room.

  ‘Let me tell you something Rukmini,’ Savitramma said. ‘When I was eight years old, my mother woke me up from my sleep one morning and said we were going to the neighbouring village for a wedding. She dressed me in a silk langa as usual and made me wear gold bangles and a gold necklace. Then we sat in a bullock cart and trundled over to the next village. The wedding turned out to be my own. I have grown with the man I married, like Kalyani will, like you too have, no doubt. We are “partners” as you call it, in every respect. It is through him that I have become what I am; I support him in everything he does …’ Savitramma pulled her limp pallu over her shoulders in a deliberately formal gesture, moving a fraction closer to Narayana Rao, and Rukmini knew that any misgivings that Savitramma may have had over her daughter’s marriage had been resolved right then.

  Narayana Rao interrupted his wife and spoke for the first time. ‘Does your husband know that you have come here like this?’ he said gently, as one would speak to a child that has run away from home and has to be coaxed back.

  At that, Rukmini stood up and stumbled towards the door.

  ‘Wait!’ Savitramma said, suddenly apologetic. ‘You have not had anything … let me give you haldi-kumkum at least. I know you meant well. The boy is related to you, from your mother’s side �
� they are very good people, your mother herself said so … you must come for the wedding …’

  But by then Rukmini had crossed the courtyard, climbed into the waiting tonga and ridden off.

  She said nothing at home about the visit and if Mylaraiah noticed that his wife was unusually silent over the next few days and that she had abandoned her genteel writing pursuits for physically demanding tasks—she dusted the book cases and sorted out the books, bought bales and bales of cloth from Ananthramu’s shop and ran up curtains for the whole house—he did not comment on it.

  There was nothing, it dawned on Rukmini, that could be done. The Samaja too, she was appalled to find, did not think it a serious matter, not even Umadevi. It’s their personal affair, we must not interfere, Umadevi said, sounding rather impatient. Narayana Rao is not an irresponsible man. He would have given it much thought. The Samaja has other, more important things to do.

  The law too, apparently, could not interfere. The government, Mylaraiah informed his wife, almost with relish, hadn’t ratified the minimum age for marriage for girls as twelve, even though the Assembly had passed the bill. Undue interference with the liberty of the subject, Diwan Mirza had said. Let us be practical, and check our ideals by actualities. You can’t force reform down people’s throats. Even the two women representatives in the Assembly had agreed with him. People had to be ‘educated’ out of their backward ways.

  Over the next few weeks, putting matters of the heart behind, Rukmini applied her mind to the problem. For the first time she did not consult Dr King. Sitting with Umadevi, she worked on a petition to the Director of Public Instruction. They drafted a scheme by which girls could take the middle school exam after six years of schooling and not eight, since it seemed the rule that most of them would be married off by the time they were twelve years old. At least, this way, a man could marry a middle-school pass girl rather than one who had abruptly discontinued her schooling without a certificate to show for it and if he were broadminded, he would put her through school, or at least some years of it, till their first child was born. Mylaraiah, without a single aside on her ‘defeat’ or on the fact that Narayana Rao’s name no longer crossed her lips, volunteered to carry their letter personally to the directorate on his next visit to Bangalore. One of the younger inspectors in the Directorate of Public Instruction was his friend Vishwanath Rao’s son—the very same district judge who had been so helpful to him. What was more, this boy had a reputation for being dynamic and open to new ideas, though he was very young. Like his father, he was reputed to go far. To her astonishment, she actually received a reply from the Director of Public Instruction saying that her scheme had been appraised and something similar was already on the anvil. Well, Rukmini thought as she folded the letter and put it away, the next time her cousin Shivaswamy visited, she could rightfully claim to have assisted in policy making in the state!