A Girl & a River

by K R Usha

  Ten

  1987

  Houses are usually cluttered with memories, but ours had only shadows. There were few objects in it to recall associations or to spark off anecdotes. There were no photographs in the house, not even the mandatory wedding photograph, no memorabilia of any sort. As a child, Mother told me no stories; the written word has always been my best friend. Of the two mementos of his past that my father allows, one is the solid, silver-plated Ganda-Bherunda, which lives in the showcase, with its glittering red eyes. This mythical twin-faced bird is the crest of the royal family of Mysore and stands testimony to my grandfather’s—my father’s father’s—excellent service to the Wodeyars. I know this much that he was a lawyer. The other one that my father tolerates is a takli, a small spinning wheel with a broken spindle that also graces the showcase. I believe his mother used to spin on it regularly. From his cousin Chamu’s references to her, I know that she was an elegant woman, dressed in khadi. ‘A very forward lady’, he called her.

  I am told my father nursed both his parents through their long illnesses and that he had to return abruptly from Calcutta where he was studying, to take care of his father. Sometimes, my father sings Bengali patriotic songs in his bath, loudly, with a lilt when it comes to the chorus. I find it difficult to connect this man who sings in his bath with the one who comes out of it. He seems happiest when he slips into the past, but it is a private country of which he is both monarch and subject. I cannot understand him, try as I will.

  One summer, my holiday was rained out. It was raining in school, in the hills and I seemed to have carried the clouds home. Despite the gloom—which seemed to be deepened by the weak 40 watt electric bulbs—there was a hush in the house, not of anticipation but of relief. My mother seemed more cheerful, almost happy, but my father was visibly despondent. The whole of that year they had written few letters to me, they even made me stay in school for the shorter winter vacation—there were many classmates staying back, so I quite enjoyed myself, but unforgivably, the packages my mother sent me had smelt of floorwash.

  The smell followed me, and when I came home, the house too smelt strongly and reminiscently of it. The guest bedroom had been thrown open to the sun. It was being fumigated. I learnt that it had been occupied for the past few months by my grandmother, and that she had died there. It was the first time that I had heard of her, my mother’s mother, a woman I had never seen and would always associate with floorwash.

  That summer we had many visitors and there were many conversations behind firmly closed doors. I could hear raised voices, and once, to my surprise, even my mother’s. Cousin Chamu was in and out a lot, though from my father’s manner, he did not seem very welcome. One evening I chanced upon him and my mother’s nun-cousin deep in conversation in one of the bowers that my mother had so hopefully created in the garden. They stopped when they saw me and I still recall the heat of their resentful joint appraisal.

  ‘So, they’ve managed it to their advantage, as always,’ my mother’s cousin said.

  I just looked at them, knowing that no response was expected of me.

  ‘Mothers and sisters are easy to deal with. They make no noise.’

  ‘Your dowry’s taken care of,’ Chamu said to me in his peculiarly grating voice, now sharpened by malice. ‘You can marry a rich man.’

  As it turned out, the money my grandmother left did not go towards my dowry but to send me abroad to an American university. It also saved my parents from selling off the house to Chamu, which may have explained his resentment. In her joy, my mother immediately got the house painted, which brightened it up—the red floor no longer seemed to drink up all the light, but though she constantly lit incense sticks in the guest room, she could not drive out the smell.

  Eleven

  1934

  ‘Don’t you just love David Copperfield?’ Kaveri leaned across the table to Ella and lowered her voice conspiratorially.

  Her Wind-in-the-Willows days, the days of her babyhood, were behind her. Dickens and David Copperfield were Kaveri’s latest passion. For a week now, she had lived in an aching haze of love for David Copperfield, feeling his curls between her fingers, and his suffering and fragility in the marrow of her bones. She had followed him word by word on his travails, begging him to be careful as she turned the page, importuning the fates to be kind to him, knowing all along that they would not. By an easy flight of the imagination, she altered her circumstances to suit his—a cruel stepfather whose duplicity could be spotted the moment he appeared on the page, but not, alas, by her who would be most affected by it, a beautiful but hopeless mother, incapable of taking care of herself, a batty aunt, a loyal servant, a friend whose weakness you could see but whom you couldn’t help loving, the gross sufferings that awaited one of ‘noble’ birth—and felt it could well be her story. In fact, she would put David’s suffering and nobility on par only with that of Punyakoti, the cow. The legendary Punyakoti was waylaid one evening by a tiger when she was making her way home from the forest. You are my evening meal, the tiger declared. Please, Punyakoti begged of the tiger, let me go home and suckle my calf which has been hungry all day and is waiting for me, and then I’ll come back to you and you can eat me up. The tiger, who was quite a noble animal himself, let her go and true to her word, she returned after feeding her calf. So moved was the tiger by her integrity that he jumped off a cliff and killed himself.

  ‘Ajji,’ she asked her grandmother after her nightly feverish recitations of the story-so-far, ‘is it possible? Can such things happen? To a boy of ten?’

  ‘Is this the book you have been weeping over, David Copperfield?’ Bhagiratmma turned the cherry leather-bound book over. In the past few days she had come across Kaveri huddled in a corner in the verandah, her face streaked and her eyelashes spiky, the book lying half in abandonment on her lap, as if she couldn’t bear to continue reading it and yet could not let it go.

  ‘No, tell me. Can it be true?’

  ‘It is a story book,’ her grandmother comforted her, ‘and in a book, anything can happen. But don’t worry. Things always turn out well in the end.’

  Reassured that the world she lived in was a moral one, in which wrongs were righted, the evil punished and the good rewarded in the end, she read on with more ease. Not that it lessened the poignancy of each page; she still felt keenly everything that her hero was going through.

  And here was the perfect opportunity to share her anguish and who better than an English girl who was surely born to such things. For weeks, she had waited in anticipation of Ella, Dr King’s niece, hoping that she would not be too strange, that she could slip into easy familiarity with her like her mother had done with Dr King. In her more hopeful moments Kaveri felt that they would be best friends at first sight, they would connect in an unexplainable visceral way, as she could not with even Kalyani. They would understand each other’s most secret thoughts, just like that. And so she repeated, though a little less confidently this time, ‘David Copperfield … you know … don’t you like Aunt Betsey’s donkeys?’

  But it was not to be. Ella had no idea who David Copperfield was, unless he was related to Lieutenant Copperfield of the Sixth Bengal European Regiment. She had never been to London and her own school was a splendid one in the hills of Darjeeling where she went each summer by toy train, and where she was treated very well.

  ‘Oh, a book,’ she shrugged. Well, she liked poems herself and could recite The Wreck of the Steamship Puffin fully. She had learnt it as a child and still knew it by heart but she hadn’t the patience for books, she would rather play hockey.

  The visit so far had not been a success. When Ella had finally arrived, Dr King had brought her over, said ‘Estella, or Ella as we call her … Kaveri,’ and gone off with Rukmini leaving the girls to their own devices, and Kaveri had found that she had to give Ella tea and entertain her all by herself. At first sight, she was not as intimidating as Kaveri had imagined, possibly because she didn’t have light hair and blue eyes
like Dr King. With her brown hair and brown eyes and normal frock with a Chinese collar, Kaveri felt that she was ‘manageable’; even though Ella was taller, she could take her on.

  In Ella’s honour, the porcelain tea set—the same that was brought out for Mrs Spencer—was arranged on the table in the coffee room, the girls got cocoa to drink in the tea cups, and Achamma’s gulpavate and chaklis were served in porcelain bowls. But unlike her aunt, Ella would not touch any of it. Lady Cannings she didn’t mind, she said, she quite liked the coconut and sugar mix, and curry puffs which she had at the club when she went rowing with her sister. (Clearly, when it came to miscegenation, that was as far as she was willing to go.) But of Lady Cannings and curry puffs Kaveri was ignorant, and could offer her only bread and butter and cocoa—a choice of Von Hotten and Roundtree—the closest that came to ‘English’ food in her house. And no, it was not the season for strawberries here, nor had Kaveri tasted the Darjeeling orange—the only thing on offer was the humble Nanjangud plantain.

  So, when Dr King and Rukmini came into the coffee room, they saw the two girls at either end of the table, Ella working her way through thick slices of bread and butter washed down with cocoa.

  ‘What’s this?’ Rukmini said, ‘Take Ella for a walk, Kaveri. Show her the mango tree and all your knick-knacks.’

  The walk was a little better. Though Ella would not climb the mango tree she peered into the hollow where they stored the salt-and-chilli powder mixture, and seemed satisfied with the Hindustan closet, gleaming white, which Kaveri led her to as if it were the royal throne. They might not have been able to come up with Lady Cannings and curry puffs, but the toilet arrangements in the house were not primitive, so Ella could be assured. Ella threw a few sticks for Pat and Zip to fetch and volunteered that she had had a pet parrot at school, which she had bought from a box-wala, but that it had soon died either from the cold or from being kept in a cage.

  For the rest of the brief evening, till Dr King was ready to leave, they both sat in the wicker chairs on the verandah, legs dangling, and stared out into the garden, without saying a word. What use was an English girl, Kaveri thought, who did not read English books? Instinctively she knew that she could not boast about ‘my English friend Ella’ at school.

  When Ella visited next, she had a little more conversation. By then Kaveri had discovered the reason for her petulance. Dr King, she learnt, had brought her away for she felt Ella was ‘running quite wild’ in her long winter vacation—from November to March—‘too much walking on the promenade, shopping at Hogg’s Market and too many Regimental balls and hanging around with her older sister and her beaus at the Great Eastern Hotel’. Within a week here, Ella had had enough of helping her aunt out in the Women and Children’s Clinic in the evening and the morning visits to Mrs Spencer’s embroidery and tailoring workshop. She had all but pronounced Aunt Mary (so it was plain Mary, Kaveri thought with regret, not Marjorie or even Margaret) a bore.

  ‘My best friend Kalyani,’ Kaveri tried, in a desperate bid to win Ella’s heart, ‘is getting married next week.’

  ‘So will Lizzy, my sister, soon.’ Ella returned.

  After that there was no stopping Ella. Ella’s elder sister Elizabeth, nineteen and a secretary in a shipping company in Calcutta, had a young man, a captain in the Royal Artillery and they were ‘practically engaged’. Lizzy had already started ordering her trousseau, but of course they had to wait till he could afford to get married.

  That was why Ella minded being away from home. She would miss the shops being all lit up for the Christmas season, the entertainments at the Club (this, Kaveri gathered was very different from the town club where her parents played tennis), the annual Treasure Hunt for which she was allowed. She would not see what her sister wore to the Regimental Club Ball, nor help with her clothes and shoes, and above all she’d miss the Governor’s New Year’s Ball. Had Kaveri even been to an entertainment at the Government House?

  No, but she had been to see the Dussera procession at the Mysore Palace, Kaveri said stoutly, holding up for the pomp of the princely states against the grandeur of the Raj. The only balls Kaveri knew were from Cinderella.

  Oh yes, Ella replied with a knowledgeable air, she knew all about the princely entertainments. She had spent a whole day at the palace of the Princess of Paraspur, a classmate, ‘the only Indian in my class’. It had been quite boring for they had been shut up in a room all morning with a lot of solemn women servants who brought them endless glasses of sherbet and sprinkled them with attar of roses. In the evening they had sat behind a latticed screen in a huge hall with crimson and gold trimmings and seen the most amazing tricks being performed by a juggler and his pet monkey and finally, a group of gorgeously dressed women with pearls and emeralds worn in vast quantities wherever possible on the body, had danced to loud, wailing music. They had whirled and floated in their gauzy skirts and tight pants—Ella did a credible imitation—and one of them had balanced lighted lamps on her head and on her outstretched palms, exchanging them from hand to head so quickly that it was a wonder her hair did not catch fire.

  Had Kaveri ever been to such a nautch?

  Kaveri, who had begun to feel her inadequacy quite keenly, replied as nonchalantly as she could, that she had been to a play—either it was Krishnaparijata or Sadarame or was it Bhukailasa, she couldn’t remember, in which a woman had danced on stage—actually it was a man dressed as a woman.

  But it was the New Year’s Ball, the one that she would be missing, that animated Ella the most.

  The arrangements would begin days in advance, sorting out the guest lists and the menus and the flowers but the excitement really began when the reception tents began coming up on the lawns in the colour of the season—that year it would have been purple and pink—and the men started stringing up the coloured lights. There would be men polishing the wooden floor with wax and coconut husk and the whole room—at this point Ella closed her eyes and sniffed, nose in the air—would be redolent with the smell of fresh flowers and polishing wax. As Ella’s mother worked in the governor’s house, Ella was allowed to help with the flowers and the decorations on the morning of the grand ball. She would briskly tap-tap across the wooden floor all morning, delivering notes about the linen or the last minute changes in the menu. She would follow her mother as she placed the guest cards in the right places at the tables, ticking off names from the list of confirmed invitees, the two of them making their way carefully between the men polishing the ballroom floor. Till the last minute, there would be things going wrong because the stupidity of the hammals seemed to multiply at crucial times, and impending disasters would be averted in the nick of time, but come night, there would be no sign of the hectic morning.

  There would be a band playing all night, led by Ella’s father …

  ‘Your father plays in a band and your mother is a … works in the governor’s house?’ Kaveri asked incredulously, imagining them to be the equivalent of Timrayee and Achamma. Wait till she told her grandmother about this.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Ella frowned, impatient at being interrupted, ‘my mother is the assistant housekeeper at the governor’s residence, I told you, and my father is the leader of the governor’s band. You should see him, how splendid he looks in uniform …’

  There he would be, the brass buttons on his uniform shining and his epaulettes standing stiffly, and the hall and the lawns would be full of ladies in gorgeous gowns and white gloves and glittering jewels and men in long coat-tails and crisp shirt fronts. They would all sit down at an enormous table with the governor, Sir John, at its head, and eat a never-ending meal of entrees and desserts—the bearers would bring in course after course—off silver plate, under the light of a hundred chandeliers. There would be much curtseying at the door and drinking of toasts to the King Emperor.

  ‘And you,’ Kaveri interrupted, ‘where do you sit?’

  At which Ella stopped and laughed heartily. Of course she wasn’t allowed to attend the ball! Neither were
her parents, technically. Both were on duty. She was supposed to be in bed, but she was allowed, as a special favour to watch from one of the ante rooms for a while. It was a native habit, her father said, to allow children to mix with adults and listen to their talk. The ball was meant only for ‘fine ladies and gentlemen’; the only Indians allowed were princes and ‘suchlike’, just as in her class the only Indian girl was the Princess of Paraspur. And apparently, at the club, no Indians were allowed at all, princes or not.