A Girl & a River

by K R Usha

  ‘Well, in my house, there are places the English are not allowed either,’ Kaveri said, by way of offering a fair deal. Much as Achamma admired Dr King, Kaveri knew she wouldn’t dream of allowing her to enter her kitchen. And Rukmini would know better than to challenge her on it.

  But Ella swept on, deaf to Kaveri, intent on the ball she would miss. That year, the ball would be really difficult to manage, Ella said, because the head housekeeper, to whom her mother reported had suddenly died in summer—she had gone to the hills as part of the governor’s entourage, eaten too many pineapples there, so they heard, and was gone in the space of one afternoon. The new one didn’t know a thing and Ella’s mother had to do all the work. Her father too had lost his saxophonist, again to the heat, and a cellist to cholera, the list seemed endless. The climate here, it appeared, was unsuited to the English constitution, which was used to cooler temperatures and incessant rain.

  ‘Then why do you stay? Why don’t you go back?’ Kaveri asked, moved by the quick depletion of Ella’s father’s band.

  ‘My father says we have to stay and rule the country. What would the Indians do without us? They could never manage on their own.’

  ‘Did you know Ajji,’ Kaveri began tentatively that night to her grandmother, ‘in Ella’s school, there are no Indians except princesses and where Ella lives, there are places where the English do not allow us to enter. I told her,’ Kaveri dangled her carrot, ‘it was the same as them not being allowed to enter the kitchen in our house.’

  ‘Well,’ Bhagiratamma said thoughtfully, ‘none of us would want to go to those places, to begin with. Tell me, would Dr King want to enter our kitchen or would you like to leave your nice school and go so far away to a boarding school …’

  ‘Yes, but if I wanted to, would I be allowed?’

  ‘People usually mix with their own kind. Even if they were allowed, they wouldn’t like to go to places where they feel uncomfortable or be friends with people with whom they have nothing in common.’

  How could the same family have produced a doctor and a bandmaster? It was simply inconceivable that the destinies of siblings could be so much at variance. It must have been a terrible disappointment to Dr King’s parents, Bhagiratamma said to Rukmini who agreed with her, that their daughter turned out to be the doctor and their son the bandmaster, and one who seemed to have married beneath him. The English were strange they agreed; they might admire them but they would never fully understand them. Kaveri too, who was beginning to feel less and less satisfied with her grandmother’s answers to her questions, could not connect Ella and her family, the Governor of Bengal who ate off gold plate and danced with fine ladies, with the British who ruled the ‘natives’, the makers of the laws which were held in neatly-tied files in her father’s office room, the builders of railways and the conjurers of telegraph lines, and none of them, beyond doubt, could have written David Copperfield.

  Twelve

  1934

  Kalyani was to get married from her uncle’s house in Nanjangud, the town famous for its temple and its small, sweet plantains. Her uncle, her mother’s brother, was a prosperous lawyer and only too happy to open his large house for the celebrations. Since Rukmini refused to have anything to do with it as a matter of principle, Bhagiratamma decided to go with Kaveri, and Ella said she wanted to come too for she wanted to see an Indian wedding. Rukmini was hoping that Mylaraiah would refuse to let Kaveri go but Savitramma and Narayana Rao insisted. She was their Kalyani’s closest friend, they would take good care of her.

  It was not a large party that left from Narayana Rao’s house—only about twenty people, Bhagiratamma, Kaveri and Ella included. Already, on the train, Kaveri began to feel strange for Kalyani, who had insisted that she come, would not talk to her and Ella was too busy looking out of the window. Kalyani sat sandwiched between her mother and grandmother, wearing a sari and feeling very important, refusing to return the faces that Kaveri pulled at her. Moreover, it was hot and other than wheezing ponderously, the train showed no sign of starting. Inside the compartment, the women kept fussing with their innumerable baskets and packages, which they made her count again and again.

  Kaveri sat in her corner, rocking herself into a doze, speculating idly on the prospect of matrimony. She could not quite believe that Kalyani, who sat right before her, her face hidden behind her mother’s ample arm, and the almost-mythical Lizzy would be entering the same state soon. The way Ella described it, marriage was not the exalted, near-fatal thing her mother and grandmother made out to be; there was magic here, and mystery; a prince, a red dress and a glass slipper overturned at the head of a grand flight of stairs. But neither picture held true for Kalyani, who was just her friend behaving strangely. It was a temporary lapse and she would soon revert to normal.

  The train set off. The pleas of the vendors were ignored. Narayana Rao made last minute enquiries after the ladies before going off to the next compartment where he was sitting with the men. Bhagiratamma pulled out a basket and started handing out bananas—a sign that the journey had truly begun. It was the periodic round of eats that pacified Kaveri on the journey, for Kalyani steadfastly looked at the floor of the compartment and Ella looked out of the window, not seeming to tire of the endless landscape or waving at the urchins who watched the train go by.

  They reached Nanjangud at the end of the day, after changing trains twice, once at Bangalore and then at Mysore, and Kaveri was almost fast asleep when they were taken in a tonga to Kalyani’s uncle’s house where they were to stay for the next few days. Ella was to go to the guest house attached to the local hospital to stay with Dr Smith’s friend. It felt strange to be without her mother but also oddly liberating. For three days Kaveri curled up on an unfamiliar mattress next to her grandmother, had coffee in the morning and in the evening—no milk, dusted her face liberally with talcum powder and borrowed a pair of dangling jhumkas to wear in her ears. Strands of jasmine hung down the back of her head, covering her short hair. Her mother would not have known her.

  The morning of the wedding Kaveri stood with the other women at the gate of the house under the welcoming arch of mango leaves, armed with a sprinkler of scented water, ready to douse the guests when they arrived. Ella was given flowers, which she had to throw gently at the arriving group. The groom’s party arrived to the blast of valagas and an elaborate arati. The women could not stare openly at him, so they watched his face reflected in the silver lamps and the red water of the arati, and the groom, a mere lad of seventeen who was studying in a college in Mysore, was quickly appraised and pronounced healthy although a little thin.

  Then the rituals began. The groom pretended to have last minute misgivings and set off to become a sanyasi in Kashi, but was cajoled and escorted back under a stout black canvas umbrella to have his feet washed in a silver plate by Savitramma and Narayana Rao. Mollified, he returned to the mandap and Kalyani was led out by her uncle, dressed, much to Ella’s disappointment in a plain white khadi sari. A mirror was brought out. The bride and the groom sat on a swing and looked at each other in the mirror.

  There was a satisfied murmur from the crowd of matrons. ‘This is the first time she is setting eyes on him,’ Bhagiratamma said.

  ‘First time she’s setting eyes on him?’ Ella echoed, bewildered. ‘You mean they haven’t seen each other before?’ she whispered to Kaveri. ‘Aren’t they in love with each other?’

  ‘You mean, like David and Dora?’ Kaveri stammered. It took her a while to collect her wits for she was confused at this sudden untramelling of boundaries. Love between men and women was an emotion she had confined to the realm of her imagination, something she was perfectly comfortable confronting in the pages of a book, not any book but an English book, but not exposed like this in broad daylight. ‘Of course not,’ she said, with feeling.

  ‘It’s love at first sight, then.’ Ella would not allow for a loveless marriage. ‘Even Aunt Mary fell in love … What’s that?’ she asked, easily diverted. ‘That pink
thing round her forehead like a miner’s lamp?’

  ‘I don’t know, ask my grandmother. What was that about Aunt Mary?’

  ‘Shhh … it’s supposed to be a secret … happened long back … she fell in love with an Indian … nobody talks about it now.’

  A melodic blast from the valaga distracted them. They could not return to Aunt Mary. The tali was being tied. Kalyani’s chin sank lower on her chest. The groom looked quite bewildered at the contrary instructions being issued to him on how to knot the tali thread. They were now man and wife.

  ‘And now,’ Kalyani’s cousin, an older married girl, said, ‘the fun and games begin. The next two days are the best.’

  Kalyani and her boy-husband played ‘house’ with the black wooden dolls they were given—blessed symbols of marriage—under the guidance of a roomful of giggling women. There were mock fights and instantaneous resolutions between the two dolls, ‘just as it will be between the two of them,’ Bhagiratamma explained.

  The women sang homely songs in which mothers-in-law and fathers-in-law and other relatives tried to make life difficult for the newly married couple, but they were advised to persevere till finally love and understanding won all. Kalyani had lifted her chin off her chest by now and was beginning to look around, sometimes even at her husband.

  Then, with a clang of vessels the cooks came in to announce lunch or dinner or whatever meal it was—everyone had lost count in all the revelry. The fun and games continued well into the evening. What Kaveri liked best was the game in which the bride and the groom had to burst papads and rotis on each other’s backs. If she had one like that, a fine uraddal papad, so large and crisply fried, she would’ve thumped it to smithereens on his back, not patted it so half-heartedly like Kalyani was doing, and as for the fluffed out wheat-flour rotis, her’s would’ve popped like a paper bag and nipped him sharply between the shoulder blades, she could assure. However, both Kalyani and this boy were shy and wouldn’t enter into the spirit of things. Why, Kaveri thought, this was like Blue Birds, only the games were played indoors. If it was so much fun, she wouldn’t mind getting married herself.

  ‘This is not a proper wedding,’ Ella complained, ‘the bride and the groom haven’t kissed yet.’

  ‘Oh look,’ Kaveri said, even as she pondered this bit of worldly wisdom, ‘they’re playing the war of the elephants—the rice elephant and the salt elephant!’

  There were two elephants outlined in white on the floor, one filled with salt and the other with rice and Kalyani and the boy took turns standing next to each elephant and denouncing the other.

  ‘Watch out,’ the new husband cried with a confidence now given him by the gods themselves, ‘I can wash your salt elephant away.’

  ‘And I,’ said Kalyani, finally with some show of spirit, ‘will eat yours up. After all it’s made of rice.’

  And then it was Kalyani’s turn to stand next to the rice elephant and wash out his salt elephant.

  ‘Where are they going for their honeymoon?’ Ella wanted to know.

  ‘Honeymoon?’ Again, Kaveri felt the tug of unchartered waters.

  ‘They must ride off in a carriage with tin cans and other things tied to the back which will clatter, and go somewhere.’

  ‘They might go to the temple …’ Kaveri said doubtfully.

  ‘Oh I don’t mean that! Somewhere far off where they can be by themselves.’

  Why on earth would they want to be by themselves, Kaveri wondered but knew better than to ask. The last thing Kalyani would want was to be closeted with a stranger when she had her family and friends and all the games here.

  ‘Lizzy has already planned her honeymoon. She will go to Darjeeling, that’s where my school is.’

  ‘And what will Lizzy … people … do on this honeymoon?’

  ‘Oh, stay in a nice hotel, go dancing and walking in the mall, hold hands …’

  Meanwhile, the women had struck up a song, this time a love song.

  ‘Come let us play together, beloved,’ they sang, ‘with this ball here, made of Suragi flowers,’ as the bride and the groom tossed a ball of white flowers, dipped in the red arati, at each other.

  ‘Come let us play together beloved …’ the chorus took it up. And before the song was over Kalyani’s white sari was stained red with the red of the arati.

  Then, there was a lull, as if a tide of sadness had overcome them all and the women grew suddenly subdued, so suddenly that a laugh from the back of the hall sounded embarrassingly high-pitched and a bit of conversation rang out of context.

  That night, shifting on her mattress, next to her grandmother’s gently snoring bulk, Kaveri contemplated the solitude of marriage, a new aspect that Ella had revealed. The thought of being alone with a strange man on a honeymoon caused her a vague sense of distress; yet she wondered what it would be like to hold hands with him. She held her palm up to her face and in the dark, saw her for-once ink stain-free fingers, and sensed the tingling in her warm palms. Then a flush mounted, from the base of her stomach upwards, through her neck, her lips, to her face and still tingling palms, and downwards, over her thighs to the ends of her toes. It had something to do with their bodies, she knew, a transaction of some sort, but when she thought of Kalyani wrapped like a bundle in her white khadi sari and the boy, with his stick-like legs, and shoulder blades so hollow and bony that you could easily hang two coats on them, she could not imagine what it could be. She wished her grandmother were awake so that she could talk to her, or that Setu were there so that she could have a fight with him and work off her uneasiness.

  But by the next morning there was no room for dolefulness of any kind. It was time for the grand finale, when the new in-laws threw challenges and mock-insults at each other, all in rhyming verse and song, in which the bride’s side was careful not to outdo the groom’s. Ella too was so taken that she said not a thing the whole morning.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the bride’s mother consoled her husband, ‘we’ll make do with eight Annas of gold,’ assuring him that their parsimony would get the better of the groom’s people, ‘we’ll get it all with eight Annas of gold—the bangles, the necklace and the earrings, and have some left over for the nose ring as well …’

  Since Savitramma and Narayana Rao would not sing, the women sang on their behalf.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the bride’s mother consoled her husband, ‘we’ll make do with four Annas of silver, and get it all—the chambu, the plate and the cups, and have some left over for the uddharane …’

  ‘Your uncle Shivaswamy,’ Bhagiratamma said, ‘is so clever, he can make up these songs on the spot, and really insulting ones at that.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the bride’s mother consoled her husband afresh, ‘we’ll make do with eight Annas of rice and get it all—vangi bhat, kesari bhat and bisi bele bhat, and still have some left over for the akshate …’

  And then it was all done and Kalyani, still in her white sari stained red with the arati, was led to the room that was earmarked as the groom’s ‘house’. She pushed the quarter measure of rice on the threshold with her right foot and walked in. She dipped her hands in the arati and left two red handprints on the wall, her unmistakable stamp on the new household, and wiped her hands on her mother-in-law’s sari.

  The women murmured approvingly. Kalyani’s mother-in-law had worn a beautiful green silk sari, which was very generous of her, for that sari would have to be given to her daughter-in-law, and many women were known to wear their oldest saris, ostensibly not to get them stained with the arati, but in reality because they did not want to part with yet another ‘good’ sari to an untried daughter-in-law.

  ‘Wipe well,’ one of the women urged Kalyani, ‘the two of you have far to go together.’

  And there was further proof of generosity. When Kalyani searched in the Lakshmi chambu full of rice, she found not the usual eight anna bit, but a lovely coral pendant which made even Savitramma smile.

  ‘Will they have a house of their own, a
small one at least?’ Ella whispered to Kaveri.

  ‘You mean just the two of them?’ Kaveri was perplexed that Ella should continue to harp on the subject. ‘No, they’ll live in his house.’

  ‘With his parents and all? Surely they’ll have a room to themselves.’

  No, Kaveri said stoutly. They’d spread their mattresses in the hall and sleep like everybody else.

  When her parents and the company of laughing women began to withdraw, Kalyani began to cry and Savitramma too hid her face in her pallav. The women struck up a song to tell them that this was the way of the world and they were not the first mother and daughter to be separated thus. Ella, Kaveri was surprised to find, was crying too.

  There was one more thing left, Narayana Rao’s sister-in-law reminded them. It was a family ritual and would not take much time—she knew that Kalyani’s in-laws were in a hurry to go home with their new daughter-in-law and that Narayana Rao himself had a train to catch. There was a Congress working committee meeting that he had to attend the next day. The bride and the groom had to do a small puja at the temple and take a dip in the nearby river. The women would escort the newlyweds since the men had to attend to all the last minute arrangements, the tongas and the tickets.

  The puja at the temple was done. The bell outside was rung and it resonated sharp and clear and pure, across the open courtyard and the space beyond. From the top of the steps they could see the Kapila river, diamonds of sunlight sparkling capriciously in her fluid trunk of translucent green, as she made her way downstream in a business-like way—I have fields to water and hydroelectricity to generate, she seemed to say, so what if I glint and leap about, I know I belong to the progressive state of Mysore.

  They sat awhile on the steps and rested, now completely relaxed—the wedding had been hard work and you could never ensure that things would go off smoothly. They knew they made a beautiful sight—women in silk in the mid-morning sunlight, filled with grace, content with having set a boat a sail on its journey, of having redeemed a promise to the gods. Surely, for hundreds of years people must have sat in the courtyard of the temple like this and given thanks, and felt the comfort of the granite-hewn steps beneath their feet; the bilva leaves and marigold flowers fallen on one side must have waited an eternity in the same spot, surely the tuft of grass sprouting in a crack in the barren rock face must have been there since time began, as also the split-tailed drongo that hovered over a mossy stone on the river bank. Temple, stone, tree and river; man and nature seemed to come together for an immensely still moment and strain towards a realm beyond, like the spire of the temple reaching to pierce the sky. They need not speak their hearts’ desire, their hopes and their deepest fears, for even as they sat there, they felt a lessening of the load.