by K R Usha
From the bottom-most step Kalyani dipped her feet daintily in the water and splashed some on her face—her bath was done—and stood back to make way for her husband. He stood in the water for a moment and then looked upstream. There was a broad ledge of stone that skirted the steps and the side of the river for some distance. A few feet from where they stood, the ledge widened invitingly into what could be a diving platform. It may have been the sun upon the waters or the natural playfulness of his still-seventeen years or the admiring eyes of so many women or he may have just felt he needed a bath. He shrugged his angavastra off and handed it over to his wife in a gesture of consummate husbandly authority. Then he climbed on to the ledge, his wet footprints clear on the dry granite down to the detail of the cushiony pads of his toes tailing off into tadpoles. For a moment his torso gleamed in the sun, the tender shoot of a banana plant, like something not quite of this earth, of base flesh, his sacred thread a heavenly girdle cleaving it cleanly into two. He put his hands up, his shoulders dimpled as the shoulder blades moved with the athletic precision of well-oiled pistons, the tendons at his ankles tightened, and he dived into the water—and was gone.
Thirteen
1987
Every summer I came home from boarding school. My parents were glad to have me home, I could tell, but they did little to engage me except to see that I was always safe. Not that I needed engaging. I played with the servants, with whom I was imperious, and when I grew a little older, I got a bicycle and was allowed a territory of four streets behind and beyond the road on which I lived. Of course I went farther, up to Lal Bagh at first and soon the whole of south Bangalore was old ground for me. All these expeditions were solitary, for I had no friends; I simply didn’t want any.
On one of my visits home, I discovered the attic. It wasn’t an attic proper but a wedge-shaped room just above my mother’s, with a ceiling that sloped dramatically from one end to the other, following the tiled roof of the house. There was a large window in the spine of the wedge which allowed light into the room during the day. There was nothing much of interest there, only my discarded rocking chair, old curtains which my mother could not bear to throw away and my father’s official papers, copies of clauses of the Industrial Act and suchlike. But one summer, when I had grown tall enough to reach the cane hamper on the ledge and haul it down by its broken leather straps, I did so and opened its rusty clasp. The only thing it contained was a large white tin, the familiar Finlay’s tea tin with its faint blue and pink markings on the outside—the Finlay’s tea plantation had long closed down and we no longer drank Finlay’s tea, in fact we hardly drank any tea, ours being a strictly filter coffee household. The box was not too heavy for my ten-year-old hands, and the lid, despite being shut for years, opened easily, no rust marks on the rim.
There were two books inside the tin, and a collection of soap wrappers, the same brand that sat in my soap dish downstairs, promising to keep my skin baby-soft forever as it seemed to have been promising since time began.
I opened the volume bound in cherry leather first, with gold lettering on the spine, a 1924 edition of David Copperfield. It had the owner’s name inside. Despite being shut inside the tea tin, I couldn’t imagine for how long, probably forty years or more, no silverfish lived among its pages and the book sat with such practised ease in my hands that it must have been much-read, and from the markings within, it must have been much-loved as well. I must confess to being a little shocked to see how heavily marked the book was, for I truly believed that books were an embodiment of the goddess Saraswati and must be treated with reverence. The pencil lines ran deep on successive pages of onion skin paper, and the comments in the margin were in a decidedly girlish hand—why, it could have been my own.
The other book interested me more at first, with its lurid cover on which a white woman in a décolleté gown cowered by a window while a dark-complexioned, bare-torsoed man leered at her through the bars. Tales by the Hoogly by Ella King. Charles Dickens I had heard of, but not Ella King. It was a paperback, already crumbly despite being only about fifteen years old, clearly not as well produced or printed as the other book. Nobody claimed ownership of it for there was no name inside.
I did not tell my parents about the books immediately, for they did not know of my daily sojourns in the attic which seemed to smack faintly of the illicit—looking at dead people’s things is much like turning over their graves. I just came away from the attic each afternoon that summer with my fingers smelling faintly of Pears soap. I did not read the books immediately either, being just content to look at them and speculate on how they had got into the tea tin, for I am not much of a reader. Make-believe worlds have never interested me. I would rather play in the garden and the servants were only too happy to leave off whatever they were doing to join me in badminton, tennicoit or plain bat and ball. With time, I outgrew my childish games and started playing tennis at the club, coached by a true professional, encountering for the first time an opponent who was not happy to lose to me.
Before I left for school at the end of the vacation, I showed the two books, still unread, to my mother and father.
‘Who is Kaveri?’ I asked.
My father held the book by the spine and it nestled like an old friend in his palm. ‘Oh this,’ he smiled, ‘Barkis is willing. This is your grandmother’s book. One of her favourites, I remember.’
I half turned to my mother but my father held the book away from her reach. ‘Your mother would not know,’ he said suddenly, his voice sounding raw, as if his throat had sloughed off its inner skin, ‘she’s practically illiterate, anyway. I don’t know how these two books survived the white ants, in her care.’ These sudden swings of temper and mood were part of my childhood; I took them in my stride as one does patches of eczema which flare up when unknown allergens chance to confluence.
I remember once my mother had appeared for lunch wearing a new pair of earrings, gold hoops with a little arch at the bottom through which a large pearl was strung. They were distinctly old fashioned, but my mother looked nice and girlish in them. Father noticed them immediately.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked incredulously. ‘Go take them off.’
‘They are mine, I have a perfect right to wear them,’ she said with surprising show of spirit. ‘They belonged to my mother.’ But then it lasted for a very short while; she took them off and said in a subdued way that she was just checking to see how heavy they were and whether my tender ear lobes could support them yet. My tender ear lobes as yet unpierced, obviously couldn’t, so they were put away and when the time came for me to formally wear earrings, I declared that they were far too much even if they had been my grandmother’s, and I’d much rather wear something less obtrusive.
To the charge of illiteracy too, my mother said nothing. She just sat back in her chair and went on with her daisy stitch. I had always wondered why she put up with these irrational bursts of anger in an otherwise correct, in fact too-correct, and formal a relationship between them. But this was how it was between men and women, between mothers and fathers, I thought and knew right then that I would have none of it. All along I must have known, all along, even before what I came to consider my moment of truth, I must have known that this was a passing phase, that I was biding my time for a future elsewhere.
Why the Ella King book had survived, my father did not know. It had not been part of his library. In fact, he couldn’t remember it at all.
By the time I finished reading both the books, I was almost through with high school. Charles Dickens was never a favourite. I found him sentimental and rambling. The only fiction I read now is crime fiction—I like guns and hard-boiled detectives. As I thumbed through David Copperfield every summer since my tenth year, I grew familiar with the book, with the texture of its leather binding and the rustle of its pages, till it came to sit as naturally in my hands as it had done in my father’s. When you opened the book it automatically fell open at those pages which were underlined the m
ost, possibly the most read. More than the story I looked for the notations in the margin my grandmother had made, and I smiled as I imagined her, a serious little girl, eyebrows drawn and tongue sticking out with the effort of writing, so taken up with the fortunes of an imaginary boy in a distant country. Poor David, she had said in one place, and in case the reader had not noticed, David’s mother is dead! and Steerforth is not a good boy! There was even the desperate injunction on page 401—Don’t marry Dora!—as if her exhortations in the margins would save him from the fate decided by his creator. The passages where young David suffered, his chops and his pudding eaten cleverly by the waiter at the inn on the way to London, his being humiliated and diddled in his new school, his toiling in the wine trade at the age of ten and his flight to Dover with his box being stolen by a common thief, were heavily underlined. The grown-up David seemed to have engaged her less; Uriah Heep and Micawber were unmarked.
At thirteen, I found the book with the lurid cover more interesting. It was a collection of ‘Indian’ tales, written in a heavy-handed style, mawkish, and the romance was of the bodice-ripping genre. There was one about a chaste English girl who studies to be a doctor and a handsome, swarthy ‘Indian’, an aide-de-camp to the maharaja of a princely state—they have a ‘romantic entanglement’, their child, which he doesn’t know about, is still-born and she leaves him suddenly, to go as far away from him as possible. The last image was that of the dead child floating down the river in a basket with a lighted lamp to guide it. But the most preposterous of the tales was one called ‘Bride-Widow’, which featured at a breathless pace, a noisy wedding ceremony, cacophonous singing and blowing of ‘native’ trumpets, much spilling of symbolic blood and suggestive staining of clothes with yonis and lingas being brought in at least once on every page, and finally, a groom who gets washed away in the river as soon as the wedding is over. His bride is burnt on the pyre along with his body and the story ends with her clinging to his feet, until the smoke closes in on her and hides her from view.
There were two short anecdotes that I liked despite their hysterical plot and tone. One was about a soldier disabled in war, who lies on his bed all day in the hills, and is slowly driven out of his mind by the monotonous cry of the Brain Fever bird. And the other, rather ghoulish, was about refugees from Rangoon fleeing to Calcutta from the Japanese attack during the Second World War. Their progress up the historic Burma Road was described very convincingly. They had set off along the Chindwin river, dressed in their best, clutching their plate and their pictures, and then up through Tamu or the ‘Death Valley’ by which time the jungle, the mountains and diaorrhea had begun to take their toll and they began to shed them all one by one, marking their exit through the woods with a litter of precious things, till at Palel, almost within sight of Imphal where help could well be at hand, they fell down dead and then a host of butterflies—large, colourful and lovely, fluttered down and settled silently on the not-fully-dead bodies.
This book, published in 1955 by a little known London publisher, had no name or message inscribed in it. My father did not know who Ella King was and why the book had been preserved. About the author, the book said that she had been born and brought up in Calcutta and had returned to her ‘native English soil’ after India became independent. I cannot tell how far such a book or such writing skills would have taken the writer but the book kept me rivetted through my thirteenth summer. (I used the Pears soap wrappers that I found in the Finlay’s tea tin as bookmarks.)
Quite by chance, I found the letter. It was among the soap wrappers, the same colour, scented now and without an envelope. It was written in purple ink and the handwriting was so small and crabby that I couldn’t read it. Moreover the ink had run in several places. It began with ‘My’ so I could tell that it was a letter but ‘My’ was not followed with a ‘dear’, and it had neither the addressee’s name nor the writer’s. A letter that ignored the basic rules of letter writing that even I, a ten-year old knew and which hadn’t the decency to possess an envelope was not worth bothering about, I thought then, and lost interest in it. As I rifled through the soap wrappers for other keepsakes I found a fragment of a picture—of a masked woman holding a whip above her head—the picture had been torn across the middle so that just one masked eye, a bit of white thigh and the whip-wielding hand flung above her head were left. It seemed to belong more with Ella King’s book than with David Copperfield, so I inserted it into Tales by the Hoogly to use it as a bookmark.
I knew instinctively that I had to keep quiet about my find. In a few years’ time I would know the letter by heart and unmask the woman in the torn picture, just as I would be able to reel off the annotations in the margins of David Copperfield. Many fruitless hours would go in speculation and detection. Two books and a letter. In time, they would not just intrigue me but become quite an obsession, the cause of much heart ache. But of course, at ten I had no way of telling that.
Part III
The War and After
Fourteen
1938
The war came to them in its own time, gradually working its way off the inch tall newspaper headlines and settling into the alleyways of their small town. There was talk of mobilizing troops from Mysore; time again, Mylaraiah thought, for Shivaswamy to get rich. Then the trucks began to appear, the convoy of green army trucks rolling in stately stealth on the newly asphalted highway, on their way to or from Poona. Soon the rationing would follow, as it had twenty years ago during the First World War, all supplies being diverted to the army. Of course, Mylaraiah’s and Rukmini’s household would run as it always had since their fields grew everything they needed—they even had their own castor oil press in the backyard. As it had been during the previous war, in the evenings, people queued up at the back of the house and Mylaraiah’s clerk distributed grain and oil from the store. This time the district commissioner’s office had announced a system of coupons for cloth and petrol, and Mylaraiah knew that it was only a matter of time before the coupons started changing hands not for goods but for money. Those who argued most vociferously that the British must go would be the ones doing it too.
The white boat cap and the khaddar dhoti-kurta of the Congressmen were becoming noticeable in the market square these days, and it was not surprising, for the Congress had got a firm foothold in the state now, having subsumed the local parties in its fold. Narayana Rao, good man, was the district head of the newly fortified Congress and a member of the state-wide Congress Committee. Actually, things couldn’t have been better for Mylaraiah either, right then, for he had been nominated to the maharaja’s legislative council and his appointment as government advocate was almost confirmed.
‘Have you ordered the robes for the ceremony?’ one of the lawyers asked him half-seriously.
‘Hope we’ll get an invitation to the grand durbar.’
‘I believe you are handing out your local briefs to your juniors. What have you decided about the Modern Mills case? Have you allotted it to anyone? You know I’ve been following that case with interest …’
Had it not been for the war, Mylaraiah was sure he would have been instituted as government advocate by now. Thanks to Vishwanath Rao, he had already fixed up a house in Bangalore. It was a little more than what he would have liked to pay and he still had to find the money, but it was in one of the most coveted areas of the city. He was also disconcerted to find that the valuation for his lands was so much at odds with what he had imagined was their true worth, but this was not the time to look into such things. Setu’s school too had been settled, and Kaveri of course, would be married off soon. It would do Rukmini a world of good too, for she was becoming morose of late, ever since her mother died. As soon as the war was over, they would move and things would change. Of course, they would retain this house too, for it was his ancestral home, built by his father.
For Rukmini, the war was just one in a series of events. If she were to mark the one from which things began to spiral out of control, she would s
ay it was Kalyani’s wedding, four years back; on her Richter’s scale, it was the epicentre of a quake that set off many unlikely tremors. It festered in her mind, like an internal injury to a vital organ, unseen and unapprehended, but which bled quietly inside, sapping her of her vitality, her health. Perhaps the connections were all in her imagination, but she could not shake off the feeling of sadness and exhaustion that invaded her and the house.
It had first taken its toll on her mother, for Bhagiratamma had returned from Nanjangud a bent old woman.
‘Rukmini,’ she said as soon as she came home, ‘it is just a matter of time, I know. Send for my jewellery. I want to give you what I have put aside for Kaveri.’
While she still could, Bhagiratamma went one day, leaning heavily on Achamma’s arm for Rukmini had proclaimed with a vehemence that seemed strange to Bhagiratamma that she would not cross their threshold again, and spoke to Savitramma and Narayana Rao. Get Kalyani back, she told them, many families have done that. Or at least persuade her in-laws to enrol her in a school.