by K R Usha
‘She can come home now, can’t she,’ Kaveri had said, ‘and join our class again. She hasn’t missed much.’
And Rukmini’s heart had caught as she watched her daughter sitting by the window, shoulders squared to do battle, as if it were all a matter of sorting out the practicalities of schools and readmission. Quite unlike herself, she had whispered a quick prayer for her daughter’s well being, for her high spirits to be tempered into a natural docility, and then scolded herself for her stupidity. She should not forget how resilient children could be, she had told herself, and Kaveri was but a child. In fact, on coming back home Kaveri had given her brother a graphic description of Kalyani’s husband being eaten by a crocodile—a huge beast that had jumped out of the water, snapped him up and carried him off, his legs kicking in the serrated clamp of its jaws. She had repeated the story to her friends and as she continued to embellish and fine-tune the image through retellings, she came to believe it completely.
‘Kalyani has a new home now, and new people,’ Mylaraiah had answered his daughter seriously.
Rukmini had frowned at her husband, at the note of finality in his voice, as if his statement brooked no argument, as if it were a law of nature and not a man-made stricture.
‘Our Kaveri thinks it’s as simple as going to her house and fetching her back in a tonga,’ Bhagiratamma had sensed a breach and stepped in.
‘I know you have to travel by train first,’ Kaveri had said impatiently. ‘When I get married, I’ll catch a tonga and come home whenever I want.’
Her father and grandmother had laughed. But not Rukmini. Kaveri had said, when I get married, a change from her usual, I’ll never get married.
‘… Kalyani’s people, Narayana Rao’s sambandhis seem to be good people.’
‘Oh yes, the father is the headmaster of the government boys’ school …’
‘But the mother, what about the mother?’ Rukmini’s dictum was, when marrying the son, look at the mother, for she will be the root of all his faults.
‘Well, she allowed Kalyani to wipe her dirty arati-stained hands all over her new sari,’ Kaveri had said triumphantly.
‘Shhh … don’t butt in when grown-ups are talking …’
‘Our Kaveri is a clever one, she may be a tomboy but she notices everything …’ Bhagiratamma’s voice had quavered as she pulled Kaveri on to her lap.
Bhagiratamma slipped away one night, without bothering anybody, her conversation with her granddaughter about the ramifications of married girls ‘coming back home’ incomplete. The final straw had been her son’s refusal to come and fetch her even when she had sent word for him, saying she was ill and would like to die at home. She had gone inveighing against the wickedness of subtle, underhand women like her daughter-in-law—give her a woman who hitched up her sari and brawled like a fisherwoman any day—and the culpability of spineless men. Better to do wrong, she said, than to do nothing, than to build an anthill of routine around yourself and hope that keeping yourself occupied from morning till night will make the things you didn’t want to confront, disappear.
Rukmini grieved quietly. The house and its relentless routine claimed her, it did not give her time to brood but she found herself feeling more and more dispirited. One morning, a few months after her mother’s death, she discovered a whole shock of silver at the back of her head, which had escaped her notice, and she was barely thirty-five! Her husband put it down to the strain she had been facing of late, she would recover soon. Rukmini went about her chores, outwardly calm and orderly as always, issuing instructions to the servants and working out the Samaja accounts, and stopped from time to time, feeling for the phantom limb by her side, the absence of which she felt as painfully as if it had been amputated. She had lost an ally, her sounding board, her intermediary not just between herself and the world but between her home and herself too. You should have waited, she complained to her absent mother, you should have hung on for Kaveri, for you were her friend and I can only be her mother.
The copper pod at the end of the compound blazed into life in April and May, and in June, with the rains, the pods turned a quiet brown. Rukmini walked under its shade and that of the generous rain tree once in the morning and once in the evening; she was too tired to go to the club and play tennis any more. She had even detached herself from the day-to-day work of the Samaja, though Umadevi would not hear of her quitting. She could not work up much enthusiasm for spinning either, though she sat at the charkha quite religiously. That year she gave the annual Ramanavami harikatha by the famous Panneerbai of Madras a miss, an event which was almost a pilgrimage for her and which she had not missed in years.
‘Rukmini,’ Mylaraiah said to her gently, ‘what is this? Shivaswamy tells me he has written to you suggesting possible houses in Bangalore and bridegrooms, but you haven’t written back. She must be really ill, he says, if she’s left the house-hunting to you.’
Rukmini made no reply. She did not tell her husband that in the same letter, Shivaswamy had made a pointed reference to Mylaraiah’s ‘dealings’ with Vishwanath Rao. She did not ask him why the seedy lawyer Bhat, known to be a broker in the shadiest of deals was visiting his chambers these days; she did not even ask him why they were short of so many sacks of rice that year. As for his appointment, which everyone considered a done thing, she would believe it only when she saw the government order, complete with the Ganda Bherunda seal on it.
‘I have been thinking … anyway, Achamma and Timrayee are going to remain here. I will continue to stay here with the children. We’ll see how it goes with you in Bangalore and then shift …’
‘The house in Bangalore I will take care of,’ Mylaraiah said, ‘and yes, we can even shift in stages, but what about the proposal? Shivaswamy said he suggested a Bangalore boy and got no response from you.’
‘A proposal?’ Rukmini looked up. ‘But she hasn’t even completed her Intermediate …’
‘I’m surprised at you Rukmini!’ Mylaraiah was less gentle this time. ‘Your elder sister started looking for grooms for her daughter when the girl was twelve—but of course, I forgot, you are “progressive”. Does that mean you have to shirk your responsibilities? Today she’s sixteen, tomorrow, before you know it, she’ll be twenty.’
Rukmini sat back in her chair and shut her eyes wearily. ‘We must talk to Kaveri first,’ she said, her eyes still closed.
‘What is there to talk about? She knows very well. Girls sense these things. We are her parents. We know what is best for her. You may want her to heal the sick and the poor like Dr King, but Kaveri herself shows no particular inclination in that direction. And it’s not as if she’s shining in her studies. Her school-leaving results were disappointing—don’t deny it—and there’s no sign that her Intermediate results will be better. And how can they be when she sits around reading story books all the time!’
‘She needs to be guided,’ Rukmini said ‘She may want to be a teacher. She’s good at languages.’
‘She also says she’d like to act on stage. Remember, when the Gubbi Company was in town, we couldn’t stop her from singing and dancing and “acting” round the house.’
‘If she wants to go to the university, she could stay with my brother.’
‘Why are we just bandying words like this? Your brother could barely tolerate having his own mother in the house. You don’t even get along with your sister-in-law. Do you seriously think our daughter can stay in that household? And what is this talking-to-her nonsense? We must just tell her and be done with it.’
There was no point in asking her anything, he said, as she did not know her own mind. No girl of seventeen brought up the way Kaveri had been, would. The most demanding decision she had taken so far was to choose the colour of her sari.
And then Rukmini said something which made Mylaraiah lose his temper.
‘Even Kalyani,’ Rukmini said, ‘is being put through her BA in Mysore by her in-laws.’
‘You want to compare our daughter with the u
nfortunate Kalyani,’ Mylaraiah said coldly, ‘and that too to disadvantage! And after her BA, what? Will you find your daughter a nice widower to marry? No one else will be ready to marry her then. You really are peculiar. Other women would be hounding their relatives, especially their husbands by now, scouring the countryside for grooms, matching horoscopes, setting up meetings, but not you. You think your daughter is still a baby. Perhaps it is you who should go to Mysore to do your BA.’
Mylaraiah gathered himself with an effort and sat down in front of her, forcing her to look at him.
‘Am I an unreasonable man?’ he asked
‘No,’ Rukmini replied. Like all benevolent patriarchs he was the soul of reason so long as his word was not questioned. But that did not count as being unreasonable.
‘Am I a bad husband or father?’
‘The best,’ Rukmini replied, looking down, feeling the heat rise in her cheeks. ‘And if Kaveri could be as fortunate as I am I would wish for nothing more …’ she said in perfect truth.
‘Have I not taken care of you well? Have I not provided for all your wants?’
Rukmini looked at him reproachfully for asking her such a thing at all. He would have wrapped her in an old mul sari and put her away at the bottom of the chest of drawers if he could; she was precious enough for that. It was that that she did not wish upon her daughter, while wishing her the love of a good man.
‘You are making it so difficult for me, don’t you see … It is not easy for me either. And things are getting so uncertain these days, it is better we absolve ourselves of our responsibilities …’ There was something in his voice that made Rukmini look up and in that moment she read in his face and tone a premonition.
Rukmini had strange dreams of late, dreams that woke her up in the middle of the night, dreams of which she had no recollection, but which left her uneasy. One night she dreamt of her children—the ones she had lost before Kaveri and Setu were born. She saw their small faces clearly, eyes open, resting in their graves, watching as the earth was spaded on to them. After that, she decided to stave off sleep as long as she could, and would sit in the moonlit courtyard or stand by the window watching the glistening leaves. Sometimes she would stand for hours by their bedside and watch them sleep—Setu and Kaveri—these are your children, she would tell herself, watch over them well.
Of her son she was sure; he was still her own, her baby, transparent and totally amenable to her control. He would work hard at what he was good, like his father, not allowing himself to get distracted. His father had great ambitions for him. That he would study maths in Presidency College in Calcutta, like his uncle before him, and then, given his natural proficiency in the subject, a degree from Cambridge, like Ramanujan himself. Yet it was Kaveri, less ambitious but more lively, who could well slip through her fingers. She was growing up so fast, with each passing day she seemed to be moving towards the edge of the circumference of Rukmini’s ambit; Rukmini feared that soon she would escape it altogether and then would float free, light but directionless, vulnerable to being buffetted about.
If you find the world at odds with yourself, if you think the fault lies outside, look within yourself, Gandhi had said. In all probability, the dissonance was within you and you were projecting it outside. It was not just her home, her body and her mind, but the world outside too seemed to have become a strange place, with new ways of working that she could not quite understand or keep pace with.
I am losing my grip, I had better watch out, she told herself, when she stared stupidly at the dabba of Mysore Pak, still fragrant and hot from the stove, that came from Narayana Rao’s house. It was Savitramma, of course, marking her husband’s appointment to the highest Congress post in the district, and Rukmini wondered whether a similar reciprocal gesture was expected from her, to mark her husband’s successes.
‘Savitramma may have been a little hasty with the Mysore Pak,’ Mylaraiah remarked. ‘The talk is that Narayana Rao may make way for a much junior party-man, a Harijan. The others in the party have challenged him, considering what a champion of the oppressed he makes himself out to be.
Mylaraiah’s own foray into ‘politics’ brought him little joy. ‘Rukmini,’ he said when he came home after a meeting of the legislative council, his smart gold-edged turban wilting on his head, his excitement over his nomination already worn off, ‘today in the first joint session of the two houses, the Congress members in the assembly actually walked out when the session was in progress … and the noise they make! A far cry from the Westminster model, I tell you. I think his days are numbered.’
‘Whose? Narayana Rao’s?’
‘Oh no, not Narayana Rao’s. He and the Congress will grow from strength to strength. Our future lies in their hands. I mean the maharaja, if the mood of the assembly is anything to go by. He will have to go or at least concede a truly representative assembly, not just the noise-making, demurring body that it is.’
‘The maharaja is like a woman,’ Rukmini mused. ‘Just as a woman is safe as long as she stays within the bounds set for her by her father or her husband, His Highness too is assured of his throne so long as he has the protection of the British.’
Mylaraiah’s anxiety about the world at large translated into fresh strictures at home, a tighter curfew. Setu and Kaveri were to come home straight from school, especially Kaveri who would be escorted everywhere by Timrayee. Teach her to walk with her head bowed, Mylaraiah said in some irritation to Rukmini, she cannot consider the street an extension of her home. And see that she keeps her shoulders covered. In matters of propriety, he seemed to imply, Rukmini should have taught her daughter better.
Fifteen
1939
When Kaveri had just turned fourteen, one morning in her bath she felt herself and her fingers came away wet and dark and she knew that puberty had caught up with her. Her mother gave her a lecture on diet and hygiene and showed her how the strips of cloth from her old mul saris had to be washed and dried away from sight of the world. A glass of milk and four almonds were placed on the coffee room table every night for her. And yes, she was no longer to fight with Setu, or climb the mango tree in the back yard.
It scared her in the beginning, it made her feel as if she were in the first stages of a wasting disease, till she got used to the routine. So this, she understood, was the key to womanhood; this bore, this nuisance, this ever-damp piece of cloth wedged between her legs. There seemed little connection between the explanation Dr King her given her, complete with charts of the human body, the uterus and the ovaries spread out like the canna flower in her mother’s garden, and the indignity she was subjected to every month. No wonder her mother was so grave about it. She wished her grandmother were there, to lighten the load, for them to laugh over it and put it in its place as it deserved to be. All the women in the world aren’t fools and they aren’t weeping either, her grandmother would have told her. So, just get on with it. She remembered the time some years ago when she had come out of her bath and got into a panic.
‘Ajji!’ she had pleaded, ‘I can hear an ocean roaring in my ear! When I walk it thuds against my head!’ And without looking up her grandmother had said, ‘Did you wash your hair? Water must have got into your ears then. It’ll come out on its own, don’t worry.’ And sure enough, in the middle of the maths class, a warm trickle had emerged from her right ear and she heard the ocean no more. To tell the truth, sometimes she found her mother’s ‘high-mindedness’ a little tiring. At night, when she drank her medicinal glass of milk and in the mornings, while she submitted herself to her mother’s ministrations with the coconut oil and the comb, Rukmini would try to talk to her about school and college and the books she was reading, but she usually ended up giving instructions.
But there were some compensations. She got her first sari, a pumalo-green silk, all the way from Bangalore, from Kapurchand in Chikpet, for which her mother paid all of five rupees!
‘Oh my!’ her father teased, ‘don’t tell me this is our Kaveri.
I thought it was back-street Sarojamma come to invite us for her son’s namkarna.’
‘I won’t talk to you,’ her brother sulked, ‘you look like somebody else.’
‘Ayya, it’s time to look for a suitable groom for our Kaveramma,’ Achamma said.
Kaveri tossed her head and pretended not to care, but in truth she loved the feel of the soft folds of silk around her ankles, and its breathless sussuration when she walked. If her manner had a new composure, it reflected nothing of the excitement she felt; perhaps it could be put down to the cotton bodice, cut out and stitched by her mother, which sat snugly, like a secret beneath her blouse. She looked at the two slim gold bangles that she now wore and noticed how fragile her wrists were, and the heavy hoop earrings, brought out from her grandmother’s hoard, set off a rush of tenderness for her ear lobes; her whole being seemed centered in the hollow between her new breasts where the pendant of her gold chain nestled. Rukmini saw the soft glint in her daughter’s eye, as if surprised by its new-found beauty and wished her mother were there.
Wash well, Rukmini had told her, dry your clothes in the sun, not in the shade, in the far corner of the yard behind the screen of bushes. But she had not told her the other things. That her feet would not tread quite so heavily and that she would not look everyone in the eye anymore, and that her mind would wander. She did not mind the castor oil and soapnut powder routine now, for it would help her hair grow—she longed for a plait like Shanta’s, and she even rubbed her face surreptitiously with turmeric before her bath—to stop any hair from growing on her face, as Achamma had whispered to her. Her sandalwood book marks and the wrapper of her Pears soap she put between her clothes, so that the perfume would linger. And when Setu burst in to announce that Dr Murty was driving on the main road in his Ford V8 with eight cylinders, she waved a languid hand at him and continued to read her book.