by K R Usha
School—the all-girls’ Empress High School—gave way to the co-ed Intermediate College, and Kaveri found herself one of the two girls in a class of eighty. Her school-leaving results had disappointed her mother, she knew, but she couldn’t summon an interest in maths and science; give her a novel, a ‘story book’ as her father called it, any day. However, she had done quite well in the languages. What would she do after Intermediate? She wished her mother would not keep asking because she did not know. Right then she was considering the possibilities of each day as it rose before her and doing the most with it. With her now best-friend Shanta, the only other girl in the class, she had learnt to enjoy theatre and music. There was one glittering season of the theatre when Gubbi Veeranna’s troupe put up their stock favourites, and she had seen all their plays. T.P. Kailasam visited and sang on stage and the whole town was agog for his parodies. All day Kaveri hummed Nam Tippar-halli balu doora, Kailasam’s take off on It’s a long way to Tipperary. All of Dickens she had finished by the first year of college, The Three Musketeers, and by far her favourite now was The Scarlet Pimpernel.
When it came to theatre and books, she found it all—intrigue and mystery, romance and glory but when she looked around her, she was disappointed by how little there was on offer. No one to take her by the hand. All ready and primed, what she needed was a touch of the wand to bring her to life. She did not feel as much at ease in her college as she had done at school. Perhaps because she and Shanta were the only girls in class. The boys in her class were shy, and there was no question of her talking to them. Shanta and she sat alone on a bench meant for four, right in front of the class and the bench behind them was usually empty, even when the rest of the class was crowded and the boys sat six to a bench. When the Kannada master wanted to punish one of the boys, he’d make him sit in the empty bench behind them and once, for a grave misdemeanour, he had made a boy sit alongside Kaveri and Shanta. The boy had not come to college for days after that.
At home there was talk of marriage. Her uncle Shivaswamy came with proposals from eligible boys and at night she could hear her parents discussing the various prospects. When her mother asked, Kaveri would you like to get married, she said nothing. On the one hand she wanted her life to continue forever like this, in this pleasant stream of outings and conversations, but on the other, she knew she was ready for more, for a different kind of life, only she did not know what it was. When she listened to her uncle’s descriptions of the ‘boys’ who seemed to be only waiting for her answer, and looked at their photographs where they stared back at her, some smooth, some innocent, some self-assured and some plain bad-looking, she saw, reflected in them, proof of her own desirability. She played a little game with herself, reconstructing briefly a future with each of them as she imagined it would be—an engineer’s wife in Calcutta, a lecturer’s wife in Bangalore, a lawyer’s wife in Shimoga—and found all the prospects equally pleasing, depending of course, on how personable the man in the photograph was. It was at such times that she missed her grandmother. This one, she would have said whimsically, this one looks as if he’d be kind to animals, marry him.
Then there was Shanta’s brother, who was a journalist in Bombay. It was only now, after so many years of knowing Shanta that her brother had been given a name. So far, he had been ‘Shanta’s brother’ or ‘that Kole boy’ or ‘C.G.K. Sir’s son’. She had been in middle school and he must have been in Intermediate College, when he had earned a brief notoriety in town for picketing liquor shops. He had voluntarily lost a year of Intermediate when he had become a member of the Sevadal and had joined their alcohol-and-untouchability awareness campaign. He had come to be known then as ‘Junior Narayana Rao’ for he was a regular at Narayana Rao’s speeches and marches and ran a local newspaper, a two-page newsletter for students where he wrote on political events and social issues in a fire-and-brimstone manner. Unlike Narayana Rao, he was short and bespectacled but an unfortunate speech impediment made public speaking impossible, so he reserved his ardent opinions for his writing. One of his articles, ‘How long will we be slaves?’—Kaveri remembered it from its provocative title and the sensation it had caused—had caught the attention of the district commissioner and Shanta’s father, in his avatar as C.G.K. Sir no stranger to the district commissioner himself thanks to his son Mukunda’s bulletins about his history teacher, had been summoned.
They heard little of him when he was away at college in Bombay till he came back with ‘Gandhi is not the way forward’, which was featured prominently in Vishwakarnataka. Subhash Chandra Bose was the man of the hour, he said. In their small town, where championing Gandhi was the mark of a revolutionary, it created quite a stir. Bose was a distant star, a chimera, the stuff of newspaper sensationalism and legend; at least Gandhi Mahatma was real, he had spoken in the high school field and there was a maidan named after him. And here was their own C.G.K. Sir’s son saying that the Gandhian methods of non-violent non-cooperation would not work and that the British had to be resisted with violence and if need be, the maharaja as well.
Kaveri had first noticed him the other evening when she and Setu had accompanied their mother to the waterworks. The waterworks was at the edge of the town, a huge windswept space with two large, high tanks at one end, with pipes leading from them, much like grotesque giants trying to fend the wind off. The town was justifiably proud of its waterworks, one of the first water treatment plants of its kind, the envy of many bigger, more prosperous towns in the state. The waterworks was enclosed within a compound wall and treated as sacred but in the evenings, the gates were opened to the people. Perhaps it was the direction in which the place was located and the height, but the wind whipped up your hair and clothes as you walked on the bund that was built round the ground, which was quite refreshing. Of late, this had become Rukmini’s favourite evening’s outing. She liked to walk for a bit on the bund and then sit quietly and listen to the whistling wind.
One evening there were about twenty young men in white in the bowl of the waterworks, whom Setu identified immediately as the boys from the ‘Youth Movement’. They watched them from the bund and listened to the faint melodic sounds that floated up to them. The boys seemed to be practising a song. One of the boys provided the lead and was followed by a lusty chorus—we will not rest, we will not rest.
‘They will not rest till they have done what?’ Kaveri asked.
‘Freed the country from the British, what else,’ Setu replied scornfully.
‘Who is that, the main singer?’
‘That’s C.G.K. Sir’s son Shyam, your Shanta’s brother,’ Setu’s tone was non-committal but his eyes were watchful.
‘So, that’s Shanta’s famous brother. Hadn’t he gone off to Bombay, or was it Calcutta, to study?’
‘He’s returned now. To start a newspaper and to train the boys again.’
‘He sings very well.’
‘You should have seen how Anna scared him off once, from Anantaramu’s shop. They were trying to bully Shetty.’
‘I still think he sings very well.’
‘What are they doing here?’
‘They must have just finished their meeting. The song always comes at the end.’
‘What do they do in their meetings? You used to go to them didn’t you, Setu?’
‘That was a long time back, and I just went once or twice,’ Setu shook it off as one would a youthful indiscretion. ‘It’s a complete waste of time. I remember he tried to teach us all to clean toilets, and many boys ran off then. I believe now he makes bombs in secret. Right in a house in the Agrahara Colony. It’s no laughing matter,’ Setu said angrily to his sister, ‘It’s true. He’s a dangerous fellow, Shyam.’
Kaveri was smiling at him, her eyes bright. ‘He seems really talented … he can clean toilets, make bombs, sing, and look now, he’s playing cricket!’
The singers had disbanded and most of them had gone. A few were still there, hitting a ball around with a bat, looking absurd in their white p
yjamas and caps.
‘He’s good, he was on the Intermediate College team …’ Setu admitted grudgingly as he watched Shyam give the ball what seemed like a gentle pat but which sent the other boys scampering across the ground after it.
‘Why do you say it’s a waste of time?’
‘Anna says all these people—the Youth Movement, even Ramu’s father and C.G.K. Sir, they are destructive. They just make us feel dissatisfied with what we have but they can give us nothing instead.’
‘Poor Setu! Anna’s parrot!’
Before Setu could retort, they saw the Youth Brigade coming their way, their game over. While Kaveri stared after them boldly, Setu avoided looking at them and in an attempt to appear insolent, dangled his feet over the sides of the stone bench and swung his legs rapidly. Kaveri looked at her brother’s averted face and noticed for the first time the soft downy black above his upper lip and a purple pimple on his smooth cheek from which sprouted two black strands of hair. She knew better now than to tease him about it.
‘Why don’t you join them?’ she said, for she could sense that he was torn between his attraction for the boys in white for they were young and vigorous after all, and the counter weight of his natural abhorrence for immoderation combined with their father’s strictures.
‘I play in school, after classes, in the field—not with this lot. That Shyam … I hate him.’
Kaveri smiled to hear her brother use so strong a word but said nothing.
The next time Kaveri heard of Shyam, he was being discussed as a possible invitee to one of the Samaja meetings. After a fiercely divided discussion (in which Rukmini did not participate), the Samaja invited him to address their next gathering. It proved to be their most successful evening yet. The hall was thronged with people. Many young men had gate-crashed and had been allowed to stand at the back. Kaveri came late and sat discreetly somewhere in the middle of the hall, while Shanta and her mother occupied the privileged seats in front. Though it was a little difficult to see him from where she was sitting, she could hear him clearly; he seemed to have got over his speech impediment.
‘I am glad to see so many young women and men here today, for you are the future of this nation, you will shape its destiny,’ he began and was immediately greeted with loud cheers from the young men at the back.
People get the kind of rulers they deserve, he continued, and an apathetic, comfort-loving people would get the worst sort; they would find the ground shifting like a tectonic block from beneath their feet. This time the young men at the back were silent.
‘Our young men are emasculated and our young women, too timid. We have lost the vital spirit of youth, too fond of our food and drink, our unhampered routines, our clothes and jewellery, our meaningless entertainments, so much so that we want others to rule us, to think for us, to tell us which is our right hand and which is our left … we don’t even mind being slaves so long as we are not disturbed from our state of rest.’
They sat back and listened to his mild scolding turn into a taunt and then almost a call to arms. Then just as the Samaja women were beginning to look alarmed, he cracked a joke, told them how anxiously he had practised his speech all morning till his mother had told him he wasn’t going for a swayamvara, he needn’t be so nervous; he digressed, he even recited a snatch of poetry, and protest as poetry and song, the Samaja women were comfortable with—poetry and song gave everything an unquestionable legitimacy.
‘Do you want the fragrance of the full-blown rose?’ he quoted from his hero Bose, and here Shanta’s brother’s lisp returned.
‘Do you want the fragrance of the full-blown rose?
If so you must, accept the thorns.
Do you want the sweetness of the smiling dawn?
If so you must, live through the dark hours of the night.
Do you want the joy of liberty and the solace of freedom?
If so you must, pay the price.
And the price of liberty is suffering and sacrifice.’
Kaveri had come out of a sense of loyalty to Shanta, expecting another evening of mild entertainment, and more to observe Shanta’s brother than to listen to him. And she had to admit that her interest had been aroused since the day at the waterworks when Setu had attributed such perversely varied skills to him—singer, cricketer, toilet-cleaner and bomb-maker. And now, she felt that all his sharpest observations were being directed at her. When he came to the bit about women being consumed by their clothes and jewellery, she squirmed; she had worn her best sari, a silk, for the occasion and all her new jewellery. She was stung by his insinuation that she was vain and that her interest in the world ended at her own doorstep. After his speech, which was wildly applauded, she wanted to ask him questions but he was so mobbed by the young men that she could speak neither to him nor to Shanta. On her way back she swung between anger and admiration but by the time she reached home, she had to admit that she was impressed, even though he was only Shanta’s brother.
After that, at college she paid attention to Shanta’s ‘my brother’ stories and tried to find out more about him without seeming curious. It was in Bombay that he had gone to the university and not Calcutta as everyone said—Shanta’s stories had now begun to acquire an ‘everyone’ or ‘people’ angle as well—and he worked for an English newspaper in Bombay.
‘Who is this Shyam that our Kaveri is always quoting?’ Mylaraiah asked Rukmini.
‘The Kole boy—Nanjunda Kole’s nephew, Setu’s C.G.K. Sir’s son. This boy used to be Advocate Kole’s apprentice, he used to come with messages from Kole’s office at one time. He had planned to study law but his mother tells me he abandoned his studies half-way in Bombay and decided to become a journalist.’
‘Trust Kaveri to fall in with the Swadeshi lot. Narayana Rao’s daughter first and now C.G.K. Sir’s daughter.’
‘Well, they are her classmates. Kalyani was, till she got married and Shanta is the only girl in her class now. Anyway, Setu has forsworn their sons. He will have nothing to do with Ramu or with Shyam and the Youth Movement,’ Rukmini said. ‘He believes they are both “disruptive elements”.’
‘And so they are,’ Mylaraiah said approvingly. ‘But girls are not so bad. Shanta is the docile girl who walks to college with Kaveri, isn’t she?’
Rukmini smiled. Her husband’s first yardstick for judging a girl was how biddable she was.
‘I have nothing against Kole’s family, just as I have nothing against Narayana Rao, even though I disagree with them. They are eminently respectable. So long as she stays clear of their ideas.’
‘The boy’s speech at the Samaja was a grand success, so they tell me. It isn’t just Kaveri. Since then even Umadevi has begun to sing his praises.’
‘Wasn’t he Narayana Rao’s shishya. I remember he used to be part of the picketing and protest brigade.’
‘Shanta says he’s organized many student protests in Bombay. Even here, when he was in Intermediate he was arrested once.’ Kaveri rushed out onto the verandah, her comb tangled in her hair.
‘They should have kept him in jail and not let him out,’ Setu said.
‘And the penal fines almost cleaned his father out,’ Mylaraiah snorted. ‘He had a tough time keeping him out of jail. I remember he borrowed money too.’
‘In Bombay he was beaten up by a policeman and I believe a bullet narrowly missed him,’ Kaveri said, deaf to their taunts. ‘Here too, he was hit with a lathi when he was still a student. He has a scar on his forehead … when he frowned, it looked like a perfect star.’
‘All his brains seem to have leaked out through the star-shaped hole …’ Setu baited his sister.
‘So, he has already become the stuff of local legend,’ Mylaraiah said dryly.
‘He’s the one who wrote that article quoting Bose, calling Gandhi a useless piece of furniture … no longer useful,’ Rukmini reminded him.
‘Oh! I’m sure he’s surprised to see how Gandhi has suddenly sprung back to life, the grand old sofa broug
ht back into service. Churchill called Bose a lunatic.’
‘Churchill also called Gandhi a naked fakir,’ Kaveri returned spiritedly.
‘So somebody’s been reading the newspaper closely, I see.’
‘You told me that yourself, Anna, I didn’t read it anywhere.’
The next time she went to Shanta’s house, she was careful to wear only khadi, but she couldn’t resist picking one of the finer saris; she kept her gold bangles on, if not, the eagle-eyed Shanta would notice and tease her. But he wasn’t there. One evening, when she was rushing out of Shanta’s house with Timrayee prowling impatiently at the gate, she came face to face with him in the doorway and turned speechless. She had thought of so many different things to say to him, but now they were all lost. Even as she noticed how compellingly his eyes held hers through the thick lenses, she had to fight a tiny squiggle of disappointment that they were level with hers; he must be about the same height as she was. But perhaps it helped her find her tongue.
‘I wanted to say …’ she stammered, ‘after your talk at the Samaja that day … Shanta may have told you …’ Where was Shanta? Never around when she was needed most. ‘My sari may be silk but it’s Mysore silk …’ she said abruptly, ‘and the gold from my bangles is from Kolar. It’s pure swadeshi.’
He smiled at her outburst. ‘Well, I hope I haven’t caused you to change from silk to khadi,’ he gestured towards her sari. ‘I’m no votary of khadi, not anymore. Not at all practical to wear and makes no economic sense. I don’t know how we expected to demoralize the British with it. Make sure you don’t get wet in the rain,’ he said mock seriously, ‘the thing will become so heavy that you won’t be able to stand up.’
She stared at him, trying to think of an appropriate retort for she was sure he was laughing at her. He caught her eye and smiled a sudden gap-toothed smile, and she could not but smile back. Shanta came in with coffee and they both sat down in the verandah. He followed, and sat down at the desk in the verandah, for the house was small and they had turned the open verandah into a study-cum-drawing room, humming under his breath. While Shanta and she had coffee in steel tumblers, he had tea in a cup and saucer with biscuits on the side. As they watched he poured his tea into his saucer and started drinking out of it, dipping his biscuits into the hollow.