by K R Usha
‘Is that how you drink tea?’ She could not stop herself. ‘I mean,’ she tried to make amends, ‘don’t you drink coffee like us?’
‘Both tea and the way I drink it is a Bombay habit,’ he said, continuing to drink out of his saucer.
‘Bombay, I believe changes people. My uncle says so …’
Bombay people, he said, were without pretensions. They were not afraid to show themselves to be what they were, and they were vigorous and straightforward. It was the sea, he said. It sweeps lethargy away and fills you with energy. And if you lived near the beach as he had, the sound of the waves was with you all the while, setting your spirits humming. He had learnt music in Bombay, amidst attending college, organizing and attending meetings and writing for the newspaper. Classical music it was and from none other than Dinanath Pandit himself, who had told him he had a future as a classical musician if only he were not so distracted.
‘You sing very well,’ Kaveri said generously. ‘I heard you at the waterworks the other day, with the Youth Movement boys …’
‘If you keep making the boys march all the time or lecture to them about swadeshi and Swaraj, they’re sure to turn British sympathizers. So we sing songs … play kabaddi, even cricket. In Bombay, all of us would go and see films together sometimes.’
‘Films? Charlie Chaplin?’ Here was a name that would not make her look as provincial as she was feeling.
He waved Charlie Chaplin aside carelessly. In Bombay, he had learnt Hindi. He had learnt Hindi, not to follow the Mahatma’s speeches so much as to understand Hindi films. Devdas and Kundan Lal Saigal were his favourite, which no doubt she had not heard of. The film had taken Bombay by storm. And how that man could sing. He began humming again but the sound of Timrayee banging on the gate broke through.
‘The next time you come to the waterworks, you can watch us fly kites,’ he called out after her. ‘That’s another thing we learnt to do very well on the beach in Bombay.’
Timrayee grumbled all the way back about how late it was getting and how ayya would be sure to scold him, all because of her, but she took no notice of him. The evening breeze helped cool her inflamed cheeks and she played their conversation over and over again in her mind. She thought of the sweep of his not-unattractive, spatulate hands as they had gestured towards her, saw his gap-toothed smile and heard the laugh rumble in his throat. She basked in it till she sighted the familiar gate posts. For once she was unhappy to have reached home so soon.
Shanta would tell her about the terrible arguments there had been at home despite her father’s nationalist leanings. C.G.K. Sir was a votary of Gandhi, of passive resistance, a prayer and petition man, a social reconstructionist. He did not hold even with Narayana Rao’s forcible picketing. He did not hold with his son’s call to arms at the slightest provocation, a product of the distempered Bengal–Bose school of resistance. But in Shyam’s mind it was very simple. People must work for the kind of community and nation they want and they must be ready to risk everything for it. He had never held with working from within the system to change things and he had often urged his father to give up his job just as Narayana Rao had given up his practice. In fact, he had been sent away to his uncle’s in Bombay because he was becoming too conspicuous in their small town. C.G.K. Sir had hoped that the anonymity and even the lure of Bombay would temper his zeal and that his activism would take on the seva avatar; but if anything it had thrown him among more like-minded people and given him direction. Three years into the law course and he decided he had had enough. There wasn’t time for an elaborate and indulgent studentship when there was so much to be done. He had joined a newspaper, for as a journalist he could best feel the pulse of his times and his articles were considered very provocative; they had just stopped short of challenging the section on sedition in the Press Act. And now he was back. To serve his hometown, he said, by starting the right kind of newspaper and continuing with the Youth Movement where he had left off.
Shanta also kept her informed about his comings and goings. Today he has left for Bombay, she would say, having progressed from ‘my brother’ to ‘he’. She implied that he was involved in activities of a mysterious and secretive nature on which the future of the country depended. ‘He has refused to see Gandhi, says he will meet him only when he does something worthwhile.’
Once again they met unexpectedly, this time when Shanta and she were on their way to college. He stopped to talk to his sister and looked appraisingly at the books Kaveri was carrying.
‘Shanta tells me you read a lot.’
So Shanta had been talking to him about her. She glanced quickly at Shanta, who looked impassive.
‘The Scarlet Pimpernel!’ he stared at the jacket, astounded. ‘What kind of book is this? What! An English aristocrat who rescues French aristocrats from the French people?’ He stood on the footpath and laughed, rocking squatly on his heels. ‘Being read by an Indian girl who would rather wear silk but wears khadi.’
Before Kaveri could retort Shanta had grabbed her elbow. ‘We’ve reached. Come on, we can’t stand on the footpath and talk forever …’
Their exchanges were always short. Shanta was forever cutting them off. But Kaveri would carry the resonances of the last conversation till they met next. She had also begun to feel that she was now on a different footing with Shanta. It was barely noticeable but she could tell that Shanta was beginning to condescend to her.
A few days later Shanta handed over a khaki-green hard-bound volume to her. ‘Mein Kampf … My Battle … Adolf Hitler?’ Kaveri ran her fingers over the red lettering and the red swastika separating the title from the author’s name. He had asked Shanta to pass on a message as well. Read about real people in the real world, men who are poised to change the course of history, not make-believe tales of fops who did trivial things.
‘How can you get so immersed in cooked-up tales of fictitious people? How can you remove yourself from the real world so easily?’ he asked her at their next accidental meeting. Sometimes, when he was in town, he would walk Shanta up to college and then carry on to the newspaper office, and they would walk part of the distance together.
‘On the contrary, it is the real world created differently. And people are the same everywhere. The things that happen to them in books, their thoughts, their feelings, everything seems so much more enjoyable and more real too because you are sitting in a chair and reading about them and they are the ones getting wet in the rain and having problems and …’ she stopped, for she had been about to say ‘falling in love’.
‘That’s escapism …’
‘No, it’s another way of getting to know the world and yourself. You see films don’t you …’
He stood on the footpath, rocking on his heels—she had come to recognize his characteristic stance—looking at her speculatively. ‘You have a keen mind …’ he began. ‘And you have such a sound grasp of language. Would you go through our articles and correct them? Some of our writers have such important things to say but they say them so poorly … so many mistakes in language and grammar … And I’m sure it would do you good too.’
‘I must ask my father,’ Kaveri said.
‘Ask your father? For such a simple thing … you a modern miss who can even take on Hitler …’ he mocked.
Kaveri turned on her heel and walked off. But she sent word with Shanta that she was ready to take up her brother’s offer; only, she would not come to the newspaper office, the articles would have to be sent home to her.
Soon, Shyam’s newspaper became the new entertainment for the family. While the news reports were patchy, depending on what correspondents he had managed to muster, the editorials, written by various ‘eminent’ personalities varied widely in tone, style and content. At night, Kaveri would read out the choice passages—sentimental, sententious and poorly written—and Mylaraiah remarked that Kole’s son did not have to go all the way to Bombay to learn how to gather trash like this. Sometimes, Rukmini would find Kaveri quite absorbed
in what she was reading, and those were invariably articles that Shyam himself wrote. ‘Did you know Amma,’ Kaveri would call out, ‘the number of people who died in the famine, the year Queen Victoria’s durbar was held in Delhi?’ or ‘If all the money we spent on the Dasara celebrations could be directed elsewhere, do you know how many more schools we could have?’ Some of Shyam’s articles were eye openers for Rukmini herself. Forcefully written, if a little over-wrought, they brought home the facts well; the mere titles were illuminative. ‘How the Manchester Mill ruined the Indian Weaver’, ‘The Sponge that sucks from the Ganga and swells the Thames’, ‘Why are we Plagued by Famine?’ We must accept the facts of history and move on, Mylaraiah would say as usual. Far from being the cause, the British benifice—their railways and irrigation systems—has helped relieve our natural conditions. And in any case, machines of iron will replace our tools of wood. Look at the motor car. A time will come when we will say goodbye to the tonga, though you cannot imagine it right now.
As the war progressed, opinion in the coffee houses was evenly divided over the maharaja’s support for it. The newspapers recounted the number of martyrs from the Mysore Cavalry in the first great war and the fact that Mysore had contributed fifty lakh rupees to it even as the state recovered from a famine. All India Radio broadcast the progress of the war regularly and one day they thrilled to the sound of Churchill’s voice. Churchill! Mylaraiah’s hero and by default Setu’s too—announcing that his aim was victory at all costs but he had nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. All India Radio played the speech over and over again till the brandy and cigar growl rang familiarly in their ears. Often, by twiddling the knobs of the radio in the opposite direction they would catch one of Radio Berlin’s broadcasts—what Mylaraiah dismissed as ‘German propaganda’—on which a clipped British accent detailed the number of British ships sunk and assured the world that Britain was on the edge of collapse.
Every morning there was a tussle for the newspaper between Kaveri and Setu after their father had finished with it, to read the latest bulletin from the war front. At that time, in a journalistic ‘coup’, the first of its kind, one of the newspapers—the one in Bombay that Shyam wrote for—produced Gandhi’s undelivered letter to Hitler, where Gandhi had apologized for his ‘impertinence’ in writing to Hitler and called him ‘the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to the savage state’. The British government had impounded the letter and secreted it in their files before it could do any damage. For months, the letter was discussed all over town. The local newspapers commented on it at length. If only he had been allowed to send it, the local Congress loyalists said, Mahatma Gandhi might have stopped the Second World War!
They discussed Gandhi’s letter and the war as they strolled in the waterworks, Rukmini, Kaveri and Setu.
‘Britain will win the war!’ Setu said.
Kaveri agreed with the coffee house verdict. ‘No, Germany will,’ she said.
‘Anna says if Hitler wins the war, the British will be sent packing, and then this country has had it!’ Setu said.
‘Shanta’s brother says given Germany’s airpower, there’s no way Germany cannot win.’
‘Shanta’s brother’s parrot!’
And before the argument could develop into a fight, they spotted the man in question himself, in the bowl of the waterworks, playing cricket with his boys.
‘There he is, Amma,’ Kaveri said excitedly, ‘That’s Shanta’s brother, Shyam. You remember the article we were reading yesterday, “Why are we Plagued by Famine”, you liked it too …’
‘He must be really stupid to continue playing in this wind. It’s so strong in the pitch that it might quite blow the ball away,’ Setu said in the scornful manner that he acquired whenever he spoke of the Youth Movement.
Almost as if they had heard Setu, the boys in the middle wrapped up their game and started dispersing. Shyam walked in their direction, stopped by and first said namaskara to Rukmini, before turning to talk to Kaveri and Setu. He exchanged a few pleasantries with them, folded his hands in Rukmini’s direction again, and went off.
‘Today, they didn’t sing. Too windy, he said.’
‘How dare he come over and talk to us so … so boldly!’ Setu fumed.
Rukmini too was struck by his poise, his confidence. Few boys his age would have acknowledged a female acquaintance in public, leave alone salute her mother.
‘Why not!’ Kaveri said. ‘It’s only polite to greet people you know, of course such things wouldn’t count with your country bumpkin friends. What’s his name, Chapdi Kal, aha!’
Rukmini said something suitably soothing and noncommittal to stop them from fighting, and then she looked at both of them. Kaveri’s eyes lingered after Shyam, and so did Setu’s, their expressions quite dissimilar and far from childlike. Oh no, she thought in a quick burst of panic, the Kole boy would not do at all. Apart from the fact that her husband would come down on Kaveri and herself like thunder, she herself did not want it. She did not wish for her daughter a future like Savitramma’s. She could imagine how their life would progress—he marching ahead with bright-eyed fervour either from pinnacle to pinnacle or from jail to jail, while his wife and brood of children—for few men would give up on that—stumbled after him as best as they could. And unlike Narayana Rao, Kole had no lands to sustain his ideals with, he was a poor man.
‘Kaveri,’ Rukmini said and Kaveri was surprised by the tone of reproof in her mother’s voice. ‘Your Intermediate will be over next year. You must think of what you want next. Your father is quite determined to get you married before we shift to Bangalore you know. Have you thought about it? Those photographs that Shivaswamy has sent, and which you keep looking at … it isn’t a game.’
‘And you, Amma. What do you think?’
‘Amma thinks the same as Anna, what else!’ Setu interrupted tartly.
They ignored him. ‘I would have liked you to do medicine, but that is not to be.’
‘I will do my BA perhaps …’
‘Perhaps it would be best if you got married!’ Rukmini was really angry.
‘Every one of those photographs looks better than goggle-eyed shorty there,’ Setu did a perfect imitation of Shyam’s expression and Kaveri burst into laughter.
‘You should see the way he slurps tea from his saucer. Like a cat!’ Kaveri gurgled.
For the moment, Rukmini was relieved. She had presumed prematurely upon her daughter’s affection for that young man. But these were fleeting anxieties and in many ways, inconsequential. What Rukmini wanted was to get to the heart of the matter, if only she knew how to do it without making heavy weather of it, for then she would embarrass both of them. There were so many things she wanted to tell her daughter, so many things she could not explain to herself completely, thoughts that even as they passed through her mind, seemed ponderous and clumsy. These were things that had to be slipped in, in between snatches of laughter but she could not strike the same pitch of intimacy with her daughter as her mother had done. So when she asked her daughter whether she would not like to be like Dr King, riding around merrily on her bicycle, she could sense her daughter’s bewilderment and despaired of ever making sense to her. I do not want you, Rukmini wanted to tell her daughter, to be hemmed in by motherhood and domesticity before you have had a chance to know your mind; I do not want you to be led into womanhood by the hand, on a straight and narrow path, under the umbrella of a husband’s care, for it will mean that you cannot step out of its shade, however benign. You should not end up like a perfumed flower on the lapel of your husband’s handsome coat, happy only to obey every command. At the same time, beware of men who ride on their ideals for you will never matter in their scheme of things, they will let you down when you are counting on them. Unless … unless both of you march in step, to the sound of the same drummer, unless the ideal matters to both of you equally, unless you have the determination and he the courage to be yoked like a pair of ox
en, ploughing the field together. I want for you a full life but for that you have to want it first yourself, and you will have to prove your mettle. But how was she to tell her daughter these things without frightening her? She longed so much for her mother’s methods, her imagination, her lightness of touch. Of late, to tell the truth, she lacked the will as well. Like Setu, she wished Kaveri was adept at reading between the lines. The trouble with Kaveri was that she flitted too much. Perhaps she would ask Dr King to talk to her.
Sixteen
1940
Dr King arrived unexpectedly and in a fluster one evening, nursing her grazed knees and elbows. She had fallen off her bicycle but seemed more dazed than hurt. She had been making her way from the hospital to the Women and Children’s clinic on the other side of the Bellary Road, as she had done each evening these past ten years or so, when her path had been blocked by a gang of khadi-clad college boys. The incident had not robbed Dr King of any of her self possession; she seemed more annoyed with herself for not having manouvered her cycle past them skilfully.
Achamma and Timrayee flapped around her ineffectually, till Rukmini carried in a basin of boiling water herself and dismissed them with a sharp word.
‘They wanted to plant a flag on the handlebars of my bicycle,’ Dr King said, wincing as she cleaned her own cuts with tincture of iodine, ‘Their flag, not the maharaja’s and I wouldn’t let them. No, it’s nothing serious, just a superficial graze,’ she assured Rukmini. ‘It was more a show of bravado than anything else, they didn’t frighten me.’
‘I’ll talk to the district commissioner about it, and Narayana Rao too. It’s absolutely irresponsible of him to let his boys loose like that. If anything, things will get worse,’ Mylaraiah said grimly.