A Girl & a River

by K R Usha

  Dr King’s injuries, which were minor, were attended to, and soon she was sitting comfortably cross-legged, drinking some of Achamma’s excellent coffee from a silver tumbler and as a concession, she was allowed to light up a cigarette in the coffee room.

  ‘And to think,’ Dr King said, ‘that the man in Rothney Castle, Alan Hume, whom the whole of Simla considered an oddity, was responsible for starting the Congress Party.’ Dr King was her usual self, unable to resist telling a story, the more bizarre the better.

  People in Calcutta used to laugh at him, him and his grand passions and his grand house. Alan Octavian Hume, the retired English bureaucrat had dabbled in succession in ornithology, mysticism and politics, giving to each his fullest and most passionate attention in turn. His house used to be full of stuffed birds at one time, all of which he shipped off to London when he took up with the Theosophists. There was talk of mystical séances and other goings-on with Madam Blavatsky their founder, reputed to be a Russian spy. Madam Blavatsky’s seances in Alan Hume’s house were a byword. She wrote letters—in English and on pink letter paper—to her two Buddhist ‘mahatmas’ who in turn conveyed those letters to the realms beyond. The letters were transported between Simla and an unknown cleft in the mountains in Tibet where the ‘mahatmas’ lived, part of the way by the postal department and then by astral osmosis. All this, Hume believed implicitly. According to witnesses, Madame Blavatsky had on occasion demonstrated her psychic powers. She had once ‘discovered’ lost jewellery in Rothney Castle in the course of a séance, leading her mesmerised audience, herself in a trance with her eyes closed, from the dark room in which contact was first made with the ‘spirits’, to the garden and had asked her hosts to dig under a certain bush. Of course the precious brooch had been right there, and so forceful was her personality and so excitingly self-deluding the whole caper of communicating with mystic realms, that nobody in Simla doubted her or openly suggested that she had used her hypnotic powers to mesmerize her hostess into planting the brooch under the bush in the first place.

  ‘The Theosophists moved on from Simla to Madras,’ Dr King paused to sip her coffee, ‘and Alan Octavian Hume moved on to found the Indian National Congress. People presumed it would be yet another “tamasher”, which would quietly lose steam in a couple of years, and he would move on to another fad. And look what it’s become in fifty years! I’m sure Hume didn’t intend your Gandhi to come along and seize the Congress by the scruff of its neck …’ the veins in her neck stood out and her hand clenched into a fist, ‘and use it against us …’

  ‘You cannot say he seized it …’ Kaveri’s impassioned voice rang out from the doorway and they turned to look at her. ‘It is only natural that we will take what belongs to us. Our systems may have been given by you, but one day we will run them.’

  ‘Kaveri!’ Rukmini said, surprised as much by Kaveri’s argument as by the forthrightness of her manner.

  But Dr King did not think anything was amiss. ‘Hello Blue Bird,’ she said easily, ‘I wouldn’t have recognized you. How much you have grown and how graceful you look in a sari! How old are you now … let me think … I remember you were born right here, there in that room … and a difficult time you gave us too …’

  ‘Sixteen, Dr King’ Kaveri said, in a small voice.

  ‘Sixteen! I don’t think I can take you riding on my pillion any more.’

  Kaveri smiled at her, and looked shamefaced, ashamed as much by her outburst as by the memory of riding pillion with Dr King to school; at one time she had thought no honour could be greater that that!

  ‘How is Ella?’

  ‘Well. She sends greetings. I don’t see what you wanted me to talk to her about, Mrs M,’ DrKing added in an undertone to Rukmini, ‘here is a young lady who seems to know her own mind.’

  ‘Well, Hume started the Congress in good faith,’ Mylaraiah said, struggling to return to his regular, measured tone, giving his daughter a searing look, ‘but and I doubt if he ever wanted it to come to this. At their first meeting of the Congress, the delegates actually swore an oath of loyalty to the Queen Empress.’

  ‘Well, the Congress is loyal no longer. I remember when I picked myself off the ground, after those boys had knocked me down,’ Dr King heaved on her cigarette holder, ‘one of those boys said, “soon, you will have to go too”.’

  ‘Not you, but the British government. The Congress wants self-rule,’ Rukmini said placatingly.

  ‘I have lived here all my life, Mrs M,’ Dr King said, as if it had just struck her, ‘I was born here and I can’t imagine living anywhere else. My brother says he will go back if we lose the War and concede the Empire, but I can’t think of it.’ Dr King put her tumbler down sharply, and then sighed and sat back in her chair.

  They remained silent for a while, Rukmini and Mylaraiah leaning against the counter, Kaveri hovering by the door and Dr King contemplating the plug of ash that had collected on her cigarette. Kaveri caught her mother’s eye and held her tongue. Things would become uncertain for everybody, she had wanted to add, but more so for people like Dr King, who would have to switch sides from ruler to subject. She was a good soul, but as Shyam said, people like her were representations of the anachronism the British had become, at their best, well meaning.

  ‘Your nationalist sentiments do you credit,’ Mylaraiah said to Kaveri as soon as Dr King had left. He spoke to her in English, for matters of such gravity had to be addressed in a formal tongue. ‘They are the fashion now. But you would do well to refrain from airing your half-baked and borrowed ideas in public, where you will shame us and yourself. Keep them confined to your debating club. You are not at liberty to be rude to our friends. You will write a note to Dr King apologising for your bad manners.’

  ‘It’s those Koles,’ Mylaraiah said to his wife. ‘That fellow who writes the most unbalanced and illogical nonsense in that rag of his, and his sister. Rukmini, I hope Kaveri hasn’t been frequenting their house. They are together in college, that’s enough. Not that I have anything against Kole’s family, they are entitled to their views, but a girl like Kaveri, whose head is full of fanciful notions can easily be led astray. She can stop that newspaper business too … waste of time. And I hope you have written to your sister-in-law about following up that Mysore proposal. She finishes her Intermediate next year. Old enough.’

  Seventeen

  1940

  Setu slept alone in the large hall, on the single piece of bedding that was rolled out for him. When the occasional male visitor arrived, another mattress would be brought out, but their numbers were dwindling now that it was known that the family was in transit. His sister slept in their mother’s room now, after her mysterious transformation from long skirts to that damning garment, the sari. It was a strange garment, the sari, badge of comfort-giving motherly and grandmotherly laps, distinct from the equally voluminous dhoti—you would never dream of resting your head on a dhoti-clad lap for what use is a man’s sinewy and muscled thigh for a head that seeks to lie down. And what a miracle-performing garment the sari was. It could put a ten-year old girl who had just now been grinding your face in the dust, beyond reach, almost as if she had become a member of a different species altogether. Not that his sister was ten years old, but she certainly could grind a boy’s face in the dust if she wanted to. He remembered the whispered conversations she and his grandmother would have at night, on the far side of the hall. He would catch a word or two, sometimes whole snatches of it, and often he too would join the feast of nightly whispers. He would fall asleep each night to the music of his sister’s teasing. Now, all that was gone. The nature of their sparring too had changed. Earlier, it had been an elaborate Machiavellian strategy, complete with a master plan and emergency short-term tactics, one waiting for the other’s move before planning the counter-move. It had always been in deadly earnest. They went all out, testing the limits, devising new ways of outdoing each other, but they were always equals and together, they would take on anybody. But now she
seemed always in a hurry, impatient, looking more to kill the conversation than finishing him off. It was almost as if she could no longer take him seriously as they no longer shared the common ground.

  The other day she was putting up a picture on her cupboard. His sister had always put up pictures on her cupboard but this one was different. It was the picture of a masked woman showing off her fat thighs in a short black dress, holding a whip above her head. It had been an honourable if unwritten rule between them that anything she put up on her cupboard, he would deface. That could provide fodder for weeks of warfare, of a pitting of wits. Pictures of butterflies, blonde babies and flowers one could mutilate. The blonde baby could acquire a moustache, the butterfly could be made famously cock-eyed and flowers could sprout jagged teeth. But what could one do with a picture like this, already shamed and defaced?

  ‘Hunterwali?’ he read the lettering on top of the picture aloud. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘A hunter is a whip, and this is the woman with the whip so, Hunterwali, in Hindi,’ his sister had explained with exaggerated patience. ‘It’s a Hindi film in which the heroine rides a horse, beats up men. She is bad to the rich and good to the poor.’

  ‘How do you know? Have you seen it?’ His heart pounded for fear of confirmation that she had seen such a film without him, and worse, before he had.

  ‘No, it has been shown only in Bombay. Sh … Shanta told me about it.’

  He peered at the poster, at the words someone had written in ink on the clear space at the bottom. ‘If you are fond of rescuers in disguise, here is one better than the Scarlet Pimpernel. One of our own!’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Oh nothing,’ she shrugged her shoulders, bringing the conversation to an end.

  It was that Shyam, he knew, who had turned his sister’s head. As for the poster, he did the only thing he could. He tore it down the middle and left it there, on the cupboard. He waited all evening for her to start a fight over it, but she didn’t. When he next went into the room, the poster had been removed.

  That evening, after she had been so shockingly ill-mannered with Dr King, there had been a scene at home. Kaveri had been sulky and defiant, arguing with their father. The next day he had cycled over to Dr King’s clinic with his sister’s note of apology. It had been brief again to the point of rudeness. Dear Dr King, I am sorry for my behaviour last evening. I did not mean to be rude to you. Your’s sincerely, K.M. Kaveri.

  ‘My sister is sorry for her behaviour. She did not mean to be rude to you,’ he said.

  ‘Have you read her letter, then?’ Dr King said, even before she opened the envelope.

  He bowed, flushing with shame and at her unfairness in showing him up. ‘She has been behaving badly with me too.’

  ‘You’re very fond of your sister, aren’t you? I remember, you used to be great friends, ganging up against your cousins.’

  He looked up sharply to see her watching him.

  ‘She’s older than you. She’s growing up. You’ll still be friends, but not like before.’

  ‘She does wrong things,’ his voice was grave with judgement, ‘She disobeys our father.’

  ‘When you grow up and start thinking for yourself, you may often end up disobeying rules …’

  He looked up, perplexed, wondering whose side she was on. Surely she did not support the boys who had attacked her?

  ‘Will you take a note to your mother?’

  From the parlour, where he waited, Setu could see Dr King’s bedroom beyond, a very modest sized room—even the coconut room in his house was bigger—with a bed in the middle that seemed to be keeping the walls apart and a gloomy mosquito curtain suspended above the bed from the ceiling. A chest of drawers was squeezed to one side. There was a small verandah to the west of the parlour where he had left his slippers, and the door to the room on the other side, probably the kitchen, was shut. The small weather beaten suitcase under the bed, her doctor’s bag on the chest of drawers, her sturdy shoes and her mud-encrusted bicycle in the verandah, these seemed to be all her worldly goods. Not counting the books and photographs on the mantelpiece. There was a picture of two fair haired girls, probably her nieces and a hand-drawn picture of a baby. He was wondering why Dr King would possibly have a crudely drawn picture of a baby on her mantelpiece when she came out of her room and handed him the note for his mother.

  He would not have done it if she had not shamed him so, but she had so he stopped under a lamp post and read the note. After the usual salutations, which he skipped, Dr King had said ‘Please thank your husband for sending those boys over to apologize to me. They came first thing in the morning and were quite abject, they did not know that I was the famous Dr King! But yesterday evening was an eye-opener. I must thank your daughter as much as the boys who tried to foist the national flag on me. I cannot but read the writing on the wall. It will not do to “tempt fate”, something I learnt from your people. I say this not out of a sense of defeat — it would take more than a few boys to frighten me—but out of realization that my task is done and I must leave. In all my years here, I have faced daunting situations but I have never felt unwanted. If I continue here, I will always be dependent on the kindness of right-thinking people like your husband and yourself and that will not do. I have lain sleepless last night and thought it through. This morning I wrote to my brother. I will have to decide soon.’

  ‘You have driven Dr King away,’ Setu accused his sister.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she returned, not stopping to talk to him or even ask how he knew.

  ‘You … Hunterwali!’ he threw bitterly after her and heard her mocking laughter.

  That night, as Setu kept his lonely vigil in the hall, he felt a strange tingling—painful and pleasurable in equal parts, all along his body, as if a line of less-viciously-disposed ants was crawling under his skin. That shows that you are growing, his grandmother would have said. But what would she have made of his nightly sweats, the sheets that stuck to his skin, so much that he rolled over to the cool ground to sleep. Sometimes, when he caught a glimpse of boys in white walking together, banding at the bottom of the field in the afternoons, he felt forlorn. His own group of friends had all but disbanded. Only rarely did they play cricket or a nameless game of their own invention in his backyard. The old games, Prison Riot and Caning the Prisoners had been worn threadbare. The log that they whipped instead of the satyagrahis lay in the woodpile, deeply lacerated, soon to stoke the fire that would heat the morning’s bath-water.

  And then suddenly, there was a flutter of activity and it looked as if his gang would revive, thanks to the flag. The flag in question, the flag that was to drive Dr King away, was not the royal Mysore flag with its emblem of the twin-faced bird, the Ganda Bherunda, but the tricolour of the Congress—bands of saffron, white and green, with the charkha at its heart. Successively, in two places in the state, at Shivapura and Vidurashwatha, the Congress had hoisted its flag to mark its stake in the affections of the people. Despite the government’s prohibitory orders, people flocked to public meetings addressed by the leaders of the Congress and processions were taken out. At Vidurashwatha, the police opened fire on the crowd. The newspapers said that thirty-five people were killed in the firing, though the ‘official’ figures quoted a much smaller number.

  And in the excitement, the boys began to gather again in Setu’s backyard. Benki Basappa, the police officer dubbed the ‘butcher’ of Vidurashwatha, had briefly revived their interest in their old games.

  ‘The flag that was hoisted at Vidurashwatha, is right here, in my house. My father brought it home,’ Ramu confided to them.

  Narayana Rao had returned from Vidurashwatha, bringing home the flag that had been hoisted there, fully intending to hoist it here in the Gandhi maidan, in the face of the district commissioner’s prohibitory orders. The rumour had got around, and a raid on the Congress office proved fruitless for the authorities did not know what every schoolboy knew. That the tricolour lay neatly
folded among Narayana Rao’s wife’s saris. But unlike in Vidurashwatha, there were no fireworks in their town. The authorities were forewarned. Narayana Rao was still in the process of delivering his ‘seditious’ speech when he was arrested, and the flag was removed before it could be hoisted.

  ‘Rukmini, get the coconut room cleared, will you,’ Mylaraiah said. ‘We need plenty of space.’

  This time Mylaraiah had said that he would not defend Narayana Rao—anyway Narayana Rao hadn’t a leg to stand on—but he would help him all the same. Narayana Rao had refused to pay his penal fine and the district commissioner had ordered his office furniture and books to be seized and auctioned off. Mylaraiah planned to buy the whole lot and store it in his coconut room.

  ‘What will we do with it?’ Setu asked, when the desks and chairs started arriving.

  ‘Return it to him when he comes back.’

  In a reckless flush of patriotism Setu joined Chapdi Kal and his rag-tag-and-bobtail gang, game for anything bordering on the lawless, but the excitement of holding a tin of black paint while Chapdi Kal misspelt ‘British—Go Home’ and ‘maharaja—Shame Shame’ on the walls of disused buildings or throwing fire crackers into post boxes, which only turned cold in the womb of governmental authority, waned. We must do something truly earth-shaking, Chapdi Kal said. We must outdo the Youth Movement, Setu said, and that Shyam.

  Then one evening, Chapdi Kal turned up with one of Mr O’Brien’s kittens. Mr O’Brien who worked at the Mission’s carpentry workshop, had a Siamese cat, admired for its beauty and its temperamental disposition. Mrs O’Brien had to take the cat in her lap and feed it with her own hands, no leaving milk in an enamel bowl for this cat. Mr O’Brien had also acquired a reputation for another reason. When his cat littered, he would give away as many kittens as he thought would be looked after, to deserving homes, and drown the rest in a tub in his backyard. Chapdi Kal had managed to fish one of the kittens out from the tub and it now lay supine in his arms, a dark wet furry rag, blinking wearily when they poked it. Chapdi Kal said that they were doing it for Bhagat Singh, just as the man in the maidan had said. A rope was found in the cow shed. The mango tree held out its branch invitingly. They were consumed by the attendant ritual, getting the equipment right. The rope in the cowshed turned out to be too thick, string would do for a kitten or better still, Setu suggested, the twine with which his mother hung her paintings. Finally, they got the right kind of rope, the kitten was given some warm milk and then it was strung up on the mango tree. They got it right the third time, when it jerked and struggled and swung and finally went limp. Then they ran round the tree and whooped and whistled and clapped, just as they did at the speeches in the maidan. Then they cut it down and buried it at the foot of the tree, hoisting a hastily contrived tricolour over the mound and decorating it with red flowers. But the dogs dug it up in no time at all and chased the carcass around till it was thrown away by one of the servants.