by K R Usha
If Kaveri came close to falling in love, it was at that moment.
For some strange reason she felt the tears welling up in her eyes. She turned away hastily and said something innocuous to cover her confusion. Thankfully somebody called from the door and the moment passed.
‘My brother is staying longer than usual this time,’ Shanta mused, ‘usually, he should be up and away by now, he’s so restless.’
College was soon done, the exams were over and the results were out. Kaveri’s marks this time too did not inspire much confidence, but Rukmini asked her the mandatory question, whether she should ask her brother in Mysore to get forms from the university. Kaveri made no definite reply. She was restless now, and impatient. Impatient for the next horoscope to arrive, for something to happen. For once college was done, Kaveri found her activities severely circumscribed. Mylaraiah had decreed that Kaveri should not go out unnecessarily; she should stay at home and learn to manage the household. The only outings she was allowed was to the Samaja where she now managed the Bal Vadi, staging plays with the children and teaching them patriotic songs. There was no excuse for her to go to Shanta’s house for they would meet at the Samaja. Occasionally, Kaveri gave spirited accounts of the proposals she received to Shanta and they found themselves laughing to tears over them. Shanta herself was safe for she was promised to her uncle, her mother’s brother, when he acquired his law degree and returned from Bombay. One day after a particularly good imitation, Kaveri found her tears of laughter turning into something else. ‘One of these days, I might just say yes, you know,’ she said, not quite meeting Shanta’s eye. But Shanta made no reply and brought no message even of the glancing, humorous sort, the one-liners and aphorisms that she usually did.
One evening, at a Samaja meeting, Kaveri found herself inadvertently in the limelight. Of late, the flavour of the proceedings of the Samaja had turned distinctly political and nationalistic, one of the reasons that Rukmini had dissociated herself from its offices. They usually began these days with a patriotic song. The Samaja would invite luminaries to speak on the burning issues of the day. People had spoken on khadi and spinning, on why it was necessary to learn Hindi; it was in one of these meetings that Shyam, in the days when he had still been Shanta’s brother, had distinguished himself and become a local hero. That evening a literary heavyweight had been called to talk about the power of the written word in changing the world, in creating heroes and Kaveri had warmly championed not the usual Gandhi or Bhagat Singh, not a real-life hero but an imaginary creation in the real world. She had spoken on Marali Mannige and had been eloquent about the young Rama Aithala. His combination of sensitivity and idealism and vulnerability, his love of music and his land, his very humanness, made him her ideal, she declared. And never before had she read a book that presented a slice of life as it was lived. You could smell the sea and taste the salt in the pickle and hear the crunch of the sandige on the pages. Moreover, for a man to have written such a book in which the details of women’s lives had been portrayed with such accuracy and sensitivity—why they should accord him honorary woman’s status! In her flush of enthusiasm she had been extraordinarily eloquent and she had eclipsed the literary heavyweight completely.
At the end of the meeting she noticed that Shyam had been in the audience. She was surprised for Shanta was not there, having left for an extended tour of her relatives’ houses whom she could not visit after she got married. As she was preparing to leave, he made his way to her side and whispered to her, ‘You lifted him off the page and breathed life into him. He has become flesh and blood, a true hero.’
It was quite an admission coming from him and so heady was she with all the approval and applause that it led her into something foolish. She gave Timrayee the slip and agreed to go out with Shyam for coffee. As they settled down on the wooden bench of the Udipi hotel on Ashoka Road she sensed that she was doing something vaguely dishonourable but they were soon immersed in conversation and she forgot her earlier misgivings. They were joined by a group of Shyam’s acolytes and a lively debate started over the merits of fictional heroes over real life ones.
That was the whole point, Kaveri said. People in fiction were the same as people in real life, only better. One dimensional, Shyam countered. No, the spotlight is only on one of their characteristics at a time, Kaveri said. Even if one were to admit they were the same, didn’t she think, Shyam was asking her, that Rama lacked fire, that essential quality of heroism and hadn’t she noticed that even the author Shivarama Karanth did not approve of Gandhi’s methods. Shyam himself would have preferred a man of action, one who would go out and plunge into the fray and not turn tail and run. Was it necessary to be sensational to be heroic, Kaveri challenged. What about those who did their best in the station allotted to them? Why must it always be giant leaps and not small steps forward?
‘Tell us,’ one of Shyam’s shishyas said, ‘what your ideal hero would be like?’
Kaveri caught Shyam’s eye for the briefest second and then answered. ‘Someone tremendously brave and dashing and yet constant and gentle, someone whose strength you can feel and yet he makes you feel a little sad for him,’ she said, stirring her coffee vigorously.
‘No, no room for weakness in a hero,’ Shyam cut in laughing. A hero or heroine must be spectacularly brave, he said, must reach for the sky and wrench a star out of it, do something which only the lion hearted would attempt. Wrenching a star out of the sky, Kaveri laughed, was ridiculous. A more down-to-earth, more believable courage was preferable. Then he would forever remain a domestic creature, forever plodding, not daring to run even, let alone fly, Shyam said.
At that Kaveri was reminded of her father and suddenly realized where she was. She glanced round the room and noticed that she was the only woman there and curious looks were being thrown in her direction. People had probably even recognized her as Advocate Mylaraiah’s daughter. Going to a coffee house even with the family was exceptional; it was allowed perhaps once in all of the summer holidays when her cousins visited. But to come alone with a man, and that too one her father clearly disliked, the consequences were too drastic to imagine. Her father would stop her visits to the Samaja too. Moreover, these were uncertain times, any minute a rally may turn violent and there might be a lathi charge or a firing, and her father was particular that she should be home before dark and that she should not go about unescorted. She left hastily, hurrying her tonga through the still-brightly-lit streets. It was only when she reached home that she realized that her father was away at Bangalore and her mother would most probably be resting and she need not have hurried, but it did not put her any more at ease.
Even as she hurried in, her brother came out from the shadows in the unlit porch. ‘Where have you been?’ he asked. ‘There were no lights on outside. The house was in darkness when I came home. The night light in Amma’s room had not been switched on.’
‘You could have turned on the lights if you were so bothered,’ she said, mustering up a casual air.
‘Where is Timrayee?’
‘How should I know where he is?’
‘Wait! Don’t walk off like that. Where have you been, I said. What have you been doing?’
‘I was at the Samaja. Today was my talk, remember?’
‘You didn’t tell me …’
‘Would you have been interested? Anyway, Amma was supposed to be there …’
‘She has a headache again …’
Kaveri shrugged. ‘I haven’t been torturing cats in the backyard, I can tell you that much.’ That, she knew, would keep him quiet. He wouldn’t dare tell on her when their father came home.
A few days later, after she returned from her extended tour of her relatives’ houses, Shanta brought her a sealed letter from her brother. Handing it over she said, you needn’t reply if you don’t want to, not right away in any case.
She read the letter quickly once and then just sat with her eyes closed, blocking all thought, allowing the rising tide of war
mth to spill over her. Then she read it again and again in rapid succession, thrilling each time to its unexpected delights. A jewel among women, he had called her. He said he admired her intelligence, her sensitivity and skill in argument. Her feminine radiance inspired him. He was sure her energy, if directed correctly could be used to purpose. She was the ideal helpmate for a man like him, a man of passionate ideals and avowed direction. Right then he had little to offer but his devotion; he could promise her they would never be rich and her life would not be as soft and coddled as it was now, it would be khadi, not silk, but he had a feeling that would not matter with her. Would she wait for him?
‘My adamantine friend,’ the letter began and was signed off just ‘Yours—’, with no name, not even a squiggle of a signature.
‘Amma, what does “adamantine” mean?’ she called out from the verandah.
‘It could mean as brilliant as a diamond and as hard too …’
She sat back and felt the corners of her lips and her cheeks lift into a smile, and bit her lower lip to stop herself from laughing out loud. She saw him in the act of writing the letter, awkward, trying to snatch a private moment in his crowded house. He must have grabbed the first sheet of paper available—why it almost looked like blotting paper—and skimmed his mind off on it, hastily, in disjointed sentences and in ghastly purple ink. Of course he would have had no time to compose it or perhaps even go over it after he had finished; such a contrast to his sure, precisely worded, unambiguous, loudly declaiming articles. She saw the letter for what it was, the nervous proclamation of a man afraid to open his heart out completely for he was not sure of his ground, a man afraid of rejection, of being laughed at; a man who was confident when he had to commandeer the world at large but completely lost when it came to himself, to matters of the heart. She also saw his predicament. He was asking her to wait for him and in that event he could neither promise nor expect anything more affirmative.
She lingered over the details. She liked the play of meaning in ‘adamantine’, it was to tease her for he must have been sure she would not know what it meant. But still, he had called her a jewel among women. The next sentence brought her to her intelligence, her sensitivity and her skill in argument, how very like him to juxtapose two abstract qualities with a concrete skill. Trust him to speak his mind and say that her life was soft and coddled (which it was), but at least he had paid her the compliment of saying that he knew she could do without the coddling. Finally, he had asked forgiveness for his lapses—by then he must have been quite prostrate with the effort of writing the letter. When she met him she would laugh at him, she would be quite merciless. She would throw phrases from his letter at him and watch him blush. So she was to be his helpmate and that was all? So, her energies were all used up for her own enjoyment, were they? Your tuft is my hand and my grasp is nimble, she would say to him. When she had read the letter for the hundredth time perhaps, she admitted to a slight stirring of disappointment. Even while he confessed he did not measure up to her fictional heroes, she would have liked more ardour; she had looked in vain for the word ‘love’. ‘My adamantine friend’ he had called her, tantalizingly, but then again, he had not proposed marriage, he had asked her to wait for him.
Even as she carefully put away the letter so that her brother would not find it, she reflected upon the unfairness of life—that her real-life heroes should fall so short of the creatures of her imagination—a Rama Aithala or a Scarlet Pimpernel on paper were so much more substantial and comforting and well, less messy than a Shanta’s brother or a Bayer and Company Boy in flesh.
‘Amma,’ Kaveri said when they were settling down for the night. ‘I’ve decided. I want to go to college in Mysore. Will you send for the forms? And tell Anna …’
Nineteen
Quit India
Early in 1941, along with supplies for the army, the green Mann trucks brought the first lot of Italian prisoners-of-war from Sidi Barani in North Africa, to be housed in the camp on the outskirts of town. The maharaja of Mysore, genial host, had agreed to house more than twenty thousand prisoners in the state. The newspapers had reported off and on the fortunes of the legendary 4th Indian Division, the ‘pebble in David (England)’s sling’ which had been sent off to Egypt the year the war began and had fought the Italians heroically in Africa. When the trucks rolled into town, a crowd gathered to see the Goliaths whom the Indian David had felled, and leading the camp arrangements was Zafar Ali, formerly of the Imperial Service Corps, winner of the British Government’s Military Cross, a first class medal of the maharaja’s Ganda Bherunda Order and the White Eagle of Serbia for having distinguished himself against the Turks at Gaza, Jericho and Haifa in succession in the first World War. In a few weeks’ time, Zafar Ali had put the camp to order. There was a furniture workshop in the POW camp and there were sounds of musical instruments being tuned—some of the prisoners were going to form an orchestra. But the reason the boys and the men in town gathered outside the high wired fences was to watch the Italians practising football. Soon, thanks to Zafar Ali, matches were fixed between the Italian POWs and the local clubs and for a few days the excitement of these matches eclipsed the World War and Gandhi Mahatma as far as the town was concerned. There were anxious moments in the coffee houses. How would the local hero Jayaram, who had played for clubs in Bangalore, fare? Should Morris’s Eleven, led by Morris Jr the son of the Mangalore-tile factory owner, combine with the town club team and form a new team? There was much shaking of head over Muniraju, the games master from the high school who acted as referee in all the local matches. He had a perpetually stuffed nose which caused him to breathe through his mouth and he was known to blow the whistle at all the wrong times.
The debate got so heated that one day, the local newspaper shifted the fortunes of Rangoon, bombed in December that year by the Japanese, into the second column. Dr King brought news fresh from the front from Ella, who had volunteered with the Ladies General War Committee. Calcutta was next on the Japanese list, it was rumoured, then Vizag and next, Madras. She had heard that people were asking to be evacuated from Ooty! Ella had not got her dream post of Manager in the Army and Navy stores but had become a secretary in the same company as her sister. She was now being trained to be a cipher clerk to be posted in a camp on the Burma Road. It was all absolutely thrilling, she had said, having to sign the Official Secrets Act saying she could be shot if she gave anything away. They also had to be in readiness to burn the cipher books and smash the machines the minute they heard of the Japanese advance and one of the officers had advised her seriously to keep the last bullet for herself if things got really bad. Meanwhile the refugees were pouring in from Burma, Hong Kong and Singapore. ‘You should see some of the things they are trying to sell off here in Calcutta,’ she wrote, ‘far classier than ours. They’ve been better up on fashions than we have.’ While Ella trained in deciphering code, her actual duties appeared to be wrapping bandage rolls, preparing food packets and dancing with the soldiers of the defeated Fourteenth Army to keep up their morale, when they came on weekend leave. There was ice cream and hot chocolate sauce at Firpos and ‘rinking’—where couples skated together on a large floor at the club but all strictly part of her ‘duties’. Her kit bag was packed and ready to go in case she was needed on the Burma Road. The new ‘bunnies’ or sanitary towels that had arrived were a god send, she had written.
There were other, serious developments to follow. In August that year, the year of 1942, Gandhi asked the British to ‘Quit India’ and spun into immortality the phrase ‘do or die’.
‘We are on the verge of a precipice,’ Mylaraiah read out from the newspaper, quoting Nehru, ‘and we are in dead earnest.’ Seldom, he thought as he rested his head on the frame of the chair, had the newspapers reflected his state of mind so cannily. A few days back Rukmini had left for Vellore with Shivaswamy on the first of successive trips, to see a specialist for her now undeniable ‘condition’ which no doctor seemed able to diagnose, let alone c
ure. And she could no longer hide the fact that she was in pain.
In the phlegmatic, neither summer-nor-winter air of the town, this new turn in the political wheel of the country caused but a ripple at first. There had been other make-or-break resolutions in the past which had gradually petered out. Narayana Rao and two others were among the several Congressmen from the state to be arrested at Guntakal railway station on their way back from Bombay, after attending the meeting where the Quit India resolution was passed. Early in the morning, as Mylaraiah paced his vast garden, distracted over Rukmini’s condition, trying to compose his opening argument for the session in court later in the day at Bangalore, and wondering whether the train that was bringing the new housekeeper—a distant relative of Rukmini’s whose name was either Raji or Vishalakshi, he couldn’t remember, would arrive at all, he heard the faint singing of the khadi clad group of volunteers as they went past on the main road, on their morning round or prabhat pheri. Even from the distance, he had to admit, their singing had a rousing ring to it. The processions seemed to grow longer each morning and there were quite a few women in it.
Mylaraiah summoned both Kaveri and Setu to the verandah one morning. He knew Kaveri and her friend Shanta were part of a patriotic chorus in the Samaja for Kaveri was forever singing about the time her chains would fall off—and not getting the bit right, and that Setu and his friends indulged in some slogan-shouting in the back yard.
‘You will not,’ he said firmly, looking at Kaveri, ‘be part of any committee or public meeting that is involved in these protests against the government. I want you to promise me.’