by K R Usha
Sometimes she wished she had her mother-in-law’s habit of prayer, but she only read the newspaper. Her brother’s letters came to her, disembodied voices from the outside world. But of what use was it all, Kaveri wondered, for nothing was certain, even the newspapers contradicted themselves. For one day they said that Bose’s Indian National Army and the Japanese were coming to free the country from the British and the next that Subhash Bose had disappeared. Disappeared? One day that India was free, the British were gone and the next that Gandhi was dead, shot. Had he fallen in the dust, she wondered, the whites of his eyes showing, his spectacles smashed, lying at arm’s length from him.
She had thought that if there was one thing that even babies knew instinctively, it was the certainty of being loved, of being wanted. And here as she lay on her bed in the narrow room where even the sunshine was uncertain, in this house of cadaverous, watchful, banana-breaking women, the only certainty she knew she could depend upon was the secret voice in which she spoke to herself. Sometimes, she found herself floating, high above in a distant space, dissociated from everything. Was this the state of equanimity that the saints craved, where all was one; hot and cold, sweet and sour, day and night, good and bad, kith and kin and strangers, your left foot and your right so that slippers were interchangeable, and your head the same as your feet, so that you could walk on your head?
Twenty-two
1955
Illness, an astrologer Setu’s grandmother had once taken him to see against his mother’s wishes, had told him, would change his life. Illness would change everybody’s life, his grandmother had said dryly. They didn’t need an astrologer to tell them that they would all die one day. Illness and death had always been there, if anything they had been more in evidence when he had been a boy. He himself had been lost almost, to typhoid, he remembered his sister alternating between tears that he would die and gory descriptions of the carbuncle on his head. But what the astrologer had not specified was that it would be the illness of others that would intrude so dramatically and so completely upon him.
He tried to recall when they had last been ‘normal’, his sister still the teasing companion, his father still the man he knew and his mother healthy, and he, still the boy who thought a public demonstration the extension of a backyard game. The year the war broke out, the Ganesh Chaturti celebration in his house had been really grand. The house had been full of people, he had hidden his sister’s book—The Three Musketeers it was—under the parijata bush and had clean forgotten about it and it was reduced to pulp in the rain, there had been so many kargadabus frying in the kitchen that they had thrown them up in the air and aimed slingshots at them. In the evening, a procession had left the house, Timrayee carrying the idol of Ganesha and he, Setu, ringing the bell and shouting himself hoarse as they danced all the way to the pond. That year Ganesha had been immersed and he never came back, not the clay idol at least. The next year onwards, his mother had said that the silver idol would do; they would worship him and keep him at home, she hadn’t the energy for the festivities that a clay Ganesha involved.
Then Kaveri was gone and he was in Intermediate College with only Ramu still left among his friends, Chapdi Kal having joined his mandi merchant father in the family business. During his two years in the Intermediate College Setu had learnt of necessity to spin fast, furiously and simultaneously in different orbits. To college, where he had begun to enjoy his maths classes and back home to the smell of disinfectant and bulletins of hopelessness. He made trips to Vellore with his mother and he had watched her waste away and become thinner and thinner, till on her deathbed she had become so thin that he could carry her like a baby. And it was he who had kept a grip on reality then—it had become his sole virtue in those days, the ability to just keep track of things—a virtue he did not want to lay claim to. He had become his mother, the mistress of the household. The servants had started coming to him for instructions, and gradually, money as well. Shall it be pumpkin curry today? Achamma would ask in a whisper and Ranga would touch his forelock and say apologetically that the cattle shed door had rotted clean away or that the calf was surely sickening for something and the vet had to be called immediately. When he walked in the cornfield at the back, it brought back no memories of the games he had played, not even the cat he and his friends had hanged, he was intent only on inspecting the crop for termites.
His father, his implicit touchstone in everything, the master of the house, had alternated between pacing the corridor outside Rukmini’s room and travelling to Bangalore and meeting people in anticipation of being confirmed as the government’s advocate—when it was clear to the meanest of wits that he had lost the race. He had been pipped at the post, the job going to a man whose caste was on the ascendant and Judge Vishwanath Rao had smoothly changed horses mid-stream, abandoning one protégé for another. At one time the term ‘government advocate’ had been bandied about so much in their house that it had become their favourite game. Kaveri would drape her mother’s sari round her shoulders and march up and down issuing severe pronouncements to ‘clerks’ and harsh punishments on ‘criminals’, with him cowering on the floor, as both ‘clerk’ and ‘criminal’. His sister, well, she was married and did not count now. She had come to visit once, with her silent, grave, handsome husband, and kept a vigil by their mother’s bedside.
‘If your leg aches, Setu,’ she had told him, ‘don’t fold it backwards from the knee. Try folding it forwards. It helps.’
He would see her again only three years later and to his long letters from Calcutta, he received only monosyllabic replies on a post card and sometimes not even that. Write to me, she said, your letters and The Hindu are all I have.
Calcutta, the city he had always wanted to live in, claimed him for the next five years. One of the last decisions his parents had taken together, apart from Kaveri’s marriage, was that he should go to Calcutta to specialize in statistics. Your uncle, whose aptitude you have inherited, went there and he says you must go nowhere else, his mother said. He knew she had dreams for him. A Ph.D. from Cambridge like that fabled uncle, and like the famous Ramanujan himself!
But as always his timing seemed to be wrong. Between the pre-Independence riots and the post-Independence influx of refugees, and his father at home, he managed to graduate with a high first but had to abandon his post-graduation. Out Cambridge, goodbye Ramanujan.
‘Today, classes at the university were disrupted,’ he wrote to his sister. ‘We joined a protest march against the trial of the INA officers.’ As the procession had made its slogan-shouting way from Dharamtala to Dalhousie Square, at Lalbazar, the police had attacked them with lathis and opened fire. ‘This is the real thing,’ he wrote to his sister. ‘You see fervour in the raw on the streets here.’ Later in the evening, a military truck, along with its black American driver, had been burnt close to the students’ hostel and he had heard it burst into flames. From the terrace of the hostel they could see smouldering fires in several places. And then in August of 1946, the city burnt again when the call for ‘Direct Action’ to carve out their portion of the country was given by Jinnah and the Muslim League. ‘There are bodies on the tram tracks on Rash Behari Road, close to where I live, and I have seen people searching the pockets of the dead, for their ration cards.’ He had actually gone past the ill-fated Kamalalaya Stores, recently burnt and resurrected, as it was being looted and burnt again, but like the Phoenix it was sure to rise on its ashes as it did after every communal riot. But she need not worry about him, he reassured her. The arrangements in the Keyotalla Lane flat where he now roomed with a Mysore family were pukka, he said. They were prepared for any attacks. The men waited on the first floor with revolvers—why, he could fire a .38 himself—the women on the second floor, while the spill of oil on the ground floor made sure that any intruders would slip. Of course, there was the incident when poor Ghosh babu, unable to bear the ‘tension’ had let off his revolver. What a commotion that had caused. And all the wrong people
had slipped on the oil. He had been on two rescue missions already, going in a truck with the Sikhs of Bhowanipore from their gurudwara, armed with knives and swords, to places where they received SOS messages from. Every workshop in Calcutta, Setu wrote, was busy hammering swords and spears into shape, and the women had turned their skill at blowing conches, usually exhibited at weddings, into sending riot-alert messages.
The Setu of old surfaced in the letters home, the show of boyish bravado to conceal his anxiety. To one of his letters assuring his father that he was safe and classes would resume soon, his father wrote back saying that Setu’s fish in the cement totti were safe too and that it was a myth that frogs ate fish, for there were frogs and fish swimming side by side in the tank. But the lotuses were withering away, he was sad to say.
At first he was bewildered by the enormity of change in his father, then the thought of him made Setu impatient, driving him at times to a white hot rage. Rukmini’s death had been hard on all of them; often, Setu woke to the sound of her footfall and heard her call his name in the dark, and stayed awake the rest of the night. Mylaraiah may have lost the government advocate’s post, but he still had his practice in town. But he seemed to make no effort to resist the tide, to reassert his mettle. Setu had a good mind to throw in his father’s face his lectures about duty above everything else and iron in the spine, the staple diet of Setu’s childhood, ideas that he had grown up on and had come to believe were as natural as the air he breathed. In those early days after her death, Setu would tell the unfamiliar grizzled man who sat at the table in the coffee room, his shirt front stained with food, ‘Anna, you must shave before you leave for the courts in the morning.’ After that, his father had taken to sitting in the verandah and reading out the newspaper and expounding his ‘death of the nation with the departure of the British’ thesis to the semi-circle of attentive servants at his feet.
Each visit home brought new evidence of the rot that was setting in—white ants in the book cases, tiles missing from the roof and snakes in the garden. No servants, no one to light the evening lamp, and no dogs. For the first time, the house was without dogs. His father seemed to be managing, but barely. His eyes still stared a little vacantly, but his black coat was not shabby and his shoes were polished. A distant relative had been installed as housekeeper and she seemed to be taking care of him, only she had quarrelled with the servants and sent them away.
‘I am talking to Darcy Riley, about that post,’ Mylaraiah nodded assuringly at his son.
‘Anna, why don’t you talk to Narayana Rao, after all he’s a minister now.’
‘Narayana Rao! That upstart! There was a time when I did him favours. And I doubt whether he can do anything at all. No, I’m talking to Judge Riley, don’t worry.’
‘Who,’ Setu asked Balarama, the only one of his father’s clerks who was still around, ‘is Judge Riley?’
‘Darcy Riley, an old-time British judge,’ Balarama smiled wanly, ‘long retired, gone back home. Must be dead by now.’
‘And does my father still go to his chambers?’
Balarama looked out of the window and cleared his throat. ‘His partner manages the practice,’ he said at last.
A scholarship to do his post graduation bought him a further reprieve from home. He had lost time; his graduation had dragged on and so would his post graduation, but he was glad to get away. His father seemed to be managing in his own way. In fact, the scholarship had made him happy. In a brief moment of complete lucidity, his father had become his father again and had patted him on the head, as he used to, when Setu had been a boy and had managed to please him by doing a simple thing like running to the corner shop and buying him a nib. But Setu was back home within two years, without taking his degree, summoned by his uncles and the widowed aunt who had been installed in his home to look after his father. His father, it appeared, needed to be taken firmly in hand.
The summer that Setu came back for good was particularly beautiful; every tree in town must have been abloom. The copper pod and the rain tree in his own compound greeted him as if he were a hero returned from the war. Each government office in town sported the flag of the newly independent nation—bands of white, green and saffron with Ashoka’s chakra of peace in blue in the middle, a variation of the flag that Narayana Rao had been arrested while attempting to hoist and Shyam Kole had given his life for. It seemed to matter little, what they had done; it had passed like everything else, whisked into a void. Men of greater stature had met more bizarre ends in pursuit of their flags. Subhash Bose was lost, quite literally, somewhere in China or Central Asia, no one knew where for sure, in pursuit of his tricolour with the springing tiger in the centre. Gandhi had not attended the ceremony when the new flag was first hoisted; he saw little sense in the celebrations when the bloodbath of Partition was barely over. Moreover, he had wanted the original flag with the charkha in the middle, which he had considered the symbol of the struggle for freedom. But his displeasure was to no avail. His job was done and he was out of the reckoning and soon enough an assasin’s bullet would save him from further disillusionment.
The house was in shambles. The tiled roofs of the cowsheds at the back and the store rooms had fallen in and there was nothing left of the coconuts and the grain. The gate hung indecisively on its hinges, tempting those who had not originally intended to come in. The garden had become a thoroughfare between the main road in front and the cross road at the back, and all kinds of people loitered in it, helping themselves to whatever was handy. Once he found his father deep in conversation with a stranger in his office room; it was only after the man had left that Setu realized that he had managed to take the coat off his father’s back and the slippers off his feet. There were government officials on the prowl too, jealously guarding the rights of the new nation, eyeing the house, convinced that it would be better off as the new irrigation or land records office. Then too the slew of litigation started, from people claiming their right to Mylaraiah’s various lands, for despite being meticulous about the cases he handled, Mylaraiah had been careless about his own records, often leaving things entirely to his clerks.
Balarama had left and Achamma had retired, too old to cook. All the servants were gone and what had precipitated the crisis was that the last one, a young woman, newly inducted into the household, had thrown herself into the well at the back. His father, who had now given up his practice completely, had refused to see the police, for he still believed that it was his clerk’s duty to attend to such things. He would meet the inspector general and no one else, he said, and there was no convincing him that he had no clerks left. All Mylaraiah did now was to set off promptly in the morning in the direction of the courts and hang around in the Udipi coffee house all day, sitting majestically at one of its tables and holding forth on his pet themes to whoever would care to listen. Very shamefacedly, the proprietor came to Setu with the bills that his father had run up and not paid. And yes, he was acquiring quite a reputation as a coffee house sage.
At the end of a day’s stock taking and sorting out, Setu would sit in the sagging, eternal wicker chair on the verandah, in the discouraging shadows of twilight, telling himself that this too would pass and he had only to concentrate on the tasks on hand and things would come back to normal. If he was sometimes besieged by a strong rush of feeling, he allowed himself to shed a few tears and then he found that he was ready to confront the next crisis. Had he been less prosaic, he could well have seen his misfortune as part of a grand tragedy; if he could have articulated that strong rush of feeling he could have said that the claims of his family and the destiny of a nation had conspired against him. All he knew was that he should guard against the lead settling in his soul.
‘Your father needs a proper doctor. Take him to Bangalore,’ his uncle told him. ‘You could get a teaching job in a school, it won’t be too bad. Or you could run the factory my friend has. He’s looking for someone he can trust. The money will be a lot better than the teaching job.’
Of course; in action lay the answer. There was no point getting sentimental or fatalistic about things. That was not his normal bent of mind, not his naturally sunny, solution-seeking disposition.
‘Excellent idea,’ his father said when he was told they were shutting the house down and moving to Bangalore. ‘It has been my life’s ambition to breakfast on the dumrote in Modern Hindu Hotel every morning. There is nothing to beat it. Make sure you take up a house nearby. Let us move to Bangalore at once.’
Even in those early days when he had just moved to Bangalore with his father, he still had the feeling that there was hope. It was more than ten years since his mother had died and he had had to close down their home. He must be the only factory accountant, he often thought wryly, with an aborted post graduation in mathematics, a course that he had had a scholarship to pursue. There was a time when he had thought he could follow in Ramanujan’s footsteps! But destiny deals with an uneven hand. You have to make the most of what you have been given, that Setu had come to accept. When his tonga trotted through the broad, tree-lined roads and the air was cool against his face, he felt his senses quicken; he was young enough for that. There was his father, yes. But there was also the boulevard of South Parade, the city lights and the cinemas. The Tommies still cruised the cantonment area with pretty Eurasian girls hanging on their arms. He liked the girls in their short dresses, their pomaded hair and bright red mouths. All is not lost, they said to him, where’s your spirit?