A Girl & a River

by K R Usha

  Ah well, Setu told himself, so long as you did not allow your mind to dwell on what might have been. His father he had now learnt to cope with. But there was also his sister. And there he stumbled. He wished his father had been more of a help there but he drew the line at a cheery, ‘How is Kaveri doing?’ To which Setu could make no other reply than ‘Fine, she’s fine. I had been to see her just the other day.’ Until it became an unvarying routine. So much so that his father soon had to just raise his eyebrows and his hands and Setu would supply, ‘She’s fine,’ and there the matter would end.

  Every visit was the same. Things did not get easier. On those days, circled in red on the calendar, the circles growing fewer in number with successive calendars, he would start telling himself all would be just fine, right from the morning. But at the mere thought of it, even as he saw himself walking down the pathway through those ornate gates, a feeling of helplessness overcame him.

  This was the house of the man who had been the chief justice of the state, a prominent pillar of the community, a man whose reach was long and who had the ear of those in power. Within those ornate gates, the very air seemed to grow columnar, standing at attention in the presence of such compelling majesty. After it grudgingly gave of itself for him to breathe, and Setu proceeded, a little short of breath, there was the watchman’s salute, the deference of his gesture belied by the flash of curiosity in his eyes. The next step in his disarmament was the library, draughty, dusty, with uncomfortable chairs in which he was sure no one sat, the shelves lined with intimidating law tomes, where his sister’s father-in-law, the retired chief justice, would make him wait. That was a calculated move on the old man’s part and Setu never failed to rise to his expectations, for when the judge made his entry, he would find the young man sitting hunched up in the worst chair in the room—the wicker chair with the protruding nail, which could be depended upon to send away any one who sat in it with a right-angled tear in his coat tails—too intimidated even to look around the room or study the titles on the spines of the books. Resplendent in his starched, gold thread-edged turban, the judge would slip into his role of potentate and Setu, despite himself, into that of grateful, humble retainer.

  The opening comments were always about the state of the nation. ‘What is Nehru doing to this country?’ the old man would ask and proceed to answer it himself. Setu was expected to do nothing but nod. Then there would come the parade of names. ‘I was lunching with Nijalingappa the other day … Your Narayana Rao’s days are numbered … useless man, can’t get anything done … people can’t be expected to remember your freedom struggle sacrifices forever, you know …’ And once the way was smoothened, would come the solicitous enquiry about his father, the cue for Setu to ask about his sister. At that, with a sigh and a heave and a change in tone, the judge would say, What can I say, we are doing our best. And the awkward silence that followed would be broken by his sister’s mother-in-law, rolling in the trolley with the refreshments. It had always struck him as incongruous that this household should have a trolley but he had also paused to wonder why in a house full of servants, it was the woman of the house who had to bring it in. Right through the plate, spoon, tumbler and napkin-giving ceremony, (he had to admit, her badam milk was unbeatable, he had never drunk anything like it), she would creak and sigh around him, making it very clear that whatever hospitality she was extending to him came at great physical cost to herself; she had had plenty of buffetting on the high seas in her days and it was time someone else, like a daughter-in-law for instance, took over these duties of hers.

  He had already been outwitted, he knew; he was going through the motions of a game where the fall of the dice and the fate of the pawns had already been decided. But there was so much ceremony to the charade, such an intricate web of etiquette through which he had to pick his way. One (false) solicitous enquiry about his father was exchanged for one (false) solicitous enquiry about his sister—your rook for my castle, and in the process he would have forgotten about his inert and circumscribed king, till the wretch toppled over. Every time it was the same. He could never bring himself to mention the unmentionable, the real thing, for every time he looked into the judge’s eyes he could read the warning there; beware, it said, don’t go too far, you are the dandelion in my hand and it is so easy to snap your head off.

  And by the time his hostess had finished with him, plying him with exquisite food and drink, and managing to convey her immense tact and her suffering, he was almost convinced that they were in the right. They were good, noble souls and perhaps he should go home right then.

  But of course, he would not be allowed to go. For after that he would be conducted through the dark maze of rooms to the back of the house, escorted by a retinue of women. As he stood in his sister’s doorway and tried to talk to her the women would peer over his shoulder and make encouraging clucking noises at him. Sometimes, she would talk to him but that was very rare, as most of the time she would just lie on the bed with her face turned to the wall.

  And amidst all those women was his niece, a thin girl with scabby knees who scratched her head all the time, whose eye chased him with the nakedness of a raw nerve, only to look away when he caught it. When he looked at the girl, he felt the fervour of his mother’s fingers as they had scrabbled at the collar of his shirt and he smelt her failing, sour-scented breath as she had entreated him, ‘Take care of your sister’, and with a sinking heart he knew—and this he knew very clearly—what it was that he must bring himself to do eventually. And that, if the truth be told, was what finally got him.

  In time he came not only to depend upon his desires being thwarted but even perhaps to do what he could to thwart them himself, well at least to side-step them. Forearmed, he told himself, is forewarned. He wished for things in a lukewarm way, so that he need not work to make them come true. Soon the kindling of a wish and its dousing became simultaneous and from that it was but a matter of time to think that desire was meant to be extinguished—that was the way to equanimity, the state of mind in which all things appeared to be the same.

  Part V

  Post Script

  Twenty-three

  1987

  It is a tradition in my family to name its girls after rivers. My mother is named after a lost river, of which no traces can be found now. A Himalayan river—ice-fed, perennial, with no fear of going dry, lends her name to me; my great-grandmother too had the same name. But Kaveri is a straightforward commonplace name. Every family in the state of Mysore at one time had a daughter named after the river, the goddess whose life-giving waters were being harnessed to provide for a future writ large in letters of gold. While driving to the city of Mysore once, when I was a still a child, the car rattled over a bridge and looking below all I could see were rocky outcrops, some with full grown trees, separated from each other by streams of sand marking the course of a river. Of the river itself, if a river means water, there was no sign. A few buffaloes drank from pools, which had formed in the shallows of the rocks in the river bed. So when my father proudly said, ‘This is the Kaveri,’ I could only stare.

  Those brought up in apparently quiet families where nothing happens on the surface, but a river of disquiet runs underneath, have a curious ability. While they learn early to limit their world, to shut out things that don’t concern them, their antennae lie dormant, to pick up the slightest adverse signal, like a virus in the blood stream that leaps to life the moment the body seems preoccupied. My parents did their best all right, by keeping quiet and lying low, hoping that a semblance of normalcy would be the thing itself, that a placid surface would be proof from tremors.

  I remember a meeting with one of my professors in the college campus. Those were my desperate days, I was desperate to get out of home, and she, the professor, was advising me on the universities I could apply to and the courses I could choose from. There was a clump of trees on one end of the grounds and we made our way to it and chose a sprawling ficus, and sat on the cement platform buil
t around it. We commanded a view of the landscaped grounds, framed by a stone pavilion roofed with a pergola. The sky that morning was blue and the air, vitaminously healthy. A creeper trailed through the ribs of the pergola. My professor was happy with me, my performance and my manner; I suppose I embodied the promise of youth, of confident new womanhood and she possibly saw in me what she would have been had she been born a generation later. I had done quite brilliantly in my exams, so bending a proud gaze, now proprietorial, now maternal over me, she was telling me that I could get into a good American university and was discussing the relative merits of the various universities, their aid packages and their programmes. And there, as I thanked her for having first introduced me to Stephen Hawking and she spoke about the advances in particle physics, I saw a squirrel lying fast asleep. It was sleeping on the mud just behind where my professor was sitting. She was sitting with her back to the tree and I was standing in front of her and all through our conversation, I was aware of it and was absurdly pleased—it added the right touch to the conversation—and was about to remark on how trusting the animals on the campus had grown of humans, when I realized that it was dead. It was so close behind her that if my professor leaned back to make herself more comfortable or stretched her hand, she would touch it. It was lying in perfect repose, its tail curled round its body, only the spot of blood at the bottom of one closed eye, catching the sunlight like a bubble of blown glass, suggestive of an unnatural, violent end.

  My days were like that then, with an undertow beneath the placid surface that threatened to pull me in; only I could see the ruby-red eye.

  It took me some time to figure out that the woman I had caught a glimpse of when I had accidentally visited the hotel-hostel with my mother those years back, of whom the only memory I clearly carry is of calloused soles and cracked heels against a blue bedsheet, was the same as the girl who had underscored the lines that had moved her in the book; the girl who had thought that her fervid pleas in the margin could change the pre-ordained course of the characters’ lives, that she could will differently the course of a pre-scripted world. She was not the kind to buckle down tamely—she had had the spirit to pin up the picture of a daredevil stunt woman, and it had meant enough for her to preserve a fragment of it but when she had been given a half chance to change the script of her own life, if the testimony of a blotchy purple scrawl were to be believed, she had refused it. But then my memory plays tricks on me for I also think of her as the girl in a white tunic, with whom I had played awhile on a red cement slide, whose unusual face I remember clearly. This, then, the gentle creature whom my mother had not wanted to bring home, and who had died in the front room leaving it permanently smelling of floorwash, was my grandmother—my mother’s mother, and my aunt—my father’s sister. I must have been around fifteen by the time I figured it all out and it explained some of the whispered confabulations of my childhood. My parents had been perfect conspirators; I had not known a thing, except that sometimes, just sometimes, I felt I had a film of prickles over my skin, and I had a faint suspicion that the eye that watched over us was a red-flecked bubble of spittle.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I demanded of my mother with all the indignation of a teenager who believes that everything of consequence that will happen to you is encoded in your childhood. Freud was popular in the 1970s.

  ‘Tell you?’ she seemed truly bewildered. ‘What is there to tell, and that too to a child …’ These are things to be hidden, she seemed to imply. Tragedies must be played out and suffered softly and quietly.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘What happened! Even if I did tell you what happened, it wouldn’t be what actually happened,’ my father said, getting up to go out of the room.

  ‘Surely I have a right to know what has happened in my family …’

  ‘No, you do not. You have not lived through it.’

  ‘Don’t,’ my mother begged, dropping her stitches, ‘don’t do this to him.’ As if she had nothing to do with it.

  The house with its dark-red stained floor and its small closed windows trapped me in; when I came home for the vacations I took to hiring a bicycle and cycling round and round our area—I was not allowed to venture too far. Perhaps it was then that the seed of flight was resolutely planted in my mind, how long could I keep on pedalling around known streets, where neighbours looked at me strangely and asked my mother why I talked to myself as I went past their houses. I was reading Simone de Beauvoir then, in my fifteenth year and the irony of reading The Second Sex with my newly discovered circumstances cutting so close to the bone was not lost on me. And yet I also listened to Neil Diamond telling me in a seductive baritone that I’d be a woman soon, soon I’d need a man. That was also the time I read whatever I could lay my hands on on mental illness and the human mind. When I was not pedalling around or reading or listening to music, I would churn things in my mind, thinking up of things to bait them both with, these two who had thrust me by their silence into a theatrical melodrama of the worst sort, the sort you watch on screen and cry about even while telling yourself that such things can’t be true, that these are only devices to help you live out your worst fears vicariously.

  When I went back to school that final year, I brooded over it. I dropped a round-bottomed flask full of concentrated acid in the chemistry lab one day and watched the black leather toes of my right shoe melt away before my eyes and the floor at my feet smoke, hiss and crater. The teacher was so alarmed that she forgot to fine me.

  Finally, overcoming my distaste for him, I wrote to my father’s cousin Chamu and asked him about Kaveri, and no, not that same old weak nerves and habitual Mysore inertia story again, I said. Weak nerves and vapours were the preserve of old ladies and maidens in English fiction. I wrote to my mother’s Brahma Kumari cousin as well. She took a long time to reply but when she did, she asked me to concentrate on God and my studies. People tended to talk too much, she said. She herself had been on a long mauna vrata and since she had forsworn speech, she had not been able to write earlier.

  Chamu wrote back amazingly quick. Shadenfreude was a word I had not yet come across but when I read the letter I understood the emotion perfectly. He did not know if it was the truth, he said, he was only telling me what people said and what he had heard. He also added that he had not told my father he was writing to me. Your father’s family had everything, he said, but then Mylaraiah got too greedy and Rukmini, too complacent. They had reached above themselves and got Kaveri married off into the best family in the community—the only hitch was that the boy was already married. You couldn’t discount the nerves, he said, because people said that the shock of discovering that her husband was already married must have sent her off. The man was married to a Japanese beauty, employed by the maharaja as a translator in the cultural department. People called them Beauty and the Beast—she so fair and exotic-looking and he so dark and well … They had met when he was asked to teach her Kannada. He had three children by this woman, three girls, and had got married again at his mother’s insistence. He was not to blame. He was a good man and his family was renowned for its acts of charity to distressed women. Everyone, everyone had known about that business with the Japanese woman except your people, he said. Of course, Kaveri had always been acknowledged as the daughter-in-law of the house and people said she could have been happy if she wanted to. Such arrangements were not unknown. Even later, she was very well taken care of. And yes, Chamu had added, he had converted in order to marry that woman. So Rukmini’s romance with the Methodists had come a full circle. Only, she hadn’t been alive to see it. And one more thing. It may not have been just this Japanese woman thing that could have sent Kaveri over the edge. You could not blame her husband entirely. There was some talk of Kaveri and a freedom fighter type. The man had got killed in a demonstration. Mylaraiah had seen to it. Ask your father, Chamu had written. He was complicit in everything, a mere boy though he had been, in getting rid of his sister’s suitor and in arranging her
marriage to a married man. Of course, none of this would have happened if Kaveri had married him, Chamu, as his father had suggested to Rukmini for his was the very first proposal she had received. But Rukmini had been too proud. Of course he didn’t believe what some people said that my parents—her brother and her daughter—had abandoned her. Made off with her money and consigned her to an asylum. There was no denying it, Chamu said. There is something in your family. The slightest untoward thing unhinges you people. Mylaraiah too … Why don’t you ask your father …

  The relish with which the letter had been written was unmistakable, especially that bit about Rukmini. He seemed to have bided his time to say it, and he probably would not have had the courage to say it to my father. I felt a mild regret at my transgression, I remembered my father calling him a ‘bounder’, but he was no help, my father. There was no other way I could have found out.

  So, he had been the writer of the purple letter—the ‘freedom fighter type’. I thought of the lukewarm declaration the letter contained, a half-measure from a reluctant man who would always put his ‘cause’ first. However, even the half chance to subvert her future had been lost to her. The man had gone and died.

  In the showcase in our house, a bejewelled Ganda Bherunda—the crest of the royal family of Mysore, has pride of place. It is plated in gold with real rubies for the eyes of the two birds (the rubied eye seems to be the letimotif of my script). The Ganda Bherunda, a shawl and a scroll are evidence of my paternal grandfather’s loyalty to the Wodeyars. My father is very proud of those mementos—it is strange how he can be simultaneously reverential about Churchill, Gandhi and ‘His Highness!’. My mother’s grandfather too, I believe, was a high-profile judge, chief justice of the state. I thought of how unevenly they were matched, a cabal of hefty men and women in blue who could carry anyone away kicking and screaming and a serious little girl, her funny face frowning, her large mouth a moue of concentration as she looped her l’s and curled her c’s, quaking self-righteously at fictional injustices—‘Murderer-stone’, ‘Don’t marry Dora!’—little aware of the invidiousness of real life. I know the book by heart, each smudged pencil line, each childishly scribbled comment, the crackle of the onion paper when I turn the pages especially those that have turned stiff with, I imagine, her tears. And as for the purple letter, it now lies in four parts. Whenever I want to read it, I fit the pieces together.