A Girl & a River

by K R Usha

  ‘You could have brought her home. That was what that Brahma Kumari cousin of yours used to hint at all the time, isn’t it?’

  ‘We had a child at home to bring up.’

  ‘You sent me to boarding school.’ Dumped me there quite unceremoniously too.

  ‘She left you a lot of money, didn’t she, and property …’

  My mother would say nothing to me but look strangely baffled as one would if a stranger had suddenly started throwing stones at your house.

  Those were the days when my tongue was a whiplash. ‘And you,’ I would ask my father from time to time in different ways, ‘what did you do for her?’ Other than making sure she was safely out of sight. Don’t scoff at the Mysore predilection for prevarication, Chamu had written, cowardice runs in our blood in many different guises. Did you know, I would tell my father, that there was a time when ‘fools’ were shipped across the seas to other places, far away from their own, and some were known to have made their way back, like intelligent, faithful dogs. Towns in Europe made money by exhibiting their insane and inviting people to throw stones at them.

  ‘Don’t you dare speak to your father like that!’ This from my mother, to whom my father speaks as he likes.

  They are in it together, this incestuous pair, part of the grand conspiracy of silence. They say nothing in explanation or in defence of themselves. All that my father would do, undoubtedly, was recommend coffee, for coffee is known to calm the nerves, cleanse the bowels of wind, to absorb excess water without heating the body. I would also recommend to him soap, eaten plain, and cold water baths.

  After school, our ways practically parted. My father wanted me to do maths, but I chose to pursue physics, despite dire warnings that it was very difficult and all that I could hope with the results I’d get was a job as a schoolteacher. But then I like explanations, figuring things out and here was a subject where the simplest of physical systems were analysed and understood, where the world could be reduced to an experimental problem in a lab or expanded to study the cosmos. Moreover, I am gifted with brains and also the ability to apply my mind relentlessly to something when I want it badly. And I wanted right then to get away from home. Not just go to any old place but somewhere where I could go in a blaze of glory. I topped the university in the subject and got the gold medal—you’ve inherited your father’s brains, an old timer told me, and your family talent for maths and science, much to my annoyance, adding, I hope you have better luck than he had. In my years at college, I made a systematic study of all the universities in the US, which offered the courses in theoretical physics I wanted, the scholarships they offered, and worked out the details about the work I’d have to put in, the sort of testimonials, the proofs I’d have to offer of my mettle. Father protested mildly that I could do research ‘right here in the Institute of Science’, but shrugged and gave up in the face of my resolution. You are like my mother, he said, as determined. So, I got my brains from him and my determination from his mother. What, I wondered, would I inherit from my grandmother, his sister?

  It was at its height then, the dull discord of our daily life, and by implicit understanding we stuck to those transactions that were absolutely necessary, speaking to each other only when it was unavoidable. That was the time when I spoke to my parents only when I wanted money.

  Twenty-four

  1987

  Even as I longed to get away, on the reverse was the need to see things in black and white, to establish cause and effect, to which I also attribute my love of whodunits, those with a clear plot and structure and characters whose motives are unambiguous. As meticulously as I planned my career and groomed my plans for the future, I launched on the search, the unravelling, which didn’t get very far. I stumbled on most things by chance.

  I discovered the house she had lived in, the house my mother grew up in. It was quite funny, the way it happened. Right through my college years, I had been following various slender threads—Chamu, as usual and his distant leads, trying to locate the house when my mother pointed it out casually to me when we were driving in that part of town. As usual she would say little else, except that she did not remember.

  ‘I just grew up,’ she said, ‘there were a lot of women in the house and it is easy for a child in a houseful of women.’

  What women, I ask. Oh an assortment of relatives, she says. In some houses you have them around, widowed sisters and aunts. I am grateful to them, she adds, they took care of me. I can almost read in parentheses, they kept me safe from her. And what became of them, I ask. If I ask, what became of your father, my grandfather, I know the conversation will end immediately. I don’t know, she says. I never went back after I got married.

  It was a large shabby property, which had obviously been partitioned and sold off in bits. It was now part house and part office, two multistoreyed offices in fact. One part of it had come to her, my mother says blandly, when the property was eventually partitioned. That is her way of pointing out that her father had done the right thing by her. One of those office buildings has paid for my American degree, the part not covered by the scholarship, for my airfare to and fro, off and on. So I too am pinned into the heart of the conspiracy. I get a share of the spoils. I want to ask her, was this what it was all about, all those undercurrents, but I know she will say, what undercurrents, you must have been imagining things. Always, her loyalty to my father and to hers too, I could say, has been absolute. And to her mother too. Perhaps, as she says, she really didn’t give it too much thought, she just went through it day by day, event by event, seeking the comfort of things that would bloom gratefully under the toil of her fingers, things like applique work pillow covers and cross-stitched table cloths or even a garden. I have belatedly tried to understand how it must have been to be brought up by a houseful of indifferent women, to go to a school round the corner—I don’t think she went beyond high school, my mother—and then everlasting gratitude and loyalty (and perhaps even love!) to the man who married you but who does not bother to mask his indifference to you. But I find it difficult to sympathize with those who have almost willed themselves into their circumstances and shift drearily through; it is like going through each day of you life with a low grade fever.

  I took to walking in Lal Bagh, reconnoitring, looking for signs of human habitation in that bombed-out shelter, speculating on the family I might have had—I imagine meeting girls in kimonos and white pancake make-up, like the women I saw in ‘The Last Geisha’. I had asked my mother, fresh from Chamu’s letter, whether she had kept track of her sisters. What sisters, she had shrugged, I was an only child.

  In my third year of college, I visited the house. I just walked in one afternoon.

  The gate creaks as I open it. The office buildings are cut off from this still-residential bit by a high wall. There is a name on the stone plaque on the wall outside, too worn away for me to read. There are no dogs. I walk unassaulted to the door on the side of the house, past a narrow, scummy channel with a thin stream of putrid water flowing through it. It really smells. I have chosen to come in the afternoon, when the men will be away. They cannot possibly know that I have walked on the uneven pavement opposite this house several times, waiting for time to ripen.

  A young girl in school uniform opens the door and I tentatively explain my mission to her. Behind her I can see a large black stone-paved hall, empty except for the odd bits of furniture on the fringes.

  ‘A girl has come,’ she announces, with no preamble, ‘asking about the Number Four who used to live here.’

  A few more heads appear in the darkness, a household of women. They ask questions. Who am I? I stick to my explanation. I am making enquiries on behalf of a friend whose grandmother used to live here. We are studying together, this friend and I. As the girl looks me up and down, eyeing my trousers, the others speculate on Kaveri’s identity. I am lucky that the women are artless and they like to gossip. People with a little more self-awareness would have asked me to leave or at least ha
ve been more guarded. But I suppose it doesn’t matter to them. It makes for a welcome diversion before they resume their evening’s chores. An elderly woman, whom the rest call Doddakka, says that her father-in-law’s brother’s family used to live here at one time, and they had a daughter-in-law whom they used to keep confined to the room at the side. She had heard a lot of stories, of course she hadn’t seen her herself, she only knew what people said at that time. The poor creature, ‘it’ she says, used to wander all over the garden—the garden used to be huge before it was partitioned—even in the pouring rain, completely unmindful of it. But such people are like that, she adds. They do not feel the cold or the heat, hunger or thirst, they do not know if it is night or day.

  ‘I believe she used to lie in her bed and read English novels, all day long; and do no work at all …’

  What do you expect, she means, when you live in an imaginary world, your emotions being wrung by second-hand sensibilities, your nerves being subjected to make-believe destinies, when you withdraw more and more from the real world.

  She had heard that it began when her child was born. The sight of her daughter used to drive her into a rage. ‘A woman’s womb is a funny thing,’ Doddakka says gravely. ‘It isn’t fixed firmly to the body. It keeps moving and that drives women mad.’

  She apparently grew so bad that they had to shut her up. She started running away—twice they brought her home from somewhere in the city. ‘As long as her mother-in-law was alive, they kept her here in that room, but as soon as the old lady died, they sent her off …’

  ‘Who sent her off?’

  ‘Her husband. But he could not have managed it without her brother’s consent. Together they put her away, her husband and her brother …’

  No, she knows nothing of his ‘other’ family. There were rumours about that too, but no one spoke openly about it. Not that she had heard.

  As I come out of the house, the setting sun in the trees hits my eyes directly and I am blinded. I rest my head on the gate for a moment and breathe in the strange mix of the fragrance of champak flowers and the sour smell of sewage. My feet are leaden, I do not want to leave. I wish they had not told me that my father had signed the certificate, condemning her forever to Number Four. Number Four? Now I get it. It is a reference to the bus route that used to go to the mental asylum in Byrasandra. This will not do. I cannot go around hunting like this and ending up feeling dizzy and sick—it cannot just be the large tumbler of boiled tea that they gave me.

  Unreal problems demand surreal solutions. I had to find other ways of cracking this. I had tried going back to the asylum—the hotel-hostel of my childhood—armed with a name but found no records, no histories, no leads of any sort; any that had been there had most probably been deleted with the inmate’s death. (I couldn’t imagine my parents keeping them as mementos, to remember her by.) Moreover, it is no longer an asylum but an institute of mental health. The buildings have multiplied but the old stone building, colonially solemn is still there as also the rain trees and the garden with the lover’s lane, but the people in white are no longer in evidence. It was then that it occurred to me, vaguely, that I should get someone to find out for me, someone neutral and to a person hooked on whodunits, the first thing that would come to mind would be a detective agency. Of course, we did not have a Pinkertons or even a Hercule Poirot, but we had the Globe Detective Agency which advertised its services for ‘surveillance’ and ‘information gathering’ with a discreet gun as its logo.

  Twenty-five

  1987

  I am late, unforgivably late and I cannot curse myself enough. I took the wrong train and had to retrace my path by taxi. I can’t understand how I could have made a mistake when everything was so clearly laid out in the map before me. I had to travel from section 94 in the grid to section 67, from Heathrow Airport to the British Museum where we had agreed to meet. I had checked my instructions several times, Terminal Four and then the tube from the station. This was the first time I was venturing into London, but I knew them all—King’s Cross, Marylebone and Regent’s Park—I had bought them all up at Monopoly, I couldn’t get lost in a place I knew so well.

  I wonder if she will still be waiting for me. I had picked the British Museum as it doesn’t charge for entry. By the tantrik Ganesha, in the Indian section of the museum, we had agreed. I have fine-tuned this meeting for months, having anticipated it for years. On my way home from Chicago, I would stop by at London and meet her. It would be ridiculous, after having broken my journey, after all the trouble with the visa to accommodate this detour into the city, if I were to miss her. This is my only chance for on my way back I plan to take the Pacific route. I was already beginning to regret this. There was nothing that she could tell me, nothing more than what she had written to me about.

  ‘Ella King?’ I put out my hand. ‘I’m sorry, I caught the wrong train.’ I launched into a long explanation about routes and my general stupidity in reading maps, giving us the time to size each other up.

  She had brown hair and a red mouth and was wearing a dress of some dark green stuff with matching low-heeled shoes. A brooch of distinctly Indian design, green stones, emeralds perhaps, of the familiar mango pattern, was pinned on to her dress, above her left breast. Her eyes behind her black framed spectacles waited for me. Now I know why I wanted to meet her so desperately. I have always imagined that if I see someone who has known Kaveri unawares, untainted by the future, I will know what Kaveri would have been like.

  ‘So you are the author of Sailing on the Hoogly,’ I said, as I searched for something to say, ‘At last!’

  ‘Tales by the Hooghly,’ she corrected me, ‘Sailing on the Ganges in a Rubber Boat is another collection. It came later.’ She had a soft accent and a low pitched voice.

  ‘Yes, yes of course.’ I had read the book so many years back that I barely remembered it now.

  ‘My books have been out of print for so long, it’s nice to meet someone who still reads me.’

  I stared at her. Of course, there had been more books than the one with the ghastly cover. Clearly she was expecting a reader, a fan. She had probably been a moderate success as a novelist at some time and had now sunk (deservedly, if her one book was anything to go by) into oblivion. I remember the list of publications her publisher had sent me had other titles and I racked my brains trying to remember the names of her other books, at least of one more, correctly.

  ‘They are trying to reissue my Brave Hearts of Rambaug.’

  ‘Yes of course, Brave Hearts of Rambaug. I loved that one,’ I said, unwisely.

  ‘Really! Where … how …?’

  ‘Shall we go outside? We needn’t talk in whispers then. We can stroll on the grounds or sit in the park opposite.’ And even as I said it I realized I had no money to take her anywhere, not even to buy her the pancakes that I had seen a man selling outside. All my precious pounds had gone on the taxi.

  ‘Ella King,’ my father, blessed man, had said turning the brittle pages of the book with the lurid cover when I had pestered him with it. ‘Must be Dr King’s niece. I remember she had come down a couple of times. My mother and Dr King used to be quite thick—a lady with light hair riding on a bicycle. She used to smoke in the dining room and that used to really annoy the cook.’

  It is such incidental salvos that I have always locked away for future reference. I must say, my father is replete with memories of the cook.

  ‘Miss King … Ella,’ I took a deep breath. I had to be out of there in fifteen minutes. ‘Do you remember, in the town where your aunt lived, she went on to be the Chief Medical Officer of the general hospital there—you must have gone there for your holidays …’

  ‘Once. I just went once. I told you that in my letter. My aunt died a long time back, almost as soon as we returned from India, which was in 1953, I think. I had to wait to publish the Hoogly stories because one of them is based on her life—the one about the English girl and the maharaja’s secretary. It happened when she wa
s in Baroda. Of course, they never married and the child she had was stillborn. All my stories …’

  ‘Yes, but do you recall …’ I am not interested in her aunt. I jog her memory, I toss names and places at her. Did you keep in touch with her, I want to ask. Who were her friends? What sort of a girl was she? Was she as sharp as I imagine she was? What was her life like? Do you know who wrote her that purple letter?

  But she can remember nothing.

  It is too slim a thread to go by, I know and have known all along, but it is all I have. Given my father’s refusal to remember, my mother’s intransigence and Chamu’s lip-smacking judgements, all I can depend upon are the tangential observations of acquaintances.

  She cannot recall the town or the people she met there. Her aunt obviously was peripheral to her life. All she can remember is going to a wedding and seeing the groom getting washed away—but that too she remembers because she wrote about it. The woman you are looking for, was she the bride?