A Girl & a River

by K R Usha

  No, I say, she was not the bride. I am certain of that.

  ‘People ask me, or they used to, whether I’d made up my stories, they can’t … couldn’t believe such things could actually happen, but every one of them is true. You know the one about the soldier and the brain fever bird, that was Captain Milcher of the Fifth Dragoons …’

  I hear her out. It’s only fair. I cannot tell her that this is my last trip home and that I am counting on her to tell me things about myself and make me whole. I cannot tell her that I have tried all these years and am now tired of it all. I want to set it at rest and wash my hands of it and never see them again. So I ask the right questions in the fifteen minutes that remain. Her one regret is coming back she says. So was it her aunt’s. They had no idea it would be so cold and rainy and so tough, no servants and what with heat being so dear. The only thing she could do was write about the life she had left behind. She had not married, presumably. There was no ring in evidence and her name had remained the same, which had helped me find her.

  I thank her and bid her goodbye and can see that she is disappointed. She probably expected me to ask her about herself, the avid fan trying to delve into the depths of her writerly imagination. But still, she has had an airing after thirty years and she might not get a chance to talk about her books again, ever.

  It struck me then that I might never find what I was looking for, that I would be dogged forever with those niggling feelings of uncertainty. I had my future ahead of me, and I couldn’t go into it with that frame of mind. I had a life to build, a change of citizenship to effect and three men dangling after me—a Japanese American (it must be sixth sense I think, my prefiguring the Japanese connection); an Italian (it’s true, all that they say about the Latin lover) and an Indian (whom I will definitely dump). It was there in the unreal and vastly removed environs of my university, gluttoning on gangster films and detective fiction that I made up my mind about the Globe Detective Agency, an address in that most official of roads in Bangalore—J.C. Road, named after the last maharaja of Mysore, and wrote to them. It had such a melodramatic feel to it that I began to enjoy my correspondence with them—piecing together the discrete bits of information I had about my family. The first thing I would do on reaching home was to go to J.C. Road and meet the man behind the discreet gun. Once the case was closed I would move on and never look back. I would cut myself loose from the baggage of the past. As for my parents, I was going home to bid them goodbye.

  Twenty-six

  Closure

  The first thing you learn about stories is that they must have a beginning and an end. When I was a child, all stories began, ‘Once upon a time’ and they ended ‘they all lived happily ever after’. As a child too, I remember refusing to get up from my warm cinema seat till ‘The End’ flashed with dramatic reassurance on the screen. People, I now know, are untrustworthy narrators. They are either indifferent or forgetful or they spin things the way it suits them. I have gathered a clutch of stories, about the same person, but each with its own beginning and ending. To the women in the old house, Kaveri was an interesting footnote, a woman who had willed her own end; to Chamu she was the whipping boy in his story of the family that had somehow managed to breast the tape at the finishing line ahead of his own and had got the comeuppance it deserved; she was the ghost who hovered in the background of Ella’s story, never to come to life. To my mother and father she is no story but a life they have endured. To the Brahma Kumari cousin, she was irrelevant—perhaps I should have listened to her and concentrated on God and my studies. But I too have a Kaveri story that deserves an ending. Few stories end happily I know but each deserves closure, for ends to be tied, for the connections to be complete. All I needed now was to lay to rest the aborted narrative so that I could go in peace.

  I have lasted almost three months in my parents’ home without a single quarrel, nothing major that is. My parents too are kinder to each other, I notice. I am none the wiser, no closer to clearing up the debris of the past. I feel more charitably towards them though, especially my father. In these three months I find that familiarity has crept upon me unawares. Possibly it is because their routine is so unchanging, they are so settled in their hole, a square peg and a shapeless pebble abraded to fit the angles of the peg. The associations are most unexpected—waking up to a certain slant of light in the morning, the smell of freshly ground coffee and in the afternoon, asafoetida seasoning in ghee—I must be careful of becoming a child again. Even as I unbend towards them, I cannot stray from my course. My future is elsewhere, I don’t quite have iron in my soul but I can taste the rust on my teeth.

  I have been hard at work. By now T.P. Muralidhar, my local Sam Spade, and I have had several meetings and he assures me that he is making ‘good progress’ and well before I leave he will ‘produce results’. But by now I have given up hope. There is just a month left for me to go back and he has unearthed nothing, though I have been paying regularly for all his false alarms.

  I have not yet told them that this is my last visit home and that I will not be coming back, at least not for a long time, several years perhaps. Every time I begin to tell them, I stop. I cannot bring myself to say it. Perhaps I will not tell them at all but go back and write to them. They are beginning to be openly proud of me, I see that. No, not for another two weeks, my mother was telling someone from her bhajan group the other day. My daughter, you know she is a research associate at Chicago, she’s also had offers from Wall Street as a financial consultant, well she is here for two more weeks and I want to be with her. But being with me meant sitting silently in the same room with me and looking up anxiously every time I got up to go out of it. My parents still have very little to say to each other or to me. Mother has turned religious of late. She has started visiting a nearby ashram with her friends and is part of their bhajan group. My father, of course, has an instinctive suspicion of anything that smacks of the religious. Every morning since I’ve been here, my mother has asked me what I want to eat, so that she can ask the cook to make it. She and the cook spend long hours in the kitchen drying, roasting, grinding and mixing spices for me to take back. The dining room is full of little heaps of ground spices set out to cool before being packed into plastic bags. My mother loves to hold a candle to the mouth of those spice bags and watch the edges melt and blacken and curl. Then she will label each one so that I can distinguish one packet of red-brown powder from another. My father and I have exhausted all conversation in the first few minutes of my visit, all civil conversation that is. I have told him all about my courses—nothing that I haven’t already written about in my letters, but it is a safe topic as he can understand the work I am doing and that sees us through the minimum required conversation. But our long drive to his ancestral house—the house that had disappeared into thin air—has almost wrecked our fragile peace. I have begun to be tart with him again. Domesticity—those little bags of curry powder and shopping, has saved us, my mother and I.

  And then, unexpectedly my Sam Spade—T.P. Muralidhar of the Globe Detective Agency—calls me. He has unearthed the remains of my grandfather’s ‘other’ family. He calls me at home, excitedly, telling me he has located a ‘survivor’. I avoid my mother’s questioning look and go to his office, for much as I disregard my parents, I cannot let them know this. I haven’t been able to convince them that the only way of laying things to rest is by digging them up by the root; or that I am doing it as much for them as for myself.

  The ‘other’ woman, it turns out, returned to her native Japan a long time before my grandfather’s death—I was happy to note that she deserted him. She also left him their three girls. Of my mother’s half sisters, the eldest was untraceable—probably dead and the second one lived abroad and never visited. Muralidhar has located the third one. Her name is Lucky Milton. Lucky Milton! For one moment I almost agreed with my mother that it was best not to know more—she has always maintained that she did not want to know and did not care what happened to her f
ather’s ‘other’ family. She, Lucky, was divorced from this Mr Milton, had no children and lived alone in a flat in one of the by lanes off Double Road and ran a travel agency.

  I had found myself a new travel agent now.

  For the return ticket, I would go to the Milton Travel Agency and deal only with the proprietor. Madam came only on Thursday and Saturday evenings, the girls at the counter informed me. One Thursday went by and there was no sign of Madam. I drove past the crowded lanes parallel to Double Road, where balconies of flats overlooked an open drain, but I could not locate the flat. On two days, a Friday and a Saturday, I found I had ‘work’ in that direction and just dropped in at the agency and though my ticket was ready, I would not take it. Madam would definitely be there on Saturday evening, the girls assured me.

  And once I meet Madam, I decide, I will play it by the ear.

  Come with me when I go to collect my ticket, I tell them. You rarely get out of the house. We will get the ticket, stroll in Cubbon Park, have an early dinner—there is a newly opened Chinese restaurant—and come back home. I don’t know if they like Chinese food and I am sure my mother will want to know why they charge us so much for strange smelling rice, and that the cook could have fixed better at home for one hundredth the price but I won’t let that bother us. Over the soup and the noodles, I will tell them that I have no definite plans to come back, so why don’t they come and visit me instead. Maybe I would add, you could book through this new travel agency; after all it is run by a relative—your sister, I would tell my mother.

  When we enter the office on Saturday evening, she is there. I look in her direction and look away quickly. I don’t want to see her yet, I want to push the moment as long as I can. I go instead to one of the assistants. I fill up a form and she checks all my documents. Then she asks me to see Madam.

  Madam is wearing a nylon sari and in her sleeveless blouse her arms are plump and fair. Her short hair stands stiffly black on her shoulders and her mouth glistens.

  ‘Yes,’ she says and I look into her grey-green eyes.

  She looks at the sheet of paper in front of her and I wait for her eyes to settle on the column that has my address and my mother’s maiden name. I anticipate her reaction. I hope she will start, catch her breath and look up in confusion. Of all the scenarios I have run in my head, this one is my most favoured one—dinner in a setting of Hollywoodian sentimentality, a casual announcement, surprise, disbelief, initial denial and then curiosity, a tearful reunion of sisters. I will have to take them by surprise. All will end well. They will talk about their father, and who knows, perhaps about their mothers.

  She runs a manicured forefinger down the form, not pausing at the column where I have filled out my mother’s maiden name. Her father’s name, including the characteristic family middle name, juxtaposed with another, does not cause her finger to falter. For the first time it strikes me that she too might not know about my mother, or care.

  I feel a rush of anger. Wait a minute, I want to say. That there, the name you so casually ran over, belongs to the woman sitting across the room on your sofa, glancing at your travel brochures, your sister. I am furious to be trapped like this between them—my mother, whose tired, trusting smile I catch across the room, this fat woman across the desk, with spreading hips and cellulite specked arms, and my father, who as usual has refused to come in and is pacing the corridor outside. I feel so helpless, so tightly wound up that my hands and feet tingle; I would so like to be whipped off a string and spun on the ground like a top and whirl my anger away, coming eventually to rest on my side.

  Outside the long glass-fronted windows, I can see the darkening sky and the sudden breeze whipping up the dust into spirals. My father is standing in the driveway leading to the main road, empty today of the usual office traffic, as it is a Saturday. The wind sends his trousers flapping and blows his hair askew and even as I watch, he bends and strikes an instantly recognizable pose. He looks up, squares his shoulders and pats the ground with his bat as he waits for the ball to come down the cement driveway. He watches the ball spin through the air, and as it comes up to him he looks ahead and drives it straight past the bowler, freezing into position with the blade of his bat held in front of him, looking down to see whether his feet are placed correctly; and I watch his eyes as they follow the ball all the way as it goes across the ground for a four.

  As I follow the ball to the boundary I see the crowd leap to its feet and roar, I see the boy in the sixty-year old man, I see a life lost and reclaimed, a life given him in dribbles. I sense the shadows of other worlds, worlds I have not known and have no inkling of, except that I feel their chill and shiver in their gloom, out of their sun.

  Then I see my mother. She is poking in the ditch outside and has come up with a plant, something she will plant in our garden no doubt. She catches my father’s eye just as he strikes the ball and smiles.

  I remember once, in the days when I had swilled freshly with self-righteous anger, I had asked him what he had done for his sister, and he had replied—I did the only thing I could, I married her daughter. And I had had the grace to feel ashamed.

  How audacious one gets, I thought, when assured of love—love unchanging and unconditional.

  When you have lived through things, he has tried to tell me, you cannot sum them up, for then you would be reducing your life to nothing and there would be no hope.

  How can I think that it is all a matter of air space and road lengths, of airports and bus terminals, of distances in the sky and kilometres on land? Wherever I go I will carry them all with me, a book with underlined sentences and pleas in the margin, my lost schoolboy of a father, my ostrich-with-its-head-in-the-sand mother, even this raddled woman across the table, and of course, their taint of madness.

  When I had first arrived at Chicago, I had been terribly homesick but loathe to admit it in my letters. I had written about the weather, my courses, the food and the friends I never had. In the first package my mother sent me from home, among the pickles and the pudis, there were four rolls of incense sticks, the ones that were always lit at home, morning and evening. I have been lighting one every day in my room over the years and each day, as their mild fragrance spreads through the air, I bless the manufacturers of that brand of incense sticks for their constant hearts or their lack of enterprise, whichever it is, for the perfume has remained unchanged in the past twenty years. And each day I breathe deep the fragrance of my childhood, the subtly invading perfume which has now become the odour of my body.

  Lucky Milton is holding my ticket out to me. I thank her with a smile and put it into my bag. I pat the sleeping dogs and bid them lie. Outside, it has grown dark. My father has stopped playing cricket and come home. My mother has started to look anxious again, and is reminding me to check whether something or the other is in order.

  ‘No time for a walk,’ I say and see them staring at me because my voice is trembling. I clear my throat. ‘Let’s go straight for dinner.’

  Acknowledgements

  This book is a work of fiction that owes much to family reminiscences and lore. I thank all the members of my family—immediate and extended—for making the effort to remember and answering my questions patiently.

  Of my many readings, I owe a special debt to Swatantra Senani Talakere Subramanya (jivana mattu sadhanegalu), by T S Visweswaria; Modern Mysore: From the Coronation of Chamaraja Wodeyar X to the Present Time, by M Shama Rao; Mother India, by Katherine Mayo; The Dust in the Balance: British Women in India, 1905-1945, by Pat Barr; Netaji: The Man, Reminiscences, by Dilip Kumar Roy; and the collected letters and articles that appeared in Young India, 1927–1929.

  Read More in Penguin

  The Chosen

  Usha K.R.

  Her familiar existence disrupted after her father’s death, Nagaratna is forced to move from her village to the semi-squalid environs of Vitthala Colony in the city of Bangalore, where her brother lives. A former village that has been engulfed by the expanding metrop
olis, Vitthala Colony retains some of the ‘primitive’ characteristics of a south Indian village. It is the bastion of the lesser tradition, for here live Plague-amma, the goddess who was created when an epidemic of plague swept the land, and Nallikai Swami, a no-nonsense swami named after the four gooseberry trees in his compound.

  Trapped in this world with people whom she sees as leading truncated lives, people with thickened sensibilities and no hope, Nagaratna yearns for ‘something uncluttered and noble and fulfilling’. And then a job in an exclusive ashram school allows her to glimpse a world where the human state of grace has been restored, a school emblematic of the restraint and good taste inculcated by a more sophisticated awareness … Nagaratna is transfigured by the life it offers and the people she meets, and most importantly, by the love she believes she has found.

  Set in southern India, shifting between Bangalore and a fictional French protectorate on the western coast where the ashram is located, The Chosen tells the compelling story of a young woman torn between who she is and who she wants to be.

  Fiction

  India Rs 295

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