Dasacharya lived entirely on the meals that brahmins get at death-rites and anniversaries. He would walk ten miles for such a meal any day. He complained: “As you all know, we let him stay in our agrahara, so for two whole years we didn’t get calls for any meal or banquet. If we do the rites for him now or anything rash like that, no one will ever invite us for a brahmin meal. But then we can’t keep his dead body uncremated here in the agrahara either, and fast forever. This is a terrible dilemma. Praneshacharya should tell us precisely what’s right and what’s wrong. Who in our sect can dispute his word?”
For Durgabhatta, this was an internal issue. He sat unconcerned in his place, ogling Chandri. For the first time his connoisseur eyes had the chance to appraise this precious object which did not normally stir out of the house, this choice object that Naranappa had brought from Kundapura. A real “sharp” type, exactly as described in Vatsyayana’s manual of love—look at her, toes longer than the big toe, just as the Love Manual says. Look at those breasts. In sex she’s the type who sucks the male dry. Her eyes, which should be fickle, are now misty with grief and fear, but she looks good that way. Like Matsyagandhi, the Fisherwoman in the Ravi Varma print hung up in Durgabhatta’s bedroom, shyly trying to hide her breasts bursting through her poor rag of a sari. The same eyes and nose: no wonder Naranappa threw away the worship-stone for her, ate taboo meat and drank taboo liquor. One wonders at his daring. One remembers Jagannatha the brahmin poet who married the Muslim girl, and his verses about the alien’s breasts. If Praneshacharya were not present, if Naranappa weren’t lying dead right there, he would have happily quoted the stanza and expanded on it even to these barren brahmins. “To the lustful”—that is, to Naranappa and his like—“there’s no fear, no shame,” as the saying goes.
Noticing that the audience was silent, Durgabhatta spoke up:
“We’ve anyway said whatever needs to be said. What’s the use of raking up dead men’s faults? Let Praneshacharya speak. He is a guru, for me as for you, regardless of what Garudacharya may say in his passion.”
Praneshacharya was weighing every word, knowing full well that the protection of the entire brahmin agrahara was now on his shoulders. He spoke haltingly.
“Garuda said: an oath stands between him and Naranappa. Yet the Books of Law have ways of absolving such oaths—you can perform a rite of absolution, give away a cow, make a pilgrimage. But this is an expensive matter, and I’ve no right to ask anyone to spend his money. And as for the question raised by Lakshmana and Dasa and others that Naranappa didn’t behave as a well-born brahmin, that he’s a smear on the good name of the agrahara, it’s a deep question—I have no clear answer. For one thing, he may have rejected brahminhood, but brahminhood never left him. No one ever excommunicated him officially. He didn’t die an outcaste; so he remains a brahmin in his death. Only another brahmin has any right to touch his body. If we let someone else do it, we’d be sullying our brahminhood. Yet I hesitate, I can’t tell you dogmatically: go ahead with the rite. I hesitate because you’ve all seen the way he lived. What shall we do? What do the Law Books really say, is there any real absolution for such violations? . . .”
Suddenly Chandri did something that stunned the brahmins. She moved forward to stand in the front courtyard. They couldn’t believe their own eyes: Chandri loosened her four-strand gold chain, her thick bracelet, her bangles, and placed them all in a heap before Praneshacharya. She mumbled something about all this jewellery being there for the expenses of the rite, and went back to stand in her place.
The women calculated swiftly: that heap of gold was worth at least two thousand rupees. One after another, the wives scanned their husbands’ faces. The brahmins bowed their heads: they were afraid, fearful that the lust for gold might destroy brahmin purity. But in the heart of every one of them flashed the question: if some other brahmin should perform the final rite for Naranappa, he might keep his brahminhood and yet put all that gold on his wife’s neck. The new reason inflamed further the jealous hatred between Lakshmana and Garuda: “Suppose this wretch should rake in all that gold giving a poor starving cow as a token gift, insuring both the goods of this world and the other?” Durgabhatta said to himself: “If these Madhvas get tempted and cremate Naranappa, I’ll roam the towns, spread the news, expose these so-called brahmins.” The eyes of the poorer brahmins like Dasa grew moist, their mouths watered. Would Garuda and Lakshmana let anyone else do the rites?
Praneshacharya grew anxious. Why did Chandri spoil everything with her good intentions?
Every brahmin present was afraid that someone else might be tempted to agree, and vied with the others in lurid accounts of Naranappa’s misdeeds—things done not to them but always to others.
“Who induced Garuda’s son to run away from home and join the army? Naranappa, who else? Praneshacharya had taught the boy the Vedic scriptures, but what mattered finally was only Naranappa’s word. That fellow was hell-bent on corrupting our young people . . .”
“Look at poor Lakshmana’s son-in-law now. Lakshmana picks an orphan, nurses him, brings him up and gives his daughter in marriage to him—then Naranappa comes along and turns the young fellow’s head. You hardly see him here once in a month.”
“And then those fish in the temple-pond. For generations they were dedicated to Lord Ganesha. People believe that anyone who catches the sacred fish will vomit blood and die. But this outcaste scoundrel didn’t care two hoots, he got together his Muslim gang, dynamited the tank and killed off god’s own fish. Now even low-caste folk go there and fish. The rascal undermined all good brahmin influence on the others, he saw to it. And then, he wasn’t content with ruining our agrahara, he had to go and spoil the boys of Parijatapura too, make them run after dramas and shows.”
“The casteless scoundrel should have been excommunicated, what do you say?”
“How could that be Garuda? He threatened to become a Muslim. On the eleventh day of the moon, when every brahmin was fasting, he brought in Muslims to the agrahara and feasted them. He said, ‘Try and excommunicate me now. I’ll become a Muslim, I’ll get you all tied to pillars and cram cow’s flesh into your mouths and see to it personally that your sacred brahminism is ground into the mud.’ He said that. If he had really become a Muslim no law could have thrown him out of the brahmin agrahara. We would have had to leave. Even Praneshacharya kept quiet then, his hands were tied too.”
Dasacharya put in his last word. He was upset he’d had to get up from his meal before he’d a chance to taste one morsel of his mango-rice. He was hungry.
“After his father’s death, no brahmin here got a taste of that jackfruit in his backyard—and it used to taste like honey.”
The women kept staring at the heap of gold and they were disappointed by their husbands’ words. Garuda’s wife, Sita, was outraged by the way Lakshmana had shot his mouth off about her son joining the army. What right did he have to talk about her son? Lakshmana’s wife, Anasuya, was outraged by Garuda talking about her son-in-law being corrupted—what right did he have?
Thinking what an ordeal this whole affair was getting to be, Praneshacharya said almost in soliloquy:
“What’s the way out now? Can we just fold our arms and stare at a dead body laid out in the agrahara? According to ancient custom, until the body is properly removed there can be no worship, no bathing, no prayers, no food, nothing. And, because he was not excommunicated, no one but a brahmin can touch his body.”
“Not excommunicating him at the right time—that’s the cause of all this mess,” said Garuda, who for years had screamed for an excommunication. He got his chance now to say, “I-told-you-so, you-didn’t-listen-to-me.”
The brahmins countered him as one man: “Yes, yes, if he had actually become a Muslim, we’d have had to leave the polluted agrahara; there’d have been no two ways about it.”
Dasa, who had meanwhile been imagining the hardship of a whole day without food, suddenly came out with an idea. He stood up alertly and said:
<
br /> “I have heard that Naranappa was very friendly with the brahmins of Parijatapura. They ate and hobnobbed together. Why don’t we ask them? Their orthodoxy is not as strict as ours, anyway.”
Parijatapura’s brahmins were Smartas, not quite out of the upper set, their lines being a little mixed. Once upon a time some lecher got one of their widows pregnant and their agrahara tried to hush it up. The rumour was that the guru at Shringeri heard of it and excommunicated the whole colony. On the whole the brahmins of Parijatapura were pleasure-lovers, not so crazy about orthodoxy and strict rules; they were experts at running betelnut farms, and rich too. So, Durgabhatta had a soft spot for the whole clan; furthermore, he was a Smarta himself. He had secretly eaten their flat-rice and uppittu and drunk their coffee. He was not brazen enough to eat a whole meal with them, that’s all.
Furthermore, he was fascinated by their widows who didn’t shave their heads and grew their hair long, who even chewed betel leaf and reddened their mouths. He got into quite a rage at Dasacharya— “Look at this Madhva’s gall, though he can’t afford a morning meal.” He stood up and said:
“Look, that’s a foul thing to say. You may think them low hybrid brahmins, but they don’t think so themselves. If your sect will be polluted by laying hands on your own dead man, wouldn’t it pollute them worse? Go ahead, be cheeky and ask them—you’ll get an earful. Do you know that Manjayya of Parijatapura has enough money to buy up every man’s son here?”
Praneshacharya tried to pacify Durgabhatta’s anger.
“You’re quite right. It’s not truly brahminical to get someone else to do what you don’t do yourself. But friendship is as strong a bond as blood, isn’t it? If they and Naranappa were friends, don’t you think they should be told of their good friend’s death?”
Durgabhatta said, “Agreed, Acharya. The brahminism of your entire sect is in your hands. Your burden is great. Who can go against what you decide?” He had spoken all he felt. He didn’t speak again.
The question of the gold ornaments came up again. If the Parijatapura people chose to perform the rites, shouldn’t the gold go to them? Lakshmana’s wife, Anasuya, could not bear the thought of her sister’s rightful jewels falling into the hands of some hybrid brahmin in the next village. Unable to contain herself any more, she blurted out: “Who does she think she is? If things were straight, they should be around my sister’s neck.” Then she broke into sobs. Lakshmana felt the tightness of his wife’s words, but he didn’t want his status as a husband to be lowered in public. So he snarled, “You shut up now. Why are you prating in an assembly of menfolk?”
Garuda, angry now, thundered: “What kind of talk is this? According to the decree of the Dharmasthala guru, this gold belongs to me.”
Wearily Praneshacharya consoled them.
“Be patient. What’s before us is a dead body waiting to be cremated. About the gold—leave the decision to me. First send someone to Parijatapura with the news. If they decide by themselves to perform the rites, let them.”
Then he stood up and said, “You may go now. I’ll look into Manu and other texts. I’ll see if there’s a way out of this dilemma.” Chandri pulled her sari-end over her head respectfully, and looked imploringly at the Acharya.
II
There were cockroaches in the buttermilk shelves, fat rats in the store-room. In the middle room, ritually washed saris and clothes hung out on a rope stretched for a clothes-line. Fresh pappadams, fries, and marinated red peppers spread out to dry on the verandah mat. Sacred balsam plants in the backyard. These were common to all the houses in the agrahara. The differences were only in the flowering trees in the backyards: Bhimacharya had parijata, Padmanabhacharya had a jasmine bush, Lakshmana had the ember-champak, Garuda had red ranja, Dasa had white mandara. Durgabhatta had the conch-flower and the bilva leaf for Shiva-worship. The brahmins went to each other’s yards each morning to get flowers for worship and to ask after each other’s welfare. But the flowers that bloomed in Naranappa’s yard were reserved solely for Chandri’s hair and for a vase in the bedroom. As if that wasn’t provocative enough, right in his front yard grew a bush, a favourite of snakes, with flowers unfit for any god’s crown—the night-queen bush. In the darkness of night, the bush was thickly clustered with flowers, invading the night like some raging lust, pouring forth its nocturnal fragrance. The agrahara writhed in its hold as in the grip of a magic serpent-binding spell. People with delicate nostrils complained of headaches, walked about with their dhotis held to their noses. Some clever fellows even said Naranappa had grown the bush to guard with snakes the gold he had gathered. While the auspicious brahmin wives, with their dwarfish braids and withered faces, wore mandara and jasmine, Chandri wore her black-snake hair coiled in a knot and wore the flowers of the ember-champak and the heady fragrant screw-pine. All day the smells were gentle and tranquil, the sandalpaste on the brahmins’ bodies and the soft fragrance of parijata and other such flowers. But when it grew dark, the night-queen reigned over the agrahara.
The jackfruit and mango in the backyard of each house tasted different from all the others. The fruit and flower were distributed, according to the saying: “Share fruit and eat it, share flowers and wear them.” Only Lakshmana was sneaky, he moved out half the yield of his trees and sold it to the Konkani shopkeepers. His was a niggard’s spirit. Whenever his wife’s people came visiting, he watched his wife’s hands with the eyes of a hawk—never sure when or what she was passing on to her mother’s house. In the hot months every house put out kosumbari-salads and sweet fruit-drinks; in the eighth month they invited each other for lamp-offerings. Naranappa was the only exception to all these exchanges. A total of ten houses stood on either side of the agrahara street. Naranappa’s house, bigger than the others, stood at one end. The Tunga river flowed close to the backyards of the houses on one side of the street, with steps to get down to the water, steps built by some pious soul long ago. In the rainy month the river would rise, roar for three or four days, making as if she was going to rush into the agrahara; offer a carnival of swirls and water-noises for the eyes and ears of children, and then subside. By mid-summer she would dry to a mere rustle, a trickle of three strands of water. Then the brahmins raised green and yellow cucumber or watermelon in the sand-bank as vegetables for rainy days. All twelve months of the year colourful cucumbers hung from the ceiling, wrapped in banana-fibre. In the rainy season, they used cucumber for everything, curry, mash, or soup made with the seeds; and like pregnant women, the brahmins longed for the soups of sour mango-mash. All twelve months of the year, they had vows to keep; they had calls for ritual meals occasioned by deaths, weddings, young boys’ initiations. On big festival days, like the day of the annual temple celebrations or the death-anniversary of the Great Commentator, there would be a feast in the monastery thirty miles away. The brahmins’ lives ran smoothly in this annual cycle of appointments.
The name of the agrahara was Durvasapura. There was a place-legend about it. Right in the middle of the flowing Tunga river stood an island-like hillock, overgrown with a knot of trees. They believed Sage Durvasa still performed his penance on it. In the Second Aeon of the cycle of time, for a short while, the five Pandava brothers had lived ten miles from here, in a place called Kaimara. Once their wife Draupadi had wanted to go for a swim in the water. Bhima, a husband who fulfilled every whim of his wife, had dammed up the Tunga river for her. When Sage Durvasa woke up in the morning and looked for water for his bath and prayers, there wasn’t any in his part of the Tunga. He got angry. But Dharmaraja, the eldest, with his divine vision, could see what was happening, and advised his rash brother Bhima to do something about it. Bhima, Son of the Wind-god, forever obedient to this elder brother’s words, broke the dam in three places and let the water flow. That’s why even today from the Kaimara dam on, the river flows in three strands. The brahmins of Durvasapura often say to their neighbouring agraharas: on the twelfth day of the moon, early in the morning, any truly pious man could hear the co
nch of Sage Durvasa from his clump of trees. But the brahmins of the agrahara never made any crude claims that they themselves had ever heard the sound of that conch.
So, the agrahara had become famous in all ten directions—because of its legends, and also because of Praneshacharya, the great ascetic, “Crest-Jewel of Vedic Learning,” who had settled down there, and certainly because of that scoundrel Naranappa. On special occasions like the birth-anniversary of Lord Rama, people mobbed the place from the neighbouring agraharas to hear Praneshacharya’s ancient holy tales. Though Naranappa was a problem, the Acharya nursed his invalid wife to uphold the great mercy of god, bore up with Naranappa’s misdeeds, dispersed little by little the darkness in the brahmins’ heads filled with chants they did not understand. His duties in this world grew lighter and more fragrant like sandalwood rubbed daily on stone.
•
The agrahara street was hot, so hot you could pop corn on it. The brahmins walked through it, weak with hunger, their heads covered with their upper cloth; they crossed the three-pronged river and entered the cool forest to reach Parijatapura after an hour’s trudging. The green of the betelnut grove lifted the earth’s coolness to the heat of the sky. In the airless atmosphere the trees were still. Hot dust burned the brahmins’ feet. Invoking Lord Narayana’s name, they entered Manjayya’s house in which they had never set foot before. Manjayya, a rich man shrewd in worldly affairs, was writing accounts. He spoke loudly and offered right and proper courtesies.
“Oh oh oh, the entire brahmin clan seems to have found its way here. Please come in, please be good enough to sit down. Wouldn’t you like to relax a bit, maybe wash your feet? . . . Look here, bring some plantains for the guests, will you?”
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