Samskara

by U. R. Ananthamurthy

  But Dasacharya, who had just returned beaming, after filling his belly with uppittu, had an idea. “Bring out the sacred gongs and beat them,” he said. The men, happy at the thought, ran into the household gods’ rooms, brought out the bronze gongs and the conches. The dreadful auspicious din, like the din during the great offerings of flaming camphor, shattered the grim silence of the afternoon like grisly wardrums. For anyone who heard it in the villages five or six miles around, it created the illusion that in Durvasapura it was worship time, that they were making an offering of flaming camphor in the temple and beating the huge temple drum. The vultures looked this way and that, as if astonished; then they unfurled their wings and flew, with rats in their beaks; turned into floating glimmering dots in the sky. The brahmins, tired out, uttering the holy name of Narayana, climbed their front yards, covered their noses with their upper cloths and wiped the sweat off their faces. Sitadevi and Anasuya went to their husbands and begged tearfully: “Let the gold go to hell! Why do we need other people’s property? Please take out the body and get to the rites. Naranappa’s spirit is calling out these vultures.” There was not a breath of wind; the stench stood stagnant in each house, and like a bodyless ghost it troubled everyone—wretched already with heat, hunger and dread. The orthodox brahmins were distraught, as if nothing in lives to come would wash the filth of their day.

  •

  The burning sun climbed the sky. Chandri, sitting in the shade of a tree, was very tired. When her hand fumbled at the plantains in her lap, she thought of Praneshacharya in the temple, fasting and worshipping the god; she couldn’t eat. She was surprised by the sound of gongs and conches in the distance. She looked around. The air was still, not a leaf was stirring. The only moving things were the gently gliding vultures in the clear blue sky. When she saw Praneshacharya pouring over his body another pitcher of water, she thought, “All this trouble is because of me.” And it hurt her to think so. Before she knew it, her hand had peeled the plantains and put them in her mouth. “These things don’t apply to me,” she consoled herself.

  •

  Again and again the obstinate vultures came back and sat on the roofs. The brahmins came out again and again and beat their gongs, blew their conches. The battle was on till evening. But it was the brahmins who got exhausted. In spite of all their humble waiting, Praneshacharya didn’t appear. The thought of another night was unbearable. The agrahara grew dark, and the vultures vanished.

  X

  Praneshacharya waited desperately for the god’s favour, His solution. “Without a proper rite, the dead body is rotting; Maruti, how long is this ordeal going to last?”—he pleaded. “If it shouldn’t be done, give me a sign, at least the flower on the left, please,” he begged. He entreated. He sang devotional love-songs to the god. He became a child, a beloved, a mother. He recalled the holy songs that blamed the Lord, listed His hundred and one faults. The man-sized Monkey-god Maruti just stood still, carrying on His palm the mountain with the life-giving herb that He carried to save the wounded hero in the epic war. Praneshacharya prostrated himself, laying the entire length of his body on the ground, and prayed. It was evening. Night fell. In the lamplight, the flower-decked Maruti didn’t yield; gave neither the right flower nor the left. “I didn’t get the answer in the Books, and didn’t get it here, do I not deserve it then?”—the supplicant doubted himself. “How can I face the people who have put their trust in me?”—he said, mortified. “You’re testing me, teasing me”— he scolded Maruti. As the darkness thickened, he realized it was the darkness of the new-moon night. He tried to persuade Maruti: “Don’t you think it’s my test. Keep in mind the rotting corpse, don’t forget that.” Maruti, unhearing, unyielding, stood there, His profile turned forever towards the mountain on His palm. The Acharya suddenly remembered it was time for his wife’s medicine. His legs had gone numb with all that sitting. He walked out weakly with slow steps.

  As he walked a little, he heard footsteps behind him in the forest dark, and he stopped. The sound of bangles. He listened. “Who’s that?” he asked. And waited.

  “Me,” said Chandri, in an embarrassed low voice.

  Praneshacharya felt strange standing like that all on a sudden with a woman in the dark of the forest. He searched for words. Remembering his own helplessness, overcome with sadness, he stood there murmuring, “Maruti . . . Maruti.”

  Listening to his gentle grief-stricken voice, Chandri suddenly overflowed with compassion. The poor man. Famished, distressed, he had suffered and grown so lean in a single day for me. The poor brahmin. She wanted to hold his feet and offer him her devotion. The next second, she was falling at his feet. It was pitch dark, nothing was visible. As she bent over as if overcome with grief, she didn’t quite fall at his feet. Her breast touched his knee. In the vehemence of her stumbling, the buttons on her blouse caught and tore open. She leaned her head on his thigh and embraced his legs. Overwhelmed with tender feeling, filled with pity at this brahmin who had perhaps never known the pleasure of woman, helpless at her thought that there was no one but him for her in the agrahara— overcome, she wept. Praneshacharya, full of compassion, bewildered by the tight hold of a young female not his own, bent forward to bless her with his hands. His bending hand felt her hot breath, her warm tears; his hair rose in a thrill of tenderness and he caressed her loosened hair. The Sanskrit formula of blessing got stuck in his throat. As his hand played on her hair, Chandri’s intensity doubled. She held his hands tightly and stood up and she pressed them to her breasts now beating away like a pair of doves.

  Touching full breasts he had never touched, Praneshacharya felt faint. As in a dream, he pressed them. As the strength in his legs was ebbing, Chandri sat the Acharya down, holding him close. The Acharya’s hunger, so far unconscious, suddenly raged, and he cried out like a child in distress, “Amma!” Chandri leaned him against her breasts, took the plantains out of her lap, peeled them and fed them to him. Then she took off her sari, spread it on the ground, and lay on it hugging Praneshacharya close to her, weeping, flowing in helpless tears.

  PART TWO

  I

  IT WAS midnight when the Acharya woke up. His head was in Chandri’s lap. His cheek was pressed into her low naked belly. Chandri’s fingers caressed his back, his ears, his head.

  As if he had become a stranger to himself, the Acharya opened his eyes and asked himself: Where am I? How did I get here? What’s this dark? Which forest is this? Who is this woman?

  It felt as though he’d turned over and fallen into his childhood, lying in his mother’s lap and finding rest there after great fatigue. He looked about wonderingly. A night of undying stars, spread out like a peacock’s tail. The constellation of the Seven Sages. Next to the sage Agastya was Arundhati, paragon of faithful wives, twinkling shyly. Below were green grass smells, wet earth, the wild vishnukranti with its sky-blue flowers and the country sarsaparilla, and the smell of a woman’s body-sweat. Darkness, sky, the tranquillity of standing trees. He rubbed his eyes, maybe it’s all a dream. I clean forgot where I came from and where I should go from here, he thought anxiously. He said, “Chandri,” and his wakefulness was complete. In the forest, in the silence, the dark was full of secret whispers. Chirping sounds, from a bush that suddenly appeared outlined like a chariot, a formation of twinkling lightning-bugs. He gazed, he listened, till his eyes were filled with the sights, his ears with the sounds all around him, a formation of fireflies. “Chandri,” he said, touched her belly and sat up.

  Chandri was afraid that Praneshacharya might scold her, despise her. There was also a hope in her that his touch might bear fruit in her body. And a gratefulness that she too might have earned merit. But she didn’t say anything.

  Praneshacharya didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally he got up and said:

  “Chandri, get up. Let’s go. Tomorrow morning when the brahmins gather, we’ll say this happened. You tell them yourself. As for my authority to decide for the agrahara, I have. . . .”

/>   Not knowing what to say, Praneshacharya stood there in confusion.

  “I’ve lost it. If I don’t have the courage to speak tomorrow you must speak out. I’m ready to do the funeral rites myself. I’ve no authority to tell any other brahmin to do them, that’s all.” Having said the words, Praneshacharya felt all his fatigue drop from him.

  •

  They crossed the stream together. Out of embarrassment she let Praneshacharya go ahead, and when she reached the agrahara a little later, she had anxious thoughts: Why is it everything I do turns out this way? I gave the gold out of my good will, and it made nothing but trouble. And now the Acharya is in trouble, trying so hard to get the funeral rites performed right. But Chandri was a natural in pleasure, unaccustomed to self-reproach. As she walked the agrahara street in the dark she remembered—the dark forest—the standing, the bending—the giving, the taking—and it brought her only a sense of worthwhileness, like the fragrance of flowers hidden. The poor Acharya, it may not strike him the same way. Now one should not go back to his verandah and trouble him further. A great good fortune had suddenly rushed into her life. She couldn’t speak of it in broad daylight before those dry brahmin folk as the Acharya asked her to, and expose him to their mercy—she couldn’t do it. But then,—what was she going to do now? It wasn’t right to go to the Acharya again, and she dreaded going to her dead master’s house. What could she do?

  After all, he’d lived with her so long—she said to herself, and plucked up courage. “Let’s go there and see, if I feel strong enough I can sleep on the outer verandah. If not I can go again to the Acharya’s verandah. What else can be done in an emergency?” So arguing with herself she went straight home. She stood under the thatch and listened. Dogs barked tonight like any other night. She started climbing the steps. Her groping hand felt the open door. “Ayyo O God, hope no fox or dog has entered the house and done things to the body. . . .” She felt distressed, forgot her fears, went in swiftly, found by habit the box of matches in the wall-niche and lit the lantern. A horrid stench. Dead rotting rats. She was grief-stricken that she’d left the body orphaned, unprotected, the body of the man who’d antagonized the whole agrahara for her sake. She went upstairs, thinking, “We should have burned some incense and filled the place with sweet smoke.” The dead body was reeking. The belly was swollen, the face of the dead man was grisly, disfigured. She let out a scream and ran out. Her spirit cried out: what’s up there, that thing, that’s not the man who loved her, no no no there’s no connection. Like one possessed, she gripped the lantern and ran a mile all the way to the farmers’ section. She recognized cartman Sheshappa’s house by the white oxen tied up in the yard—he used to deliver eggs to their house. She went in. The oxen reacted to the unfamiliar shape, stood up, breathed out in hisses and tugged at their halters, the dogs barked. Sheshappa got up and came down. Chandri hastily described the situation and said to him, “You must come with your ox-cart and take the dead body to the cremation ground. There’s firewood in the house, we can cremate him.”

  Sheshappa had woken up from a happy sleep after a swig of toddy. He panicked.

  “Chandramma, that can’t be done. Do you want me to go to hell, meddling with a brahmin corpse? Even if you give me all eight kinds of riches, I can’t. Please. If you’re scared, come sleep in this poor man’s house, and go home in the morning,” he said, all courtesy.

  Chandri came out without a word. What was she going to do? Only one thought burned clear: it’s rotting there, that thing, it’s stinking there, its belly swollen. That’s not her lover, Naranappa. It’s neither brahmin nor shudra. A carcass. A stinking rotting carcass.

  She walked straight to the Muslim section. She offered them money. She went to Ahmad Bari, the fish merchant. His late master, Naranappa, had once loaned him money to buy oxen when he was bankrupt. He remembered that, and came at once with his bullock-cart, secretly loaded both the body and the firewood into it, drove to the cremation ground before anyone knew, kindled a flapping flaming fire in the dark night and burned it to ashes—and left, twisting his bullocks’ tails, goading them with various noises to run faster. Chandri wept, came back home, collected a few of her silk saris in a bag, bundled up the cash in the box and the gold ornaments the Acharya had returned, and came out. Suppressing her desire to wake up the Acharya and touch his feet, she decided to catch the morning bus to Kundapura and walked towards the motor route in the forest path with her bundle in her hands.

  II

  Meanwhile, in Parijatapura, in Rich Man Manjayya’s spacious terrace, several young men from four or five agraharas—Shripati, Ganesha, Ganganna, Manjunatha and others—had gathered to rehearse a play. Right in the middle was a harmonium, donated by Naranappa to their drama troupe.

  When he was alive, he had to be present for every play. Without his encouragement, the Parijata Drama Group would never have been born. He was the prime mover; he added some money of his own to what the young fellows got together and bought them “sceneries”—backdrops—from Shivamogge. He also gave them ideas about acting style. In the whole neighbourhood, he alone owned a gramophone. And had with him all the records from Hirannayya’s plays. He would wind up the gramophone and play them all to his young friends. When he heard about the Congress Party here and there, he came to the village and taught the boys the new fashion of Congress uniform, of handspun knee-length shirts, loose pajamas and white caps. Now all the young fellows were in grief over his death. But they were quiet, afraid of the elders. They’d shuttered all the doors, lit Passing Show cigarettes. A rehearsal was on, somewhat half-heartedly. Shripati, who had a passion for dance-drama, was present, though he had no acting part. He loved anything in makeup. While the rehearsal was going on, they also consumed a small wicker tray full of spicy crisp-rice and a vessel full of hot coffee. Thinking of Naranappa now and then, eating the spiced rice and drinking the coffee, they rehearsed their play till midnight. When it ended, Nagaraja winked at Ganesha. Ganesha pinched Manjunatha who did female roles. Manjunatha passed it on to Ganganna of the Malera caste. Ganganna gave Shripati’s dhoti a tug. After these secret “in” signals, the rest of the boys were told that the rehearsal was over for the day, and packed off. When everyone was gone Nagaraja bolted the door, opened the lid of the trunk very importantly and held up two bottles of liquor. He hummed a drinking song from an old play in memory of mentor Naranappa. After that, they put the bottles in a sack; tied up the spiced rice in a banana leaf; carefully, without making a sound, glasses were packed. “Ready?” asked Nagaraja. “Ready,” said the others. One by one, as they went down the stairs, Manjunatha said, “Hold on,” like a bus conductor and put a sliced lemon in his pocket. The young men silently closed the door behind them, and crossed the agrahara. Delighted by their own nefarious activity, they walked in the dark towards the river by the light of Shripati’s torch. “Our guru could down a whole bottle and still play the drum without missing a beat!” said Nagaraja on the way, remembering Naranappa. They came to a large sand-heap, sat on it in a circle, placing the bottle, the glasses, the rice in the centre. They felt the world contained only the five of them; the stars for witness, they wanted to shed the dwarfish Vamana natures of the agrahara and prepare to grow, with the help of liquor, into giant Trivikrama forms. The river gurgled in the silences between their words and assured them of their privacy.

  As the liquor went warmly to his head, Shripati said, his voice breaking, “Our companion, he’s dead.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Nagaraja, his hand reaching for the crisp-rice. “A pillar of our company broken. In this whole area, who kept time like him on the drums?”