THE PUPPETEERS OF PALEM

by Komarraju, Sharath

Lakshmi set a little steel bowl down with a clang. ‘You don’t feel he should tell us the reason? You’re so meek!’

  Her mother looked up at her, smiled faintly, and resumed scrubbing.

  ‘Hmph! Meek, meek meek! If I were you, I would have demanded to know the reason why he is depriving his little girl of something she loves so much.’ Lakshmi glanced at her mother surreptitiously, to see if her tone affected her. When her mother did not react, she said mournfully, ‘Oh, Amma, why does he do things like this?’

  ‘Lakshmi!’ Her father’s voice came from his room.

  Mother and daughter traded glances. The mother nodded in the direction of the room, the daughter shook her head.

  ‘Lakshmi!’

  ‘Haan, Nanna.’

  ‘Get me some amrutanjanam, my girl, please.’

  Nanna never said please normally, except when he pretended to be normal. Lakshmi sighed, washed her hands, got up and took the amrutanjanam bottle from the shelf where the photo of Lord Krishna sat, garlanded. Before she went into her father’s room, she stopped to recite a quick prayer to the lord.

  ‘Lakshmi…’

  ‘Coming, Nanna.’

  He held his hand out for the bottle. When she placed it in his hand and turned to go, he said slowly, ‘Lakshmi.’

  She stopped at the door, one hand on the edge of the doorway, her back to him.

  ‘We cannot always do things that we love, my girl.’

  She did not say anything. She could tell he was not finished.

  ‘I know how much you love cycling. But you’re not a little girl any more. You’re a big girl. A grown-up. Understand?’

  She made a movement of her head to say she understood.

  ‘Big girls don’t ride their cycles to school,’ he said.

  She repeated the movement of her head.

  ‘Did you do your homework?’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Good. It’s late now. Go and sleep. You have to wake up early for school tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, Nanna.’

  She pulled out the mat from the attic and spread it on the floor. She threw the pillow on it and lay down on her side, her arm folded under her head. You’re a big girl now. What sort of pathetic reason was that? Everyone in the village said Jalandharachari Sir was a wise old man, but in her mind, going by what had happened tonight, she thought he was also an extremely unreasonable old man.

  It was only after a few months had passed that she understood what her father had meant. She noticed that girls in her class were growing bigger. Not taller, but bigger, in some strange manner. And while girls grew bigger, boys grew taller. Over the space of one school year, all the boys, who had until that year been shorter than them, had outgrown them.

  She had thought she would deeply resent this sudden shrinking down of her person in the eyes of the boys—boys she had bossed around all these years—but to her surprise, she found there was a queer pleasure in being smaller. All her life she had felt being strong and independent were the virtues to aspire to, while being meek and submissive were the vilest of vices. But now, she could see the pull in being meek. She could feel the attraction in being submissive. In a way, she was beginning to understand her mother.

  She came home one day and chirped excitedly to her mother about how Mahender Reddy gave her a peacock feather to put in her notebook. ‘If you keep it in your notebook for two years and don’t open it even once, it will grow into a full feather,’ she informed her mother grandly. ‘I am the only girl in the class Mahender Reddy even talks to. I think he likes me.’ And while her mother smiled at her, combed her hair, and cautioned her not to accept things from other people now on, her father’s face clouded over in worry.

  Lakshmi wondered why.

  She had all her questions answered when she moved to the town for her Intermediate studies. Her father had made a big scene before she left, demanding to know why a girl needed to study after her schooling was completed, but she cajoled and cried and blackmailed him into submission. She also promised him that she would not do anything that would ‘blacken his name’.

  She met boys in college, of course. Hers was a girls’ college (her father would never have said yes if that were not the case), but she found out quite early in the year that the boys’ college was not far off. And every day, before lectures began, then at lunch time, and at the end of the day’s lessons, the front gate would be smattered with boys of all kinds—tall ones, short ones, thin ones, fat ones, ones with glasses and ones without, but all of them had two things in common. All of them wore bell-bottomed pants and inserted shirts, and all of them had neatly combed hair that positively dripped with oil. A pocket comb and a mirror were every young man’s prized possessions.

  The English medium of teaching presented its challenges, but it helped that the English-educated among her classmates were not that great at the language either. She struggled through the first month, coped better in the second and third, and started to excel from the fourth. Economics and Civics were her main subjects, but her favourite continued to be Telugu. At nights, she yearned to hear her father’s voice as he had read out poems from the Gita to her. To her ears, her own voice sounded hollow and devoid of any spiritualism whatsoever.

  She found that she interested men more than the other girls in her class. Some of them walked up to her and handed her love letters, rather apologetically. Some of them gave her flowers (none gave peacock feathers). Some of them informed her there was a new movie and that they would be privileged to take her along. But her mother had warned her that men needed only an inch of permission and they would be all over you. That they grovelled only as long as you said no. Besides, there was also that serious matter of her promise to her father that she would not ‘blacken his name’.

  If she went to a movie or accepted a flower from one of these men, she knew it wouldn’t be long before she would blacken her father’s name. She did not trust these men, but she did not trust herself either.

  She went back to Palem every six months, and for festivals. Every time she went back, she felt more and more like an outsider. First, there were matters of simple amenities. The college in town had fans and clean bathrooms and running water (if salty) and electricity. Coming back to lanterns, petromax lights and dim twenty-watt bulbs was depressing. Then there were matters to do with the people themselves. Everyone in town was so much more forward. They talked of important things like what was going to happen to the country, the role of youth, India’s place in world politics and such things. Over here, all anyone talked about was their farm and their cattle and their house. People in Palem, she decided, lacked the big picture.

  It was when she came home after completing her first year at college that her mother said to her one day after dinner, ‘Lakshmi, Avadhanayya was here yesterday.’

  Lakshmi looked up from her book (A critical review of Shakespeare’s Othello for Young English Readers) and sighed. She already knew where this conversation was going to go. She sneered and said, ‘Amma, how many times should I tell you? He is old enough to be my father.’

  ‘Lakshmi,’ her mother said. ‘You shouldn’t talk about men like that.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Lakshmi immediately. ‘Amma, I used to go to his house to play. I call him—everyone my age calls him—Avadhani Mama.’

  ‘So? So what?’

  ‘So, nothing. I don’t want to get married to someone who is so much older than me.’

  ‘But Lakshmi, do you know how wealthy he is?’

  ‘Amma…’

  Her mother did not look up, but her lips pursed in visible annoyance. ‘Do you know how much older than me your father is?’

  ‘Amma,’ Lakshmi said, ‘I want a man, not an uncle.’

  ‘He is not that old. Men mature later than women, my dear. An older man will take good care of you.’

  ‘I am not interested.’

  ‘Arey, but why?’

  Lakshmi put her book away and leaned towards her mother. ‘Mother, I’ve never l
ooked at him that way. I’ve never really… liked him. Besides, I am not interested in living in Palem all my life. I am going to study further and get a job.’

  Her mother opened her mouth in shock.

  Lakshmi gave her a sweet smile and went back to her book.

  It was on that very evening (fate had a way of rubbing it in) that she saw him. He came with a bundle of clothes on his back and a roll of tobacco between his lips, his blue lungi folded at his thighs. He knocked on the door and called out, ‘Amma, clothes!’

  She looked at him without betraying any recognition. But his eyes, so wide open that they were more white than black, stared unashamedly at her. She was about to look away and point the rascal to the living room corner where he should put the bundle and leave, when she suddenly saw something glint in the afternoon sun. On his chest was a pendant made of sheet metal, carved out in the shape of a tiger’s claw. In school, everyone used to call him Puligoru Sanga. She looked closely at the necklace again, at the twine thread that dived twice through the holes on either side of the claw, at the claw itself, which looked so much like one side of a funny man’s moustache, at the broad, hard, granite-like surface it lay against.

  She remembered it to be much larger than it appeared now. Back then he used to lug it around wherever he went, like a small calf tied to a plough. It used to sit there on his chest, extending almost from one nipple to the other, advertising him wherever he went. But now, it needed the sun to draw attention to it. The sun, and Sanga’s broad chest. Now his chest itself seemed to advertise his pendant. It embedded itself obediently in the middle of his chest, looking small and insignificant.

  She had never known anything about him but his name. He had been one of the shorter boys in school and always the dullest. In every test, in every quiz, every year, one thing in her class stayed constant—Puligoru Sanga came last. He had also been lanky to the point of malnourishment back then. But now he had grown—in every sense of the word.

  Her gaze travelled up his chest and into his eyes. She had never looked into his eyes before. In fact, she had not looked into any man’s eyes this closely before. There was a strange air of innocence about them—unblinking and wide but moist and almost, it seemed to her, on the verge of welling up. She caught his gaze and held it powerfully, as though she were shaking him by the wide, ox-like shoulders, confident that he would be the first to pull away.

  He was. Wrenching his eyes away from hers down to the ground with a strength of effort that she could see, he mumbled, ‘How are you, Lachamma?’

  Lachamma. Of course. He might have been Puligoru Sanga back in school, but now he was a washerman. And she—she was the daughter of Jalandharachari, the Telugu teacher, head of one of the two Brahmin families in the village. He might have called her Lachi when they were both in school (did he… she couldn’t remember), but now it had to be Lachamma. And she, the superior Brahmin lady, would call him by his name and order him around.

  She stepped aside and pointed him to the corner. She did not speak to him. She watched him twist the bundle of clothes off his back onto the floor. She saw the thin film of sweat that covered his body and made it shine like an oiled bronze statue. She watched the hem of his lungi stick to his thighs and drag itself up reluctantly as he bent down. She noticed the particles of sand that stuck to his body here and there, refusing to let go.

  He walked out of the room without another look at her, and she closed the door behind him with a decisive clip. It was then that she decided she would make him call her Lachi once again. She would give anything to hear those thin lips move and make the sound of her name—yes, anything—even her proudly proclaimed plan of studying in the city and getting a job and going away from Palem forever.

  He did say her name the way she wanted it, eight days later, on the banks of Ellamma Cheruvu, above the croaking of the frogs and the chirping of the crickets, when she straddled him into the dust, had her teeth dug into his neck and her finger coiled around his pendant, so hard that she drew blood on both.

  He drew blood from her too, that night.

  And when she rolled off him and they lay beside each other, looking up at the stars and listening to their breaths gradually die down amid the other sounds of the night, he asked in a whisper, ‘Will your father agree?’

  He did not. ‘If she marries him,’ he told her mother loudly enough so that she could hear, ‘tell her that I will be dead to her. And she will be dead to me. Do you understand? You had one job—to bring up a good, well-behaved daughter—and you failed in that one job. Shame on you!’

  Lakshmi came out and said simply, ‘Nanna, I am going to marry him.’

  ‘Wait, Lakshmi,’ her mother said.

  Her father turned to her, stared at her for a second, then turned back to his wife and slapped her. ‘Did you hear? Did you hear what she said?’

  Her mother lay sobbing on the floor, her palm to her cheek, and somehow managed to nod.

  ‘How dare she,’ her father went on. ‘She does not care about us, Purna. She would run away with that washerman even if you and I are going to die.’

  Lakshmi walked to her mother and helped her up on her feet. She faced her father and said, ‘Nothing you say will stop me, Nanna. I’ve made my decision.’

  And as she turned to go back into the bedroom, she heard her father hiss, ‘He… he will make you miserable, Lakshmi. Listen to me. He will make you miserable.’

  She stopped at the door, looked back at her father. ‘Are you warning me, Nanna? Or are you wishing it would happen?’

  ‘I… I am cursing you!’ He supported himself against the cot with one hand and raised the other at her. ‘If a Brahmin’s curse means anything, if I have gathered any good deeds in my life, I am using all of them to curse you.’ His body started to shake, as if about to topple over in fury. ‘May you live a miserable, miserable life with that man. In return for all the misery you’ve caused me and your mother.’

  Lakshmi could not bring herself to swallow her disgust and look her father in the eye. She arrested the lowering motion of her head and cocked it up straight. With a single firm nod, she walked into the room and started packing.

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Diary of Sonali Rao

  March 30, 2002

  It is loud.

  I thought it was loud when it first hit me, the day the boys dug that thing up at the Shiva lingam. One moment everything was quiet as death around me, and then suddenly, I was bombarded with sounds—with whispers, like a thousand people speaking at the same time; with buzzes, like someone had thrown a hundred stones at the hives up the road; with drones, like all the mosquitoes in Ellamma Cheruvu taking wing at once. It was a lot of noise. I almost thought I was going to die a second time.

  But slowly, the incoherent sounds died down to a thin, background whine, and the whispers got louder. I thought they were random at first, but it didn’t take long for patterns to emerge.

  And I started to see things too. It’s hard to explain to ‘normal’ humans exactly what I see. The only way I can explain is to use the example of television. It is as if I see a scene from a movie being played out in front of my eyes, over and over again, by people I know, people in Palem. And somehow, I know that these incidents have not happened yet. In short, yes, I see the future.

  But I can also give these future incidents as dreams to other people, and allow them to change them as they see fit. Some of them do, some of them don’t. But once a dream is planted, and once the person I’ve given it to has seen it and changed it, it will come to pass. Yes, I could give it to another man and he would change it in some other way. I could give it to a third man and he would tinker with it differently. I could keep giving the same dream to as many people as I could so that eventually, one of them would change it the way I wanted it to unfold. So in a sense, you could say the people of Palem are puppet-masters of their own futures, and I, the master of the puppeteers.

  It took me a few days to realize all this, you know, and
only then I knew how much power I had in my hands. I could only see two or three minds at a time, but that was enough to change the future of Palem however I wanted it. But power did not interest me. What I wanted—what I craved for—was revenge.

  Over the next few days, it was not hard to arrange for Aravind’s father to smash his head against the lingam and bleed to death. It was only a matter of two or three dreams to convince Chotu’s father that suicide—and the killing of his wife—was the only way out of his guilt. I had something special in mind for Ramana’s brother, because by now you see I was beginning to enjoy myself… So I had his legs bitten off by that langur that they used to hunt down the monkeys (monkeys have very vivid dreams too, I found out). Well, he was no more than a monkey. And Sarayu’s father, well, I didn’t have to touch him. He saw these three deaths and hung himself before I could get my hands on him.

  All this time I was too busy—too taken up with the delight of revenge, I should say—to notice that the villagers had begun to sleep for a little longer than usual. It was only after Sarayu’s father’s death and when I set my sights on the last piece on my meal—yes, the juiciest, the most delicious part of my meal—that it struck me. Someone else had the same powers as I did. Someone else was doing the same thing as I was doing, but he was doing it on a bigger scale, to more people than I could. And soon as I thought that, he sprang up in my consciousness, arms splayed apart like the devil, that same smile that had played on his lips that night, when he peeked in through the door.

  I tried getting at him, but he was always one step ahead of me. Every time I tried sending out a dream, I would find the subject already taken. He seemed to have more control over a larger number of people than I did. I could see the dreams he sent to people, dreams that effectively blocked me out of his future. I had no chance with him watching my every move, and with him in control of the whole village. But I lay in wait all the same, patiently. He was human. He had to sleep sometime.

  He did, and I pounced at the opportunity to make him write a letter to the five kids asking them to come back to Palem. I gave the dream to Sarayu and made it seem to her that it was her illiterate father who was writing the letter, knowing that she would will him to write. You see, by then, I had gotten the hang of what sort of dreams I should give to whom. If I had so much expertise, you could imagine how good he was. But this one dream had got by—he had not noticed it.