A Girl & a River Read online

  USHA K.R.

  A Girl and a River

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR

  Part I: Distant Thunder

  One: 1987

  Two: 1933

  Three: 1933

  Four: 1987

  Five: 1933

  Six: Gandhi

  Seven: 1987

  Part II: Reaping the Whirlwind

  Eight: 1934

  Nine: 1934

  Ten: 1987

  Eleven: 1934

  Twelve: 1934

  Thirteen: 1987

  Part III: The War and After

  Fourteen: 1938

  Fifteen: 1939

  Sixteen: 1940

  Seventeen: 1940

  Eighteen: 1941

  Nineteen: Quit India

  Twenty: 1987

  Part IV: Deliverance

  Twenty-one: 1947

  Twenty-two: 1955

  Part V: Post Script

  Twenty-three: 1987

  Twenty-four: 1987

  Twenty-five: 1987

  Twenty-six: Closure

  Acknowledgements

  Read More in Penguin

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  A GIRL AND A RIVER

  Usha K.R. has been writing fiction for over two decades, beginning with short fiction. Her short story ‘Sepia Tones’ won the Katha Award for short fiction in 1995. Sojourn, her first novel, was published in 1998 and the second, The Chosen, in 2003. A Girl and a River is her third novel. Usha lives and works in Bangalore.

  In memory of my grandmother, S.R. Puttathayi

  PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR

  ‘What compels you to turn the pages is a fine eye for detail’—The Hindu

  ‘Usha K.R. is a miniaturist, and she shares the miniaturist’s fierce love of technical virtuosity and minute attention to detail’—Indian Review of Books

  ‘Usha’s writing is intelligent’—Deccan Herald

  Part I

  Distant Thunder

  One

  1987

  We are driving down National Highway 4, my father and I, on the road that leads from Bangalore to Poona. But Poona is not our destination. We don’t have to go that far. My father is not driving. We have hired a taxi, a trusty diesel Ambassador. My mother is not with us but there is nothing unusual about that; over the years, hers is an absence I have got used to.

  We have cleared the city and have entered the suburbs. We are driving through Peenya Industrial Estate, home of motor winding works and credit cooperative banks. My father’s factory which manufactures radiator caps for cars is here somewhere. This is the kind of place, I would imagine, where it is always noon and the sun relentless, where the roads are a pool of tar and the trees give no shade. Even as we escape the bounds of Sisyphean small-scale industry, we drive, quite incongruously, into the smell of fresh baking. It is the Mangharam biscuit factory—I think briefly of the pink wafers of my childhood, wrapped in waxy white corrugated paper, gifts from the infrequent visitors to my home—but soon the road reverts to the reassurance of petrol fumes.

  As we travel on it, the highway acquires a Jekyll and Hyde predictability—shanties of shops and slush alternate with clean green space. The names of the towns and villages we go past tell of probable histories and lost geographies—some echo gods and kings and mythical beasts and some more banally, the district commissioners who had saved the village from the plague or built a dam; some are named after trees—now no longer there, streams—long dead, or hills—flattened for their granite; some fall musically upon the ear while others are descriptively matter-of-fact—my father’s own cut-and-dry, two-syllabled town took its name from a fragrant backyard herb. But right now, for our beleaguered taxi, the towns and villages are bottlenecks on the highway, clusters of mechanic shops and tea-and-cigarette stalls and trucks parked too close to the road.

  From time to time we come upon a stretch where the road seems to be holding on to a fast-fading memory of itself. Green fields stretch out on either side, their bounds marked by massive, knotted trees whose branches arch overhead, filtering the sky, harking back to the pre-reflector days, when the faded red-and-white stripes on the tree trunks were the only indicators the highway motorist had in the dark to mark the verge of the road. A train hoots and rattles in the distance and sends up a puff of smoke that uncurls in the sky; it suggests faraway lands and unknown destinations. There is not another human being in sight, except the moustachioed and turbaned man on the lone cement structure sheltering the tube well, his steady eyes affirming the miraculous powers of urea or phosphate.

  ‘When did you come on this road last?’ I ask my father. It’s the first thing I’ve said to him since we left home.

  He turns to me, startled. ‘Oh! Long back … I’ve forgotten … several years possibly … I came last when there was a court case about the disputed land …’

  I remember that. He lost the case.

  We are going to a town about a hundred kilometres away, a small town where my father was born and where he grew up, to take a look at his ancestral home before it is demolished. I haven’t seen the house before, and I know only as much of it and of his life as he lets slip now and then. My father isn’t one for memories. I believe it is a healthy sign.

  We have been talking about this trip for years, but this time I booked the taxi and presented him with a fait accompli. Anything that varies from his routine is considered an unwelcome intrusion that he just waits to put off. It is not the onset of age; he has always been like that. I have lost count of the number of picnics we had planned when I was a child—the lunch all but packed into hampers and the newspapers that we were to spread on the grass all gathered—and had not gone on because my father would lose his mood that morning. Ours was a household regulated by the clock. Mealtimes were like running to catch an express train that stopped for just two minutes at the station.

  At some propitious time, when his defences are down or when he is not so preoccupied, I have to tell my father that I will not be coming home again. I have applied for a postdoctoral research position in the university from where I graduated and from where I stand a very good chance of being accepted. I have also asked to be the citizen of my new home, the United States of America.

  I doze off and wake up to the blast of an air horn. I have slept for almost an hour.

  ‘This is it,’ my father says.

  We are in a crowded street. There are shops on both sides with railings on the footpath to hem the crowds in. A temple escapes on my right, its gopura crowded with brightly coloured humans and rakshasas and animals, ferocious enough to spring off the statuary—their beauty has always eluded me. But nothing can deter the cinema halls on my left, three in a row, their florid architecture outdone by the large pink-and-blue posters announcing the film, and cut outs of the film stars garlanded in faded marigolds.

  My father sits back, stunned and then springs up in his seat.

  ‘All this … all this,’ he waves an agitated hand at the cut outs and cinema halls, ‘used to be church property. It’s all gone now. The Christians, they’ve betrayed this town’.

  I hold myself in check. I’ve promised myself there will be no fights on this trip. After all it might be my last one.

  I must remember my father belongs to a generation that expects a certain sense of morality, of honour, of nobility, of better behaviour from the Christians by virtue of their association with the British (my father even thinks Churchill is the greatest writer of English prose!). But not from the Americans; no, not them. They are the ones who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  So I just say mildly, ‘They’ve done no worse th
an the others. Everybody is selling off their land these days.’

  And while we are still bemused by the looming cut outs, somewhere on the opposite pavement the footwear and textiles part and we have left the road behind. We drive through an imposing gateway with no gates, on to a stretch of stony mud track, and when the track leads no further, we stop. The hum of the running engine fills the car.

  There is nothing there, nothing but a looming emptiness, a huge hole in the air where the house should have been. The plinth is marked clearly in white with deep brown scars where the walls once stood. The driver switches off the engine, as if marking respect for the dead.

  My father gets out of the car, stumbling over the stones, and I let him go alone. All that is left of the grand, beautiful, doomed house are the two magnificent trees by the crumbling compound wall, lush green matrons quietly savouring the memory of their fecundity, now that the flowering season is past. The copper pod is burnished against the sky and many monsoons must have watered the generous canopy of the rain tree.

  ‘Krishnaiah Shetty had promised to wait for a bit before bringing it down … his family owes so much to us …’ my father appeals.

  But I cannot help him. The only responses I have are contrary. Once you sell your property, you lose all claims over it. Promises that are not on paper need not be honoured. He possibly still thinks of himself as a local grandee or a zamindar come home after long, to visit his dependants, and to find that the upstarts have gotten above themselves. I wish my mother was here. She would have matched his distress with the right noises, for she is a good wife who reflects all her husband’s moods. (I have had to employ the most literary of retrieval devices to deal with her. The thought of it still makes me blush.)

  I walk across the meaningless plinth tentatively. The house does not seem as large as I had imagined it to be. I stoop to pick up what looks like a tile made of mud with a rude floral design stamped on it. It does not tell me anything. Neither does the empty space. As with everything else I suppose I must return empty-handed.

  ‘Which was your room?’ I ask him, and then more boldly, ‘And hers, which was hers?’

  He turns round and stares at me. ‘Room! What room?’ he snorts. It is just not my day. ‘We had no rooms, we didn’t even have beds of our own. We just spread mattresses on the floor in the hall and slept on them.’

  ‘Let’s go!’ he says abruptly, striding towards the car.

  It was a mistake to have come, I can hear him think. It is best to let sleeping dogs lie.

  He loosens his collar and inserts his folded handkerchief between the collar and the back of his neck and fans himself with his fingers. He shifts in his seat and flinches as the car hits a rut in the road. I look at his rheumy eyes, at the milky polyps glistening in their corners. I remind myself that he is sixty years old and that he has not worn particularly well.

  At one time I carried a live coal in my heart. Now it has almost returned to normal, my heart that is—a muscle that receives impure blood and pumps it out pure. The years apart, the distance and a new life have taught me acceptance, if not understanding. The edge, the sharpness of immediacy is gone; the vinegar has receded from my tongue. I am ready to speculate on his compulsions, to look at things his way but I cannot undo what they have made of me. I cannot go back and smoothen out the wrinkled brow of my childhood. This is the first lap of my three-month stay and already I am irritated by the old unchanging things, fretting to get away. I would rather be elsewhere, getting on with my life and leave them to theirs. But there are things I must settle, gaps I must fill. Both for their sake and mine.

  Two

  1933

  It was eleven in the morning and she was not at school. Her brother, however, was. If this was not enough to induce that body-less feeling, that mildly euphoric state of disorientation, it must have been the heat. April was the hottest month and the town was situated on a flat, unrelieved plain. No hills or hillocks, no streams or rivulets, the soil a crumbly red. Once the natural ponds and lakes go, this town will be shut down, her mother said grimly each summer. The verandah where she stood was deep and safe, she knew, but one could well roast an urad dal papad on the bottom-most step where the awning of the portico ended.

  Beyond the yellow blaze of the copper pod and the soporific hood of the rain tree was the road that ran all the way to the port of Honnavar; the road on which, if R.L. Stevenson and Shivarama Karanth were to be believed, she could ‘run away to sea’. And on the other side of the highway to Honnavar lay the restful, tree-filled compound of the Methodist Mission. The only ‘building’ in evidence there, directly opposite, was a small white shed, which carried no legend but had a bird etched in blue on its cement head. Its closed shutter had tantalized her as long as she could remember. She had caught the shop open now for the first time and its magic was revealed to be just stacks of eggs on a counter and a bored-looking man in a white bush shirt fanning himself with a newspaper. To think that this was the source of her winter torments, the dreaded egg flip her mother made her drink in the morning because she was too thin. Past the egg shop, somewhere within the recesses of the vast garden was the carpentry workshop which had supplied all the furniture in their house, where her brother spent many an hour watching Mr Alpine examine each plank of wood for the perfection of its grains to fashion the massive rosewood dining table which was to be shipped in six parts to Buckingham Palace.

  When the townspeople walked on the footpath in front of the gate, she imagined that they slowed down to tell themselves that this was the house of K. Mylaraiah, one of the most prominent lawyers in town, owner of lands, municipal councillor, sure to be nominated to the maharaja’s legislative council, and in the reverential hush that followed they craned their necks, no doubt, to take a better look at the imposing house and the impeccable garden.

  Behind her, the house stretched, a cool shell, thrumming to the beats of a long-practised routine. The comforting drone from her father’s office told her that he had not yet left for the courts and his industrious clerk, Balarama, tuft protruding from his black cap, was still scratching away with his ferocious nib. If asked what lay in the sheaves of paper, wrapped in canvas across their midriff, neatly stacked on shelves with notations in an impeccable hand, she would say in her father’s tone of conviction—British jurisprudence, the backbone of our legal system (despite what Gandhi says).

  As soon as you entered the office what you first saw, was a cast-in-silver Ganda Bherunda with real rubies for eyes, displayed prominently in a locked glass case. The mythical twin-faced bird, held up by two elephants on either side, was the symbol of the state of Mysore and the ruling Wodeyars. This particularly fine handcrafted specimen had been presented to Mylaraiah in recognition of his services to the state. The district commissioner himself had come home to present the bird and drape a silken shawl round his shoulders, for however much he respected the maharaja, Mylaraiah would not go to the royal durbar and present himself as a supplicant.

  Beyond the large hall with the veiny black floor and the high roof supported by wooden beams, where they rolled out their mattresses to sleep at night, the house hived off into two around the open courtyard. When it rained, it was difficult to get from the front of the house to the back through the courtyard. If you put your mind to it, it provided easy access to thieves, but thankfully nobody did.

  On one side of the courtyard was the morning room, where her mother worked, where the light was the brightest and where the terracotta tiles crunched underfoot, however softly you trod. If she strained her ears she could hear the rattle of the charkha and the gentler wheeze of the takli—it was almost a religious duty with her grandmother and mother to spin their quota of thread on the wheel every morning, and send it at the end of the week to the Khadi Bhandar.

  The living rooms were on the opposite side of the courtyard, all in a row. You walked past them and climbed down three steps from a low doorway to enter the coffee room. The morning’s first cup of coffee or cocoa was
to be had here. If the house had a lodestone, it was this room, to which all people gravitated naturally, whether it was coffee time or not, like water finding its level. Strangely, few entered the coffee room from the courtyard, preferring to enter from the living room, despite being knocked on the head by the inexplicable projection in the doorframe, and those who had grown into adulthood in the house were known to duck instinctively at doorways.

  The territory beyond the coffee room was of little concern to Kaveri—the precincts of cooks and servants and the women of the household. Here were the kitchen and the puja room and an assortment of rooms to house the produce from her father’s plentiful lands, which rolled in every few months in bullock carts. Even the coconuts had a room to themselves, where birds nested in the eaves; her brother had brought down a sparrow with his catapult once and the cook had never let him forget it, assuring him he would be reborn in a lowly hunting tribe in his next life.

  Beyond the house proper were the cow sheds and the toilets and the acre of garden for coconut and mango trees and a small patch of corn, which fed the cows. Kaveri’s grandmother usually pottered around this part of the house, when she was not shooting off letters to newspapers about cows. Bhagiratamma’s fierce love of cows was not the only reason she hung around there. It was Kaveri who had made the connection and told her father about it and he had broken an important taboo by building a toilet inside the house, next to the living rooms, so that his mother-in-law would not be confined to the back quarters of the house.

  She felt her toes grow warm and moist, and looked down.

  ‘Zip,’ she prodded him gently, ‘Oi Zip, come let’s walk to the gate to see if the tonga is coming …’ But Zip wouldn’t even twitch his whiskers at her.

  She put on her shoes and started up the cobbled pathway by herself, squinting into the yellow haze. The day seemed to have completely forgotten that it had begun as a cool morning, that it had smelt not of the crisp dry lash of heat but of the soggy wetness of the just-washed stone steps and the elusive sap of the black seed pods of the rain tree, which her brother had bashed into a ‘cork ball’ on the verandah. She walked up to the gate and looked out, careful not to rest her chin on the bar. It was so hot that she could hear her bobbed hair singing about her ears and her legs, she was sure, were cooking under her long skirt. There was no one on the stone-metalled road other than a bullock cart at the far end. To her left stretched the road to Bellary, which was not her concern and to her right lay her school, the library, the cinema, the ice cream shop and Honnavar—all that mattered.