A Girl & a River Read online

  She felt a twinge in her left foot, bound in a length of mul from her mother’s old sari—the result of an unusually energetic tussle with her brother that had earned her this holiday from school. Moreover, it had yielded an unexpected bonus. She would be the first to meet her uncle, her mother’s cousin, who was promised that afternoon. As sure as the heat, summer brought its flow of visitors—cousins, aunts, uncles and assorted relatives. There would be picnics in mango orchards, by wayside streams; sitting on strange grass and eating off banana leaves. There would be pink ice candy from Glory Das’s shop in a thermos flask. Her mother would take time off from her ‘good works’ and come out with them, her father too would sit with them and talk late into the night.

  But right now Kaveri waited for her mother’s cousin Shivaswamy, the superintending vet of the state stud farm and remount stables, whose voluminous coat pockets could yield anything from a cricket bat to a long playing record. When others visited, they brought with them merely the dust of their towns but Shivaswamy, he carried a prickling of daring and the whiff of experience beyond her imagination and her books. Both Kaveri and her brother Setu liked Shivaswamy, though they were aware that their father treated him with a certain amount of circumspection.

  As for Setu, she had got even with him for drawing a moustache and fangs on her favourite calendar beauty. She had been diabolical, really. She had simply tweaked each ‘va’ into a ‘pa’ in his laboriously written composition, so that every ‘kavi’ read ‘kapi’. Her brother’s teacher, C.G.K. Sir, indulgent though he was in other ways, would simply not tolerate disrespect to hallowed cultural icons, and instead of ‘the poet says’ when he would read ‘the monkey says’, Setu would get it. She waited in sweet anticipation.

  Setu set off that morning, frowning a little, wondering whether Chapdi Kal would be there and was relieved to find him swinging on the gate as usual, waiting for him. That was the pattern with Setu—easy anxiety and quick relief, and a perpetual doubting of certainties. Chapdi Kal had never disappointed him. He was there each morning by the time Setu came out, swinging the hinges off the gate undeterred by Timrayee’s threats. Once he was leaning casually against the wall with a slender loris clinging to his neck—he had gone to the forest that morning to get it, he said, and now it would not let him go. As always, Setu felt a quick, keen surge of pride when he saw his friend. As rough hewn as his name, which meant ‘stone slab’ (it was only the school register that perversely identified him as Gangadharappa), he stood unshod and uncombed, his khaki shorts falling over his pitted knees. He was perhaps the only boy in school who had been kept back for three successive years in middle school, but one who would never submit to the humiliation of being escorted to school by a servant. Unlike his sister who had beaten Timrayee into staying a few paces behind her while she walked like a queen in front, Setu had to suffer his insolence; Timrayee insisted on holding his hand.

  But once they crossed the main road and the band of the khaki clad began to swell, Timrayee was shaken off. A slight detour brought them into Electric Colony and a cluster of shops. At Anwar’s, the straggling group came to order instinctively. Anwar’s was perhaps the only one of its kind in the world—a cycle-repair-cum-sweetmeat shop. While no one could vouch for the cycles he repaired, Anwar was the undisputed king of komberghat. There was a quick counting of money, the clink of coins changing hands—sometimes, if they were short, the nearest head would get a clip on the ear—and each boy came away with a rustle of paper. A single komberghat—a sticky lemon-sized ball of jaggery and desiccated coconut—costing one paisa, could comfortably wad a boy’s mouth for the whole morning and trickle slowly down his throat, and no one would be the wiser. If ever the authorities of the Government Boys’ School had wondered about the exemplary ruliness of their pupils in the pre-lunch session, they would never attribute it to Anwar’s komberghat. Anwar was not just a name, he was real flesh and blood. Once a year he moulted from his grease-stained shirt and became a tiger. He then led the Moharram procession, his bare torso ash’d and striped, his face hidden in a ferocious mask, dancing to the particularly disembowelling throb of the drum, as the procession made its way round the market square to cries of ‘Ya Hasan! Ba Hussein!’

  A darshan of the gods is a good way to begin the day. And if you can spot two in the space of five minutes, you can well believe that the world is an illusion. Even the prospect of school can sit on you as lightly as the body sits on the soul. Sometimes if the timing was right, they saw the Venkateshwara Company bus. A bus on the road was a rare sight, for there were only three in the whole town, and if they were lucky they could catch the bus going to Bellary in the morning. But there was more to it than the bus itself. And that morning, as they walked back from Electric Colony to the main road, thoughtful and silent—the daily komberghat ritual being more akin to pressing a bit of prasada reverentially to your eyes before putting it in your mouth rather than something as gross as ‘eating’—and stood on the kerb, the large green Venkateshwara Company bus made its ponderous way down the road, its newly-washed windows dazzling in the sun. Sitting at the wheel ramrod straight, in dark glasses and pith hat, was the man who guided the destinies of many; the man who drove sixty five miles down the hot road into the wilderness.

  ‘It’s no joke, driving that heavy bus. First to Koratagere, then Madhugiri, Pavagada, Anantapur and finally to Bellary,’ the seasoned Chapdi Kal had informed them. Setu, who had been to Bangalore just once as a baby, had felt the weight of his inexperience.

  ‘His name,’ Setu had imparted to his sister as a favour, ‘is Jambaiah.’ And she for once had said nothing but gazed respectfully after the bus.

  They turned the corner and the moment of reckoning came—school was sighted. The day lapsed into another school day. They scuffed their way through ‘Kayo Shri Gowri’, the morning prayer and hoped that there would be something to mark the day, at least a tumbled inkpot. One didn’t count the canings of course, for immediately after the prayer three boys, Chapdi Kal among them, were caned by the games teacher, this time for having bullied the district commissioner’s son. With the district commissioner’s son, their classmate, their relationship was on even keel—he was used to being teased and so long as they didn’t touch him he kept quiet—he knew the hazards of being the son of the top government official in town and he also knew how to get even with the louts. Their real quarrel lay with the games teacher who was zealous in ingratiating himself with the ‘authorities’ in the hope of nebulous favours. The boys generally did not dislike any teacher on a permanent basis—their enmities were usually sharp and short-lived and rarely lingered longer than the sting of the cane, but with K.T. Sir, it was different. However, they had their own way of getting back at him. K.T. Sir had a secret, which he thought was well-guarded. K.T. Sir was afflicted with temperamental bowels and often the call came when he was on his way to school. Fortunately for him he lived near the lake, but unfortunately he’d find that just as he had finished washing, a stone would come skimming the surface of the water dunking once, twice and even thrice before falling with a mighty splash just next to him, wetting his dhoti completely.

  ‘I’ll see you at school, bastards!’ he’d rise pendulously, shaking his fist at the shore.

  And as he was fastidious, he’d go home and bathe once again, and come late to school.

  The one teacher who roused grudging respect and managed to get anything across to his students was C.G.K. Sir. No one knew his real name; for generations of students he remained Chikka-Gidda-Kulla Sir, an appellation quite suited to his short and squat frame, if a little overwrought. C.G.K. Sir did not carry a cane, nor did he raise his voice. He taught Kannada and History and was never known to carry a text book to class; he knew the Kannada text by heart and as for History, he acted the lessons out. He was particularly good at battles and beheadings—the English uncharacteristically cutting off Charles’s head, Marie Antoinette on the tumbrel, her golden locks being fingered with satisfaction as her head was
tossed like a melon by the Parisian crowd, and Tsar Nicholas and his children being hunted down in their own palace. The distance from the door to the blackboard acquired the bleakness of the Russian winter through which Napoleon had retreated, one hand behind his back and the other inserted into the front of his coat, his head bowed against the icy wind—C.G.K. Sir’s students often emerged from his classes as dazed as they did after two hours in the make-believe world of Shri Krishna cinema.

  Causally, C.G.K. Sir tossed out bits of historical gossip. Cromwell’s great grandson had come to India and become the governor of Bengal and that Sir Walter Scott’s son—yes, the same Sir Walter Scott who had written Ivanhoe, the tenth standard text—had been a soldier in the East India Company and was buried in a churchyard in Bangalore. But when it came to the history of his own land, the state of Mysore, C.G.K. Sir became subdued and resorted to plain speaking. Histrionics required a certain amount of detachment, of disassociation from your subject matter. He found it difficult to romance something so close home. Sometimes he lapsed into silence and stared out of the window, as if what he saw was not the the broad sweep of the playground fringed by the magnificent ficus, the paddy field-edged highway leading to Koratagere, then Madhugiri, Pavagada, Anantapur and finally to Bellary, but the paradox of a drought-prone, famine-ridden land of rivers; a princely state within British India that still paid twelve lakh rupees every year as salt tax to the ‘paramount power’. So much so that he often forgot that he was a government servant and was paid a salary directly from the maharaja’s coffers.

  They had a Kannada class with C.G.K. Sir after lunch, but that day just as he reached the door of their classroom, the peon came up to him and whispered in his ear, and C.G.K. Sir threw a rueful look at the district commissioner’s son and went away.

  ‘Ey Mukunda!’ Chapdi Kal called out to the district commissioner’s son, ‘did you carry tales home about C.G.K. Sir as usual?’

  Mukunda shook his head slightly from side to side, as if he were shivering, and tried to draw his neck into his shoulders. ‘If you dare lay a finger on me …’ he challenged shrilly.

  ‘I wouldn’t sully my hands!’ Chapdi Kal drawled and Setu and the others sniggered.

  Sometimes C.G.K. Sir brought the newspaper to class and read out snippets of news. The previous day, he had brought a whole sheaf of crudely printed pages to class, and read out a high-sounding, lengthy piece. It had ended with an innocuous reference to the maharaja distributing rock sugar to the people of Mysore, after which C.G.K. Sir had folded the pages deliberately and said, ‘Of course, one cannot force comparisons between an English Charles or a French Louis XVI with our rulers, the House of the Wodeyars, our own Krishnarajendra. We are a model state and our kings are well loved. Moreover, we aren’t even sovereign in the true sense of the word. Our state is a gift from the British …“ His Highness” says proudly that he is part of the Imperial 26th British Cavalry, as his father was before him.’

  C.G.K. Sir’s views were common knowledge. Everyone knew that his sympathies lay not just with the Congress, but he was something much worse, he was a Communist—his house even had Russian books. It was said that he wrote trenchant articles criticizing the government in the newspapers under a pseudonym. So long as he did not air his views in school before his students, the authorities could ignore his political predilections, which were mere rumours as far as they were concerned. But once in a way C.G.K. Sir would get carried away and what with Mukunda in their class and his elder brother in the tenth, his ‘incendiary’ views would reach the ears of the district commissioner, and he was ‘warned’ from time to time by the authorities. Besides, criticism of the British they could be indulgent about, but when he targeted the maharaja, they had to be more vigilant.

  The previous morning, C.G.K. Sir’s manner had been deceptive enough and the class had not understood most of what he had read but Mukunda’s eyes had narrowed purposefully behind his spectacles and despite Chapdi Kal’s threats, the summons to C.G.K. Sir followed the very next day. Perhaps it was a sign of the watchfulness of the times or the attempts of the maharaja’s government to intercept even the mild breeze of change that had reached this sleepy quarter of the state. In the post-lunch period of that uneventful day, when not even an inkpot had tumbled, C.G.K. Sir went off with the peon without entering the class, leaving the boys forlorn. Setu was lucky because the bomb ticking inside his satchel, his Kannada composition with all the va’s changed into pa’s, was not discovered.

  ‘No C.G.K. Sir and only games after his class,’ Chapdi Kal said. ‘That coward Mukunda has run off, so we can’t even tease him. But we could take the whole afternoon off. No one would find out.’

  A half-holiday, unsought, came rarely. So much so that they had to bestir themselves to think of what to do. Cricket and football were out; if the principal found them playing when they were not scheduled to, he might send C.G.K. Sir back to class. The last time they had had such a holiday, more than a year ago, they had participated in a procession, part of the inner convoy ringing the famous muni who had his headquarters in their town. Once a year the muni came out of his self-imposed seclusion to shift from one matha to the other in different parts of the town, and to give darshan to his followers. The piety of those who went to receive his blessings was somewhat suspect as the muni, being a Digambara Jain, was always ‘sky clothed’, dressed just as when he had emerged from his mother’s womb. Chapdi Kal and the others maintained that it was the kesari bhat that was given out as prasada in the matha once the procession was over, that made them go—it had so much ghee in it that it trailed down from their palms to their elbows in multiple rivulets.

  ‘They are picking coconuts in my neighbour’s compound and there’s a kite’s nest in one of the palms. We could watch,’ one of the boys offered.

  Picking coconuts was a skilled job; not everyone could climb a coconut tree. In Setu’s house, the job was Timrayee’s. He would tie himself to the trunk of the palm, grip the trunk with both his feet and shin upwards like a frog, holding a machete between his teeth to hack at the tough fibres. Once at the top he would drop the coconuts one by one. It was quite a performance but not enough for a day like this.

  But you don’t understand, the boy insisted. There were seven trees in the yard next to his house and a Brahminy kite was nesting in one of the palms and would allow no intruders within the periphery of her vision. Every time the coconut picker started climbing and reached halfway up a palm, even if it was the tree farthest from her, the kite would sail towards him, without a flicker of her outstretched wings, making straight for his face. Twice that morning he had slipped and dangled at an awkward angle, his make-shift cloth strap just about holding; once he had dropped his machete, narrowly missing someone below. He had finally given up, promising to return in the afternoon. It would make a diverting spectacle. They could all cheer for the bird.

  ‘No,’ Chapdi Kal said, ‘I know something better. They’re picketing the shendi shop. It’s the third day today. Let’s go and watch.’

  One of the boys sucked his breath in sharply as they all turned to stare at Chapdi Kal. To run off during school hours and participate in a ‘nationalist demonstration’! They thrilled at the audacity of the suggestion.

  ‘The bonfires are nothing compared to picketing,’ Chapdi Kal said, ‘Only, you must be ready to run.’

  Perhaps it was the sense of danger, possibly even the sound of the word ‘rusticated’ ringing distantly in their ears that helped them make up their minds.

  ‘Come on, I’ll take you there and bring you back home,’ Chapdi Kal urged, looking at Setu, who was the only one still looking doubtful. ‘Okay, if you’re scared …’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Setu said immediately and to mark the momentousness of the occasion, he took off his shoes and put them in his armpit. Now, truly, he was like the rest of them.

  Chapdi Kal led the way. They set off through Electric Colony and then came to the unfrequented parts of town—Pension
Mohalla, Santepete, Aralipete—so far they had been just names to Setu. His ambit was the tamer quarter—the Mission compound, the town club where his parents played tennis, his mother’s Samaja and the library. Occasionally, it included Shri Krishna cinema.

  By the time they reached the market square they were hot and sweating. Three boys had dropped out. Never before had Setu walked so much, through such crowded streets, and that too without footwear.

  As they paused for a minute in the square, Chapdi Kal turned to him and asked, ‘Want to go back?’

  Setu shook his head vigorously, sending the sweat flying. It was a strange ticklish new sensation, two streams of sweat trickling down the sides of his face. He wiped them off with his fingers at first and then, from time to time, used his sleeve just the way Chapdi Kal did. Chapdi Kal looked at him enquiringly and Setu smiled back.

  The market square was the busiest part of town, always clogged with people and bullock carts. Here were the law courts, the district commissioner’s office, the post office and the hospital, jostling with the fruit, vegetable and mandi merchants going about their business. Leading off from the market, but not quite off the square, the road dipped picturesquely and ran along the lake before joining the highway to Bellary. Right there, at the picturesque dip was the liquor shop, an innocuous thatch-roofed structure with two rough benches in front to seat its clientele. The liquor cart, mounted with wooden barrels covered with palmyra leaves, was a common sight on the streets (though you could smell it much before you saw it) and considered a good omen. Coming across the shendi cart accidentally meant that your transactions would go well, especially those of an auspicious nature. As the evening wore on, scenes of mild revelry could be witnessed outside the shop; loud raucous singing at worst or a misadventure in the nearby ditch, since the shop was located on a bank higher than the road. It was a spot generally avoided by ‘women and children’.