A Girl & a River Read online

  Like an old hand, Chapdi Kal pushed his way through the crowd till they could get an unimpeded view. A group of young men, little more than boys, stood to one side of the shop next to the dip in the road so that the shop was perched above them. There were seven of them, their white dhotis or pyjama and jubba and white caps identifying them immediately as swayamsevaks, or Congress party volunteers. They had assembled in front of the shop as soon as it opened and by the time Chapdi Kal, Setu and the others arrived, the initial curious rush was over. The crowd had thinned, consisting now only of the regulars, the good-for-nothings who hung around the market place. The Congress boys were huddled together, and were beginning to droop. It was hotter now with the afternoon sun directly in their faces. The air carried the telltale sour, fermented smell and the flies hovering around could not be swished away for long. The sweat ran freely down Setu’s forehead, but it no longer bothered him.

  ‘That one there, right in front, he’s C.G.K. Sir’s son,’ Chapdi Kal said.

  ‘You mean that short chap with buck teeth, the last one who is facing us? I know him,’ Setu whispered. ‘He works for Nanjunda Kole advocate and comes to my father’s office sometimes.’

  ‘That’s his uncle. He works in his office in the mornings, before college. I bet you didn’t know that the K in C.G.K. Sir’s name stands for Kole.’

  There was no limit to Chapdi Kal’s resourcefulness, thought Setu. He knew everything. His own first rank and the maths medal he won every year paled in comparison.

  The owners of the shop, two of them, sat on the wooden bench outside the shop daring the boys in white to advance further. It was the third day of the protest and business had come to a standstill. Though the boys had just stood outside, sung songs and distributed pamphlets, none of the usual customers had had the courage to walk past them into the shop. The owners had lodged a complaint with the police.

  ‘They take turns at it. There was a different lot in the morning,’ someone said.

  The picketing of a liquor shop was a rare event and the crowd really didn’t know how seriously to take the thing. They were used to speeches in the maidan in the evenings, even the occasional bonfire of foreign cloth—people were free to burn their own clothes after all—but such forms of protest where the protesters were not demanding anything for themselves, only that others be denied what they wanted, was new. Moreover, the protesters here were very young and from ‘decent’ homes.

  ‘Listen, o brothers …’ the swayamsevaks struck up a song.

  The owners had tried everything short of assaulting the protesters. They had tried appealing to the swayamsevaks to go home and when that failed, they had appealed to the crowd. The crowd, however, was fickle, sympathizing with the swayamsevaks one minute and heckling them the next. The owners had tried hiring their own crowd to out shout the swayamsevaks. They walked menacingly around them brandishing sticks but, since the boys were not on their property, there was only that far that they could go. The swayamsevaks carried on undeterred, saying that they would stand there till the shop was closed.

  ‘Listen …’ one of the owners, stood up from the bench and shouted, ‘we’re doing nothing wrong … this is a licensed shop …’ he appealed to the crowd again.

  ‘Listen to the call of your conscience, listen to the beat of your heart …’ the boys sang.

  ‘Look, you’ve made your speech, you’ve given out your pamphlets and sung your song. Now go.’

  ‘The women are weeping … the children are hungry …’ the song took a rousing turn.

  The crowd shifted restlessly.

  ‘Mere boys! Singing like women instead of going about their work. They say they’re going to save the nation!’

  Setu recognized the heckler with a start. ‘I know him too. It’s Vyasa Rao, and he’s a gentleman!’ he whispered to Chapdi Kal.

  It startled Setu to see people he knew out of the placid context of his daily life in the crowd. It surprised him that they had other identities, ones so completely different from what he was acquainted with. Until now, the buck-toothed swayamsevak had been the boy who carried messages from Advocate Kole to his father, the boy who waited on the verandah without knocking on the door or attracting any sort of attention, till one of the clerks came out to see what he wanted. As for Vyasa Rao, Setu was truly aghast to find him here, so much at ease with the riff-raff.

  Vyasa Rao, distinctive in his closed-collar coat, long hair and red rimmed eyes, was an artist reduced to painting signs. He was the one who had painted Setu’s father’s name board—K. Mylaraiah, Advocate and Public Prosecutor—with eyes for full stops and commas. When Vyasa Rao had first approached her, Setu’s mother had felt sorry for him and commissioned a ‘temple tank scene’. He had taken an advance for the canvas and the ‘special’ paints and that was the last they’d seen of him, though he was profusely apologetic whenever he bumped into a member of the family.

  ‘Look, horses! The mounted police are here!’ Chapdi Kal said, spitting in excitement.

  They heard the thatack-thatack of the hooves and saw sparks flying off the stone flints on the road as the horseshoes struck them. ‘Hoi!’ a voice commanded, ‘Hoiiiiii!’ and the crowd was pushed back. Setu staggered and almost fell, and when he recovered, he found that Chapdi Kal was not by his side.

  He struggled, pushing blindly at the voluminous dhoti-clad waists that surrounded him, calling out his friend’s name, when someone pulled at his hand. He was surprised to see Ramu, another of his classmates who had not been part of the original group that afternoon. Even as the two of them tried to make their way out, the pushing stopped, the crowd steadied and came together again, and miraculously Chapdi Kal was with them.

  ‘Right, my sons, you’re our guests, we must treat you well …’ One of the owners hitched up his dhoti and tightened it round his waist. He now had the police on his side.

  ‘Give them a drink. They’ve been standing all afternoon. They must be thirsty,’ someone suggested.

  ‘Yes, we must welcome them properly. Come boys, some panneer seve for our guests. Get out the silver sprinklers, let’s anoint them with scented water.’

  One of the men smashed a barrel open in a splendidly theatrical gesture and the owners began scooping out the contents of the barrel with coconut shells and flinging it at the boys. With the second barrel they grew impudent, climbed down the slope to where the boys were standing, and threw the stuff right into their faces. The swayamsevaks ducked, as if to ward off blows and wiped their faces, but did nothing else.

  ‘Jokhe! Jokhe!’ a policeman warned, bringing his horse up and the owners retreated.

  An uneasy murmur ran through the crowd.

  ‘They take it like wedding guests, with heads lowered the poor boys … from such traditional families, they wouldn’t even know the smell of liquor …’

  ‘They’ve been at it since morning, they just stand there soaking.’

  One of the boys now seemed to be crying.

  ‘Come, come, drink up your tears …’

  ‘Mind you boys,’ someone cackled, ‘go home and wring out your clothes well.’

  ‘Yes, you can get a whole barrel.’

  ‘You can finally see what it tastes like.’

  The crowd began to relax.

  All of a sudden there was a stir and a murmur of excitement ran through the crowd. Yet another man in khadi arrived on the scene. He was older than the swayamsevaks and looked authoritative.

  ‘It’s Narayana Rao,’ someone said.

  ‘Long live Dandi Narayana Rao!’ a voice called out weakly from the back but there was no answering chorus.

  Standing next to Setu, Ramu froze and Setu goosepimpled in sympathy.

  ‘Ey Ramu, that’s your father!’ Chapdi Kal said unnecessarily.

  One of the owners brandished a coconut shell at him.

  ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’ the swayamsevaks shouted with a fresh burst of energy, now that their leader had arrived.

  Narayana Rao’s arrival s
eemed to incense the owners afresh and they greeted him with a new barrel. Stepping right up to him, despite the hovering policemen, they emptied the barrel over him. Narayana Rao was soaked to the skin, but like the boys he did nothing to resist, wiping his face instead. Then one of the men hoisted the empty barrel on to his shoulder and threw it at Narayana Rao, which he deflected with a neat flick of the elbow.

  The crowd roared with approval.

  ‘Gandhiji ki jai!’ Narayana Rao pumped his fist in the air and the swayamsevaks echoed the slogan and the gesture, their voices ringing. The mounted policemen came closer.

  In reply the owners rolled a barrel along the ground to dislodge the Gandhians. Since the shop was located on a slope and the boys stood on the road below, the barrel picked up speed even over the short distance and hurtled towards the swayamsevaks. Narayana Rao pushed the boys aside and stood directly in the path of the advancing missile. It hit him on the foot before rolling over and smashing into the ditch. The crowd surged forward, its more desperate members, Vyasa Rao included, running to stem the tragic waste.

  ‘Back!’ a policeman drove his horse into the crowd, ‘get back all of you.’ Setu was jostled again but this time they clung to each other, the three of them, and found themselves pushed right into the front, the hindquarters of a horse framing the scene for them. Even as the other policemen moved into their positions round the shop, a jeep drove up and a man in khaki, indisputably the highest authority in town, stepped out.

  ‘The inspector general himself has come!’ the murmur went.

  ‘I know him,’ Setu said, ‘he plays tennis with my father.’

  Even as Narayana Rao started limping towards the highest authority, things started happening. The swayamsevaks too started moving en masse towards the inspector general, and the policemen, in their zeal to forestall what they saw as a threatening gesture, swung towards them with lathis. Narayana Rao put his hands up to cover his face and ducked; the swinging lathi caught the swayamsevak behind him full on the face. As more policeman started closing in, Narayana Rao hobbled towards the inspector general’s jeep and got in. ‘You may arrest me but not the boys. Our movement will continue. We will not give up till this shop is closed down. Gandhiji ki jai!’ he shouted before being driven away.

  And then there was utter confusion. Ramu darted after the jeep, crying out for his father and was swallowed by the crowd. Abandoning the swayamsevaks, the policemen started for the crowd, swinging their lathis in the air. The horse standing right in front of Setu and Chapdi Kal turned round and prepared to charge. Chapdi Kal caught Setu by the hand and was out like a shot, the first to leave the crowd which would soon break up in chaos. Even when they reached the market square, they did not slow down, Chapdi Kal leading Setu through strange, labyrinthine streets till they were safe.

  On the road that Setu lived, the road that led one way to Bellary and another to Honnavar, not a leaf stirred and not a man moved, except for the two boys. Setu leaned against the wall of his house and listened to his heart pounding in his ears. The two of them stood there awhile without speaking. Setu thought of the swayamsevak, the messenger boy whom he now identified as C.G.K. Sir’s son, young, with just a hint of a moustache, who had borne the full fury of the lathi on his face when Narayana Rao had ducked. The boy’s scream and the crunch of lathi on bone were almost simultaneous and Setu felt a churning in his stomach and the bile rise in his throat. But that and the chaos that followed had been an aberration; this was home, this was real.

  ‘You will have to go back the way we came,’ he said, timidly.

  ‘That’s all right. I’m used to it. I don’t have to go far,’ Chapdi Kal assured him.

  ‘Ramu …?’ Setu began hesitantly.

  ‘He will have reached home too,’ Chapdi Kal said, sounding less certain.

  Both of them were silent, knowing that they must not mention C.G.K. Sir’s son or even wonder how much damage the lathi had done.

  ‘Why were the boys standing there and singing?’

  ‘They are Congress people, Gandhi bhaktas. They want to burn foreign cloth and stop people from drinking. Only then will we become strong enough to send the British back.’

  Something stirred in Setu’s head, and a tentative connection was formed between the events of the evening, the charkha and the takli at home on which his mother and grandmother spun, and his mother haranguing her cousin about his drinking.

  ‘Tell me, have you ever seen the British?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘Well, I know three English people—Dr King of the government hospital, who comes home and Mr Spencer and his wife from the Mission, but they’re not the same as the British that C.G.K. Sir is always talking about.’

  C.G.K. Sir’s ‘British’, as Setu imagined them, were a formless but all powerful force, sometimes a phalanx of men and sometimes pure spirit, who could do what they wanted, be at different places at the same time, and control people’s thoughts and actions whenever they chose; somewhat like God.

  ‘And Ramu’s father …’ Setu could say no more, mystified by what he had seen of Ramu’s father, radically different from his own and from his notion of fathers in general. ‘Imagine Ramu darting after the jeep like that!’

  ‘Well, naturally he’d run after the jeep. Wouldn’t you do the same if your father was being taken away by the police? If your father fell into the fire wouldn’t you save him?’ asked Chapdi Kal heatedly, his sense of filial duty finely honed by the mythological films and melodramas he saw in the weekly theatre.

  Setu said nothing for if any such circumstances arose, it would be his father who would be doing the taking away and the saving. He could never imagine it otherwise, but for the first time he sensed that the sins of fathers could well visit upon their sons.

  When Setu entered quietly by the back door, it had turned dark.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  It was only his sister, lying in wait for him.

  ‘Somewhere.’

  ‘Where are your shoes?’

  ‘Somewhere.’

  She stared at him, at his new found cockiness. ‘You’d better tell me. Or I’ll tell them.’

  ‘Tell. What do I care!’

  He ran past her outstretched hand into the house. A few minutes later, when he had caught his breath, he remembered his shoes and his heart sank for they had been brand new; but right then he did not care. His sister’s usual intimidating tactics seemed childish. He had, after all, now drunk the milk of a tigress. His shoes were there, somewhere among the splintered wooden barrels, the horse dung and the abandoned slippers of those who had run pell-mell, his first offering at the altar of adulthood.

  In the days that followed, his pantheon of heroes would admit another. Other than Anwar, the komberghat-maker and Jambaiah, the Venkateshwara Company bus driver, Setu conceded that he wouldn’t mind being yet another. All things considered, he wouldn’t mind being Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

  Three

  1933

  That evening Shivaswamy asked for ice instead of hot water. It threw the servants into a tizzy. Timrayee ran off at once with the thermos, wondering whether he’d get any at that hour. The ice machine at Dorai’s, it was believed, was a giant hen that would ‘lay’ its quota only at fixed hours. It was Morris Sr, a trader in assorted goods, who had first brought ice to the town one hot summer—a piece of the Wenham lakes that had travelled over two oceans in an American ship to land at Madras, and from there by rail to arrive here, wrapped in a piece of burlap. That had been more than fifty years ago. Morris Jr now owned the Mangalore tiles factory on the outskirts of the town, and ice was made right here in a clanking machine out of water from the local lake.

  When Shivaswamy bellowed for hot water, the servants jumped to do his bidding with surprising alacrity, with excitement even, for it gave them a perverse thrill that this large, blustering man drank openly in a teetotalling household, behaved as if he owned the place and made the master of the house uncomfortable.
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  ‘Hot water!’ was also the sign for the children to leave. He would then bring out his bottle of old Jamaican rum and sit talking to his cousin and her husband, drinking late into the night even after they had retired. For the daytime, he had a silver hip flask. ‘Now, you two, turn the other way while I have a quick swig of my medicine,’ he’d say solemnly. But this time Kaveri and Setu had clung to him even after he had sent for the ice. He had told them all the stories they wanted—as the Superintending Vet of the maharaja’s stud farm, he had a fund of them—but he had not yet produced his mysterious ‘gift’, something that he never failed to do.

  ‘How is Fernando?’ Kaveri asked.

  ‘And Chevalier?’

  These were old friends whom they’d never seen but knew all about, descendants of the famous Pero Gomez, the first English stallion in the Mysore stables. Someone had tried to steal them once and Kaveri and Setu never tired of hearing about their uncle’s overnight vigil in the stables and his hot pursuit of the intruders through the night. Yet another favourite story of his was how he had personally examined every single horse from his stables, before sending a hundred of them off to join the famous Lumsden’s Horse in the Boer War. He had been all over the papers then, at his swaggering best, as Mylaraiah said.

  And then, after all the preliminaries were over, he had asked them to close their eyes and dipped into his right hand pocket and brought out a puppy.