Left from the Nameless Shop

by Adithi Rao

  Right about then, Srikanth, Manju, Putta and Aditya passed that way, talking animatedly. Lakshmi looked up and saw them a moment before they saw her. She hurriedly brushed away a tear.

  ‘Namaskara, Lakshmi Aunty!’ they cried in unison.

  ‘Where are you off to looking so busy?’ demanded Lakshmi, the sadness in her eyes replaced by a twinkle at the unmistakeable air of mystery that surrounded the bunch.

  ‘To the hardware sho …’ began Putta, before Srikanth’s elbow dug into his ribs.

  ‘Ay!’ Putta glared at Sri, rubbing his injured side.

  ‘You know you are not supposed to tell!’ hissed Aditya so discreetly that Lakshmi was forced to busy herself with imaginary stones in the rice to hide her laughter.

  ‘But … it’s Lakshmi Aunty!’ whispered Putta. ‘She’s not like other grown-ups!’

  Srikanth watched them in exasperation. Suddenly, Manju said in his quiet way, ‘It will be good to have an adult in on our plan. Lakshmi Aunty will help us.’

  ‘Avaru namma Ammana friend, kano,’ whispered Srikanth warningly. ‘What if she tells our mothers?’

  The boys gazed at Lakshmi, unsure of what to do. She looked up and asked, ‘Do I ever come and tell you the secrets your amma shares with me, Sri?’

  Srikanth shook his head.

  ‘Then why would I share your secrets with her?’

  This logic clinched it for the boys. Seating themselves down on the steps around Lakshmi’s feet, they told her all about their plan in such low tones that they only carried to the second storey of Sheshadri Mansion where Adishree was putting her son to sleep, and not beyond that. So the members of the Sheshadri household who were in the backyard or the outhouse, for instance, did not hear Putta say, ‘The monsoons are going to fail this year. We read about it in the newspaper.’ Or Aditya add, ‘We are going to have water shortage, Lakshmi Aunty! Some places in the country will have no water at all, they are saying. Yesterday Manju went to Parvati Temple and came up with an idea. Ay Manju, neene helo!’

  Manju took up the story from there. ‘There is not much water in the temple well. But the temple roof is flat and wide, and will be a perfect place for water to collect when the rains come. If we fit a pipe to the opening in the roof, all the water can be sent directly into the well.’

  ‘That man who came the other day to speak on rainwater harvesting said we need to build tanks to collect the rainwater in. But we can just use the roof as our tank,’ explained Sri.

  ‘And this way we won’t need a pump also,’ finished Manju.

  Lakshmi gazed at the boys for a long time in thoughtful silence.

  ‘A plastic pipe will be expensive,’ she said at last. ‘I’ve just thought of a better way.’

  Subhadra was eager to see the new contraption that was being built on the temple roof that morning. Raghuvir had told her about it the night before, but the idea, unclear as it still was even to her husband, had nevertheless caught her fancy. She finished cooking early, then called to her mother-in-law: ‘Atte, naanu devasthanakke hogutiddene. The children are doing something there.’

  ‘What are they doing?’ asked Raghuvir’s mother, looking up from shelling aurekai.

  ‘I don’t know. But I want to go see,’ and Subhadra laughed so infectiously that the old lady smiled fondly.

  ‘You come back and tell me all about it,’ she said.

  Subhadra ran out, straightening her sari as she went. It was hot and she felt tired walking, even though the temple was only a few furlongs away. She looked up at the sky and surveyed the slight darkening in the direction of Shivamogga. No wonder it was so sultry. The monsoons must be on their way. She wondered how her grandmother was holding up in this weather and hoped she was not straining herself over cousin Chaitra’s wedding preparations. She was prone to having dizzy spells when it became too hot.

  Tomorrow is Sunday. I’ll ask him if we can go visit Ajji in the afternoon. Appaji too must have returned from Mysore after his court case, thought Subhadra. From the gateway of the temple premises, she spotted him standing with a small group of boys, Lakshmi Akka and Adishree. Subhadra’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of her husband. He was so beautiful. As if on cue, Raghuvir turned. He beckoned and she joined him, and they all stood together and watched the goings-on.

  Up on the temple roof, Manju and Srikanth had joined two vertical cross sections of a bamboo stalk end-to-end using wire, then slipped a plastic ring over the joint to secure them together. One end was jammed into the water outlet and the other rested on the wall of the temple well down below.

  ‘Raaganna!’ called Manju from the rooftop. ‘Neeru.’

  Srikanth lowered the bucket on a rope, and Raghu quickly sent it into the well and brought it up filled with water. From above, the boys hauled it up to the rooftop together. At that moment, the watchers down below held their breaths, sensing that something important was about to happen.

  Srikanth poured the water around the opening of the roof. It pooled there for a few seconds and then disappeared with a gurgle into the bamboo stalk where it was received like a cup. The water ran the length of the first half of the stalk with no mishaps, disappeared into the plastic ring, reappeared into the second stalk, and emptied itself into the well with a hollow, musical sound!

  For a second, nobody moved. Then Srikanth threw his arms around a laughing Manju. Putta and Aditya danced a jig, Lakshmi clapped her hands like a little girl, and Adishree laughed with joy. Smiling, Subhadra automatically looked up at her husband and found that he had forgotten to automatically look at her. For, his eyes were on Adishree’s face, and in them was a tortured, searching look that Subhadra had never seen there before.

  Word spread quickly through the town about the clever handiwork of four sixth-grade boys from Christos Convent. People flocked to the Prasanna Parvati Temple from all over Rudrapura to gaze at it. They were deeply impressed with the whole thing, and quite taken with Lakshmi’s idea of saving money on pipes by using hollow bamboo poles from the nearby groves instead.

  When James came running into Brother Abranches’ office room in the old age home and recounted what he had just seen, the priest listened open-mouthed, then hurried away to the temple on his TVS moped.

  But when he pulled up inside the temple premises and saw old man Basavaraj standing with Raghuvir, two qualms hit him at once. He became conscious of the fact that, garbed as he was in his cassock, he would be quite severely out of place in this setting. In ironic juxtaposition, Raghuvir’s tall, slim body was bare from the waist above, and his sacred thread gleamed in the sunlight. It also struck Brother Abranches that he had not seen Basavaraj since the morning he had told him of the beggar’s … Robert Foster’s … death. He remembered the look on the old man’s face, and thought maybe Basavaraj still blamed him for not calling Doctor Bhaskara that night.

  ‘Father Abranches?’ Basavaraj’s surprised voice cut across his reverie. Abranches approached the two men, his head lowered to hide his embarrassment. He cleared his throat and looked up to see both observing him keenly. Raghuvir he had heard much about, but had never been introduced to. When Basavaraj completed the formality, Brother Abranches automatically extended his right hand, caught himself and jerked it back into an awkward namaste. But Raghuvir smiled and held out his hand, and when Brother Abranches put his own into it, shook it warmly. His smile reached all the way to his eyes, and Abranches liked him at once.

  Basavaraj put an affectionate hand on Brother Abranches’s back as he tried to explain in broken English what the boys from his school had achieved. Then he gave up with a laugh and Raghuvir took over, speaking in clear but accented English, dropping his articles, which only seemed to bring him to his point more quickly and effectively. Brother Abranches was struck by the simple brilliance of the idea that Manju and his gang had pulled off.

  Pattabhiram sowed the seeds of his idea in excellent ground, he thought, feeling pride in the achievement of these boys from his school.

  There wa
s the same note of pride in Raghuvir’s words and in Basavaraj’s smile; it was evident that each of the three men thought of the boys as his to be proud of.

  Narayanamma stood in her backyard and looked up at the slightly overcast sky. Wiping her damp face on her sari pallu, she groaned, ‘Devare, it is so sultry today! I hope it rains.’

  From the corner of her eye, she spotted Srikanth emerging from the lumber room, dragging something heavy behind him. It was her defunct icebox, the one her brother-in-law Ranjaiah had destroyed. Making up the rear was Pamban, leaning his entire weight (all thirty-six kilos of it) on the box to get it to move under Srikanth’s urging. Inch by inch, the icebox emerged. Alarmed, Narayanamma made a dart towards them, her arms flung out like a goal keeper’s.

  ‘Ay! What are you doing?’

  Srikanth abandoned his efforts and perched his posterior on the edge of the icebox, trying to catch his breath. Pamban-the-mighty, his eyes half-popping out of his head from the exertion, looked gratified for the rest.

  ‘Defunct,’ wheezed Srikanth. ‘Suresh Uncle … says … can’t repair. No use…’

  Unconvinced, Narayanamma swatted her son off the machine and put both hands protectively over the glass top.

  ‘So? So?’ she cried. ‘I bought it with my life’s savings. You’re not taking it anywhere!’

  ‘I’m not. Just putting it to good use, that’s all,’ replied Sri, and Pamban nodded in vigorous support.

  ‘What use?’ demanded Narayanamma, eyeing her son suspiciously.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Sri said laconically and began tugging at the box again.

  Lakshmi met Maithili at the marketplace. They picked out their vegetables, paid for them and left their shopping bags with the old fruit seller, promising to come back and collect them later. They set off for the temple, where Lakshmi gave Maithili a tour of the new rainwater harvesting venture.

  ‘Careful, this step is a little uneven,’ said Lakshmi, putting an anxious hand on Maithili’s arm as they climbed up to the roof.

  Maithili smiled. ‘I’m fine, Lakshmi Akka. Don’t worry,’ she said, touching her rounded belly. They had reached the top now, and Lakshmi pointed out the hole and the bamboo pole passing from it into the well below. By the time she finished explaining everything, Maithili’s eyes were shining.

  ‘What?’ asked Lakshmi with a laugh.

  ‘Nothing. No. I mean yes! I mean, it’s just an idea, Akka. I’m not sure if it will work…’

  Soon, the children of Rudrapura were animatedly discussing the new contraption in the Shankarnarayana household. At first they lowered their voices to a whisper, but after a while stopped bothering to do so. At Christos Convent, Pashupati sir had to bang on his desk several times, rap Haren on the knuckles with his cane, and send Pamban back to his hostel room in disgrace halfway through social studies period before they didn’t stop, and Pashupati finally gave up. But so desperate did he get over the inattention of his students that Manju took pity on him and put him out of his misery.

  ‘It’s all because of you, sir,’ he told the social studies teacher solemnly.

  ‘Me?’ yelped Pashupati indignantly, his glasses slipping down his nose.

  ‘Yes,’ said Manju. ‘That day when we were reading out the news in class, we came upon an article on drought. Remember, sir?’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Pashupati, not remembering and not willing to commit until he was certain where this was going.

  ‘After that is when we decided to start harvesting rainwater,’ put in Srikanth helpfully.

  ‘Hmm …’ said Pashupati, slowly getting the drift.

  ‘If it were not for you, sir, we would have been facing this coming drought without any preparations, sir!’ cried Vadiraja, ever the lover of the macabre. ‘Doomed we would have been, sir, doomed!’ he insisted, when a swift kick in the shin from Srikanth brought his two bits to an unceremonious end.

  But the ploy worked. Pashupati gradually took to walking around Christos Convent with what he imagined to be an unstudied air of dignified benevolence. Where the whisperings and goings-on used to once drive him distracted, he now felt the irrepressible pride of He-Who-Had-Brought-It-All-About.

  One boy, Tejas, went home and told his sister Gauri all about it. At night in the little attic room they shared, he brought out his slate and drew a picture of the contraption Shankarnarayana’s wife had designed. Since the sketch was based on Maithili’s description of it to Lakshmi, who had reported it to Narayanamma, who told Srikanth about it over dinner, who explained it in great detail the next day in school to the boys, and since not one of these people – with the exception of Maithili – had actually seen the contraption, the sketch turned out to be nothing like the original. But Gauri listened interestedly and that was enough. For you can never pass on an actual cold to someone; only the germs for it. And once it takes hold, a whole new cold develops in a whole new way inside that other person’s nose.

  So it was that the germ of the idea of harvesting rainwater took hold of Rudrapura and spread through it like a happy epidemic, until nobody (except maybe the dogs lying about outside the Decent Haircutting Saloon) was spared, and nobody ever recovered from it thereafter.

  During English class at Sacred Heart Girls’ Convent the next day, Gauri put up her hand and Tessie ma’am stopped speaking about Jane Austen to wait for her question. Instead, Gauri said, ‘Tessie ma’am, do you know about rainwater harvesting?’ She anxiously held out a slate with Tejas’s sketch on it, and there was no more talk about the Victorians for the rest of the lesson.

  Old man Basavaraj was digging out a hollow within a dead tree root in his backyard. It was a raintree. His grandfather had planted it, and Basavaraj had grown up in its shade. Then, a few years prior, during a violent summer storm, lightning had struck the tree and it had split down the middle, right to its base, and collapsed. Basavaraj had done all he could to revive it, feeling sure that if he used plenty of manure and cut off the superfluous branches, in time new ones would grow with leaves and pink wisps of flowers, like the ones with which he and his sisters had decorated the threshold of the home on festival days as children.

  The home was still the same tiny two-room place. But the tree had made it charming, lending it a greenish tint when he couldn’t afford to whitewash it, and dimming with its shade the shabbiness of the old walls. But now no new branches appeared, and over time the vital old trunk had gradually taken on a deadened look. Basavaraj hadn’t the heart to remove it, and had left it standing there as a testimonial to childhood, and to something beloved and beautiful, now late.

  Today the old man picked up his axe and began to strike at the inside of the massive stump, carving out a cup-like hollow deep enough to hold some thirty-five litres of water, maybe more. In the silence of his heart, he spoke to the tree, thanking it for everything – for living, for loving, and for the water it would hold for him and his Shanta when the rains came. In life and in death, the tree had been his friend. The sweat ran off his brow and mingled with his tears, falling into the receptacle that was forming under the patient blows of his axe.

  Three boys passed that way and rushed to help, but Shanta, who was watching her husband from the veranda, held up her hand and shook her head at them. She understood that this was something he had to do by himself. The boys went away.

  Later, when Basavaraj shouldered his axe and came inside, he saw his wife watching him with a wistful smile. ‘What is it?’ he asked her.

  ‘Everybody in Rudrapura is doing their bit to harvest the rain…’

  ‘Everyone, except me,’ is what Basavaraj heard, even though she didn’t say it. She didn’t have to. His Shanta, whom he could never stand to see sad or to be left behind in anything if he could help it. And he had tried to help it, to the best of his ability, in all these years that they had been husband and wife.

  That night, Basavaraj lay awake thinking, and a plan suddenly popped into his head. He knew it wasn’t much of an idea. It would not harvest much rainwater, t
his idea of his. But it would harvest happiness for his Shanta, and that was more important than anything else. He peered into the darkness at her slight form curled up beside him.

  ‘Shanta? Shantamma? Wake up,’ he whispered excitedly. She stirred drowsily. He shook her, and this time she opened her eyes.

  ‘Eeyn ri? Eeyn aaytu?’ she mumbled.

  ‘I’ve thought of a way!’ His eyes were shining and so she lay there, waiting for him to speak.

  ‘Your saris!’

  Suddenly, she smiled. ‘They are in the bottom of that trunk. The old cotton ones. Take them, ri!’

  ‘Illa, Shantu,’ he said, sitting up and smiling down at her. ‘You take them.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘Me? How? I can’t even stand up.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. You carry the saris and I’ll carry you!’

  ‘But your back—’

  ‘Is strong enough to carry my wife! Come on!’ He leapt up and dug out three cotton saris from the bottom of the tin trunk in the corner of the room. They were old and faded, but were still sturdy. ‘Never underestimate the strength of old things,’ he chuckled to himself.

  Handing the bundle of saris to his wife, he bent down and lifted her up in his arms with a grunt, stumbling a little. She grabbed onto his shoulders to steady herself and him, pulling her knees to her chest so that she wouldn’t be dead weight.

  When they reached the backyard where the thin wires of the clothes lines ran, old man Basavaraj – feeling like a young man again – stopped beneath the first wire. Shanta flung two of the saris about his shoulders, laughing like a little girl when they covered his eyes and face.