The Cat and Shakespeare

by Rao, Raja

  That is why I carry Shantha so badly on my face. When Govindan Nair wants to speak of her, he simply says, the Vazhavan-kad house (Vazhavan is a small hamlet in north Travancore). He calls her by her house name as if her house were she. In fact her house is she. To speak the truth, that is how I met her. She came to the Revenue Board about some land division. She looked so innocent, I told her to sit down and immediately took out her file. She was sure her case was right for she could not know how her face might ever be wrong. Might she think of anything wrong? She was certain she could not. So truth became her thought. If she said, ‘Come to me’—it meant come. If she became my mistress it was because she felt wife. She remained a wife. My feet were there for her to worship. My weaknesses were there for her to learn; my manhood, at least such as I possess, for her to bear children. She had never touched any man before. She said she knew me to be her man the moment I went and stood against the filing ladder. For a woman love is not development. Love is recognition. The fact that my intestinal troubles improved after I met her proved she was right, so she felt. Devotion to me was proof of her truth. The child was meaning. The woman is always right.

  Who told Shantha then that I had fallen unconscious? She said my son (in her) told her so. She went to Govindan Nair’s house, and she and Tangamma stood at the wall, while Shridhar came to open my window. Shantha would never come to me. How could she come to my wife’s house? She looked from under the bilva tree, her figure square and big, and I could see tears fall from her eyes. She seemed to be more in prayer than in sorrow; her skin shone like black ivory, so it had the colour of blue. I could almost (I used to tease her) see the white hands of the child inside of her (for I am sort of Brahmin-fair). Will this illness affect the child? I must build a house, a house three storeys high.

  Destiny brings to us little slips of paper, as the office peon does from some visitor or the boss. What does a name really mean? The British bubo is a name given by my friend Govindan Nair to an unknown phenomenon of physiological eruption, when pus and blood seem to rise on the skin, round themselves up like a country mango, and split, and the flies and the lizards have the feast. Now that the bubos are finished, tell me, who will feast the lizards? Who will feed the bacilli, if indeed it was a bacillus and it came from Benghazi? Is it really so hot in Benghazi? What made some autonomous invisible crawly active entity enter into an Indian soldier in his wars with Hitler and Rommel, burst into a million bloody worms which having travelled through boats, trains, restaurants (through the files of the sanitary inspectors’ reports), penetrate into some flies perchance that sat on a cow whose milk my milkman brings, and, having gone into my intestines where the bacilli field was relatively vacant (like an empty conference room, chairs and tables set out and the meeting might begin at any time and the resolution be passed), give me, sir dear sir, my beautiful British bubo? Everybody must do something—the clerk must correct his files, the fleas must bite. Illness come, and one goes to Narayan Pandita Vaidyan, and the horse-dung medicine is given. I go for the purge, the sun is hot, I tumble against the threshold and fall. And that’s Shridhar’s death. For him an unconscious state is death. What is sleep then to Shridhar?

  Poor Shridhar was also ill. He had malaria (or was it filaria?)—another flea bite. So he did not go to school. One goes to school when one is well (and when Uncle is not ill). Thus the two flea families had made a pact. Across the wall they said to each other: ‘We will change the world. You come from Benghazi and I come from, say, Uzhavezhapuram. We met and we shall play destiny.’ Invisible are the ways of destiny. Food will go across the wall—Shridhar will not go to school. ‘Pappadam and rice will I take down to Uncle.’ The bilva tree will bless.

  Shantha is carrying four months. I can just see the rise in her belly, from where I lie. Her smile is freedom of the world. It is trust in herself. She looks in as I look out (as Shridhar does). To trust is to be. She can lean against the wall whispering out words to me, as if the world would create itself to her wishes for me. She created a child for herself and gave it to me. She said, ‘This is yours.’ And that is the truth. Who can create a child but God . . . What is the relation between God and Shantha?

  ‘I go and come.’ Shantha smiles from the wall. She, as it were, bows to me behind her back. Then slowly I hear the leaves of the jack trees crunch under her. I now see the head first, blue as sky, then the hair (with flat big chignon), and then she is gone. For a long time I go on listening to myself like a lizard. It is beginning to be hot already. Tangamma sends Shridhar with some coffee to console me. Then Govindan Nair (with sandal paste on his forehead and his packet of betel leaves and tobacco) jumps across the wall.

  ‘How are you, my lord and liege?’

  ‘Better than if the kingdom were at peace and no wars anywhere.’

  ‘The Hitlers are in us, like objects in seeing. We think there is Hitler, when Hitler is really an incarnation of what I think. You are bad because I am. You are good because I am. The sun is because I see. You do not suffer because you are the British bubo. Ah, brother, you too be British’—and he guffawed. He liked his own jokes, and tears came to his eyes. Then he smiled in love. ‘I love the British. I respect them because they are such shopkeepers. What can you do after all? If you have to buy you must sell. If you want betel and tobacco, you must work in numbers. You issue ration cards, six hundred seventy a day, and God gives food to the needful. I must say I have never come across so much respect for God as amongst the British. I often think God is a ledger keeper. Loss and gain do not interest him. Accounts do. Even a rat can give trouble to the British.’

  ‘How so?’ I ask. Govindan Nair’s methods are so devious. I just do not understand.

  ‘Rats eat up accounts. That is how we explained away the ration given to Kolliathur village. When the big boss asked, ‘Where are the files?’ we made such a grand search. First my boss said: ‘We have misplaced it.’ Then he said: ‘We do not think we have it in this office.’ Finally he wrote: ‘Eaten away by rats. Please ask the Public Works Dept. Officer to come to Ration Office No. 66 for inspection. Two reports on rat pest remain unanswered.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘He built a house, that is John did. He built a modest little house. He said it was done from the proceeds of his wife’s property sale. Her grandmother had just died. Everybody has a grandmother, you know.’

  ‘Where is the house?’

  ‘On the Karamanai side.’

  ‘Is it expensive?’

  ‘Only some fifteen thousand rupees. The Brahmins are getting poorer with the wars. So they sell their houses. Why, soldiers earn more than clerks today. That is the law of the rats.’

  ‘What do you do then for the rats?’

  ‘We encourage them. We even invite them, like the Pied Piper, with music.’

  ‘Seriously speaking?’

  ‘Dead seriously. Rats are necessary for the ration shops. Otherwise who will eat up all the rice? If you want the population of Trivandrum to feed on food, then you have to employ other means.’

  ‘What?’ I asked in my denseness.

  ‘Ah, sir, you need the mother cat,’ he said in utter gravity, then rose and spat out tobacco.

  ‘Shridhar!’ he shouted. ‘Bring two cups of coffee.’ And settling down, he put some more chalk to his betel, and started chewing again.

  ‘You need education, sir. You are poor in general knowledge. You do not know you have a grandmother. You know too little about rats. You must become a pathologist and write a paper on the nature of bacteria, as seen in ration-shop ledgers. One rich man in the north, so I heard, was travelling on a train. Where are you going, Seth Sahib? they asked him. I’m going to Jagannath Puri, sirs, for the annual festival of the Lord of Earth. Why, do you belong hereabouts? they said. No, sirs, I come from Calcutta. I am a grain merchant, he said. The famine, we hear is very serious now, they said. Yes sirs, who should know it but me? he said. It must be terrible, they said. Yes, I am going to Jagannath Puri. I am g
iving the Lord a silver spire, the grain merchant said. Now, I ask of you, my friend, when shall we build your golden spire?’

  ‘When do you want to?’

  ‘In four or five months Shantha will have an heir. Let us build a spire ten men high.’

  ‘It will be three storeys high.’

  ‘First let us build one two storeys high.’

  ‘Anything you like,’ I said, laughing.

  ‘No sir, it is a dead serious matter. A woman bears a child. The child needs a basic house to be born in. You cannot be born just anywhere. Let us buy this house itself,’ he said, spitting out his tobacco. Shridhar had brought in the coffee. He stood there, amazed and in admiration before his father. His father looked like a sea captain hatching plans to decoy a cargo. The night is falling. The sea is calm. The sea will obey the captain. ‘Captain, the sea of Arabia is mild.’ ‘Turn towards the Laccadive Archipelago.’ ‘The Dutch ships sail.’ ‘Who cares if they have guns? We have sinews. You build empires. We build houses. Slaves, to the nor’east!’

  One must build a house if one has to have a house, I say to myself. We’ll plant a bilva tree by it. Shantha will look at me, whispering words. How beautiful it is to be pregnant. Why not always be pregnant and four months carrying? You can play with bilva leaves, and, like the hunter, you can go on dropping them on the silence below. Shiva will appear. I envy women that they bear children.

  ‘Usha will be coming back from school,’ I sit and say, as if to the chair. I have a canvas chair, and, my feet on its edge, I scratch the curve of my limbs, and I think. The coffee has just gone down my throat. I have been to the Home Friends to have my bad cup of coffee. (Sometimes I want to avoid this, and go to the milk bar near my office and gulp a cup of milk. I feel so virtuous after that. But milk is never an immediate friend like coffee. In life we search for truth but live in the illusion of permanence. Milk is good for me. ‘It is good for the mother cat,’ Govindan will shout, and laugh, ‘No cat will ever touch your potion of the dark bean. We have no feline instinct. We live like rats,’ etc., etc.) Thinking of Usha of an evening is a pleasant thing. I could always take her out on a walk: ‘Come, child,’ and she will leave her book and give her little finger for me to take. And so we go. Usha is the dearest thing in my life. She is my child. She is not merely that. She is child. When I hear somebody say, he walks, you may think it is an impersonal, a grammatically correct statement. I walk, he walks, they walk. But for me walking is Usha. When she sits it is sitting. Shantha understands this. Shantha’s silence has all that logic cannot compute. Saroja wants two and two to make four, and if I say, ‘What about your dreams, there do two and two make four?’ she says, ‘It always makes four, according to me. Yet in the logic of my dreams it’s seven. But I am not living in a dream. Usha is five years old. She is not ten. You can open the school register and see.’

  When you have Saroja’s logic, what can you do? What logic, Usha must ask herself, has the railway train that says Kimkoo-chig, chug, chug, as if it were a great-aunt, and it goes on spitting out fire at the Elayathur railway station? The train watches all school returners. Evening after evening it will come and spit out friendly smoke. The cigarette vendors, the wada sellers, the coolies, the jhatka- and bandi-walas6 outside will all have a logic with the train system. Soon after the train arrives, passengers will get out. They have so many bundles. Usha is sure the train knows it. She knows too that jhatkas come in the right numbers. As there are so many benches at the school every morning for so many children, you have so many jhatkas. Every evening you have so many bandis. Snakes know when the school children pass. The train has told them: Take care, take care, they are under my protection.

  I love Usha for the way she comes back from school. She dreams of the train behind her. She has no fear. For the train will let her pass first on the Sethupallea bridge. Then you go down and stand in the field below, under the small young coconut tree. The train is happy. The tree says, ‘Good morning,’ as the soldiers say to one another. Usha and her friends put stones around the tree. They are building a marriage house. Once the train has passed with all the men and women, faces and shouts, Usha feels she can go home. Saroja does not wait for her. She is busy inspecting the rope making. Saroja is a tremendous worker. For her fact is that which yields. Her fathers have left thirty-three acres of wet land. They worked hard. They gave her and her sister education. Land is a fact. You reap what you sow.

  I have a system of no logic, and that is the story. What logic can speak of Usha? How and what shall I say about Shantha? She lives backwards, as it were, when, with her rounded belly, she moves forward. Birth is instantaneous with time. Who is born where? Time is born in time. And that is Shantha. To be a wife is not to be wed. To be a wife is to worship your man. Then you are born. And you give birth to what is born in being born. You annihilate time and you become a wife. Wifehood, of all states in the world, seems the most holy. It stops work. It creates. It lives on even when time dies. Suppose you broke your clock, would the garden go? Suppose the garden were burned, where will the sky go? Such is woman.

  I was thinking of the house and of Usha, scratching my feet, sitting on the canvas chair. The evening will slowly draw in bringing the sea nearer. How the night coming gives trees and sound a peculiar shy truth. They want to hide and go and come. Morning will reveal them, as if they had gone somewhere, and returned. The bilva tree always seems on a voyage to nowhere. It has gone and come like a clock that ticks. Time ticks. You close your eyes and open. I want to be free.

  Shall I build a house for Usha? Who will give the money? I ask myself. Shantha could if she wished. My office can have her papers registered, and she could then have her disputed land, and she can sell it. Shantha loves Usha without having seen her. Shantha’s house will be the right house for Usha. Vithal my son will inherit from his mother . . .

  ‘Don’t worry, brother,’ says Govindan Nair, coming in after his bath. He has The Hindu in his hand. The newspaper is visible truth, is one of his theories. When truth becomes visible, it is a life. So the world is a life, etc., etc.

  ‘As true as The Hindu, I tell you I will help you to build the house.’

  ‘With what?’ I ask.

  ‘With bricks,’ he says, and roars in laughter. ‘A house, dear sir, is built with bricks. In dreams you can build it in gold. In the Mahabharata you build it in lacquer. I will build it for you in stone.’

  ‘But stone will make it hot.’

  ‘Stone gives permanence to objects. You must have a house that will last five hundred years. Someone in history will say: This house of stone, in the ruins of old Trivandrum, is one thousand one hundred years old. Look at its inscriptions. They are in Roman characters. That was the character used universally for some five hundred years. It was called the period of the big empires. They set. The Indians quarrelled among themselves. Then the Huns came. We fought the Huns. Some soldiers scratching the wall found a name. It read: Govindan Nair, Ration Clerk. They thought it meant a general. Or a prince. He who gives is a prince. I give rations or rather ration cards, so I give food. I am a prince, we will therefore build a palace. The palace of truth.’

  I never could understand all that he meant. He always seemed to be pulling my leg. ‘Yes, sir, the cat always meows. That is my nature, to say meow-meow. All my language can be reduced to that—meow, meow, meowooow.’

  I love Govindan Nair.

  Hearing I was ill, Saroja brought Usha by the morning train. It comes in at ten-ten and she left by the evening local at four forty-three. She had boat repairs to inspect—boats had to carry away coconut shells. Her land is in the Elayathur lagoon. A patch of land surrounded by water. There are such deep-bent coconut trees. And you hear the sea.

  Shantha said to me one evening: ‘When my land is sold, we’ll buy this house,’ by which she meant my house. She never came inside, but it was this house for it was mine. That is the way with woman. What belongs to you belongs to me, what belongs to the lord alone belongs. For woman
is belonging, as mind is belonging—belonging to me. You can only shine of light. The shine knows its light, but to whom does the light belong? Light belongs to light. Lord, how beautiful thou hast made woman! She tells you. If woman were not, would you know you were? Shantha said: ‘You,’ and I saw I. Wonderful is man. He needs to be told he is. Then he knows he is. Looking alone he sees himself and tries to say: You. He is dumb. He cannot speak. He makes a bare movement of lips. The mirror says so. There is no sound. But sound comes and tells him: ‘You.’ Who said ‘You?’ She. Thus the world goes moving on its pivot.

  Usha goes along the railway line. The railway engine is kind to her. When the wind blows in gusts, and the monsoon comes pouring through the coconut trees, the train blows and blows the whistle, and says: ‘Child, child, I am coming. Please keep away from the railway line. I am your mother. I protect you, even though you see me come and go. I dream of you in my roundhouse. In the Trivandrum roundhouse there are many old hags. They were all made in foundries before this era was born. But I was born in 1921. I have grown up among coconut trees. I have played with the Kanchi and Kali rivers. I know every bridge by its sound. I whistle past Kartikura House. I know the sound of my whistle wakes up the wildcats on your roof. They have such bright eyes. I come to protect. I am the thread of your lives. What would you do without the railway line? How will you go to school otherwise? The signal is my eldest daughter, the shunting hand my granddaughter. Children, children, who go to school, keep away from the railway line: I am passing.’ And the engine floods the line with milky light.