Sripathi liked the gentle eyes gazing at him out of the black-and-white photograph and agreed to marry Nirmala as soon as their horoscopes were matched and found to be compatible.
“What is the hurry?” Ammayya wanted to know. “Wait and see other girls. There will be a long line-up. After all, you are a big man’s son.”
But Sripathi was adamant and a few months later the marriage took place.
Three years after his wedding, Sripathi, bored by the routine triviality of his work, applied for a job as a newspaper reporter in Delhi. He had even gone for the interview and was delighted when he was offered the job. The salary was not very much more, but the thought of having his own byline, of being recognized for his work, was thrilling. Nirmala was excited too, mostly because it would mean a house of her own and freedom from Ammayya. She would miss Putti, and so would two-year-old Maya, but they could always visit.
Ammayya would not hear of it. “What will I do here alone?” she asked Sripathi. “With a young daughter to look after?”
“Why don’t you come with us to Delhi?”
“Ayyo! You want me to die of cold there, or what? And what will we do with our house? Sripathi, you are the son, it is your duty to think about your mother and your sister.” She began to cry. “You want to abandon us like your father did. I knew this would happen some day. Oh God, why am I cursed with such sorrow?”
Eventually, Ammayya’s tears persuaded Sripathi to refuse the Delhi offer. He never tried to change jobs after that, even when Chandra Iyer’s son, Kashyap, returned from the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia and took over the agency. Kashyap had big ambitions. Within a month, he had changed the name from Iyer & Son Printing and Advertising to Advisions Marketing. He moved the business out of his father’s house, renting instead a small office on the first floor of a modern building on Mahatma Gandhi Road. He ordered new desks and chairs, hung pictures on the walls and even got a few potted plants to fill any empty corners. He hired a secretary and travelled frequently to Madras, Madurai and Chidambaram, energetically collecting clients. In the early years, the business grew rapidly, simply because advertising and marketing were new concepts. People were impressed with Kashyap’s enthusiasm. They saw how the advertisements attracted more customers. Then Kashyap’s father died, and he took over the business entirely. He hired two more copywriters and another artist. There was a receptionist now as well, who sat behind a desk near the entrance. She was constantly pressing buttons on the phone console and speaking in a low, rapid voice to callers. Sripathi realized that, apart from the accountant, Ramesh Iyengar, and the artist, Victor Coelho, he was the oldest person in the office. He also noticed that Kashyap had become very critical of his work. “Too trite,” he would say, flicking at the sheet of paper with a contemptuous finger. He made Sripathi stand like a peon before his desk. “You need a hook to grab your customer.” Or, “Your concepts are too old-fashioned. You should learn to use more modern terminology.”
The young owner gave him all the low-budget clients’ advertisements. Minaret Beedis. Champak Hair Oil. Ranga’s Shoe Store. And even when Sripathi wrote what he considered scintillating copy for those cheap cigarettes and oils and shoes, Kashyap made him rewrite each a dozen times and frequently decided to use no copy at all. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” he would tell Sripathi, not even looking up from his glass-topped desk that was littered with paper. Then he would tell him to write something for a cement company that had just opened its business in Chintadripuram and needed some cheap publicity.
The fear of poverty haunted Sripathi. He thought of his pauper relative often. He remembered how, when he was twenty, he had tried to find out what had happened to the relative’s daughters who would have been about his age. Nobody in his family knew. Nobody wanted to know about the failures, only the successes.
Sripathi plodded on doggedly through the years, wondering when Kashyap would find an excuse to sack him. Then Maya had got her letter of admission from the American university. Soon after came an offer of marriage, and Sripathi’s life began to acquire a glow.
Her grandfather was coming to get her on the first of September. How many tomorrows was that? They said he wanted to take her to live with him, but she wasn’t going to leave Vancouver. No way. She had become used to Aunty Kiran’s house, and she did not really mind living in the upper bunk in Anjali’s room. Her friend had told her that she would adopt Nandana, if she wanted, because now she was an orphan and orphans got adopted.
India. That’s where she was supposed to go with the Old Man. Many times her mother had shown her pictures of the house in India, and she hadn’t ever thought much of it. “Are there ghosts inside?” she’d wanted to know. Her mother had laughed and told her that there was a mango tree in the backyard, a snake in a hole at the foot of the tree and a big fat frog near the well, but not a single ghost. “Soon we will all go there—you and me and Daddy,” she had added. And Nandana had asked, “How soon is soon?”
Once she had heard her mother crying, and her father had said to her, “Why do you torture yourself like this? If the Old Man doesn’t want to see you, to hell with him. You have us, don’t you?” The Old Man was the grandfather who was coming to take her away, and he had always made her mother cry. Once a week, in the evening, her mother would make a long-distance call to India and talk to her own mother, whom she called Mamma. Sometimes she spoke in English and at others in a language called Kannada that Nandana could follow in bits and pieces. Her father didn’t understand it at all and said he felt left out when she and her mother spoke it. Nandana had seen a picture of her mother’s Mamma in an Indian dress called a sari. One time her mother had visited school in a sari because Mrs. Lipsky was having an International Day, and everybody was supposed to bring their parents in their special dresses. She had cut up one of her old saris and made a long skirt with pleats for Nandana. She had also cut up Nandana’s blue tube top, so that her belly button showed, and made her wear it with the long skirt. That was the kind of outfit, she said, that she had worn when she was a small girl in India. Nandana felt silly in the dress, especially since she’d had to braid her hair and wear some flowers in the braid, and put a small round sticker on her forehead like the one her mother wore with a sari. But afterwards, when her friends and Mrs. Lipsky told her that she looked cool, she felt better. They all wanted to wear the stickers on their foreheads, and the next time her mother went to the Indian store on Main Street, she bought a pack full of multicoloured felt dots for Nandana and her friends.
As for her grandfather, Nandana did not like him. He made her mother cry.
5
IMAGES IN A MIRROR
PUTTI SAT ON THE VERANDAH, silently watching her brother as he wheeled his scooter to the blocked gates of Big House. She wondered whether she ought to go back inside and sit with Nirmala. She thought of Maya, and a sadness settled over her. What had got into Sripathi to make him cut the girl out of his life like that? Granted, she had disgraced the family, but people had done things far worse.
In Munnuswamy’s house next door, the cow Manjula, tethered to one of the pillars in the portico, lowed and flicked its tail to keep away the flies. Its newborn calf tottered weakly around, butting its head against the mother’s swollen udder. The cow stopped chewing cud and licked the calf gently. There was a law against keeping livestock in residential areas, but Munnuswamy had somehow got around it.
When Putti was a child, Munnuswamy used to come over with a scythe once a week to hack the long grass in their back garden for fodder for his cows. In return, he would tie up the jasmine, prune the roses and weed out the parthenium from the vegetable beds. He was always accompanied by his son, Gopala, a bold, noisy boy clad in ragged shorts donated by one of his father’s customers. A year or two older than Putti, Gopala climbed the trees and helped himself to their fruit. When she threatened to complain to Ammayya, he made hideous faces at her through the leafy branches. He whistled tunes from films and imitated bird calls. O
nce, she had caught him pissing against the far wall of the compound, and she had watched wide-eyed and silent as the golden fluid arced from between his fingers and splashed into the grass stubble at the foot of the wall.
She had never imagined that one day Munnuswamy and Gopala would live in the house next door. That in addition to being a successful businessman, Munnuswamy would become a member of the Legislative Assembly. From an obsequious milkman who had carved deep, bleeding crevasses into his heels by trudging barefoot from house to house with his cows, he had turned himself into an imperious, powerful character, with two gleaming cars parked outside his house all day. He still walked barefoot, though. “The earth is my mother,” he would tell his voters. “How can a humble cowherd like me insult her by wearing shoes?” Sometimes he would make a dig against a young minister who was in the opposition party and say, “Appapa, I don’t have the money to wear Gucci loafers and fancy clothes like our young prince. When my fellow countrymen have nothing to eat, can I spend on useless things like shoes?”
Munnuswamy’s dairy business was also known for its trouble-making services, offered to any and all political parties at rates as reasonable as the milk that he continued to sell to his old customers. Munnuswamy’s “Boys”—a euphemism for his horde of hard-eyed thugs—specialized in religious unrest, fasts-unto-death (or at least until the newspapers arrived on the scene) and suicide squads. Its services were most in demand during elections, when political parties were ready to try extreme tactics to garner votes. If, for instance, a party needed Muslim votes, the Boys spread rumours among Toturpuram’s Muslim population about violence being planned by an opposing Hindu party, churning up rage and rioting as easily as they did butter. And if it was the Hindus who needed a stir, the Boys ran over a cow or two and blamed a Muslim truck-owner for the outrage. Munnuswamy’s suicide teams threatened to detonate themselves at busy bus stops, and his rally masters gathered groups of discontented youth to hold up traffic and generate chaos. Some of the Boys lived with the Munnuswamy family and ran errands or helped around the house. Putti was fascinated by one of them, a young, tense-looking fellow named Ishwara with a look of controlled violence about him who was famous for his dreams. One morning, after a complaint about livestock in residential areas had been registered against his employer, he had woken up and rushed out to Manjula, the cow, kissed her on the forehead, decorated her with hibiscus blossom and vermilion powder, and declared that she was Munnuswamy’s saintly sister who had died twenty years before of typhoid. It was he who, on behalf of the Hindu Mahashakti Dal, a fanatically religious organization, dreamt that a stone on a local mosque’s valuable property contained Lord Shiva’s toenail. And to balance the scales, he discovered a hair from the head of a famous Muslim saint inside the trunk of an ancient tree that grew in a rich Hindu farmer’s field.
The Boys’ latest accomplishment was the International Beauty Parade incident in Madras, organized to push Munnuswamy onto the front page of every national newspaper. He had already gone on a hunger strike to protest the display of female bodies clad only in bathing suits, but the strike had attracted one sole reporter from The Toturpuram Chronicle. The national press was on the beaches of Goa, where the pre-parade photo shoots were taking place, holding out tape recorders to bikini-clad beauties from around the world who charmingly offered their impressions of India. Munnuswamy sent a group of earnest young women, dressed in long-waisted blouses and sober saris to lie down on the stage built for the Beauty Parade at the cost of a million rupees. They threatened to set themselves on fire after swallowing a double dose of cyanide, to detonate bombs in the audience, and to hold the contestants hostage until their demands were met. These demands were never really articulated, but nobody noticed this omission, and the press arrived like a flock of crows, eager to capture the rivetting combination of violence, beauty and politics. Munnuswamy was photographed several times standing self-righteously beside a hysterical young woman holding a grenade. She clutched a megaphone in her other hand and yelled tearfully that everybody in the country appeared to have abandoned Indian values for American ones, except the honourable MLA beside her, who clung to all things good and proper. The creative genius behind these acts of disruption and vandalism was widely believed to be Gopala, who had grown into a handsome man with passionate eyes. He had been married once. His wife had died in childbirth and he had stayed resolutely single. Since he had become a widower, his mother had paraded troops of women before him. She had begged him to provide her with grandchildren, with heirs to inherit Munnuswamy’s fortune.
Now the milkman’s son appeared suddenly on his verandah, clad only in the loose, striped cotton shorts commonly worn by labourers. Putti blushed at the sight of his dark, taut body, burnt and robust as strong Mysore coffee. He stood straight. His arms grew out of his wide shoulders like sinewy branches and his sturdy legs were planted firmly apart. He spoke in a soft murmur to the calf. With his right hand he absently rubbed the mat of greying curls on his broad chest. Putti gazed at him for a few minutes, and then, ashamed of herself, hurried inside before Gopala caught her watching.
When Putti entered the house, Ammayya was still in her chair at the entrance to the bedroom. “My darling, were you standing in the sun?” she asked, looking up from the newspaper she’d been scanning. She read Sripathi’s copy of The Hindu every day, as well as the local newspapers that she borrowed weekly from a young couple who lived in the apartment building across the road. They were both busy lawyers, the new breed of well-to-do, upwardly mobile Indians who bewildered Putti (and whom she inarticulately envied) with their confidence, their careless aflluence and their amazing ability to throw things out after a single use. They did not seem to care that Ammayya never returned their papers. The old lady pored over them, her nose a few inches away from the thin sheets. She stored them under her bed—the Tamil ones on Putti’s side, the English ones on hers—before selling them to the rubbish man, triumphant at having made money out of somebody else’s property.
“Not good for your skin, how many times have I told you?” She peered at her daughter. “What is wrong? You are looking very funny. Are you falling ill? Maybe we should go to Dr. Menon for some medicine. Let us go now itself, before it becomes too hot. On the way back, we can stop at the lending library. Miss Chintamani told me that the new book by K. Sarojamma will be in today.”
“I was on the verandah,” Putti replied, squeezing past her mother’s chair and into the dark bedroom they shared. “Nothing is wrong with me, and I don’t want to go anywhere. How can you think of going out when we have had such a tragedy in the family?”
“Tchah-tchah-tchah!” Ammayya exclaimed. “I was only thinking of you, my darling. Inside my heart is breaking, my grandchild is dead and I am alive. Why can’t Yama-raja take me away from this world?”
Putti hoped that her mother would not launch into one of her weeping, dramatic acts. Ammayya could cry any time: at weddings, funerals and birth ceremonies; when she didn’t get her way; when she was bored or in need of attention or sympathy; and when she wanted to play the bereaved, long-suffering widow. She had a whole repertoire of scenes. After living with her for so many decades, Putti thought she knew them all, but Ammayya could still surprise her at times. Her martyr act was the one that annoyed everyone the most, although the tragedy-queen role was the one she performed with the greatest aplomb. Both were lubricated with copious tears and eloquent pauses between dialogue that was guiltlessly lifted from the torrid Kannada romances that Miss Chintamani had introduced into her life. Putti dimly understood her mother’s need for attention, her growing fear and loneliness. But today, her mind in a curious tumult, she ignored Ammayya instead of offering to massage her sparse white hair with warm oil or to look at old photographs with her or to take her to the library.
She sat before the Belgian mirror inherited from her great-grandmother on her dead father’s side and moodily worked the tangles from her damp hair with her fingers. The mirror had a bubbled silver surfa
ce, yellow in patches from long contact with the sea air, and returned only a faint reflection. It should have been discarded years ago, but Ammayya did not believe in spending a paisa more than necessary to keep body and soul alive. Narasimha Rao, the father whom Putti knew only through other people’s memories, had stolen so much from Ammayya that she clung to everything he left behind. So the mirror stayed in the room, concealing in its mottled depths the tiny wrinkles matting the skin around Putti’s mouth, the vertical line beginning to carve a channel on her forehead and the anxiety that filled her eyes a little more with every passing year. The dim 20-watt lightbulb, coated with oily vapours from the kitchen, did its bit to hide the truth from her and give the impression that she was still young and attractive, and deserved, as her mother kept assuring her, a prince among suitors, a Rishi Kapoor film star for a husband. The bulb was another of Ammayya’s economy measures. A few years ago she had acquired a vast stock of them, at a quarter of the original price, from a small trader whose business went under. Until she ran through the entire stock, the whole house was obliged to use them. When Putti gazed at herself, she saw only her high, round cheeks perched on either side of a slender, sharp nose (which, Miss Chintamani told her, were the attributes of a perfect beauty according to her favourite fashion magazine), and her lips pouting over a pair of overlapping front teeth. Her hair was jet black and shone with perfumed hair oil, and her eyes, not quite as large as she would have liked, looked dramatic as a Kathakali dancer’s thanks to a lavish lining of kohl. They were not always the same size, though, for Putti could barely see her face in the dark, corroded mirror. Of course, she could have opened the shuttered windows—there were two large ones—but Ammayya had warned her about exposure to sunlight. “Puttamma, my darling, listen to me, I have lived years longer than you, so I know. Light will make your skin darken and dry up. And it will turn your hair completely white. Then who will marry you, tell me? Besides, you don’t want all the loafers we have in this neighbourhood to peep at you!” Especially not people like Gopala next door, or the bunch of ruffians who distilled illicit liquor in the empty plot behind Big House, burying the wretched stuff in the dry, hot soil to ferment, where it filled the air with the fetid stench of rotting rice. You never knew what those rogues might do, the old woman said, even with the windows shut tight. Smash them down in a liquor-coloured haze? Anything was possible. Sometimes, late at night, when she lay awake beside her snoring mother, Putti could hear the muffled sounds of laughter and voices from beyond the windows, and she shuddered voluptuously at the thought of those rough-bodied men bursting through the wood and stained-glass panes to watch her turn in her bed.
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