The Narrow Road to Palem

by Sharath Komarraju

‘The village likes to sleep, sir. Lazy fellows.’

  ‘Will it take long to walk around it?’

  ‘No, sir. Very small village. I think you will like it, sir.’

  Ritu ran her finger along the mirror’s handle. It felt cool and rubbery, though it looked like metal. She felt that she would be able to twist it out of shape with little effort. The frame in which the mirror was set had the look of varnished teak, and emitted a faint odour, one that she could not quite place. But it made her think of Nimmi, and without her knowledge tears had begun to collect in her eyes.

  ‘Madam?’ said the old man. ‘You must take a walk in the village, madam. You will feel better.’

  At that moment, Ritu turned the mirror around to look at her reflection.

  * * *

  With a shriek she tossed the mirror at the man and fell back on the muddy ground. Vikas got down on one knee and took her hand in his. She had been told by Dr Mehta to stay away from mirrors, for some time at least, but did she listen? He wanted to reprimand her for being such a fool, for being unable to deal with this small hurdle that life had thrown at them, but that would turn into another fight. He knew.

  So he said, ‘Are you okay?’

  Ritu frowned at the mirror, then looked up at the old man.

  The man was looking at her too, with the white eye glittering in the misty morning light. ‘What did you see in it, madam?’

  ‘I think we need to go,’ said Ritu.

  ‘Go?’ said Vikas. ‘I thought we were going to take a walk in the village.’

  ‘Yes, madam,’ said the man. ‘Take a walk in the village. You will like it as much as you like your own home.’

  ‘No,’ said Ritu, pushing herself up to her haunches. ‘We will leave. Please.’

  ‘Hey. Hey. It’s all right. Here, have some water.’

  Ritu shook her head, adjusted her hair, cracked her knuckles. Her hair had become thin and grey over the last few months, and she had gained a good five kilos of weight too, around the stomach. All his efforts to put her on a diet had come to nothing. She had been a track and field athlete in college. After graduating, she had taken up salsa, and until they had gotten married they had gone dancing and cycling three times a week. But ever since –

  ‘Where are you from, sir?’ The old man was setting his mirrors back on his sheet, faces down.

  ‘Hmm? Hyderabad.’

  ‘Oh, the big city. You came in your car, did you?’

  Vikas nodded, and felt his back pocket for the keys. He did not find them.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Where is your car?’

  Vikas started to answer, but the words would not come. He realized for the first time that morning that he had no idea where their car was. They must have woken up early and left the car parked somewhere around here, before they set out for their walk, but he remembered none of it.

  The old man looked at the road by which they had come. Vikas followed his gaze. A straight stretch, covered on both sides by black and green trees. A white Maruti Dezire sped past them in a flash, windows down, driven by a tattooed young man with shoulder-length hair.

  ‘That road,’ he said, inclining his head in that direction. ‘Where you came walking. They call it Kanakangi road. They say that Kanakangi was a prostitute here in Palem a few years ago. She had a son – nobody knows whose – and she left him on the steps of the Shivalayam. But after taking a few steps away from the boy, she found that she loved him too much, and she ran back for him, but he was not where she left him. From then on, they say she walks up and down this road, looking for her baby.’

  Vikas looked at the wet road. Ritu’s grip on his hand became tighter. ‘There’s always a story like this in every village,’ said Vikas.

  The old man continued to stare. ‘If you hold up a mirror, close your eyes, and say ‘Kanakangi’ three times, they say you will hear the sound of a baby crying.’

  ‘Vikas, let’s just go from here.’

  Vikas looked at the old man, a thin smile playing on his lips. ‘Let’s test this.’

  ‘No, Vikas, please.’

  He picked up one of the old man’s mirrors in one hand, and shielded his eyes with the other. Ritu’s fingers clawed at his jacket sleeve. ‘Kanakangi, Kanakangi, Kanakangi,’ he said. His breath had quickened, he noticed, and he felt ashamed. For all the bravado, something in him had expected to hear that baby’s cry.

  He handed over the mirror. Then he opened his eyes and said, ‘Where?’

  The old man nodded, and raised a finger to his lips.

  After a second, the pristine morning silence was broken by a clear, ringing wail of a baby.

  * * *

  Ritu clapped her hand to her mouth. Her eyes bled tears. She listened to the sound coming from deep within the green woods, and it seemed so much like how Nimmi would have sounded if she had not been suffocated to death in her womb.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ Vikas was saying. ‘You set this up, didn’t you? You set this all up.’

  The old man met Ritu’s gaze and asked softly, ‘What did you see in the mirror, my dear?’

  ‘I am talking to you, mister. You stay away from my wife, all right?’ He pulled her up to her feet and pointed a finger at the man. ‘Is this village full of tricksters like you, huh? Scaring away women with tales of ghosts and babies? Your tricks won’t work on me, you understand?’

  The old man did not say anything. He just kept looking at Ritu with a sad smile. Ritu turned her head away from the glass eye, and said to Vikas, ‘Let’s go. There is something creepy about this place.’

  ‘Sir, madam,’ said the old man, ‘your home is here. In Palem.’

  Vikas took a step forward, ready to argue, but Ritu took him by the hand and led him away. She did not know where they were going, because she did not remember where they had parked the car, but she knew they had come walking up the road. They just had to walk back.

  ‘Such charlatans, everywhere. That’s why nothing will ever come of this country.’

  Your home is here. In Palem.

  It all seemed such a waste, suddenly. All those arguments and fights about Nimmi. All that bickering about who was giving more to the relationship. All the nights of hurt and hate, all of his big words, all of her tears. All those unspoken feelings, the techniques that Dr Mehta suggested to them, the methods they were to use to work on their marriage, to fall in love with each other again...

  Such a waste, all of it. It no longer mattered.

  They walked, hand in hand, up the road, to the end of the straight stretch. Then they turned right along with the sharp bend, at the row of five coconut trees that rustled in the wind. Somewhere in the distance, a stream gurgled. Now Ritu remembered what she had smelled on that black mirror. It had been the smell of fresh blood. Her own blood. Nimmi’s blood. That night in the hospital, when they had showed her a stain of blood on a cream-coloured towel and told her that it was all they could salvage.

  She had hugged that blood-stained cloth to her bosom that night. She had wept into it, smelled it, kissed it, sung lullabies to it.

  ‘How dare he make such fools of us. Tell you what, Ritu, we should go back, and I should give him a piece of my mind.’

  Ahead of them, they saw a gathering of fifteen or so people, looking at something. Some of them were speaking on their phones. Others milled about and stared. ‘Do you know what I saw in the mirror?’ she asked him.

  ‘What is going on here?’ said Vikas, looking ahead.

  ‘I saw nothing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I saw nothing in the mirror.’

  ‘How is that possible?’ said Vikas, laughing, but his face had turned pale. ‘You’re seeing things, Ritu. You and mirrors – you have a bit of history together, in case you’ve forgotten.’

  Ritu did not reply. None of the people there took any notice of them. They went to the front of the crowd and saw the shattered Ford Falcon. Yes, thought Ritu, it did not matter
anymore. Even as they stepped slowly along the side of the vehicle, examining the damage, she knew what she would see in the front seat. Vikas had been stunned into silence; surely he must see now why they had not remembered where the car was.

  Kanakangi Road.

  ‘Ritu,’ he said.

  Ritu nodded. ‘Yes.’

  The phone in the jacket of Vikas’s body rang, and someone from the crowd came trotting forward, answered it. Vikas retrieved his own phone from his pocket and looked at the screen. No missed calls. No unanswered messages.

  ‘There has been an accident,’ the man was saying into the receiver. ‘Both the driver and the passenger have died on the spot. I am so sorry, madam...’

  They stood to the side, listening.

  * * *

  The man at the mouth of the muddy path to Palem looked up from his mirrors. The couple with bags strapped to their shoulders were returning, their hands clasped tight together. As they passed him, the girl looked at him and smiled.

  ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘This is our home.’

  And they walked on to the village, in the direction of the mist.

  The Sitarist of Palem

  2002

  Even in mid-monsoon, even under heavy early-morning mist, Rudrakshapalem was a parched place. Sister Agnes, one of the elderly matrons at the church of Dhavaleshwaram, here on assignment, looked out of the side window and saw a woman walking toward the building from the direction of the village. She appeared only as a smudge in the fog, but her step was slow, and the way she wrapped her arms around herself as she walked made Sister Agnes certain that she was headed for the centre.

  For a moment Sister Agnes thought that one of the centre’s ladies was returning after a stealthy night out. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened, and Sister Agnes was practical enough to ignore such incidents – after all, the centre was no church; women who lived here were not required to live like nuns. They lived lives that required them to stay out of doors for most of the day. It was only understandable that they met young men from the village now and then, sometimes during the day, sometimes after the day was gone. As long as they took enough ‘care’ not to get ‘physical complications’ from one of their nightly visits, Sister Agnes did not care. She had once even pretended not to notice one of her wards paying a covert visit to the big hospital in Dhavaleshwaram with a hundred-rupee note tucked under her blouse.

  The figure had come closer now, into sharper view. Once or twice she stopped and turned around to glance at the tar road that came out of Palem. The women’s wellness centre stood on a dry plot of land behind two paddy fields in which Sister Agnes had never seen sign of crop, and which were now being taken over by rather large tufts of greenish yellow bushes. Between the two fields a path wove its way from the centre’s entrance, connecting it to the Palem main road. It was on the fag end of this path that the woman stopped and hesitated.

  Sister Agnes cleaned her glasses with the edge of her tunic and slid them on. Now she saw that the approaching woman was not really a woman but an overgrown girl. While her chest and hips looked like those of a woman nearing twenty, the freckles on the cheeks, the frazzled hair, the pimples on the forehead, and the callous disproportion of her nose with respect to other parts of her face – all hinted at a girl of thirteen. A sudden wave of tenderness washed over Sister Agnes. Yes, she thought, she could guess what a girl like this would have gone through in a village like Palem. It was for women such as this that the church of Dhavaleshwaram had set up the wellness centre. Father Abraham had once said to her that Palem ‘needed cleansing’. Sister Agnes had not had the need to ask what he meant by that.

  It was not an easy place to live, even for nuns. The centre was set up in an old barnyard bought off a farmer whose fields nearby had stopped yielding. The asbestos roof made Palem’s already dry and hot weather unbearable, and when it rained water seeped in through the termite-infested wood and made the interior a breeding ground for mosquitoes. The window panes were half-broken. Food, water and habitation were at least two kilometers away whichever direction one looked. This was why Father Abraham had asked the nuns at his church to rotate shifts at the centre so that no one person needed to stay there for longer than a month. This was Sister Agnes’s third week.

  For a fleeting moment she tasted the cool, pure water of the church-tap at Dhavaleshwaram, and felt it slide down her throat. She thought of the fragrance-sprayed pulpit where she said her daily prayers, the finely made bed on which she would sleep in a week, the steaming hot Idli-sambaar the hotel boy opposite brought for her every morning; she missed even Father Abraham’s disapproving frown, the kind he wore whenever he saw one of the new girls giggling at mass.

  She suppressed a smile, then quietly chided herself. She knew that the church was actively trying to get a foothold within the boundaries of the village, and this rotation business was only temporary – until Father Abraham negotiated the terms with the village elders to set up a permanent centre there. Maybe then the church could take some proactive steps; try and get at the disease rather than limply offering shelter to the victims. Palem certainly needed cleansing; Father Abraham was right. The last time she had gone back to the church he had given her a bundle of papers to read when she was in Palem. He had said reading it would give her a ‘better understanding of the Palem affair’. She crinkled her nose; with all the experience she’d had with the girls, did she need any more understanding?

  She craned her neck. The girl had come to the door and pushed it open. Sister Agnes had expected to see a timid face peering out from behind the door, but the girl stood with her legs apart, her expression defiant, as if she was daring the older woman to do her worst. Sister Agnes smiled at her and said in her softest tone, ‘Come in, child. What is your name?’

  The girl walked in, and the door closed behind her. In the light of the mercury tube Sister Agnes saw uncertainty creep into the girl’s face. ‘Do you – have women here?’ The strong voice was nervous; even a little frightened.

  Sister Agnes nodded.

  ‘Women with – no home? No family?’

  Sister Agnes nodded again.

  ‘I have no home. And no family.’

  ‘That is perfectly all right, child. I have no home or a family either.’

  The girl looked up hopefully, almost in joy. ‘Really?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, really. Now, tell me, what is your name?’

  ‘Lata.’

  ‘Is that why you’re so thin, because you’re named after a creeper?’ The girl was big-boned, but her face was drawn with hunger. Sister Agnes wrote down her name in the register and paused for a moment. Then she asked, ‘Are you coming from Palem?’

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  After another pause, Sister Agnes asked softly, ‘And what did you do there?’

  ‘I – I worked at the headman’s house, madam.’

  Worked at the headman’s house. Sister Agnes wrote it down verbatim, closed the book and looked at the girl with a wide smile. ‘Nobody here calls me madam. They call me sister.’

  The girl’s voice was disbelieving. ‘You want me to call you sister?’

  ‘I insist on you calling me sister. Will you?’

  The girl nodded brightly.

  ‘Good. Now, if you stay here, you will have to work. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘All of us work here. There is no freeloading. But at the end of each day, after all the work is done, we play.’

  The girl’s eyes shone. ‘What do you play?’

  Sister Agnes said, ‘Different things, my child. Some of us sing, and some of us dance. Some of us tell stories. What would you like to do?’

  ‘I – I am not very talented.’

  ‘Child,’ said Sister Agnes very gently, ‘God gives us talent in one thing or the other. It just takes us time to find it, that’s all.’

  ‘Really? You think I will find it here?’

  ‘Of course you will.’ Sister Agnes leant forward in her
seat and patted the girl on her cheek. Raising her voice just a little she called to the maid. ‘Vijaya, please show Lata to the kitchen.’ To Lata she said, ‘Go, child. Go and eat and take some rest. You have walked for long.’

  * * *

  1970

  The portly figure of Subramanya Shastri, Head Priest at Palem’s Shivalayam, stretched out languidly on Komati Satyam’s front porch. Across the steps that led to the front door and into the house, Komati Satyam sat huddled in his easy chair, his stick-like arms hugging the arm-rests, and his fingers wrapped around the edges. He sat with his feet both planted on the ground, not resting back but slouching forward, as though preparing to spring to his feet any moment. Shastri knew from their long association that this meant Satyam was thinking hard about something. He felt around with his hand behind him and found the empty glass. Reaching out for the mud vase that stood between them on the floor, Shastri said, ‘More?’

  Satyam nodded and pushed his glass an inch or two in Shastri’s direction. Shastri filled it, spilling half of it on the floor. ‘Damn,’ he cursed. ‘Turn the lamp on brighter, why don’t you? Can’t see a damned thing.’

  ‘No oil.’ Satyam pressed the brim of his glass to his mouth and closed his eyes. After he downed a gulp he said, ‘She is pregnant, Shastri-gaaru.’

  ‘Hmm? What?’

  ‘Did you not see her today at the old Banyan tree? She has a belly this big.’

  ‘Ah, you mean Lachi.’ Shastri’s tone became relaxed. ‘Why does it bother you so much, Satyam, as long as you are not the – are you the –?’

  ‘Don’t be foolish, Shastri-gaaru! What is her age, and what is mine?’

  ‘Oh, my friend, believe me, these things do not care about your respective ages – merely genders.’ He hiccupped and broke into a long giggle. At the end of it he said, ‘Nice, heavenly thing, toddy – almost as heavenly as a woman’s –’

  ‘Who do you think is the father?’

  ‘Eh? Why do we care?’