The Smoke is Rising

by Mahesh Rao

  Knowing he was in full view of the front windows, his features creased into an expression of honest industry. He wheeled the bicycle in through the gates and propped it up against one of the pillars of the carport. It looked like Uma had not arrived yet and so he stayed away from the front and back doors. The gravel on the path leading to the shed looked white in the dazzling sunshine. Deciding not to take on the blaze, he squatted in a small patch of shade under the dining room windows, sluggishly tracing his fingers through the desiccated soil. His days usually began with a steaming coffee, set down in his steel lota by Uma next to one of the sinks by the back door. He leant over the spent blossoms of the hibiscus shrubs. As a bead of sweat from his face dropped on to a bud’s wrinkled lobe, he settled down to wait.

  In the master bedroom Susheela inhaled deeply and tried to hoist herself up on her arms, fixing her gaze on the corniced ceiling. Her wrists seemed to be made of moist clay. She renewed her attempt, managed to hold the position for a few seconds, before setting her head back down on the mat. A strange pain had launched itself between her shoulder blades, as if to counterbalance the throbbing circle around her right ankle.

  There was a time when she would have taken herself off to see Dr Bhat for any such complaint, even if it meant having to endure his hyperactive receptionist and the jolt of her vigorously hennaed hair. Such frequent visits to the doctor, however, had become embarrassing. Although his manner was always solicitous, he probably assumed that she had little else with which to occupy herself. She recalled their last conversation, which had taken place as the doctor scribbled on a pad.

  ‘You must think I’m a hypochondriac, doctor, but truly, this cough has not gone for weeks,’ she had said, wishing he would look at her, rather than at his own jerky hand.

  ‘There is no need for any concern at all, you are absolutely in the pink,’ he had responded, still failing to meet her gaze.

  ‘But, after all, something must be causing it?’

  ‘Without a doubt. But you please don’t worry. I am here, no? How are your daughters? Doing well, I hope?’

  ‘They are doing very well, thank you. They were also a little worried about this cough, you know. They have been pestering me to get it investigated.’

  ‘Oh yes, good thing that you came to see me. The body is such a complicated instrument, isn’t it? The important thing is to be happy and enjoy a positive outlook. Joyful thoughts, in fact.’

  ‘Doctor, to be most frank with you, I don’t think my thoughts are more or less joyful than anyone else’s, but not everybody goes around having a strange cough for weeks.’

  ‘That is true. But in worrying about such matters one forgets that cheerfulness is the true medicine in life. An elixir, in fact.’

  Susheela had given up. She had taken his prescription, a tonic that was apparently beneficial for general health and all-round well-being, and left the clinic in a state far removed from the recommended joyfulness.

  Apart from the ankle and the shoulder blades, the last three months had also seen the appearance of a patch of dry skin on one thigh and an unaccountable watering of her eyes every time she lay down. Susheela had learned stoicism and a benign neglect. She no longer discussed matters with the Nachappa boy, who was a junior doctor at St Theresa’s, and avoided the temptation of consulting an online compendium of illnesses. Given the array of symptoms, no doubt she would be able to diagnose herself with everything from aphasia to scurvy.

  Some aspects of aging were easier to accommodate than others. The trouble, she thought to herself, in her most private moments, was that having had a face once widely acknowledged to be beautiful, one could hardly be expected to make an accurate assessment of its current merits. Just as an old but treasured cardigan would fail to reveal its frayed seams and baggy sleeves to its devoted owner, Susheela had begun to suspect that she had been rendered blind to a number of indignities in her facial appearance.

  When she looked at her face she saw a woman who looked perhaps fifty-four rather than sixty-four. She saw good skin, lighter than the matrimonially prized ‘wheatish’, large brown eyes flecked with hazel, a fiercely proportionate nose and a well-defined Cupid’s bow that gently dropped her mouth into a soft vulnerability. She saw a slightly fleshy chin and a deep fold of skin that had somehow nudged its way to the top of her neck. She saw a deep dimple in her left cheek when she smiled and a faint crease radiating out under each eye from the top of her nose.

  All this she saw but was this what everyone else saw too? And when they had seen it, what did they make of it? She knew very well that what anyone saw or thought about her looks did not matter ten paise at her age but, in spite of herself, she still felt the need to place herself within an assembly of women of her generation. She pictured a line of dumpy elderly women in shawls and Kanjeevaram silks, chappals slapping against the floor as they walked across a stage, adjusting their sashes and tiaras.

  As for her body, on the other hand, there she was perfectly confident that she had not been spared any realisations on the subject of its decline. Over the years it was clear that her hips had widened, apparently seeking to conquer with bulk what could not be conquered by grace. She was conscious of a solidity in her upper arms that she could not remember from her youth. Her stomach, she felt, was a disgrace. Obstinate and insistent, it seemed to pillow around her, taking no notice whatsoever of her hostility. Where had this flesh come from? It was at least fifteen years since Susheela had properly regarded herself as slim but her changed form still took her a little by surprise.

  Susheela turned her head to look at the clock on the bedside table. She rolled on to her side and then slowly stood up, feeling between her shoulder blades for the exact source of this new visitation. A short bath later, it seemed to have subsided as she uncoiled the thin cotton towel from around her head. Her hair was still a little wet and had settled in stubborn waves down to her shoulders. Above her ears, Reshmi, her hairdresser, had artfully left a few strands of subtle grey.

  ‘In all good lies, there must be a little bit of truth,’ Reshmi had pronounced.

  The rest of Susheela’s hair proclaimed itself a glossy black. It was a fiction that she felt that she owed to the world and one in which the world ought to collude gratefully. This was not so much a matter of vanity as mutual courtesy. She picked up a comb and began to run it through her hair, wincing as she broke through tangle after tangle. Every day the same: first the right side and then the left, and then sweeping motions over her crown and the back of her head, all culminating in a sad fuzz of jilted hair, plucked from her comb and dropped deftly into the waste-paper basket.

  In the bottom drawer of the teak dresser in the dining room was a picture album, the pink and grey floral swirls on its cover a reminder of her early married life. A third of the way into this album, carefully pasted on to the lower half of the page, lay a photograph of Susheela at the age of twenty-four. This image of herself had over the years become embedded in her mind and she clung to it without ever having meant to do so.

  The photograph had been taken on a trip to Mount Abu with her husband, Sridhar. The year was 1968. ‘Mere saamne wali khidki mein’ crackled out of transistor radios in tea shops, university hostels and railway station waiting rooms. Indira Gandhi was in Thimphu, discussing democracy with the Bhutanese monarch. In Tamil Nadu bursts of agitation continued against the declaration of Hindi as India’s primary official language. The Beatles transcendentally meditated in Rishikesh, a group of friends in tow, and, quite coincidentally, condoms were being distributed and marketed across rural India by the large tea, petroleum and chemical corporations in a government family-planning initiative.

  The photograph’s white border, mottled by an unidentifiable substance, had curled up at the corners and a yellow tinge had washed across the scene. Sridhar had taken the photograph in the early evening of their first day at the hill station. Susheela’s sari, a green Japanese georgette with a brown geometric motif, seemed to shimmer in the light, although
she would have been horrified at the suggestion that she might have been dressed in anything that lent itself to a daytime gleam. Her hair was perfect. She had resisted the vulgar pull of a Sadhana cut or a beehive but some limited backcombing had given her face the composition that she had sought. A couple of kiss curls were a further concession to the era but the glossy braid that hung heavily over her left shoulder was timeless. Her posture was stagey, right arm tilting awkwardly by her slender waist and her chin lowered in a reproduction of cinematic coyness. In the background, the clutter of structures on the hillside looked about to pitch into the orange waters of Nakki Lake.

  The last time she had looked at the picture had been a couple of years ago when her daughter had been recovering from chicken pox. It was a humid June day and Priyanka had been lying in the sitting room, listlessly turning the pages of the album, one eye on the Wimbledon match unfolding on television.

  ‘God, amma, you look just like Sharmila Tagore in this one,’ she had said, rather incredulously, it had seemed to Susheela.

  ‘Yes, maybe when she played a mother’s role in her fifties,’ had been Susheela’s retort.

  ‘No, really. I think it’s the hair and the shiny shiny sari.’

  The photo album continued to be confined to the dresser drawer.

  Her hair done, Susheela stood up and got dressed, picking out a purple silk sari with a black border. She adjusted the angle of the dressing table mirror, moved across to close the bathroom door and then straightened the edge of the bedspread. As she went downstairs, she wondered why Uma had not yet arrived. Maybe she was up to something with the mali.

  Uma’s eyes opened just as the train heading south to Mayiladuthurai wheezed into Mysore Junction. Only a row of dilapidated sheds, a slope covered with banks of refuse and a collapsing chain-link fence separated her home from the outlying platforms of the station. The sky was a sooty grey in the gap that ran around the room between the wall and the corrugated iron roof. In the near darkness, Uma’s eyes focused on the wooden frame of the picture of Shiva on the wall. The liquid eyes and the open palm would only be visible after another hour or so when the light filtered through the gap and the room’s tiny window. Uma shifted slowly on the thin foam mattress. Her skin felt flushed and sticky, the sheet twisted into a clammy wreath underneath her.

  In one corner of the room, a pipe with no tap extended over a square of lumpy cement, surrounded by an uneven brim. Apart from the mattress, the room also contained a tin trunk and a plastic chair. Placed on the trunk were a small mirror, a comb and a bar of soap. Uma sat up and tried to perform the deep breathing exercises that Bhargavi had shown her. Pranayama would help bring peace to the mind and take away all fears and negative thoughts, she had said. Uma closed her left nostril with her thumb and inhaled deeply through the right one. After a few tepid attempts she stopped. She kept losing count and was not sure she was following the correct order in any case. She would probably just have to learn to live with the negative thoughts, at least for today.

  She reached for a small scarf and wound her thick, fractious curls into a tight coil at the nape of her neck. Once she had bathed, she would begin the process of marshalling them into place, drawing them into a neat braid. When she was about six or seven, the neighbourhood children had scored a complicated ditty involving her ‘hair like steel wool’ and ‘skin like charcoal’ before moving on to another victim some months later. Even after their overtures had ceased, the hair continued to be an issue: agonising sessions of her mother’s firm tugs and jerks as she tried to bring order to the jet black kinks. The skin remained even more of an issue, a plague that was impossible to hide.

  Uma unbolted the door and stepped outside. There was movement even at this early hour. Her neighbour’s daughter walked past, a mewling toddler hitched to her waist. The sound of water drumming against plastic filled the air. Somewhere a radio droned out the news while its owner hawked loudly by the gutter. Uma picked up her two plastic pots and, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, walked down the row of rooms to take her place in the morning queue at the tap. Parvathi, her neighbour, was already there and smiled weakly at her. It was too early to exchange any pleasantries. The earth around the tap had been churned into a grey sludge, trailing skeins of banana leaves and strips of newspaper. Uma shut her eyes and pressed her pots against her chest as she waited to reach the front of the queue.

  At the opposite end of the row another queue was growing, this one for the toilet. Uma walked quickly back to her room, her muscles taut with the weight of the water. Dumping the pots behind the door, she made her way out again towards the toilet, clutching a mug of water. A rooster seemed to have joined the queue in front of her, jerking its head and puffing out its feathers, as if in an attempt to be escorted to the front. Uma looked down and waited. A man now stood behind her: she could see his cracked feet in the blue rubber chappals. The wait to use the toilet in the morning seemed to be getting longer these days. Maybe more people were living in the rooms in this row. Then there was also the landlord’s teenaged son who had taken to smoking in the toilet, barricading himself in there for ten minutes at a time, leaving behind a rank fug and a floor covered in cigarette butts. As she waited, Uma felt an almost imperceptible tug at her sari, a sough that instantly made her stiffen. She stood very still. It happened again; a soft but deliberate graze against the backs of her legs. She did not turn around, praying that the toilet door would open. The feet in the blue rubber chappals seemed to have moved closer.

  Just then a man emerged from the toilet, wiping his hands on a towel slung over his shoulder. Uma rushed in and firmly locked the door behind her.

  Mala could feel the hot sand pulsating through her chappals as she walked down the gradual decline to the river. She slipped them off and for a second the blistering charge against the soles of her feet made her spine ache. Drawing up her sari a few inches, she stepped quickly into the water and gained instant deliverance. Here the river bed was nearly forty feet wide where it gently swung away towards the lean scrubland further downstream. The stately progress of eucalyptus trees on both sides of the river came to a halt as the steep banks dipped into this gentle grainy bowl. The sustained dry spell had assailed the river basin and the water level was in full retreat.

  Despite the mid-morning heat, various groups had made their way across the scalding dune to the water’s edge. Four young boys had stripped off to their shorts and raced into the river. Mala squinted at their brown bodies glancing off each other as they whooped at the world around them. Following some prearranged signal, the bodies disappeared for a few seconds before four pairs of inverted legs emerged in a row, pointing shakily at the sky.

  A boy in trousers rolled up to the knee was offering to take people across the river and back for ten rupees.

  ‘Madam, you want a boat ride?’ he asked Mala.

  She shook her head.

  ‘It will be like heaven,’ he said, his eyes rolling in earnestness.

  Mala could not help smiling. But she shook her head again.

  The boy looked crushed and then, quickly recovering, disappeared into the cluster of kiosks that inevitably sprang up in the fecund earth around tourist sites.

  At the top of the dune, behind the low wall, one hundred and one stone steps led to a temple that faced the high lustre of the river. The temple’s roof was supported by thirty-six pillars bearing inscriptions in praise of the resident deity. A frieze of rearing horses ran over the plinths that formed the base of the structure. At its main entrance, the fangs and bulbous eyes of the carved sentinel served as a warning to tourists unable to muster sufficient interest in the history of the shrine. Taking his cue from this figure, a priest stood on the uneven porch and looked bleakly at the figures below, before returning to the solace of a large potato bun.

  Mala looked at her feet, strangely flat and wide in the rippling water, like brown table-tennis bats. She wiggled her toes and a puff of sediment rose up to obscure the dull glint of her toe ring. Swea
t was now running down her back, the fierce heat basting her arms and her neck. She looked around for Girish, who was deep in conversation with the father of the boat-boy. It was his usual sociological burlesque: what is your native place, who lives with you, how many children, how old are they, what do you grow, where are your parents, how far is your native place? Mala had seen the performance countless times. Girish would never listen to the responses, preferring instead to stack up more questions, revelling in the beneficence of his camaraderie with the drivers, the guides and the porters.

  This time the conversation had veered into local politics. The constituency’s MLA had recently succumbed to his injuries following a disastrous attempt at skiing in Kufri. A by-election had been called and the opposition was taking full advantage of the district authority’s failure to construct a bridge at Suvarnadurga, four kilometres away. In fact, plans for the bridge had been stewing for nearly a decade. Opinions had been canvassed, engineers had been consulted, funds had been allocated, contracts had been awarded and invoices had been raised. The bridge, however, remained unconstructed: a footnote in the life of the late MLA for Suvarnadurga.

  Girish waved at Mala, gesturing towards the tea stalls. She shook the water off her feet, slipped on her chappals and walked heavily up the dune again, the coarse sand cleaving to her toes. Girish was seated at one of the few shaded tables. She had felt his gaze all the way up the dune but had kept looking down at the little gullies her feet were making in the sand. She sat down opposite him, wiping her neck with her pallu.

  ‘So do you know about the myth?’

  ‘No, what myth?’

  ‘About the temple.’

  When Mala looked blank, Girish continued: ‘It seems that there was a just and responsible king who ruled this area in times of yore. He always looked after his subjects and made sure that they did not start filing public interest litigation cases.’