by S L Bhyrappa
‘Bangalore. I drove down.’
‘Sit down. I’ll make some dosa.’
‘No. I already ate at a restaurant in Kunigal.’
‘Why do you eat out? It’s not healthy. I’ll make coffee now, but you must have lunch here.’
Razia sat on a wooden chair, facing Sastri. His wife, Acchamma, went in.
‘I sent Kumaresh to Bangalore. It’s been more than fifteen days since your father passed away. You need to take care of his property… Did you come here directly?’
‘No. I went home first. I’ve parked my car there. Some lady lives in my father’s house now. She’s gone to get her husband. I thought of taking your blessings in the meantime.’
‘I’m glad you’ve retained goodwill towards us.’
‘Was Father suffering from some disease, ayya?’
‘No. He was eighty-five when he died… Umm…let’s see…he was four years younger to me. By that token, I should’ve gone first, but tell me, is death in our hands? Oh! And he had complained of chest pain the previous evening…that was the end. He didn’t wake up the next day. He was an early riser…as early as 3:30 a.m. Kenchappa—the husband of the lady who opened the door—thought he was asleep after reading late into the night, and left for the fields. When he returned at around 9 a.m., your father was still asleep. He opened the door and when he checked, your father’s body had already turned cold. He sent word to me through his son. Word about…you know what.’
‘So he wasn’t aware that he was dying?’ she asked him.
‘No.’
‘Hmmm.’ She nodded. He caught the import of her empty nod but didn’t volunteer to speak. It would be impolite. A little while later, she spoke.
‘If he was aware, would he have called me?’
He didn’t reply. She waited. He still said nothing. After about two minutes, she asked, ‘Please tell me, ayya. You were his closest friend and I know you know.’
‘How can I say what was in his mind, child?’ he said.
It was unconvincing. His tone and features betrayed the hesitation he felt. She knew he was trying to save himself from uttering some unpleasant truth.
‘Then why did you send Kumaresh to Bangalore to see me?’
‘You are his only successor and heir and it is fair that everything he had is now yours. You owe a responsibility to sort out and manage his estate. If not now, at least sometime in the future. You know how times are, so hurry up and start looking at his property and finances before something happens.’
‘He had…disowned me completely. And you hinted that he wouldn’t have sent for me even if he knew that he was dying. And now you’re asking me to manage his property. How fair is that?’
‘Well, since you’re asking me this directly, let me tell you everything. Your father told me that all of his landed property is ancestral—a grove of some three hundred coconut trees, ten mango trees and five jackfruit trees, three acres of wetland, eight acres of arable land and that house. Legally, he couldn’t will all of that to someone without your consent. If he could, there is no way I can say what he would have done. Remember Ningavva, the lady who took care of you when you were young? She left his house to be with her son about four years ago. Your father then brought Kenchappa and got him married. The couple stayed with him, looked after the fields and did the housework, and they have two children. Your father has made some arrangement for Kenchappa’s future. He has willed him a farm of a hundred coconut trees, two acres of wetland and four acres of arable land. He also had a house built for him outside the village. Kenchappa has rented it out to a doctor. Kenchappa is a loyal fellow and his wife is a good woman. Both of them took really good care of your father as long as he was alive. But now you can do as you please. They’ll leave if you ask them to.’
She mulled over this. She wasn’t surprised at Sastri’s intimate knowledge of her father’s financial matters. They were very close friends and this was a small village, where everybody knew pretty much everything about everyone’s affairs. But the detached manner in which he conveyed these details made her slightly uneasy. She felt like he had mentally distanced her. He was very close to her father and probably—perhaps, naturally—shared her father’s opinion about her, and it was unsurprising to her that he spoke the way he did.
She replied, ‘I honestly didn’t come here to know all this. I have the least interest in taking over my father’s property. I didn’t know anything about the legalities of ancestral or self-earned property and am not interested in it even now. I came here because you sent for me.’
‘I had a feeling you were unaware of all this. Which is why I sent for you. And I’m glad you came. Kenchappa is actually a little scared because he has no idea what to do now. The coconuts are ripe and ready to be cut and stored, so that they become dry for extracting copra. And it’s not just the coconut trees. He is scared to take the smallest decision even on day-to-day cultivation work. He doesn’t know how business works. Lakshmi, Kenchappa is a very simple but loyal servant. If it were someone else, he would have used the law applicable in such cases and swallowed all of your property. As a first step, you get your father’s death certificate and get the property title transferred to your name…’
They both turned when they heard the sound of heavy footsteps and saw a sturdy villager of about thirty-five or thirty-six walking towards them. He was dressed in a white dhoti, now turned brown. His striped knickers were visible from under the thin dhoti, which he had raised and wrapped around his thighs. He wore a striped half shirt and a towel hung from his shoulders. His hair was unkempt and he wore a five-day-old stubble on his face.
‘Ah, there! Here he is, Kenchappa!’ exclaimed Sastri.
‘Akka, when did you come?’ Kenchappa directly asked Razia, as if he had known her for years. She stood up.
‘Wait, Lakshmi, lunch is almost ready. Have your food here and then go home,’ said Sastri.
Razia told him she would return for lunch after visiting her house.
Kenchappa opened the lock of the small room located on the right as soon as they entered the veranda. He said,‘This is where your father slept. He locked himself up and read day and night. We did not disturb him…nobody knocked on the door if he was inside.’
This room was familiar to her. He used to sit here and spin the chakra for at least two hours every day. But now, the better part of the room was occupied by three enormous bookshelves. Each bookshelf measured seven feet tall and four and half feet wide and had sliding glass doors. Each contained several rows of books. A small divan stood almost attached to the wall. A long, soft pillow was placed against the wall and a study desk was placed almost at the edge of the divan. To the left of the divan was a bed. A blanket was neatly folded and placed on it. She looked up and surveyed the walls. The familiar picture of Gandhi was absent. Another brief survey showed her that the chakra was gone. She peeked into one of the bookshelves through the glass door without opening it. She saw several translations of the Holy Koran in Kannada and English, four volumes on the life of the Prophet Mohammad (sallallahu alaiyhi wassallam) written by Margoulith, Sir William Muir, Martin Lings and one in Kannada. Alongside these were English translations of several volumes of the Hadis, Akbar Nama, Badshah Nama, Tughlaq Nama, Tuzhuk-e-Babri, volumes of Ijaz-e-Khusravi, Masir-e-Alamgiri and similar works that told the history of Islam’s triumphs on the Indian soil, all written by contemporary Muslim historians. And then there were several volumes on Indian history written by various scholars and historians. She slid the door and took a quick look at some books at random. Every book she picked up had detailed markings, indicating that they were well read. Pages were marked, pencilled, underlined and notes written in the empty space at the top and bottom. She recognized her father’s handwriting. His notes were both in Kannada and English. She began to read a few of the notes he had made in English and was surprised at the fluency. As far as she could recall, his command over English was very basic. He had abandoned his high school to join the fr
eedom struggle and then spent a few years in jail, and after Independence he had devoted most of his life to social service. She opened another cupboard and found the complete set of Will Durant’s Story of Civilization. She opened one of the volumes—the same well-worn signs. She put it back and looked at other books, mostly tomes on religions by French, German, Japanese, English and Indian scholars. The lower rungs of the shelf contained different variants of the Oxford and Chambers English dictionaries and English–Kannada and Kannada–English dictionaries. Three thick notebooks stood next to them. She opened one—full of English words and meanings all copied by hand from the dictionary. Then she caught the smell of naphthalene emanating from the bookshelf. She turned to Kenchappa, still standing at the door.
‘Who put these naphthalene balls here?’
‘Sastri Ayya asked me to put them behind the books some days after your father passed away.’
She looked in the direction of the bed, then said, ‘Did he sleep here?’
‘Hmm. Everyday…his breath left him here, on the same bed.’
She walked over and sat on the bed for a while. Suddenly she wanted to rediscover the insides of the house she had been forever forbidden to enter. She didn’t express this desire to Kenchappa. Even if he was willing to, she was sure his wife wouldn’t let her anywhere beyond this room. She mulled on the alternatives. She could take the passage that ran the length of the house by the left side to reach the spacious backyard, which ended in the modestly-sized cow pen. And she killed that thought instantly. Using the passage would automatically mean that she was acknowledging that she was disqualified from using the house like any other member of family, because she was a Muslim. Then she heard loud voices emanating from the porch. She got out of the room, walked out of the front door and as she approached the porch, a woman in her fifties spoke loudly, ‘Hey! Aren’t you our Narasimhappa’s daughter…I know you spoiled your religion and ran away.’ Her tone wasn’t venomous. And it wasn’t an accusation. This was the only way she knew to speak. But ‘spoiled your religion’? The words gnawed at her. That woman could’ve said anything but why ‘spoiled your religion’? She didn’t even know Razia. She was angry at this unexpected assault on her privacy, but her manners and etiquette stopped her from responding with equal vehemence. She looked at the small crowd of eight or ten people, everybody’s eyes trained on her. This woman had neither the upbringing nor the vocabulary to speak any differently. And so Razia nodded her head as she sat on the porch. ‘That’s right. I’m Narasimhe Gowda’s daughter.’
‘Why is your forehead blank, my child? When did your husband die?’
This time, it was a very old woman. Razia’s face flushed but she managed to retain her composure, reminding herself again of the background of the people she was dealing with. These women couldn’t imagine a married woman not wearing a bindi on her forehead when the husband was still alive. They’d look at her with shock and disbelief if she told them that the religion she had married into considered wearing bindi as a heresy of faith and prescribed everlasting hell as the punishment for this. They couldn’t simply fathom even the existence of such a faith. And so she simply answered, ‘I had worn it. I guess it must’ve fallen off.’
By then a fifty-something man had arrived upon the scene and when he heard this, he said, ‘Oyl Lakkavva! The Turks don’t wear bindis! Haven’t you seen their women in Kunigal?’
She looked at him for a moment and then surveyed the rest of the folks. There was no hint of scorn, sarcasm or censure in either their tone or expression. But that only made the truth clearer to her: this was their way of determining her exact status in the village. This kind of cross-examination was familiar and she knew that if this age-old practice hadn’t changed in twenty-eight years, it was unlikely to change now.
But this questioning wasn’t restricted to the village. She recalled the painful apartment-hunting exercise she and Amir had done. People were set in their ways even in cosmopolitan Bangalore. Who your neighbour was depended upon what caste you belonged to and whether you ate non-vegetarian food, although some people were willing to overlook the caste element. Some were non-vegetarians themselves but they were loath to welcome folks that belonged to another religion. And when they finally managed to find an apartment in the still traditional Malleswaram, they discovered that they were alone. Segregated. Nobody would talk to them. Most of their neighbours in the apartment complex were aware that they had a celebrity couple of sorts in their midst, but they persisted in their cold indifference. And she was under no illusion that this was some price they were paying for fame: their neighbours were mortally scared of her revolutionary ways. They didn’t want her to be the role model for their daughters. Almost all the families in the apartment complex forbade their children from even smiling at her. But that was in the city, in the orthodox Malleswaram, which knew the subtleties of enforcing a silent boycott even twenty-five years ago. These were simple village folk, whose directness was almost rude.
A boy of about fifteen years suddenly almost rammed his way through, stopped in the middle of the crowd and yelled breathlessly, ‘Sastri Ayya asks the Bangalore madam to come to his house now! Food is ready!’ and ran away.
This was an unexpected but much-needed relief. She rose and left.
She sat by the pillar at Sastri Ayya’s house opposite to him, resting her back against the pillar as she sprinkled water on her plantain leaf. He sat just outside the kitchen. Not too orthodox, she thought. But she felt very wretched about herself each time the eighty-plus woman bent to serve her. She felt compelled to say something.
‘When did Father begin to read all those books? He didn’t even know English properly.’
‘We must not talk about unpleasant things while eating. I’ll tell you later.’
‘I won’t feel bad. I need to know the truth.’
‘Eat now.’
That was the end of the conversation.
Lunch done, she got up, washed her hands and returned to her place. According to custom, she folded her plantain leaf, cleaned the floor with water and wiped it with the cloth meant for the purpose. Then she sat on the wooden chair opposite Sastri Ayya, now reclining on the divan. He opened the conversation.
‘Child, you have no idea what your father underwent after you left his house, converted and married. But he was made of sturdy stock, thank God for that. And he had always been that way. He was a man of great self-restraint who never showed his pain, anger or sorrow to the world. He asked me once, “Why do these things happen, Sastriji?” with only the slightest tremor in his voice. I told him that karma dictates all actions, that your karma made you do what you did and that we all have to suffer our lot. But that was just my attempt to give him solace. He wasn’t convinced. He just shook his head and said, “Your karma philosophy doesn’t answer anything clearly.” And then the whispers from neighbouring villages gradually became louder and began to show up in everyday transaction. “His own daughter did this and he still comes to us to preach.” He slowly reduced his social service tours and completely stopped it one day. On one of his visits to the Gandhi Study Centre in Bangalore, he met a gentleman named Venkataramanayya. Their conversation turned to society, books, Gandhi and religion. And then Venkataramanayya asked your father if he had read the Holy Koran and the Life of the Prophet Mohammad. Your father said no. Venkataramanayya told him that it was not wise to hold an opinion on things he barely knew about. Your father told him it was impossible to read those books because they were in Arabic. The gentleman replied that English translations were available. Your father said that his English was very poor. Venkataramanayya took him to a bookshop, bought him a dictionary and suggested some broad guidelines for study: write down the meanings for the words you don’t know and refer to them now and then. It’ll be tough in the beginning but your mind will tune itself to it eventually. That’s how your father began. He visited Bangalore regularly for Venkataramanayya’s guidance and eventually outgrew the need for it. A bookstore in
Bangalore couriered him the books he wanted to read, published in India as well as abroad. He became immersed in his studies.
‘I asked him what he wanted to do after all that studying. He told me he wanted to write a scholarly work in Kannada. But God called him to his abode before he could accomplish that. You know, a couple of days after his death, a history lecturer from Tumkur came here, to Narasapura. This is what he told me. “Narasimhe Gowda’s depth of scholarship in Indian history is truly astounding. His knowledge of and insights about the Muslim conquest of India is several notches higher than our university’s history professors.”’
Neither of them spoke. Razia sat still for a long time, engrossed in thought. Suddenly, she wanted to read all the books he had read. Her English was good. The Hampi assignment had trained her in the methodology of historical research. A moment later she realized that she had merely read handbooks and pamphlet-like historical material, whereas her father had investigated the primary sources. She made up her mind. She would read them all and if she faced any difficulty, she would consult scholars and make sure she would… Suddenly she asked,‘Where did the dafan happen?’
‘What is dafan?… Oh, you mean where his body was buried?’
‘Yes. I want to go there and pay him my respects…alone.’
‘Our Narasimhe Gowda didn’t explicitly say how he wanted his body to be treated after he was dead. But I recall he told me once that he considered cremation was better and more hygienic than burial. Usually they bury the dead according to their caste’s traditions, but because I remembered what he had told me, I had his body cremated on top of the small mound in your farm. Kenchappa lit the pyre, performing his duty…like a son. I officiated. After that Kenchappa put the ashes in two separate pots. He kept them with him in your house for three days and then buried one of the pots next to the graves of your forefathers. It’s there behind the bael tree in your farm. The other pot is still in the farmhouse. It should’ve been scattered in the river at Sangama eleven days after the cremation. I’ll send Kenchappa to Sangama one of these days.’
