The Narrow Road to Palem (10 page)

* * *

The dead don’t grow old either. In the last twenty years that Uttam and Unnat have lived with us – they turned up together at Palem, the day after Tillu left – they have not aged a day. In the last eight months, ever since he slipped on the bathroom tiles, Bhaskar has stopped ageing too.

They don’t do any work around the house, so all the packing is left to me. But the decision has been made. All three of them said they wanted to return to Palem. There is a woman stuck to the wall in the guest bathroom here who looks a lot like Rangi, and she keeps asking me whether she can take her boy home. I told her to wait, then locked the door from outside. I told Bhaskar about it and he just made a gesture to let it go.

‘We’re leaving in a day or two. Why worry?’

‘Yes,’ said Uttam and Unnat together. ‘Let’s not worry.’

Twenty houses in twenty years, and we’re returning now to where it all began. We’re coming back to you, house. If someone is living in you, we will get them evacuated. Avadhani is a close friend. (It just struck me that he may be dead too, in which case I have to speak to his son, or grandson.)

Today, when I was packing the clothes, I asked myself again why we have been so unlucky, why we have been only finding haunted houses ever since we left you. There is a paper mill right next door where we live, and machines drone throughout the day. Sometimes they drive you mad, as though a saw is being used on the soft tissue of your brain, but at other times, the sound is quite soothing. Makes you think.

It made me think today.

It made me wonder. Are you haunted, house, or are we?

Did the houses we live in haunt us? Or did we haunt them?

I used to think that it took a year for the evil in a house to awaken. I used to think that the good in us fights against the evil, but after a year, it just gives up. Maybe I have been looking at it all wrong. Maybe it takes a year for the evil in the four of us to awaken. Maybe the house fights the good fight.

It is possible, isn’t it?

I have not told Bhaskar or the kids about this. They will just laugh at me. They will say I’m going cuckoo in my old age. When Unnat says that, he does a very convincing impression of a real cuckoo. He makes me laugh.

Rangi will be there waiting for us, won’t she? She will ask us if her boy is there, if she could take him home. I will have to sit her down and tell her that she’s dead. She will get her son only after he dies, and who knows where Tillu lives now in Vizag, with that shady uncle of his.

It will be nice if he visits Palem again. This time we won’t make the same mistake.

Okay, listen, I am about to go and finish off the rest of the packing. Bhaskar and the kids are just sitting around munching on apples and giggling like schoolchildren. We will talk more in person, once we’ve arrived. We leave by the eight-thirty bus, tomorrow. We should alight at Palem at seven in the morning the day after.

You will welcome us, won’t you?

‘There’s no yellow in my rainbow,’ said Mariamma. ‘There’s no yellow in my rainbow.’

Every morning, on our walk to school, we would pass by her house. Those days she lived in the now rundown hovel near Mahender Reddy’s general store, and they said that by six in the morning, the sounds of crackling fire and the smell of burning coal came from her house. It would be closer to eight by the time we passed it, and the sun would be out already. We would peek in the hope that the lithe, wrinkled form of the old woman would appear and shout at us, so that we could giggle and run away.

She always seemed to be looking for something, did Mariamma, and whenever someone would ask, she would stop for a moment, say, ‘There is no yellow in my rainbow’, and keep right on searching. No matter what time of the day it was, you would see her stealing along mud walls, or knee deep in gutter water, her fingers blackened by wet dirt.

‘Mad woman,’ said my mother. ‘Take the other path to school. If you pass by that house too often, you will lose your mind too, one day.’

We did not listen to my mother. Mad she may have been, but Mariamma did not harm us in any way. Even when she thought we were going to steal her mangoes, she only hurled the smallest stones at us, and as we fled the scene, I would always look over her shoulder and see her giving us one of her toothless grins.

One of my friends, Ramchander, once told me that Mariamma did not look for a
thing
on her daily search routines. She looked for a
person
; a person that had gone missing from Palem the year before; a six-year-old girl named Anupama.

No one knew who Anupama was, but ever since Mariamma moved from Rameshwaram to this village, she and the little girl stayed together. Mariamma earned money by sweeping the temple steps under Rama Shastri’s employ. They say that out of the rupee and a half that Rama Shastri paid her every day, Mariamma would place ten paise into the donations box in the inner sanctum. Not one evening would pass without her presenting a bunch of chrysanthemums to the lord, and getting Rama Shastri to narrate some verses in Anupama’s name.

Before she left the temple compound for the day, she would feed Sarama, the stray bitch that loitered around the temple, with a piece of chapatti torn from her portion of the food that Rama Shastri gave her.

The girl, Anupama, called her Ammamma, which meant maternal grandmother, but no one in the village knew who Mariamma’s daughter was, and where the rest of their family was. Rama Shastri, like any other dutiful priest, made some enquiries with some of his relatives in Rameshwaram. None of them had heard of either the name Mariamma or Anupama, and no one recognized her from descriptions either.

The villagers expressed outrage for a while, but soon, they forgave both the old woman and the girl. Mariamma was kind to everyone she met, and she had a placid pair of eyes that always appeared on the verge of breaking into tears. Anupama went to the same school as us, and though for the first few days she got teased for her exceptionally pale and flawless skin, before the week was out, she had made friends. Like her grandmother, she too had a personable nature, and she was a bright student.

The transition from elderly matron to mad woman for Mariamma took place in reasonably quick time, over the course of two days.

On the morning of the first day, Anupama left as usual in the morning but did not turn up at school. Teachers noted the girl’s absence but did not think much of it, since kids falling sick was not uncommon in Palem. It was only when Anupama did not return home at her usual time of 3:30 did Mariamma become worried.

When she went to the school, they told her that Anupama had not come at all.

Then she went to Rama Shastri and pleaded with him to search for the girl. The priest was reluctant, but after waiting for a further hour with no news, he organized a search party and they began to scour the grounds. They went as far as the riverbank to the East and to Rayalapalli on the West. They went as far as Arthur Cotton Dam and called out her name. They got no answer.

That night, Mariamma went to bed, praying for the welfare of her granddaughter. News began to spread within the village, and someone said something about seeing a girl with pigtails and a red water bottle following a haggard man that that looked a lot like one of Girisham’s men. Girisham, in those days, was Palem’s biggest landlord, and rumours in the village abounded with his lust for female flesh. They said that maids that worked at Girisham’s house got two payments at the end of the month; one for the cleaning work they did in the house, and one for the work they did in the bedroom.

Until then, though, no one had thought that his tastes extended to little girls as well.

The mothers in the village went up in arms, and forced the men to bring a Police Patel from Dhavaleshwaram so that a proper investigation could be started. The inspector was a rotund bald man by the name of Mallareddy, and as soon as he arrived, the villagers could smell the stink of bribery on his uniform. Just by the way he looked around the village, as though we were all mosquitoes that ought to be swatted away, and the way he bent over with joined hands at the sight of Girisham, we could tell that this was not the man who would put the child molester in handcuffs and drag him away.

‘We need evidence,’ Mallareddy said that morning, smiling sweetly at the crowd. ‘Do you have any evidence that it was definitely Girisham babu that you saw?’

The boy who had seen Girisham stepped forward and said yes.

‘How far away were you when you saw him walk away with the girl?’

The boy didn’t know. Perhaps a few meters, a few tens of yards.

‘And they were walking
away
from you, right?’

Yes, they were.

‘Can you say for sure, then, that the only person that you could have seen is Girisham babu? Of all the people in the village, can it be no one else?’

The boy hesitated.

‘You seem to be unsure.’

Yes, said the boy. He was unsure.

‘If you’re unsure, even if there is the slightest sliver of doubt, we have to investigate further. In our system, we cannot let an innocent be punished for something he has not done.’

The meeting was called under the banyan tree, and Mallareddy rapped his stick on Mandiramma banda as he spoke.

‘Besides,’ he said, ‘Girisham babu was not even in the village all of yesterday. He has witnesses that confirm that he was in Krishnapalli, on the other side of the river, and he came only last night. Is that not correct, Girisham babu?’

Girisham sat in his foldable metal chair in white trousers and shirt. He had his ray-ban glasses on. He twisted the end of his moustache, and told the man holding the umbrella over his head to block out the sun. He seemed not to have heard Mallareddy’s question, and therefore did not answer it.

The inspector turned back to the crowd and said, ‘But that’s okay. This is a serious matter, and we will investigate fully, with all the power vested in us by the government. We will find your little girl. We promise.’

That evening, people began to talk that Mallareddy had come with a battery of five policemen and raided Girisham’s house. They had found nothing. Then they had begun to search the grounds around the school. Their plan was to search every inch of the village, and move from Ellamma cheruvu down to the river. They were going to search throughout the night, so all the villagers should cooperate by letting them into their huts whenever they wanted.

The night came and went. None of the villagers heard a knock on their doors.

Mariamma spent another sleepless night, once again praying to the lord.

The morning after, at around 8 A.M., Mallareddy walked to the banyan tree at the head of a procession of four policemen. Their shirts were hanging loose, and their pants were wet up to the knees. They did not find the girl, they said, but they did find the red water bottle by the riverbank, and also some torn piece of Anupama’s school uniform. The girl must have wandered off to the Godavari in the morning, for some reason, and the strong current must have carried her away.

‘We have intimated the police stations up and down the river,’ said Mallareddy. ‘As soon as we hear from them, we will let you know what happened.’

They never came back. That was when Mariamma began to search every small nook and corner of Palem for Anupama.

* * *

It was two days to go for the shivaraatri of 1985. This was nine months or so after Anupama had gone missing. We had not seen Mallareddy or his cohort of policemen after that day. Even Girisham kept a rather low profile, choosing to leave and enter the village either early in the morning or late at night when he had to travel, and keeping to his house with the big gate shut at other times.

Whenever he ventured out to the temple, or the house of Ranganayaki, he would have his four bodyguards accompany him, armed with staffs.

Mariamma now worked at the temple for four or five hours every day, whereas when Anupama was around she had only worked for two. Someone asked what the mad woman was doing with all the extra money and food. She certainly didn’t seem to be eating any of it. In answer, someone else said that she gave all the extra money to Rama Shastri, and asked him to pray to the lord ‘in his language’, so that she and Anupama could be reunited at shivaraatri. The extra food, she distributed to the beggars on the temple steps.

But all the while she walked around, swinging her broom against the granite floor and the stone pillars, she kept saying, ‘There is no yellow in my rainbow. There is no yellow in my rainbow.’

That evening, clouds gathered. Rama Shastri said that in all the years that he had been working at the temple in Palem, it had never – not once – rained on shivaraatri. Mid-February in Palem meant a nip in the morning air and a rustle in the leaves once the sun went down. But the people gathered around Mandiramma banda and looked at the branches of the banyan set against the slate coloured clouds. They said, ‘Mariamma has been praying. Mariamma is going to make it rain.’

Mariamma, for her part, was at her home, muttering to herself, oblivious to the sound of thunder.

* * *

It rained in Palem that night. We boys ran out to the bank of Ellamma cheruvu and danced in the sodden dark. The rain whipped at our eyes, stung our arms, pinched our ears; it was a deluge, an undertow at the ankles. Who knew what snakes crawled out of which holes on nights such as these? But we were too young to care, to heed the frantic calls of our parents who held out lanterns into the dark from the warm interiors of our homes.

The rain came down in swathes, and it hacked at Avadhani’s paddy fields that lay beyond the lake. It cut into the dark bark of Girisham’s row of palm trees like scissors, and as we watched the trees sway noisily to the wind, we thought that at least one of them would be uprooted right off the ground and come flying at us, and crash into the rippling water of Ellamma cheruvu.

It was a rain to sink all rains.

Rivers flowed on the streets of Palem. Electric poles fell. Wires snapped and dropped to the ground like live snakes, and they licked at the water in white, hungry sparks, but only for a few seconds. The relentless downpour drowned them out, and threw the village into blackness. Every house, even Subbai’s, which had a backup generator, had to light candles, and they had to shut their windows tight so that the wind would not rush in and put the flames out.

Ellamma cheruvu looked like a small sea, her surface a carpet of black pelted with bullets of water. It swelled and rose in our direction as we stood in the shade of the guava tree with our arms held out and our eyes closed, the name of the lord on our lips. When we opened our eyes we saw that the water had reached the trunk of the tree, and our ankles were already immersed. We looked up at the sky just in time to catch it being torn in two by a long streak of lightning, and in that one second, I thought I saw a little girl in a school uniform standing by the lake. She had a water bottle slung over her shoulder.

Anupama?

The next second all was dark again, and we yelled at the top of our lungs at the raining sky. We hooted and laughed, and we ran back to our homes, knowing full well that the gutters of the village must have already flooded onto the roads.

* * *

We were woken up in the middle of the night, with the sound of rain still howling in our ears. ‘To the shivalayam!’ said someone, and we went, bleary-eyed and following an adult, wading past running water, as frogs and earthworms and slithery things clung to our ankles and heels. We shook them off. We cried out when we thought we were bitten by a snake or a scorpion, but we walked on.

The village went as one large huddle, guided by hurricane lanterns held by three or four men at the front. The temple and Rama Shastri’s house stood on higher, firmer ground, but the water only seemed to rise. Now it came to our waists, and my uncle hoisted me on top of his shoulders. ‘I will swim!’ I said in the noise.

‘Shut up and sit on top of my shoulders,’ said my uncle.

The rain kept coming down, beating on the back of my neck, slashing at my calves, rapping at my knuckles. Water streamed down my forehead onto my eyes. I could not wipe my face clean fast enough. I closed my eyes, and trusted my uncle to know his way.