THE PUPPETEERS OF PALEM (24 page)

Chapter Thirty One

March 30, 2002

M
emories.

They were no longer fleeting and thin, here one moment, there the next, so flimsy that they vanished when you looked at them closely. For so long now, faces had been mere shadows and bodies were sticks, the voices all alike. Time was constant and fluid at the same time. Motives blurred, characters meshed, reasons diminished, confusion reigned.

But now… Yes, now! Everything was once again clear. She had carried the weight of her memories in her soul all this time, and she had felt the weight lessen so imperceptibly with each passing day, the details becoming increasingly sketchier—all details bar the most important one, the one that she did not allow herself to forget even for a second. And now she had something concrete to imprint them on—a real brain—and how they all came running back to her, with such shocking sharpness.

Life—what she thought of now as
her
life—had begun on that cold winter night when her father, the Telugu teacher at her school, came home one night and said to her mother, ‘Take that cycle away from her. Tomorrow onwards, she is going to walk to school.’

She somehow kept her cool all through dinner, and during the Gita-reading afterwards. Her father’s dulcet voice and the precise, easy beauty of his Telugu pronunciation—something which effortlessly transported her every night to the Kurukshetra battlefield—did nothing of the kind today. While he recited verse after verse from the big book, all she could think of was the stony hardness with which he had spoken to her mother a few hours before. She clasped her hands together and dutifully recited the verses after him, but every now and then, her mind and her gaze would go out to the bicycle that stood by the front gate, chained and locked.

When her father retired to his room, she exploded at her mother. They were in the backyard, washing the dishes and putting them away.

‘Why does he do this to me? Why do you take it from him without defending me? You know how much I love cycling.’

Her mother said, not looking up from the dishes. ‘If he said something, Lakshmi, he usually has a good reason for it.’

‘But doesn’t he have to tell us the reason? Do
you
know the reason?’

A pause, then, ‘No.’

Lakshmi set a little steel bowl down with a clang. ‘You don’t feel he should tell us the reason? You’re so meek!’

Her mother looked up at her, smiled faintly, and resumed scrubbing.

‘Hmph! Meek, meek meek! If
I
were you, I would have demanded to know the reason why he is depriving his little girl of something she loves so much.’ Lakshmi glanced at her mother surreptitiously, to see if her tone affected her. When her mother did not react, she said mournfully, ‘Oh, Amma
,
why does he do things like this?’

‘Lakshmi!’ Her father’s voice came from his room.

Mother and daughter traded glances. The mother nodded in the direction of the room, the daughter shook her head.

‘Lakshmi!’

‘Haan, Nanna.’

‘Get me some amrutanjanam, my girl, please.’

Nanna
never said please normally, except when he pretended to be normal. Lakshmi sighed, washed her hands, got up and took the amrutanjanam bottle from the shelf where the photo of Lord Krishna sat, garlanded. Before she went into her father’s room, she stopped to recite a quick prayer to the lord.

‘Lakshmi…’

‘Coming, Nanna
.
’

He held his hand out for the bottle. When she placed it in his hand and turned to go, he said slowly, ‘Lakshmi.’

She stopped at the door, one hand on the edge of the doorway, her back to him.

‘We cannot always do things that we love, my girl.’

She did not say anything. She could tell he was not finished.

‘I know how much you love cycling. But you’re not a little girl any more. You’re a big girl. A grown-up. Understand?’

She made a movement of her head to say she understood.

‘Big girls don’t ride their cycles to school,’ he said.

She repeated the movement of her head.

‘Did you do your homework?’

‘Hmm.’

‘Good. It’s late now. Go and sleep. You have to wake up early for school tomorrow.’

‘Yes, Nanna.’

She pulled out the mat from the attic and spread it on the floor. She threw the pillow on it and lay down on her side, her arm folded under her head.
You’re a big girl now
. What sort of pathetic reason was that? Everyone in the village said Jalandharachari Sir was a wise old man, but in her mind, going by what had happened tonight, she thought he was also an
extremely
unreasonable old man.

It was only after a few months had passed that she understood what her father had meant. She noticed that girls in her class
were
growing bigger. Not taller, but bigger, in some strange manner. And while girls grew bigger, boys grew taller. Over the space of one school year, all the boys, who had until that year been shorter than them, had outgrown them.

She had thought she would deeply resent this sudden shrinking down of her person in the eyes of the boys—boys she had bossed around all these years—but to her surprise, she found there was a queer pleasure in being smaller. All her life she had felt being strong and independent were the virtues to aspire to, while being meek and submissive were the vilest of vices. But now, she could see the pull in being meek. She could feel the attraction in being submissive. In a way, she was beginning to understand her mother.

She came home one day and chirped excitedly to her mother about how Mahender Reddy gave her a peacock feather to put in her notebook. ‘If you keep it in your notebook for two years and don’t open it even once, it will grow into a full feather,’ she informed her mother grandly. ‘I am the only girl in the class Mahender Reddy even talks to. I think he likes me.’ And while her mother smiled at her, combed her hair, and cautioned her not to accept things from other people now on, her father’s face clouded over in worry.

Lakshmi wondered why.

She had all her questions answered when she moved to the town for her Intermediate studies. Her father had made a big scene before she left, demanding to know why a girl needed to study after her schooling was completed, but she cajoled and cried and blackmailed him into submission. She also promised him that she would not do anything that would ‘blacken his name’.

She met boys in college, of course. Hers was a girls’ college (her father would
never
have said yes if that were not the case), but she found out quite early in the year that the boys’ college was not far off. And every day, before lectures began, then at lunch time, and at the end of the day’s lessons, the front gate would be smattered with boys of all kinds—tall ones, short ones, thin ones, fat ones, ones with glasses and ones without, but all of them had two things in common. All of them wore bell-bottomed pants and inserted shirts, and all of them had neatly combed hair that positively dripped with oil. A pocket comb and a mirror were every young man’s prized possessions.

The English medium of teaching presented its challenges, but it helped that the English-educated among her classmates were not that great at the language either. She struggled through the first month, coped better in the second and third, and started to excel from the fourth. Economics and Civics were her main subjects, but her favourite continued to be Telugu. At nights, she yearned to hear her father’s voice as he had read out poems from the Gita to her. To her ears, her own voice sounded hollow and devoid of any spiritualism whatsoever.

She found that she interested men more than the other girls in her class. Some of them walked up to her and handed her love letters, rather apologetically. Some of them gave her flowers (none gave peacock feathers). Some of them informed her there was a new movie and that they would be privileged to take her along. But her mother had warned her that men needed only an inch of permission and they would be all over you. That they grovelled only as long as you said no. Besides, there was also that serious matter of her promise to her father that she would not ‘blacken his name’.

If she went to a movie or accepted a flower from one of these men, she knew it wouldn’t be long before she would blacken her father’s name. She did not trust these men, but she did not trust herself either.

She went back to Palem every six months, and for festivals. Every time she went back, she felt more and more like an outsider. First, there were matters of simple amenities. The college in town had fans and clean bathrooms and running water (if salty) and electricity. Coming back to lanterns, petromax lights and dim twenty-watt bulbs was depressing. Then there were matters to do with the people themselves. Everyone in town was so much more
forward
. They talked of important things like what was going to happen to the country, the role of youth, India’s place in world politics and such things. Over here, all anyone talked about was
their
farm and
their
cattle and
their
house. People in Palem, she decided, lacked the
big picture
.

It was when she came home after completing her first year at college that her mother said to her one day after dinner, ‘Lakshmi, Avadhanayya was here yesterday.’

Lakshmi looked up from her book (
A critical review of Shakespeare’s Othello for Young English Readers
) and sighed. She already knew where this conversation was going to go. She sneered and said, ‘Amma, how many times should I tell you? He is old enough to be my
father
.’

‘Lakshmi,’ her mother said. ‘You shouldn’t talk about men like that.’

‘Sorry,’ said Lakshmi immediately. ‘Amma, I used to go to his house to play. I call him—
everyone
my age calls him—Avadhani Mama.’

‘So? So what?’

‘So, nothing. I don’t want to get married to someone who is so much older than me.’

‘But Lakshmi, do you know how wealthy he is?’

‘Amma…’

Her mother did not look up, but her lips pursed in visible annoyance. ‘Do you know how much older than me your father is?’

‘Amma,’ Lakshmi said, ‘I want a
man
, not an
uncle
.’

‘He is not
that
old. Men mature later than women, my dear. An older man will take good care of you.’

‘I am not interested.’

‘Arey, but why?’

Lakshmi put her book away and leaned towards her mother. ‘Mother, I’ve never looked at him that way. I’ve never really… liked him. Besides, I am not interested in living in Palem all my life. I am going to study further and get a job.’

Her mother opened her mouth in shock.

Lakshmi gave her a sweet smile and went back to her book.

It was on that very evening (fate had a way of rubbing it in) that she saw him. He came with a bundle of clothes on his back and a roll of tobacco between his lips, his blue lungi
folded at his thighs. He knocked on the door and called out, ‘Amma, clothes!’

She looked at him without betraying any recognition. But his eyes, so wide open that they were more white than black, stared unashamedly at her. She was about to look away and point the rascal to the living room corner where he should put the bundle and leave, when she suddenly saw something glint in the afternoon sun. On his chest was a pendant made of sheet metal, carved out in the shape of a tiger’s claw. In school, everyone used to call him Puligoru
Sanga. She looked closely at the necklace again, at the twine thread that dived twice through the holes on either side of the claw, at the claw itself, which looked so much like one side of a funny man’s moustache, at the broad, hard, granite-like surface it lay against.

She remembered it to be much larger than it appeared now. Back then he used to lug it around wherever he went, like a small calf tied to a plough. It used to sit there on his chest, extending almost from one nipple to the other, advertising him wherever he went. But now, it needed the sun to draw attention to it. The sun, and Sanga’s broad chest. Now his chest itself seemed to advertise his pendant. It embedded itself obediently in the middle of his chest, looking small and insignificant.

She had never known anything about him but his name. He had been one of the shorter boys in school and always the dullest. In every test, in every quiz, every year, one thing in her class stayed constant—Puligoru
Sanga came last. He had also been lanky to the point of malnourishment back then. But now he had grown—in every sense of the word.

Her gaze travelled up his chest and into his eyes. She had never looked into his eyes before. In fact, she had not looked into any man’s eyes this closely before. There was a strange air of innocence about them—unblinking and wide but moist and almost, it seemed to her, on the verge of welling up. She caught his gaze and held it powerfully, as though she were shaking him by the wide, ox-like shoulders, confident that he would be the first to pull away.

He was. Wrenching his eyes away from hers down to the ground with a strength of effort that she could see, he mumbled, ‘How are you, Lachamma?’

Lachamma.
Of course. He might have been Puligoru
Sanga back in school, but now he was a washerman. And she—she was the daughter of Jalandharachari, the Telugu teacher, head of one of the two Brahmin families in the village. He might have called her Lachi when they were both in school (did he… she couldn’t remember), but now it had to be Lachamma. And she, the superior Brahmin lady, would call him by his name and order him around.

She stepped aside and pointed him to the corner. She did not speak to him. She watched him twist the bundle of clothes off his back onto the floor. She saw the thin film of sweat that covered his body and made it shine like an oiled bronze statue. She watched the hem of his lungi
stick to his thighs and drag itself up reluctantly as he bent down. She noticed the particles of sand that stuck to his body here and there, refusing to let go.