I must have gone to sleep, for I woke up, perspiring. Sukumari was not there, but Baliga stood fanning me. Uncle Seetharamu came in, followed by the Brahmins. The coconut and betel leaf and dhoti and gold-coin were ready. I placed one silver plate before each and touched their feet. ‘May the householder, the giver of kine and gold, be blessed,’ they muttered, with wrong Sanskrit accents. How very painful Sanskrit wrongly pronounced can be, I was trying to say to myself, when I rolled over and fell on a Brahmin, kicking the coconut and the betel nut right across the room. They lifted me up, and Uncle Seetharamu said, ‘Oh, it’s nothing. Air journeys can be so tiring.’ The Brahmins agreed with Uncle Seetharamu.
The bridegroom came and sat by me. He was full of respect and affection for his new brother-in-law. He felt proud of Saroja, and showed how honoured he felt to be a member of our family. ‘I have a boss who knows France very well,’ he explained. ‘He knows Monte Carlo, Paris, and the South of France. You will meet him when you come to Delhi.’ His brother, younger than him, dropped in to say he had taken French for his degree. He was reading Lettres de Mon Moulin and Moliere’s Malade Imaginaire. He was going to be a diplomat, he had decided. Cousin Vishweshwara’s son Lakshmana came to say how delighted he was to see me. He had just returned from Cornell. He had a degree in radio engineering. The world was large and prosperous. There was no reason why I should be suffocating in this room.
‘You idiots,’ shouted Uncle Seetharamu, ‘here is a man who’s tired and wants air, and you are surrounding him as though he were on the point of digging out sacred gold.’ Everybody left. Only the bridegroom remained, with his crown, perspiration, and gold on his fingers. As I closed my eyes he went, and returned with Saroja, Saroja sat at my feet, pressing my legs. I went back to sleep.
It is no use giving you details of the procession, the laddu and pheni dinner at night, and the way in which the other party came to take Saroja away. Long after midnight, as Saroja sat near my bed saying nothing but fanning me, the bridal car came and the ladies invaded the house. ‘The bride, the bride!’ they demanded, and Saroja said, ‘It is time for me to go, Brother,’ She laid the fan beside me and started to go. ‘I’ll come back soon. Get well quickly, Brother. Meanwhile I will look after the household,’ she said, smiling, and went down the steps. So much gravity, decision, and responsibility had come into her that already she looked a woman.
Ladies sang songs of welcome as she came down, and laughed and asked her to name her husband, as she crossed the threshold of the house. Saroja did not need much persuading. ‘Mr Subramanya Sastri,’ she said, as if it was the name of her professor.
All the night Little Mother sat up fanning me. I spat blood once again, but it was not too serious. I pressed her to go to the ‘other house’ and see the dancing and hear the music. ‘Baliga will do,’ I said. She went. Late in the night I could hear them come back.
‘Low untouchables, they be,’ said Little Mother. ‘To think we gave such a flower of our courtyard to them.’
‘Ah,’ rejoined Sukumari, ‘till the tali is tied all is sweetness, afterwards it’s the festival of the bitter neem leaf.’
In the morning, as I sat drinking my coffee, who should drop in to see me but Uncle Seetharamu. ‘Oh, Rama, to have given such a slip of a girl away to these cadaver-eating pariahs. They will sell their tongue for position, and the rest I cannot say before women. The whole night,’ he whispered into my ears, ‘the sisters and aunts went round and round the bridal room singing ribald songs, and in the morning hardly was the cock crowing before they entered the bridal chamber, those widow- born did. Are we Muslim, I ask you, Muslim? What? Saroja sat in a corner and wept. Ah, the butchers — did I give them a talking-to! “We don’t sell meat in our houses. Sir, we marry our girls,” I told them.’
Little Mother heard half of what was said: ‘Shiva, Shiva,’ she cried, and went into the kitchen to bring us more coffee.
Two nights later Saroja and Subramanya came to take leave of us. Little Mother had prepared all there was to give her— dolls, sheets, vessels, gods, saris, photographs of Father and myself — and Saroja seemed full of smiles. She left home looking bright and fulfilled, as though she liked marriage. ‘Come and spend at least a week with us in Delhi,’ she begged, and looked up to her husband for support.
‘The climate of Delhi is wonderful — it’s a tonic,’ said Subramanya. Saroja was really married.
‘She looks happy. After all, Rama, what more happiness does a woman need than a home, and a husband. The temple needs a bell,’ Little Mother quoted some proverb, ‘and the girl a husband, to make the four walls shine.’
The same afternoon Dr Pai came to examine me. He was not too alarming, but there was no question of an air journey for the moment — nor the cold air of Europe. No, not even the South of France, he persisted: he knew that part of the world very well. ‘Later in the summer, perhaps,’ he said.
‘But I have a wife, and she’s going to have a baby,’ I argued.
‘Your wife would no doubt prefer you alive here than dead there,’ he laughed.
Little Mother was shocked at his crude remark. She beat her knuckles on her temples: what an inauspicious thing to say!
‘Today medical science is so well advanced that there is no danger for a patient like you; I don’t think you’re such a serious case. The X-rays will tell me, once I have them. For the moment take rest. And don’t you let people come and worry him,’ he said, turning to Little Mother. ‘In Europe, people are so understanding about patients and diseases. Here we treat disease as thought it were a terminal examination — whether you pass or fail it makes no difference. Look after yourself, old boy. After all, now that your father is no more you are the pillar of the family. You must get better.’
~
I got better. Dr Pai ordered three months in Bangalore, so Little Mother, Sukumari, Sridhara, and I, with the cook and Baliga, all went up to Bangalore. I hired a house in upper Basavangudi and with cauldron and drying bamboo we established ourselves. Living in the intimacy of my own family — where every gesture, idiosyncrasy, or mole-mark was traced back to some cousin, aunt, or grandfather; where there were such subtle understandings of half-said things, of acts that were respected or condemned according to the degree of stature, age or sex of one another— gave a feeling of a complex oneness, from which one could never get out save by death, and even after that one would get into it again in the next life, and so on till the wheel of existence were ended. ‘Father scratched his leg just there, at the arch of his foot, with the second finger, just like you,’ Sukumari remarked one evening. ‘Look, Rama, look!’ Little Mother said; ‘Sridhara has a mole under his right arm, just where you have…’ One night, when Little Mother was telling me a story, I went to sleep saying, ‘Yes, yes, Hum-Hum,’ and everybody laughed, for I was snoring. ‘Just like his grandmother,’ said Aunt Sata, who had joined us.
Later, when the rains had started, we visited our lands in the Malnad with Aunt Sata and walked by the Himavathy again. Little Mother had not been to Hariharapura for six or seven years. The peasants were trying to play false with us, complained Aunt Sata; ‘I am only a helpless widow, and I cannot look after my own twenty-five acres of wetland. For what with the hay and the false measures, the pick-axe broken and the manure washed away, Lord, it is beyond a woman’s ken to control these black-blanket peasants, especially in these evil mountain-lands. I tell you, forget your seventy-six acres of wetlands, spread over Kanchenahalli and Siddapura, Hobli, and Himaganga, Kanthapura and those dry lands in Seethapura Taluka; forget your coffee and cardamoms. And as for your bright Sundarayya, he knows when to write charming letters to you saying, “The Himavathy has run into the land at Sivganga corner, divine sir, and she’s washed away canal-bund and all; during these floods she ate away fifteen man-lengths of land.” Or, “The manure this year was bad, and Whitey, Pushpa, Madhuri, Kala, Nandi, and Sankri have died of the new cattle- dysentry,” while actually he’s sent them to Balapura Saturday fair for sale. Remember what he did to your father during the war? He sold your cattle to those Europeans — and for butchery, you understand. He who’ll sell cows for butchery will sell you one day,’ continued Aunt Sata. ‘Ah, you do not know the people hereabouts, and you do not know the peasants either. For every yea and nay, for every sneeze or scratch, they’ll tell you such a huge Ramayana; and if you question them too much or say this or that: “The weeds have grown here”, ‘“The cattle look lean”’, or “When will you give us the Spring-rice? It’s already three months due and the rains are here”, you never know when their scythes will be at the touch of your neck, never, never. Remember Posthouse Venkatanayana,’ concluded Aunt Sata, and became ominously silent.