I would shout back, ‘What can I do? You think marks are to be bought in the market?’
After some more exchanges of the same kind, she would break down and have a quiet cry in a corner, abandoning for the day her normal activities, not even lighting the lamp in the puja room in the evening. A deadly gloom would descend on the house, everything still and silent, no life stirring even slightly. We would become petrified figures in that vast house. I would feel upset and oppressed in this atmosphere and leave without a word, to seek some bright spots such as the town library, the marketplace, the college sports ground, and, more than any other place, the Boardless Hotel, to pass the time in agreeable company.
Instead of the dark house to which I usually sneaked back, today when I returned from the Boardless I found the light in the hall burning. I was puzzled. I went up a few steps in the direction of my room and stopped. I heard voices in the hall and a lot of conversation. My mother’s voice was the loudest, sounded as spirited as in her younger days. She was saying, ‘He is not a bad boy, but likes to sound so. If we talk to him seriously, he’ll certainly obey me.’ The other one was gruff-voiced and saying, ‘You should not have let him go his way at all; after all, young persons do not know what is good for them, it is for the elders to give them the necessary guidance.’ I was hesitating, wondering how to reach the door to my room, unlock it without being noticed. If they heard the click of the key, they were bound to turn their attention on me. My door was at the end of the veranda, and I could not possibly go past the window without being seen. I felt hunted. I could not go back to the Boardless. I quietly sat down on the pyol of the house, leaning against the pillar supporting the tiled roof, stretched my legs and resigned myself to staying there all night, since from the tenor of the dialogue going on there was no indication it would ever cease. The gruff voice was saying, ‘What keeps him out so late?’ My mother was saying, ‘Oh, this and that. He spends a lot of time at the library, reads so much!’ I appreciated my mother for saying this. I never suspected that she had such a good opinion of me. What secret admiration she must be having—never showing any sign of it outside. It was a revelation to me. I almost felt like popping up and shouting, ‘Oh, Mother, how nice of you to think so well of me! Why could you not say so to me?’ But I held myself back.
He asked, ‘What does he plan to do?’
‘Oh!’ she said, ‘he has some big plans, which he won’t talk about now. He is very deep and sensitive. His ambition is to be a man of learning. He spends much time with learned persons . . .’
‘My daughter, you know, is also very learned. She reads books all the time . . .’
‘Sambu has read through practically all the volumes that his father left for him in that room. Sometimes I just have to snatch the books from him and lock them away so that he may bathe and eat! I don’t think even an M.A. has read so much!’
‘I really do not worry what he will do in life, though holding some position or an office is the distinguishing mark of a man.’ He recited a Sanskrit line in support of this. ‘Let him not strain in any manner except to be a good husband. My daughter’s share of the property . . .’ Here he lowered his voice and they continued to talk in whispers.
At dawn my mother caught me asleep on the pyol when she came out to sweep the front steps and wash the threshold as others before her had been doing for one thousand years. She was aghast at seeing me stretched out there. At some part of the night I must have fallen asleep. I think they were passing on to some sort of reminiscences far into the night, and they were both convulsed with laughter at the memory of some ancient absurdity. I had never heard my mother laughing so much. She seemed to have preserved a hidden personality especially for the edification of her old relatives or associates, while she presented to me a grim, serious, director-general aspect. It was foolish and thoughtless of me to have lain there and get caught so easily. Luckily her guest had gone to the back yard for a bath and had not seen me. Otherwise he’d have suspected that I had come home drunk, and been abandoned by undesirable companions at our door. Ah, how I wish he had seen me in this condition, which would have been a corrective to all the bragging my mother had been indulging in about me. She hurriedly woke me up. ‘Sleeping in the street! What’ll people think! Why didn’t you go into your room? Did you return so late? What were you doing all the time?’ There was panic in her tone, packed with suspicion that I must have been drinking and debauching—the talk of the town was the opening of a nightclub called Kismet somewhere in the New Extension, where the youth of the city were being lured. Someone must have gossiped about it within her hearing. I was only half-awake when she shook me and whispered, ‘Get into your room first—’
‘Why?’ I asked, sitting up.
‘I do not want you to be seen here . . .’
‘I found you talking to someone and so I . . .’ I had no rational conclusion to my sentence.
She gripped my arm and pulled me up, probably convinced that I needed assistance. I made a dash for my door, shut myself in and immediately resumed my sleep, a part of my mind wondering whether I should not have said, ‘I was at Kismet . . .’ I got up later than usual. There was no trace of the visitor of the night, which made me wonder if I had been having nightmares. ‘He left early to catch the bus,’ explained Mother when I was ready for coffee. I accepted her explanation in silence, refraining from asking further questions. I felt a premonition that some difficult time was ahead. We met at the middle courtyard as usual, where I accepted my coffee after a wash at the well. Normally we would exchange no words at this point; she would present a tumbler of coffee when I was seen at the kitchen door. There our contact would stop on most days, unless she had some special grievance to express, such as a demand for house-tax or failure on the part of the grocer or the milk-supplier. I’d generally listen passively, silently finish the coffee and pass on, bolt myself in, dress and make my exit by the veranda as unobtrusively as possible. But today, after coffee, she remarked, ‘The servant girl hasn’t come yet. Of late she is getting notions about herself.’ I repressed my remarks, as my sympathies were all on the side of that cheerful little girl, who had to bear a lot of harsh treatment from her mistress. After this information Mother said, ‘Don’t disappear, stay in . . .’ and she allowed herself a mild smile; she seemed unusually affable; this combined with all the good things she had been saying last night bewildered me. Some transformation seemed to be taking place in her; it didn’t suit her at all to wear a smile; it looked artificial and waxwork-like and toothy. I wished I could fathom her mind; the grimness and frown and growl were more appropriate for her face. I said, ‘I have some work to do and must go early.’
‘What work?’ she asked with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes. I felt scared. There were a dozen excuses I could give; should I tell her about Varma’s treasure-hunt (on Mondays he brought a sheaf of planchette messages purporting to give directions for a buried treasure in the mountains and sought my interpretation of them), or the little note I had promised a college student on Jaina philosophy, or apt quotations for a municipal councillor’s speech for some occasion. I was afraid my mother would pooh-pooh them, and so I just said, ‘I have many things to do—you wouldn’t understand.’ Normally she would burst out, ‘Understand! How do you know? Have you tried? Your father never kept anything from me.’ But today she just said, ‘Very well, I don’t want to bother you to tell me,’ with a mock-sadness in her voice. It was clear that she was continuing the goodwill she had exhibited last night before the stranger. I felt uneasy. She was playacting, for what purpose I could not guess.
Presently she followed me into my room and said, ‘You may go after listening to me. Your business can wait for a while.’ She sat down on my mat and invited me to sit beside her to listen attentively. I felt nervous. This was not her sitting hour; she’d be all over the place, sweeping, washing, cleaning and driving the girl about. But today what could be the important item of business, suspending all else?
It wa
s not long in coming. ‘Do you know who has come?’ I knew I was being pushed to the wall. Sitting so close to her made me uneasy. I felt embarrassed, especially when I noticed a strand of white beard on her chin. Was she aware of its existence? Ridiculous if she was going about, behaving as if it weren’t there. ‘Grey-beard loon . . .’ A phrase emerged now out of the miasma of assorted reading of hypothecated property. I recollected her boasts before the visitor about my studious habits. After waiting for me to say something (luckily I was brooding over Shakespeare’s line—or was it Coleridge’s?—otherwise I would have promptly said, ‘Some dark, hook-nosed fellow with a tuft—I couldn’t care less who,’ every word of which would have irritated her), she explained, ‘The richest man in our village: a hundred acres of paddy, coconut garden—from the coconut garden alone his income would be a lakh of rupees, and from cattle . . . They are distantly related to us . . .’ She went into genealogical details explaining the family alliances of several generations and dropping scores of names. She was thorough. I was amazed at the amount of information stored in her mind; she knew also where every character lived, scattered though they were between the Himalayas in the North and the tip of Cape Comorin in the South. I was fascinated by the way she was piling up facts in order to establish the identity of the man with the tuft. I felt like the Wedding-Guest in ‘The Ancient Mariner’. I could not break away. Here was another line floating up from the literary scrap acquired from my hypothecated property: ‘Hold off!’ the Wedding-Guest wailed, ‘unhand me,’ but the Ancient Mariner gripped his wrist and said with a far-away look, ‘With my crossbow I shot the Albatross.’ While my head buzzed with these irrelevant odds and ends, my mother was concluding a sentence: ‘The girl has studied up to B.A. and is to be married in June—he is keen that it should be gone through without any delay. She is his last issue and he is anxious to settle her future . . . and the settlement he has proposed is very liberal . . .’ I remained silent. I could now understand the drift of her conversation. She mentioned, ‘The horoscopes match very well. He came here only after the astrologers had approved.’
‘Where did he get my horoscope?’ I asked.
‘They took it from your father many, many years ago; they were such good friends and neighbours in our village.’ She added again, ‘They were such good friends that they vowed on the day the girl was born to continue the friendship with this alliance. On the very day she was born, you were betrothed,’ she said calmly, as if it were the normal thing.
‘What are you saying? Do you mean to say you betrothed to me a child only a few hours old?’
‘Yes,’ she said calmly.
‘Why? why?’ I asked, unable to comprehend her logic. ‘Don’t you see how absurd it is?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘They are a good family, known and attached to us for generations.’
‘It’s idiotic,’ I cried. ‘How can you involve me in this manner? What was my age then?’
‘What does it matter?’ she said. ‘When I was married I was nine and your father thirteen, and didn’t we lead a happy life?’
‘That’s irrelevant, what you have done with your lives. How old was I?’
‘Old enough, about five or six, what does it matter?’
‘Betrothed? How? By what process?’
‘Don’t question like that. You are not a lawyer in a court, she said, dropping her mask of friendliness.
‘I may not be a lawyer, but remember that I am not a convict either,’ I said, secretly wondering if it was a relevant thing to say.
‘You think I am a prisoner?’ she asked, matching my irrelevancy.
I remained silent for a while and pleaded, ‘Mother, listen to me. How can any marriage take place in this fashion? How can two living entities possessing intelligence and judgement ever be tied together for a lifetime?’
‘How else?’ she said, and picking up my last word, ‘What lifetime? Of course, every marriage is for a lifetime. No one marries anew every month.’
I felt desperate and cried, ‘Idiotic! Don’t be absurd, try to understand what I am saying . . .’
She began to wail loudly at this. ‘Second time you are hurling an insulting word. Was it for this I have survived your father? How I wish I had mounted the funeral pyre as our ancients decreed for a widow; they knew what a widow would have to face in life, to stand abusive language from her own offspring.’ She beat her forehead with such violence that I feared she might crack her skull. Face flushed and tears streaming down her cheeks, she glared at me; I quailed at her look and wished that I could get up and escape. At close quarters, unaccustomed as I was, it was most disturbing. While she went on in the same strain, my mind was planning how best to get away, but she had practically cornered me and was hissing and swaying as she spoke. I began to wonder if I had thoughtlessly used some bad word and was going over our conversation in a reverse order. My last word was ‘idiotic’, nothing foul and provocative in such a word. Most common usage. ‘Idiot’ would have been more offensive than ‘idiotic’. ‘Idiotic’ could be exchanged between the best of friends under any circumstance of life and no one need flare up. Before this word she had said, ‘No one marries anew every month.’ I never said that they did. What a civilization, ‘A Wounded Civilization’, a writer had called it. I could not help laughing slightly at the thought of the absurdity of it all. It provoked her again. Wiping her eyes and face with the tip of her sari, she said, ‘You are laughing at me! Yes, I’ve made a laughingstock of myself bringing you up, tending you, nursing you and feeding you, and keeping the house for you. You feel so superior and learned because of the books your father has collected laboriously in the other room . . .’
‘But they weren’t his . . . only someone’s property mortgaged for a loan . . .’ I said, unable to suppress my remark.
And she said, ‘With all that reading you couldn’t even get a B.A.! While every slip of a girl is a graduate today.’ Her voice sounded thick and hoarse due to the shouting she had indulged in.
I abruptly left, snatching my kurta and the upper cloth which were within reach, though I generally avoided this dress as it made one look like a political leader. I preferred always the blue bush-shirt and dhoti or pants, but they were hanging by a hook on the wall where Mother was leaning. As I dashed out I heard her conclude: ‘. . . any date we mention, that man will come and take us to see the girl and approve . . .’ So, she was imagining herself packing up, climbing a bus for the village with me in tow, to be received at that end as honoured visitors and the girl to be paraded before us bedecked in gold and silk, waiting for a nod of approval from me. ‘Idiotic,’ I muttered again, walking down our street.
Going down Market Road, I noticed Dr Kishen arrive on a scooter at M.M.C., already opened by his general assistant named Ramu, who fancied himself half a doctor and examined tongue and pulse and dispensed medicine when the doctor’s back was turned. The doctor did not mind it, as Ramu was honest and rendered proper account of his own transactions. The doctor on noticing me said, ‘Come in, come in.’ A few early patients were waiting with their bottles. He was one who did not believe in tablets, but always wrote out a prescription for every patient, and Ramu concocted the mixture and filled the bottles. The doctor always said, ‘Every prescription must be a special composition to suit the individual. How can mass-produced tablets help?’ He wrote several lines on a sheet of paper and then turned the sheet of paper and wrote along the margin, too; he challenged anyone to prove that his prescriptions were not the longest: ‘I’ll give free medicine to anyone who can produce a longer prescription anywhere in this country!’ And his patients, mostly from the surrounding villages, sniggered and murmured approval. When he hailed me I just slowed down my pace but did not stop. ‘Good morning, Doctor. I’m all right . . .’ He cut me short with, ‘I know, I know, you are a healthy animal of no worth to the medical profession, still I want to speak to you . . . Come in, take that chair, that’s for friends who are in good health; sick people sit there.’ He flourished h
is arm in the direction of a teakwood bench along a wall and a couple of iron folding chairs. He went behind a curtain for a moment and came out donning his white apron and turned the hands of a sign on the wall which said DOCTOR IS IN, PLEASE BE SEATED. He briefly glanced through a pile of blotters and folders advertising new infallible drugs and swept them away to a corner of his desk. ‘Of value only to the manufacturers, all those big companies and multinationals, not to the ailing population of our country. I never give these smart canvassing agents in shirt-sleeves and tie more than five minutes to have their say, and one minute to pick up their samples and literature and leave. While there are other M.D.s in town who eat out of their hands and have built up a vast practice with physician samples alone!’ Ramu went round collecting the bottles from those occupying the bench. ‘Why don’t you give me a cheque?’ asked the doctor.
I thought he was joking and said, ‘Yes, of course, why not?’ to match what I supposed was his mood, and added, ‘How much? Ten thousand?’
‘Not so much,’ he said, ‘Less than that . . .’ He took out a small notebook from the drawer and kept turning its leaves. At this moment an old man made his entry, coughing stentoriously. The doctor looked up briefly and flourished his hand towards the bench. The old man didn’t obey the direction but stood in the middle of the hall and began, ‘All night . . .’ The doctor said, ‘All right, all right . . . sit down and wait. I’ll come and help you to sleep well tonight.’ The man subsided on the bench, a sentence he had begun trailing away into a coughing fit.
The doctor said, ‘Two hundred and forty-five rupees up to last week . . . none this week.’ I now realized that this was more than a joke. I was aghast at this demand. He thrust his notebook before me and said, ‘Twenty visits at ten rupees a visit. I have charged nothing for secondary visits, and the balance for medicine . . .’ The cough-stricken patient began to gurgle, cleared his throat and tried to have his say. The doctor silenced him with a gesture. A woman held up a bawling kid and said, ‘Sir, he brings up every drop of milk . . .’ The doctor glared at her and said, ‘Don’t you see I’m busy? Am I the four-headed Brahma? One by one. You must wait.’