Outside, the sun blazed. May was the hottest month in a year constituted of hot months and a few hot and wet months. The Kathiri star had been spotted and nobody in their right senses stepped out during the day. The heat scorched the scalp and parched the throat. Even at three o’clock in the afternoon, shadows remained knee-high. The leaves of the giant ficus tree at the end of the street shivered in the heat, bleached and grey. Dogs crouched beside culverts that ran on one side of the road. Mirages swam before one’s eyes in a matter of minutes. Akhila hurried towards Sarasa Mami’s house. She didn’t care about the heat or that the roads were deserted, but the neighbours did. If
someone spotted her, they would find a way to point out to her mother the evils of letting a young girl like Akhila out in the streets by herself
Sarasa Mami had a trunk full of books. Novels that her brother-in-law had bought during his college years and had no use for any more. It had lain there till one day she asked Akhila to help her clean the trunk. ‘Every few months I take it out, dust it, kill the silver fish that seem to breed within the pages and put it back,’ she said, opening the lid of the trunk. ‘I keep telling my brother-in-law that he must take it with him but each time he has a fresh excuse.’
Akhila let her hand slide over the books. There were James Hadley Chases and Perry Masons; Harold Robbins and Irving Wallace and the odd classic or two. Dog-eared, yellowed with age and sweet-smelling racy books that made the blood hammer in her heart and unfurled forbidden thoughts. Sarasa Mami let her borrow one book at a time. ‘Are you sure your mother won’t disapprove of these books?’ she asked the first time.
‘They are not bad books. They just have covers like these to attract attention,’ Akhila hastened to explain before Sarasa Mami changed her mind about letting her borrow the books.
‘I suppose you are right. But if your mother makes a fuss, don’t tell her I gave it to you. She’ll give me hell.’
‘Sarasa Mami,’ Akhila called as she knocked at her door.
Subramani Iyer’s face split into a wide grin. ‘Look who’s here,’ he said. It was rare to see him without a smile on his face. ‘All dressed up as a princess, I see.’
Akhila looked down at her davani self-consciously. Her skirt and blouse were not new. But the purple-coloured georgette half-sari was almost new. No one but Subramani Iyer would have noticed it.
Akhila knew no one quite like him. She had seen him saunter towards Sarasa Mami and fling his arms around her while she blushed and squirmed to escape from the circle of his embrace. He called her his queen and his children their
treasure. Akhila had heard him weep large wet tears, moved by the tragedy of a film they had all gone together to watch at the cinema one afternoon. Every month on the day he was paid, he brought home a large box of sweets from the big sweet shop on Broadway — Ramakrishna Lunch Home. During Deepavali, he bought enough firecrackers to keep ten boys happy. He gifted them to Akhila’s brothers and then joined them at the street corner as they sparkled, whizzed and exploded the firecrackers, filling the air with smoke and the acrid stench of gun powder. All he asked was that every now and then they give blind Srini a lit sparkler to hold, so that he didn’t feel left out. ‘He can’t see but all his other senses are intact and probably work better than ours,’ Subramani Iyer would say, ruffling his son’s hair affectionately.
His forehead was high and marked with a scar like a half moon right above the bridge of his nose. ‘Aren’t I lucky? Even if I have forgotten to smear vibuthi on my head, everyone thinks I have …’ He giggled, fingering the scar. His eyes popped out of his face, bearing in them a perennial expression of wonder. A child taken for the first time to a fairground.
His clothes were always scruffy and hung on him as if they belonged to someone else. His shirtsleeves flapped and his trouser bottoms stood three inches above his ankles. He worked as a peon in an office where he had to fetch cups of tea and coffee, carry files from one table to another, empty the wastepaper bins and clean the office every morning, apart from doing an endless number of chores and yet, there was none of that aura of suffering that Appa with his superior clerical job wore around him.
‘He’s a happy-go-lucky sort of a chap,’ Akhila’s morose father was fond of saying. ‘Though how he can be with a grown-up daughter, a blind son and two young daughters, I wonder.’
But when the ambulance came screeching down the road early in the evening, its shrill siren wailing, and when
someone rushed to Sarasa Mami’s house with a message for Akhila to come home immediately, there had been an accident, it was Subramani Iyer who hurried out with her murmuring, ‘Don’t worry, it won’t be anything serious. Pattabhi Iyer is a good man. Nothing bad could ever happen to him.’
Who were these people? Where did they come from? Why were they all here? Questions pounded as they hurried towards Akhila’s house. They were greeted by the sight of Akhila’s father’s balding scalp, a steady murmur of voices and Amma’s wails: How could this happen? How could he do this to me?
Appa lay on a reed-mat on the floor. A white sheet was drawn up to the chin, beneath which his limbs were tidily arranged. His eyes were closed and there was cotton wool stuffed up his nose. He looked as though he were fast asleep. There was none of that harried exhaustion, the frustration and the bitterness that had marked his waking face. In death, he seemed completely content and relieved.
‘It happened just outside the station. At that turning between Central Station and Ripon Building … God knows what he was thinking of when he stepped on to the road. The bus driver claims that he had right of way … There will be an enquiry and all that. But I have some influence with the police department so they gave back the body an hour ago. They have performed a post-mortem so please don’t let the family hug and embrace the body too much. Everything was done in a hurry, you see, so the stitches might not hold too well …’ Someone from Appa’s office spoke quietly to Subramani Iyer. Akhila tried to fit a face to that voice but through the haze of tears all she could see was a miasma of features.
Was he one of her father’s tormentors? Was he one of those they had learned to hate? Was he the man who caused their father so much anguish that he lost all ability to draw pleasure from any of their little triumphs?
So that when Narayan or Akhila won a prize at school,
the only way he knew how to respond was by sinking low into himself and sighing, ‘All this is well but will it help you in real life? What use is it getting a certificate for English recitation or for the best handwriting? They ought to give you lessons on how to hurt those who hurt you; on how to trample upon other people’s hopes; that will help you survive and not all this. I’m not saying I’m not happy …’ he would conclude and wipe his brow with a little gesture of weary defeat they had come to recognize so well as a prelude to a headache.
That was the other thing about Appa. His headaches. It didn’t need much to set one off. A hot day. An overcast sky. A loudspeaker that blared forth Tamil devotional songs from the next street. The fragrance of incense sticks. A stomach upset. Padma’s chatter. Narsi scraping his knee on the street. A flickering light. A clattering plate. A howling dog. A motorbike revving up outside. A bad day at work. The crowded trains. A memory of some past hurt. A disquieting letter from a relative …
They had learnt to shelter Appa from most things that gave him a headache but in spite of it, he often had an attack. And then Appa would retire to the dark inner room and slam the door shut. A couple of hours later, he would emerge reeking of Amrutanjan balm, his eyes crinkling in the light after having being in the dark so long. Even after a headache had vanished, he would open a jar of the balm, curl his forefinger into its innards and scoop out a dollop of slick yellow salve that reeked of lemongrass oil and rub it into his temples in a long drawn out movement, filling the house with its unmistakable and completely indelible stench. Then he would rub the remnants that clung to the finger against his thumb and sniff at it. Once. Twice. And a final drawn-in breath that perhaps would carry the sting of the balm to the inside of his skull. He finished off by wiping his fingers on his nostrils.
And now Appa would never be troubled by a headache again. He lay there completely oblivious to the noise of
strangers weeping, vehicles stopping and starting as fresh batches of people came in to condole and commiserate, the swirls of sickening sweet smoke from a whole packet of incense sticks lit and placed close to his ear … Appa was finally at peace.
Amma lay curled up on the floor. A heap of lacerated emotions. When she saw Akhila, she rose. The women huddled by her side put their arms around her. One had to keep a close guard on a widow. Grief made even otherwise sensible people do rash and stupid things. Amma shook them off and raised her face to Akhila’s. ‘How could he do this to us? How could this happen to us?’
Akhila looked at her helplessly. What was she to say? ‘Where are the children?’ she murmured, sitting down beside Amma.
‘They are somewhere around,’ she said, laying her head on Akhila’s shoulder. After a while, Akhila eased Amma’s head off her shoulder and went looking for her brothers and sister. Narsi and Padma were sitting on the veranda playing some complicated game involving vehicle licence plates. They seemed rather excited by all the commotion and the comings and goings. That their father was dead seemed not to have registered yet. Or, if it had, they were quite untouched by its implications. But then Narsi was only eight and Padma six.
Akhila found Narayan crouched in a corner, his arms wrapped around his knees. His face was clenched with the effort of not giving way to tears. He was fifteen; the fragile age caught between man and boy. He didn’t know what he was supposed to be. A man strong enough to accept death, even an untimely one such as this. Or a boy, frightened by death and the void caused. Akhila put her arm around him. His shoulder muscles were taut. ‘Akka,’ he asked the floor, ‘why do you think he did it?’
‘Did what?’
‘Why did he try and cross the road when the traffic was
moving? He knows how treacherus that road is …’ Narayan’s voice cracked.
For the first time, it dawned on Akhila that this perhaps was not an accident. Akhila remembered the note of suspicion that had underlined Appa’s colleague’s words. And now this: Narayan’s question was innocent enough on the surface but she could read the doubt there.
Had Appa stood at the pedestrian crossing that morning and decided to end it all? Had it seemed to him to be the cure for his increasingly frequent headaches? Had the pressures of being the father of a grown-up daughter and three other children been too much for him to take? Had Appa thought he could take no more of Koshy and the torture he piled upon him? What was Appa thinking of when he stepped into the river of traffic?
Quo vadis.
Whither goest thou?
Kim gacchami. Nee yenga selgirai.
Had he closed his eyes and plunged into it? Or had he walked to his death unaware of where his feet were leading him?
Oh, Appa, why? What was so intolerable that you had to end your life to escape it?’
‘Akka,’ Narayan asked, ‘What are we going to do?’
‘Cremate him and then … and then, we’ll find some way to keep ourselves afloat and alive.’ The harshness in her voice astonished her as much as it did Narayan. The tears that had risen in her eyes quelled abruptly. Anger had replaced grief and this Akhila could handle better. Tears made one look around a room wildly searching for someone to cling to and unburden one’s sorrow. Tears made you vulnerable and distorted your focus. But anger made one stronger. Anger made one inviolable. Anger prepared one to face things better.
‘Where have these people come from? Who brought them here?’ Narayan’s perplexity cracked the thoughts that wound around Akhila like a coil of steel.
Appa had always kept their relatives at a distance. They saw them rarely, perhaps at a wedding or some other family
function. During the school holidays when other people went away to visit their relatives, they stayed in their house in Ambattur. Occasionally, in the summer, Amma would persuade Appa to take all of them into Madras City. ‘It’s so near. And the children need to have some fun,’ Amma would say.
Appa would frown at first. ‘When I was growing up, we didn’t have fun. We didn’t think it necessary. We studied or helped our parents with chores.’ It was yet another expense, and, besides, what was there in Madras City? It was just another place located a little distance away. But Amma would cajole and plead till he reluctantly agreed.
Amma made the whole trip seem like an awfully big adventure. First there was the business of boarding a bus to the city. Changing buses and the long wait in-between was guaranteed to put Appa in a foul mood. So they set out only in the middle of the day when the buses were empty and everyone was sure to find a seat. They would get off near the Central station and walk towards Moore Market. Its imposing red walls and turrets made it seem like a fort and, as they wandered through its long, dark corridors lined with stalls that sold just about everything anyone would need, Akhila and the other children felt like little princes and princesses for the day. They had two rupees each to spend. Amma usually picked them something they needed and used the money to pay for it. Somehow the newness of the gift – a bag or a blouse or simply an atlas for school – made it seem precious.
They would go to a roadside restaurant for coffee and snacks and then there would be another short bus ride to Marina Beach. Amma and Appa would sit on the sand while the children ran around in bare feet. Akhila, Narayan, Narsi and Padma would stand holding hands, letting the waves tickle their toes.