Song of the Cuckoo Bird Read online

  The backlash against Taruna’s radical ways struck Ramanandam harshly too. He lost his job as a schoolteacher. He took his family and moved to Tirupati, to the famed Bhagwan Hariharan ashram. They stayed there for almost a year before Ramanandam decided that he needed to find his own home. Already devotees were coming to Bhagwan’s ashram to see Charvi, causing some tension between Ramanandam and Bhagwan Hariharan. It was time to find Charvi an ashram of her own.

  Ramanandam wanted a large place with minimal rent. When he lost his job, he was allowed to keep his pension, and that would have to suffice as income. As luck would have it, he found Tella Meda.

  “The owner, Somayajula-garu, didn’t want to rent the house to anyone. After all, his wife died here, you know,” Subhadra told Kokila. “But when he heard about Charvi he just handed it over, free of charge. That was four years ago. Charvi was just fifteen then, but you know how it is with saints—age is not material.”

  Subhadra was awestruck by Charvi, convinced she was an incarnation of a goddess.

  “You can see it in her eyes,” Subhadra claimed. “Do you know she named this house? Before her the house had no name but then when we did the gruhapravesham and the boiled milk spilled on the floor, Charvi just looked at the house and said, ‘This is Tella Meda.’ And this became our ashram.”

  But when Kokila met her, Charvi clearly said, “This is not an ashram and I’m not a guru or your religious leader or your god. Others call this an ashram, but Tella Meda is a home, and this is now your home for as long as you want and need it.”

  Kokila should have been in awe of Charvi, but she was suspicious of such disarming modesty from a guru.

  The Cuckoo Bird Girl

  In the beginning, Kokila was afraid, unsure of her new surroundings and the people in them, but soon her shyness dissolved in the good company of her two new friends, Vidura Sastri and Chetana, another young girl who stayed at Tella Meda.

  Ramanandam Sastri believed in freedom. He believed that children should be allowed to run as they like and do as they please. If they didn’t want to go to school, they didn’t have to go; if they wanted to eat only chakli for dinner, they could; and if they wanted to stay up until midnight watching the stars, that was allowed as well.

  Coming from a conservative Brahmin home, where rules and regulations had shaped her childhood, Kokila dove into her new, unfettered life with unmatched eagerness. The ashram to her was a grandiose house where food was always available and no one ever scolded her. Later on Kokila realized that the food was actually meager, and that it would have been better if someone had scolded her and taught her to live a more disciplined life. But at the time she thought she had fallen into heaven.

  Kokila sat with Charvi while she performed the morning puja, making long garlands with jasmine flowers. They prayed in the room that was the music and temple room. Only Charvi was allowed to touch the mahogany temple, which she cared for every day with love and respect and plenty of wood oil.

  In those days not too many people lived in Tella Meda, and several rooms were empty. Guests would come and stay in those empty rooms. They would come to visit Ramanandam Sastri and then they would be mesmerized by the goddess they could see in Charvi’s face. And before they left they would leave some money behind as they paid their respects to the guru of Tella Meda.

  “Are you a goddess?” Kokila asked Charvi once, and Charvi became sad. She was twenty-one years old then, but she seemed much older than her years.

  “No,” she replied softly.

  “But everyone says they see Amma in your face,” Kokila prodded.

  Charvi closed her eyes then and sighed. “I can’t control what they see.”

  Kokila wanted to ask her what she saw when she looked at herself in the mirror but didn’t. Charvi’s eyes were already closed in meditation and Kokila didn’t have the courage to question the guru’s godliness.

  Kokila and Chetana, her closest friend in Tella Meda, had discussed Charvi several times. The daughter of a prostitute who had all but abandoned her, Chetana was devoted to Charvi, who had given her a home when so many would have cringed at the idea of a prostitute’s daughter living with them. But even Chetana agreed that she couldn’t quite see the light of knowledge burning brightly in Charvi’s eyes.

  Every evening Charvi would go for a walk on the beach and many of the residents of the ashram would join her, among them Vidura, Charvi’s young brother. Chetana hated getting sand on her feet, so she would stay back in the ashram to help Subhadra in the kitchen. Ever since Subhadra had come to Ramanandam Sastri’s house eleven years ago, it was she who had played the role of mother to Chetana.

  But it wasn’t Subhadra’s attention that Kokila wanted, it was Vidura’s. So she joined Charvi on her walks in order to be alone with Vidura, away from Chetana.

  Kokila was thirteen years old when her body started burgeoning, making her a woman. Desires that had been unknown were unraveling within her and each time Vidura smiled at Kokila, touched her, she felt a tingle that ran through her entire body. Except for Charvi, who once when she saw Kokila hold Vidura’s hand mentioned to her that she should be careful with her dreams, no one objected to the time Kokila spent with Vidura.

  Kokila, Chetana, and Vidura had been playing together since they were children and no one noticed their transition to adulthood. No one noticed Kokila’s shy smiles, Vidura’s knowing eyes, and Chetana’s full breasts. On the beach no one cared that Vidura and Kokila would wrestle in the sand like children, even though their bodies could feel the sensations of adults. No one seemed to mind that Vidura would openly stare at Kokila after she had been drenched in the sea.

  This was just another aspect of Ramanandam Sastri’s faith in freedom. He didn’t believe in dictating how people lived and children, although small, were still human and had rights.

  Kokila dreamed that Ramanandam’s openness and acceptance toward her meant he liked her and would accept her marriage to Vidura. The only problem with Kokila’s dreams was that she was already married to a boy named Vamsi Krishna from Visakhapatnam. But she couldn’t even remember Vamsi’s face anymore, wouldn’t be able to recognize him in a crowd, so she didn’t feel pressure from the validity of that union.

  “No matter what you say, you are still married,” Chetana reminded her when Kokila confessed her growing feelings for Vidura. She pointed to the mangalsutra Kokila wore around her neck. The thin gold chain holding two small gold coins that looked like little gold breasts symbolized her marriage, but it had lost its meaning for Kokila. How could this symbolize marriage? And if it did, wouldn’t it be powerful, so powerful that her heart would not be tempted?

  “No, I’m not,” Kokila said adamantly. “I haven’t set up household with anyone.”

  “You’re going to menstruate soon,” Chetana warned her. “And then they’ll come, your husband’s family, to take you away. You’ll have to go, you’re their daughter-in-law.”

  To Kokila that was a potent threat.

  “Maybe I’ll stay,” Kokila said, not knowing how she could. But the idea of leaving Vidura, and especially of leaving him to Chetana, was intolerable. The idea of leaving what had become her only true home for a stranger’s house was intimidating.

  “No, you won’t stay,” Chetana said confidently, and added slyly, “You’re a married woman. You should not let your eye wander so.”

  After that Kokila waited in dread to see blood in between her legs. How would it gush out, where would it happen? Maybe if she was careful no one would know her menses had begun and she could continue to stay in Tella Meda. If there were no celebrations confirming her arrival at puberty, her husband’s family would not know and would not come to take her away. Yes, she decided, she would hide it.

  Chetana had already started having bleeding. It began three months earlier and since then, for five days every month she would sit in the room by the bathrooms where all the other women in the ashram who had bleeding congregated. The women having their monthly were not all
owed to cook or touch anything in the rest of the house, except for the things in the room assigned to them. Subhadra would place their food outside the “menses room” and would not touch the utensils until they had been washed by the woman or women having their monthlies. Those utensils were not mixed with the other plates and glasses in the kitchen. They were stored in the menses room, away from everything, and were used only while the women “sat out.”

  Chetana hated to sit out but would pretend as if the menses room were a palace. Kokila had never been inside the room. With so many women in the house, the room almost always had an occupant. And in any case it was an impure room and if Kokila went in she would have to be doused with water drawn from the well in the backyard to be cleansed.

  But Kokila had been fascinated by the mysterious room where women sat out from the first day when Ramanandam had avoided the room on their tour of the ashram. The first menstruation was a bona fide rite of passage, and Kokila couldn’t imagine how it would be to bleed from between the legs.

  “Oh, it hurts and hurts,” Chetana warned her. “But Subhadra gives me this rice medicine and all the pain goes away. Maybe she’ll give it to you . . . or, maybe your mother-in-law will. Because once you start you’ll have to leave.”

  At the mention of leaving Tella Meda, the fascination Kokila had for the menses room turned into fear.

  The only woman who didn’t sit out with the other women was Charvi. No one even knew if she had monthlies. According to Chetana, a goddess didn’t have monthlies. It was true that Charvi never missed the morning puja and everyone knew a woman having her period was a soiled woman and shouldn’t be allowed in the presence of God.

  “Do you have monthlies?” Kokila asked Charvi once after the morning puja.

  Subhadra, who was hovering around the music room, snapped at her, “What stupid questions you ask, Kokila! Go and sweep the courtyard. It’s your turn this week.”

  “I just . . . ,” Kokila began, but fell silent when Subhadra sent her another fierce glare. She left the puja room and went to sweep.

  Everyone had chores in the ashram. Subhadra was responsible for all the cooking. Each person had to wash his or her own plates and glasses, but Subhadra cleaned all the pots and pans.

  Chetana and Kokila shared the sweeping of the courtyard and the inside verandah. One week Kokila did it and the next Chetana had a period, so Kokila did it again. It wasn’t fair but Kokila didn’t want to complain about something so silly, especially since the Mysore tiles were so easy to sweep.

  Kokila had gone to school until the fourth class, but when she got married that stopped. Chetana still went to school, though she stayed home more often than she caught the school bus. Ramanandam Sastri had asked Kokila if she wanted to study in a school or stay home and study in Tella Meda. The decision was an easy one: the ashram it was. Who wanted to wake up early in the morning and run to the school bus and go to school? In school there would be exams, strict teachers, and punishment, but at Tella Meda there was none of that. In addition, Vidura was home-schooled and the lure of being with him all day was too much for Kokila to resist.

  Every evening before dinner, from 4 to 6 PM, Ramanandam Sastri would teach the children. Vidura, Chetana, and Kokila sat next to each other with black slates on their laps and thin chalk in their hands. They had no books. Occasionally, Ramanandam Sastri would give a book to them, asking them to read it, but they never did.

  Ramanandam believed in imparting what he called a “real-world” education. He didn’t want the children to just learn math; he wanted them to learn the applications of it. He didn’t want them to just know the capitals of all the states; he wanted them to know what every state’s political affiliation was and how each state was part of India as a whole. But the children didn’t have any basics, not in math or geography or social studies, so Ramanandam’s lengthy lectures about social models made little sense. They learned little about the applications of the knowledge they didn’t have.

  Ramanandam was not consistent either. He would tell them about geography one day, gathering everyone around an atlas and spinning his old globe to show where India was and where America was. Another day he would try to teach accounting or he would talk about the planets and gravity, switching from topic to topic with little continuity, leaving the children with a jumble of information with no relevance. His favorite thing to teach was Indian history. He would start from the Indus Valley civilization and go all the way to Nehru. He spent days talking about Chanakya and King Chandragupta Maurya, and would get very emotional when he spoke of the British Raj.

  At the age of thirteen, listening intently to the exciting stories Ramanandam would tell, Kokila was mesmerized. He was the most brilliant man under the sun to her. Vidura was also immensely proud of his father and would show off about how many people came to the ashram to visit him, honor him, and seek guidance from him. He didn’t speak that highly of Charvi and claimed that his father was the real guru of the ashram, the true saint.

  And because Vidura believed that, so did Kokila.

  “He sleeps around,” Chetana told Kokila one night when they were getting ready to go to sleep.

  “What? Who?”

  “Ramanandam Sastri Garu. And with prostitutes, young girls,” Chetana said casually.

  “And who told you, your whore mother?” Kokila asked, furious at the accusation. It was a mean thing to say to Chetana, only meant to hurt her, because it was one thing to call someone’s mother a whore, but it was quite another to say it when it was the truth. It was no secret that Chetana’s mother, Ambika, was a prostitute who had had Chetana when Ramanandam Sastri’s sister had advised against yet another abortion. Ambika had not wanted to take care of her daughter and had left Chetana at the mercy of the world. Taruna had brought her as a baby to Ramanandam Sastri and Charvi, and Chetana had been with them ever since.

  “Everyone knows about Sastri Garu,” Chetana said, blinking back tears. “Why do you think Charvi doesn’t even talk to him?”

  That wasn’t quite true. Kokila had seen Ramanandam Sastri and his daughter talk to each other on many occasions, but it was obvious to everyone in the ashram that there were dynamics at play between them that no one knew of.

  Even though Kokila didn’t believe Chetana, her fertile young mind started to concoct scenarios, fueled by gossip, each time Ramanandam stepped out of the ashram.

  According to Vidura, his father went to the library, met with friends, and wrote at the beach. They all seemed valid reasons for Ramanandam to leave Tella Meda, but Kokila continued to think about the prostitutes he allegedly visited.

  The only prostitute Kokila had ever seen was Chetana’s mother, Ambika. She had come just once to Tella Meda since Kokila started living there. Ambika looked like a normal woman, except she had silk underwear. Kokila had sneaked into Ambika’s room with Chetana to go through her suitcase. The underwear was silky, with lace on it, and the brassiere, oh, that was just indecent. Kokila hadn’t even known clothes like this existed and seeing them had lifted another curtain that separated her from the real world.

  The saris in the suitcase were garish, pink and yellow, cheap, with golden flowers on them. There were two lipsticks in the suitcase, one dark red and another dark pink. Chetana stole the dark red one despite Kokila’s protests. Everyone knew that women who wore lipstick were not from good families.

  “Do you know that Taruna Auntie, Sastri Garu’s sister, tied her tubes?” Chetana whispered.

  “What does that mean?” Kokila asked.

  “I don’t know, they go inside the body and tie the tubes that create babies,” Chetana said. “After me, no one wants that bitch to get pregnant again.”

  For years Kokila thought of Chetana’s mother as a bitch, a dog in heat, her tongue lolling as she copulated with male dogs outside Tella Meda. Dogs weren’t allowed inside the ashram; they were foul creatures who ate their own feces and mated with their offspring and their siblings. Charvi hated dogs.

  “I hate
her,” Vidura announced one night. He and Kokila often sneaked out in the night to go for a walk on the beach.

  Vidura’s feelings for Charvi were ambivalent. Kokila was constantly confused because sometimes he would speak highly of her and other times he would talk like his older sister Lavanya and call Charvi the worst kind of fraud. His feelings transferred to Kokila and she never quite worked out how she felt about Charvi. Sometimes she thought her to be the godliest and most serene person she knew; other times she thought Charvi was just ordinary, pretending to be someone greater.

  “What did she do?” Kokila asked, barely able to conceal her curiosity. Everyone in the ashram craved glimpses of Charvi’s life beneath the façade of the guru.

  “She actually believes she can heal people,” Vidura said, kicking sand with his bare feet. “I don’t. But this man, some doctor or something, came by a month ago from Bangalore, do you remember?”

  Kokila nodded even though she didn’t. So many people came to the ashram that it was hard to keep track of all of Charvi’s devotees. Only those who stayed in Tella Meda made an impact, however small.

  “This doctor said he gets headaches and Charvi . . . she touched his forehead or something and today that doctor sent a letter saying that his headaches are completely gone,” Vidura said, sneering a little. “And Charvi believes it. She was trying to stroke Chetana’s stomach because she has a stomachache. How can she believe any of this?”

  Kokila didn’t know what to say. She didn’t mind it so much that Charvi believed in herself and now had elevated herself to a touch healer. How did it matter?

  “And you should see Nanna. He is just so proud that his daughter has these powers. Even he believes her,” Vidura said resentfully. It became clear to Kokila that Vidura was jealous of the attention Charvi got from their father.