Song of the Cuckoo Bird Read online

  “I love him,” Kokila said, the anger seeping out of her.

  “I love him too,” Chetana said with a sad smile.

  “He lied to me,” Kokila said, her heart breaking. What had she done? She had given up her husband to be with a boy who had no loyalty.

  “What did he lie about?” Chetana asked.

  Kokila tried to remember what it was Vidura had lied about, but there was nothing to remember. “I just assumed,” she said weakly. “I thought if I stayed for him . . . but he told me that I should have gone with my husband, that I was a bad Hindu wife. Am I a bad Hindu wife?”

  Chetana snorted. “You are not a wife anymore.”

  Even though he had broken Kokila’s heart, she was prepared to forgive Vidura, if only he would speak with her and not be so remote. But Vidura isolated himself more and more from the people around him. And three months after Kokila had her first menses, Vidura ran away from Tella Meda without saying anything to anyone.

  Kokila never saw him again.

  1964 27 May 1964. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the architect and first prime minister of modern India, passed away at the age of seventy-four.

  28 May 1964. A slow-moving funeral cortege containing the body of Jawaharlal Nehru inched through the streets of New Delhi. A million and a half Indians lined the route to pay final respects to their beloved leader.

  A Modern Woman

  Vidura ran away on the twenty-seventh of May, 1964, the day Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, died.

  Ramanandam Sastri was destroyed.

  He was like a walking corpse, going up the stairs every day to stand on the terrace under the splintering sun, watching and waiting for his son to come home.

  Telegrams had been sent out, letters had been written to relatives, friends, anyone Ramanandam could think of. Most of them replied apologetically that they didn’t know Vidura’s whereabouts. The inspector of Bheemunipatnam also investigated but no one had seen Vidura with his battered suitcase filled with his belongings. Vidura’s room, one of the small rooms across from the kitchen, was bare except for his bed and an empty Godrej steel cupboard. He had managed to take everything away but no one knew when, no one knew how, and most important, no one knew why.

  There was speculation that he had been kidnapped and taken away to the docks where young boys were used as slave labor. Some thought he had seen something untoward and had run away because of fear. And some thought that he was just a crazy boy who had left his nice home for God only knew what. Everyone believed he would come back and they tried to console Ramanandam Sastri with that hope. But he was inconsolable, both because of Vidura and because of Nehru.

  Kokila cried for days after Vidura ran away. It didn’t seem fair that she was allowed to stay in Tella Meda but had to lose Vidura. Chetana was morose as well but less affected, Kokila thought, than herself. A gloom settled on the ashram. The ringing voices of play and laughter vanished, as if Vidura had taken not only his belongings but also the happiness out of Tella Meda.

  Kokila found it hard to wake up in the morning and start a new day. She found it hard to find sleep in the night. She would lie down on the terrace and stare at the stars above and wonder if maybe Vidura was looking at the exact same stars at the exact same time. Maybe through the stars and moon she could reach out to him and ask him to come back home.

  She wondered if he’d left because of her. Had he been so repulsed by her refusal to go to her husband’s house that he had left Tella Meda? She could confide in no one about how she felt, how remorse and guilt at being the cause of Vidura’s departure ate at her. If Chetana was upset, she didn’t show it, and Kokila was coming to believe that Chetana wasn’t upset or even disturbed anymore. Chetana seemed to have gotten over Vidura’s leaving very quickly. When once Kokila mentioned that Chetana didn’t seem to miss Vidura, Chetana serenely said, “Those who are gone are gone. I have to live my life now. My mother left—you don’t see me cry about that, do you? And she was probably a whole lot more important to me than Vidura.”

  Kokila had experienced similar losses when her parents died, but this was different. They had died, their bodies had been burned, there had been closure. Vidura had left a raw open wound that didn’t heal and Kokila feared it never would. Kokila stopped going to the beach in the evenings with Charvi. She couldn’t bear to be there without Vidura. As it started to become obvious that Vidura would never come back, something within Kokila shriveled; laughter, which used to come easily, wouldn’t come at all. She felt older and seemed to have little interest in the idle times and nonsense of her old life.

  To pass the time, Kokila started doing more chores at Tella Meda. Everyone except Charvi did their own washing; Subhadra did Charvi’s and the other common linens. Kokila took over that responsibility. She would wash and dry and iron everything accordingly, nagging Chetana to help.

  She even started helping Subhadra in the kitchen and coaxed Chetana to do the same. Cooking three meals a day for the people who lived in the ashram plus the inevitable guests and devotees who came unannounced was a full-time job and Subhadra welcomed their help in chopping vegetables and serving the food.

  Chetana woke up late each morning but Kokila made it a point to be up early and do the morning puja with Charvi. Her faith in Lord Venkateshwara Swami had increased since Vidura ran away. She started to believe that everything had a divine reason and everything happened for one’s own good. It was the only way she could cope with Vidura’s desertion.

  Breakfast was never an elaborate affair, as Subhadra just steamed idlis and served them with leftover sambhar and coconut chutney. Sometimes she would make lemon rice, curd rice, or tamarind rice with rice left over from the previous night’s dinner.

  Kokila and Chetana would help clean the dishes after breakfast and then start cleaning the verandah. Clothes had to be washed every other day, and Chetana helped, but reluctantly.

  “Once I get married, I’m going to get a maid to do all this work for me,” Chetana would say.

  Then they would help Subhadra prepare lunch, do the dishes, and then repeat the process again for dinner. In the middle they would help clean the rooms and the terrace and also work in the garden with Narayan Garu, who loved the plants as if they were his own children. The small vegetable garden that Narayan Garu tended produced tomatoes, peas, carrots, coriander, mint, and various gourds. It was a lifesaver for Tella Meda, especially on the many days when there was no money to buy vegetables and Subhadra would have had to serve just rice and pickle if it hadn’t been for Narayan Garu’s vegetables.

  Despite all their work, Chetana and Kokila still managed to find free time. Gradually they returned to their habits of spending many an afternoon gossiping, playing cards, reading Telugu film magazines, and going for matinees at the cinema when they could get money from Subhadra. Since neither Kokila nor Chetana had any income, it was always a matter of begging and nagging hard enough to melt Subhadra’s heart so that she would part with a few paisas from her meager monthly pension.

  Vidura used to accompany them in all their activities but as time passed, both Kokila and Chetana couldn’t imagine how it had been with a third person intruding on their friendship.

  Three months after Vidura ran away and Nehru died, she came to the ashram. She was an odd woman, everyone thought, a little too modern, too masculine. Her name was Vineetha Raghavan and she was an old friend of Ramanandam Sastri. Hearing of his loss and needing some peace herself, she arrived at the ashram unannounced. This was her first visit to Tella Meda.

  She wasn’t just Vineetha Raghavan, she was Dr. Vineetha Raghavan. And she wasn’t a sick people’s doctor but an engineer, a scientist.

  Amongst all her father’s friends, Charvi disliked Vineetha the most. It was Vineetha’s bizarre friendship with her father that irked Charvi no end. Theirs was a special relationship, one she had never been able to pierce through or look into. Charvi was not sure and didn’t care if they were having sex. That wasn’t important. I
t was their emotional bond that grated on her nerves and kept her awake at night. For Charvi there was only one man in her life and to have another woman claim a place in his heart was torture.

  Vineetha didn’t care what anyone thought of her. It was enough that she had achieved what she set out to achieve. One of the first women scientists to be offered a post at the Bhabha Atomic Center, the first nuclear power plant in India, Vineetha felt she had done justice to the lakhs of rupees her wealthy father had spent in sending her to university in America. She had met Ramanandam Sastri at a party in Hyderabad several years ago when his wife was alive and the children were still young. The party was thrown by a literary friend and several writers and wealthy readers had been invited. She had immediately taken to the feminist writer, who was more than ten years her senior. Those who thought that they were having a sexual relationship couldn’t have been more wrong. But it wasn’t platonic either; there was a spark, something neither Vineetha nor Ramanandam could define. It was a cherished friendship and one both counted on.

  In the past few years, however, they both had been too busy with their lives and their friendship had thinned with time. Vineetha had not had time for anyone, including herself, once she started working at the nuclear power plant. For years, Vineetha along with other scientists had worked to make India stronger, but now, after Nehru’s death, the political dark clouds were settling on the Bhabha Atomic Center. Dr. Homi Bhabha, the founder of the nuclear program in India and a good friend of Vineetha’s, had gone to New Delhi to speak with the new prime minister, Lal Bahadur Sastri, who, unlike the late Jawaharlal Nehru, didn’t condone India becoming a nuclear power.

  “He takes ahimsa too far,” Vineetha complained to Ramanandam. “Doesn’t believe in weapons and war, he says. Nehru didn’t either and now we have China holding on to Indian territory.”

  “I believe in Gandhi and ahimsa,” Ramanandam reminded her.

  “But you can’t believe in it blindly,” Vineetha said. “India has to protect her borders. Anyway, I’m not here to think about the politics and the problems at work. I’m here to relax and spend some time with you.”

  “What do you think of my Charvi’s ashram?” Ramanandam asked, looking around the courtyard where they were sitting and the rooms that spilled around it. “Isn’t it serene?”

  Vineetha followed his line of vision and couldn’t see the serenity. The house had obviously been built for opulence, but opulence had to be maintained; this house looked like an old woman who in her youth used to be beautiful.

  The whitewashed walls were dirty and the tiles in the courtyard seemed dull and old; obviously no one was polishing them as they were supposed to. The clothes that hung on the clotheslines were faded and inexpensive. The rooms seemed cluttered with things and the entire house was unkempt. The instruments in the music room were battered and old and the veena that Charvi played every evening during bhajan really needed to be restrung. It was worse in the evening because all the bulbs in the house were of low wattage to save money, and in that stale yellow light the house looked even more destitute than it did in the harsh light of day.

  The food served at Tella Meda was simple, almost boring, Vineetha thought, and she wondered if no one got tired of eating sambhar, rice, and mango pickle all the time. And then there were the bathrooms. Vineetha shuddered as she wondered how she was going to get through the next two weeks with bathrooms that looked like they belonged next to a hut, with their rickety doors, damp walls, and cold and rough cement floors. The toilet was just a hole, which probably had never been cleaned, and the flush on top with a lever on it did not always work, which meant that you had to go out, fill a bucket with water from the taps in the bathroom or outside, and use that water to flush.

  She was not really a snob and could adjust to any life, Vineetha believed, but here the stench of poverty and neediness was overwhelming, especially when she had to stand so close to it.

  Always before, they had met in Hyderabad or Bangalore, where Vineetha had homes. When Ramanandam’s wife was alive, Vineetha hadn’t come to his house because she didn’t want his wife’s feelings to be bruised. After her death, she had continued to stay away rather than endure Charvi’s almost blatant disdain. It was obvious to everyone that Charvi was very possessive of Ramanandam. And why shouldn’t she be? She had no other man in her life and never would. Ramanandam had named her a goddess and had therefore thrown her into the land of spinsters and loneliness. The only man in Charvi’s life was Ramanandam and she needed him, almost desperately.

  So this was the first time Vineetha had come to Ramanandam, to Tella Meda. Here everything seemed different. Ramanandam seemed different.

  “How do you keep it going? This is a huge house and you have . . . many people here.” The term she wanted to use was free-loaders but since Ramanandam himself could be considered one of those living off his daughter’s asceticism, she couldn’t be direct.

  “There is my pension, there is no rent on the place, and everyone chips in,” Ramanandam said, not feeling any shame in openly discussing his lifestyle. “And many devotees come by and leave an offering for Charvi. Everything helps and we don’t need much. We’re simple people trying to get closer to God and live our lives the way we want to.”

  Religion and money, Vineetha thought, walked hand in hand often enough, which made her wary of the former and appreciate an abundance of the latter.

  “It seems like a sad place,” Vineetha said. But that was not entirely true. It was not just a sad place; it was a desperate place, as the people who lived within the walls of Tella Meda filled it with their hopeless-ness.

  “It is sad, my son is gone,” Ramanandam said, his eyes filling with tears.

  “I know,” Vineetha said, responding to the devastation in his voice. “I can only imagine your anguish.”

  Ramanandam sighed deeply. “I never thought my heart could break this much. I never knew pain could be this sharp, this intense, and this all-encompassing. I feel like my insides have been scraped.”

  He seemed to have aged so much since she’d last seen him. But Vineetha suspected that most of the gray hair on his head had sprouted in the three months since Vidura disappeared.

  “Why do you think he ran away?” Vineetha asked. They had talked about Vidura briefly when she first arrived but it had been a superficial conversation, meant only to soothe Ramanandam.

  He raised his hands in defeat. “I don’t know. I don’t know and it is making me mad.”

  “You must know something,” Vineetha said.

  “I don’t know,” Ramanandam repeated in exasperation.

  “Children don’t just run away, Raman, there is always a reason,” Vineetha prodded.

  “I wish I knew, I wish I could tell you,” Ramanandam said.

  “What does Charvi say?” Vineetha asked.

  “She hasn’t spoken to me since he ran away. She blames me, I think, though she hasn’t said anything,” Ramanandam told her. “I can see her heart breaking but I can’t do anything. I have searched for the boy . . . Does this pain ever go away? Is there ever any ease?”

  Vineetha raised her hands and turned her palms toward the skies. “Maybe God knows the answer to that. But time will heal and you never know—he may come back.”

  “How? How will he come back?” Ramanandam asked in frustration. “It’s been too long. Anything could have happened to him, anything at all.”

  “You have to keep faith,” Vineetha said, though she knew it was just platitudes she was offering him. It had been three months and no one had heard anything from or about Vidura. She knew as well as Ramanandam that the chances of them finding Vidura were not very good.

  “I keep trying to remember what I did, what I said, was it me? Why would he run away?”

  “You are a good father,” Vineetha said firmly.

  “I’m so relieved to hear you say so,” Ramanandam said. “Because I have doubted myself and . . . I’m so glad you’re here. Just having you with me eases me
.”

  “I had to come,” Vineetha said with a smile. “Through all my difficult times I knew I could count on you for support. I had to come here and see if I could be of any help to you during yours.”

  When Vineetha was growing up it was unheard of for a woman to leave her home country, get an education, stay unmarried, find a job, and continue to stay unmarried. Now that she was perceived as being well beyond marriageable age, her family had given up on finding her a husband and tried to hide her scandalous behavior behind superficial talk about “one of the great women scientists of India.” Vineetha knew that her mother would have died happier if her only daughter had been married with children.

  In America and even back at home it had been difficult and almost impossible to explain that her interest in men was limited to the superficial. Even though some believed her to be homosexual, she was not. Ramanandam told her that not everyone is destined to be with a soul mate. He never found his, he said, even though he married and had four children.

  At her age Vineetha felt that she didn’t have to make any more excuses to society. Her life was what she made it and if it wasn’t the life society would want her to have, that was not really her problem. “My dear feminist,” Ramanandam called her.

  Though she loved Ramanandam and respected him, his declaration that Charvi was a goddess had never sat well with her. She openly criticized Ramanandam for forcing the poor girl into a life that no one should have to live, unable to make her own choices, unable to marry or live on her own terms. But Ramanandam didn’t see it that way. He truly believed that Charvi had been born with the spark of divine knowledge within her. Siddhartha had become Buddha after gaining knowledge one night while meditating under a banyan tree, but Charvi had been born with that knowledge.

  Naturally, among Ramanandam’s three daughters, it was Lavanya that Vineetha was drawn to. It was Lavanya that she kept in touch with through the years. Manikyam, Ramanandam’s eldest daughter, deemed Vineetha a corruptor of Lavanya because of the closeness they shared.