Song of the Cuckoo Bird Page 8

  If Mark noticed her breathlessness, her heart on a platter, he didn’t say anything.

  “I have to ask you something and I hope I won’t offend you,” he said, and Charvi nodded eagerly.

  “You cannot offend me, ask away,” she said with a big smile, trying to contain the small quakes in her heart.

  “How do you feel about accepting what your devotees leave behind when you don’t believe you are a goddess?” Mark asked, carefully placing his words in the sentence, not wanting to hurt her feelings because of the language barrier or his insensitivity.

  Charvi looked stunned and Mark immediately started to apologize. She held up her hand and shook her head.

  “You don’t owe me any explanations,” Mark said before she could speak, eager to make amends. She had been wonderful company and he didn’t want her to think that he was some jerk right before he left.

  “I can’t control the desires of others, only mine,” Charvi said in a low voice. She had hoped he would ask a different question and her heart splintered into a hundred pieces. “I can’t make their decisions for them, I can only make mine. I take what they offer because not to do so would hurt their feelings. They bring me gifts with such purity that it would be small of me to turn them away. Do you understand me?”

  Mark nodded even though he felt what she said was a load of bull served with a dollop of rationalization, but he didn’t want to press the matter.

  The next day he left and as tradition required, he even touched Charvi’s feet. He did it because he had seen everyone else do it, and also because he did respect her. She was a smart woman making her way in a man’s world in the best way she could and in the process she was helping others. He admired her even though he believed she was not being entirely truthful.

  “I’m so glad I came,” he said, and then, just as he swung his camera bag over his shoulder, he leaned over and brushed his lips against her cheek. “Be well, Charvi.”

  A month after he left he sent her a framed photograph. It was her picture as she stood on the terrace under the light of the full moon.

  Kokila was beside Charvi in the temple room when she opened the package and gasped at the image in front of her. This was not Charvi at all; this was a sensuous woman, out of a black-and-white movie, a woman waiting for her lover. There was slumbering passion in her eyes and face.

  “You look . . . different,” was all Kokila could manage before Charvi hurriedly took the picture and the letter that came with it inside her room.

  The accompanying letter from Mark Talbot was brief.

  “Dearest Charvi, I’m sorry to have taken this picture, but I couldn’t resist it. I have kept one copy with me but I will not publish it anywhere or let anyone else see it. It will be for my eyes only and I am sending you one so that you can remember me and yourself when the moon was whole. Best wishes, Mark.”

  Charvi never fell in love again and until the day she died she convinced herself that she could feel the brush of his lips against her cheek—the soft brush, the caress, the power of it. She never saw or heard from Mark Talbot again.

  1969 21 January 1969. The first Indian-built electronic digital computer was commissioned.

  12 March 1969. The Reactor Research Center was established at Kalpakkam in Tamil Nadu.

  The Lost Father

  Dr. Vishnu Mohan, who lived three houses down the street, came running to Tella Meda at five in the morning. There was an urgent phone call for Ramanandam Sastri from a relative. It was about Vidura.

  It had been five years since Vidura ran away. He was nineteen years old now and the relative said he had seen Vidura. He had talked to him on a train, but then in one of the worst railway accidents in the history of Andhra Pradesh, the train had crashed. He didn’t know if Vidura had survived or not but he thought it would be prudent for Ramanandam Sastri to come to the outskirts of Ongole, where the toppled train lay, to see if maybe Vidura was one of the two hundred dead people who were being piled up and taken away. Another four hundred were being treated at the hospital for injuries.

  It took Ramanandam Sastri fifteen hours to reach the wreck site. Kokila came along with him, insisting that he not go alone. The man had become frail in the years since Vidura left. He spent more and more time indoors and spoke very little. When Subhadra told Kokila and Chetana that Ramanandam was going to find Vidura, Kokila knew that there was a good chance that he would find only Vidura’s dead body. Her love for Vidura and affection for Ramanandam propelled her into demanding that he take her along.

  She shouldn’t have come, Ramanandam thought when the taxi dropped them off where the red and brown train lay in a heap. Bodies were scattered everywhere even as rescue workers in khaki clothes moved as many as they could.

  Kokila went pale when she saw the severed arm of a little baby in front of her by the railroad tracks. The baby’s hand was still holding a small rattle. Kokila’s body started to shake and nausea filled her. She had never seen such carnage before and she wished she’d never had to. There were so many dead people, so very many. One of them could be Vidura.

  She had been determined to come with Ramanandam and take care of him but as she stood shaking, she knew she shouldn’t have come.

  “You sit here, Amma Kokila,” Ramanandam said gently as he led her away from the carcasses and the stench of death. Ramanandam found a rock for Kokila to sit on and turned her away from the scene of the crash. “Stay here,” he instructed, and she nodded, too horrified to do anything else. There were tears rolling down her cheeks and there was shock written on her face.

  Ramanandam wanted to stay and console her but there was an urgency to find his own son, if he was indeed in the train. His relative, an old man who was married to a second cousin from his father’s side, had sounded confident that he had seen and spoken with Vidura but when Ramanandam had asked him for a physical description, the old man had been vague.

  “Those who are alive have been transported to a hospital in Ongole,” one of the doctors told him. “The dead, they are here, except for those that have already been burned. But you can go through belongings . . .” The doctor pointed to another pile of suitcases and boxes, half-burned, half-broken.

  Ramanandam wanted to go to the hospital first and see if Vidura was there, alive.

  “You also have to remember there were eight hundred people on the train and many people left without a scratch on them. Your son could be one of them,” the doctor said. “I’d start with the dead, as we need to start burning bodies as fast as possible. Then you can go to the hospital and see. It’s a matter of time.”

  Ramanandam rubbed his hands on his smudged white kurta. He hadn’t even taken the time to change. He had rushed out after the phone call, dressed in his slept-in dhoti and kurta. He hadn’t brushed his teeth and there was a bitter taste on his tongue. He had long ago stopped shaving regularly but the beard still bothered him and he kept scratching his chin and cheeks, wishing for a razor.

  As he reached the first body of the many lined up under white muslin sheets throughout the field Ramanandam pulled his spectacles out of his pocket and placed them on his nose. He couldn’t summon his hands to lift the first white sheet smudged with dirt and blood. So he stood there, in front of the first body for a long time, hoping the wind would blow the sheet away and he would see that the face wasn’t Vidura’s. He hoped some other family member looking for his or her father, mother, brother, or sister would move the cloth so that the face would be revealed. But no one was coming his way and he stood rooted, unable to perform the simple task of looking at a face.

  Finally, a policeman in khaki clothes came up to him. “ Sar, we are very shorthanded. If you want to see the dead, do so fast. We’re going to start burning from that other side in half an hour.”

  Ramanandam nodded and then waved his hand ineffectually. The policeman sighed and kneeled down and pulled the sheet from the face of the first body. It was an old woman, her face bashed in, dried-up blood crusted on her face and in her e
yes. Ramanandam shook his head.

  “Who are you looking for, sar?”

  “My son,” Ramanandam said.

  “How old?”

  “Fourteen . . . no, nineteen,” Ramanandam said, and desperately tried to form Vidura’s face in his mind. He could see a baby, a boy, but he couldn’t see a nineteen-year-old or even a fourteen-year-old anymore. His memories of Vidura were warped and Vidura’s face in his mind was like a fuzzy picture, burned around the edges, smudged in the center.

  “Well then,” the policeman said, and started to look at the bodies as fast as he could. “Sar, here is a young boy, is it him?”

  Ramanandam raced down the bodies and came to the one the policeman was standing over. It was a boy, maybe seventeen years old, and he was not Vidura. The policeman helped Ramanandam look at every young male dead body on the field and though Ramanandam shook his head each time, the faces were blending into one another. One bloody face, one squished, one broken, one torn apart, one half-burned, one half-missing . . . the faces were going past him like a film reel and he couldn’t remember if he had seen Vidura or if he hadn’t. He couldn’t remember his own son’s face and wished he had brought a photograph along to help remind him.

  “Thank you,” Ramanandam said, taking the policeman’s hand in his and leaving a ten-rupee note behind after all the bodies had been seen.

  The policeman saluted him casually and walked away to help other relatives, who were swarming around the field.

  “He isn’t there,” Ramanandam said confidently to Kokila, and knew he was lying. Even if his son was there, he wouldn’t know for sure. He would never know if one of those bodies had been Vidura or not. He couldn’t remember anymore. He was an old man, his eyes weren’t that good, his memory was failing, and his heart was broken.

  “Oh, I’m so relieved, Sastri Garu,” Kokila said, and rose on unsteady legs. “I came to help you and here I am . . . Sastri Garu, are you okay?” Kokila immediately put her arm around Ramanandam as he started to collapse.

  From the small roadside food stall that had appeared by the crash site to feed the relatives and policemen, Kokila bought Ramanandam a cup of tea, a glass of water, and a masala dosa.

  Ramanandam just sat on the rocks Kokila had been sitting on, staring into space. He looked so frail, so old that Kokila wanted to hug him to her and tell him that she would do what she could to make this time easy for him.

  “Here,” she said, and held a piece of dosa dipped in coconut chutney to his mouth.

  She fed him patiently and made him drink tea and water from time to time. He ate half the dosa and Kokila ate the other half. She hadn’t had anything to eat in almost a day and was ravenous.

  “Now let’s go to the hospital,” she told him, and he nodded.

  She had to hold his arm and lead him. He seemed not to have the will to do anything. If she’d left him, he would have sat on that rock forever, Kokila thought. A bus was taking the relatives of the people on the train to the hospital, which was an hour away. Many victims of the crash had died midway to the hospital and the policeman on the bus warned the relatives that they would have to see more dead bodies in the hospital morgue.

  Ramanandam didn’t speak at all and Kokila didn’t ask him any questions either. She held his hand as they rode in silence all the way to the hospital, knowing that they might find Vidura there, dead or alive. And then there was also the chance that they would not find Vidura at all. What then?

  When they reached the hospital there seemed to be miles of people in long lines around it, crying, sobbing, screaming, demanding answers, urinating against the walls, kicking stones. Kokila held on to Ramanandam as they were jostled around in long queues.

  The wounded were everywhere, spread on the floor, lying on filth, resting on small beds that were stained with blood and dirt, sitting on chairs. Their bodies were in different stages of disintegration. Some just had a few scratches, some had blood pouring out of their wounds still, and on some the blood had dried to a brown crust. Some were conscious and crying in pain, some were blissfully unconscious, and some were dying.

  This was somehow worse than the train wreck where only the dead lay. Here it was harder to accept that Vidura might be one of the bleeding lives lying in all that filth and muck.

  They didn’t find Vidura among the living.

  Kokila threw up the half-dosa she had eaten when they came out from the morgue. Ramanandam put his arm around her and she leaned into him. Vidura wasn’t among the dead in the hospital either.

  They waited outside the hospital with other relatives who hadn’t found their loved ones, and even those who had, for a bus that would take them to the Ongole railway station. Kokila and Ramanandam would have to wait for ten hours, until two in the morning, when the train for Visakhapatnam would arrive. From Visakhapatnam they would have to take a three-hour bus ride to Bheemunipatnam.

  Kokila wasn’t sure if she was happy or sad that Vidura was not among the dead or the living. To have found his body or seen him wounded would have at least meant that she would have seen him. Now nothing had changed: he was still gone and she still didn’t know whether he was dead or alive.

  “Maybe he was never on the train,” Kokila told Ramanandam when they were at the railway station, sitting on a small wooden bench waiting for their train. She had bought idlis from the station canteen and had fed him bite after bite. He still wore a wooden expression on his face and his eyes were the eyes of the dead.

  “Maybe,” Ramanandam said, and managed a weak smile. “You shouldn’t have come, Amma Kokila. There are dark circles under your eyes.”

  “I couldn’t let you go alone. I love him too,” Kokila said simply, and held the cup of coffee she’d bought for him against his lips.

  On their way back in the bus from Visakhapatnam to Bheemunipatnam, they held hands again. This time it was Ramanandam who reached out for her. When they walked back to Tella Meda from the bus station in Bheemunipatnam, Kokila was almost sad that the intimacy she had shared with Ramanandam in the past days was now over.

  “Thank you,” Ramanandam said before he opened the metal gate leading into Tella Meda’s garden. The gate was rusty and made a lot of noise when it was opened; it would alert those inside, waiting to hear about Vidura.

  “You don’t have to thank me,” Kokila said shyly, suddenly conscious of her boldness in feeding Ramanandam and holding his hand.

  “Yes, I do,” Ramanandam said, and brushed his hand over her head. “God bless you.”

  Subhadra came running out as soon as the metal gate opened. She stopped when she saw Ramanandam’s face.

  “No,” she cried out. “He can’t be dead.”

  Ramanandam waved his hand and looked at Kokila, silently asking her to take care of the questions. He disappeared into his room while Kokila spent two hours telling everyone what happened.

  “Bad business, boys running away from home,” Renuka said sternly to Kokila after everyone had left and they were sitting alone at the dining table in the verandah. “Bad business. It means there’s a devil in the house.”

  “Means no such thing,” Kokila told her. “He ran away and that is terrible, but there is nothing wrong with this house.”

  “But why did he run away?” Renuka demanded.

  “If you hate it so much here, why don’t you just leave?” Kokila asked angrily. “All you have done is speak ill of Tella Meda and all of us who live here. You don’t seem to like it around here that much. I think you should leave.”

  “How you talk,” Renuka said as tears filled her eyes. “Insulting a poor widow like this. Shame on you.”

  “Oh, the tears might work on Subhadra, but they won’t work on me,” Kokila said, still angry that this woman had slapped Chetana, twice, and now was talking about the devil living in Tella Meda. “You talk nonsense like that again, I will tell Charvi that you hit me.”

  “You will lie? You rotten girl! No one will believe you!”

  “Everyone in Tella Meda will
believe me and trust me. They will all be happy to see your bony back,” Kokila said, and left the old widow alone.

  Kokila checked on Ramanandam for the next few days regularly. She was the one who took him his food, fed it to him, and even brought warm water into his room so that he could wash up. She cut fresh flowers from the garden to bring some of the outside world into his room.

  It frustrated her that no one seemed interested in helping Ramanandam get through his grief. It had been five years since Vidura had run away, and Ramanandam was still mired in the loss. Perhaps if others had helped Ramanandam more, he would be better. Kokila resolved on that day that she would be the one to help Ramanandam.

  “Chetana, you look fine,” Kokila snapped when for the fifth time that afternoon Chetana put on a different sari, even trying on some of Kokila’s. “You’re just going to the cinema; no one cares how you look.”

  Chetana arranged the pleats of the white sari with a blue border on her shoulder. It was fake silk but looked almost like the real thing. Chetana had recently had two blouses made, one white with a blue and gold border around the sleeves and the neckline and the second black with red flowers and mirrors embroidered on it. She had begged and borrowed money from Subhadra, and Kokila couldn’t understand the fuss. It wasn’t like anyone saw what she wore because she was at Tella Meda all day long.

  “It’s not just the cinema,” Chetana told Kokila with barely suppressed excitement.

  “Then what?”

  “You can’t tell anyone,” Chetana said as she went and sat next to Kokila on her bed. They were in their room and Chetana had been admiring herself in the old steel cupboard mirror. Her blouses, petticoats, saris, and half-saris were scattered everywhere on the floor.

  “Tell what?”

  “I’m getting married,” Chetana said, and then a laugh spilled out of her. “I’m going to get out of here.”

  Kokila stared at her, not able to think of anything to say for a very long moment. “To whom?” she finally asked.