The Narrow Road to Palem (6 page)

‘Such charlatans, everywhere. That’s why nothing will ever come of this country.’

Your home is here. In Palem
.

It all seemed such a waste, suddenly. All those arguments and fights about Nimmi. All that bickering about who was giving more to the relationship. All the nights of hurt and hate, all of his big words, all of her tears. All those unspoken feelings, the techniques that Dr Mehta suggested to them, the methods they were to use to work on their marriage, to fall in love with each other again...

Such a waste, all of it. It no longer mattered.

They walked, hand in hand, up the road, to the end of the straight stretch. Then they turned right along with the sharp bend, at the row of five coconut trees that rustled in the wind. Somewhere in the distance, a stream gurgled. Now Ritu remembered what she had smelled on that black mirror. It had been the smell of fresh blood. Her own blood. Nimmi’s blood. That night in the hospital, when they had showed her a stain of blood on a cream-coloured towel and told her that it was all they could salvage.

She had hugged that blood-stained cloth to her bosom that night. She had wept into it, smelled it, kissed it, sung lullabies to it.

‘How dare he make such fools of us. Tell you what, Ritu, we should go back, and I should give him a piece of my mind.’

Ahead of them, they saw a gathering of fifteen or so people, looking at something. Some of them were speaking on their phones. Others milled about and stared. ‘Do you know what I saw in the mirror?’ she asked him.

‘What is going on here?’ said Vikas, looking ahead.

‘I saw nothing.’

‘What?’

‘I saw nothing in the mirror.’

‘How is that possible?’ said Vikas, laughing, but his face had turned pale. ‘You’re seeing things, Ritu. You and mirrors – you have a bit of history together, in case you’ve forgotten.’

Ritu did not reply. None of the people there took any notice of them. They went to the front of the crowd and saw the shattered Ford Falcon. Yes, thought Ritu, it did not matter anymore. Even as they stepped slowly along the side of the vehicle, examining the damage, she knew what she would see in the front seat. Vikas had been stunned into silence; surely he must see now why they had not remembered where the car was.

Kanakangi Road
.

‘Ritu,’ he said.

Ritu nodded. ‘Yes.’

The phone in the jacket of Vikas’s body rang, and someone from the crowd came trotting forward, answered it. Vikas retrieved his own phone from his pocket and looked at the screen. No missed calls. No unanswered messages.

‘There has been an accident,’ the man was saying into the receiver. ‘Both the driver and the passenger have died on the spot. I am so sorry, madam...’

They stood to the side, listening.

* * *

The man at the mouth of the muddy path to Palem looked up from his mirrors. The couple with bags strapped to their shoulders were returning, their hands clasped tight together. As they passed him, the girl looked at him and smiled.

‘You were right,’ she said. ‘This is our home.’

And they walked on to the village, in the direction of the mist.

2002

Even in mid-monsoon, even under heavy early-morning mist, Rudrakshapalem was a parched place. Sister Agnes, one of the elderly matrons at the church of Dhavaleshwaram, here on assignment, looked out of the side window and saw a woman walking toward the building from the direction of the village. She appeared only as a smudge in the fog, but her step was slow, and the way she wrapped her arms around herself as she walked made Sister Agnes certain that she was headed for the centre.

For a moment Sister Agnes thought that one of the centre’s ladies was returning after a stealthy night out. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened, and Sister Agnes was practical enough to ignore such incidents – after all, the centre was no church; women who lived here were not required to live like nuns. They lived lives that required them to stay out of doors for most of the day. It was only understandable that they met young men from the village now and then, sometimes during the day, sometimes after the day was gone. As long as they took enough ‘care’ not to get ‘physical complications’ from one of their nightly visits, Sister Agnes did not care. She had once even pretended not to notice one of her wards paying a covert visit to the big hospital in Dhavaleshwaram with a hundred-rupee note tucked under her blouse.

The figure had come closer now, into sharper view. Once or twice she stopped and turned around to glance at the tar road that came out of Palem. The women’s wellness centre stood on a dry plot of land behind two paddy fields in which Sister Agnes had never seen sign of crop, and which were now being taken over by rather large tufts of greenish yellow bushes. Between the two fields a path wove its way from the centre’s entrance, connecting it to the Palem main road. It was on the fag end of this path that the woman stopped and hesitated.

Sister Agnes cleaned her glasses with the edge of her tunic and slid them on. Now she saw that the approaching woman was not really a woman but an overgrown girl. While her chest and hips looked like those of a woman nearing twenty, the freckles on the cheeks, the frazzled hair, the pimples on the forehead, and the callous disproportion of her nose with respect to other parts of her face – all hinted at a girl of thirteen. A sudden wave of tenderness washed over Sister Agnes. Yes, she thought, she could guess what a girl like this would have gone through in a village like Palem. It was for women such as this that the church of Dhavaleshwaram had set up the wellness centre. Father Abraham had once said to her that Palem ‘needed cleansing’. Sister Agnes had not had the need to ask what he meant by that.

It was not an easy place to live, even for nuns. The centre was set up in an old barnyard bought off a farmer whose fields nearby had stopped yielding. The asbestos roof made Palem’s already dry and hot weather unbearable, and when it rained water seeped in through the termite-infested wood and made the interior a breeding ground for mosquitoes. The window panes were half-broken. Food, water and habitation were at least two kilometers away whichever direction one looked. This was why Father Abraham had asked the nuns at his church to rotate shifts at the centre so that no one person needed to stay there for longer than a month. This was Sister Agnes’s third week.

For a fleeting moment she tasted the cool, pure water of the church-tap at Dhavaleshwaram, and felt it slide down her throat. She thought of the fragrance-sprayed pulpit where she said her daily prayers, the finely made bed on which she would sleep in a week, the steaming hot Idli-sambaar the hotel boy opposite brought for her every morning; she missed even Father Abraham’s disapproving frown, the kind he wore whenever he saw one of the new girls giggling at mass.

She suppressed a smile, then quietly chided herself. She knew that the church was actively trying to get a foothold within the boundaries of the village, and this rotation business was only temporary – until Father Abraham negotiated the terms with the village elders to set up a permanent centre there. Maybe then the church could take some proactive steps; try and get at the disease rather than limply offering shelter to the victims. Palem certainly needed cleansing; Father Abraham was right. The last time she had gone back to the church he had given her a bundle of papers to read when she was in Palem. He had said reading it would give her a ‘better understanding of the Palem affair’. She crinkled her nose; with all the experience she’d had with the girls, did she need any more understanding? 

She craned her neck. The girl had come to the door and pushed it open. Sister Agnes had expected to see a timid face peering out from behind the door, but the girl stood with her legs apart, her expression defiant, as if she was daring the older woman to do her worst. Sister Agnes smiled at her and said in her softest tone, ‘Come in, child. What is your name?’

The girl walked in, and the door closed behind her. In the light of the mercury tube Sister Agnes saw uncertainty creep into the girl’s face. ‘Do you – have women here?’ The strong voice was nervous; even a little frightened.

Sister Agnes nodded.

‘Women with – no home? No family?’

Sister Agnes nodded again.

‘I have no home. And no family.’

‘That is perfectly all right, child. I have no home or a family either.’

The girl looked up hopefully, almost in joy. ‘Really?’ she asked.

‘Yes, really. Now, tell me, what is your name?’

‘Lata.’

‘Is that why you’re so thin, because you’re named after a creeper?’ The girl was big-boned, but her face was drawn with hunger. Sister Agnes wrote down her name in the register and paused for a moment. Then she asked, ‘Are you coming from Palem?’

‘Yes, madam.’

After another pause, Sister Agnes asked softly, ‘And what did you do there?’

‘I – I worked at the headman’s house, madam.’

Worked at the headman’s house
. Sister Agnes wrote it down verbatim, closed the book and looked at the girl with a wide smile. ‘Nobody here calls me madam. They call me sister.’

The girl’s voice was disbelieving. ‘You want me to call you sister?’

‘I
insist
on you calling me sister. Will you?’

The girl nodded brightly.

‘Good. Now, if you stay here, you will have to work. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘All of us work here. There is no freeloading. But at the end of each day, after all the work is done, we play.’

The girl’s eyes shone. ‘What do you play?’

Sister Agnes said, ‘Different things, my child. Some of us sing, and some of us dance. Some of us tell stories. What would you like to do?’

‘I – I am not very talented.’

‘Child,’ said Sister Agnes very gently, ‘God gives us talent in one thing or the other. It just takes us time to find it, that’s all.’

‘Really? You think I will find it here?’

‘Of course you will.’ Sister Agnes leant forward in her seat and patted the girl on her cheek. Raising her voice just a little she called to the maid. ‘Vijaya, please show Lata to the kitchen.’ To Lata she said, ‘Go, child. Go and eat and take some rest. You have walked for long.’

* * *

1970

The portly figure of Subramanya Shastri, Head Priest at Palem’s Shivalayam, stretched out languidly on Komati Satyam’s front porch. Across the steps that led to the front door and into the house, Komati Satyam sat huddled in his easy chair, his stick-like arms hugging the arm-rests, and his fingers wrapped around the edges. He sat with his feet both planted on the ground, not resting back but slouching forward, as though preparing to spring to his feet any moment. Shastri knew from their long association that this meant Satyam was thinking hard about something. He felt around with his hand behind him and found the empty glass. Reaching out for the mud vase that stood between them on the floor, Shastri said, ‘More?’

Satyam nodded and pushed his glass an inch or two in Shastri’s direction. Shastri filled it, spilling half of it on the floor. ‘Damn,’ he cursed. ‘Turn the lamp on brighter, why don’t you? Can’t see a damned thing.’

‘No oil.’ Satyam pressed the brim of his glass to his mouth and closed his eyes. After he downed a gulp he said, ‘She is pregnant, Shastri-gaaru.’

‘Hmm? What?’

‘Did you not see her today at the old Banyan tree? She has a belly this big.’

‘Ah, you mean Lachi.’ Shastri’s tone became relaxed. ‘Why does it bother you so much, Satyam, as long as you are not the – are you the –?’

‘Don’t be foolish, Shastri-gaaru! What is her age, and what is mine?’

‘Oh, my friend, believe me, these things do not care about your respective
ages
– merely
genders
.’ He hiccupped and broke into a long giggle. At the end of it he said, ‘Nice, heavenly thing, toddy – almost as heavenly as a woman’s –’

‘Who do you think is the father?’

‘Eh? Why do we care?’

‘Because she is a woman of our village. Tomorrow she will give birth to the boy, and what if she points at one of the young men and say he is the father?’

‘What if –’ Shastri stopped himself and hiccupped again. He said in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘You are afraid that your son may have – eh?’

‘Maybe.’ Satyam lifted the glass to his lips and downed its contents in one large gulp.

‘I do not know why, Satyam – eh? – I do not know why this is bothering you so much. She is a crazy loon, that girl. Who is going to believe her word over yours, eh?’

‘They might not believe her now,’ Satyam said acidly, ‘but if the boy grows up with
my
son’s eyes and nose, it won’t take long for them to crow about it.’

‘Ah, yes, that could be a problem. But you know what, my friend? I think the boy will grow up with that schoolmaster’s eyes and nose.’ The priest tried winking at Satyam a couple of times, failed, and gave up. ‘Eh?’ he said, and stretched out on the porch, looking up at the stars.

‘It will all be so neat and nice if
that
happens. But you know what they say about Avadhani. He’s – you know.’

‘Eh?’

‘Why do you think his wife left him?’

‘Eh? Oh – oh!’ Shastri broke into another long giggle. ‘Any man in the village could have had Lachi. She is always out by herself in the night, is she not? Out by the old Shivalayam, under the Banyan…I have heard of people talk of seeing her by Ellamma cheruvu in the moonlight…if a girl like that walks by you in the night when the full moon runs in your loins, what red-blooded man would resist picking her up and pinning her to the nearest tree and –’ His voice abruptly stopped, and his eyes glazed over, his tongue moistening his lips. ‘Such a heavenly thing is toddy, and a woman.’

* * *

Lata plucked at the strings of the sitar and cocked her head, her eyes focused on some far away, invisible point. Somebody in the gathering of women called out for her to play a movie song. Lata smiled indulgently and continued plucking, listening – she ran her fingers along the length of the strings once, one by one, and then strummed them, allowing them to catch in her longest fingernails at the very end of the stroke. She bided her time, allowing her fingers to play idly and yet with enough rhythm to entertain the ladies sitting in front of her. Her hands then changed tack as though with a mind of their own, and her ears perked up in anticipation, following the notes, knowing where they would lead. Her mind, conscious of what had happened on the three previous nights, told her that the first tabla note would hit just about – now!

Dhum
.

She lifted her eyes and looked around the room once, to make sure no one had heard it this time as well. On the first occasion, three nights ago, she had sat up and stared all around her when the note appeared; much to the ladies’ annoyance. Only after she had heard it a couple more times did she realize she was the only one to hear it. She had resolved to tell Sister Agnes about it that night, but the notes on the accompanying instrument had been so precise, their combination with her own had been so delectable, that she had not had the heart.

The tabla was also speaking to her in some strange way. Yesterday in the middle of her performance she had begun to see flashes of Palem – now here, now there, flicking into her mind and out of it with such rapidity that she could not tell for certain what it was that she saw. She could make out Avadhanayya’s house amid the slew of images; of that she was sure, and there had been the Shivalayam too…no, not the new Shivalayam in the middle of the village, but the old, decrepit one, in the shade of the big Banyan tree.

Now, without her knowledge, her mind was being taken over by these notes, and it was floating away, borne by them, into Palem, and this time she was taken into Avadhanayya’s field behind his shack and the irrigation well next to it. Unlike the images of the previous day these were sharp and fluid, as though an old movie was playing in front of her eyes. She went to the well, peeped inside, then went around it to the back; and there she stopped.

She opened her eyes with a start, in cold sweat, suddenly aware that her fingers had been playing of their own volition on the sitar; that control of her fingers was only now gradually being returned to her. She could hear the notes of the tabla recede, and it seemed like tendrils that had wrapped around her mind were loosening their hold…she looked around the room once again just to make sure that she hadn’t attracted notice…and her eyes fell on Sister Agnes, who was watching her with a curious expression in her eyes…yes, she would have to tell her tonight. She had to tell her that she had to go back to Palem, though she did not know why or for what.