“Why don’t you go, Giridhar Rao?” demanded Mrs. Shirthadi. “Don’t you want to rise in the bank?”
“I’m happy out here, madam,” Mr. Rao said. “I have my private beach, and my BBC in the evenings. What more does a man need?”
“You are the perfect Hindu man, Mr. Giridhar,” said Mr. Murthy, who was growing restless for dinner. “Which is to say, you are almost completely contented with your fate on earth.”
“Well, would you still be contented if I ran away with Lalitha?” Kamini shouted from the kitchen.
“My dear, if you ran away, then I’d be truly contented,” he retorted.
She shrieked in mock outrage, and the intimates applauded.
“Well, what about this private beach that you keep talking about, Mr. Rao-when are we going to see it, exactly?” Mrs. Shirthadi asked.
Before he could reply, Kamini came scampering out of the kitchen and leaned over the banister.
A stertorous breathing grew louder. Sharadha Bhatt’s face became visible as she limped up, one stair at a time.
Kamini was agitated. “Should I help you up the stairs? Should I do something?”
The old woman shook her head. Half out of breath, she stumbled onto a chair at the top of the stairs.
The conversation stopped. This was the very first time the old woman had joined the weekly dinners.
In a few minutes the intimates had learned to ignore her.
Mr. Anantha Murthy clapped his hands when Kamini came out with the appetizer tray.
“So, what’s this I hear about your taking up swimming?”
“And if I am?” she snapped, putting a hand to her waist. “What’s wrong with that?”
“I hope you are not going to wear a bikini like a Western woman?”
“Why not? If they do it in America, why can’t we? Are we less than them in any way?”
Lalitha giggled furiously as Kamini announced plans for the two of them to buy the scandalous swimsuits right away.
“And if Mr. Giridhar Rao doesn’t like it-then the two of us are going to run away and live together in Bombay, aren’t we?”
Giridhar Rao glanced nervously at the old woman, who was gazing at her toes.
“All this ‘modern’ talk isn’t getting you upset, is it, Sharadhaamma?”
The old lady breathed heavily. She curled her toes and stared at them.
Mr. Anantha Murthy ventured a comparison between the barfi that Kamini had put out on the appetizer tray and the barfi served in the best café in Bombay.
Then the old lady spoke in a hoarse voice:
“It is written in the scriptures…” She paused for a long time. The room went silent.
“…that a man…a man who has no son may not aspire to enter the gates of Heaven.” She breathed out. “And if a man doesn’t enter Heaven, neither can his wife. And here you are talking of bikinis and wikinis, and cavorting with ‘modern’ people, instead of praying to God to forgive your sins!”
She breathed heavily for another moment, then got to her feet and hobbled down the stairs.
When the intimates left-it was a truncated evening-they found the old lady outside the house. Sitting on a suitcase bursting with clothes, she was bellowing at the trees.
“Yama Deva, come for me! Now that my son has forgotten his mother, what more is there for me to live for?”
As she called to the Lord of Death, she struck at her forehead with the stems of her fists, and her bangles jangled.
Feeling Giridhar Rao’s hand on her shoulder, the old woman burst into tears.
The intimates saw Giridhar Rao gesture for them to leave. The old lady had exhausted her histrionics. Her head sank onto Kamini’s breast, and she convulsed in sobs.
“Forgive me, mother…The gods have given us each our punishment. They gave you a uterus of stone, and they have smashed the heart in my son’s chest…”
After they had put the old lady to bed, Mr. Rao let his wife climb the stairs first. When he joined her, she was lying on the bed with her back turned toward him.
He walked onto the veranda and turned the radio off.
She said nothing as he picked up his helmet and headed back down the stairs. The kick-starting of his engine rent the quiet of Bishop Street.
In a few minutes, he was heading down the road that went through the forest toward the sea. On either side of the speeding bike, serried silhouettes of coconut palms bristled against the blue coastal night. Hanging low over the trees, a bright moon looked as though it had been cleaved by an ax. With its top right corner sliced off, it hung in the sky like an illustration of the idea of “two-thirds.” After a quarter of an hour, the Yamaha bike swerved off the road onto a muddy track, thundering over stones and gravel. Then its engine went dead.
A lake, a small circle of water inside the forest, came into view, and Giridhar Rao stopped his bike, leaving his helmet on the seat. Fishermen had cleared a small shore around the lake, which was bounded on the far side by more coconut trees. At this hour, there would be nets all over the lake, but there was not another soul to be seen. A heron, walking through the shallow water at the edge of the lake, was the only other living thing in sight. Giridhar had stumbled upon his lake years ago, on a drive through the forest at night. He had no idea why no one came here; but a small town is like that, full of hidden treasures. He walked beside the lake for a few minutes, then sat down on a rock.
The water, its glossy surface broken by black ripples, looked like sheets of molten glass settling one on top of another.
The heron flapped its wings and rose into the air. Now he was all alone. He hummed softly, a tune from his bachelor days in Bangalore. A yawn expanded his face. He looked up. Three stars had emerged from the tatters of a gray cloud; together with the two-thirds moon, they composed a quadrilateral. Mr. Rao admired the structure of the night sky. It pleased him to think that the elements of our world were not cast about at random. Something stood behind them: an order.
He yawned again and stretched his legs out from the rock.
His peace was broken. It had begun to drizzle. He wondered if he had remembered to fasten the windows above their bed; the rain might strike her face.
Leaving his private beach behind, he sprinted to his motorbike, donned his helmet, and kicked the machine to life.
One morning in 1987, all of Bishop Street woke to hear the dull thack-thack-thack of axes hacking away at the trees. In a few days, chain saws were buzzing, and cranes were scooping up huge portions of black earth. And that was the end of the great forest of Bajpe. In its place, the inhabitants of Bishop Street now saw a giant pit filled with cranes, trucks, and an army of bare-chested migrant workers carrying stacks of bricks and cement bags on their heads like ants moving grains of rice. A giant sign in Kannada and Hindi proclaimed that this was to be the site of the SARDAR PATEL IRON MAN OF INDIA SPORTS STADIUM. A DREAM COME TRUE FOR KITTUR. The racket was incessant, and dust swirled up from the pit like steam from a geyser. Outsiders who returned to Bajpe thought the neighborhood had become a dozen degrees warmer.
DAY SEVEN: SALTMARKETVILLAGE
If you want a servant you can trust, a cook who won’t steal sugar, a driver who doesn’t drink, you go to Salt Market Village. Although it has formed part of Kittur Corporation since 1988, Salt Market remains largely rural and much poorer than the rest of the town.
If you visit in April or May, you must stay to watch the local festival known as the “rat hunt”-a nocturnal ritual in which the women of the suburb march through the rice fields bearing burning torches in one hand as they pound the earth with hockey sticks or cricket bats in the other hand, shouting all the time at the tops of their voices. Rats, mongooses, and shrews, terrified by the noise, run into the center of the field, where the women pound the encircled rodents to death.