There was a pause. Then Swami said softly, ‘You must call me Dinakar, you are my elder.’ Shastri, hearing these soft hesitant words, felt as if he were receiving punya from a previous birth, and it swept away his fear of hell.
‘From your kuttavalakki I remembered the name Mother used to call me, “Putani,”’ Dinakar said. ‘What does Putani mean? If the name suits me, call me by that name.’
When the man dressed in fashionable jeans heard this conversation, he closed his India Today, laughed and said, this time in Hindi, ‘Achcha, my guess was right, then.’ Then he returned to his magazine.
Dinakar, to enable Shastri to understand, began to speak in Hindi slowly and simply.
‘I have heard that my mother was from Kannada country. When I was five, she died in the Ganga at Hardwar. Many years later, because of a friend's mother, I remembered that my own mother fed me kuttavalakki, for I loved it very much. And now your kindness has brought that back to me. As for my father, I don't know who he was. I might have lost him earlier than I lost my mother. Now, I have been trying to lose my name these past two months or so’
Dinakar smiled in a beguiling manner. With what effortless intimacy he spoke. His words seemed to Shastri like a sudden gift of grace.
‘For your sake, I will return to my name. If you like, I will even return to the pet name that Mother gave me.’
This time, Dinakar spoke as if making fun of himself — he had made this part of his engaging TV manner — and then continued with some seriousness, ‘Achcha, I need help from you. Twenty-five years ago, in Hardwar, I got acquainted with someone from Mangalore. I hear he is now a famous advocate. For a whole long month, we were close friends. This was also because of his mother — her name is Sitamma — the only person I ever felt was like my true mother. If Amma is still living, I want to meet her again’
Taking from his bag an old address book, Dinakar showed Shastri the address of one Narayan Tantri. The sign that his whole life would change became stronger, and again in anguish Shastri forced himself to return to his everyday personality. ‘Ayyo! These people are very dear to me, I know them very well. I always stop for a day at their place on the way to my village. Your friend's mother is still there. Every time I go, she makes me recite from a Purana. In these ten or fifteen years, I must have recited the same Purana many times to her. I myself will take you to them. This train reaches Bangalore in the evening and then at night there is a luxury bus to Mangalore.’ Shastri surprised himself with his own volubility.
As he used his Bombay Hindi to speak of his present calling, Shastri remembered that he had learnt that language half a century ago, when he used to wear a shirt and pyjamas and a black cap to hide his brahmin tuft, with no caste mark on his forehead, while wandering like a lost spirit on the streets of Bombay. Therefore he felt that it was not he who was speaking. but the demon that had entered him. Yet Dinakar looked at him with such earnest hope that Shastri spoke on without holding himself back.
‘“Putani” means a dear son. I have no children now. The one daughter I had, walked out of my house two years ago. It is all my fate. You could have been my son.’
When Shastri risked saying those words, Dinakar replied with unaffected courtesy.
‘If you feel like calling a bearded bumpkin like me your son, what can I call you? Shall I call you Chikappa, or Dodappa, or Mama?’
Hearing Dinakar speak in this way, Shastri was so shaken that he felt himself drained and insubstantial, like a wraith. But Dinakar was cheerful and, when the man in jeans took his autograph book out from his briefcase, he scrawled in Hindi, ‘Not from the Dinakar of TV, but rather an ignorant putani who is now reaching Bangalore.’
Then, looking at Shastri, who had become pale, Dinakar spoke as sweetly as a putani. ‘Chikappa, your Hindi sounds good to me. But please don't address me in the plural’.
Shastri kept staring at the amulet around Dinakar's neck, and what Dinakar now said in explanation made him even more fearful.
‘Look, Chikappa, this amulet was tied around my neck before my mother went into the river Ganga. She never came back again. The food you fed me made me remember what happened. For forty years I have worn this amulet as matra-raksha.’
Hearing this, Shastri closed his eyes, grasped his rudraksha beads and silently prayed, ‘Shiva, Shiva, protect me.’
3
Shastri was stupefied, as if he had been stricken. The language embellished for the pleasure of others which he had cultivated for recitation of the Puranas; the lewd language which he had learned in Bombay as if in a previous birth — neither could express what he was beginning to understand in his anxiety. Dinakar was insisting that he accept a ride in his hired car to Mangalore.
‘Look, Chikappa. Although I may be an Ayyappa bhakta, still I have a credit card.’
‘Ayyo, it is not a question of expense. It is not safe to travel in the Ghat section during the night. I myself have plenty of money. I earn not less than five lakhs of rupees from growing areca. And have I children or grandchildren to spend it on? Why then should I bother about money, why bother about expenses? No, in order to work off my karma, I have cultivated this addiction. I keep on wandering, keep on doing what I do.’
Speaking these words with effort, Shastri found himself desiring to address Dinakar as Putani, his dear child, but the endearment stuck in his throat. ‘What if he is the son of Pundit, what if he is that prostitute's son?’
∗
The taxi shared by Shastri and Dinakar wove this way and that, through narrow lanes, climbing up and down, and finally stopped in front of the bungalow of ‘Narayan Tantri, Advocate’. Dinakar, whose eyes had become jaded from living in Delhi, was cheered at the sight of the Mangalore-tiled roofs, the many tones of faded brick-coloured tiles, the little porches jutting out from the faces of the old houses.
‘Don't tell them who I am, Chikappa. I would like to see whether “Mother” will recognize me after twenty-five years, especially dressed as I am now. If Amma does recognize me, it will mean that Dinakar has not yet become nameless.’
Dinakar had become very light-hearted. Walking easily, the bag swinging from his shoulder, he opened the gate. Green hedges, mango trees and coconut trees had half hidden an old bungalow to which winding paths led, as if the bungalow were playing hide-and-seek on its two acres of land.
Shastri, counting his rudraksha beads, followed Dinakar.
An old woman was standing in the veranda outside the, house, her white hair neatly combed. The eyes in her wrinkled face caught the light of the pole lamp; they shone in expectation of discovering who the visitors were. If a person is thin, it is said, you cannot tell their age. Sitamma looked not very different from her Hardwar days. She had more wrinkles and more white hair, that was all. Her white sari and her wet hair knotted at the end showed that she had just finished her bath.