In Shastri's family, his elder brother had hated him, and Shastri hated him too. That brother suffered from asthma, didn't have any children, and his wife had died.
Shastri's elder brother never married again. He begged Shastri to marry and save the family, but Shastri would not agree. He did not like living in a jungle, cultivating the garden, eating — all throughout the rainy season — jackfruit palya, or sambar made with cucumber. And he did not want to live under his miserly brother's control, every day hearing that asthmatic breathing. So, fifty years ago, he had taken his share of the property and gone to Bombay, where he began squandering money. He also opened a hotel, the Bhagavati Krupa. But although he owned the hotel, he had somebody else sitting at the cash counter. Shastri had no care for what he earned or what he spent.
Nobody who had known him in his Bombay days would now say, ‘This is the same Shastri.’ In Bombay he had taken to wearing pyjamas and a shirt, and with a cap on his head seemed transformed into a Sindhi or a Marwari, even though he hadn't had enough courage to cut off his brahmin tuft.
It was also in Bombay that Shastri developed a taste for women. Pimps became his friends. He got into the habit of playing cards the whole day. His eyes were always red from going without sleep. Constant smoking had given him a cough, and he began to worry that, like his brother, he would get asthma.
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One day, in a rich prostitute's house, Shastri saw a young girl. She spoke both Kannada and Tulu, and was seventeen or eighteen years old. Shastri was twenty-five. A pimp dressed in silk dhotra, trying to look like a respectable householder, had recommended ‘a fresh high-school girl of your own side,’ and taken him to look her over.
Shastri learned that the girl had been enticed away from a poor family in a village not far from Shimoga.
He was surprised at the compassion he felt for her, although he was a libertine and full of crude sexual desires for women. The madam who had bought the girl could not be won over by three of the four upayas — sama, bheda, danda — so Shastri then used the fourth upaya — dana — and gave the madam four times the money that she had paid. He also gave the name Radha to the grateful girl, and took her to the Bhagavati Krupa, where he kept her in one of his rooms as his woman. He gave up cards and gambling and instead began to keep an eye on her.
When a telegram came saying that his brother was not keeping well, Shastri took Radha with him. He left her in a Mangalore hotel with someone he trusted, and went to the village. By then his relatives were waiting for him to do the funeral rites.
The mouth of his asthmatic brother, which had always been open for breathing, was now closed. There were flies around his short pointed nose, that nose he had often felt like smashing. Even seeing his brother's corpse did not bring tears to his eyes. They had spoken such cruel words to each other. Now, remembering this, it seemed to him that they were a cursed family. He had never enjoyed his mother's love, she had died giving birth to him. His father, in old age, had married another woman. This stepmother thought that she was cursed, being the wife of an old man, and she made it her aim in life to give pain to everyone. Finally, she died after getting bitten by a snake in the garden. The father died of dog-bite, and Shastri's brother's wife of pneumonia. Shastri's brother then lived alone, a miser who dug up every corner of the house searching for gold which might have been buried there by ancestors.
There was already a lot of wealth which had been bequeathed to them — a trunk full of gold which must have been looted by some ancestor during the fall of the Vijayanagar Empire. The brother, looking for more, first dug up the whole house, then began digging in the garden. One day while digging, he died.
Shastri now owned the entire property. After his brother's funeral rites he took out the trunk from the iron safe to satisfy himself that his brother had not squandered the gold, and he felt relieved. Then he brought his ‘dear parrot’ Radha from the hotel and had a small cottage built for her on the bank of a river near an arecanut garden. Then, considering who could look after her safety, he remembered Radha saying that she had an aunt in Shimoga. This aunt's husband was a tailor. Radha's mother — who had been mistress to a rich man in Chennagiri — had grown old and unwanted, so Shastri brought the mother as well. He bought a tiled house for Radha's family, and set up a cloth shop in the town for the tailor.
Shastri had no neighbours of his own caste near his house and gardens in the forest. His relatives who lived at a distance acted distant as well. They would have to come when there was a funeral rite in the house. Apart from this, nobody wanted to be anywhere near his place, and so Shastri could carry on his relationship with Radha fearlessly and unabashedly. He also bought a cloth-topped Ford car and took to wearing a draped dhoti with a shirt over it, and pump shoes; he drove his car on the cart tracks. All these things separated him still more from his relatives.
Two years went by in this way. Radha began to tell him, ‘I am anyhow your mistress, but you must also marry.’ He had no child by Radha, and this worried him. ‘Am I cursed to be without issue in this house as well?’ he thought.
‘It may be my fate to be without a child,’ Radha had said. ‘You should marry and see.’ In this way she kept after him.
Shastri had never in his life met another spirit like Radha. It was not that she was without desires, but that all her desires were contained within the limits of family life. If she could get coconut milk for her gruel and, on top of that, mango pickle, this was what made her happy. And Shastri, who went around burning in anger, would always soften before Radha, enchanted by the charming words which came from her sweet mouth. Unable to say no to her, and also curious to know whether he could father a child, he went in search of a bride.
Nobody in those parts would give a girl to this wealthy, cursed house. They would raise some objection about the household and then refuse. There was no family elder with whom Shastri was close, someone who could go about arranging his marriage. And who respects a man who goes on his own to ask for a girl? But at last, Shastri came to know of a girl in a poor family near Chikmagalur. Wearing a gold-bordered shawl and draped in a dhoti, with a turban on his head like a Mysorean and kumkum on his forehead to make him look like a proper, traditional person, Shastri went to ask for a bride.
Having produced eight daughters and desiring to get at least the first one married, the parents — noting the prospective son-in-law's wealth, lineage, his family, his horoscope — and showing no desire to know any other detail about him, agreed to give their daughter Saroja in marriage.
Saroja was a beautiful, classically-featured girl. With her large, heavenly, indifferent eyes, Saroja got married without ever saying what she wanted. In the beginning, it had made Shastri proud that she liked reading books, that she was good at reciting the Mahabharata. Radha too was pleased that the girl was educated.
Radha even attended the wedding. Dressed like goddess Gauri, she came in splendour, the only loving member of the bridegroom's party. Radha's relationship with the wealthy Shastri wasn't unknown to Saroja's parents, but they acted as if they didn't know. Their only concern was where to seat Radha for the wedding dinner. Radha, using all the savings from the garden Shastri had given her, had bought gifts for the bride: a sari, and coral-studded gold bangles made by the famous craftsmen of Mangalore. No one else on Shastri's side had taken such delight in this marriage. No one else had given a present. Saroja's father and mother, worn out by being parents to eight girls, were comforted by Radha's affectionate nature, by her wealth and her expensive gifts, and felt that their daughter didn't have to worry.