Grandfather Kittanna was heroic in another manner. He could manage a horse, the fiercest, with a simplicity that made it go where it did not wish to go. I was brought up with the story how Grandfather Kittanna actually pushed his horse into the Chandrapur forest one evening — the horse, Sundar, biting his lips off his face; the tiger that met him in the middle of the jungle; the leap Sundar gave, high above my Lord Sher, and the custard-apples that splashed on his back, so high he soared— and before my grandfather knew where he was, with sash and blue — Maratha saddle, there he stood, Sundar, in the middle of the courtyard. The lamps were being lit, and when stableman Chowdayya heard the neigh he came and led the steed to the tank for a swish of water. Grandfather went into the bathroom, had his evening bath — he loved it to be very hot, and Aunt Seethamma had always to serve him potful after potful — and he rubbed himself till his body shone as the young of a banana tree. He washed and sat in prayer. When Achakka asked, ‘Sundar is all full of scratches…?’ then Grandfather spoke of the tiger, and the leap. For him, if the horse had soared into the sky and landed in holy Brindavan he would not have been much surprised. Grandfather Kittanna was like that. He rode Sundar for another three years, and then the horse died — of some form of dysentery, for, you know, horses die too — and we buried him on the top of the Kittur Hill, with fife and filigree. We still make an annual pilgrimage to his tomb, and for Hyderabad reasons we cover it up with a rose-coloured muslin, like the Muslims do. Horses we think came from Arabia, and so they need a Muslim burial. Where is Sundar now? Where?
The impossible, for Grandfather, was always possible. He never — he, a Brahmin — never for once was afraid of gun or sword, and yet what depth he had in his prayers. When he came out, Aunt Seethamma used to say, ‘He has the shine of a Dharma Raja.’
But I, I’ve the fright of gun and sword, and the smallest trick of violence can make me run a hundred leagues. But once having gone a hundred leagues I shall come back a thousand, for I do not really have the fear of fear. I only have fear.
I love rivers and lakes, and make my home easily by any waterside hamlet. I love palaces for their echoes, their sense of never having seen anything but the gloomy. Palaces remind me of old and venerable women, who never die. They look after others so much — I mean, orphans of the family always have great-aunts, who go on changing from orphan to orphan — that they remain ever young. One such was Aunt Lakshamma. She was married to a minister once, and he died when she was seven or eight. And since then my uncles and their daughters, my mother’s cousins and their grandchildren, have always had Lakshamma to look after them, for an orphan in a real household is never an orphan. She preserved, did Lakshamma, all the clothes of the young in her eighteenth-century steel and sheesham trunk, in the central hall, and except when there was a death in the house these clothes never saw the light of the sun. Some of them were fifty years old, they said. The other day— that is, some seven or eight years ago — when we were told that Aunt Lakshamma, elder to my grandfather by many years, had actually died, I did not believe it. I thought she would live three hundred years. She never would complain or sigh. She never wept. We never wept when she died. For I cannot understand what death means.
My father, of course, loved me. He never let me stray into the hands of Lakshamma. He said: ‘Auntie smells bad, my son. I want you to be a hero and a prince.’ Some time before my mother died, it seems she had a strange vision. She saw three of my past lives, and in each one of them I was a son, and of course I was always her eldest born, tall, slim, deep-voiced, deferential and beautiful. In one I was a prince. That is why I had always to be adorned with diamonds — diamonds on my forehead, chest and ears. She died, they say, having sent someone to the goldsmith, asking if my hair-flower were ready. When she died they covered her with white flowers — jasmines from Coimbatore and champaks from Chamundi — and with a lot of kunkum on her they took her away to the burning-ghat. They shaved me completely, and when they returned they gave me Bengal gram, and some sweets. I could not understand what had happened. Nor do I understand now. I know my mother, my mother Gauri, is not dead, and yet I am an orphan. Am I always going to be an orphan?
That my father married for a third time — my stepmother having died leaving three children, Saroja, Sukumari, and the eldest, Kapila — is another story. My new stepmother loved me very dearly, and I could not think of a home without her bright smile and the song that shone like the copper vessels in the house. When she smiled her mouth touched her ears — and she gave me everything I wanted. I used to weep, though, thinking of my own mother. But then my father died. He died on the third of the second Moon-month when the small rains had just started. I have little to tell you of my father’s death, except that I did not love him; but that after he died I knew him and loved him when his body was such pure white spread ash. Even now I have dreams of him saying to me: ‘Son, why did you not love me, you, my eldest son?’ I cannot repent, as I do not know what repentance is. For I must first believe there is death. And that is the central fact — I do not believe that death is. So, for whom shall I repent?
Of course, I love my father now. Who could not love one that was protection and kindness itself, though he never understood that my mother wanted me to be a prince? And since I could not be a prince — I was born a Brahmin, and so how could I be king? — I wandered my life away, and became a holy vagabond. If Grandfather simply jumped over tigers in the jungles, how many tigers of the human jungle, how many accidents to plane and car have I passed by? And what misunderstandings and chasms of hatred have lain between me and those who first loved, and then hated, me? Left to myself, I became alone and full of love. When one is alone one always loves. In fact, it is because one loves, and one is alone, one does not die.
I went to Benares, once. It was in the month of March, and there was still a pinch of cold in the air. My father had just died and I took Vishalakshi, my second stepmother, and my young stepbrother Sridhara — he was only eleven months old— and I went to Benares. I was twenty-two then, and I had been to Europe; I came back when Father became ill. Little Mother was very proud of me — she said: ‘He’s the bearing of a young pipal tree, tall and sacred, and the serpent-stones around it. We must go round him to become sacred.’ But the sacred Brahmins of Benares would hear none of this. They knew my grandfather and his grandfather and his great-grandfather again, and thus for seven generations — Ramakrishnayya and Ranganna, Madhavaswamy and Somasundarayya, Manjappa and Gangadharayya — and for each of them they knew the sons and grandsons — (the daughters, of course, they did not quite know) and so, they stood on their rights. ‘Your son,’ they said to Little Mother, ‘has been to Europe, and has wed a European and he has no sacred thread. Pray, Mother, how could the manes be pleased.’ So Little Mother yielded and just fifty silver rupees made everything holy. Some carcass-bearing Brahmins—’We’re the men of the four shoulders,’ they boast — named my young brother Son of Ceremony in their tempestuous high and low of hymns — the quicker the better, for in Benares there be many dead, and all the dead of all the ages, the successive generations of manes after manes, have accumulated in the sky. And you could almost see them layer on layer, on the night of a moon-eclipse, fair and pale and tall and decrepit, fathers, grandfathers, greatgrandfathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, nephews; friends, kings, yogins, maternal uncles — all, all they accumulate in the Benares air and you can see them. They have a distanced, dull-eyed look — and they ask — they beg for this and that, and your round white rice-balls and sesame seed give the peace they ask for. The sacred Brahmin too is pleased. He has his fifty rupees. Only my young brother, eleven months old, does not understand. When his mother is weeping — for death takes a long time to be recognized — my brother pulls and pulls at the sari-fringe. I look at the plain, large river that is ever so young, so holy — like my Mother. The temple bells ring and the crows are all about the white rice-balls. ‘The manes have come, look!’ say the Brahmins. My brother crawls up to them saying ‘Caw-Caw’, and it’s when he sees the monkeys that he jumps for Little Mother’s lap. He’s so tender and fine-limbed, is my brother. Little Mother takes him into her lap, opens her choli and gives him the breast.