Mahesh Rao - The Smoke is Rising

Uma had responded to Bhargavi hesitantly, unable to resist her onslaught, but at the same time clinging to her own customary defences. In time, she had come to see Bhargavi’s actions in a different light. The genuine warmth and consideration were there, but they were sifted through with a desire to be needed. Bhargavi’s own compulsions had led her to act as a friend in places where regard was only given in return for profit or abasement. Much of this had become clear to Uma as she watched Bhargavi’s interventions. As she pushed herself to the fore she always told her mother’s story, an example of a woman who would not be forced down or held back.

Bhargavi’s mother had been born in a remote village in the Velikonda Hills, marooned on a bank of shale between two slow-moving streams. Her birth had been greeted with conventional disappointment, and then distress, as a bewildering fact became known about the newborn. The baby’s tiny palms were devoid of lines; they were as smooth as one of the hundreds of grey pebbles washed clean by the listless streams. The palms were washed, oiled, massaged and repeatedly inspected under the glow of first light, in the bleached dazzle of noon and by the beam of a smoky lantern. They remained unblemished and unbroken, a reminder that here lay an infant with barely a past and, seemingly, no future.

The creases that should have sealed her journey through life did not make an appearance in the weeks that followed, perhaps in protest at the life they foresaw. There were only two ways of looking at this unnatural occurrence: as a curse brought down on the whole community or a sacred sign indicating the arrival of a superior being. Unfortunately the lines had failed to materialise on female palms, in the home of a low caste potter, in a village marooned on a bank of shale in a forgotten corner of the Velikonda Hills. There was only one way that this story could end.

So Bhargavi’s mother was not fated to join the ranks of glorious local miracles: the weeping marble deities; the babies emerging unscathed from cauldrons of hot oil; the temple domes sprouting out of forest earth. Branded a witch, as soon as puberty struck she was palmed off to a drunkard from a neighbouring village, thirty years her senior. Bhargavi was born four years later and, shortly after, mother and daughter left the Velikonda Hills to find the future they had been denied.

Bhargavi’s mother had a dynamic imagination and a flinty streak of resourcefulness, both more useful than all the palm lines in the world. She reinvented herself as a healer using some practical midwifery skills, a flair for astrological neologisms, an education in the properties of various herbs and a store of common sense. Where particularly thorny cases were concerned, she flashed her naked palms at her patrons, silencing their doubts and hastening the efficacy of their treatment. Mother and daughter travelled from town to town, sourcing new remedies and clients, rapidly establishing a daunting reputation, and then, with impeccable judgment, moving on.

Upon her mother’s death, Bhargavi had not taken on her work but had, in her own way, continued the therapeutic tradition. Lacking an education, she was locked into a narrow channel of options, but had decided that this would not prevent her from making common cause with others when the situation required it. She had ended up in Mysore, starting out as a tailor’s apprentice in exchange for a couple of meals a day. Later she had joined a garment factory that specialised in men’s shirts destined for a supermarket chain in Germany. Her attempts at organising trade union membership among the young women at the factory soon saw her ordered off the premises and blacklisted in various quarters of the industrial area. Bhargavi had not gone quietly. She had returned at the end of each day’s shift to talk to the women as they emerged from the cramped depot into the evening haze. Eventually, one of the security guards had warned her not to return, while standing on her toes, his carefully polished shoe enormous on top of her tiny feet. She had left the area but she was sure that she would return.

A week later she had found work at the Bhaskar house. Now Uma found herself the latest beneficiary of Bhargavi’s solid determination and, as she watched her hurry out of sight, she was not sure whether she ought to be grateful or not.

Susheela began the long journey around the house, shutting windows and drawing curtains. The early evenings were the most difficult time. The tasks of the day were complete but the entrenchment of night was yet to begin. The gate lights would flicker into life along the streets of Mahalakshmi Gardens and the mosquitoes would begin their crepuscular investigations. The fridge would register its boredom with a prolonged sigh and every planet would pause in its orbit for a fraction of a second. She tried to delay turning on the television for as long as she possibly could, since it was, in her mind, a clear admission of defeat. She would pick up her current novel, the last unread section of the newspaper, the telephone book or an old copy of the Reader’s Digest : anything that might stave off a descent towards that final recourse.

The intensely irritating thing about being a widow, apart from all the other intensely irritating things, was that she had been rendered void by most of their social set. In the immediate aftermath of Sridhar’s death the messages of condolence had flooded in, as they should. The sombre visits, the enquiries as to the final days, the ceremonial panoply, everything had been correctly in place. It was after those first few months of bereavement that Susheela had dropped to the bottom like a sunken stone. Perhaps they thought that her grief would make her incapable of pleasant intercourse; perhaps they lacked the idiom required to extend a social courtesy to a woman missing a crucial appendage; perhaps they thought she would run off with one of their decrepit husbands; perhaps they had never warmed to her in the first place. Whatever the real reason, a curtain had fallen with a heavy thud over the invitations to bridge evenings at the Erskine Club, concerts at Jaganmohan Palace, drinks at the JW Golf Club and dinners at the Galleria by Tejasandra Lake. There were still the weddings, housewarmings and naming ceremonies, of course; anything where a woman with a dead husband could be seated in a corner among other women with dead husbands, so that they could all quietly discuss their loss.

Across the road, the Nachappa boy had just returned from work. As he reversed his car into the garage, a tinny version of ‘Que Sera, Sera’ sputtered out into the early darkness. Susheela admitted defeat and turned on the television. A news channel was relaying footage of the chaotic scenes witnessed in the Karnataka Legislative Assembly earlier in the day. A number of MLAs had stormed the Speaker’s podium in protest at what they saw as continued procedural unfairness in the conduct of debates. The Speaker had been escorted to another part of the building for his own safety while his microphone was dismantled by a particularly zealous member of the House. Balled-up paper flew across the room and, in the background, two MLAs had hoisted a chair up on to their shoulders, an action whose legislative purpose remained unclear.

Susheela’s mouth turned down in disgust at the sight of these hooligans who were in charge of running matters. What had the people of Karnataka ever done to deserve such representatives?

The newsreader announced impassively that one MLA had threatened to take poison in the House, at which point the Speaker had adjourned proceedings for the day before slipping away. The Assembly members had carried on with their protest against the disregard for parliamentary rules, apparently too absorbed to notice the adjournment.