Mahesh Rao - The Smoke is Rising

In the bottom drawer of the teak dresser in the dining room was a picture album, the pink and grey floral swirls on its cover a reminder of her early married life. A third of the way into this album, carefully pasted on to the lower half of the page, lay a photograph of Susheela at the age of twenty-four. This image of herself had over the years become embedded in her mind and she clung to it without ever having meant to do so.

The photograph had been taken on a trip to Mount Abu with her husband, Sridhar. The year was 1968. ‘ Mere saamne wali khidki mein ’ crackled out of transistor radios in tea shops, university hostels and railway station waiting rooms. Indira Gandhi was in Thimphu, discussing democracy with the Bhutanese monarch. In Tamil Nadu bursts of agitation continued against the declaration of Hindi as India’s primary official language. The Beatles transcendentally meditated in Rishikesh, a group of friends in tow, and, quite coincidentally, condoms were being distributed and marketed across rural India by the large tea, petroleum and chemical corporations in a government family-planning initiative.

The photograph’s white border, mottled by an unidentifiable substance, had curled up at the corners and a yellow tinge had washed across the scene. Sridhar had taken the photograph in the early evening of their first day at the hill station. Susheela’s sari, a green Japanese georgette with a brown geometric motif, seemed to shimmer in the light, although she would have been horrified at the suggestion that she might have been dressed in anything that lent itself to a daytime gleam. Her hair was perfect. She had resisted the vulgar pull of a Sadhana cut or a beehive but some limited backcombing had given her face the composition that she had sought. A couple of kiss curls were a further concession to the era but the glossy braid that hung heavily over her left shoulder was timeless. Her posture was stagey, right arm tilting awkwardly by her slender waist and her chin lowered in a reproduction of cinematic coyness. In the background, the clutter of structures on the hillside looked about to pitch into the orange waters of Nakki Lake.

The last time she had looked at the picture had been a couple of years ago when her daughter had been recovering from chicken pox. It was a humid June day and Priyanka had been lying in the sitting room, listlessly turning the pages of the album, one eye on the Wimbledon match unfolding on television.

‘God, amma , you look just like Sharmila Tagore in this one,’ she had said, rather incredulously, it had seemed to Susheela.

‘Yes, maybe when she played a mother’s role in her fifties,’ had been Susheela’s retort.

‘No, really. I think it’s the hair and the shiny shiny sari.’

The photo album continued to be confined to the dresser drawer.

Her hair done, Susheela stood up and got dressed, picking out a purple silk sari with a black border. She adjusted the angle of the dressing table mirror, moved across to close the bathroom door and then straightened the edge of the bedspread. As she went downstairs, she wondered why Uma had not yet arrived. Maybe she was up to something with the mali .

Uma’s eyes opened just as the train heading south to Mayiladuthurai wheezed into Mysore Junction. Only a row of dilapidated sheds, a slope covered with banks of refuse and a collapsing chain-link fence separated her home from the outlying platforms of the station. The sky was a sooty grey in the gap that ran around the room between the wall and the corrugated iron roof. In the near darkness, Uma’s eyes focused on the wooden frame of the picture of Shiva on the wall. The liquid eyes and the open palm would only be visible after another hour or so when the light filtered through the gap and the room’s tiny window. Uma shifted slowly on the thin foam mattress. Her skin felt flushed and sticky, the sheet twisted into a clammy wreath underneath her.

In one corner of the room, a pipe with no tap extended over a square of lumpy cement, surrounded by an uneven brim. Apart from the mattress, the room also contained a tin trunk and a plastic chair. Placed on the trunk were a small mirror, a comb and a bar of soap. Uma sat up and tried to perform the deep breathing exercises that Bhargavi had shown her. Pranayama would help bring peace to the mind and take away all fears and negative thoughts, she had said. Uma closed her left nostril with her thumb and inhaled deeply through the right one. After a few tepid attempts she stopped. She kept losing count and was not sure she was following the correct order in any case. She would probably just have to learn to live with the negative thoughts, at least for today.

She reached for a small scarf and wound her thick, fractious curls into a tight coil at the nape of her neck. Once she had bathed, she would begin the process of marshalling them into place, drawing them into a neat braid. When she was about six or seven, the neighbourhood children had scored a complicated ditty involving her ‘hair like steel wool’ and ‘skin like charcoal’ before moving on to another victim some months later. Even after their overtures had ceased, the hair continued to be an issue: agonising sessions of her mother’s firm tugs and jerks as she tried to bring order to the jet black kinks. The skin remained even more of an issue, a plague that was impossible to hide.

Uma unbolted the door and stepped outside. There was movement even at this early hour. Her neighbour’s daughter walked past, a mewling toddler hitched to her waist. The sound of water drumming against plastic filled the air. Somewhere a radio droned out the news while its owner hawked loudly by the gutter. Uma picked up her two plastic pots and, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, walked down the row of rooms to take her place in the morning queue at the tap. Parvathi, her neighbour, was already there and smiled weakly at her. It was too early to exchange any pleasantries. The earth around the tap had been churned into a grey sludge, trailing skeins of banana leaves and strips of newspaper. Uma shut her eyes and pressed her pots against her chest as she waited to reach the front of the queue.

At the opposite end of the row another queue was growing, this one for the toilet. Uma walked quickly back to her room, her muscles taut with the weight of the water. Dumping the pots behind the door, she made her way out again towards the toilet, clutching a mug of water. A rooster seemed to have joined the queue in front of her, jerking its head and puffing out its feathers, as if in an attempt to be escorted to the front. Uma looked down and waited. A man now stood behind her: she could see his cracked feet in the blue rubber chappals . The wait to use the toilet in the morning seemed to be getting longer these days. Maybe more people were living in the rooms in this row. Then there was also the landlord’s teenaged son who had taken to smoking in the toilet, barricading himself in there for ten minutes at a time, leaving behind a rank fug and a floor covered in cigarette butts. As she waited, Uma felt an almost imperceptible tug at her sari, a sough that instantly made her stiffen. She stood very still. It happened again; a soft but deliberate graze against the backs of her legs. She did not turn around, praying that the toilet door would open. The feet in the blue rubber chappals seemed to have moved closer.

Just then a man emerged from the toilet, wiping his hands on a towel slung over his shoulder. Uma rushed in and firmly locked the door behind her.