Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

The same afternoon Dr Pai came to examine me. He was not too alarming, but there was no question of an air journey for the moment — nor the cold air of Europe. No, not even the South of France, he persisted: he knew that part of the world very well. ‘Later in the summer, perhaps,’ he said.

‘But I have a wife, and she’s going to have a baby,’ I argued.

‘Your wife would no doubt prefer you alive here than dead there,’ he laughed.

Little Mother was shocked at his crude remark. She beat her knuckles on her temples: what an inauspicious thing to say!

‘Today medical science is so well advanced that there is no danger for a patient like you; I don’t think you’re such a serious case. The X-rays will tell me, once I have them. For the moment take rest. And don’t you let people come and worry him,’ he said, turning to Little Mother. ‘In Europe, people are so understanding about patients and diseases. Here we treat disease as thought it were a terminal examination — whether you pass or fail it makes no difference. Look after yourself, old boy. After all, now that your father is no more you are the pillar of the family. You must get better.’

~

I got better. Dr Pai ordered three months in Bangalore, so Little Mother, Sukumari, Sridhara, and I, with the cook and Baliga, all went up to Bangalore. I hired a house in upper Basavangudi and with cauldron and drying bamboo we established ourselves. Living in the intimacy of my own family — where every gesture, idiosyncrasy, or mole-mark was traced back to some cousin, aunt, or grandfather; where there were such subtle understandings of half-said things, of acts that were respected or condemned according to the degree of stature, age or sex of one another— gave a feeling of a complex oneness, from which one could never get out save by death, and even after that one would get into it again in the next life, and so on till the wheel of existence were ended. ‘Father scratched his leg just there, at the arch of his foot, with the second finger, just like you,’ Sukumari remarked one evening. ‘Look, Rama, look!’ Little Mother said; ‘Sridhara has a mole under his right arm, just where you have…’ One night, when Little Mother was telling me a story, I went to sleep saying, ‘Yes, yes, Hum-Hum,’ and everybody laughed, for I was snoring. ‘Just like his grandmother,’ said Aunt Sata, who had joined us.

Later, when the rains had started, we visited our lands in the Malnad with Aunt Sata and walked by the Himavathy again. Little Mother had not been to Hariharapura for six or seven years. The peasants were trying to play false with us, complained Aunt Sata; ‘I am only a helpless widow, and I cannot look after my own twenty-five acres of wetland. For what with the hay and the false measures, the pick-axe broken and the manure washed away, Lord, it is beyond a woman’s ken to control these black-blanket peasants, especially in these evil mountain-lands. I tell you, forget your seventy-six acres of wetlands, spread over Kanchenahalli and Siddapura, Hobli, and Himaganga, Kanthapura and those dry lands in Seethapura Taluka; forget your coffee and cardamoms. And as for your bright Sundarayya, he knows when to write charming letters to you saying, “The Himavathy has run into the land at Sivganga corner, divine sir, and she’s washed away canal-bund and all; during these floods she ate away fifteen man-lengths of land.” Or, “The manure this year was bad, and Whitey, Pushpa, Madhuri, Kala, Nandi, and Sankri have died of the new cattle- dysentry,” while actually he’s sent them to Balapura Saturday fair for sale. Remember what he did to your father during the war? He sold your cattle to those Europeans — and for butchery, you understand. He who’ll sell cows for butchery will sell you one day,’ continued Aunt Sata. ‘Ah, you do not know the people hereabouts, and you do not know the peasants either. For every yea and nay, for every sneeze or scratch, they’ll tell you such a huge Ramayana; and if you question them too much or say this or that: “The weeds have grown here”, ‘“The cattle look lean”’, or “When will you give us the Spring-rice? It’s already three months due and the rains are here”, you never know when their scythes will be at the touch of your neck, never, never. Remember Posthouse Venkatanayana,’ concluded Aunt Sata, and became ominously silent.

But as soon as they saw me — they were in the middle of the rice planting, water up to their knees and rice shoots in hand— Linge Gowda stopped his plough and came rushing towards us, blanket and folded hands and all. ‘The Learned-one has come! The Learned-one! The Krishnappa family has come!’ And the women came rushing too; they looked at me and said, ‘Oh, he looks just like he looked when young, lovely as the son of a king,’ and they knocked their knuckles against their temples (that no evil eye should fall on my princely face!).

‘Well, when you have drunk the Himavathy waters you can’t ever look different,’ remarked Sakamma, fat, long-eared, deaf as a hen; she put her finger on her lip and proclaimed. ‘He looks just like his grandfather, when he started building that rice-mill there, that never did function.’

The Linge Gowda said, ‘Hé, Rangi, is this the way to receive elders and big people? Go and get some milk, you she-buffalo!’ Meanwhile the villagers all came — Ramayya, Sundarappa, Bodhayya, Cart-Wheel Sivaramanna, Timma, Putta, Kitta, Nanjanna, boatman Kalappa — they came with their silver bangles, their whips and black-blankets, and fell at my feet. The milk arrived and the bananas, and as we sat under the Buxom- mango — we were near my Aruni-field — the blue Himavathy flowing below me, with the fair-carts wading through the waters and the smell of rotten mango and cow-dung coming to us. I wondered at the gentleness, the fertility and greenness of the earth that had shapen me.

We went home, and after my bath, meditation, and meal, I went up the loft to see what had become of the manuscripts. Grandfather had such a lot of palm-leaf manuscripts that had come generation on generation down to us. And once in a while when he found a child lighting the evening lamps one after the other with one of those palm leaves, how Grandfather gave him a nice marriage ceremony! And you burst your lamentation the louder, that Aunt Sata or Grandmother Rangamma might take you on her waist, and went to bed with a nice song and many a restful pat. Night would come. And Grandfather Ramanna, who got angry so quickly and forgot equally quickly, would say, coming back from the morning river with his wet clothes and wet vessels in hand, ‘Give that orphan his breakfast, Sata. You know he’s just like his father. He will never ask.’

Some of the manuscripts were still there. I wiped them gently and tried to read here and there. Some were on medicine, some on Vedanta (mostly commentaries, on the Upanishads by Gaudapada and Sankara, the Rig Veda Samhita, or the Ramayana) and others on sundry things, such as a strange book on Lizard-wisdom, which interpreted the clucking of house-lizards on the wall (unlike most of the others, this was in Kannada): one cluck meant bad, two meant success, and four and five meant different things during different parts of the day. There were also Sanskrit manuscripts on house-building, describing with extraordinary precision what to build for a merchant and what to build for a Brahmin householder. There was a sixteenth-century book on music, and a small palm-leaf manuscript on snuffs, which read, ‘On the eighteen ways of autumn trituration of snuff, for maladies, delights, cosmetic, and erotic purposes; with the eleven ways of perfuming it, in the Northern, Southern, South-Eastern and Malabar ways, and with multiple fashions of making it a means for attaining peace and prosperity. Written by the great jewel of medical and other sciences, Linga Sastry.’ I also took out the copperplate inscription, carefully tied in cotton cloth, and with many auspicious marks of kunkum, turmeric and flower-spots on it. How proud I was to read it again! I brought it in front of the still turning sanctuary lights, and read it out to Little Mother.