Song of the Cuckoo Bird: A Novel (13 page)

“I haven’t written in a long while,” he said.

Kokila sat down by his feet and looked up at him. “I think you just need to be inspired. After Vidura . . . Ramanandam, you have so much to give the world with your writing. Why would you stop?”

“I am Ramanandam now?” he asked, amused.

Kokila put a hand against her mouth. “I—”

“It’s okay, you can call me Ramanandam,” he said, and set his plate down on the floor beside her. He washed his hands with his glass of water and pushed the plate aside.

He sat down on the floor next to her and took her face in his hands. “You think I can write again?”

“Yes,” Kokila whispered, the blood pounding inside her at Ramanandam’s closeness. When had this happened? she wondered. When had she lost her heart to this man?

“Will you be my muse?” Ramanandam asked.

Kokila nodded and closed her eyes.

She felt his breath close to her face and she could smell the
kesari
he had just eaten. He kissed her then; their lips locked and Kokila felt her universe implode.

The next morning Kokila hurried from Ramanandam’s room like a thief and slid into hers, which was two rooms away. An empty room and that of Subhadra lay in between. No one saw her as it was still dark.

She had left him sleeping and naked. Her heart pounded as she remembered what they had done, what he had done to her. It was craziness, she decided, utter madness to have done what they did.

She lay down on her bed as the first rays of the sun kissed Bheemunipatnam. She hid her face in her hands and a laugh burst out from inside her. It was the laugh of a girl who had just discovered the brilliance of love.

It would be years before Kokila realized that what happened between Ramanandam and her was not love. It was the need of an old man to prove he was younger and the need of a young girl to protect her benefactor and make him feel younger.

1971
3 December 1971.
The third Indo-Pakistan war officially commenced and a national emergency was declared by Indian president Zakir Husain. The first night of hostilities commenced with Pakistan bombing several Indian airfields. The Indian ships
Rajput
and
Akshay
left Visakhapatnam harbor when they obtained a sonar contact. They fired several depth charges, and then a loud explosion was heard off the Visakhapatnam beach. The Pakistani submarine
Ghazi
(a
Tench
-class submarine obtained from the United States in 1964) came to grief.

17 December 1971.
The war ended on this day when a cease-fire was called between India and Pakistan.

Casualties

E
ven though the war was taking place in the northern part of India, there was a tense atmosphere everywhere. Rumors were brewing about big Pakistani rockets that could be launched all the way from Karachi and land on southern India.

Just a few days before, the sound of war had reached Visakhapatnam when a Pakistani submarine was destroyed by Indian ships off Visakhapatnam harbor. Windows had rattled and it had felt like a small earthquake had shaken the world. No one had ever believed that the Pakistani army could find a way to come so far south and the level of fear had increased all over the country.

“They have very powerful bombs,” Ravi was telling poor frightened Subhadra, nervous Renuka, and unperturbed Puttamma, the maid who had been hired recently to clean the bathrooms and the outside verandahs. “We can all die. Tella Meda”—he snapped his fingers—“will be gone, just like that. Poof!”

Subhadra and Renuka listened intently, while Puttamma was not buying it. “India is most powerful,” she said. “No one can touch us.”

Ravi shook his head. “What do you know? Go, get to work and stay out of talk that you know nothing about.”

“ ‘What do you know?’ he says,” Puttamma said angrily as she left to clean a bathroom. “I know plenty. What does he know? Idiot, son of a whore, talks to me like I am no one. Thinks he knows everything. Useless drunk! Son of a whore that—”

“Puttamma, what’s wrong?” Kokila asked as she came out of the bathroom, a towel around her wet hair and her
sari
-wrapped body still a little damp after her bath.

Puttamma gargled in her throat and spat on the tiled floor. “It’s that boy Ravi, telling stories to Subhadra Amma and Renuka Amma. That boy is up to no good. Chetana should’ve had better sense than to marry that loser.”

“What stories is he telling?” Kokila asked casually as she removed the towel from around her head and shook her hair. Water sprayed around her as she started rubbing the moisture out with the towel.

“About the war and how those Pakis can come kill us here,” Puttamma said. “You have lovely hair, Kokila Amma. Someday a man is going to come and make a grab for you.”

Kokila ran a hand through her wet waist-length hair and laughed. The sun was shining on her face when she turned her head and her eyes fell on the man who had already grabbed her.

He was sitting on a cloth chair in the verandah in front of his room, comfortable, watching her. She turned away from him, afraid someone would see. But how could they not see what was going on? Were they all blind? Could no one see how happiness glittered in her eyes? How she smiled all the time?

“I say, why scare those poor women, eh?” Puttamma continued. “War is happening way up in the north and he says they’ll throw bombs down here and kill everyone. I say, why make stories that make no sense? I say—”

“What are you bitching about now?” Chetana asked, her perfumed Lux soap in one hand and a white towel hanging over her shoulder. “Are you done cleaning? I need to take a bath.”

“Your husband is a no-good fellow,” Puttamma told Chetana, who sighed.

“He is
my
husband, I’ll worry about him, you worry about yours,” she said. “So, how is your husband?”

“Which one?” Puttamma asked on a harsh laugh. “My third husband left yesterday. Ran away, that son of a whore, took my copper pot and gold earrings with him.”

“You don’t have gold earrings,” Chetana pointed out.

“Well, he thought I did, stupid bastard,” Puttamma said slyly. “You go take a bath now. I will clean up after you are done. Kokila Amma, I’m going to go to the garden to smoke a
bidi.
”

Kokila nodded. “I’ll come along. I have to get some flowers for the temple room. And you can tell me all about your third husband.”

Kokila knew Ramanandam was watching her as she walked toward the garden with Puttamma. He was always watching her. It was unnerving, flattering, exciting. Her heart felt like it was on a giant wheel, up and down, up and down, and every time the excitement mounted and mounted.

Since that first night they had been together, Ramanandam and Kokila had spent countless nights together, sometimes in his room, sometimes in hers. She used to share her room with Chetana but with her married and staying with Ravi, Kokila was alone in her room.

For two years now she and Ramanandam had been lovers. Two years of great joy, torture, and uncertainty. Sometimes Kokila would wonder where all of this was going. Other times she didn’t want to know. No one seemed to notice the change in her behavior or her status in the
ashram.
Kokila had taken over so many responsibilities. She kept the books, paid the bills, did the accounting. The money from devotees and the residents didn’t go to Subhadra anymore, who always used to make a mess of the finances, but came to Kokila. She used Ramanandam’s room to store the books and keep track of money.

Maybe that was what everyone thought she was doing in Ramanandam’s room.
Yes, that is what they must think,
Kokila decided. She wasn’t sure how she would feel if her relationship with Ramanandam became public knowledge. She wasn’t sure what others would say, especially Charvi, who was possessive about Ramanandam. Chetana would probably be appalled and hurt at not being made privy to such juicy information about Kokila’s life.

Chetana had related in full, excruciating detail to Kokila the events of her
shobhanam
night. She had told Kokila everything, but Kokila had not told her about Ramanandam. But what could she say? She knew that her relationship with Ramanandam would not be accepted. Ramanandam was thirty-nine years her senior and they were not married. He said he didn’t believe in marriage as an institution and after his wife died he had sworn that he wouldn’t enter that fraudulent institution again. He didn’t judge those who believed in marriage and even admired their faith in the partnership but said he felt he couldn’t bind himself like that again.

“If two people love each other, why do they feel the need for their relationship to be validated by society?” he told Kokila.

In any case, Kokila couldn’t imagine marrying Ramanandam. She didn’t think of him as a husband, even now, even when they did those secret things that made her blush.

So who was Ramanandam to her? Lover? Father figure? Protector? Benefactor? All?

Puttamma enjoyed smoking her
bidi
very much. You could usually find her walking down the street,
bidi
in mouth, as she yapped away with a companion. She knew everyone in Bheemunipatnam and lived in one of the thatched huts that filled a part of the small town. The poor, the hungry, the wretched ended up there, scraping through life.

A gutter went through the area where the thatched huts were; it was considered the bad neighborhood, where the red-light district more or less survived and toddy shops lined the perimeter. Despite the poverty and the desperation that thrived in the slum, there was a certain sense of happiness that prevailed. Marriages, a girl’s first step into womanhood, childbirth, death—everything was celebrated with great gusto. Songs would be played at full volume on loudspeakers late into the night and early into the morning and toddy would flow from the shops along with the drunks. Whenever Kokila found herself passing the slum she wondered if she would’ve ended up there if she hadn’t found Tella Meda and then she would realize she would have ended up in her husband’s home if she hadn’t found Tella Meda. She wasn’t sure if she was distressed about having stayed. Sometimes she craved the security, the normalcy, of a husband, a home and family.

At Tella Meda she had a roof over her head but not the respectability of a married and decent woman. People in Bheemunipatnam knew the life stories of most of those who lived in Tella Meda. Everyone knew that Kokila had refused to leave with her husband and that Chetana was a prostitute’s discarded daughter. Every drunk in town had made a play at Kokila and Chetana while they were out in the bazaar or at the cinema, anywhere outside the protection of Tella Meda. Women looked at them with a combination of scorn, pity, and disdain. It was one thing to visit Tella Meda as a devotee of Charvi, quite another to live in Tella Meda. Those who lived in Tella Meda lived there because they were outcasts. As a child Kokila had seen the beautiful house by the beach as a place where there was always food, even if in meager amounts, and clean clothes, four walls, and a roof. As a child Kokila had thought that would be enough. As a woman she had begun to realize that by choosing Tella Meda she had rejected a respectable life as a wife. By choosing Tella Meda she had condemned herself to live on the sidelines of society.

“I see Ravi there all the time, at Mangalam’s toddy shop,” Puttamma gossiped as she smoked the thin brown cigarette filled with tobacco, hand-rolled in a
temburni
leaf and secured with a string at one end. She was standing in Tella Meda’s front garden with Kokila.

“Chetana said he stopped going a week ago,” Kokila told her. Usually she didn’t indulge in gossip but sometimes it was hard to resist and after all she was a woman, wasn’t she?

“Stopped? I saw him last night, piss-faced drunk. Manikyam Amma will be so sad to hear that her son is traipsing down to the toddy shops and”—Puttamma’s voice dropped to a whisper—“going to Sundari’s room.”

“No,” Kokila gasped. “No, Puttamma, you must be mistaken. Chetana would never allow Ravi to go to a prostitute.”

“Uh-uh.” Puttamma only made a sound and continued to smoke her
bidi.

“Are you sure?” Kokila asked.

Puttamma nodded.

“Poor Chetana. If she finds out . . .”

“She knows,” Puttamma said, surprising Kokila.

“She knows?”

Puttamma nodded smugly. “Came by three days ago in the afternoon and yelled the place down. Called Sundari names. Told that
munda
to keep her hands off her husband and find someone else to . . . Well, Chetana never did have a clean mouth.”

Kokila was shocked. Maybe there were things that Chetana didn’t tell her anymore. She was obviously embarrassed by Ravi’s behavior. And then Kokila wondered if she was embarrassed about Ramanandam and if that was why she kept their relationship a secret. Was it a dirty thing they did? Yes, it was a dirty thing. Unclean, impure, without the benefit of marriage, a sin, and yet she loved him and loved being with him. Yes, she was embarrassed, but not enough to walk away from him.