Song of the Cuckoo Bird: A Novel (29 page)

“I stopped going there once I found out,” Chetana said.

“Why did you start spending time with them?” Kokila asked.

Their friendship had been strained in those days and she hadn’t been able to question Chetana’s ill sense in working with those tailor girls in Bheemunipatnam, well known for their side business of prostitution.

Chetana shrugged. “I needed to get away from Tella Meda. I needed to breathe outside. You know?”

Kokila nodded. She did know.

She
got onto the train at the Ongole railway station.

It was a big station and Kokila filled the earthen pot they carried with water and bought some fresh mangoes and bananas. Since Chetana and she had no qualms about eating outside food, she also bought some
vadas
and
bajjis
for a snack.

Charvi ate only the fresh fruit, while Kokila and Chetana fell upon the spicy
bajjis
and
vadas.

She
sat in a corner of the ladies’ coupe. Gayatri Devi and Pushpa Lata wanted to send her out on accord of her dirty clothes and smelly person but Charvi asked them not to. Her face was hidden by her
sari
and she was crouching in the corner. A small bundle of clothes was hidden under her arm.

Chetana and Kokila ignored her and continued to gossip and talk, while Charvi did the same with the two sisters.

It was almost ten o’ clock at night and time for Charvi to retire when the ticket collector came by. The woman in the corner all but leaped out of her skin when he asked her for a ticket.

“No ticket, no train,” the ticket collector said loudly. “Now come on. Next station is Bapatla, you can get off there. All sorts of people getting on the train . . .”

“I need to go to Visakhapatnam,” the woman said, a quiver in her voice. “Please . . .”

“This is not a charity service, Amma. Do you have any money? Any money?” the ticket collector asked.

The edge of her
sari
covering her face fell off then and everyone in the coupe gasped. Half her face was covered with dried blood and was bruised.

“Ayyo, papam,”
Kokila said, and went toward the woman, who cowered some more.

“Look . . . ,” the ticket collector began, obviously melting at the condition of the woman.

“I have twenty
rupees,
” Kokila said before the ticket collector could go on. “Will that do?”

The ticket collector looked at Kokila suspiciously and then nodded. The ticket cost more than that but he didn’t say anything.

“Thanks,” the woman said, and started to cover her face with the
sari
again.

“Amma, have you eaten anything?” Charvi asked, and when the woman didn’t respond, she held out a mango and a banana.

“We have some
vadas
left,” Chetana said as she looked for the food in her bag.

“No, no, it’s okay,” the woman said but as Chetana held the
vadas
under her nose, her protests died away.

Her name was Shanthi. She came from a small village in the Prakasam district. After she ate the food put in front of her she related her tragic story, one the other women had heard often.

“Some men have no shame,” Gayatri Devi announced. “Beat you up like that . . .
chee-chee.
But Shanthi, how can you survive now? Things were bad but at least you had a husband. Now what will you do?”

“My sister is in Visakhapatnam. I’ll live with her. I used to be the village tailor and maybe I’ll do that in Visakhapatnam. They need tailors everywhere,” Shanthi said.

“Is your sister married?” Pushpa Lata asked, and when Shanthi nodded, she sighed. “You don’t want to be a burden on your married sister. Go back to your husband. His ways will change if God is watching you.”

“Why will his ways change?” Chetana demanded. “My husband’s ways didn’t change no matter what I did. Don’t go back, Shanthi, next time he’ll beat you to death.”

“How you talk,” Pushpa Lata said, obviously scandalized. “A woman’s place is with her husband, no matter how bad he is.”

“What nonsense,” Chetana said as she patted Shanthi’s hand.

“Are you a good tailor?” Charvi asked, speaking for the first time since Shanthi told about her abusive husband and how she ran away from her village.

Shanthi nodded shyly. “I can make all kinds of blouses. All weddings in the village, they come to me. I make the best blouses and I have also learned how to make
chudidars.
Not too much demand but I make good ones, like Rekha wears in the movies.”

Kokila looked at Charvi and saw the intent on her face. She might have changed, become more conceited, and believed she was a goddess, but her heart was still in the right place.

“We could do with a tailor in Tella Meda,” Kokila said, and Charvi smiled at her. “We all live there. It’s Charvi’s home and she shares it with us.”

Chetana grinned then. “And you and I can set up a tailor shop there. I can stitch
sari
falls, I have a very clean hand.”

Shanthi looked at the women and suspicion clouded her eyes. It was not uncommon for madams to recruit unsuspecting young women for their brothels like this.

“She really is a
guru,
” Gayatri Devi confirmed. “She is Ramanandam Sastri’s daughter. Do you know who he is? A great writer.”

Shanthi shook her head uncomfortably. She obviously had no idea who Ramanandam Sastri was and what being a great writer meant.

“I promise that this will be a home for you, not another hell,” Kokila said, taking Shanthi’s hand in hers. “It’s not much but it has walls and it is secure.”

Shanthi nodded, still unsure but realizing that she didn’t have many options and this, if true, was a gift from God.

“You’ll have to pay some rent,” Chetana said. “But you can manage that with the tailoring. What do you say? Do you want to be partners with me?”

“Yes,” Shanthi said, and smiled for the first time since her husband had beaten her. Sometimes fate brought you home. Years later when she and Kokila would reminisce about her train journey to Visakhapatnam, Shanthi would always say that it was Kokila, not Charvi, who convinced her that Tella Meda could be her home too.

1981–1982
14 January 1980.
Indira Gandhi was sworn in as the prime minister of India for the second time.

16 July 1981.
India performs a nuclear test.

30 November 1982.
The world premiere of Sir Richard Attenborough’s
Gandhi
was held in New Delhi to record audiences.

The
Professor

T
here was a slight chill in the air as Kokila climbed the small wooden stool to pluck flowers from the
neem
tree growing in the front garden. Narayan Garu had painstakingly planted three
neem
trees seven years ago but only one had survived. One had died as a sapling and the second had been torn off the ground during a hurricane.

Every year, Kokila was thankful that this
neem
tree had survived, because every January, for the Telugu new year, Ugadi, Kokila plucked the
neem
flowers for the traditional Ugadi
pachadi.
Dr. Vishnu Mohan and his wife, Saraswati, along with several others in the area, also got
neem
flowers for their Ugadi
pachadi
from the Tella Meda
neem
tree.

The Ugadi
pachadi
contained the three prominent flavors, sweet, sour, and bitter. The sweet was from jaggery, the sour from unripe mangoes, and the bitter from the
neem
leaves. Subhadra bought fresh jaggery from the market for the
pachadi
and some unripe mangoes from Dr. Vishnu Mohan’s garden where six mango trees thrived and produced different and flavorful mangoes.

“Good year this year will be. I can just feel it, can’t you, Kokila Amma?” Puttamma said as she sat on the grass smoking a
bidi.

It was on the tip of Kokila’s tongue to say that it was going to be just another year, like the previous years had been.

“It’s just not the same, is it, without Sastri Garu,” Puttamma said, mistaking the sadness in Kokila’s eyes as being for the man who had died three years ago.

Kokila nodded and then smiled. “People go and people come.”

And that was true as well. There were many new faces at Tella Meda. Shanthi had settled in nicely, taking the big room in one corner for her tailoring shop and living space. Chetana and she had come up with a system of stitching clothes and dividing the income. They were becoming popular with the locals as well as with guests who would come to Tella Meda for a week or two. The regular guests would bring various pieces of cloth along so that Shanthi and Chetana could make clothes from measurements they took then and there. It was a decent business and like the bruises on Shanthi’s face, her past had faded away. She couldn’t remember her life before Tella Meda and Kokila was happy that this life was better than the previous one.

Chetana had a second daughter and she was convinced that she had yet another girl because she had refused to have her head tonsured at Tirupati when she was seven months pregnant.

“I didn’t fulfill the vow and see, another girl,” she told Kokila. But she was smiling this time. This time she didn’t care about Ravi’s disappointment or anyone else’s. This time she fed her baby and clothed her with a possessiveness that surprised everyone and hurt Bhanu, who was now seven years old and understood that Renuka was her surrogate mother while her real mother was busy with her sibling.

Chetana named her daughter Meena Kumari after her favorite Hindi movie actress. The name got shortened to Meena. She was only three years old now but she had her mother’s determination and stubbornness.

“That girl, she’ll be trouble,” Puttamma announced to Kokila as she crushed her
bidi
and watched Meena stealthily follow one of the new cats at Tella Meda. This one was really a kitten, gray in color with dark stripes running over its little body.

“She’s a good girl,” Kokila immediately defended Meena as the little girl pounced on the cat. It screeched in fright and ran away from its tormentor. Meena chased the cat into the house, making growling sounds.

“No, no, this one has malice in her soul . . . just like her mother. Mark my words, she will grow up to be just like her mother,” Puttamma said clearly. Her affection for Chetana had not increased in the past years.

Puttamma thought that a woman who couldn’t keep her husband in line was not a good woman or a strong woman. “A bad wife is the reason a man strays from home,” Puttamma said. “I know because I’ve had enough husbands stray from home.”

“Ravi was spoiled long before he married her,” Kokila told Puttamma. “You stay for some Ugadi
pachadi,
okay?”

“If Subhadra Amma is making it, it’ll taste like
amrutam,
” Puttamma declared. Indeed, Subhadra’s
pachadi
did taste like food for the gods.

Every year for Ugadi, everyone at Tella Meda wore new clothes and celebrated with a lunch of tamarind rice, fresh yogurt, rice, mango
pappu,
sweet
pulusu, gongura pachadi,
and plenty of sweet rice
payasam.

Large amounts of food disappeared as many guests came to wish Charvi a happy new year and take her blessings so that their new year would be prosperous and happy.

This year, for the first time in her life, Kokila bought herself dangling gold earrings. They were small with a little hat hanging from a gold knob. A piece of red coral adorned the gold knob. The earrings cost her all her savings, but it was Ugadi and she had promised herself she would renew herself and try to be happy this year.

“Look at those earrings,” Chetana had teased her. “Are you trying to impress someone?” she asked as she looked at the guest who had arrived just the day before.

Professor Manjunath Kaakateeya had been coming for a week every summer for the past three years. Every year he would arrive, full of anecdotes and gossip. He was a lively man who was respectful to everyone but still managed to be playful. Chetana always insisted that he looked at Kokila with a man’s eyes, to which Kokila only rolled her own.

This year, Professor Manjunath came early and he was quiet and hesitant. Something had happened to bring him here early, everyone was certain, but no one dared to ask.

“He always brings blouse pieces for his wife and daughters,” Shanthi said with concern. “Nothing this time.”

“Maybe he has had some bad news,” Subhadra said as she squeezed out tamarind pulp for the tamarind rice. “Even Charvi was talking about it. It isn’t healthy to be this sad during Ugadi. It’s the time of renewal. Ah, poor man, God knows what happened.”

Ugadi at Tella Meda was always a festive occasion. Devotional music played on the radio, accompanied by the smell of
payasam
that had been simmering for hours. Kokila could almost taste the new year, it was so palpable. This year she would turn thirty. She was an old woman already, in her middle age, with nothing to show for her years. It was time she turned her life around, she told herself. And so she had started with the earrings.