Song of the Cuckoo Bird: A Novel (54 page)

Tella
Meda,
the
House
with
the
White
Roof

T
he last time Kokila stepped out of Tella Meda was in the beginning of the new millennium.

When she looked back at the house she still saw the most beautiful house she had ever lived in. But now she could see the marks of the years, and she could, she thought, see that the soul of the house was not innocent and untouched anymore. The house had been built in 1955 and now was being broken down in 2000. It was a short life for a house but Kokila thought with a smile that it was not the number of years but the quality of those years that were important.

Tella Meda would be demolished the next day. A big ball of iron would be rammed through its center and then workers with hammers and chisels would come and chip away the rest. And in a few days, they would take all the remains away and there would be nothing left.

The house’s foundation would be dug up and a new foundation would be laid in. A new house would emerge—a house bigger than Tella Meda, a house with more rooms, a house that would stand higher, a house in which more people would live than had ever lived in Tella Meda.

“But some of us will remain,” Kokila whispered to Tella Meda as she stood in its verandah.

It was really Babu who had come up with the idea. He’d found out that since Kokila and Chetana and the others had lived in Tella Meda for over twenty years for no rent, according to the law, the house was actually theirs and they could fight for it in court. Neither Kokila nor Kedarnath wanted that, so a deal was struck. Of the thirty apartments to be built on the plot of land where Tella Meda stood, one each would be given to Kokila and Chetana since they had lived in Tella Meda the longest and had the most right to the house.

When Kokila looked back and remembered the people who had come and gone, there were so many who hadn’t had any impact on her; yet there were those who had broken her heart and there were those who had eased her sorrow.

This house,
she thought,
has had an interesting life.
It had been named by a goddess and had embraced her presence within its walls for four decades. And she had been fortunate as well, Kokila knew, for she had lived with brave women such as Charvi, Chetana, Subhadra, Shanthi, and Renuka. She had watched the birth of the future, Meena, Bhanu, and Karthik, and the death of the past, Ramanandam and Narayan Garu.

Yes, Kokila decided, hers had been an interesting life too, and with her son poised to realize his dreams, she felt her life had been a fruitful one as well.

She walked through the garden, now unkempt since no one had bothered with it after the sale of the house had been announced. When she reached the metal gate and opened it, she felt a pinch in her heart.

This house, this home of hers, would be gone tomorrow.

Next year she would come back here, to live in an apartment that one could see the Bay of Bengal from, but she knew that it would never be the same again. There would be no coconut trees to make dolls with, there would be no courtyard to sit around, no big kitchen to cook in and bicker with the others about chores.

And maybe that was okay too. She sighed and closed the rickety gate as she stepped away from the house. Maybe it was okay that Tella Meda would go, as Charvi had gone. Maybe it was right as well because Tella Meda had been Charvi’s regardless of who the legal owner of the house was.

At least one person was glad the house was being demolished, Kokila thought with a laugh as she walked away from Tella Meda toward Bhanu’s house, where she was going to live with Chetana until the apartments were built. Chetana had clapped her hands when Kokila told her Tella Meda would be torn down. And Chetana thought it was ironic that after all her attempts at trying to get away, she would live the rest of her life in an apartment on the same land where the house with the white roof had stood.

It was dusk and the lilting notes of a cuckoo bird’s song filtered through the air. Kokila looked back at Tella Meda one last time.

She stood and watched the house as the sun set into the shimmering waters of the bay, and when the house became just a silhouette, she turned around and walked away.

Song of the
Cuckoo Bird

AMULYA MALLADI

A READER’S GUIDE

A Conversation with Amulya Malladi

Amulya’s mother, Lakshmi Malladi, helped her write
Song of the
Cuckoo Bird
. Not just by saying all the encouraging things mothers say, but by telling her the stories that found their way into this book. Amulya feels that this book is as much her mother’s as it is hers.

Amulya Malladi:
So, how did you think the book turned out? I took a lot of the stories you told me to write this book. I made them my own stories, but still . . . they started from your descriptions.

Lakshmi Malladi:
You wrote the stories differently, but I felt that they were still real, still very down-to-earth, not contrived at all. I liked the book. I liked the characters very much, maybe because they seemed so real to me.

AM:
A friend of mine, Jody Pryor, who always helps me with my books while they are being written, felt that the book was quite an experience for her. She thought everything was new and fresh. I think she might have even felt that parts of the book were unbelievable.

LM:
No, no, I was not surprised by any of the stories of the characters. I have seen it all . . . nothing was unrealistic or unbelievable. But tell me, which character did you feel had the unhappiest life in the book? Let’s see if we agree on that.

AM:
I think that would be Charvi. She got pushed into a life she never really had a chance to reject and in the end she was all alone. She lived the life that others expected her to live. She was this
Guru,
this goddess and she never had a husband, a lover, children . . . she was lonely in the end.

LM:
I agree that she was the saddest person in the book, but not for the same reason. I think that her life was the most painful because she was never sure if she was a goddess. She doubted herself all the time and probably lived with guilt that she was cheating all these people by taking their money. To not be sure of who you are, especially if you feel you are being dishonest . . . that is probably the hardest way to live. What do you think?

AM:
I agree. I never thought about it that way, but you are right. That is a hard way to live. So, who did you think had the fullest life?

LM:
That has to be Chetana. I don’t like her as a character, she is self-centered, thankless . . . I just didn’t like her. But she managed to have a full life. She got married, had children who did well, and she was the only one who did whatever she wanted. Her husband died and she wanted to have a boyfriend, so she went and got one. Her daughters took care of her in her old age. She was the luckiest of them all.

AM:
I think Chetana was the happiest, and she is also my favorite character in the book. She is so spirited and she was a lot of fun to write. She is very selfish and yet, there is something redeemable about her because she is Kokila’s friend and Kokila is the best person in that entire story. She is the one with the big heart and good soul, the one who wants to help others, save others.

LM:
Yes, Kokila is the person with the big heart, but her life was so tragic. You know, all the others who lived at Tella Meda were people who had lost something before they came there. Kokila came there and lost her life. She lost her parents, yes, but it was after she came to Tella Meda that she lost the chance for having a life . . . you know, to be a wife and mother.

AM:
But she got to become a mother; she adopted Karthik.

LM:
Yes, yes, but it isn’t the same thing. She had no man, no husband, and even the men she
had
been with . . . What good would even the sex have been with that old man, Ramanandam? Why did she go with him?

AM:
I think she was in love with him. I think Kokila is the kind of woman who needs to be needed. She loved Ramanandam because he needed her, which is never a good basis for a relationship.

LM:
And it was the same with the professor whose daughter committed suicide.

AM:
Yes, Manjunath. He was also a sad man who needed someone to hold on to him, so she volunteered.

LM:
Manjunath I can understand, he sounded like a good-looking man, but Ramanandam?

AM:
Love is blind!

LM:
What I can’t understand is why Charvi didn’t do something to stop the relationship. She seems very possessive about her father, so why didn’t she?

AM:
First, I think she did try, in her way. She spoke with her father and then she also spoke to Kokila, she—

LM:
She didn’t speak to Kokila about it; she just told her that she knew she was sleeping with Ramanandam.

AM:
I think that was her way of trying. Charvi, I think, has a strong moral code and she feels she must not interfere in anyone’s life. She would never forcefully try to make anyone do anything. But no one else in the
ashram
said anything either. Subhadra actually tells Kokila that she thinks it is a good thing that she is having a relationship with Ramanandam and Kokila is furious. She has always thought of Subhadra as a mother but a mother would never be happy about her daughter sleeping with a man twice her age, a man she could not marry or have children with.

LM:
Still, it is a shame that no one did anything to help Kokila. She was just a child, what did she know? Do you think Ramanandam did not encourage her to go with her husband because he liked her?

AM:
No, I don’t think he had designs on her from then. I hope not; that would be even more disgusting. I think he truly believed that children needed to do what they wanted to do without interference from elders.

LM:
That girl needed some elders in her life, people who would have told her that staying at Tella Meda was going to ruin her life.

AM:
Okay, I have a specific question. Some women writers, especially from South Asia, are accused of always portraying men in a bad light. Were all the men in my book bad?

LM:
No, no, not at all. You had Shankar, who was a very good man. Narayan Garu who lives at Tella Meda, he is also a good man. But Ramanandam was not a good man, and that professor . . . Manjunath, he was somewhere in between. And you also had women who were not very nice. There are good people and bad people; it is not specific to being a man or a woman. And then there was that American man, Mark. Do you think he was interested in Charvi?

AM:
No, I don’t think so. I think he was interested, even fascinated about this side of India, but he was not really interested in Charvi. He had a crush on her, but that was about it.

LM:
He seems not to believe in her, so why did he come to Tella Meda?

AM:
He came looking for something new, but he didn’t come back. And he respected Charvi, I think. He thought she was a smart single woman making the best of the hand she was dealt.

LM:
When Mark asks her why she takes money and gifts from people, Charvi says that if they want to give something, who is she to say no. Which is really nonsense! Still, it must not have been easy for Charvi to accept that money and those gifts when she was in doubt of her godliness.

AM:
But don’t you think she felt she deserved the money and the attention because she was making so many sacrifices by being a goddess?

LM:
I don’t like Charvi much. But then again I have to like her as well because she helped so many people by giving them a roof over their heads.

AM:
I agree. Tella Meda is part
ashram,
part women’s shelter, part orphanage, and part home for the elderly.

LM:
But she also never helped anyone get out of there. She never encouraged Kokila or Chetana to have better lives, to leave Tella Meda and become productive members of society. And they didn’t make much of an effort either.

AM:
People get used to something and then they are afraid of making changes. Chetana and Kokila were used to living in Tella Meda and they were afraid of going out and facing the real world.

LM:
It is like a goat that is tied up; it gets used to eating the grass around it and does not want to wander away from the pasture where it is tied up. Who knows what is there beyond the pasture? Here it gets food and it is safe, god only knows what the goat will find outside. I feel that is why they stay.

AM:
That is a fine way of putting it.

LM:
And also, they are a family at Tella Meda. They are not related by blood but there is a sister figure, there are sort of children, a father figure, a surrogate mother . . . all in all, with all these broken pieces, these broken people, they get together and become a family in Tella Meda. And there is security with family!