The Old Man Who Directed the Puppets

 

It was a December in the early seventies, the month of the winter holidays, and the restless Ambi had at long last reached his Nana’s village of Kollenvilai in Kanyakumari district, on the southernmost tip of the peninsula, after a long and arduous journey by train and bus all the way from the township. Hardly had the aches of that journey worn off when the boys grew fidgety, and then positively naughty, as boys will in a village home where the days are long and the grown-ups are preoccupied.

The last of Ambi’s maternal uncles, Mr Subramoni, was the typical prodigal son of an indulgent father. He had made a habit of failing his college examinations, with a regularity that bordered on devotion, and Nana was growing anxious about his life and his future. But Subramoni had a passion, and it burned for the celluloid world. He kept himself abreast of every development in Kollywood and Mollywood in the manner of an ardent student preparing for the most punishing quiz ever set, on actors and actresses, producers and directors, on-screen matters and off-screen lives, and the doings of all the heroes and heroines of celluloid. His room lay strewn with Bommai, Filmfare, Cineyug, Stardust and Pesum Padam.

Whenever Ambi and Kalyan went racing up the stairs to the only room on the first floor, the one that housed the family’s granary, there he was, either attending to his coiffure before the mirror with the gravity of a man due on a film set, or sunk deep in the gupshup that the film magazines narrated so vividly. He never tired of promising Ambi that he would travel with them on their return journey to Sunabeda, as far as Madras, where he would get down to visit the studios at Vadapalani, gather a first-hand account of the proceedings on a film set, and catch a glimpse of his favourite stars, MGR above all, and Manjula. He also considered himself smart and handsome enough to be given a chance to act in Kollywood. But when the hour came to bid adieu at Kollenvilai, the man was invariably missing, no doubt holed up in a cinema house in Nagercoil, or watching a film shoot in progress in some picturesque spot like Muttom, or at the Palace near Thuckalay.

Now, as the days dragged on and the boys grew ever more restless, Nana hit upon an idea: he would take them along to watch the evening sunset at Kanyakumari. The folks at home were not exactly enthused about this onerous task that Nana had shouldered, and they suggested, rather pointedly, that the unemployed, starry-eyed undergraduate might as well stand in for Nana and take the boys out.

Subramoni, for one, was not up to the idea at first. But it soon dawned on him that he could profit from the trip after all, since he could cadge some good money from Nana on the pretext of covering expenses and keeping the boys in good humour. So Nana agreed and pressed a Gandhi note of those days into Subramoni’s palm. Then the plan took an unexpected turn. The two elder boys, Swami and Ganesan, bowed out of their own accord, having resolved to complete the elusive eleven of a local cricket team that was raring to take on a side from neighbouring Tiruvithamcode. These two were the self-styled opening pair, Fredericks and Greenidge of Kollenvilai, and no excursion to the sea could hope to compete with that.

So it was Subramoni, the mischievous Kalyan and an unruly Ambi who resolved to make a day of it to Land’s End. But the note stayed snug in Subramoni’s pocket, and looking at Ambi, he rubbed his palms with glee as the two opening batsmen withdrew.

They set out for the local bus stand, since express buses would not deign to stop at Kollenvilai, and asked Moses to drop them there in the Ambassador. Moses had been Nana’s driver in the late sixties, and when the car was sold to an acquaintance, Nana had sent him off along with it. He was still at the wheel of the same Ambassador for its new owner, and gave the three of them the lift as a favour.

Soon an express bus to Nagercoil came rolling in from Marthandam. Subramoni ushered the boys aboard, and finding them haggling over the window seat, instructed them to sit tight and quiet in an empty seat line. Before long they saw him haggling in turn with the conductor for two half tickets, swearing solemnly that the two boys were tiny enough to merit the special concession. He was, of course, counting every paise he could save for a “filmy” day. The conductor, naturally, had to yield, if only to buy peace.

The bus wound its way through green paddy fields, with rocky hillsides rising to the west and small hamlets strung along the road, past Puliyoorkurichi, Kumarakoil, the Villukuri viaduct, Chunkankadai and Parvathipuram, and finally, after about thirty minutes, swung into the city bus stand at Vadasery. The boys leapt down, ran, and installed themselves on the cement benches of the terminus. Their hero descended last, with the unhurried dignity of a star stepping out of a studio limousine, scanning the terminus for the admirers who must surely be waiting for him to set foot on terra firma.

But the seventy-odd people waiting for buses in different directions were all engrossed in a tamasha at one corner of the stand, which the boys could view clearly from their benches. A mini screen had been put up under a low roof, and the organisers were working half a dozen puppets from behind the back screen. It was a bommalattam, a puppet show put on by the local social welfare unit, with a large red triangle displayed as publicity, urging people to take to family planning. The song that accompanied the puppet dance was a Tamil song 

நான் எங்க போனாலும் நீயும் கூடவே வர்றியே,
யாருக்கும் தெரியாம மெல்ல என் நெஞ்சுக்குள்ள குடியே புகுந்துட்டியே.
சொல்லு பாரு, நீ எனக்கு யாருடா?
பேர் வைக்கவும் தெரியல, விட்டுப் போகவும் மனசு வரல.

This song was inspired by the Hindi number from the iconic Raj Kapoor’s movie, Chori Chori.

जहाँ मैं जाती हूँ, वहीं चले आते हो, चोरी-चोरी मेरे दिल में समाते हो, ये तो बताओ कि तुम मेरे कौन हो...

Subramoni, who knew no Hindi, had not the faintest idea where the tune had been lifted from. Ambi knew very well. He had heard that song again and again on the valve radio at home, during the noon break after twelve, in the Vividh Bharati programme Aap Hi Ke Geet.

Kalyan grew so rapt in the bommalattam that he abandoned his cement bench, tiptoed up to the screen, and fell in with the bandwagon of little boys capering around the show, in spirited competition with the puppets. A little later he slipped around the screen and discovered that the whole spectacle was being run by two men pulling the strings from behind. He came rushing back to the benches to announce how the entire system was operated by a couple of puppeteers. Subramoni paid no heed. Ambi asked Kalyan to take him to see the string-pullers, and he did see them, but scurried back to the benches, lest he lose his uncle to the buses.

Subramoni’s attention had not stayed on the puppets for long. It had drifted to an old, haggard man in his seventies, who stood watching the puppetry from a safe distance, a little away from the screen. The frail old man gesticulated and gestured the whole time, as though he were issuing instructions to the dramatis personae, directing them to act as he wanted, from moment to moment. The crowd had very nearly concluded that he was insane.

When Ambi got back, Subramoni was still where he had been left, though he had edged slightly to his left, and was muttering to another man beside him, pointing a finger at the frail old man. Ambi had no idea then what Subramoni was up to.

Soon a line of buses filed into the terminus, one after another. Subramoni’s attention was fixed wholly on the old man and on where he was heading. The old man boarded a bus to Kanyakumari, one that took a detour before reaching the sunset point. Subramoni shepherded the boys into that same bus, seated them securely in the middle, and went up to where the old man sat and settled down beside him. He was seen trying to break into a conversation, though the old man was rather reluctant to speak, but Subramoni showed no inclination to give up. He pushed and plodded on until, at last, the old man could be seen nodding gently and answering in single syllables. He looked sick, morose and melancholic. For a full twenty minutes Subramoni kept him engaged, until the bus turned off the highway into a village, Agastheeswaram. Five minutes later the bus screeched to a halt, the old man alighted gently, and Subramoni shouted the boys out of the bus as he got down himself.

He followed the old man to his house, talking to him all the way, while all the man did was nod to his fellow walker. Ambi and Kalyan simply trailed the two of them, until they came to a large, old, tiled mansion, where the old man bade adieu to Subramoni and walked into a tenement on the ground floor.

Then miserly Subramoni marched the boys all the way from Agastheeswaram to the sunset point, a good two and a half kilometres. As they trudged along, Ambi began his round of interrogations. He was told that the old man had been a great film maker, one of the earliest of the early twentieth century, from the days when celluloid entertainment had not yet touched Kerala, though Tamil Nadu had already made some strides in silent movies.

They arrived at the sunset point tired and famished, just in time to watch the Sun sink, blushing and unhurried, into the confluence of the three seas. Then the boys served Subramoni with an ultimatum: take them to a hotel and feed them masala dosa, nothing less, or they would not budge. Left with no alternative, he led them to a cafe and ordered the exotic long dosa, muttering all the while, “I made a mistake in taking these devilish ghouls out of Kollenvilai,” his kutti pisasus, his little ghouls.

*  *  *

Years passed, nearly half a century of them. It was only in 2020, during the covid holidays, when Nambi sat down to watch Kamal’s Celluloid, that the whole scene at the Vadasery bus stand came flooding back to him: the puppets, the red triangle, the crowd, the frail old man at the edge of it all. The “insane” old man was probably none other than J.C. Daniel, Joseph Chelliah Daniel, the father of Malayalam cinema.

Nambi realised, all those years later, that Ambi had seen a forgotten celebrity.

And the strings, he thought. All the characters of Vigathakumaran vanished without a trace, P.K. Rosy among them, and the man who had made them was himself left standing at the edge of a crowd. The truth, perhaps, was that he never did direct the puppet show at all. But he was so passionate about film making that he stood there directing the puppets anyway, lost in it, losing sight of his way home. He had probably come to Nagercoil to see a doctor about his ailments, Nambi supposed, a diagnosis offered, alas, nearly half a century too late. Sitting there on the cement bench all those years ago, Ambi had only wondered where the old man was going, and had never thought to ask him anything.

The Hillranger writes from Dharmarajapuram, where the strings are pulled by hands no one sees, and the finest directors are often the ones who stand a little apart.

The Zamindar's Last Son and the Lord's Last Rupee

 

The Reddys were a sprawling household in Dharmarajapuram, zamindars who held vast tracts of land in and around the village. Krishna Reddy had, once upon a time, journeyed from his native Tayyuru near Chittoor and taken root in this soil. He married into a Reddy family of Dharmarajapuram, established a property agency, and in due course prospered in his trade. His household prospered too, with three less than a dozen children, most of them brought up with dignity, who unfurled their wings across the length and breadth of the country to become engineers, architects, captains of business and holders of respectable offices in the government. The last of them, Ramu Reddy, turned out to be the quintessential prodigal son of a rather indulgent father.

The old-timers of the village, however, tell another tale of the land. Quite a few of those parcels, they murmur, passed into the zamindari family when mortgaged farmlands were seized, the hapless farmers having failed to discharge their debts.

The zamindar dealt even-handedly with all his sons, and so Ramu was enrolled at the venerable Goudie Memorial School in Tiruvallur, the district headquarters, just as his elder brothers had been before him. The school dated back to the days of the sepoy mutiny of 1857 (a tumult that scarcely touched the Madras Province), when an emissary of the Scottish missionaries felt a pressing need to educate the common people and lead them out of their backwardness.

                                      (Rev William Goudie Memorial School)

Unlike his brothers, who completed school and proceeded to reputed colleges, Ramu abandoned his studies before he could sit the matriculation examination. His mind was never in his books. He preferred to wander the rural countryside, lording it over the simple countryfolk with his social standing at his back.

Ramu gave his undivided devotion to money, the very resource for which his brothers toiled and struggled to rise in life. Ramu sought the easy road. In his early days he was perfectly content to cadge money off his brothers and visiting relatives, so that he might drift along in a happy-go-lucky haze. But such indulgence could carry Ramu Reddy only as far as his family’s patience would stretch, and not a step further.

While his elder brothers settled into plush positions, thriving lines of business and respectable government service, and were wedded into decent families in Chittoor, Madras, Nellore and Gudur, Ramu Reddy stared into a bleak future.

A worried Krishna Reddy then urged Ramu to take up his property agency. He wished to hand down the tricks of the trade, and the art of making money with little effort and a measure of guile. But the old man passed away before he could wholly bequeath his legacy to his youngest son.

With all of Krishna Reddy’s children, save Ramu, having departed the village for greener pastures, the duty of tending the local temple, and of managing its festivals and village functions, devolved upon Ramu. He seized the chance at once, for these occasions brought in a great deal of cash from devotees and village folk alike, money that had to be pooled to meet the common expenses of the festivities.

Around this time Ramu also took a bride, a girl from a respectable Reddy family of Mydukur near Cuddapah. She bore him two sons. They lived a rich and lavish life, to the envy and chagrin of the neighbourhood.

Soon Ramu Reddy grew adept in the art of mobilizing money for every occasion. There was Pongal, the harvest season revelries. There was Rama Navami, when the presiding deity was propitiated before the utsavar was borne through the village streets. There was Aadi, when folk cooked gruel beneath the open sky as an offering to Amman. There was Vinayaka Chaturthi, when the elephant God was celebrated with great pomp and splendour for three days at the very least, before a procession carried the sculpted divinity to be immersed in the Kosasthaliyar flowing past the village. There was Vaikunta Ekadasi, when the Lord granted his devotees darshan of his “Vishwaroopam”. And last of all came the Margazhi winter festivities, beginning every morning at four to rouse the Lord from slumber to the chant of “Kaushalya Supraja Rama Poorva Sandhya Pravartate”.

Thanks to the austere ways of the large household, nurtured on the modest earnings of the Reddy Patriarch, Ramu also learnt the art of containing expenses and setting aside a handsome sum from the monies mobilized for the festivities. In this manner he went on amassing cash, festival upon festival. He learnt, too, to fudge the accounts and records, inflating the expenditure so that each festivity closed with a meagre residual balance.

Wondering how to multiply the wealth thus gathered, Ramu hit upon the novel notion of lending to village folk, traders and merchants of the neighbouring villages at exorbitant rates of interest, compounded daily. Ramu never believed in formal banking, so he kept all his monies in cash, at home or in the hands of his borrowers.

Ramu put on weight, prospered, and piled up a vast fortune in the process. The village folk began to entrust him with their own savings as deposits, earning interest at twenty-four per cent per annum and above, and Ramu mobilized lakhs of rupees in this fashion. He now began depositing monies in a scheduled bank in the neighbouring village of Tamaraipakkam, and before long became a well-known and successful financier of the rural neighbourhood, whom people sought out for their financial needs and unforeseen obligations.

This drew Ramu Reddy into close fellowship with the bank managers of the day. He became the extended lending arm of the bank, facilitating farm loans, jewel loans and petty loans for the villages around, and exacted a hefty commission for all the trouble he took in securing them. He soon rose to be President of the farmers’ cooperative society of Tamaraipakkam. His weight grew. His girth grew. He bought himself a Royal Enfield, though he could only be ferried about by his confidante, for he never learnt to ride it. The thump-thump and dug-dug of that machine, anywhere in the neighbourhood, heralded the arrival of Ramu Reddy.

In due course, Ramu Reddy’s gaze fell upon lands lying unoccupied, unused and bereft of cultivation. He drew out copies of land records (patta, chitta, adangal, village sketches and the like) from his father’s collection of documents, and enlisted the local surveyor to identify those parcels. He quickly mastered the tricks of the property trade, though his father had taught him scarcely a thing, and discovered an avenue for regularizing land parcels, wetlands, drylands, poromboke and whatever the prevailing classification happened to be. Colluding with the powers that be in the offices of the sub-registrars, the Village Administrative Officers and the Tahsildar, he usurped parcel after parcel in his own name or to his order.

Before long he set up a sprawling office near the bank premises at Tamaraipakkam, with separate chambers for land dealings, deposits, banking services and a host of other tertiary services incidental to the main objectives of his business.

Of his two sons, the elder went on to become a college professor, while the younger, more or less, walked in his father’s footsteps.

And then came Covid, unannounced.

With the onset of the pandemic, the village folk who had forsaken farming and the traditional modes of life began to lose their livelihoods, or were paid too meagrely to keep their households afloat. Trade and commerce ground to a halt.

People began to throng around Ramu Reddy, clamouring for their deposits to be returned. There was a ruinous run on the informal banking he offered, and he was caught utterly unawares. He struggled to refund his depositors. Ramu had never been particular about keeping proper books of accounts, save for jotting down the names of his major borrowers on scraps and slips of paper.

His efforts to recover the monies he had lent came to nothing as the pandemic refused to relent. Either the borrowers swore that they had paid him back fair and square, or they simply pleaded their inability to repay just then.

A morose and gloomy mood settled over the Reddy household. Ramu’s attempts to sell some of his clandestinely acquired land parcels fell flat, for there were no takers when everyone was starved of cash. The village folk were content merely to buy rice and lentils for subsistence, with the small vegetables of their backyards to accompany the humble soup.

The second wave of Covid, sometime in mid 2021, proved more devastating than the first. While 2020 had scarcely claimed a couple of lives in the village, 2021 brought a grim procession of casualties. Velan, a cattle farmer who owned two bullocks, was the first to go.

Sometime in early July 2021, when the birds and bees had hardly stirred, I heard the long wail of a woman behind my village home. It was Lakshmi, beating her breast, lamenting the sudden passing of her husband, Ramu Reddy. At the inquest, I was told that he had been brought dead on arrival at the general hospital at the district headquarters in Tiruvallur.

I went early to pay my last respects to the departed soul. Having laid a wreath upon the glass box that held his mortal remains, with a circular one rupee coin stuck on his forehead, I turned back, retracing my steps homeward, when Anwar Basha, the local butcher and my errand guy, whispered into my ear:

“Sir, Korona illai onnum illai saar. Avar tharkolai senjuttaru.” (No damned corona, sir. He simply took his own life.)

=============================================

The Hillranger writes from Dharmarajapuram, where the Margazhi mornings still begin at four, and the Lord wakes, mercifully, without being billed for it.

Karikala Ambi Rides Out to Koraput

Bhanja Mandap on a Saturday evening, when the township theatre authorities had a fresh release running, was as close as Sunabeda came to a proper Tamil village sabha. The theatre owed the community nothing beyond a screen and a projector, but the township's Tamil families had long ago appropriated the evening for their own purposes, arriving as if summoned. Families arrived early, not for the film so much as for the hour before it — the aunties comparing the season's mango pickle, the uncles arguing cordially about the previous month's cricket score, the children conscripted into standing still while somebody's mother adjusted somebody else's collar. It was the one evening in the month when the township's scattered Tamil households, otherwise thinly distributed across sectors and shifts, gathered themselves into something resembling a community.

Word of what was showing travelled by a method that owed nothing to posters or the newspaper's film page. The township market, and one or two other vantage points besides, had wooden boards on which old newspapers were pasted layer upon layer, and on these some anonymous municipal hand announced each week's attraction in dark blue ink — a dye of uncertain origin, mixed locally, that bled faintly into the newsprint and gave every title the slightly haunted look of something written underwater. The board offered only the name of the film, nothing more, rendered in a transliteration that owed rather more to enthusiasm than to orthography. That week, at the market, it read: RAJA RAJA COZEN. Ambi had stood before it for a full minute on his way back from an errand, turning the word over, unable to work out how a perfectly respectable Chola emperor had been quietly naturalised, by the sheer accident of English spelling, into somebody's cousin.

Ambi, twelve years old and freshly conscious of his own opinions, worked the crowd the way a much older man might work a wedding reception — scanning faces, cataloguing who had come, who hadn't, and above all, whether anyone his own age had turned up worth the trouble of talking to. This particular evening, the returns were poor. The LKG Teachers' boy was down with mumps. The twins from Q-type quarters had gone to their grandmother's for the holidays. Iyengar Dilip was nowhere to be seen. Ambi was beginning to resign himself to an evening of adult conversation — a fate he considered only marginally better than school — when he saw her.

She was standing a little apart from the main knot of people, next to a man Ambi didn't recognise, in a canary yellow pavadai that caught what little light the entrance offered, and she was, unmistakably, his age. Ambi had in fact seen her once before — at the previous week's Sangam meeting, a duller affair involving someone's lecture on Carnatic music appreciation, where she had sat two rows ahead of him and he had spent forty minutes memorising the back of her head rather than the lecture. He had not, on that occasion, managed to speak to her. He was not going to repeat the omission tonight.

He walked up with the swagger of a boy who had rehearsed nothing and was about to discover the cost of that. "I've seen you before," he announced, which is not, strictly, an opening line so much as an accusation. The girl — who would turn out to be called Nandini — regarded him with the polite, unhurried wariness of someone who has been raised to be civil to strangers without being encouraged by them. She said very little. Ambi, undeterred, or perhaps simply unaware that he ought to have been deterred, tried a second approach and a third, each greeted with the same composed silence, until it became clear even to a twelve-year-old that a direct assault on Nandini was not going to succeed.

So he did what any resourceful boy does when the front door won't open: he tried the side entrance. He turned to the man standing beside her, and, with the particular gravity boys reserve for showing off in front of girls, asked, "Sir, is it true this temple in the film has stood since Rajaraja Chola's time, without so much as a crack, for nearly a thousand years?"

The man, who turned out to be Nandini's father, looked faintly startled to be addressed with such confidence by a boy roughly the height of his own hip. "You know about Rajaraja Chola?" he said, one eyebrow travelling upward.

"My father tells me everything," Ambi said, with the modesty of a boy who has decided modesty is unnecessary. "He has the book. Ponniyin Selvan. By Kalki."

"Is that so." The man's amusement was giving way, visibly, to something closer to interest. "And which do you think is the greater temple — the one at Thanjavur, or the one his son built afterwards, at Gangaikondacholapuram?"

Ambi, who had opinions on this exact question and had been waiting his entire short life for someone to ask it, did not hesitate. "Thanjavur is older, so it should get the respect. But my father says Gangaikondacholapuram has a softer stone, so the carvings came out better." He paused, weighing the matter with visible seriousness. "I have not decided yet. It is a difficult question."

The man laughed outright at that — not unkindly — and answered generously, warming to a subject he clearly enjoyed, and within a few exchanges Ambi was holding forth on how the two temples compared, each side of the argument delivered with the settled authority of a boy who had never once been required to defend it before a sceptical audience. This last fact he had off Raman, who — cornered often enough by his son's relentless questioning on all matters historical — had taken to supplying him, unprompted, with entire chapters of Chola history, largely lifted from his own well-thumbed copy of Kalki's Ponniyin Selvan, which sat on the shelf at home like a family heirloom nobody was quite permitted to touch without permission.

It was at this point that Nandini, who had been standing to one side with the air of someone enduring adult conversation, found herself listening. And then, to Ambi's very great satisfaction, joining in — first with a question, then with an observation, then with something close to enthusiasm. Raman, who had drifted over from the main knot of families in search of his son and arrived just in time to hear Ponniyin Selvan being invoked, could not resist joining in himself, supplying a few episodes of the serial that neither Ambi nor Dasarathan had between them — the poison-tipped arrow, the fire at the temple, Kundavai's fierce and complicated loyalty to her brother — until the four of them, father, son, Dasarathan and daughter, stood discussing Ponniyin Selvan's prophecies and Arulmozhivarman's destiny as though they had known each other for years. Ambi, watching Nandini's face change from polite indifference to genuine interest, arrived — with the total, unexamined certainty available only to twelve-year-olds and poets — at a conclusion he did not trouble to question: God had made Nandini for Ambi. There was, as far as he was concerned, no further evidence required.

The lights dimmed and the families dispersed to their seats, sector by sector, in the loosely enforced but universally understood hierarchy of who sat where at such a screening. Ambi lost Nandini in the general shuffle and spent the newsreel and the first ten minutes of the film twisting around in his seat, ostensibly to wave at an uncle, in fact conducting a methodical survey of the hall. He found her eventually — right at the back, in the corner of the topmost row, a small patch of canary yellow against the dark, her face lit every few seconds by the flicker off the screen. It was, from where Ambi sat, an impossible distance to close. He tried, twice, inventing errands that took him up the side aisle — a forgotten handkerchief, a sudden and wholly fictional need to find the water tap — but each time some obstacle presented itself: an aunty blocking the aisle, an usher with a torch, his own mother's hand closing firmly around his wrist the second time, on the reasonable suspicion that a boy who needed the water tap twice in fifteen minutes was up to something.

He gave it up, eventually, and let the film run its course — the Chola armadas, the temple, Sivaji Ganesan's magnificent scowl — without retaining a great deal of it, because a part of his attention remained fixed, for the rest of the evening, on a small yellow shape in the top corner of the hall. When the lights came up and the families began the long process of finding their chappals and their children, Ambi looked for her once more and did not find her — swallowed up, along with her father, into the general exodus. He walked home behind Raman and Chella that night carrying nothing more substantial than a face, a voice he had barely heard, and the memory of a canary yellow pavadai — which, for a twelve-year-old freshly convinced of divine intervention, was quite enough to be going on with.

❈

It did not fade. A fortnight came and went, and if anything Nandini's face had grown more vivid in Ambi's memory rather than less, in the manner of things that are handled often and carefully in the mind. He turned the matter over so persistently that Raman eventually noticed the particular, unfocused look his son had taken to wearing — the look of a boy doing complicated sums that had nothing to do with arithmetic — and asked him what the matter was.

Ambi, who had never in his short life shown the slightest instinct for concealment, told him outright. He wanted to know about the girl from the cinema screening, the one with the father who knew all about the Cholas.

Raman did not need to search his memory for this one; he supplied it at once. He had, after all, been introduced to the man himself that same evening at Bhanja Mandap, before the film began — the two fathers exchanging the usual pleasantries a little apart, while their children conducted a rather more consequential negotiation of their own nearby. The family were not residents of the township, Raman said; they had come across as guests of somebody's relative. The father was one Mr Dasarathan, a senior government officer posted at the district headquarters in Koraput. Not Sunabeda. Koraput.

Ambi absorbed this piece of geography the way a general absorbs the location of an objective.

❈

The plan, when it arrived, arrived with the complete, unshakeable confidence of a twelve-year-old who has never once had to account for consequences. Raman was away for a couple of days on an official commitment — this Ambi correctly identified as an opportunity rather than an obstacle — and the coming weekend was a holiday. He told Chella, with a straight face that would have done credit to a much older and more practised liar, that he was going out on a picnic with his friends and would be back by evening. Chella, who had no particular reason to doubt him and every reason to be glad of an hour's peace, packed him off with a small tin of idlis for the road and thought no further about it.

What she did not know — what nobody in the household knew — was that the "friends" did not exist, the "picnic" was a fiction, and the vehicle for this entirely solo expedition was to be Raman's own bicycle, borrowed for the day on the reasonable calculation that at twelve he could finally manage the reach and the road without disgracing himself.

He set off a little after ten in the morning, freewheeling past the Factory Manager Mr Madekar's bungalow with the particular sense of occasion a boy feels when he is up to something the Factory Manager himself would certainly not sanction, on down to NAC and Township 1, past the MIG factory and Chikapara, and across the timber bridge that spanned the Kolab — a stretch he covered in the manner of a boy who has correctly identified that he is doing something forbidden and glorious. He rehearsed, as he rode, the speech he intended to deliver to Nandini upon arrival — several versions of it, each more eloquent than the last, none of which would survive first contact with an actual audience, though Ambi could not have been expected to know this yet. He pictured himself received, admired, perhaps invited to stay for a meal. He did not picture, at any point in this extensive rehearsal, a security guard.

Soon he was out of the township altogether, freewheeling past Dhumriput — a village that would, within a few years, disappear under the Kolab's rising waters, though on this particular morning it was still very much above ground and entirely unconcerned with Ambi's errand — and up onto the Jeypore–Vizianagaram highway proper, where the traffic thinned and the gradients began in earnest. Undulations that had looked, on no map Ambi had consulted because he had consulted none, considerably flatter than they turned out to be in practice, now presented themselves one after another. He puffed. He panted. He got off and pushed on the steeper stretches, glancing about first to make sure no one he knew was watching a general on foot beside his own horse. He allowed himself a stopover at the College at Landiguda, ostensibly to rest, in fact to work through a fair portion of the idlis, and pressed on, reaching Koraput about two hours after setting out — sweating, saddle-sore, and still, remarkably, undeterred.

Koraput itself, when it arrived, was a great deal bigger and a great deal less obliging than Ambi's imagination had prepared him for. He made enquiries — of a paanwallah, of two schoolboys who did not know, of an old man who sent him confidently in the wrong direction — before finally locating, well beyond the railway terminus, a mid-sized government bungalow that answered to the name of Mr Dasarathan, whom Ambi now understood, from the size of the compound and the gravity of the gate, to be rather more than an ordinary government officer — a senior man of the IAS cadre, no less, which explained a good deal about the compound wall and rather less about why nobody was at home.

At the gate stood a security guard of the school that regards twelve-year-old boys on borrowed bicycles as a category requiring firm handling. Ambi, drawing himself up to his full and modest height, announced his business with what he hoped was official gravity.

"I have come to see Nandini. Dasarathan Sir's daughter."

The guard looked him over — the bicycle, the boy, the general absence of any accompanying adult — with the unhurried scepticism of a man who had seen a great many things arrive at that gate and very few of them worth the trouble. "Who has sent you?"

"No one has sent me," Ambi said, which was, if nothing else, the truth. "I have come myself."

"From where?"

"Sunabeda."

The guard considered this piece of information for a moment, as though weighing whether it changed anything. It did not appear to. "Dasarathan Sir left this morning. Malkangiri. Flood relief."

Ambi absorbed this, and rallied. "And Madam? And—" he hesitated fractionally over the name, "—Nandini?"

"Gone to Rayagada. Wedding in the family." The guard delivered this second fact with no more ceremony than the first, and looked, if anything, faintly entertained by the boy's evident deflation — two short sentences, and the entire architecture of the morning lay in ruins on the gravel.

Ambi stood at the gate for a moment absorbing the scale of the anticlimax. Somewhere in the calculation that followed, a small, practical, entirely unheroic thought surfaced and would not be talked back down: Rayagada was a further stretch again, in the opposite direction, and even a boy in the grip of certainty that God had made Nandini for him could recognise, on reflection, that there were limits to what a single pair of legs owed to divine intervention in one day. He had cycled about two hours, up a road he had grievously underestimated, powered by idlis and unfounded confidence, to arrive at a locked gate and a guard who regarded the whole affair as a minor and faintly amusing interruption to his afternoon. There was nothing further to be done. There was no appeal to be lodged. He turned the bicycle around.

The ride back was a different undertaking altogether from the ride out. The slopes that had felt like a glorious obstacle course on the way up felt, on the way back, like a personal grievance. The idlis were long gone, and so was the confidence that had accompanied them. Somewhere on that road Ambi composed, and discarded, several explanations he might offer Chella for his lateness and his evident exhaustion, none of which survived his own scrutiny any better than his speech to Nandini had survived the guard's two sentences. In the end he decided, correctly, that the safest account of a picnic that never happened was the shortest one.

He reached home a little after five in the evening — tired, sore, thoroughly deflated, and considerably older, in some small private way, than he had been at ten that morning. Chella, seeing the state of him, put it down to an overlong day's play with friends who had evidently run him ragged, and did not enquire further. Ambi did not correct her.

He never saw Nandini again. The township's roster of visiting families turned over, as such rosters do, and Mr Dasarathan's transfer, when it eventually came, took him to some other district headquarters that Ambi never learned and never asked after. What remained — for a good while afterward, and perhaps, in some quiet corner, still — was a canary yellow pavadai in the corner of a darkened hall, and the memory of a morning when a twelve-year-old, entirely on his own authority, decided the matter was worth two hours up a mountain, and found out, the way these things are usually found out, that it wasn't his to decide.

The Hillranger writes from Dharmarajapuram, where a Royal Enfield now does the climbing Raman's bicycle once did, and where certainty, at any age, still occasionally rides off a great deal further than the facts can carry it.

Ambi's Cyclonic Storm

 

It was the early seventies, and a devastating cyclonic storm had just finished ravaging the Andhra coast with considerable thoroughness when Raman decided, with characteristic resolution, that none of this was any reason to postpone his youngest sister Mangalam's wedding. He had been saving money for over a year, dispatching funds in careful instalments to his paternal aunt in Ponneri. Ponneri was one of those small, unhurried towns that sit quietly north of Madras, going about their business with the serene indifference of places that have never felt the need to announce themselves. It was here that Mangalam had been living under the old aunt's guardianship, and it was here that Raman had been directing three months of meticulous wedding preparation. A cyclone was not part of the plan, but then, cyclones rarely consult anyone's plans.

Three days before the family was due to depart, news arrived at the township that railway tracks between Vijayawada and Nellore had been torn up at several points, roads damaged, bus services disrupted across the state. Raman stared at this information briefly and then proceeded to pack the large squarish leather bag that contained everything the family would need for the journey and return — a portable household compressed into cowhide — and ushered Chella, Ambi and Kumaran onto the early morning bus from Nowrangpur that arrived at the township bus stand near the town market at six in the morning, already almost full. The conductor had barely raised his whistle to signal departure when an old man who had been sleeping in one of the seats — sleeping with that complete, boneless abandon that only the very old can manage — suddenly woke up, looked around with the wild eyes of a man who has no idea where he is, and shouted that he needed to get off, was this Jeypore? The conductor, a thin, lanky young man of about thirty, informed him with barely contained exasperation that this was the township, that the bus did not go to Jeypore, and that he had specifically asked the old man to get off at Borigumma — and the old man had slept off to glory all the way past it. The old man gathered what dignity was available to him and hurried off the bus.

What followed was the kind of journey that only a man with a sister's wedding on his conscience could endure with equanimity. The ramshackle bus wound its way down the eastern ghats — pausing at Pottangi where the crew stopped to pay their obeisance to Hanuman, and at Sunki at the summit where Ambi, undone by the combined assault of coconut pieces, diesel fumes and winding gradients, went to a corner of the road and parted company with everything he had eaten since morning, Chella producing a lemon for him to smell and Raman pressing a few aromatic betel nuts into his hand — before descending to the Andhra plains and reaching Vizianagaram at half past twelve. The Madras Mail arrived on time at one thirty but ran only as far as Vijayawada, the cyclone having made further travel by rail impossible. At Vijayawada, APSRTC bus services had been suspended entirely. Raman, after considerable exploration, located a private tourist bus heading to Tirupati, negotiated passage with the conductor through the universal diplomacy of a five-rupee note pressed discreetly into a willing pocket, and the family breakfasted at the VLR stall at the station before boarding. As the driver started the engine, the devotees among the passengers called out in chorus — "Govinda! Govinda!" — an auspicious invocation in Telugu households seeking the Lord's blessing for the journey to his abode. In Tamil households the same exclamation carried the approximate meaning of: at God's mercy. Both interpretations seemed equally apt. The feisty driver drove through the day and into the night on battered roads, kutcha paths right through hamlets that no buses ventured hitherto and shallow water bodies and sometime around dawn the bus reached Sullurpeta, where Raman and family alighted, found a local bus heading south toward Pulicat, and arrived at Ponneri an hour or so later — three days after setting out from the township.

At the Ponneri bus stand, Raman hailed a horse-drawn tonga — a publicly available conveyance that clip-clopped passengers about town for a negotiated fare — and after some haggling, the family settled themselves inside, on a mat laid over generous hay that offered the occupants a degree of cushioning against the road's opinions. The tonga made its way down Hariharan Bazaar Street and pulled up in front of a pyol abutting a long stretch of household. Raman's paternal aunt, Pattammal — a formidable woman in her late seventies who managed large households and larger crises with equal composure — opened the grill door and ushered them all in.

They had made it. Mangalam's wedding was still on.

— — —

Ambi had no remembrance of having witnessed a complete wedding before, and weddings, insofar as he had formed any opinion of them, seemed to involve a great deal of activity directed at no clear purpose that he could identify.

What he understood immediately and completely was Mangalam.

Raman's youngest sister took one look at Ambi and an attachment was formed, the kind that occasionally happens between people who recognise something in each other that neither could name. Ambi was no less drawn to her. While the adults — Raman, his parents, his younger brothers, Mangalam's elder sister and a typically reticent fufaji and the ancient Pattammal — busied themselves with the hectic logistics of a three-day wedding, Ambi attached himself to Mangalam's side and entertained her with detailed accounts of his school life and township adventures, to which she listened with genuine interest and delight. He was not wrong. Mangalam was happy to have a small, earnest, talkative boy for company, and Ambi was happy to have found, in this unfamiliar coastal town, someone who was entirely and exclusively his.

The seaside climate had its own views on the matter. Ambi, accustomed to the cool hill air of the eastern ghats, developed an allergic response to the coastal humidity that rapidly turned into a bronchial asthma attack. Pattammal proposed taking him to her trusted doctor. Ambi refused to go unless Mangalam accompanied him. The tradition was firm: a bride-to-be was to remain at home for at least a week before the wedding rituals began. Ambi was equally firm on his condition. The standoff continued until Raman stepped in, bundled Ambi into a bullock cart with the old aunt, and proceeded to the clinic — Mangalam's participation having been successfully vetoed by the combined weight of tradition and Raman's patience running out.

Ambi returned a couple of hours later with bronchodilators and an expectorant syrup, and found Mangalam waiting. She put him to bed, administered his medicines, sat beside him and lulled him to sleep with the quiet assurance of someone who knew he would be all right. He was. Within two days he had recovered fully.

But with the wedding now only a few days away, the house had taken on a different character entirely. When Mangalam was busy, Ambi took it upon himself to loiter from room to room in the large house, with a curiosity for people and things. Soon he came upon the timber room in the backyard to spy upon his father Raman and Pattammal talking heatedly over money matters. Raman was quietly grappling with an unplanned funding gap that had appeared from nowhere — most of the accumulated savings he had been dispatching to his aunt over the past year were unavailable for the marriage expenses, a discovery that must have landed like a stone in still water. As a last resort, (Ambi reckoned many years later) Raman commuted fifty percent of his IAF pension to bridge the shortfall — a decision made without fanfare, without complaint, and almost certainly without anyone else in that busy house fully understanding what it cost him. Relatives meanwhile arrived in all hues, anchoring themselves at Pattammal’s home, filling every available corner with noise and bags and the cheerful self-importance of people who have come a long way for an occasion. Mangalam was absorbed into the preparations — present but not accessible, near but not his. Ambi grew pensive. He did not have the vocabulary for what he felt, but he felt it completely.

— — —

The three-day wedding commenced after the entire contingent moved over to the Kalyana Mandapam, the venue for the grand gala celebrations on the other side of the town beyond the railway bridge, closer to the Kari Krishna Perumal Temple.

The first morning brought the Naandi Shrardham — a ritual preceding an auspicious event to seek the blessings of the manes — and the evening the Nichayathaamboolam, the formal engagement ceremony. Ambi sat through it watching a stranger sit beside Mangalam with a familiarity he found deeply objectionable. He tugged at Chella's sleeve and demanded to know who this impudent man was and what precisely he thought he was doing, sitting so close to our Mangalam. Chella told him to be quiet and go play with Kalyan and Ganesan, his cousins from Kollenvilai, boys of his own age. Ambi transferred his interrogation to Raman, who told him matter-of-factly that Mangalam was getting married to the Mappillai — the groom — Surya, who has a good job at a government research undertaking and that Surya will henceforth protect and take care of Mangalam for the rest of her life. He wondered aloud why Raman could not continue to protect Mangalam himself — if not in Ponneri, then back at their own place in the township. Raman merely frowned at him and said, "You are too young to understand these matters." The words passed through Ambi and left no impression, because the idea that anything could alter the fundamental arrangement of the world as he currently understood it — that Mangalam was Mangalam and therefore available — did not register as a real possibility.

The evening brought the Janavasam — a procession ritual announcing to the world at large of the ensuing marriage — in which the bride is taken in a decorated car to a nearby temple, the groom in another. Ambi managed, by methods not precisely documented, to get himself into Mangalam's car. She was pleased to have him there. For that brief hour the world was restored to its proper order. Ambi went to bed that night with mixed feelings, turning over the day's strangeness, but anchored by the evening's rightness.

Dawn the next day broke to the loud play of Nadaswaram and Mridangam, announcing the main day of the wedding with the unambiguous authority of a proclamation. Chella rushed Ambi through his bath and dressed him for the occasion, fielding his questions with the economy of someone who had budgeted a fixed number of answers for the exercise: "yes, no, maybe, I don't know all that, Ambi."

The rituals unfolded. Kasi Yaathirai was performed — the theatrical tradition in which the groom pretends he has renounced the world for Kashi, and the bride's family must persuade him otherwise. Ambi found this genuinely entertaining, though he may have been rooting for the wrong side. Then Surya and Mangalam were seated together before the sacred fire, and the rituals proceeded through their ancient order while Ambi watched with awe, fascination and a growing unease he could not name.

The Nadaswaram reached its piercing peak as Surya tied the thali — the sacred thread — around Mangalam's neck. Then Surya took Mangalam's right hand in his and held it, and did not let go.

Ambi stared. He was thoroughly confused. He was also, though he would not have known the word, possessively green with jealousy that tormented him no end. Who was this Surya from nowhere, and by what right did he take such liberties with our Mangalam?

He turned to Chella and complained, bitterly and at some length, about the fundamental ridiculousness of what he was witnessing. Chella delivered a sharp slap to his face and told him to mind his own business. Ambi retreated to a corner of the wedding hall and sat there shedding tears, unable to understand why the world had arranged itself so unfairly against him.

Pattammal, doing the rounds, warming up with guests seated in the hall, finally saw a morose Ambi in a corner, depressed and teary-eyed. She had, from the moment Ambi arrived at her grill door, taken the measure of this boy with the accuracy of long experience. She dried his tears, took him by the hand, led him to the assembled guests and introduced him to the doctor's little daughter, Valli — approximately Ambi's age, probably the most captivating person he had laid eyes on, standing there in her paavadai (traditional long skirt) with a smile that was infectious.

She took both children to the kitchen, instructed the cook to feed them sweets and savouries, and turned them loose in the garden outside with instructions to play until further notice.

Mangalam was forgotten with a speed that would have been alarming had anyone been paying attention.

Ambi and Valli ran and jumped and frolicked through the wedding hall's precincts with the focused energy of children who have found each other. They had lunch together — Ambi talking to Valli considerably more than he ate, until Chella threatened to send Valli away if he didn't finish what was on his leaf, whereupon he ate in rapid, virtuous silence and waited by the dining hall entrance for Valli to emerge. They picked flowers in the garden. They commandeered the gardener's hose pipe for purposes the gardener had not intended. They had their evening snacks together.

Then the doctor came to fetch his daughter.

Ambi pleaded with Pattammal to let Valli stay. She negotiated with the doctor — she would bring Valli home by evening after dinner. The doctor, who trusted the old woman completely, agreed and left in his chauffeured Fiat. Ambi and Valli had their dinner. The Doc's car had come to fetch Valli. Pattammal then had to wean away Valli, not before assuring Ambi that Valli would return the next morning. He believed her completely and went to sleep.

He woke at dawn to find the hall quieter. Most people had gone. A few relatives sat around in the relaxed manner of those whose work is done. There was no sign of Valli. The old aunt told him gently that Valli was unwell, but that they could perhaps visit her at her father's house in the evening.

Chella dragged Ambi to breakfast. Mangalam and Surya sat directly across from him, having their meal together in the easy manner of people who were now, by every measure available, each other's. Ambi's face fell. The despondency that Valli had so thoroughly dissolved came flooding back.

— — —

It was the last day. The kitchen was busy packing Kattusadham — parcels of rice and accompaniments — one for each member of Surya's entourage. Ambi watched without understanding what it signified. He grew quiet. Pensive. Morose in the way children are morose when they sense something ending without knowing quite what.

Then came the moment he had not foreseen, because it had never occurred to him that it could happen.

Five bullock carts were summoned. Surya's entourage loaded their belongings, along with the seer-gifts given away by the bride’s family to the couple. The carts formed a small procession in the street. Mangalam and Surya took the last cart. Her kith and kin bade her farewell. The procession began to move — down Hariharan Bazaar Street, toward Ponneri railway station.

Something broke open in Ambi's chest.

He understood now, with the sudden terrible clarity that comes when the thing you didn't know you were waiting for arrives all at once, that Mangalam was leaving. Not for an hour. Not for a ceremony. Leaving — going away with Surya to Madras, where Surya worked, and not coming back to this house on Hariharan Bazaar Street, and not coming back to the township in the eastern ghats, and not coming back to any place where Ambi could find her.

He broke free from Chella's hand and ran.

He ran after the carts, down the street, past the shops on Hariharan Bazaar Street, his small legs working with the furious conviction that if he could only keep pace, something might still be salvageable. Mangalam looked back and saw him. She could not help herself — she wept, copiously and without restraint, calling to him to go back, that she would return, that he must go back now. Ambi was in no mood to retrace his steps. He kept running.

He ran all the way to the underbridge. The carts turned right at the junction toward the station and disappeared into the din and the ordinary indifferent commotion of a morning in Ponneri.

Ambi stood at the turn for a moment, looking at the space where the last cart had been.

Then he walked to a culvert near the underbridge and sat down.

The street went about its business around him, indifferent and unhurried. Carts passed. People passed. Somewhere, a vendor called out his wares. The morning had places to be. It spared no thought for a small boy sitting alone on a culvert at the edge of Hariharan Bazaar Street, somewhere between bewilderment and grief, turning over in his mind — without quite the words for it — the unfairness of life.

The cyclone that had ravaged the Andhra coast had long spent itself. The one inside Ambi was only just beginning.

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The Hillranger writes from Dharmarajapuram, where weekends are long, memories longer, and somewhere in the distance, a bullock cart is always turning right.