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.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

Lucid Intervals of Parental Custody - The Road to Nandapur

 

By his own reckoning, Ambi was now a boy of means. The ten paise handed to him by Ramayya represented, it is true, only the visible portion of his fortune; to it he had added a further fifteen, cadged off Chella in modest instalments over the course of a month, in the patient manner of a tax collected a coin at a time. Twenty-five paise in all — a sum that, to a child of that era, carried the unmistakable ring of a treasury. And a treasury, in Ambi’s private accounting, earmarked for one purpose only: it was precisely, he had determined, what a boy would need to get himself to Nandapur.

He had, of course, made the tactical error of announcing the first instalment. Coming home flushed with his ten-paise wage, he had laid the news before Chella as one lays down a trophy — and Chella, after regarding him a moment with frank incredulity, had simply laughed the whole thing away. That laugh, Ambi would later have cause to reflect, was the last easy moment the household would enjoy for some days.

For the matter did not rest there. A couple of evenings on, Raman came home from the factory wearing the particular expression of a man who has heard something about his son from a third party and has been chewing upon it the whole way home. He accosted Ambi directly: “What, precisely, were you doing loitering about the LZ quarters in the company of those wretched neighbours and their treadle grinder?” Ambi had barely opened his mouth when Chella — with the fatal helpfulness of mothers everywhere — supplied the entire history unprompted, from the sharpening of the kitchen Aruvamanai clean through to the ten-paise earnings.

Raman was furious. It was a fury of a scale Ambi had not previously witnessed, and it arrived without preamble: a single resounding blow across the boy’s back with the stick — the very stick with which Ambi was accustomed to driving his cycle tyre about the streets, his own faithful instrument of liberty now turned to quite another use. Before Raman could give fuller vent to the thing, and work his way — as he plainly intended — from the boy’s head to his heels, Ambi let out a howl fit to wake the entire neighbourhood, made for the door, cleared all three steps of the threshold in a single flying leap, and was gone.

He struck out straight for the forest picnic spot across from the PZ blocks. Raman went after him — bare-chested, one hand clamped to his veshti, which showed every intention of parting company with his waist — and kept up the pursuit until, somewhere short of the trees, discretion and dignity together persuaded him to abandon the chase. By then the contest had acquired an audience: the next-door neighbour Dey, and Sadanand the Bank Manager, and Rammurthy, and Mrs Basu from the next block, and sundry others besides, had assembled at their respective doorways to enjoy the spectacle of the evening’s running competition.

Ambi lay low on a cement bench under the trees until the light had gone out of the sky — until seven o’clock or thereabouts — and then, rather than creep home, did a characteristic thing: he made his way up to the central library. There, at a reading table, he drew out the book on Nandapur and bent over it in earnest, giving particular and professional attention to the sketch-map bound within its pages — the map of a kingdom he now had every intention of visiting in person.

From there, Ambi loitered down to the cinema house next door, and caught sight of Punjappa at the ticket counter, tallying the evening’s takings against the stubs of tickets issued. “What’s on today?” Ambi asked, planting himself in front of him. Punjappa, without looking up from his counting, said only, “See the poster.” Ambi walked over to it, pasted outside the main entrance: Hawas, it read. He knew a little Hindi, though not quite enough to know what “Hawas” meant. He wandered on down the aisle towards the canteen, where he found Ramu and asked him the price of a singhada. “Fifteen paise,” came the terse reply — and all Ambi could produce from his pocket was a lone five-paise coin. He turned instead to the Kaka from DP Camp, who sold peanuts and chana from a basket nearby, and bought himself a packet of roasted chickpeas, which he stowed away in his pocket for later. Then he slipped round behind the theatre to the ventilators on its right-hand side. These were built so that no one outside could get a straight line of sight to the screen — but a boy could pop his head into the open bottom of a vent and watch all the same. Ambi hoisted himself up, head through the vent, arms braced on the ledge, legs dangling in the air, and settled in to watch. A song was playing: “Teri galiyon mein na rakhenge kadam, aaj ke baad, tere milne ko na aayenge…” Before his arms, tiring on the ledge, could give way beneath him, a security guard came up from behind and delivered a stinging blow on his buttocks with a slender stick — one that reminded Ambi sharply of GB Rana, the school PT master. He dropped to the ground and fled, the guard cursing him the whole way in the choicest epithets Odia could offer.

Only then did Ambi circle back towards home, popping in the roasted chickpeas, one at a time. He did not go straight in. He first sought out his brother, Kumaran and made discreet enquiries as to whether the coast was clear — whether, that is, Raman was yet about. Learning that their father was still out, Ambi tiptoed indoors, weathered a frown from Chella that spoke volumes, took a quiet meal, and put himself to bed, lying there in no small dread of what the night, or the morning, might bring on Raman’s return.

It brought, in the first instance, an inebriated Raman, home from the market and making a determined line for Ambi’s room. Chella stood on his way, dissuading him from going over to Ambi’s bed. There followed a loud and lengthy debate in the course of which she prevailed upon him to let the matter stand over till morning — a reprieve negotiated, so to speak, over the sleeping body of the accused. For Ambi was not asleep at all. He lay with his eyes shut and his ears wide open, and so heard every word of it.

And it was a good deal to hear. Raman rounded on Chella. “You give this boy far too much freedom — and see what it earns me! It was Panigrahi — Panigrahi, of all people! — who had to tell me that my own son is roaming the township with that damned Ramayya out of the security guard’s one-room tenement, trying to earn a pence or two off that confounded ferrous tooling machine. What have I ever deprived this vagabond of? Tell him — tell him plainly — that if he cannot stick to the routines of school, I will pack him off to Ramasamy the milk-vendor to graze his cattle.”[1]

Even with judgment thus postponed, there was no comfort to be had. From his corner of the room Raman kept the boy under a baleful eye, plainly laying his plans for the morrow’s assault; and Ambi, frightened clean out of what little wit remained to him, drew the blanket up over himself from head to heel and stayed there. Sleep did not come. The night passed in one long wakeful misery, the boy turning over and over in his mind the ordeal that dawn must bring, and pitying himself thoroughly the while — as one does at that age — for having been born into so unjust a world.

Morning came grudgingly. The sparrows had begun their business about the nest in the ventilator, and the sun was not yet up, when Ambi sat himself up in bed. Raman was fast asleep. Ambi went to the door, and there found Chella already out upon the veranda, stooped over the step below, laying out the morning kolam in coarse rice powder. He waited. He drew the twenty-five paise from his private closet and pocketed it; he pulled on a full-length pair of trousers with a shirt over them — a costume of most unusual gravity for him — and he waited on, until Chella had completed her star of white flour upon the floor and gone back indoors. Then, barefoot, he slipped out, and set his face along the double road that ran beside the school.

For Ambi had made up his mind. He would go to Nandapur — not by bus, nor by any other conveyance that ran upon wheels not his own, but on his own two feet. He would walk. He would walk the whole of it, some twenty-five kilometres from his door, upon a working capital of twenty-five paise laid by for incidentals along the way. It was, the reader will observe, a strictly one-way provision. Ambi had no plans whatever to return.

He went briskly at first — across the PZ blocks, down a kutcha road to the double road, and along it towards Semiliguda, on the stretch that ran past the school. Enroute, Mrs Gopalakrishnan, who taught there and happened to be out on her balcony, spotted him. “Engada ivlovu seekiram kilambittai, Ambi?” she called down — and where, indeed, was he off to at such an hour? Ambi, in no mood for cross-examination, flung back a half-hearted “Velai irukku,” — some work to attend to — and sped on before she could think of a second question.

He was, in truth, thoroughly sorry for himself. Had he stayed, he had no doubt Raman would have fallen upon him the moment he woke, with blows and epithets in generous and simultaneous supply. He was aggrieved, besides, that Chella had not come properly to his rescue the previous evening — she had, at best, only postponed the reckoning. As for Kumaran, that saintly elder brother had kept to his usual policy of studied neutrality: neither watching the spectacle, nor worsening it, nor putting in a word to dissuade Raman, but withdrawing himself from his father’s sight altogether and sulking, as was his settled custom, at a safe distance from the entire proceeding.

His thoughts, as he crossed the circle and turned left onto National Highway 43 — the old-numbered highway, as it then was — raced a good deal faster than his legs could carry him. Nobody wanted him at home, he decided, neither his mother nor his father; and school, in any case, had never once managed to enthuse him. Somewhere in Nandapur, he imagined, some descendant of the old royal lineage must still be living, and to this personage he would present himself with a carefully rehearsed history — an orphan, without family, come to the kingdom in search of honest work at the palace. He would parade his hard-won knowledge of the Nandapur dynasty, extol the justice of its ancient rule, and trust that so well-informed and deserving a candidate could not fail to be taken in and given some small employment.

Thinking thus, he reached the highway, turned right, and struck out briskly for Semiliguda. Away to his left he presently made out the old cement-mixing machine, abandoned these many years and gently going to ruin — a relic he had visited often enough on his wandering afternoons, in the days when no other soul seemed to come there, climbing over it and puzzling out, with the seriousness proper to such research, what the great rusting thing might once have done. He walked down to it now, took a last look, and bade it a formal goodbye before returning to the road.

The sun was well up by this time, and the factory siren sounded, thin and distant, somewhere behind him. Ambi looked back more than once to satisfy himself that nobody was following — that no one had been sent to haul him home before the adventure had properly begun. He walked on until the road bent left near a hillock, and there he paused to weigh a question of some strategic importance: whether to leave the highway and cut across country to strike the Semili–Nandapur road by a diagonal short-cut, or to hold to the highway as it was. Prudence, or possibly the thought of the hotel he knew stood at the Nandapur road junction, decided him in favour of the longer, safer route.

It was there, under a vast advertisement for CEAT Tyres, that his resolve wavered for the only time that morning. He stopped, looked up at the giant hoarding, and thought — with the sudden, practical enthusiasm of a boy half his mind still at home — that he really must get Appa to buy him a brand-new CEAT for his cycle tyre; how sturdy it looked, how proudly erect, quite unlike his own poor tyre, sagging along the ground beyond all dignity, unable to roll a straight furlong without wobbling. And then, in the very next breath, the small, cold correction: that’s no use to me now… I am leaving the township, and home, for good. He walked on rather more soberly after that. The song he had heard at the cinema the previous evening kept playing in his mind all the while, hardening his resolve never to go home. Teri galiyon mein na rakhenge kadam, aaj ke baad, tere milne ko na aayenge sanam...

Semiliguda’s little row of shops came into view soon after, and with it the junction where the Nandapur road cut away to the right. Ambi had covered some three kilometres by now, and was tired and thoroughly hungry. He found the promised hotel at the junction, went in, and settled himself upon a bench. A young waiter of about five-and-twenty came to attend him, and recited what there was to be had — vada, rasagollas, singhada, dosa — while Ambi enquired gravely into the price of each, running a private census of the coins in his pocket as he did so. The vada proved cheapest by far, a pair of them going for eight paise, and a pair of them he accordingly ordered, ate with coconut chutney, paid for, washed down with a hurried glass of water, and rose to resume his march. It was by now half past nine in the morning.

He walked on, though trotting had by now given way to a plainer amble, entirely ignorant of how far Nandapur actually lay from Semili, and cheerfully assuming an hour or two would see the business done. The road bore him on confidently enough, shaded in alternation by gulmohar, tamarind, banyan, and kadamba trees, under which he would periodically halt, squat down with his legs stretched before him, and rest his back against a trunk before pressing on. At one such halt he came upon a milestone by the roadside, its lettering half worn away: “Nandapur — 15 kms.” He absorbed the figure without its quite sinking in — fifteen sounding, to a boy still buoyed by vada and confidence, very much like a number that would be somebody else’s trouble to reckon with, later.

An hour of this passed, his mind running well ahead of his feet — turning over what talk there might presently be, at home and at school, once his flight became known; and beneath that, a harder, more settled grievance. What wrong, after all, had he done in accompanying Ramayya on his rounds? He had only been helping a man in honest need. How could his own father speak of the poor as Raman had spoken of Naga’s family — with such contempt, such demeaning words? Ambi’s sense of justice, at that hour, weighed a good deal heavier in the scale than the cool comfort of home; he would rather, he told himself, have his own way early in life than bow to Raman’s whims and fancies. So, at any rate, Ambi thought.

The day grew hotter as he went. He kept walking, and then merely ambling, past a large farm that ran alongside the road, until, weary and footsore, he came upon a wayside tea shop and stopped. Tea itself he had no taste for — a boy raised on Chella’s kitchen was not easily won over to the roadside brew — but he bought instead some of the local biscuits, made of broken rice and jaggery, and ate them where he stood. It was by now about one o’clock.

It was at this point that the sky, which had been gathering itself unnoticed, began to drizzle — and within minutes to pour in earnest. For the better part of half an hour it came down in a proper deluge, and Ambi took shelter beneath a great tamarind tree whose foliage was thick enough to turn most of it aside. He sat himself down at the foot of it, and there, as the rain finally ceased and the day settled into a grey and dripping quiet, he fell asleep, as a cool breeze blew across his drenched body.

He woke to an overcast sky that threatened more of the same, and to a light that was noticeably, alarmingly, going out of the day. And it was here, quite suddenly, that his nerve — which had carried him a good eight or nine kilometres on bravado alone — failed him entirely, and rather more comprehensively than it had ever failed him before a mere library sign or a scolding schoolteacher. All at once he wanted nothing in the world so much as the ordinary comforts of home; he thought of Chella with a longing that had nothing whatever to do with strategy or grievance, and sat on under the tree, brooding over the whole business since the previous evening, weighed down by the plain and unglamorous fact that a twenty-five-kilometre ambition looks a good deal more manageable at dawn, on a full night’s sleep, than it does at dusk, on an empty one. Fear settled over him properly as the sun went down behind the hills to the west.

It was at this low ebb — providentially, and with the sort of timing could only be incredulous — that a jeep came rattling down the road. It was Uncle Tony Rao: Raman’s colleague at the factory and, since their days together in the Air Force, as thick a friend as the man possessed, returning that evening from some official errand out at Machakund, and quite unaware that he was about to complete, single-handed and without the smallest exertion, a rescue for which the entire township might otherwise have been mobilised by morning. He slowed at the sight of the small, solitary, and unmistakably bedraggled figure under the tamarind tree, and asked what in heaven had brought him so far from home. Ambi, at the question, simply broke down and wept — copiously, and without the least remaining pretence of the fugitive dignity with which he had set out that morning, a fortune-hunter of twenty-five paise reduced, by six in the evening, to a very small and very wet boy indeed. He blamed Raman for this misfortune and pleaded with Tony Rao not to leave him at his mercy.

Tony Rao took him up into the jeep without further ceremony and drove him not home but to his own quarters in GZ, Ambi being altogether too frightened to face his own door directly, and no one thinking to blame him for the diplomacy of it. Tony Rao muttered something in Telugu to his wife. She simply smiled and pulled Ambi’s cheeks, remarking, “Konte Kurrodu.” (Naughty Boy). Late evening word was sent to Raman that his son might be collected from the Rao household — a message that must have made, one imagines, for an interesting few minutes at the Rao dinner table — and Raman came for him on his bicycle, and brought him home in silence. It was, in its way, the most eloquent thing he had said to the boy in two days: he asked only that Ambi have his food and go to bed, which Ambi, too exhausted for either fresh terror or proper relief, was only too glad to do. Chella, who had spent the day in an anxiety she was at no pains to hide, let out a long breath at the sight of him. Kumaran, seeing his brother’s safe return, received the news with his usual air of a man hearing agreeable but faintly irrelevant weather reports from a distant town, smiled his usual untroubled smile, and returned to whatever it was that so reliably absorbed him.

What Ambi did not learn until later — and might, on the whole, have been comforted to know a good deal sooner — was that Raman had never actually panicked, nor sent word round the township that the boy was missing, nor done anything at all beyond going about his ordinary evening with the settled patience of a man who had watched this particular child before and knew his habits. He had simply been confident, in the way of fathers who have been through this once already, that Ambi would turn up again in his own good time, at somebody’s doorstep or other, considerably the worse for the experience. And so, within a day, he had.

Of the great expedition only the ordinary residue remained. Ambi discovered, on enquiry, that Ramayya had already left for Berhampore — the open road, and the man who had first shown it to him, having quietly packed up and departed in his absence, as if the universe itself had decided the temptation was best removed before it could be renewed. He returned to his library and his school routines with no further comment on the subject from anyone. Not a soul at school ever learned of the escapade; asked where he had been, Ambi explained, with a straight face that would have done credit to a much older diplomat, that he had been unwell and taken to the hospital — and in those unhurried days, when nobody thought to demand a leave letter as proof of anything, that settled the matter entirely, and Nandapur, forsaken kingdom that it was, remained exactly as forsaken as before, and exactly as far away.

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[1]Ramasamy delivered the household’s milk each morning, cycling the whole way from the NAC market, and kept a dozen head of cattle. For upwards of a year, Ambi’s alarm at dawn had been not a cockcrow but the sound of Chella and Ramasamy conducting their daily negotiations at the doorstep — chiefly concerning the vendor’s incorrigible habit of carrying water the entire distance in his can, to which he would then add a generous benediction of the precious white liquid, stored religiously in a more deserving can.

Lucid Intervals of Parental Custody

 

When this story begins, Ambi was all of ten, a boy of the fifth standard, and precisely the sort of child for whom the word wander-struck seems to have been coined. In those days the family lived at the west end of the township, near the hospital — a respectable enough address, but one that offered painfully little to a boy whose chief ambition in life was to discover what lay just a little further than he was permitted to go.

And he was not permitted to go very far. As a sub-junior of the household, Ambi operated under a strict radius, an invisible tether pegged somewhere close to the front door. There was nothing beyond the hospital, he was given to understand, and most certainly nothing beyond the nursery — and so his adventures were confined to the local repertoire: Kings, Gulli Danda, the mysterious “iron rod” game, and the grave diplomatic business of winning other boys’ marbles off them.

Now and again the iron rod game — in its more ambitious prick-trek incarnation — would carry the boys past the OCC market and out towards the ragged edges of the township, to unknown country far from the dignified precincts of Sector VII headquarters. It took a full week of rain, in the end, to set the great expedition in motion. Cooped up for the better part of a working week, the boys emerged the moment the skies relented with the restlessness of prisoners on parole; and an unscheduled expedition — got up, as always, in the innocent guise of the iron-rod-prick-trek game — steered them towards the north-western corner of the township. And it was there, that afternoon, that Ambi and his friends discovered the railroad to Suku: the line that came stealing out of the factory sidings and meandered down to Suku, a modest station on the Koraput–Vizag stretch of that German engineering marvel.

Within a few months of these mystic discoveries, Ambi’s world underwent a metamorphosis of sorts. The family moved up in the world — quite literally, to Sector III, a posher and more elite locality altogether, where the carefree GZ type-3 way of life was regarded with the sort of distaste reserved for something tracked in on the sole of a shoe. And carefree it had been. Ambi and his fellow adventurers had been, if one is honest about it, only slightly better than vagabonds with lucid intervals of parental custody — a condition advertised plainly in their persons: clothes simple and minimal and expected to last a full twenty-four hours at the very least, no slippers or footwear to boot, hair unkempt, feet muddy, and hands perpetually soiled from the honest labour of handling mud-soaked marbles, earth-pricked iron rods, and rubber balls retrieved from slush.

Amidst PZ quarters in Sector III, this would not do.

Ambi felt, from the very first, like a fish out of water. Mr Dey, the neighbour, took it upon himself to chide the boy for going about without footwear; and Mrs Dey, not to be outdone, rendered unto Ambi’s mother a great deal of free advice upon the merits of the same. The upshot was that Ambi was duly furnished with footwear — not one pair but three: one for pottering about the immediate vicinity of home, one for walking long distances, and one for school. He detested all three with equal fervour, but was compelled, at the very minimum, to wear the shoes to school.

For all that, Ambi looked forward keenly to falling in with the boys of the new neighbourhood. He prepared for the encounter rather as a soldier prepares for a campaign, marshalling his ammunition — marbles small and large, the Gulli and its Danda, a couple of rubber balls, a worn-out cycle tyre with a stick to drive it, an iron hoop for rolling, and sundry other trifles calculated to command the respect of boys of a certain age. The boys of the new neighbourhood, however, looked upon these treasures askance, and wondered — without ever quite putting it into so many words — of what earthly use such things could possibly be.

Ambi was crestfallen. Not one of his hard-won assets could purchase him a single friend in the locality. Some small comfort came from two boys in the immediate vicinity — one a classmate, the other a senior from school — though even they could muster little enthusiasm for Ambi’s heirloom possessions.

But Ambi was not a boy to hold back. If the others would not play, then he resolved to play alone. And so, on most afternoons, he was to be seen careering around the blocks driving his cycle tyre before him with a stick, or walking the double road behind his rolling hoop — barefoot, naturally, upon tar roads gone soft and treacherous in the summer heat. A dozen rounds of the ten blocks of buildings thus accomplished, he would settle upon the grass opposite the house to prise the melted tar from the soles of his feet, succeeding chiefly in transferring a good portion of it to his fingernails. His mother, Chella, having first admonished and then instructed him, would set him to work with a little kerosene — of which there was never any shortage, it being the very fuel that lit the fire on which the household’s meals were cooked.

In the course of a year, the games that all that ammunition had once promised quietly petered out. Between the need to maintain a certain dignity before the neighbours, and the settled indifference of the local boys to his primitive amusements, Ambi’s assets were, one by one, laid aside. School, until now, he had not troubled to take seriously. It was his mother who reframed the matter for him. “If you want friends around here,” she told him, “you will have to do well in school. That is how the boys will come around to you and treat you seriously.”

It was in the course of one of his exploratory wanderings around the new neighbourhood that Ambi strayed into the man-made forest that lay ahead of his home, down the double roads that ran parallel to the blocks of apartments. Some twenty acres it covered — eucalyptus and neem and a scattering of evergreens — reaching all the way to the Bhanja Mandap Cinema in the west and the DZ quarters to the north. Pressing on beyond the trees to Bhanja Mandap itself, Ambi came upon the central library, standing next to the cinemas.

One evening he tiptoed inside. Ranged behind glass panels stood a great host of books, and from their titles Ambi made out sections on mythology, on history, on novels, and — the discovery that quickened his pulse — a section given over entirely to folk tales. Gathering his courage, he approached the librarian: a stylish, lanky young man, impeccably turned out in bell bottoms, scholarly spectacles perched below a head of well-groomed curls. How, Ambi asked him, might one borrow books from the library?

The librarian regarded him much as one might regard an insect, and delivered himself, in terse Hindi, of the following: “Yahaan bachchon allowed nahin hai. Baahar jo likha hai, padke samaj lo. Ab niklo baahar.” Outside, as it happened, a board announced with perfect finality: Non-members are not allowed. Scared out of his wits, Ambi made for the door and fled home through the evergreen forest.

He sat forlorn at the dinner table that evening — a Friday — awaiting the return of his father, Raman. When Raman came home, Ambi poured out the whole tale of the library and its books and his great desire to get at them. Raman was unmoved. Only adults, he explained, were permitted to enter the library, borrow its books and carry them home; Ambi would do far better to confine his reading to the books prescribed at school. Ambi was disappointed. Long after he had been put to bed, the folk tales section returned to him in the dark, and he lay turning over the single question of how he might yet lay his hands upon those books.

Ambi wanted that access very badly indeed. He turned Chella’s advice over in his mind — how better marks at school would draw more friends in the locality — but Ambi, as it happened, had ideas of his own. Beyond the craving for the folk-tale series, there was a second attraction: a library membership was just the sort of thing a boy might flaunt about the neighbourhood, and stood to make the other boys take him seriously far sooner than any report card would. One way or another, there was no question of Ambi letting the library go.

The next morning he was up early, and presented himself at his father’s bedside to declare a hunger strike. “No food, and no school,” he announced, “until you get me those books.” Now, Raman was an indulgent father where Ambi was concerned; and rather than sit down to negotiate terms with a striking ten-year-old, he soothed the boy, bade him keep to his routines, and promised to find a way.

Raman found a legitimate way out of the challenge thrown to him by Ambi. That very evening he came home with an indemnity letter, neatly typed, undertaking to bear full responsibility for any books his son should borrow. He walked Ambi over to the library, introduced him, paid the nominal fee to enrol him as a member, and submitted the letter. The librarian looked askance at the boy still — plainly unconvinced that so small a person could be trusted to carry off his precious volumes and return them intact — but he relented, all the same. And Ambi, happy beyond measure, made straight for the folk-tale series: every last one of them bound in white, in hard case-bound covers.

Ambi became a fixture at the central library soon enough, borrowing folk-tale books one after another at intervals of a day or two — a pace that did nothing whatever for the librarian’s peace of mind. Folk Tales of Finland, Folk Tales of Poland, Folk Tales of Congo, Folk Tales of Persia, and heaven knows how many more of the series, were carried home and consumed one after another, until the day arrived when Ambi had foraged his way clean through the entire folk-tale run on the classified shelf.

His eye then fell upon the regional histories — books dealing with the very country in which the township stood. He stumbled upon the modern history of erstwhile Chikapara, the hamlet that had been evacuated and razed to the ground to make room for the aero-engine factory. It was a slim thing in coarse print, got up in a hurry — the work, most likely, of some senior hand at the factory, and meant not for any public circulation but for the handful of local history enthusiasts about the township.

The next day, home from school for his lunch, Ambi settled himself at the dining table and put it to his father directly. “Did you know,” he asked, “that your factory was built only after the desia people — the aborigines of these parts — had been chased away from here?” Raman, mildly startled, asked how on earth he knew any such thing. Matter-of-fact as you please, Ambi replied that he had read all about it in a book from the library — and produced the very volume to prove it. Raman turned to Chella. “This boy,” he pronounced, “will turn out an investigator yet.”

But it was a book on the “Nandapur- A Forsaken Kingdom” that truly took hold of him, the more so when he learned that Nandapur lay no great distance from the township. He read it from cover to cover, and as he read, the little kingdom assembled itself in his mind, its images and its events conjured up vivid and whole. Now Ambi had always been a boy given to wanderlust, and it was not long before he began to toy with the notion of going over to Nandapur himself, to see what different world might be waiting out there. He was, in short, the very “Naughty Boy” of Keats’s poem.

A couple of months on, a Telugu-speaking family of four came and settled into a portion of an apartment in the block next to Ambi’s — a middle-aged man and his three sons, Prakash, Nagabhushanam and Babu. The father took up work as a security guard at the township factory, and all three boys were duly admitted to the local vernacular high school, while Ambi carried on at the English-medium school that stood close to his home.

To Ambi’s sweet surprise, he found these boys to be every bit as rustic, as touched with the rural, as he himself had been in the old GZ days. He lost no time. He went about recovering his play equipment from wherever it had been abandoned to its fate, and set forth to renew his acquaintance with the “heirloom” assets. Books, for the present, were bundled into the back seat, while Ambi flung himself into Gulli Danda, the iron hoop and ring, the iron rods and all the rest of it with gay abandon. He was, to his great contentment, back in his GZ home days.

One day an elder cousin of Naga’s — Ramayya by name — descended upon the household from Berhampore, bringing with him an old treadle grindstone: a foot-operated affair with a flywheel, used for the sharpening of iron tools. Ramayya’s plan was to stay put for a month or so, earn a little money by his machine, and then return whence he had come.

Ambi took an immediate liking to the man and, quite as much, to his machine. He carried his iron hoop and ring across to have the bends straightened and the edges roughed out, and Ramayya made a clean job of it — the whole thing done, with precision, in a matter of minutes, and done for free. Ambi was thrilled. He hurried home and returned bearing a large knife and, for good measure, the kitchen Aruvamanai — the floor-mounted vegetable cutter — which he plucked clean out of his mother’s hands before dashing off. Chella was left looking distinctly worried, wondering whether the boy had armed himself to go and settle some score with a neighbour. He was back before long with knife and Aruvamanai alike honed to a professional edge, all of it once again for nothing and all of it in minutes — and Chella looked askance at him and asked however all this had come about.

Then, on an early morning, Ambi was rolling along with his iron hoop when Naga hailed him. “Ramayya and I are off to go round the township with the machine,” he said. “Are you coming along?” Ambi begged them to wait, hurried the hoop and ring back home, and ran back to where the two stood waiting. Off they ambled, down the double road beside the school, in the direction of the next town, Semiliguda; and skirting the circle, they turned right towards the L Zone quarters. There Ramayya set up his hawking, crying himself hoarse in the local Odia dialect — “Churi Kachi Tangia saan deba,” “Loha-patara saan kariba ke ochi?” (roughly, “Knives, scissors, axes — shall I grind them?” and “Any iron blades here to be sharpened?”) — and alternating, for the Telugu households, with “Sanai pettali, Kattulu paduna cheyyali?” (“Shall I set the grindstone to your knives and give them an edge?”).

Ambi went about the business with the air of a Sales Supervisor accompanying his firm on its rounds. He helped carry the heavy equipment, fetched the tools out from the households and delivered them back again. It was a Sunday, and most of the breadwinners were at home. One of them, a factory man named Panigrahi, recognised Ambi — though Ambi had no notion of it — as the son of his own RA-department engineer, and asked him, “Are you related to Ramayya?” “Of course!” Ambi announced, with enormous pride.

Half a dozen homes in the LZ quarters thus attended to, the three made their way to the central market. There Ramayya bought three packets of mixture from the vendor, who assembled his concoction from the various elements stowed in his rectangular glass box, topping it off with finely cut chillies and onions and a sprinkling of that pungent mustard oil which lent the whole a hot and fiery character all its own. To Ambi, after the labours of the morning, it came as sweet relief, and he consumed his share gleefully the whole way home. And before they parted, Ramayya — who had earned all of seventy-five paise over the morning’s session — handed Ambi a ten-paise coin as his rightful portion of the revenue. Ambi accepted it with gratitude, and marched home victorious.

(To be continued…)