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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.
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.
[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.
