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.
Posts
