Song of the Cuckoo Bird: A Novel (14 page)

“This is terrible.” Kokila sighed. “We need to do something. I will ask Sastri Garu to speak with Ravi. He will listen to his grandfather.”

“Whatever you say,” Puttamma said, obviously thinking that Ravi was a lost cause and no one could help him. “Maybe Charvi Amma could talk some sense into him. She is such a bright light in all our lives. I come here to clean so that I can catch glimpses of her. She is such a goddess, looks so beautiful and peaceful. Once, I touched her feet and she put her hand on my forehead . . . ah, what bliss.”

“Ay, Puttamma, the verandah is dirty, dirty, dirty,” Subhadra called out from the kitchen window that looked into the front garden. “Stop smoking that disgusting thing and get to work, woman.”

“Coming, coming.” Puttamma threw her
bidi
on the grass and stepped on it with her bare right foot. “That Subhadra Amma, she has no patience. I’m here all day, so I take a
bidi
break—what’s wrong, eh, I ask, what’s wrong with that?”

She muttered all the way back into the house while Kokila picked flowers and tried to figure out how to solve this crisis with Ravi and Chetana.

“You know I believe in personal freedom,” Ramanandam said clearly as he stroked her naked arm and then cupped her small breast.

Kokila shrugged his hand off by moving her body. “This is not about personal freedom, Ramanandam, this is about wasting one’s life.”

“It’s his life,” Ramanandam said with a smile, and kissed her softly on the mouth. “If people knew about you and me, don’t you think they would try to tear us apart?”

She couldn’t win an argument with him. He was smarter, wiser, and not afraid to use his advantage.

“For Chetana’s sake you must talk to Ravi. He can’t wander around brothels and toddy shops. I thought he was going to start college but . . . Manikyam sends money and he spends it on toddy and women and nothing is left to go to college with,” Kokila said angrily. “And you won’t do anything about it. He’s your grandson. If you won’t try to steer him onto the right path, who will?”

She sounded like a nagging wife; it was there in her tone, her demeanor. Instead of getting irritated Ramanandam was amused.

“This is not funny,” Kokila raged at him.

“You are beautiful,” he said, and kissed her. “You are so beautiful, so young, so soft . . . I can’t believe that I have you with me like this. When you are gone in the morning I can’t believe you stayed all night. It feels like a dream, like a fantasy.”

Kokila softened immediately. These were words she lived to hear. All day she would listen to his voice and remember his words and remember his hands and remember the slide of his body into hers.

When Chetana told Kokila about sex it sounded like a rushed thing, a physical thing, but with Ramanandam there was affection, there was love, and most of all, there was beauty.

Chetana had always thought sex to be an ugly thing. How could it not be? Her mother had been in the business of selling it and Ravi didn’t even bother to take Chetana’s clothes off when they did it. He just hiked Chetana’s
sari
up and undid his pants. Kokila felt sorry that Chetana would never know the ecstasy of love and she couldn’t explain it in words anyway. And what would she say?
Sastri Garu is a wonderful lover? Chee-chee,
just because they were doing it didn’t mean she had to announce it to the world.

“I’ll ask Charvi to talk to Ravi, then,” Kokila said thoughtfully as Ramanandam started to doze off.

He chuckled. “You never give up, my little tigress,” he said before falling asleep.

Charvi was no better than her father.

“This is a personal matter, Kokila. If Chetana came to me, I could help. If Dr. Nageshwar Rao or Manikyam Akka came to me, I would try to talk to them and then ask them to talk to Ravi. But we shouldn’t interfere in someone else’s marriage and life,” Charvi said. “I don’t think drinking is . . . And going to brothels? He is really going to a prostitute? Well, everyone has their
karma
to contend with.”

Kokila didn’t understand why Charvi couldn’t just talk to Ravi and see if maybe she could lead him away from bad women and alcohol. What was this nonsense about personal matters? Everyone at Tella Meda always interfered in everything, yet now they were pretending that they didn’t?

“Just talk to him,” Kokila said in exasperation. “He’s your nephew. Just talk and see if you can’t convince him to start college, that’s all.”

Charvi smiled. “You’re a good friend to Chetana. I’ll see what I can do. But he’s chosen his path. Only he can make the changes in his life to make the wrongs right.”

Kokila didn’t say anything to that. Even though she agreed that only Ravi could change his life, she didn’t think that help was unwarranted. The strongest people needed help and Ravi was such a weakling.

“I’ll try and talk to him tonight after
bhajan
—if he’s there, that is,” Charvi said in a placating tone.

“Thank you,” Kokila murmured, and left Charvi to do whatever it is she did all day in her rooms.

Lately, Kokila was starting to get frustrated with Charvi and everyone else in the
ashram.
The more she looked at the finances, the more she was depressed. Narayan Garu had not paid his “rent” in four months. Renuka hadn’t bothered to give Subhadra any money for eight months now. Ravi and Chetana had promised to put some money into the running of Tella Meda but they had not. Kokila now knew in intimate detail how much money Manikyam sent to her son without her husband’s permission and where that money went. But Kokila felt she couldn’t demand that anyone give money because she didn’t add any income to the Tella Meda finances either.

She needed a job, she decided. She talked about it to Subhadra, who was instantly enthusiastic and had several suggestions.

“You can talk to this woman, she comes to the temple every Wednesday afternoon and distributes raw ingredients for
papads
and takes back the finished product,” Subhadra explained. “You go there tomorrow. You can sit right here in Tella Meda and make
papads.
This girl, she’s eight months pregnant, her husband is a soldier, he’s in the war. She makes thirty packets every week and gets thirty
rupees.
It’s good money.”

When Kokila asked Chetana to join her she was reluctant but went along with her to the temple on top of the hill all the same. It was the same temple where Chetana had married Ravi and the priest nodded at her when he saw her.

“How is your husband doing?” he asked, and Chetana murmured appropriate words in response.

“One of these days I’m going to say my husband’s a drunk who can’t get his
lingam
up at night. Maybe then they’ll all just shut up and stop asking me how Ravi is doing,” Chetana said angrily.

Kokila wisely kept silent. These days it was better to not offer any marital advice to Chetana, as she would go into a rage. Charvi’s conversation with Ravi had never taken place and Kokila didn’t press the matter. She herself tried to talk to Ravi but he made a blatant pass at her, which made Kokila realize that Ravi was probably as unredeemable as everyone said he was. Maybe Chetana could save his soul but Kokila seriously doubted it.

Kanka Lakshmi was a large, matronly woman who wore a hand-woven white cotton
sari
with an orange border. She sat on a chair while the women who made
papads
sat on the floor in a corner of the temple. Two large gold rings adorned her ears and a diamond nose ring flashed as she spoke. She wore gold bangles and a big thick gold chain, but it was not a
mangalsutra.
Kokila didn’t think the woman was married.

A large dark man carried supplies into the temple and carted away the finished packets of
papads
to a three-wheeled yellow and black auto rickshaw at the bottom of the hill. Kanka Lakshmi spoke in a manly and stern voice. She chastised the women who hadn’t made enough
papads
and those who had ruined their ingredients and produced bad
papads.
She even fired one woman, accusing her of stealing ingredients and using them in her kitchen instead of for the
papads.

Radhika was eight months pregnant and the only woman who was praised for her good work. She rented a room in a house owned by an elderly couple near the temple. She was waiting for her husband to return from the war. The rumor, of course (which had already reached Chetana and Kokila, who had been at the temple for less than an hour), was that Radhika was carrying an illegitimate child and the husband at war was just a fabrication to cover up her sin.

Radhika was a demure woman with beautiful fair skin. If you didn’t look at her belly, she didn’t look pregnant at all. Her arms and face were still thin and she had a healthy glow about her. She talked very softly and often smiled shyly. How anyone could think this woman was sleeping around and conceiving illegitimate children, Kokila wasn’t sure. She looked like a nice woman, a wife and a mother-to-be.

Kanka Lakshmi asked Radhika to stay back with the new women who wanted to make
papads.
There were four of them, including Chetana and Kokila.

“It’s very simple,” Kanka Lakshmi said. “Radhika, can you make some so that we can show these women how it is done?”

Radhika immediately went into action. “I’ll make plain
papads
and then those with chili flakes in them, okay?” she said sweetly.

She measured flour, salt, oil, a tablespoon of turmeric and water and poured them into a big steel bowl. Then she kneaded the mixture until it was a soft dough. “Now you have to roll out the
papads,
” she explained, and pulled out a wooden base and a thin rolling pin. Efficiently, she rolled out fifteen
papads
in no time, and then made more dough, this time adding red chili flakes from a packet.

“We give you everything you need. If we want you to make
papads
with chili flakes or black pepper, we will provide you with the ingredients,” Kanka Lakshmi told all the women.

Radhika made three more
papads
and then set the dough aside.

“Sometimes if you don’t put in enough water or too much, the dough gets lumpy or dry, then you have to be careful and add more flour or water accordingly,” Radhika told the four women watching her carefully. “Now, you try,” she said to Kokila.

Kokila hadn’t cooked much in her life but she had participated in all kitchen duties at her father’s house and at Tella Meda, so Kokila started out easily.

“Excellent,” Kanka Lakshmi said when Kokila made
papads
and put them side by side to let them dry. “Once you are done, you leave them in the shade, never in the sun, and let them dry for a whole day. The sun will ruin the
papads
so don’t leave them outside without paying attention. And then you stack them one on top of the other and put them into the packet that we give you.”

Kanka Lakshmi showed them how to seal the plastic packet with a burning candle. That seemed to take some effort to get the hang of but all four women were hired to make five packets of
papads
each for the first week.

“If you do well, we’ll ask you to make more,” Kanka Lakshmi told them. “We give you enough ingredients for the
papads,
so don’t use them in your kitchen. I will not tolerate thievery. You get paid one
rupee
for each packet and there are twenty-five
papads
in one packet. I pay more than the others do. They pay only seventy-five
paisas
per packet. So, do a good job and you will make good money.”

Chetana was also excited now because it had been easy to make
papads
and money was in short supply, what with Ravi spending it on toddy and that whore Sundari.

“We live in Tella Meda,” Kokila told Radhika as they all packed up to leave. “Do you want me to carry your supplies?” she asked politely, because despite being healthy, the woman was still eight months pregnant.

“Thank you so much,” Radhika said. “I live right down there.” She pointed to the houses on the street below. “It’s the stairs, to get up and down from the temple, that are difficult for me.”

The temple was up on a hill and it took thirty stairs to get up. But from the top of the temple you could look down and see all of Bheemunipatnam and on a clear day all the way to Visakhapatnam.

Radhika made tea for Chetana and Kokila when they got to her room. The kitchen area had been set up in one corner of the room with a pump kerosene stove and a few other essentials. A small coconut-straw bed leaned against a window, which was where Chetana and Kokila sat. There was an old three-legged chair leaning against the wall, and a straw basket that had been modified to be a baby’s bed next to the kitchen area. An old black Philips radio sat on a rickety wooden table in the kitchen area. There wasn’t much but the small room seemed overcrowded.

“The landlady is very nice,” Radhika said. “They rent out two rooms, one I took and one two college boys have taken. They are just horrible.”

Chetana sipped the tea quietly, looking around for evidence that the woman did have a husband. So far she could see absolutely nothing that indicated the woman was married, except for the
mangalsutra
she wore, which didn’t mean anything anyway.

“It must be hard being on your own,” Kokila said sympathetically.

Radhika nodded. “Very hard. In the beginning every drunk on the street would come and knock on the door. And those college boys . . . I am eight months pregnant and they still . . . The nonsense they talk! But the war is going to be over soon, they say on the radio, so my husband should come back home. I don’t think he’ll be back before the baby is born, but I hope he will.”

Chetana set her teacup down and saw a small framed picture on the windowsill. “Is this your husband?” she asked of the man in an army uniform.

“Yes,” Radhika said, and smiled shyly. “This was taken right after he was commissioned. That was when we got married. We knew each other since we were children. We were almost neighbors growing up. Our parents are still very angry. My parents don’t want to see me and . . . They are Brahmins, you know, and I’m a Reddy, so it wasn’t a marriage either side approved of.”