Song of the Cuckoo Bird: A Novel (2 page)

One room adjoined the bath area but Ramanandam Sastri didn’t show her the room, nor did he tell her what it was for.

A staircase from the courtyard led up to the open terrace where Ramanandam Sastri said some of the kids slept on warm summer nights. The Bay of Bengal lay ahead, an unbelievable blue, shimmering like a silk
sari,
and Kokila truly fell in love with the house when she saw the bay.

Ramanandam Sastri had then taken her to the kitchen to meet Subhadra, who lived in the
ashram
and took care of all the cooking. Subhadra was a portly woman, her skin dark as coal, her hair slick with coconut oil and tied in a neat bun. She wore small gold earrings, a thin gold chain, and two thin gold bangles, one on each hand.

Subhadra had a soft voice that Kokila would soon learn turned gruff when she became angry.

“This house used to be grander,” Subhadra told Kokila as she gave her a tiffin of
idlis
left over from breakfast and some coconut chutney. “Out in the verandah and courtyard you can still see the tiles, brought from Mysore, especially made for Tella Meda. Srikant Somayajula, a contractor from Hyderabad, built this house. But during the
gruhapravesham
itself his wife died. He never lived here; no one from his family did. Imagine that! Some people have terrible luck.”

Kokila ate the slightly hardened
idli
with the spicy coconut chutney and listened to Subhadra talk about the house, the people, Charvi, and everyone else.

Even though the kitchen was massive and could easily seat thirty people, meals were served outside in the verandah, Subhadra told Kokila, where a long knee-high table stood between thin strips of coconut straw mats used for seating.

The kitchen had been built to feed an army. The stove had six burners instead of four and there were several large cupboards for storage. On the stone-tiled floor there was a wooden floor knife with its blade laid down, like a ship that had lost its mast. A large stone mortar stood on one side with an equally large pestle. It was used to make the
idli
and
dosa
batter from soaked
urad dal
and rice every Saturday and Sunday, Subhadra said, and she explained to Kokila that grinding the
dal
and rice was the worst thing she had to do every week.

“When the house was built all the rooms had ceiling fans. Not anymore, though,” Subhadra said as she fanned herself with a straw fan.

“What happened?” Kokila asked as she finished eating and washed her hands in the plate with the remaining water in her glass.

“Somayajula-garu was so distraught after his wife’s death that he left the house to looters and the like. When we came here the house was all but ruined,” Subhadra said. “We had to clean it all up, whitewash the walls. We set up the bathrooms; just had to, couldn’t have Charvi taking a
chambu
of water and going out, now, could we? But it has been all worth it—we live here rent free.”

“Rent free?” Kokila’s eyes widened.

“Hmm,” Subhadra said, and smiled. “Everyone should be so lucky to have a saint like Charvi live in their house. So, of course, Somayajula-garu doesn’t charge us a
paisa.
”

Charvi was Ramanandam Sastri’s daughter. There were different stories as to how Charvi became a
guru
and a representative of God itself and Kokila wasn’t sure what to believe. According to Subhadra, Charvi was goddess,
guru,
and saint all rolled into one.

“We found the house because Dr. Vishnu Mohan—he lives three houses down the road—and Sastri-garu are friends. So when Sastri-garu was looking for a house to rent, Doctor-garu suggested Tella Meda,” Subhadra said. “Did you know that it was Sastri-garu who first saw the light of knowledge in Charvi?”

Ramanandam Sastri had been living in Tenali when the alteration of his soul began and he saw the light of God in his daughter.

He hadn’t started out believing in God and Hinduism. He’d started out an atheist, always ridiculing his wife, Bhanumati, for her religious beliefs. Manikyam, his eldest daughter, with her fat pockmarked face, also turned to God; Ramanandam Sastri, who never learned to mince his words, told her that praying to God wouldn’t change the fact that she was ugly. But his second daughter, Lavanya, came out looking like a movie star. Her skin was light in color, her eyes light brown, almost catlike; she was beautiful. She grew up to be vain, stubborn, and shallow, and ultimately amounted to nothing.

And then Bhanumati had a third child. Ramanandam’s third daughter was ethereal and he named her Charvi, which means “beautiful.” When Charvi was but a week old, Ramanandam saw the light of God in her and deemed her a Devi, an Amma, a goddess. His sudden transformation from nonbeliever to believer was viewed with some skepticism by Bhanumati but she knew it was not her place to question her husband and she didn’t.

For years after Charvi was born Bhanumati did not get pregnant again and quietly endured the role of wife, mother, and particularly mother to an Amma. She was quiet and complacent and she fulfilled the duties prescribed to her.

Eight years after Charvi’s birth, the much-desired son was born. It had been a time of great joy, as both Bhanumati and her eldest daughter, Manikyam, were pregnant at the same time. And they each, by the grace of Lord Venkateshwara Swami, had a son.

Ramanandam named his son Vidura, for the great wise man from
The Mahabharata
who narrated the entire battle between the Pandavas and Kauravas to the blind king, Dhritrastra. Bhanumati died just a month after giving birth to her son because of a blood clot in her uterus, but not before she extracted a promise from eight-year-old Charvi that she would watch over her baby brother. It was a promise Charvi was unable to keep and until the day she died she felt the burden of that broken vow.

People who flocked to Ramanandam for his words, his books, and his writing didn’t question his ability to see a Devi, a goddess, in his daughter. The number of people who came to stay with Ramanandam increased dramatically. In the beginning it was students who came to discuss his work and pay their respects. Of course, everyone stayed for free.

Ramanandam could barely pay his bills on his meager schoolteacher’s salary and his book sales didn’t bring in much money even though he was quite a well-known writer among the intellectual elite. It was, after all, only the elite who could pretend to believe in Ramanandam’s theories that a woman had the right to independent living beyond the men in her life. Ramanandam wrote about a woman being a woman first and then being a daughter, sister, wife, or mother. He wrote about how man and woman were equal in nature and how he believed that a woman’s ability to give birth actually made her superior to man. Through his writings he encouraged women and men to break the traditional trappings in their life and be freethinkers and live a life unfettered with the customs and mores of an ancient culture.

But not everyone believed he was the champion of women that he claimed to be. His own daughter Lavanya did not respect her father and felt that he did not live up to what he wrote about. Her father, the great defender of women’s rights, would complain if she was seen talking to a boy; he would complain when she talked about a woman’s freedom to marry anyone from any caste; he would turn his nose up when she would talk about living with a man without the benefit of marriage. For all his writing about the rights of women and gender equality, when it came to his own daughters Ramanandam was quite traditional. He even had his eldest daughter, Manikyam, married to a doctor, Nageshwar Rao, the arranged way.

It was after Manikyam married and left the family home that the scandal happened. And what a scandal it was. The news was fanned with grotesque imagery and plenty of gossip.

Ramanandam’s sister Taruna, who was almost twenty years younger than he, had been married at the tender age of twelve to an aging Brahmin. Her husband died six months after the marriage. Her husband’s family wanted their twelve-year-old daughter-in-law to shave her hair off, wear white, and live in a corner of their house, as was traditional.

Ramanandam refused to let his young sister be subjected to such anachronistic and demeaning rituals, so he brought her to his house. He helped her go to medical college and become a doctor. She set up a small clinic, open to women only. She dealt particularly with “woman troubles”—one of which was unwanted pregnancies.

It didn’t take long for everyone in Tenali to find out that Taruna Sastri was performing abortions. Everyone talked about it. Taruna’s clinic was broken into, people threatened her, and one night someone even put a knife to her throat, warning her to either leave Tenali or stop the abortions. Finally Taruna left for Bombay, where an old classmate offered her a job in his clinic as a general practitioner. She stopped performing abortions. Ramanandam accused her of abandoning her principles and she responded by cutting him out of her life.

The backlash against Taruna’s radical ways struck Ramanandam harshly too. He lost his job as a schoolteacher. He took his family and moved to Tirupati, to the famed Bhagwan Hariharan
ashram.
They stayed there for almost a year before Ramanandam decided that he needed to find his own home. Already devotees were coming to Bhagwan’s
ashram
to see Charvi, causing some tension between Ramanandam and Bhagwan Hariharan. It was time to find Charvi an
ashram
of her own.

Ramanandam wanted a large place with minimal rent. When he lost his job, he was allowed to keep his pension, and that would have to suffice as income. As luck would have it, he found Tella Meda.

“The owner, Somayajula-garu, didn’t want to rent the house to anyone. After all, his wife died here, you know,” Subhadra told Kokila. “But when he heard about Charvi he just handed it over, free of charge. That was four years ago. Charvi was just fifteen then, but you know how it is with saints—age is not material.”

Subhadra was awestruck by Charvi, convinced she was an incarnation of a goddess.

“You can see it in her eyes,” Subhadra claimed. “Do you know she named this house? Before her the house had no name but then when we did the
gruhapravesham
and the boiled milk spilled on the floor, Charvi just looked at the house and said, ‘This is Tella Meda.’ And this became our
ashram.
”

But when Kokila met her, Charvi clearly said, “This is not an
ashram
and I’m not a
guru
or your religious leader or your god. Others call this an
ashram,
but Tella Meda is a home, and this is now your home for as long as you want and need it.”

Kokila should have been in awe of Charvi, but she was suspicious of such disarming modesty from a
guru.

The
Cuckoo
Bird
Girl

I
n the beginning, Kokila was afraid, unsure of her new surroundings and the people in them, but soon her shyness dissolved in the good company of her two new friends, Vidura Sastri and Chetana, another young girl who stayed at Tella Meda.

Ramanandam Sastri believed in freedom. He believed that children should be allowed to run as they like and do as they please. If they didn’t want to go to school, they didn’t have to go; if they wanted to eat only
chakli
for dinner, they could; and if they wanted to stay up until midnight watching the stars, that was allowed as well.

Coming from a conservative Brahmin home, where rules and regulations had shaped her childhood, Kokila dove into her new, unfettered life with unmatched eagerness. The
ashram
to her was a grandiose house where food was always available and no one ever scolded her. Later on Kokila realized that the food was actually meager, and that it would have been better if someone had scolded her and taught her to live a more disciplined life. But at the time she thought she had fallen into heaven.

Kokila sat with Charvi while she performed the morning
puja,
making long garlands with jasmine flowers. They prayed in the room that was the music and temple room. Only Charvi was allowed to touch the mahogany temple, which she cared for every day with love and respect and plenty of wood oil.

In those days not too many people lived in Tella Meda, and several rooms were empty. Guests would come and stay in those empty rooms. They would come to visit Ramanandam Sastri and then they would be mesmerized by the goddess they could see in Charvi’s face. And before they left they would leave some money behind as they paid their respects to the
guru
of Tella Meda.

“Are you a goddess?” Kokila asked Charvi once, and Charvi became sad. She was twenty-one years old then, but she seemed much older than her years.

“No,” she replied softly.

“But everyone says they see Amma in your face,” Kokila prodded.

Charvi closed her eyes then and sighed. “I can’t control what they see.”

Kokila wanted to ask her what she saw when she looked at herself in the mirror but didn’t. Charvi’s eyes were already closed in meditation and Kokila didn’t have the courage to question the
guru
’s godliness.