Song of the Cuckoo Bird: A Novel (22 page)

Amma writes short letters and says that she will be back soon
but doesn’t say when. I’m very concerned, but I’m also happy to
spend this time with Mallika.

I miss you and Puttamma very much. Please give my regards to
Charvi Auntie, Subhadra Auntie, Renuka Auntie, Narayan Garu
Uncle, and Ramanandam Uncle. I miss playing with Bhanu, but
Mallika says that there might be a new baby in our house as well
and I can play with him.

Please write to me and come and see me in Hyderabad.

Love,
Manasa

The letters came in a timely fashion in the beginning and Kokila responded promptly to each. But as Manasa grew up and her memories of Tella Meda faded, the letters stopped coming. It was something Kokila had learned to accept. You could make friends with guests but it never lasted, even with regulars. Tella Meda stayed fresh right after a visit and faded away into oblivion soon after.

1975
25 June 1975.
President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signed the declaration of Emergency rule in India. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announced that emergency rule would be implemented as early as the next day.

28 June 1975.
As a response to antigovernment demonstrations, the Indian government imposed the toughest press censorship since independence.

The
Lepers

R
avi came back to Chetana and Tella Meda when Bhanu was a year and a half old. His planned marriage to his cousin, Anuradha, had fallen through when she eloped with a boyfriend from a lower caste. Apparently, it was her affair with the lower-caste boyfriend that had prompted Ravi’s aunt—Anuradha’s mother—to accept Ravi as a son-in-law even though he was already married.

Ravi had stopped going to college, not that he ever really began, as he became involved with a Baba who provided him and his friends with inferior quality LSD and
ganja.
There were several Babas around the university who in the name of Rama and Krishna sold drugs to students. It was a common enough pastime and all of Ravi’s friends from college indulged as he did. Manikyam and her husband were devastated, though. They had been sure that Ravi would put himself on the straight-and-narrow path as soon as he left the detrimental influence of Chetana behind. They cut off his allowance and threatened his independence. But Ravi started stealing money, first from home and then from his father’s clinic. When Manikyam and Dr. Nageshwar Rao discovered the theft, they declared that Ravi had crossed too many lines.

Manikyam thought that if Ravi left Visakhapatnam and went back to Tella Meda, away from that fraudulent and dangerous Baba, he would start living a clean life. But even more than that, it was Ravi’s influence on his younger brother, Prasad, that prompted Manikyam and her husband to shove Ravi out of their home.

Prasad started smoking
ganja
because of Ravi and then started drinking heavily as well. Dr. Nageshwar Rao knew that it was time to remove the bad apple from the basket before it completely ruined the good one.

Ravi had nowhere else to go, so he went back to Tella Meda, where he had a wife and a child.

The years had been difficult for Chetana. She hated Renuka with a passion because Bhanu preferred to be with that old widow rather than with her own mother. In an effort to reinvent herself, Chetana started learning how to be a tailor. In the town two women, sisters, Jaya and Sheela, ran a small tailor shop. The women were not considered to be “right,” as they ran a side business from their bedroom, the room next to where the tailor shop was. But Chetana needed money and sewing was one thing she could do, so she worked with the sisters.

Ravi went back to his old life very quickly at Tella Meda. Manikyam continued to send money to Ravi without her husband’s knowledge. Ravi continued to waste it. This time Chetana didn’t seem to care what he did as long as he gave her half of the money Manikyam sent. They both spent most of their time outside Tella Meda.

“I work,” Chetana snapped at Kokila when she asked where Chetana was all day. “I make money as a tailor. And here.” She threw a few
rupee
notes and
paisas
on the floor. “Our rent for this month.”

“Just give it to Subhadra,” Kokila told her, eyeing the money with distaste.

Was it true? Were the rumors floating around Bheemunipatnam about her friend real? Was Chetana also turning into a prostitute like her mother? Jaya and Sheela, the owners of the tailor shop, were known to be women who engaged in licentious activities with wealthy men. Their clientele was considered to be varied, including the inspector of Bheemunipatnam, a few politicians, and some other men who came from all over the region. They had loud parties in their house with foreign alcohol and Kokila wondered if Chetana was drinking as well.

“We all know you’re the one in charge, so why should I give money to Subhadra? Maybe I should’ve hardened Ramanandam’s
lingam,
and then I’d have been the woman of the house,” Chetana said with a sly smile. “You’re not lucky, Kokila, but you’re very smart, I’ll give you that.”

Every time Kokila tried to speak with Chetana, the conversation ended with Chetana being angry and resentful. Confused by her friend’s behavior, Kokila finally gave up. The relationship that had bound them together for years, through good times and bad, was breaking. Kokila tried to look back and see when it all had begun. Was it before Chetana’s marriage? After? Was it when Bhanu was born? Or had their friendship been sloughing off even before?

Subhadra tried to explain to Kokila that Chetana was behaving like this because she was sad and depressed. Her life had not turned out the way she had envisioned and what it was now was painful and embarrassing to her. If she was lashing out at everyone, it was a sign that she needed help. But Subhadra had always supported Chetana, through all her shortcomings, all her mistakes, and Kokila paid little heed to what she had to say.

The beautiful walls of Tella Meda seemed to want to strangle Kokila; her sense of suffocation at being inside was so intense. With Chetana gone from her life, it was as if a limb had been cut off and the loneliness threatened to drive her mad. Ramanandam was always sick now and she was tired of taking care of him. A part of Kokila wondered if the reason he was so interested in having a relationship with her was because he knew he needed a nurse.

Ramanandam was having some heart and lung problems. He was getting more and more frustrated because he couldn’t move around as freely as he used to. On some days he would get tired easily, would be breathless just after a short walk. But some days he would be normal, as if the sixty-four years of his life had not taken their toll. He looked frail and continued to lose weight, regardless of how much food Kokila was able to coax into him. He didn’t sleep and his only lifeline, his writing, he confessed, was also becoming more and more incoherent.

His demands on Kokila’s time sapped her energy. He wanted so much from her. He wanted her to stay with him all night and stay up with him when he couldn’t sleep. He wanted her to listen to him talk about his glory days and he wanted her to not express an opinion or tell him about her life, which was moving at a completely different pace than his. The situation had become so bad that Kokila made excuses to not be with him. She loved him but his sickness and neediness were throttling her.

It was when Kokila was all but ready to jump into the well in the backyard that she met Dr. Shankar Gurunathan. He was well known in Bheemunipatnam: the son of a wealthy Brahmin, he had given it all up to take care of leprosy patients camped in a small area just outside Bheemunipatnam.

A small clinic stood by the huts where the lepers lived and it was in this hospital that Dr. Shankar Gurunathan worked for the greater good of the people. The hospital was essentially two rooms and a verandah. The patients waited in the verandah and Shankar examined them in one room. If the case was very serious, Shankar would put them in one of the five beds available in the second room.

He was not just the doctor who doled out medication for the lepers, he was also their grief counselor, their messiah, their confidant, their father, their son, and anything else they needed him to be. He was always short on help and during every visit to Tella Meda he would ask Charvi if there was anyone she could think of who would like to join his cause. Charvi would politely assure him that she would definitely ask around but she never did. Despite Charvi’s godliness and belief that all people were made equal, she found lepers repulsive. When Subhadra once wondered if she should help Shankar, Charvi ordered her to not even think about it.

“Leprosy is very contagious. If you want to help, send them some food but don’t go there yourself. What if you get it? What will you do then?” Charvi said.

Maybe it was because Charvi was so against it, maybe it was because Kokila was feeling more and more stifled inside Tella Meda and its routine, but whatever the cause, Kokila volunteered her services to Shankar during one of his Sunday visits to Tella Meda.

“Are you sure? It is a very contagious disease,” Shankar warned her, as he did all his helpers. Most never lasted more than a few months. “You will always have to wear gloves and a mask when you work with the patients. The risk is very high.”

Kokila knew that leprosy was contagious. She had seen lepers with their fingers and toes falling off, their dirty clothes, their deformed bodies. She was afraid she would become one of them as well but something compelled her to curb that fear and accept the challenge.

“I’m sure,” Kokila told him. “I’ll be very careful. This is my chance to help people.”

Shankar smiled. He had just lost one of his helpers to marriage and was shorthanded, as always. Kokila’s offer had come at an opportune time.

“We open the clinic at eight in the morning. I see patients who come by at that time. At ten I make rounds around the huts. You will have to accompany me on those rounds. We have lunch at noon and then we stay in the clinic until four in the evening. You will get paid one hundred
rupees
a month. I know it isn’t much but that’s the best I can do,” Shankar said.

“When do I start?” Kokila asked.

The reaction from Charvi and the others at Tella Meda was predictable.

“Well then, she can’t come into the house if she goes there,” Renuka was the first to say. “What if she gives it to Bhanu?”

“All of us will be at risk,” Ravi claimed. “This is pure suicide. Why should she drag us all down with her?”

Subhadra was the only one who didn’t see anything wrong with what Kokila was planning to do. “She’s trying to help people. We all should have such big hearts.”

“It’s not a matter of a big heart.” Charvi joined the criticizers. “This is a matter of her health, everyone’s health. Leprosy is contracted by touch, breath, everything. We will all be at a very high risk. Kokila, I don’t think you should do this. I’m sure Shankar will understand if you explain to him . . .”

“Explain what? That Charvi doesn’t think I should go? Or that everyone is so scared that I will become a leper and give the disease to them? Someone has to help these people and if Shankar has managed to work there for three years without an infection, why should I be scared?” Kokila demanded.

“Shankar is rich—” Chetana began, but Kokila interrupted her with a glare.

“And being rich is some antidote to disease?” she asked, looking pointedly at Ravi, the son of a rich man.

“There is no cure, Kokila,” Charvi tried again, and Kokila shook her head.

“There is. Shankar told me that they have done some research in Malta and—”

“That doesn’t even sound like a real place. Malta? What kind of name is that?” Renuka piped up. “And I wouldn’t believe anything that boy says. Too slick for my liking. Watch it, Kokila, you’ll get infected too and then what? I say, stay at Tella Meda and be healthy.”

Kokila wanted to scream that if she stayed at Tella Meda any longer, she’d go mad. She looked at Ramanandam, who hadn’t said a word and continued to eat his dinner quietly. She never addressed him in public, never spoke with him freely. Their relationship, though not clandestine anymore, was still very private and discreet.

“Ramanandam, what do you think?” she asked softly but loudly enough for everyone to hear.

The fact that she’d called him Ramanandam and not Sastri Garu didn’t go unnoticed. Even Narayan Garu, who was trying to stay out of the discussion, looked up in shock.

Oh, let them look,
Kokila thought bitterly.
I’m good enough to sleep
with him and I’m good enough to take care of him now that he’s sick but not
good enough to call him by his first name? If I can do in it private, why not in
the open?

“It’s your decision. I don’t believe in interfering in anyone’s life,” Ramanandam said, unperturbed by her use of his first name in public. “But I also think that you’re taking a considerable risk, and of course, there is a risk to all of us if you bring it into Tella Meda.”