Song of the Cuckoo Bird: A Novel (32 page)

Manjunath looked at her, his eyes bright with tears, glistening in the light of the moon, just a couple of nights shy of being full.

“It wasn’t some girl, Kokila, it was my daughter,” Manjunath said, and Kokila’s eyes widened. Had he made his daughter pregnant?

“She didn’t want to go back to medical college . . .” He paused and then shook his head. “There’s nothing to say. She didn’t want to go, I made her go, and she killed herself. It was my fault.”

They went downstairs as they had the previous time and just like that time, Manjunath held on to her as they slept, trying to ward off his demons.

Kokila wondered if she should tell others the truth but this was Manjunath’s secret and until he said it was okay, she couldn’t tell anyone else about it. But Manjunath’s secret didn’t remain one for long. Dr. Vishnu Mohan and his wife, Saraswati, arrived the next day, somber and apologetic. Dr. Vishnu Mohan asked to speak with Manjunath in his room while Saraswati told everyone else what they had learned. Even Shanthi was huddled in the kitchen to listen to Saraswati and usually she stayed away from Tella Meda gossip.

“Manjunath’s wife phoned last night,” Saraswati said, wiping tears that were streaming down her cheeks. “She knows a relative’s friend . . . Anyway, his daughter, you know, the one he keeps talking about? The one who went to medical college? She was raped. She didn’t tell anyone except some of her friends.”

“Who raped her?” Subhadra asked.

“Some man, she wouldn’t say who. But he threatened that he would do it again if she told anyone and then he would kill her,” Saraswati explained. “All this has come out now, from those friends of hers.”

“Why didn’t they do anything to help her?” Chetana demanded. “If they knew, they—”

“Hush. So what happened to the girl?” Subhadra asked eagerly.

Kokila listened in silence, pretending to focus on chopping green beans for lunch.

“She came home for the Dussera holidays and told Manjunath that she didn’t want to go back. He thought she couldn’t handle the studies and was scared of failing exams, so he insisted that she go back. They had a big fight and Manjunath said that he didn’t have any respect for her if she wouldn’t go back and he was really harsh to her,” Saraswati said.

“Anyone would be,” Renuka said. “Medical college is difficult to get into. He did what any father would do.”

Everyone nodded and then focused their attention back on Saraswati to hear the rest of the sordid tale.

“She went back and ten days later hung herself from the ceiling fan of her dormitory room,” Saraswati finished.

“Oh, the poor man,” Shanthi said. “He’s blaming himself.”

“Well, he is a little to blame,” Renuka said thoughtfully.

Chetana snorted. “But you just said that he did what any father would do.”

“Well, first, he should just have gotten the girl married and not worried about medical school—-fool. Not that important, education,” Renuka said firmly.

“Was she pregnant?” Chetana asked.

Kokila was numb. Charvi was right, she thought, Manjunath carried a deep pain. Could there be a pain that was deeper than losing a child? And wouldn’t that pain be blinding in its intensity if the parent felt he was to blame? Just like Ramanandam who never got over Vidura leaving, never came to terms with losing him.

Saraswati nodded. “And now he won’t go home. He resigned from Andhra University and his wife wants to come here but he has written to her asking her to leave him alone. His older daughter has written to him but he doesn’t even respond. So they called us to see if we could help. Vishnu is talking to him. Maybe we can convince him to go home.”

All the women focused on Kokila and she sighed.

“He isn’t staying here because of me,” she said. “Nothing is happening between us, so don’t look at me.”

“He seems to be taken with you. Maybe you could talk to him,” Saraswati suggested, and Kokila shook her head.

“What should I say? He’s a grown man, I can’t tell him how to live his life,” she said. “And he is not taken with me. We just talk, we’re just friends.”

Manjunath came to her room that night after
bhajan.
He had spent the evening elsewhere and came to her saying he was hungry.

Kokila hurried to the kitchen, prepared a plate of cold food for him, and took it back to her room.

He sat quietly and ate everything: the rice, the leftover green bean curry from lunch, the
sambhar
with sweet potatoes, the slightly sour yogurt, and the mango pickle.

He drank half the glass of water, used the other half to wash his hands in the plate, and pushed the plate aside.

“They told you what happened,” he said.

Kokila nodded. “Dr. Vishnu Mohan’s wife can’t keep anything inside her.”

Manjunath laughed harshly. “My wife’s like that. She gossips all the time but has a clean heart, no malice.”

Kokila nodded again.

“I have a wife, Kokila,” he said, looking at her.

Kokila bit her upper lip, unsure of what to say, unsure also of what he was telling her.

“I love my wife. I love my daughters . . . both my daughters,” he said. “And I killed one of them.”

Kokila took his hand in hers. “No. It was fate. We can’t always choose to make the right decisions because we don’t know what the future holds.”

“I shouldn’t have forced her to go back,” Manjunath said, holding Kokila’s hand in both of his. “The pain is too much. I can’t bear it. Sometimes . . . sometimes I’m sure I’ll die of it.”

Kokila put her arm around him and pulled his head toward her. “Let me help,” she said, and kissed him tenderly on his mouth. He wrapped his arms tightly around her and kissed her back with desperation.

He was gone in the morning. His dinner plate was still in the corner where he had left it and her clothes were scattered by the bed. Kokila looked out of the window and judged the time to be around five. It was still early but the birds were singing softly, gearing up to chirp with more gusto.

It hurt her that he had left while she slept. He had sneaked away while she was sleeping, happy, in peace. She wished he had stayed, wished she could have woken up with him.

“I have a wife, Kokila,” he had said, and she knew that whatever they would share would be temporary. And as Charvi said, he was unable to recognize happiness right now. It would take years of healing before Manjunath would be a happy man again and even then, the wound of losing his daughter would never quite heal. It would bleed occasionally and would always be a part of him.

Maybe he had left before she woke up to protect her reputation, Kokila wondered, and that thought erased the hurt. Yes, he was chivalrous enough to think of that.

She hastily put on her
sari
and ran to the bathroom to take a quick bath.

Fresh, smelling of her jasmine soap, Kokila tied a towel around her wet hair, feeling shy and gauche as if she were a new bride. Already, Tella Meda was coming alive. Charvi must be taking a bath as well, Kokila thought, as she got ready for the morning
puja.
Subhadra would be up soon to bathe and then cook breakfast.

Puttamma would arrive shortly and start sweeping the courtyard and cleaning the bathrooms. It was just like every morning but there was something special about today.

Kokila’s silver anklets tinkled merrily, in tune with the swish of the gold baskets in her ears, as she walked up to the guest room where Manjunath was staying. She looked around to make sure no one was watching. She should wait for him to come out, she knew, but the temptation to see him and feel as she had the night before was too heavy. Like sweet molasses, it clung to her senses.

She knocked on the door and then tested the doorknob. It opened and she stepped in, a smile on her face, as she searched for Manjunath on the guest room bed.

His feet dangled on top of the bed, his tongue was sticking out, his eyes were wide and bulging. His neck fell forward in an odd angle as he hung on a rope from the ceiling fan. The rope was familiar; it was the clothesline from the courtyard that everyone used to hang their clothes.

But she had been so happy, she thought as her body froze, suddenly incapable of any movement.
It isn’t fair,
she almost cried out in indignation.
It isn’t fair.

She couldn’t avert her eyes from his hideously disfigured face. She wanted to look away, turn away so that she wouldn’t carry the image of him hanging lifelessly from the white ceiling fan, but even as she closed her eyes and tried to recollect the Manjunath from the night before, kissing her, suckling her breasts, touching her lips, she couldn’t. All she saw was him hanging, his dead face a parody of what it had been when filled with life.

1984
31 October 1984.
Indira Gandhi, India’s four-time prime minister, was gunned down by two members of her personal security guard as she walked from her home to her office in New Delhi. She died after four hours of emergency surgery.

31 October 1984.
Rajiv Gandhi, son of Indira Gandhi, was sworn in as prime minister of India by President Giani Zail Singh in New Delhi.

5 December 1984.
Methyl isocyanate gas leaked out of a Union Carbide factory in Bhopal during the night. Casualities were extremely high.

Widows
and
Orphans

I
t didn’t seem appropriate to have a television in Tella Meda. Charvi didn’t like the idea at all. She didn’t mind the radio, but television? But the pressure to get a television was very high. Even the quiet Narayan Garu said he thought it would be nice to watch the news every evening, a Telugu movie once in a while. What would the harm be?

Finally the decision to buy a television was made, and then the argument began whether it should be a color TV or a black-and-white one. Chetana declared that if they wanted to buy a black-and-white TV, they needn’t buy one at all. If one couldn’t see the news anchor’s lipstick color, what was the point? So despite the expense, everyone at Tella Meda agreed it would be better to get a color TV.

Then another discussion emerged. Where would the television be housed? Definitely not the temple room, but where else could the TV be placed so that it would be in the open and for everyone’s use?

One of the three guest rooms with doors facing both the front garden and the inside verandah was suggested as the future TV room.

“No, no, no,” Kokila said the day before the television was supposed to arrive. The electrician had promised to have the antenna up and running the same day so that the television would start spouting images and sounds as quickly as possible.

“Why not?” Renuka demanded. “Why do we need three rooms for guests?”

“Because they make sure that we all have food to eat,” Kokila said angrily. Did no one realize how much juggling it took to maintain a house as big as Tella Meda? Everyone paid a minimal rent that barely covered food purchases for an entire month and there were other bills to pay: water, electricity, extra food purchases for the Sunday lunches and festival days. Puttamma had to be paid for cleaning the bathrooms and the courtyards, a job that no one offered to do. Now that Narayan Garu had become too old to work in the garden, Puttamma’s son from her first marriage, a thirteen-year-old boy, Balaji, came to remove the weeds, water the plants, and cut the grass. He wasn’t paid much but it was still an expense.

Ever so often a musical instrument would need to be replaced or fixed, a bulb would have to be replaced, the water pipes fixed, a door hinge repaired . . . the list was endless. And then there was Charvi, an expense all in herself with her increasing demands for special food and clothing. Guests came and usually left some money behind. But no big donations were coming into Tella Meda. Charvi was well known locally but not well known enough to have very wealthy people give thousands of
rupees
as they did to other, more popular
ashrams.

“Oh come on, Kokila,” Chetana said. “It will be nice to have a TV. You’ll see.”

“Yes, Kokila Atha,” Bhanu pleaded. “All my friends have TV, I want TV too. This Sunday they’re showing that Krishna movie with—”

“It isn’t about movies,” Renuka interrupted, and glared at Bhanu. “This is about education also. They show a lot of educational programs on television. Saraswati says that she has learned a lot from TV.”

Kokila shook her head. “Find another place for it. A guest room is—”

“If we have extra guests, they can have my room,” Subhadra said superiorly. “Will that do?”

Kokila sighed. Everyone was in on this scheme and no matter what she said it would not matter. They were all blinded by the lights the television promised.

V. C. Ramarao had his own television company in Visakhapatnam. The company thrived on local sales, on people who couldn’t afford the twice-as-expensive BPL Sanyo, Samsung, and other brand-name television sets.

V. C. Ramarao’s wife, Rambha Devi, was a conservative woman who believed in saints and
gurus,
unlike her husband, who thought all religious people to be fraudulent. Rambha Devi, however, managed to get enough money out of her husband’s tight fists to donate to
ashrams, sadhus,
and the like by convincing him that ill luck would befall him if he wasn’t charitable.