Song of the Cuckoo Bird: A Novel (35 page)

“What is this noise about?” Charvi stepped out into the verandah from the temple room, her eyes red and irritated. “You’re disturbing my meditation.”

“Now look what you did!” Manikyam said urgently and rose to lead Charvi back to the temple room. “Chetana is just upset.”

Charvi, who had sworn never to speak with Manikyam again, turned away from her older sister and instead looked at Subhadra.

“You’d be upset too if your dead husband’s brother came and made a pass at you,” Lavanya said casually before Subhadra could say anything. “Manikyam, you did a poor job of raising your sons. That one died of bad toddy and this one . . . this one will die of stupidity.”

Manikyam’s face contorted with anger. “What would you know? You are a worthless woman, no better than that whore’s daughter.”

Lavanya shook her head. “I don’t know why I bother to come here. Next time someone dies or gets married, you needn’t let me know. I don’t think I’d want to come.”

“Okay, we won’t tell you,” Charvi said to Lavanya, and then turned to Chetana. “What happened?”

Chetana looked at Prasad with hatred. “He made a pass at me. Asked me if I’d like to spread my legs for—”

“This woman is lying, Charvi Pinni,” Prasad said. “Come on, Pinni, you know I’d never—”

Charvi’s eyes blazed. “Get out,” she said clearly and firmly.

“What?” Manikyam’s mouth fell open.

“You’re asking me to get out?” Prasad demanded cockily.

“Yes, this is my home and there is no room for philandering, indecent men like you. Your brother was bad enough. He stole money from us, came home with alcohol on his breath, and treated his wife shabbily. I won’t have you here too. Now get out,” Charvi said. “And if anyone has a problem with that, they can leave as well. Now I’m going back to meditate. Please try to keep your voices down.”

Everyone thought that Manikyam and Dr. Nageshwar Rao would leave with Prasad but they stayed even though they packed him up and sent him home in their car. Lavanya left with him, cursing him, Manikyam, Charvi, Tella Meda, and anything else she could think of.

Manikyam and her husband stayed through the thirteenth-day ceremonies and left only after all the religious needs pertaining to their son’s death had been fulfilled. Dr. Nageshwar Rao came to speak with Kokila the day he and his wife were to leave. He had never bothered with more than a nod of the head for her in all the years she had known him. Kokila wasn’t even sure he knew her name. Nevertheless, when he knocked on her door, she opened it and let him in.

“I wanted to talk to Chetana but after how Prasad behaved I find myself too embarrassed to speak with her,” Dr. Nageshwar Rao said without preamble. He was known to be a straight man who spoke as he felt, so Kokila waited for him to get to his point.

He pulled out two small books from his pocket and held them toward Kokila. They were State Bank of India passbooks. Kokila took one and flipped through the pages.

“There is fifteen thousand
rupees
each for the girls when they turn eighteen,” Dr. Nageshwar Rao said. “The money will grow by then and become more, and I think it will be enough to support them when they’re ready to marry.”

The passbooks were made in the name of Bhanumati Rao and Meenakumari Rao.

“Your grandchildren need more than money,” Kokila said as she put the passbooks back in Dr. Nageshwar Rao’s hand. “Chetana will never accept this money.”

He shook his head. “They’re not my grandchildren, not legally . . . but I would like to do this for them. Will you give them to the girls?”

Kokila thought about it for a moment and then agreed. No matter how Chetana felt about Dr. Nageshwar Rao and his money, this was for the girls, and Kokila wasn’t about to turn away their future.

No one was really mourning Ravi; everyone had been maintaining a posture just until all the
pujas
and other formalities ended.

The television room that had been set up in such haste had not been used at all. But after the thirteenth-day celebrations, the adults pretended to cave in to Bhanu and Meena’s insistent pleading for television and turned it on. It was a Wednesday evening, the day
Chitrahar,
a show with songs from Hindi movies, was broadcast. Even Charvi decided to come after
bhajan
to watch some television. After the difficult past few days, everyone was in need of some excitement and enjoyment.

“What is this?” Bhanu demanded angrily. Two women were sitting on the floor with
tanpuras
playing slow, classical music. “This is not some movie song, is it?”

“No,” Renuka said, perplexed.

They all watched the boring music for a while and then there was a break for the Telugu regional news.

There was a shocked silence as they listened. Just that morning Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been shot by her Sikh bodyguards. Ravi’s death had distracted everyone and they had not heard yet. The country was in mourning for ten days. When the country went into mourning, Doordarshan, the government-run television station and the only one available in India, played only devotional music with breaks for the day’s news.

“So, will there be just this boring music for ten days?” Meena asked, her eyes filled with tears. “I just want to see some songs. First he dies and we can’t watch TV and now someone else dies and there’s nothing to watch. It isn’t fair.”

Charvi sighed and started to walk back to her room. She passed Kokila, who had been finishing up in the kitchen and was hurrying to get to the TV room.

“No rush,” Charvi said when she met Kokila on the way to her room. “Some Sikhs shot and killed Indira Gandhi, so they’re only going to show devotional music for the next ten days. Bhanu and Meena are quite disappointed.”

“They really wanted to watch some movie songs. First Ravi and now this . . . they must be very frustrated,” Kokila said, feeling sorry for the girls.

“It’s sad, isn’t it, that they should compare the death of their philandering father with the assassination of a great leader and treat both deaths with less regard than movie songs,” Charvi said wearily. “What has the world come to?”

Kokila wasn’t really listening to Charvi but planning how to make it up to Bhanu and Meena. “Well, I’ll take them to the cinema on Sunday for a matinee. That should make them happy,” she decided.

“It probably will,” Charvi said wearily, and went back to her room.

1987
4 June 1987.
A Swedish government inquiry determined that the Swedish company Bofors paid a commission to middlemen for concluding an arms purchase agreement with India. The identity of these middlemen was to be the subject of an investigation, an Indian government spokesperson said.

14 June 1987.
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi ruled out the termination of the 17 billion
rupees
Bofors gun deal.

Surrogate
Mothers

S
ubhadra was getting too old to cook all the meals alone. Her arthritis made it difficult for her to stand up and sit down. Once she sat down on the floor to cut vegetables or clean the rice she couldn’t rise easily again. So it was the perfect time for Sushila and her daughter, Padma Lakshmi, to arrive at Tella Meda. A relative of Subhadra’s in a very convoluted and distant manner, Sushila had lost her husband in a bus accident in Cuddapah. With nowhere to go and a nine-year-old daughter, Sushila wrote to Subhadra and was invited to live in Tella Meda.

Padma and Meena immediately became friends. Meena was delighted. It was not easy to make friends in school, as everyone knew she was Chetana’s daughter and that she lived in Tella Meda. Mothers of several of the girls in her class had told their daughters to stay away from Meena. She found out because those girls had cruelly shunned her when she’d tried to make friends with them and they’d called Chetana all kinds of names. Meena had a few friends in school, other girls who were not very popular and didn’t have many friends. But having Padma in Tella Meda meant having a permanent friend whose mother would not ask her to stop speaking with Meena.

“Amma said that this is an
ashram
and people can come live here if they have nowhere else to go,” Padma told Meena. The girls were the same age and both of them had lost their mostly absentee fathers recently.

“We also live here because Nannamma and Thatha don’t want us to live with them,” Meena said. “I don’t like Thatha. I didn’t like my father. I don’t care that he is dead.”

Padma didn’t like her father either. “He used to shout at us all the time. And I don’t have any Thatha and Nannamma—my father’s parents died when he was a boy and my mother’s parents died a few years ago, so we had no place else to go. Do you like living here?”

Meena shrugged. “It’s okay. I don’t like Bhanu. She’s always so mean.”

“Always angry,” Padma agreed. “Why? What’s wrong with her?”

“Don’t know,” Meena said.

Meena’s skinny knee bumped against Padma’s as they sat in the verandah, a yellow rice basket on Meena’s lap. The rice basket was yellow so that the black of the stones and the white of the rice would stand out, making it easy to separate the rice from the unwanted stones. Open on one side, the wide and shallow basket had been used by Subhadra for years to glean stones from the rice. She would expertly hold the closed end of the basket and shake the rice within. She was so good at it that none of the rice granules would fall out of the basket, only the husk that hadn’t been removed. Like magic, with every move, the stones hidden inside would rise above the white rice, making them easy to pick out and throw away.

Since Meena and Padma were too young to shake the heavy basket of rice, they had to sift carefully. It was their after-school chore. Subhadra had been reluctant to give any work to Meena or Bhanu, as she was so attached to them, but Sushila, who had already started training her nine-year-old daughter, decided that it was high time all the young girls in Tella Meda learned how to cook and do chores.

Bhanu wasn’t about to let some new woman in Tella Meda teach her how to live her life. At fourteen, blossoming into a woman, Bhanu wasn’t listening to anyone. Having been thoroughly spoiled by Renuka, Bhanu was growing up to be exactly like Chetana had been at her age, headstrong and adamant.

Bhanu resented that they all lived in Charvi’s house and that Charvi was given special preference. Charvi didn’t do anything at Tella Meda but everyone catered to her needs as though they were her servants. Bhanu wasn’t like the others and she made sure that Charvi and everyone else at Tella Meda knew that. Her disdain for Charvi seemed to have grown out of nowhere.

“Why should I do any of this?” Bhanu demanded of Sushila as soon as she was given vegetable-chopping duties.

“Because you live here,” Sushila told her firmly.

“Charvi lives here and she doesn’t do anything,” Bhanu pointed out slyly.

“Charvi is the
guru.
What are you?” Sushila asked. “Sit down and start cutting vegetables, otherwise we might have to ask Puttamma to stop coming so that you can start cleaning the bathrooms and the courtyard.”

Kokila liked Sushila’s frank manner. Unlike Chetana, Sushila wore white in deference to her widowhood, but unlike Renuka, she didn’t shave her head. She was a tough woman in her mid-thirties who had been married to a man rumored to be a political thug in Cuddapah. She had a brisk manner and her skin was completely black. When Padma and Sushila walked together, everyone joked that they looked like a black
sari
with a white border because Padma was luckily very fair, like her father. She was a pretty girl and everyone was sure she would grow into a beautiful woman.

Bhanu disliked Sushila for her strict ways and disliked Padma as well. In her fantasies, Padma’s face got burned and no one thought she was pretty anymore. The fact was that everyone around Bhanu was prettier than her. Meena was supposed to be just like Chetana, pretty-pretty; Padma was supposed to be beautiful. No one said any of those things about Bhanu. She was just Bhanu. And what kind of a silly name was Bhanumati?

Since Ravi had died Manikyam came to Tella Meda almost every month, clothes and sweets in hand for her granddaughters. She now openly called them her granddaughters. But even she was partial to Meena, calling her the beautiful girl, while calling Bhanu just Bhanu.

Chetana didn’t notice Bhanu’s resentment and even if she did, she couldn’t be bothered by it. Shanthi and the tailoring business kept her busy, as did a young man who recently had moved to Bheemunipatnam from Vijaywada. He was the new cinema manager. Chetana had met him during a matinee show of a Chiranjeevi movie and after much flirting and eyelash batting, Chetana was now privileged to receive free balcony tickets for the first show of every movie. And she went, to the disapproval of Renuka, Manikyam, and even Subhadra.

“Nothing is free,” Subhadra would warn Chetana. “You know what he wants? Beautiful widow like you, he thinks you’re easy.”

Chetana confided in Kokila that she was attracted to Srinivas. He was the antithesis of Ravi.