Song of the Cuckoo Bird: A Novel (6 page)

Vineetha didn’t care what anyone thought of her. It was enough that she had achieved what she set out to achieve. One of the first women scientists to be offered a post at the Bhabha Atomic Center, the first nuclear power plant in India, Vineetha felt she had done justice to the
lakhs
of
rupees
her wealthy father had spent in sending her to university in America. She had met Ramanandam Sastri at a party in Hyderabad several years ago when his wife was alive and the children were still young. The party was thrown by a literary friend and several writers and wealthy readers had been invited. She had immediately taken to the feminist writer, who was more than ten years her senior. Those who thought that they were having a sexual relationship couldn’t have been more wrong. But it wasn’t platonic either; there was a spark, something neither Vineetha nor Ramanandam could define. It was a cherished friendship and one both counted on.

In the past few years, however, they both had been too busy with their lives and their friendship had thinned with time. Vineetha had not had time for anyone, including herself, once she started working at the nuclear power plant. For years, Vineetha along with other scientists had worked to make India stronger, but now, after Nehru’s death, the political dark clouds were settling on the Bhabha Atomic Center. Dr. Homi Bhabha, the founder of the nuclear program in India and a good friend of Vineetha’s, had gone to New Delhi to speak with the new prime minister, Lal Bahadur Sastri, who, unlike the late Jawaharlal Nehru, didn’t condone India becoming a nuclear power.

“He takes
ahimsa
too far,” Vineetha complained to Ramanandam. “Doesn’t believe in weapons and war, he says. Nehru didn’t either and now we have China holding on to Indian territory.”

“I believe in Gandhi and
ahimsa,
” Ramanandam reminded her.

“But you can’t believe in it blindly,” Vineetha said. “India has to protect her borders. Anyway, I’m not here to think about the politics and the problems at work. I’m here to relax and spend some time with you.”

“What do you think of my Charvi’s
ashram
?” Ramanandam asked, looking around the courtyard where they were sitting and the rooms that spilled around it. “Isn’t it serene?”

Vineetha followed his line of vision and couldn’t see the serenity. The house had obviously been built for opulence, but opulence had to be maintained; this house looked like an old woman who in her youth used to be beautiful.

The whitewashed walls were dirty and the tiles in the courtyard seemed dull and old; obviously no one was polishing them as they were supposed to. The clothes that hung on the clotheslines were faded and inexpensive. The rooms seemed cluttered with things and the entire house was unkempt. The instruments in the music room were battered and old and the
veena
that Charvi played every evening during
bhajan
really needed to be restrung. It was worse in the evening because all the bulbs in the house were of low wattage to save money, and in that stale yellow light the house looked even more destitute than it did in the harsh light of day.

The food served at Tella Meda was simple, almost boring, Vineetha thought, and she wondered if no one got tired of eating
sambhar,
rice, and mango pickle all the time. And then there were the bathrooms. Vineetha shuddered as she wondered how she was going to get through the next two weeks with bathrooms that looked like they belonged next to a hut, with their rickety doors, damp walls, and cold and rough cement floors. The toilet was just a hole, which probably had never been cleaned, and the flush on top with a lever on it did not always work, which meant that you had to go out, fill a bucket with water from the taps in the bathroom or outside, and use that water to flush.

She was not really a snob and could adjust to any life, Vineetha believed, but here the stench of poverty and neediness was overwhelming, especially when she had to stand so close to it.

Always before, they had met in Hyderabad or Bangalore, where Vineetha had homes. When Ramanandam’s wife was alive, Vineetha hadn’t come to his house because she didn’t want his wife’s feelings to be bruised. After her death, she had continued to stay away rather than endure Charvi’s almost blatant disdain. It was obvious to everyone that Charvi was very possessive of Ramanandam. And why shouldn’t she be? She had no other man in her life and never would. Ramanandam had named her a goddess and had therefore thrown her into the land of spinsters and loneliness. The only man in Charvi’s life was Ramanandam and she needed him, almost desperately.

So this was the first time Vineetha had come to Ramanandam, to Tella Meda. Here everything seemed different. Ramanandam seemed different.

“How do you keep it going? This is a huge house and you have . . . many people here.” The term she wanted to use was
free-loaders
but since Ramanandam himself could be considered one of those living off his daughter’s asceticism, she couldn’t be direct.

“There is my pension, there is no rent on the place, and everyone chips in,” Ramanandam said, not feeling any shame in openly discussing his lifestyle. “And many devotees come by and leave an offering for Charvi. Everything helps and we don’t need much. We’re simple people trying to get closer to God and live our lives the way we want to.”

Religion and money, Vineetha thought, walked hand in hand often enough, which made her wary of the former and appreciate an abundance of the latter.

“It seems like a sad place,” Vineetha said. But that was not entirely true. It was not just a sad place; it was a desperate place, as the people who lived within the walls of Tella Meda filled it with their hopeless-ness.

“It is sad, my son is gone,” Ramanandam said, his eyes filling with tears.

“I know,” Vineetha said, responding to the devastation in his voice. “I can only imagine your anguish.”

Ramanandam sighed deeply. “I never thought my heart could break this much. I never knew pain could be this sharp, this intense, and this all-encompassing. I feel like my insides have been scraped.”

He seemed to have aged so much since she’d last seen him. But Vineetha suspected that most of the gray hair on his head had sprouted in the three months since Vidura disappeared.

“Why do you think he ran away?” Vineetha asked. They had talked about Vidura briefly when she first arrived but it had been a superficial conversation, meant only to soothe Ramanandam.

He raised his hands in defeat. “I don’t know. I don’t know and it is making me mad.”

“You must know something,” Vineetha said.

“I don’t know,” Ramanandam repeated in exasperation.

“Children don’t just run away, Raman, there is always a reason,” Vineetha prodded.

“I wish I knew, I wish I could tell you,” Ramanandam said.

“What does Charvi say?” Vineetha asked.

“She hasn’t spoken to me since he ran away. She blames me, I think, though she hasn’t said anything,” Ramanandam told her. “I can see her heart breaking but I can’t do anything. I have searched for the boy . . . Does this pain ever go away? Is there ever any ease?”

Vineetha raised her hands and turned her palms toward the skies. “Maybe God knows the answer to that. But time will heal and you never know—he may come back.”

“How? How will he come back?” Ramanandam asked in frustration. “It’s been too long. Anything could have happened to him, anything at all.”

“You have to keep faith,” Vineetha said, though she knew it was just platitudes she was offering him. It had been three months and no one had heard anything from or about Vidura. She knew as well as Ramanandam that the chances of them finding Vidura were not very good.

“I keep trying to remember what I did, what I said, was it me? Why would he run away?”

“You are a good father,” Vineetha said firmly.

“I’m so relieved to hear you say so,” Ramanandam said. “Because I have doubted myself and . . . I’m so glad you’re here. Just having you with me eases me.”

“I had to come,” Vineetha said with a smile. “Through all my difficult times I knew I could count on you for support. I had to come here and see if I could be of any help to you during yours.”

When Vineetha was growing up it was unheard of for a woman to leave her home country, get an education, stay unmarried, find a job, and continue to stay unmarried. Now that she was perceived as being well beyond marriageable age, her family had given up on finding her a husband and tried to hide her scandalous behavior behind superficial talk about “one of the great women scientists of India.” Vineetha knew that her mother would have died happier if her only daughter had been married with children.

In America and even back at home it had been difficult and almost impossible to explain that her interest in men was limited to the superficial. Even though some believed her to be homosexual, she was not. Ramanandam told her that not everyone is destined to be with a soul mate. He never found his, he said, even though he married and had four children.

At her age Vineetha felt that she didn’t have to make any more excuses to society. Her life was what she made it and if it wasn’t the life society would want her to have, that was not really her problem. “My dear feminist,” Ramanandam called her.

Though she loved Ramanandam and respected him, his declaration that Charvi was a goddess had never sat well with her. She openly criticized Ramanandam for forcing the poor girl into a life that no one should have to live, unable to make her own choices, unable to marry or live on her own terms. But Ramanandam didn’t see it that way. He truly believed that Charvi had been born with the spark of divine knowledge within her. Siddhartha had become Buddha after gaining knowledge one night while meditating under a banyan tree, but Charvi had been born with that knowledge.

Naturally, among Ramanandam’s three daughters, it was Lavanya that Vineetha was drawn to. It was Lavanya that she kept in touch with through the years. Manikyam, Ramanandam’s eldest daughter, deemed Vineetha a corruptor of Lavanya because of the closeness they shared.

“Lavanya is becoming just like
her,
Nanna,” Manikyam would warn her father. “Look at Lavanya—no husband, no marriage, and she goes with men, even married men, just like your Vineetha.”

“In this house we don’t cast stones,” Ramanandam would say quietly but firmly to her, even though Lavanya’s promiscuous life had disappointed him. It was one thing to believe in women’s rights and liberation and it was quite another to have sex outside of marriage, especially for his daughter. “Lavanya is living the life she wants to live and you are living yours, Charvi hers, and Vineetha hers as well. You have no right to judge or question what they do with their lives.”

A week after Vineetha came to the
ashram,
Lavanya came as well. These days Lavanya was living in Madras. One rumor said she was a mistress to some married movie producer, another was that she had married a man of lower caste in secret, and yet another was that she was living in some hotel with the wrong kind of clientele. With Lavanya there were always rumors and usually they were well-founded ones. She rarely visited Tella Meda, so the residents of the
ashram
usually only heard the rumors despite the fact that she was family.

Upon hearing of Lavanya’s visit, Manikyam arrived with her two sons, Ravi and Prasad. They were good-looking boys but completely spoiled.

“Did you say something to Vidura?” Lavanya demanded of Charvi. “You must have. Why would a boy just run away?”

“Why this suspicion?” Charvi asked, surprised at the accusation. “I’m just as worried as you.”

“Oh, you mean you can’t look into your crystal ball and tell us where Vidura is? What, the goddess doesn’t have that power?” Lavanya demanded.

“I never said I’m a goddess,” Charvi said humbly.

“See, Vineetha, how she turns it around,” Lavanya said, her words hot and angry.

“There is nothing to turn around. He is gone and there is a deep pain inside all of us. Why he left? I don’t know. When he left? I don’t know. If I knew, I would openly tell everyone. I have nothing to hide,” Charvi said softly.

They were sitting at the empty dining table outside the kitchen. Charvi was sipping Darjeeling tea while Vineetha was drinking a glass of water.

“I should’ve taken him away with me,” Lavanya said as tears filled her eyes.

“You couldn’t have,” Charvi consoled her. “Your job takes you all around the world. You couldn’t have given him a home.”

“And this is home?” Lavanya asked. “This . . . place with the people, this is home? This is not a home, Charvi, this is a free inn for losers.”

“You should ask our father why Vidura left. Maybe he can help you,” Charvi said quietly.

“Oh, now you want to blame him? Well, I don’t. I blame you for this hocus-pocus you are throwing at people.” So saying, Lavanya left the table.

“She doesn’t understand that saving Vidura is not in my power,” Charvi said sadly. “He chose his destiny and his age doesn’t have anything to do with it. He decided what he wanted to do and why. How can she blame me?”

Vineetha didn’t want to get embroiled in a fight between sisters but for the first time she was not on Lavanya’s side. It seemed unreasonable and unfair to blame Charvi for the actions of a confused teenager.

“She is just very upset and doesn’t know whom to blame so she blames you,” Vineetha said. “Why do you think your father would know why Vidura left?”

“He knows,” Charvi said in her serene, goddesslike voice.

“Do
you
know why he left?”

Charvi shook her head. “I can’t read people’s minds. But my father knows.”

“I asked him. He would have told me if he knew,” Vineetha said, though she wasn’t sure if Ramanandam would indeed tell her the truth about Vidura. As close as they used to be, the past years had put a strain on their relationship. She had been busy with work and he with setting up Tella Meda as an
ashram
for his daughter.

“Sometimes there are some truths that are more bitter than the
neem
fruit. He may believe that he doesn’t know because he doesn’t want to,” Charvi pointed out.