The Cat and Shakespeare (4 page)

The author’s note to the reader asks that the eleven stories in
On the Ganga Ghat
‘be read as one single novel’. The scene is Kashi, the City of Light, with the ever-flowing Ganga in the background. This is the stage on which the stories are enacted. It seems that the entire world has gathered in Kashi as if for a festival. The Indian imagination is mythopoeic, and so gods and humans mingle with one another as story after story from Kashi’s
sthala-purana
is woven seamlessly into the narrative. Like the ever-flowing Ganga, there is no end to the stories. It is for this reason that Rao would like us to consider the book as a ‘single novel’.

Let us look at one of the stories, ‘X’ (the stories do not have titles)—that of Sudha, the only daughter of the jeweller Ranchoddoss Sunderdoss, whose family business was founded way back in 1799 on Girgaum Road in Bombay.

They say on the day she was born, suddenly, a peacock, wings outstretched and keening, strutted past the courtyard (the mother had gone to Kathiawar, to her own mother, for the childbirth) and everybody said: ‘Well, this girl, she will bring in holy riches.’
²³

At fourteen, Sudha resolves not to marry. She would sit for hours in the family sanctuary, chanting ‘Rama, Sri Rama’. She would even fast and observe days of silence. One night she has a vision: ‘a sadhu would come to initiate her, and she would then become a true devotee of the Lord’ (1993: 113). In three days, a handsome south Indian sadhu arrives at the Ranchoddoss’s and asks Sudha’s mother, Ramabehn: ‘Is there anyone living in this house who’s deeply devoted to the Lord?’ (1993: 114). On hearing this, Sudha comes out and falls at the sadhu’s feet. At that moment, she remembers her past life ‘somewhere in Kathiawar’. After three months, the sadhu initiates her into sannyas (‘life as a wandering ascetic’). Sudha puts on a white sari, and a few days later leaves with the sadhu for the Himalaya. Ramabehn is devastated and dies, and Ranchoddoss leaves home in search of his daughter. He finds her in Benares, reading the
Vāsiṣṭha Rāmāyaṇa
to widows and ascetics. ‘”Father,” she said, looking at the flowing Ganga before her, “Father, I think I have just a chink to the door of Knowledge—to Jnan’’’ (1993: 120). Happy to be reunited with his daughter, Ranchoddoss begins his spiritual exercises in earnest under her guidance. Later, father and daughter visit Badrinath to see her guru’s guru (her own guru, the sadhu, had died). The Guru initiates Ranchoddoss into sannyas. ‘Life flows as you see, like the Ganga herself . . . reminding you that the Truth is but one indivisible flow. What is dream and which reality, then?’ (1993: 120). Ranchoddoss, the jeweller from Bombay, understands. He has at last come home.

Sankara praises the river in his ‘Hymn to Ganga’ (‘Gangāstotraṃ’):

Rather a fish or a turtle in Thy waters,
A tiny lizard on Thy bank, would I be,
Or even a shunned and hated outcaste
Living but a mile from Thy sacred stream,
Than the proudest emperor afar from Thee.
²⁴

The true protagonist of these stories are not the men and women who throng the ghats of Kashi, but the Ganga herself. Like a thread of gold, the river braids the stories into a seamless whole.
On the Ganga Ghat
is steeped in the spiritual life of Kashi and is an eloquent reminder of the centrality of the city and the river in the Indian consciousness.

What is remarkable about these three stories is Rao’s understanding of women. Javni, Nimka and Sudha come across as real people whom we may have known. They are not characters in fiction. Sudha’s story is especially poignant. Born into a wealthy family, she gives up a life of ease and privilege. A spiritual aspirant, she leaves home and goes forth into homelessness in search of, as her name implies, the nectar of Knowledge.

It was Rao, who, more than any other writer of his generation—which included Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004) and R.K. Narayan (1906-2001)—established the status of Indian literature in English during India’s struggle for independence from British rule. Neither Anand nor Narayan had come anywhere close to Rao’s innovative approach to fiction. Rao’s fiction is a philosophical quest in search of the word as mantra that would lead to liberation. Rao never considered himself to be solely an Indian writer. He had spent his formative years in France and not in England. Though his novels are rooted in the Indian philosophical tradition, they are universal in scope. Rao was conscious of the fact that English is an Indo-European language and therefore distantly related to Sanskrit. In his fiction, English, French and Sanskrit rub shoulders with one another in a linguistic family reunion of sorts. What is explored is the nature of language itself in an attempt to know the Truth.

The English language does not have sufficiently deep roots in India. It is therefore important for the writer to find his own individual style through which to express his world view. The reader, on his part, if he is not to misread the text, must get to know the writer’s epistemological viewpoint, or the sum total of beliefs, preconceptions and values which the writer shares with others within a sociocultural context.

R. Parathasarathy

Saratoga Springs, New York

15 January 2014

I have a small white house here, with a courtyard. From the back I look over coconut trees, and huts, and somewhere there’s the sound of the sea.

I was appointed divisional clerk, Trivandrum, some two years ago. I left my wife and two children at Pattanur. My eldest was five years of age, my youngest three. It’s not so easy to change schools, you know; and then it was monsoon time. When I thought of the bad new road (which leads to Kamla Bhavan, the noble name my fat landlord inflicted on this blue and ochre-banded building), I suffered to think of Usha coming back from school in this mess. Usha has sensitive hands, and her schoolmistress Tangamma was always telling her: Child, you have the fingers to make a nice braid. You will be a dutiful wife. My wife Saroja said: ‘Nice thing for teachers to be talking of wives already.’ But that is the way with my wife. She cannot help all the time talking of the wife. I am a quiet man, and to speak the truth, I don’t yet know what it is to mean husband.

Yes, at last I had a house. It was new and it was white. It had ochre bands on it—almost as on a temple—and I could hear the sea.

Now that the monsoon was as its fiercest, there was a problem even about going to the office. I ate every day at the Home Friends; the food was bad, but the freedom was so good. When I did not eat at the Home Friends, I could always go to the Trivandrum Brahmins’ Hotel. There the food smells less bad but the place looks more untidy. Life is always this choice—to choose an old house nearer the office or the new one sitting amidst coconut gardens. My wife saw this and said: ‘Oh, it’s just like home, coconut trees, huts, and the sound of the sea.’ For she is from Alwaye. And she never tired of saying how her old grandfather spoke of the way the Dutch landed some two hundred years ago, and thank heavens the Kartikuras’ house was two miles inland—but you could hear the sea—and the Dutch took away all the able-bodied men to fight (or to become Christians), and Kartikura House, being two miles inland, was left in peace. So the two miles and the coconut trees saved the Kartikura people, and thus emerged my wife, and from her and me, Usha and Vithal, my last born, a boy so round and fresh, with a
tilak
on his brow, and he leaps when he sees a car, and says, ‘Take me on a pom-pom,’ but I make him ride on my knee. But here, in Trivandrum, I sit alone and ride my own knee, as it were. I like being alone. I like eating
dose
and drinking coffee at Jyothibhavan. ‘Hey, take this away, this is such bad coffee,’ you can always say to the Brahmin boy, but you cannot say that to Saroja. She will talk of the Dutch and Christianity—and the sea.

The Dutch of course are an able-bodied people who have white ships. I have seen them because I have been to Bombay. During the war I tried to get into the navy and have better emoluments. At the interview they made me sit and leap so much, I cried, ‘Ay ya yo yo,’ and said: ‘No more silver than this hand can earn driving a nib.’ A man is meant to work for his wife, to feed her, and for the children to go to school (I so much liked Usha coming back along the railway embankment from school—three miles are three good miles from Pattanur to Alwaye, but then there’s the signal, the red and green lights, and all the other children, and father at home. Vithal was, of course, always in his mother’s arms).

I was thirty-three, and I had ever wondered that one is alive. I wanted to become a rich man, for then my wife would be so happy that I could do what I liked. If my plans went well—and in the new India plans are never so difficult, the new is made with plans—I would build a big house, like contractor Srinivasa Pai. He is some distant cousin of mine, and I no more like his house than I like his face. But people usually introduce me in the office saying, ‘This is Mr Ramakrishna Pai, cousin of Srinivasa Pai of Chalai Bazaar,’ as if I belonged to some royal lineage. My lineage smells of chilli and cardamom and tamarind as my wife’s does of coconuts. But then my wife’s people had two or three boats that plied the canals, and banditry and pilfering can make a lot of difference with prices. One can build a Kartikura House on thuggery. My wife was the second child; the first daughter was amply given away to a merchant in Ernakulam. Sundari (my wife’s sister) must tell Ramu, her husband, about the Dutch and the sea. Ernakulam must have many ruins and the Dutch must have left a few guns there. In Kartikura House they still show you Dutch cannon balls. When you plough for the tapioca sowings, the cannon balls come out just like the tapioca. Usha used to say, ‘The cannon is hard tapioca but this tapioca is man’s.’ Thus the cannon became the gods’. Strange how we transform all things into ours. Our houses must look like us, just as our ancestors built temples in the shape of man. In Chidamabaram Temple, Shankar Iyer says, the image of Shiva occupies the place of the heart. Then what is the place Parwathi
¹
occupies? I sometimes wonder whether I have a heart as I wonder in summer whether the rains will ever come. In heat I strike. I struck my wife only twice and have left marks on her face.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of a
bilva
tree—it has three leaves and a crust of thick thorns. It’s a scraggy tree but dear to Shiva, for one night a hunter trying to shoot at his game—was it a deer or a porcupine?—went up this obnoxious stump, and in his hours of waiting, sent down leaf after leaf, so they say, and a Shiva image being beneath, Shiva himself came in a vision and said: ‘Here I am.’ For it’s not the way you worship that is important but what you adore. Even an accidental fall of leaves on Shiva’s head got the wicked hunter his vision. And thus the stump of tree became sacred—and its trefoil sacred, for all that is sacred to God.

So when I look from my window eastwards, just by the garden wall, I see this stump of
bilva
tree, thorns visible in the morning sun. And I wonder if God will ever bless me, just like that.

Vithal would have to go to school next year, I was saying to myself one vacant morning. Usha would have to be brought to Trivandrum and sent to the convent. The sisters there, you know, are Belgian, they say, and very good. They teach excellent English—and never forget they also teach Malayalam. But then for a Saraswath Brahmin
²
like me, Malayalam or English is all the same. The Revenue Board has no preference, or if preferences there be, they lie in the direction of English. But soon it will be Hindi, and my Konkani will be of help. God helps one in everything. Will I build a big house? That is what I asked looking at the tree.

Just at that moment Govindan Nair looks up from between the leaves and says: ‘Hey there, be you at home?’ That is his style, if one may say so, of talking. It’s a mixture of
The Vicar of Wakefield
and Shakespeare. The words are choice, the choice of the situation clumsy. He never says come and go. He will always say: ‘Gentleman, may I invite myself there? Will I be permitted into your presence?’ That’s ever the way with him, in English or in Malayalam. He must twist a thing into its essence and spread it out. So that milk becomes cow’s precious liquid or water the aqua of Ganges. His heart is so big, it builds a wall lest it runs away with everything. He always wants to run away with everything. In fact he himself is . . . running.

I have hardly formulated this in my slow mind—for as you can see, I am just like that hunter carelessly dropping
bilva
leaves on some Shiva as yet unknown—when this big creature Govindan Nair leaps across the wall. That he is round and tall makes no difference to his movements. The fact is, to him all the world is just what he does. He does and so the world comes into being. He himself calls it: ‘The kitten is being carried by the cat. We would all be kittens carried by the cat. Some, who are lucky (like your hunter), will one day know it. Others live hearing “meow-meow”. . . . I like being the kitten. And how about you, sir?’ he would say. Then he would spread his fat legs on my bench, open his paws, produce some betel leaf or tobacco (or a cheap cigarette, if that could be found, but this almost never before me, for he knows I hate lighted tobacco), and munching his munch and massaging his limbs, he opens his discourse. ‘I tell you, Ramakrishna Pai, there’s nothing like becoming rich. Our wives adore us if we can produce a car, even a toy car for the baby. Females have one virtue. They adore gilt. My wife is from a grand family. But I am a poor clerk like you. Of course, I did brilliant things when I was young—I was handsome and all that, mothers used to tell me, and I rode a B.S.A. bicycle. I wore grey flannels and went to the College Tennis Club. For I do know of girls. Then some big man thought I was going to be a big man. And thus the wife came into existence. And two children to boot. But the great man became big in fact, and his clerkship remained at forty-five rupees. Fortunately there are wars. And rationing is one of the grandest inventions of man. You stamp paper with figures and you feed stomachs on numbers. I was such, I am such, an original figure. You know there are sadhus, so they say, for I am ignorant of such things, who are supposed to eat three pinches of sand one day, and the mantra
³
does the rest. For three months they need no food. I am such a sadhu, dispensing numbers. I give magical cards, and my wife eats pearl rice. My children go to school. My father-in-law lives on his estates and says: “Hey, clerk, what about my daughter?” I laugh. A clerk is a clerk. He could at best rise to the post of superintendent and have two peons at his door. Isn’t that so, dear sir? Ah, the kitten when its neck is held by its mother, does it know anything else but the joy of being held by its mother? You see the elongated thin hairy thing dangling, and you think, poor kid, it must suffer to be so held. But I say the kitten is the safest thing in the world, the kitten held in the mouth of the mother cat. Could one have been born without a mother? Modern inventions do not so much need a father. But a mother—I tell you, without Mother the world is not. So allow her to fondle you and to hold you. I often think how noble it is to see the world, the legs dangling straight, the eyes steady, and the mouth of the mother at the neck. Beautiful.’ Then Govindan Nair would go off on a quiet silence munching his betel leaves. ‘You are an innocent. I tell you God will build you a house of three storeys-note, please, I say three storeys—here, just where you sit. It’s already there. You’ve just to look and see, look deep and see. Let the mother cat hold you by the neck. Suppose I were for a moment to show you the mother cat!’ Govindan Nair never says anything indifferent. For him all gestures, all words have absolute meaning. ‘I meow-meow the dictionary, but my meaning is always one,’ he used to assure me.

‘And so?’

‘And so, sir, let us build a house of three storeys here. I am in the rationing department, and you in the Revenue Board. Figures, magical be figures in wartime. And you build a house, and like in some hospitals where it is writ, Vithaldass Ward, Maruthy Aiyer Ward, I will have a Govindan Nair Ward. My name will thus be writ once in marble. Ah, the mother cat, does one know where she takes us?’

‘Which is to say?’ I venture.

‘Which is to say, your three storeys will go high. Your leaves will have fallen on Shiva. The hunter has to feed his children; the divisional clerk will have to build a house for his august wife. Understood, sir? This is our secret pact,’ said Govindan Nair. He went out to spit, and cried back from the veranda: ‘I say, it’s time for my office’—and jumped across the wall and was gone. What a will-o’-the-wisp of a wall it is, going from nowhere to nowhere; tile-covered, bulging, and obstreperous, it seems like the sound heard and not the word understood. It runs just a little above my window, half an inch higher, and on the other side it dips and rises, running about on its wild, vicarious course. The
bilva
leaves fall on the wall. And sometimes as if to remind us what a serious tree it is, a
bilva
fruit drops over the cowshed on the other side, and the thud makes even the cattle rise. The cattle see me, and urinate. The smell of dung and urine of kine is sweet to me. Purity is so near, so concrete. Let us build the house. Lord, let me build the house.

Govindan Nair is a terrible man: huge in his sinews but important in his thought, devious though it is—for it will take you, as some tribespeople do that lead you through jungle and briar, beside the bones of hyena and of panther, and ichor smells of the elephant, and up again through narrow pathways, wind against nostrils, that of a sudden show you his Lord the Tiger might have passed by just now, just a moment ago, look at his paw prints there, and you hear the tiger call while sharp sword-grass is grating your feet; and once up the ledge, standing under a tree, the tribesman will whispering say: ‘There, look, that’s the Pandya Waterfall, Mother Bhavani’s secret trysting place with Lord Shiva,’ and you shudder at the beauty and the silence—such are Govindan Nair’s twists of passage and of thought which take you through fearful twists and trysts and imponderables, to some majesty. Meanwhile he says his mantra (even while he talks), and you hold your breath. Look, look, there Shiva comes down three days before full moon and in
Marghashira
⁴
to besport himself with his spouse Bhavani. The river therefore carries flowers, and the young tigress cubs. The mother cat, why, haven’t you seen it—it walks on any garden wall . . .