Two Disappearances - Part VI

Ah, that was a long three days.
***

After twenty-two years, Sharada looked into her cousin's eyes. Frozen in time, cast in glossy paper, they were twenty-two years fresher than her own. Sharada's face, wrought with wrinkles caused both by age and worry, was a sorry shadow of her cousin's. Saraswathi would never look as careworn as her, Sharada thought. Even in those photographs in the last year of her life, she did not look like a person battling a terminal illness, two broken families and a vicious, gossipy society.

Sharada gazed dreamily at the photograph with the tambura, she remembered her cousin's exact expression when she heard an apasruti string. It was that very expression - of slight disgust and slight amusement, caught perfectly in that picture. She would tame those off-key tamburas like she tamed off-key people around her - calmly and ruthlessly. Yet, the person at the receiving end came off feeling like he was being done a favour.

Sharada smiled.

The image of Saraswati sleeping reminded Sharada of the way her nostrils flared and relaxed with each breath, her lips curled into a contented smile, her closed palms tucked beneath her chin. It reminded Sharada of the time when, as a teenager, Saraswathi would sleep off on her lap in the afternoons while Sharada read a book.

The photograph that affected her the most was the one Ajith skipped over - the photo of Mani performing to a sparse audience. Ajith found the inscription at the back interesting, but didn't investigate. If he had looked at the photo closely, he would have seen two women in the front row facing away from the camera - his grandmother and her cousin. The black-and-white photo didn't show it, but they were in matching blue sarees - the shade made popular by MS. It was a concert at a noisy wedding at a noisier wedding hall on Boag Road in T. Nagar. Sharada remembered the entire evening vividly, like she had been living it each evening.

Mani sang that day, accompanied by a young, spirited Veeraraghavan on the violin. An ageing Palani Subramania Pillai sat at the mridangam in his characteristically emotionless fashion. Sharada never found out the name of the ghatam vidwaan. Sharada remembered the exact phrase with which Mani began his Thodi alapana. It was a lengthy, labyrinthine brigha that traversed two and a half octaves at unreal speed - starting with the mandhra sthayi panchamam, snaking towards the atitara shadjam, before settling down on the daivatam. Saraswathi, who was milling about, talking, socialising, paused mid-sentence and turned to the stage.

"Lets listen for a while?" she asked Sharada.
They settled down in the front row. Mani looked at her and stopped singing almost immediately. At twenty-eight, she was that beautiful. Mani collected himself and continued his alapana, although he seemed distracted by Saraswathi's presence in the first row.

As if to collect himself, he rested on the panchamam for unnaturally long, closing his eyes and knotting his eyebrows in concentration. Da pa, he hummed. Da pa ma pa da pa, the violin prodded. "Hmmm," he said, in appreciative contemplation. He repeated after the violin, and fed off that sangati, revolving around the madhya sthayi to come back, each time, to the same phrase. Da pa ma pa da pa. And every time he came back to that phrase, he opened his eyes and looked at Saraswathi, like he expected the phrase to trigger some memory.

Saraswathi began losing herself in the Thodi. Languorous, formless, floating, yet precise, imaginative, structured, it disarmed her. She was listening to a Thodi that was fresh and new, yet traditional and classical. It was a Thodi of paradoxes. It was a Thodi you could touch and feel, but never hold. It was a Thodi that softened Saraswathi's heart.

With each passing song, Mani began ignoring more of the audience and concentrating only on Saraswathi, and she, for her part, forgot that she was at a noisy wedding.

When the concert ended, the bride, a movie actress, came to the stage to honour the artistes. When they were descending, the bride spotted Saraswathi in the front row and called out, "Sarasi!" Saraswathi came out of her trance and noticed the bride standing with Mani. She walked up to her.

"This is Mani. I'm sure you know him," the actress said, "And this is Saraswathi - I know her because she sang at my first wedding," she giggled.

Saraswathi had heard of Mani, but had never heard him until that day. She had seen him at social gatherings. She had vague memories of listening to him when she was around ten years old, but she couldn't confirm whether they were true.

"You sing?" Mani asked.
"Not much anymore, I teach more than I sing now."
"This is Saras' cousin, Sharada," the actress said.
Mani smiled, briefly glancing at Sharada before turning to Saraswathi. Sharada smiled back. The actress then whisked the cousins away to introduce them to other people.

They ate in the dining hall, Mani and Saraswathi safely away from each other's eyes. After dinner, the cousins stayed back to talk to the bride her and siblings, and Mani and the groom's uncle were sitting in the portico of the mantapam, arguing out some musical disagreements.

Saraswathi whispered in her cousin's ears, "I'll come back," and headed to the restroom. On her way back, from a shadowy corridor, she heard a voice, "Janani!" it said, in a stage-whisper. Saraswathi ignored the voice. "Janani!" it came, again. The same urgent hiss. Saraswathi turned to the corridor to see Mani silhouetted against a dim room behind him. He beckoned her again, "Janani!"

She asked, suspiciously, "You're calling me?"
"Yes."

She walked to him, and said, "Janani?"
Mani's face fell. He looked at her closely and asked again, "Aren't you?"
"Aren't I what?"
"Janani..."
Saraswathi frowned, "No."
"Janani... The old man with the Veena, that town on the hill... Railway station..."
"No."
Mani looked like someone hit him with a club. He muttered, "Sorry," and walked through the door that led to the side exit. He walked briskly, opened the side door and found himself in a narrow back alley.

"Sir!" a voice called behind him. It was Saraswathi.
He stopped.
"I just wanted to tell you - I have never heard anyone sing like you."
"Thanks," Mani muttered, slightly flushed. They were walking towards each other now, involuntarily.
"Sir, can I learn from you?" she asked, almost floating towards him. They were only a couple of metres apart.
"Come home tomorrow, I'll listen to you sing, and we'll see," he said, standing two paces away from her.
"Thanks!" she said, taking one step towards him. They were within touching distance now.

"Saras?" came Sharada's voice from behind her. Both of them took a step back.
"I'll see you tomorrow, then," Mani said, putting on a formal voice.
"Yes, sir," Saraswathi replied, sounding even more formal.

Sharada realised that she had walked into a moment where even though there wasn't any physical closeness, there was intimacy. She wondered for years if her entry that day delayed Saraswathi's crime by a few days. She also wondered if she could have averted the whole thing if she had walked in moments earlier, if she had just stopped Saraswathi from running after him into the gully.

Sharada couldn't sift through those photographs anymore. She felt the kozhakattai in her throat growing, butterflies in her stomach flying more intensely, and drops of saltwater on her cheeks with each passing photo.

Sharada wasn't too fond of nostalgia. She found it awkward, even slightly disturbing, to look at old photographs, remember the 'good' times. Somehow, the good memories tended to throw up bad ones. The two were always intertwined, like in those photographs. For every photo of Saraswathi looking ravishing, there was Mani on the other side of the camera, prowling around her to capture her charm. For every carefree smile, every happy phone call from Saraswathi in Kodaikanal, there were phone calls from Mani's wife, and the questions that the world asked Sharada about her cousin. Nostalgia tickled her, and pricked her at the same time. Sharada couldn't take it.

Just then Ajith knocked on the door and cried, "Paati!"
Sharada didn't say a word. Ajith called again, and again. The knock grew louder, and more worried. "Paati? Are you there? You don't have to come outside. I just want to know if you're okay." Sharada didn't say anything. She picked up her TV remote and turned it on. The Kerala TV channel had started its early morning Guruvayoorappan bhajans. She increased the volume until it drowned out Ajith's demonstrations.

The phone in her room rang. She turned down the volume and picked it up. It was Ajith, "Paati. I'm going to Kodaikanal. I'll be back in a couple of days."

Sharada did not react, just put the phone down and sat on her bed.
***

Ajith didn't go to Kodaikanal. He called Shankar instead and asked if he could meet Mani for another interview.

At eleven o clock, after a lengthy breakfast at her house, Ajith and Nethra found themselves at Mani's gate. The house, as always, looked disused. But, the gate was locked from the outside. Ajith called Shankar's phone and found out that Mani had been rushed to hospital - he had lost consciousness that morning. Shankar could barely speak on the phone; fear made his voice tremble.

When they reached the hospital, they found Shankar and Mani's brother, Sadasivam running around, completing all the formalities. Amidst filling out forms and making payments, Sadasivam told Ajith, "If Anna becomes conscious again, the first thing he'll want to do is get back home. He hates this hospital business!"

Sure enough, the next morning, a conscious Mani kicked up a fuss and shifted back home. First, he complained that the ambulance that brought him was dirty and bad, and demanded that the ambulance that took him back should be the posh, new one. Then, he pointed out that the bed they gave him was uncomfortable, "This is the one you give to dying people, no?" He told off the doctor for missing his rounds and delaying Mani's discharge.

When he reached home, the first thing he did was order Ajith to come and finish the interview that afternoon, "I have only three days left to live," he said on the phone, his voice, once an arresting baritone, was now too feeble and unclear to even convey this message intelligibly. Shankar translated it for Ajith.
***

Ajith sat by Mani's bed, now housed in the same dingy room upstairs where Ajith met him the first time. The curtains were drawn and there was little light in the room. Ajith sat on a chair and Mani, leaning towards him on on one side, was almost on his lap. Ajith held his dictaphone right next to Mani's mouth as he asked him the questions.

"Sir, your second disappearance, in 1987-88... What caused that?" When he asked him this question, a piece of a jigsaw suddenly fell in place - the dates in Taapi's photographs were all late 1987 or early 1988.
Mani took some time answering the question.
"Unrest," Mani said, finally.
"Can you elaborate?" Ajith asked.
Mani didn't say a word, he turned his head and faced the ceiling in silence. Ajith was supposed to infer that Mani wanted to say nothing more.

"Sir," Ajith tried again, "Do you have any interest in any other arts? Say, photography?"
Ajith realised, as soon as he asked it, that the question was too direct. Mani's eyes turned almost instantly from the ceiling, to Ajith and glared at him. There was no response to this question either. Ajith had hit a dead-end. He had to pursue his story elsewhere.

Resignedly, he asked, "Sir, do you have any regrets about your musical career?"
"No," Mani said, clearly having lost the inclination to talk anymore.
Ajith asked, "For instance, you haven't been given the Sangeetha Kalanidhi..."
"No regret about that, definitely," he said with a start, "MD Ramanathan never got it. Ramnad Krishnan, Mali, Rajarathnam Pillai, Palani... These people were not treasure houses of music? Lots of connoisseurs, musicians listened to my music, many of them loved it. I'm happy."

"You stopped performing after your wife's death... What was the reason for it?"
"I loved her a lot. I almost died in 1988, she saved me. The only thing I could give her in return was my music... One she died, I had no reason to perform, no one to perform for. Anyway, all this is there in that old interview that you've read."

"It doesn't make sense to me," Ajith said, frustratedly. Mani was startled. Ajith said, "You didn't love your wife all that much. Both of us know enough to know that. That can't have been the reason."
"I'm too weak to smile. I would have smiled otherwise," Mani said, "That isn't the reason."
He paused, collected his breath, and continued, "I had been a bad family man - ignored my wife, my children, immersed in my musical world..."
Ajith still didn't understand why Mani held up this facade. Both of them knew it wasn't always Mani's music that separated him and his family.
"When I lost my mind and nearly died, my wife came looking for me. She nursed me back to health. I realised that she had no source of income apart from me. She did some tailoring, but that wasn't enough. I had to keep performing and teaching to keep her alive. So, I performed to keep her going. When she died, I saw no reason to continue performing. I had lost interest in the process for fifteen years anyway."

It was an unconvincing story, but it seemed closer to the truth than what Mani had been telling people all along.

"Your wife came looking for you. Where were you at that time?"
"You don't know? I thought you knew more."

Ajith didn't know what to make of that.

Mani carried on, "I had a house near Kodaikanal then. I was staying there, alone. The weather didn't agree with me, I almost always had a cold and severe breathing problems. One evening, I went for a long walk, and I became breathless in a fairly secluded place. I fell down that day, and I woke up a few days later at home, with my wife. We stayed there until I was strong enough to travel again. We sold that house, and came back to Madras to start over again."
Mani began coughing uncontrollably, and Shankar, who was under strict instructions not to enter the room, rushed in. Mani motioned to Ajith to leave, as he still coughed. Shankar, peering through his thick glasses, told Ajith, "He'll call you when he's better. See you then."

Mani wasn't going to tell him the truth, Ajith had to ask his Paati.
***

To continue.

The Two Disappearances - Part V

Inexcusable delay. My only reason is that I was distracted by a stem-cell researcher.
Find all previous parts here.
***

Sharada's house has two bedrooms; one where she sleeps and the other were Ajith sleeps. But neither bedroom really belongs to either inhabitant - Ajith's books are in his grandmother's room, and some of her sarees are in his. The radio is in Ajith's room, and she listens to the afternoon radio concert on her way to sleep on the bed there. His room has more light during the day, and she reads the newspaper there (the drawing room is always dark). Ajith likes listening to music in Sharada's room - he thinks it is quieter. Ajith partially closes the door only late at night when he wants to watch pornography, and even then, he doesn't lock the door - he only turns the screen away from the door.

Spaces simply aren't private in Sharada's house, save the bathrooms.

But there are spaces that have become private because no one looks there anymore - like the lofts in both bedrooms. Sharada, her husband and her cousin had collected an assortment of junk during their lifetimes that found their homes in that loft. There was old, dismantled furniture. A folding chair on which Ajith's grandfather spent much of his waking hours in his fifties. When his son bought him a new one, reluctantly, this was broken into three pieces and relegated to the loft. Three legs of their first dining table was there, hiding amongst back issues of physics journals. The cradle on which Ajith and his father rocked, remnants of the small table on which Ajith did his homework, the chair that broke when Ajith made out with his girlfriend on its arm, all lay defunct and disused.

Then there are those vessels that the family brought from their ancestral house in Tirunelveli when they moved to Madras. Vessels large enough to cook for forty people in forgotten shapes and forms. There was that one in which his great-grandmother apparently made soan papdi once a year, another copper vessel used to store water in which Ajith bathed till he was five. There was also that other vessel in which Ajith's father burnt his hand trying to taste boiling payasam whilst it was still on the stove.

Somewhere in that space was a set of books and photo albums that belonged to Ajith's grand-aunt - the one he called 'Taapi'. She wasn't his Paati, but she was similar - of similar age, build, look, dress sense. But they were vastly different in their temperaments. Sharada was strict and slightly cynical. Ajith couldn't tell whether she was cynical because she was who society wanted her to be, or it was the other way around. She loved Ajith dearly, but sometimes Ajith thought of her love as almost mechanical - she loved him because she was supposed to. She was wise, she was good with finances, and she had a natural feel for human behaviour. But she was dependent - on her husband, her son, and now her grandson - for her courage.

Circumstances taught Sarswathi to fend for herself. Her parents died even before she could register their presence, she lived with her uncle after that along with nine other children. She was, as her uncle put it, too pretty for her own good, and had to learn to cope with all the attention she got from the boys in her school, her college, and even the cousins she grew up with. She learnt quickly - to keep them at a distance, but keep them.

The two girls went to their music classes with the sole objective of being able to sing when a prospective groom came to see them. Sharada perfected Seetapate in Khamas, while Saraswathi, being the more proficient singer, was saddled with having to execute Emani Ne in Mukhari. Her music teacher soon discovered that Saraswathi was too good for this. He wanted to make her a singer. Her uncle had issues with the idea, he stopped her music classes and got her to learn cooking from her aunts instead. Saraswathi eloped with her music teacher. She was only fifteen then. Eventually, her family caught up with her, the marriage was annulled by a court, and her teacher was convicted for kidnapping.

Saraswathi still learnt music, on her aunt's insistence, now with a female teacher. As consolation, Sharada also learnt with her. The two girls progressed steadily though Saraswathi was clearly the better musician. They even performed together until Sharada got married.

The first photograph in Saraswathi's album had the two girls seated together on a stage in matching half-sarees, matching pottus (the black-and-white photo showed them as black, but Ajith imagined them in crimson), matching nose and earrings, their hair neatly double-pleated and ribboned and their eyes heavily lined with kohl. They were surrounded by a violinist who looked more at ease on stage than them, his bow resting by his side and his hands on his knees; a mridangist staring at the camera nervously while holding his tuning stone in his left hand, and their mother holding up a tambura in the background. There was only one microphone placed between the two girls, a flask on Sharada's right with two tumblers by it, a notebook, and a banner behind them with the words, "Vinodini Gana Sabha (Regd.)". Ajith found it funny that sabhas always found it necessary to announce to the world that they were registered.

The photo was taken before the concert started, clearly. Back then, photographs were too precious for people to take chances with live action. If one of the girls shook her head too much or the mridangist moved his hands too violently, the motion blur would make the entire exercise pointless. So, they settled for a photograph where the girls stared at the camera like it was a firing squad. They could have smiled, Ajith thought.

But even in that solemn, posed photograph, the girls' characters came through. His grandmother looked like she was there because she was supposed to be, 'they' told her to be there, and his Taapi looked like she wanted to be there. Something in the way they sat, the way they stared, the way they wore their clothes revealed this. His Taapi looked every bit the stunner she was. Her frame was fuller than her cousin's, she had sharper features, brighter eyes and a darker complexion. One of her eyebrows was raised, as if she was questioning this process.

On the back of the photo, in clear, black lettering belonging to Taapi, was the song list for that evening. Ajith noticed a proliferation of eclectic ragas - Karnataka Behag, Shuddha Bangala, Srutiranjani, Gundakriya - amidst Kalyani and Madhyamavati. If someone as beautiful as his Taapi sang E Dari Sancharintuvo, Ajith would have melted.

Ajith turned the page to find his Taapi staring at him again. She was sitting on a bannerless stage this time, without her cousin by her side. The mridangist was the same as the previous concert, but the violinist was a young girl (Ajith wondered if she was T. Rukmini) wearing a dark half-saree contrasting with Taapi's light one. Taapi looked a little older and prettier than the previous photo, and so did the mridangist - his Adam's apple more prominent than it was in the other photo. On the tambura was an uninterested, feeble, old man who looked incapable of holding the tambura up for three hours. But that's what tambura artistes looked like all the time. The setting looked like a temple. It was outdoors, there were pillars around her, and the background was not a screen - it looked like the pathways of a temple. There were no microphones here, only flasks and cloth bags.

What struck Ajith, though, was the freedom and authority with which Taapi sat on the stage. Her regality suggested that the stage belonged to her. She wasn't just going to sing a concert - she was conducting darbar. She couldn't have performed too much by this time, Ajith thought. She looked barely twenty, she must've been. Sharada was married by this time and had stopped performing. Was it the absence of Sharada's nervousness that allowed her to lord over the stage?

There was nothing written behind the photograph - no date, no kacheri list.

The next page had a curious photo. It was of a young NV Mani in the middle of a raga alapana. The mridangam was off the mridandgist's lap and the ghatam player leaned on his ghatam. The violinist watched Mani in close concentration. Ajith knew there would be photos of Mani in that album, but he didn't expect one so soon. He turned around to find, "12th October, 1969: Found you!" written in a hand that was not his Taapi's. Ajith guessed, correctly, that it was Mani's handwriting. He didn't understand what the photo was about, though.

Ajith excitedly turned the pages of the album looking for an explanation to Mani's inscription, but he was soon distracted by the other pictures. There were many photographs of his Taapi - black-and-white photos that played spectacular games with light and dark. There she was, sitting at a table and turning around to look at the camera, as if the photographer had just called her. There was another one, where she sat on a cane chair in a verandah, the hills behind her, holding a steel tumbler in her hand. Then, he found a photograph of her tuning a black tambura in a dark room. He could only see the outlines of her figure, her face and the tambura, lit by distant, dim, balmy sunlight, and her radiant eyes fixed on the tambura. The rest of the photograph was just black.

There was a photo of her hair, just her hair, and her eyes peeking out through them teasingly. Another one of her fingers as they strummed the tambura. One photo of her feet almost smashed against the camera as the blurred outline of her face could be discerned in the bekoh in the background. Another one, extremely alluring, of one-half of her tilted face in a subtle smile.

Ajith's favourite photo was one in which she slept on one side, facing the camera, her dark eyes closed to the world, a blanket covering everything but her head, her hair strewn over the top half of the face. Again, there was more darkness than light in the photograph; a feature common to most pictures in that collection. The light only drew outlines - guides to define the contours of the subject. Light's lines were only suggestive, the viewer had to participate in the photo to draw the rest.

They had an intimacy to them, it was clear that the photographer loved his subject deeply, in a way that he saw beauty in everything Taapi did, in every single movement of hers. She must have loved him too, for the photographs suggested an affection, almost as if he weren't simply capturing her with each photo, but caressing her with it.

He ogled at the photo for a whole five minutes before telling himself that she was his grand-aunt. He wondered if the photographer had done the same - watched Taapi when she slept. Women looked most beautiful when then, Ajith believed.

Ajith instinctively turned the photo around to see if there was anything written on the back. In her neat lettering, there was "November 1987, Swara", written on it. Quickly, he went back to the other photographs. All of them had the same inscription.

She was forty-seven years old in 1987, but didn't look a day older than thirty-five. She died in early 1988.

Before Ajith thought too much about "Swara", the explanation came in the next photograph. Taapi stood, wearing trousers and a sweater (he had never seen her in these clothes before), at the gate of a house that said, " 'Swara', No. 9, Eastern Hill Street". On the other side of the gate, there was a board that said, "S. Ramachandran, Sharada Ramachandran". He suddenly remembered - this was the house his Thatha owned a little away from Kodaikanal. He sold it when Ajith was fairly young, but Ajith still has vague memories of holidays in that house. What he didn't understand, though, was what Taapi was doing there, and who took all those photographs.

Just then, Ajith's phone rang from the other room. He left the albums on the bed and rushed to receive it. It was Nethra.

He excitedly told her about this album and what he saw in it, when the conversation meandered into other topics. While he lost track of time in this conversation, Sharada entered the house from her shopping and walked straight into the room where the album was kept open.

She dropped her bag of vegetables on the floor and gasped. She then collected herself, went into the kitchen and started putting the vegetables into the fridge.

Ajith finished his call, and noticed his Paati in the kitchen. He panicked and rushed to the bedroom. He found it undisturbed and presumed that his Paati hadn't been into the room. He packed the photos back in the carton and climbed up on the chair to put it back in the loft. Then he realised that he needed to look at them again. So, he put the carton under the bed.
***

The photographs lay, unmindful of the storm brewing around them, under the bed on which Ajith slept. A full moon lit up a hazy Madras night - the streetlights causing the haze. If you looked carefully, squinting your eyes, you might have noticed a star or two, a few of the brighter ones. Otherwise, like all cities, the sky was just a blanket of purssian blue and faint orange.

Sharada's eyesight, even during the day, wasn't the best. She needed a cataract surgery that she kept postponing. By night, she managed to go to the toilet or for a drink of water only using an LED torch that Ajith bought for her from Bombay.

Presently, the torch threw a circular light on the wall behind Ajith's bed, under the loft that held the photographs. Sharada, as quietly as she could, moved a stool under the loft, stool in one hand, torch in the other. She tried standing up on the stool when it made a loud creak. Ajith didn't wake up. Emboldened, she tried again. This time, she made it on to the stool. She opened the loft and started looking inside. She found a box with "Saras" written on it, but it was too heavy for her to move. Those were Saraswathi's books. Sharada was looking for the one with the photo albums. She craned her neck to look around. It could not be too inside, Ajith had just seen it that afternoon.

"It's under the bed," Ajith said. Startled, Sharada almost fell off the stool. "The carton is under the bed," Ajith said, calmly, "Paati, get down." Sharada obeyed. Ajith pulled out the carton from under the bed and gave it to her. He turned on the light, and their eyes narrowed as they adjusted to it. Sharada simply picked up the carton and strode out to the other bedroom without a word and slammed the door shut.

A space had become private in Sharada's house.
***

(To continue. In three days. Sharan style.)