Witness for the Plaintiff

If this post offends you, it is meant to.
***

The ten-thirty bell signalled tension for both sides. The plaintiff's crucial witness would be cross-examined by the defendant's bewildered lawyer. The large courtroom where the Full Bench of the High Court would sit was a large, airy, cheery, bright room until they installed air-conditioning a few years ago. Now, it looked like early evening throughout the day, and a low hum provided the background noise for complicated litigation.

The lawyer held the witnesses proof affidavit nervously in his hand.

"I state that Rama, also known as Lord Rama (no offence meant to My Lords) Ram (not to be confused with a male sheep), Ramachandra, Raghuvara, Pattabhirama, Kodandarama, Ram Lalla (I did not know this one until this case), Dinamanivamsatilaka, Maryaadapurushottam, Daasaratha etc. was born in Ayodhya in the sanctum sanctorum of a ruined temple. I was present that day, and was one of the sanyasis who performed his naamakarana. I state that a structure was built, around four thousand years later on this very site by invaders."

The defendant's lawyer read the paragraph thrice to make sure he was reading what he was reading. "This guy can't be serious," he told his tired junior, who was poring over volumes of officialese that archaeologists had thrown up. He saw, in the back row of the visitors gallery, a geriatric with long white hair tied up in a ridiculous bun on top of his head, flowing white beard, dressed in saffron attire, sitting cross-legged on the century-old wooden bench, looking irritatingly smug.

The judges entered the courtroom ceremonially, led by three ushers in traditional white-and-red attire and majestic sceptres. Even as they entered, one was giggling, the second was trying to tell the first to stay in control, and the third looked grave. Everyone stood up, and bowed. The judges acknowledged the bow with folded hands. The bench clerk called out, "Item one!" and read out the cause title, and said, "Posted for plaintiff's evidence."

"If it may please your Lordship, I am appearing for the plaintiff. My lord, the matter is posted the cross examination of PW 677."

The bench clerk handed the proof affidavits to the judges, and the senior-most judge said, "Are you ready, counsel?" The defendant's lawyer nodded unsurely.

"Please call the witness."

The plaintiff's lawyer signalled to the gallery, and the old man in saffron robes got up from his seat, and walked confidently to the witness box, where he was administered an oath. The typist recorded on his barely-in-one-piece desktop that the witness was administered oath.

The defendant's lawyer, reading from the affidavit asked, "Shri Shri Shri Shri Shri Shri Shri Shri Shri Satyasivasundarananda..."
"You have one Shri too many," the witness said.
"No, I don't. If your name was Ramesh, I'd say, 'Shri Ramesh'..."
"Oh."
"Out of curiosity," a judge asked, "How do you decide how many Shris you add before your name?"
"In the olden days," the witness expounded, "We added one Shri for every three-hundred years of abstention from Shrimatis. Though sources today tell me that the figure is about three hundred minutes."
The judge giggled. His fellow judge whispered in his ear, "Learned Brother, please behave yourself."
"You state in your affidavit, Shri Shri Shri Shri..."
"I think you can call him 'PW 677'," a judge interjected.
"Much obliged, my lord," he said, looking truly obliged for a change, and turning to the witness, "Shri PW 677, you state that you are about 5010 years old. That would mean that you were born in 3000 BC."
"Wrong. I was born in 2940 BC. You see, we sanyasis are born at the age of sixty. Have you ever seen a twenty-year old sanyasi?"
The defendant's lawyer nodded gravely. The typist duly recorded the evidence. The judge said, "This is fascinating."
"Yeah. So, when I was eighty, someone said I was young and upcoming. I was overjoyed." The typist was about to record this when the judge motioned him to ignore it.
"I wish I was a sanyasi," the giggly judge said, suddenly, "I'm just sixty-one, and I'm retiring in a few months."
"Please ignore my Learned Brother. He's been like this for months. Anticipatory withdrawal symptoms."

The defendant's lawyer picked up a book, and said, "If you are that old, how come you don't figure in this book?"
"What book is that, counsel?" a judge asked.
"The Limca Book of World Records."
"Ho dude, what is that?!" the witness asked, "Looks like I've been away from civilisation for too long. Damn it."
The typist looked at the judge uncomprehendingly. One judge said, "The Limca Book of Records does not mention my name as the Oldest Living Indian."

"You state in your affidavit that you reside at 'Small hillock, K2 backside, Karakoram Range, Gilgit Baltistan, Pakistan'. How do you survive there? What do you eat?"
"I meditate for a few years, and then wake up for a small bite, and then meditate again. I eat snowflakes."
"Snowflakes? How do you eat those?"
"Like you eat cornflakes."
The giggly judge asked, "Ooh. Is it tasty?"
"Of course! Why don't you come home sometime? Bring some milk when you come, and if possible, some bananas, strawberries and honey."
"Honey! Yum!"
"Learned brother! Let us please concentrate on the issues at hand."
"Learned brother, we are writing an 8000 page judgment. Surely one small recipe won't hurt."
The second brother whispered to the third, "Our Learned Brother is acting like he's had too much grass."
"Oh. Is he vegetarian?"

The defendant's lawyer soldiered on, "You state that your occupation was as a rishi and a sub-guru to Dasharatha and Rama after him. What were your duties?"
"My main task was to perform rituals for the princes. Drive away ill omens and the like. And then we taught Sanskrit to our princes, juniors and successors. I was an expert archery theorist. I couldn't shoot an arrow too well, but I could talk about it relentlessly."
"Like Harsha Bhogle," the judge said, guffawing.
"Learned Brother!"
The typist duly recorded these findings.

"Were you personally acquainted with Rama?"
"Oh, of course. I was born only ten years before him. So, even though I was seventy years older, we were contemporaries in a sense." The keyboard clippety-clapped.
"What interactions have you had with him?"
"We used to discuss matters of civil engineering. That helped him build bridges later on. We even enjoyed the occasional drink of soma. That was quite something, not like the drink this lawyer fed me last night - whiskey, he called it. Jack Daniel, apparently."
"Any other interactions?"
Oh, I was also his economics teacher briefly."
"Only briefly?"
"Yeah. Before I could teach him macroeconomics, he went away to fight some gents and ladies in the forest with a senior of mine, and came back married. And once he was married, he had little time for classes."
"Anyway, after marriage, you only need microeconomics," a voice rang.
Another resigned voice said, "Learned Brother..." Then came the clippety-clap of the keyboard.

"What were you doing on the ninth night after the New Moon during the Chaitra month on the day when Rama was born?"
"Dude, I can't reveal all that."
"Did you watch him being born?"
"No, I did not have access to those areas."
"So, you did not see him being born."
"No, I didn't."
"So, it could well be that he was not born at all."
"But I told you that I knew him."
"Please answer my question."
"Yes, yes," the judge said, "Just answer the questions put to you, 677."
"I put it to you that Rama was never born." The plaintiff's lawyer banged his fist on the table.
"Wrong."
The typist typed furiously, "It is wrong to say that Rama was not born at all."
"At what age did you interact with Rama?"
"When he was around fifteen."
"I put it to you that just as you were born at the age of sixty, Rama was born at the age of fifteen."
"Wrong." The typist typed, "It is wrong to state that Rama was born at the age of fifteen."
There was some murmuring around the courtroom. Someone shouted, "Don't insult my God!" The giggly judge said, "Damn. If this was a movie, I'd have a gavel in my hand, and I could say, 'Order! Order!' I'll retire in six months without ever having said it!"
"Learned Brother!" came the groan.

"Where was Rama born on that night?"
"In Ayodhya."
"Can you show me the palace on this map?" the lawyer said, taking out a map of Ayodhya.
The witness peered at the map closely and pointed to a spot and said, "Here!"
It was the place right under the central dome of the destroyed mosque.
"But you said you hadn't seen him being born."
"Well, that was the delivery room in the palace."
"Delivery room?"
"Yes. There were so many women in the palace, and so many children being born that the palace had one. You know, I can even tell you where he was conceived."
"Conceived? I thought the king just gave his wives some nectar and they conceived."
The witness erupted into a volcano of laughter. "Valmiki wrote in metaphors you know! Nectar! Hahahaha!"
The giggly judge roared with laughter. "Learned Brother!"
Then the judge asked, "What do you mean by lots of children being born?" The typist began to type, when the judge asked him not to.
"Oh, the palace was a fairly wild place, My Lord. If you played your cards right, you could get fairly lucky."
"Damn. I'm telling you. I should've been born five thousand years ago."

"Lets get back to the point here," the lawyer continued, "Babies were usually born in this 'delivery room'. But not necessarily."
"I don't know of a baby who wasn't."
"Rama?"
"He was."
"Did you see him being born?"
"No."
The typist typed away, the plaintiff's lawyer exasperatedly stoop up and said, "My Lords! I have already gone through this. The Amar Chitra Katha clearly shows a room where the queens are lying on beds. This must be a delivery room."
"That's a matter for argument, My Lords! No point raising it now."
"Yes, Counsel. Go on with the cross-examination."
"How do you know the delivery room was at this exact spot."
"I have seen it. I used to go there to bless the children."
"Did you bless Rama there?"
"No..."
Type, type.

"Now, PW 677, lets come to the other important question. What were you doing in the year of 1528?"
"AD or BC?"
"AD."
"There was a Kumbh-Mela at Sangam. I came down from the Himalayas for it. I lost my brother there."
"Did you pass via Ayodhya?"
Guiltily, the witness said, "Yes. We aren't supposed to have any material pleasures, according to our dharma. But you see, I had a sentimental attachment to the land of my birth. So, I came here."
"Did you see a mosque in the city?"
"They were building one."
"Were 'they' Babur?"
"No. 'They' were some masons and daily labourers."
"Did Babur commission the mosque?"
"I don't know who Babur is."
The judge whispered to his brother, "He doesn't know Babur. No wonder he hasn't got a haircut. Teehee."
The other judge whispered back, "Really, Learned Brother, are you on drugs?"
"Abbey, Learned Brother, you were the one arguing yesterday that the place of birth is a juristic person."
"Well, it is!"
"God save this country from judges like you."
"Just for that, I'm going to dissent."
"Learned Brothers! Maintain decorum!" the third judge said.

"PW 677, do you know Humayun?"
"Of course! He was this monkey who used to hang around Rama."
Type, type.

The lawyer, quite pleased with himself, said, "I have no more questions."
***

Tyagaraja, the Environmentalist

The anupallavi of Tyagaraja's popular Kharaharapriya kriti, chakkani rajamargamulundaga, always intrigued me. Consider, first, the words of the pallavi:

chakkani rajamargamulundaga
sandula duranela, o manasa

"When there are beautiful, wide roads suitable for kings, why do you squeeze through gullies?" Fine. Makes sense. If you ignore the traffic, of course.

Then, we come to the anupallavi:

chikkani palu migadayundaga,
chiyanu gangasagaramele?

"When you have sweet milk and cream (yum), why would you choose to drink the..." and this is where I kept getting stuck - "gangasagaram?" I know the Ganga is highly polluted, and I would choose sweet palu and migada (yum!) over it, but I found it unlikely that the pious Tyagaraja would denigrate the Holy Ganges in his songs. But then, I'm a lazy guy, I didn't bother to find out what this word meant. I convinced myself that that the saint was also an environmental activist and let things be. Each time I sang the anupallavi, I would picture the yucky Ganga, floating dead bodies, toxic effluents from corrupt factories, the stench, the green colour, and contrast it with sweet milk, flavoured with a little badam, perhaps, drunk hot from a steel tumbler, early morning, skimming the cream (yum!) off the top with one swift movement of the tongue.

Bliss.

This morning, while writing the notation to this song for someone, I checked T.K. Govinda Rao's book for the lyrics and meaning. And I found, "river of toddy - gangasagaram!" After ploughing through another Telugu book that has detailed commentary on all Tyagaraja kritis, I found that "gangasagaram" was the saint's sarcastic way of referring to toddy. The man had a wicked sense of humour!

I sang the anupallavi with rare vigour this morning. "Chikkani palu migada(yum!) yundaga, Chhiyanu gangasagaramele?"

Two Disappearances - Continued

I wanted to put this part and the next one up together, but it was too long. Split it in two. Kachaak.

Also, there's a chapter in Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle called 'No Good News in this Chapter'. Random fact.
***

On a rickety bus to Kodaikanal, trundling along a highway in disrepair, Ajith called his father. They hadn't spoken in almost a year.

"Ajith?" his father asked, immediately.
"Dad," Ajith said, in a tone that suggested he wanted to stay away from small talk, "Where in Kodaikanal is that house Thatha owned?"
"Why?" his father asked.
"Just answer the question."
His father paused, considered his response, and then said, "Your Thatha sold it. I'm not sure if it exists anymore."
"Address?"
His father hesitated, and then said, "Listen. Your Paati called me the other day and told me that you were meeting NV Mani about your grand-aunt." Ajith was surprised. Sharada was not on talking terms with her son for as long as Ajith remembered. "She wanted to know," he continued, "If I told you about them."
"Well, you did," Ajith said, bluntly.
"I might have. But that doesn't mean you go looking for these dead stories. It has split three generations of our family already. Leave it alone now."

"What does that mean?" Ajith asked.
"Why doesn't your Paati talk to me?"
"Because you left me."
Ajith's father sighed, and said, "No. I had stopped talking to them even before you were born. I didn't leave you, Ajith. I left your mother, and my parents. You just happened to be with them, that's all."
Ajith was silent. His father continued, after a few moments, "Your thatha gave away that house to your Taapi a year before you were born. For nothing. And she gave it away to Mani. Again, for nothing. And your grandparents did not say a thing. They said it was her property, and that she could do whatever she wanted with it."
"And you left my mother because?"
"They were all together. In their love for your Taapi and Mani."
"I never thought you were such a prude."

Ajith's father went completely silent, the words stung. They lingered for as long as father and son held their phones. His father finally cut the call. Ajith stared out the window as a dark, indiscernible landscape spiralled around him on the climb up the mountains. He couldn't sleep, for thoughts formed whirlpools in his head - swirling, chaotic and deadly. He drifted occasionally into snatches of sleep, only to be awakened by the rumbling of the bus or of his own mind. Ajith woke up in the morning, from that half-sleep, to the cry of touts and auto-drivers in the Kodaikanal bus stand. His phone had two messages from his father. One gave him the address of the house, and the other said, "My father loved her. Everyone knew."

The weight of that revelation fell surprisingly lightly on Ajith's shoulders. Too many lofts in too many houses with too many secrets had been emptied out onto the floor too quickly.

Ajith barely remembered how he made his way to that address. He didn't register how much the auto driver asked him for, he was only vaguely relieved that the driver immediately knew the place. He noticed that the house was slightly away from the bustle of the touristy quarter of Kodaikanal. Inhabitation became more sparse as they made their way through an untarred, climbing road towards the top of a densely forested hill.

"Shortcut!" the driver announced. Ajith nodded distractedly. "You're working at the observatory?" the driver asked again. Ajith muttered, "No..."
"A writer, then!" the driver said.
"Yes," Ajith said, not wanting to engage in any conversation.

When they reached the house, Ajith found that it had been converted into a guest house of sorts. A home-stay, they called it. A caretaker emerged from behind the house with a pair of gardening shears in his hands.
"Yes?" he asked Ajith, scanning him through his thick glasses. His gaze reminded Ajith of Shankar.
Ajith didn't really know what to do at this point. He needed to see the house, but he had no idea what else to do there. He said, "This is a guest house?"
"Yes."
"I need to stay here."
If the caretaker was surprised, he didn't show it. "How many days, Sir?"
Ajith made up his mind as he went along, "Two days."
The caretaker now stopped hiding his surprise, "Sir, what do you do?"
"I'm a writer," Ajith said, almost naturally.
"Ok," the caretaker said, "This way. I'm Thanjan, owner."
"Hello," Ajith said, swinging his backpack over his shoulder, as he walked along the pathway to the door. Thanjan had a walk that was slightly off-balance, with each step, it seemed like he would fall over to the left. He wore a faded khadi kurta and track pants, and hadn't shaved in four days.

As he walked towards the make-shift reception, Ajith had this disconcerting sensation that something was wrong, somewhere. He had seen this house in those photographs, and he vaguely remembered the place from his childhood, but something disturbed him. The place was largely familiar, but not entirely. There was a newness that troubled Ajith - since the owner had kept it so similar to the way it used to be, the small changes stood out. It was almost what he remembered, but it wasn't. That unsettled him.

As Ajith filled the details in the caretaker's register, tweaking small details here and there, changing one digit of his telephone number, or changing the old and new number for his house out of sheer habit, Thanjan asked, "Only two days, Mr. Ramachandran?"
"Yeah."
"The reason I'm asking you, is because we've had writers before, and they've all spent months here, writing."
"I'm not writing," Ajith said, "Merely looking for inspiration."
"For a novel, Sir?"
"Perhaps."

Thanjan picked up Ajith's bag, and led him along a corridor. "Until last month, there was this girl staying in this room," the caretaker said, joyfully pointing Ajith to a bright room with a sit-out. Ajith remembered it as the sit-out where his Taapi sat with a cup of tea in a photograph. "This writer, Sir," the caretaker continued, "Sharanya Ramkumar, her pseudonym is Mythili Iyer."
"Ah," Ajith said, "I know her. Very autobiographical novel..."
"Yeah? A sad life, then! She wrote the whole thing here, in this room," he said, almost wistfully, then, suddenly, springing to life, "Shall I get you some chai?"
"That would be great."
"You don't mind a light tea? Flavoured?"
"Sounds great."
"I'll get you the tea. You have to guess the flavour. You will not get this anywhere else in South India. I grow the flavouring in the garden!" Thanjan left Ajith to himself and scurried away to the kitchen.

Ajith spotted a black tambura in a corner of the room, in a pretty wooden stand, nestled amongst floor-pillows. He recognised it immediately as the one in the photograph.

He fished out his toothbrush from his bag, and found he didn't have paste. Thanjan came back, almost on cue, and said, "I thought you might not have toothpaste!" and handed him a Dabur Red paste. The paste tasted as foul as it looked, and Ajith washed his mouth until he could taste his teeth again.

When he finished, he found Thanjan waiting for him in the sit-out, laying out the tea. There were two cups - Thanjan had invited himself.

The sit-out was sunshiny, it opened out to the view of a rivulet twisting around moss-ridden grey rocks amidst a thicket. There were two cane chairs - Ajith recognised them from the photographs again - and a plastic teapoy that looked woefully out of place.

"I suggest you have it with honey. No milk, no sugar," Thanjan said.
Ajith obeyed, he was hardly given any option. He brought the hot cup towards his mouth, and smelt something fruity. He sipped the tea and found that the flavour was a mix of two or three fruits. Pineapple, definitely. A dash of mango, perhaps. And a little lemon.

"Wrong," Thanjan declared, "It's only one fruit."
Ajith was surprised. He took another sip, the taste began to grow on him now, and it achieved some coherence - instead of tasting like a mixture of three flavours, it tasted like one. But he couldn't put his finger on what it was.
"Passion fruit!" Thanjan said, "The previous owner of this house was a bit of a gardener also."
This made Ajith curious, "Who was he?"
"There was a she, who was the gardener, and then there was a he, who sold it to my father," Thanjan said, "Biscuit?"
"Mani sold it to your father?" Ajith asked, ignoring the biscuit.
Thanjan put the biscuit back on the tray, "How do you know Mani Sir owned this house?"
"I've been interviewing him."
Thanjan didn't believe him, "He wouldn't have told you this."
"Why?"
"I can't tell you that. Anyway," he said, emptying the contents of the teacup into his mouth in one large gulp, "I must be going now. You can leave the cups here."

Thanjan stood up to leave, when Ajith said, "I am Ramachandran's grandson. I've been to this house before."
Thanjan sat down, "Please don't tell me you are going to write this story?"
"Why is everyone so ashamed about it?"
"Mani Sir is a respected classical musician..."
"Many respected classical musicians have had open dalliances."
"But at his age, you want all this to come out... And," he said suddenly, "Saras Akka is your own family!" Then he declared with an air of finality, "If you came here looking for a story, you're not getting one."

Thanjan stormed out, and walked back in to say, "Do you want hot water for a bath? I'll have to heat it on the stove."
Ajith nodded.

Ajith bathed lazily, the hot water from Thanjan's stove was exhausted too quickly, but his body got used to the sting of the cold tap-water after a few tentative mugs. How quickly we get used to things, Ajith thought, what seems undigestible, intolerable, painful, soon becomes a part of our everyday. This isn't about making friends with discomfort, he thought, it is about redefining it for yourself.

He felt a lot better after that bath, the happy smell of soap and shampoo lifted his spirits. He went back to the sit-out, spread his legs out on to the teapoy and picked up the newspaper that was kept for him. He tucked into the sports page when Thanjan came back and said, "Breakfast is ready."

Ajith took his newspaper with him to the dining table, where he ate in silence. Thanjan coldly served him idlis, fresh from the cooker, with steaming sambar and slightly salty chutney. They didn't say a word to each other. Another cup of passion fruit tea later, Ajith went back to the sit-out and sat down with his laptop. Now that he had two days to himself, he thought it might be a good idea to sit and transcribe the interview.

With his legs on the teapoy, laptop on his lap, recorder in his shirt pocket and earphones in his ear, Ajith began the transcribing. He started with the first part of the conversation - Mani's memories of his childhood and his early teachers. He spoke of his mother, of how he kept taalam with the clatter of her sewing machine. "She had rhythm in everything she did," Mani said, "You could play the mridangam to her walk, to her talk, to her cutting vegetables, cooking, churning the cream into butter..." And his father, who could imitate the great nadaswaram vidwans, the distinct violin styles of Chodiwah, Dwaram and Papa, Dhanammal's veena, all with his voice, and Mali with his whistling. He wrote about Mani's brief schooling in a convent, where Mani claimed to anger his English teacher by asking him how Jesus could carry a goat in his hand and walk around when his followers ate the goat with relish. Then came his memories of the drama company, practising long and hard to get every entry, exit, every dance sequence, every song perfect, travelling on bullock cart to different villages for performances, singing and acting about eight hours a day without a trace of tiredness or boredom, tasting alcohol for the first time at fifteen after a particularly successful show, and learning Tyagaraja kritis from unnamed 'mama's.

Ajith remembered Mani's wonderment and joy while recollecting these memories - he really didn't want them lost with his passing. And he was happy he found a patient listener, who would also write about them.

By lunch, Ajith reached the part about Janani, but he had already exceeded his word limit. He had two-and-a-half days' worth of conversation still left to go through on his recorder. He decided to transcribe everything, and then begin the editing process.

Thanjan announced lunch as sourly as he had announced breakfast. Ajith ate the lunch at the common dining table as sourly as he had eaten the breakfast, which was a pity, for the food was excellent. There was another man at the table for lunch, but Ajith buried himself in a novel, not wanting to make any conversation.

After lunch, Ajith resumed his writing in the sit-out, but found it a lot harder to concentrate. The food had settled heavily in his tummy, and kept sending him into snatches of sleep.

The rivulet gurgled outside, the water sparkled in the sunlight that fell from directly above it. He saw a rabbit by the trees, hopping about aimlessly. His phone rang, and a woman's voice he had definitely heard before said, "Follow the rabbit." The voice was familiar, but Ajith couldn't exactly place it. Something told him, though, that he should follow the rabbit. Soon, the rabbit had led him to a part of the forest where Thanjan and Mani sat discussing something in hushed tones. When they saw Ajith, they bolted, and Ajith ran after them. Soon, Ajith found he wasn't chasing Thanjan or Mani, but his father and grandfather. Saraswathi overtook him, caught up with them, and ran past them. Ajith ran faster, overtaking all of them, and nearly reaching a finish line, when he found the rabbit and a tortoise had reached before him, and were bickering about some cheating.

Ajith woke up when his laptop fell to the ground with a thud. He was disoriented and worried for a second, but he calmed down when he found that there was no damage done. He saved the file, and put his computer on sleep mode and took a proper nap on the bed.

He woke up nearly three hours later, with a faint sense of a tense, nagging dream - he didn't remember it, though. He could do with another cup of that passion fruit tea. He found Thanjan in the garden again, with his shears and a hosepipe, tending to a tree that Ajith had never seen before.

"What tree is this?" Ajith asked.
Thanjan, his voice still unfriendly, replied, "Tea tree. You let the plant grow, and it turns into this."
Thanjan didn't seem to be doing anything with his shears or the hosepipe. He was just walking around the garden with them for company. Once he reached the main gate with Ajith following him, Thanjan asked, "You want tea?"

Ajith was now at the desk in his room, his laptop on the table, a cup of tea by its side, attempting to restart his transcribing. After much thought, he decided to skip the portion about Janani for now, and moved on to the second day of the interview. Here, Ajith found, very little of the conversation was recorded - most of it happened in the room when Mani's brother was picking out furniture, or in the car on the way to the beach. Ajith dropped the conversation format, and wrote in a more freestyle prose way for this part of the interview.

It was almost eight before he finished writing this part and editing the entire interview until then, when Thanjan came again for dinner. Ajith said, "You want to read what I'm writing?" Unsurely, Thanjan said, "Yes."

Just then, Ajith's phone rang. It was Nethra.
"Hello!" he said.
"Where the hell are you?" she asked, urgently.
"Kodaikanal."
Ajith heard her take a deep breath, before she said, "Mani's very breathless. Might not last till morning."
***

I am not a Whale

Some borrowed words for your reading pleasure, from an early chapter in Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase. I finished reading this book a while ago, but the book hasn't finished with me.

"We are not whales - and this constitutes one great theme underscoring our sex life.


When I was a kid, there was an aquarium thirty minutes by bicycle from where I lived. A chill aquarium-like silence always pervaded the place, with only an occasional splash to be heard. I could almost feel the Creature from the Black Lagoon breathing in some dim corner.

Schools of tuna circled 'round and 'round the enormous pool. Sturgeon plied their own narrow watercourse, pirahna set their razor-sharp teeth into chunks of meat, and electric eels sputtered and sparked like shorted-out lightbulbs.

The aquarium was filled with countless other fish as well, all with different names and scales and fins. I couldn't figure out why on earth there had to be so many kinds of fish.

There were, of course, no whales in the aquarium. One whale would have been too big, even if you knocked out all the walls and made the entire aquarium into one tank. Instead, the aquarium kept a whale penis on display. As a token, if you will.

So it was that my most impressionable years of boyhood were spent gazing not at a whale but a whale's penis. Whenever I tired of strolling through the chill aisles of the aquarium, I'd steal off to my place on the bench in the hushed, high-ceilinged stillness of the exhibition room and spend hours in end contemplating this whale's penis.

At times it would remind me of a tiny shriveled palm tree; at other times, a giant ear of corn. In fact, if not for the plaque - WHALE GENITAL: MALE - no one would have taken it to be a whale's penis. More likely an artifact unearthed from the Central Asian desert than a product of the Antarctic Ocean. It bore no resemblance to my penis, not to any penis I'd ever seen. What was worse, the severed penis exuded a singular, somehow unspeakable aura of sadness.

It came back to me, that giant whale's penis, after having intercourse with a girl for the very first time. What twists of fate, what torturous circumnavigations, had brought it to that cavernous exhibition room. My heart ached, thinking about it. I felt as if I didn't have a hope in the world. But I was only seventeen and too young to give up on everything. It was then and there I came to the realization I have borne in mind ever since.

Which is, that I am not a whale."

Now you know why he leaves me speechless.

Grandmother of the Bride

Mohammad Amir bowling is one of the more beautiful sights in the world - fast, fresh, whippy, and seaming, he lights up dull evenings here in Madras. And then there's Mohammad Asif, trundling along from the other end, weaving his wiliness around that unsuspecting outside edge. On one such evening, I sat before the television, watching these two when Paati sat beside me and said, "Will you turn down the volume for a second? I need to talk to you."

Paati always had the strangest things to say, and mostly, they concerned food. She would offer some strange dish, usually, "Shall I make Maggi for you with some kadalai in it?" or "What about bread with tomato and molaga podi, toasted with cooking oil?" "Perhaps you'd like some mango juice - one half of the mango was spoilt, so I squeezed it along with the other half to compensate." I usually listened to these questions, and dismissed them politely. Sometimes, impolitely. But Paati never failed to offer these quirky culinary delights.

On this particular day, it didn't seem like she was offering me anything to eat or drink. I felt she actually had something to discuss. I wondered if she had her leg-cramps, whether her eyes were watering, it could've been her teeth, or her hands, or that shooting headache she complains of sometimes. She once had a 'gastric' pain from her head to her stomach, radiating from end-to-end endlessly.

But she seemed fine. Perhaps she wanted to buy something for the house. Once she wanted to buy a folding bed, in addition to the four in the house, because you need one for the guests. Once she decided that a steel almirah must be duly purchased for keeping my books. Once she demanded a separate TV she never really watched.

"I am organising a wedding," she said, with a faint smile.
I was surprised. Organising a wedding - at eighty-six! It couldn't have been mine, she didn't have the guts to suggest something like that. There was only one other cousin eligible, but my Paati wouldn't bother with his wedding at her age.
"It is between a neem tree and another sapling," she continued, with that smile still lurking on the corners of her face.
I was startled. But I maintained a straight face and asked, "Why? What have these trees done to merit this treatment?" I really wanted to ask her if this was an inter-caste wedding.
"So," she started. My Paati tells the most convoluted stories - like the Panchatantra, where one starts with a story, and then moves to another one, and another one nestled within it, and so on and so forth, before each shell is reopened, and each story is revisited in reverse, and all neatly tied up in the end. "You know, that a niece of mine gave me a neem sapling. I planted it in a little pot on the balcony, next to the manathakkali plant. It was growing really well, and slowly outgrowing its pot. So, I called Sarasu, the lady who sweeps the steps, and asked her to plant it outside somewhere. When she uprooted it from the pot, She discovered that another plant was intertwined with it. She told me that this was great luck, and that I had to marry them off for lifelong fortune."

I wondered if it was some Rama Sene at work - marrying off intertwined couples.

Paati was in her flow now, "So, Sarasu took the plants to the Amman kovil on Boag Road and planted them there. A vaadyaar will come sometime next week and decide the date of the wedding. I have already arranged for a veshti and saree to be bought for the bride and the groom, and one more saree for Amman and a veshti for the vaadyaar." Darth vaadyaar.

I was now too stunned to speak. Paati said, "I know you think this is ridiculous, but I believe in all this. See, your cousin in the US gave birth to a boy the day I found these plants, and that other cousin found a good job. All this is because of the intertwined plants." I wondered if discovering intertwined people also brought good luck. What about intertwined dogs? Or cats? Or books?
***

A few days later, she told me, "The vaadyaar came today from the Amman kovil. He is from the Nagavalli Amman kovil."
Thatha jumped in with this little detail, "It's on the platform right next to Sivaji Ganesan's house."
"He said that the wedding will cost a thousand five hundred. Four brahmins will be fed, and some naivedyam will be given to the people who come to the temple that evening!"
"When is the wedding?" I asked.
"On the fifteenth."
"Fifteenth, fifteenth. Sunday." Thatha repeated.
"On Thursday, the vaadyaar will come and collect the money."
"I have been discouraging your Paati from the time she brought it up," Thatha said, suddenly. By this time, I found the whole wedding too beautiful, too poetic to let it die. So, I said, "Thatha, please. It's just a small thing. Let her have her fun."
***

As Thursday approached, and a fever raged within me (the intertwining wasn't bringing me health), Paati began getting expectantly fidgety. "Should I make a sweet for the wedding myself?" she asked me. I gave her some sound logic, "See, at your daughter's wedding, you didn't cook. Only the samayal fellows did. So lets just let it be, no?" "Should I give the green saree to the bride and the red one to the Amman?" "That sounds like a plan, Paati. Amman usually wears red, no?" I said, offering my expert knowledge on the Nagavalli Amman's fashion sense.

Thursday morning, I was too tired from my fever to drive to work. I worked on the internet and a phone, sleeping for an hour, working for an hour, and pretending to be important to the world. Every time the doorbell rang, Paati would jump and rush to open it (her leg pain, her limping, were pushed to the background), only to find the milkman, the flower-lady, the courier-dude, the vegetable-lady, or a man collecting donations for a temple. By evening, Thatha was muttering under his breath, "Kandraavi. Dirty fellow. He's not come at all. Keeping us waiting like this all day. I told your Paati on that day only - don't try and organise something at her age. She can barely walk, and she's trying to organise a wedding."

I looked up from my laptop and asked Paati, "Do you want to go check the plant and the vaadyaar in the temple?"

She agreed immediately. Ninety-year-old Thatha and a four-year-younger Paati trudged down the stairs and in my car to the Nagavalli Amman temple on the platform next to Sivaji's house. When we reached the platform, we found that there was no such temple there. There was an Amman temple, but she was of a different variety. We asked a fruit-seller, who directed us to the road behind Sivaji's house.

When we reached the road, we found no kovil. I looked around, Paati was getting a little irritated, but Thatha got down the car and confidently walked towards what looked like a house. "That's the temple!" he declared. It was, in fact, a house. Thatha tried asking someone where the Amman kovil was, but his deafness meant he didn't hear a word of what was said.

Suddenly, I saw this large hoarding for a festival at the Nagavalli Amman kovil, and hiding behind that hoarding, was the kovil - the size of ten matchboxes, adjacent to a gutter. "That's the temple!" I said. I led them towards it when loud devotional music started playing from a conical speaker above it. Thatha discovered a temple festival office just behind the temple, and Paati immediately recognised her vaadyaar in the makeshift office.

I expected this vaadyaar to be the topless, pot-bellied, bearded, severely sacred-ashed and veshti-clad. Instead he looked like an extra from Goripaalayam. Long, curly hair, almost like a Afro, a thick moustache, a gold chain, a bright green shirt with the top button off, dark green loose pants, rings on six fingers, a pair of shades in one hand and a Reliance phone in the other, and bright, white shoes. When he saw Paati, he smiled brightly and said, "Amma! So nice of you to come here!"

I asked, "So, where are the trees?" Are they still up to naughtiness or have you unintertwined them?
Paati asked, "Why didn't you come home today?"
He said to my Paati, "You see, Amma, the trees..."
And suddenly, someone increased the volume on the loudspeaker, and we didn't hear the rest of the sentence. Thatha hadn't heard a word of the conversation until then even.
Then the vaadyaar shouted out to some boy to turn the damn music off.
When it was quiet again, he said, "The neem tree, Amma... It died."
"Died?"
"Yes, Amma, the leaves all dried up, and it died."
"And the other plant?" I asked.
"Oh that," he said, "That died a week ago."
Paati was heartbroken. The vaadyaar was unmoved, "That's why I didn't come today, Amma." He walked us to a small enclosure next to the temple, right by the gutter, and pointed out the flora to us. The neem tree was just a stick standing on the ground, and the other plant was nowhere to be seen. The vaadyaar said, matter of factly, "So, if you buy two more plants and come, we can get them married off."
"But weren't they to be married off because they were intertwined?" I asked.
"You can always intertwine the new plants," he said.

Thatha, who finally heard and understood what had happened, said, in English, "I think this isn't worth it."
"Lets go, he is cheating us," Paati said, again, in English.

And that was the final word on the entire affair. We got into the car and drove back almost silently.

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.)