The Smoke is Rising (7 page)

The towels had been hanging on the line all day and were baked crisp. Uma piled them into a brittle mound in a bucket and stashed the clothes pegs in the cubbyhole under the water tank. On the neighbouring roof terrace, Mr Bhaskar stomped from one end to the other, deep in thought. Uma could not understand why he chose to boomerang from one end of that small space to the other when there were at least half a dozen shady roads along which he could promenade; not to mention the neatly paved paths in the
Gardens. She had overheard Susheela mention the same thing to one of her friends the other day. The friend’s response was that Mahalakshmi Gardens was a more agreeable place without the risk of running into Mr Bhaskar. A pleasant enquiry would inevitably lead to a long fulmination from the gentleman on the country’s decay.

‘Better that he just wears out his roof tiles than makes your ears drop off in desperation,’ the friend had observed.

Uma heard the neighbouring gate clank shut as Bhargavi left for the day. She looked down over the parapet and saw her half run towards the end of the road, obviously trying to catch the 42 bus before it rumbled off northwards. Bhargavi had only worked for the Bhaskar family for about three months but had established herself as quite a presence in this corner of Mahalakshmi Gardens. Within her first few weeks she had ensured she was on friendly terms with almost all the watchmen and
malis
. By the end of the second month she had managed to organise a boycott of a local coffee stall; the owner had gravely injured a boy who worked for him following some minor infraction. Recently she had arranged jobs in the locality for a distant cousin and her daughter, ensuring that they were aware that their conduct reflected closely on her reputation in the area as an efficient fixer.

One of Bhargavi’s new acolytes had declared: ‘
Akka
has a big heart. She is a good woman, very decent, very clean.’

Not everyone was a fan: ‘What decent? What clean? Does she wash her
kundi
with Nirma?’

Bhargavi had cornered Uma by the dustcart one morning and introduced herself. Then, assuming a fiercely protective air, she probed into the circumstances of Uma’s employment. How much was she paid, did she get her day off every week without fail, how was she treated, were there any problems, what meals did she get, any bonus, any gifts, what did her duties entail, who lived in the
house, was there anything else she ought to know? Uma stared at this creature, not quite five feet tall, with her tightly oiled braid and the glossy mole in the middle of her forehead, who seemed to want to gather her up in the pleats of her sari. Uma was attuned to demarcations and boundaries. Her steps were the gentle footfalls of the careful navigator. Now she was faced by this tornado of unsolicited concern. While Uma had always been aware of the malice in prying eyes, Bhargavi’s kind interest was exotic territory.

Uma had responded to Bhargavi hesitantly, unable to resist her onslaught, but at the same time clinging to her own customary defences. In time, she had come to see Bhargavi’s actions in a different light. The genuine warmth and consideration were there, but they were sifted through with a desire to be needed. Bhargavi’s own compulsions had led her to act as a friend in places where regard was only given in return for profit or abasement. Much of this had become clear to Uma as she watched Bhargavi’s interventions. As she pushed herself to the fore she always told her mother’s story, an example of a woman who would not be forced down or held back.

Bhargavi’s mother had been born in a remote village in the Velikonda Hills, marooned on a bank of shale between two slow-moving streams. Her birth had been greeted with conventional disappointment, and then distress, as a bewildering fact became known about the newborn. The baby’s tiny palms were devoid of lines; they were as smooth as one of the hundreds of grey pebbles washed clean by the listless streams. The palms were washed, oiled, massaged and repeatedly inspected under the glow of first light, in the bleached dazzle of noon and by the beam of a smoky lantern. They remained unblemished and unbroken, a reminder that here lay an infant with barely a past and, seemingly, no future.

The creases that should have sealed her journey through life did
not make an appearance in the weeks that followed, perhaps in protest at the life they foresaw. There were only two ways of looking at this unnatural occurrence: as a curse brought down on the whole community or a sacred sign indicating the arrival of a superior being. Unfortunately the lines had failed to materialise on female palms, in the home of a low caste potter, in a village marooned on a bank of shale in a forgotten corner of the Velikonda Hills. There was only one way that this story could end.

So Bhargavi’s mother was not fated to join the ranks of glorious local miracles: the weeping marble deities; the babies emerging unscathed from cauldrons of hot oil; the temple domes sprouting out of forest earth. Branded a witch, as soon as puberty struck she was palmed off to a drunkard from a neighbouring village, thirty years her senior. Bhargavi was born four years later and, shortly after, mother and daughter left the Velikonda Hills to find the future they had been denied.

Bhargavi’s mother had a dynamic imagination and a flinty streak of resourcefulness, both more useful than all the palm lines in the world. She reinvented herself as a healer using some practical midwifery skills, a flair for astrological neologisms, an education in the properties of various herbs and a store of common sense. Where particularly thorny cases were concerned, she flashed her naked palms at her patrons, silencing their doubts and hastening the efficacy of their treatment. Mother and daughter travelled from town to town, sourcing new remedies and clients, rapidly establishing a daunting reputation, and then, with impeccable judgment, moving on.

Upon her mother’s death, Bhargavi had not taken on her work but had, in her own way, continued the therapeutic tradition. Lacking an education, she was locked into a narrow channel of options, but had decided that this would not prevent her from making common cause with others when the situation required it.
She had ended up in Mysore, starting out as a tailor’s apprentice in exchange for a couple of meals a day. Later she had joined a garment factory that specialised in men’s shirts destined for a supermarket chain in Germany. Her attempts at organising trade union membership among the young women at the factory soon saw her ordered off the premises and blacklisted in various quarters of the industrial area. Bhargavi had not gone quietly. She had returned at the end of each day’s shift to talk to the women as they emerged from the cramped depot into the evening haze. Eventually, one of the security guards had warned her not to return, while standing on her toes, his carefully polished shoe enormous on top of her tiny feet. She had left the area but she was sure that she would return.

A week later she had found work at the Bhaskar house. Now Uma found herself the latest beneficiary of Bhargavi’s solid determination and, as she watched her hurry out of sight, she was not sure whether she ought to be grateful or not.

Susheela began the long journey around the house, shutting windows and drawing curtains. The early evenings were the most difficult time. The tasks of the day were complete but the entrenchment of night was yet to begin. The gate lights would flicker into life along the streets of Mahalakshmi Gardens and the mosquitoes would begin their crepuscular investigations. The fridge would register its boredom with a prolonged sigh and every planet would pause in its orbit for a fraction of a second. She tried to delay turning on the television for as long as she possibly could, since it was, in her mind, a clear admission of defeat. She would pick up her current novel, the last unread section of the newspaper, the telephone book or an old copy of the
Reader’s Digest
: anything that might stave off a descent towards that final recourse.

The intensely irritating thing about being a widow, apart from all the other intensely irritating things, was that she had been rendered void by most of their social set. In the immediate aftermath of Sridhar’s death the messages of condolence had flooded in, as they should. The sombre visits, the enquiries as to the final days, the ceremonial panoply, everything had been correctly in place. It was after those first few months of bereavement that Susheela had dropped to the bottom like a sunken stone. Perhaps they thought that her grief would make her incapable of pleasant intercourse; perhaps they lacked the idiom required to extend a social courtesy to a woman missing a crucial appendage; perhaps they thought she would run off with one of their decrepit husbands; perhaps they had never warmed to her in the first place. Whatever the real reason, a curtain had fallen with a heavy thud over the invitations to bridge evenings at the Erskine Club, concerts at Jaganmohan Palace, drinks at the JW Golf Club and dinners at the Galleria by Tejasandra Lake. There were still the weddings, housewarmings and naming ceremonies, of course; anything where a woman with a dead husband could be seated in a corner among other women with dead husbands, so that they could all quietly discuss their loss.

Across the road, the Nachappa boy had just returned from work. As he reversed his car into the garage, a tinny version of ‘Que Sera, Sera’ sputtered out into the early darkness. Susheela admitted defeat and turned on the television. A news channel was relaying footage of the chaotic scenes witnessed in the Karnataka Legislative Assembly earlier in the day. A number of MLAs had stormed the Speaker’s podium in protest at what they saw as continued procedural unfairness in the conduct of debates. The Speaker had been escorted to another part of the building for his own safety while his microphone was dismantled by a particularly zealous member of the House. Balled-up paper flew across the room and,
in the background, two MLAs had hoisted a chair up on to their shoulders, an action whose legislative purpose remained unclear.

Susheela’s mouth turned down in disgust at the sight of these hooligans who were in charge of running matters. What had the people of Karnataka ever done to deserve such representatives?

The newsreader announced impassively that one MLA had threatened to take poison in the House, at which point the Speaker had adjourned proceedings for the day before slipping away. The Assembly members had carried on with their protest against the disregard for parliamentary rules, apparently too absorbed to notice the adjournment.

‘What we need is someone to just come and take charge and put all these
goondas
in their place,’ thought Susheela. ‘If you give a little bit of freedom to these thugs, they just abuse it.’

She flicked through the channels, looking for something indicative of a more enlightened society.

Mala slid open the glass doors of the cabinet and gingerly fluttered a duster over the ceramic debris of her late mother-in-law’s life. Girish’s mother had died some ten years ago in a flash flood while on pilgrimage to Badrinath. Discussions of a possible match between Mala and Girish were at an early stage when Rukmini and Mala’s elder sister, Ambika, came to know of the tragedy. They had clucked appropriately, Rukmini’s eyes gazing sadly into the middle distance, but there existed an unspoken contentment that came with the knowledge that Mala would not have to endure any mother-in-law related guerrilla warfare. Girish’s stock had just risen.

A week after the wedding, when Mala arrived at the house in Sitanagar, she wondered whether it would have been preferable for the departed lady to have been present in the flesh. As a memory, Girish’s mother weighed heavily on the rooms in the small house.
The garlanded photograph in the sitting room showed a skeletal woman who looked like she had just sat on a pin. Her love for frogs was apparent in the cabinet, which also contained spindly trophies from some forgotten sports day, an enigmatic award from the Indian Red Cross, a few pairs of castanets and a soapstone elephant with one eye. In the spare room a wheelchair she had once used now housed a couple of badminton rackets and a vase filled with plastic flowers. Her sewing machine still glowered in the master bedroom, her name painted across the base in a five-year-old’s wobbly hand.