THE PUPPETEERS OF PALEM Page 7

  The third and final factor that contributed to Avadhani’s status in the village was the breed of buffaloes that he owned. Imported by his father from Ongole when Avadhani was a little boy, they had been passed on to him after his father’s death. He had taken good care of them and had made sure the next generation of buffaloes were as profitable as the last. If Rangayya was able to make such a good living selling milk, it was all thanks to Avadhanayya and the first-rate buffalo that he had sold to him. And for such a small price too.

  But lately, Avadhani had begun to have competition. A couple of years ago, Komati Satyam, his immediate neighbour, had razed his shack to the ground and erected in its place a brick house of two stories. For good measure, he had had it painted a spotless white with a touch here and there of a pleasing blue. Then he had gone one step further and had a bore pump installed in front of his house, free for anyone in the village to use. And Komati Satyam was not nearly as particular about who touched his pump as Avadhani was about his well.

  Soon, Avadhani’s house became ‘the smaller house next to Satyam’s house’. When visitors asked for Avadhani, they were asked, ‘You mean Komati Satyam’s neighbour?’

  It was, however, a few months later, when Satyam received a batch of twelve choice buffaloes from Ongole—healthier, plumper and more beautiful—that Avadhani’s defeat was complete in the eyes of the villagers of Palem. All he had now to fall back on was his field—which in recent times, like most other fields in Palem, had been steadfastly refusing to support plant life, no matter what.

  Chanti looked around the room in which the three of them sat, and wondered again at how little things had changed in Palem. When he had arrived that afternoon, he had thought it looked a little drier than he remembered it. But then, it was almost summer, he had reasoned. For a few years now, summer had eaten a little into both spring and winter. Nothing surprising, global warming and all that, he mused.

  But very little of the essential things had changed, he noted. Mandiramma Banda, the piles of hay by Saraswatamma’s house, the school building and Gandhi’s statue, the new Shivalayam (by now about thirty years old), Prabhakarayya’s house, Ibrahim Bhai’s shack—everything was just as he remembered it.

  Why, even here in Thatha’s house, everything was the same. Those clay puppets still hung from the kitchen doorway, swinging around in the breeze. The old radio with the big black speakers was still there, though from the dust it had gathered on top, he could tell Thatha probably didn’t use it much anymore. Thatha’s old cot was as sturdy and spotless as ever. Yes, those days, they did build things to last.

  Thatha himself looked good for someone pushing eighty. Yes, his face had shrivelled to the point where it was all nose now, his lips were deathly pale and the skin on his cheeks showed cracks that looked ready to burst open. But somehow, beyond the thick glasses, some of the fire in his eyes had remained, and his voice still carried the same note of thoughtful authority as always.

  ‘When did Komati Satyam build that house, Thatha?’ Sarayu asked.

  Sarayu’s voice had grown tender. She used to speak in a shrill, commanding voice to everyone but Aravind. But years in the city had taught her to mellow down. Her tone, as befitted a lady, now barely rose above a whisper. Culture, wasn’t that what it was called?

  His eyes travelled down to her feet. The sight surprised him. In his memory, he had always pictured Sarayu’s feet as big and manly. He recalled an incident when as kids, she had teased him about his small feet. Yes, her feet had been at least a third bigger than his. But now they were so… dainty. Now, he thought, looking uncomfortably at his own feet, his feet were big and ungainly.

  But she was wearing anklets. The same ones. Some things do not change.

  ‘Two years ago,’ Thatha said. ‘His son is earning big money in the city, no?’

  Chanti wondered how much money Avadhani Thatha’s son made. He remembered how people had talked when this house was built. Back then, Thatha’s son had just begun working in the city and sending money home. Had he stopped somewhere along the way? Somehow, Chanti felt it wouldn’t be appropriate to ask.

  ‘I saw his buffaloes too,’ Sarayu was saying, tapping her feet on the floor. ‘Ongole?’

  Thatha nodded, his eyes still closed and his body slumped in the armchair.

  ‘I didn’t see that cow in your shed when I walked in—you know, the spotted one. What was her name?’

  Thatha smiled. ‘You have Gowri’s memory, my child. You still remember Surabhi?’

  ‘I used to drink her milk. She gives the best milk.’

  ‘Gave.’

  There was a silence. No matter how much non-living things stayed the same, beings that lived and breathed changed all the time. A little bit of change each day, each second, until one day, they all stopped changing.

  ‘Oh,’ Sarayu said.

  ‘There is sadness in your voice,’ Thatha said.

  ‘Well…’

  Thatha chuckled loudly. ‘You are a carbon-copy of your mother, my dear! Gowri. Gowramma. She used to listen to my stories with such rapt attention, such big eyes.’ He sat up and gestured with his hands. ‘But you know what? In the darkness, she used to hold hands with… with that boy. Subbai. I think they got married too. They did, did they not?’

  ‘They did, Thatha. I am their daughter.’

  ‘Oh yes, yes. I don’t remember things as well as I used to, my dear. Sometimes, I think in circles. Subbai hanged himself, did he not?’

  Sarayu did not reply. Chanti looked at her pained expression and felt it was rather inconsiderate of Thatha to have said that.

  ‘I brought you some peanut powder,’ Sarayu said after a while. ‘You used to like it.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I used to.’ He sank back into the armchair. ‘I used to.’ Suddenly he asked, ‘What is your name?’

  ‘You asked me ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Did I? Did you tell me?’

  ‘Yes. It’s Sarayu.’

  ‘Sarayu, yes. Sarayu. I don’t know why I keep forgetting it. It is such a nice name, too. Lord Ramachandra immersed himself in the Sarayu river before going back to heaven as Mahavishnu.’

  Sarayu smiled. ‘I know. You told me this too, ten minutes ago.’

  A knock sounded on the door, quiet and apologetic. ‘Who is it?’ Thatha called out.

  ‘Adi… Chotu,’ the voice replied.

  ‘Chotu is here?’ Sarayu asked, raising an eyebrow and throwing a glance at Chanti.

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ Thatha said. ‘Did you think I called just you two?’ Then, raising his voice, he called, ‘Push the door, Chotu. It’s open.’

  Chotu’s face had not changed one bit. It was as if somebody had taken the kid’s head and transplanted it on an adult body, taking care to alter the size of each feature proportionally. His frame big and muscular, he stood beaming at them, filling the doorway completely. He was tall, probably six-foot-two, at a conservative estimate. Calling him Chotu had made sense when he was the tiniest of them all, but now it somehow felt ridiculous.

  But Thatha clearly was not given to any such considerations. ‘Em ra Chotu, everything good with you? Come and take that chair.’

  ‘Forget about me, Thatha,’ Chotu said. He glanced at each of them and smiled in turn before bringing his eyes to rest on the old man. ‘How are you doing? Your letter scared me. I thought something was… wrong with you.’

  Thatha sighed and waved him to the chair. ‘Something is wrong, my boy. But not with me.’

  Chotu sat down and swatted at his arms. He looked at Sarayu, then at Chanti and said, ‘There are so many bees here. Have we always had so many bees?’

  ‘Still scared of bees?’ Thatha asked, snorting. ‘Whose son are you, boy? I have never remembered whose son you are.’

  ‘Gopalam is my father’s name.’

  ‘Oh, Gopalam… Gopalam who poisoned his wife and then jumped into Prabhakarayya’s well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Horini. You are his son, eh? Then you
must be Kannamba’s grandson. She took you away to the city, no?’

  ‘Yes, Thatha. Bamma and I live in the city together. You wrote to my address there.’

  ‘Yes, yes, so I did. You know, kids, I have forgotten that I wrote you those letters. I keep thinking it was a dream. I keep thinking it did not happen. But you are here. So it must have happened. But I don’t remember anything about you all. But then, that is not saying anything, because these days I forget. I forget a lot.’

  Would Thatha be able to tell a story now like he used to in the old days, Chanti mused. One of the reasons he had come to Palem was that he had hoped to listen to a story told by Avadhani Thatha, one last time. He had not expected to see this old, rambling fogey in Thatha’s place. What did he want from them? Did he know even that much?

  Thatha turned to Chanti and pointed his finger at him. ‘You haven’t been speaking at all, Chanti. Still the quiet one, aren’t you? Your brothers still don’t let you speak?’

  Chanti smiled.

  Chotu said, ‘So… you’ve invited the others too?’

  Thatha looked at Chotu and shrugged his shoulders. ‘How am I to know? I don’t even remember writing the letter, my boy. When this girl here appeared at my door today, I asked her who the hell she was and what the hell she was selling. Because no one has stopped here at my door for a long, long time. Then she told me I had written to her. And then Chanti here showed up, and now you. But somehow, I knew you would come, Chotu. I knew you would come.’ He pointed at the other two. ‘If these two had come, you would come too. I just knew.’

  ‘So, Ramana…’

  Thatha chuckled, cutting him short. ‘Ramana is already here, my boy! He is already here. He came by the afternoon cart. He will be here any time now.’

  ‘How do you know he is here?’

  ‘Ah, you know how it is, Chotu. Nothing stays hidden in Palem. He has been seen walking around near the school building.’

  Chanti had a strange sense of foreboding about that. If Ramana had been called too, there couldn’t be any other reason for Thatha calling them all here. Which meant he would be here too.

  ‘And Aravind?’ Chotu asked.

  ‘I don’t know about that boy. But you see how this is shaping up, don’t you? We are all here. Ramana is here. Who is the only one to complete the picture?’ He looked around the room at the three of them.

  All of them knew the answer.

  ‘So I think he will come too.’ Thatha craned his neck and looked out of the window. The evening light shone full on his face, accentuating every fold and every black scar. His mottled nostrils twitched and his lips parted in a smile. ‘I see someone coming.’ He groaned into a sitting position. ‘Yes, someone is coming.’

  Chanti followed his gaze. A figure had just crossed the gate and was making his way to the front door. Chanti had not seen him in seventeen years but he recognized him immediately. Now, he thought, now there was no doubt as to what this was all about.

  ‘It’s going to be a reunion, kids,’ Thatha said, his toothless smile broadening and his smooth bald pate shining. As he ran a hand over his scalp, his eyes glazed over like a ganja addict’s eyes. ‘Yes, a reunion,’ he murmured. ‘It’s going to be a reunion to remember.’

  Avadhani Thatha reached out for the dark blue cylindrical box of Manikchand Gutkha and opened the lid slowly, one twist at a time.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch.

  The skin of his arms was only barely hanging on. His fingers were those of an anorexic teenager’s. His legs belonged to a polio patient. Overall, he looked like a matchstick that had burnt itself out and was now waiting to be thrown away.

  There was the familiar evening chill in the air now. The best part of Palem in winters, to Chanti at least, was the chill that the air caught just before sunset. No matter how hot the day had been, the Godavari always cooled the village as the sun dipped. And the breeze from the river brought with it the light, musty odour of wet mud. It was divine. Always had been.

  It was the same now, and the evening light was just turning golden. Thatha was still opening the box of gutkha.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch.

  Nobody said anything. In seventeen years, it appeared that Aravind had not lost his ability to silence a group of people. And to add to a room that had been gay and carefree before he arrived a definite feeling of uneasiness.

  It surprised Chanti that this quality of Aravind’s should stay so unchanged after all this time. It was a different story when they were kids, of course. Then, Aravind had been the only adolescent in a group of kids. He had been taller than all of them by a good bit. Only Sarayu, because she was a girl, matched up to him, but only just. He used to wear a lungi folded up to his knees and always had a matchstick between his lips. Whenever he spoke to them, he did so with authority and regality. How could you not be affected by someone like that?

  But now, it was different. He was not particularly taller than them; in fact, Chotu appeared to easily dwarf him. In the twenty minutes he had been in the room, he had not spoken a word nor moved from the window. He had not acknowledged their presence; not even a look of recognition had shown in his face when he swept the room with a cold glance upon entering. He had pulled out a beedi from Thatha’s bundle and puffed on it, staring at the wall opposite as the shadows lengthened behind him.

  He wore blue jeans and a full-sleeved shirt folded up to his forearms. Thin, hard, white-and-black shoes. One foot thrown over the other. The beedi danced between his lips.

  No, there was no reason for them to be in awe of him any more. No reason for him to hold them in thrall. And yet here they were, waiting in silence as the chill descended on them—for what?

  Scratch, scratch, scratch.

  The lid finally opened. Avadhani Thatha popped the stuff into his mouth and began to chew.

  ‘So she’s back.’

  None of them said anything. Aravind was only stating the obvious. If Thatha had called everyone back here, there could only have been one reason for it.

  ‘Hmm,’ Thatha said. ‘Hmmm… Yes, boy. She is back.’

  ‘After so long… I thought we…’ He stopped and went back to staring. Sometimes, you’d rather do nothing than say what’s on your mind. Sometimes, staring at something as featureless as a mud wall (with a lizard or two on it maybe) was more comforting than talking.

  ‘She is more powerful now,’ Thatha said. His chewing was noisy, his tongue clicking against the inside of his cheeks each time he ground his jaws together.

  Click. Snort. Click.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She is more powerful now. Not like last time.’

  Chotu said, ‘But Thatha, what about us? We are more powerful too than we were last time.’

  Thatha snickered and the golden light blackened the spots on his cheeks. Or what were once cheeks, now reduced to bare bones with a thin layer of skin stretched tight over them, Chanti observed.

  ‘I say we leave this all and go away,’ Aravind said quietly. He took a last puff and ground out his beedi on the sill. Rings of smoke blew out of his nostrils and hung in the air. ‘I don’t live in Palem. I don’t even like Palem. Why should I care about this… this thing?’

  Sarayu looked up at him indignantly. ‘Listen to you! You haven’t changed in all this time. All you can think of is to drop it and run.’

  Aravind didn’t look at her. He didn’t give any indication of having heard her.

  ‘The truth is,’ Chotu said guardedly, ‘we don’t know what she is capable of.’

  ‘She has dried out my whole field,’ Thatha said.

  Aravind continued to exhale rings of smoke. Behind him, a small group of people dressed in torn, muddy whites, ran along the path and disappeared around the bend. ‘That is the thing,’ he said. ‘We don’t know how harmful she is. We don’t even know if she is harmful.’

  ‘She has dried out my field,’ Thatha repeated.

  Aravind, once again, took no notice.

  ‘Listen to me, boy. Listen
to me. Look around you. Palem is dying. You see how dirty it has become? You see the dog shit on the ground everywhere you go? Nobody bothers to clean it. You see the crows flying around? Something or the other dies everyday in this village. Every. Single. Day. The plants have stopped giving us food. And did you look at the ground, boy? Can you look at it and tell me, with your hand on your heart, that everything is all right here? Hain?’

  Aravind shrugged. ‘Everything dies at some point, Thatha. Isn’t that what you always told us?’ But he looked out of the window at the ground, where Thatha was pointing. Black veins coursed through it. Chanti had once seen cracks like these on the walls of Ibrahim Bhai’s old house. His father had told him then that the house was dead. That Ibrahim Bhai had not taken good care of the house. The only thing to do was to break it down and build anew. What could you do then, if the earth itself died? And whose fault was it that it did?

  Their eyes suddenly met, and for one moment, Chanti was sure Aravind was thinking exactly the same thing.

  The next moment they both looked away.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I will do, Thatha,’ he said. ‘I will stay here for the night. For you. Because you called me here. But tomorrow morning, I am taking the cart back.’

  ‘Irresponsible prick!’ Sarayu said.

  Aravind held his forehead between his fingers and squeezed it. ‘I am not asking any of you to follow me, but I will give you some advice. All of you have lives to live. Live them. Don’t waste them on Palem. Palem will give you nothing back.’ Another wave of people ran across the house along the path and disappeared around the bend.

  Thatha’s chomping became more haggard now, his breathing hoarse and wheezy. The air filled with the smell of the gutkha. Mixed with the aroma of the evening air and the smoke from Aravind’s beedi, it was not altogether unpleasant.