The Ganges

Sreekumar K

Picture Credits : Ms. Latha Prem Sakhya, a poet and painter

 

            It was always a little embarrassing for me to tell others that my father’s name was Malleeswaran since that is a rare name in Kerala. Everyone seemed to know what that name meant and that was strange to me. Not many people know that Sasi means the moon or that Ravi means the sun. But everyone seemed to know that my father was named after the god of love or rather lust. My grandmother once told me that my grandfather had foreseen all this when he named my father thus. He had chosen the name from some Oriya novel.

            Almost everyone in my family had a strange fascination for literature in other languages. More than a fascination it was a contagion. Not only those who were born in our family, but those who were married into our family also were bitten by the same bug. The new generation had some overseas obsessions too, with two of them hooked on to Spanish and another cherishing a French connection. None of them kept abreast of the modern trends. It was mostly romantic or classic stuff. Half a dozen bloggers, one columnist, two biographers and a novelist shared my family name. But the one who gave me a welcome shock was our cook, Binu, a teenager, who could quote verbatim, from The Saga of Khasak, the myth of how two bits of life went for a walk and one went beyond the sunlit horizon to become Maimoona and the other stayed back to become frangipani. It won’t be long before the mice on the attic start chanting the Ramayan.

            My wife Mala's interest is in Marathi literature. Her full name is Malathi. She is from Maharashtra. My first appointment was in Nassik. All my colleagues were from north India and except Mala, they all had the same look with typical north Indian features. I was a pedegreed Dravidian breed and this made me go for Mala. Luckily, our similarity started with looks and ended with looks and in no time, we went ahead and tied the knot. Soon afterwards, I found that like the wives in Padmanabhan’s short stories, she was an adept in hiding her little share of pettiness. She could be mean on her own choice too. But along with the post modernist trends in Marathi literature, we steered clear of discussing our angularities in character.

            All of us flew away to far off places in search of jobs and only my parents were left behind in our ancestral house. We all invited them repeatedly to come and live with us. But my mother didn't want to and so my father declined the invitation. Thus, it was usual for all of us to fly back to Kerala whenever we got a long vacation.

            My wife wasn’t very fond of my parents. She found my mother tolerable when she took lesson from her on knitting and my father agreeable when he didn’t discuss Marathi literature with her, but sadly, this was all too rare. My father knew very little English and my wife knew even less Malayalam than that. I had to act as the translator between them. And whenever my father saw us together, he would join us. This didn't improve the situation at all. Once, while the discussion was about ‘Bangarwadi’, Binu, who was splitting firewood came over and stayed around. He was seen splitting logs the whole afternoon, till there was nothing left to chop or split.

            When my mother died, I and my wife were working in Hyderabad. Both of us worked in a huge establishment, a good distance from the city. It was on a beautiful landscape with accommodation facility for about ten thousand people. They had provided multiple cuisine and a common dining hall with seating capacity for five thousand people at a time. There were long walkways and a well maintained garden and a park. Against my wife's wishes, I invited my father to come and stay with us. This time my father happily joined us.

            We had been married for years but we had not been blessed with children. Still, Mala couldn’t stand anyone else making our company a crowd. After my father came over, Mala didn’t miss any chance to go out of station for official tours and training sessions. I too found some relief in her plans. I had begun to realize how three made a crowd.

            My father’s health improved much, mainly because he had to walk several kilometers between the mess hall, the park and the library. He had made some acquaintances here. One day he told me that I didn't have to bring home food from the canteen. He said he preferred eating in the dining hall. Even in the dining hall he didn't sit with us. He mingled freely with the others and made at least a new acquaintance each day. He had alienated much from us. Consequently, my wife's outstation sojourns became less and less frequent.

            We were too caught up in our own worlds and I wasn’t able to attend to my father properly. It was Mala who solicited my attention to some changes in my father’s behaviour. She came to notice it through Sheena, one of her colleagues.

            There was a certain Thara Sen in the accounting section. She was not a very socializing person and never mingled much with anyone outside her section in the office. She was a spinster but didn't dress like one. Sheena and her gang obviously had decreed how spinsters should and shouldn’t dress. Probably Mala had also been tutored in it since she wasn’t puzzled by her friend’s description of Thara’a dressing habits. It didn't take me much insight for me to see what had made Thara the focus of their attention.

            “Don’t you remember her, Abhee?”

            “No”, said I.

            But my ‘no’ wasn't enough. She listed out all the occasions on which I had seen Thara, which sari she was wearing on each occasion and how she had had a unilateral discussion about them with me on each such occasion. She succeeded in proving to me that I did remember her.

            It had been reported to my wife by her friends that Thara Sen, for the first time since she had joined the firm, had developed a friendship with a man and that too with an old man. There was much difference in their age, though they had grown past the age. I could not exactly understand what grown past the age meant. Sheena had shown this old man to all her friends that day. No one knew who he was. He was related to someone who worked there. He used to come to the mess hall all by himself. But now Thara accompanied him always, everywhere. No one knew how or when Thara had landed him. Or why.

            “I didn't tell them that it is my father-in-law.”

            It was like a child hiding behind the door and jumping before you yelling “boo” to scare you that Mala said that. I was a genius at hiding whatever explosions happened within me and Mala was again disappointed.

            In fact I too had some intuition that something like this was about to happen. Everyone around my father had someone close to them, spouses, friends, babies and siblings. Even Binu had found a mate in our neighbour’s daughter. My father would have felt very lonely after my mother’s death.

            His loneliness only got worse after he came to Hyderabad. Loneliness had greyed to solitude. Earlier he used to wait for us to return from the office and exchanged a few words with Mala and me. He used to ask me about our neighbours and then about those whom he had met in the dining hall that day. Thara’s name had also come up. But we didn't know anything about her except the fact that no one knew anything about her.

            Days later, Mala looked up from the book she was reading and asked me, “Who had suggested this name for your father?”

            “I know the sting in your question. So, what is the update on Sheena’s investigations?”

            “It might not be of any importance to you. But, by now, everyone in my office knows that the old man Thara has landed is my father-in-law. It is all the more shameful for me to have hidden that from them. I should have revealed it to them myself.”

            O, God! If those in her office know, pretty soon everyone one in my section will also find out. Almost everyone in my office was the spouse of those who worked with her. People will smile more at me now and ask amusing questions about my people just to see if it is heredity or just from the environment. I wondered what kind of stories were already reviving the grape vine.

            I decided to get some information about what was going on from my father himself. But there was no need. He himself started telling us about his new friend.

            She was a Bengali. Living alone. Knows Malayalam really well. Deeply interested in Malayalam literature. She was also interested in word games, puzzles and other pastimes which were dearly loved by my father. Talks way too little but listens like no one else.

            Interpolating all this with what Sheena forwarded to me through Mala, I had enough to give myself some tension. Thara was not very popular among the female population there, for reasons not known to them. Now they had a good reason too.

            I too noticed something. My father wasn’t home in the evenings. As soon as we returned from the office, he went to the mess hall for his tea and would return only after dinner, sometimes long after dinner.

            His room had a door that opened to the front yard and he had taken the key from me weeks ago. So, I didn't actually know when he came in or went out. I felt bad about it all. People who live in the same house  weren't seeingeach other and that too, a father and a son.

            Even after days, there weren’t any stories, remarks or comments in the office other than the ones I imagined.

            One day when the servant cleaned my father’s room she discovered some bits of construction paper neatly cut with a blade. Mala gathered some and spreading them on the dining table, tried to divine what they were. I couldn’t help laughing at her.

            This was my father’s hobby. He used to cut out some English letters and then cut them again into smaller pieces and challenge us to identify the letters and put them back together like a jigsaw puzzle. I and my brother had a hard time doing that. My brother used to figure them out faster than me. He became an architect and I became a programmer.

            My father had once given me and ‘X’ cut into seven pieces and asked me to give it to Mala. I didn't even mention it to her. Now it seemed to us that even Thara had come to know about his hobby.

            Days later, when Mala suggested that we should go for a stroll in the park after dinner, I thought it strange but I had no idea she was setting me up.

            It was not my father and Thara that I saw in the park. It was my mother and my father. They were having so much fun as they used to do, cracking jokes and telling stories. Only that she looked much younger, just as old as my eldest brother. We saw them from a distance. Mala didn't say anything. Was it her shame or her irritation that had silenced her? Or maybe she wasn’t silent at all. It was I who was in a world of silence. No sounds could reach me. Even the leaves on the trees around me moved very slowly in the wind which wasn’t there. Time stood still.

            In another week Mala developed a stomach ache. Something she had had for dinner didn't agree with her. She had always complained about the food at the dining hall. So, she decided to cook at least one meal every day. We had never used our kitchen before and I didn’t know whether she could cook at all. To my surprise, my father liked the idea much. He bought the groceries, some vessels and a couple of dinner plates.

            Since it was the first meal in that house, Mala made some sweet also. We were eating with my father after a long time. He enjoyed it and the food. He uttered a very good opinion about Mala’s cooking. I translated it for her.

            He had said that she could cook as good as my mother. Mala could not fathom the depth of that praise. If there was anyone who could have understood it fully, it was my eldest sister, the one who had translated ‘The Winter Moon’. But she was no more.

            If Mala’s plan was to dissuade my father from meeting Thara in the dining hall in the evenings, it didn't work. He did meet her every eveing before dinner. He used to dine with us every day, and engaged in a very hearty chat with us. My mother used to say that when my father ate more came out than went in. Now, most of it was about Thara.

            We were amused at Thara’a interest in Malayalam literature. Every day after his tea, my father would go for a walk with her or spent time at the library or in the park. And at each dinner, he would relate everything he had discussed with her that day.

            Mala was irked about this and soon she decided to cook only on alternate days and then only on Sundays. However, my father was regular in telling us all about his discussions with Thara.

            Going by his report on those discussions, we were sure that it would have been only a one way talk. She wouldn’t have had a chance to put in a word edgewise. Once I said to Mala how I pity Thara and she complained that he had bored her also to death and I had never bothered about it.

            My father began to read more and more. He was probably gathering enough to talk to Thara. We used to see him in the park, caught up in their own world. It had become so much a part of the landscape that  even Sheena had lost interest in them. I never met Thara face to face or talk to Mala about her. Thara also seemed to be evading us.

            My father continued to spent most of his day at the library or in his room cutting out new shapes and making puzzles out of them.

            One day Mala showed me a piece of paper she had found in my father’s pocket when she was dumping his clothes in the washing machine. It was a piece of creased paper with the rough cartoon sketch of a dog which looked like Snoopy. She folded it along the creases and showed it to me again. Now it was a different picture. It was the picture of the nude bust of a lady. This worried me.

            My eldest brother had shown this to me and my sister when we were in school and my father had hit him hard when he heard about it. It was the same picture that he had recreated now, probably to amuse Thara. He had been telling us only about his literary discussions with her.

            One of those days, I happened to talk with Thara about clearing a bill. Instinctively, I talked to her in Malayalam as I would talk to my father. She stared at me and I switched over to Hindi. But her answer was in English. Her accent was remarkable.

            Why was she puzzled? Was it because she recognized me or wasn’t she able to understand my language?

            “Cats too do that”, said Mala.

            “What?”

            “They like to keep their eyes closed while sipping the spilt milk.”

            It occurred to me that my father had never told us anything about Bengali literature that Thara might have informed him about. Or anything that Thara would have told him for that matter. It was always what he had told her.

            Mala also would have sensed that Thara didn't know any Malayalam at all. She, in fact, asked him one day whether Thara had told him how she liked the place. She hadn’t. It wasn’t a Sunday, but Mala cooked dinner for all of us and waited at the dining table till my father had finished his dinner.

            When my eldest brother came to hear about all this, he didn't think it was such a silly thing. He decided to take my father to Delhi with him. We knew he would resist and so he told him only after making all the arrangements, even the flight ticket. He said he wanted my father to give his second son his first letter, to initiate him into writing. His first son had been initiated into writing by Baba. My father couldn’t resist.

            A week after my father had left, our staff magazine came out. There was a photo of our park on the back cover. We could spot, among other people sitting on the park benches, Thara and my father. There was a poem by Thara Sen in its Hindi section. It was titled ‘A Speck of Gray Cloud’.

            Two months later we got a letter and a parcel from my father. He inquired on our health and well being. Mala was overjoyed to hear that he missed her cooking. In a few weeks he had discovered that Prem Chand was no more a popular writer in Delhi circles. People were not interested in long novels any more. Graphic novels had taken their place. He had also requested us to send him a copy of the staff magazine if it had come out.

            The parcel was a birthday gift for Thara to be delivered personally to her on October 21st, her birthday. Both of us went to her apartment on that day with the gift and a card from ourselves, but her house remained locked. The neighbours told us she had left a week ago. She was not feeling well when she left.

            A few weeks back my brother took my father's last remains, mixed with those of my mother's, as they both had wished, to Benares to scatter it in the Ganges.

            Since then Mala has been insisting that I should seek out Thara and hand over the birthday present to her.

            I collected Thara's address from the office. It looked like outdated information. She was from a place called Kakrajhol, many kilometres away from Midnapur town, more to the western part of Bengal where it is quite hilly. I hope to find her there.

            My wife has asked me to hand over to Thara a sweater she had knitted for her. She herself can't accompany me on this jounrney. She has a mild peptic ulcer and her doctor has advised her not to travel much.