The Death of A Writer - Part VI

(Part V has been skipped - will be published soon. 

Recap: A writer and a PhD student investigate an incident in a village where the landlord's house is burnt down. They hear that the Naxals are involved, hence they arrange a meeting with them. Subsequently, they meet with the local government officials - the Panchayat Secretary. In the unpublished Part V, an attack on the writer-student duo contributes to them returning to their university town.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 . 

) 

NELARATNA

I was sitting in my office when the librarian walked up to me and said I had a young lady visitor.

Back then, only selected PhD students were entitled to an office. I wasn’t one of them. My research was barely underway (under an advisor so distant that I could feel the entire asteroid belt whiz past between us) and I was a student of lowly humanities. I used to work out of the Public Library – the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. The name was a misnomer: the collection was modest, certainly not befitting a bibliophile such as Nehru. Also, I still don’t know where the “Museum” is.

The reading room was on the first-floor. This room was vast and rectangular – the sort with thrown-open windows allowing for shafts of light where motes of dust danced dervish-like – and filled with row upon row of benches and tables stacked with newspapers and magazines. Readers were few and preferred to keep their distance.

A month or so after my first appearance, the librarian– a quiet middle-aged woman whose kindness never made it to her eyes or words – took me by the hand and pointed me to an unused ante-room to a long-shut entrance. “For you to use.”, she said.  

The room had a table and a chair, with a window that overlooked our town’s main road. Shelves comprising books no one read lined the walls, giving the illusion of the room being smaller than its dimensions. On that first day, I remember looking from the window to the chair to the librarian’s stern, weary face. Without warning, I hugged her and said: “This is perfect, thank you.”

I couldn’t tell if she was mortified or happy.

*

The librarian said lady visitor and paused briefly – long enough to suggest curiosity, but not nosiness. Sensing I had no inkling of who this visitor may be, she left. Unconsciously, I turned my collar upwards – in the style of Mohammed Azharuddin, our hero back then – and smoothed my hair, watching myself in the window pane. Something beyond the pane caught my eye – a horse-cart, parked at the entrance to the library. Horse-carts were dying out already, but it was the attractive driver who had me piqued – his familiar yet unplaceable face evoked a rush of warmth within.

A firm knock on my ajar door alerted me to a presence in the room. I turned and froze. 

It was the Naxal.  

She smiled and stretched out a hand to shake mine.

After what felt like an eternity, I felt my own hand rising to meet hers. Our fingers linked.  

“Bachigowloe”, I blurted, pointing to a chair.  

She nodded and took a seat.

I was relieved she didn’t ask me to repeat myself.  

“Here – how, madam?”, I said.

“Madam?”, she asked, one end of her lip curving to form a familiar smile.

“I mean – Miss.”

“You can call me DK”

“DK?”

“Dhrishtikon”, she said and made a gesture to suggest displeasure at having uttered the word, “My parents thought I would be called Dhrishti. I prefer DK.”

Dhrishitikon, I wanted to say, does that mean your father is a judge? Or a photographer?

Instead, I found myself incapable of words. I stared blankly at a calendar on the wall beyond her left shoulder. Through the corner of my eye, I found myself admiring her: in the fresh summer sun, she looked nothing like the other night. No guns. No beedi. No khaki. No men. She looked clean. The word fetching seemed appropriate, not merely because it implied very different things in separate contexts.

I now noticed that she’d turned around too, following my gaze, and was staring at the shelves. I remained embarrassingly tongue-tied. She walked up to them, caressing the spines of books, reading softly the titles to herself.

“Your collection?”, she asked, turning around.

I nodded my head from side-to-side: no.

“Then?”

“Library’s”, I said.

I wanted to tell her that I thought of myself as a budding biblio-palliative care specialist. “No”, I wanted to say, “not the sort that would read books to the dying, but the sort that would care for books that are dying; books that no one else reads. I am the Library’s Mother Teresa, surrounded by dying books, lovingly ensuring they go about their last days in peace.”

I wanted to tell her all that. Instead, I coughed into my fist, in the manner of those hammy comic actors from the ‘50s.

“Have you read any?”, she asked.

 “Sturrock” – I said, finally finding my voice.  

“Huh?”

“Sturrock. The author of the book you are holding. He was an I.C.S officer who lorded over these parts. That book is from 1891 –  a century ago. To this day, it is the only book of its sort, a veritable encyclopaedia on our district, its people, the geography, flora and fauna - it is what you’d call a treatise, I guess.” I said.

She raised an eyebrow and opened the book.

Was she impressed?

Why would she be? After all, I sounded like a Professor from Sturrock’s generation, throwing around words like flora and fauna and treatise. And veritable – who says veritable? (At this point, a voice in my head, sporting a strong British accent, went: “I’d like some tea, with some veritable sandwich on the side, please?”)

Meanwhile, she seemed engrossed in Sturrock. I watched her closely – she read a phrase, her lips mouthing the words silently, and smiled. I thought she’d turn around to relate whatever it was that amused her. She didn’t. It was almost like I wasn’t in the room.

My mind remained a whirlpool of questions. Why was she here? Should I offer her something – water, a cigarette maybe? How did she know I was here? Should I take her out for lunch? Maybe we could go to Annapurna canteen (4 rupees 25 paise for a full meal)?

“It is very hot here”, I said eventually and added – as if it were a natural transition – “Do you want to get some lunch?”

“Only if you let me borrow this.”

She was holding up Sturrock.

“That’s a book in great demand, actually. I’ll need to pull some strings,” I said.    

“Ah – it did strike me as being in great demand. It says in the front that the last time this was checked out was by you, a year ago. And before that –  on 08.01.1957 – by a Dr Venugopal Bhat.”

“That’s two people in thirty years – I told you, great demand!”

Maybe I sounded now like a Professor of Bad Jokes.

“Where’s the lunch place?” she asked. Her face had smoothed into a smile.

“Annapurna – behind the Corporation Bank Head Office. We can walk there.”

“I am serious about borrowing the book,” she said.

“I am serious about lunch.”

If the librarian was surprised about my re-borrowing Sturrock barely days after I’d over-borrowed and paid 11 rupees 65 paise worth late fees, she didn’t show it. I signed on her borrowers’ register with a flourish, conscious of DK watching over me. I looked up from the pen to the librarian’s concerned face. I asked her what the matter was.

“Your collar,” she said, “It is upturned.”

*

Over multiple servings of rasam anna, sandige and palya, she told me about herself. She went to school at St. Mary’s Convent: an idyllic old British boarding institution perched on a hill, three kilometres inwards from the Bombay highway. She was ambivalent about her time there. She made friends for life – “the sort you’d go to Church for” – but hated the culture of discipline and homogeneity that the school prided itself for. She was “above average” at academics, had a knack for mathematics and loved physics. (My heart sank when she mentioned physics. Forget Newton’s laws, I was the sort of man who took twenty-two years to understand we lived on earth, and not inside.)

On an unexpectedly wet day in the middle of May – “it was like the rain Gods had a pissing competition” – lightning struck. Twice. In the morning, a drenched type-written letter informed her that she had made it to the M Sc. Physics programme at IIT Bombay. After lunch – avalakki that she barely touched – a breathless phone-call from her lawyer-mother informed her that her I.P.S-officer father had been beaten up by unidentified hooligans. The attack was carried out in his office. He was admitted in the local hospital, under an old classmate of her mother’s.

DK hurriedly packed her bags and took the first bus out to Mangalapura, where her parents lived. Her father was in bad shape. He’d been sleeping when she had first got to the hospital ward. “This reality felt borrowed,” she said, “as if I were a character in another’s nightmare”. She sat by his side and held his palm, feeling his fingers, their familiar rough texture. When she made to get up and leave, he held on tight, as if to say, I am here. Reality hit her like a punch in the plexus, the world spun around. Her scream brought the nurses rushing in.

That night, she went to the balcony adjoining the ward and set fire to the still-moist acceptance letter. Three long months later, her father died. She began college at St Anthony’s – Mangalapura’s best degree college – the following week, enrolling in the B.A Pass.

“Why not physics?”, I asked.

“I wanted a clean break from physics and the sciences.” she said.

Of all the things she told me over lunch, that was the line I empathized most with.

*

I suggested ice-cream. She assented without a pause. I could barely believe my luck. We walked towards Ideal Ice Cream Shop for “softies”, 2 rupees worth cone ice-creams in two flavours, vanilla and the “flavour of the day”. Even though she had done most of the talking, the rasam had rid me of some of my inhibitions. As we walked, I told her of what I loved most about Shadymane – waking up to the thin film of mist that coated the trees, flirting with the hills at dawn.

“Flirting with the hills at dawn”, she repeated after me, in an accent that Sturrock would be proud of, and added: “This is why you will never be a revolutionary.”

“Because I am a romantic?”

“No, no: romanticism fuels the revolution. You, on the other hand, are a softie”, she said.

“Very funny. Are they different – a softie and a romantic?”

“One is an ice-cream – ”, she began.

I scowled. She smiled and continued: 

“A majority of persons are both or neither – but there are an insignificant few who are only one of the two.”

I mulled over this and asked:

“And you?”

She didn’t answer.

We had reached Ideal Ice Cream anyway. The flavour of day was Banana, a type I avoided like it was a pack of snarling strays.

We stood in line to order. Up ahead, a couple holding hands were taking their time. When it was our turn, a burly man cut past me and, in gruff Hinglish, demanded ice-cream. I protested meekly, telling him there was a line. He didn’t acknowledge my presence.

What transpired next caught me by surprise: DK walked straight past me and grabbed the man by his collar. She dragged him back to his spot in the queue. She then gave him a mouthful in Kannada, finishing off in English:

“Ask this nice gentleman to translate what I said to you.”

She was gesturing towards me, her gaze fierce and expectant. Apparently, I had to play my part. I looked the man straight in the eye and said: “Respect queues,” and added, remembering his preference for Hinglish, “Achchi hai?”

The burly man seemed too stunned to respond.

Her voice losing little of the sternness of her outburst, she turned to ask me:

“What do you want?”

“Nothing”, I said, unconsciously withdrawing from her.    

“What ice-cream do you want?”

“Oh - Banana”, I said.

The trauma of banana ice-cream took me a full week to recover from.

*

“Why are you here?”, I asked.

We had, by then, made our way to the lake, savouring our ice-creams in the late afternoon sun. October, in those days, still saw the odd shower. That day, however, the sun glinted in our eyes, rolling down the metal edges of passing cars, flashing in bells of cycles and burning the placid, blue surface of the lake. The question had been tossing inside me all this while and I had hoped the answer would emerge, unasked. My eventual courage was merely curiosity in disguise.

For the first time, I sensed hesitation.

“I want you – ” she said and paused, weighing her words.

Those three words would have sufficed. If this were a film from back then, I would have cupped her mouth, asking her to tell me no more.

The truth, however, was stranger than film: 

“I want you to study us. I want you to see what we do – the scope of our work, the nature of our engagement with the world. I am open to constructive criticism.”

“Why?”

“The Panchayat elections are around the corner. We plan to support and back selected women candidates. It would help to get an outsider’s perspective on who we pick.” she said.

“No – why me?”

“Because –”

We were interrupted by the clip-clop of hooves. It was the horse-cart from earlier in the day. Looking at her, the driver asked: “Hogona?” (Shall we go?).

I now knew I had met this man previously: his angular, kind face had little to hide.    

“I am afraid I have to leave,” she said addressing me, “Why don’t you come to Shadymane one of these days? We can pick up from where we left off.”

“You can’t go now!”

“She has to,” the driver said, “It gets dark quickly these days.”

“How do I get in touch with you?” I asked her.

“By showing up. In Shadymane!”

The driver stretched his hand out – she took it and, dancer-like, pirouetted onto the cart. As they embarked, she turned to wave goodbye, her slender fingers silhouetted against a horizon lit purple-orange. As I waved back, my insides were a Giant Wheel on steroids. The lake mimicked the skies, its undulating surface a rippling mirror. My eyes stayed anchored to the cart as it skirted the lake, the horses raising a trail of dust, their clip-clopping hooves receding gently into the evening.

And, suddenly, in that tranquil calm of the gathering dusk, realization dawned: the pretty horse-cart driver was Gundappa the Naxal, only clean-shaven and in whites.

*

That night, a dream. I am cycling on a flat, green, high plateau adorned with a single tree at its distant edge. Soon, I notice I am not alone: I am, in fact, trailing another cycle – the writer’s. We navigate along narrow muddy paths partitioning tall, swaying grass that dance inwards and outwards, like a tribal ritual. Rain-laden clouds loom large above us. I register that the writer and I are teammates in some sort of a race, one we are almost certain to lose. Our opponents are simply too far ahead, mere specks in the distance. We desperately cycle to catch up. As we draw closer, I ascertain our only competition comprises another team of two: a man and a woman. The woman has a snake around her neck; the man sports a beard that appears and disappears at will.

They are, of course, DK and Gundappa.

*

The next day, under piercing blue skies, we walked all the way down to the river. The writer was attired in his favourite grey pants and white shirt, a crumpled white cricketer’s hat keeping a drowsy late-afternoon sun at bay. The trail snaked down a hill; the landscape on either side comprised a confused – but oddly beautiful – collection of trees and rocks. In the distance, a dog howled; in response, from somewhere nearby, a peacock shrieked.

“The only rival to a peacock’s beauty in magnitude is the ugliness of its squeal,” I said.

The writer made a noise to indicate that he concurred, but he was now on his haunches, peering closely at something under a smallish rock. I walked back to him.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Come, look. Have you seen this fellow before?”, he said.

Ungainly and wriggling, an earthworm was making its way from the underside of the rock to its surface, from darkness to light. It was a dazzling emerald-green in colour – the light seemed to simply filter through its exterior. Immediately – and momentarily inexplicably – my mind’s eye pictured celestial courtesans. The word soon followed the image:

“Ethereal,” I whispered.

“Do you know the what he’s called in these parts?” the writer asked, tempting the earthworm with a twig.  

I nodded to indicate that I didn’t.

“Nela-ratna – Pearl of the Earth. Look at how he moves, plodding, asymmetrical – so utterly graceless. It is the incongruence with his exterior that makes us notice his gait. 

Like the peacock’s awful shriek.”

The earthworm had wound itself around the twig, but I wasn’t paying attention anymore, for another pair of images took shape in my mind: of slender, elegant fingers holding a battered, brown gun; of an attractive, youthful face that evoked both fear and warmth.

“Hogona?”, the writer asked, snapping his fingers in my face.

I was shaken out of my reverie. A nameless inertia lingered, almost like a hangover.

“I need to tell you something,” I told the writer, “DK had come to see me yesterday.”

“DK?”

“The Naxal we met – the woman.”

“Ah – how do you know her name?” he said.

 “She told me herself.”

“And DK is Dayanand Kamath?”

(I never asked the writer who Dayanand Kamath was. Recently, however, in the local newspapers I had learnt of the death of an all-rounder from Mangalore who had played 22 First Class games for the erstwhile Mysore team in the ‘60s. His name? Dayanand Kamath.)

“No – Dhristikon. But she prefers DK,” I said.

“She prefers DK?!”

“Most people will have a problem with the name, not the short-form.”

“And you are defending her choices now?”

I felt hot in the face. I told him of her visit, of how she asked me to come back to Shadymane. I thought I saw a smile flash across his face; perhaps he had thought up a joke, but he didn’t interrupt me. When I was done, he said:

“You know, I wish I had come to your office at least once. It’s just that the library is a sham – I have been writing to the administration for years now to have a better curated set of books.”

“There’s not much to see.”

“I know … but, still.”

“You can still come, you know.”

“I know.”

He sounded genuinely wistful. He was staring at a conference of trees in the distance, many of their branches sprouting black inverted-triangular forms: delegates of sleeping bats. When it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything more, I asked:

“Well?”

“You should go.”

“What about you?”

“I have work.”

I cannot say I was disappointed to hear him say that. A part of me – a big part of my heart and the part of my brain that produced raging hormones – wanted DK all for myself. Feigning disappointment, but careful not to overdo it, I responded with an:

“O-ho!”

The lie danced on my vocal chords, causing my voice to quiver ever so gently. Did he notice? I watched him carefully. He continued to stare into the distance. Relieved, I was mentally congratulating myself, when he tore his eyes away from the trees, popped his hat back on, and briskly strode on. Suddenly, turning to me, he said:

“This DK of yours … Don’t fool yourself into thinking she’s some Nelaratna personified.”

*