The Girl in the Photo

There was nothing wrong with that November morning more than fifty years ago. The look of a newborn day had just begun to evolve. From the bay window of our living room I see a green Osmania University bus, carrying students dressed in black sherwanis, their eyes radiating dreams of an ambitious future, glide past our marble-washed white house. The bus blocks for a nano second a view of the Barkatpura chaman, shining green and gold under a sun itching to get into his angry mood. The nano second dies swinging the chaman back into view filling chlorophyll in my eyes. A thought occurs to me me making me head for our renovated kitchen where my mother is making coffee for the family that includes my father, and his four sons. I want to reveal to the thought that occurred to me that Monday morning when the birds sang a song of the time and the chaman awakened brightly in its youthful glory.

Amma, I address her clearing my throat. She is facing the kitchen counter and the coffee things spread on it like my kid brother scatters Mecano toys around himself. Standing on a low stool, she doesn’t look back at me in acknowledgment. Unlike her, I thought. I catch a glimpse of the coffee-making expression on her face caught by the shining stainless steel jar before her. Her face, spread distortedly on the jar, had shed the smile that always shone on her lips. Did she swallow it in a mood of distraction?

‘Amma,’ I call her again.

‘Don’t talk to me,’ she said. My face fell as soon as she delivered that sharp sentence of silence on me. She dispatched the steel jar to the sink, so I couldn’t check how I looked like when my face shrank. My mother, I guessed, was not in a frame of mind to open a conversation. So I don’t ask her for how long I should remain dumb. I try to decipher what went wrong so early in the morning. It was too early for such things to happen. My mind went over events of the recent past to understand her withdrawl.

‘Don’t talk to me’ is how the conversation between my mother and me opened and concluded. A hurriedly edited version of my understanding of her mood went like this:

‘You know how worried is your father,’ she asked me her face still fixed on the spherical surface of the coffee jar ready to empty its caffeine contents into six freshly washed china.

‘What about,’ I ask her, my mind focused on the beverage.

‘You ought to know,’ she said, not wasting her words..

‘I really don’t know,’ I tell her in as convincing a manner as possible.

‘It’s about your marriage,’ she said.

‘What’s so urgent about it,’ I ask her in unbecoming irritation.

To me it looked like it was some form of theater characteristic of women.

‘You think you’re still at school,’ she asks me.

‘It can wait,’ I mumble.

‘Wait, how long?’

‘Amma, there’s no law time-barring marriage. Anyway, give me some time,’ I tell her.

She says nothing and falls silent. It means we’re not on talking terms thereafter. Silence is her weapon and it has never failed.

There is no harm if it is that she just wants me to marry. A harmless maternal sentiment, I would think and breathe normally. But no, she has hidden agenda though to suspect such an intrigue residing in a mother’s bosom is unlike a son. She wants someone to help her in kitchen chores. If that’s the thing why beat about the bush? It’s not a big problem to get a cook, I tell myself.

‘I’ll get you a cook,’ I tell her, to show how dutiful a son I’m.

 

No, that won’t do, she wants a daughter-in-law. Truth to tell, she has set her eyes on a Bapatla girl, who is learning music from my sister we call Nooki. I don’t say anything more to my mother that would amount to a clear promise.

‘Does everyone born marry,’ I wanted to ask but knowing she hates such stupid questions gag myself. She stops talking to me.

My mind is full of figuring out ways to get the smile back on her face and get her talk to me again like old times. She is not used to bear the presence of an unmarried person of marriageable age before her. She detests celibacy as if it were some kind of a cancer. She is wedded to the institution of marriage. What the spouses make or unmake of it is their problem, she says. Parents are free of all duties towards their children once they get married. Some parents get this freedom only after the birth of grandchildren. Perhaps amma is afraid I would die heirless. Where is the empire to inherit? There’s still time to build it, I thought.

 

Seeking a breather from mother’s sulk I go look up a cousin of mine living all by herself on the YMCA Road. She is not married. So what, she’s happy. I must tell my mother about this: How people remain unmarried and yet (and therefore) happy. I’ll listen to some music at my cousin’s place to calm my nerves. Maybe Hirabai Barodekar. Seeta has a studio accommodation opposite Reddi College for Women. It is on the second floor of a building reached by a spiral stairway that is as fragile as my cousin. The stairhead provides a view of the quad of the women’s college, sitting enticingly on a large tract of grass. It is overrun by the gaiety and flamboyance of girls, free of today’s care and dreaming of an unyoked tomorrow, some wearing salwar kameez and some odhni and lehenga. A galaxy of maidens whose youth is on the verge of shedding innocence and who’re yearning to hear the melody of wedding pipes. I suppress a bachelorly temptation to wave randomly to one of them. I catch a girl smiling at me. I smile back. Her smile disappears.

***

My cousin’s studio resembles Maharaja Parikshit’s refuge resting on a single pillar in the middle of the sea. I tap on the studio’s open front door and wait. My cousin keeps it open to steal the capricious November breeze. The rap on the door brings her out of the kitchen, which is dim like my mood at that time. She is wearing a white Tangail saree, irreverently wasting its fine weave on such lowly chores a kitchen is home to. Her unstitched garment has a train of swimming black swans as border. There is no lake or water on the border, though. She blows a virgin smile, displaying her tiny teeth, abode of undetected cancer. Her eyes become two chinks when she smiles. She is dusky, the color of the earth after rain. She motions me to a wicker stool imported from Delhi.

‘Please sit; I’ll join you in a while. I’m making tea for both of us,’ she sings a preamble now familiar to me. Her words sound like they are climbing out of a deep well. The tea chores take her into the dark mist of the sooty kitchen.

‘Welcome,’ I shout back my endorsement of the tea idea.

My inconstant eyes pan the room and settle on its meager inventory. There is hardly any furniture in the room barring a dresser with a mirror that has lost its silvering at many places. Parts of you disappear when you look into it. On the dresser is a rummage: a comb, hairpins, a barrette and a number of things women accumulate for likely use in an unforeseeable future. The cousin’s music notebook, staring from the mat rolled out on the floor, checks the progress of my nomadic eyes. It looks like the notebook is appealing for a lift. The rolled out mat is an indication that Seeta is all set to practice music. I hunch forward and pick up the music notes to check for additions to her repertoire. I riffle through its pages and stop doing it when a passport-size black and white photo floats down from inside the book. I lean forward and grab the picture before it makes a landing. My exercise reminds me of a catch in the first slip. I look at it with my glaucoma-free eyes. The photo shows a girl in her late teens, her bust region hiding behind a half-saree that concealed a blouse with half sleeves reaching her elbows. The face is about to launch a smile. She is quite a thing, I tell myself. But her teeth, essence of a smile, are not visible. Her eyes seem to do the job. It’s a black and white photo that threw no hint of the color of the saree or blouse. Seeta, that is my cousin, brings chocolate tea, a unique Hyderabad blend, in a tray that rattles from fright of an impending crash in her hands. I stretch my body like a slug to reach for one of the two cups and take it in my hand.

‘Guess who she is?’ she asks certain I would say I can’t. Perhaps the girl’s identity is stored away in the heart of a parrot living in a forest reachable only after you cross seven seas, as it happens in many of Indian folk tales.

She slurps tea from the saucer like many people in Hyderabad do.

‘I don’t know. I think she looks like Jamuna,’ I tell her, too lazy to make a guess. She laughs showing her cancerous teeth.

‘She is your wife,’ she says and succumbs to gasps of mirth.

‘I’m not married,’ I tell her as if she didn’t know.

‘This is the girl uncle and aunty want you to bring home,’ she says and puts down the cup. Things are getting interesting now. Is she that Bapatla girl my mother had in mind?

‘Let’s come to the point. Tell me, when are you going?’ my cousin asks me, the question pregnant with multiple assumptions.

‘Where?’ I ask her.

‘To the girl’s place,’ she says and collects the cup for more slurping.

‘What will I do there,’ I ask her though I knew where.

‘You’ll see the girl,’ she says.

‘What girl are you talking about?’ I ask her with a straight face.

‘The girl in the photo.’

‘What varnam (first item in a Carnatic music concert) are you now practicing?’ I ask her trying to change the topic and disguise my bursting interest in the girl.

‘We’ve learnt ten varnams so far from Nooki cousin,’ she says.

‘Who are we?’ I ask her

‘Your wife and I,’ she says and laughs again loudly.

 

More than her resemblance to Jamuna, I find varnams a greater reason for making the girl in the picture mine. I adore varnams and I adore the girl who sings them.

‘Where’re you? Are you listening?’ She asks me noticing the flight of my mind.

Where am I? I’m already there looking into Jamuna’s eyes. ‘Carry on, I’m listening,’ I tell Seeta.

‘You can’t take your eyes off her if you see her,’ she says.

‘You mean my eyes can’t see anything else other than her,’ I ask her.

‘I know what you want. A fair girl. Good-looking and intelligent. She’s all that,’ she says and collects the empty cups. A fancy comes over me. I let her withdraw into the kitchen. Assured she isn’t around, I open the music notes and take a fleeting peek at the photo and kiss the girl in it. I’ve a hunch that I’d met this girl in a previous birth or some long time ago in a dream. Like Usha saw Anirudh.

I reach home, my mind full of the girl, scenes of the wedding and the auspicious strains of the pipes in the background. That night she appears to me in a dream and sings the viriboni varnam. I join her and we sing a song together.

‘Okay amma, I’ll go see the girl,’ I tell my mother. The smile returns to her face after a long layoff. She is my mother again. Off I go to Bapatla on a Saturday to see the bright-eyed photo girl, that Bapatla girl as my mother refers to her. I take an overnight train pulled by a steam locomotive, looking like an Emmett caricature, belching smoke and soot. The kind you see mounted on a cement platform in front of the Kacheguda railway station, smarting under the sun and soaking in rain. I get into a compartment full of decibel-happy families returning from or going to a wedding. I climb onto an upper berth reserved for me. It smells of calico and the sweat of a previous passenger. I spread myself on the berth and find its upholstery ravaged.

***

A few minutes later the train heaves out of the station and the unorganized commotion and chaos plaguing the platform. The marriage parties open their food containers before the train reaches Bhongir. They serve themselves food, homemade perhaps, in paper plates. They make a happy racket. The smell of food rises like steam to reach the upper berth and replaces the stink of a previous passenger’s sweat. From my vantage I spy a young girl, with the eyes of a doe and long hair decked in strung jasmines spraying the air with intoxicating fragrance. With a smile coruscating her bridal face she asks me to join the food orgy. Could her name be Annapoorna? I release a smile intended to travel into her eyes, stay there and thrill her being all the way to wherever she was going. No, I whisper to her without taking my eyes off hers. I begin to consider her as an alternative. For a while I wondered if her people would ask me, on an impulse, to accept her hand had they known I was a bachelor. I put Jamuna on hold, for the while.

The train zips through the winter night throwing a black shroud over the landscape on both sides of the track. Such is the hazard of traveling at night that you miss a lot of the coastal scenery, the lay of the land, the river Krishna and the marvelous rail bridge over it. I make up the loss by building in my mind a small house (in addition to a colony already housing my imaginary harem) by the sea where Annapoorna who offered me food and I would live when we get off the train, granting our destination is the same. Also, granting that my mother doesn’t object. So, I doubt if the small house I’m dreaming of building for the girl will ever take off. Poor Annapoorna girl, she is condemned to my memory until she is hooked to another guy.

It is early morning when I reach Bapatla hoping that the girl I’m going to see would look like the girl I’d met in the train. I don’t see the girl who offered me food on the train or her people on the platform. Perhaps the party had got off at some earlier station when I was asleep. I surrender the ticket stub to a man in white dozing away at the gate on a high stool. Then I cut my way through sleeping bodies, immune to mosquito bite, sprawled near the ticket counters. They remind me of a line-up of bodies awaiting identification following a train crash. I come out of the station. The weather outside is pleasant enough to tickle the birds on the ancient trees in the parking lot to sing Saaveri. How do they know Saaveri is an early morning raga? Maybe, they roost next to my sister’s place.

Bapatla is a middlebrow dopey town like Malgudi in many ways. It is where the Grand Trunk Express stops for a while, adding to the prestige of the town. It is within hearing distance of the nocturnal melodies of the sea in the Bay of Bengal. The locals breathe this knowledge as if it were the very oxygen of their life. It is a place well known for jasmines, eggplants and briefless lawyers who outnumber litigants.

I walk down a short stretch from the station in the direction of the town, turn right and when I reach the Bhava Narayana Swami temple turn left. The town’s only main road takes off from the temple and ends where it is washed by the boisterous waves of the sea. Ten minutes later I am standing before the Anjaneya Swami temple. It is closed because it is not time yet to open. From there my bride-hunting-sister’s place is a stone’s throw. She teaches music to the girl I’m going to see, the same girl in the photo hiding in my cousin’s music notes, the same girl my mother knows as the Bapatla girl.

I’m no stranger to Bapatla. On my way through the main road I notice that the walls of several houses, eaten into by hungry sea breeze, remain untouched as if they were heritage structures. A first-time visitor is likely to think that most people in the town look alike, and have the same Bhavanarayana name. He may even think that the locals love to live on the town’s main road lined by shops and restaurants on either side. All life in the town is compressed within a mile of a clock tower of uncertain age and make on the main road. People gather here in amorphous knots and discuss politics, economy, elopements, marriages, births, abortions, deaths, murders, films, matrimony, late running of trains, promotions, raises in dearness allowance.

I reach my sister’s two-storied house built when architecture was in its infancy. Not far from there lives the father of the girl in the photo. An official of the posts and telegraphs department he is a widower with a college-going son and three daughters in the care of three widowed grand aunts. My sister teaches music to one of his three daughters, the Jamuna lookalike. She gets me coffee and before it becomes lukewarm pours out personal information about her disciple: her height and age: two inches shorter, twelve years younger and fairer than me. She topped the school leaving ranks and was good at sports and elocution. With her father unwilling to send her to college in a faraway town, she is learning varnams from my sister. Enough, I thought.

The day after my arrival, on an evening my sister considered auspicious according to panchangam and blessed by sea breeze, Bava, my brother-in-law, and I get ready to go to the postal official’s place to see the girl my mother had eyed for a daughter-in-law. Telling us to wait, Nooki sprints ahead of us for a few yards and turns back. She then tells us, ‘You can start now.’ She believes that when you set out on an important mission a woman coming from the opposite direction is a good omen. After a nod from her we take an unpaved road that passes the postal official’s place.

After a few minutes, we are there. We pass through a small gate that broke the run of a low brick and cement wall enclosing the front yard. In a corner near the wall is a jasmine creeper. We trek down a brief walkway and reach a veranda with a sloping roof. The veranda has two doorways for entry into the main house. An impudent crow sitting on the low wall wonders who we are. I wished I knew bird language. As we climb three steps to reach the level of the veranda, ducking a low beam, several chairs such as one is familiar with in government offices greet us. In two of them we see two men in their late fifties, one of them I surmised is the bride’s father. They looked like they were expecting us.

They see us and rise from their chairs and intone in unison like pages in a Sanskrit play, please come in. Both of them wear mustaches, short of bushy. Are we late, asks Bava, part of tradition-sanctioned inanities people utter to start a conversation. ’Not at all,’ we say because it is good manners to utter a lie. Two amusing pretences, I tell myself. We take our seats very close to the doorway that opens into the postal official’s portion of the house. I look up for no reason I could cite then or later at the gabled roof of the veranda resting on palm rafters past their expiry date. Bava introduces the girl’s father to me. His name is the same as mine. The father points to me the person next to him, and says he is his elder brother. The brother doesn’t nod acknowledgement. He has a head that is either bald or tonsured, deep-set eyes and is wearing a homespun collarless white shirt buttoned up to the neck on a white dhoti. A red vermilion mark cuts across his forehead wreathed in wrinkles. He sits with his feet tucked under him. The other brother, younger of the two, looks much younger and muscular with a thick steel-gray mop. He has vocal eyes and a mouth that refuses to close tightly. The shirt he is wearing has a collar.

The brothers position themselves on the left side of the doorway facing the road to be able to talk to the womenfolk, vaguely visible, on the other side of the doorway. The younger brother, my namesake, asks me about the weather in Hyderabad. More irrelevance assails me before he looks inquiringly at his senior. The elder brother looks at his watch tightly wound around his wrist like a monitoring bracelet and indicates a go-ahead. The junior peeps into the yawning void behind the doorway and tells nobody in particular to usher in the girl.

Now, the show begins. My wife in the making emerges unobtrusively from her passport photo and sits hugging her knees on a mat of palm reeds near the doorway separating us from the bridal gaggle in the background. Looking demure and abandoned, the varnam girl engages herself in determinedly appreciating the woof of the mat. She is draped in a sari of white chiffon with orange polka dots. An emerald necklace she is wearing is beaming off and on a spray of green tint on her placid face. She has a nose that resembled her father’s, reddened by the embarrassment of playing the mannequin. She has an oval face framed by lustrous hair.

More of her features come into view as she gets up to join her sisters in the gray background. She smoothes the ruffled pleats of her saree. She has long, thick glossy hair secured into a plaited braid that flowed deep down her nuque and dangled. Pinned into her hair is a string of jasmines and kanakambarams. The jasmines must have come from the creeper we had seen at the entrance. Behind her hovers in the haze of winter dusk a huddle of women, presumably her grand aunts, sisters and neighbors. High above them is a bamboo trapeze suspended from the ageing rafters. It serves as a clothesline. Below the clothesline are some bedrolls piled upon old trunks. The presence of the bride’s retinue makes me uncomfortable. I wish the charade to end at the earliest.

Would you like to ask her any questions, the bride’s father asks me in a tone that suggested I should. It’s okay, I say, not meaning to ask any. There’s a sudden silence. It tells on the composure of the father and uncle who move uneasily in their government chairs. Trying to check the creeping vacuum, the elder brother asks, how about some coffee. Bava declines the offer, dismissing it as an afterthought. Now, there really is not much left to do except prolong the state of pointlessness. My eyes focus on two well-fed lizards on the wall watching the proceedings, motionless. Abruptly, one of them swashes in a westerly direction to suck in an insect. The second one pretends death.

Seeing my poorly concealed discomfort, the father rises from his chair, a signal suggesting that the session has ended. Bava and I stand up, pre-empting the revival of the drama. This girl, I tell myself, is more comely than the girl that for a while stole my heart in the train the night before. She, the postal official’s daughter, has a grace that reminds you of a Bapu drawing. She looks at my back thinking I was leaving. I look back intending to take leave of the brothers. Without design my eyes meet her smiling eyes. She blushes a deep red and lowers her head. Bava and I make appropriate leave-taking noises and walk back through a wall of silence to the small gate where we stop for a while, finding the father hesitate to ask a question. I will send the girl’s horoscope if you need it, he says. No, I have no faith in such things, I say. Politely. Okay, we will look you up tomorrow, he says meaning he expects to know my decision in twenty-four hours. He and his brother watch us till we disappear at the bend of the road.

 

At Bava’s home, my sister, her face swathed in a broad grin, greets us and asks, ‘What’s the news? Did anything come out of the sitting?’

‘Okay,’ I tell her.

“I know,’ my sister says, delighted.

That very night she relays my approval to the girl’s side. They check the Hindu calendar and fix a date for the wedding. One suitor less for the train girl!