A Rat, a Sparrow
When she turned around in her sleep and opened her eyes, the rat’s face was right next to her cheek. And when she screamed out loud, leapt to her feet and stood there shuddering, the rat too, startled by her scream, jumped on to the window and sought shelter there. It lifted its nose and stared at her as if to say, “How you terrified me with your scream!” Every time it tried to move, she screamed again. Finally, it sat right where it was, motionless. And she stood frozen in front of it, staring at it all the time.
It is difficult to be friendly with rats. Most particularly so with this one. It must surely have been this one. A rat which tended to eat up only the autobiographies in the top shelf of her bookcase. Because the covers of the autobiographies had been nibbled completely at random, their titles stated starkly, My His or My Autobiog or My St. As for one of them, entitled The Autobiography of a Donkey, only the Donkey remained. When you looked up at it, beneath the smiling photograph of the author, you could only see the word “Donkey” in boldly-inked letters. Although many people might have thought the word appropriate to the author, one could not say whether they would have wanted it to be left to the rat’s judgement in the end. It struck her that even if the author had called himself a donkey in false deprecation, he might object to its being emphasized in quite this way.
It was because of this that as soon she heard the sounds “krk, krk” the following night she flashed her torch along the top shelf. The rat was sitting on the autobiography, and had begun nibbling its way around the “Donkey.” It looked down at her. It seemed to her that it was laughing. Her tongue rolled into a scream. Her friends, knocked out after their customary Saturday celebrations, woke up. They chased after the two-inch-long rat. It scuttled into the bathroom. Paramvir followed it inside with a coconut-frond broom, and locked the door behind himself.
“Param, don’t kill it. Just make it faint.”
“It’s just two inches long. Do I know how to hit it so that it just faints?” he replied from within.
“If, after thou hast given it chase, it still does not die, what wouldst thou do?” asked Susan in pure Tamil. She was from Paris. Paramvir’s girlfriend. She had attended a three-month intensive course in Tamil, and was here to do some research on female deities. According to her, Lakshmi sitting at Mahavishnu’s feet and stroking them was not an indication of being dominated by him; she was only instilling in him the energy and strength he needed to succour the world and to create whatever was necessary. When asked why someone with so much energy should not stroke her own feet and take on Vishnu’s work herself, she said, “Thou givest me cause for laughter.” Now she stood there exclaiming “Aiyako” in response to the loud noises of Paramvir’s battle with the rat inside the bathroom.
Paramvir emerged, with the rat lying prone on the coconut-frond broom.
“It’s only fainted,” he reassured her. He let it go on the street below, and then returned. The caretakers of the building were somewhat disturbed by the sight of a Sardarji with his hair bound up, coming downstairs at one o’clock in the morning, carrying a rat on a broom. The next day, they avoided looking directly at her.
Just as she had fallen asleep peacefully, assuring herself that when the stunned rat opened its eyes, it must surely have walked off into a world without autobiographies, here it was again, sitting right next to her cheek.
But was it the same rat? When it recovered from its swoon, did it come straight back here? Or was this one its mate?
Many people had forewarned her that the big city was full of rats and bandicoots. Because it was artists and intellectuals who told her this, it was reasonable for her to assume that they were referring metaphorically to the human inhabitants here. Besides, when she and Amulyo spent their very first night in this city in a flat which belonged to Gita and Sukhdev, with its single room, its kitchen smelling of mustard pickle, and sweaty clothes hanging up on the line, the rat-image had struck her as particularly appropriate. The kitchen was really like a rat-hole. And it was on that night that she had her dream.
Skyscrapers on all four sides, like mountains. Narrow streets. If you enter a building looking for a place to stay, they turn into rat-holes where you cannot even stand upright. Everywhere there are people lying either on their backs or on their sides, sitting with their heads on their knees, talking together, laughing. A woman returns home from her office. Very casually she enters her rat-hole. Voices, as if from heaven, tell her of the comforts of their flats…When she tries to take hold of a rope in order to raise herself up conveniently, it turns out to be a rough, abrasive rat’s tail.
She must have called out in her sleep. She opened her eyes. Amulyo was peacefully asleep. He was one who was truly blessed with the gift of sleep. She shook him awake.
“Amul, Amul!”
“Ha…” he said, waking up with a start. “Amul, I had a dream.”
“Mm.”
“A frightful dream, Amul. I went cold all over.”
Amulyo sat up and drank from the water bottle. He poured some water into a glass and gave it to her. When she had drunk it, he said, “Tell me.”
When she finished describing the dream, he laughed.
“How do you manage to dream in such beautiful images? It’s complete with symbols and everything. And for all that, you don’t even agree with Freud.”
She hit him on the stomach. “You are a goonda, a loafer. You are a Kumbakarnan who sleeps all the time. You are a rascal.” A blow accompanied each epithet.
He lay back, still laughing. She climbed on top of his stomach, her legs on either side of him, and took up the posture of the Destroyer of Demons.
Amulyo caught hold of her raised hand. Very gently. Her eyes filled. Tears came too, to his eyes.
He glanced at the shelves above them, blackened with smoke; at the aluminium vessels that could be discarded at any time they chose to pack up; the kerosene stove; the roach-powder scattered at the edges of the walls; the kitchen drain only ten feet away. Then he looked at her and was silent.
She touched his navel gently.
“It was only a dream, Amul,” she said.
She remembered the spacious backyard of her grandmother’s house in Coimbatore. Certain images are inextricably linked with certain places. Her image of her Paatti was inseparably linked with that house. Paatti who had borne children from the age of thirteen. Paatti who had cooked vegetables and stirred halva in great big pans. Paatti who had told stories from the Ramayanam as she massaged her puny grandchildren — including herself — with castor oil, firmly, firmly. Paatti with her tongue like a whiplash. Whose every word had stung.
Animals always surrounded Paatti, like the cattle which stood about Krishna, enchanted by his flute.
One hot summer afternoon, Paatti woke up with a start. She went to the backyard. A monkey sat on the wall behind the well, making the most frightful noises.
“What’s the matter, da?” asked Paatti.
“Urr,” it replied.
“Paatti, don’t go near it Paatti!” she and her cousins, Chithi’s children, called out.
Paatti looked at the monkey steadily. Then she went to the room next to the bathroom where the firewood was stacked, and brought an empty coconut shell. She dipped it into the water trough and filled it. She went towards the monkey and held it out, full of water. It grabbed the coconut shell from her and drank it down in a single breath. Having drunk three times from her shell, it leapt away, swirling its tail.
“It was thirsty,” said Paatti.
The house was full of black and white and brown cats. At least a dozen of them. After a row of children had eaten their meal, followed by the men, when Paatti stretched out her leg and sat down to eat with the women, the cats would come, swarming about her.
“Miaou,” one would say.
“It wants an appalam,” Paatti would translate.
They were cats which had acquired a palate for appalam, rasam, rice, roast potatoes, and so on. She would give ghee-rice to a cat that had just survived the delivery of a litter of kittens. When the morning milk arrived, the cats too had their share.
“Would you like to keep a cat?” asked Amulyo.
“Mm. No. What about you? You keep a dog at home, don’t you?”
“It’s really wrong to keep animals locked up in these cage-like places,” he said.
“Children too,” she agreed.
After the rat-dream, there had been other rat-darsanams, manifestations. Rat legends. Rat experiences about which Sukhdevand Gita told them. As she watched a cinema show, munching popcorn, Gita had felt a sharp nip at her foot. The very moment after she shook her foot and looked up again, Sukhdev was shaking off his foot, too. When both of them looked down, they saw a huge bandicoot running away. Both their feet were bloodied. Several injections later, full of righteous indignation, they had approached a journalist friend and asked him to make a report about it. He, however, had shed a patient smile and informed them about the experiences of the cinema critic of their paper. For some reason, this woman had missed the preview meant for the press, and went instead to the cinema theatre where the picture was being released publicly. As she was writing her notes, she felt her dupatta being pulled. Apparently, she took no notice of it, but held her pad against the armrest of her chair, and went on busily making her notes. When the lights came on for the interval, she bent down and saw a rat on her lap! When she stood up and screamed, the other spectators calmly watched the rat running away and commented, “Such a lot of fuss, just for a rat!” Then someone sitting next to her told her an elaborate rat joke. There was a girl who learnt judo. She learnt karate. She learnt kalaripayittru. One day, she saw a rat running across her kitchen floor. She screamed out loudly and climbed on to a chair. He cackled loudly, “ke-ke-ke-ke,” as he told her this.
One does not know whether a bandicoot ever bit his feet.
She knew a story about a Rat Prince. Once, there were three princes. Two of them chased one away from the land. After many trials and tribulations, he meets a princess. When she kisses him, he turns into a handsome prince. When she grew up a little, she added a postscript to the tale. The Rat Prince became a handsome Human Prince after the kiss. The princess, though, became a rat. What a wonder! No prince came forward to kiss her. Not even the Rat Prince.
After Gita and Sukhdev had gone abroad for a year, they had taken over the flat and this rat had come to do battle with them. Often, there is a particular symbol which stands for a big town. Just as the Big Apple stands for New York. It struck her that only one symbol could possibly stand for this city: a Rat. Rat city. Rat people. People who stayed as rats, even after a kiss. There might be a whole history behind this rat cowering by the window. It might be a rat which was bored with many yugas of life as a rat, weary after eating so many autobiographies; it might be hoping to change after a kiss from her.
She got up and pushed the window shutter outward with a long rod. The rat sprang up and ran outside.
When Amulya returned home from his trip the next day, she told him all about the rat. He suggested they buy some rat poison. She thought that this was, after all, a literary rat. It shouldn’t die in agony. There were any number of ways to die other than by poison. Come to think of it, she had a nonsense ula, a song of praise, in her possession. It was an ula composed in praise of a Tamil Nadu leader. In fact, one sect of the now-divided party had circulated a rumour that this ula had been sung to the leader hours before he died, and that there was definitely a connection between the poem and his immediate dispatch to the hospital. She thought that if this rat ate the ula, it would certainly die. But would it die without writhing in agony? She wanted to laugh.
“Why, do you have a book that will put an end to it or what?”
“Look here, don’t make fun of Tamil. All your books are rotten ones which even a rat won’t eat.”
“What’s this, a ‘linguistic state’ dispute?”
“Well then, should any idiot who can’t even pronounce ‘zh’ make fun of Tamil? What’s all this Tamil, anyway? It’s Tamizh, Tamizh. Say ‘zh.’ ”
“Zh,” said Amulyo, pronouncing it perfectly.
“Is it enough to say it just once? Say after me: Vaazhaippazham vazhukki kizhavi nazhuvi kuzhiyil vizhundaal.”
“Look, I didn’t get a sleeper, so I’ve sat up all night. Why can’t you teach me Tamizh — see, I said Tamizh — after I’ve had a cup of tea at least?”
They said that this was a city where all sorts of people lived. But it was clear that several among them were marked off as Madrasis. There was a certain friend of Amulyo’s. As soon as he saw her, his mouth would grimace a little. “Namaskaram ji,” he would say, grinding away, with the idea that if you added “-am” to a word, it became Tamil. “Sambaram, rasam, tea-am, coffee-am, puri-am, chappati-am…” he would say in a rapid volley, and then ask in a drawl, “Kya ji?”
After he had done this a couple of times, she questioned him, full of concern, “Vijay, you poor man, have you had this speech defect since you were a child? Is there no way to correct it? How you have to struggle to speak!”
Vijay was taken aback. He stumbled, “No, no. This is…Madrasi…”
“Oh, I see. I was feeling sorry for you all these days. You see, we don’t speak like that at all.”
Vijay looked at Amulyo as if he were seeking help.
“Well, Vijay, what will you drink? Tea-am?”
“Tea,” he answered in a subdued voice.
There was another friend who insisted on telling jokes after having downed three pegs of rum. “I’m going to act like a Madrasi,” he proclaimed loudly. Before the others could stop him, he had turned himself into a Madrasi. He rolled back his shirt sleeve. He pretended that there was a leaf in front of him, scooped up a handful of food and sucked at it with a loud hiss. Another scoop, another hiss. Then a series of rapid movements as if he was shovelling the food into his mouth. Finally, he thrust out his tongue and licked off both the inner palm and back of his hand. He laughed at his own performance. Nobody else laughed with him.
Vijay went up to him and whispered something. He looked at her and said, grinning away, “It was only in fun. I like the temples in Tamil Nadu very much. Then dosa, vada, idli,” he drawled, stressing the “d.”
“Saniyane,” she said, meaning, You wretch.
Only Amulyo understood what she said. He gave the friend his bag and sent him on his way. When Vijay left that day, he didn’t say, “Namaskaram ji,” but gave her a hug and said limply, “Good night.”
She was in a sudden frenzy. She wanted to embrace the plantain-leaf seller in that part of the city where most of the Tamil people congregated. When she heard a certain Tamil accent, she felt as if the Tambaraparni had burst its banks and come flowing towards her. Dosai, idli, rasam, idiaappam, and Chettinad chicken curry seemed to her like the very staples of life. Suddenly at night, or in the afternoon, or in a crowded bus or train as she was wiping away her sweat, a long-forgotten song would come to mind, sharp as a lightning of pain. She heard the Kaavadichindu song her grandfather used to sing in the terrace at night, looking at the stars and pacing about with his legs held apart,
This rotten body is of use to no one –
like a broken sieve, oh parrot,
always it brings pain.
That frenzy held her in its grip until she reached the Tamil library. There, when she saw the brightly coloured book covers, all of them portraying women either on their backs or lying prone, her legs began to buckle.
It seemed that the overseer of the library would never take his hand out of his veshti. Heaven knew what buried treasure he had there. As soon as he clapped eyes on a woman, his hand went into hiding. He spoke vociferously about Tamil culture, gesticulating with his other hand.
“We are safeguarding a whole culture, amma. For the sake of Tamil, I’ve had stones thrown at me.” He displayed a bald patch on his head. “We are making great efforts to have a statue of Bharati placed outside here, and another of Tiruvalluvar. I’ve also put forward the idea that we should cover all the walls here with kural couplets. As soon as you walk in, a kural should catch your eye immediately. It should hit your eye. Say you’ve just come in. You see a kural right in front of you:
She who worships none other than her husband as her god
Says “Rain” and instantly the rainfalls.
What do you think of that, amma? Your hair would stand on end, wouldn’t it? You’d be thrilled. We must praise our women, amma. We have competitions at singing kural, tevaram, and all that. If women win, we don’t give them prizes at random. We might give them a pedestal oil-lamp. Or we might give them a book about the role of women in Tamil culture.” He leaned towards her. “It’s simple, amma. Our entire culture is in the hands of women, amma.”
His voice revealed his tranquillity at having given over Tamil culture into women’s hands. She thought to herself, if his hand were ever to emerge from its own cultural search, then some of Tamil’s cultural burden might be placed there too.
Outside, just by the door, a singer attached to the Sabha, where all south Indians came to learn various arts, was talking away.
“They’ve got rid of me. Did you know that?”
“Is that so? And why?”
He rapidly undid the buttons of his crisply starched shirt and displayed his bare chest.
“I don’t have a sacred thread.”
The two of them bought an extremely potent poison. They smeared it on bread and placed the pieces in corners of the room. She put one piece behind The Autobiography of a Donkey. Heaven knew which particular piece of bread it ate. It lay dead, modestly, in a bag made of soft blue material. She felt a shock. Would it have suffered a lot? Might it have been in agony? Certainly, it had tormented them. Wrecked their sleep. Ruined their books. It died alone and in agony, in the blue bag. Amulyo went and shook it out on the seashore.
This rat would not act in obstinate resistance like the one they had once seen. One evening at the beach a man had walked ahead of them, carrying a rat trap. The tiny rat peeped out of the trap, squeaking. He placed the trap facing the sea and opened its door. It saw the sea in front of it and was paralysed. It refused to come out of the trap. Squeaking aloud it clung to the bars. The man who had brought it there tilted the trap. He shook it hard. He banged at it. The rat obstinately refused to come out. Not knowing what else to do, the poor man settled down by the trap as if in penance, waiting desperately for it to come out. When they left the beach and turned around one last time, the rat still had not come out, and he still sat there waiting, so that he could take the trap home. It didn’t seem as if the rat appreciated the man’s obstinacy either. Both man and rat trap were silhouetted against the fading light of the sunset. In front of them, by the horizon, apartment blocks rose, like mountains.
Some days after all this, there was the advent of the sparrow. Standing in the balcony which could only accommodate one person comfortably, she looked down on the rubbish heaps below and the children sitting there defecating; then turned her gaze towards the old theatre opposite. An old Hindi film was showing there. The balcony doors stood open, perhaps to compensate for the breakdown of the electric fans. Through the heavy black curtains a song sung by Mukesh for Raj Kapoor came floating towards her. It was then that it fell, brushing against her shoulder. Startled, she moved, leaned down, and saw that it was a sparrow. A baby sparrow. One wing was broken and crooked. Inside its beak, its mouth showed, red as a berry. She was afraid to touch it. She filled an ink-filler and dropped water into its mouth. It opened its eyes. She carried it inside on a piece of cardboard and laid it in a corner. At night she covered it with a net basket.
When she lifted the basket in the morning, the sparrow shrieked. It circled about, calling out “ki-ki-ki.” It tapped the ink-filler with its beak. Before she could recover from her shock, two birds alighted on the balustrade of the verandah parapet. Swiftly they flew down, and thrust little worms into the baby sparrow’s mouth. With little relishing squeaks, it swallowed. Then it snuggled down once more.
In the afternoon, flying lessons began. One of the sparrows flew up and down, down and up; first slowly then rapidly. As soon as it stopped, the other one took over. The baby sparrow rose to its feet, raised itself into the air with its crooked wing, then fell. Until five in the afternoon the parent birds went on trying, incessantly. The baby sparrow gave up its attempt at flying and began to walk about. At last, the parent birds left the baby sparrow in her safekeeping, and flew away. The older birds came back for some days, but disappeared after that. The little sparrow could not fly further than five or six feet. It made its home against the first iron bracket of her book shelf. Unlike the rat which laid siege to the books stealthily in the middle of the night, this sparrow cast its droppings all over the books on that side, in broad daylight. One day, she knelt in front of it and sang, “Sparrow, little sparrow, do you know what has happened? My husband has gone away and not yet come home.” The sparrow squeaked “kerk,” making its protest clear. It was greatly attracted to red things. It shed its droppings most generously on books with red covers. When they came in late at night after a long time away, as soon as they opened the door, it called out sharply from the corner of the book shelf, expressing its disapproval loudly.
When she opened the window nearest the bookshelf, it immediately went and perched against the bars. As she gazed out at the buildings covered in factory smoke, standing out against a background of stench and noise, it was the little sparrow in the foreground that caught her eye. A sparrow that opened its jewelled eyes and looked outward.
When she rested her head against the window bars, and everything behind the curtain of rain turned into shadowy lines, the sparrow perched next to her. She narrowed her eyes and looked sideways, and the sparrow filled her vision. Behind it, the ash-coloured city extended. Like a city that was placed upon its head. Like a crown.
One day, after she had stood for a moment with her head against the window, eyes closed, she opened her eyes again to find the baby sparrow gone. She searched throughout the flat, calling out, “Kutty, Little One!” She came out into the verandah, calling loudly, “Kutty,” when it peeped out from a hole in the outside wall of the apartment building. She could just catch a glimpse of its broken wing. As she stood there wondering anxiously how to save it from the clutches of a kite, or an eagle, or a vulture, it rose gracefully upward and then flew back into the hole. Another time it rose upward, demonstrating that it could fly. A third time, while Amulyo and she stood watching from the window, it rose high into the air, flew up and down harmoniously, and then disappeared into a tree that stood at a distance of fifty feet. There were several other sparrows there.
As far as the eye could see, there were long rows of buildings, with no space in between. Unrepaired walls, displaying their cracks. Curving lines of cement covering some of those cracks. Some walls tarred over, to prevent rain water from seeping through. Many-coloured clothes hanging on hooks extending from the verandahs. Green leaves sprouting from flowerpots on window sills. The city lay like a rakshasa, displaying all this. And in the branch of a tree that had somehow struggled its way up in the midst of it all, a little sparrow.
And then one evening, a little later, this happened. Street lights and shop lights and neon advertisements had all come on. The street was an ocean of traffic. Roaring double-decker buses; autorickshaws with their incessant noise as they wound their way in and out; impatient scooters and cars. An absolute deluge of noise. Amulyo entered the traffic stream, ran, shoved, pushed, and reached the other side. She got halfway across the street, and was stuck on the stone barrier, one foot wide, that divided the street into two. Amulyo stood on the other side, beckoning with his hands, “Come over.” All around her, huge advertisement lights flashed, without even a foot’s interval in between, assaulting her eyes. A red double-decker bus, with violent blue, yellow, and green lettering rushed past, practically scraping her back. Terrifying vehicles, stopping, screeching, and then overtaking each other. She sprang forward a couple of feet, then fell back again, frightened by a furious black car. Car horns practically squealed into her ears. Her face, her neck, her armpits, and her thighs were all streaming with sweat. And then a woman came next to her, holding a couple of empty fish baskets at a slant. She caught a whiff of smell from the baskets. With the one hand which was free of the baskets, the woman caught her by the waist. Holding her baskets high up to stop the traffic, the woman dragged her along. As soon as they reached the opposite verge, the fisherwoman left her at Amulyo’s side and went on her way.
As she stood gasping for breath on that pavement covered with spittle, waste, cigarette stubs, vendors, and gutters, a place where all the city’s noises seemed to gather and overflow, he suddenly appeared in front of them. In the city’s language, he was a bevda, a drunk. The city behaved with kindness towards bevdas. If they stretched themselves out to sleep in buses or in trains, nobody shook them awake. “Bevda hai…He’s only a bevda,” they would say, and walk past, excusing him. Once, a bevda boarded a bus at midnight and obstinately refused to buy a ticket from the conductor. He stood there, shouting in Hindi, “Drink, drink, drink; drink in the evening, drink in the morning; drink at day, drink at night; drink, drink, drink.” The conductor himself bought the man a ticket. The bevda said, “Wake me up at the temple,” crashed down and slept. There were temples all along the way. A wayside shrine to Sai Baba every ten feet. At which temple should he be woken up? “Poor old bevda,” said the conductor.
The bevda came near her, and she realized he was middle-aged. When he was just about ten feet away, he slithered down, gently and in slow motion, on to the pavement. Nobody took the slightest notice. They just started walking around him.
He tried to get to his feet as she and Amulyo went up to him, but failed. He held out his thumb and forefinger, two inches apart, and smiled radiantly, saying, “It just got a bit too much.” They helped him to his feet and made him sit up, leaning against a wall. “Are my chappals on my feet? Place them in my hands. Otherwise, these rascals will snatch them and make off.” He hugged the chappals as soon as they were in his hands, and closed his eyes. A peaceful smile on his face.
When they reached the bus-stand, they joined the long queue. She leaned against the lamp-post nearby and started to laugh. A second later Amulyo joined in. They could not stop laughing.