Zen

The scooter in front of the gate coughed dreadfully. With every kick it could only cough more, showing no sign of coming to life. Krishna’s face was drenched in sweat. The scooter now looked to him like a villain that affronted his wife. Seething with rage, he gave it an almighty kick, only for it to sputter and die again. This time Krishna sent it reeling to the ground and spewed abuse.

“Come into the shade,” said his wife, standing behind the gate in the shade of the terrace. Krishna came and stood beside her wiping his face, wanting to kill the scooter.

“Bloody scooter! Had to conk out just in time. It’s not worth even ten rupees!” he fumed, making an obscene remark about the two-wheeler’s moral character.

Sarala blushed, “Chee! Mamayyagaru may hear you!”

“Let him! What do you care? Who’s the one to go to office – Me? Or you! What a pain! That chap couldn’t find a bigger fool than me to sell it to! And now I’m stuck with this piece of crap.”

“Krishna hasn’t left yet?” Nayudugaru walked up to the gate wiping his glasses with the towel on his shoulder.

“It’s not starting,” said Sarala, moving aside.

Nayudugaru turned to his son. Krishna kept glaring at the scooter without a word. Pushing open the gate, Nayudugaru walked to the vehicle and hitched up his lungi as if getting down to work.

“Don’t go into the sun. You can’t fix it anyway. I’ll figure it out myself.”

Raising his hand signalling him to wait, Nayudugaru put his other hand under the scooter and checked. He straightened a tube and got up, then looked at his son and laughed.

“Overflow. Didn’t check, eh?”

With a look of surprise Krishna came up to him.

“I forgot in my hurry.”

“Why hurry, son? If a vehicle stops, you must check everything carefully and not just break your leg kicking the pedal. Leave now.”

The scooter set off, respectfully offering a streak of blue smoke.

“He was in a rush because it’s already late for office, uncle,” said Sarala, speaking for her husband.

“What do scooters know of offices and delays? It’s our job to check before leaving. One must spare half an hour on Sundays to sit by the vehicle and check everything.”

Sarala laughed conveying a hidden message: Your son doesn’t have that kind of patience.

“Give me some coffee. I want to spend some time with Ammatalli before taking bath.”

Sarala nodded and went into the house.

A small terrace, and in front of it, space enough to hang three lungis. Nayudugaru, when he was in service, had had the house built with great care. Potted plants sat on the low terrace wall and two rose plants grew on either side of the gate. Krishna strongly believed that Nayudugaru talked to them everyday while watering them. No matter how many flowers bloomed, the daughter-in-law had been allotted two, the little girl next door and God, one each. The rest belonged to the plants. He had also planted a Turai tree outside the gate that bloomed rubies in the month of Chaitra. At dawn and dusk, Nayudugaru sat outside the gate, gazing intently at the red blossoms. Watching him like that, his daughter-in-law sometime felt as if he himself would start budding red soon. Nayudugaru only wished for more space for plants.

Afternoons at lunch, Nayudugaru reminisced about his early years while Sarala listened patiently. By now, she knew most of her father-in-laws’ childhood and adolescent experiences by heart, with every comma and period intact. It never occurred to him that he had been telling her the same things over and over again for the past ten years.

A small village near Kakinada. A little away from the village, river sliced through thick green blobs of mangroves, and slipped softly into the sea…

Nayudugaru set off gently into the river, swaying in his boat of memories. Large white storks; a fishing cat make an appearance right on the dining table. One day, during low tide at sea, his boat got stuck amidst the mangroves in the river, and he had a tough time scooping out the water and pushing the boat out. Hearing him recount the incident for the five-hundredth-and-forty-second-time Sarala laughed patiently. Actually, she had stopped listening after the sixteenth narration. But Nayudugaru was not talking to her. He only looked at her while he spoke. Images of the sea, the forest and the storks flitted across his eyes like scenes from a vintage movie. When he narrated this incident to his daughter-in-law, he sometimes appeared to her like a stork wearing glasses.

Sarala came into the veranda with coffee. Cigarette in hand, Nayudugaru took the cup from her absent-mindedly. He took a sip, tossed the cigarette away and looked at Ammatalli. Seated in a corner of the veranda, half on the floor and the rest on wooden planks, she looked radiant in a shade of faded wrought-iron with oil and grease. Perching himself on a stool, Nayudugaru picked up a wrench and started unscrewing a small wheel and one by one, the entrails come apart.

Ammatalli was an old machine that had entered the veranda with its hinges, plastic tubes, a big wheel, two small wheels and several screws, Nayudugaru had never bothered to explain what kind of a machine it was, what it was used for or why it should be repaired. (“Iron is a bad omen in fact. But he doesn’t listen.”) He had given her the name himself – Ammatalli, meaning Mother Goddess. Not unlike a village priest, he served her dutifully with love and patience, soaking small nuts and washers in oil and screwing them back again.

The wheel came off. Keeping the wrench aside, still sipping his coffee, he examined the wheel. Not even a hairline crack. Threads were fine; he had greased them only yesterday. Walking over to the other side of the machine, he checked whether electricity was flowing smoothly through the system. All good. Pulling out the plug, he secured it back again and returned to his seat and fixed the wheel back carefully. Then, wiping his hand on an old rag, he pressed the switch. Ammatalli cleared her throat, then sputtered and shook heavily before stopping again. Nayudugaru turned it off and sat there staring at it.

In Nayudugaru’s long years of experience, many a stalled machine had had to yield. As soon as a machine felt his touch, its pulse would start beating and it came to life with a cry. Seeing a machine out of order sent a tremor of excitement through Nayudugaru. Mechanics under him twisted and turned and wrestled with the machines, sitting, standing, lying down, trying to fix them. After two days, he himself would don the gloves and pick up a wrench. (“A machine too, is like a human being. We only need to understand it.”) Like a patient taking an injection, the machine would then groan weakly and spring back to life within no time, fit as a fiddle.

“One must examine everything, son. Look, the current is flowing through fine. So, then you need to check what’s wrong inside. You should be able to guess from the sound it makes. Do you hear it now? If the sound is perfect, the machine is perfect. You just need a stable hand, son.”

In Nayudugaru’s house, geysers, lights or taps never went out of order except in case of power failures caused by dipping water levels in the Srisailam dam or due to the Government’s incompetence. When Sarala returned from her bath, Nayudugaru was still with Ammatalli, cleaning and reattaching a plastic pipe he had pulled out. For a minute she stood there looking at him. By this time, his childhood and youth were a little clear to her, but why he had to repair this old broken-down machine so patiently was still beyond her. Sarala had never seen him upset or annoyed while doing so. Once or twice, the machine came to life suddenly, started turning, and stopped the next instant. Nayudugaru simply shook his head and laughed to himself.

Normally, on Sundays, three things happened. When Nayudugaru’s son and daughter-in-law woke up from their afternoon nap at tea-time, they found him either by Ammatalli’s side or busy straightening out the scooter’s innards. Then they went out in the evening. And soon after returning home at night, they quarrelled.

Changing into fresh clothes after a bath, Nayudugaru leafed through the paper. The summer had not yet hit its peak in March, but Hyderabad was gearing up for water shortage. The Chief Minister had revealed a secret plan to quench the city’s thirst, saying he would go as far as the Himalayas to get water, but artificial rain too would be showered meanwhile. Just as the Prime Minister called on his Mexican counterpart, Nayudugaru nodded off with the paper still in his hands. Sarala came out to check on him. Seeing him like that makes her anxious sometimes.

“Uncle! I’ve served lunch.” Nayudugaru woke up immediately.

“We may have to go to Malakpet in the evening.”

“What for?”

“It’s Prasad-garu’s son’s birthday. Your son said, ‘We’ll both go, be ready by the time I come home’.”

“Fine then, go. But don’t take too long.”

“Oh no, we won’t. We’ll just hand over a gift to the child and come back soon.”

“And tell him to drive the scooter carefully.” Sarala laughed.

Father and son did not talk to each other much, but Krishna respected his father. He did not remember his father ever being rude to him, or hitting him as a child. Even the arrival of the daughter-in-law hadn’t driven a wedge between father and son. But the scooter often managed to do that. Nayudugaru took issue with everything, right from how Krishna changed the gears. He disliked raising a dust storm or stopping with a screech. (“One should drive a vehicle without using the brakes.”) In his opinion, his son simply did not know how to calculate distance or speed.

“Nothing’s more stupid than driving a vehicle in this terrible traffic”.

“That’s how traffic in cities is. All I’m saying is, first learn to take care of your scooter properly. It should run smoothly when you drive, and stop effortlessly as soon as your foot touches the brake. Driving should be an enjoyable experience, right? That’s the key. Why worry about traffic if you can easily glide through it!”

“That doesn’t work here, father, only in America.”

“America or Hyderabad, it’s all the same. Isn’t there traffic in America? That’s not what I’m saying at all.”

“You’d know if you drove a scooter now – your hands would end up with blisters. And this horrible thing, it stopped in the middle of the traffic the other day, took me a full five minutes to restart. I was so mad I felt like hurling it into the Hussain Sagar lake… Sarala!… Is there any chilli powder left in the jar or did you just dump the whole thing in the curry?”

“Looks like you’ve been troubling the vehicle. As soon as you touch the handlebar, the scooter should soar like a stork in the sky.” (“Tell father to go to Kakinada and get a stork.”)

After his lunch, Nayudugaru wiped his hand with a towel, popped two pieces of betelnut into his mouth and lit a cigarette.

Sitting down to her lunch, Sarala said, “Have you heard, uncle? Duck eggs are being sold as eggs from hens, these days.”

“What’s new about that, everything’s adulterated,” he said.

As soon as she mentioned duck eggs, ducks and storks came and landed on Nayudugaru’s shoulder. Chewing the betelnut softly, he suddenly asked her, “Have you ever seen tortoise eggs?” A little smile from his heart landed on the shore.

“No, I have never even seen a tortoise.”

“Really? You have never seen a tortoise?”

“I mean, I did, once.”

“There are many types of tortoises. Do you know that some are as big as this dining table?”

“Oh my god!”

“They don’t harm you though. I once went to see turtles lay eggs. A fisherman, Dorayya, told me about it. I badgered him one day and went to the sea at night.”

“Alone!”

“Just the two of us.”

“Soon after midnight, the sea turns black and angry. In the swell, the pleated waves sparkle white. Far away on the shore, Dorayya’s boat is rocking back and forth. The twinkling stars seemed to have been washed clean and fixed in the sky. It was two nights before the full moon and the casuarina grove was as excited and restless as the sea. The waves gleamed green and the surf took on a shine – whenever the white eye of the light-house flashed. Having set out many hours ago in the afternoon, sea turtles, their bellies filled with eggs, came washing over the waves in hordes like a small black boat and landed on the beach until well past midnight. Swaying heavily over the soft wet sand, leaving tracks in their wake, they reached the arid dry sand, dug burrows there and lay eggs in them, easing the burden of their wombs. Every time an egg was laid in the silence, a tapp sound was heard. Stars, waves, the eyes of foxes hiding in the bushes – all glowed in the dark. Calmly, the turtles covered their burrows and slipped back into the sea, as quietly as they had come.”

“The foxes eat them all. The crabs too eat them of course. If any little ones survive, they wade into the sea at night.”

Nayudugaru felt the wet sand touching his feet.

Krishna was home by half-past-four. With the sound of a hailstorm crashing a door open, the scooter rammed into the front gate and came to a stop. The horn blared. Sarala rushed to open the door.

“Hurry up.”

Sitting on a stool at one end of the veranda, Nayudugaru was examining Ammatalli. He picked up a screw that had been soaking in oil. The rust was gone. Fixing it back carefully, next he removed a wire running end-to-end in the machine, sliced off a little piece with the scissors, reconnected the wire and turned on the switch. This time the whole machine shook as if possessed. In two quick strides, he switched it off and stared at the motor fixedly with pursed lips. The motor had been rewound. No fault there. A second later, a burning smell wafted from the machine’s belly. A little smile parted Nayudugaru’s black lips. Pulling his stool closer, he picked up a wrench.

“Father! We are leaving. Take care.”

Nayudugaru got up and accompanied them to the gate. As Krishna dragged the scooter out, his eyes fell on Ammatalli sitting in the veranda. He looked at his father gazing out at the street, hands stained with oil, a black rag in one. Krishna pulled the scooter onto the road and heaved it up on the stand. Nayudugaru locked the gate, came back and dipped his hand into Ammatalli’s belly. Feeling his way around gently, he pulled out a small wire. Meanwhile, Krishna’s face was drenched in sweat. It took four kicks to bring the vehicle to life. His chappal nearly snapped.

Yanking the scooter forward angrily, he yelled, “What are you still staring at? Are you coming or not?”

“It’s barely started!” said Sarala, feeling slighted. As she climbed on behind him, the Chetak lunged forward like a horse making her grab his shoulder firmly.

“You never get ready on time.”

She didn’t say anything. If she replied, he would nag her all the way to Malakpet and back.

Nayudugaru sat with Ammatalli for an hour after they left. He understood the machine fully, but something, some little detail was still evading him. He couldn’t figure out if the fault lay with him or the machine. The more adamant it became, the more his patience increased. It felt to him like a sulking friend. He watched television for a while, then brought out a pencil, a big sheet of paper and a scale and spread them out on the dining table. First came two rectangles, then lines and circles, and slowly the machine manifested over the entire paper. The insides he drew separately at the bottom of the paper. Increasing and decreasing the dimensions, drawing and erasing the figures, Nayudugaru kept searching for the key to bring it back to life.

The chiming clock on the wall dragged him back into this world. Eight o’clock. Removing his glasses, he wiped his face and went out into the veranda and lit a cigarette. His son and daughter-in-law must be on their way back already – we won’t be long, they had said.

Standing there, cigarette in hand, Nayudugaru could see in his mind’s eye, his son, hastily, impatiently, penetrating the lotus-like Padmavyuha battle formation of cars, buses, scooters and cycles. Eyes narrowed and nostrils flaring, he drove on, punishing the vehicle relentlessly, his hands torturing the gears. Nayudugaru didn’t see any correlation between him, the road and other vehicles. The scooter looks like a piece of iron stuck to his son’s body and he kept trying to get rid of it as soon as possible. Nayudugaru had never understood whether it was his son who rode the scooter or was it the scooter that rode him.

Even after half an hour there was no sign of them. We must definitely apply for a telephone connection this time around. Going back into the house, he sat at the table closely examining every inch of his drawing again.

Around nine, he heard the scooter stop at the gate. The gate opened with a boom. Sarala went in, her head bent. Krishna crashed into a chair.

“Why so late?”

Peeling the shirt off his body, Krishna muttered, irritated, “They wouldn’t let us leave, and this lady wouldn’t let go of them. Useless gossip. And as usual on the way the bloody vehicle had to stop twice. I thought the tyre got punctured, the blighted thing.”

As he went in to change, Nayudugaru rolled up the paper and put it in the almirah. Instantly, voices of the husband and wife could be heard from their room, quarrelling in low tones. Nothing new. Nayudugaru knew his son’s anger was not directed at his wife. No doubt. Taking out the paper from the almirah again, he stood looking at Ammatalli. For some reason, he suddenly remembered the day he had brought Ammatalli home. Nayudugaru had been to Jagannatham’s house. After a chat and two cigarettes, he got up to leave. Coming down the stairs with him, Jagannatham suddenly said,

“Nayudu! I forgot. Come, I have to show you something,” and took him to a side of the house. Against the wall stood an old lifeless machine.

“Old British model.”

“Where did you get it from!”

“It’s a long story, anyway, mind taking a look at it once? I think it’s not even worth a piece of sugar candy.”

Nayudugaru approached the machine and examined it carefully with a keen eye. As he continued to look at it for a while, his hands and fingers started dancing animatedly.

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Ah! I think I’ll sell it off for a paise or two.”

Nayudugaru thought for a second and said, “Don’t. Send it to my house. It seems to be good, working on it will keep me occupied too.”

Without a paise or two, one afternoon two days later Ammatalli was ushered into Nayudugaru’s veranda. He pulled out the electric cord, fixed it to a switchboard and set it up.

“What is this, uncle?” His daughter-in-law was curious.

“A machine, dear. Has to be repaired.”

She did not quite understand. It did not look as if it could be repaired. Nayudugaru was rubbing his hands excitedly.

“You think it’ll work?”

“I don’t know. Let’s hope it will.”

After a cup of tea, Nayudugaru sat down with the machine. He cleaned the whole thing with a rag, applied grease at various places and pulled out all the wires and tubes. Then detaching all the inside parts, he took them apart patiently and started examining them.

Krishna, as soon as he came home from office in the evening, noticed the machine’s carcass in the veranda. Dragging the scooter onto its stand, he came closer. Nayudugaru did not notice his son’s arrival.

“What is this?”

Startled, Nayudugaru raised his head and looked at him.

“Jagannatham sent it. I’m examining it. It seems all right.”

“You want to repair it?”

“Of course. It feels good to work on it.”

“What for? It is not even worth a paisa. Why repair it?”

“It’s not about money, son. I want to see what the problem really is. It will take time though.”

“You are straining yourself for nothing, what use is it anyway?”

“It’s good to keep it in working condition. I want to make it run smoothly, perfectly.”

“You are just wasting time on silly things.”

The door opened behind him. Sarala came out alone. Serving dinner, she said, “We got late, come and eat. He has a headache he said.”

Sarala’s face looked wilted to Nayudugaru. He got up after eating two chapatis, went out and lit a cigarette. Sarala woke up around ten thirty. Krishna was sleeping, turned to the other side. Did her father-in-law lock the main door? She opened the bedroom door. The light was still on in the living room. A big paper was spread open on the table. Scale in hand, lips tightly sealed, Nayudugaru was looking at Ammatalli’s drawing. Mechanically he extended his hand and lit a cigarette.

 (Does the story remind you of the book?)