Part 2 of 5 · 12 minThe Boy on the Bund

Chinthalapalem is a kilometre back from the highway, behind the dhaba, down a mud road that the lorries never take. In 2023 it had about two hundred houses, a temple, a canal, and one old man who was there in 1963. His name was Narasimhulu. He was eighty-eight. This is what he told Kiran, and this is what Kiran did with it.

Kiran went on a Thursday, in April, in the afternoon, when the dhaba was empty and Sambaiah was asleep. He did not tell his mother where he was going. He told himself he was going to ask about land. By the time he reached the first houses he had stopped pretending.

Women were drying chillies on the road. A boy was washing a buffalo at the canal. Kiran asked a man at the tea bunk where the old school was, and the man pointed without speaking.

The pathasala was a heap of black stones in a square of weeds. Not fallen stones. Burnt ones. Sixty years of rain had not washed the black off them. Beside the heap there was a round wall of brick, knee high, and on top of it a concrete slab, cracked across the middle, with a stone on each corner to hold it down. Somebody had put a few marigolds on the slab. They were two days old.

He asked a woman passing with a water pot whose school it had been.

She looked at him, and looked at the slab, and said, "You are Veeraiah's boy."

He said he was.

She put the pot down and walked him to a tiled house at the end of the street with a neem in front, called inside, "Tatayya, Veeraiah's boy has come," and left without looking back. Two people who had followed him from the tea bunk stopped at the neem and went no further. Nobody came in with him.

Narasimhulu was sitting on a cot on the verandah with a towel over his shoulder. He was thin and very dark and his eyes were clouded, but when Kiran came up the steps he looked straight at him and said, "Sit."

Kiran sat on the step.

"You want to know about the tree."

"Yes, tatayya."

"Your father came and sat where you are sitting. In 1996. He had the same face." The old man was quiet for a while. "I was twenty-eight. A farm hand. I carried thatch. That is all I was. I did not hold the door. Remember that when you hear the rest."

Now listen to what the old man said.

There was a teacher in Chinthalapalem. Vidwan Nagabhushana Sastry. Born in 1911, taught Sanskrit in the one-room pathasala, and in summer he taught under the peepal behind it. There was no highway then. There was no dhaba. There was the tree, the canal bund beyond it, and the fields.

"He was a great scholar," Narasimhulu said. "People came from Nalgonda to hear him recite. I did not understand one word of it, but I stood and listened like everybody. He knew everything that was in the old books. And he gave it to nobody."

Sastry took students from three families. The karanam's house, the landlord's house, and the temple priest's house. Nobody else was allowed near. Narasimhulu had seen boys from the farm streets creep up behind the tree to listen, and he had seen Sastry get up from his mat and beat them with the stick he used for pointing at letters. Until they ran.

"He said the learning would be spoiled if the wrong ears heard it. He said it like a man says the milk will spoil. He believed it."

There was a washerman's boy called Yellaiah. In 1960 he was nine. He could not go near the tree. So he went to the canal bund, forty paces behind it, and beat the clothes on the stone, which was his work, and listened. Every morning for three years. By the time he was twelve he had the whole of what was taught under the tree in his head. Nobody knew. Not his father. Not Sastry.

"I knew," Narasimhulu said. "I cut grass on that bund. I heard him once, saying something to the water, in the big language. I told him to stop before somebody heard. He laughed at me."

Then the summer of 1963 came, and the temple feast.

The feast was in May. After the pooja, every year, Sastry's students recited for the village, and the village gave them coins and sweets, and Sastry sat on a chair and was given a shawl. That year Sastry stood up and said he would set the first line of a verse, and whichever of his boys completed it would get the shawl.

He said the first line. His three best students stood up, and one began, and stopped. The second began and stopped. The third did not begin. The verse was from somewhere deep in the old books. Sastry had set it to show the village how deep the learning went.

"It was quiet," Narasimhulu said. "You could hear the lamps. And then from the back, from where the washermen stood, a boy's voice said the second line."

Kiran did not move.

"Sastry turned around. The whole temple turned around. The boy was standing by the pillar with his father's hand on his shoulder, and his father's face was grey, and the boy was not looking at anybody. He was looking at the floor, and his lips were moving, and he said the third line. And the fourth. Then Sastry said the first line of another verse, in a different voice, a soft voice, and the boy finished it. And another. Seven verses. I counted. Seven. The boy did not miss one word. Some of them, the priest said later, were verses the three students had never been given."

Nobody gave the boy the shawl. Nobody gave him anything. The village stood there and looked at a washerman's son who had the whole learning in his mouth. Then Sastry sat down in his chair and said, quite gently, "Good. Come to the tree tonight, boy. I will teach you properly."

He repeated it so that Kiran would have it exactly: "I will teach you properly."

The boy went. His father could not stop him, because a washerman does not stop a Brahmin from teaching his son. The boy went to the peepal after dark with a slate under his arm. His father had bought it that evening from the feast stalls. He had never owned one.

In the morning the boy was in the pathasala well.

"The record says he fell," Narasimhulu said. "The karanam wrote it. Fell in the dark, drawing water. A washerman's boy, drawing water from the school well at night." He wiped his mouth with the towel. "The slate was on the mat under the tree. Not at the well. Under the tree. Everybody saw it there. Then it was gone."

Kiran's hands had gone cold the way they had gone cold the night Mastan shouted at the driver. He did not know why that detail did it. The slate on the mat.

"Then July," the old man said.

He told the next part slowly, looking at the floor.

In July the washermen's street went to the pathasala at night. Not only the washermen. The farm hands, the toddy men, Narasimhulu with them. Sastry slept in the school in summer. They did not go in. They piled thatch against the door and the walls. Narasimhulu carried two bundles and put them down and stepped back, and that was all he did, he said, and he said it again.

The door was held shut by three men. Narasimhulu named them without names. "The karanam. The landlord. The priest. His own students' fathers. They held the door. I saw that. I will say that to God."

Somebody lit it.

"I will not tell you what came from inside," the old man said. Then he was quiet, and then he said, "He was reciting. Till the end. Loudly. It was the sound of a man reciting."

They buried him before dawn, where the roof had fallen in and burned through to the ground, which was the side of the pathasala against the peepal's roots. No priest. No shaving, no water, no rice, none of the things that are done. They dug and put him in and covered him and went home.

"We went home and washed. Nobody said his name again. The karanam wrote that the school burned by accident with the teacher asleep inside. That is the record. The record is good for nothing."

He stopped.

The next summer was 1964. In May a toddy tapper called Peddi Raju, who climbed the palms along the canal, slept under the peepal one hot night because he was drunk and it was cool there and he was not from the village, he was from across the canal, and did not care about a burnt school.

"They found him at dawn. In the tree. Hanging by his own towel. Mouth open." Narasimhulu opened his own mouth to show it, and shut it. "Like a man about to say something. He was a strong man, Peddi Raju. There were no marks."

In August a cattle trader who had come for the Tuesday market slept there, and was found the same way. After that nobody slept under the tree. Children were told. Dogs would not go under it after dark; the old man said that as if it were the most important thing.

Then the highway came, in 1972, and in 1979 a man from Kodad built a dhaba on the road with the tree behind it, because it was the only shade. The drivers learned one at a time. A driver in 1981. A cleaner in 1985. "The village told them. Drivers do not listen to villages." In 1996 Kiran's father bought it.

"Your father laughed too," Narasimhulu said. "Like you. He put a cot under the tree the first week. Then his cook was found in the branches. A Muslim boy, from Kodad. Nineteen. Mouth open. Your father came and sat on that step. Then he went back and laid the stones, himself, with his own hands, and whitewashed them. He measured the shade at noon. He put the bulb. He never slept under the tree after that, and he never let anybody else. Twenty-seven years. He did not tell you?"

"No."

"He did not want you to come back here. That is why."

"One more thing," the old man said. "Then go. Peddi Raju. The night it took him. There was a boy awake. The toddy man's own boy, eight years old, sleeping in the bullock cart outside the line of the tree, because his father had told him to stay in the cart. He heard the voice. He told the village in the morning, before anyone had told him anything, before they had even cut his father down. He said a man under the tree cleared his throat and asked his father a question. He said it was not a question. It was a verse. A line. His father did not answer. He said his father laughed and turned over."

"Which verse," Kiran said.

"The one from the feast. The first one. The one the boy on the bund finished." Narasimhulu looked at him with his clouded eyes. "It was the first line. Shuklambaradharam vishnum."

And Kiran, who had done two years of Sanskrit at the high school in Khammam because it was the easy second language and the teacher gave marks, who had not thought of it in ten years, heard his own voice say, before he had decided anything, "Shashivarnam chaturbhujam."

The old man's face changed. Kiran had never seen a face go that colour. The old man took the towel off his shoulder and held it in both hands.

"Get out of my house."

"Tatayya, I only…"

"Get out. Do not say that under my roof. Do not say it anywhere. Go." His hands were shaking so hard the towel shook. "Go back to the road, boy. Sell the dhaba. Go to Hyderabad. Do not go near that tree with that in your mouth."

Kiran went. The people under the neem moved out of his way and did not look at him. The woman with the water pot was at her door. She said, "What did he tell you," and Kiran did not answer, and she said, "Do not come back here," not unkindly, and shut her door.

It was four in the afternoon when he walked back up the mud road. The sun was still high. Remember this: it was full daylight, the bulb was burning because it could not be switched off, and by every rule the old man had just given him, the tree was only a tree.

He came around the back of the dhaba, past the tap, and he walked under the peepal. He did it on purpose. He stood under it. Nothing. Wind in the leaves, the tin roof ticking in the heat, Sambaiah's radio inside. He let out his breath and almost laughed.

Then he looked at the cot.

There were two cots under the tree. Nobody used them; Sambaiah had been meaning to carry them in since the week Kiran kicked the stone. On the nearer one, in the middle of the sagging rope, there was a towel. A dhaba towel, the thin checked kind. It was folded. Not thrown down. Folded in three lengthwise, and then in half, and then in half again, with the corners squared, so that it made a small, neat, tight block.

Kiran's father had folded towels like that. Nobody else did. Padma had laughed at him for it for thirty years. Three times lengthwise, then half, then half, corners squared, and he would tap the block twice with his flat hand when he was done. Kiran had not seen a towel folded that way since February.

He did not touch it. He went inside and asked Sambaiah who had put a towel on the cot.

Sambaiah was cutting onions. He said nobody had been near the cot. He said it without looking up, and then he looked up, and he put the knife down, and he went out to the tree in his bare feet and came back in without the towel, and Kiran did not see what he did with it, and neither of them said anything about it that night.

But that night Kiran lay in the dark inside the dhaba, with the bulb burning outside the window, and the second line of the verse would not leave his mouth. He kept it shut. He said it anyway, behind his teeth, over and over, the way you keep touching a tooth that hurts. Shashivarnam chaturbhujam. And he found, lying there, that he also knew the third line. He had not known that an hour ago.