Oros was a dull town. They did not have much in terms of entertainment. Some lonely shops where songs played on off keys on communal radio. People gathered around to listen to the news while paying a paisa for coffee. But that was much later.
He remembered random hallucinations from those early years. Dew covered evergreen trees, warm woolen shawls, everyone puffing smoke and burning wood. Waking up the clouds from June to January. Most of the people he saw worked in the estates picking coffee. Rainbow pierced through the forest horizon. Squeak and squalor of life rushing out of green covers under pattering drizzle. A sheet of gray sky had lonely birds flying across, cawing the cold away. The thorny branches of spindly thin trees spilled white flowers on the trail. Faint scent of crushed flowers, wet barks and petrichor hung on him even after bathing from copper boilers heated from wood.
The local school had 70 students in all grades. His grandfather known as Shyamappa was the principal. Apparently he had dark quivering lips, especially when he was angry. My father got that look when he ran out of school. The school didn't have any grades or metrics though the teachers were very strict. He hated that, he was caned a lot for not sitting still or praying. OH gosh he hated the praying. He never believed in that nonsense, all he had for religion was insults, he berated God verbally in front of believers and others alike. But I saw him praying once. When my infant brother Raj was in the hospital and they said he might not make it. I think he prayed for himself more than anything else. But all of that ended when he took us back to Oros telling my mother to just keep the infant alive.
My brother never did recover from the fever and the town did not even have an emergency clinic. All the stories I have about my father were the random aspects of his life that Malla and my mother told me when we stayed there for 2 weeks.
He loved dogs, he had a couple of pups growing up. His grand father hated them but he didn't get rid of them. He knew how much they consoled my father. He was the only kid at the school without both parents around. The house was a constant mess of hair, mud and piss for a couple of years. Till he crossed the line, and was punished.
We come from a line of zamindars who traveled south in the 18th century. They bought the land of locals one by one. Eventually settling on Nagabetta. Additional rooms, floors, linking water and later even electric lines was done by the workers whose grandfathers had worked the same soil. The most learned man of the town was Shyamappa, who had studied in Bombay Elphinstone college. He often spoke about meeting Tilak and other revolutionaries during his days there. My father was not taken out for most festivals, his grandpa left him home and was back before the stars could twinkle.
Lot of initial housing came in the 20s. People started turning their huts into mud houses in the Kunte village. Roads and Factories were set up, outsiders with harsh tongues and hard food came over to work on them. Railway lines were extended over the ghats once the British saw the profit from the estates. My father heard no whisper of his parents and when asked he would be ignored harshly. But he did find 2 photos of his mother in random books in the library looked like a sketch of human, almost unnatural and alien.
Malla was one of the few who were allowed inside the house, he cleaned up while his wife and children finished the chores. Malla had found the pups and brought them to the estate during his early morning constitutional when my father was about 5. Brown fur with black and white patches, they whined and cried all day long. Their mother had died, crushed under some timber loosely arranged. Malla brought over some milk everyday to feed them in the early days.
Malla often took him on the cycle. It was old and squeaked, he made those squeaking sounds even into adulthood as a joke. While on one those is when he saw that house and met the British man, Simon Elymus. The one who took all his pups away.
Mr.Elymus had a smaller estate. But he had no family or kin who stayed with him in that red house. Mr.Elymus attended none of the local festivities. But he would put a chair out on his lawn and see all the people gathering and celebrating. His house oversaw the nearby temple. The villagers said he had come in the 20s from Bombay and bought the estate from people around.
Shyamappa had vitiligo. By the time he saw the country's independence he had patches all over. My father told me about the kids mocking him, they hinted about the British man being his father and his obsessive grandpa painted him brown. His grandfather died in '48, at the age of 82, he was 15. He claimed proudly to me how he hadn't shed a tear while doing the last rites. He had finally heard what happened to his mother. He smiled when he spoke about lighting the pyre.
Mr.Elymus also had passed away 7 years earlier. For some reason he had left the house in care of Shymappa. The land was donated to the local temple. Not being able to walk much my father was forced to to visit and maintain it. He felt ashamed because he remembered how he had directed the pups to go attack Mr.Elymus when he was walking up the slope to his house. He fell over and rolled nearly to his death. The villagers rushed him to Shyamappa's house where he was put in the backseat of an imported Morris car. Shyamappa drove it himself at the age of 70 down bumpy and muddy roads to the city hospital about 15 kms away. 5 hours later he returned and gave all the puppies to Mr.Elymus to decide what he wanted to do with the perpetrators, he pushed and kicked my father at the gate too, calling him names he used harshly when angry at his estate workers. It attracted all of them, they were staring at him wearing torn and soiled lungis. He wanted to scream, Grandfather had told him we were better than them, that we shouldn't fall in front of them, and if we had no choice, we should choose death over it. He was humiliated by people who didn't know the language he made a living with few years later.
Mr.Elymus was tired of the scene taking place in front of his gate just accepted the pups and shooed them all away. He was caned at home, the cane once struck his ring finger and he screeched in pain into a hollow red-oxide veranda. He still couldn't bend that finger backward on his right hand. After the sun set the caning stopped. He cried into emptiness staring at the footwear and the thin film of dust on the ground. He cried so much he went to sleep, Malla woke him up the next day in bed. He told him about his mother, they went to the closed well in the corner of the estate, he spoke about how she had fallen to her death, she was Grandpa's favorite and she had gone against him to marry a grandson of a fisherman, he had insulted and berated her after my father was born. She had a fight with my father who, Malla suspected, humiliated ran away, leaving her with the a month old him. She had no sleep and babies cry a lot. She fought constantly shut inside Shyamappa's mansion and never saw the sun again. Soon shapes shifted in her eyes, people lost all value, life lost all meaning, she laughed and cried at odd hours, edging herself to madness. She was eventually completely empty, strolled the estate at night. When she walked into the well, Malla said she didn't even look down, she had stepped in before he could pull her from behind, that there were no screams other than his own.
Malla told my father that he had to learn from her mistakes and never humiliate his boss again. That there were rules to this world he had learn quickly. He lived from that day on in rage. A rage that drove him to be someone who would be brave and accepting. A rage that led him to my mother eventually in Bengaluru. A rage to fight against the unfair whippings of fate that made him run back to Oros when Raju was sick. A rage to correct and not fall, we were something completely outside his past. So he went back ignoring his own vow to never return, because the Mirror had the answer, he believed he could cure the infant Raju's fever.