1. From out of the blue clouds your song reached my ears
A heap of broken images
When he was ten, Bharati ,his teacher , had incurred the wrath of his grandmother's sister when the
latter had married an upper caste boy. He hid his embarrassment when the old lady pulled the teacher
up openly .He himself had a crush on her and hated her being the target of the fury of his own
grandmother's sister. The teacher loved him due to his deliciously perverse intelligence or at least that
was what he thought .There was this dark inscrutable look on his face which would certainly have
attracted her to him. Kameswari , the dimpled beauty of the class, appeared to feel that Bharati
preferred his scintillating intellect to her own famed arithmetical prowess. Or at least that was what he
thought. The sadness in her face appealed to him very much and it was his innate desire to cup her
tragic face in his little hands and console her. He was very sure that she would not live long and it was
only a matter of a few years that she would leave this world and go away to the dark inky infinitude of
the moonless night.
Like Bharati , Saraswati came floating into his life , at the age of twenty,like a bird's feather which had
fallen from the blue sky slowly riding the layers of air. She was a swan of incredible grace and when
she entered the room you almost heard the flutter of her white fluffy wings .Her swan-brain collected
no wisdom .Back home ,in Madanapalli , she loved a man dearly .Her pakodas were tasteful and her
love overwhelming. Once she was chased by a full-grown bull all the way through the streets of
Madanapalli .Her petite frame betrayed a fierce passion for the man she had loved .He felt betrayed
.How could she not love him? The double-think in him of course felt happy that it was not him .Years
later a portly he would reflect on this with middle-aged satisfaction as he exchanged gossip with the
matronly Saraswati in her Rajampet house.
When he was seven ,Tayi , a distant cousin , expected him to teach her a song or two which she could
sing before the prospective groom. Tayi was plump like the Sompeta pumpkin ; it was necessary for her
to impress the groom with her musical prowess. Impress she did with the film song :
From out of the blue clouds
and the waves of the breeze
your song reached my ears
His throat choked with emotion when Tayi, his disciple ,sang this song, in abheri raag ,before the
groom in full-throated splendor. Years later Tayi ,married and comfortable, decided to call it quits and
one fine morning he heard that the rolly-polly Tayi no longer needed to impress anybody and did not
need his tutoring services any more. Her blithe spirit haunted him for years, however.
Tayee's grandmother was a tough old lady with a shaved widow's head .Her toothless monologues
talked of the glories of her youthful times when she could cook food for one hundred people at a
stretch. She boasted that the white man , who stayed in the bungalow outside the town, relished her
sweet pancake, so much that he, the blue-blooded white man,would beg of her for an extra helping of

2. her delicacy each time. The white man liked her very much and would insist on her coming to his
bungalow frequently. Of course she would not touch a pariah and would only drop the prized pancake
into his outstretched hands from a height of two or three feet .
That was what they did in our village .During the God Sriram's birthday celebrations when the
patriarchs hosted a feast for the entire village mustachioed farmers squatted on the bare floor with the
stitched lunch-leaves before them .The elders would not bend to serve food but would only drop
mounds of rice with lentils and vegetables from a safe distance .The villagers wouldn't mind it either.
During the celebrations the shehnai and the mridangam played the Tyagaraya kritis and the God
Srirama wedded Sita in all His refulgence .
His mother's uncle, an old gentleman with close -cropped hair conducted the celebrations with
extravagance , slowly squandering away the family lands. He had no known sources of income apart
from what he could scrounge from ignorant villagers depending upon his semi-literate
accomplishments .Money would come from somewhere but the show had to go on.
He was born in this very house .In the dimly-lit room where a Castor oil-lamp flickered several child-
births had taken place unmidwifed and the shrieks of the laboring mothers were followed by the smells
of the placenta and curdled mother's milk. At night he heard the tales of the woman who had turned
into a ghost in this very room. This woman, who was half-ghost and half-human, was lying on the cot
awaiting her pains when suddenly she projected her tongue, lizard-like,three feet away to extinguish the
oil-lamp in the presence of a horrified female relative. Then there was a huge boulder hewn in the
shape of a pestle which had been lying for generations twenty feet away .This stone overnight shifted
its position to a place just behind the kitchen. These ghostly actions mystified him who was besieged
with crowds of skeptical thoughts mixed with terrifying fears.
The babies cried out lying on the midwife's knees waiting to be oiled and bathed. The frankincense
filled the room with sweet fragrance. The woman warmed her hands on live coals and patted the baby's
tummy rhythmically to ward off trouble in the digestive system of the baby. The babies are branded
with hot irons on the tummy in the first month to protect them against liver problems.
In the village the mad man ,Pettadu hurled stones at small mischievous boys. Once , as he turned near
the elementary school he saw the mad man,full of gibberish and fury. He stood petrified. He had a
swirling fear under his navel which quickly spread in his bloodstream .The mad man's vacuous eyes
flashed fire as though he blamed him for the evils of the world. It was a cunning move on his part that
saved him from the mad man's fury. At the washerman's pond ,he found half-burnt human bones and
hair. He was sure that at the dead of the night spirits freely roamed the area .Broken pieces of clay pots
were the remnants of the tantric ritual some villager had performed the previous night. One of the
villagers was credited with the powers of chillangi , the art of invoking a lowly spirit with a view to
bringing about the destruction of an enemy. In order to acquire the powers of chillangi one had to eat
human excrescence for three consecutive nights and perform the ritual, entirely naked, in honour of the
spirit ,at the dead of the night at the cremation ground.
When he was nine ,he stood on the fringe of the Baruva sea and he thought he had seen the edge of the
earth , where the sea and the sky meet .It was so dangerous to stand on the edge .Little children would
fall off. The earth appeared to be the shape of a disc although the geography taught in the Sompeta
school said it was spherical .If one went on drilling into the earth at the spot where one stood, would
one reach America ? If one went into the deep seas and not along the coast endlessly ,would one reach

3. the shore on the other side ? One of his worst fears was if everything on the earth including us clung to
it due to gravitation and the earth was revolving continuously wouldn't we fall off the earth sometime
or other into deep outer space like a lizard on the roof falling to the ground ? As huge waves rose and
broke on the Baruva beach he thought God in whose dream he existed stood at the other shore of the
ocean and rolled the waves in continuous sweeping motions of His hands .At night he slept in a
relatives house on the Baruva beach he heard the roar of the sea all night long lying under the inky
moonless night ,afraid that the sea would , at the dead of the night , grab him and swallow him into its
cavernous stomach.
The little insect which made conical holes into the ground fascinated him These insects would become
elephants in two or three months. He put them in a rubber-corked medicine bottle and waited for them
to transform into full-grown elephants .During the arudra karti it rained the whole night .In the
morning pretty red-velvety insects burst out of the wet ground and crawled under the wet grass. Soon
they were all over the place filling the green carpet of fresh grass with bright red motifs. Once a swarm
of locusts descended on the plains of Sompeta. Millions of these creatures ate every single leaf and
blade on the way .They had come all the way from the plains of Siberia crossing the Himalayas. He
used a large green stick to beat clusters of them above the ground and bring them down to the ground
writhing. He imagined the lands that lay beyond the hills near Sompeta .He was sure another world
,like the one he read about in the story of Rip van Vinkle , existed on the other side of the hills. He
heard that strange animals like dummaragundu lived on the hills .This animal was so dangerous that it
just sniffed your life out of you.
There were fierce tigers in the jungle nearby which sometimes waylaid the buses on the highway .Once
the neighborhood compounder who had a gun with which he killed pigeons went into the jungle to kill
the man-eater tiger which strayed into the villages. He headed a procession of the killed tiger through
the streets of Sompeta. During sugarcane season big black bears descended from the hills .Once when
his cousin Samba was cycling his way returning froma nearby town to his home a full-grown bear
confronted him on the highway. There were two-headed snakes in the Sompeta bushes .He wondered
with which head these snakes thought .Of course snakes do not think .He had an uncanny sense of the
presence of a snake . Once he was lying on a string cot alone in the house with a vague snake-fear
spreading its hood in his child-mind . There it was a full-grown krait clinging to the wooden beam of
the tiled roof. He sweated under his skin .Another time a cobra slithered on the broken rim of the well
deceptively looking like the rope of the water-pail. As acts of bravery he caught the tails of the water-
snakes and twirled them in the air expertly .Of course only water-snakes.
He dreamed of coils of snakes .Fearful Freudian snakes which coiled around you constricting your
throat and slowly draining away the oxygen-supply to your tissues. On the day of the snake festival he
went to the snake-pit along with the women and poured milk into the pit .The children saved some
crackers during the festival of lights for the festival . If you accidentally killed a cobra its spouse would
avenge herself on you and pursue you wherever you ran to. He saw several green snakes on the low
branches of the hibiscus tree .They coiled around the stem indistinguishable from the tree. These
snakes can rise in the air. They bite you on the back of the head and their poison is so deadly that
within minutes the victim froths at his mouth and dies. The mongoose is no friend of the snake .He is a
friend to humans. In the Panchatantra story he saved the baby from a snake.
End of Chapter 2