OUR VILLAGE-I don't think you have ever heard about it-Kanthapura is its name, and it is in the province of Kara.
High on the Ghats is it, high up the steep mountains that face the cool Arabian seas, up the Malabar coast is it, up Mangalore and Puttur and many a centre of cardamom and coffee, rice and sugarcane. Roads, narrow, dusty, rut-covered roads, wind through the forests of teak and of jack, of sandal and of sal, and hanging over bellowing gorges and leaping over ele- phant-haunted valleys, they turn now to the left and now to the right and bring you through the Alambè and Champa and Mena and Kola passes into the great granaries of trade. There, on the blue waters, they say, our carted cardamoms and coffee get into the ships the Red-men bring, and, so they say, they go across the seven oceans into the countries where our rulers live.
Cart after cart groans through the roads of Kantha- pura, and on many a night, before the eyes are shut, the last lights we see are those of the train of carts, and the last voice we hear is that of the cart-man who sings through the hollows of the night. The carts pass through the Main Street and through the Potter's Lane, and then they turn by Chennayya's Pond, and up they go, up the passes into the morning that will rise over the sea. Sometimes when Rama Chetty or Subba Chetty have merchandise, the carts stop and there are greetings, and in every house we can hear Subba Chetty's 350-rupee bulls ringing their bells as they get under the yoke. Ho,' says Subba Chetty, 'hé-ho,' and the bulls shiver and start. The slow-moving carts begin to grind and to rumble, and then the long harsh monotony of the carts' axles through the darkness. And once they are on the other side of the Tippur Hill the noise suddenly dies into the night and the soft hiss of the Himavathy rises into the air. Sometimes people say to themselves, the Goddess of the River plays through the night with the Goddess of the Hill. Kenchamma is the mother of Himavathy. May the goddess bless us! Kenchamma is our goddess. Great and bounteous is she. She killed a demon ages, ages ago, a demon that had come to ask our young sons as food and our young women as wives. Kenchaunma came from the Hea- vens-it was the sage Tripura who had made penances to bring her down-and she waged such a battle and she fought so many a night that the blood soaked and soaked into the earth, and that is why the Kenchamma Hill is all red. If not, tell me, sister, why should it be red only from the Tippur stream upwards, for a foot down on the other side of the stream you have mud, black and brown, but never red. Tell me, how could this happen, if it were not for Kenchamma and her battle? Thank heaven, not only did she slay the demon, but she even settled down among us, and this much I shall say, never has she failed us in our grief. If rains come not, you fall at her feet and say 'Ken- chamma, goddess, you are not kind to us. Our fields are full of younglings and you have given us no water. Tell us, Kenchamma, why do you seek to make our stomachs burn?' And Kenchamma, through the darkness of the sanctum, opens her eyes wide-oh! if only you could see her eyelids quicken and shiver!- and she smiles on you a smile such as you have never before beheld. You know what that means. That every night, when the doors are closed and the lights are put out, pat-pat-pat, the rain patters on the tiles, and many a peasant is heard to go into the fields, squelching through the gutter and mire. She has never failed us, I assure you, our Kenchamma.
Then there is the smallpox, and we vow that we shall walk the holy fire on the annual fair, and child after child gets better and better-and, but for that widow of a Satamma's child, and the drunkard Dhirappa's brother's son, tell me, who ever has been taken away by smallpox? Then there was cholera. We gave a sari and a gold trinket to the goddess, and the goddess never touched those that are to live--as for the old ones, they would have died one way or the other anyway. Of course you will tell me that young Sankamma, Barber Channav's wife, died of it. But then it was not for nothing her child was born ten months and four days after he was dead. Ten months and four days, I tell you! Such whores always die untimely. Ramappa and Sub-banna, you see, they got it in town and our goddess could do nothing. She is the Goddess of Kanthapura, not of Talassana. They ought to have stayed in Talassana and gone to Goddess Talassanamma to offer their prayers 'O Kenchamma! Protect us always like this through famine and disease, death and despair. O most high and bounteous! We shall offer you our first rice and our first fruit, and we shall offer you saris and bodicecloth for every birth and marriage, we shall wake thinking of you, sleep prostrating before you, Ken- chamma, and through the harvest night shall we dance before you, the fire in the middle and the horns about us, we shall sing and sing and sing, clap our hands and sing:
Kenchamma, Kenchamma, Goddess benign and bounteous, Mother of earth, blood of life, Harvest-queen, rain-crowned, Kenchamma, Kenchamma, Goddess benign and bounteous.
And when the night is over, and the sun rises over the Bebbur Mound, people will come from Santur and Kuppur, people will come from the Santur Coffee Estate and the Kuppur Cardamom Estate, from coco- nut gardens and sugarcane fields, and they will bring flowers and fruit and rice and dal and sugar-candy and perfumed sweetmeats, and we shall offer you all, dancing and singing-the bells will ring, the trumpets tear through the groves, and as the camphor rises before you, we shall close our eyes and hymn your praise. Kenchamma, Great Goddess, protect us! O Benign One!'
Our village had four and twenty houses. Not all were big like Postmaster Suryanarayana's double- storied house by the Temple Corner. But some were really not bad to look at. Our Patwari Nanjundia had a veranda with two rooms built on to the old house. He had even put glass panes to the windows, which even Postmaster Suryanarayana could not boast of.
Then there were the Kannayya-House people, who had a high veranda, and though the house was I know not how many generations old, it was still as fresh and new as though it had been built only yesterday. No wonder that Waterfall Venkamma roared day and night against Rangamma.
'Why should a widow, and a childless widow too, have a big house like that? And it is not her father that built it,' said she. 'It's my husband's ancestors that built it. I've two sons and five daughters, and that shaven widow hadn't even the luck of having a bandi- coot to call her own. And you have only to look at her gold belt and her dharmawar sari. Whore!' And so, night and day did she howl, whenever she met Temple Lakshamma or Bhatta's wife Chinnamma coming back from the river. To tell you the truth, Venkamma's own house was as big and strong as her sister-in-law's. But she said it was not large enough for her family. Besides, she could not bear the idea that it was occupied by Rangamma's father and mother, and when the vacations came Rangamma had all her younger brothers, and the children of the elder one from Bombay -'all those city-bred fashionable idiots,'-to spend the summer. 'Tell me,' said Venkamma one day to Akkamma, bringing forward her falling sari over her shaven head, 'why should our family feed theirs? If her parents are poor, let them set fire to their dhoti and sari and die. Oh, if only I could have had the courage to put lizard-poison into their food! Well that will come too. She would clap her hands and go into her house leaving Front-House Akkamma to hurry up her steps.Akkamma had people come to visit them. You know, Coffee-Planter Ramayya is a cousin of her sister-in-law, and when he is on his way to Karwar he sometimes drops in to see them-and even spends a night there. He left his Ford on the other side of the river, for the ferry did not ply at night, and he came along. Today he is there and people are all busy trying to see him. For midday meal he will have a vermicelli paysama and Patwari Nanjundia and his son-in-law are both invited there. There are others coming too. The Teniple people and the Fig-Tree-House people, and Dorè, the University graduate,' as they call him. He had lost his father when still young and his mother died soon after, and as his two sisters were already married and had gone to their mothers-in-law, he was left all alone with fifteen acres of wet land and twenty acres of dry land. And he said he would go to the city for higher studies' and went to a University. Of course, he never got through the Inter even-but he had city-ways, read city-books, and even called himself a Gandhi-man. Some two years ago, when he had come back from Poona, he had given up his boots and hat and suit and had taken to dhoti and khadi, and it was said he had even given up his city habit of smoking. Well, so much the better. But, to tell you the truth, we never liked him. He had always been such a braggart. He was not like Corner-House Moorthy, who had gone through life like a noble cow, quiet, generous, serene, deferent and brahmanic, a very prince, I tell you. We loved him, of course, as you will see, and if only I had not been a daughterless widow, I should have offered him a granddaughter, if I had one. And I know he would have said: 'Achakka, you are of the Veda Sastra Pravina Krishna Sastri's family, and is it greater for you to ask something of me, or for me to answer "Yea"?" He's the age my Seenu is, and he and Seenu were as, one would say, our Rama and brother Lakshamana. They only needed a Sita to make it complete. In fact, on that day, as everybody knew, Coffee-Planter Ramayya had come to offer his own daughter to Moorthy. But the horoscopes did not agree. And we were all so satisfied.......
