The Mali

Chapter 3

News about a child staying with the Shastris spread quickly through Thandavar. Everyone heard the same report: a quiet, solitary being whose presence was seen more through the shadows he cast when walking along the windows than in the flesh. The town elders, who had long since dragged an explanation out of Ashok Shastri, had made it known where the boy came from and who his mother was, but each round of gossip that swept through Thandavar was more elaborate than the last. That his mother was the Shastris' sister remained unaltered. However, since Ashok had proved reticent when asked to furnish details regarding the boy's father, the lies that emerged could both curdle milk and keep old Sachet Kulkarni next door laughing silently for days.

"He is coming from a place in Kerala where they like to taste human flesh," said Jeevan's wife to Sarita Akka one day, leaning against the latter's ugly gate as she made perfunctory departure conversation. "They had to teach him to stop biting. He is now only learning the taste of chicken." Sarita Akka shook her head in horror and made to draw away into her home, but not before she noticed a quiet Giorina snaking behind her neighbour on the road. That evening, Giorina reported what she had heard to Ashok. "Let them say. No one has asked us, no one will," came the gruff reply.

Though a trademark of Shastri Mansion, it was precisely this silence on things that mattered that had hampered Minerva's search for a gardener. Not that she hadn't tried. Sitting the previous week with her nephew, saree folds bundled between her legs as she squatted on the floor beside the boy to paint 'wanted' signs, she imagined what sort of gardener would finally respond to their summons. It was a queer thing, gardening, she thought to herself dryly as she leaned back against the bedroom wall to catch the creaking fan's gusts. Full of touching and caressing green things and digging in mud to make more green things turn out from them. She looked at her nephew who painstakingly sat copying her Kannada script onto paper in his own flowing hand, wondering whether he would like the plants that would come to life when this gardener did. But no gardener ever came.

Days melted into weeks. May was turned out for June who hurried into Thandavar and set to work, splashing browns on leaves and melting untended butter slabs with infuriating relish. While Varun sat copying sum after sum onto the leaves of a tattered notebook thrown at him by his uncle and Goro cooked and spat into their food, while Giorina washed and rewashed clothes at the grinding stone behind the servants' quarters and Minerva gusted around the house, the garden decayed on, weeds flowering and reproducing along the cobbles, happy with the vast unclaimed territories they hoped to wipe out.

To Ashok, who passed the town well daily on his way home from Saint Stanislaus School, his sister and nephew's painted appeals on the little mount board for notices felt like a targeted insult. One day, as he trudged along the rough road to Shastri Mansion, the red words seemed to shout more and more desperately to the insouciant town, causing his face to spasm in shame. At that moment, Sarita's daughter darted around Ashok, shouting after Jeevan's dark skinned son. The boy laughed as the girl tried to snatch the large kite in his pale pink palms on their way home. He looked at the boy with distaste, thinking of his uncle, ejected from his post as school administrator a few weeks previous. The man had had a natural finesse with plants; Ashok remembered how he would whisper every day to a particular barren patch of the garden, causing it to grow pink roses only a few weeks after. Gardening was clearly something that most anybody in Thandavar was good at. Yet no one came forward.

To be fair to the Shastris, the forbidding cut of their house was not entirely to blame for the dearth of applicants for the garden's revival. Unbeknownst to brother and sister, it was the plants themselves that deterred those who entered its walls to knock at the mansion. Every time a Jeevan's uncle or an Usha or a Meenakshi strode bravely past the gate, their arms so gently caressing the plants in need of revival, they would never make it to the front porch. As they drew closer and closer to the steps leading to the veranda, the plants whispered an unfinished errand, a stray fear, or a passing hopelessness into the ears of the would-be gardeners. The most resilient of them who somehow managed to lay a foot on the veranda would forget what they had stalked all the way to Shastri Mansion for, and assuming they had come merely to make mock of the derelict state of the house, they would turn on their heels and scuttle back home. Like a miraculous spinster who knew precisely why she had affronted the many suitors she so desperately needed, the plants sent away soul after soul whose touch was what they wanted, but never what they needed.

But when the man reached the main gate for Shastri mansion, winds rippled from the lines of his feet and the tread of his uncovered toes through the decrepit garden. Having narrowly escaped a fire that had tried very hard to consume him, the man had walked kilometres seemingly aimlessly, not knowing where the wind and the soil and the fire were sending him. And the plants, and the trees, and the shrubs, and the half-dead flowers knowing that they had met their maker, announced his arrival to each other with a wind chatter that is known only to those whose spirits reside in the happiest of gardens. Life welcomed him, this being who could sense the love wreathing an old, beloved clay pot or the lost childhood cloying a lonely toy soldier left in the dirt. And death sobbed at the destruction he would wage on this mansion and its advocates, trembling in the wake of his quiet feet.

Led on by the Shastri plants, he reached the mansion, ignoring the yellowing notices for a gardener stuck across its gates and compound walls, walking through the back yard, past the door for the servants' quarters left open by an unwitting Giorina who had disappeared to insult vegetable vendors, into the ugly corridor, through the open kitchen archway, where the scent of cooking beef broth tingled his senses. He was starving, he realized, and he needed food. So he ambled into the kitchen, to come face to face with the backside of a very angry Goro.

At that moment, he noticed the stew, along with the various other accoutrements that Goro dished up for the tiny family every day. And from this mélange, he was battered by a rush of emotions, none of them even vaguely palatable; bitterness spat into the rice kheer set to boil, anger simmering with the paneer left to cook. Around the dwarf, cupboards and cabinets lay wide open, filled with pots, pans and little jars of varying shapes and sizes. The Mali saw him in his mind's eye all through the day since that dawn, peppering the unsavoury food with a little bit of kasthuri methi, some dished out venom.

Rousing him from his reveries came a curious whistling sound, and he recovered his senses sufficiently to see a ladle filled with scalding broth flying at his face. He jumped backward soundlessly just in time for Goro's thick head to make contact with his hip bone. The pair fell backwards onto the kitchen floor as the broth splashed beside them, while Goro tried to grab purchase on the man's clothing. "Filthy beggars, dressing up like wealthy whoresons and creeping into houses, sniffing at soups and staring at cooks, I will teach you to steal, you dirty rat!" The full throated tirade, accentuated with occasional punches, scratches, and bites buoyed itself on its own steam till the man finally opened his mouth, blurting out the first thing that came to his mind.

"I have come for the plants!"

Suddenly, the flow of Goro's speech ceased and his limbs slackened. The voice, that voice, changed things. Floating through the air like a piece of paper in the wind, it carried itself round the room, ringing like the sound of a fingernail tapping against a freshly baked clay pot, causing the dwarf's hand to drop. The pair separated their entangled limbs and each rose, the dwarf staring at this neat, new-shirt-pant man with the voice like a temple bell. "You have come to be Mali?," said the ugly dwarf, squinting being in amazement. When the man did not reply, primarily because he did not know whether coming for the plants meant being Mali. Goro assumed his silence as assent. "Then, come. We will go to Mistress."

Not knowing what else to do, the Mali rushed to catch up with the dwarf, whose heels were already disappearing past the open archway, for his first meeting with Minerva Shastri.