THE COPPER SCROLL

(An old botched-up attempt in a short-story competition!)

“He would love it when he will be a grownup”. Arun could not have felt any better when he affectionately glossed over the framed black and white photograph of his toddler son. The smiling baby was finally chosen from a huge collection of photos for the life-size print.
Never a day passes without capturing those tender moments of Akash since his arrival in the family a year ago. The ever growing collection of pictures and video clips, which he keeps watching quite often, reassures him with the feeling that he is fulfilling his fatherly duty with diligence.
Arun could feel that mystifying bond with the baby when he was still in anticipation of his fatherhood. Now he realizes how unreasonably unsympathetic was he when he would not take kindly to parents whose kids cried and disturbed people in buses, trains, cinema halls... He always wondered why people beget children if such was the kind of trouble.
It was a bit of a surprise when Dr Suma, staring at him and Ranjitha with her eyes peeping above her golden-rimmed reading glasses crouched on the edge of her unusually long nose said while inserting the scan report in an envelope with professional deftness, “I strongly recommend you to continue with the pregnancy. Otherwise you might regret later. I have seen many such cases, especially working professionals who tend to postpone”. Probably, it was the countenance of the young couple which did not betray any traces of enthusiasm about having a baby that prompted the doctor to offer an advice instead of congratulating the prospective parents.
Everything changed the moment the truth was out. Arun and Ranjitha already felt like parents. Those nine months were a long wait. It was then that the cries and calls of kids started sounding sweet and their mischief enlivening. The thud of the baby punching the mother’s belly from inside was music.
During the course of introspection an expectant father would normally indulge in, Arun’s pattern-matching sense deciphered that those latent delicate parental feelings, which were profusely aroused in him now, were an inheritance from his father.
Thirty years ago, Sreenivas Rao was like what Arun is today. Extremely warm and comforting for his son, just like the way he took organic care of plants and trees in his farm. He would take Arun wherever he went- areca farm, paddy field, nearby town..., and held no grudge even if the toddler wreaked havocs. Nor did he behave like a hard taskmaster when his schooling began at the nearby government school in Kadu. It was no different with Amrutha who was born three years younger. He loved to witness all early moments of his children.
While Arun has somewhat hazy memory of his early childhood escapades with monsoon rain, streams and brooks in his quintessential malnad village, he has not forgotten his informed conversations with his father, as such dialogues have continued even to this day, even after he completed his engineering and migrated to Bangalore to work in software industry.
Arun is amazed by the enormity of his father’s understanding of ecology. It is a colossus. He precisely knows what happens to flora and fauna if Swathi rain pounds heavily but the following Vishaka rain disappears. The very permutation and combination of the types of rain and all possible scenarios make up for a huge volume of information. And this is only a slice of knowledge which Sreenivas holds in his elephant’s memory. Arun always thought the wealth of organic knowledge inherited from generations should be documented.
One thing cannot be documented and can only feebly be remembered- his childhood, which Arun considers too precious not to have recorded. For, his younger days in Kadu mean a lot to him. It was profound and incomprehensible. He often felt his childhood was richer than that of his urban counterparts including his wife. He first sensed it when he joined college in the nearest city Shimoga. In Bangalore, far removed from parents and the woods, he tries to latch on to something which could make him feel at home by reviving his pastoral memories, but fails.
Barring a lone photograph taken at the age of three when his long hairs were still uncut and he looked like a girl, there are no other visual records exist of his childhood. Sreenivas Rao never worried about having his children adequately photographed and archived. He did not think it was necessary.
It did not happen that way with Ranjitha who works in the same company where Arun is employed. Daughter of a chartered accountant, she possesses a great collection of photographs, most of them black and white, taken from the day when she was a month old baby. She was also photographed with her grand parents who are no more. It is obvious to Arun that she prides herself in showcasing her frames from the past.
Now, Akash stands before him as a reincarnation of himself. For, it is said that Akash bears complete similarity with his father when the latter was of the same age. Dark wide eyes, pointed nose, salient cheek bone, longer fingers.., all resembling boy Arun. According to Sreenivas Rao, the third photograph in the album in which Akash is seen sitting on an old bamboo chair, most resembles Arun. This is of the smiling Akash, now in life size and without colours. Arun has planned it as the main attraction for his son’s birthday which is just a week away.
Ranjitha is making the final list of guests and busy making calls. Her mother Arundhati has also come to assist the couple. The house in the posh Koramangala locality is drowned in refreshing odour of Asian Paints, and sundry decorative items are lying everywhere.
“It is already Sunday. All pending works should be completed by evening”, thought Arun while lazily stretching out on a brown leather sofa, after slanting the photo frame against the wall.
The bell rang. Arun got up lazily and opened the door.
An aged man of good height with a red turban concealing much part of the prominent but wrinkled forehead; tanned skin disguised by unkempt grey beard, and moustaches pointing a little skyward; a full-sleeved shirt of dull white colour ill fitting the dark stout body, the lower part of which is attired in soiled dhoti of similar colour with its loose ends flapping in the whiff of air; tired feet stuck in travel-soiled leather sandals dotted with visibly worn-out hand stitches; long pieces of thick cloth in the shape of a sac stuffed with his belongings hanging heavily from either side of his shoulders. Completely out of place with all the rest is the blue cap of a Reynolds pen clipped to his shirt pocket from inside.
Wafts of hairs popping out of his large sagging earlobes appear like gilded mesh in the backdrop of bright morning rays. But those eyes in deep sockets are intensely serious and frighteningly penetrative, radiating youthful exuberance which overwhelm even the most conscious beholders with momentary forgetfulness of the man’s senility. A faint smile lingering on his lips reddened by regular pan chewing fails to belittle the solemn sobriety on his face.
Arun is struck by a strange feeling of duality; neither the man is familiar enough to start a conversation, nor a complete stranger to turn himself away in haste. That turban, the artistic curve of moustaches and the eyes seem to be of some acquaintance but not the grey hair, wrinkled skin and the drooping posture. And the very metro ambience which is in stark contrast to his earthly figure appears to alienate the old man further, pushing his incompatible personality to a realm of its own.
He stood clueless while looking at the man for sometime and before he could say anything, the man asked: “Is this the house of Aruna?”
“Yes, I am Arun”
A spontaneously warm expression changed the serious countenance of the old man.
“Oh son, you have changed so much. I am seeing you after so many years. Don’t you remember me? I am Siddappa, Helavara Siddappa, who was telling you stories when you were a kid”
Arun required no further introduction, but shell-shocked to a degree of disbelief and delighted to the hilt. It took a moment to come out of the bewilderment.
“Siddappa.., you are here!?”
He never expected that he would meet this man, who enthralled him in his childhood with stories of his grandfather, after a gap of twenty years, that too in Bangalore!
Putting hands around his burdened shoulders, Arun affectionately asked him to come inside the house. Leaving his footwear near the door and unloading his baggage, the man said: “Your father told me that you have a baby boy. That is why I am here”.
Even as Siddappa prepared to enter the house, images of Kadu and its life flashed before the eyes of Arun at a great shutter speed.
His first encounter with Siddappa which Arun scarcely remembers was when he was a three-year-old kid. The man was in his prime and his costume and the compelling talk were enchanting. He never understood his conversation with the father and mother. But it was understandable that his parents held Siddappa in great respect and listened to his words which he seemed to pluck from the pages of a large worn-out book kept open on a foldable wooden cross before him.
The man started engaging the boy with his art of story telling in subsequent years of his annual visit. Amrutha joined the company later. It was the story of their grandfather who built the existing ancestral house in Kadu. What made the story hilarious was the friendship between Ganapathi Rao and Kanneshwara Rama, the dreaded dacoit of yesteryears who was finally shot by the police. He was so notorious that films were made on him. It was a public knowledge in the village that the brigand often visited Ganapathi Rao secretively during night. But nobody made an issue of it for the fear of incurring wrath of the bandit as well as the Ganapathi Rao, a rich landlord and an astute politician who was into freedom struggle.
The brother-sister duo was held captive by Siddappa’s style of narrating the events and characters. His own association with the grandfather made it sound more real.
Before he could recoil himself from memory, the old man sat on the floor in the same fashion he used to do in Kadu house, with his belongings lying by his side. He got up with difficulty and sat on the sofa after much insistence. But his discomfort was palpable from his stiff upper body as he seemed half hidden in the extra-thick cushion. The perplexed faces of Ranjitha and her mother made him more uncomfortable.
The women could not make any sense of the happenings before their eyes. They were nonplussed and stood motionless as if waiting to be answered. Sensing their inquisitiveness, Arun made a brief introduction- “I know him since my childhood”.
When they still seemed clueless, he hurriedly quipped- “he knew my grandfather”, as though he did not have patience to offer any further explanation.
Siddappa asked for a glass of water and then the baby. Water spilled over his dhoti when he held the glass in his trembling hands even as he kept talking about his recent visit to Kadu and how difficult it was to trace the house in Bangalore.
When Arun came to the room, Akash was still in the bed and a little feverish. He was exhausted by his birthday shopping spree the previous day and the prolonged stay at the Forum Mall.
Arun held his son protectively in both the hands and went near Siddappa, much to the chagrin of his wife and mother-in-law. The same trembling fingers came down and gently caressed the cheeks of the baby with great affection.
After a while of a diagnosing look, he took out a long notebook from his sac and opened a crumpled page which was already bookmarked with a peacock feather. The title read: BELLIKALU FAMILY. It contained multiple tree-like pyramid structures, all in an orderly sequence flowing from below the title and almost touching the bottom where the pyramids stopped with open-ended nodes. One of the last nodes was named Arun with the date: 19/05/1976.
Arun grew curious. “It is my date of birth”.
With sobriety back on his face, the man uncapped the Reynolds pen and drew a vertical line hanging down from the nod called Arun and named the lower tip as Akash with the date 03/09/2007, the day Akash was born.
While Siddappa was busy encrypting other details like zodiac sign, Nakshatra and Gothra of Akash, Arun who stood behind him found sufficient time to scan through the entire page. Little did he realize that he was on the way to a long journey back into the ages.
“My family has a history of six hundred years!? Unbelievable”. It all began with Thimmappa Aramane with the date 17/03/1451, almost during the Vijayanagar Empire! and about eighteen generations have passed since then. Akash is the latest edition. There are so many contemporaries of Akash, all from Bellikalu family.
“Some are in Bangalore. Also scattered everywhere including Mangalore”, Siddappa explained. He himself has witnessed about three generations, the last three levels in the pyramid structure.
The immensity of the past shook Arun. One of his great grand fathers was an official in the palace of Mummudi Krishnaraja Wodeyar of Mysore a century back. Thimmappa Aramane, the precursor of the family, was a priest in a temple built by Vijayanagar rulers near Hampi. That is why the name ‘Aramane’.
All of a sudden, a huge cache of great Memory lay threadbare before him. What Arun was desperately trying to reconstruct so far was just a droplet of this.
Watching the stunned face of Arun intently, Siddappa said: “It is our duty to record your family”.
“But why?”
“We are ordained by the god. Every family of the Helava community maintains genealogy of at least a thousand families. The art continues from generation to generation. My son will come to you when I die”
Encouraged by Arun’s enthusiasm, Siddappa continued in his typical style of story-telling, how his community members living in parts of north Karnataka visit their client families every year and update family trees.
“We stick to only those families which our forefathers have recorded and go wherever their tree branches out in the country. We are literates from generations”
Now, paper has replaced palm leaves as the temporary recording medium. But the details are finally inscribed on copper scrolls which safely preserve the history of families for ever. The financial condition of a Helava family is measured by the number of copper scrolls in its possession.
“We can mortgage copper scrolls in our community bank and get loans”
As Siddappa got ready to leave, Arun stuffed a currency note and a photograph into his pocket. The septuagenarian promised to visit again. Arun was not sure how. His eyes were moist.
Back in the room, Akash was still asleep with his tiny fists clenched. Arun slowly unfolded the right fist and the lines on the tiny palm were visible, triggering a train of uncontrolled thoughts in him a rush. He gently folded the fist back to its clenched state and came out with a blank gaze. Ranjitha was searching for a suitable place to keep the framed photograph of the birthday baby. Her mother was completely busy with the household routine.