He was stunned, bitter. There was nothing he could do. In time a marriage would be arranged for him, but not with such a beautiful woman as Radha. No, she was not for him, a bank clerk living as a poor relation in a back room …. A poor relation. In the village back home he would be someone, but not in the city. Never. He was a nobody here. He had been castigated severely for his presumptuousness. Radha would forever be beyond his reach. He would have to be content with his parents choice, a wife who would be suitable for a bank clerk. He would go back into the obscurity from which he had temporarily emerged but he would not forget, ever. He would watch and wait. He would be patient.

Yet when he would one day settle down to a predictable relationship and marry, bring forth children, he would look back on the days of his youth without regret. He had had his fill of that vision of beauty. And visions always elude. He would settle down to a different life. He would not forget her, Radha.

Tradition and Hierarchies

‘Is there anything I regret after all these years of a well-arranged marriage, the wealth, status in society?’ Radha asked herself. ‘What is love, what is passion? I have never really known or understood, although I have sung time and time again of the passion of lovers for each other. The thorn has never pricked my heart to shed even a droplet of blood. But Saradha? That breaker of conventions ….’

It had needed a kind of reckless courage to break away from the rigid constraints of the Tamil hierarchy of that era, of the generation of Radha’s mother. Women who knew men as husbands, fulfilling their ordained roles of obedience, chastity and the begetting of children. But Saradha had returned. Where was that ardent lover, the Italian ship’s captain, Luigi Botticelli, with whom she had gone away leaving her home, her husband, her family? She had returned with her young daughter, Lucia, to beg on the streets of the city, to be shelterless, ostracized, spurned by the society she had once lorded over. Saradha, whose wardrobe had been filled with the richest Indian silks, brocades, organzas; her full-bosomed body swathed in turquoise, emerald, crimson, with elaborate jewels in her pierced nostrils, her ears, throat, wrists. A woman who had brought dowry with her, houses, land, money … she had returned perhaps to claim it all but it was lost to her forever. A woman so strong as herself, why had she not fought back to reclaim what was hers by right? There was no one to defend her. Women like Saradha were considered immoral. She was not seen as a woman who desired to free herself of the bondage of custom and rigid roles, but only as a loose woman. The long sea voyage had taken whatever money she had, and all her jewels. Everything spent.