He laughs again. ‘You want to destroy me? Isn’t that why you came? You hate me for what I have done to you. I will tell you how to get your revenge. This place will always grant you your wishes. But you have to wait another seventeen years. Then get that garland of swetasanchari and suryavamsi which Ajji carries at her waist. That garland is the one Chenni last wove in prayer to Kamadeva. Get it and throw it on me, I will become…’ Annaiah trails off, gesturing to the heap of ash that had been the Chenni lookalike.

Her blaze of black hate returns. She slowly nods. ‘I will wait, Annaiah. I will get my revenge,’ she mutters, turning on her heel and leaving him among those piles of ashes.

He stands there, looking at her disappearing form with dead eyes. Finally, Annaiah bows his head in defeat.

By the time she returns home, Bangari is back. With no comment at all, Thimmakka accepts Bangari’s re-entry into the house. She carries on as though nothing has happened. Bangari too never uses her power over Ramappa and Chandru to sideline her. The proud Thimmakka, though, unable to stomach Bangari’s generosity and her husband’s indifference, is more cutting and cruel than before.

She never tries throwing Bangari out again, though. Instead, she works at winning Chandru over. She sides with him on every whim, overrules both Bangari and Ramappa when Chandru wants something, be it studying at the market-town school and going to it by the lumbering bus that now visits their village or attending English classes over there. She listens to her radio songs and news every day, and often knows more about the politics of the world than Puttaswamegowda does. It is she who tells him when Indramma is killed by her bodyguards a few years later.

She does everything she is supposed to do, uses her learning to teach children at the village’s government school, starts interacting with women from other villages. She even ropes in Bangari and Dasegowda’s wife Bachchamma to help out at the school and teach their knowledge to other women, sets up groups to make pickles and other savouries and sell them – outwardly, the same strong, active Thimmakka.

Inside, she becomes more bitter every day, unloved, untouched and unwanted, with no child or life of her own, no one to look to her needs or cherish her, all of which she lays at Annaiah’s door. And she bides her time.

16. Ramani’s Story Continues

16

RAMANI’S STORY CONTINUES

o one remembers hearing a specific end to Ramani’s story. Somehow the story goes on and on, with no beginning and no end, better than the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Puranas. Many of them have heard it all their lives.