Suraa

At Karuppaiya Tea Kadai, nothing was ever done in the spirit in which it ought to have been done. Tea was made too strong, sugar was added with partisan loyalties, vadai was fried into geological formations, and the radio, mounted high upon a soot-darkened shelf with the pride of an heirloom and the sound quality of a legal dispute, habitually murdered music before it reached the ear. One forgave these things because Karuppaiya himself, a man of broad chest and narrow patience, poured tea with such sacerdotal seriousness that criticism seemed ungrateful. It was from that radio, on an afternoon swollen with heat, that Sādhinchene began. Surya, who had been standing at the counter with a notebook under his arm and a future under more serious consideration, lifted his head at once. He had been halfway through paying for a tea he had not yet properly tasted. His fingers remained extended with the coins in them. “Karuppaiya anna,” he said, with the urgency proper to revelation, “volume, konjam.” [Increase the Volume] Karuppaiya, who would have ignored a fire, a flood, the local goon or a municipal complaint, reached up and turned the knob. Until then, the world had consisted of ordinary things. Steam rising from the aluminium boiler, tea sloshing from tumbler to dabbah, a boy scraping coconut chutney from the side of his plate, two flies disputing possession of a sugar crust, and a bus at the junction sounding its horn with the entitled sorrow of public transport. BUT Arabhi entered the air and set all these things in a finer relation. The singer’s voice, bright and tensile, moved through the raga with a clean play, teasing the notes and leaving them quivering in its wake. The gamakas sprang from the line itself, as light would spring from water at a wind’s touch. Surya, by temperament, was one of those young persons upon whom music takes hold. The kriti was a holy visitation. There was mischief in it, and a tender species of complaint so intimate that it bordered upon affection. Tyagaraja, in that rendering, did not praise the Lord from an unreachable altitude of piety. He was speaking to Him with the liberties of long acquaintance, accusing Him sweetly, with the boldness only devotion can afford. Every line appeared to Surya as a hand entering the chest and tampered with the arrangement of his inner life. By the time the pallavi returned, he had the unmistakable stillness of a man who had ceased to stand in a tea shop and had begun, without outward consent, to be possessed by the music. This susceptibility had long been evident in him. Surya belonged to that harmless but inconvenient variety of youth in whom seriousness arrives early and absurdly. He had already decided that life, properly handled, ought to submit itself to discipline, that the rougher confusions of existence might perhaps be corrected by sruti, tala, and respectful attendance under the instruction of a competent vidwan. He was going, that very afternoon, to enroll himself at the Lakshmi Narayana Karnatik Academy on South Car Street. In his notebook were copied three varnams, two kriti meanings, and one quote on devotion whose author he had forgotten but whose sentiment he considered sound. --- It must be said here that fate, in our locality, has never been known to acknowledge art. Surya finished his tea in one distracted swallow, tucked the notebook more firmly under his arm, and set off while Sādhinchene still accompanied him in the mind. The road glistened. A cycle-rickshaw moved past in moral collapse. Somewhere a pressure cooker whistled with authority. The world, touched by Arabhi, had acquired for him a certain inward freshness. Even the municipal drain, over which he leapt with unusual grace, did not offend him! His feet hardly touched the ground. He was leaping towards his destination. In this condition of musical elevation, he took all the wrong lanes. Any number of explanations may be offered. One man, chewing betel with civic confidence, directed him left instead of right. A goat of stubborn theological disposition occupied a turning and refused negotiation. A funeral procession, moving with elaborate slowness, diverted him further. Then, from somewhere ahead, there came a long vibrating sound which Surya, already half-transfigured by the 20 minute-long composition, mistook for a tanpura being tested in a nearby house. It was in fact an exhaust fan with a damaged bearing but possessed an unreal pitch. Following it with the docility of the devout, he found himself in Mambattiyaar Sandhu (Literally, “Axeman Lane”), a lane so narrow that daylight entered it with visible reluctance. The houses there leaned inward confidentially. A rusted shutter hung half-closed over a doorway. Two men stood outside it, both moustached in a manner suggesting independent revenue streams. They looked up as Surya approached. Because he was carrying a notebook, wore white, because his face had about it the grave preoccupation of one sophisticatedly occupied and because criminal organisations, no less than marriage halls, survive largely on misunderstanding, they took him at once for a person expected. Before Surya could inquire after the academy, one of them pushed the door open. “Inside,” he said. Surya entered. The room into which he stepped, had already passed the stage of disagreement, and was in a more dangerous phase in which every man present was speaking as though he alone remained in possession of reason. Two men of evident authority stood at opposite ends of a long table littered with opened whisky bottles, ledgers swollen with loose papers, a steel plate of sliced raw mango gone untouched, and one revolver placed in the middle, with the false calm that it had already been thought about by everyone in the room. A ceiling fan laboured overhead, chopping the cigarette smoke into slow, uneven circles. The windows were shut. The curtains had once been cream and had since become the colour of old compromise. Around the table stood six or seven others in various postures of readiness, each of them catching notice of the man privately hoping to be spared from the labour of it. One had rolled his sleeves up far beyond practical need. Another kept cracking his knuckles with devotional regularity. A third, thin and sharp-nosed, leaned against the wall with his arms folded, speaking in a low, measured voice whose politeness made its threat more immediate. From the fragments Surya caught, the quarrel appeared to concern three lorries, a riverbed, ten missing lakhs, and an injury to loyalty from which nobody in that room seemed willing to recover with dignity. One man slapped the ledger with the flat of his hand. Another laughed without mirth. A bottle tipped, rolled, and settled again. The air had the cramped, overheated quality of a room that had long ago exhausted argument and was now waiting for some coarser particle to continue on its behalf. Had Surya entered a music room, he would at this point have removed his slippers, bowed slightly, and inquired whether beginners’ admissions were still open. However, in this situation, he had to inquire, “Excuse me, is this the Academy?”. It was precisely the wrong sentence. One of the two principal gentlemen turned pale with rage. The other narrowed his eyes. “Academy?” repeated one of them. No one answered him. The stout man slapped the table. “So he has sent him,” he cried. The lean man gave a short laugh with no mirth in it. “Send him? Maybe it is him” “I came to join-” Surya began. That was as far as he got. Each understood the question according to the deformities of his own conscience. To the first, it confirmed that Surya was an assassin sent under code. To the second, it proved he was a new thug with insolent courage. One fellow near the cupboard, who had thus far contributed nothing except an expression of strenuous loyalty, decided at that very instant that his moment had come: Eliminate his boss’s threat. With the eagerness of a man anxious to be recognised, he plunged a hand into the back of his waistband, drew out a pistol too quickly. In finding his fingers unequal to the speed of his ambition, the pistol slipped at once from his grasp. It struck the edge of the cupboard, glanced off a tin ashtray, and fell to the floor with a metallic crack that sounded, in the tension of that room, unnervingly similar to the beginning of gunfire. This was enough. Another man, seeing only the movement, the dropped weapon, and the expression of catastrophe already spreading across three faces, concluded that the first shot had been fired and that history now required from him a heroic sideways response! He flung himself across the table with more loyalty than direction. His shoulder struck the nearest whisky bottle, which toppled into a second, and the two of them went rolling through the ledgers with the drunken deliberation of men already acquainted with ruin. One bottle hit the steel plate of sliced raw mango and overturned it entirely, so that pale green wedges slid through the papers and onto the floor. The second struck the edge of the table and burst open there, sending whisky in a shining sheet across the polished wood and down in fat drops to the tiles below. The stout man, who had been in the act of rising to a higher pitch of accusation, chose this precise moment to step back and gather himself for a threat of historic proportions. Instead, his right foot landed squarely in the spreading liquor. For one suspended second, his body retained all its authority while the ground beneath it withdrew cooperation. Then his legs abandoned the office. His arms windmilled. His mouth opened upon what was clearly intended to be a sentence of devastating force, but what emerged instead was a noise of pure constitutional outrage. In falling, he caught the tablecloth with the blind instinct of a man who believes furniture ought, in a crisis, to prove physical support. The cloth came away in his fist. At once the whole table renounced order. The ledgers flew up and opened themselves mid-air, their loose papers rising in disreputable flocks. A tumbler spun off and shattered near the door. The revolver lying in the middle described one brief, elegant circle upon the tabletop, then vanished under a chair. The mango slices, released from all civic arrangement, scattered themselves in every direction. And then, because the room had not yet finished humiliating itself, the pistol on the ground went off. Nobody saw precisely whose foot caused it. Later, five men would claim to know, and each version would contain both malice and geometry. What is certain is that the shot flew upward at an angle and struck the ceiling fan, which had until then been labouring above them with an uncomplaining fatigue. The fan gave a startled jerk, trembled on its stem, and then, seeming to conclude that the matter below had exceeded the obligations of its employment, tore itself loose and came down in a furious wobble upon what remained of the table. The crash was so enormous, so final in tone, that half the room crouched at once. The lean man by the window, who until then had preserved a dangerous economy of movement and had perhaps still hoped to emerge as the only adult in the room, decided that command must be repossessed personally. With a face arranged in injured superiority, he drew his revolver in one smooth motion and turned to aim at the stout man, whether in self-defence, revenge, or mere tidiness, no one would ever know. But in stepping forward he planted his heel neatly into the brass spittoon standing beside the leg of the chair. It shot out from under him with a speed wholly disproportionate to its appearance. His body lurched forward. His arm, still committed to authority, discharged the revolver straight into the stout man, who had only just hit the floor. There was a stunned pause. Then, from somewhere low to the ground, beneath chair legs, ledgers, and the wreckage of masculine decision-making, there came another shot. The pistol that had earlier fallen to the floor had been kicked, trodden on, and caught the lean man. —-- When the outer circle of henchmen rushed in, they found both bosses dead, the table overturned, the fan on the floor, whisky everywhere, and Surya standing in the midst of it with his notebook still under his arm. For a long moment nobody spoke. Then one of the newcomers, who was imaginative in excess of evidence, aligned beside Surya. He whispered, “Anna.”. [Anna = Brother] Following this, another announced, “Single entry. Two finish.” A third, more devout by nature, looked at Surya’s stillness and concluded that he was in the presence of a professional beyond ordinary classification. Surya made one attempt to clarify matters. “I came here by mistake,” he said. This unfortunately, only deepened their respect. “Annachi” they upgraded, “Vera maari, vera maari”. [Annachi = Respected Brother] - - Men who had been ducking under tables were standing upright again. One had begun, from force of habit, to gather the scattered ledgers. Another righted a chair and then thought better of sitting in it. A third, finding a mango slice on his shoulder, ate it with solemn discretion. It was at this point that two among them detached themselves from the general confusion and came forward with the proprietary readiness of men who decided that proximity to power was the safest department in which to seek employment. The first was a dark, broad-shouldered fellow with a moustache that seemed to have been trained separately from the rest of his face. The second was thinner, quicker in movement, and possessed the bright, erratic eyes of one who had made a life of arriving second and speaking first. They introduced themselves with a gravity that suggested entry into this script. “Shevag,” said the first, striking his own chest lightly. “Suruli,” said the second, with a small half-bow that managed, even under the circumstances, to contain both respect and opportunism. Then Suruli, eager to regularise the relationship before anyone else could, leaned forward and asked, “Unga peru enna, Annachi?” [What is your name, Respected Brother?] “Surya,” said Surya at once, seizing upon what he considered his final chance to reintroduce proportion into the proceedings. “And enna vitturunga, please.” [My name is Surya and Please let me GO] This plea, unfortunately, had no effect except to increase the tenderness with which they regarded him. To them, it had the quality of supreme confidence disguised as modesty. This was the leader they wanted. Shevag shook his head slowly. “Neenga Surya illa, anna.” [You are not Surya, my Elder Brother -Shevag] “Vera maari, vera maari,” Suruli agreed at once, with replenished devotion. [You Extra Ordinary x2 - Suruli] “Vaaya moodra,” said Shevag to him without turning, unwilling to have revelation cheapened by commentary. [STFU - Shevag] Suruli closed his mouth at once, but only briefly. Reverence, in certain temperaments, retains long-run power in the system. He looked at Surya again. He took in the white shirt, the notebook still under the arm, the astonishing composure, the two dead men on the floor, and the room now orbiting gently around the young stranger at its centre. Then, with the delighted certainty of a man naming destiny after it had already happened, he said, “Anney… neenga Suraa.” [Brother… We will address you as the Shark” 😎] [END OF PART 1]