Free Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? by Anita Rau Badami Page A

the pale-eyed, thin daughter of Hari Shastri and Rosa Schweers, a half-and-half hovering on the outskirts of their family’s circle of love. It was a time that Leela herself had shoved to the remotest corner of her mind, although she could never really forget that day in February 1946 when, as a child of eight, she had watched her mother die.
    The day had begun well enough. A photographer had arrived to take pictures of the entire extended family that lived in the Shastri home: Akka the matriarch, Hari Shastri, his brothers Cheenu and Rama, and their wives and children. They had all arranged themselves in the sunny central courtyard of the house in various groupings and poses. Only Leela’s mother, Rosa Schweers, was not in the picture, for she had refused to come downstairs from her room.
    Now the photo session was long done. Leela finished her lunch and washed her hands. She looked over at her cousins Vishnu and Narayana, who still had mounds of rice piled on their plates, and decided she had enoughtime to go outside the house and see if the custard apples hanging on the tree in the backyard were ready for picking, and get back in before the two boys finished their meal. The house was quiet. Her two uncles had retreated into the cool, shuttered bedrooms surrounding the large courtyard for much-needed rest with their wives.
    Leela had left through the back door and wandered around the yard, humming an improvised song to herself, touching the walls, peering into the well, which was covered with a sheet of tin to prevent nosy parkers like her from falling in, gently squeezing a low-hanging custard apple and finding it still too hard to pick.
“This is the house that Rama Shastri built,”
she sang.
“This is the well in the house that Rama Shastri built. This is the tamarind tree by the well in the house …”
She felt overwhelmed by a hazy sense of contentment. She
belonged
here. She was part of the family of Well-Known People living inside these walls. All this was hers as much as it was her cousin Vishnu’s or Narayana’s, no matter what they said.
    The thought of her cousins sent her hurtling back into the house, to the central courtyard where her grandmother Akka sat in an easy chair. As soon as Vishnu and Narayana arrived at her side, Akka would, as she did every day, start to tell her grandchildren stories from the
Mahabharata,
the
Ramayana
or the
Panchatantra.
This, she said, was how she taught them what was good and bad and how to live a proper life edged with righteousness and decency and goodness. Leela was determined to get to Akka before her cousins did so that she could sit in the favoured spot, right beside the old lady. This way, shehoped she might get a loving pat on her head the way the boys did, or perhaps some of the sugar beads from a silver box on the table beside Akka.
    But it was no use. Moments after she had settled down close to Akka’s chair the two boys strolled into the courtyard, emitting little burps in imitation of the men of the house and thumping their fists against their bare chests as if to beat out a frog stuck there. Akka’s dark eyes, which were stones whenever they looked on Leela, turned to melted tar. She beamed at her grandsons and crooned as if she had not seen them for a year, “Aha Naani my pet, aha Vishnu my monkey, come, come and sit next to me!”
    And somehow, without quite knowing how, Leela discovered that she was no longer right next to her grandmother but off to one side.
    Now Akka began her story: “Many centuries ago, there was a king named Trishanku who wanted to take his body with him to heaven when he died. He went with his absurd request to the great sage Vishwamitra, who agreed to send the king to heaven in his mortal form. He chanted mantras and performed such powerful penances that the three worlds shook with the force of his will. Soon Trishanku began to rise heavenwards. This unnatural occurrence raised such chaos in the three realms that the gods