The House by the River

We are moving a river when I receive the call about GauriVelyama. The waters close over my head as I gasp for comprehension. Though she was very old, she was not ailing and was remarkably fit. This makes no sense.

The Kerbers are sympathetic, despite their own distress over the impending riverine displacement. I convince my boss that I can handle the Kerber negotiations from India. Klaus, my husband, who works for the same organisation as I do, helps make the arrangements with his understated efficiency. Before I know it, I find myself on a series of flights that will compress my geography into a tiny house that listens to a river in Kerala.

As I push open the heavy wooden door, the house reaches out its spotlessly clean arms to enfold me in a familiar embrace of gleaming red floor and freshly-watered plants. KochuGeetha rushes to greet me, her face torn between tears and smiles. Geetha, wrapped in her white mundu, is as tiny as her moniker “Kochu” suggests.

“Ethra nalayi kutti vannittu,” she scolds, taking me to task over the long time I have been away. “Irikku, irikku, nchan mollkku korachyu vellam kondu varam.”

As instructed, I sit down and wait for the drink from the ancient terracotta pot. KochuGeetha returns with a glass of cool, cool water, placed on the familiar, battered, teak tray with its incised pattern of grape vines. There's even a napkin, the embroidered flowers faded but starched and neatly folded. I feel like weeping into it, instead, I muster a smile of thanks. My Great-aunt’s implacable training has outlasted her.

GauriVelyama's presence lingers, as though she walked by here mere moments ago, twitching a cushion into place, running her finger over a ledge to check for forbidden dirt.

I sip. It grounds me, this taste of the earth in the water. I’m in the house that belonged to GauriVelyama – my maternal grandmother's sister. My Great-aunt didn’t have children and took over my care when my Ma died. Despite our painful estrangement this past year, I was her whole family, as she was mine.

KochuGeetha and I flow with seamless ease into the old pattern of chatter. I insist on giving her some money to tide her over until decisions are made, and I know she hears what is unsaid —that I will take care of her.

Mine is gratitude from the heart, for my irascible Great-aunt was not easy to care for. Even at age eighty-seven, when I last saw her, GauriVelyama would berate KochuGeetha for too much coconut grated into the vegetable dish of aviyal, or be furious about her morning porridge brought in the wrong bowl. I was always amazed that KochuGeetha stayed on despite the frequent temper tantrums, but something about my Great-aunt commanded loyalty.

I sip, listening to KochuGeetha tell me how GauriVelyama's low-grade fever took a sharp turn for the worse, the end was too sudden to summon me in time. It was a peaceful end, and her lawyer, Kuttappan Pillai, saw to all the necessary details.

I make no complaint. I respect my Great-aunt’s well-known wish that when she died, a lamp was to be lit and her body taken to the crematorium as quickly as possible. No waiting for anyone, no elaborate rituals.

The lamp remains lit.

My Great-aunt disliked clutter, and she sold the more valuable knick-knacks when money was needed. But the few pieces which hold the weight of my genes are still here.

This lamp, used in prayer by GauriVelyama’s mother, my great-grandmother. My mother's aranmulla kannadi, the brightly polished metal mirror. A battered, ancestral money box. The pair of oxblood Chinese vases that GauriVelyama's father brought back from a trip to the exotic Orient.

She had been furious when I accidentally broke one of the vases. I still smart at the memory of the tongue-lashing that the child-me had received for that piece of carelessness. Later, calmer but still angry, GauriVelyama had put it back together – so carefully that I have to search with my fingertips for the deep lines of fracture that I know are there.

I see the bulky old radio and switch it on, its wavelengths still set to a classical music channel. A singer is singing a familiar number. I could swear…

"Jala… Molé?

I tune back into the endearment from KochuGeetha, who has been chattering through my reverie. During the long journey that plucked me from a German river and placed me beside an Indian one, I had come to the exact conclusion that KochuGeetha has voiced with sadness... That I have come back to pack up my childhood, dispose of my Great-aunt’s things, sort out her affairs and sell her home.

I equivocate, not wanting to upset KochuGeetha, and ask instead if she would cook me her tamarind fish curry and tapioca for lunch. She fusses it might be too late to get good fish, but this demand for her cooking has made her happy. I give her some money, she rushes off to see what catch of the day she can conjure from the market.

I tune back to the singer on the radio who is finishing what I'm sure is a composition in the liquid raga Saranga. My ears are rusty but the notes have rubbed away the tarnish.

KochuGeetha has made me puttu for a late brunch. I tuck into the rice flour-and-coconut concoction that has been mixed with enough ghee to melt in my mouth. Satiated, I take my coffee and a pile of old letters I have discovered to the verandah. The letters startle me with their emotional charge. I sit listening to the river, brain-in-stasis till it’s time to call Germany.

Given the time differences, the jet lag and the emotional exhaustion, I’m amazed that I seem to be making sense down the phone line to the Kerbers. I reiterate the offer that seventy other homeowners in their position have accepted: a better-than-market-rate from the authorities for their house, and logistical support in relocating.

"But where’ll we go? This has always been our home," Anna Kerber wails, a now-familiar refrain. "We’re too old to start anew..."

I let her have her say. There are no new discoveries in the conversation, but every repetition of a sorrow represents invaluable miles on the road to acceptance.

"The river has a pattern, Anna," I say, my words too an oft-repeated salve. "We’d destroyed that pattern by forcing the river into straight lines. It's why we have so much flooding. People have lost lives and property in these last floods.

"It's time to undo some wrongs, time to allow the river to meander again as it used to. Yes, that’ll mean that your home will be flooded and I'm so sorry, Anna..."

The Kerbers are not unintelligent, but they are in their early seventies. It's almost more than they can cope with, the endless rebooting that awaits if they move out of their home: the rearrangement of furniture, the repopulation of life with strangers as neighbours, the differently stacked grocery shelves in unfamiliar stores.

Cradling my Great-aunt’s ancient black phone here in Kerala, I empathise more deeply with their sense of dislocation. Against my better judgment, I offer to help personally with the move.

They promise to think about it. I promise to call them again tomorrow.

Exhausted, I telephone my husband. I tell him about the newly-discovered letters, and I tell him about the Kerbers. He makes sympathetic noises and transmits pulses of energy down the phone lines. I call off, saying, "Klaus, I have to get things ready for Velyama's lawyer, Kuttapamavan. KochuGeetha’s told me to be vigilant – she thinks he has a buyer for the house, and is trying to broker a deal!"

There are more papers to go through on GauriVelyama's neat wooden desk, but there's something more urgent calling to me first.

I walk to the old, custom-made wooden stand on which GauriVelyama's beloved veena rests, the stringed instrument draped with a mango-yellow silk cloth to keep out the dust. The fabric catches the light as I sweep it up, flowing gold like a watercolour sun emerging after torrential monsoon rains.

Fingertips touch the strings, the wood … and the synapses in my brain are jolted alive with remembered currents of sound. The memory is intense, disconcerting, as is the specific music I hear. I haven't thought about it for so long. The snatch of music on the radio has awakened old melodies.

I hear GauriVelyama explaining to me how the classical Carnatic music of South India is made up of melody motifs called ragas. How each raga is composed of specific variations of seven notes – Sa, Ri, Ga, Ma, Pa, Da, Ni – in the ascent and descent scales.

In the mood to bid farewell to my Great-aunt through the reliving of her music, I try and tune into the particular melodies of a raga named Saranga. How GauriVelyama would play Saranga with her heart-wrenching fluidity, in this ferociously clean house by the river. There was her obsession with orderliness, and then there was her obsession with music.

My earliest memories of my Great-aunt centre around music, her playing the veena or listening to classical music on the radio. The heyday of her radio concerts and live soirées was long gone. She would reminisce, sometimes, about the glory days in Madras, where she used to live.

I never understood why she didn't make more of her music. Perhaps marriage, her husband’s peripatetic life and early death had shrunk her options. Perhaps she had missed the lucky breaks.

I don’t know if she minded the lost opportunities; that was not the kind of cosy chitchat she encouraged. I don’t know how she had stacked up when graded within the highly competitive and unforgiving world of Carnatic music. But people did murmur about how talented she had been.

I cannot say I was immediately drawn to Carnatic music as a child. It represented an extension of my ambivalent relationship with GauriVelyama. She seemed more connected to her veena than to me. None of the awkward phrases, misunderstandings or brittle edges that constantly shaded the patterns of our interactions were ever present in the music that she played.

The musical ragas that flowed from her fingers were effortless, powerful. Even the resentful child-me could see she was intensely and completely drawn to it, in a way that I could not seem to engage her. I was so young, barely five, and violently unhappy, trying to cope with a half-understood, half-articulated grief. I resented the music as something my Great-aunt loved more than me.

It was around the age of seven that I first began to understand what music is meant to do. I have no idea why certain events are chosen by our brain to be processed from raw data into stored information that can be replayed at will. But this December day is one of the earliest memory spools that I can thread through my neurons, and watch as though it happened yesterday.

The clouds hung low without spilling over into rain. Energies spent, after my daily routine of playing by the river, I followed a slow path into my Great-aunt’s home. I paused at the entrance, gripped by the melody swirling from her fingertips. She was humming it too, and that evoked a half-remembered memory of another lovely voice singing that tune.

I washed my hands, filled a glass of water from the terracotta pot and watched her play the veena from the kitchen door. When she paused, I asked, "What raga are you playing, Velyama?"

Not bothering to hide her surprise at my unprecedented curiosity, she replied, “Saranga."

"Ma used to sing it, didn’t she," I asked, the fragment of a memory about my mother sharpening into focus.

"Yes," said my Great-aunt, at her abrupt best.

She stopped playing, put away the veena, and demanded, "Why haven't you bathed yet?" She sent me off with a huge scolding ringing in my ears about cleanliness, laziness and godliness.

I couldn’t understand why she would not speak of my Ma and the music. Yet, something in me had shifted. After months of wilfully closing my ears to the music, some tightly barred door in my mind swung ajar. The sounds I had been trying to shut out became melodies I was not unhappy to let in.

She played it again the following day, as was her habit, to explore one raga for several days before moving on to another. I wandered around and finally sat in front of her on the little cane-and-rope seat. She didn't stop playing. There was strange comfort in allowing myself to drown in the waves that emerged from the constantly shifting points of contact between her fingers and the strings.

I closed my eyes as she played, feeling how the music of the raga flowed like water, how I could ride the notes to the waterfalls and rapids in the river outside. It surprised me that my GauriVelyama – whom I had classified as hot-tempered, obstinate and self-centred – could extract such sensitive sounds from an instrument that was essentially pieces of string tied to pieces of wood.

School opened, and I did not have as much time to hang around listening to music. The notes stayed with me, though, and I would sing the patterns of its music over and again on my walks by the river. One day, I hummed the melody at lunchtime. GauriVelyama made no comment on the singing, but announced it was time I learnt Carnatic music.

My opinion was not asked, nor was Father's. A bhagawathar was found, a shy gentleman who came twice a week to teach me music, armed with a furled umbrella and general nervousness around GauriVelyama. Sulking because I hadn't been consulted, I refused to practice in the days between the classes, much to GauriVelyama’s very vocal displeasure.

The lessons proceeded in a desultory fashion. The singing didn't improve much, but despite my resentments, my enjoyment in listening to the music grew.

One day, I asked her to tell me more about the raga that I now secretly associated with my Ma. “Why do you like Saranga?” she asked me in her turn.

I bit back my real answer, saying instead, "I enjoy how it flows like water, I like these notes in the raga," and hummed again the snatch of melody that had initially got my attention.

“But that’s the essence of Saranga,” she exclaimed. “It’s an unusual raga that has two values for the note 'Ma'. The phrase you sang captures that.”

Two kinds of Ma. The rigid “Ma” of the present, the dreamy “Ma” of a dimly remembered past.

GauriVelyama continued, “Because there’s a molten pattern in these descending notes, I think of rippling water when I play it." I perked up. She added, "Yes, just as you did. But you made the comparison without any real understanding.”

I had no real singing ability and could never capture the intricacies of the music. However, I fancied myself getting quite knowledgeable about it.

I would ask the names of the ragas that I listened to, and mentally classify them into a simple Like-Dislike binary. Months into my lessons, I felt emboldened enough to comment while listening to GauriVelyama play.

My youthful arrogance annoyed her, setting us on the path of an uneven music battle. Whenever GauriVelyama played a raga I didn't like, I would make a face.

“Just because you’re learning music, you think you know something about it? How foolish. All you’ve done is dip a toe into the sea that is our Karnatic music," she said sharply.

"I didn’t like the musical raga you just played." I would not climb down from my inflexible tall tree either.

GauriVelyama snapped, "Perhaps hidden inside things that you think you dislike, Jala, are things you actually like very much, but are too obstinate to see."

I'm still in the mood to reminisce in the house by the river and its small collection of memory-keepers. I prop up the picture I have carried out with me to the verandah today, the framed photograph of Ma, all dressed up for her wedding day. Behind her, a little out-of-focus but looking happy, stands GauriVelyama with a flash of diamonds in her ears.

Of my Ma, I have few concrete memories other than the sense of a loving presence that I have missed ever since. Father was a good man, but remote. He came from a generation that did not teach a grieving widower how to express the love of a parent to his little daughter.

We had muddled along initially, Father and I, with frequent visits from GauriVelyama. A few months into this arrangement, she faced up to the central fact: Father was not equipped with the domestic wiring needed to raise a child. GauriVelyama, being a decisive woman, acted immediately.

She sold her home in Madras and bought the tiny home by the river, which adjoined our equally tiny home, except that ours was set a little further inland, and had no river view.

My Great-aunt was not easy to grow up around, she did not take kindly to her worldview being thwarted, questioned or disobeyed. The slightest infraction earned her ire. But unlike some of the nosy people in our neighbourhood who would speak to belittle, GauriVelyama was not malicious. Her biting tongue and explosive rages were the by-products of disappointment when things did not measure up to her highly particular satisfaction.

Father retired with gradual, if implacable, steps, from anything to do with domestic or parental obligations. I grew up in my own home under the sharp-eyed supervision of GauriVelyama from a stone’s throw away. Father repeatedly asked her to move in with us, but being fiercely independent, she wanted her own space. Her home was a marvel of how modest funds could be stretched to so much spare elegance.

I built up my inner life around the river I could see from the windows of GauriVelyama's house. I would skip and dance around its banks every day. Sometimes I made up stories of river creatures whose country lay beneath the waters and where Ma now lived, as their Queen. In my dreams, I went to be with her, as her little Princess.

At other times, the river creatures were monsters who had captured my Ma. I prayed they would release her, so she could come back to me. I spun out elaborate adventures of how we would travel far and wide over the waters, how the river would carry both of us to a new life.

Did I believe these dreams would materialise? I'm not sure, but I certainly got told off for daydreaming by GauriVelyama, another nail in the coffin of resentments. I was too young to appreciate that she had given up a life in Madras to come here and look after me. Her authoritative ways deafened me to her sense of loyalty to us, her family. I always had nourishing food and simple clothes, but not the endearments that I desperately wanted to accompany them. I yearned to be hugged and kissed, to have a Ma who would make much of me. But this was not her way.

GauriVelyama became more eccentric and dominating as she grew older, while I became a self-centred teen. Our competing battles of moody eccentricity were fuelled by hormones kicking in, in my case, and by hormones shutting down in hers. It didn't help that she played less and less of the music that had been our real, if unexpressed bond.

I get up early, lace up my trainers for a brisk jog down time and up the banks of the river. There's a new soundtrack running in my head where the rediscovered music and the gurgling of the waters intermingle. Old memories resurface but their shapes seem different.

I recall the incident of GauriVelyama asking me point-blank why I liked the raga Saranga. I had not explained the half-remembered association of my Ma singing its notes.

When I had tried to resurrect the conversation about my Ma singing, GauriVelyama had shut down. She didn't speak of it again, and didn't invite any more questions. The child-me had interpreted the act as one of meanness. Why, then, would I share a precious memory of Ma and the music with GauriVelyama? I decided to hold it close, I had so very few impressions that lingered about my Ma…

Now, bitterness washed away by the old letters I had discovered, I understand her pain. GauriVelyama had taught music to her talented niece, who repaid her by putting her own music career on hold to raise me. Then, by dying young, caught in the claws of a beast that multiplied in her throat, robbing her voice and then her life.

After the move to Germany, I had wilfully shut my ears to music. There was another kind of sound that preoccupied me as a water ecologist. Nature as a stakeholder was an idea that had re-entered the public imagination, and the business of cleaning up and re-naturalizing rivers gained urgency.

I would go home to see my evermore-distant father and Great-aunt every winter. Twice in the year that Father died. While I felt the obligatory sadness, Father and I had never been emotionally attuned to each other. It was a simple relationship, linear, and born out of conventions – not at all similar to the complex, deep and peculiarly patterned motif that characterised my bond with GauriVelyama.

Working up a good sweat, I return to find KochuGeetha waiting for me with warm bath water and scandalized expression at my running clothes. Kuttapamavan, the lawyer, is coming by in the afternoon, she reminds me. I bathe quickly as I also have calls to make.

"Your river is quirky like my GauriVelyama," I tell the Kerbers. “Your river’s path is like the remembered music from my youth. A melody-motif that meanders away from the regular notes of its mother, to create its own design."

When I share my flights of fancy with Klaus, I can hear the warmth of his smile.

Soon enough, the doorbell rings, and I go to welcome Kuttapamavan. KochuGeetha brings us tea, and we get down to business. I can tell Kuttapamavan wants to know my plans for selling the house, perhaps he even has a buyer, as darkly hinted by KochuGeetha. We work our way to the central plot via smaller parcels of administrative tasks.

There are no significant belongings other than the house and its contents, which she had settled on me a while back. A fixed deposit with a miniscule amount of money has been left to KochuGeetha. I say that I will quietly add to it, so it becomes a substantial bequest. Kuttapamavan enquires what is to be done with GauriVelyama’s personal items.

"I want to ship the veena and a few things to Germany," I hear myself say.

"The veena?" Kuttapamavan’s expression says how outlandish he finds this selection. He offers to find a moving company to take care of the shipping, and we move on.

I expected no startling disclosures, but there is one – a mortgage taken out on the house. I knew GauriVelyama had debts from the past, but I’d thought them all settled. This evokes a guilty sadness; a substantial part of what I’d sent her every month would have been used to service the mortgage, putting her day-to-day life under strain.

"I wish she’d told me that she needed more than what I regularly sent her,” I say. “I suppose pride prevented her from disclosing them to me, these uncleared debts."

Kuttapamavan, through his humming and hawing, lets me know he doesn't like the implied criticism of his GauriEttathi. We smooth out the moment.

"Do you want to put the house on the market while you’re here?" he asks, a not-question. "There are mortgage payments due. If we sold it soon, we could settle all the financials easily."

Despite no involvement from my brain, my heart knows the precise solution. I say, "Let’s think about selling the house at another time.

"For the moment, give me the breakdown of the mortgage arrears, Kuttapamavan, I'll pay them immediately. And explain to me how I can foreclose the mortgage."

If my heart has taken my head by surprise, then Kuttapamavan is equally dumbfounded. "We need to sort out the financial arrangements as soon as possible," I say. “I’m in the middle of a project in Germany, Kuttapamavan, I have to go back very soon."

"Sheri sheri," he acquiesces. "I'll call you after I’ve talked with the bank manager. I’ll arrange a meeting for us tomorrow."

I dress with care in a mundu for my visit to the bank manager, accompanied by a fussy Kuttapamavan. It turns out better than I had hoped. The manager is a nice man in his sixties, Mr Avarachan, who had personally dealt with my Great-aunt. He speaks of her with admiration and some awe. When we take our leave, the timelines to resolve the mortgage issue have been sorted.

Outside, on the hot, dusty street, when I turn to thank Kuttapamavan for all his help, he hands me a package inside a red silk pouch.

"In my hurry yesterday, I forgot to bring this. GauriEttathi left it with me," he says, "to be given to you. She told me to keep it safe in case she was tempted to sell it when she needed money."

Puzzled, I peek inside the pouch. There's a box within, which I open after I reach home. Glittering against the burgundy velvet are a pair of earrings – a beautifully matched set of large diamonds of the best quality, surrounded by smaller stones. I know they are GauriVelyama’s, for she wears them in that wedding photo of my Ma. However, I’d never seen them, and assumed they had been long sold to finance something or the other.

Also in the pouch is a cream oblong of stiff, textured paper that's been carefully cut out of some wedding invitation. In her elegant hand is the inscription, "For my Jala, with love, to be given to her daughter from GauriAmmuma."

The waters finally come, coursing down my cheeks, for my dead aunt who calls herself grandmother to my unborn daughter. I shed water for all that is gone and all that will never come back, for the hope of something not yet there, but of something that yet might be.

The cause of my estrangement with GauriVelyama this past year was my miscarriage. The baby would have been a girl; the loss was indescribable. But if I was heartbroken, my Great-aunt was devastated. She blamed it on me, that I had continued to work through my pregnancy.

My Great-aunt wanted, so much, for the family line to continue, which among us Nairs can only be down the female bloodline. She had made it very clear on the phone that she thought my priorities had been wrong. It was to deaf ears that I explained it was not overwork that had ended the pregnancy.

"Why aren't you trying again?" she had asked.

"I will, Velyama, but not just yet."

"You aren't getting any younger, you know," she bit out. "Your generation’s just selfish and self-centred. You have so much to give and share, but no, you just want to think about yourself."

So it went down the phone line. And so I hadn't come back last year.

KochuGeetha rushes in, alarmed at the sound of sobbing. "Saramillya, kutti, karanchollu," she soothes, it’s okay, it will be okay. My ache of regret is eased, a little, by KochuGeetha’s balm of pragmatism. I know it would have been a traumatic visit, had I come last year, with bitter accusations flung back and forth. It would not, in the end, have been the best way to remember GauriVelyama.

No thoughts, no talk, no memories. Everything is submerged in the patterns of the river. I walk alongside, listening to the waters whisper and wheedle, comfort and chortle.

I’m floating along on the waters outside my window, following its surges and tides. It is rainy weather and the river is swollen. I call my husband daily and then the Kerbers; sometimes just to vary the rhythm, the Kerbers first and then Klaus.

Klaus does not question my need for this limbo. He busies himself appeasing my employers about my prolonged absence. It helps that the Kerbers, by this stage, don't want to talk to anyone other than me.

The river in Germany is waiting to move, for the engineers and machines to dig into the earth and redirect the waters along a new path. A new path that is actually the old one, before foolish men forced the river into straight lines in the name of efficiency. We have all reached, unsaid but understood, the point of agreement that the Kerbers’ house must go. They will have to leave, and the river will have its say.

As surely as I know that the Kerbers need to lose their home to the river, I know that I need to keep this other house by a different river.

I sort out my Great-aunt’s things, I talk of days past with KochuGeetha, I hum old tunes, I walk the river's routes. Hovering over me is the benediction of a melody that is the closest connection I have with my Ma, and the most complex link I share with my Great-aunt. A relationship that I finally acknowledge comes from a place of love rather than obligation.

It is time, so I take my Great-aunt’s ashes in the little mud urn to the river. I let them flow with the water. I let the river move me forward.

Music guide and consultant for the story: Vidushi Sangeetha Sivakumar