by Sujatha Bala Subramanian, The Illustrated Weekly of India, Volume XCVII 12, March 20-26 1977

Ruth stared at her hands in horror, remembering the crooning voices of the old ladies exclaiming over the white softness of her fingers. What was she doing here, far from home? What did she really know about Rudra or the community he belonged to?

Ruth Adams prowled around the dimly lit room, restless and tense. The musty odour of unused furniture and books that had not been opened for generations made her head heavy. The windows were securely closed. They had obviously not been opened for years; the panes were opaque with grime and sported vestiges of brown paper from a bygone air-raid.

As Ruth turned away sharply, her food caught in a loose thread of the worn carpet and she almost fell into the jaws of a snarling leopard mounted on the wall. Recovering her balance with a gasp, she grimaced to herself. It was a long way indeed from Maple Avenue, Teddington, Middlesex, to the Government Travellers’ Bungalow at Devarayapet in Karnataka. A wave of nostalgia swept over her at the thought of the familiar smells and surroundings of home.

It had been another of those grey, weepy days. The sun had made a gallant attempt to rise in the morning but had retired beaten by the pervading gloom as early as 10 o’clock. Rain fell in a fine misty spray. Ruth, waking up to the corner supermarket for her weekly shopping, slipped gratefully into the dry, warm entrance of the shop.

At that precise moment a slight, dark figure wheeling a trolley cannoned off a pyramid of soup cans (thoughtfully provided by the management as a speed breaker) and backed into her. The ensuing melee lasted a full ten minutes with the young Indian apologizing profusely to all who cared to listen. For his pains he received stony glances and a couple of audible sniffs.

Ruth had stifled a giggle and smiled at him, deliberately turning on the charm of her blue eyes. For a fraction of a second, the perplexed, dark brow cleared and the brown-coated shoulders lifted. Then he shrugged, “I should have practised harder on my neice’s pram,” he had said with a wry smile.

They fell into step while Ruth loaded her wire basket. “I am Rudrish,” he said, and did not hold out his hand. At close quarters, Ruth could see that he was a trifle taller than she, though rather thin. He was dark, clean-shaven and had thick, wavy, black hair.

“Ruth Adams,” she replied. “Would you like some macaroni?”

“Well, actually, I don’t do much cooking – just a bit of soup and things now and then. I eat out mostly. No time, you know. We work all sorts of hours at the lab.”

“You must be new,” said Ruth. “Most of you people drop in at the local library often.”

“Just been here a month,” Rudrish said, as they both paid for their purchases, he held out his hand for her shopping bag. Ruth found herself on the street with this unknown young man nervously clutching an armload of groceries.

“Thank you. I’m off this way,” said Ruth, reaching to her bulging bag of food. “Do you mind if I walk with you? It’s such a nice — “

Ruth had laughed. “Don’t say it – don’t say, it’s such a nice day. It must be awful for you, coming from all that sunshine and warmth, Mr Rudriah.”

“Call me Rudra,” he answered, rolling his ‘r’s in a way that Ruth found funny.

They had walked along in silence for a while and then turned left. The main road was not behind them and except for a few early shoppers, the place was deserted. They could see glimpses of the river shrouded in mist and somewhere a couple of children were playing, their voices raised shrilly.

She went out to dinner with him that night and watched with a strange compassion his clumsiness with the knife and fork and somehow found herself relaxing with his staccato conversation. After the glib patter of her other escorts, in which thrust and parry were taken for granted, Rudra’s naivete brought forth a natural response from Ruth.

She found herself laughing at his wry humour in describing his first few days in England. “Well, then, luv, coome oop and see your room.” he mimicked his landlady’s Northern accent. “And why the milkman persists in calling me Jack…” he held his head in his hands and groaned theatrically. “What a country I’ve come ti! Where is the language of Shakespeare and Milton that I swotted up and where are the daffodils swaying in the gentle breeze? All I have is a bloody streetful of smog and an earful of gibberish.”

Ruth laughed delightedly. “Wait till you go up further North. You haven’t seen anything yet.”

“Not for me, thanks,” Rudra put up his hand in protest, a ghost of a twinkle in his eye. “I dinna ken you Gaelic.”

She took him home the following week and soon after they were engaged. She found him good fun to be with and behind the mask of facetiousness, he was kind and gentle.

Her father made a little comment when she announced she was going to marry Rudra. Engrossed in his pools as usual, he remarked, “You are old enough to know luv, and if this is what you want, you are welcome. I’ve nothing against him, seems a decent sort.”

Her aunt, who came in every evening to sit with them after the death of Rudra’s mother, looked up from her latest romance from her library long enough to say in foreboding tones: “Are you sure you know what you are going in for? Them heathens are a rum lot, I’d watch out if I were you.” She raised her eyebrows heavenwards and shrugged her bony shoulders before going back to her lurid tale.

But Ruth was in love. Noting could mar her happiness. She had only smiled when, a month later, Rudra said, “There’s just this little thing, darling. We’ll have to go to India to get married. My mother has written that she would like to meet you and have the wedding performed according to our custom.”

“Won’t it be terribly expensive?” Ruth asked, her apprehension tinged with excitement. A visit to India with Rudra did not seem a bad idea at all.

“Leave that worry to me,” Rudra had replied masterfully, patting her hand.

They had arrived in Devarayapet one morning after a jolting bus ride preceded by a long day’s journey on a local train. A horde of Rudra’s relatives were there to meet them. There were old men and young men, cronies of seventy off, teen-age girls and children of all ages and shapes in every kind of dress conceivable. It was all like something out of a fantastic dream to Ruth who was already half asleep with fatigue.

She was separated from Rudra and taken to the ladies quarters. Women crowded around fussing over her, offering sweets and coffee. Her long, honey-blonde hair was stroked and admired, her smooth arms caressed.

“What lovely, long fingers she has, like tender bhendi,” sighed her mother-in-law to be, in her own dialect. Ruth looked askance and a young girl jumped up to translate for her. Her fingers were examined lovingly and smooothed over by work-gnarled hands.

Then someone remarked that it was not auspicious for her to stay the night in her fiancé’s house. So she was to spend the night at Traveller’s Bungalow where she would find all the conveniences she needed. Two women offered to keep her company during the night but Ruth sent them away, wishing for solitude. She needed time to adjust to the momentous events that awaited her the next day.

Ruth steadied herself against a rickety little teapoy. Here she was, on the eve of her wedding, cooped up in a musty old room, waiting for the dawn and a new kind of life. In spite of, of perhaps because of, her extreme fatigue, she could not sleep. The bed was mouldy and damp, the pillow like a chunk of solid rock.

She paced up and down the room wondering what kind of people had come to rest here before her. Petty officials on tour, a traveller or two on his way to a bigger town… certainly there were no traces of a woman’s touch anywhere.

Ruth slid her hands idly over the tattered and brown volumes in the tall bookshelf which almost filled the entire length of one wall. Manuals on Government Acts, Surveyors’ Reports, Law books — the titles were as dry and aged as the books.

She picked out a thick, card-bound volume, at random and turned the pages. They were typewritten on heavy parchment paper. Annual report by the Director of Archeology in Mysore State, 1910. Ruth chuckled quietly to herself at the date and began flipping the pages.

On finishing my work in Kolar and its neighborhood, I left for Siti to examine the Tamil inscription there. Siti Hill appears to have been a place of considerable importance during the Chola and Hoysala periods. On the hill, there are two large temples, the Sripatisvara and the Kalal Hairava, adjoining each other. One of the inscriptions there, dated about the 14th century, is of particular interest as it alludes to the practice of offering a finger to the god Kalabhairava, the most important deity on the hill. Kalabhairava is the tutelary deity of large sections of cultivators such as Morasu Okkaligars, Reddys, etc.

Gripped by a macabre interest, Ruth read on.

… when Kalabhairava asked Shiva what he was to do, he was directed to take his abode on the Siti Hill and, as punishment to the cultivator who betrayed Shiva’s whereabouts to the demon with his forefinger, he was to receive as offering the last joint of the offending finger from him and his descendents. The custom of having the last joint of the forefinger cut off and offered to Kailabharava continued for some time. But as the amputation of the right forefinger interfered seriously with the duties of the cultivator, it was subsequently agreed to propitiate the god by arranging to have two fingers — the little and the ring finger — of the females cut off as a substitute for the one finger of the males. The class of cultivators who observed this practice is known as the “finger-grieving” class.

With a short gasp, Ruth closed her eyes in disbelief. Not in tis day and age! Cutting off fingers indeed! She looked around again at the moving shadows and smelt the dry decay of age covering in everything with a patina of dust. Inexorably drawn to the faint words, she read at random… a regular establishment in the temple for carrying on the amputation— a goldsmith for cutting off the fingers and others for dressing the wound and for kneading the finger and holding it tight so that no blood may be shed at the time.

The words twisted and turned in her mind. “Them heathens are a rum lot,” her aunt’s sombre warning echoed in her ears.

What community did Rudra say he belonged to? The Reddys? Ruth stared at her hands in horror, remembering the crooning voices of the old ladies exclaiming over the white softness of her fingers. Her weary mind fought for sanity but couldn’t be —. But really, what did she know of Rudra? Or of his people, with such totally different looks and habits? Ruth sank into the broken armchair and wept.

Before the first tinge of pink in the horizon, they came for her. Ruth was like a limp doll in their hands as they began to deck the bride in the traditional finery. Her lovely, silken hair was oiled and braided grotesquely with jasmine and the heady-smelling pandanus, her peachy complexion smeared with turmeric and kumkum. Unfamiliar chains and bangles adorned her and a beautiful red and gold sari was draped around her five-foot-eight frame. Huge garlands of roses and jasmines weighed heavily on her slim shoulders.

The pipers piped and the drummers drummed. The priests chanted while the fire smoked. Ruth’s mind was a blank till Rudra came to her side and took her hand with a smile. As he stroked the long, graceful fingers the girls around them giggled.

“Call for the barber!” cried someone and the shout was passed on from person to person. Ruth felt suffocated by the rising smoke of the sacrificial fire. The barber came with his box of tools and took her hand in his dirty palm. There was a sharp pain on the ring finger, a constriction, and Ruth fainted.

“Ruth — wake up. It must have been the smoke– give her a little air. Bring some water.” Rudra was by her side, and Ruth found her head pillowed on his shoulder. Surreptitiously, she freed her hand from the folds of her sari. Her third finger was numb. She pulled her hand from the cloth and raised it to her eyes. Encircling the ring finger was a circlet of the sweetest smelling jasmine she had ever seen.

Rudra bent down to examine it. “That fool, I hope he has not tied it too tightly,” he said. Unable to answer yet, Ruth gave him a brilliant smile and shook her head silently.