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ePaper created 2013-10-09, 06:36:00 | version 1.25.20
200 From american canyon I listened to the rain as it fell mid-day that summer in August, soaking the sack on the roof. I slept next to my grandfather, who reeked of Chivas Regal whiskey and 555 cigarettes. Tattaya had very little hair on his body, which he prided himself on, saying in his animated hours that he had ‘baby soft’ skin. I remembered how we had travelled to tattaya’s, the bus honked its way out of Hyderabad through rural stops, through towns with white plastered temples; through streets lined with fruit carts and hot burning corn the bus played chicken with other busses on one lane highways in the heart of Andhra. It was packed after an hour of this; a baby perched on the haunch of a woman standing next to my seat pissed all over my shoes and legs and the mother insisted that I should sit in my mother’s lap because I was young enough for it. Twelve hours later we crested the hills down into Markapur, past the reservoir and into the main center where tattaya greeted us through the window and took us home. When I opened my eyes I heard wet clothes tied in bundles and slapped dry against a rock outside. A rickshaw with a bullhorn pedaled by announcing the latest movie, one with Sridevi and Kamal Hassan. Everything was audible because tattaya’s house is over a sari store on the main street full of stray dogs and dust clouds from passing trucks and the foot pedal sewing machine of a tailor whirred at the bottom of the stairs by the front door. Up above all of this noise was the roof, where I slept when it was dry; from there I could stare at the blue to black sky through the mesh of the mosquito net over my bed at night. When I came down from the roof to go to the outhouse, I passed my grandmother, amamma, sifting rice for dinner. Nearby was a pile of cooked rice from the night before, being picked at by blackbirds. My grandmother was young. At the age of thirteen she had married T. Chennakesavulu, when he was twenty-four. T. Chennakesavulu, or tattaya, was the surviving son of seven-