Song of the Cuckoo Bird: A Novel by Amulya Malladi

face.
    Finally, a policeman in khaki clothes came up to him. “ Sar, we are very shorthanded. If you want to see the dead, do so fast. We’re going to start burning from that other side in half an hour.”
    Ramanandam nodded and then waved his hand ineffectually. The policeman sighed and kneeled down and pulled the sheet from the face of the first body. It was an old woman, her face bashed in, dried-up blood crusted on her face and in her eyes. Ramanandam shook his head.
    “Who are you looking for, sar ?”
    “My son,” Ramanandam said.
    “How old?”
    “Fourteen . . . no, nineteen,” Ramanandam said, and desperately tried to form Vidura’s face in his mind. He could see a baby, a boy, but he couldn’t see a nineteen-year-old or even a fourteen-year-old anymore. His memories of Vidura were warped and Vidura’s face in his mind was like a fuzzy picture, burned around the edges, smudged in the center.
    “Well then,” the policeman said, and started to look at the bodies as fast as he could. “ Sar, here is a young boy, is it him?”
    Ramanandam raced down the bodies and came to the one the policeman was standing over. It was a boy, maybe seventeen years old, and he was not Vidura. The policeman helped Ramanandam look at every young male dead body on the field and though Ramanandam shook his head each time, the faces were blending into one another. One bloody face, one squished, one broken, one torn apart, one half-burned, one half-missing . . . the faces were going past him like a film reel and he couldn’t remember if he had seen Vidura or if he hadn’t. He couldn’t remember his own son’s face and wished he had brought a photograph along to help remind him.
    “Thank you,” Ramanandam said, taking the policeman’s hand in his and leaving a ten- rupee note behind after all the bodies had been seen.
    The policeman saluted him casually and walked away to help other relatives, who were swarming around the field.
    “He isn’t there,” Ramanandam said confidently to Kokila, and knew he was lying. Even if his son was there, he wouldn’t know for sure. He would never know if one of those bodies had been Vidura or not. He couldn’t remember anymore. He was an old man, his eyes weren’t that good, his memory was failing, and his heart was broken.
    “Oh, I’m so relieved, Sastri Garu,” Kokila said, and rose on unsteady legs. “I came to help you and here I am . . . Sastri Garu, are you okay?” Kokila immediately put her arm around Ramanandam as he started to collapse.
    From the small roadside food stall that had appeared by the crash site to feed the relatives and policemen, Kokila bought Ramanandam a cup of tea, a glass of water, and a masala dosa.
    Ramanandam just sat on the rocks Kokila had been sitting on, staring into space. He looked so frail, so old that Kokila wanted to hug him to her and tell him that she would do what she could to make this time easy for him.
    “Here,” she said, and held a piece of dosa dipped in coconut chutney to his mouth.
    She fed him patiently and made him drink tea and water from time to time. He ate half the dosa and Kokila ate the other half. She hadn’t had anything to eat in almost a day and was ravenous.
    “Now let’s go to the hospital,” she told him, and he nodded.
    She had to hold his arm and lead him. He seemed not to have the will to do anything. If she’d left him, he would have sat on that rock forever, Kokila thought. A bus was taking the relatives of the people on the train to the hospital, which was an hour away. Many victims of the crash had died midway to the hospital and the policeman on the bus warned the relatives that they would have to see more dead bodies in the hospital morgue.
    Ramanandam didn’t speak at all and Kokila didn’t ask him any questions either. She held his hand as they rode in silence all the way to the hospital, knowing that they might find Vidura there, dead or alive. And then there was also the chance that they would not