Ullas Quotes

Ulla could forgive betrayal, another abandonment, even her own death. But not this moment, when after all her sacrifice, she begged for mercy and Signy sought a prince's permission to grant it.

The storm has brought Ulla to the cold shelter of the northern islands, to the darkened caves and flat black pools where she remains to this day, waiting for the lonely, the ambitious, the clever, the frail, for all those willing to strike a bargain. She never waits for long.

For the briefest moment, Ulla despised Signy, as we can only hate those who rescue us from loneliness.

I wept when the muse Ulla bent over me. Blinded by tears I could not prevent her from kissing me, I could not prevent the Muse from giving me that terrible kiss. All of you who have ever been kissed by the Muse will surely understand that Oskar, once branded by that kiss, was condemned to take back the drum he had rejected years before, the drum he had buried in the sand of Sapse Cemetery.

I . . . I don’t think compassion is a matter of deserving, Mother Ulla.

At the beginning of the semester, Ulla wanted to pose only for the 'new trends' - a flea that Meiter, her Easter egg painter had put in her ear; his engagement present to her had been a vocabulary which she tried out in conversations with me. She spoke of relationships, constellations, actions, perspectives, granular structures, processes of fusion, phenomena of erosion. She, whose daily fare consisted exclusively of bananas and tomato juice, spoke of proto-cells, color atoms which in their dynamic flat trajectories found their natural positions in their fields of forces, but did not stop there; no, they went on and on... This was the tone of the conversation with me during our rest periods or when we went out for an occasional cup of coffee in Ratinger-Strasse. Even when her engagement to the dynamic painter of Easter eggs had ceased to be, even when after a brief episode with a Lesbian she took up with one of Kuchen's students and returned to the objective world, she retained this vocabulary which so strained her little face that two sharp, rather fanatical creases formed on either side of her mouth.

But Ulla was not alone; all these broken, betrayed girls were with her, and what a terrible sound they made.

And if some self-proclaimed expert tells you that Martians are disembodied creatures of brain without emotion, let him listen to the recordings that were made of those cries, of victory, of vengeance, of exultation. ‘Ulla! Ulla!’ We

E tenebris tantis tam clarum extollere lumen qui primus potuisti inlustrans commoda vitae, te sequor, o Graiae gentis decus, inque tuis nunc ficta pedum pono pressis vestigia signis, non ita certandi cupidus quam propter amorem quod te imitari aveo; quid enim contendat hirundo cycnis, aut quid nam tremulis facere artubus haedi consimile in cursu possint et fortis equi vis? tu, pater, es rerum inventor, tu patria nobis suppeditas praecepta, tuisque ex, inclute, chartis, floriferis ut apes in saltibus omnia libant, omnia nos itidem depascimur aurea dicta, aurea, perpetua semper dignissima vita. nam simul ac ratio tua coepit vociferari naturam rerum divina mente coorta diffugiunt animi terrores, moenia mundi discedunt. totum video per inane geri res. apparet divum numen sedesque quietae, quas neque concutiunt venti nec nubila nimbis aspergunt neque nix acri concreta pruina cana cadens violat semper[que] innubilus aether integit et large diffuso lumine ridet: omnia suppeditat porro natura neque ulla res animi pacem delibat tempore in ullo.

Karanth had a fine sense of humour, a dry kind of humour which is there in his novels. During the first World Kannada Conference, a few writers were discussing with Karanth about the glorious cultures of Karnataka. One writer offered to accompany Karanth to Shravanabelagola Hill to see the Digambara (naked) statue of Gommateshwara, a great figure with fine genitalia, a magnificent work of art. Karanth smiled and said, ‘Why should I climb the hill to see what I see every day in the bathroom?’.

Tata's car trips, always with a driver at the wheel, typically lasted five or six days. Tata would visit different regions of Karnataka to give talks, preside over functions, participate in literary events and always drop in on his friends. If he was in southern Karnataka, he would invariably visit us at Mysore. Tata was incredibly punctual, following a schedule that he sent me well in advance. As Tata grew older, I kept telling him to avoid these longer trips. One day in late 1987, when Tata did not reach our home from Tumakuru at 7 p.m. as he had promised, we were worried that the car may have broken down, or worse, met with an accident. In those pre-cellphone days, we could not check on him. Finally, much to our relief, Tata turned up an hour late. Looking apologetic, he explained, 'Just as I finished my talk, a man approached me with the manuscript of a story he had written, seeking my comments. I could not refuse because he was so old (thumba mudukaru).' I asked Tata to guess how old the aspiring writer was. 'The poor man was at least seventy' came the reply. Prathibha and I both burst out laughing, looking at the expression on his face when I asked him his own age. Tata was so full of life force that he never realised that he was eighty-five.

Railways, by days and by night. The flowers in the cuttings with their sooty blossoms, the birds on the wires with their sooty voices, they are their friends and long remember them. And we also stand still, with astonished eyes, when-already from the far distant distance- there's the cry of promise. And we stand, with hair streaming, when it's there like thunder and as though it had rolled round heaven knows what worlds. And we're still standing, with sooty cheeks, when-already from the far distant distance-it cries. Cries, far, far away. Cries. Really it was nothing. Or everything. Like us. And they beat, beyond the windows of prisons, sweet dangerous, promising rhythms. You are all ears then, poor prisoner, all hearing, for the clattering, oncoming trains in the night and their cry and their whistle shiver the soft dark of your cell with pain and desire. Or they crash bellowing over the bed, when at night you're harboring fever. And your veins, the moon-blue, vibrate and take up the song, the song of the freight trains: Under way-under way-under way- And your ear's an abyss, that swallows the world. Under way. But ever and again you are spat out at stations, abandoned to farewell and departure. And the stations raise up their pale signboards like brows beside your dark road. And they have names, those furrowed-brown signs, names, which are the world: bed, they mean, hunger and women. Ulla or Carola. And frozen feet and tears. And they mean tobacco, the stations, or lipstick or schnapps. Or God or bread. And the pale brows of the stations, the signboards, have names, that mean: women. You are yourself a railway track, rusty, stained, silver, shiny, beautiful and uncertain. And you are divided into sections and bound between stations. And they have signboards whereon is written women, or murder, or moon. And then that is the world. You are a railway- rumbled over, cried over- you are the track- on you everything happens and makes you rust blind and silver bright. You are human, your brain giraffe-lonely somewhere above on your endless neck. And no one quite knows your heart.

To see something for the last time can be as intense as seeing it for the first time

To be satisfied with what I have. Not to postpone things. That life is fragile.

To experience something for the last time can be more intense than it was the first.

Sometimes when terribly hard things happen to you, you can arrive at a turning-point in life, although you may not see it as such. And people whom you may not have counted on in the past can be the ones to step forward and give new love and help. It can mean unexpected intimacy. That can sometimes be a turning-point, a new opportunity, in the midst of all the difficulties. All these people who have understood, and who want to be close, perhaps they are the most important people. The ones who dare to come close, and share both pain and pleasure.

Moments of total closeness and total friendship belong to eternity. It is a glimpse of eternity at any rate.

To watch powerlessly while a loved one slowly gets weaker is awful. To grieve and at the same time to make the most of each day. Of the time one still has. One prepares oneself consciously and unconsciously for the loss one knows will come. In despair one can be anything but sympathetic and tolerant.

One must accept that death is a part of life, even the most terrible death. And do we not live a whole life every day, and does it then make any great difference if we live a few days more or less? -Anita Goldman

Grief often feels lonely. Part of the work of grieving has to be done by oneself. Nobody can be of any help with the innermost sorrow. One must bear it on one's own.

மற்ற பூனைகளைப் போலவே, புலியின் பாதங்களும் சதைப் பற்றுடன் கூடியவை. முன்னங்கால்களில் ஐந்து விரல்களும் பின்னங்கால்களில் நான்கு விரல்களும் உண்டு. ஆனால் பாதச்சுவட்டில் தெரிவதென்னவோ நான்கு விரல்களின் பதிவுதான். பாதங்களிலுள்ள நீண்டு, வளைந்த கூரிய நகங்கள் இரையத் தாக்கும் போதோ அல்லது மரம் ஏறும்போதோ வெளியில் நீட்டப்படும். மற்ற நேரங்களில் உறையுள் இருக்கும் கத்தி போல அடங்கி இருக்கும்.

Then she drank a glass of water, switched on her computer, checked her e-mails, proofread the conclusion of her dissertation for the umpteenth time, chewed a nail, scratched her head, and when she had finally run out of displacement activities, she called Ulla

Ulla Sallert, wearing one of her famous facial expressions with about eleven ambivalent meanings and twenty-three enigmatic nuances, drops into a deep curtsy.

[...] människan lever på ytan, och det som hon inte har för ögonen lär hon sig så småningom leva utan.

All these people who have understood, and who want to be close, perhaps they are the most important people. The ones who dare to come close, and share both pain and pleasure.

What is death?’ ‘I imagine it as being taken out of time, bodily time, and the physical dimension. And whatever we were, our personality or what we sometimes call the soul, goes to God and we leave our body here. It returns to the earth. It belongs to the earth. But it also gives rise to new life.

The word for patience in Arabic is ‘cactus’. They have the same meaning -‘to endure thirst’.

Roommates ...the door opened and the most improbable trio walked in: a tiny dark-haired man, a very tall and big-nosed guy with long hair like a rock star, and a girl in a white nightgown with a toilet seat around her neck. They were Edmondo Zanolini, Michael Laub, and a fifteen-year-old girl named Brigitte—an Italian, a Belgian, and a Swede— and they were the performance-art trio who called themselves Maniac Productions. They gave themselves this name because, among other things, they would enlist people from their own families to do strange things. For instance, Edmondo’s grandfather was a pyromaniac. And since he was also a bit senile, he was very dangerous—he had set his house on fire a number of times. His family was very careful to keep matches out of his reach at all times, except when Maniac Productions was performing. Then Edmondo would invite his grandfather to the theater and give him a big box of matches; the grandfather would wander around the theater lighting fires while the group performed and pretended not to notice him. This was his maniac thing. It was very original theater, and very satisfying to Edmondo’s grandfather. He didn’t care if the audience was looking at him or not, because he had his box of matches. Edmondo and Brigitte moved into our flat. Michael came from a family of diamond merchants in Brussels and stayed in five-star hotels. Another tenant was Piotr from Poland. Piotr had a book of logic—I think it was Wittgenstein translated into Polish—and for reasons best known to himself, he kept it in the freezer. This book was his favorite thing in the world. And every morning he would wake up with this imbecilic smile on his face, take his book out of the freezer, wait patiently until the page he wanted to read unfroze, read to us from it in Polish, then turn the page and put the book back in the freezer for the next day. Brigitte’s father had started the pornography industry in Sweden—a very big deal; the porn revolution really began there—and she hated her father; she hated everybody. She was a deeply depressed person: she literally never spoke a word. All of us in the flat ate all our meals together, and she would just sit there, completely silent. Then in the middle of the night one night, Edmondo knocked on our door. I opened it and said, “What’s wrong?” “She talks, she talks!” he said. “What did she say?” I asked. “She said, ‘Boo,’ ” he said. “That’s not much,” I said. The next morning, she packed and left. (...) “I’m so happy,” Michael told us one day, about his pair of girlfriends. “The two of them complement each other perfectly.” Marinka and Ulla knew (and liked) each other, and knew (but didn’t like) the arrangement. Then Ulla got pregnant—not only pregnant, but pregnant with twins. When Michael told Marinka about it, she moved to Australia. And Piotr followed her there, and committed suicide on her birthday.

with my friends around, the photos of Gregor were no longer different from the pictures Ulla would clip out of magazines - portraits of people you couldn’t touch, with whom you couldn’t talk, who might as well not have existed

Incluso en esos días cuando el mundo la drenaba de toda su fe, François era para ella como la tibieza del pan recién horneado en la mañana y como el crujido del pasto al viento en un jardín lleno de sol. Del cuento 'Ulla y Salman', de la versión es español de mi libro, 'Monos o Lagartijos' a estrenarse en Noviembre de 2019.

Ich kann doch nicht verantwortlich sein für das, was war. Ich bin mitverantwortlich für das, was jetzt geschieht.

Missglückte Lebensgeschichten zu erzählen, anderen die Schuld zuzuschieben, die „Mängel aufzuzeigen“, ist allemal leichter, als mühsame, aber erfolgreiche Werdegänge darzustellen, ohne in die Nähe von Kitsch zu geraten.

Zu Hause sein. Was heißt das? Es heißt, dass da jemand ist, den alles, was du erlebt hast und noch erleben wirst, interessiert.

Ich fühlte mich in Margas Gegenwart nicht mehr wohl, als müsste ich stets vor etwas auf der Hut sein, ein dumpfer, verschwommener Argwohn, ich könnte ihr Missfallen erregen. Kontrolliert, beinah zensiert, fühlte ich mich.

Wörter können wie Gift wirken. […] „Sie auch hier?“ So ein harmloses Sätzchen, das aus einem freundlichen Mund das genaue Gegenteil besagen könnte. Wer das Wort verabreicht und wie, entscheidet über die Wirkung: Gift oder Gabe, Gnade oder Gnadenstoß.

Sahti on seurustelujuoma, jonka ei tarvitse olla kovin väkevää. Sahtihaarikan ääressä kulutetaan aikaa ja rupatellaan kuulumisia ja naurattaa niin kamalasti, että muistuu mieleen vielä huomennakin. Ei sahdilta kovaa ytyä odoteta. Joka äkkikännin haluaa, hankkii sen Alkon tuotteilla toisissa yhteyksissä, selventää sahtimestari Lammilla.

Jos juot litran sysmäläistä kusaset kaksi hämeenkyröläistä!

Hämeenkyröläisarvio sysmäläisestä: -- Jos se olisi maailman parasta, niin kyllä siitä meilläkin tieto olisi!

When Tata worked on a book, be it fiction or non-fiction, each day he would discuss the progress with all of us after dinner. Once he was laying out the overall theme of his latest novel before us. He said, ‘I have given it the title, Thiddidavaru, Telidavaru, which roughly means “those who improved others, and the rest who escaped”.’ I had laughed out loud and teasingly said, ‘Why not add Yemme Karu Kattidavaru (those who tended the water buffalo calves) to the title to make it sound even more ridiculous?’ This led to tremendous mirth, with Amma, Ullas and Kshama too joining me in teasing Tata. Next morning, he had changed the title of that novel to Sameekshe (The Overview).

In 1986, Amma was very sick, semi-conscious and sometimes delirious, even three months before she died. Once, when I was tending to her, she suddenly burst out crying and called out to me. She wept bitterly, saying, ‘Ullas has died!’ I consoled her, telling her that it was Harsha who had died a long time ago, and Ullas was very much alive. Then she felt better and resumed her singing.

Amma was in and out of Manipal Hospital much of the time. Tata finally decided to bring her home when the medical treatments were proving futile. Even the day before she died, doctors had suggested hospitalisation. Tata said, ‘I don’t want her to be a piece of meat on a table, to be poked and probed and kept alive like that. I want her to die at home.’ She passed away the next day—23 September 1986. I was at her side, but Ullas and Tata had gone to Manipal to consult doctors.

For a whole generation of Kannada children, he was ' Karanthajja' (grandfather Karanth) through his popular weekly column in Taranga magazine. I am sure none of those children he enthralled will believe my tales. Despite his great admiration for gentle Maria Montessori and the pacifist Mahatma Gandhi, Tata firmly believed in corporal punishment as a tool to discipline children, and, for that matter, adults too.

Although it matters little in the larger scheme of things, we must confess that we are disappointed that recent generations have given up on the Kota Brahmins’ unique traditional claims of grandeur. Kota Brahmins now readily fall at the feet of sundry human Gurus, thus abdicating their unique privilege of reporting directly to God without any intermediaries.

As narrated in his autobiographies, Tata was first educated in Kota. He and his siblings had to shed all their clothes and bathe outside the house to ritually cleanse themselves after returning home from the company of ‘lower caste’ students at the village school.

Swept up by tides of new revolutionary ideas blowing across the country, soon the rebel in Tata rejected most Brahminical orthodoxies, shedding his ‘janiwara’ (sacred thread) in his late teens. After years of a soul-searing search for God, wandering across the physical and intellectual terrains earlier traversed by Buddha, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and the Hindu reformists from Bengal, Tata discarded all these paths. He became a rationalist, and even a vocal atheist, who acerbically lampooned Brahminical orthodoxy in his early literary works like Gnana (Deep Knowledge) and Devadootharu (God’s Messengers).

When Tata was a student in the Government College at Mangalore in 1922, Kannappa, who was his teacher, one day found him in a pensive mood. When asked the reason, Tata had said he did not find college education useful to his life’s journey. The very next day, Tata quit college and joined India’s freedom movement that had just been reinvigorated by the charismatic messiah, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Tata became an ardent follower of Mahatma Gandhi, struggling tirelessly to advance causes such as the promotion of khadi and cottage industries, abolition of untouchability, eradication of traditional caste-based concubinage and the promotion of adult literacy. Tata’s actions caused much unhappiness within his extremely orthodox family and community. Even Tata’s father, Shesha Karanth, a remarkably audacious man in his own right, shed tears of disappointment over the life choices Tata was making. Shesha Karanth’s closest friend, one Narayana Mayya, had tried to placate him saying although the renegade Shivarama had abandoned Brahminism, he had seven other fine sons to be torch-bearers of tradition. Shesha Karanth had retorted that Mayya had no idea of the true worth of his fourth son Shivarama, ‘who is weightier than all the others combined’.

Tata liked his other brothers too, but they did not share the same chemistry. Two brothers, his immediate elder, Vasudeva Karanth (K.V. Karanth; 1900-88), and the immediate younger, Shankaranarayana Karanth (K.S. Karanth; 1905-79), were men steeped in orthodoxy. The former was an eminent engineer who headed the electricity department of the Madras Presidency. The latter was a brilliant but acid-tongued lawyer in Mangalore, who was professionally not very successful. These two brothers spent only brief moments with Tata when they visited our home in Puttur. However, they chatted at length with Amma, sharing their joys and sorrows. Although their empathy with Amma was genuine, neither man ever ate or drank anything in our ‘ritually polluted’ home.

Widow remarriage was practised among Bunts long before the Hindu reformers struggled to introduce it among the self-proclaimed higher castes.

By the late nineteenth century, many Saraswats had risen to high levels in the service of the British colonial administration. Tata has spoken to Ullas particularly about Vombatkere Pandrang Row (1881-1946), who had grown up in poverty and studied under street lamps as a school student in Kundapur. Because of his academic brilliance, Vombatkere travelled to England on a scholarship in 1901. He studied law at Cambridge University, qualified as a barrister, and was recruited into the Imperial Civil Service (ICS) in 1904. Vombatkere was the first Kannadiga to achieve that distinction. Ironically, upon returning home, he was compelled by elders to undergo rituals to ‘purify’ himself—for having violated the Brahminical prohibition against crossing the seas.

When I entered my home in Balavana as a new bride, it was full of children I had to care for. Karanth was already running a residential school for orphaned children. The responsibility of managing Balavana and taking care of those orphan children were squarely on my shoulders. Therefore, I experienced motherhood well before having my own children.

No one has written as much for children in Kannada as Karanth has. Here too the similarity with Tagore is remarkable. Tagore wrote Bengali primers for children; Karanth wrote them in Kannada. After I learnt to read Kannada, the first books that I read were the Amar Chitra Katha stories written by Shivarama Karanth. It is not generally known that the early Amar Chitra Kathas were written by Shivarama Karanth. The project was the brainchild of G.K. Anantharam, who headed IBH Publications in Bangalore. He asked Karanth to write the text, which he did, for the sake of children. Anantharam got the text illustrated. They were later translated into English and as is often the case, the English editor got the credit. The real credit belongs to Anantharam and Shivarama Karanth.

This book is interesting also as a cultural study of the communities of South Kanara. I, for one, did not know that there was one kind of rice for the Bunts and one for the Brahmins.

Ullas has also written about his father’s foray into politics and elections. When Karanth contested the parliamentary election from Karwar in 1989, I was the election observer. He filed his nomination papers and told me that he was leaving for America. He left Karwar, and his acolytes campaigned for him. That was the only time when I saw that all election rules were scrupulously followed. Those were Karanth’s instructions.

Mrs Leela Karanth had said, ‘This Karanth is not a real person. He is a gifted actor. His entire life is an enactment by that actor. No real individual could have lived life this way and accomplished so much in a single lifetime.’ When the lights faded on the gifted actor, the outpouring of grief from the public was overwhelming. He belonged as much to them as to the family.

All his children, following a tradition set by our deceased elder brother Harshanna (Harsha Karanth, 1938-61), always addressed our father as ‘Tata’ (pronounced Thatha, literally meaning ‘grandfather’). In this intimate portrait, we will continue that practice. We have also labelled our mother, and a few others, with similar familiarity.

Unlike most other Kannada writers, Karanth never held a salaried job in his life. He engaged in the rough and tumble of an activist’s life when he was barely twenty, by dropping out of college to plunge into the freedom struggle.

Among the Brahminical intellectual traditions, Kota Brahmins follow the Advaita philosophy expounded by Shankaracharya in the eighth century CE. However, unlike other Advaita sects who worship the god Shiva, the Kota Brahmins’ primary deity is Narasimha, the half-lion avatara of Vishnu. Going a step further, Kota Brahmins have boldly proclaimed themselves as the highest-ranking among all Brahmin sects in the whole world—so high, in fact, that they do not accept any human being, including Shankaracharya, as their Guru. Consequently, Kota Brahminical tradition forbids the falling at the feet of any human Guru. Instead, they claim Narasimha as their sole Guru.

During the 1920s Tata had tried hard to practice what Mahatma Gandhi preached. He met with failure at every corner: trying to sell handspun khadi to villagers who did not want it, trying to convince labourers that the drink they enjoyed at the end of the day was an evil to be shunned, and preaching eternal celibacy to girls in communities that traditionally turned them into consorts of rich men. Tata was turning into a rationalist, atheist and a modernist. He appreciated the benefits that science, technology and medicine had gifted to society. He found Gandhi’s anti-economic growth arguments, sex-denying prudery and god-fearing piety largely irrelevant to improving the lives of Indian citizens.

I was studying at Besant Girls’ School at Mangalore. The teachers were also training us in various extracurricular activities. Some of us friends were in the dance and drama training class. Shivarama Karanth was our dance teacher! The appointed day for staging some play was approaching. We were rehearsing hard for the day. That was not the first time I had seen Karanth. Many a time I had been the target of his short temper during our drama rehearsals. I had also argued back with him more than any other student in the class. On this day he had called all the girls to help him in making the costumes and jewellery needed for the play. Lots of gold and silver foils, coloured crepe papers and beads were spread out before him. With his nimble fingers literally dancing, Karanth wielded the scissors to cut out papers and foil, sticking them to create crowns, waistbands, armbands and such other costumes. He was so fast and so deft! I was mesmerised by those artistic hands. In the past, I had argued as well as chatted with him happily, along with my friends, without feeling such an emotion. But this was a very decisive, strange moment in my life. Until then I did not know what I really wanted to possess in my life … On that day, at that moment, I felt I had to possess those magical hands, forever. A strong desire filled my heart to make those hands exclusively mine. Those magical hands began to haunt me day and night after that moment. Being a girl, the only way I could possess them was to marry the man. Traditionally, a girl’s mother is the conduit to carry a daughter’s desires to her father. I wasn’t that fortunate: I had already lost my mother. How I wished my mother were alive! After brooding over my dilemma for two days, I could see no other option than boldly opening my heart to my father.

However, following the South Kanara tradition, two kinds of rice were cooked at our home at mealtime. Amma, Harshanna and I ate the boiled brown rice that the non-Brahmins preferred, whereas Tata and my two sisters liked the polished white rice which the Brahmins ate.

Tata had given up driving in the 1940s, soon after he learned to. I am sure it was a wise decision that saved many lives. For the long road trips, he hired a taxi until he could afford a car and a driver in 1960.

However, as Tata got older, he even tolerated some religious rituals around him to please his friends and admirers. On Tata's ninetieth birthday, I saw an amusing instance of this tolerance. Tata's good friend Mattur Krishnamurthy, a devout Brahminical theist and Sanskrit scholar, who had headed the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in London, had come to Saligrama to greet him. He brought along two tall, plump Brahmin priests from his village near Shivamogga. In that hamlet steeped in Vedic traditions, many reportedly speak Sanskrit as a matter of routine. The priests had brought jagates (musical instruments) and some vibhuti (sacred ashes). Krishnamurthy first sought Tata's permission. Thereafter, the priests smeared some vibhuti on Tata, and, loudly clanging the jagates, they bellowed Sanskrit slokas. While Krishnamurthy was beaming with happiness, the bored-looking priests performed by rote. Tata stood still with a bemused look on his face. At the end of it all, Tata said he was pleased that his friend was happy.

However, Tata had to go through the formal ritual of personally inviting members of the Karanth clan to my wedding, the memory of which amuses me hugely to this day. Tata took me along through the lanes, gardens and rice paddies around Kota to distribute the wedding invitation to friends and relatives. We would walk into a home and Tata would hand over the invitation card. He would then loudly announce, 'Ullas is getting married in Mangalore. But you should not come.' With his elder brother K.L. Karanth, he used a more polite variant, saying, You should not bother about attending. He would then go on and tell the invitees that 'they should not lose sleepover' the wedding ceremony because he was arranging a wedding feast in Kota a couple of days later. 'Do attend the feast without fail!' he admonished. We then walked off to the home of the next 'invitee', leaving the last one entirely befuddled. To Tata's many friends and admirers far away, he sent printed 'invitation cards', with a handwritten note, similarly disinviting them. Tata did not like the crowds, pomp and pageantry associated with traditional weddings. He just wanted my wedding over and out of the way.

The roughly reconstructed genealogy of the Karanth family begins with a Kota Vasudeva Karantha, about whom we know little else. His son Parameshwara Karantha was, however, a wealthy landlord. Unfortunately, Parameshwara lost his entire fortune in trying to transform copper into gold through ancient Hindu alchemy. Parameshwara Karantha thereafter promptly disappeared, abandoning his wife and children to their fate. Tata’s father, Shesha Karanth (1868-1940), was the only son of that doomed alchemist.

Manjanathiah and his outspoken but warm-hearted wife, Meenakshiamma (1909-94), were among Tata's closest friends. Some of Tata's early novels like Bettada Jeeva (Man from the Mountain) were written when he took time off to stay with them. At the end of each day, Tata read out his literary output to the couple.

Tata was also an inspiration to three other next-generation stars of Kannada literature, theatre and culture: U.R. Ananthamurthy, Girish Karnad and B.V. Karanth. It was only after I got to know them well later that I realised how profound Tata's influence had been on them during their formative years and how much they stood in genuine awe of Tata's pioneering intellectual and personal explorations despite their ideological differences with him. Among the trio, Tata was personally very fond of Ananthamurthy (1932-2014). When Tata was in Mysore, he would always drop in for a cup of coffee with Murthy. Basking in Tata's reflected glory, Prathibha and I too have benefited much from Ananthamurthy's incredible affection and charming erudition.

Although B.V. Karanth made a brilliant film based on Tata's famous novel Chomana Dudiu Tata had not liked the film. B.V. Karanth, a warm, good-hearted man and a true genius of Kannada theatre, in contrast to Tata, was somewhat undisciplined and often unpunctual. I suspect Tata's dislike of that outstanding movie had more to do with B.V. Karanth's disorganised persona. B.V. Karanth had once confessed to me that he was 'scared of' Tata. Because Tata was a jack of all trades who dabbled in anything that took his fancy, some of his prolific intellectual output tended to be mediocre. Since Tata did not like B.V. Karanth's film, he set out to make a better movie based on another acclaimed novel of his, Kudiyara Koosu. Prathibha and I spent a couple of days on the sets when this movie, titled Maleya Makkalu, was filmed in a very scenic forested landscape in the Western Ghats. Although the scenery was grand and the movie starred the popular Kannada actress Kalpana, the movie was a rather amateurish effort compared to Chomana Dudi. Tata's flm failed the test of critical appreciation, and at the box office.

Narayana Manjeshwara recalls his very first encounter with Amma, years before he joined Tata’s service: When I was a little boy, I was once walking back home past the Kallimaru Bridge. It was getting dark, and the rain started pouring, totally drenching me. I was carrying home some smelly fish hanging on a string in my hand. A kind-looking lady was walking down the road with an open umbrella. She suddenly asked me, a perfect stranger, to come under her open umbrella. I told her I was carrying these rather smelly fish, and, so could not share her umbrella. But she insisted and took me under her umbrella. She walked with me to my home in that pouring rain and then left. I realised only years later that the kind lady who took me home was the ‘Amma of Balavana’ whom people spoke about.

Another event witnessed by Kshama and Ullas: ‘Mad Akku’ was a mentally ill woman who used to drop by occasionally at Balavana to beg for some money or food. Without having had a bath for months, she was stinking to the high heavens. Her long hair had matted and turned brown, caked with dirt. Amma had asked, ‘Akku don’t you ever have a bath?’ Akku had rudely responded, ‘Who will give me a bath, will you?’ Amma said ‘yes’ without a moment’s hesitation. She took Akku to the bathroom, washed her hair and gave her a thorough bath. She then draped Akku in a fresh clean saree and fed her a hot meal. All of us watching were stunned by her actions. Akku started weeping. She said, ‘Amma eer deveru, eer naramani atthu,’ in Tulu. (Amma, you are God. You are not a human being.) Akku fell at Amma’s feet and continued weeping.

When Shivarama Karanth was among children, he too became a child. He was like a wiser older friend to any child he met. Most of the times, Karanth used to address his own children using funny nicknames that he affectionately coined for them. After Karanth finished his work for the day, as he came down the stairs from his study, he used to affectionately call out to Leelamma, addressing her as ‘O La’. He would ask her for a glass of water and drink it up before going on his routine evening walk to the town. When Karanth bantered with his children about their mother, he jokingly referred to her ‘Ammade’, which is how the name ‘Ahmed’ plays out on Tulu tongues. Leelamma also used to banter with Karanth. Instead of going up the stairs to his office, she would mischievously call out to him from below, addressing him as ‘Hoy Karanthare’.

His Karma Yoga which starts in the morning ends only when he goes to bed in the night. He is a real Yogi. He is a superhuman. He has achieved whatever he aimed at with great dedication, undaunted by difficulties he has faced. We are so lucky to have him amongst us. He is fortunate too. Many people with great intellect are not backed by the lady luck in their lives, and, obstacles have the upper hand. That did not happen with Karanth. He faced difficulties during the first half of his life, whereas in the second half things went quite well for him. It was good that he struggled during the first half. It made him mature fully. At a younger age, he had the ability to absorb the blows life dealt him. Others, who are too weak to withstand such hardships, collapse and get sidelined in life. However, Karanth regenerates new aspirations and sets new goals, even while undergoing disappointments. No difficulty or sorrow shakes him. His basic mantra is his work. Once he delves into his work, there is nothing in his mind. His life revolves around his work.

Karanth is an admirer of all the beauty around him. He is a simple man. Nothing makes him feel arrogant or proud, not even money. What he feels in a particular situation may be different from how any of us would feel. He can experience special, strange emotions. His feeling of sorrow, hardships, difficulty or happiness is far more intense than in others. We can’t fathom the depths of that rare mind. Karanth himself is not aware of what an asset his mind is. Only god, the creator, is aware of that. The good wishes of the people, their prayers for Karanth, do bear fruit. We may not find this kind of a person anywhere else in this world. It is our pride that such a person is ours. Although Karanth appears to be like one of us, only Karanth can be Karanth.

In her essay, ‘Naa Kanda Karantha’ (The Karanth I Saw) Amma offers a more nuanced perspective of Tata. Here, inter alia, Amma says, ‘This Karanth is not a real person. He is a gifted actor. His entire life is an enactment by that actor. No real individual could have lived this way and accomplished so much in a single lifetime'.

In the mid-1950s, Tata endorsed the political philosophy of C. Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) who had quit the Congress party to establish the Swatantra party. The new party espoused the model of economic growth that some Southeast Asian countries were rapidly adopting. When Rajaji campaigned for the Swatantra party in South Kanara during the 1960s, Tata travelled with him, interpreting his speeches in Kannada for the voters. When Tata was campaigning for the Swatantra party in the 1962 general elections, Amma was canvassing votes for the Jan Sangh, mainly because many of her good friends supported that party. Tata's attitude towards the Jan Sangh, which also endorsed the free enterprise-based economy, was more lukewarm. Tata liked the dedication and discipline of its RSS cadres and the personal honesty and integrity of its early leaders. But being an atheist, Tata could never be wholly enthusiastic about Jan Sangh's version of god's own truth.

Indira Gandhi imposed her dictatorial national emergency in 1975. Tata was one of the few among his generation of literary intellectuals in Karnataka who boldly proclaimed his opposition. He publicly protested when many were muted by fear. Tata returned the Padma Bhushan he had received in 1968, stating that as a writer he could not tolerate a government depriving citizens of their hard-won liberties. That was the first step in Tata's risky public stance against the Emergency. Thereafter, he became a hero to many opposition leaders like George Fernandes, Atal Behari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani, who were all either on the run or in jail during those dark days. Tata attended anti-emergency conclaves organised by the RSS which led the fight in Karnataka, as well as similar events in Kerala organised by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM). Tata would simply say, loudly and publicly, that he would vote for 'anything else, even an electric pole' if it contested against Indira Gandhi.

Tata had married Amma in a civil ceremony on 6 May 1936 in Mangalore. The news of their inter-caste wedding had caused much social consternation among orthodox Brahmins as well as Bunts. One of Amma's maternal uncles from her Kadenja Guthu clan was so overwrought that he allegedly slapped his forehead in despair and cried out, 'che, che, che, yenna kulaku onji aibu!' ( What a blot on my clan!). There was also a Brahmin journalist in Udupi, aghast at this 'varna sankara' (radical or inter-caste mixing), who wrote defamatory articles in his tabloid. Tata, feisty as ever, successfully sued the journalist for libel. That aggressive champion of orthodoxy also struck to his principles and chose to go to jail rather than plead guilty and pay a fine.

Among Karnataka politicians he had two lifelong admirers. One was Ramakrishna Hegde whom he had known from student days. Somewhat oddly, the other one was from the Congress--Marpadi Veerappa Moily who was inspired by Tata's emancipatory politics captured in Chomana Dudi. As a young lawyer, Moily had fought the landlords on behalf of sharecroppers when the land reform laws were implemented in South Kanara during the early 1970s. Both Hedge and Moily consistently supported Tata's literary and cultural efforts during their tenures as chief ministers of Karnataka.

Tata remained a lifelong atheist. Among Tata's generation of Kannada writers, only A.N. Murthy Rao, Gowreesha Kaikini and Rayasam Bheemasena Rao (Ballari Beechi) were self-proclaimed atheists. Tata never reached out to god as a crutch even when facing extreme adversities in life. Amma used to read Bertrand Russell and sound like a rationalist when I was young. However, after her illnesses and Harshanna's death, she too reached out for that crutch to steady herself.

Tata placed the values of ethics and personal integrity way above self-proclaimed piety. Tata's book Balveye Belaku (Living the Right Way is The Only True Enlightenment) presents a brilliant exposition of his ethical atheism. Tata, however, did not impose his atheism on others. In his early writings like Devadootharu and Gnana, he had lampooned Hindu gods. However, later he became more tolerant of people who sought relief through a belief in god. Tata seemed to feel that if such beliefs helped them cope with their real-world problems, it was allright.

Tata, the lifelong atheist, had directed in his will that no religious obsequies be performed for him. Some of our cousins conducted a Brahminical shraddha for him. Although we did not participate, we did understand their compulsions of tradition.

These were all stark reminders to us that, as far as people were concerned, Kota Shivarama Karanth was their property. We had an obligation to share our 'Tata' with all of them. However, 'growing up Karanth' was a uniquely personal experience to each one of us. No one else could claim that rare privilege.

Following the revelations after De-Stalinisation in Russia, Tata had come to abhor communism.

Tata's handwriting in Kannada was almost illegible. Therefore, he began to 'dictate' his books to 'scribes' who took dictation in longhand. Tata then corrected the drafts in red ink, and the scribe would prepare a final clean copy for publication. That was it: within a week or ten days the novel would be ready for print.

When I graduated from engineering college in 1971, T.A. Pai of Manipal suggested to Tata that I should join as a management trainee in a new company in Bombay that a friend of his had launched. When Tata asked me, I politely declined the offer because I desired to be based not too far from the jungles I loved. In hindsight, often wonder where my career would have taken me had I accepted Pai's offer: the aforementioned friend was the entrepreneur Dhirubhai Ambani who was just beginning his meteoric rise, perhaps with some help from Pai. I am glad I did, because my life would not have been the wild and wonderful one I have enjoyed in the five decades since.

It took me two more decades of persistent effort to switch my professional career entirely to wildlife biology: first graduating from the University of Florida, and then being hired to work in India for the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Tata was truly happy at this outcome. Tata had originally seeded this interest in natural history in my heart. In 1963, he had given me George Schaller's book on gorillas, saying, 'Read about this remarkable man and his dedication to wildlife.' Once again, it was in Tata's collection of LIFE magazines in 1965 that I read Schaller's article titled 'My Year With Tigers', which made me set my heart on becoming a tiger biologist. This chain of events came full circle when George Schaller recruited me off the University of Florida campus to join WCS in 1988 at the ripe old age of forty.

Using family connections to advance one's career is the norm in India, whether it is in politics, industry or entertainment. At the outset of my career, I had noted how Tata had made a name for himself without seeking patronage from his family. I was determined not to use Tata's name to promote my own career. I think he appreciated this attitude. I did, however, seek his help in some public conservation causes, and he readily obliged. In 1980, a small band of us wildlife conservationists in Mysore were protesting the construction of a luxury wildlife lodge that would have disrupted elephant movements in the Kabini river area of Nagarhole. The project was actively promoted by the then chief minister, R. Gundu Rao, who was an acolyte of Indira Gandhi's all-powerful son, Sanjay. When all else failed, I decided to use Tata as a weapon. I wrote up a carefully crafted appeal against the project addressed to Indira Gandhi and convinced Tata to sign it. I then got the writer R.K. Narayan also to sign it. Narayan was genuinely interested in wildlife and had borrowed my tiger books for reference when he wrote his novel A Tiger for Malgudi. Next, I persuaded writer U.R. Anathamurthy to endorse the appeal. Thereafter, I mailed their joint appeal to Tata's friend, H.Y. Sharada Prasad, following this up with a long-distance phone call. This strategy worked: Indira Gandhi ordered Gundu Rao to review the project. Eventually, the Kabini lodge was moved out from the Masthigudi corridor to its present location in Karapura village.

It is my eternal regret that Tata did not preserve any of his correspondences with historical figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Rajaji and others. Tata had visited Gandhiji's Sabarmati Ashram in his youth and consulted him on the dilemmas he faced trying to follow up on Gandhi's prescriptions for social reform. But no original correspondence exists about these milestones. Tata's routine practice was to tear up the letters he received everyday, soon after he replied to them. Years later, I realised what a treasure I had lost when my colleague in WCS, Josh Ginsberg, showed me a letter from Albert Einstein he had inherited from his grandmother.

Tata took a keen interest in national politics from his late teens. His autobiographies delve into the matter in some detail. Initially, the radical, socialist fighter in Tata appears to have held sway. His novel Chomana Dudi perhaps best captures Tata's emancipatory politics. It cemented Tata's reputation as a novelist, telling the story of an 'untouchable' bonded labourer whose lifetime ambition was to merely elevate his status to that of a sharecropper on leased land. Even this limited aspiration is ultimately crushed by the forces of tradition and economics that overwhelmed Choma, the main character. The last paragraph in Chomana Dudi is one of the most powerful, beautifully crafted pieces of prose in modern Kannada literature. Reading it sixty years later, I still find it hard to hold back my tears. However, Tata did not remain a leftist for long. Joseph Stalin and his brutal social experiments in Soviet Russia alienated Tata from socialism in general forever.

In electoral politics, Tata was generally aligned with his eldest brother, K.R. Karanth, who had resigned as a cabinet minister in 1948 to protest the emerging corruption in the Congress party. K.R. Karanth then got involved with the Praja Socialist Party (PSP), with stalwarts like Acharya Kripalani, Ashoka Mehta and H.V. Kamath, at one point becoming the vice president of that party. Supporting his brother, Tata contested as a PSP candidate from the Puttur Assembly segment in 1952. Amma told me a story about how, when Kripalani was addressing local voters in Hindi, which practically no one understood, the audience became restless and inattentive. Angered by this, Kripalani roared in Hindi, 'Tum Sabh Gadhe Ho!' (You are all donkeys!) There was a moment of silence until the local interpreter caught up to sheepishly announce: 'Naavellaroo Katthegalanthe!' (This man thinks we are all donkeys!)

My uncle was a hardworking, muscular man whose daily exercise routine was to chop firewood. I once requested him to turn on the radio to listen to cricket commentary. He instantly retorted that a growing boy like me should be outdoors playing cricket, and not listening to rubbish on the radio. He compared the real joy of playing cricket to the pleasure of eating holiges, and the cricket commentary to listening to some stranger describing someone else eating holiges! What is the fun in that, he asked. He made me stumped!

As I absorbed natural history knowledge from specialised books and field visits, I started noticing this disconnect between Tata's broad interest in nature and his lack of awareness about the serious problem of wildlife around us being wiped out by hunters. When Tata published his science encyclopedia, Vijanana Prapancha, in the mid-1960s, I recall passionately arguing with him about his averment that wild tigers were so numerous in Malenad that local hunters could never extirpate them. I told him that if a famous writer like him said this in print, his many admirers among the local landed gentry would rush out to finish off the last wild tigers. Tata appeared nonplussed for once, but the book was already out in print.

However, Tata had to go through the formal ritual of personally inviting members of the Karanth clan to my wedding, the memory of which amuses me hugely to this day. Tata took me along through the lanes, gardens and rice paddies around Kota to distribute the wedding invitation to friends and relatives. We would walk into a home and Tata would hand over the invitation card. He would then loudly announce, 'Ullas is getting married in Mangalore. But you should not come.' With his elder brother K.L. Karanth, he used a more polite variant, saying, You should not bother about attending. He would then go on and tell the invitees that 'they should not lose sleepover' the wedding ceremony because he was arranging a wedding feast in Kota a couple of days later. 'Do attend the feast without fail!' he admonished. We then walked off to the home of the next 'invitee', leaving the last one entirely befuddled. To Tata's many friends and admirers far away, he sent printed 'invitation cards', with a handwritten note, similarly disinviting them. Tata did not like the crowds, pomp and pageantry associated with traditional weddings. He just wanted my wedding over and out of the way.

Tata had becomne a rationalist by choice in his early twenties. However, he remained a vegetarian and abhorred alcohol. Tata remained a vegetarian to avoid needless cruelty to animals, he said. He was also sure that alcohol inevitably led to one's ruination. This was based on his experience preaching temperance to ruralfolks at Mahatma Gandhi's urging. Tata had witnessed many rural poor families driven to misery because of alcoholism among the menfolk.

Tata grew quite fond of Prathibha, perhaps because of her calm, balanced personality, in contrast to my testy Karanth temperament. He opened up and talked to her about things that he simply could not discuss with me. She did not question him or judge his actions like I sometimes did. Prathibha recounts a couple of instances of how Tata, beneath his tough exterior, was a sensitive, subtly observant man. When she came as a bride to his home in Saligrama, she was fascinated by the National Geographic magazines in his library and spent hours reading them. Soon after, he quietly started mailing them to Prathibha. Always a sharp dresser, Prathibha wore only sarees to work and when we stayed with our parents. And when Tata stayed at our home, Prathibha was always in a saree. At other times she liked to wear western clothes. She was pleasantly surprised by a gift Tata brought for her from Russia: a beautifully tailored lady's shirt that fitted her perfectly.

They became a new constellation: Ulla like a black flame, Signy burning red, and golden Roffe, always laughing, a yellow sun.

and one of the young women in Ulla’s apartment, Mala, came from Delhi, just like Sunny. He’d been considering asking Mala to broker a formal introduction to Ulla, when one night in the cafeteria, as if she had deduced his interest, Sunny overheard Mala begin to denounce the disheartening and repetitive occurrence of Indian boys running after white American women, always picking the most pallid, androgynous ones, the kind who withdrew to spend moody hours scribbling in diaries. This was what attracted them, said Mala, because no Indian woman was bequeathed enough privacy to thus indulge herself with a solipsistic obsession over her own psychology—encouraged to chart the fluctuations of her temperament in response to deep crises that