THE SILENT AESTHETIC SAINT

When I tried to  read his novel in its serialized version in Andhra Jyothi weekly around 1970 and left it unread within  three or four weeks as I couldn’t understand and follow it  I didn’t  foresee that I would have the rare opportunity of getting befriended to him after  two decades. It didn’t happen suddenly or accidentally as it took more than a decade for bringing us together. He is Vaddera Chandidas, a Telugu novelist par excellence.

After the publication of Himajwala, his very first novel he became a celebrity instantaneously. Then I was studying in the high school. After one of his trips to Tirupati, my father told me that he met Vaddera Chandidas there in the University quarter which was almost at the feet of the huge Sheshadri hills. In a secluded house like that he, with his odd simplicity, uncanny truthfulness and unassuming frankness, appeared as a person lost in a forest, according to my father.

 When I joined the Degree College in Tirupati I attended many literary seminars held in S V University and whenever I went there I tried to grab at least a glance at him. But in vain as I leant after wards that he never attended such meetings.   I might have seen him for the first time, at least from a distance, when I joined the department of English in 1979 as a student. He was among the faculty of Philosophy department which was situated quite beside our department. By then his second novel, Anukshanikam, was getting published as serial in Andhra Jyothi weekly and many of my young and writer friends used to meet him regularly. But I never dared to meet him at all.

Once I accompanied a friend who was visiting him and then I was introduced to him. He was very docile but very much reserved. My friend posed him some questions about his first novel and tried to exhibit his scholarship by citing some western writers who might have influenced Himajwala. Then he gave a cool, clear and rational lecture on the difference between influence and imitation for more than two hours. Neither he nor we were exhausted or wearied.

I went to his house, another university quarter which was beside a busy road, once or twice, after I joined the department of English as a lecturer. He was warm and very much hospitable but still reserved and inaccessible. Then I was staying in a small room on the second  floor of a house of my friend Kirankranth’s in-laws. After my marriage I took a rented house nearby and it so happened that Chandidas had shifted to the same second  floor micro apartment in which I lived for a year. Kirankranth told me that he had rush to the quarter of Chandidas when a neighbor telephoned him, found him very sick, took him to the hospital and then brought him to the micro apartment as he had to  nurse him regularly.

In the beginning Chandidas used to give me the poetry anthologies sent to him as complimentary by the writers. Slowly he got opened up and began to indulge in prolonged discussions on various literary and worldly issues. It was as lively and comfortable as speaking to one self. I had never tried to embarrass him by being inquisitive of his personal life. He was very much fond of his daughter, Radhika Chaithanya, who studied medicine in Tirupati, then got married to another doctor and migrated to USA. During those five or six long years I never found him referring anybody with disrespect and his mild critical remarks on some people were simply amusing. Once I asked him why did he manipulate an accident in the life of Gitadevi , the protagonist  in Himajwala  so as to make her love a father and his  son and thus  indulge in incest. He simply answered that he did it consciously to make a comment on the ethics. He used to be very prompt in the correspondence with everybody who wrote him.  Many readers used to visit him regularly and he was courteous to all of them in the beginning. He used to open up to the stranger only when he realized that he is sincere and knowledgeable. To the others he  was very much inaccessible.  He was a very good host and he used keep cigarettes and drinks for those intimate friends who used to visit him frequently though he was a teetotaler then. My friend, Kirankranth had almost become a guardian for him in the last years. In the beginning he used to cook food for him selves but afterwards he became almost a member of Kirankranth’s house. It was not easy to cook food for him as he had periodic allergies to the common things like Dhal and tamarind. And Mrs. Kirankranth took care of him more than a daughter and a mother. But he never appeared sick and week. Once I took a friend to Chandidas’ dwelling and then he was lying on the bed bare-chested. Afterwards my friend told me that his physique was very much like that of a wrestler.

K.Sadasivarao, the Inspector general of Police who is retired now was one of the regular visitors to him and once he took him to the movie, Schindler’s list. He used to reprimand Chandidas friendly for not keeping his small room clean and tidy. Once when Chandidas was away he made arrangements to clean the room but Chandidas was not happy by that. Chandidas proclaimed that he was Saakteya in one of the introductions he wrote to his novel and he composed a book of mystical poems. After a long gape he wrote around hundred pages of his third novel but tore it off saying that it was not worth writing. Once I casually suggested him to write his autobiography. He smiled and told me that he had already wrote it , kept it in  a bank locker and handed over the key of it to a confidant whom he instructed to open it and publish  it after a certain time as some people whom he referred in it would  be no more to  get hurt by that time .

                He taught me that one had to follow a certain method of reading Chalam to understand him properly. He suggested me to begin with Ameena and to take up Maidanam, Jeevithaadarsam and Sasirekha in the same order. When I got fed up with my Ph D he insisted that I should not neglect it as, in his own words, the teachers without a Ph D would be looked at as if they were streaking. But the amusing thing is that he never applied for the regular promotions. Even when the administration sent messages to him to send the application as they couldn’t promote him without a formal application, he kept quite.  He told us that the university should not expect a teacher to apply for the promotion and should promote the deserved. He took voluntary retirement two years earlier than the date of superannuation as he found that the lecture he had to deliver in the class began to get conclude by half an hour and then he found nothing to speak and teach.

                In the last years he preferred more to be a listener and I stopped meeting him when he confessed to me that he had lost the zest for living and got engulfed by the silence. He was never sociable and in the last five or six years he was confined to his eight into ten feet dwelling spending most of the time watching TV and listening music. When he was found fallen unconscious on the staircase he was taken to the hospital. During a fit of semi conscious state he became furious with the doctors as he found his beard cleanly shaved. A relative took him to Vijayawada for better treatment but he never returned to Tirupati. Most of the people of Tirupati don’t know that a Gandharva(faerie) called Vaddera Chandidas came here, spent the prime period of his life and left it as silently as a cloud.

                                              ---                MADHURANTHAKAM NARENDRA

            (The writer is a bilingual short story writer, novelist and poet, who writes in Telugu and English)