India

by Shashi Tharoor

  I couldn’t see why anyone else found this funny, but I was soon sent off to wash my hands. I sat down to my dosas feeling as frustrated as a vegetarian at a kebab-shop.

  “Who is Charlis, anyway?” I asked as my mother served me the mild chutney she made specially since I couldn’t handle the fiery spiced version everyone else ate.

  “I don’t know, dear, just a boy from the village,” she responded. “Now finish your dosas, the adults have to eat.”

  “Charlis is the Prince of Wales, didn’t you know?” honked Kunjunni-mama, enjoying himself hugely. “I thought you went to a convent school, Neel.”

  “First of all, only girls go to convent schools,” I responded hotly. “And anyway the Prince of Wales is called Charles, not Charlis.” I shot him a look of pure hatred, but he was completely unfazed. He soaked it in as a paddy field would a rainstorm, and honked some more.

  “Charlis, Charles, what’s the difference to an illiterate Untouchable with airs above his station? Anyway, that’s how it sounded in Malayalam, and that’s how he wrote it. Charlis. So you see how the Prince of Wales was born in Vanganassery.” He exploded into self-satisfied mirth, his honks suggesting he was inhaling his own pencil-line mustache. I hadn’t understood what he meant, but I vowed not to seek any further clarification from him.

  My mother came to my rescue. I could see that her interest was piqued. “But why Charles?” she paused in her serving and asked Kunjunni-mama. “Are they Christians?”

  “Christians?” Kunjunni-mama honked again. “My dear chechi, what do these people know of religion? Do they have any culture, any traditions? One of them, that cobbler fellow, Mandan, named his sons Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Can you imagine? The fellow didn’t even know that ‘Mahatma’ was a title and ‘Nehru’ a family surname. His brats were actually registered in school as M. Mahatma Gandhi and M. Jawaharlal Nehru. So of course when this upstart scavenger shopkeeper has to name his offspring, he went one better. Forget nationalism, he turned to the British royal family. So what if they had Christian names? So what if he couldn’t pronounce them? You think Charlis is bad enough? He has two sisters, Elizabeth and Anne. Of course everyone in the village calls them Eli and Ana.”

  This time even I joined in the laughter: I had enough Malayalam to know that Eli meant “rat” and Ana meant “elephant.” But a Bombayite sense of fairness asserted itself.

  “It doesn’t matter what his name is,” I said firmly. “Charlis seems a nice boy. He went into the rubbish heap to get our ball. I liked him.”

  “Nice boy!” Kunjunni-mama’s tone was dismissive, and this time there was no laughter in his honk. “Rubbish heaps are where they belong. They’re not clean. They don’t wash. They have dirty habits.”

  “What dirty habits?” I asked, shaking off my mother’s restraining hand. “Who’s they?”

  “Eat your food,” Kunjunni-mama said to me, adding, to no one in particular, “and now this Communist government wants to put them in our schools. With our children.” He snorted. “They’ll be drinking out of our wells next.”

  * * *

  A few days later, the kids at home all decided to go to the local stream for a dip. On earlier Kerala holidays my mother had firmly denied me permission to go along, sure that if I didn’t drown I’d catch a cold; but now I was older, I’d learned to swim, and I was capable of toweling myself dry, so I was allowed the choice. It seemed a fun idea, and in any case there was nothing better to do at home: I’d long since finished reading the couple of Biggles books I’d brought along. I set out with a sense of adventure.

  We walked through dusty, narrow lanes, through the village, Balettan in the lead, half a dozen of the cousins following. For a while the houses we passed seemed to be those of relatives and friends; the kids waved cheerful greetings to women hanging up their washing, girls plaiting or picking lice out of each other’s hair, bare-chested men in white mundus sitting magisterially in easy chairs, perusing the day’s Mathrubhumi. Then the lane narrowed and the whitewashed, tile-roofed houses with verdant backyards gave way to thatched huts squeezed tightly together, their interiors shrouded in a darkness from which wizened crones emerged stooping through low-ceilinged doorways, the holes in their alarmingly stretched earlobes gaping like open mouths. The ground beneath our feet, uneven and stony, hurt to walk on, and a stale odor hung in the air, a compound of rotting vegetation and decaying flesh. Despair choked my breath like smoke. I began to wish I hadn’t come along.

  At last we left the village behind, and picked our way down a rocky, moss-covered slope to the stream. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this, a meandering rivulet that flowed muddily through the fields. At the water’s edge, on a large rock nearby, women were beating the dirt out of their saris; in the distance, a man squatted at a bend in the stream, picking his teeth and defecating. My cousins peeled off their shirts and ran into the water.

  “Come on, Neel,” Balettan exhorted me with a peremptory wave of the hand. “Don’t be a sissy. It’s not cold.”

  “Just don’t feel like it,” I mumbled. “It’s okay. You go ahead. I’ll watch.”

  They tried briefly to persuade me to change my mind, then left me to my own devices. I stood on the shore looking at them, heard their squeals of laughter, then looked away at the man who had completed his ablutions and was scooping water from the river to wash himself. Downstream from him, my cousins ducked their heads underwater. I quickly averted my gaze.

  That was when I saw him. Charlis was sitting on a rocky overhang, a clean shirt over his mundu, a book in his hand. But his eyes weren’t on it. He was looking down at the stream, where my cousins were playing.

  I clambered over the rocks to him. When he spotted me he seemed to smile-in recognition, then look around anxiously. But there was no one else about, and he relaxed visibly. “Neel,” he said, smiling. “Aren’t you swimming today?”

  I shook my head. “Water’s dirty,” I said.

  “Not dirty,” he replied in Malayalam. “The stream comes from a sacred river. Removes all pollution.”

  I started to retort, then changed my mind. “So why don’t you swim?” I asked.

  “Ah, I do,” he said. “But not here.” His eyes avoided mine, but seemed to take in the stream, the washerwomen, my cousins. “Not now.”

  Bits of the half-understood conversation from the dining table floated awkwardly back into my mind. I changed the subject. “It was nice of you to get our ball back for us that day,” I said.

  “Ah, it was nothing.” He smiled unexpectedly, his pockmarks creasing across his face. “My father beat me for it when I got home, though. I had ruined a clean shirt. Just after my bath.”

  “But I thought you people didn’t —” I found myself saying. “I’m sorry,” I finished lamely.

  “Didn’t what?” he asked evenly, but without looking at me. He was clearly some years older than me, but not much bigger. I wondered whether he was scared of me, and why.

  “Nothing,” I replied. “I’m really sorry your father beat you.”

  “Ah, that’s all right. He does it all the time. It’s for my own good.”

  “What does your father do?”

  Charlis became animated by my interest. “He has a shop,” he said, a light in his eyes. “In our part of the village. The Nair families don’t come there, but he sells all sorts of nice things. Provisions and things. And on Thursdays, you know what he has? The best halwa in Vanganassery.”

  “Really? I like halwa.” It was, in fact, the only Indian dessert I liked; Bombay had given me a taste for ice cream and chocolate rather than the deep-fried laddoos and bricklike Mysoor-paak that were the Kerala favorites.

  “You like halwa?” Charlis clambered to his feet. “Come on, I’ll get you some.”

  This time it was my turn to hesitate. “No, thanks,” I said, looking at my cousins cavorting in the water. “I don’t think I should. They’ll worry about me. And besides, I don’t know my way about the village
.”

  “That’s okay,” Charlis said. “I’ll take you home. Come on.” He saw the expression on my face. “It’s really good halwa,” he added.

  That was enough for a nine-year-old. “Wait for me,” I said, and ran down to the water’s edge. “See you at home!” I called out to the others.

  Balettan was the only one who noticed me. “Sure you can find your way back?” he asked, as my cousins splashed around him, one leaping onto his shoulders.

  “I’ll be okay,” I replied, and ran back up the slope as Balettan went under.

  * * *

  Charlis left me at the bend in our lane, where all I had to do was to walk through a relative’s yard to reach my grandmother’s house. He would not come any farther, and I knew better than to insist. I walked slowly to the house, my mind full of the astonishment with which his father had greeted my presence in his shop, the taste of his sugary, milky tea still lingering on my palate, my hands full of the orange-colored wobbling slabs of halwa he had thrust upon me.

  “Neel, my darling!” my mother exclaimed as I walked in. “Where have you been? I’ve been so worried about you.”

  “Look what I’ve got!” I said proudly, holding out the halwa. “And there’s enough for everyone.”

  “Where did you get that?” Balettan asked, a white thorthumundu, a thin Kerala towel, in his hand, his hair still wet from his recent swim.

  “Charlis gave it to me,” I said. “I went to his father’s shop. They —”

  “You did what?” Balettan’s rage was frightening. He advanced toward me.

  “I — I —”

  “Went to Charlis’s shop?” He loomed over me, the towel draped over his shoulder making him look even older and more threatening. “Took food from Untouchables?” I began to shrink back from him. “Give that to me!”

  “I won’t!” I snatched the halwa away from his hands, and as he lunged, I turned and ran, the precious sweet sticky in my grasp. But he was too fast for me; I had barely reached the yard when he caught up, seized me roughly by the shoulders, and turned me around to face him.

  “We don’t do this here, understand?” he breathed fiercely. “This isn’t Bombay.” He pried my hands apart. The halwa gleamed in my palms. “Drop it,” he commanded.

  “No,” I wanted to say, but the word would not emerge. I wanted to cry out for my mother, but she did not come out of the house.

  “Drop it,” Balettan repeated, his voice a whiplash across what remained of my resistance.

  Slowly I opened my hands outward in a gesture of submission. The orange slabs slid reluctantly off them. It seemed to me they took an age to fall, their gelatinous surfaces clinging to the soft skin of my palms until the last possible moment. Then they were gone, fallen, into the dust.

  Balettan looked at them on the ground for a moment, then at me, and spat upon them where they lay. “The dogs can have them,” he barked. He kicked more dust over them, then pulled me by the arm back toward the house. “Don’t you ever do this again.”

  I burst into tears then, and at last the words came, tripping over themselves as I stumbled back into the house. “I hate you! All of you! You’re horrible and mean and cruel and I’ll never come back here as long as I live!”

  * * *

  But of course I was back the next year; I hardly had any choice in the matter. For my parents, first-generation migrants to the big city, this was the vital visit home, to their own parents and siblings, to the friends and family they had left behind; it renewed them, it returned them to a sense of themselves, it maintained their connection to the past. I just came along because I was too young to be left behind, indeed too young to be allowed the choice.

  In the year that had passed since my last visit, there had been much ferment in Kerala. Education was now universal and compulsory and free, so all sorts of children were flocking to school who had never been able to go before. There was talk of land reform, and giving title to tenant farmers; I understood nothing of this, but saw the throngs around men with microphones on the roadside, declaiming angry harangues I could not comprehend. None of this seemed, however, to have much to do with us, or to affect the unchanging rhythms of life at my grandmother’s house.

  My cousins were numerous and varied, the children of my mother’s brothers and sisters and also of her cousins, who lived in the neighboring houses; sometimes the relationship was less clear than that, but as they all ran about together and slept side by side like a camping army on mats on the floor of my grandmother’s thalam, it was difficult to tell who was a first cousin and who an uncle’s father-in-law’s sister’s grandson. After all, it was also their holiday season, and my parents’ return was an occasion for everyone to congregate in the big house. On any given day, with my cousins joined by other children from the village, there could be as many as a dozen kids playing in the courtyard or going to the stream or breaking up for cards on the back porch. Sometimes I joined them, but sometimes, taking advantage of the general confusion, I would slip away unnoticed, declining to make the effort to scale the barriers of language and education and attitude that separated us, and sit alone with a book. Occasionally someone would come and look for me. Most often, that someone was my aunt Rani-valiamma.

  As a young widow, she didn’t have much of a life. Deprived of the status that a husband would have given her, she seemed to walk on the fringes of the house; it had been whispered by her late husband’s family that only the bad luck her stars had brought into his life could account for his fatal heart attack at the age of thirty-six, and a whiff of stigma clung to her like a cloying perfume she could never quite wash off. Remarriage was out of the question, nor could the family allow her to make her own way in the world; so she returned to the village house she had left as a bride, and tried to lose herself in the routines of my grandmother’s household. She sublimated her misfortune in random and frequent acts of kindness, of which I was a favored beneficiary. She would bring me well-sugared lime-and-water from the kitchen without being asked, and whenever one of us brought down a green mango from the ancient tree with a lucky throw of a stone, she could be counted upon to return with it chopped up and marinated in just the right combination of salt and red chili powder to drive my taste buds to ecstasy.

  One day Rani-valiamma and I were upstairs, eating deviled raw mango and looking out on the kids playing soccer below, when I saw something and nearly choked. “Isn’t that Charlis?” I asked, pointing to the skinny boy who had just failed to save a goal.

  “Could be,” she replied indifferently. “Let me see — yes, that’s Charlis.”

  “But he’s playing in our yard! I remember last year —”

  “That was last year,” Rani-valiamma said, and I knew that change had come to the village.

  But not enough of it. When the game was over, the Nair kids trooped in as usual to eat, without Charlis. When I asked innocently where he was, it was Balettan, inevitably, who replied.

  “We play with him at school, and we play with him outside,” he said. “But playing stops at the front door.”

  I didn’t pursue the matter. I had learned that whenever any of the Untouchable tradespeople came to the house, they were dealt with outside.

  With each passing vacation, though, the changes became more and more apparent. For years my grandmother, continuing a tradition handed down over generations, had dispensed free medication (mainly aspirins and cough syrup) once a week to the poor villagers who queued for it; then a real clinic was established in the village by the government, and her amateur charity was no longer needed. Electricity came to Vanganassery: my uncle strung up a brilliant neon light above the dining table, and the hurricane lamps began to disappear, along with the tin cans of kerosene from which they were fueled. The metal vessels in the bathroom were replaced by shiny red plastic mugs. A toilet was installed in the outhouse for my father’s, and my, convenience. And one year, one day, quite naturally, Charlis stepped into the house with the other kids after a game.

&nb
sp; No one skipped a beat; it was as if everyone had agreed to pretend there was nothing unusual. Charlis stood around casually, laughing and chatting; some of the kids sat to eat, others awaited their turn. No one invited Charlis to sit or to eat, and he made no move himself to do either. Then those who had eaten rose and washed their hands and joined the chatter, while those who had been with Charlis took their places at the table. Still Charlis stood and talked, his manner modest and respectful, until everyone but he had finished eating, and then they all strolled out again to continue their game.

  “Charlis hasn’t eaten,” I pointed out to the womenfolk.

  “I know, child, but what can we do?” Rani-valiamma asked. “He can’t sit at our table or be fed on our plates. Even you know that.”

  “It isn’t fair,” I said, but without belligerence. What she had stated was, I knew, like a law of nature. Even the servants would not wash a plate off which an Untouchable had eaten.

  “You know,” honked Kunjunni-mama, tucking into his third helping, “They say that boy is doing quite well at school. Very well, in fact.”

  “He stood first in class last term,” a younger cousin chimed in.

  “First!” I exclaimed. “And Balettan failed the year, didn’t he?”

  “Now, why would you be asking that?” chortled Kunjunni-mama meaningfully, slapping his thigh with his free hand.

  I ignored the question and turned to my aunt. “He’s smarter than all of us, and we can’t even give him something to eat?”

  Rani-valiamma saw the expression on my face and squeezed my hand. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I’ll think of something.”

  She did; and the next time Charlis walked in, he was served food on a plantain leaf on the floor, near the back door. I was too embarrassed to hover near him as I had intended to, but he seemed to eat willingly enough on his own.

  “It’s just not right!” I whispered to her as we watched him from a discreet distance.