India

by Shashi Tharoor

“He doesn’t mind,” she whispered back. “Why should you?”

  And it was true that Charlis probably ate on the floor in his own home.

  When he had finished, a mug of water was given to him on the back porch, so that he could wash his hands without stepping into our bathroom. And the plantain leaf was thrown away: no plate to wash.

  We returned to the game, and now it was my turn to miskick. The ball cleared the low wall at one end of the courtyard, hit the side of the well, teetered briefly on the edge, and fell in with a splash.

  It had happened before. “Go and get it, da,” Balettan languidly commanded one of the kids. The well was designed to be climbed into: bricks jutted out from the inside wall at regular intervals, and others had been removed to provide strategic footholds. But this was a slippery business: since the water levels in the well rose and fell, the inside surface was pretty slimy, and many of those who’d gone in to retrieve a floating object, or a bucket that had slipped its rope, had ended up taking an unplanned dip. The young cousin who had received Balettan’s instruction hesitated, staring apprehensively into the depths of the well.

  “Don’t worry,” Charlis said quietly. “I’ll get it.” He moved toward the edge of the well.

  “No!” There was nothing languid now about Balettan’s tone; we could all hear the alarm in his voice. “I’ll do it myself.” And Charlis, one half-raised foot poised to climb onto the well, looked at him, his face drained of expression, comprehension slowly burning into his cheeks. Balettan ran forward, roughly pushing aside the boy who had been afraid to go, and vaulted into the well.

  I looked at Rani-valiamma, who had been watching the game.

  “Balettan’s right,” she said. “Do you think anyone would have drunk water at our house again if Charlis had gone into our well?”

  * * *

  Years passed; school holidays, and trips to Kerala, came and went. Governments fell and were replaced in Kerala, farm laborers were earning the highest daily wage in the country, and my almost toothless grandmother was sporting a chalk-white set of new dentures under her smile. Yet the house seemed much the same as before. A pair of ceiling fans had been installed, in the two rooms where family members congregated; a radio crackled with the news from Delhi; a tap made its appearance in the bathroom, though the pipe attached to it led from the same old well. These improvements, and the familiarity that came from repeated visits, made the old privations bearable. Kerala seemed less of a penance with each passing year.

  Charlis was a regular member of the group now, admitted to our cardplaying sessions on the porch outside, joining us on our expeditions to the cinema in the nearest town. But fun and games seemed to hold a decreasing attraction for Charlis. He was developing a reputation as something of an intellectual. He would ask me, in painstaking textbook English, about something he had read about the great wide world outside, and listen attentively to my reply. I was, in the quaint vocabulary of the villagers, “convent-educated,” a label they applied to anyone who emerged from the elite schools in which Christian missionaries served their foreign Lord by teaching the children of the Indian lordly. It was assumed that I knew more about practically everything than anyone in the village; but all I knew was what I had been taught from books, whereas they had learned from life. Even as I wallowed in their admiration, I couldn’t help feeling their lessons were the more difficult, and the more valuable.

  Balettan dropped out of school and began turning his attention to what remained of the family lands. It seemed to me that his rough edges became rougher as the calluses grew hard on his hands and feet. He had less time for us now; in his late teens he was already a full-fledged farmer, sitting sucking a straw between his teeth and watching the boys kick a ball around. If he disapproved of Charlis’s growing familiarity with all of us, though, he did not show it — not even when Charlis asked me one day to go into town with him to see the latest Bombay blockbuster.

  I thought Charlis might have hoped I could explain the Hindi dialogue to him, since Keralites learned Hindi only as a third language from teachers who knew it, at best, as a second. But when we got to the movie theater, Charlis was not disappointed to discover the next two screenings were fully sold out. “I am really wanting to talk,” he said in English, leading me to an eatery across the street.

  The Star of India, as the board outside proclaimed, was a “military hotel”; in other words, it served meat, which my grandmother did not. “I am thinking you might be missing it,” Charlis said, ushering me to a chair. It was only when the main dish arrived that I realized that I was actually sitting and eating at the same table with Charlis for the first time.

  If he was conscious of this, Charlis didn’t show it. He began talking, hesitantly at first, then with growing fluency and determination, about his life and his ambitions. His face shone when he talked of his father, who beat him with a belt whenever he showed signs of neglecting his books. “You can do better than I did,” he would say before bringing the whip down on Charlis. “You will do better.”

  And now Charlis was aiming higher than anyone in his family, in his entire community, had ever done before. He was planning to go to university.

  “Listen, Charlis,” I said gently, not wanting to discourage him. “You know it’s not going to be easy. I know you’re first in class and everything, but that’s in the village. Don’t forget you’ll be competing for places with kids from the big cities. From the — convents.”

  “I am knowing that,” Charlis replied simply. Then, from the front pocket of his shirt, he drew out a battered notebook filled with small, tightly packed curlicues of Malayalam lettering in blue ink, interspersed with phrases and sentences in English in the same precise hand. “Look,” he said, jabbing at a page. “The miserable hath no other medicine / But only hope. — Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, III.i.2,” I read. And a little lower down, “Men at some time are masters of their fates; / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Charlis had underlined these words.

  “Whenever I am reading something that inspires me, I am writing it down in this book,” Charlis said proudly. “Shakespeare is great man, isn’t it?”

  His Malayalam was of course much better, but in English Charlis seemed to cast off an invisible burden that had less to do with the language than with its social assumptions. In speaking it, in quoting it, Charlis seemed to be entering another world, a heady place of foreign ideas and unfamiliar expressions, a strange land in which the old rules no longer applied.

  “’For the Colonel’s Lady an’ Judy O’Grady,’” he declaimed at one point, “’are sisters under their skins!’ — Rudyard Kipling,” he added. “Is that how you are pronouncing it?”

  “Rudyard, Roodyard, I haven’t a clue,” I confessed. “But who cares, Charlis? He’s just an old imperialist fart. What does anything he ever wrote have to do with any of us today, in independent India?”

  Charlis looked surprised, then slightly averted his eyes. “But are we not,” he asked softly, “are we not brothers under our skins?”

  “Of course,” I replied, too quickly. And it was I who couldn’t meet his gaze.

  The following summer, I was sitting down to my first meal of the holiday at my grandmother’s dining table when Rani-valiamma said, “Charlis was looking for you.”

  “Really?” I was genuinely pleased, as much by Charlis’s effort as by the fact that it could be mentioned so casually. “What did he want?”

  “He came to give you the news personally,” Rani-valiamma said. “He’s been admitted to Trivandrum University.”

  “Wow!” I exclaimed. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

  “Untouchable quota,” honked the ever-present Kunjunni-mama, whose pencil-line mustache had gone from bold black to sleek silver without his ever having done a stroke of work in his life.

  “Reserved seats for the Children of God. Why, Chandrasekhara Menon’s son couldn’t get in after all the money they spent on
sending him to boarding school, and here Charlis is on his way to University.”

  “The village panchayat council is organizing a felicitation for him tomorrow,” Rani-valiamma said. “Charlis wanted you to come, Neel.”

  “Of course I will,” I responded. “We must all go.”

  “All?” snorted Kunjunni-mama, who was incapable of any action that could be called affirmative. “To felicitate Charlis? Speak for your self, boy. If you want to attend an Untouchable love-in organized by the Communists who claim to represent our village, more’s the pity. But don’t expect to drag any members of the Nair community with you.”

  “I’ll come with you, Neel,” said a quiet voice by my side. It was Ram-valiamma, her ever-obliging manner transformed into something approaching determination.

  “And me,” chirped a younger cousin, emboldened. “May I go too, Amma?” asked another. And by the next evening I had assembled a sizable delegation from our extended family to attend the celebration for Charlis.

  Kunjunni-mama and Balettan sat at the table, nursing their cups of tea, and watched us all troop out. Balettan was silent, his manner distant rather than disapproving. As I passed them, I heard the familiar honk: “Felicitation, my foot.”

  The speeches had begun when we arrived, and our entry sparked something of a commotion in the meeting hall, as Charlis’s relatives and the throng of well-wishers from his community made way for us, whispers of excitement and consternation rippling like a current through the room. I thought I saw a look of sheer delight shine like a sunburst on Charlis’s face, but that may merely have been a reaction to hearing the panchayat president say, “The presence of all of you here today proves that Charlis’s achievement is one of which the entire village is proud.” We applauded that, knowing our arrival had given some meaning to that trite declaration.

  After the speeches, and the garlanding, and Charlis’s modest reply, the meeting broke up. I wanted to congratulate Charlis myself, but he was surrounded by his own people, all proud and happy and laughing. We made our way toward the door, and then I heard his voice.

  “Neel! Wait!” he called out. I turned, to see him pulling himself away from the crush and advancing toward me with a packet in his hands. “You mustn’t leave without this.”

  He stretched out the packet toward me, beaming. I opened it and peered in. Orange slabs of halwa quivered inside.

  “It’s the last bag,” Charlis said, the smile never fading from his face.

  “My father sold the shop to pay for me to go to university. We’re all moving to Trivandrum.” I looked at him, finding no words. He pushed the halwa at me. “I wanted you to have it.”

  I took the bag from him without a word. We finished the halwa before we got home.

  * * *

  Years passed. Men landed on the moon, a woman became prime minister, wars were fought; in other countries, coups and revolutions brought change (or attempted to), while in India elections were won and lost and things changed (or didn’t). I couldn’t go down to Kerala every time my parents did; my college holidays didn’t always coincide with Dad’s leave from the office. When I did manage a visit, it wasn’t the same as before. I would come for a few days, be indulged by Rani-valiamma, and move on. There was not that much to do. Rani-valiamma had started studying for a teacher’s training diploma. My grandmother spent most of her time reading the scriptures and chewing areca, usually simultaneously. Balettan, tough and taciturn, was the man of the house; now that agriculture was his entire life, we had even less to say to each other than ever. My cousins were scattered in several directions; a new generation of kids played football in the yard. No one had news of Charlis.

  I began working in an advertising agency in Bombay, circulating in a brittle, showy world that could not have had less in common with Vanganassery. When I went to the village the talk was of pesticides and irrigation, of the old rice-levy and the new, government-subsidized fertilizer, and, inevitably, of the relentless pace of land reform, which was taking away the holdings of traditional landlords and giving them to their tenants. It was clear that Balettan did not understand much of this, and that he had not paid a great deal of attention to what was happening.

  “Haven’t you received any notification from the authorities, Balettan?” I asked him one day, when his usual reticence seemed only to mask ineffectually the mounting level of anxiety in his eyes.

  “Some papers came,” he said in a tone whose aggressiveness betrayed his deep shame at his own inadequacy. “But do I have time to read them? I’m a busy man. Do I run a farm or push papers like a clerk?”

  “Show them to Neel,” Kunjunni-mama suggested, and as soon as I opened the first envelope I realized Balettan, high-school dropout and traditionalist, had left it too late.

  “What are these lands here, near Kollengode?”

  “They’re ours, of course.”

  “Not anymore, Balettan. Who’s T. Krishnan Nair, son of Kandath Narayananunni Nair?”

  “He farms them for us, ever since Grandfather died. I farm here at Vanganassery, and Krishnan Nair takes care of Kollengode, giving us his dues after each harvest. It’s the only way. I can’t be at both places at the same time, can I?”

  “Well, it says here he’s just been registered as the owner of those lands. You were given fourteen days to show cause as to why his claim should not have been admitted. Why didn’t you file an objection, Balettan?”

  We were all looking at him. “How can they say Krishnan Nair owns our land? Why, everybody knows it’s our land. It’s been ours ever since anyone can remember. It was ours before Grandmother was born.”

  “It’s not ours anymore, Balettan. The government has just taken it away.”

  Balettan shifted uneasily in his chair, a haunted, uncomprehending look on his face. “But they can’t do that,” he said. “Can they?”

  “They can, Balettan,” I told him sadly. “You know they can.”

  “We’ve got to do something,” honked Kunjunni-mama with uncharacteristic urgency. “Neel, you’ve got to do something.”

  “Me? What can I do? I’m a Bombay-wallah. I know less about all this than any of you.”

  “Perhaps,” admitted Kunjunni-mama. “But you’re an educated man. You can read and understand these documents. You can speak to the Collector. He’s the top IAS man in the district, probably another city type like you, convent-educated. You can speak to him in English and explain what has happened. Come on, Neel. You’ve got to do it.”

  “I don’t know,” I said dubiously. The advertising life had not brought me into contact with any senior Indian Administrative Service officers. I hadn’t the slightest idea what I would say to the Collector when I met him.

  And then I saw the look in Balettan’s eyes. He had grown up knowing instinctively the rules and rituals of village society, the cycles of the harvest, how to do the right thing and what was never done. He could, without a second thought, climb trees that would make most of us dizzy, descend into wells, stand knee-deep in the slushy water of a paddy field to sprout grain into the world. But all these were skills he was born with, rhythms that sang in his blood like the whisper of his mother’s breath. He wore a mundu around his waist, coaxed his buffalo across the fields, and treated his laborers and his family as his ancestors had done for thousands of years. He was good at the timeless realities of village India; but India, even village India, was no longer a timeless place. “Don’t you understand anything, stupid?” he had asked me all those years ago; and in his eyes I saw what I imagined he must have seen, at that time, in mine.

  “I’ll go,” I said, as Balettan averted his eyes. In relief, perhaps, or in gratitude. It didn’t matter which.

  * * *

  The Collector’s office in Palghat, the district capital, was already besieged by supplicants when I arrived. Two greasy clerks presided over his antechamber, their desks overflowing with papers loosely bound in crumbling files held together with string. Three phones rang intermittently, and were ans
wered in a wide variety of tones, ranging from the uncooperative to the unctuous, depending on who was calling. People crowded round the desks, seeking attention, thrusting slips of paper forward, folding hands in entreaty, shouting to be heard. Occasionally a paper was dealt with and a khaki-uniformed peon sent for to carry it somewhere; sometimes, people were sent away, though most seemed to be waved toward the walls where dozens were already waiting, weary resignation on their faces, for their problems to be dealt with. All eyes were on the closed teak door at the corner, bearing the brass nameplate M. C. THEKKOTE, I.A.S., behind which their destinies were no doubt being determined.

  “It’s hopeless,” I said to Balettan, who had accompanied me. “I told you we should have tried to get an appointment. We’ll be here all day.”

  “How would we have got an appointment?” Balettan asked, reasonably, since we did not yet have a phone in the village. “No, this is the only way. You go and give them your card.”

  I did not share Balettan’s faith in the magical properties of this small rectangular advertisement of my status, but I battled my way to the front of one of the desks and thrust it at an indifferent clerk.

  “Please take this to the Collector-saare,” I said, trying to look both important and imploring. “I must see him.”

  The clerk seemed unimpressed by the colorful swirls and curlicues that proclaimed my employment by AdAge, Bombay’s smartest new agency. “You and everyone else,” he said skeptically, putting the card aside. “Collector-saare very busy today. You come back tomorrow, we will see.”

  At this point Balettan’s native wisdom asserted itself. He insinuated a five-rupee note into the clerks palm. “Send the card in,” he said. “It’s important.”

  The clerk was instantly responsive. “I am doing as you wish,” he said grudgingly. “But you will still have to wait. Collector-saare is so so very busy today.”

  “You’ve told us that already,” I replied. “We’ll wait.”

  A peon wandered in, bearing tea for the clerks. Once the man at the desk had satisfied himself that his tea was sugared to his taste, he added my card to the pile of papers he gave the peon to take in to the Collector. “It will take some time,” he added curtly.