Temporary People

by Deepak Unnikrishnan

  Sarama, understanding, knelt low, pressed her palms to Surpanakha’s feet, and whispered, “It isn’t pity, child, your wounds must be tended to. Let me. Let the old one through. I knew Tataka, I knew Tataka.”

  At the mention of her grandmother’s name, Surpanakha relented, allowing herself to be touched and held. And there they sat, the two of them, Sarama tenderly washing Surpanakha’s wounds and picking out larvae, as Surpanakha, tired and overwhelmed, fell asleep. The following morning, when the two armies rode out to battle, the beginning of war, Sarama searched for Surpanakha. She had slipped away. The two would never meet again.

  When Ravana was finally slain, the war over, our ancestor Sarama stepped out of the palace grounds and walked towards the battlefield, followed by concerned wives and children, family of the missing soldiers in Ravana’s army.

  The battlefield reeked of the dead, stinking of dried blood, piss, shit, men, demons, monkeys, bears, pachyderms, horses, and giant birds. The wounded lay everywhere, waiting to die or be rescued; rakshashas called out for help, dying monkeys and bears pleaded for water, while other beasts of war¬¬—elephants with no trunks and crushed legs, the horses with broken backs, raptors with torn beaks and burnt wings—squirmed, struggling to breathe. And amidst the wreckage were anxious wives and children, picking through the rubble, calling out and hunting for loved ones, frantic to find bodies to burn or salvage, as the four-eyed dogs of Yama prowled the dead zone with ease.

  Into this mayhem walked victorious Rama, followed by his brother Lakshmana, the new king of Lanka, Vibhishana, the monkey king Sugriva, and fellow monkey Hanuman, whose glowing tail lit Lanka for days.

  Grateful for their support and relieved with victory, a visibly tired Rama, close to tears, invited the bears and giant vultures who participated in battle to feast on the carrion, their deserved spoils of war.

  “As the soldiers celebrated,” said Muthassi, “Rama and the others started making their way to the palace gates. For Sita. But all is never as it seems. Behind the scenes lived the uglier underbelly of war, unscrupulous soldiers from Rama’s army who scoured the conquered land like parasites, interested in loot and women, the dirtier spoils of war.”

  But virtuous warriors also fought on Rama’s side. Many, although they themselves were injured, offered to help set pyres for the dead, finding sages and priests to perform the last rites quickly. Some opted to sit with the children of dead rakshashas, while their mothers searched for their fathers. Others didn’t care; they pillaged, raped.

  Even Sarama became prey to such wanton feasting, grabbed by a soldier from Sugriva’s camp; bent with rage, The Male, our ancestor, ferociously and brutally violated her on the very battlefield where, moments ago, Ravana’s ten heads scanned for Rama, his heart still healthy with life and blood.

  Sarama watched the creature forcing himself on her, dirtied from war, raging because of it. She paid attention to his hands, callused from bridge building, tired of killing, tired from killing. She felt pity. And then she was reminded of the war, of Surpanakha’s mutilation, of Ravana’s insistence on punishing the brothers by punishing the young princess instead, of how after the loss of so much life, one hoped the war was won by a just lord and his virtuous army. And right there, as the creature shuddered inside her, spilling his seed into her old womb, she howled with fury, screaming with such force that she tore a hole in the monkey’s chest, exposing his heart. Sarama reached in, taking hold of his beating red organ in the palm of her hand as it continued to pump blood. The monkey—The Male, our ancestor—alarmed, looked at Sarama, his body still trembling.

  Meeting his eye, Sarama slowly crushed his heart.

  In the celebratory din, no one noticed. Nearby, giant vultures tore through an elephant as it waited to die.

  She picked herself up quickly, forgetting in her haste to wipe the mud, spittle, and blood off her body. She would deal with the shock later. For now, she headed for the palace gates. She needed to be there. In the garden. When Rama received Sita. She needed to see the end to all this madness.

  Sarama felt a sense of dread when Rama didn’t meet Sita immediately. Even Vibhishana seemed embarrassed when he greeted the lady on Rama’s behalf, requesting that she bathe and bedecking her in finery. Her lord would see her then.

  And when they walked her out, and Rama stood in front of his wife like a guest, a stranger, Sarama sighed. Surpanakha’s revenge was complete. Rama had shunned Sita publicly. Neither would fully recover from the hurt. Ayodhya would never let them forget it.

  Sarama understood quite well why Rama did what he did. As she waited for Sita to appear in public, even she heard and recoiled from the spite with which soldiers from Rama’s own army—men, monkeys, bears, and other half-beasts he had commanded only a few hours ago—discussed the young princess’s lost virtue. When a group of them were hushed, the gossiping would stop, only for the cackling to resume soon after. In Ayodhya, too, it would be the same. Yet when Sita stepped into the lit pyre, not a sound was made. You could only hear burning. The crackle of embers. The burning of virtue and the fury it brings.

  And as Sarama stared at Sita, she spied tears of rage through the flames—fire that refused to touch the sullied princess of Ayodhya, as though it were afraid. She, Sita, burnt hotter than fire, swallowing fire itself, her anger burning through fire, scorching even Agni, who pleaded with Rama to accept his virtuous queen, whose purity, if questioned further, would burn every living thing into oblivion.

  When Rama was appeased, and the test, the public trial, over, the fire extinguished, the young couple faced each other once more, as husband and wife, Crown Prince and Princess of Ayodhya. Sarama did not wait to see Rama walk towards his absolved wife.

  Sarama, our ancestor, didn’t wait at all. She started to walk. Even as shouts of “Long Live!” burst across Lanka, as garlands rained down from the gods.

  She walked, disgusted, away from Lanka, refusing to stop. She could have used her powers to transport herself elsewhere. She could still fly. But she decided against it. She wanted to walk, inhaling the mayhem, recalling the egos that helped mutilate two women and burn Lanka.

  She stopped only when she neared the bridge that the creature who raped her helped build—The Male, our ancestor, the father of the child she would conceive. She stared long and hard at the beach.

  The water was calm but red, the shore quiet, yet it stank of decomposing flesh. Seagulls circled the shoreline, rats started to surface. Sarama stepped forward, didn’t look back. Not even once. The war was over but she believed little that was worthwhile had been salvaged. She began to walk across the bridge. The salty wind would ravage her face but she didn’t care. The sound of the sea kept her company until she reached the end.

  “And when she reached the other side,” Muthassi said, finally, “Sarama, our ancestor, her belly was swollen.”

  CHABTER FOUR

  VEED

  THE MONTH I BEGAN masturbating into socks, my maternal grandmother, Amooma, died. Amma was her firstborn and I was her oldest grandchild. This meant Amma and I had to board a plane bound for Kochi in order for Amma to take charge of the household and make arrangements. My little sister would also be traveling with us. At the airport, Acchan hugged Amma, the only time my parents have held each other in public.

  Before adolescent impulses possessed me like a demon, I used to be an obedient little boy, interested in doing errands for his mother.

  Amma used to regularly send me to the corner store to buy produce. Armed with a list I committed to memory, I would buy vegetables, juice, dairy, and dessert. Everything on credit. I would carry each item piecemeal and place them all in front of Uncle Saleem, the proprietor, when he would note the number of items, write them in his ledger, making up prices at random, and bag the items as he masticated a toothpick. He would, years later, flee the country after defaulting on bank loans, but not before falling out with my father over owed dues.

  When I first met Uncle Saleem, he would repeatedly ask me
where I was from. At first, I thought he was asking for our flat number so he could make note of it in his ledger. “805,” I told him.

  “No!” he laughed. “Veed? Veed, where? Where aare you from?” The English equivalent of “veed” is “home,” or “place.” In Malayalam, my parents’ tongue, “veed” encompasses a family’s soul, where ancestors are cremated, where the soil remembers your footprint. But in translation, as “veed” becomes “home,” the word’s power has ebbed.

  “I am from Trichur,” I remember telling Uncle Saleem after I checked with Amma.

  “Where in Trichur?” he asked after that. Mean, I felt, since he was a Trichur man himself.

  “Tell him Irinjalakuda,” Amma said. So I did.

  “And where exactly in Irinjalakuda?” Uncle Saleem persisted.

  “Near the bus stop, near the little shop near the bus stop, near the temple; near the temple near the little shop near the bus stop. That is where my veed is.” It was a lie, in a way. That was where my Amma’s veed was. Where her hair grew long and wild, where Muthassi, my great-grandmother, the first living being to hold me, raised her.

  In Irinjalakuda is where my Amma’s veed used to be, before it was sold, torn down. Yet before ownership changed hands, Amooma needed to die, which she did, wailing from a hospital bed, calling out for her fondest child. My mother, her daughter—Amma.

  Four years before Amma and her siblings sold the house, divided its insides like pieces of cake, I helped my uncle, the oldest male, put pieces of my grandmother, lukewarm bones and teeth, into a clay urn. It had rained the previous night, so we sat on our haunches, bare chested, sifting through damp ash the color of chalk and coal, mirroring—I wouldn’t know it then—the sea’s pallor that morning, water my uncle and I waded into until the swells lapped our necks.

  As my uncle balanced the heavy urn on his shoulder, I clasped another, a tiny, clay one, in my palms, as undercurrents pulled us out farther. My uncle carried his mother. I held the remains of her late husband, my grandfather.

  When Muthacchan, my maternal grandfather, died, the family elders deemed it appropriate for me to, one day, when older, share him with the sea, so they portioned his ashes, leaving aside some for the only grandchild he knew and looked after until he was three. Then, as the rain fell like fine splinters of wood, my uncle raised what was left of his mother and shattered the urn. On cue, I broke the urn’s seal and submerged my powdered grandfather. Water dissolved ash, took teeth and bone. We looked up and prayed, and somewhere out there, Indra, the rain god, understood what was once woman had lived alone in my Amma’s veed and what was once man had built it.

  CHABTER FIVE

  DOG

  THE GUARD DOG WAS a mutt. His father, a stray, had been a savvy mongrel, investigating an unlatched gate, pouncing on the drowsing Labrador in heat. The act produced a healthy litter, in particular a large toffee-colored male with cigarette-ash spots, and this creature, given as a present, protected the Gulf gentleman’s dead mother’s house for over four years.

  Six months after the cremation, the house, the first in the neighborhood with a flushable toilet back in the day, with two telephones and an Aiwa color TV, tame parrots in the birdhouse, a boxy Japanese sedan made in an actual Japanese plant parked in the garage at a time when Kerala’s roads mainly hosted Fiats, Hindustan Contessas, and Ambassadors, was put on the market. That was a while ago, and the place was now going into disrepair. There was rot in the roof, mold, dust in the rooms, and rumors of termites. The dead woman’s children did not live in the house anymore; they had their own houses, their own families. The old woman had died in the company of her live-in maid, a petite woman in her seventies—a lady with no front teeth, sent home for good by the children after they paid her three months’ severance for services rendered, with gifts of used wedding saris, a bottle of perfume for her daughter-in-law, some Kit Kats and Mars bars for her grandkids, and the Whirlpool fridge. The house was now empty. The windows were shut, the doors were padlocked, but the dog, he watched the house like it was a giant bone, roaming its boundaries like a drone, a visible deterrent for thieves since the house hadn’t been emptied of its possessions, a compendium of items from the Gulf gentleman’s first tricycle to curios purchased by his mother when she lived with his father in Botswana. In the kitchen storeroom, jars of homemade mango pickle, one of the old woman’s final acts, preserved in a pool of chili and coconut oil.

  The siblings needed to sell the house because everyone was in debt. No one wanted the house. Well, only one person wanted the house—the Gulf gentleman’s middle sister, the one who lived in Dubai—but she couldn’t afford the asking price, so it was as good as no one wanting the house.

  No one wanted the dog. Even when they had the family meeting, a week after the cremation, where everyone sat around a table with notepads, inventory lists, deciding which table would go to which house, how to divide the jewels, whether the cutlery was actual silver, which grandchild deserved what, the dog was not a topic of conversation, until the very end, when someone mentioned it’s a good thing there was a dog to keep an eye on the place.

  —Not really, the oldest child, the Gulf gentleman, replied. He wags his tail at beggars. Some guard dog!

  —But he’s what we’ve got, the youngest sister snapped. Mother loved him. He might get lonely, she added after a pause.

  —So what? the Gulf gentleman fumed. Dogs are dogs! They keep themselves amused somehow. He’s not going to be locked in the kennel anymore; he gets the run of the place, gets to do whatever he wants.

  But then everyone fought over how much food a dog would want, how much meat would be required to feed an omnivorous beast, how to split the expenses, whether it would be feasible to hire someone to dump some excess food into his kennel every week, hoping the dog knew how to portion out his meals over seven days, but if he couldn’t, there was going to be a problem, since finding a person willing to feed a dog watching a house without an owner wasn’t going to be easy. There were few takers for this kind of work, especially when the interested parties were told they would be required to spend the night with the dog during weekends, sleeping on the veranda, so that everyone, from the milkman’s daughter to the town grocer, knew the house was looked after, that there was a human presence, even though the dog was waited on by the man, as though man’s rule over beasts had ended. When the dead woman’s kids explained the problem to their uncle, he suggested calling on Mathai, a reasonable man who understood the old ways.

  Mathai’s family had worked for the Gulf gentleman’s household for over three generations. His wife had tended its garden for a few years; his son assisted in planting the pepper and neem trees near the wrought-iron front gates where weaver ants congregated. When the family males paid Mathai a visit, begging for help, requesting he spend his weekends on the veranda, watching over the house, keeping the dog company, Mathai contemplated what he was being asked to do. There would be compensation, of course. His wife urged him to refuse, reminding him of his arthritis, how cold the tiles on the portico would get at night. She also reminded him of their new standing as parents of government employees. He quieted her gently, rubbing her wrist with root-like fingers, the hair on his knuckles as wispy as cotton.

  —There is a debt to be paid, he said. I don’t owe them this, but their mother was a fair woman.

  —But to sleep outside like a sentry is an insult, his wife insisted.

  —Indeed, Mathai replied, but they are not forcing me, they are asking.

  —These people from Persia are asking you to take care of a dog, his wife seethed. The animal licks its own balls, don’t be a fool!

  —The animal is good-natured, Mathai assured her. There was no more said as he waved his wife away.

  —If our sons got wind of this. . ., she murmured.

  —If they come seeking quarrel, Mathai said, my house is no longer open to them.

  In this manner, the dog had a kind of companionship for almost four years, someone the dog recogniz
ed, a man to feed him, to hose him with cold water in the summer, to cuddle with during the rains, to watch over as he slept, to be spoken to as dawn broke.

  When prospective buyers arrived to inspect the house, the dog would be led to the kennel—which wouldn’t be used otherwise—where he would wag his tail at the visiting strangers who wondered how long the dog would remain, only to be reassured that the dog wasn’t part of the sale, but simply a guarantee against burglars, like a gun. And the man? Was he a guarantee, too? Yes, he was. The man was like a man who oiled the gun, kept it in working order. And the man does not sleep in the house? The man never sleeps in the house; he knows his place.

  When the dog died, the house was still unsold. The asking price was too much, the agent the children hired to sell the place confided. Then there was the manner of the old woman’s death, the loneliness of her last days, which guaranteed the presence of a sad and lonely spirit—a spirit few buyers wanted to inherit. And so the house remained where it was, wasting away, until the dog died, cursing the place even more.

  When Mathai found the dead animal, he hadn’t been to the house in over ten days. It was the holiday season; his grandchildren were in town for Christmas. To make sure the dog wouldn’t starve, he had filled his bowls with extra chow and water, put it all in the kennel, which he left half-closed but unlocked so the birds wouldn’t get at it, or shit in it. When the festivities ended, his grandkids fattened on duck stew and warm appams and cold pudding, Mathai remembered his toothy friend; in the morning he made his way to the butcher, where he bought fresh bone, then visited the local shaap for some porrota and beef fry, and a bottle of toddy for himself. He called out to the dog as he unlocked the gate, swinging the neck bone and the cooked meat in the air, expecting the usual franticness, the licks, the yelps, the cold nose on his neck. The dog did not come. Mathai assumed he had gone to the back of the house to chase squirrels as he normally did, or pester crows, but when a few minutes passed with no sign of him, Mathai went to look for the guy. He found the dog curled up near the old cowshed, near the servant’s outhouse, by his favorite playthings—an old branch, a tennis ball the sun had hardened—a place where he buried his kills, that lame cat, that squirrel, where he went to be a dog without being observed. He was a little wet from the rain, but the bugs had already arrived. They knew where to find him.