Marginal Man

by Charu Nivedita

  Kamakshi began to sell the utensils one by one. When they had all been sold, other things in the house began to vanish. A collection of Kalki’s novels, Murugavel’s dearest treasures, were bartered for rice. Although she got a trifling sum for all that she sold, she cooked only the most expensive variety of basmati rice. Finally, when there was naught to sell, she began to borrow money.

  Six months later, when Umayal returned from prison with Dhanapal in tow, she was shocked to find Kamaskhi with child again. Both she and Murugavel were in fine fettle although there was a mountain of debt waiting to be repaid. During her stint in prison, she had resolved to nevermore peddle liquor, but the food at home tasted worse than the worm-infested gruel she suffered herself to spoon and swallow in prison because it had been bought with borrowed money. She left Kamakshi’s food untouched. On borrowed money – ironically – she set off for Karaikal the next day with some glass bottles tied to her stomach with a length of cloth. She returned with money and blisters in galore. The bottles, so tightly strapped as they were, lacerated the skin on her stomach. The sight of festering and bleeding blisters moved elicited animalistic wails from Kamakshi who applied a salve to her sister’s wounds and waited on her.

  This happened several times; I saw it with my own eyes whenever I visited Thanjavur as a boy. Even with the passage of years, the memory of this pathetic scene remains fresh.

  Murugavel’s dream to go to Chennai remained a dream. Umayal was still peddling liquor and would see the entrails of some prison every now and then. She started to wear a full-sleeved white vest so as to strap the bottles to her person without inconvenience or injury. Her stints in prison had introduced and habituated her to smoking and cussing, but her acquisitions did not cost her a cubic inch of her respect. She presented a formidable appearance with her white vest, her ash-smeared forehead and her top-knot, which became something of an insignia. The day she hurled her mangal sutra in Ramasamy’s face was the day she wiped off the kumkum on her forehead, nullifying her wifehood. She no longer wore her hair in a braid or a bun. Whether it was on account of her unusual appearance or her natural tendency for tough love, she enjoyed a lot of goodwill both in prison and in the hood.

  Whenever Umayal was in prison, the house was overcast with gloom.

  After Kamalanathan, Kamakshi had a daughter called Suganthi. In the meanwhile, Dhanapal, like Umayal, had acquired the habit of smoking and had also experimented with gay sex from reformatory school. He never studied, choosing instead to play at cards and pull all-nighters with his friends. On days when he returned home late, he would serve himself a bit of supper, eat it, and sleep, but on occasion, he would perform a vanishing act and would not appear until a week later. Once, Murugavel asked him sternly, “What do you fancy this house to be, you little scoundrel?” When Dhanapal threw the question back at him, Murugavel tried to manhandle him and got kicked by his stepson. Dhanapal was fourteen when this happened.

  Thenceforth, no one dared to raise his voice, his hand or his warning finger to Dhanapal. The only person he feared was Umayal, but bringing him to heel seemed beyond her natural capacity. How could she? Dhanapal gently stroked the welts on her stomach that were as large as shoe-impressions in mud. He bought her new vests when her old ones tore and massaged her callused feet to palliate the ache; he bought her the imported cigarettes she loved to puff. He was the only person who understood her needs and satisfied them without being asked and without being compensated. For these reasons, he was exempted from Umayal’s bad graces. She knew that the boy would be able to brave the world somehow.

  When Dhanapal was sixteen, he met a landlord called Vasu who lived near Thanjavur. Dhanapal soon won his confidence and became his right hand man. Within a couple of years, Vasu reached a stage where he couldn’t function independently from Dhanapal, be it in drinking or even whoring. Dhanapal was not remunerated for his services, but his patron ensured that he and his kin were well-kept. Once, Vasu sent two sacks of rice to Dhanapal’s house and the latter angrily told him that he would sever all ties with him should he do it again. Vasu did not, knowing full well that Dhanapal was a man of his word.

  Vasu was a political figure of some importance and Dhanapal became associated by default with the party he belonged to. During poll season, they slogged in their attempt to bring the party to attention.

  At the age of forty-five, Vasu died of a heart-attack, leaving Dhanapal shattered.

  It was Dhanapal, then thirty, who made me discover my sexuality to when he introduced me to masturbation. The correctional facility had fashioned a sex-expert out of him. It became a custom for us to seek sexual pleasure from each other through fondling and stroking.The idols perched on the courtyards and seated cross-legged in their niches of the Brihadeeswarar Temple were mute witnesses to our sexual escapades. Apart from sex, I used to frequent the temple to read in the shade of the courtyard, propped against its cool walls.

  It was at Brihadeeswarar that I had chanced to meet Somasundaram, a companionable man around forty. A devotee of Vallalar, his house was like a shrine to him – the walls were lined with Vallalar’s pictures and Somasundaram spoke of him every time, all the time. He gave me food and had sex with me. I objected to neither. In retrospect, I wonder at how such an impassioned devotee of Vallalar had no second thoughts about having sex with a mite of a youth like myself.

  Kamalanathan shared all of his father’s traits. Films were the central axis around which his life revolved. He flunked his school examinations, had several romances and dalliances to his credit, and planned to become a playback singer.

  Umayal was growing tired and worked less frequently than she would have liked to. Now that the prohibition on liquor had been lifted, it became easily available, so she began to smuggle ganja which landed her in prison for two years. She left prison a walking corpse and returned home to realize how far behind they were on the rent. The landlord gave them a tongue-lashing in full view of the street which led to a loss of face.

  They vacated and began to pay forty a month for a rathole on Venkatesa Perumal Koil Street. It was to this shack that Dhanapal would return punch-drunk in the middle of the night and retch all over the place.

  Life bore down on Umayal too heavily. It soon reduced her to a wreck.

  Age was catching up with Ramasamy. Gnanavel had installed himself in his mistress’ house. Azhaguvel, who had flown the coop years ago, suddenly materialized out of nowhere with tuberculosis. He found himself a job as a cinema operator, worked late nights and early mornings, and returned home coughing up bloody phlegm. Rajavel spent every waking hour in gambling dens. Without the knowledge of his brothers, he gambled away half his father’s money. He was generally not heard from or heard of.

  One day, as fate would have it, Rajavel ran into his brothers and engaged them in serious conversation. He suggested they sell their father’s land and migrate to Chennai with Umayal. He had Ramasamy give his concession to said proposal, but Murugavel laid down a single condition: Kamakshi and the two children should be allowed to come along. Rajavel did not contend his brother as he already knew that Kamakshi would refuse. She did, adding that she’d much rather starve to death in Thanjavur than move to Chennai. When Rajavel came to fetch Umayal, she growled with the little strength that inhabited her, “If only this body had more strength than it is possessed with right now, I would meet your father with the broom-handle and take a swing at him!”

  After selling both house and land, Ramasamy and his four sons left for Chennai.

  Around this time, Vasu’s friend, a landlord, hired Dhanapal to do odd jobs. Dhanapal would do whatever the man bud him do as he was dependent on his funding to buy liquor. This man, unlike his late friend, was a teetotaler who made sure Dhanapal knew his place.

  Once, he asked a favor of Dhanapal. As his far-flung village lacked a good school, he wanted Dhanapal to put up his son Rasu at his place in so that he could attend school in Thanjavur. In
return for his help, he would send as many sacks as was needed for Dhanapal’s family. Dhanapal’s situation was so pathetic that he couldn’t refuse.

  Rasu was enrolled in the fifth grade. The family put up with his antics because his father’s rice kept their stomachs from ballooning with gas. On one occasion, however, Rasu crossed the line and Dhanapal acquainted his father with his misbehavior. The man snapped, “If the midget causes trouble, beat him up! I will not question you even if he dies.” When the next complaint about Rasu came, Dhanapal hit him, for the complaint was not of a trivial sort. The boy had snitched the teacher’s money.

  One day Rasu had an idea which he shared with Kamakshi and the others: if they could nick coconuts from the trees behind their house, they could enjoy them, couldn’t they? They certainly could, for all they were subsisting on was rice with neither condiment nor curry, and besides, the landlord kept hiking the rent. Kamakshi have her consent, but who would bell the cat? What if the neighbors spied them? Rasu assured them that he was an expert climber and since he planned to do the deed at night, no one would know.

  At midnight, the boy deftly climbed the chosen tree with a sickle strapped to his waist. He then did the unexpected. Instead of plucking the coconuts stealthily, he shook the tree and created a racket that was loud enough to shake the sleep out of the entire neighborhood, which it undoubtedly did. Kamakshi and the others ran for cover to their shack.

  The neighbors emerged from their houses with flaming torches. Rasu climbed down the tree and told everyone that it was Kamakshi who had masterminded the whole plan of stealing the coconuts.

  When Dhanapal notified the landlord of this incident, Rasu was taken back home. The landlord would rather his son lose a year of education than share a living space with thieves. He dismissed Dhanapal with whom he wished to have naught more to do in the future.

  Dhanapal stopped drinking and gave himself up to drugs. He found his drug-dependency to be of the same obsessive-compulsive nature as Murugavel and Kamalanathan’s dependency on daily films. He would suffer immensely if he did not have his daily ration of dope. By then, the consensus was that he had twisted every single nerve in his brain.

  There was no one to finance Kamalanathan’s tickets to the movies, so stealing from the neighbors became his recourse. When that failed to satisfy him, he stole on a larger scale from shops and bartered his booty for money. In so doing, he continued to indulge in his most dearly beloved pleasure.

  Suganthi, who was born after Kamalanathan, inherited a life of hunger and poverty, but she was proud of her comely appearance and had hope for the future. She was sure that her prince would come someday in a chariot and spirit her off to a good life, to a world where hunger and starvation were unknown and unheard of; a world where she would not have to wash mountains of her brothers’ soiled clothes; where her loins were not chafed by the stiff rags she was forced to wear when she bled, where she was not taunted by a mother who asked her who she was thinking of when she slept on her stomach, or who told her she was not old enough to have sex when she slept on her back; where she did not have to run away in tears – humiliated – from the roofless toilet into which lecherous men would peer through the gaps in the thatch; where it was not expected of her to clean the rancid vomit of her drunken brother; where there would be no mother to kick her in fits of misdirected anger; where there were no older brothers who fought with her mother, cursing the misfortune of their birth and the inauspicious time at which their father decided to fuck her; where she would not have to endure the shame of calling her father her older brother; where she would not have to hear the animal sounds her mother made at night as she rolled around with that same older brother; where she would not have to go to school pinching her nose to avoid the stench-waves while passing defecating children on the streets.

  In the world she had imagined, flowers would rain on her when bathroom taps were opened; a mere thought would cause savory food and drink to materialize before her eyes; there would be flower beds to romp and lie in; a lover would come and whisper in honeyed tones of passion; servants would wait on her; she would have adorable pet dogs to frolic with – everything would be possible and everything would be beautiful. Someday a man would come who would fall headlong for her charms.

  When I went to visit my aunt during the holidays, I had to relieve myself in her roofless toilet. In Nagore, most houses lacked toilets and I sometimes found myself having to make water out in the open when the toilet was in use. In Thanjavur, the toilets were a little more than buckets and a thatched roof. In Nagore, the river-banks and the thickets, where karuvelam trees grew in abundance, offered some degree of privacy. These places were usually deserted, so one needn’t fear prying eyes. Any balcony or terrace served as a vantage point from where one could get a fairly good look into the roofless toilet in Aunt Kamakshi’s house.

  The public toilet was a dry latrine with no running water. A low-caste woman had to clean the night soil in the morning.

  The house, a hut to be exact, never had a bathroom. One had to hoist buckets of water from the well behind the house to wash or bathe. To preserve their dignity, Aunt Kamakshi and Suganthi chose to bathe in the kitchen.

  Within a few days of reaching Chennai, Azhaguvel succumbed to his illness. Murugavel and Rajavel were unlikely to get acknowledged by Kodambakkam. The money from the sale of the house and the land was petering out. Realizing that the day when the four of them would be reduced to scraps was not far off, Rajavel opened a rice shop and charged Gnanavel with it. After many a great effort, Murugavel and Rajavel managed to find work as assistant directors, but their film projects stalled midway. Even if by some miracle as film was released, it ran for no more than a week.

  Ramasamy was worrying himself sick over not having married off his sons – who were still virgins, he believed – to carry on the family legacy. Azhaguvel was no more, Murugavel and Gnanavel had started to gray at the roots. But couldn’t he at least find them a couple of poor girls? He couldn’t, because no girl, however poor, was willing to marry his ill-reputed sons. Only Rajavel preferred marriage over a mistress, but his notoriety made his prospects bleaker than his brothers’. Wherever and whenever his father sought an alliance for him, he was met with cutting rebuke and humiliation.

  Eight years separated me and Rajavel in birth. One day, on my return from school, I was confronted with a sight most alarming. Rajavel was being mercilessly thrashed with sticks by a group of four men. A crowd had gathered to witness the spectacle and watched it like a film. Frightened, my friends and I climbed into a house and watched from the porch. Rajavel’s underwear was his last scrap of dignity, but it too was soon gone. The posse continued to rain blows. Bleating like a lamb being castrated, Rajavel ducked between a pair of bony thighs and escaped. The four men followed in hot pursuit.

  Later, we learned the circumstance that had warranted the sound licking – Rajavel had given a love-letter to my classmate’s mother.

  Post this incident, a disgraced Rajavel skipped town for a year. He resurfaced like a hero, swaggering in the streets wearing sunglasses.

  Once I left Thanjavur, I lost contact with this motley brood of first cousins.

  Chapter thirteen

  Kingdom Plantae

  More than the ocean, I feel drawn to the mountains and the forest. There is a reason for this. The Sangam era Tamils classified the land into five geo-spaces – kurinji (the hills), mullai (the forest), marutham (agricultural land), neythal (the coastal region) and palai (the desert or the wastelands). There is no actual desert in Tamil Nadu, so the term is applied to the agricultural lands and the coastal regions when summer parched them almost dry. Each geo-space had its characteristic flora and fauna and even its own deity. Nagore, my hometown, is a coastal region with no mountains, so, just as a person who lives in the mountains and who has never seen the ocean dreams of it, I who lived near the ocean dreamt of the mountains and the forests.
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  Every place has its own language – its own way of speaking to you. In the Nagore dargah, you’d always hear the cooing of thousands of pigeons on the minarets with the sound of the waves. The Bay of Bengal was known for its restless temperament in Nagore. On full moon and new moon nights, the waves roared deafeningly and they would rise up to thirty feet before subsiding. In my youth, I was surrounded by the sound of the ocean as much as I was surrounded by air. Nagapattinam was on the coast too, but the sound of the ocean there was muted by the blaring noise of vehicle horns.

  I lived in Delhi from 1978 to 1990. For two years, I lived on Mall Road in the northern part of the city where there was a shrubby mound called Majnu-ka-Tilla that was part of the Delhi Ridge. For someone coming from a region whose terrain was as flat as a dosa, even a thicket seemed like Dandakaranya. I used to frequent the place and on my excursions, I discovered that the forest too had its own orchestra of sounds, its own distinctive language. The forest is populated with an abundance of creatures. There is a place called Silent Valley in Kerala where you will not hear a single cricket screeching. The silence there is to be felt, not spoken of as it is beyond description. When I entered the deepest part of Silent Valley to climb the mountain, I stumbled upon a considerable number of discarded condoms.

  Back in the day when there was no such thing as the computer, a number of Malayalam movies with explicit titles like The Father-in-Law’s Lust, The Passion of the Sister-in-Law and Miss Malini’s Dirty Little Lessons found their way into Tamil Nadu’s cinema halls where they ran to jam-packed houses. Tamil Nadu used to suffer from a sex drought that movies such as these served to rectify. In fact, you got odd stares from folks if you mentioned you were going to watch a Malayalam movie. The wave created by these movies was big enough and strong enough to sweep away John Abraham, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Aravindan who made internationally acclaimed films. Erotic Malayalam movies lost their cachet in the nineties with the advent of the computer and the mushrooming of porn sites.