A Preface to Man

by Subhash Chandran

  That a man’s expressions of truth had the strength to survive beyond his death was a realization that was dawning on her: those words that no pyre could consume demanded to be taken and venerated as the preface to an entire human life.

  ‘And these were the names of those mighty hills:

  Chokkaampetti, Paachi, Kaali, Sundar, Naaga, Ko, and Valli.’

  Grampa had taught Jithen the couplet that strung together the names of the hills that had given birth to and nurtured the Periyar river. The seven splendid hills stood blanketed in green in the Western Ghats: four women and three men. They were sweating with the kind of exertion Jithen would understand only when he was older. Those sweat channels had merged to form the river.

  ‘Boy, can you tell which of them are men, and which are women?’ Grampa challenged, to pass the time as he squatted on his haunches under the coffee shrubs, straining to empty his bowels. Resting the bell metal kindi on the ground, Jithen began to count with his fingers, ‘Chokkaampetti, Sundar, and Ko are men; Paachi, Valli, Kaali, and … What was the other one? Ah … Naaga … are all women.’

  ‘Smart boy!’ Grampa praised him and eased out a long fart. Then he strained at his bowels once more, making the forest of hair on his back spread out like a peacock showing off its feathers. Rid of his burden, Grampa’s taut, black face relaxed and cleared.

  Spitting out the sticky sweetness of the ripe red coffee beans, Jithen wiped his fingers on his shorts. Camouflaging themselves as sugarcane clumps, the abundant wild sugarcane grass on the banks of the river whistled when the breeze passed through them. In Jithen’s eyes, the fuming brick kiln in the clearing between the wild sugarcane grass and the coffee bushes was Lankapuri set on fire by Hanuman. Those working in the scorching sun were struggling to rescue the Rakshasa babies from the gutted palace.

  ‘Do you know whose poem it is?’ Grampa asked, smiling as he held out his hand to take the empty kindi.

  Unsure what the question was about, Jithen slyly eyed the yellow snake that Grampa had left behind. Then, crossing the coffee trees, he began to follow his grandfather to his usual ablution spot near the wild sugarcane grass.

  Grampa was wearing the mud-coloured loosely woven thorth with thin borders that he usually wrapped around his waist while coming out in the open to empty his bowels. After the job was done, the left hand would be stretched behind to ensure that the thin towel was held away from his buttocks. The right hand would be extended forward, holding the spout of the empty kindi. It was a deliberate, slow walk, with the toes of both feet splayed to the sides and pressing into the sand. As he stepped into the river and lowered the kindi into the water, it would say ‘bluthm’.

  Usually, Ammu, the washerwoman with a mole on her cheek as big as a beetle, would be washing laundry at the river kadavu. It was her regular presence there that made Grampa carry water in the kindi and go behind the wild sugarcane grass reeds, instead of cleaning himself in the river.

  Till Grampa returned, Jithen would stand marvelling at the eighth channel of sweat coming down between the milk-mountains of Ammu, who was older than his mother. The lash of the laundry striking the worn-out yellow soap-spot on the washing stone would echo from the other bank, after a moment.

  ‘You didn’t answer.’ Grampa, cleansed now, came back to poetry: ‘Then, let me tell you. It was your great-grandfather, that is my father, who wrote it. Written means not on palm leaf or paper—in his mind!’

  ‘What was Grampa’s father’s name?’ Jithen asked.

  ‘Aaa!’ Grampa gestured ignorance with open palms and chuckled. ‘To remember the name, shouldn’t one at least know what it is? I’ve not seen him. I know only what Amma has told me. Some naïve chap who came to marry into the Ayyaattumpilli family!’ Before starting back, Grampa turned his head to look at Ammu, whose reflection was like a pliant shadow hung upside down from her legs. When he grunted pointedly, Ammu pulled up the corner of her checkered mundu and shoved it into the plunging crevasse between her bubbies.

  Revealing his large, tobacco-stained teeth, Grampa laughed out loud. ‘Moron!’ he said. ‘The first to be born in Ayyaattumpilli was Ayyaapilla! My eldest uncle’s eldest uncle! Ayyaapilla, who was hanged on the orders of the King of Thiruvithamkoor!’

  Looking at the faltering steps of the evil old man and his six-year-old guard, Ammu muttered to herself, ‘Hmm, Ayyaattumpilli!’

  ‘PPHO!’ Ayyaapilla snapped with terrifying might. A blast of blistering contempt.

  On the topmost branch of the ancient tree as tall as the sky, in the crowded thoroughfare, fifty-five-year-old Ayyaapilla lay suspended, incarcerated in the man-shaped iron cage: prey to the wrath of His Majesty of Thiruvithamkoor.

  It was now the twenty-seventh day since the sentence had been executed. Ayyaapilla had already transgressed the tradition of the accused giving up and embracing death in the sky, usually within ten or eleven days of being denied food and drink.

  It was in the first week of the month of Kumbham that the sentence had been implemented. People from the neighbouring regions of Paravoor and Aalangad—both had acceded to Thiruvithamkoor only a while ago—thronged around the tree, pushing and shoving for a glimpse of the torture chamber made by melding iron slats and contoured to fit a human body. When the limp Ayyaapilla was being hauled up on a hawser slung through a wooden pulley, the fists raised in hailing the king turned into fingers pointed accusingly at the convict.

  Ayyaapilla saw the crowd, which had come to watch the hanging, separating and falling back into layered whorls of upwardly tilted heads: in the innermost layer, the minister and other supervisors from the Ananthapuram palace; in the second layer, the local barons and the landlord-chieftains with their lackeys; then came the four castes with the carefully observed norms of untouchability evidenced by their strict observance of ritual distances solicitously kept from one another; and beyond this, his wailing family, with their ululations.

  Twirling with the rope, first clockwise and then anti-clockwise, Ayyaapilla was pulled up till the cage came to rest at its assigned place on the tree. The three men, who had sweated and toiled on the tree until then, climbed down. Only after they finished digging out the earth to make, right below where the accused lay dangling, a two-foot deep circular pit to catch the urine and faeces likely to drop down, did the men wash their limbs and call it a day. Turning to the guards, one of them said: ‘That guy up there’s robust, but will perish within ten days!’

  When darkness began to fall, the lingering crowd broke away and dissolved in different directions. Only the two guards of His Majesty were left behind to wait beneath the suspended Ayyaapilla, left to die of starvation. To avoid getting dunked by human waste, they took up their positions under the tree, taking turns to guard day and night, till Ayyaapilla perished.

  The day-sentry suffered no loneliness as long as the steady stream of onlookers, arriving after crossing many miles, stood gawking at Ayyaapilla with open mouths and bulging eyes. However, the night-guard had had enough of sitting sleepless, next to the lighted torch fed with marotti oil. Yawning and scratching his head, he looked up to estimate the height at which Ayyaapilla was hanging in the darkness. Though sorrowful at having to reveal aloud what should have been a secret, he could not resist calling out: ‘Wretched sinner, with water and rice having ceased, have you realized the gravity of your crime?’

  Disappointed that there was no response from above, the guard raised the torch high, squinting upwards. The luminous spectacle of moonlight in the month of Kumbham, streaming through the foliage, and cradling Ayyaapilla like a stone idol, sent a shudder through him. Aware of the pair of eyes blazing above him, still alive and blinking, he was shaken by the disquieting feeling that he was not watching Ayyaapilla, it was Ayyaapilla who was watching him.

  As days went by, the trickling down of urine and faeces dwindled. The two guards, staring up to see if the wish of their venerable Majesty was being fulfilled, became impatient that Ayyaapilla had not succumbed yet. Even inside the tor
ture chamber that would not let him flex his limbs, Ayyaapilla was fiercely indomitable. On the ninth day, when the first vulture was spotted like a dot on the western horizon, he hoped that it would be a pigeon and that it would be holding between its legs a rolled-up missive. He shut his eyes tight—a kindi, a wooden plank-stool for eating and a wide-brimmed uruli, flashed in his mind’s eye. The next moment they vanished. Of all the hunger-induced hallucinations, the next one was stranger. An old man, dressed up like a vidooshakan, standing in a place that resembled a Koothambalam in a temple, extended a sautéed leaf full of rice, and asked, ‘Ayya! Why have you come?’

  ‘On being apprised of the repast being served by the guardians of the temple, methinks perchance I too may partake, wherefore cometh I!’ Ayyaapilla replied as if in a trance.

  The day-guard was taken aback by Ayyaapilla’s strange language. He cocked his head. Ayyaapilla was delirious, and started muttering gibberish, glaring at the vulture: ‘Retain the tuft of kuduma hair on your head and shear off the body hair from top and bottom. Don white robes and become a devotee. Embark on the penta-discipline rigour. Loosen the sacred thread over the legs, hold the chopped tuft of hair in hand, and declare, “Off to the nether world!” PPHO!’

  The vulture, suspicious at not getting the smell of death, began to circle the tree. Through three days of circling, whenever it tried to approach him, the ferocity of the snapping from inside the iron cage scared it away.

  On the twelfth day, the month of Kumbham gave Ayyaapilla another lease of life. Clouds darkened the burning sky and it began to pour. Denied for three days, the vulture landed on the same branch from which Ayyaapilla lay dangling, and perched there staring at its prey.

  As the rain thickened and even the trees began to pour down with it, through the corner of his eye, Ayyaapilla could see the vulture’s feathers being plastered to its body. Pressing against the loosened hair of his kuduma resting against the metal, he tried to turn his head and failed. Caught in the downpour, he felt his thirst even more acutely. Making use of the length of the chain tied to the shackle around his neck, Ayyaapilla tried to move his body to and fro.

  Slowly, he was able to increase the pace into a swing. As the swings became longer, and each time the pitch of oscillations rose, he managed to make his body go horizontal, so that, little by little, he was able to collect water in his open mouth, using his scooped tongue. As moisture slaked ten days of aridity, life writhing inside convulsed his whole body. Touched by rain, the congealed blood—rendered powerless to flow from the abrasions against the iron bars—sketched crimson roots on his drenched skin and diffused. Crazed with thirst, Ayyaapilla drank with his eyes and nose and mouth.

  He was beginning to enjoy himself. He drank his fill of not only the Kumbham rain but even of the month that followed—Meenam. After four hours, the rain dwindled, having quenched Ayyaapilla’s thirst.

  On the eighteenth day, the second vulture arrived. When Ayyaapilla felt that his terrifying glares were not enough to ward off the vultures lusting to eat his flesh through the slits in his cage, he began to bark fiercely with all his remaining strength, ‘Pho! Pho!’

  The sounds emanating from the soul of the man suspended like a flag fluttering on the mast of sin, continued intermittently day and night. Mothers in the surrounding houses plugged their children’s tender ears with balls made from strips of old clothes to prevent them from being frightened by these harsh snaps that sounded like heralds from hell.

  Ayyaapilla’s snapping did not last beyond Kumbham. The birds in the sky knew of the decaying of his senses and the stilling of his body before the guards on the ground did. As the vultures, impatient with hunger, tried to tear the desiccated skin off his lower abdomen with their beaks, realizing that death sheathed in tickles was kissing his soul, Ayyaapilla let loose his final snap at the birds.

  The ferocity of that blistering snap, that ‘aattu’ named a clan, Ayyaattumpilli.

  Ammu made haste to complete the washing and leave the riverbank before the workers from the brick kiln came to wash their hands and legs and sit down to eat their lunch. When they stepped into the river ghat, the water would turn into a milky tea and soil the washed clothes.

  By then Sharada of Thandaambat and Bhavaniyamma of Nattukulam arrived, each with a bundle of clothes.

  ‘Eh, Ammu, has that Naraapilla chettan left after shitting and washing up?’ Sharada asked, scrubbing the newly formed cracks in her rheumatoid heels against the yellow trace of washing soap on the stone that someone had used previously.

  ‘The patriarch of Ayyaattumpilli? There, he just left,’ Ammu said.

  ‘That’s a relief!’ While scrubbing her feet, Sharada removed the pins from her blouse and pulled up her checkered mundu to wrap it around her breasts.

  ‘Wonder what’s his problem? Are there no toilets in Ayyaattumpilli?’ Bhavaniyamma mouthed an ‘aah’ as she shrugged, showing her plaque-ridden teeth.

  ‘No, it’s not that,’ Ammu winked. ‘Some people need to be tickled by the grass to unload!’

  The laughter of the women, tickled by the double entendre in the words of Ammu with the beetle on her cheek, bubbled over into the river.

  TWO

  Ancestors

  29 March 1999

  …Want to hear an irony of our times? Among the upper caste ‘savarna’ lot, even those who call themselves progressive would covertly reveal their castes within the first five sentences that they utter as soon as they make a new acquaintance. Do you know? With no claim to any distinctive qualities as an individual, he will manage to jump onstage with his caste superiority. Whatever I may lack, am I not from the upper caste, the feckless man will claim. Our land is going to be overrun with such imbeciles. Haven’t you written that I seem to be a Nair, from my manners and ways? With all my love for you, let me tell you that I hate myself for having made you assume so.

  Everyone called Narayana Pillai of Ayyaattumpilli, Naraapilla.

  Even as he was hailed all over Thachanakkara as the Naraapilla who measured his money with a para, the brass-trimmed, big, measuring vessel for paddy, he was not past his formative years. Brimming youth, overflowing money. Even so, living through the loneliness that his mother had bequeathed her only son through her premature death, there were certain things Naraapilla could not reach or grasp—things impervious to termites.

  In 1925, when Mahatma Gandhi arrived at Sree Narayana Guru’s Advaithaashramam at Shivagiri, Naraapilla was only twenty-seven. People from Varappuzha, Aalangad, and Kalady-Kaanjoor-Manjapra rushed to the banks of the Aluva river to see the Mahatma. Intoxicated by the whiff of the word freedom that wafted in from afar, the Nairs of Thachanakkara sprinted barefoot towards Aluva. Coming down through the Kaniyaan hill, a number of students, led by their teachers from Union Christian College, sought a shortcut to the ashram through Thachanakkara.

  Even before Gandhiji could be seen in the flesh, myths were born. One among the rumours that reached Naraapilla via Appu Nair was that Gandhiji’s entourage included four wrestlers from Haryana, one of whom, enraged when he came to know that the tea served to Gandhiji in the waiting room of Aluva railway station was made without the goat’s milk he preferred, took the glass tumbler and crushed it in his fist. Appu Nair also claimed that an eyewitness had told him that when Gandhiji alighted from the train, he was wearing a black mask with eye slits of the kind that brigands sport, to avoid the smoke from the locomotive that would cause him to sneeze endlessly—and seeing that apparition with its entourage of wrestlers, the people who had come to receive him had flung down their garlands and fled. Still, Naraapilla did not budge. That he was untouched by the frenzy that the independence struggle had awakened in the youth of the land was not the sole reason for that indifference.

  ‘Why is he on parade here to meet a low-caste Ezhava sanyaasi?’ Naraapilla taunted Appu Nair, his voice echoing the vanity of his caste. ‘And that too after crossing forests and fording rivers? Where this Nanu sat to meditate, not even a mushroom has spr
outed! Hee, hee!’

  To the west of Thachanakkara, it was harvest time in the fields of Nedumaali. The thorth-clad Appu Nair was throwing into the adjacent fields, haystacks which were tied in the middle, and resembled women who had their waists tightly girdled.

  Naraapilla stood on a ridge of the paddy field, watching the rhythmic movements of the Pulaya women as they bent over the rice, hooking and cutting the stalks with their sickles. The heat of the Meenam sun beat down mercilessly. Naraapilla’s bald head and the hairy forest on his back were slick with sweat. With a masculinity at odds with his youth, Naraapilla was by then the owner of not only Kainikkulam in Varappuzha, but also Puththankandam in Paanaayikkulam, and the three-and-a-half acre arid field of Muppathadam.

  ‘People are thronging from as far away as the kadavu near the market.’ Gandhi was still effervescent on Appu Nair’s lips, even as he was stacking the hay. Wiping his hands on his worn thorth, and stepping onto the ridge, Appu Nair cried: ‘The Aluva beach is buzzing as if on Shivaraathri. One can’t help marvelling “hari hara”, watching the crowds being ferried across to the ashram by the hunchback Velu in his boat!’

  Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was the biggest catch of his lifetime for Appu Nair of Peechamkurichi, who was adept at giving eyewitness accounts of events not witnessed by him. The author of the many myths circulating in the locality about Naraapilla was also the very same Appu Nair, the alter ego of Naraapilla. Nevertheless, this time he erred in gauging Naraapilla’s emotions.