‘Oho, have you also joined the Ezhavas?’ The sweat had enhanced the swarthiness of his brow, and made his bloodshot eyes glow. ‘What do these lot think? Didn’t they hold an all-religion meeting last year? Weren’t you the one who told me about the big board that was displayed in front of it?’
‘Yesyesyes!’ Appu Nair sidestepped quickly when he saw Naraapilla’s change of mood: ‘I can still see it in my mind’s eye. “Not to argue or win, but to learn and inform” displayed in front of the tent like a big pumpkin!’
‘Ah, that’s what I’m saying too! Who will they inform? And what’ll they instruct?’ Naraapilla’s voice rose. A dark-skinned baby, sleeping in its lungi-cradle hung from the small mango tree on the far side of the field, woke up with a start and began crying.
‘Aww! Whose is this?’ Appu Nair enquired, hoping to change the topic.
‘Not mine,’ Naraapilla said with a lewd smile. ‘Take it if it’s yours!’
Appu Nair had learnt from their proximity that laughing aloud at Naraapilla’s jokes would fetch him an extra gulp of toddy at noon. So he guffawed loudly. Hearing the baby’s cries and Appu Nair’s laughter, Kaalippennu put down her sickle and came up from the field.
Casting a beseeching glance at Naraapilla, she scooped up the baby. Appu Nair, the father of four children, was pained to see the breast milk had spilled and mixed with sweat on Kaali’s sarong of mill cloth wound tightly around her chest. For the unmarried Naraapilla, it caused tumescence.
The sickles, cutting at the base, frizzled.
The noon was aflame. Passing through two creeper-ridden plots and a narrow alley, they made for Raghavan’s toddy shop. A vacuous, loopy grin still lingered on Appu Nair’s face.
As a worshipping public—who bestowed on him more devotion than on their resident god, the Aluva thevar—stood gazing at Gandhiji in conversation with a white man under the mango tree in the Advaithaashramam, Naraapilla and Appu Nair belligerently wallowed in toddy.
‘What, Rahavaa, didn’t you go to see your swami?’ Naraapilla mocked Raghavan, who was bringing a pewter bowl filled with fish curry.
Missing the barb in Naraapilla’s question, Raghavan ventured: ‘I heard that Swami is not in Aluva today. Shutting the shop only to go see Gandhi is not going to work for us!’
Hearing this, one of the regulars at the shop laughed gleefully and asked: ‘Will Naraapilla chettan answer truthfully if I ask a question?’ Eagerly, he came and sat next to Naraapilla and Appu Nair. ‘For us Indians, isn’t Gandhiji the greatest man? If that great one has come to Aluva to see Nanu Guru, what does that tell us? Pray, what does that mean? ‘
‘You tell me!’ Naraapilla spat on the thatched palm-leaf wall of the toddy shop and wiped his lips.
‘Isn’t it clear? That this Nanu swami is a bigger deal than this Gandhi!’ the customer asserted, banging on the long table to make it sound like a fine-strung drum.
Naraapilla’s limbs trembled when he heard that. Scared that he would stop drinking and leave, Raghavan interjected slyly, ‘But I’ve also heard that our swami hates toddy tappers more than thieves.’ Scratching the nape of his neck, he added: ‘I just didn’t mention it till now. What are we to do after giving up the toddy business? Become swamis?’
That shut up the regular. Invigorated, Naraapilla and Appu Nair ordered more toddy.
‘If it helps sell more of his toddy, our scoundrel Raghavan will renounce even his own mother!’ Naraapilla said, patting Raghavan on his shoulder as he paid for the meal. Raghavan bore the touch with pride, aware that it was the intoxication from his toddy that made a Nair touch a Thiyya like him, obliterating the lines of untouchability.
At that moment, with the hand that had blessed the historic Vaikkom Sathyagraha against Hindu untouchability, Gandhiji was signing an accord at the Advaithaashramam. The mango tree on the riverbank, which had given shade to Narayana Guru years ago, shielded one more great man from the unrelenting Meenam heat.
When the paper was handed over to the Thiruvithamkoor Police Commissioner Pitt, seated on a wicker chair under the mango tree, an onlooker, intoxicated by two kinds of devotion, shouted: ‘Gandhiji-Pittji pact kii…’
‘Jai!’ the folk of Aluva-Kaaladi-Kaanjooru-Manjapra took it up.
By the time the news about the Gandhi-Pitt pact tumbled across and reached Appu Nair’s ears, it had been abbreviated to ‘pickpocket’; a hoax played by a nephew, a student of English at Aluva Union Christian College, abbreviated by all as UC College.
‘In the hustle and bustle, someone picked the pocket of Gandhi!’ Appu Nair interpreted.
‘But does Gandhi have pockets? Doesn’t he walk around with just a mundu around his shoulders?’ pondered Swadeshabhimani Kuttan Pilla,* one of those few old denizens of Thachanakkara who owned a shirt with a pocket.
‘So, that’s how it is. That is the truth.’ Appu Nair brightened like one who has had an epiphany. ‘Someone must have played a trick on my nephew; what if he’s educated, he’s still an idiot!’
Naraapilla’s days continued to darken and brighten through Appu Nair. The fear generated by a childhood accident and his own sense of caution stopped Naraapilla from taking a dip in the Periyar river which bounded Thachanakkara on the south. He also remained oblivious to the upheavals of his times. Thus, the Periyar on the south and Indian history on the north kept flowing, keeping Narayana Pillai at an untouchable’s distance.
Naraapilla was a drunkard. Naraapilla was stocky. Naraapilla’s skin was the colour of Indian rosewood. The baldness that had crept in during his youth was now the shining crown God had designed for his strange form.
It was to this Naraapilla that Kunjuamma, whose goodness could shame a crepe jasmine, ended up as wife. The effort of trying to find Naraapilla a wife from amongst the numerous Nair tharavaadus in Thachanakkara and neighbouring lands had brought Appu Nair to his knees.
One day, Naraapilla suggested: ‘Don’t you have a younger sister? The girl who’s like an anchovy? What if I marry her?’
‘My Thachanakkarappaaa … Why this brainwave now?’ A white bolt of lightning struck Appu Nair’s innards. For Naraapilla, it really was an epiphanic moment. Nobody from the Ayyaattumpilli family even partook of lunch after attending weddings in the Peechamkurichi family. It was not that Naraapilla was unaware that the absurd era of the convenience marriages of the sambandham, or cohabitation with Nair women without the contractual obligations of marriage, was over. Much time had passed since the matrilineal system of marumakkathaayam had been legally abolished in Thiruvithamkoor. Yet, the apparition of Goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, personified as the orphaned Naraapilla, preparing to step into the poverty-stricken Peechamkurichi household, fuelled more apprehensions than happiness in Appu Nair.
‘The Second Regulation…’ Thinking that it would be a sin on his part not to remind Naraapilla of the changed times, Appu Nair tried to say something.
‘Don’t say anything.’ Naraapilla stopped him. ‘Go and ask her once! If there are no objections, give your sister to me!’
‘If so…’ Struggling to hide the blush that had crept up his face as if his kid sister had sprouted a moustache, he took hold of Naraapilla’s hand. ‘Here, I give you Kunju!’
In 1928, in the month of Kanni, which witnessed the departure of Sree Narayana Guru from this earth, Naraapilla gave Kunju the wedding pudava, and brought her to Ayyaattumpilli. Time had gathered and kept in abeyance a few embers to chastize Naraapilla for making fun of Sree Narayana Guru. On their first night in the month of Kanni, resounding with the appalling mating howls of dogs, mingled intermittently with the pitiful moans of bitches repeatedly ravished, Naraapilla conjured up an amorous expression on his inauspicious face, moved a finger to touch his bride, who looked alluring wearing the gold medallion chain that he had bought for her, and asked: ‘Kunju, other than my money, do I have anything that Kunju likes?’
Sitting on the cot, with her hands covering her eyes, Kunju answered immediately: ‘Um, yes.’
Kunjuamma blushed. Her voice turned tender: ‘Your name!’
‘Which? Naraapilla?’
‘No, the full name.’ Kunjuamma’s face suffused with pride for her husband, as she completed her statement, ‘Narayanan—Isn’t that the real name of the Gurudevan who relinquished his life last week?’
Naraapilla was stunned. As Appu Nair would have said, Naraapilla went hari hara.
However, greater shocks were yet to strike.
* The real Swadeshabhimani K. Ramakrishna Pillai was a writer, editor-journalist, and political activist, famed for his brave stance against the atrocities of the Diwan and the King of the erstwhile princely state of Travancore. He was known by the name of the newspaper Swadeshabhimani he edited. He was arrested, exiled and his newspaper and press confiscated jointly by the officers of the British Raj and the King.
THREE
Thachanakkara
15 April 1999
…I have started compromising with everything here. When I see my betel-chewing boss, I am reminded of all the rulers of the world. Have you noticed a ruler’s face from close quarters? Not only will it not have a trace of God in it, but will, many a time, have the concealed smile of the devil. Will this same eyeless mask, which is applicable to the heads of families as much as to the American president, appear on my face too when I become your husband tomorrow?
Let it be. Here is a joke that may help you in your Public Services Commission exam alone: our jolly comrade Nayanar has become the chief minister who has ruled Kerala for the longest spell. Our naïve, humorous minister!
Read in the paper that the president, hailing from Uzhavoor, has advised the Central Government to face a no-confidence motion. Do you read the papers? The hoary Nairs of Thachanakkara must be cursing that Uzhavoor man now. But the government will fall. At least by one vote. Do you know that that decisive vote will be mine—the vote of an Indian dejected about the country going to the dogs.
Parashuraman is the lord or thevar of Thachanakkara.
For cleaving Bhoomi Malayalam with his axe from the sea, and measuring and apportioning it as a gift amongst the upper castes, they worship Parashuraman. Like the contours of the animal-skin laid out for Parashuraman to rest, Thachanakkara lay coiled around its temple. To the south of it were Elookkara and Kayintikkara, where the Muslims lived. Unaware of these religious differences, the Periyar flowed past these three villages, sketching their eastern borders, and emptying into the Varappuzha Lake.
On the other side of the river was Uliyanoor, the land of Perumthachchan, the legendary master craftsman—the ooru or land of the uliyan or the chisel-wielder. Thachanakkara is the land that sent that chisel-wielder to akkare, or the other bank.
However, for the people of Thachanakkara, ‘to go akkare’, was not to cross over to the rustic village of Uliyanoor, but to cross the ghat at Kamari to go to Aluva town. For the bridge linking Kamari kadavu to Aluva town to be built, it would take another decade. Rani Sethu Lakshmi Bai was ruling as the regent, as Chithirathirunnal Balarama Varma was still a minor. When Balarama Varma would ascend to the throne, the wave-shaped Marthaanda Varma Bridge would appear over the Kamari kadavu. Linked by the bridge, Aluva would then cease to be akkare or the other side for the people of Thachanakkara. That the first non-Hindu Diwan of Thiruvithamkoor—Watt Sahib, whose name reminded one of hydro-electricity—existed farther south, was not known to the residents of Thachanakkara then.
The topography that Thachanakkara’s people learnt, running left-right-front-back, was simple: the mud road that ran along Thachanakkara thevar’s line of sight, and extending as far as his vision, creates a crossroad at Thottakkattukara. Turn right and cross Kamari kadavu, you arrive at Aluva town. Turn left, and after two miles of brisk walking up to the Mangala river, you land in the kadavu wriggling with crocodiles that yanked young men towards advaitham; cross that and you are in Adi Sankara’s Kalady. Beyond that was Angamaly, starting to teem with the followers of the Nazarene. From Thottakkattukara, walk straight without turning left or right, cross the street and you reach the riverine beach of Aluva, where the solitary Aluva thevar abides, yearning for the Shivaraathri festival.
Though the Raja of Kochi was right next door, Thachanakkara was ruled by the kings of Thiruvithamkoor, residing somewhere in the remote, faraway south. The erstwhile Venad, exalted by Marthaanda Varma as Thiruvithamkoor, had the districts of Paravoor and Aalangad girdling Thachanakkara in the north; they were the central knots in the rope used in the tug of war that went on for centuries, pulled from the south by Thiruvithamkoor and from the north by the Zamorin. The Rama Varmas of Kochi stood in the middle, looking with childlike curiosity at this tug of war. Finally, Marthaanda Varma won. Though located right under Kochi Raja’s Adam’s apple, Thachanakkara folk began to offer their prayers turning southwards, and learnt to trade with the chakram coins of Sree Padmanabhan of Thiruvithamkoor.
For their understanding of history and civics, the commoners of Thachanakkara were indebted to Swadeshabhimani Kuttan Pillai, who was the only one in Thachanakkara to sport an upper garment with pockets. He had come over ages ago from Thiruvananthapuram, got married in Thachanakkara, and settled down there. Despite a Pillai attached to his name, during his initial years at Thachanakkara, the common folk had secretly believed him to be an Ezhava. However, everyone became certain that he was of Nair stock when they heard him establish his relationship to the celebrated editor Swadeshabhimani Ramakrishna Pillai, whom the Travancore king, Sreemoolam Thirunal, had exiled for criticizing his royal rule.
‘Oh, I cannot erase that last scene from my mind,’ Kuttan Pillai sighed every day, obviously reliving that scene, sitting in Pooshaappi’s shop.
The shop—owned by Poovamparampath Shashwathan Pillai, whose name was elided by familiarity into ‘Pooshaappi’—was a thatched hut straining to explode in shame with all the gossip of Thachanakkara. It was a shop from where you could get groceries, vegetables, and basket-loads of gossip. For a long while, it was the stage on which Appu Nair practised his brand of koothu performance, his version of stand-up comedy, satirizing events and targeting people. However, ever since he had become the brother-in-law of Naraapilla of Ayyaattumpilli, he had lost touch with the general public. Imitating Naraapilla, people began to call him ‘Appoliyan’—aliyan being brother-in-law—as if it were a titular name. After the change in his status, the Bonaparte of Thachanakkara drastically cut down the number of times he held court on the shop patio, and Kuttan Pillai duly took on the mantle of chief gossip disburser, and became his successor.
Setting up the original Swadeshabhimani, who had died of consumption, as his bosom friend, Kuttan Pillai would set off on his embellished flights of fancy: ‘That midnight, as he was getting into the horse carriage accompanied by the police, he turned to look at me once. I must have been forty or forty-one then. Between us, we hardly had an age difference of six or eight, that’s all. On that day, blinded by tears, I couldn’t see anything. “Do look after my printing press and pen, and give me leave, my Kuttan Pilla chettaa,” he had appealed, after which he tumbled right into the carriage!’
The first recipient of the oral circulation of this
Swadeshabhimani saga aattakatha was Pooshaappi himself.
Quoting Swadeshabhimani repeatedly, for anything and
everything, the outsider Kuttan Pillai turned into Swadeshabhimani Kuttan Pilla.
‘But, what about the police, then?’ Pooshaappi asked, all anxiety, as he lifted and carefully placed his testicles, swollen like pomelos, on the termite-eaten stool pulled up closer to be in front of his chair.
‘Would they dare touch me? Who was the Diwan then? Wasn’t it our Rao Bahadur Rajagopalachari? Heh! The very same Madrasi who was the Diwan here in Kochi as well. What do you think is this Achari? It’s nothing but our carpenter caste—Ashari! So, that means that surely there will be a
certain this for people like us. What say you?’
It was that moment which revealed to Pooshaappi that Kuttan Pilla was indeed a Nair. At that point, the washerwoman Thaamara, carrying her baby girl, called out from below the laterite steps, ‘Will there be an anna worth of washing soda to take?’
Gingerly moving aside the stool that bore his burden, Pooshaappi got up and opened the soda tin, mentally bookmarking where Kuttan Pilla had left off his tale. Kuttan Pilla’s gaze lingered on Thaamara, the eponymous lotus in bloom.
‘What’s your kid’s name, lass?’ Kuttan Pilla asked, looking at the snot-nosed girl, a lotus bud, sitting snugly on Thaamara’s waist. The little one looked uncomprehendingly at Kuttan Pilla, her hand playing absently with a mole as big as a beetle on her cheek.
‘Ammu,’ replied Thaamara, as she turned to walk back after paying for the washing soda packet.
The knowledge that this Ammu, now sitting on the waist of Thaamara, was to be the very same Ammu whom Naraapilla’s grandson would see forty-eight years later in the form of the middle-aged woman who washed the clothes of the villagers on the stone at the kadavu, made the thevar of Thachanakkara let out a deep sigh that sent scraps of paper lying on the mud road flying and scattering in the air.
The youthful voluptuousness of Thaamara, spilling over like pots of toddy in her checkered mundu, elicited a sigh in the sixty-plus Kuttan Pilla. However, what he said was something else, ‘Didn’t you hear the name of that washerwoman kid? Ammu, I believe! Look at how far fashion has come, as time goes by!’
‘And then?’ fascinated by history, again Pooshaappi settled on the two stools, ready to hear the rest of the tale.
‘What was I saying? Ah, even the Diwan knew that actually I was the brain behind Ramakrishna Pillai. But then, his Majesty did harbour a distinct animosity towards Ramakrishna Pillai. Who wouldn’t get furious when you argue for lower castes like Ezhavas and Pulayars? As for me, though I am progressive and everything, I will not compromise when it comes to caste, as everyone knows! So, they let go of me, in some ingenious manner. But could I rejoice? Was it not the real Swadeshabhimani, who lay prostrate at the feet of that inspettor Pichu Iyengar, at midnight, gibbering and weeping? Hey, what’s this? Why’re you sweating? Is your hydrocele hurting?’ Kuttan Pilla’s glance fell between Pooshaappi’s legs.
A Preface to Man Page 3