‘Nah, not that!’ Pooshaappi shook his head, still sweating. Whenever he listened to historical tales, invariably the massive double-bundles that he had been bearing for the past sixteen years would start to throb and ache; especially if they were tales about royal wrath. Ensconced on two stools, he was one of those whose hearts would simply cease working and collapse if they were ever to be confronted by the disapproving frown of a ruler whom he may have crossed.
‘Whither was he exiled to?’ the trembling Pooshaappi prodded.
Kuttan Pilla halted for a moment. If he were to be truthful and say Madras, it was certain that the gravitas of the story would be lost. Madras was a place where even the useless youngsters of Thiruvananthapuram, who ran away from home, ended up in. The memory of a poor eatery in Madras, where he had to eke out a living as a cleaning boy, flashed in Kuttan Pilla’s mind.
‘Have you heard of Harappajadaro?’ The name that he tried to recollect was Andaman and Nicobar. Because it didn’t come to his tongue on time, Kuttan Pilla had to make up a name at that very instant.
‘Yeah, yesyes,’ Pooshaappi agreed, putting on a sombre air, though it was indeed the first time he was hearing it.
‘Yeah, that’s where he was exiled to. Don’t you know that it’s a place teeming with barbarians who would eat men in the raw? But, hmm, wasn’t it Ramakrishna Pillai after all? He put up a fight there too. Retaining the honour of us Nairs, he killed three, four barbarians as well!’
When he heard that, Pooshaappi’s pain lessened a bit. Inspired, Kuttan Pilla was about to add something else. But as quickly as he had opened his mouth, he shut it. Winding up his history rendition abruptly, Kuttan Pilla scrambled out, hastily scooping up the half pound of jaggery that had been kept wrapped in a teak leaf for him.
After a long gap, Appu Nair was seen coming towards the shop.
After the disaster of the first night, Naraapilla had not touched Kunjuamma. The punishment for arrogance. For the first time, Naraapilla was seeing a Nair woman express respect for Narayana Guru, the guru of Ezhavas and Thiyyas; he was touching such a one for the first time. The first touch itself had scorched him. All his inferiority complexes from childhood woke up with a start, swelled rapidly, and unfurled their dark branches over him. In the span of a moment, Naraapilla who measured money with a para, was turned into something worth not even a miserly half-chakra. He fumed with the thirst for vengeance. His mouth welled up with saliva when he thought of catching and crushing her like a nit. He went around without food for four days. The fourth day, he confronted his wife, who was preparing to go to bed as if unaware of him being angry, and announced dramatically: ‘I’ve brought something for you to eat!’
Kunjuamma was a tad upset that the past few nights her husband had slept alone in the anteroom. She had even amused herself with the thought that the unattractive Naraapilla was trying to lure her into a lover’s tiff. Apart from the chain made of sovereigns that he had gifted her on the first night, it looked like he was now offering something more.
Kunjuamma raised the wick of the chimney lamp and stood waiting with blazing anticipation.
‘It’s underneath the bed! Grab and eat it!’ Naraapilla spat in a choleric rage, as he went into the anteroom.
Kunjuamma was startled for a moment. Then, she gathered her hair into a bun at the back of her head and bent down to look under the bed with the chimney lamp.
Under the bed was one of the three laterite bricks that were usually left in front of the pounding shed, and used as the makeshift stove on which water for heated up for Naraapilla’s evening bath. How did Naraapilla come to know that Kunjuamma had the habit of eating pieces of burnt laterite stones?
‘Pray! How did he come to know of that?’ a panting Appu Nair challenged Pooshaappi, as soon as he arrived at the store. ‘Achuttan Vaidyan had said long ago that it’s because of a deficiency as she didn’t have any good nutrients while growing up, eh Pooshaappi … She got cured of it when she went into a family that could afford to eat and sleep well. But, now, how did he come to know? Tell me, I’ve told only you. Thachanakkara thevar won’t forgive anyone who has done this to betray my Kunju!’ Appu Nair couldn’t control his sorrow and punched his own throat as he uttered the word Thachanakkara thevar, sighing expansively.
That heartfelt curse came from a crushed soul. Pooshaappi jumped up as if he had been slapped, worried that if he were to endure it further, it may set his shop afire, burning him along with it.
‘Ha! What’s the point of you acting like this; all loose-tongued and hysterical like women?’ Pooshaappi consoled him, holding on to Appu Nair’s sweating shoulders, primarily for balancing himself. ‘Tell me this first! How did you come to know what happened on a night in Naraapilla’s bedroom? Was it your sister who told you?’
Appu Nair’s sorrow lessened somewhat when he heard that. ‘Cheyy, will she say that?’ Appu Nair pushed away Pooshaappi’s hand and sat on the entrance step, gazing towards the road. Pooshaappi almost fell when his support was taken away unexpectedly. He quickly got hold of the shop pillar made of the chopped trunk of an Indian tulip tree.
‘Say, will the bitterness of the poison-nut tree disappear if it were to be irrigated with honey?’ Appu Nair continued in frustration. ‘When I went to Ayyaattumpilli today, the man asked me if it was right to feed grass to a girl used to eating stone!’
When the story reached that stage, Pooshaappi could not help laughing, forgetting the solemnity of the occasion. However, the next moment, he checked himself.
‘I do remember,’ said Pooshaappi, ‘when you were talking about Kunju’s stone-eating habit, there were a few others here. One was indeed our Swadeshabhimani Kuttan Pilla. Because you can be certain of that, there’s no need to find out about the others. There’s also no point in you pouncing on Kuttan Pilla in this regard!’
‘Then?’ Appu Nair turned his neck to look at Pooshaappi.
‘We’ll find a way for all that!’ Pooshaappi took out his statesmanship. ‘I promise that I’ll tackle your brother-in-law, advise him to discriminate between right and wrong. Now, is there anything you need to buy?’
Appu Nair made a sound with his mouth that could be taken as a no. Then, Pooshaappi once again used Appu Nair’s shoulder as support to bend down, and enquired with a mischievous smile, ‘Forget all that. You tell me this now. Did Kunju actually eat the stone that Naraapilla gave her?’
At first, Kunjuamma did not recognize Naraapilla’s evil intent. The virgin had just completed eighteen, in the month of Kanni. Keeping the chimney lamp on the floor, Kunjuamma pushed the stone left and right and searched all around it with her right hand. While she was surprised at not finding anything, the tempting smell of burnt stone rushed into her nose. For the first time, Kunjuamma felt some affection for her husband. Kunjuamma marvelled as to how she would have, earlier, finished off the stone at one go.
‘Not now,’ Kunjuamma told herself. ‘It’s no fun for the stove not to have all the three stones!’
That night, Parashuraman, who had slashed his mother’s throat to let his father’s obstinacy win, rolled his eyes as he sat looking at Kunjuamma from within the Thachanakkara temple.
FOUR
Glorious Mother
17 April 1999
…How many astounding fortuities occur behind every man’s birth? This bond of ours too is only a coincidence for certain other births in the offing. That’s how it is going to be, however we romanticize it. Upset? It’s not because I cannot wait till I receive the reply for the letter sent day before yesterday that I am writing yet another long letter. Only if I put this too down on paper for you, today itself, will I be able to sleep.
What did you feel when the government fell by a deficit of one vote? Or, did you not come to know of it? See how prophetic my words were. Anyway, I feel rather peaceful today. Now, shall I tell you something I have not told you so far? My mother was stunned when she heard that the girl I was planning to marry was a Christian. The same shock that my gran
dfather had felt, half a century ago, when Uncle Govindan decided to marry a lower-caste Thiyya woman from Cherai!
The eighteen-year-old Kunjuamma, whom Naraapilla married and brought home, was the first female braveheart in Thachanakkara to pronounce openly that her husband had bad breath. More than boldness, it was the new bride’s naïve enthusiasm that made Kunjuamma say so.
It was indeed Swadeshabhimani Kuttan Pilla who informed Naraapilla of his wife’s fetish for burnt laterite. But it was not after the marriage, as surmised by Appu Nair.
A month before, Naraapilla had stepped into the temple pond of Thachanakkara thevar for his regular morning bath. Usually, at that hour, apart from Naraapilla, only the bulbous frogs would be on the wet steps, their ballooning throats cursing the light breaking in the east. From the thoroughly chilled green hue, fine layers of mist would be wafting up. Around the square walls of the pool, the coconut palms would stand unmoving, in daunting silence. At that hour, when everything stood frozen, beyond the shoulder-high wall separating the women’s side of the pool, someone entered the water, setting off widening ripples in the water. The sound of a female mouth gargling and spitting out water could be heard. Naraapilla raised his head above the half-wall and peered. On the women’s side of the steps, the faint light of dawn framed for Naraapilla the sculpted curves of a female form, clad in a single wet, clinging mundu. He wondered if the sounds of the frogs jumping en masse into the water, after they wound up their music practice, was actually coming from somewhere inside him. Naraapilla dried himself quickly and got out.
Usually, women did not bathe in the carefully preserved temple pond of Thachanakkara, in which soap and oil were not allowed. For them to wash, bathe, and gossip, Punneli kadavu in the Aluva river was deemed perfect. The Nair men and women of Thachanakkara bathed there—except Naraapilla. For Naraapilla, who bathed twice a day, the morning bath was always at the temple pond. Without soap or oil. The yard in front of his grain-pounding house provided the stage for his elaborate second bath of the day in the evenings, with an oil massage, washed off with bath water heated in the copper vat set on the laterite stone stove fired by dried coconut flower spathes.
He too had bathed in the Punneli ghat in his childhood with his mother. Once, his mother was scrubbing away the dirt from the back of his black body with a shikakai scrub. The kadavu was empty. To keep the boy still, she kept singing and annotating a couplet his father—whom he had never seen—had composed. The poem was about the seven mountains that gave birth to the Periyar river. The pepper-infused coconut oil on the boy’s unruly hair had started warming up in the midday sun. Letting him get into the river to take a dip by himself, Pappiyamma—left a lonely widow in Ayyaattumpilli, with a single child and hectares of landed property—took ten seconds to wash and wring the thorth dry. She shook the wrinkles out of the thorth and turned, but the lad had vanished! He had gone under, weighted down by the history-laden waters of Aluva river that he had gulped down involuntarily when the sand bank had given way beneath his feet. The first time his head bobbed up, the oiled hair slipped out of Pappiyamma’s grasp. The current was slow that day. The next time he surfaced, the mother’s grip on the clump of his hair was stronger and surer, fortunately. After she yanked him up to the shore in one strong swing, she found a handful of hair stuck to her palm, and washed it off in the river. From that day onwards, the twelve-year-old Narayanan began to lose hair. If he got into the river, he began to get fits remembering his floundering in the vortex. That is how Naraapilla came to bathe in Thachanakkara thevar’s algae-bloom-green pond instead.
If the flowing river tried to drag him away from his mother and steal his life, the still waters of the temple pond gave him life, luring him in the form of Kunjuamma—in his thirtieth year, in the midst of his bath at dawn, Naraapilla recognized the woman who captivated him. The youngest sibling of his dearest friend Appu Nair, the young girl of Peechamkurichi, where they could not afford even a decent midday meal, had blossomed into a full-breasted woman! As he walked, Naraapilla turned back to look at her, and the second toe on his right foot hit the oblation stone on the temple floor and started bleeding.
Early in the morning, he reached Pooshaappi’s shop; the wound in his toe was clotted by then. Pooshaappi was just opening the shop, putting away the wooden slats. Kuttan Pilla too had reached, sans his pocket-shirt, yawning and scratching his head. Sidling under the awning of the shop, and moving into the shade, both his injured right toe and the granite-like head with its forehead smeared with sandal-paste from the temple visit early that morning, Naraapilla launched a crafty probe, ‘Isn’t there a lassie at Peechamkurichi? Appu Nair’s younger sibling. Does it have any illness, eh, Pooshaappi? Looks rather odd!’
‘Heeeyy, no way!’ With a sound resembling a ram’s snort, Pooshaappi, who held the statistics of the entire female population of Thachanakkara in his palm, dismissed it, ‘The one Naraapilla saw couldn’t have been the girl from Peechamkurichi. Though food is scarce, she is of plump stock. Anyone seeing her would yearn for her! But, hasn’t Naraapilla seen Appu Nair’s sister so far?’
That was all that remained to be discovered. Naraapilla came away before Pooshaappi could even finish opening his shop. But, as he was walking back, he overheard Swadeshabhimani asking Pooshaappi, ‘Eh, Pooshaappi, didn’t Appu Nair say the other day that she had a fetish for eating stones?’
Naraapilla didn’t find anything odd about that. Unpolished rice with adequate curries was sure to put an end to Kunjuamma’s stone consumption. If not, and even if it was a disease, the coffers of Ayyaattumpilli had enough money to treat it.
From the street paved with fist-sized granite chunks, Naraapilla entered the alley leading to Ayyaattumpilli. Next to the medicinal herb plants, he saw in the early morning light, the moovandan mango trees, known for giving fruits from the third year onwards, thus earning its name for the species, in blossom and apparently doing their workouts in the breeze.
The breeze, tangy with the smell of mango sap, presaged spring in that month of Dhanu. As the vision of the drenched Kunjuamma in the temple pond appeared before his eyes, Naraapilla’s injured toe struck a protruding root.
‘Aww!’ Naraapilla’s mouth opened wide.
There was a reason why Appu Nair’s sister Kunjuamma went to bathe in Thachanakkara thevar’s pond. Appu Nair had gone west to meet the senior astrologer of Kaniyankunnu to ascertain the root cause and remedy for the tribulations that seemed to plague the family. After the partition, his old parents and younger sister of marriageable age had become part of Appu Nair’s inheritance. As far as Appu Nair was concerned, the so-called self-acquired assets mentioned in the new legislation for Nairs were only these. It did not end there—there was also his wife, stooped over from four consecutive pregnancies and deliveries that resulted in four children, whose shapes resembled scooped-out coconut shells and empty measuring naazhis, the smallest paddy measures. After the death of his parents, he stood to inherit the dilapidated, about-to-collapse Peechamkurichi house too. All things considered, a visit to the elder astrologer was overdue.
The senior astrologer of Kaniyankunnu does not spread the cowrie shells to read the future; does not ask the name or the star under which one is born; nor does he ask for the native place or the caste. The person who comes to his front yard, he believed, invariably brings a portent with him. Kittan, his youngest son, who was chopping wood, spotted Appu Nair and called out to his father: ‘Father, someone’s here!’
When the senior astrologer—his pock-marked face rendered fiercer with the ash smeared on it—stepped out on to the portal, the first thing he saw was his youngest son standing with the axe, drenched in sweat. Behind him was Appu Nair, who had come to seek a remedy. Youngest son, axe, and sweat … The senior astrologer had no difficulty reading it altogether.
‘Instruct the youngest in the family to bathe and offer prayers at Parashuraman’s temple for forty-one days. Let it be before daybreak, and before changing out of wet clothes. Problems w
ill be solved,’ the senior astrologer shut his eyes and told Appu Nair, his eyeballs almost rolling up into his eyebrows.
Appu Nair was relieved. The remedial action was uncomplicated. In Thiruvithamkoor, there was only one temple for Parashuraman, as far as he knew. That was in Thachanakkara itself. What could he have done if it was as far away as Thripprayaar or Guruvayoor?
The senior astrologer’s prophecy did not go wrong. On the very first day of bathing in the temple pond, a soaked Kunjuamma was spotted by Naraapilla. Before the forty-first day, Appu Nair’s family was able to come ashore.
What happened on Naraapilla’s first night was the crescendo-like climax of all these happenings. When Kunjuamma uttered the name of Narayana Guru, Naraapilla was only momentarily shaken. The next minute he forgot that. As a prelude to the consecration of the goddess whom he had espied at the temple pond, now seated on his rope-bound cot covered with fresh linen, Naraapilla blew out the chimney lamp. Gagging at the foul stench emanating from his mouth, the chimney lamp held its nose and died out. Then he tried to hold Kunjuamma close and kiss her. When the fetid smell, that even his own mother could not have endured, reached her nostrils, the chaste wife shoved aside her husband and said, ‘Ayyo, Naraapilla chettan’s mouth stinks awfully!’
Naraapilla sank without a trace.
His vow of silence started thus from that day and extended to four days, at the end of which he suddenly divined the only flaw in Kunjuamma—the allegation he had overheard Kuttan Pilla make at Pooshaappi’s shop, which he had disregarded then. If he had flaws, so did she! Evading his wife’s gaze, and under cover of twilight, he went to the front yard of the pounding room, lifted a burnt stone off the brick stove used for heating water for his evening bath and pushed it surreptitiously under the rope-bound cot. Then he spent his day relishing the thought of his wife being shattered by the dramatic scenes his plan was to set off.
A Preface to Man Page 4