Menon Master recollected the children asking his permission to go to the river. But fearing that the word river might enrage Naraapilla further, he did not mention it. ‘In the morning he had come to check the books,’ he said. ‘After taking the books, Achyuthan and Govindan then went to the compound or someplace!’
‘Hraa,’ spewing the remnants of masticated betel leaf from his throat, without letting it touch the lips, Naraapilla said, ‘Cursed brat! Today, today, today, I will kill him!’
Trembling all over, he ran back. Lifting up her youngest daughter and running after him, the overwrought Kunjuamma cried, ‘My Pappinichechi, if that man says he will kill, he will!’
Going past Punneli kadavu, where women bathed, Govindan and Achyuthan walked along the river. Parting the tall stalks of the halfa grass, the children stood on the ridge jutting into the river under golden shower trees in full bloom. The Aluva river kept tempting the boy, who was a tenant and an emigrant from another place, to forget the books he was carrying. Before leaving home, Achyuthan had wound a thorth around his shorts, under the shirt. He undressed and draped the thorth and got ready. His swimming coach, Govindan, younger by a year, took the first plunge breaking the sheet glass-like surface of the still river water.
With his hair plastered and appearance altered, he bobbed up a short distance away and called to his friend, ‘Come, Achu. There is no current. Jump!’
Gingerly, as if climbing down from an elephant, Achyuthan slipped into the water, sliding over the ridge and breaking it, while still holding onto the halfa grass. The Periyar embraced the outsider and tickled him. The thorth, fastened around his waist, ballooned up in a circle above his waist-thread. Female fish peeped between the thighs of the guest and floated in a circle.
The green expanse of the river touching Achyuthan’s chin rose up and down. Right in front of him, Govindan’s head broke the surface of water. Spouting water from his mouth towards the sky in a spray, he pointed to Uliyanoor across the river and said, ‘Perumthachchan’s house is there. Shall we swim across and take a look?’
Govindan, who turned around to ask permission, saw over his friend’s head, the shape of his father descending into the water from the ridge. Following the path suggested by the women in Punneli kadavu, a seething Naraapilla was advancing with a branch broken off a golden shower tree.
‘Achan!’ after mixing in the water as much terror those two syllables could conjure up, Govindan scrambled up on to the bank. Searing the drenched skin on his back, the leafless stick struck him left, right, and centre. Mortified by seeing his friend being beaten up, an agitated Achyuthan clambered out of the water, bleating.
When his hand grew tired after beating his son like a man possessed, Naraapilla threw down the stick. Govindan didn’t even let out a whimper through the thrashing, defeating Naraapilla. That was when he saw the two books near the clothes left by the children. He did something about which he himself had no sentience: he grabbed the two books and flung them far out into river, with an imprecation, ‘To damnation!’
Like two decapitated and dismembered white birds, the two books flew, thrashing about. The books, which Menon Master had given in trust, floated for a moment on the surface of the water and then sank and disappeared.
Then something unexpected happened. In a rage born from sorrow, Govindan opened the mouth he had pursed shut. He screamed. Then with the all the strength a fourteen-year-old could muster, he beat his father with the stick retrieved from the ground.
He hit him again and again and again.
EIGHT
Outsider
26 May 1999
…Amma has written that property prices in Thachanakkara are rising rapidly. Only the day before, the president commissioned an international airport just a twenty-minute drive away. With this, the price for the land will shoot up.
However, here villages exist cheek-by-jowl with the city. In the city square, smiling, stands the beautiful statue of the renowned writer who became famous writing about his land, though he was a globetrotter. Yes, it is not that of any Zamorin, but that of a writer! His statue defines the character of this town. Not only to the indigenous locals, this land will extend affection to strangers too. There is a magnet in this soil that attracts those aliens who are on the lookout for newer shores. That Gama’s Portuguese ship reached Kappad was certainly no accident, is something that I know now. In the long line of outsiders starting from Gama, at the other end is this poor me. The difference is that the distance traversed is short, the sea crossed is of tears and the ship used was that of loneliness. When you come here, what would you be called? Outsider? Foreigner? This term was damaging enough to hurt a woman in Delhi, enough to make her resign from the position of the leader of the opposition party six days ago.
In that Thulam month, in which Menon Master decided to finally move from Thachanakkara, there was an unexpected death in Ayyaattumpilli—a very small, unsung death.
It was a time when Naraapilla’s six children and Menon Master’s Achyuthan were afflicted by a debilitating whooping cough. Both the houses of Ayyaattumpilli rang with cough day and night. The kids coughed incessantly and vomited many times with their hands clutching their tummies. The illness broke first with Padmanabhan, the second son after Govindan. When he came back from school, coughing as if his throat was about to rent itself, Kunjuamma spotted urine spots in his shorts and sensed danger.
‘Ey, listen…’ Choosing a favourable moment, Kunjuamma told Naraapilla, ‘Our Pappanaavan seems to have a bad cough!’
Naraapilla, who was busy scraping the outer skin of an arecanut with the sharp edge of a nutcracker, squinted his eyes to look at the boy coughing and leaning limp against his mother’s body.
‘If they go and gambol in the sun in the guise of going to study, they will cough, fart, everything,’ Naraapilla said with dismissive indifference.
‘This is not that.’ Kunjuamma heaved in agitation, as she held Padmanabhan close and massaged his chest. ‘The boy’s miserable. While coughing, he’s passing urine too.’
When Naraapilla continued to chop arecanut in silence, Kunjuamma sharpened her voice and added, ‘If you give me money, I’ll take him to Achuttan Vaidyan!’
‘You can take or kill or whatever!’ said Naraapilla, sending the arecanut pieces and the nutcracker with the brass handles flying with a sweep of his hand. ‘If you want, take that outsider next door too! But you won’t get even a quarter from me!’
Peering inside, he made his voice tremble to a crescendo, ‘Good-fo’-nothings that strike their mother ’n father will only die coughing and shitting. What’s the point of them recovering from illnesses after all? To do my oblation to the manes?’
By dusk, Padmanabhan’s illness intensified. When the children were washing their hands and feet to sit before the lamp and pray in the evening, Padmanabhan vomited a mouthful of yellow liquid on the front step. Naraapilla stood looking sympathetically at Kaalippennu who was washing the steps. Before he could hurl curses at Kunjuamma, Kaalippennu intervened, ‘So wh’t, master, don’t I too ’ve a boy of the same age!’
Kaali’s smile and enthusiasm cooled Naraapilla.
In the night, Kunjuamma gave Padmanabhan hot coffee laced with dried ginger and pepper. Pleased with such consideration that came rarely, he hugged his mother’s cold tummy and lay coughing. ‘Next time when you go to the beach…’ Pausing after a cough that seemed to wring out his soul, he piped up, ‘…’ll Amma buy me a thing?’
‘Surely. What does Amma’s Pappanaavan want? Tell me, my dear!’ Kunjuamma stroked his forehead.
Padmanabhan smiled a mischievous smile. ‘That…’ He tried teasing his mother, ‘That’s something. A thing!’ Because he started coughing again, he could not finish telling her.
More than her concern for her son’s cough, Kunjuamma felt the weight of her husband’s irresponsibility acutely on her chest, and somehow managed to pass the night. By daybreak, the two younger ones, who were sleeping on a mat on the floo
r beside the cot, had also started coughing. When the five-year-old Chinnamma puckered her mouth and her eyes bulged as she coughed, Kunjuamma glimpsed on her small face an expression akin to that of her husband in his angry moments, and felt a little cross. Then Pankajaakshan coughed. By the time the rasping drumming was on the ascendant, Chandran also joined in. By evening, all six of them, including Govindan, had started coughing and spitting out phlegm, pushing their ribcages forward.
Fed up with Appu Nair’s efforts to douse Naraapilla’s unbridled misadventures through affectionate reasoning, Naraapilla had been keeping his distance from Appu Nair. Kunjuamma was also banned from visiting her brother and sister-in-law at Peechamkurichi. Clinging to his last fistful of dignity, Appu Nair had also stopped going to Ayyaattumpilli and being Naraapilla’s lackey. Appu Nair had on his side reasons that would be found justifiable by anyone who cared to listen: even after the harvesting, threshing and the filling of the granary were over, Kaalippennu had not vacated the love-nest of the tenant’s anteroom. Naraapilla was making Kaalippennu stay, scarcely bothering to get Menon Master’s consent.
That night, while lying with Kaalippennu to unload the weight of his lust, and listening to the coughs of his children breaking through the confines of the New House, Naraapilla recollected his wedding night: remembering the bitterness of that night in the month of Kanni fifteen years ago, Naraapilla told Kaalippennu in the darkness, ‘Oh, the entire lot has caught a terminal cough! Don’t they sound like dogs in heat in Kanni?’
Menon Master and Padminiyamma heard from their bedroom the suppressed moans of Kaalippennu and the growls of Naraapilla in the middle of the night. The door of the anteroom opened to the outside. Fearing that a murder was being committed in their house, the couple stood trembling with fear, ears pressed to the wall. It took them a long time to understand that inside were two bodies competing with each other in unimaginable sexual acrobatics, in utter disregard of all norms of untouchability and castiest pollution. After making sure that the sixteen-year-old Achyuthan was asleep, Menon Master retreated with his wife. Till the door was shut, the rhythmic panting of a female voice moaning ‘Master, Master’ and the growling throatiness of a male voice’s underplayed amorous cuss words could be heard from the anteroom.
‘Ayye, why does it sound that way?’ Padminiyamma, who couldn’t sleep, asked Menon Master in his ear.
‘Who knows?’ Making a determined decision to leave Thachanakkara with his family, Menon Master said, ‘I know only of things related to human beings!’
Right after the children of the New House caught the bug, Achyuthan also started to cough. As soon as he reached home from school, Menon Master got ready to take him to Achuttan Vaidyan of Kaniyankunnu. When Padminiyamma came to the New House kitchen to tell Kunjuamma, she too went inside, changed her mundu and came out with her children as well. Though they were all coughing non-stop, the little children began to laugh with joy, as if going together for a festival.
Chinnamma, who was to join Aalungal school next June, was the worst affected by the cough. The whooping cough’s intensity was in inverse relation to age. Govindan and Menon Master’s Achyuthan, who were on the verge passing their childhood, coughed only a little. Crossing the ledges and alleys shadowed by beleric trees, the children walked upto Achuttan Vaidyan’s clinic, walking in a procession with a cough as its slogan. During the examination, when Achuttan Vaidyan asked them to demonstrate their cough, Govindan and Achyuthan couldn’t cough. But the kids obeyed the order. Like the early morning frog-orchestra at the Thachanakkara thevar’s pond, Padmanabhan, Pankajaakshan, Chandran, Thankamma, and Chinnamma on the hip of Kunjuamma, began to cough with little respite.
‘Enough, enough!’ Achuttan Vaidyan scolded, gesturing with the penknife with which he was sharpening the pencil butt to write the prescription. In a moment, all of them went silent together. When the suppressed cough behind the forcefully pressed mouths began to push and bubble in their kiddy throats and started to redden the capillaries in their popping eyes, Achuttan Vaidyan’s heart melted and he said, ‘Ah, go ahead and cough a little!’
Permission granted, the group started coughing with renewed strength.
Their examination over, Achyuthan and Govindan were standing on their toes to peer at the thick tomes in the top shelf of Achuttan Vaidyan’s medicine shelf. Amongst the sheaves of paper sheets between the moth-eaten covers, oily with use, lay an ocean of knowledge about wellness and longevity. With the experience gathered from Menon Master’s bookshelf, and holding his head cocked to the side, Govindan began to read some of their names: ‘Pharmacographia Indica, Materia Medica of Hindus, Siddhaprayogalathika, Dravyagunavijnanam…’ But even as he was uttering the words, without letting his friend notice, his eye was hovering around his mother. After the prescriptions were written and medicines handed over, who would pay Achuttan Vaidyan? He knew his mother was sweating in dread of that moment.
In his left ear, Achuttan Vaidyan’s voice rang, ‘For the little ones, the illness is a little bad. Would there be Malabar nut herb in your yard? You may be able to identify it. Didn’t you say you were a schoolmaster? Ah, then tell me, in Ramayana, to slay the demoness Thaadaka, Sage Vishwamithran had recruited Raman and Lakshmanan; then, the sage taught unto them two mantras to enhance their strength. Which ones?’
Master smiled. With affection for the old apothecary, he replied, ‘Bala and athibala, if my memory is right.’
‘Bravo! Exactly!’ Achuttan Vaidyan’s face reflected his happiness at having met a worthy man after a long time. ‘So, like me, you too are not from this place, isn’t it? Okay, then tell us this too, what actually are bala and athibala?’
Kunjuamma shifted the coughing child on her hip, without disturbing their conversation. Feeling guilty, Master reminded the vaidyan, ‘The children are coughing badly. If we leave now we can start them on their medicines!’
‘Ah! If you don’t know, here, listen. The arrow leaf sida plant, ubiquitous in our yards, is what is called this bala! In the same family, athibala is the one with greater potency! Understood?’
Revealing his dark gums, Achuttan Vaidyan laughed loudly.
Pointing at Achyuthan and Govindan standing near the almirah, Achuttan Vaidyan said, ‘Ngaa, let’s leave Raman’s medicines and come to our case. For the elder boys—there, for those Rama-Lakshmanans—fenugreek decoction will do. For the little ones, sweet flag should be ground and given in the honey of stingless bees twice daily. Didn’t I mention Malabar nut sometime ago? Its leaf and seeds, roasted and powdered, and mixed with pepper, dry ginger, and sugar crystals can be given to the babies. This guy in between, what’s his name? Ah, I don’t think his is a case of whooping cough alone! How old is he now? Ten or eleven?’
Govindan stood up from the bookshelf, and moved closer to his brother. Padmanabhan was sitting shirtless in front of the Vaidyan, exhausted and resembling a wilted colocasia stem.
‘Will be fourteen this Medam!’ said Kunjuamma, stroking Padmanabhan’s chest.
‘Ooh!’ Achuttan Vaidyan was stunned. ‘Then…’ he said, frowning, ‘Tell that Naraapilla to come up here when he is free!’
Before receiving the prescription, when Master’s hand was going into his pocket, Achuttan Vaidyan stopped him and said, ‘Nhum, nhumm! Keep it with you; first visit, right? It can be the next time!’
Helping the children button up, Kunjuamma got out, holding them all close together. Govindan and Achyuthan walked in the front. Menon Master took the youngest from Kunjuamma. Kunjuamma picked up the tired Padmanabhan, the fourteen-year-old who looked only eleven.
Then, Govindan turned back and took his brother off his mother. That this walk from Kaniyankunnu to Ayyaattumpilli carrying his brother, who was only one-and-a-half years younger, would be a lifelong memory for Govindan, was a fact he did not know at the time.
Of the children of Ayyaattumpilli, it was Padmanabhan who stopped coughing first.
Despite Achuttan Vaidyan’s orders, his father did not go
to the clinic. The Vaidyan’s suspicion about the boy’s sickness was not misplaced. But, he did not get the time to treat and cure it. Ten days after the cough started, the youngest baby called for her mother when she saw a white thread-like thing emerging from the nostrils of Padmanabhan, who lay with a smile in the early morning cold. Kunjuamma, roasting the leaves and rice of Malabar nut in the kitchen, had to look only once. ‘Ayyo!’ with a bellow louder than any that she had ever made during any of her pregnancies, Kunjuamma burst out crying, beating her chest. ‘Ayyo … My Pappanaavan is gone!’
He was gone. Worms emerged not only from his mouth, but also from his nostrils and ears and eyes. In the midst of children who were struggling to both cry and cough at the same time, Kunjuamma hugged Padmanabhan’s wasted body and screamed with her wet throat, ‘Call that devil, children … Tell him my son is gone!’
Naraapilla came, held the boy’s face by the chin and turned it left and right, and twisted his lips. ‘My Thachanakkara thevare!’ He pummelled his chest with his closed fists with all his strength and cried, ‘You’ve made me eat my gorpse!’
Then he came out and, forgetting the long-drawn-out hostility, called out to Peechamkurichi: ‘Appoliyo!’ He coughed up nonexistent sobs and bawled loudly, ‘Come here quickly, Appoliyo! One is gone here!’
Hearing the sound, it was Menon Master who came first, with the burnt husk dentifrice still in his mouth and holding in his hand the tongue-cleaner, improvised out of a split coconut leaf spine. When she saw Padminiyamma who followed right behind, Kunjuamma’s heart surged into her throat and got constricted. They cried hugging each other. To bear the pain of death, the mourners began to split up in pairs: Kunjuamma and Padminiyamma; the younger daughters beside the dead body now stretched on the floor; leaning against the wall beyond were Pankajaakshan and Chandran, who were younger than Padmanabhan; seated close to each other on the porch were Govindan and Achyuthan; and in the yard, without uttering a word or touching or crying, were Naraapilla and Menon Master…
A Preface to Man Page 8