Before afternoon, not only Appu Nair, but the whole of Thachanakkara had reached Ayyaattumpilli. Because a contagion was suspected, it was suggested that the child’s body be cremated on a wood pyre. Though dried cow dung discs and coconut shells had already reached the house, a mango tree yet to bloom was chopped down from the western boundary to turn Padmanabhan into ashes. When the body was taken southwards, shrouded and bound in white, Govindan, who had kept his heart on a leash by holding on tight to Achyuthan’s hand, started to roll on the floor and wail.
Govindan was to cry once again after a month and a half. It was when, stuffing household effects in two hand-drawn carts, Menon Master, Padminiyamma and Achyuthan left, ending their sojourn at Ayyaattumpilli. Padminiyamma and Kunjuamma hugged each other and cried. Govindan and Achyuthan looked into each other’s eyes and cried. Menon Master and Naraapilla settled the rent arrears, returned the advance receipt and shook hands and parted.
With leaden feet and unseeing eyes, Govindan walked a long way, aimlessly following the direction that their hired car had taken. Achyuthan kept waving back, sitting in the taxi. First the car, and then the carts drawn by two emaciated coolies, disappeared from sight.
Everything was returning the way it had arrived. Among the household effects in the carts, Master’s bookshelf was the biggest. But the heaviest was something that had been added on at Ayyaattumpilli: sorrow.
NINE
Crepe Jasmine
17 July 1999
…I never met my grandmother. Neither did grandmother see the three children my mother gave birth to. So, grandma existed only in the realm of hearsay for me. During my childhood, if anyone contracted conjunctivitis in Thachanakkara, someone would come to Ayyaattumpilli to take some of the crepe jasmine growing in abundance in the southern corner where grandma had been cremated. The Thachanakkara folk believed that the crepe jasmine growing there had more power for restoring human sight than any of the same kind of flowers that sprout elsewhere. Later, when the property had been divided up into smaller plots as inheritances and houses sprung up in them, the luxuriant crepe jasmine disappeared. Even Grampa has forgotten Kunjuamma of Ayyaattumpilli. I am sure that none of this information will be of use to you for the interview on the 21st. Therefore, I will write a factoid I read in the newspaper today: Eileen Collins of America has won the honour of being the first woman to head a space mission.
Kunjuamma, who appeared before Naraapilla in the temple pond, was the tenth child of Paramu Nair of Peechamkurichi.
They were seven girls and three boys, headed by Appu Nair, the eldest son of Paramu Nair. The penury at Peechamkurichi was such that if the land were to be split between the ten siblings, each would not have got even six feet of the ground as burial space for each one of them. But Kunjuamma had inherited something from her mother that her six elder sisters did not: thick tresses which had started touching her small bum even as she was just eight years old. Though Paramu Nair’s wife Echuamma was a broken woman after delivering ten children, in her prime she was one of the true beauties of Thachanakkara. During the infamous flood of thousand ninety-nine of Malayalam calender, after she had lost her footing while trying to retrieve a plate that was floating away from the kitchen, she had slipped into the surging waters of the canal, and Paramu Nair, who had swum in pursuit, was able to pull her out of the water only because of her hair. After that, the legend of her hair was elevated to that of the supernatural tales about yakshis, who trapped men with the alluring beauty of their tresses. She was only saved by her hair getting caught in the bamboo stems stretching across the waters of the canal, which emptied into the Periyar river. The youngest daughter, Kunjuamma, who had inherited the same bountiful hair from her mother Echuamma, got caught in the flash flood of Naraapilla’s lust in her eighteenth year at the Thachanakkara thevar’s temple pond.
Two of Kunjuamma’s brothers and three of her sisters had fallen prey to various diseases in their childhood and had become one with the soil of Peechamkurichi. Thus, Appu Nair was her only living brother. After their weddings, the three sisters had left for their husbands’ houses and, of the ten children, only the eldest, Appu Nair, and the youngest, Kunjuamma, were left behind. After the death of Paramu Nair and Echuamma, apart from his four children, this unmarried youngest sister also became his share in an inheritance. That was when Naraapilla chettan of Ayyaattumpilli had taken him under his wing, though they were unequals; as his lust heaved, Naraapilla had married Appu Nair’s sister to sleep with her. However, after being a wife to a man and delivering his six children, in her brief forty-five years of life, Kunjuamma had very few chances of knowing the meaning of the word happiness. Even in the few instances of happiness she had experienced, her husband Naraapilla, who was renowned in Thachanakkara for measuring out money using a para, had no role to play.
Appu Nair’s sister’s son, Kesavan, who was the same age as Kunjuamma, was the source of the first spring of her life. When Echuamma of Peechamkurichi was pregnant with her tenth child, her eldest daughter was also carrying. When Kunjuamma had occupied the mother’s womb, Kesavan occupied the eldest daughter’s womb. The daughter gave birth first; two months later, the mother delivered. When the children started talking, Kesavan started calling the girl, who was younger in age but elder in relationship, Vavachitta, or baby-aunt. The well-spread ainee tree in the western corner of Peechamkurichi had a root jutting out of the earth, resembling a crocodile’s tail. A circular spot around that root, which had been cleared of grass, was their private haven when they were children.
In her death throes, as she started banging her head against the wall in Ayyaattumpilli, this crocodile-tail root was the first of the three or four visions that flashed through Kunjuamma’s mind.
Kesavan, who used burnt rice husk to darken his incipient moustache, was the one who remedied her problems of not being able to continue her education in a school. Kesavan’s amma had been married into a family named Peechampadinjaappuram, to the west of Peechamkurichi. From there, he came every day to see Vavachitta. He explained to her about the independence struggle, and about Gandhiji whom he had visited in the Advaithaashramam. He instilled in her respect towards social reformers such as Narayana Guru. He explained to her how the world really began outside Thachanakkara.
One Sunday, as they sat squeezing out and eating the flesh of ainee fruit, Kesavan said, ‘Vavachittae, you should marry someone who’s educated and knowledgeable. And when you have children, send them to big colleges and educate them.’
‘Get lost, lad,’ said a coyly blushing sixteen-year-old Kunjuamma, leaning against the termite-eaten pillar of Peechamkurichi, and pinching her nephew as she heard the word marriage. Keeping his forearm where he had been pinched close to his nose to smell the ainee, he said again, ‘When you have children, don’t add a suffix to their names with Nair, Pillai, etc. I feel, in the times to come, such surnames will be out of fashion.’
‘Lad, who told you all this?’ A piqued Kunjuamma jumped down from the parapet.
‘Isn’t there a college on the other side of Kaniyankunnu? Didn’t I tell you the other day, about how Gandhiji had come there and planted a mango tree? That day, there was a super speech by one of the teachers in the college. As Gandhiji’s arrival got delayed, his speech was prolonged. But as I sat listening to him, I wished Gandhiji would be delayed further. So interesting was that speech! His words had this something … what should I say … an illumination. That day, that’s what the teacher said.’
‘Go, you fibber.’ Pinching him once more, Kunjuamma ran into the kitchen. His eyes shone with a chivalry beyond his sixteen years; Kesavan said to himself, ‘I am also going to snip my name, Vavachitta. What is the use of this? Kesavan Nair! Kesava Menon, Kesava Pillai! Kesava Kosavan! Pthooo!’ He spat.
To escape the dire penury at Peechampadinjaappuram and, more importantly, to know the world outside Thachanakkara, in his seventeenth year, Kesavan ran away from his home, without telling even Kunjuamma. While his flight would not
cause anyone else any remarkable pain, Kunjuamma froze, unable to even weep. She developed a pain in her throat which made swallowing her own spit painful. Her mind was hollowed out in a single day. The next day, as she was gathering the scattered ainee seeds from beneath the ainee tree, unknowingly she gathered small stones the size of the seeds and deposited them in the bowl formed out of her skirt. When she ate the roasted ainee seeds, she ate the roasted stones as well. When she realized she was eating stones, she acknowledged those were tastier than anything else she had eaten before. Stones collected from the small clearing around the crocodile-tail root of the ainee tree. How could the others understand the taste? Till Appu Nair discovered it and took her to Achuttan Vaidyan, she continued eating roasted stones regularly.
‘It is a lack of nutrients,’ Achuttan Vaidyan told Appu Nair, lifting her eyelid and peering. ‘When she gets a good husband, your sister’s stone-eating and all will stop all by itself.’
It was a misdiagnosis by Achuttan Vaidyan. Kunjuamma’s stone-eating habit was related to her psyche, not her body. But as if to prove him right, when she was eating rice and curry to her fill in Ayyaattumpilli for her three meals, her stone-eating did seem to stop for a long while. On the fourth night of her wedding, even when tempted by her husband by his gift of burnt laterite, she was unmoved. Till the pregnancy cravings in her third pregnancy drew her out to come across the stones bathed in moonlight, and stacked up for building the New House, Kunjuamma had forgotten the pleasure of eating stones.
‘Pappinichechi.’ As she sat on the steps at the back of the tenant’s in the afternoon breeze, Kunjuamma would point out to Padmanabhan, who was too small for his age, and say, ‘If I tell you, you will not believe me. When I was pregnant with this Pappanaavan, my tummy had more laterite stones than the child.’
When she heard that, Padminiyamma would feel a fondness that breached the levees of all indulgent affection for Kunjuamma’s innocence. As she gazed at the flat tummy which six pregnancies hadn’t made flabby, she would tease, ‘It is no wonder it is a hard-as-stone abdomen.’
When all her four boys were registered in the school, Kunjuamma had used a trick to ensure that their names were not tagged with Nair or Pillai surnames.
‘As per tradition, shouldn’t we keep Nair for our children, like in their uncles’ names?’ Kunjuamma asked once when Appu Nair had come to Ayyaattumpilli.
‘Nah!’ Appu Nair interjected, ‘Hasn’t the matrilineal system moved on? For your kids, use Pillai! Isn’t it, Naraapilla chettaa?’
Unaware whether Nair or Pillai was more eminent, Naraapilla was perplexed. Using that opportunity, Kunjuamma said, ‘But if we go against tradition and add one or the other, what if there is some problem? Let’s now admit them as mere humans without surnames. All the suffixing can be done later, no?’
Thus, after finding out some names which were in fashion then and using them for her sons without a surname, envisioning a reformation, Kunjuamma repaid her debt to the playmate of her childhood.
The second owner of Kunjuamma’s joys was Padminiyamma who stayed as a tenant for many years at Ayyaattumpilli. The one instance that gave Kunjuamma great happiness was when, just before her last confinement, Padminiyamma secretly carried out a strange procedure practiced solely where the latter came from.
It was the month of Thulam. Those were the days when Naraapilla remained obsessed with banana plantations, and most of the time, he was tending to the one-and-half acres of land in Paanaayikkulam and grappling with green leaf manure and fresh cow dung. Though there was Appu Nair to attend to these matters, a restless Naraapilla could not sit tight at home.
‘Owner’s supervision is the primary manure.’ Thus turning his presence at the fields into a philosophy, Naraapilla would rush to Paanaayikkulam every morning.
One day, when Naraapilla was not at home, Padminiyamma made Kunjuamma sit in the lotus position facing east, in the portico of the New House. In her womb, her sixth child had already started the kicking and punching of the ninth month. Since it was afternoon, the surroundings were in a somnolent state. Padminiyamma had extracted juice out of the hog plum—which she had got Achyuthan and Govindan to gather from the compound the previous day—by crushing it on the grindstone and collecting the juice in a coconut shell. Chandran, who had not yet joined school, was despatched to fetch the knife from the kitchen. She let the sour juice drip on to the knife, held pointing north and above the face of Kunjuamma; Kunjuamma started to lap up the juice falling and scattering off the tip of the knife.
‘Oh my Pappinichechi,’ Kunjuamma expostulated with a contorted face. ‘OH! what sourness! Enough to kill the lice on one’s head!’
Her facial expression was mirrored on the face of Chandran, who was standing to the side.
‘Thus our sour-juice drinking ritual is over,’ said Padminiyamma after throwing out the coconut shell and wiping the knife clean. ‘Now you watch, this next child of yours; it will be like a battering ram!’
Those were the few sparkling moments of real happiness that Kunjuamma received as her meagre share in her petty life. She used to grieve over the lack of education of her husband and herself with the tenant couple repeatedly. She would try to imitate with her own husband how Padminiyamma would behave with Menon Master, only to meet with chagrin. She would burn up inside with the realization that, unless undressed, her husband was incapable of showing any affection. When in her forty-fifth year, she hit menopause when menarche had still not set in for her sixteen-year-old youngest daughter. During those last months of hers, she used to have a same dream repeat itself early in the morning. In her entire life, this was the strangest and most dismaying dream.
In that nightmare, the Ayyaattumpilli house was slipping under water, which had risen to roof level, flooded from torrential rains and the Periyar river in spate. All the men of Thachanakkara were running towards Kaniyankunnu, carrying their wives and children. Under the grey skies, in the vast floodwaters, seeing her six children, whom she had been clutching close to her, slip away one by one from her grasp and drowning and disappearing, she started bawling. The water was lapping against the last row of the roof tiles. She crawled up the slippery tiles using her cold, trembling legs, towards the top of the roof. Naraapilla was standing astride the inverted V-shaped top tiles, as if on an elephant. He was wearing only a loin cloth. He was telling her, as she pleaded to be saved with stretched hands, ‘Kunjo, it is easy for me to remember the year you died—the year of the floods.’
Then, when he would start his attempt to throw her off, flinging at her fist-sized laterite stones from inside his bulging loin cloth, she would wake up with palpitations loud enough to echo off the walls of Ayyaattumpilli.
During the initial days of her marriage, just on one night, she had seen a light dream, which had made her happy enough to remember it till her death.
‘Kunjo,’ running his fingers through her hair, Naraapilla asked her in the dream, ‘which is my Kunju’s favourite colour?’
‘The green of the tender plantain inflorescence.’
‘Favourite bird?’
‘Parrot.’
‘Then who’s the most favourite person?’
‘Who else?’ She hugged and kissed him and said, ‘This Narayanan himself.’
Preserving the sweet smile gifted by that dream, Kunjuamma found the match box, lit the chimney lamp, and gazed at her sleeping husband. She smiled bitterly looking at the reality—with the sweat pouring off him and the snores causing his cheeks and jowl to tremble.
During day time, the eternally love-starved Kunjuamma would be regaled by Padminiyamma, who would retell the tales of uxorious love that she had heard from Menon Master. That is how she came to know of a writer called Chandumenon writing a long tale for his wife to read and be entertained. She found out through Govindan that that book was not available in Menon Master’s book shelf. For a long time she thought that the Menon who had woven a story for amusing his wife was their Menon Master himself, the husband of Pa
dminiyamma. When he heard of that mistaken identity and had laughed for a long time, he narrated to her, in person, a more amusing episode. Menon Master went in and fetched the handwritten edition of an aattakatha, written by a gifted writer, Kottayathu Thampuran.
He searched for a particular page and handed over the book to Padminiyamma. In a nasal voice, Padminiyamma started reciting the poem:
Reveal thy provenance to me,
Ye pretty-face who comes in war!
Are you Kamadeva, Vishnu, ye exalted one,
Or Shiva, or a mere human being?
When she saw Padminiyamma gaze at her husband with love, after finishing the recital without any stutter or spit-spraying, Kunjuamma felt a flash in the pit of her stomach.
‘Kunjuamma has understood the meaning, no?’ asked Menon Master. ‘Nivaathakavachan, an asura is asking this question of Arjunan, who has come to kill him. Did you find any anomaly in this question?’
Kunjuamma stood in a stupor, looking at the sky.
‘Ayyae, I thought they were the words of some woman,’ Padminiyamma said.
‘That is the joke!’ Menon Master said. ‘Actually, these lines in the aattakatha were not written by Kottayathuthampuran.’ As if afraid that Thampuran’s spirit may be hovering around, Menon Master looked around and lowered his voice and said, ‘His wife, Kaitheri Maakkam, is the author of these four lines! She was reportedly very erudite. When Thampuran had got up from his writing and had gone away, possibly to pass urine, Maakkam came and added these four lines. The words which came out of the asura Nivaathakavachan’s mouth became that of a woman’s, filled with desire for the accomplished archer!’
A Preface to Man Page 9