By the time the board was taken up for hanging after the paint had dried, it was already afternoon. As it was being lifted up, spotting washerwoman Thaamara’s daughter Ammu coming alone to the shop for the first time, Kochu Parashu paused for a moment and asked, ‘What, lass, where is your mother today?’
‘Amma has gone to Vettungal where that Kuttambilla chettan died,’ Ammu said.
‘Who, our Swadeshabhimani?’ Setting the board down, Kochu Parashu shouted into the interior of the shop, ‘Father, it seems our Kuttanpilla chettan is dead.’
After instructing Artist Krishnan to look after the shop, Kochu Parashu helped his father up and supported him down the steps to head towards the deceased’s house.
Artist Krishnan got in and sat inside the shop. As Ammu stood at the bottom of the steps imitating her mother and called out for washing soda and 501 bar soap, Krishnan said, ‘Come up and stand here, lass. Those days are over.’
With hands dotted with yellow and white paint, Krishnan gave her a bar of soap and a matching quantity of washing soda. The artist in him saw sweat painting dark blue peacock feathers in the arm pits of that beauty’s light blue blouse.
‘One day I’ll paint you, including this birthmark on your face,’ said Krishnan, while taking and putting the money into the till.
Inside that sweet seventeen-year-old, a drum ensemble rolled. She staggered when she heard Krishnan ask, ‘Do you hear a sound?’
But Krishnan was listening to something in the distance. ‘Can’t you hear?’ he asked again. ‘Oh, today is the first of November. That must be the procession celebrating the founding day of our Kerala state. They may have reached the bridge now. They may come this way too. Do you want to see?’
Without replying to that, Ammu got out with the soap and washing soda. It was not that she did not want to see the celebrations of the changing times. But waiting for her at the riverbank was dirty laundry that was much more than what her mother could handle.
TWO
Seed
19 September 1999
…It’s after ages that I am seeing a movie. When this art form, capable of depicting human form and genius at its acme, is being reduced to a farce with comedians who crack jokes indiscriminately, I am unable to enjoy the humour. If I sit and cry amidst people roaring with laughter, it would be even more farcical. But yesterday’s film was not like that. Undoubtedly, he is one of the greatest actors of our times. This man, who seems very ordinary when he is standing, creates sheer poetry when he starts moving or when he delivers his dialogue. The story was that of a bond between the protagonist and his greying mother. But I could not enjoy it even a bit.
I don’t know why I hate that actress who walks around with an eternal expression of maternal affection on her face, now frozen into a mask.
Only one child born to Kunjuamma was a spitting image of Naraapilla—that was their sixth child, Chinnamma. While the four boys, including the deceased Padmanabhan, and Thankamma were more or less an amalgam of the diversities of Kunjuamma and Naraapilla in varying degrees, the youngest daughter, Chinnamma, was cent per cent Naraapilla. The eldest son, Govindan, was the closest to his mother in nature and appearance. From there on, in the children, increasingly there was less of Kunjuamma and more of Naraapilla. In the sixth one, Chinnamma, Naraapilla was complete and Kunjuamma was missing.
Before a year had gone by after the death of Kunjuamma, an incident—which had been anticipated for long and for which all hope had been abandoned—occurred in Ayyaattumpilli: in her sixteenth year, Chinnamma experienced the onset of menarche.
It was four years since she had stopped going to school, troubled as she was with a persistent issue of her endemic worm attacks. It was Naraapilla himself who had named the child—with knobbly forehead, a large head, bulbous nose, and missing eyebrows—Chinnamma, on her twenty-eighth day, after ritually tying around her waist five beads made of gold, silver, copper, iron, and lead. At the time of her admission in Aalungal School, the headmaster Karunakara Menon, while entering her name in the attendance register, lifted up his head from the writing and told Naraapilla, ‘A Christian child with the same name also has been admitted yesterday.’
‘Oho,’ said Naraapilla, ‘then tell its father to change its name quickly.’
Initially, when everyone used to say that the child resembled him, Naraapilla used to misconstrue that as a compliment to his looks. On such occasions, with a fondness not bestowed on his other offspring, he used to gather up his youngest daughter in his arms indulgently and utter, with a loopy grin, a phrase—which had obscure origins and which could be taken to mean ‘my youngest’—‘embilla elava’.
Chinnamma traversed the tricky terrains of female adolescence like a champion. Govindan, who was beaten by Naraapilla for swimming in the Periyar river and had hit him back, had unknowingly seized from his father a right for his younger siblings—the right to cavort in the Aluva river to their hearts’ content. Naraapilla did not beat his children for the crime of bathing in the river again. Because of that, before she turned nine, Chinnamma had acquired the prowess to swim across the river to Uliyanoor and swim back even before she managed to get her breath back. Once she tried to clamber aboard a houseboat headed for Varappuzha, which was moving with the help of sails and was loaded with vegetables. Finding a favourable wind unexpectedly after a long stint at punting the boat, the boatmen had just hoisted the patched sail. After laying down the long bamboo punts in the boat, the young men were smoking beedis and chatting, sitting on the edge of the plank on which banana bunches had been stacked. One of them, while dipping the small oar in the water to steer the boat, saw someone trying to board the boat from one side. It was Chinnamma. As he rushed along the length of the boat to push the intruder off using the oar, Chinnamma yanked the oar along with him and pulled them both into the water. The enraged man managed to swim to the oar, catch hold of it and shove it into the boat, before he turned to face the intruder in the water. In the struggle that ensued, the opponent lost her thorth, the only piece of cloth on her, alarming the astonished young man who let go of her in panic and clambered back into the boat, to warn his fellow boatman at the sail. ‘Ayye, that’s a woman, Mammad!’
Making up for the arrears of her father, who had avoided the waters of the river for an inordinate length of time, Chinnamma continued to bathe in Punneli kadavu. With the death of Kunjuamma, the reins on Chinnamma had come undone completely. Her fellow water-maiden was Leela of the Muringaattil family, who lived five houses away from Ayyaattumpilli. In the company of Leela, a stick-like emaciated figure with the face of an owl and a voice like a cracked bell, Chinnamma swam to the land of Perumthachchan countless times.
It was the day that they brought home bundles of red spinach stolen from Uliyanoor, planted and tended by unknown Mappila Muslims. As they walked down the alley, to those who looked at them and the spinach bunches in their hands suspiciously, Chinnamma and Leela said, ‘A Mappila threw this for us from the other bank. If you go quickly, all of you will also get some!’
‘Which Mappila flings them this far?’ the washerwoman Thaamara wondered aloud, while she was walking towards the kadavu, with soiled clothes in light red plastic buckets and a washing soap bar with the 777 brand prominently written on it. With her was Ammu with the beetle on her cheek, a nubile seventeen-year-old.
As the flushed, drenched girls ran with effort, they laughed and made up a name on a lark, ‘Perumthachchan Mappila.’
While Muringaattil Leela had lunch with spinach curry that afternoon, what awaited Chinnamma was the fury of Naraapilla. After grinding the stolen spinach underfoot, Naraapilla broke off a branch from the tamarind tree and whipped Chinnamma brutally. The tamarind stick landed on the wet skirt with the sound of crackers going off. Embilla elava writhed in pain. Naraapilla’s eyes bulged; he gnashed his teeth; he trembled in his rage. ‘You good-for-nothing!’ he said. ‘Do you think you can do anything just because your mother is dead?’
It was the first
time Chinnamma was getting a beating from her father after her mother’s death. As she was bawling, recognizing the truth that she had become an orphan, she felt miserable. When the tamarind stick broke, Naraapilla threw it away and stomped off in fury. Alarmed at the fear of her father flowing down her thighs, she ran to the latrine at the southern end of the compound. Her youth was emerging, breaking free of the cocoon of adolescence. The tender and colourful wings of femininity were unfurling painfully. Her womanhood, delayed by years, was squeezing her tight so as to extract the last drop. Trembling and standing with her legs apart, she screamed loud enough to be heard in the old house, ‘Chechi, please come quickly…’ Bending and peering down between her legs once more, she leant her head against the latrine wall and shouted again, ‘It looks as if the damned thing has come!’
Rushed by her sister’s shouts, Thankamma reached the New House, and the first thing she saw was the red spinach on the floor crushed into a pulp by her father. From there, on the beaten path in the grass winding southward, she saw droplets of blood scattered like seeds of the coral bead tree. Following their trail, she reached the latrine.
‘Don’t crow!’ Though she was older by only two years, with a maturity forced on her by her married life, Thankamma scolded her sister, ‘Crowing and announcing are for the hens.’
Chinnamma sat in the latrine for the next three hours. When Thankamma checked on her every now and then as her sister sat straining with the unending flow, she spied on her dark thighs and buttocks the welts left by the tamarind branch.
‘So that was what was lacking for her all this while,’ Thankamma mused to herself.
Informed by Thankamma, by evening Appu Nair and his wife arrived from Peechamkurichi and made a few arrangements for the therandukalyanam, the menarche ceremony. In the room in the southern corner of the New House, on a rug folded in four and covered with a starched white sheet, the maiden was seated like an accused, holding a brass handheld mirror. Her face wore an inscrutable expression those days, due the persistence of the painful spasms on the one hand and the excitement of unexpectedly becoming the centre of everyone’s attention on the other. Her upper lip appeared to be smiling even as her lower lip seemed to weep. Muringaattil Leela, mourning the break in water games in Punneli kadavu, and a brass pot filled with paddy in which a coconut flower had been planted, sat beside Chinnamma as her constant companion for the next four days. As per the tradition, the women in the neighbourhood visited, carrying beaten rice and plantains. Hearing of a girl attaining menarche in Thachanakkara, the velathi women from Muppaththadam arrived on the third day, with a change of clothes for the menstruating girl, and to sing the song of menarche. An innocuous couplet sung by these washerwomen, through teeth that protruded as if by their constant singing, got stuck in Chinnamma’s mind.
…Aren’t Mother and Step-mother listening
We are singing glories of your daughter dearest!
Chinnamma was drinking a tumbler full of warm milk after a long time. When the song reached this couplet, she wiped her mouth, belched, handed the tumbler back to Thankamma and said, ‘Our mother too should’ve been here now, no, chechi?’
At that moment, the spirit of Kunjuamma possessed Thankamma. Holding her younger sister close, the elder sister said, ‘Am I not there for you? Am I not your mother?’
Though Thankamma, from the standpoint of a mother, had instructed Chinnamma on accepted feminine ways, Chinnamma broke them at every possible turn. When she climbed the tree on the sly to pluck hog plums, the tender branch broke and she fell down. With no second thoughts, she left blood-stained menstrual cloth on top of the heap of the dirty linen waiting to be given to the washerwoman. On the day she frolicked till dusk in Punneli kadavu, an otter bit the calf of her leg. Anxious months went by. As her biological clock was fickle, her monthly periods were irregular. It was Thankamma who felt all the pressure.
She shared her anxiety about her sister with her husband: ‘Her therandukalyanam got delayed anyway,’ said Thankamma one night. ‘There’s nothing we can do about it. But at least we should get her married off without further delay!’
Kumaran smiled in the dark thinking of an amazing coincidence. He remembered the dark and slim Shankaran who was with him in the Communist Party study class in a room in the primary school in Eloor, which was still under construction. Kannan Master who was taking the class, spraying his spittle everywhere, was talking of a country called Cuba, its ruler Batista, and a brave young man called Fidel Castro who had declared total war against Batista. As he was wiping the back of his neck with his thorth, while insisting that the first election in Kerala was a war akin to that, Kannan Master saw the face of a young man sitting at the back contorting with pain. Shankaran stood up holding the bandaged middle finger of his trembling right hand with his left fist. After first scolding him for ignoring the finger that had been caught in a machine, Kannan Master sent him off to the hospital, instructing Shankaran and another comrade—Kumaran—to accompany him.
Returning from the hospital after the finger was stitched up and bandaged, Shankaran gave Kumaran a précis of his life story. Meanwhile, a brown colour secretion that smelt like a millipede was oozing from within and turning the white bandage dark. That was the beginning of a close relationship between Kumaran and Shankaran, which was to stretch into many years in the future. When they were finally wrapping up the day and getting ready to go their separate ways, realizing it was necessary, Kumaran asked him a question which workers engaged in a class struggle would normally not ask each other: ‘Not that it matters, but what caste are you? Nair?’
Shankaran smiled. ‘I don’t know my caste. But I am sure that my father and mother are Nairs!’
Lying beside Thankamma in the dark, Kumaran was marvelling at that day. Though he did not have the wisdom to appreciate the astonishing process chosen by Time to blend two strains of blood, unwittingly, he became the catalyst for such a merger. Three weeks later, an impromptu ceremony of seeing the prospective bride took place in Ayyaattumpilli, without anyone’s foreknowledge. Pointing to Chinnamma, who had come out at dusk to sweep the yard of the New House with a broom made of the spines of coconut leaflets, Kumaran urged his friend, ‘Take a good look. That’s the girl.’
As she was serving steamed banana cuts and jaggery-sweetened coffee to the guest, Thankamma’s heart was beating wildly. Looking through the window at Chinnamma, who was cursing herself as she swept the yard of the neighbouring house, the impoverished young man popped a piece of steamed banana into his mouth and said indistinctly, ‘Not as bad as I imagined!’
Kumaran and Thankamma were in the forefront to get Naraapilla’s permission and to invite the Thachanakkara folk for the wedding. Except for going to Cherai to invite Govindan, Naraapilla assented to everything. Thus in 1957, in front of Thachanakkara thevar, the communist Shankaran married Chinnamma, who stood wearing eight sovereigns of gold. Under the tent put up in Ayyaattumpilli was a feast for all the folk of Thachanakkara. The paayasam for the feast was made with jaggery. The groom’s emaciated mother and younger sister, with elephantiasis on her right leg, stood on either side of the bride, holding her hands throughout the ceremony. Unaware of what was expected of them during such ceremonies, this was an escape route to which the hapless women had clung. To accept the wedding puduva which Shankaran was extending towards her on a brass plate, Chinnamma shook off both their hands, protesting, ‘Can you let go now? Let me accept this. How else!’ As if its continuation, Naraapilla, apparently to make conversation with them, bent down low and told the mother who was fanning her mouth with pappadam to assuage the heat of the chilli, and her daughter who was licking the curry made with sweet bananas, ‘Shovel in and eat your fill! I don’t have another daughter to hold a marriage feast for!’
The tent held many people willing to laugh at the misery of those distressed women.
In the month of Dhanu that year, under the aegis of Thankamma, a poothiruvaathira, which is the first thiruvaathira celebration of
a bride after her wedding, was held in Ayyaattumpilli. All the women of Thachanakkara took part in the dance performed for attaining everlasting marital bliss, in which women danced moving in a circular pattern while clapping hands and singing, for twelve nights starting from the day of thiruvonam and lasting till thiruvaathira. On the portico of the New House, Naraapilla’s two communist sons-in-law sat watching the performance without demurring. Though Appu Nair’s son Kumaran had seen thiruvaathirakali performances before, for Chinnamma’s husband, Shankaran, this was something new. The sound of the tender palms of the women clapping was closer to the sound that the mature tamarind fruits made, pattering en masse when shaken out of the trees. Kumaran had learnt by heart the names of eight things needed for the offering called ettangaadi during the makayiram fasting, which he had to buy from the Aluva market, from the shopping list his wife gave him. But Kochu Parashu, Pooshaappi’s son, surprised him one day, appearing with a bursting gunny bag, before the dance began. As yam, greater yam, lesser yam, long beans, coleus, and colocasia tumbled out of the gunny bag when Kochu Parashu emptied it, he told the women, ‘Here is the stuff for the ettangaadi. It’s all on me, for my pleasure!’
When compared, the condiments to the list of eight things he had learnt by rote he found some missing, Kumaran queried, ‘But then, where are the coconuts and plantains?’
‘O.’ Kochu Parashu stroked Kumaran’s shoulder and laughed. ‘Do I have to bring plantains and coconuts for Naraapilla chettan’s house?’
As she swayed artlessly to either side along with the other women dancing in a circle around the lighted lamp, to impress her husband, Chinnamma’s full-throated voice accompanied the others in the thiruvaathira songs being sung. Next to her, Muringaattil Leela, her mate in water games, was circling the nilavilakku lamp with a face that reflected envy, and as if only to warm herself in the chill of the nights of Dhanu. But her indifference was just an impression. Even as she was physically accompanying the chorus, she was perfecting a new thiruvaathira song within her, which she had learnt over the previous two weeks with great effort, in order to make her friend’s poothiruvaathira memorable. As stage fright held her back the first ten nights, and as more songs were necessary to keep everyone awake on the night of thiruvaathira, that unexpected miracle happened.
A Preface to Man Page 12