A Preface to Man

by Subhash Chandran

  Eleyelo…

  eleyelo, eleyelo, eleyelo

  thaam thaka thaam!

  The sound rose from within the circle of women as if from a cracked temple bell. That was Muringaattil Leela. The women in the circle, taken aback by this new entrant, nevertheless took up the chorus. Though her inspiration almost drained her, she sang in a fast tempo, impressing her fellow dancers more by her improvised lyrics that tickled her fellow dancers into laughter more than by her singing voice:

  Rapid on seas, a mercantile ship

  Dropped anchor in eventide

  Cutlery-plates-blankets-whisky

  Matchboxes-kerosene-mull mull

  These and sundries unloaded on shore

  Reached the middle of the Atlantic Ocean…

  Chinnamma was the one who enjoyed the song the most. She was at the end of her tether after singing the praises of Lord Ganapathi and Goddess Saraswathi continuously. She felt unmoved by the romantic songs that the women of Thachanakkara had always been singing. However, she felt that Leela’s song, the provenance and authorship of which were completely unknown, was written specifically for her honeymoon. She also felt as if she and Leela were swimming in an ocean, and overtaking a sailing ship that was leaving behind two lines of white froth in its wake. As the other women were laughing it away as a joke, Chinnamma, immersed in her friend’s song, was sweating with the pleasure that the song gave her even in the chill of Dhanu. Another person who enjoyed the song with the same gusto was Naraapilla, who was sitting half asleep on the portico of the New House. Days after the thiruvaathira was over, he continued to remember her every now and then: ‘You know, that girl from Muringaattil? She’s smart!’

  Five months later, Naraapilla had to say the same sentence in past tense. That was the day Muringaattil Leela disappeared, leaving behind a white mildewed dress, a torn green skirt, and a piece of washing soap on the ghat of the Periyar river. Though boats and canoes searched for her up to Varappuzha, her body was never found. As an expert swimmer, a death by drowning seemed unlikely for her. Many had seen the nubile girl, past the age of marriage, going alone for her bath towards the river. Anyone who looked at the tattered relics left by her on the kadavu could easily guess how, with no one to wait for her, no one to want her and no place to anchor in, Leela could have taken her life deep into the recesses of the river.

  ‘All said and done, that girl from Muringaattil was a smart one!’ standing on the kadavu, Naraapilla said with a face that seemed to curse the flowing river.

  Hugging Shankaran, Chinnamma cried the whole of that night, tearlessly.

  Three

  The Decade

  10 April 1999

  …After the phase of reading children’s stories is over and done with, it is by searching for sexual content within the pages that most people begin their reading of serious literature. The literature that is available in the school texts being winnowed and cleaned of all desires, the reader would have scant regard for literature during his school days. As for the history in the educational texts, it would, unfortunately exhibit closer links with mathematics than human life. Except nausea, it can create little. However, for the sake of three or four sentences touching upon the secrets of male and female bodies, scattered randomly in the book, a thirteen-year-old may finish reading a three-hundred-page work of literature in three days’ time. And if it is a history book that is given to him? He will start yawning. Scratching his crazed head, he will keep looking around. Someone inside him will keep reminding him that it is only the sexuality of the dead that can be gleaned from history. He will be least interested in unearthing the dead bodies of beautiful damsels from between the lines.

  Dearest girl, do not be upset with this repeated use of ‘for him, for him, for him’! To write ‘for her’, some changes will have to take place.

  I am writing this by keeping this sheet of paper on a two-day-old newspaper. In it is the picture of President K.R. Narayanan inaugurating the C. Achutha Menon Memorial Study Centre at Poojappura.

  From the time of Chinnamma’s wedding to the first delivery of her child ten years later, the world outside Thachanakkara was going through stupendous changes. It was in the year that the first communist ministry was formed in Kerala under the leadership of E.M. Sankaran Namboodiripad, popularly known as EMS, when Shankaran Nair entered Ayyaattumpilli as Chinnamma’s husband. Ten years later, in 1967, when EMS came to power again, Chinnamma, taken to be a barren woman throughout Thachanakkara for a decade, uttered some new words unheard in lullabies, with her four-cubit-long tongue. From the Mathrubhumi newspaper that Kalyanikuttyamma, wife of Pankajaakshan, had started subscribing to, many new words and names had vaulted over the stile of Ayyaattumpilli: the birth of the Kerala state, vimochanasamaram or liberation struggle, Periyar Water Irrigation Project, Sputnik, general election, Khrushchev, Angamaly Crypt, Fidel Castro, Mannathu Padmanabhan and the NSS, President’s Rule, Explorer, Baghdad Pact, Kennedy, Atom Bomb, China border, Indira Gandhi, Kantambechcha Coat, R. Shankar, Cuba, old-age pension, Kwame Nkrumah, Armistice, Yuri Gagarin, Kerala Congress, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, and the Communist Party split, were all part of those interesting words. Stuttering on the neologism of ‘seven-party coalition’, EMS ascended to power for the second time, when with Chinnamma’s first delivery, a girl, was born to Shankaran the communist. This was the only remote connection that Naraapilla’s Ayyaattumpilli had with Kerala history.

  ‘All babies stay inside the stomach for ten months,’ Chinnamma used to say every time she scolded her eldest daughter, Geetha, ‘but you alone stayed for ten years, your majesty!’

  During those ten years in which she did not conceive, many rumours were being spread about Chinnamma in Thachanakkara. At first, everyone thought that the revulsion or indifference wrought by Muringaattil Leela’s death was the reason why her menstrual periods were not halting. But, eventually, her husband Shankaran, and later the rumour-mongers, realized that, apart from letting out an open-mouthed bawl like she had at the death of her mother, she was unaffected by any deep sorrow when she came to know of Leela’s death. The people of Thachanakkara saw Chinnamma forcing her apparently unromantic communist husband to learn swimming in the very same river in which the wavelets created by the boats and canoes zipping about in desperate search for Leela had not subsided; and they were surprised at how Chinnamma was laughing heartily, while returning with him, wet and flushed. When Shankaran was ashamed to discover himself cavorting in the river in a manner not befitting a working-class man and tried to escape by reminding her of her best friend Leela, Chinnamma’s response debased the memory of her dead friend, quite undeservedly. Pushing out her eyes, which looked as if Indian nightshade had been applied on them, bloodshot from diving with eyes open, she dismissed her old swimming mate. ‘What’s wrong with you? Those who’re dead are dead!’

  Muringaattil Leela, who had not been noticed by anyone nor desired by any man in Thachanakkara while she was alive, had begun to reign in the Periyar as a person to reckon with, after her death. Washing clothes one afternoon, washerwoman Thaamara’s daughter Ammu felt that something like a woman’s finger touched her on the calf of her leg. That touch ignited unprecedented discussions about life after death in Thachanakkara. Waking up from a nap one afternoon, Pooshaappi saw with sleep-startled eyes, the dead Swadeshabhimani Kuttan Pilla weeping as he stood in front of his shop with a torn umbrella and a dented vessel used for carrying rice gruel. But Kochu Parashu, who did not like anyone—even the dead—coming to the shop other than for buying something, insisted that it was a hallucination of his rapidly-aging father. The noteworthy question raised by Kochu Parashu was, if the dead were to visit friends again, how was it possible for Naraapilla’s daughter Chinnamma to swim fearlessly in Punneli kadavu, without bumping into Muringaattil Leela? Nevertheless, that interrogation mark, which was bent a little too far, snapped shortly. One by one, accounts were emerging, confirming the popular assumption that Muringaattil Leela, whom Periyar river had consumed
without even giving up her body, had started laying hands on unmarried young women bathing at the Punneli kadavu. Women staying near the river began to lose sleep over sounds heard at midnight, echoes of Leela beating her tattered skirt on the washing stone, standing naked in the river. Many housewives clearly heard the song starting with ‘eleyelo’, which Leela had sung for Chinnamma’s first thiruvaathira, even amidst all the din created by the famished and jealous foxes in the bushes near Punneli kadavu who, with howls that went on for hours together on full-moon nights, futilely tried to heckle into submission the moon in its full glory. Swadeshabhimani Kuttan Pilla’s granddaughter, the eighteen-year-old Sarala, who had inherited her grandfather’s penchant for exaggeration, shuddered at the sight of Leela’s face with eyes melting like wax, when she opened her own eyes in the water while bathing in the river. With strands of her hair floating up in the light-green, glassy water, Leela smiled at Sarala.

  ‘Your marriage is fixed, no? Lucky dame!’ With each syllable sending up a huge bubble, Leela said with a voice that seemed to resound as if she had spoken into a copper water pot.

  ‘She’s even come to know of the news of my marriage,’ scrambling out of the river with trembling limbs, Sarala told her aunt who had also come along to bathe. ‘Even after she’s dead, her jealousy has not lessened! The corpse!’

  It was Naraapilla, who did not bathe in the river, who was most vexed by the legends about Muringaattil Leela’s post-death antics in the water. Even during his morning bath at the Thachanakkara thevar’s pond, he used to go underwater only with his eyes tightly shut. Nevertheless, during those three or four minutes between staying under water and breaking surface, Kunjuamma would appear suddenly in the morass of green algae bloom, smiling with a face which oozed blood drops bubbling up into the boiling mirage above, and tell him a different thing each time: what was to be made for lunch; that Padmanabhan had a bad fever; asking him if he would have some spiced buttermilk; or worrying that their Chinnamma had still not had her menarche. Naraapilla thus came to understand that the thoughts of the dead concerned only those things that took place till the time of their death. To prevent the dead worrying over things that time had solved unknown to them, once again he went to see the senior astrologer, climbing Kaniyankunnu along with Appu Nair. The omen was clear to the senior astrologer as soon as he saw the two sixty-plus men coming towards the house.

  ‘Which wife is making trouble?’ The elder astrologer looked into both the faces. ‘The living or the dead?’

  ‘The deceased one!’ said Appu Nair. ‘Wasn’t it my younger sister that Naraapilla had married? It’s many years since she departed. But he still does see her sometimes!’

  ‘Perhaps the deceased hadn’t done enough loving!’ said the elder astrologer, rotating his index finger and eyes simultaneously while trying to dig out a tiny blob of ear wax that had been tormenting him, from the depths of his left ear. ‘Now what we must do is take good care of the dead one’s offspring. Convince the deceased that everything is being looked after well, leaving no stone unturned. Should also completely give up the things that would have displeased the dead when alive. Understood?’

  Naraapilla did not understand. Coming down Kaniyankunnu, Appu Nair interpreted the elder diviner’s words for Naraapilla. Ahead of them, a herd of buffaloes was moving. Needlessly whipping their shiny backs that looked as if they were oiled, and enjoying it, was a cheruman boy, a low-caste cowherd. Naraapilla, who was listening carefully to Appu Nair’s interpretation, patted the boy’s back and asked, ‘Why are you laughing over it?’ Going past the boy, who stood baffled, unable to make out the significance of that friendly gesture, Naraapilla and Appu Nair took the turn towards Thachanakkara.

  Following the next harvest and threshing, Kaalippennu did not get permission to stay on in the anteroom. Behind Naraapilla’s back, people said that it was because she was ageing. But Naraapilla’s communist sons-in-law, Thankamma’s husband Kumaran and Chinnamma’s husband Shankaran, saw it differently. Thankamma was going through a bad patch, following the loss of her third pregnancy, after delivering two. Her womb had, in the sixth month, ejected a stillborn boy who was supposed to keep company for the elder two daughters. Though she did not get the baby, post-natal care had to be given as per tradition. While eating rice sprinkled with fried onions and turmeric, to heal the inside of the womb and the cervix, baring her yellowed teeth and lips, she found out about things from her husband.

  ‘Your father is cleverer than I thought,’ said Kumaran, getting ready to go for the second shift by dabbing Cuticura talcum powder behind his shirt collar. ‘He knows that all this fun will end when our party comes to power again. Didn’t Kaalippennu build a hut in the corner of the Muttattaali field? By law, that now belongs to Kaalippennu. It’s your father’s luck that Comrade EMS’s government fell within two years, following the Vimochanasamaram. Or else, all of Muttattaali field would have gone to Kaalippennu and other low-caste comrades!’

  ‘To our luck, you should say!’ Thankamma corrected him, listening to the joyous sounds of her two girls playing a game juggling pebbles on the porch.

  ‘We should have only what is needed to fill our children’s tummies. Let those who do not have anything get what is surplus. Isn’t it better?’ said Kumaran, tucking in his mundu securely before heading out.

  ‘I don’t think that’s so great. God, don’t let this man’s Communist Party ever come to power!’ said Thankamma.

  Next door, at the New House, Thankamma’s sister Chinnamma was untouched by such anxieties. As she did not have children yet, Shankaran’s salary itself seemed to be a lot for Chinnamma. Imitating her sister-in-law, Kalyanikuttyamma, she began making tea for her husband in the morning and dosa and puttu for breakfast, instead of day-old rice gruel. Hearing that in places such as Kochi, people had begun to make different dishes for breakfast, Chinnamma too decided to introduce those in her house. Waking up at six, she cleared the ash from the stove, sprinkled it with water and pushed in fresh firewood into the stove. She lighted the kerosene-sprinkled dry coconut frond midribs with the pieces of paper that had come as wrapping for groceries from the shop. Blowing through a broken iron pipe that made a sound like that of a damaged conch shell, she made the fire flare. White smoke like clouds about to melt wafted up above the tiles of the New House, which had started to blacken with moss, and began to become visible in the gentle rays of the early morning sun as Chinnamma’s kitchen woke up and yawned.

  The day Kaalippennu left Ayyaattumpilli for good, Shankaran told his wife with a half-smile, as she pushed firewood into the stove, ‘Whatever you might say, that woman was a good match for your father!’

  From the time Pankajaakshan’s wife, who was from Kochi, began to get the newspaper delivered at Ayyaattumpilli for the first time, the roar of the waves of history from afar began to be heard in Ayyaattumpilli too. For Thankamma and Chinnamma, Kalyanikuttyamma of Kochi was Kalluchechi. Pankajaakshan’s plot alone stood in the middle of Ayyaattumpilli with a bamboo fence all around it—another habit imported from Kochi—amongst the other plots that had survived without fences and pales, even though they had already been partitioned. Though she was loved as a sister-in-law, Thankamma thought for a while that everything Kalluchechi said was a flagrant lie. Part of it was that hundreds of Jews, who had lived in central Kerala for centuries, had departed with their children, and other encumbrances, in a ship bound for a country called Israel. As Kalyanikuttyamma insisted that it happened just two years before she was married and brought to Ayyaattumpilli, Thankamma felt that the chances of it being a lie were four-fold. However, since the newspaper began to come to Pankajaakshan’s house, Thankamma became certain that things stranger than fiction were happening in the world outside. In the afternoons, Thankamma went to her sister-in-law’s and lapped up everything in Mathrubhumi. Through Thankamma, Time was taking revenge for something which could not be done through Kunjuamma. She read from the newspaper that Jordan’s King Hussein had suppressed the rebels
who raised their voices for Egypt, and to help King Hussein, America had sent their sixth naval battalion to the Mediterranean, relishing it like a war story that someone had put together in the days of yore. The newspaper had started to influence her so much that the day after she read about Soviet Union sending a dog to space, she nagged her husband to get her a dog as a pet. After scouring for two weeks, finally Kumaran was able to bring to Ayyaattumpilli a puppy, whisked away from a bitch nursing her litter near the riverbank. The day Naraapilla broke its front legs with one kick for the crime of having licked his feet, Thankamma too had a thorny fence built around her plot to protect her dear possessions from her father.

  Fences were chopping up Ayyaattumpilli into several pieces. Except for the dead Padmanabhan and the runaway Chandran, Naraapilla had divided his house plots and fields amongst his surviving four children—including Govindan who had become a resident of Cherai: he had the deeds drawn, and sat smug for having done his duty. Over half an acre of a house plot on the eastern boundary and half of the Kainikkulam field at Paanaayikkulam were set aside for Govindan. It was an act done as per the advice of the elder astrologer of Kaniyankunnu, to please Kunjuamma who kept coming to show her face in the temple pond. But traders like Kochu Parashu of the new generation interpreted this apportioning as a pre-emptive action on the part of Naraapilla, foreseeing the implementation of new laws by the communist government likely to come to power again.

  In 1967, when a victory parade marched through Thachanakkara to celebrate the day of ascension of the EMS ministry, at the vanguard were the two sons-in-law of Naraapilla. At that time, Chinnamma who was washing her hair in the Punneli kadavu noticed big bubbles taking turns to come up to the surface and bursting with a sound resembling a cracked bronze bell saying ‘Oh God!’ She stopping washing her hair to dive underneath to find out about the source of that familiar voice. She recognized the pale form of Muringaattil Leela sitting in the lotus position on the riverbed, chanting the names of gods. With each utterance of ‘Oh God’, a bubble rolled up from her mouth. Unable to bear the suspense, Chinnamma touched Leela. Leela, who looked the same age she was ten years ago, opened her eyes, grinned to show her broken tooth and said, ‘And finally you too have become pregnant, no? Lucky dame!’