A Preface to Man

by Subhash Chandran

  When Shankaran arrived late in the night, Chinnamma pressed his hand, which still smelt of firecrackers, to her belly and and told him about her first conception. When she told him that during her afternoon nap she dreamt of bathing in the river and Muringaattil Leela had congratulated her on her pregnancy, Shankaran laughed the laugh of a communist.

  However, Chinnamma was right. Shankaran saw that she had vomited out the mouthful of river water she had brought in from her dream during her afternoon nap near the sleeping mat. After misleading Thachanakkara for ten years about being barren, Chinnamma was going to bear a child.

  Jithendran’s eldest sister, Geetha was in the womb. Time was in a hurry. But only after the delivery of Geetha in sixty-eight, Rema in seventy, and an abortion in seventy-one, could Jithen be born in seventy-two.

  FOUR

  Siam Weed

  1 May 1999

  …Hadn’t you asked me why I don’t write about my father? It is on purpose. A person who regrets that today is a dry day on account of it being May Day, has no right to even reminisce about him, let alone write about him. It has always surprised me that a green plant with the power to heal wounds quickly is called appa in our region. (I forgot to ask you: do you call your father appa?) Another, rather interesting, name for appa is Communist Pachcha. This Siam weed, which used to grow abundantly once upon a time in the fallow lands of Thachanakkara, may perhaps appear in tomorrow’s markets as a medicine that can keep the cash counters ringing. What was I talking about? Oh, yes, my father. In the first half of the century, following the disappearance of the matrilineal system and the ensuing division of property, when Nair joint families were split up rendering young men rudderless, many ended up as tiller-holders in the communist movement, intoxicated by revolutionary spirit, whereas a few others who were less gifted—like my Siam weed father—thrived on account of being married into families like those in Thachanakkara. Though they had not read the red books, it was the inner calling—that a worker earning his livelihood by himself, merits dignity—that made them lean naturally towards communism. The blood and stool of such savarnars could be tested against the single phrase of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’.

  Poovamparampath Shashwathanpilla alias Pooshaappi didn’t live long enough to hear the first radio of Thachanakkara, sitting in his shop, chattering non-stop about the Land Reforms Act. Pooshaappi, whose testicles used to ache while listening to historical tales, died on his son Kochu Parashu’s fifty-eighth birthday, when his soul escaped along with a burp after the feast.

  ‘Father had no illness,’ Kochu Parashu told all the mourners who had come for the cremation, till his mouth ran dry. ‘When he got up to wash after eating to his heart’s content, I held his hand. Since he had that problem, he had difficulty walking, no? Saying “I am feeling very sleepy, Kochu Parashuve,” he burped with a strange sound. One couldn’t tell if it was a burp or a yawn—it was that kind of a noise. To cut the story short, he didn’t fall down because I was holding him, fortunately!’

  For the last ten years, Pooshaappi had lived in the house built by his son and heir apparent to the shop, Kochu Parashu. He had been the upright trunk of a big family tree with sons for branches and grandchildren for twigs. All his seven children, including the youngest son Phalgunan, who usurped the original tharavaad when the partition of the property was done, had become white-haired. They had started their squabbles over property, cursing their dead mother, challenging their extant father, and living as if they were weighed down by being dragged into some vexing moral struggle. The six younger siblings suffered severe heartburn over the coveted piece of land on which the shop stood, adjacent to the Thachanakkara temple grounds, being given to Kochu Parashu. Those siblings conveniently forgot that it was Kochu Parashu’s sweat and efforts that had transformed a tiny grocery store into a shopping complex big enough to let even its premises be known, in later years, as Pooshaappi Corner. It was while old Pooshaappi was still healthy enough to sit in the shop and wrap and tie the condiments, that his wife, Sarojiniamma, younger than him by twenty years, felt dizzy and fell in the kitchen to her death. From that day onwards, the next ten years of his life were spent on the cot in Kochu Parashu’s house. In his shrunken, desiccated body, his soul was still blooming. Except for the tremors in his limbs and forgetfulness, and hallucinations about the dead calling on him, his mind was none the worse for the ravages of his geriatric state. Naraapilla and Appu Nair and the other recently-aged folk of Thachanakkara would come occasionally and sit around his bed and chat. In his body, which was withering from the unbearable heat of the fear of death that accompanies old age, his testicles still continued to grow. During his last days, his demeanour was that of a hapless chameleon, beleaguered by peckings received for hiding, between his legs, large eggs that he had filched from some mammoth bird. When Naraapilla and Appu Nair came to visit him four days before his death, he woke up with a start, as if from his previous life, having smelt fragrant tobacco, and looked at them.

  ‘Ayyo, Naraapilla.’ With his tongue tremulous in his toothless mouth bereft of saliva, Pooshaappi said, ‘I forgot to buy your fragrant tobacco today also!’

  ‘It’s sixteen years since I stopped chewing paan, Pooshaappiye,’ Naraapilla reminded him. After struggling for some time to make sense of things, and then reading Appu Nair’s face suddenly gone gloomy with the thoughts of his youngest sister, Pooshaappi said, ‘So, it’s so many years since Kunjuamma left us, isn’t it? What kind of sleep have I been sleeping?’

  The public of Thachanakkara forgot Pooshaappi the moment he let his life escape in the midst of an indeterminate yawn or burp. Instead, they continued calling his son Kochu Parashu ‘Pooshaappi’, as if it was an inheritable title. Sitting beside Kochu Parashu on the stool used by Pooshaappi to support his testicles, a radio with big knobby-eyes taught new words to the denizen of Thachanakkara. Some of these words such as K.C. Pant, Ninth Schedule, Land Tribunal, etc., were beyond the understanding of the new generation who came to listen to film songs.

  Time was standing like a four-legged creature, swishing its tail and staring at the people of Thachanakkara, with its hind legs planted in memories, and forelegs in hope.

  Building two more rooms on either side of the store, Kochu Parashu gave it the wings of progress. Shivan, Aandi’s youngest son—and the fourth after Krishnan, who had thrown away the barber’s scissors and turned artist—had rented the room at the south end for fifteen rupees and started a barbershop. When Aandi died, Shivan brought the surviving tonsorial implements and a new mirror as big as a winnowing tray, and installed them in the shop. If it was Aandi’s eldest son, Artist Krishnan, who had painted the board for Poovamparampath Stores, it was his eldest son, Babu, who repainted that old board appending Pooshaappi Buildings to it after the passage of many years. With the remaining paint, on the front wall of his uncle’s shop, he also painted ‘Shivan’s Barbershop’ with the letters vertically arranged. Then, more with artistic freedom than the liberty of a relative, he also painted the picture of Lord Shiva with his matted hair, beneath the lettering.

  The big room adjacent to the barbershop fitted with a door at the back and a makeshift kitchen added to it as a lean-to, made up Vengooran Thankappan’s teashop. In that shop, inside a glass almirah, about half a dozen each of parippu vada and uzhunnu vada lay at all times like pitiable little orphans. The shop owner was Thankappan, who had migrated from Vengoor and married into a Thachanakkara family. His cross-eyes, which seemed to focus on three people at the same time, would have helped him in his business a lot more, had it been a busy teashop with lots of people to focus on. The public of Thachanakkara thought the name Vengooran had more to do with his cross-eyes than with Vengoor, the land of his origin—so much so that, in later years if any squint-eyed suitor came looking for a bride in Thachanakkara, the words that sprung to their tongues were, ‘Oh, here’s another Vengooran!’

  The Thachanakkara folk’s surmise that Vengooran Thankappan could not have been
a Nair, being an orphan, was only partially correct. He had come to Thachanakkara by marrying Shantha, the younger sister of Leela of Muringaattil, who had committed suicide by jumping into the river. Kochu Parashu knew that the reason people had doubts about Thankappan’s caste was because he showed no false pride by trying to avoid running a teashop in his wife’s village. ‘If Thankappan were to loiter around like our old Swadeshabhimani Kuttan Pilla, gossiping and doing nothing, I am sure none of you would have any suspicions about his caste!’ Kochu Parashu said with conviction, to a few who secretly asked him about Thankappan’s caste.

  The room on the right side of Kochu Parashu’s grocery store had not been let out. Used as a storeroom, it had a large jar for storing salt, closed with a plank, atop which sat a coconut shell scoop darkened by the contact with salt; coir ropes of various thickness; full and partially-empty sacks of chillies, onions, and rice; and stacks of coconut oil tins with their surfaces reflecting all the contents of the room. In between these, baby tit-mice with pencil-line moustaches, scurried about, unmindful of Kochu Parashu’s curses. The room beyond this housed the Eagles Club and Reading Room, where the young generation of Thachanakkara met up irrespective of it being day or night. Since the eldest sons of Kochu Parashu—Vishwanathan and Vijayan, who were students of UC College—were the stalwarts of the club, Kochu Parashu did not get any rent from the room. When assailed by the clamour of the tit-mice squeaks, whenever he opened the storeroom to take rice or decant oil, he used to peer into the next room full of silent young readers of that day’s newspapers and taunt, ‘Hey, smart eagles, instead of wasting your time reading, can’t you all kill and eat some of these mice?’

  Newspaper reading was not the only activity at the Eagles Club. The young generation of Thachanakkara, inspired by progressive ideas that came along with the light that streaked in through a window on the north side of that small room, were getting to learn of a new world order in which neither caste nor creed built fences, the sweat of the worker was deemed more potent than wine, and which did not make necks sprain trying to hold conversation ensconced on upper and lower levels. When in addition to newspapers, some books too reached them, the dream union of those young men began to grow rapidly. The chief conductor for all these was the junior Nampoothiri from the Nedumpilli Mana, Vasudevan, who had smashed through the mana’s walls built with casteist arrogance and incomparable ignorance. Vasudevan Nampoothiri, who graduated in physics from UC College, was the maternal grandson of Parameswaran Nampoothiri, who the folk of Thachanakkara used to call Parashunampoori. Parameswaran Nampoothiri was on his deathbed, watching helplessly as this young scion of the illam, who did not pray at the temple or wear the poonool thread, or maintain the traditional prescriptions of ritual distances to be maintained to avoid getting polluted by lower castes—the gap varied from a distance of twelve feet from Nair, thirty-six feet from Ezhava, and sixty feet from Pulaya—and instead mingled freely with the populace of Thachanakkara. When Parameswaran Nampoothiri, the main priest, heard that the upstart had started demanding that instead of being addressed respectfully as cheriya thirumeni, or junior highness, he should be called only Vasudevan, the soiled thread of his sacred poonool stuck to the old man’s body trembled just where it passed across his chest.

  These were the replays of revolutionary scenes, which had played out elsewhere in Kerala some forty years earlier, being staged in Thachanakkara as if they were new productions. It was undertaken by the youth, not as a farce, but rather as an anxious and panting run to catch up with the train of history that they had missed. Educated Muslim youth of Elookkara and Kayintikkara, which lay to the south of Thachanakkara, came to the Eagles Club and started reading the newspaper, drawn by Vasudevan’s sphere of attraction. In their houses, where the arguments used to be only about whether the newborn should be named Kunjumohammed or Abdullakutty, a number of new names were introduced through the newspapers: to make it easier to select from the thousands of names in the Holy Book, news about the many great leaders outside India, who governed their countries, helped. Names such as Nasser, Ayub, Yahya, Faisal, Hussain, etc., thus flowed from history into the new generation of Elookkara and Kayintikkara. The progressive Nair youth of Thachanakkara went a step further. They showed remarkable courage in eschewing names that would reveal the religion and caste of their children at the first instance. Faced with mothers who came to make offerings in the names of Siji, Viji, Mini, Gini, etc., the younger brothers of Parashunampoori, and their sons in the temple, were bewildered. The other Nampoothiris of Nedumpilli were dismayed to know that it was their own Vasudevan—remembered as a child troubled by chronic diarrhoea—who, in the capacity of a guide, was directing the belated wavelets of the giant wave of reformation that had already swept through Kerala, towards the Thachanakkara folk. During the evening poojas of lit lamps, and after closing the door of the sanctum sanctorum when he was alone with God, each Nampoothiri prayed for good sense to be granted to Vasudevan Nampoothiri. Since Thachanakkara thevar did not have sufficient felicity with human language to explain to them that what Vasudevan had now was indeed right sense, the unhappiness of the Nampoothiris continued unmitigated for a long while.

  When it was evident that their dreams could not be contained within the small shop-room of Kochu Parashu, the young men shifted their club to a small hut they built from woven coconut palm leaves, in the common poromboke land, which lay unclaimed to the west of the temple, overgrown with goat weed and touch-me-not. Karunakaran Karthaavu, who had been importuning Kochu Parashu for a room on rent, moved into the empty room. He was Thachanakkara’s document writer. Karunakaran Karthaavu, who used to take up his pen only once in a while till his middle age, came to be in demand with the coming of the land reforms. He moved into the building of Pooshaappi one Monday, with a small table, a sheaf of papers, and a writing board. On a plank broken off an old clothes box, using a wet chalk, Karunakaran Karthaavu wrote ‘Document Writer’s Office’ in the old winding script and hung it as a board in front of his room. As he was seen busy all the while with his writing, Thachanakkara’s youth gave him a nickname—Karunasky.

  A new name board was also required for the club, which had been transplanted to the thatched hut. As Babu mixed his paints and got ready, an epiphany that floated in from somewhere made Vasudevan say thus: ‘Eagles doesn’t seem to be the name we should keep. It’s the emblem of America. So, shall we change it?’

  ‘But,’ Kochu Parashu’s son, Vijayan asked, ‘will we get another super name like this?’

  ‘What about Young Challengers?’ a new member from Elookkara asked.

  Vasudevan stood pondering for some time, chewing on his moustache, which had grown over his upper lip. Opening his naturally large eyes a little wider, he glanced at everyone. ‘We’ll give it a Malayalam name,’ he said. ‘Arunodaya Arts Club and Reading Room, what say?’

  Everyone agreed on that name, which meant ‘red dawn’. The moment he heard the name, a fitting image came to artist Babu’s mind. Two hills, resembling the breasts of a supine nude woman, visible when looked at with one’s face pressed against her navel, and between them a halved rising sun with wavy flying hair. Before he lost the vision, the artist quickly sketched it on the board.

  This sunrise, lying exposed to the elements for eight years, atop the thatched hut-club, was the first painting enjoyed by Jithendran—when he was three years old.

  Jithen was on the hip of his eldest sister Geetha, who had gone to the club in search of Venu, the son of Pankajaakshan Uncle. Clawing her face to draw her attention to the picture on the thatched hut, Jithen said in his indistinct words, ‘Lo, bubbies.’

  It was his off-day. After a hair-cut in Shivan’s saloon, drinking tea in Vengooran’s teashop and having four parippu vadas packed, and buying two packets of beedis from Kochu Parashu’s shop, Shankaran told him, ‘Kochu Parashu chettaa, I have been confirmed in my job in the company.’

  ‘That’s good. Your child is lucky for you, then. What have you named it
?’

  ‘Geetha,’ Shankaran said.

  ‘Hai, do the communists name their daughters Geetha and all?’ Kochu Parashu asked.

  Shankaran did not understand the allusion to the Bhagavad Gita. He had other things to say.

  ‘What I meant was,’ Shankaran went on, ‘when it is a salary, there won’t be money every day in hand. Like you give Kumaran, if you could give me credit from this month onwards…’

  Kochu Parashu pondered over it. His merchant’s mind was flooded with questions.

  ‘What’s the salary date?’ Kochu Parashu asked.

  ‘The first,’ Shankaran replied.

  ‘Will you pay on time?’

  In reply, Shankaran gave him an open, honest smile. That appealed to Kochu Parashu. Handing him a book smaller than his palm, Kochu Parashu said, ‘Then keep this. I too shall write in the book here. We’ll start with today’s beedis, what?’

  Shankaran smiled gratefully. As he was stepping down from the shop with the book in hand, he overheard Kochu Parashu say, ‘When credit is sought for Ayyaattumpilli, how can I say no? I only hesitated because I’m scared of these Commies.’