A Preface to Man

by Subhash Chandran

  Half a kindi of moonlight.

  SIX

  Crescent

  6 December 1999

  …Today the newspaper says that there will be high-level security checks at the airports, railway stations, and bus stands. Even on this cool day in December, the nation fears an erstwhile sibling that might arrive at the terminals.

  Has my nazrani girl heard of this story from Mahabharatham? The story of a dog ascending to heaven? Fully aware that despite fighting battles and winning it all, they had lost everything in front of God, the five Pandava siblings and their shared wife had started climbing the mountain to enter heaven in their corporeal forms. Even as the rest of his companions fell behind him, one by one, the eldest continued on his way, justifying his progress. Finally, he and a dog, which had accompanied him all the way, reached heaven. But how deserving was he of that? When he appears morally more depraved than those who fell, by his sole act of proceeding alone without heeding the tragedy that befell his siblings?

  This I am telling you in confidence: the version that the dog who accompanied him to heaven was Yamadharman, the lord of death, is a hoax. A ruse planned by the author Vyasan to not dishearten the readers. The moral of the story is this: the chances of a selfish person ascending to heaven are the same as that of a scruffy mongrel.

  My nazrani lass, it is in the same India where a mausoleum built by Emperor Shah Jahan is showcased as a matter of pride that a mosque built by Shah Jahan’s great-grandfather was razed.

  A killer joke about families, no?

  The pomelos, which grow in abundance in Chinnamma’s plot now, were planted by Chandran who left Thachanakkara fifteen years ago.

  Chandran—after the deceased Padmanabhan—was a member of Ayyaattumpilli who was heartlessly forgotten by the denizens of Thachanakkara. The one who stuck to Kunjuamma like her shadow. The one who suckled at her breast the longest. The one who clung to his mother, even after being weaned using aloe vera paste.

  Most of the stories he had heard as a child were about his mother’s eldest sister’s son and her playmate, Kesavan. In his mother’s remembrances about this valiant and heroic person, the sword of the past flashed. Kesavan, who had run away without uttering a word to anyone before Kunjuamma’s wedding, thus grew into a legend in Chandran’s imagination. The young man called Kesavan, who had not even left a photo to remember him from the time he had disappeared like vapour in history, was recreated in Chandran’s mind in glowing form like the archer Arjunan, through the tales his mother told of him. Like death, which was the ultimate measure for engendering fond memories in others, running away was the second-best method to make others remember one. This was a feeling that grew in him, blessed by the spirit of Kesavan. He had the far-sighted vision that circumstances would conspire to provide him with reasons to leave on an endless journey, flying on the mast of courage. When he was thirteen, he confessed to Kunjuamma.

  ‘Ammae,’ he called her one day in a seemingly mature voice and said, ‘if you find me missing one of these days, you should not feel distressed!’

  Kunjuamma was squatting on the bamboo mat, amidst the de-shelled tamarind left in the sun for drying. Busy using the knife-point to do surgery on the tamarind to expel the seeds, she gave Chandran a sharp look. ‘If something like that happens,’ Kunjuamma said, lifting only her index finger from the handle of the knife, ‘I will do that thing which I could not do when Kesavan had left.’

  ‘What thing?’ Chandran asked, picking up the tamarind seeds that had to be roasted and de-shelled, and their kernels put in salt water.

  ‘You try running away, then we’ll see. Ngaa,’ Kunjuamma spoke with flared nostrils.

  Though, like all mothers, Kunjuamma was also jesting, it stuck in Chandran’s heart. After many years, the drops of breast milk that he had drunk till he was five—and which he had won from the share of his two younger sisters, with the help of his tears, started popping in his veins. He forgot the bitterness of the aloe vera paste.

  ‘Surely not.’ Kneeling down and pressing his face against the cool, sandal-smelling tummy of his mother, he said, ‘I will never leave my mother and go anywhere!’

  That was not a vow. Nor had he attained the age to make vows. His adolescent attempt to flee from his house ended up unsuccessful. It was when he took on Naraapilla, after declaring his intention to visit his brother Govindan in Cherai, that his first running away drama was played out. Two months after spending his days in Poornathrayeeshan Temple in Thripunithura, on the sixty-first night a dream shocked him out of his sleep. In that nightmare, which left him dry-mouthed, Kunjuamma sat with a knife on the stile of Ayyaattumpilli, crying non-stop, calling out his name, ‘Chandra … Chandra.’ The next day, when he reached Ayyaattumpilli what awaited him was a reality close to his dream, but more horrific. With a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around her head, Kunjuamma had begun her final days. It did not look as if the mother recognized her son who had come back. Naraapilla had succeeded in creating the impression that it was her son’s running away that was responsible for Kunjuamma’s condition. Afraid of the accusing looks of his father and siblings, he walked with his head bowed. He wept through the window bars looking at his mother, who had started circling around the room, calling out to people dead and gone. After two months, when he was lighting his mother’s pyre, he became completely free from the single thread that was holding him back from his journey. As he stood by to light the pyre, forced by the gap created by his three absent elder brothers—holding behind him the twisted twigs from the mango tree, each cut approximately to the length of a chenda drumstick—he realized that he was also firing open his own liberation. As his mother’s body was being baked in a mound made of dried coconut shells and cow dung discs plastered over with river clay, and the flames began first by consuming her luxuriant hair followed by the rest of the body, smiling with tears in his eyes, he asked his wretched mother: ‘What would you do Amma, if I run away now?’

  On the day after the sanchayanam, Chandran again clashed with Naraapilla for insulting Govindan and his wife in front of the public, when they arrived in the evening. Pankajaakshan stood by guiltily, having reached only on the day of sanchayanam, as he could not be contacted earlier when he was on a pleasure trip to Munnar with his wife. Pankajaakshan realized that it was neither the animosity towards their father nor his love for their eldest brother that was impelling Chandran to raise his rebellion. He was only creating a justification in the eyes of the world for his next flight from home.

  ‘I felt right then that he was making grounds to go away again,’ Pankajaakshan said on a later occasion, sitting in Vengooran Thankappan’s teashop. ‘When one decides to run away, here, there will be two vertical folds on the forehead!’ Pankajaakshan said, touching the centre of Vengooran Thankappan’s forehead. When the policeman’s fingers touched him, Vengooran felt as if the crown of his head was splitting from the touch of Bhasmaasuran.

  On the seventeenth day of Kunjuamma’s death, after completing the daily oblations to the manes and ensuring that his mother had ascended to heaven, Chandran scribbled his decision to leave, in a complex, curly script that was as illegible as tiny, on Naraapilla’s lime-washed bedroom walls with a piece of charcoal taken from the brick stove, and left Thachanakkara. On the floor beneath the wall lay a used charcoal piece like a relic of his life in Ayyaattumpilli. The gist of the lengthy scrawl of ungrammatical sentences written with that piece of charcoal, which had made its way from the kitchen Kunjuamma had used for so many years and into the bedroom of Naraapilla, was simple enough for anyone to guess. It was more or less this: This house is hell. But when mother was there, I could bear it.

  This time, Pankajaakshan himself made a missing person’s report on behalf of his father. While trying to take his thumb impression, Naraapilla frowned and asked, ‘But, what’s the benefit in getting him back?’

  Reading the charcoal mural on the wall, Thankamma cried loudly. The whole night, she dreamt that her kochettan was running direct
ionless through the dark night, clutching two shirts and two mundus wrapped as a bundle. The next morning, as soon as she woke up, she went seeking him in the narrow space behind the mirror almirah in Naraapilla’s room. What prompted the still half-asleep Thankamma to head there, was her thought that like in the old times her brother would be hiding there between the wall and the back of the mirror almirah. Once in their childhood, when Chandran went missing, after searching for a long time, she had found him in that secret place behind the mirror almirah. The sanctuary of the twelve-year-old, for taking refuge after his crime. Kunjuamma had entrusted him to stand guard for the dried red chillies left in the sun, spread out on bamboo mats. In the meanwhile, a mother hen and her chicks came into the yard. They were the darlings of Bhavaniyamma of Naattyol house. As they started pecking, attracted by the bright red colour of the chillies, an immature coconut thrown by Chandran to scare them away took the life of an innocent, sprightly chick. As her yellow brood ran helter skelter, the mother hen stood by the side of the dead chick—lying with its legs pointing up—cocking its head left and right, in a daze. Once again, Chandran heard the echoing wails of his mother calling for her Pappanaavan, holding on to the body of his elder brother, three years ago. His heart trembled. In a quick dash he was inside the house; realizing that the shadow of his amma’s clothes box was not large enough to hide him, he stood baffled for a while and finding himself boxed in, he chose to hide behind the mirror almirah in his father’s room. Wedged between the lime-washed wall of Ayyaattumpilli and his father’s treasury, he spent two-and-a-half hours, afraid that the sound of his heartbeat would give away his hiding place. He could hear four throats calling out ‘Chandro’ and ‘kochetto’ in various pitches, looking for him in the various corners of Ayyaattumpilli. Then Thankamma’s tilted head stretched into that cob-webby, narrow space and screamed for the whole world to hear: ‘Ammae … here’s the venerable chicken-killer!’

  He came out ready to accept any punishment for the merciless killing of the neighbour’s chick. Kunjuamma embraced him and removed the cobwebs sticking to his head and swabbed the sweat off his face. Then she kissed him on the crown of his head with a vehemence that seemed enough to suck it in. ‘How you frightened your mother!’ she said with unshed tears.

  The corpse of the chicken was missing in the yard. The mother hen and rest of its brood were not there either. His father was not there. None that he feared was there. ‘My son needn’t tell anyone about the chicken dying,’ Kunjuamma said. ‘If the fox took it away, how is it my son’s fault?’

  Not just the fox that stole the chicken of Bhavaniyamma of Naattyol, but another fox which had stolen his elder brother at a tender age was what flashed in Chandran’s mind for a moment like a bolt of lightning. That fox which lurked and pounced was called Time. That vision’s inspiration was powerful enough to instigate him to leave not only Thachanakkara and Kerala, but even the whole world, and go wandering around. As if to make up for that one life obliterated by him, he planted and watered innumerable saplings all over Ayyaattumpilli—the edges of the yard, the compound, along the fences, everywhere. Not flowering plants, but those bearing fruits and nuts. In that plot of Naraapilla, replete with coconut, mango and jackfruit trees, and plantains, in all the empty spaces, new kinds of trees started to grow and flourish. The new generation of Ayyaattumpilli got to see sapote, Indian almond, and pomegranate only when the saplings planted by Chandran grew into trees. Among those saplings uprooted from his friend’s places, one alone, due to its droll name, happened to grow nurtured by everyone’s anticipation. When Kunjuamma suspected it to be Key lime, because its smell remotely reminded her of it when she had crushed the tender leaves, Chandran corrected her, ‘Nothing of the sort, Amma. This is babloos lime. Babloos. Wait till it grows up and then see. This tree will resemble my mother.’

  Kunjuamma waned from Ayyaattumpilli. Chandran, named after the moon, disappeared too. In the plot that was given as Chinnamma’s share, the pomelos or the so-called babloos grew plentiful. It was Geetha, Chinnamma’s eldest daughter who spotted the first babloos flower; amongst the shiny, oiled-looking leaves, it stood smiling. As the sunlight that streamed through the foliage was too blinding, Chinnamma could not see the flower pointed out to her by the four-year-old Geetha. That evening, while seated on the hip of Shankaran, the child pointed up once more. This time everyone managed to see the flower. Within the next two or three days, more flowers were seen on the tree. As it grew, initially as big as a lemon, then sweet orange, then Key lime, and finally reached the size of Kunjuamma’s breasts that had suckled six children, Chinnamma smiled remembering Chandran and told her husband, ‘So, this is what kochettan had meant then, when he said that to our mother!’

  ‘What?’ Shankaran queried.

  Without answering and donning a faux sadness on her face, Chinnamma said, ‘Lord, if only one could hear that he’s not dead and is living somewhere!’

  Since it was about someone whom he had never met, that prayer did not touch Shankaran.

  One afternoon, two months later, as the work on her brick house was going on, following the demolition of the thatched hut, one of the workers plucked the first babloos from the tree. At that time, Aaminumma from Elookkara was also present. Aaminumma was an old lady, with a soiled cloth covering her hair and pierced ears resembling sieves, who used to come to the houses in Ayyaattumpilli to collect rice water with a rimless bucket. Suffering from a condition which made her burp loudly all the time, Aaminumma used to carry news from the outside world to Ayyaattumpilli, as a free service in return for the rice water. One of her favourite subjects was the poverty amongst the Muslim families of Elookkara and Kayintikkara. With her tummy filled with the hunger tales of Elookkara, she journeyed to Thachanakkara and returned with a bucketful of rice water to Elookkara—burping all the while. With the first calving of her cow, which was more desperate than her, Ayyaattumpilli got creamy yoghurt. In return, she mowed the thick-growing grass in the empty plots earmarked for Govindan and Chandran and carried it as a headload back with her.

  Those days, Chinnamma and Shankaran and their two daughters were living in a one-room lean-to that resembled a small cowshed, made out of the thatches retrieved from the demolished house, and built adjacent to the laterite foundation of their new house being built. Though Kumaran and Thankamma had come in person overlooking their old tiff, and invited them to stay with them while the new house was being built, Chinnamma did not relent. In a voice untouched by affection, she said, ‘Why should we bother you, chechi? To say this and that, and needlessly pick on each other? My children and I can make do with this and sleep here!’

  Aaminumma, who visited all the houses in Ayyaattumpilli, collected and took to Elookkara, along with the rice water, the titillating stories of the fights between sisters and sister-in-law and the loneliness of Naraapilla in the New House. She would narrate the tales of the corrupted blood of Naraapilla in front of her own children, their spouses, and neighbours and let out a long burp and declare, ‘Lord, even if you didn’t give us money, at least you didn’t let us be born Nairs, that is enough!’

  On her return to Ayyaattumpilli, while decanting the rice water she would tell each housewife, ‘Dear, who doesn’t have difficulties? Whatever you’d say, can the Nairs let go of their prestige? Tell me!’

  That day, while decanting the rice water, Aaminumma saw the building workers sharing something to eat. Leaving the bucket there, she headed towards the gang.

  ‘Bu-u-rr-rrp.’ After a burp broken up by inquisitiveness, she frowned and asked: ‘What now, what’s this new thing?’

  Offering one from the crescent-shaped carpels found when they had peeled the moon-shaped pomelo, one of the workers said, ‘Here, eat this. If a categorization is needed, it can be taken as a younger uncle of our orange!’

  When she peeled the white covering off her carpel, she saw the juice sacs, resembling neatly-stacked pieces of chopped reddish earthworm. Flicking away the yellow seeds stuck on the edge,
she started eating it with suspicion. As the sweet-sour juice of the pomelo touched her worn taste buds, the old woman, with eyes tightly shut, said, referring to her hungry grandchildren, ‘Give an entire one for Aaminumma, son. My house has a number of sparrows; it’s for them.’

  So the pomelo too reached Elookkara through Aaminumma. When the Aalungal School closed for the summer holidays, the children from Elookkara came to Chinnamma’s house and bought pomelos at thirty paise each. Carrying vessels stacked with peeled carpels on their young shoulders, the little vendors rushed about in Thachanakkara, Elookkara, and Kayintikkara, touting their wares loudly, ‘Liiiime caaaarpels…’

  By selling each carpel at five paise and getting fifty paise for an entire pomelo, the children became vainly rich. They bought green gram to go with gruel, and buns for the evenings, for their mothers. The mothers were happy. They prayed to Allah for a bountiful harvest of pomelos at Ayyaattumpilli.

  When the money from the sale of the paddy field was not enough, Shankaran mortgaged the plot on which the house stood to the Thachanakkara Service Cooperative Society for a loan of seven thousand rupees, and completed the house before Onam. Provided the gestational calculation did not go wrong, Chinnamma was supposed to deliver her third child on the auspicious day of thiruvonam or the nearby dates. She insisted that, before that, they had to move from the lean-to, which had earthworms and millipedes crawling about. The day she saw a baby rat snake slipping out of the mat she was rolling up, and on which her daughters had slept the previous night, watching the yellow snake slithering away, Chinnamma said, ‘At least let this one in the womb be destined to live in a proper house. We’d be lucky if these two do not die of snake or centipede bites by then!’

  The innovative design of Pankajaakshan’s house, effected by her sister-in-law from Kochi, had entranced Chinnamma. If Chinnamma had not insisted that the rounded drawing room in the front should have a concrete ceiling, after that fashion, the work could have been completed without taking a loan. Using the money remaining in the loan of seven thousand, Shankaran was able to build a laterite compound wall in the front and have a small metal gate with Geethalayam written on it in English with the letters bent and cut with difficulty. It was the first iron gate to appear not just in Ayyaattumpilli, but in all of Thachanakkara. When Pankajaakshan’s and Thankamma’s children mistook the blue gate for an instrument of entertainment, and during Onam holidays climbed on and started swinging it as if it were a vehicle, the hugely-pregnant Chinnamma screamed at them, ‘Go home, brats!’ Gathering the four-year-old Geetha and the two-year-old Rema close to her, she frowned at the others. ‘Swinging it this way and that way, and spoiling it! Go back to your homes and play … ummm … Scram!’