‘It can’t be that of an elephant, my Kochu Parashu chettaa,’ barber Shivan called out as he was getting into his den, continuing to have his doubts about gods. ‘Must be some ox or buffalo that has died and is now bloated. Communists like our Shankaran chettan will think elephant even when they see a buffalo!’
Sitting in the teashop, Vengooran Thankappan laughed heartily. Kochu Parashu and Karthaavu smiled.
The children of Ayyaattumpilli milled and jostled around the hospital bed to see the baby. All of them had arrived together in the evening to visit Chinnamma and the new born. For their second visit, Thankamma and Kalyanikuttyamma were wearing new sarees. When the children began to circle around the oranges and Chinese pears, a kilo each of which Pankajaakshan had brought, Chinnamma said, ‘Chechi, whatever it is, peel and give to the children!’
Shankaran had gone with the prescription for medicines. Thankamma’s husband, Kumaran, looked at the baby snuggling beside Chinnamma, and remarked to his brother-in-law: ‘Aliyaa, look at its ears. Truly elephant ears!’
Removing the white cloth covering the baby from waist down, Pankajaakshan added, ‘Not just the ears, see this!’
To ward off her brother’s evil eye, Chinnamma pulled the baby’s cloth back in place. The blood from the umbilical cord began to form a red flower on the white sheet, like the lotus growing out of Lord Vishnu’s navel. Rolling his eyes, the baby looked in wonder at all the faces around him. Nine children, from Thankamani, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Thankamma, to the two-year-old Rema, a little elder to him, were peering down at him. Beyond that circle of little faces, the faces of Thankamma, Kumaran, Kalyanikuttyamma, and Pankajaakshan hovered. His unfocused pupils got stuck on another peeping face that had joined them just then: Shankaran, who had come back after fetching the medicines. Like the iron particles in sand vibrating in front of a magnet, every tender cell of the newborn vacillated towards that face. His soul, not yet matured to use language, tried to hail this man who had kindled for him ten months ago, the light, the sound, the touch, the sweetness and smell of amma’s milk, and also all the joys, sorrows, desires, and rejections of life on earth that were yet to come.
The syllable ‘chha’ of achchan—father—sprouted in his soul, and knocked on all of his nine orifices, bewildered at not being able to find an outlet.
‘Chchoo,’ sneezed the newborn, through the nose through which life’s breath had cleared its path to the outside.
The story of how an elephant come to drink water lost its footing in a slippery stream high up in the Western Ghats, tumbled six or seven times, slammed its head against the rocks, and, being ripped of its life and ivory, got carried in swiftly flowing water without getting struck in the bunds and dams, came under the public gaze for the first time beneath the Marthaanda Varma Bridge, floating through the stares of the unblinking eyes of amazed children on both sides of the river before rotting and becoming an apology for an elephant, till it finally got stuck for three weeks in the mangroves at Punneli kadavu, was a story that grew into an elephantine lie, which Shankaran would tell his son much later. Told by the elder children of Ayyaattumpilli that the carcass found in the river on his birthday was that of a buffalo, Jithen made up a story that other children could not dream of: the story of how the God of Death, Kaalan, who was lurking near the hospital on his buffalo to take the lives of his mother and his own the day after Onam, was scared off by Thachanakkara thevar, who also killed Kaalan’s buffalo and threw it in the river, and how that buffalo, as big as an elephant, had floated all along Aluva river till it reached its final resting place among the mangroves at Punneli kadavu for all of the Thachanakkara folk to see.
EIGHT
Progeny
8 May 1999
…I have been sending you at least one letter a week since I came here in March upon getting this job. I know a lot of this must be boring you. However, as this is my sole means of tiding over this infernal loneliness, you will have to bear with my letters. When I sit down to write, even if it is only a letter to you, I am in God’s lap. To say a little more harshly, in God’s den!
Write something readable about life; or else, live in a way fit for others to write about you—these are the only two ways to escape death.
Undoubtedly, these are not my words. I am not old enough to state things of such gravitas. Nevertheless, I know one fact: all those who attempt to write about life must suffer failure at one point. That is, when trying to render human childhood into language. Which wordsmith of a fisherman can net the free-swimming goldfish of childhood from the great ocean of the unconscious mind?
I am not continuing with this concept. There is a more important thing. A writer not being able to write only goes on to show that he is a genuine writer. A dilemma remains: how does a person who is struggling, on the one hand, in not being able to bring real art into one’s writings, and on the other hand, is not able to live life in all its realness, survive his own death?
The ten grandchildren of Naraapilla kept extending the empire of their childhood by pulling up the pales and fences of the four houses of Ayyaattumpilli. The fort and battlements of the tiny empire was the laterite wall built only along the front yard of Chinnamma’s house that stood in the seventy-eight-cent plot of land. During the summer holidays, the Muslim children of Elookkara and Kaintikkara breached the ramparts to pluck and take away the pomelos. The young ones with yeast infection and warts, and an eye for profit clambered up the pomelo trees, braving the crawling fire ants with acid sacs on their backsides. Except Thankamani, who had started feeling that looking up at the clambering kids wearing only shorts was something of a sin, all the other children of Ayyaattumpilli stood around looking up with their mouths agape.
With no defence against old age and cataract, Naraapilla had started to flounder in the New House. Yet, he hadn’t stopped his early morning baths in the temple pond of Thachanakkara thevar. Sitting on the last row of the broken stone steps of the pond covered in algae bloom, he bathed, using a bowl to pour water on himself. His advanced age was not the only thing keeping him from going waist-deep into the water, holding his nose and immersing himself completely. The remedies prescribed by the senior astrologer in Kaniyankunnu to stop him from having visions of Kunjuamma when he immersed himself in the pond, had not removed his dread completely. Appu Nair, who understood that the temple pond also had started giving Naraapilla the jitters like the waters of Aluva river used to, was fobbed off by Naraapilla. ‘After all, it’s also water, isn’t it? Whether in the river or the pond or in the well, one can’t trust it, Appoliyo!’
Naraapilla could not identify the children of varying ages—who ran about in the yard of the New House where he was living alone—as the offspring of their respective parents. He would not make a mistake with only Thankamani, the eldest daughter of Thankamma. She had long tresses and had inherited Kunjuamma’s looks. When the other children would appear as shadows on the portico, he would ask, ‘Whose are you, Pankajaakshan’s or Thankamma’s or that accursed one’s?’
If the children of the eldest son, Govindan, who anyway were being brought up in Cherai, were to be excluded, the first grandchild that should have been born in Ayyaattumpilli was the one in Kalyanikuttyamma’s womb, when she had walked in with Pankajaakshan. However, caught in the heat of a honeymoon celebrated in Munnar, that child had forfeited the honour and departed from this world as a stillborn. As she was being carried for burial at the southern boundary of his plot, seeing the dark curly hair of that six-month-old baby, Pankajaakshan remembered his mother. When Kalyanikuttyamma did not conceive for the next two years, Pankajaakshan was convinced that it was retribution for leaving his sinking mother and going for his honeymoon. When his sister gave birth the same year to a child resembling his own, who was buried, Pankajaakshan was overwhelmed. She had been named Thankamani by Kumaran and Thankamma, but in order to remember his own mother, Pankajaakshan gave her a pet name: Kunjikunjomma. She, in return, called him Pankaachammavan. Thus, Pankajaaks
hanpolice became Pankaachammavan for the children of Thankamma and Chinnamma.
Thankamma gave birth to another girl after Thankamani—Radha, the singer who was afflicted with polio and ended up with a limp—followed by two boys, Vijayan and Vidyadharan. Kalyanikuttyamma, Pankajaakshan’s wife, after the loss of the curly-haired stillborn, gave birth to three boys with an interval of two years each between them: Venu, Shashi, and Soman, who had all inherited their father’s features and the Ayyaattumpilli bawl. It was after four plus three, i.e., seven children in the neighbourhood and his two sisters—Geetha whose name that graced the iron gate, and Rema who at two had started making noises like Chinnamma—filled Ayyaattumpilli, that Jithendran’s incarnation happened. The Tenth One. The first child to be born in a hospital in the Ayyaattumpilli lineage. The first one to be taken out with a scalpel. The baby with a huge head and big genitals. The first grandchild to affectionately touch Naraapilla, who was turning fetid like a corpse. Despite being given a name which meant ‘he who has triumphed over Lord Indra’, a hapless Jithendran could not even triumph over himself.
The wonder of coincidences worked even in the selection of his name, which the Thachanakkara denizens had thought to be rather strange when they first heard it. The name, Jithendran, took shape the day the eldest son of Pankajaakshan, Venu, fell off the bicycle and broke his leg.
The anniversary celebrations of Arunodaya Club had taken place in the temple grounds, along with the Onam festivities. Using the surplus amount remaining from the donations collected by moving from house to house in Thachanakkara, Muppaththadam, and Panaayikkulam in the hot sun, the club bought a new cycle for general use. Reading out loud the shiny red lettering on the iron pipe, which extended below, emerging underneath the seat and shining like a black beetle, which said Raleigh Cycle, Vasudevan the club president said, ‘It’s the number one company. If we keep the cycle in the club, it’s for certain that thieves would take it away, breaking in through the thatch.’
Entranced by the smell of the new tyre and the reflections on the oily dome of the bell, which transformed every skinny member into a pot-bellied giant, the members standing around the cycle looked at each other with fear-tinged surmise. The solution also came from Vasudevan: ‘There’s one thing we can do. Each day, it can be taken to a different member’s house. Those who do not know how to ride a cycle can also practise in the morning in the temple grounds.’
Thus, taken by turns to the members’ houses, on the twenty-fourth day, it finally reached Ayyaattumpilli. Venu, the eldest son of Pankajaakshan, was the youngest member of the Club. It was by virtue of being the son of Pankajaakshanpolice that he got in as a member though not out of his adolescence yet. In order to impress his mother, seating his younger brothers Soman and Shashi in the front and back, he started circling his home on the cycle. By the third round, Soman, who was sitting astride the pipe in front, felt his hardly-ten-year-old tender testicles inside his knickers getting crushed. As he lifted his bum off the pipe to give a little relief to the aching testicles, the rider lost his balance and the cycle fell. Bearing the weight of both his brothers, Venu’s right leg got caught under the cycle and was crushed. The fourteen-year-old’s bone was fractured below the knee.
That evening Paanamparampath Nanu reached Vengooran Thankappan’s teashop with the tale of Pankajaakshanpolice’s son falling off the cycle and fracturing his leg. It was when the discussion, which started with Nanu’s declamation that reposing faith in a tyre as thin as a rat snake—that too, a tyre in motion—and riding on it, was not for intelligent people, moved on to motorized two-wheelers, that Karunakaran Karthaavu joined in, after closing the door of his Writer’s Office. That set the stage for Karunakaran Karthaavu to narrate the story, taking care not to compromise one bit on its entertainment quotient, of the Hindi movie he had seen the previous week in a talkies in Ernakulam.
‘Amongst the actors to date, who’s the most accomplished in riding motorcycles?’ Karthaavu entered into a direct quiz. Not just Nanu, Vengooran, Thankappan, Shivan barber, and Kochu Parashu, but even Shankaran who had just reached to pay his credit amount, shrank back in front of that question. Who is the best rider of a motorcycle was a question they had not asked themselves before!
‘That’s our Sivaji Ganesan,’ said Nanu, a staunch fan of Sivaji, the thespian actor of Tamil movies.
‘Haeey, what good are Tamilians other than for driving lorries?’ Karthaavu dismissed it contemptuously. ‘If you don’t know, listen, it is Hindi’s Jeetendra!’ Enjoying the frown on everyone’s brow occasioned by that name, Karthaavu continued, ‘Ho, last week I had been to Ernaa’lum and saw that guy’s movie. Parichay.’
‘Parichai! The Tamil name of the parichaa thingy we use to block blows by the sword?’ Nanu asked innocently.
‘That it is NOT.’ Karthaavu was cross. ‘This is “parichay” in Hindi. What we call parichayam, or acquaintance.’
‘What is its story?’ queried an eager Barber Shivan, angling to hear the story of a Hindi movie without spending money.
‘That’s fun!’ Karthaavu started off with his typical laugh that made him shut his eyes, which was how he always set off his narration of the story of a movie. In the five listeners, five inner silver screens began to come alive with five different movies based on a single story. In them, a grandfather called Pran, his son and a music lover, Sanjeev Kumar, his five children, the eldest of which was Jaya Bhaduri, flickered and grew in clarity. With the death of their parents, the brats reached their grandfather’s house and began to indulge in much mischief. One by one, the masters who came to tutor them failed. Finally, the very smart Jeetendra turns up at their bungalow, and succeeds in taming the children. The eldest child, Jaya Bhaduri, falls in love with Jeetendra. On the assurance that their wedding will happen, on each of the five screens ‘The End’ flashed in Malayalam as shubham, as the Hindi movie played out.
When he realized that Shankaran had come to pay his credit amount, Kochu Parashu got up from his inner cinema and came out. Shankaran had come also to invite Kochu Parashu for the next day’s naming ceremony of his third child. After taking the money, marking the entry, and returning the notebook, Kochu Parashu asked the usual question, ‘What are you naming your son?’
‘Not decided yet,’ Shankaran said. ‘Do you have any good names?’
After thinking about something for a while, Kochu Parashu switched on the radio. The needle which runs over stations tickled many places. Finally, Kochu Parashu’s search ended on a wavy film song. That was a Malayalam song which emanated from Ceylon, which had recently renamed itself Sri Lanka. ‘Haven’t people used up most of the names?’ Kochu Parashu spoke without turning his head away from the radio. ‘Now the kids will have to be named Jeetendra, Jaya Bhaduri, and the like.’
While at that time his opinion appeared to be in jest, next day, by the time the five ceremonial beads were to be tied on his child, it had brought Shankaran to a state of dilemma. Though he had told Kochu Parashu that no name had been decided on, an eminent name was glowing inside him. The name of a comrade who had been dismissed for unionizing the workers in the aluminium factory: Balaanandan. But when only hours were left for the naming ceremony, Chinnamma protested against the name.
‘You could find only this oldie’s name?’ Chinnamma asked, powdering the navel of the child. ‘We should give him a modern name. Something like Surendran or Rajendran … It’s that kind of name I am thinking of.’
Shankaran tried in vain to recall the name of the hero in Karthaavu’s movie. On the pretext of going to get turmeric paste for applying on the string of beads, he got out and asked Karthaavu the name of the hero whose motorcycle-riding skills were exemplary.
‘His real name is Ravi,’ Karunakaran Karthaavu explained about that baptism while he was opening his Document Office. ‘Ravi Kapoor who used to peddle gold jewellery to cinema actors. When he started acting, Jeetendra was the name given to him by Director Shantaram.’
‘Jithendra,’ Shankaran re
peated that name many times, as he was walking back. By the time he reached home, the name had grown a tail of half a syllable. As it is typical of Malayali names, Jithendra lengthened into Jithendran. In the circumstance in which her sister-in-law’s son was down with a broken leg falling off a bicycle, Chinnamma heartily approved naming her son after a skilled motorcycle rider.
For the naming ceremony, there were only two invitees other than the Ayyaattumpilli family members. Kochu Parashu, who came exactly around lunchtime after locking up his shop, and the policeman Raman Pilla, who attended the function but did not stay for lunch. To register his protest at his wife not being invited, Raambillapolice left the moment the beads were tied on. Shankaran had gone two days ago to the New House and invited Naraapilla. After he had delayed so long to see his grandson, no one expected Naraapilla to turn up for the twenty-eighth day ceremony. As the time drew close for the ceremony, Geethalayam was filled with Ayyaattumpilli members. As the baby to be named had a cold and was sneezing since morning, Chinnamma refused to give him a head bath; instead, she lay him on a spathe and washed his body with lukewarm water. After shaking out and spreading a grass mat, Shankaran sat with the baby, facing East. Two-year-old Rema stood close, touching him. Applying kohl on his bulbous eyes, dabbing the snot with his own mundu, and tying the turmeric-encrusted string with the five-metal beads on the baby’s waist, Shankaran reinforced his recall of the chosen name. Closing the right ear of his son with a tender betel leaf, into the left ear he whispered ‘Shreeparameswaran’ thrice. Then, blocking the left ear, in the right ear he called his son thrice: ‘Jithendran … Jithendra … Jithendro!’
Tickled by the syllables, Jithendran laughed. In various pitches, in various sounds, amazingly bereft of love…
A Preface to Man Page 18