A Preface to Man

by Subhash Chandran

  Can you see his roguish smile?

  Hey, have a look at Remakutty’s face … as if stung by a hornet!

  For that, praise our Geetha! Her brother is her life.

  Move over! Let me see the kiddo.

  Havooo! Where was Pankaachammavan till now?

  Is there any need to ask? Can’t you see he’s coming after a tipple?

  After the kohl has been applied, doesn’t he resemble our father, Chinnammae?

  Shush, kunjetta … my son is not that repulsive!

  Isn’t it so, Kalloo? You take a look.

  I felt it before. Grampa’s features mean that of you all as well.

  Haii, why have you come here now with your broken leg?

  I am going mad lying there all by myself, ammae. You want to hear something? When I was coming here, achchachan asked if there was a feast.

  I see! He didn’t ask what has happened to your leg?

  Fancy! When I came away without answering, he was cursing me to a shortened life!

  Thankamani, take some rice and curry for father in a vessel.

  I won’t go. If you want, you go yourself.

  What, you are leaving, Raambillachettaa? Have something and go.

  No, no. She’ll be waiting there to eat with me. Shankaro, my friend, let me leave then!

  Shush … he’s coming, leaning on the stick!

  My God, dee, Chinnamma, look, father’s coming this side!

  What should I do? Should I light a lamp with buttermilk? Whoever has to come will come. There’s enough to eat his fill. Let him eat. And go.

  Where’s the baby? All the kids go out. Shankaro, where’s the baby?

  Why call Shankaran? I’ll tell you. Here, this is the baby. You haven’t come all these days. Take a good look!

  Shush … sis-in-law, this is not the time to talk this way.

  Why have you put charcoal on his face?

  That isn’t charcoal. It’s kohl! Today’s his twenty-eighth day, no?

  Eh?

  His twenty-eighth day! Don’t you know?

  That’s why I came. What have you called him?

  Jithendran…

  Eh?

  Jithendran.

  What kind of name is that?

  I am also asking the same thing!

  She’ll do that and worse. She’s always done what she wants.

  I am living in my home with my kid! Chechiye, if he’s hungry feed him and send him away. Let me hold my peace.

  Phthooo! Who needs your feed? Naraapilla hasn’t come to eat your food. That accursed corpse of a woman came when I was nodding and asked if I wasn’t going to see her grandson. He’s a boy like our Govindan, she said. Go and take a look, and she wept. That’s why I came … not for your rice … phthooo!

  Don’t go, Father, because she said things mindlessly. Come, sit here. Dee Thankamaniye, cut a plantain leaf!

  I don’t think he’s going to sit down, Kumaro!

  Shankara, hold him please. If he falls on the steps, that’d be it!

  How old is uncle?

  Seventy-four. Was born in ninety-eight.

  Son, why are you in the midst of this throng with your bandaged leg?

  Right, let me move away. If achchachan sees me, he’ll begin cursing.

  Chinnammae, did you hear what father said? That Amma came to him in his sleep and told him that the baby resembles our vallyettan! When I look at him now, I too feel so.

  Lies. I don’t want to listen to all this.

  No. Take a look. Really. Etta, here, you take a look. See if he resembles vallyettan.

  Aavo! I don’t feel anything. Well, hasn’t anyone informed Govindettan? After the surgery and all that happened here?

  Who’s there to inform him? Let my tummy heal. I am going to Cherai with my kids. Sulu sister-in-law dotes on me. Isn’t it this accursed father who kept that poor thing away?

  Aw! Will you keep quiet, Chinnammae? You shouldn’t be shouting like this now, do you understand?

  In that case, lay the plantain leaves for everyone. Everyone go back home after food. Boys, cut a few plantain leaves. Not from the New House. Can’t start a fight for that!

  Looks like this ruckus has frightened the baby, look at its face!

  Now he really resembles vallyettan. He too left after being fed up with the shouting.

  Jithendra … monae, Jithendrakutta … don’t worry. When you can walk and run, you too escape to someplace else!

  NINE

  Iconoclasm

  13 June 1999

  …Have you noticed that all the schoolchildren in uniforms nowadays have the same face. Same eyebrows, same nose, same mouths that have been pressed down with wires to remove all resemblances to Dravidian looks … like the most popular toy manufactured in our toy factory—a monkey playing a drum. Same attire, same facial expression, same drum, even the sound it makes is homophonic…

  But each child at Aalungal School, where I went, was different. Each smile and each soul was different.

  Why did I remember this now?

  Yesterday, a friend in my office bought a mobile phone. A young man from a rich family. He said that this thing which can be carried in the pocket is going to become very common in our country too, like it is abroad. Since both our houses don’t even have land phones, we don’t have to bother about it, do we? Will the time come when all will carry such mobile phones? Should we have been born a little late in time? No. Let’s love now and live now and die now itself. It will be terrifying to live at a time in which letters written by dipping in love will be supplanted with something else. An instrument that is an accomplice in destroying words will defile human life tomorrow. Oh God, has that time come?

  There used to be a mad Nampoothiri in the Thachanakkara of my childhood who would walk around with an old telephone receiver with its wires cut, talking earnestly to important people not present at the other end of the line. On our way to school, we used to run and hide after calling him by some nickname. When father told me that he was once the president of the youngsters’ club in Thachanakkara, and was exceptionally smart, I stopped joining the kids’ army that harassed that poor soul.

  During the time she was breastfeeding her youngest child, Chinnamma had shifted her bath from Periyar river to the irrigation bund.

  It was after the asphalt layers had blackened the mud road that ran caressing Kochu Parashu’s shop, that the new irrigation bund, which came as part of the Water Authority scheme, drew parallel lines through the green fields of Thachanakkara. Beyond the temple, on the border of the land on which Arunodaya Club stood, the road passed over a culvert to cross the irrigation bund. The waters of the Periyar, sucked up and spat out by a gigantic machine that wheezed from insufficient horsepower, lost control and kept gushing through the cemented channel of the eight-feet-wide irrigation canal. The first things that floated like ripened yellow mango leaves, in the water surging through the channels gone dry in the heat of the summer mornings, were human faeces. Before the crack of dawn, the children from the houses anchored close to the edges of the bund, moved like sleepwalkers towards the bund to empty their bowels. Turning the dry bund into an endless snake boat, they squatted here and there. When they would hear the clog-like sounds of water approaching from afar, they would clutch the floor of the bund, clawing their toes in as a precaution against losing their balance in the onrush of water. When the warmth of the first surge of water hit their bottoms, the children’s mouths would open in primordial pleasure. And, when the water, flowing just above the floor for a long while at the beginning, would begin to rise, the children’s turn would be over. By then the women, who had learnt to bathe in the bund without losing their balance and to stand perched in the water like monkeys, would start arriving with their bundles of dirty linen. The irrigation bund was a refuge from the Aluva river in which Muringaattil Leela still romped. Forgetting the advaitham that both the waters were the same, some silly women said, ‘It’s not at all like the river water, there’s this something
special in bund water!’

  Of the soiled clothes of Ayyaattumpilli, now, only Naraapilla’s single mundus took their trips to Punneli kadavu, passing through the hands of washerwoman Ammu. Ammu’s mother Thaamara had stopped washing, after her right hand had become paralyzed. Out of the habit of having washed the dirty laundry of Thachanakkara, the old Thaamara still fancied that she had in her right hand, which had become limp like a wrung mundu, an impulse that felt like the one just before she raised the cloth to hit the washing stone. Thaamara’s life had began to fold in, sighing at how the Thachanakkara women had started washing their clothes, and gave only a small share of their soiled linen to Ammu with the beetle on her cheek. By then, the Thachanakkara women had realized that it was better to stand in the sunlight and wash their clothes in the irrigation bund, rather than give ten paisa each for shirts and mundus to Ammu as washing charges. Kalyanikuttyamma, the wife of Pankajaakshan of Ayyaattumpilli, had begun washing her family’s clothes by beating them on the washing stone fixed near the well in her house, following the trend she had picked up from Kochi. Thankamma on the other hand, went to the bund just to wash clothes, after the sun’s heat retreated a little. To be one up on her sister, Chinnamma went to the bund in the scorching heat, wrapped in a single mundu covering her breasts and torso, and washed and wrung dry all the clothes and stacked them on the dry upper steps. Then, she scrubbed herself with coir fibre and leftover washing soap, before she returned home around the turn of noon, with a sunburnt hide. She would scorn her sister and sister-in-law who wouldn’t go with her to have a bath in the daytime. ‘Won’t the madams become dark if they were to bathe in the daytime? For us people since there’s nothing left to darken, if it’s the bund, then it shall be the bund!’

  Chinnamma used to go for her baths, leaving Geetha and Rema at Thankamma’s and the younger one, who had started to crawl, in the house of Raambillapolice. This was the same Raman Pillai, who remained as Thachanakkara’s Raambillapolice even after his retirement, and whose virtue of having informed Pankajaakshan that recruitment to the police force was taking place on the grounds of Aluva School, was later turned into a lie when he claimed that it was he who got the job for Pankajaakshan. Due to some mysterious reason, even the shadow of Raambillapolice was detested by Pankajaakshan’s wife Kalyanikuttyamma. She forbade her three sons from going to his house. Raambillapolice’s house, with its corroded pillars on the half wall, was just across the small road in front of the laterite wall of Geethalayam. The three children of Chinnamma called him Granpa Rambilla. Each time that tall dark man, who was marking time in his childless life with a wife who looked older than him, heard himself addressed so by Chinnamma’s children, he would experience a surge of happiness not befitting the policemen of his era. Chinnamma’s younger son, Jithen, peed on Granpa Rambilla’s chest, and tried to pull out the lush grey hair on his umbrella-like ears. When the boy was lifted up into the air, he kicked his nose and forehead with baby feet. Raambilla would laugh uproariously, taking care to not let his two protruding front teeth hurt the child. Jithen stole from Granpa Rambilla. who was merely a neighbour, the sum total of all the affection due to the nine grandchildren of Ayyaattumpilli from the patriarch Naraapilla, but was never received by any.

  When Vasudevan of Nedumpilli Mana was being taken away by policemen, charged with trying to dump the minor deity of the Thachanakkara temple into the temple pond, Granpa Raambilla warned Jithen, who was bouncing on his waist and watching the scene innocently, ‘If you misbehave, I will make policemen catch you too like that, ngaa!’

  Jithen was then not old enough to understand how the childless Raambillapolice had turned an innocent young man of Thachanakkara into a madman. By the time he heard, for the first time, about how the youngest Nampoothiri of Nedumpilli Mana had evolved into a madman named Alamboori, he had grown up. Granpa Raambilla, who had gifted Alamboori to Thachanakkara, had expired.

  The story begins with Vishwanathan, the eldest son of Kochu Parashu, the most important trader of Thachanakkara.

  Vishwanathan’s selfishness was behind the decision to shift the club from the confines of the small shop next to Poovamparampath Stores. Not many knew that it was Lalitha, the youngest daughter of Amminiyamma of Chammaram and the deceased Kamanthan Gangadharan Nair, who was the reason for transplanting the club. At the very onset of her youth, Lalitha who was smoothly rounded like a spout-less kindi, had gone way ahead of her mother in mastering certain techniques of sexual combat. Vishwanathan, who once happened to glance accidentally at the bathing ghat at the irrigation bund in the killing heat of the month of Kumbham, was struck by lightning when Lalitha opened her sarong and retied it with a sweeping swish. Though it looked totally unintentional then, it was actually a very clever ploy on her part to trap into her mundu the more-than-capable son of Kochu Parashu who always had cash in his cash box. Vishwanathan, who had been sent by his father to check the flow of water from the bund to his field, was hurled upside down by that fleeting vision of temptation that he had witnessed.

  It was the time when he had been sending applications and waiting for a job, after having completed his bachelor’s degree from UC College. It was he, along with his brother Vijayan, two years younger than him, and Vasudevan of Nedumpilli Mana, who had established the Eagles Arts Club in one of the unused shops owned by his father. When the increasing membership made the functioning of the Eagles Club difficult within the confines of Pooshaappi’s shop, Lalitha’s enticing figure, revealed when her lungi was flung open, flashed again in Vishwanathan’s mind. He was beckoned by a place that would not be accessible to his father’s eyes, so that he could worship that idol during the unengaged afternoons at the club. With that, the club moved from the shop to the unused plot near the irrigation bund. Into the afternoons of the hermitage of the club, renamed Arunodaya, Lalitha turned up, wet and plump, like a goddess strutting out of the irrigation bund. Vishwanathan began to experience from top to toe, the complexities of her short body which was taut like a tightly strung udukku drum.

  When Vijayan, Vishwanathan’s younger brother and a club member, found a correlation between money disappearing unaccountably from his father’s cash box and Vishwanathan’s club visits in the afternoons, there was a new turn for the secret rendezvous. It was left to the club president, Vasudevan, to deliver the final words of the chastisement to Vishwanathan after summoning him alone to the club: ‘In my opinion, the ill-repute to the club would only be secondary. What about channelling your father’s hard-earned money to flow freely to Chammaram? You should realize one thing. She is not Lalitha. She’s a man-eater, a pucca Poothana, Poothana!’

  After that, there was a temporary hiatus in Chammaram Lalitha siphoning off cash from Kochu Parashu’s cash box, with Vishwanathan as the key. But she did not stay idle. Since her mother had started ageing, there had been a substantial decrease in the income at Chammaram. When Vishwanathan could find no new place to meet her, as Vasudevan had forbidden him from opening the Arunodaya Club in the afternoons, Lalitha guided him to the little temple that was constructed for the minor deity on the north-western corner of the Thachanakkara temple yard. The isolation of the temple yard, the small temple surrounded by thickets of Siam weed plants, was no doubt an ideal place for secret sex. The deity there was a small Vishnu idol, with a hand wrecked in a fall during Tippu’s military occupation of Kerala. Circling the small temple of red laterite stones, was a narrow mud path made by the footfalls of the devotees who went around it, as if in sympathy for those who came without fail in the morning and evening to bow before Thachanakkara thevar. Lalitha assured him that except for the two or three cows and the crows that came to eat the insects on their backs, in the frightening silence of the temple yard reposing in the afternoon, there would be no one around. As he had imbibed enough atheism from Vasudevan, Vishwanathan did not have any qualms in picking up the kid-sized idol of the small temple from its place to lay it on the floor, and to spread the lungi in that empty space to gambol with Lalitha. Due
more out of womanly greed than fear of God, for each ten-rupee note that smelt of tea and coconut oil that Kochu Parashu’s son Vishwanathan had filched for her, an adequate performance was presented by Lalitha in her sanctuary. Though he was frightened by the sounds of the hooves of cows occasionally, Vishwanathan panted with elation at the return of the joyous days of Arunodaya Club that he had thought were over for good.

  However, those happy days too were short-lived. Raambillapolice, who had come to the temple yard to graze his newly-acquired cow in the temple lands, frowned seeing a movement in the isolation of the small temple further ahead. Letting the cow graze among the touch-me-not plants, with a leftover gusto from his old khaki days, he walked with sure steps towards the temple. At that point, inside the little temple, the last rendezvous between Lalitha and Vishwanathan was reaching its crescendo. Spotting a greying head near the clumps of Siam weed plants, Lalitha broke the prolonged union and pushed Vishwanathan away, saying, ‘There, somebody’s coming! Just give that money and run, son!’

  She disappeared into the thickets around the temple with the ten-rupee note. Holding in his hand the red shirt he had draped around the idol, Vishwanathan jumped out and ran towards Arunodaya Club. In their hurry, the lovers had forgotten to return the granite Vishnu to his place.

  As soon he was able to adjust his vision after the initial blindness upon entering from the glare of the sunlit yard, Raambillapolice, casting his eye around, deduced what had happened. He went directly to Aluva Police Station to report in person about how his timely intervention had prevented the uprooting and throwing of the deity into the temple pond by two young men who had run for their lives into Arunodaya Club. Raambillapolice pointedly stressed to the young sub-inspector—who had joined service only after his retirement—that though the faces of the young men were not distinct, the man who ran behind had a red flag in his hand. Before evening, a police jeep reached Arunodaya Club. When Vasudevan asked the three policemen what the matter was as they threw out all the magazines and newspapers in the club, one policeman demanded, ‘Where’re the pamphlets?’