A devatha rose up from the ocean and accosted Parashuraman, who was waiting after having flung his axe into the sea to create Kerala. She had a gleaming silver axe in her hand.
‘Is this the axe that you threw?’ the devatha asked him.
Parashuraman replied in the negative. After going back to the deep, she resurfaced and this time she had a golden axe in her hand. ‘Is this your axe?’
‘No, no.’ Rubbing his beard, Parashuraman fought temptation.
The third time, the devatha returned with the original axe. Though it was lying deep in the salt water, the blood from his mother’s neck was congealed dark on its edge.
‘This is mine,’ Parashuraman said, taking the axe in his hand and examining the blood stains. ‘But I had thrown it into the sea to lose it.’
‘And I gave it back to counsel you,’ the devatha said. ‘Where can you get rid of the axe with which you killed your own mother? Without the parashu or axe, won’t you become a mere Raman?’
The devatha vanished. Giving up his plan, Parashuraman came to Thachanakkara temple and installed himself as the deity. He held the axe in his right hand as if about to swing it.
Naraapilla roared with laughter.
Imagining the squatting Naraapilla in the midst of the coffee bushes, beyond the wild sugarcane grass and beyond the brick kiln, washerwoman Ammu, who was washing dirty laundry in Punneli kadavu, was startled, and froze.
Part Three
Kaama
‘Men are more moral than they think and
far more immoral than they can imagine.’
—Sigmund Freud
ONE
Sequel
25 December 1999
…As usual, I am abandoning halfway what I started writing yesterday. This time I am not throwing it into the wastebasket anyway. This useless piece of paper is also enclosed with yesterday’s letter. I know very well that there is nothing valuable in this paper for you to preserve it. Yet, before you throw it away do not forget to read it thoroughly! It’s the farthest point of my memories, the awakening of my senses:
Resounding light. The shadows that emerge from it. The many forms born as they firm up to become bodies. Everything in constant motion. Some come close, are enlarged, and become clearer. Some dissolve in the flicker of a moment. Bodies with faces stuck on top come closer, with firm steps. Eyes stuck on unfamiliar faces begin to blink and sway alarmingly. Below the glass eyes, small clamorous burrows full of white teeth. Many kinds of hands. If they came closer, baby trips to the cradle, or cot, or the baby bath in the spathe of areca palm. On the oiled tummy, warm water keeps sliding. In the nose and eyes, the sting and aroma of soap bubbles. When his mother blows a mouthful of air on the top of the head to dry his hair after bathing him, the momentary shudder and loss of breath. The bubbies that ooze milk when given a kiss. Suckling drowsily, forgetting even to breathe. Waking up startled, sighing, and diving back into slumber. Then, the odours of shoulders and necks. The yucky tastes of many sweats and blouses. Sounds kept boiling over. Suspended in them, many emotions. Screeching caws of crows in the scorching sun. Songs of indeterminate birds that lose out to the cawing. The soft tone asking where my son is, where my little son is, while tickling the face with his stubble, is Father. Glancing often to check if asleep, and singing loud lullabies that don’t allow sleep is Amma: ‘Omanakuttan govindan balaramanae koode koottathe, malinimaniyamma thannannga seemani chennu.’ ‘Geethae, deee, Geethae … oh, oh, oh … where’s this accursed girl?’ The swinging cradle. The squeaky cry of the cradle’s rope. The swaying beams and cobwebby roof tiles. The rope that goes around the beam under the attic-less roof and hangs down double-tailed; the rod of the cradle at its end, bisecting the vision. The rattle hung on the rhythmically swinging rod, tinkling on.
Except for the New House that Naraapilla stayed in, the other three houses in Ayyaattumpilli got electricity that year.
That was the time when four government servants scampered about in Thachanakkara, enthusiastic and sunburnt, planting wooden poles resembling stretched crucifixes at regular distances and pulling shining double cables through them. It was Pankajaakshan’s wife, Kalyanikuttyamma, who educated Thankamma and Chinnamma on the greatness of electricity and filled and submitted the three applications for Ayyaattumpilli. She repeated the new word ‘connection’ often. It was with awe that Chinnamma and Thankamma uttered words such as wiring, plug and main switch.
Kalyanikuttyamma, who had gone that year with new clothes as Onam gifts for her parents in Kochi, returned with two paper parcels. After a fight over the disappearance of ripe pineapples from the plants near the fence, the sisters-in-law had just started talking to each other again. Making her youngest son Soman summon both Thankamma and Chinnamma, Kalyanikuttyamma took out the parcels to open them. Into the line of vision of her waiting sisters-in-law, who expected to see either the sweetened rice balls or high-quality tea she usually brought from Kochi, she displayed something resembling the piriform head of a mace, lifting it out with some difficulty from the first package. By then Soman had pulled out, one after the other from the second package, three big yellowing steel petals that he handed to his mother. By the time Kalyanikuttyamma had arranged the three petals equidistant around the dome, as if making a floral decoration for Onam, everyone had more or less made out what it was. The twelve-year-old Soman asked loudly, ‘Hey, isn’t this our fan in Kochi?’
Looking at her sisters-in-law, Kalyanikuttyamma said with pride, ‘Our old fan, my father gave it to us to use when we get the connection!’
Envisaging the fan suspended from the ceiling like a bunch of bananas, Chinnamma had a start. What Kalyanikuttyamma had brought to Ayyaattumpilli, all wrapped up, was the monster which had robbed her of her sleep through all the four nights that she spent in the hospital after delivering Jithen! Those days, she had complained repeatedly to the nurses about the dangers posed by it, spinning and swinging with an alarming noise, directly above her and her days-old child. Unsatisfied with their assurances, on the fourth day, when Dr Madhavan came to discharge her and score out her name from the patients’ list, pointing at the fan overhead, she said, ‘Before that damned spinning thing falls on our heads and kills my baby, I just want to be home, dottr!’
Madhavan Doctor laughed. ‘The fan won’t cause any problem.’ Lifting the sheet covering the child with his pen, and peering at the navel, he said, ‘as long as Chinnamma won’t go and attack it!’
Not only did the doctor’s words not make her fears disappear, but it also instilled a belief in her unconscious mind that the fan was a strange animal without a sentient mind. But when she saw her sister-in-law from Kochi treating it like a toy sent by her father, Chinnamma lost her fear. ‘Oh,’ she said shifting Jithen from her left hip to the right side of her waist, ‘we too have a so-called father!’
There was some substance in that grouse. Naraapilla’s concept of electricity itself was something else. When Kalyanikuttyamma approached him with the application form, his response was, ‘To get electricity? For what? Is there anything in the night life of humans that can be done in the presence of light?’
On the country roads and alleys forking off the tarred main road, cables slithered. With great devotion, the housewives living on either side of the alleyways offered containers filled with ginger-laced buttermilk and pickle-laced gruel to the workers. The folk of Thachanakkara were left open-mouthed as they stood looking up at the workers who were busy atop the just-installed poles, to which they were secured with the yellow nylon ropes tied around their middles. The children were spellbound at how easily these workers caught, with their hands, the small implements for cutting and joining that were thrown up to them. On the day the pole was planted in front of Geethalayam, Geetha, with baby Jithen at her waist and her sister Rema by her side, stood watching them the whole day.
‘Now,’ Geetha asked one of the workers, ‘why’re you uncles burying these poles and stretching the rope across them?’
‘It
’s for drying our wet clothes!’ he replied without batting an eyelid.
‘Ayyo! But for that, why do you need to string up the clothesline so high?’ Rema asked.
Patting Jithen’s cheeks, he changed his style to suit the children. ‘Only we males know the secret of this, isn’t it so, son? The clothes that we are going to hang on this, are God’s clothes! Humungous dresses which only boys can see!’
When she realized the brother she was carrying on her hip was a male, for the first time, she felt envious of him. Unaware that they were talking about lengthy loincloths, that was also the first moment when she felt sad about being born a girl.
Electricity had reached more than half the houses in Thachanakkara. When a street light was put up on the extant pole near Pooshaappi Junction, Thachanakkara stayed illumined even after sunset. The houses that had indicated their presence earlier by the twinkle of their chimney lamps seen through the dark shadows of the fences, now appeared here and there like painted backdrops with walls and tiles used as stage curtains. Delivered from the smoky chimney lamps that made the hair of their nostrils sooty, children sat beneath the new incandescent bulbs and read their lessons loudly, late into the night. Arecanut spathes, replaced by electric fans, reincarnated as containers for drying marinated and salted vegetables and rice paste in the yards. Those Nairs who still had considerable landed property left—even after being stripped by Land Reforms and partitioning of family wealth—in which they grew coconuts palm and plantains, installed water pumps on the wells overrun by Siam weed. As the elephant-trunk-like hoses of the pumps spewed the crystal slivers of water into the canals hacked in the dry earth, even the grown-ups were amazed. Coconut palms and plantains sucked in water upto the tip of their buds and belched.
Atop the external portal of the Thachanakkara thevar’s temple, two spittoons facing east and west appeared. Morning and evening, they sang hymns from Jnaanappana and Harinaamakeerthanam to the Thachanakkara denizen, in a veteran female voice. On hearing that the lady melodiously reciting the hymns sitting squeezed inside the spittoon-shaped loudspeakers was called Leela, at least some of the women of Thachanakkara genuinely believed that it was Leela of Muringaattil, who committed suicide at Punneli kadavu. It was so imbued with the voice and music of the supernatural. Before they left the temple grounds after finishing the circumambulation, some of the old women stood in worshipful devotion in front of the blue loudspeakers, which were the source of the disembodied voice, with the same reverence with which they bowed before the oblation stones and the banyan tree.
The folks of Thachanakkara were dumbfounded by the sight of the brilliant light from the ripening glass bubbles on the vines suspended from the ceiling, which outshone bell metal oil lamps and camphor lights.
Naraapilla had leased about seventy-five cents of land on the riverbank adjacent to Punneli kadavu, to Devassy from Angamaly for putting up a brick kiln. That place, where the brick kiln now stood, looking like the ruins of a riparian civilization, could not easily be included in deed documents, being an extension of the riverbank. Hence, Naraapilla had not included it in the property to be divided amongst his children. Pankajaakshan who was whiling away his time as he was suspended from police service, had an eye on that land, unaware of its status. Devassy, who had come to Thachanakkara on the lookout for a suitable place to set up his brick kiln, had to undergo greater ordeals than the fire in a brick kiln. Because he was a Christian, his entrance test into Thachanakkara itself proved to be a trying one. When the rumour went around that the men and women who were coming to work at the kiln were all Christians from Angamaly, the Nairs of Thachanakkara were livid. Advancing as a group, they waylaid Devassy and in the middle of a one-sided squabble, toppled his bicycle which had a box on its carrier.
Devassy, who had remained silent till then, set his cycle right and asked with a smile, ‘We can employ anyone at the brick kiln. But tell me, how many of you Nairs will come to knead the clay for making bricks?’
Faced with that question, the Nairs looked at each other, swallowed their saliva and left one by one. Thus, with Christian women from Angamaly and able-bodied Muslim men from Elookkara, Devassy started the kiln. In between, Paanamparampath Nanu tried to spread an allegation that in the name of the kiln, Devassy was actually digging up the riverbank looking for treasure, but it did not hold water even with Naraapilla. Devassy quickly improved his image when he sold half-priced bricks—even though they were only half-baked—to Shankaran when he was building Geethalayam at Ayyaattumpilli. On top of all that, by rescuing a boy from Chammaram, accepted as lost when he nearly drowned while learning to swim, Devassy—who dived headlong without even taking off his shirt—gained such eminence that he was, from then on, affectionately referred to by the Thachanakkara folk as ‘Achaayan’.
Pankajaakshan, who was trying his best to curry favour with Naraapilla ever since he got dismissed from the police service, finally succeeded in getting Naraapilla’s permission to collect the rent from the kiln. Pankajaakshan was aided by Kalyanikuttyamma’s shrewdness and regularity in sending one meal a day to the New House for Naraapilla without fail.
In the surplus land beyond the kiln, Pankajaakshan planted some coffee saplings on his own. A friend of Kalyanikuttyamma’s father, that same estate manager in Munnar who had once arranged for them a cottage that had more glass than bricks to enjoy their honeymoon days in, had sent thirty of those saplings. Though he had to suffer a lot of ridicule initially for transplanting the coffee saplings from the cold climate of Munnar, the trees stumped the critics by growing quickly and growing in girth on the riverbank.
The Christian women who came early in the morning to work at Devassy’s kiln, changed from their sarees into their husband’s shirts and lungis behind the coffee trees as soon as they got there. They put the sarees and blouses into soiled plastic bags, which they left hanging on the branches of the dwarfish coffee trees till they wound up work in the evening. One of the workers, Rebecca, easily identified because of her shapely figure and fair skin, once discovered an adolescent boy standing under the coffee tree, smelling the faultless yellow saree that she had hung on the coffee tree and trembling as if struck by electricity. From that day, the women gave up the practice of hanging the plastic bags from the branches. The adolescent boy who stood trembling was Shashi, Pankajaakshan’s second son. During twenty-six days of that summer vacation, every day he used to search and smell only Rebecca’s clothes, and run home when he could not stand the ecstasy anymore. On the twenty-sixth day, Rebecca, who had come to pee under the coffee tree, unexpectedly saw that sight.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Looking at the fourteen-year-old, she called out to everyone, ‘Is this fellow going to be one up on his father and grandfather?’
The toilet at the New House overflowed.
Though Appu Nair searched in all directions for scavengers, he could not find anyone. Appu Nair was unable to search and persuade people like old times. Cataract had congealed like a film of rice water in his pupils. Though he advised his brother-in-law to finish the job in either Thankamma’s or Pankajaakshan’s toilet, Naraapilla did not listen. As he felt that it was not proper to ask him to go to Chinnamma’s from where he would not eat anything, Appu Nair did not mention her name at all. But, Chinnamma was aware of her father’s dilemma. She was also planning countermoves to Pankajaakshan’s secret moves to wrest the Puzhampallath land. She had initiated the first phase of that plan, when she pushed Kunthi to take the paayasam to the New House, the day after Onam the previous year. The birthday boy, who accompanied her, had grown two years older now and had started running and jumping. Whether because he had accompanied Kunthi that day, or because Kunjuamma kept talking about him often in his dreams—it was difficult to determine—Naraapilla had started feeling an intense fondness for Jithen. Thus, even if temporarily, Jithen’s days were transplanted from Granpa Raambilla’s house to Naraapilla’s sombre presence. Once the initial unfamiliarity was over, Jithen must have recognized in his own grandfa
ther, a stronger magnetism pulling him from Granpa Raambilla. Chinnamma too felt that it was better that this bond of affection continued, at least till the heir to the New House was revealed. As soon as he woke up, Jithen would cross the fence and go over to Grampa’s. Despite seeing the hairy forest on Grampa’s back and his silvery stubble innumerable times, Jithen’s fascination did not abate. His favourite toys were the wooden holy ash basket hung on the porch of the New House and the latches fixed on the inside of the front door. He was the first among the grandchildren of Ayyaattumpilli who touched Naraapilla. When Naraapilla went behind the cover of the coffee trees at Puzhampallath to escape from his overflowing toilets, Jithen accompanied him, hanging on to his finger. When he became strong enough to lift the kindi, which Naraapilla used to fill water from the river, Jithen carried it as he walked with him. From his momentary inspirations, he blended the many stories his tiny ears had heard to spin new ones and narrated them to his Grampa. In return, he had only one tale left to tell his grandson. The tale of the Periyar originating from the seven mighty hills of the Western Ghats. Squatting under the coffee trees, he tried to recollect a couplet he had heard from his mother at least three-quarters of a century ago.
‘Chokkaampetti … Paachi … Sundaram…’ Unable to remember the rest of it, he kept straining.
In the grey forest of hair on his back a thrill spread. ‘Got it!’ Laughing like a child, he began to recite it in full:
‘And these were the names of those mighty hills:
Chokkaampetti, Paachi, Kaali, Sundar, Naaga, Ko, and Valli.’
The seventy-seven-year old Naraapilla did not have an option. Hanging on to his thumb was a marvelling childhood in the form of Jithen, which transformed the wind-swept njaanganna clusters into sugarcane fields and the brick kilns emitting smoke into the sky of Lankapuri that had been turned to ashes by Hanuman.
When referring to the youngest among his grandchildren, Naraapilla began to repeat the same phrase that he had affectionately used for the youngest among his six children, three decades ago:
A Preface to Man Page 21