A Preface to Man

by Subhash Chandran

  ‘Narayanan!’ Sulochana lifted her head and looked at her husband. ‘Understood! The full name of the man who cursed and banished us that day, right?’ she asked with displeasure.

  ‘It can be taken that way too,’ Govindan Master said. ‘There’s a small debt to be repaid. Narayanan was the one who created this Govindan. Govindan repays it by creating another Narayanan!’

  For a moment, Sulochana felt an unreasonable hatred towards the ebony-dark infant lying next to her. With no resemblance to either her or Govindan in complexion or looks, the boy lay with a big head and thin body, like a stone-cutting axe that Naraapilla had hurled afar from Thachanakkara to Cherai. Her first born, Chandrika, who resembled Kunjuamma so much like a sapling sprouted from the hacked root of Kunjuamma, stood near the cot and said, ‘Shall I say what I’ve named the li’l baby? Kannan, the nickname of Lord Krishna! See, isn’t he as dark as Lord Krishna?’

  With that, the name the baby would have at home was set, but the argument about what should be his name on the records continued between the parents. Sulochana suggested many names that sounded close to Chandrika. Govindan Master was stuck on Narayanan. When he felt that the name was hated only because it was a reminder of his father, from Govindan Master’s mouth popped out a statement that took him by shock.

  ‘Don’t consider it my father’s name,’ Govindan Master said in a voice unfamiliar to Sulochana. ‘It can be considered the name of your Guru as well. Yes?’

  When he realized that Sulochana, who was on her delivery bed, was looking at him with fuming eyes, Govindan Master cast his eyes down. He discerned within himself a dimmed shore of casteist pride. Hearing from within him the surging sound of the blood of Ayyaattumpilli advancing as a wave and shattering against a mammoth rock inscribed with the name of Naraapilla in large, ungainly letters, Govindan Master was mortified. As if to stop losing his balance in that wave, he held his three-year-old daughter close to him.

  ‘Oh.’ Sulochana pulled her nipple from the child’s mouth and lay on her back. ‘Your guru! That’s what you said now, isn’t it? That is, the guru of Ezhavas, no? How pathetic!’

  One look from Sulochana had vaporized the flood tide of polluted blood in Govindan Master’s veins. He went near her bed, and caressing her cheek tenderly, said, ‘Forgive me, Sulu. I said that with not a bit of…’ and jerking his hand away, he rolled it into a fist, and smashing it on his forehead, he said, ‘Chchey. So dreadful!’

  When Chandrika, standing between father and mother, began to cry looking at her baby brother, the clash that had flowered by drawing water through roots that extended deep into remote time, hastily folded its petals and subsided.

  Whether it was in memory of the ebony-coloured Naraapilla or the world-renowned great guru, finally, Govindan Master’s son was named Narayanan. At home, he was called Kannan. He grew up with certain characteristics not usually seen among the children of teacher couples, and it was evident from the first glance that he was a soul that harboured unusual emotional torment. After he showed signs of epilepsy in his sixth year, Govindan Master was compelled to bring him up without letting him come under any mental stress. Seeing in his son standing next to him, an image of the one from whom he had tried to run and hide, a bitter smile became a permanent feature on Govindan Master’s face. Returning from school, he lay in the armchair, immersed in some book from one of the three glass cupboards full of neatly-arranged books in his room. At times, he leaned towards a board balanced on the arms of the chair and scribbled something. His greying hair, thick glasses, and white clothes had gifted him the signs of premature ageing when he was just past forty.

  Narayanan hated his father and his book cabinets. He hated his name and roots too. His nights were hell from the knowledge that not far from his place, lived an old devil with his name and likeness. In the daytime, he carried his adolescent body like the flesh of some wild beast impaled on the trident of inferiority. He fled from the presence of women, even as he lusted after them. He was deeply devoted to his mother and sister. One late evening, he thrashed a youth in an alleyway in Cherai, who was foolish enough to make the mistake of thinking that it would be easier to give a love letter to Chandrika by getting into the good books of her younger brother. Had he himself not fallen down in an epileptic fit, Narayanan would have ended up a murderer on that occasion. Without bothering for the permission of his father, he removed the two glass-framed pictures—of Narayana Guru and Chattambi Swamikal that Govindan Master had hung on the porch—which, attacked by hornets and termites, had begun to look like the map of hell, and hung in their place a painter friend’s rendering of the sunset at Cherai beach and a picture of the silhouette of Vladimir Lenin. Though he was not good in studies, that he was gifted with a remarkable memory was something that Govindan Master could make out even as he was a small child. Govindan Master was stunned when he realized that, during Narayanan’s epileptic fits, often he would blabber about events that happened prior to his birth, as if he were recollecting them from memory. It was on the day he declared that he had stopped going to college, and at the end of the long and heated exchange of words that ensued, that Govindan Master came to know of his son’s ability in all its potency. At one point, when he could not stand his backtalk, Govindan Master raised his hand. Stopping his father with his left hand, with a voice slurred because he was frothing at his mouth, Narayanan lifted his right hand and said, ‘Do you want to get from me what you gave your father in Thachanakkara long back? Do you want to?’ Trying and failing to repeat that question once again, he fell with his eyes popping out; from that eighteen-year-old’s mouth spewed the lava of epilepsy, like the wrath held in check by a volcano for centuries.

  That night when she witnessed her son raising his hand to hit her husband, Sulochana had her first episode of chest pain. After a detailed examination, the specialist doctor from Ernakulam told Govindan Master that her condition was not mild enough to be ignored. Her heart, once brimming with poetry, was on its last legs. Govindan Master had already been warned about the inevitable solitude looming over him. He began to look quickly for alliances for his daughter, who was trying for a job after completing her bachelor’s degree. To find a groom for a girl born of a Nair-Ezhava marriage was not as difficult as he had expected. However, on the day of the engagement of his daughter with a progressive-minded school teacher at Paravoor School, Govindan Master was not able to introduce the girl’s brother to the boy’s relatives. That whole day, Narayanan was whiling away time, sitting under a coconut palm on Cherai beach. He had started becoming unreasonably disturbed even as alliances were being weighed up for his sister. Anyway, Sulochana did not live to see the greater complications that were to happen on Chandrika’s wedding day. Sulochana and Govindan Master were leaving for Ernakulam to buy gold ornaments and dresses for their daughter’s wedding. She was on long-leave from school. When she insisted on going to shop for her daughter’s wedding dress, Govindan Master agreed, despite her condition. When they were about to get into the bus from Cherai to Vypin, Sulochana’s legs gave away and she sat down on the ground.

  To her husband, who rushed out of the back door through which he had boarded the bus, tried to lift her up, when she lifted her sweat-drenched face and said, ‘How sudden, isn’t it? Oh, how altogether sudden!’

  The hospital was quite near. As if it was meant to take her there, a cycle-rickshaw was standing near the bus stop. But nothing was of use. Govindan Master felt faint as he realized that it was his sanctuary of twenty years that was now lying insensate on his arm. He, by then, had recognized the full significance of what she meant by ‘how sudden’. Certain things that shine from an illusion of conferred immortality suddenly get extinguished and dissolve into nothingness: the irreplaceable security of mutual trust; a radiant love that no one else can extend in this world anymore; a pure affection that could not be polluted by caste, religion, or gender differences…

  In one’s journey, everything falls by the wayside.

  At the poin
t of time when the sun’s heat was abating, on the mud road in front of Govindan Master’s house, some unexpected visitors arrived in a taxi. Except the boy who had gone to Thachanakkara to inform them of the death, none of the mourners congregated in the house where the death had occurred could recognize any of the visitors. Opening the front door of the car, a man with protruding eyes and a thick, upturned moustache was the first to get out. Giving the house a once-over, he opened the back door. Three women, who showed no resemblance whatsoever to each other, looked askance at the surroundings before they got out. Hanging on to the hand of the last woman to get out, a little boy too appeared.

  The car doors shut loudly. Govindan Master, who sat near the dead body, turned his head to look at them and informed his aged father-in-law seated near him, ‘It’s them!’

  People made way for the group to enter. Letting go of the child, Chinnamma reached first. Freed from his mother, the little one began to explore a house in mourning for the first time. With pillars made from arecanut palm and mud-coloured tarpaulin, a tent had been erected in the yard with potted plants on both sides. Seated around in circles here and there on rented steel chairs, people were murmuring. The first daughter-in-law of Ayyaattumpilli lay shrouded in white, on a banana leaf spread across the length of the dining table placed to the right of the sacred fount for the holy basil plant.

  A family infamous for their open-throated wailing stood silent around the corpse. To Govindan Master, the silence began to feel frighteningly lethal. When Govindan Master lifted the cloth from Sulochana’s face, a scream loud enough to startle the dead person broke out. ‘My Sulu chettathiamme!’

  That was Chinnamma. It was taken up by Thankamma and Kalyanikuttyamma. Noticing Kalyanikuttyamma crying near the corpse of a person she had never met before, Pankajaakshan touched his brother on his shoulder, after a gap of many years. ‘Chettaa…’ He pointed to his wife, and bowed down to be level with his brother’s ear and said, ‘This is my…’

  The mourners who stood around, began to deduce the identity of the visitors. Govindan Master’s daughter, Chandrika, held on to the fingers of the aunties she was seeing for the first time, one after the other. Thankamma cried, hugging her.

  After a round of crying, Chinnamma queried in the ear of her niece, ‘Where to urinate a little, daughter?’

  This urge, which she had been holding back during the long trip, was troubling her more than the sadness of death. Chandrika took her inside.

  That’s when it happened. From inside, came a roar potent enough to shock the Ayyaattumpilli stock. A young man, clad in only a saffron mundu, rushed out towards the visitors, stamping his feet and screaming, ‘Who is it who wants to see my mother’s corpse? Tell me, who?’

  In an astonishing upending of time, as if the youth of Naraapilla of Ayyaattumpilli was being re-enacted with little deviation, Govindan Master’s son, Narayanan, jumped into the yard. Like the possessed oracle in the temple of some evil spirits, unable to curb himself from insulting the folk from Ayyaattumpilli, he verbally challenged the relatives around his mother’s dead body. ‘For whose oblation to the manes have all of you come uninvited? Eh?’ Trying to rush forward and break free from the hold of the two younger brothers of Sulochana, he looked at Pankajaakshan’s face and asked, ‘What, do you too want to eat my mother’s corpse? Eh? Get out all, this moment! Or else … or else…’ At the corner of Narayanan’s mouth, froth began to form a channel. His eyes vanished into his forehead. The explosion of emotion inside made the nerves in the neck and forehead of that young man bulge.

  The very next moment, he slipped out of his uncles’ hold and down onto the floor, unconscious.

  After a long while, when everything except the still-blazing pyre had abated somewhat, happy at the melting of twenty years’ of frosty distances and forgetting that she was in a house in mourning, Chinnamma uttered impulsively, ‘Whatever it is, we got to see our chettan, at least on this excuse!’

  Then, aware that it was time to return, she started looking for her child. Away from all the hullabaloo, Jithen was standing near Govindan Master’s bookshelves. From the time he let go of his mother’s hand, he had taken refuge in that deserted room. Govindan Master searched for Jithen, calling out his name and coming across the child standing with his face stuck to the glass of the bookshelf, he gathered him into his arms and kissed him.

  Jithen did not know that the salt he tasted when he licked the wetness on his lips was from tears. He also didn’t realize that, seeing the boy standing alone among the books, Govindan Master had wept suddenly, remembering his childhood.

  Dusk was approaching. Jithen was also not old enough to understand that the smouldering light, which could be seen through the window, was the waning of the solace that had come into that man’s life twenty years ago.

  FOUR

  The Well

  30 August 1999

  …Since returning after our meeting last week, it felt as if I was caught in a whirl. The day I reached here, it rained well. When I say well, I mean terrifyingly. When I entered the house at night, it was full of water and stinking! It was with great difficulty that I had found this house for a rent of a thousand rupees, for us to live here after our wedding. This is one half of a tiled house occupied by an aged couple. There was no power because of the rain. After opening the door and getting hold of a candle and lighting it, I understood that the water from the drainage outside had flowed in. The foundation of this house is below the level of the gutter! The aged owner of the house came in stumbling and apologized. He is as old as my father. How many nights have the moans of his ailing wife troubled me! Abandoned by their children, their only source of income is the rent I pay. To bail out the muck inside, he too joined me with a bucket. As the rain became stronger again, I sent him away, wishing him a good night. I feel like crying. From the time I remember, I have not cried aloud. Tears of twenty-seven years have welled up like a pool in my soul. Twenty-seven multiplied by three hundred and sixty-five. Are you able to comprehend? I lay there, fully dressed, listening to the gutter water lapping into my room. For no reason, I dreamt about a tortoise which had fallen into our well in my childhood and which was rescued by my father who climbed down into the well.

  Together, the ten grandchildren of Ayyaattumpilli built a cowshed in Pankajaakshan’s plot.

  It was Pankajaakshan who cut down the arecanut palms in the plots kept aside for Govindan and Chandran. Everyone, including the polio-affected Radha, took part in the funeral procession of the arecanut trees. The rear was brought up by Jithen and Rema, holding on to the dark green fronds of the arecanut palm. After Pankajaakshan decapitated the palms with his machete, sharpened on the edges of Kalyanikuttyamma’s washing stone, the youngest children got bunches of wonderful arecanut flowers. The arecanut tree had been saving these for them all this while, ensconcing them in their attractive yellow and green spathes. When the spathes were separated, they saw the arecanuts in their infancy, stacked one upon the other. As the flower bunch was liberated from the spathe, the tenderness of the flowers thrilled Jithen’s palm. Attracted by the smell, he chewed on the tips of those tender flowers.

  Pankajaakshan’s son Venu and Thankamma’s son Vijayan made a square-shaped clearing in the plot, overgrown by touch-me-nots interspersed with crepe jasmines. Thankamma’s youngest son, Vidyadharan, and the younger sons of Pankajaakshan, Shashi and Soman, helped Pankajaakshan split the trunks using an axe and crowbar. Making the foundation a single laterite stone high, filling it with soil, watering, and then compacting it into a smooth floor was done by Thankamani and Radha. As Radha moved up smoothening the floor, dragging her polio-affected leg, she created complex patterns behind her, which looked like music notations. Fearing the distress of the handicapped, no one excluded Radha from any activity. Since she had a talent for singing, after her tenth standard, she had joined the music school in The Alwaye Sangeetha Sabha, better known by its abbreviation, TASS, and had progressed to mastering many ragas. Having taken an oath
to win recognition through music, which her sister could not do with her dancing, she used to walk, her lame leg notwithstanding, cross the Marthaanda Varma Bridge, and take the short cut in front of the Aluva Market and reach the Sangeetha Sabha for her music lessons.

  When he looked at his nieces daubing the floor with mud for the cowshed, for some reason, Pankajaakshan was touched by the past.

  ‘Hey, Thankamani.’ Reminded of his mother as he saw the tip of Thankamani’s hair touch the floor, Pankajaakshan asked, ‘do you know where we are making this cowshed?’

  ‘Of course!’ Thankamani said, shifting her hair with the back of her hand, ‘Pankaachammavan’s property.’

  ‘No dee, my Kunjikunjommae.’ Calling her by her pet name after a long time, Pankajaakshan said, ‘this is where your grandma was cremated.’

  ‘Ayyo.’ Getting up with a start, Thankamani said, ‘are you serious?’

  ‘Then what! It was fortunate that we didn’t build a memorial for her here. Or else where would we have found the place to make this cowshed now?’ Pankajaakshan said with an expression unique to Ayyaattumpilli stock.

  Thankamani and Radha gazed with melancholy at the chopped crepe jasmine plants lying on the side. Despite their bodies being slashed and flung on the bed of arrows made by the thorny touch-me-nots, their flowers had not wilted and were now turned smilingly towards Naraapilla’s grandchildren.

  ‘O my mother!’ Pankajaakshan howled as a splinter from the arecanut trunk pierced his hand. Grimacing, he pulled out the splinter, and blood began to flow freely. As it was noon, and the tide had started affecting his father’s hand to bleed more, the frightened Soman called out for his mother. By the time Kalyanikuttyamma came running, her hands smeared with rice dough, Pankajaakshan had pulled out some cobweb from between the midribs of a young coconut tree and covered his wound with that.