A Preface to Man

by Subhash Chandran

  ‘Nothing,’ Pankajaakshan told his wife, ‘it’s only a reminder from Mother.’

  By the time it was evening, the cowshed was ready with all the work completed, except the thatching of the roof. The woven coconut fronds, brought by Maniyan pulayan in his handcart, were stacked on the yard. He had been instructed to come the next day to fix them on the roof.

  When Naraapilla’s grandchildren were splitting up, having washed their limbs and cleaned up, Geetha asked, ‘So the cowshed is ready. When will the cow come, Pankaachammava?’

  The rays of the setting sun and anticipation had reddened the faces of the younger children.

  ‘Day after tomorrow,’ Pankajaakshan said, pouring water on the congealed blood on his wound. ‘If not, then the day after. If it doesn’t come even then, we can tie this Kunjukunjomma inside the shed and feed her the grass. She is overdue for getting married, anyway, no?’

  ‘Pankachchamma, stop it,’ Thankamani protested coyly and ran to her home. Head bowed, Radha limped behind her.

  Looking at Radha, Kalyanikuttyamma said, ‘Poor girl, she’s also of the age to get married!’

  ‘Oh-ho!’ said Pankajaakshan. ‘Then we can tie her up as well in our cowshed!’

  Chinnamma scolded her children severely for going to build the cowshed in her brother’s plot and, since she took her younger siblings with her, Geetha was beaten with a piece of the midrib of a coconut tree. Kalyanikuttyamma also heard Chinnamma shouting above Geetha’s cries, ‘She, she, she … She’s gone to build a cowshed in someone’s house.’

  On the other side, Thankamma did not even scold her children for helping build the cowshed. Instead, she said, ‘That was a good thing, children. After the cow comes and a calf follows, sister-in-law will surely give us some milk.’

  After three days, a Jersey cow arrived in Pankajaakshan’s cowshed. She, who came with sorrel colour maps on the body, eyelids that seemed to droop with tiredness and shyness competing with each other, and a ring the size of a copper coin in her left ear, started her life in the cowshed, which had sprung up at the spot where Kunjuamma had been cremated. On the pretext of chewing hay, she began to masticate on the cud of memories that went back to Time immemorial.

  Kothappulakkalli, who used to sit and smoke beedis in Naraapilla’s kitchen, got a friend to kill time in the afternoons: a creature which fell into the well in the New House, having lost its way when riding the floodwaters. A tortoise, which was tired of circling along the laterite wall of the well.

  Hearing Naraapilla’s snores in the afternoon, the tortoise would surface from the depths of the well. Staring at the gleaming white clouds seen above the ring of the well, broken only by the cement pillar on which the pulley was hung, and the branch of a jackfruit tree pointing at the pillar from the opposite direction, the tortoise lay suspended in the water with a terrifying stillness. Looking at the thousands of clouds passing every moment through its circle of vision, it filled its longevity with wonder.

  One afternoon, an old woman’s face, framed by hair as white as the clouds, came into its circle of vision. Before it could dive and hide, a tender voice of love penetrated its shell and touched it. ‘When did this come and fall into this well? My son, won’t you die of starvation?’ Kotha asked.

  The tortoise was not amenable to words of love or the invitation to climb on board the spathe-bucket guided by the rope from above. When the spathe-bucket touched its shell, hardened from centuries of primordial fear, the tortoise dove down to the bottom of the well, paved with gooseberry planks.

  Gradually its fear faded. Its neck started hurting from stretching out and looking up at the sky to see if Kothappulakkalli was coming for their afternoon parley.

  Without Naraapilla’s knowledge, without the knowledge of the Ayyaattumpilli neighbourhood, Kothappulakkalli started scattering cooked rice into the well. Pressing her flaccid abdomen, made soft and loose by bearing eight children, against the coolness of the well’s parapet wall and bending over, the old woman enjoyed talking and singing to the solitary creature inside. In a voice deprived of its femininity by beedi smoke, she emptied into the well the only ditty she had learnt in her childhood, about the story of Rama and Seetha, who in her dialect were Cheetha and Ramachan:

  Cheetha the daughter of Chanaka,

  For her Ramachan offered the wedding sari,

  Wasn’t it her that Ravana swiped away

  Because of which the monkey roasted Lanka too.

  As she could not remember the rest of the lines, she repeated them. Her attempts to lengthen the recital by adding a line of her own succeeded finally. With a voice laced with pain that lessened from sharing, and bending further into the well, Kotha sang the fifth line: ‘Did you know any of these, tortoise-sir?’

  Each time the ditty was sung, she laughed loudly, tickled by her own creative genius. The like-hearted fellow in the well swam around helplessly, inscribing a zero in the water. This was repeated till the next flood came along.

  Chinnamma did not have to go to Kalyanikuttyamma’s house to read about the death of A.K. Gopalan, the renowned communist leader. By that time, the newspaper boy had started shoving the eight-folded Mathrubhumi newspaper into the gate of Geethalayam. As the subscription to the newspaper had started before the annual exams of Geetha and Rema, news of A.K. Gopalan’s death and the resignation of the Achutha Menon ministry, which had ruled for seven years, reached Geethalayam the next day itself. At the beginning of April, Chinnamma was to be astonished by the detailed news of Karunakaran taking over as chief minister, only to be followed by a youngster called A.K. Antony, in a few days’ time. The reading of newspapers those days created a strange impression in Chinnamma: a feeling that time was rushing past.

  ‘Listen,’ Chinnamma told Shankaran, who was keeping her company while she was drawing water from her father’s well in the night, ‘this coming June we have to enrol the boy in school. Shouldn’t we dig a well before that?’

  As the husband stood trying to make the connection between the school and the well, she continued, ‘The rains will start in June. If we dig the well before that, well, that’d be over with!’

  Four days later, Paanamparampath Nanu and Karunakaran Karthaavu prospected the location for the well and marked the spot with a stake. Apart from document-writing and narrating film stories, Karthaavu also had powers of water-divining. The unemployed Paanamparampath Nanu accompanied Karthaavu in his water-divining forays. After Karthaavu had selected the spot, Nanu would linger at the site, lazing around the mouth of the well, till the well-diggers finished their work. As the workers’ pickaxe or spade struck something solid and gave out a metallic ring, with a palpitating heart Nanu would say, ‘Easy, easy, if it is some treasure pot, we split half-half!’

  However, when he accompanied Karthaavu to site the well in Chinnamma’s land, Paanamparampath Nanu had more than just treasure-prospecting as his purpose. Nanu had been yearning to follow the story of what happened after the Ayyaattumpilli team left in a car for Cherai, upon hearing of Govindan Master’s wife’s demise. There was a physical ache in the pit of his stomach to know of the rest of the story, and though he had created many denouements for that story in his imagination, Nanu was dissatisfied with all of them, and scratched his head in frustration, sitting in Vengooran’s teashop. Since the stories he had created about Pankajaakshan’s dismissal had gained more currency than he had expected, Nanu was spending his days dreading meeting him. When he heard of the planned well in Chinnamma’s plot, his stomachache vanished completely.

  As Karunakaran Karthaavu and Nanu were entering Geethalayam, Shankaran and Chinnamma, carrying their youngest child, were leaving for somewhere. Looking at the weakened child, lying with his head on Chinnamma’s shoulder and leaving snot stains there, Karthaavu and Nanu had misgivings.

  ‘You get the site fixed. I’ll take the boy to the doctor,’ Chinnamma told her husband.

  ‘What happened to him?’ Nanu asked, touching Jithen’s limp palm.

  ‘
Oh, the less said the better, my Nanu,’ Chinnamma replied, stuffing the currency notes given by her husband into her blouse. ‘It’s a disease he’s had since birth. He’s been wheezing and wheezing! This morning I lay him on his back on the mat. I thought, if he has to die, at least let him die lying down properly.’

  ‘Okay then, you go and come.’ Not allowing his wife to get ahead further, Shankaran interrupted, ‘go to the government clinic! Won’t you take care while boarding the bus?’

  ‘Oh, aren’t I still wet behind the ears!’ With a sarcastic laugh, Chinnamma walked into the alley. As he walked back, unbuttoning his shirt, Shankaran told Karthaavu, ‘All the smoke which the companies in Eloor are belching out is proliferating in the air. It’s not just our kid, lots of children now have this ailment!’

  ‘Only air?’ Nanu added a lie come to him at that instant. ‘What about water? My wife has broken out in rashes after bathing in Punneli kadavu!’

  ‘Haeey!’ Karthaavu intervened. ‘That cannot be true. Aren’t the Eloor companies so far down the river from Punneli kadavu? From there, can the pollutants come up river, against the flow?’

  ‘It will, it will,’ Nanu said with conviction, ‘it’s poison, isn’t it? It’ll come up the river like migrating fish do.’

  All three walked towards the northeast corner of the plot. He noticed two types of trees dominant there, Karthaavu’s intuition woke up and started functioning. Holding a forked stick ahead of him, resembling a catapult, and of unrevealed origin, Karthaavu walked among the trees along an imaginary line over and over. The yearning of the branch to be a tree growing from the earth made the hands of Karthaavu shiver when it reached the place where the presence of water was strong. ‘Here, you can dig here,’ Karthaavu told Shankaran after spiking the branch into the soil. ‘It’s a dead certainty that you’ll find water here.’

  The work on the well started the next day. Jithen, standing on the windowsill, saw workers making many trips, bringing in cement rings on their handcarts. His attempt to piddle into the grey ciphers lying scattered on the yard failed. He was worn-out from the bitter medicines and tablets, which looked like tiny idlis cooked only to feed birds.

  On the third day, when Kochchayyappan and Kandankaali had come to dig the well, Jithen was granted permission to leave the house. He also stood in wonderment near the pit by the side of which endless dialogues were taking place between Paanamparampath Nanu and his own mother. To view the well being made by lowering cement rings, instead of traditional wells with angle-measured laterite-lined walls, sometimes passers-by also came in. Jithen felt frightened as the pit deepened further and he felt that the workers inside, who were lowering and stacking the cement rings tied with ropes, resembled Thachanakkara thevar. The laughter of Kochchayyappan and Kandankaali from deep down inside, joyful at the sight of the spring, echoed off the cement rings and rose up and made Jithen peer inside, stretching towards the mouth of the well and holding his mother’s hand tightly.

  ‘Ayyo,’ he asked, ‘how will you climb up now?’

  ‘Don’t worry, little master,’ came the reply from below, the incomprehensibility of which troubled him for a long time. ‘First I will bend down, and he will climb up stepping on me,’ Kandankaali said looking up, ‘then when he bends down, I will climb up stepping on his back!’

  Jithen did not see how they came up that evening, after their backbreaking work.

  That year, the rains came down hard, before the school opened.

  The dark clouds enveloped Thachanakkara and beat down on it. Fiery sparks flashed in suppressed melancholy. The rumbling thunder frightened the small children. The rain blew a different tone inside covered ears. The fallen arecanut trees turned into multiplication symbols. The sky, which let in threads of light like wicks of the chimney lamp through the cracks in the tiles in summer, now used the same cracks to insert the fingers of rain to catch the residents. The big vessels and pots, which had been arrayed in a line to catch the water falling off the eaves, floated a while on the yard and settled down and got filled with water. The children of Thachanakkara, who rinsed their mouths after the meals with that water, felt the taste of the rain along with its chill that made their teeth sensitive. The children had goose pimples from their skin brushing against the damp clothes, which had suddenly started appearing on the clotheslines inside. The soles of their feet, which were wet all the time, had become paper white. The tortoise, which had been fed cooked rice by Kothappulakkalli, broke out of his decades’ long incarceration and escaped from the well.

  As the rains ceased, the water drained and skies cleared, Geetha saw a tortoise near the gate of Geethalayam.

  ‘Ayyo, poor thing,’ she said standing on its hard shell. All the children came to Geethalayam to see the tortoise. They flipped it on its back to prevent it from escaping.

  It disappeared the next day. No one knew that Soman, the youngest son of Pankajaakshan, had got up early in the morning, slipped out surreptitiously, and put the tortoise in the new well at Geethalayam.

  Kothappulakkalli had no idea that her new friend, after escaping from his old well, had ended up in the well of Geethalayam and was to spend the rest of his days there.

  FIVE

  The Old Man

  21 November 1999

  …Yesterday, I dreamt of you again. Our first night. Before you sat on the bed, you touched my feet and placed your finger on the crown of your head, in that traditional way of showing deference. For this lusty man, the desire was to see the scenes after that. But, from that point, the dream vanished.

  Kisses for the Anasooya and Priyamvada on your bosom; on the softness of the tautened skin like a drum top, seen through the rounded low-cut back of your blouse; on the last vertebra of the spine; on the webbing of your toes; and then, on each of your seven pores…

  Girl, snuggle under my wings. Stay close to my shade. Get wet in my rain. Now I am a red-hot iron idol in the smithy of lust. Inside me smoulder those seeds held in reserve for you.

  Yes, as you know, I am living with a lust lit from the stars. When I am ablaze, struck by the lightning of lust, I burn with enough hunger to consume a cow elephant in the raw.

  Then, hear this too, in moments of love, I need only the tender heart of a doe to feel satiated as with a feast.

  Naraapilla was informed by Paanamparampath Nanu, that a sanyaasi with divine powers had taken up residence in the standalone single room called the ‘lodge’ by the local people. It was adjacent to the low platform built around the banyan tree in front of Thachanakkara thevar, where once a dance master from Paravoor called Sadanandan had run a dance school.

  It was the time when the well at Chinnamma’s was being dug. Nanu had began to thrive, loitering with ears cocked around the wide open mouth of the well till the workers broke for lunch, and squeezing out as many secrets about Ayyaattumpilli as he could from Chinnamma. Rightaway Chinnamma revealed how they were amazed to hear the eighteen-year-old Narayanan of Cherai, who had not seen Naraapilla even once, brandish usages exclusively used by his grandfather, like ‘oblation to the manes’ and ‘eating the corpse’. She kept harping on how Chandrika resembled Kunjuamma more than Thankamma’s daughter, Thankamani, did.

  ‘That can’t be otherwise!’ Nanu brought up a proverb, ‘the point of the thorn and the aroma of sweet basil are innate!’

  When Chinnamma told Nanu about how no one except Pankajaakshan went for Chandrika’s marriage, which had been postponed for a long time on account of Sulochana’s death, miffed that they had not been invited in person, and almost as a punishment to Pankajaakshan for not keeping his own dignity, how Narayanan had insulted him more virulently than on the day of his mother’s funeral, Nanu gnashed his teeth in a pretence that his blood was boiling.

  ‘And our Pankajaakshanpolice just stood there?’ Nanu asked, frowning and making his eyes bulge.

  ‘What could chettan do? If chettan were to just swing his hand won’t that weakling die?’ Chinnamma retorted.

  Nanu quaked i
nside. Imagining Pankajaakshan aiming a swipe at him for spreading concocted rumours about him and feeling as if his head was cleaving, Nanu shut his eyes tight. Quickly, he changed the topic to the greatness of the new types of wells. Feeling a little jaded at the realization that Nanu had a lot to say about wells dug with concrete rings lowered into them, to stand her ground, Chinnamma looked left and right and said with a lowered voice, ‘When I went for sister-in-law’s funeral, unfortunately, I felt like peeing. When that girl took me into the bedroom, I thought maybe there’d be some outlet to a urinal. My Nanu, you won’t believe it when I say this; though it’s a nice house and everything, their latrine is inside the house! Oh, I found it repulsive! From big brother’s room there’s a door directly to the latrine! Hau! But then, if one is dying to urinate, can we refrain from passing urine? What’s the point of big brother having so much education and knowledge?’ Chinnamma lowered her voice further, making sure that the workers in the well could not hear. ‘Perhaps these Ezhavas don’t mind these things, no, Nanu?’

  Nanu’s hood for gossip lost its venom. Nanu had heard the latest fad was to have toilets inside houses. Nanu also knew that it had a name beginning with Europe or America. But now, when he heard that the house of Sulochana of Cherai had that amenity, he sweated briefly, helpless in supporting it. Glancing quickly into the well, he winked and swerved his head, saying, ‘Shh … let’s discuss it later!’

  That moment, he felt like seeing Naraapilla. It was months since Naraapilla had asked Nanu to find a person to empty the latrine. When he saw that the well-diggers were getting out for their lunch, he quickly went through the fence into the next house. Taking a quick glance at Pankajaakshan’s house and making sure there was no one there, he went over to Naraapilla’s house.

  Hesitating at the threshold for some time, he cleared his throat. Then he called out, ‘Listen, Naraapilla chettaa.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Naraapilla asked from inside.