A Preface to Man

by Subhash Chandran

  The darling fisherwoman of the fisherman of Poonthura,

  Painted a bindi on her forehead with a smile…

  As Radha sang, Jithen sat staring into the blazing sunshine, trying to imagine the scene of the song. Taking the spit from the smiling mouth of Radha, he applied it on her forehead. With the spit bindi and breaking laughter, Radha sang the next two lines,

  Before receiving wedding garland,

  She received the flaming kiss of man!

  It was when Jithen was struggling to mimic those lines in action that he saw the wetness on her eyelashes. From morning, Radha had been consigned to Geethalayam in anticipation of a prospective groom for Thankamani coming from Thattaambadi.

  ‘What’s this?’ Chinnamma said when she saw Radha, ‘Why are you here on a special day like this? Go and try to help your mother, dee.’

  ‘Mother said,’ Radha said glumly, ‘don’t appear before the guests with your lame leg.’

  ‘Oh! I didn’t think of it!’ Chinnamma said, ratifying the decision.

  Having expected a different response, Radha’s face fell further. Seeing that, Geetha said, ‘Come chechi, the whole day we’ll spend singing.’

  ‘No, no,’ Rema said, ‘let’s play with bangle bits.’

  ‘No singing or games with bangle bits.’ Radha went inside and opened a window direct in line with her house. ‘Today we will sit here. For a long time. Till someone comes and leaves from my home!’

  ‘Who’s coming to your home?’ Geetha asked.

  Radha put Jithen on her lap and sat on the cot next to the window. ‘Isn’t there a paragon of beauty in my home? A princess?’ said Radha. ‘A prince is coming to see her!’

  While shifting Jithen to her polio-free right thigh, she espied her two brothers going towards her house bearing a package each. Vijayan and Vidyadharan were returning from Kochu Parashu’s shop.

  ‘Shu shu!’ Radha caught her brothers’ attention. ‘What all did you get?’ she asked.

  ‘Won’t say.’ Vijayan waded through her inquisitiveness.

  ‘Why da, Vidyadharan, tell me please,’ Radha pleaded with her younger brother.

  Vidyadharan’s heart melted. ‘Miccher, laddu, and plantain,’ he shouted back and ran to join his brother.

  Radha, Geetha, and Rema looked at one another. Incomprehensible to the others, singer Radha let out an imprecation, frowning, ‘Oh, it can’t be but her last!’

  As the new moon approached, the cow in Pankajaakshan’s cowshed began to moo as if it were a celestial Kamadhenu, looking at the heavens. None of the children of Ayyaattumpilli, except Pankajaakshan’s second son, Shashi, saw the cow in heat, tied to the tripod and mated by Chokli’s bull.

  The children had school that day. Chokli, who was strongly built like a cast-iron statue, came in the morning with his stud bull to Ayyaattumpilli. Tying the black bull to a coconut tree on the way to the cowshed, he stood stroking the hump on its back. Kalyanikuttyamma went to her husband’s bed, woke him up, and informed him of the arrival of Chokli and his bull.

  When Pankajaakshan reached, Chokli was already in the cowshed. Fourteen-year-old Shashi stuck around massaging his teeth and gums with burnt husk, watching Chokli lift the cow’s tail and examine it.

  ‘Don’t children have school today?’ Chokli asked, sighting Pankajaakshan. Deferring to the insinuation in that question, Shashi made himself scarce.

  Gathering the strong wooden pieces from the compound, and tying them to the poles of the cowshed, Chokli created a tripod. He lighted up the Kajah beedi he took from his lap and sucking in the first mouthful of smoke with a hiss, he told Pankajaakshan, ‘Now get the cow and tie it here.’

  Double the quantity of smoke that went in came out through his nostrils.

  ‘Let it be after sometime, Chokli,’ Kalyanikuttyamma, who had come there by then, said. ‘Let the kids go to school. By that time Chokli can have three or four idlis.’

  Pankajaakshan, while searching for the container of the dentrifice of burnt husk, asked Chokli, who was sitting on the steps of the backdoor having idlis, ‘Do you take this one for ploughing?’

  ‘Nah,’ Chokli said, ‘for that I have another two. With these useless tiller-shiller coming, they, poor ones, don’t have work now. It’s now what this guy goes around and earns that feeds even them.’

  ‘I am contemplating whether I should deploy a tiller or tractor in Kainikkulam this year,’ Pankajaakshan said, throwing a handful of burnt husk into his left hand.

  ‘Nah, no,’ said Chokli. ‘It’s only if you have many fields that it will be viable, Master. If you let that damned thing into small fields, you’ll have to sell all your paddy to pay its rent. Bloody bollocks, tiller! All said and done, can a mechanical bull be like a live bull?’

  After the children had left for school, Pankajaakshan moved the cow and tied it to the tripod set up by Chokli. The bull had started snorting and stomping the ground. As Chokli started to untie the bull, Kalyanikuttyamma withdrew to the kitchen. Even while tied to the tripod, Pankajaakshan’s cow was standing head down, coyly. Without even looking at the lover approaching from behind, she spread her hind legs. Chokli’s face had the grave aspect of a sacristan. Pankajaakshan said, ‘Ow.’

  Holding his breath and lurking alongside Naraapilla’s New House, Pankajaakshan’s son Shashi kept watching the mating of the cattle. After a while, he presented himself at the kitchen door, drenched in sweat, and told Kalyanikuttyamma, ‘I came back, Ammae. Terrible tummyache!’

  Despite Kalyanikuttyamma giving him ground dried ginger and mace of the nutmeg, the boy’s tummyache did not go away. As days went by, the pain increased. The source of the pain went lower.

  ‘Listen, we did not call him for the engagement, we should call Vallyettan for the wedding at all costs,’ Thankamma told Kumaran the day the wedding of Thankamani was fixed—with ten sovereigns gold jewellery and ten thousand rupees as dowry—after the eighteen-member group from Thattaambadi had left after lunch.

  Kumaran was setting aside the vessels hired from the temple. ‘When he invited us all for his daughter’s wedding, only Pankajaakshan went from here, no?’ Kumaran wondered. ‘That being so, would he come here?’

  Stepping into the stone-paved sunken area near the well for drawing water, Thankamma said, ‘Did brother come here and invite us for the wedding? Because we went there when sister-in-law had died, we came to know of the wedding. That was all to it! If he sends a letter informing of the change in date, what? Are we all going to go in a parade there? Pankajaakshan chettan did go. And for that, he got it nicely from the boy!’

  Kumaran was using coir fibres to remove the rice stuck to the vessels. When sand and coir fibres worked together, the scabs started to come off.

  ‘Why is the kid like that?’ Kumaran asked.

  ‘That now,’ Thankamma said, ‘he is a mixed breed, no? Then such things can happen!’

  Kumaran stopped his scrubbing and gave his wife a hard stare. Since she had been given that look in the past as well, she fell silent and continued drawing water from the well.

  Thankamma was unaware of the strange ways of the evolution of Time. It was beyond her to imagine that the same epileptic boy, who currently did not impress anyone, would marry her daughter Radha five years hence and move into Ayyaattumpilli, after hundreds of marriage proposals had come to nought for Radha.

  On the afternoon of Thankamani’s wedding, Paanamparampath Nanu posited a new theory in Vengooran Thankappan’s teashop. ‘Shivo,’ rubbing his distended stomach, after having gorged himself at the wedding, he addressed barber Shivan, ‘Do you know how Kumaran chettan’s second child got a game leg?’

  ‘She got polio, no?’ Shivan said, smelling the lime he got at the wedding.

  ‘Nah, what polio?’ He was silent for a moment, getting ready to launch the most important observation in his gossipy life. Limbering up and stretching his back, he said, ‘That girl was born in nineteen sixty or sixty-one. There was a big procession on foot by communist
s that day, till Thiruvananthapuram. In that, our Kumaran chettan and Shankaran chettan and all joined the march, shouting slogans. Shankaran chettan came away after some time; Kumaran chettan did not give up and continued walking.’

  ‘Till Thiruvananthapuram?’ Shivan asked.

  ‘You won’t believe!’ Nanu said, ‘But the guy walked. Not one or two days, thirty days continuously! When he returned, what is left to say? Both legs were practically paralyzed. But he was away from home for a long time, yes? So problems with his legs notwithstanding, he didn’t give up on his other activities. Which? That was how this second girl was born. So wouldn’t it have been surprising only if she didn’t get a lame leg?’

  ‘But Kumaran chettan’s legs have no problem now!’ Shivan raised his doubt.

  ‘Have these communists ever had any problem that has been prolonged?’ Nanu said, ‘His weakness got over in a week. It was only the kid who got into trouble!’

  Merely imagining the walk from Thachanakkara till Thiruvananthapuram, Shivan felt weak. He felt there was actually a march like this seventeen years ago. However, the barber could still not accept Paanamparampath Nanu’s theory that temporary weaknesses in communists could create everlasting handicaps in their progeny.

  SEVEN

  Caterpillar

  27 September 1999

  …A curiosity from my old diary: a note of regret about a girl who studied with me up to the fourth class, written in retrospect. I do not know if it’s advisable to talk about previous girlfriends to the one I am going to marry. However, I leave the right to decide whether this note about her should be included in the novel or not, to you. If possible, you must also suggest a name when she becomes a character.

  I will end this letter with something interesting. Do you know that like authors, real history also desires that the nature of characters and their names should match? What else, then, is the secret behind an old-style bell ringing in the name of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone?

  After reading the enclosed note, don’t get cross with me; and, without wasting time, do reply quickly.

  Is that a tiny channel of sandal that is seen when hair is parted in the middle? Is sandal-coloured skirt and green blouse the uniform of angels?

  You did not recognize how shamelessly I aped your habit of biting your lower lip in concentration while sharpening the pencil. You did not pay attention to how I had my revenge for you getting higher marks in the Onam examination, by scoring the same in the Christmas examination.

  I sang in light music competitions only for your ears. To win your approbation, I participated in elocution competitions. Drew pictures. Studied hard. Rang the school bell in the evenings. Donned the role of Ravanan in the annual play.

  You knew nothing of all these.

  Even when we changed schools, and did not meet, I continued to be myself. I saw you in a silk skirt for the festival at the Thachanakkara temple. You laughed at the naughtiness of handsome boys. On the day of the finale of the festival, I was scared that you would be frightened by the one thousand and one mortars that would burst. I alone.

  You were not seeing me.

  I was crying. I was growing up.

  My love, even though there is a proscription against turning and looking back, I will look. I too want write a paean to beauty about what was espied only once.

  To deworm children, a more bitter medicine than aloe vera reached Geethalayam—Antipar.

  That was the year when the floodwaters had covered Thachanakkara up to its knees. When Chinnamma saw the children happily scratching their anuses during the three days of unexpected holidays, she lost her head. She was already engaged in a struggle against athlete’s foot, applying gentian violet with cotton swabs on her feet and the webbings between toes. That was when the children started their finger-battle against the enemy in their anuses.

  ‘What the hell is this now?’ she said, rubbing the soles of her feet on the torn gunny bag, used for wiping feet on the floor near the kitchen door, to assuage the scratching in her feet, which the potassium permanganate in the solution could not snuff out. ‘When one itching is about to stop, another starts or what!’

  There was a reason why Chinnamma had contracted athlete’s foot. Hearing of the men getting into the churning river at Punneli kadavu to snare the timber logs hurtling down the mountains in the floodwaters of the Periyar river, Chinnamma too had ventured there the previous week. Looking at the swirling, surging waters of the river smashing against its banks at Thachanakkara and Uliyanoor on the other side, overflowing into the fields to become dark like tea with not enough milk, and forming whirlpools and eddies, Chinnamma was reminded of Muringaattil Leela after many, many years. Thousands of angling lines of the rain, baited with memories, kept falling into the river. A young man, tethered to a coconut palm on the shore by a coir rope wound around his waist, was still grabbing timbers in the maelstrom of the river. Chinnamma, who was standing under the umbrella, fancied that she could land more timber than that man, if she could get a rope long enough. She considered returning home, untying the rope used to draw water from the well, and coming back with it. She saw a big uprooted dead tree on the river from afar. The sight of the fast-approaching tree with the black roots, which looked like mating black serpents as the tree kept twisting in the water, was too enticing for Chinnamma. She felt envy for the man, who at the other end of the taut rope was waiting for the huge tree with anticipation. When he subdued it like taming a bull which was snorting and bucking in the midst of the river, and finally got on top of it and, sitting astride, started propelling himself and the tree towards the bank by pulling at the rope, Chinnamma could not contain herself and said, ‘To hell with him! That’s enough for his old woman to burn as firewood for a whole year.’

  She spent five days, on different occasions, at Punneli kadavu standing with her legs steeped in the slush, gazing at the trees floating past, like unidentified corpses. By the time the floodwaters eased and the river narrowed, she had a bad case of athlete’s foot. She pinched between her toes, grimacing; scratched inserting coir fibre and combs; pulled down embers from the stove and stepped on them. The itching did not subside. Finally, after applying the potassium permanganate solution, which Shankaran had fetched from the Aluva Government Hospital, the fungal infection stopped its boisterous laughter and started smiling.

  Since subscribing to the daily newspaper, she had started reading not only the news, but also some of the advertisements with serious intent. When a small advertisement, at a corner of the page in which the news of the miraculous birth of what was called a test-tube baby in England caught Chinnamma’s attention, a solution was found for another problem in Geethalayam. The advertisement ran like this, ‘Eradicate tapeworms and hookworms completely. Use super Antipar immediately!’

  Shankaran got the vermicide that very evening from a new medical shop in Aluva. The insufferable bitterness of the teaspoonful of the medicine that each child had to take before going to bed at night, left a screwed-up expression on their faces that remained even after they woke up in the morning. To make Jithen open his mouth, which he would clamp shut, every night Chinnamma had to slap him. The nights, which awaited the administration of the bitter medicines, swamped the new lessons Jithen had started to absorb in the daytime during his first year in school.

  The bitterness of Antipar convulsed through the inner space extending from human life up to that of a hookworm.

  The purpose of One-Eyed Kochaappu’s incarnation was the total modernization of Thachanakkara kitchens. The weapon of Kochaappu was more potent than the plough of Lord Balaraman and bow of Lord Rama. A compound word, which Jithen in his first year of school could never pronounce properly—the sawdust stove.

  Kochaappu and his son from his second marriage visited every house in Thachanakkara, carrying iron stoves, which looked like measuring paras with holes. Using the tale of his left eye—which his first wife had blinded using the rib of an umbrella as a precautionary measure
to keep him from seeing her affairs with her paramours—as the preface, he slowly introduced his business proposal. His publicity slogan was that one or two coconut husks were enough to cook an entire meal for afternoon or night. The women’s minds were set aflame by its enticement. The popularity of the sawdust stove moved from kitchen to kitchen like an epidemic in Thachanakkara. Except in the New House, in which Naraapilla resided, in every house in Thachanakkara, at least one sawdust stove established itself as a squatter.

  The fourth of every month, Kochaappu came with a truck filled with sawdust bags. After emptying the sawdust in a mound in one corner of each kitchen, he went away with the empty bags and money. After hacking two forearm-sized branches from the evil-smelling Indian Elm tree, and cutting them to size, Shankaran got ready to begin filling sawdust into the stove. Keeping one of them upright in the centre of the stove and then inserting the other horizontally through the hole in the bottom side of the stove till both met, he began filling sawdust around the right angle formed by the two pieces of wood and when it was filled to a heap, he summoned Jithen and told him, ‘Son, now use your leg to compact this sawdust for your mother!’

  Jithen used his six-year-old legs to press down on the sawdust in the stove, which was a caricature of the auspicious paddy-filled para topped with the coconut flower. When he got down from the stove, Shankaran pulled out the two pieces of wood carefully. Jithen remained open-mouthed, seeing the narrow tunnels his father had created in the stove. Chinnamma inaugurated the stove using it for warming the rice left over from lunch, for dinner. One-Eyed Kochaappu was right—before two pieces of husk were burnt, the water in the earthen pot was boiling!

  The sawdust heaped on the floor served other purposes too. The children plucked and buried pomegranates in the warmth of the sawdust to ripen them. One of the hens being raised in a new coop built in Thankamma’s house—a dotted hen which Jithen thought resembled the fisherwoman Bhaimi—when it was time to hatch, would come and sit on the sawdust heap. Chinnamma drove it away every time shouting, ‘Get lost! When it is time to lay eggs, you sluts never choose the wrong house! And now you come here only to hatch! Pho you foul fowl, pho!’