A Preface to Man

by Subhash Chandran

  After returning from school, Jithen used to go to his elder aunt’s house and stand and stare at the hen coop, without batting his eyelids. The yellow-wood rafters had new tiles on top. There were two sliding doors and a small wooden ladder at the opening for the birds to climb up and into the coop. To save the birds during nights from the foxes which lived in the thickets along the Periyar river, the coop was kept on four laterite stone pillars, as tall as Jithen. The only factor that thwarted Jithen’s ardent wish to stay with the hens in that beautiful house, was the unbearable smell of chicken poop. The rooster strutted about with his gorgeous shawl and cockscomb and wattles that Jithen felt were cut out of human tongues. Sometimes, without any provocation, it chased down one of its three female companions and mounted it. Vijayan, the younger brother of Radha, unbeatable in giving nicknames to people, did not spare the hens in his house. Amba, Ambika, Ambalika—these were the names he chose for the hens. When dusk fell, refusing to follow the hens into the coop, the rooster used to fly up into the nutmeg trees of Thankamma or the pomelo or the champaka trees of Chinnamma, and perch there. ‘Babbabbabbaba!’ a new incantation started to be heard in Ayyaattumpilli in the gloaming. Thankamma said, looking at the rooster sitting at a height, ‘It’s a relief that roosters don’t lay eggs! If he sits like this and lays eggs, will we get even a fragment of it?’

  Thankamma distributed the first eggs laid by the dotted hen, and the other two, within Ayyaattumpilli itself. After ensuring that the children had at least one egg each, she started sending eggs to Pooshaappi Stores at the rate of thirty paise per egg, through her youngest son, Vidyadharan. Holding Vidyadharan’s hand, Jithen accompanied him on his egg-sale trips. Only on the days when Shivaraaman, Thankamani’s husband and a Kerala State Road Transportation Corporation bus conductor, used to come to Ayyaattumpilli, no eggs reached Pooshappi Stores. Shivaraaman, with a wispy moustache and always smelling of talcum powder, had the face of foxes which sucked on stolen eggs. Despite his investigations, Jithen could never discover the source of the new fragrance, which had started emanating strongly from Thankamani after her marriage. By the time she got up in the morning after her first night, she was transformed wholly into a butterfly from a caterpillar. She used to praise, whether warranted or not, the wretched Shivaraaman, who used to slurp his tea reprehensibly, retch and strain his abdominal muscles every time he used the split spine of coconut leaflet to clean his tongue, and at twenty-five had no moustache worth mentioning. On an occasion when she fantasized that her good fortune in getting married had attracted even the special attention of the whole universe, with a puerile intention of engendering envy in her younger sister, arching her eyebrows, Thankamani even said, ‘When good times come to someone, even if it’s a sibling, some jealousy is sure to be there.’

  Gradually, Time started diluting such fantasies of Thankamani. Recognizing that her husband too was as pedestrian as they came, she had nausea. Kumaran and Thankamma were thrilled that they were going to become grandparents.

  After he had gone to Kallu aunt’s house to borrow a glass of sugar as instructed by his mother, Jithen also got a piece of sea battered by the waves with it.

  It was evening. After duly completing her household chores, Kalyanikuttyamma, who had seated herself in the portico to read the newspaper, stumbled over a piece of news, hurt herself, and said loudly, ‘Ayyo, hadn’t our Lord Mountbatten kicked the bucket yet?’

  Though he had read the entire paper in the morning, Pankajaakshan had missed that bit of news. Pankajaakshan, who had been gathering the coffee beans spread in the yard for drying into an old rimless bucket, stopped his work and came to the house. Jithen also reached at the same time, holding a steel glass.

  ‘Amma has asked to tell you to give a glass of sugar,’ the child repeated the sentence he had learnt by heart by repeating it over and over again on his way there. Getting up from the floor and taking the empty glass from Jithen’s hand, Kalyanikuttyamma said, ‘I had thought all those people we studied about in history, must be dead!’

  Pankajaakshan took the paper and read the obituary, which was not given prominence. When he read the news of India’s last Viceroy being killed off the Irish coast by a bomb explosion on a boat, Pankajaakshan had a strange feeling of being a part of history.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Pankajaakshan also said, ‘was this chap still alive?’

  Keeping the newspaper down, Pankajaakshan went to Jithen. ‘How’s your asthma, son?’ he asked. Touching his collar bone which was jutting out, stretching the skin like a bow facing up, he told his wife who had returned with the sugar, ‘Look at this, Kallu, like a clothes hanger.’

  Disliking her husband’s sense of humour, Kalyanikuttyamma held Jithen close. After handing over the glass with sugar to Jithen she told her husband, ‘You people from Ayyaattumpilli have this belief that you can tell the children anything. Don’t forget that the children will keep these in their minds!’

  Remembering something suddenly, Kalyanikuttyamma went inside, came out with a small package, and handed it over to Jithen and told him, ‘Here, give these to your sisters and you also eat! These are some unniappams.’

  As she gazed at him walking away holding the glass and the package close to his naked chest, she said, ‘Poor thing!’

  On his way home, though close to his chest were two sweet things, within him a thought bitter than Antipar was rising up. Though he was not aware who had died in the explosion in the boat, the death on the sea was felt overwhelmingly. Death by suffocation! He remembered his sister pointing out an old couple, in a house on the way to Aalungal School, who were waiting for their son who had died of asphyxiation. He looked at them every day, as he passed by. They were not weeping. There was a mention about them in the newspaper. His father talked at length about them. It was a bigger death than the one heard of today, because it was not a death in a boat accident, it was in a ship accident. The ship was carrying iron ore to Germany from Marmagoa. The only son of the old couple was working on that ship. The ship disappeared on the high seas. Father said the ship could have sunk lock, stock, and barrel. With water rushing in through the nose and the mouth, with their eyes and ears bursting with immense pressure as they were going deeper, people were sinking to the bottom. Jithen, who had not seen the sea or a ship, could imagine the scene. Without realizing that children who had asthma could vividly imagine death by asphyxiation in all its horrors, Jithen’s father kept up his description.

  Till Jithen was in the fourth standard, those parents used to live in the rented house in Thachanakkara. Their picture with their eyes fixed on the distance, awaiting their son, came in the newspaper twice. Then they also disappeared from that house. They too fell into the great ocean of Time, were asphyxiated and disappeared.

  ‘The name of the ship which sank was Kairali.’ The day before the social studies test in his fourth class, his father reminded him again about the death by asphyxiation. ‘Keep it in mind. The meaning of the word Kairali is “Malayalam”!’

  EIGHT

  Maelstrom

  15 December 1999

  …It was around this time, twenty years ago, that the World Health Organization announced that smallpox had been eradicated from the world for all time to come. I still remember my father reading that out to my sisters while they were preparing for the half-yearly examinations during Christmas. Father also said ‘vasoori’ or smallpox marks can be seen on the face of the sanyaasi who was living in the lodge in front of the Thachanakkara temple. My grandfather had to wait for many years to meet vasooriswami face to face, though even the children of Thachanakkara had seen him so many times. Till the day of my death, I will remember that it was in June, when I had passed from fourth standard to fifth, that my grandfather met him for the first and last time.

  Darling Ann Marie, if I tell you that doing penance as a sanyaasi is my favourite subject, would you be shocked? The other day I was reading about a Bhutanese satyr somewhere. A sanyaasi who the Bhutanese, to this day, call holy! After h
aving sex with all the women in his land, he set his eyes on his own mother. He confided his wish to her. The chaste woman wept, cried loudly, and cursed her son. But he would not be dissuaded. Finally, helpless in the face of her son’s intransigence, with the proviso that no one else should come to know of it, and with great revulsion, she acquiesced. But he did not even touch his mother. Instead, he shouted in joy. Leaving his flabbergasted mother, he jumped out into the street. With the public listening, all of Bhutan listening, he announced, ‘Listen dear ones, a woman’s mind has been revealed for all time. Understand this: once she is sure that no one else would come to know, for the sake of love, any woman would be ready to sleep with even her own son! This is the truth. Upon my mother, this is the truth!’

  At that moment of revelation, the Lothario was turned into a yogi.

  Are you frowning? Did you tell yourself that it is another story that the Bhutanese invented to demean women? But take this only as a story. Some stories help us understand life; till we grow up only to realize that life also is a fable.

  Naraapilla had tried thirty-four times to meet the sanyaasi—who used to come and stay in the charitable lodge in front of the Thachanakkara temple off and on—but each time in vain. The fact is that the sanyaasi used to stay in the lodge only for a few days a year. But even on the days he was there, for unknown reasons, he never opened the door for Naraapilla.

  That lodge stood like a quaint boathouse waiting at the beach of Time for the final journey of some stranger, with its foundation stones displaced by the roots of the banyan tree, its walls covered with creepers, and its ancient roof tiles, stuck to the disintegrating rafters, covered with fallen banyan tree leaves in myriad colours—blackened by dampness, dried and ripened, beat down by the wind or fallen by themselves. From the time Naraapilla heard from Paanamparampath Nanu that a sanyaasi was sojourning in the lodge, he fell under the spell of an unearthly attraction. Thachanakkara folk saw the old man from the New House of Ayyaattumpilli wearing a single mundu and leaning on a green ebony persimmon walking stick, going up to the lodge, knocking in vain and returning, cursing the door that remained shut each time. He used to go there and return in the killing heat of Kumbham afternoons and during Edavam evenings when the dark clouds were in heat. Appu Nair, who was almost blinded by cataract by then, and Paanamparampath Nanu used to accompany him many a time. Even when the sanyaasi was not there, Naraapilla felt that someone was watching him intently through the cracks made by termites on the windowpanes on the right side of the lodge, which always remained shut. Though his eight-decades-old body still retained enough strength to push open the old termite-eaten door of the lodge, Naraapilla never ventured to do that. Not only that, a feeling that an invisible message from the soul of the person inside was breaking through the walls and entering him, reminding him that his time had not come yet, always made Naraapilla trip up. Whenever he felt that he was being assailed by this knowledge, he also felt relieved by the thought that, each time, he was returning from the portals of death. Then, on his eighty-second birthday, the day he decided to recommence his early morning bath in the temple pond and worship Thachanakkara thevar, that inevitable meeting happened.

  As dawn was breaking in the east, he was climbing down the steps of the pond, holding the tumbler for pouring water on himself, and the walking stick, which for many years had become his constant companion. The month of Mithunam was on the cusp of its full-moon day. Naraapilla felt that the rain, which had been falling incessantly till the previous day, had taken a vacation on that auspicious day.

  ‘Moolam day of the month of Mithunam,’ he said to himself, straining to avoid slipping as he climbed down the steps made slippery by the monsoon. ‘In these eighty-two years, this is the first time a Moolam day is without rain.’

  Splitting the image of the pale full moon in a thousand shards, at that time someone was dunking himself repeatedly in the temple pond and surfacing. The sounds of the wavelets created by the ripples in that pond, tired from its centuries’ old incarceration, began to hit the sodden cracks in the laterite stones and the failing ears of the old man coming down the steps. Naraapilla was terrified by the sight of a form with shoulder-length hair, with its back to him, coming up from under the water. The next moment when he recognized it as male, his fear abated.

  The bearded man, who came up from the water, took off his chuttikkara thorth, wrung it dry, flicked it open like cracking a whip, and towelled his head and face. Then, after wearing the loincloth, when he was tying and tucking in his ochre-coloured mundu, Naraapilla recognized him as the one he had been trying to meet for so many years. Seeing the silhouette of the descending old man, the resident of the lodge froze for a moment; then he began to climb up the steps in a hurry. As it was unavoidable that two persons who were climbing and descending the same steps at the same time in opposite directions would meet at one step, Naraapilla stopped the sanyaasi with his stick as they came abreast.

  ‘Listen,’ Naraapilla said, ‘I’ve been to see you. I have been trying for many years. I have a few things I need to tell you, Swami!’

  At that moment, the spittoon-shaped speaker on the eastern portal of Thachanakkara thevar cleared its throat, from the first tickle of electric current. Then, accompanied by an ethereal tune, P. Leela’s voice started to sing the hyms from Jnaanappaana. With a regal gesture, which was perceptible even in the dark, the sanyaasi brushed aside Naraapilla’s walking stick and climbed up the rest of the steps, without uttering a word. When he reached the top, he turned and looked back. The sight of an old man holding a long stick and a wavy tumbler, which reflected the greying sky in the background of the moon straining to rejoin its original form in the still-rippling waters, held the sanyaasi immobile for some time.

  ‘Come before it’s daylight,’ saying thus in a solemn voice resounding with solitude, he disappeared.

  In that moment of bliss at having received the invitation, muttering something into the darkness of the early dawn, Naraapilla climbed down the steps for his last birthday bath.

  After praying and circumambulating Thachanakkara thevar, and generously applying the sandalwood paste that the new, young priest had pinched and dropped into his palm, on his forehead, chest, and upper arms in wide strokes, Naraapilla got out of the temple through the portal on the east side and walked directly to the lodge. It was not yet daylight. P. Leela had completed Jnaanappaana and had moved onto Harinaamakeerthanam. As Naraapilla felt the coolness of a Mithunam morning touch the grey hairs on his chest, after a long time he felt he was still one among the aristocrats of Thachanakkara. But that feeling did not last long. Even as he carefully went up the mouldy and slippery steps of the lodge with splayed toes, he lost his footing and nearly fell. Leaning the walking stick against the wall, to let his presence known over the sound of Leela’s singing, he purposely banged the tumbler on the floor, while keeping it down.

  The door opened instantly.

  ‘Come in,’ the man inside invited Naraapilla. Holding firmly onto the termite-weakened doorframe on both sides, Naraapilla entered the lodge.

  The so-called lodge had space just enough to spread two mats. Two ochre-colour mundus, and a threadbare thorth were spread on a dry, broken bamboo stick, which had been fixed across the width of the room at a man’s height. The muddy-brown streaks left on the walls by the water from the rains of Mithunam, seeping through the worn edges of the beams, could be seen even in the dim light. On a wooden plank on the floor at the corner of the room, were four or five termite-eaten spiritual books, a very small oil lamp, and a lotus-shaped incense stick holder made from coconut shell, all spread out. Though the incense sticks had died down, the flame on a wick in the lamp, which was lit in the morning, was in its last throes of getting asphyxiated. Directly above it, in the Sivakasi calendar—hung on the wall, also for hiding its cracks—the devi on her lotus-seat remained unmoved even when Naraapilla entered the room.

  The only door and windows the building had were the ones in the front. A bo
ttle of oil on the windowsill, a cloth bag stuffed with many things and tied to a bar of the window—the list of movable objects in the room was complete. Opening the window and the door and taking the grass mat rolled up and stored in the corner of the room, shaking it free of dust, and sitting on it, the sanyaasi gestured to Naraapilla to sit across from him. The old man sat down on the mat with much effort.

  Naraapilla saw the sanyaasi’s face getting delineated in the gathering light, as he was sitting facing the open door. Naraapilla sat absorbing all the aspects—the beard with a grey streak only in the middle; the matted hair, the abundant smallpox scars on the skin which resembled a freshly chipped grinding stone base; the ochre-coloured cloth, which hid the form from the neck down, sitting in lotus position. He observed that the sanyaasi was probably only half his age, and his face did not reflect the kind of divinity that Paanamparampath Nanu had been foisting on him all those years. Naraapilla cleared his throat, unaware if the sanyaasi was looking down or meditating. After cracking the joints of his two big toes, the sanyaasi continued to remain silent. At that point, Naraapilla started to hear clearly the cawing of the now-awake crows on the banyan tree, above the noise of the gramophone record of Leela.

  ‘The reason for my coming … There is no particular reason, Swami,’ Naraapilla said. ‘There used to be a senior astrologer in Kaniyankunnu. For everything and anything I only used to go to him. After he died, that too stopped! Well, what is your name? Which’s your place?’

  When he realized that the sanyaasi had no intention of replying, Naraapilla made as if he was getting up and said, ‘Well, since I was on my way after my bath, I am not carrying any money. I forgot that you would only talk after getting the hansel.’