Sitting in Vengooran Thankappan’s teashop, Paanamparampath Nanu started to dream up, among the legends of Thachanakkara, one no one had heard so far. Some of the passers-by who had ventured out without umbrellas were standing in a row on the veranda of the shop. Nanu, who was aware that along with the strength of the audience, the gravitas of the story should also go up, managed to hook a biggie on the angling rod of his memory.
‘Do you know why Kathakali performances are not held in our temple?’ he asked Kochu Parashu and Karunakaran Karthaavu. He did not even glance at Vengooran Thankappan or barber Shivan, who had no sense of history. Some of the passers-by interested in the unfolding story, moved closer.
‘In that case, I’ll tell you, you all listen,’ Nanu started. ‘Long, long ago, we had a Kathakali programme in our temple. You have this incident of Narasimham appearing and killing Hiranyakashipu or Hiranyaakshan or someone? That was the story.’
‘Hiranya Kashipu,’ Karthaavu helped him get a fix on the character.
‘Ngaa, if you say Kashipu, okay, Kashipu!’ Nanu continued. ‘The aattakatha drama was going on unfurling. At last, when the time came for the Narasimham to appear, breaking the pillar, it was beyond what the other guy could suffer!’
‘Which other guy?’ barber Shivan interrupted.
‘Haa, the guy inside our temple!’ Nanu continued after bringing on the impatience of Thachanakkara thevar on his own face. ‘Would the worthy like it if guys come to Parashuraman’s temple and enact Narasimham’s story?’
‘But aren’t they both the same?’ Kochu Parashu asked.
‘How can they be the same?’ twirling the index finger of his fisted right hand inside his mouth, Nanu asked. ‘In that case couldn’t all the ten incarnations have been in the same form? You listen to this without asking qostens! There’s this scene where Hiranyakashipu is on his back and Narasimham is pulling out his entrails, no? By the time that scene came, the real Thachanakkara thevar entered and possessed Narasimham! Ah, you won’t believe if I tell you, Narasimham split the abdomen and pulled out the orijinal entrails of the actor who was playing Hiranyakashipu!’ When he reached that point, he made a pretence of making a deferential laugh by covering his mouth with this hand.
Barber Shivan felt a spasm in his tummy.
‘Did he die, then?’ Vengooran Thankappan asked.
‘Is there any need to ask?’ Nanu said. ‘With that came the decision that Kathakali will never be held in our temple.’
At that point, Pankajaakshan of Ayyaattumpilli reached in a hurry, carrying an umbrella.
‘Did father come this side, Kochu Parashu chettaa?’ Pankajaakshan asked.
‘No, he didn’t,’ Kochu Parashu said. ‘But these days, does he come out at all?’
‘Imagine how much of a pity it is,’ Pankajaakshan said. ‘Today’s his birthday. In the morning, when my missus went with tea, he was not to be seen. That Nampoothiri boy said he had come to the temple in the morning. He has been to the pond and has had his bath there in the morning. Now where has he gone?’ As Pankajaakshan was about to close his umbrella, Paanamparampath Nanu came to the veranda and said, ‘Did you look in the lodge?’
As Pankajaakshan stood, having no answer, Nanu got under his umbrella boldly. ‘Then come, after a long time the sanyaasi has come here. Naraapilla chettan should be there!’
Forgetting their long-standing tiff, Pankajaakshan and Nanu went under one umbrella to the lodge.
Before long, the congregation, which was still standing on the veranda of the shop saw Pankajaakshan and a few others carrying Naraapilla to the New House in the rain. Pankajaakshan, who was walking in the front, was shielding Naraapilla’s face from the rain with the umbrella. Carrying a tall stick and a dented tumbler, Nanu rushed into Kochu Parashu’s shop and said, ‘He was lying inside the lodge. Covered in shit and unconscious, alone. Here, this stick and tumbler on the steps, a lot of blood and shit inside! Ho!’
Dashing behind Nanu, Kochu Parashu, Karunakaran Karthaavu, and Vengooran Thankappan, headed for Ayyaattumpilli.
‘Oh my father,’ before the throng entered the gate, Chinnamma’s scream jolted the rain.
That was a little premature. On that day, Naraapilla still had twenty-seven days left.
NINE
Harbinger of Death
28 June 1999
…The day before Grampa’s death too, a mottled wood owl, a ‘thachankozhi’, had cried in Thachanakkara, announcing an oncoming death. To cry out at midnight to portend death, he had flown across the river from Uliyanoor, the land of Perumthachchan, to perch on the tall trees of Thachanakkara. He had been living in hiding in the innards of Uliyanoor, incarnated as a bird to outlive his pitiable death by a falling wood chisel. The elders of Thachanakkara used to say that thachankozhi used to fly to the house where the son was wishing for the father’s death. He sat on the branch of darkness with a head, which could be rotated three hundred and sixty degrees, on the neck which had been sliced through by the broadest of the wood chisels. The heartbeat of one aching for the death of his father accompanied the startling cries of the legendary carpenter’s son.
The night before Grampa’s death, the bird came and roosted in one of the big trees in Ayyaattumpilli. I was woken up with a start at midnight by his alarming call, which I heard in the darkness outside, and lay with a palpitating heart. My asthma curdled in my chest like a cooing dove.
‘Damn,’ mother turned to the side in her sleep and muttered, ‘wonder who he’s come to carry away!’
Jithen had the fortune of seeing Pankajaakshan shouting into the newly-installed telephone in Pooshaappi Stores, loud enough to be heard over at Cherai, about forty kilometres away. Since Jithen had not gone to school due to his wheezing, his mother had sent him to the shop with an umbrella to get pappadam. As he turned, after buying pappadam worth one rupee and getting the purchase entered in the ledger to their debit, he saw Pankaachammavan lifting the handset of the phone. In the pocket diary in his left hand was written the telephone number of his sister-in-law’s house. Though it had been written down and given by Govindan Master when Pankajaakshan had gone to attend Chandrika’s wedding, it had stayed with him unused for many years. Later, when he used to look at it, he only thought of it as a forgotten sum that either he owed someone or someone owed him. However, on the third day after his father had been carried in from the lodge, when the realization struck him like a bolt of white lightning that, for the rest of his life, his father would become his burden alone, he suddenly recalled the number in his pocket diary. ‘My God,’ Pankajaakshan said to himself, smacking himself on his forehead, ‘isn’t this the number that elder brother had given to notify him if father was ailing!’
Using his index finger to turn the dial of Kochu Parashu’s telephone a number of times, Pankajaakshan stood listening intently into the receiver with a serious look. After someone picked up the phone at the other end after many rings, he shouted into the phone, ‘Hallo … Who’s that? Hallo, hallo…’
At that time, apart from Jithen, there were two old men on the store’s veranda. Hearing for the first time someone other than Alamboori talking into the phone, the old men and Jithen stood looking with the same sense of wonder at the spiral cable of the phone elongating as needed and Pankajaakshan talking with gestures in reply to the silence from the other end of the phone.
It had been three days since Naraapilla had been stretched out like a cast-iron statue of old age, covered with his faeces, on the rope-bound cot in his unventilated and ill-lit room. On the second day, on his way to the hospital in Aluva, Madhavan Doctor had come and done a thorough check-up of Naraapilla. From a quick physical examination, Achuttan Vaidyan inferred that the bones and internal organs of the old man—who lay delirious and screwing up his face—were unaffected. When he saw that his prescription, with only vitamin B complex for tiredness and cyproheptadine for appetite, which he had extended towards the people standing around, was not being accepted by anyone, he was forced to leave it on
Naraapilla’s bed. To Kalyanikuttyamma, who ran after him with a crumpled ten-rupee note in her hand after a minute of uncertainty, with the all-understanding smile of a doctor of the old school, he said, ‘Aren’t you the daughter-in-law of Naraapilla chettan? Keep it with you. You will need it again.’
That evening, before darkness fell, Kalyanikuttyamma pulled down the electric wire running to her toilet and extended it to the New House and lit up a bulb there. The communist husbands of Thankamma and Chinnamma, Kumaran and Shankaran, respectively, had discussed with their spouses the need for providing light in the New House where the old man was laid up. But, though they had not heard each other, both the daughters of Naraapilla differed with their husbands in similar fashion. Though residing in separate homes, their ideas and the words they used were eerily similar. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ said Chinnamma to Shankaran and Thankamma to Kumaran using different pitches, ‘At the end of the month, when the electricity bill has to be paid, will father count out and give the money?’
Ignoring the smattering rain, as she stood on a wooden chair and was trying to loosen the wire going to the toilet, when Pankajaakshan, realizing her intent, echoed his sisters’ objection, Kalyanikuttyamma, as the only unfortunate daughter-in-law of the house who had to live in Ayyaattumpilli, said with as much steadfastness as she could muster, ‘If I don’t do this, there will be no one else here to do this. Aren’t you all that kind of pitiless creatures?’
Thus, on the fourth night of his being bed-ridden, electricity reached Naraapilla’s bedroom. The first three nights in that room, where a tired, unsleeping lantern kept watch at all times, the three sons of Pankajaakshan had started taking turns sleeping, keeping Naraapilla company. It was when, unable to suffer any more the stench of his excreta and the foul words which Naraapilla kept uttering in his delirium, the three children had baulked at their night-duty that Pankajaakshan recalled the mysterious number lying in his pocket and made that long call to Cherai.
It was getting dark. As he stepped on the soil of Ayyaattumpilli after twenty-five years, Govindan Master’s soul shivered. He stood with a cloth bag and a closed umbrella in front of his siblings’ houses, now separated by bamboo fences, like a man who had come from another planet. As he gazed at the silhouette of a girl with a limp moving along the yard of the old house through his spectacles misted with the rain, Govindan Master felt disoriented. He heard the soulfully melancholic rendering of hymns by P. Leela, something which was not there in his childhood, coming out of the loudspeakers of Thachanakkara temple suffusing the twilight. He saw in his mind his younger siblings and himself standing in the torrential rains of the past in the places which now had the house with the blue gate and the cowshed with the lowing cows beyond that. Seeing the guest with greying hair, the eldest among the children asked, ‘Who are you?’
Kunjuamma came from inside and, gathering her curly hair and tying them up, sensing that some stranger had stepped into the yard at dusk, said, ‘My son! My Govinda!’ before she vanished into the darkening air. His siblings came out one after the other and smiling sadly at their elder brother dissolved into the darkness like their mother had. Only one of them, an eleven-year-old with his cheekbones sticking out and eyes rheumy, came closer and asked, ‘Chettaa, don’t you remember taking me from Mother and carrying me when we were returning from Achuttan Vaidyan’s clinic, and continuing to carry me even when your legs were aching, without letting on? But, chettaa, what a pity! Amongst us six, only I died early!’ With his lower lips trembling between sobs, he too disappeared.
‘Achyutha!’ a call came from the old house. Govindan Master saw his childhood friend, the wide-eyed Achyuthan come running towards him to show off his biscuit-coloured plastic footwear, ignoring the summons of his father, Menon Master. When the call was repeated, realizing that some of the syllables were different, Govindan Master returned to the drizzle of the present.
‘Jithaa!’ the call and the child both came from the opposite direction. From the new house with the blue gate. Govindan Master knew the name which was called out. The child with big ears and wide eyes who had stood alone in front of the bookshelf at Cherai, seeking refuge! Time had added a few inches to his height.
Unable to recognize the man who was stepping on the soil of Ayyaattumpilli after twenty-five years, the ten-year-old child turned around and shouted back to his mother, ‘Here, Mother, someone’s here.’
In that dusk, getting wet in the drizzle, Govindan Master walked towards the New House with a bitter smile.
That late evening, three generations were arrayed near the cot of Naraapilla, to see the middle-aged man standing with his hands folded and head bowed: Pankajaakshan, Thankamma and Chinnamma, their progeny—three, four and three, respectively—from child to adolescent to youth; the wailing infant who was being carried by Thankamani, the daughter of Thankamma…
‘Shush, don’t cry baby,’ said Thankamma to her grandson, ‘here, see who has come, your great-uncle!’
Unable to understand the relationship, the newborn raised the volume of his wails and peed on Thankamma’s yellow saree. Govindan Master held close to him the only one he could recognize from the next generation and asked him, ‘Which class are you in now?’
‘Fifth,’ Jithen said, snorting the phlegm from his nose which was lengthening onto his upper lip like tiny tusks.
Then, imitating her sister who introduced her grandson, Chinnamma told Naraapilla loudly, ‘Here, Father, take a look at who’s here! Your eldest son!’
It did not appear as if Naraapilla had heard her. He had shut his eyes to the sight of a centuries-old fear looking at his life with burning eyes and waiting with its wings closed. ‘Pho,’ Naraapilla snapped from his bed, ‘Go away without killing! Go away without pecking! Pho.’
Govindan Master hung his cloth bag on a peg behind the door and asked Pankajaakshan, ‘Who’s sleeping here with father?’
Pankajaakshan said with some hesitation, ‘Well … that … I and my sons are there. We take turns…’
Raising his right hand and putting an end to the stutter of his younger brother, Govindan Master said, ‘From this day onwards, I will sleep here. I have more than enough time!’
Govindan Master stayed for three weeks in the New House, without a break. Kalyanikuttyamma, who used to come thrice a day to the New House to bring food for the old man, bowed in her heart to the man who was so far away from the ruthless behaviour of Ayyaattumpilli stock. During the first week itself, she had offered Govindan Master two new lungis which she had bought for her sons, and three shirts of Pankajaakshan’s which were washed and pressed and kept in the cupboard. Lifting and showing the cloth bag which showed signs of mildew, Govindan Master told his brother’s wife, ‘No, my child, here, I have brought all that I need!’
Noticing how well Govindan Master was taking care of his father day and night—even as Naraapilla tried to dodge him like a naughty child and snorted like a wild animal—Kalyanikuttyamma vowed to herself that she too would lavish the same kind of conscientious care on her own father in Kochi when he would become old, while Chinnamma and Thankamma, who had gone there to borrow some mustard seeds, stood near the grinding stone of Geethalayam, wrapped up in a discussion of some other sort.
‘Did you understand, chechi,’ Chinnamma said in a voice which, despite her efforts, did not sound like a conspiratorial whisper, ‘why someone has dashed from Cherai to here, when it’s apparent he’s going to die?’
Glancing back, climbing on to the steps under the eaves to escape the drizzle, Thankamma asked her sister, arching her eyebrows, ‘Why?’
‘Can’t you see from the way he’s shovelling the shit and pee and licking father clean?’ Chinnamma asked, unable to control the seething in her blood. ‘If he gets the New House bequeathed to him, would he find it unpalatable?’
Thankamma’s eyebrows arched more like a drawn bow. Snapping its bowstring, Chinnamma said the next sentence, ‘When I saw the deed-maker Karthaavu going there yesterday, I got
the hint. Isn’t it enough to take the inked thumb of the dying man and stamp it on the paper?’
At that time, from the lips of the normally righteous Thankamma, a vicious hiss escaped. That was the sound of Ayyaattumpilli boiling in her soul. But when the image of her brother—who could be seen removing, with apologetic care, their father’s excreta from the mat and sheets, washing them, and drying them, defeating the wet Mithunam and Karkkadakam months—the very next moment she corrected herself and said, ‘Heyy, you are imagining things, girl! Even the land he has been given, he has no time to take up. What to say of this!’
Chinnamma who was holding back the mustard seeds in her hand, ended the brief discussion by handing them over. ‘Ummm, you watch now. You’ll see someone carrying away everything that has been written and not written, when father’s dead!’
As Chinnamma had guessed in her devious mind, Govindan Master was trying to win back something from the fallen man all through the day and night. But the only difference was that it was not money or property. He was only trying to inform Naraapilla, who used to stare at him without any recognition while he was using lukewarm water laced with Dettol to wash his father clean morning and evening, applying the ointment to prevent bed sores, and massaging his back, of one thing: ‘It’s me, Father,’ Govindan Master used to say at least thrice a day, ‘an old Govindan!’
Govindan used to blow on each spoon of gruel—which Kothappulakkalli used to make with broken rice, using coconut tree spathes to light the fire—to cool it before feeding his father. The chilli in the chutney often used to make the old man sputter and cough, spraying the gruel into his son’s eyes. Wiping off the rice from the glasses, the son continued his efforts. Apart from the medicines prescribed by Madhavan doctor, he applied ayurvedic emulsions and liniments of his own accord. He put ayurvedic ilaneerkuzhambu eye drops in his father’s rheumy eyes. He pared the black, thickened nails of the toes with a penknife.
A Preface to Man Page 29