Vengooran Thankappan asked Govindan Master, who had gone to Kochu Parashu’s shop to buy 501 brand washing soap, with overweening respect, ‘Why are you washing all these soiled clothes of your father, Master? Doesn’t he have daughters and a daughter-in-law? Otherwise, if you pay four annas, won’t that washerwoman do it for you?’
The answer that Govindan Master gave him vexed him to no end. ‘For twenty-five years,’ Govindan Master said with an inner acceptance full of magnanimity, ‘Father has been saving up those soiled clothes for me.’
By the middle of Karkkadakam, Naraapilla could sit up with the help of others. When Govindan Master was dozing one afternoon to get over the tiredness of many sleepless nights, he woke up with a start on seeing a dream, which appeared to be more truthful than reality. In that dream, Naraapilla was shouting at his son, pointing at his own back which had spots of blood as if lashed with a whip, ‘You have come to atone for the sins of beating by caressing, haven’t you?’
Startled awake, Govindan Master looked at his father who was sleeping peacefully, and let out a long sigh. Though the old man’s body had returned to the sleep and wakefulness cycles, with his fall in the lodge, he had lost his sentience. Because of that, no one could find out from him as to what caused him to fall. When Naraapilla could sit up and could drink the gruel from the plate by himself, Govindan Master took his umbrella and cloth bag, promising to return in two days after going to Cherai. Every moment he spent taking care of his father, he was loving his own epileptic son, whom he had left in the care of Sulochana’s parents, more deeply. All those days, he had this feeling that he was on a strange pilgrimage wearing his father’s slipper on one leg and his son’s slipper on the other. Both ill-fitting, biting footwear; but they protect his lower extremities on life’s thorny path. Thus on the twenty-fifth day of Naraapilla’s fall, after having lunch at Thankamma’s house, Govindan Master returned to Cherai.
‘I will come back in two days,’ ruffling Jithen’s head lovingly, Govindan Master told Kalyanikuttyamma. ‘I feel bad not seeing my son all this while.’
TEN
Swayamvaram
23 July 1999
…You know the capacious trough for bathing that you see in movies is called bathtub in English. Do you realize how many evocative words such as bath trough disappear from our lives the way some geriatrics die and vacate the space without giving any grief to anyone?
Forget the love for the language. There is a specific reason for me to remember the trough now. Yesterday, I slept at a friend’s place. It was late when I finished work. I had told you that I am ending my stay in a lodge and moving on to a house. I have been searching for a house with low rent where we can stay after our marriage. When I heard that the upper floor in a colleague’s house is being let out, I went there to check it out. Both of us had a few drinks and food to our fill from a bar in the city. Since by the time we reached his house it was very late, I decided to sleep there. I was alone on the upper floor that was to be let out. After hearing the rent expected, I had let go of any idea of staying there. Let me tell you something if you won’t tell anyone: before I left in the morning, yielding to temptation, I used the bathtub there for my bath. Immersed in its lukewarm water, like a child trying to recall its previous life lying inside its mother’s womb, I tried to reminisce about Aluva river. But lying inside that bathtub which didn’t belong to me, more than about Periyar river, I was reminded of the temple pond of Thachanakkara and of the centuries-old algae bloom-ridden water in it!
The sight of me lying naked in that bathtub of the fashionable people was amusing. How did the grandchild of Naraapilla of Ayyaattumpilli, who drowned in the temple pond, end up in a bathtub like this? After laughing for some time, lying all alone, I started feeling a little afraid.
It was the twenty-seventh day since Naraapilla had been carried home from the lodge.
On that morning, when the Karkkadakam monsoon was performing its dance of destruction, Ayyaattumpilli gaped, finding Naraapilla missing from his bed. In the downpour, which was doing its torrential work seemingly in one breath, Pankajaakshan and the next generation of males of Ayyaattumpilli scoured the yard, the compound, the well, and the streams for Naraapilla. Pankajaakshan did not forget to look for him in the lodge, to which he despatched his youngest son, Soman. Shankaran and Kumaran took leave to join the search for Naraapilla, and went into the rain. Jithen alone could not be a member of the search party. After he had started sneezing following the exposure to rain, Chinnamma had dried his hair and chest and confined him to the house. Chinnamma was heard asking Vidyadharan, who was rushing through the yard with a thorth wound around his head, ‘Did you find him?’
The rain swallowed his reply. Taking out a shirt from the almirah, which smelt musty, and offering it to Jithen, Chinnamma said, ‘Where the hell has this guy, who’s been shitting and spitting in his bed, gone to? Let the goners be gone, you wear this, lad!’
The children and grandchildren had been having misgivings that Naraapilla was casting around for more trouble, even as he was giving the impression of coming out of his bedridden state. Even the seniors of Thachanakkara, including Raambillapolice and Appu Nair, felt that Naraapilla was coming back to life. But after Govindan Master went back to Cherai, things went topsy-turvy. In the absence of a nursing attendant, in those two days, Naraapilla revealed his worst self. Causing the stench that carried even to the neighbourhood, he dipped his hands in his own excreta on his bed, and with the ritualistic artistry of one applying handprints of rice flour on the walls on the eve of Karkkadaka Sankraanthi, he started to press yellow prints on the walls. Sometimes he cried openly with the pathos of being able to leave the imprints of his eighty-two years in this world only in that manner; at other times, pleased with the expression of his artistic talents in yellow, he laughed out loud. The last time Kalyanikuttyamma saw her father-in-law by the side of the rope-bound cot, he was jumping up and down, covered in shit from tip to toe.
‘Pho,’ Naraapilla snapped, seeing the female form near the door bearing his food. ‘If you come to peck at me, I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you, and I’ll die too! Pho! Pho!’ His voice boomed for the last time in Ayyaattumpilli.
The person who noticed the dented tumbler on the topmost step of the pond of Thachanakkara thevar was the priest of the minor temple. When he saw the tumbler, which was overflowing with rainwater, he remembered a mendicant he had seen near the pond the previous evening. Realizing that the beggar, who had come stealthily from the thickets beyond the temple, was planning to do his ablutions in the pond, the priest had shouted at him and had driven him off; he even stood guard at the pond for an hour, holding up his umbrella. However, now early in the morning, when he looked at the tumbler—which, sitting on the stone steps and overflowing in the rain, looked like a sculptural rendering of loneliness in metal—the young Nampoothiri could recall its real owner. With a palpitating heart, he looked at the pond, which, gorging on the torrential rainwater and having covered all the steps, seemed vain about its depth and expanse. Then in one bound he reached the main temple and said within earshot of the priest and the deity, ‘One of Naraapilla’s possessions is near the pond. Also, his children are searching for him!’
That news blazed, disregarding the monsoon, through those who never stopped their ritual baths and temple visits even in the torrential rains. Daylight had not broken through, though it was past ten o’clock. Within no time, the whole village was assembled around the banks of the overflowing pond. A joyous thrill, which only spectators are capable of, went around the pond, the rains notwithstanding: using spades to clear the climbing nettles, siam weeds, and touch-me-nots, the public made their standing space around the square of the pond, as if around an ancient drama theatre, where a tragedy was to be staged. Holding the old dented tumbler his father had used for bathing for years, Pankajaakshan was in the front row of the audience. The boys of Ayyaattumpilli, including Jithen, also got their places in the front row without anyone protesting
, on the strength of their grandfather being the one in the pond. Though the public expected some action, when the four khaki-clad firemen entered the precincts of the temple and reached the pond, having reached from Aluva in their firetruck, the scene did not change. Someone’s two-year-old stubborn child began to cry loudly, feeling hurt about being denied the right to catch the rain drops by extending his hand beyond the circumference of the umbrella. After a brief consultation with his colleagues, the leader of the men from the fire force called out to the spectators, ‘Who here knows how to dive?’
There was a buzz in the crowd. The child crying for the rainwater increased the volume of his wails in the second round.
‘We can give it a try!’ a young man wearing an ochre mundu, with a sandal-paste mark on his forehead, and carrying an umbrella with broken ribs, came forward and said. Everyone there knew him by face, as the muscled, khaki-knickered trainer who used to lead the branch of a religious organization in the west side of the Thachanakkara thevar temple. The young man took off his shirt and mundu, folded them, shoved them between the stretchers of the umbrella, and gave the umbrella to another man to use. By that time, three more men of approximately the same age, with sandal-paste marks on their foreheads bleeding in the rain and clad only in their underwear, appeared next to him. The audience watched with interest as they descended part after part into the water, in congruence with their descent down the submerged steps. The public whispered among themselves that the corpse would be on the sixth or seventh step, invisible in the muddied waters. The sight of four heads, caught in the net of rain, surfacing here and there spitting out water, and diving again amused the children in the audience. That was when that sight caught Jithen’s attention—the girl standing in the front of the crowd across him! His heart did a somersault. Many months ago, she had sowed the seed for the shock that Jithen underwent just then, having completed her fourth standard in Aalungal School and moved to St Francis School in Aluva. From the moment she was seen standing close to her father under his umbrella, and looking steadfastly into the pond, the seed sprouted, and even as one was watching it, it grew into a huge tree of uneasiness.
‘Damn,’ he said to himself, ‘what a time for her to put in an appearance!’
He could easily recognize the small form in a green skirt, amidst the reflected upside-down images of the people on the other side of the bank. Her image was swaying in the wavelets created by the divers. It was impossible to reach where she was standing, by wriggling through the throng. He was certain that even if he could make it through the crowd, he would still not be able to do what he could not, in the four years they had studied together. He was dying to catch her attention by shouting that the man in the pond was his grandfather. However, suddenly with a terrific sneeze a bubble burst in his nose. With a feeling of inferiority, he sniffed in the two tusks of phlegm emerging from his nose and hid himself behind the crowd.
One of the four divers searching inside the pond came to the surface right in the middle of the pond after a long dive, and told the uniformed guys on the banks, ‘Saw the thing. Can’t hold enough breath to lift it and bring it up.’
The other three young men in competition dived under in the same spot and corroborated that statement. When all of them reported sighting the old man lying steeped in the mud with his limbs sticking up, from the audience women, children, and the weak-hearted men started to leave the area of their own accord, sighing deeply. Still, there were quite a number of people left behind on the banks of the pond. Jithen looked with anticipation at the remaining crowd on the opposite bank. His first love had disappeared, choosing not to witness a poignant sight, which could have stayed throughout in memory.
The young men dived singly and in groups, another two or three rounds. Deciding that retrieving the corpse stuck in the mud from such depths was impossible, they came up on land and sat with their legs spread. Their eyes were bloodshot and protruding, having seen an undesirable sight. Tying a grapnel, brought by one of the spectators, the firemen flung it into the middle of the pond. However, Naraapilla refused to be baited by the flukes of the grapnel. That was when someone suddenly remembered the brick-kiln owner Devassy, who had rescued a drowning lad many years ago at Punneli kadavu, with what seemed to be an interminable dive then. Paanamparampath Nanu, who was lurking behind till then, shouted out that suggestion, ‘Shall we call our Achaayan? Wasn’t he the one who lifted up from the river alive, the boy from Chammaram?’
Though it was clearly understood who Nanu was referring to, expecting the public’s approval, Pankajaakshan asked, ‘Who? Our Devassy from the brick kiln?’
With that, a debate began on the banks of Thachanakkara thevar’s pond. Listening to an old man holding forth on the remedial rituals required if a Christian entered the temple pond, one of the firemen withdrew to the background and looked once at the temple pond as if tempted. Fearing the possible repercussions if it was revealed that he was a Christian, he turned the side of his wedding ring bearing the name of his wife to align with the palm and looked nervously at the divers who had found Naraapilla’s body. At that time, Karunakaran Karthaavu, who was standing to the left of Pankajaakshan, said in a heavy voice that sounded peremptory, ‘If he can bring the thing up, call him! If a corpse can lie inside the temple pond, a non-Hindu can bring it up too!’
Thus, Devassy reached Thachanakkara in half an hour on a green Luna moped from Angamaly. Since his brick kiln was not working due to the monsoon, he had dropped anchor at his pig farm in Angamaly. That morning, when he had entered the pig sty, for no reason he had remembered Pankajaakshan’s father. Three weeks before, when he had gone to pay the rent for the land leased for the brick kiln to Pankajaakshan, he had also gone to the New House to visit Naraapilla. The moment he stepped into Naraapilla’s room along with Pankajaakshan, for some reason, he thought of his pigs. And when Pankajaakshan introduced the middle-aged man sitting at Naraapilla’s bedside as his brother, Devassy also thought of his only ram, which he used to lock up every night in the sty along with the pigs. Devassy had a foreboding then that during the last days of the old man on the bed, he would have to render some significant service. He gave his new phone number to Pankajaakshan that day before leaving. When, after writing it under his brother’s telephone number in his small diary, Pankajaakshan looked up questioningly, Devassy told him, ‘Write it down. You will need it before long, sir!’
The words of the brickmaker, who used to become a butcher during monsoons, turned out to be prophetic.
Before getting into the pond, wearing only red shorts, Devassy took off his thick wristwatch and gave it to Jithen, saying, ‘Son, you hold this! Give it back when I return!’ There was only a light rain then. The wristwatch resembled a circular pond for Jithen. It was getting to be twelve noon. He saw the big needle diving down to catch the stationary small needle in the glass pond on his hand. Devassy swam up to the mid-point of the pond, dived down, came up empty-handed, and shouted, ‘This is difficult. Our small boat is lying in the brick kiln. Two of you go and bring it here. And talk to the boatmen and bring a bamboo for punting. Do you understand what that is? You know the bargepole, that’s it!’
Though at first sight they looked made for one another, three things which would never go with one another, came together in front of the people of Thachanakkara: a centuries-old temple pond, a small canoe, and a big bargepole.
Devassy stationed the canoe, manned by a young man, in the middle of the pond. Then the barge pole was lowered into the water. The entire bamboo pole, as tall as six full grown adults, disappeared under the water. Asking the young man to hold the tip of the pole firmly, Devassy took a deep breath. And dived down alongside the pole, swift like a harpoon.
The light rain seemed to be casting seeds at the wavelets in the water. Jithen counted till eighty-two. By that time, catching hold of the right calf of the corpse with his right hand, Devassy had started his ascent to the top using his left hand to pull himself rapidly up along the barge pole. The
naked corpse, hanging upside-down from the leg with splayed toes, spiralled in the water, creating a small whirlpool. On the banks of the pond, rose a sound similar to wailing. With the long immersion in water, the heel had turned white and sodden. The leg itself had become darker. Till they reached the banks, Jithen could only see over the water surface the right leg of Naraapilla, held by Devassy. When he saw the pale area like the cutting edge on the dark leg, he felt he was seeing a stone-cutting axe, which had been lost, being brought up from the water. When he realized the person being hauled up along the ascent of the stone steps by the one who swam ashore was his grandfather, Jithen sat down with a breathlessness of such severity as he had never experienced before in the ten years of his life.
The corpse of Naraapilla, so sodden that no hellfire would be able to burn it, lay on the banks of the pond like a depraved icon of the bygone times.
Increasing its tempo, the light rain of Karkkadakam turned into a torrent.
As Naraapilla’s body started smoking on the pyre made on the southern plot of the New House, protected from the rain by a make-shift tarpaulin tent, not a single tear came to Govindan Master, who lit the pyre. Govindan Master had reached Ayyaattumpilli on hearing of the death, just before the body reached from Aluva Hospital after autopsy. His epileptic son, Narayanan, had accompanied him. Contrary to misgivings, Narayanan attended the funeral, in its entirety, in silence. When the corpse was moved to the pyre, he even wept.
Unable to disperse quickly because of the rain, the folk of Thachanakkara, who were distributed among the four houses of Ayyaattumpilli, got an opportunity to discuss life. There were opinions that when Naraapilla’s body was retrieved from the pond, his right hand had a clutch of dark, wavy hair in it and that it belonged to Kunjuamma, who had met with a premature death. Barber Shivan contended, with his long-standing experience, that more than female hair, it resembled the hair of a man’s beard, grown long. There were arguments that Naraapilla was eighty years old and eighty-four years old. There were surmises about the young man who came with Govindan Master from Cherai and who bore amazing resemblance to Naraapilla. Appu Nair, who had fallen faint at Peechamkurichi on hearing of Naraapilla’s death, and yet had scrambled up to attend the funeral, only to go ‘hari hara’ on seeing Chinnamma’s sister-in-law Kunthi bawling along with Chammarath Amminiyamma, became subject of discussion. There were various annotations that the sanyaasi, who seemed to have disappeared forever from the lodge twenty-seven days ago was in reality Kesavan, who had left Thachanakkara ages ago; that he was Achyuthan who stayed in the old house of Ayyaattumpilli as a tenant; and yet again, that it was Naraapilla’s own son Chandran who had run away from home. There were hyperbolic statements about the time Devassy spent underwater holding his breath while retrieving the corpse of Naraapilla. There were explanations that Christians are able to hold their breath for a longer time; that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ could be accounted for by his power to lie down holding his breath for seventy-two hours; and the technique that enabled singer Yesudas to sing long passages without exhaling was the same one that Devassy used under water. Thus, standing on the burning body of that dead man, people produced baloney, as they always do.
A Preface to Man Page 30