A Preface to Man

by Subhash Chandran

  What he had attempted to put down on the unruled pages of his mathematics notebook, during the study holidays for his ninth class terminal examination was this truth. Those eighteen lines were destined to get submerged, one rainy season, by the stinking water that swept in from the gutter outside into his tiny rented house, where he was staying with his wife, away from Thachanakkara, many years after the poem was found serendipitously among the wave-less sea of old books. However, as a poem written by a child in homage to everyone caught in their circumstances as much as in their bodies, and cursed to exist through the drudgery of their lives, those lines had originality and relevance.

  Jithen was a child; at the same time, a man. It was more strenuous than living life as half-human, half-animal or half-man, half-woman. Nevertheless, the thirteen-year-old was yet to realize that the fate of every human being is to die before reaching his or her full potential; and that adolescence, which is only a prelude to torments, is the portal to the forbidding fort of turmoil.

  TWO

  Darkness

  30 November 1999

  …It’s raining outside now. Beyond the window of the rented house, the unbroken greenery of plantain leaves is iridescent. There is rain and shine. Somewhere in the forest, mangy foxes were getting wedded. Rain queries: Demon of masturbation, when are you getting married?

  I remember: an adolescence which paid homage to libido. The guilt of it was more enjoyable. The white juice of the forbidden fruit.

  The goddess painted by some unknown artist on the calendar printed in Sivakasi. Underneath the see-through blouse of the veena-toting goddess was the strap of the undergarment with a silvery, shining square to adjust the length of the strap. The passion of the artist to make it more realistic. I meditated in front of the goddess; ‘Dheeyo yona prachodayaath’. Instead of the accepted meaning of ‘we pray to propel our intellect on the Divine-righteous path to unfold spiritual potentiality and enlightenment’, the pervert-poet inside gave it a variant translation—‘intellects are propelled by vaginas’.

  Then, on the fungus-affected walls of the toilet, images of goddesses started appearing. The time and imagination for creating a thousand Mona Lisas were being dedicated to the pleasure of indulging in a crime committed in solitude. Studies became distracted. Melancholy became a permanent resident in my eyes. In my school uniform, and with a palpitating heart, I went to a theatre with slippery seats. To compound the fear that those below eighteen years would be handed over to the police, the guy at the ticket counter grinned at him, displaying his decayed teeth. The first time he saw the nakedness of a woman he felt as if the screen was steaming; and then, catching fire.

  The seats, connected to each other, began to shake in the dark.

  A man’s libido: a black deed which sacrifices and sends as castaways tens of millions of lives for a momentary pleasure. A heinous act without guilt. A masculine act of zero benevolence. The only throne any man can mount.

  On the night of his fourteenth birthday, four years after completing his tenth birthday in the month of Chingam, which followed the unnatural death of Naraapilla in Karkkadakam, for the first time in his life, Jithen heard surreptitiously, in the company of his friends, the moans of a woman in the throes of making love. Binding all the four years together, the Vypin Hooch Tragedy left its black mark on his life story.

  The death of Naraapilla had shocked Thachanakkara more than any news, which the newspapers and radio were disseminating. There was a rumour circulating that Skylab, a manmade satellite, which was orbiting out of control in space, could crash anywhere on the earth. Jithen dreamed that, freed from the reins of America, it was shooting through the skies of Thachanakkara as a glowing ember and crashing, aflame, onto the roof of Geethalayam, setting fire to the rafters. When the news appeared in the newspapers that America would handsomely reward those who find the remnants of the Skylab, the treasure-finding dreams of Paanamparampath Nanu got diverted in that direction for some time. His enthusiasm progressed up to lugging the misshapen debris of an abandoned water pump set, which he found in some plot along the river, upto where Kochu Parashu stood, mistaking it to be some vital organ of the Skylab. By that time, the news had come in the newspapers that the debris of the Skylab had been discovered in the western coast of Australia. With that, fears about an errant Skylab ceased. The iron pump, which Nanu had dragged in, lay in a corner of the plot of Pooshaappi Stores, rusting further.

  In February that year, the bangle sellers in the Aluva beach helped Jithen’s sisters wear ‘Skylab bangles’ that came with gold glitter and tiny notches. With his hand held by his mother, Jithen walked between the shops with their eye-catching wares, sneezing all the time from the dust. His twelve- and fourteen-year-old sisters followed on either side of his father, hanging on to his hands. He heard his mother say proudly, to all the acquaintances she ran into there, pointing at Geetha who was appearing for that year’s S.S.L.C. board exam: ‘This year, it is essessellcya for our Geetha!’

  Jithen saw the Well of Death and magic show for the first time. In a well boarded up with planks, two fearless young men were driving what looked like skeletons of motorcycles, circling the well continuously. The smoke and sound, which arose from the well, gave their rashness an aura of imminent heroic death. After the young men, who wore yellow helmets, finished their ride and reached the floor of the well and waved at the spectators, there was no applause. However, in the next tent, when the magician pulled a starved-looking brown rabbit out of the hat, the spectators, in spite of their knowing that he would have hidden it inside earlier, continued to clap and cheer. On their return, holding on to the parapet of the Marthaanda Varma Bridge, along with his parents and sisters, Jithen gazed upon the picture of the temple painted by the lights, and its reflection on the wavy waters of the river.

  No one in Thachanakkara talked about V.T. Bhattathirippad dying that February in Thrissur, or Akkaamma Cherian becoming one with God in Thiruvananthapuram, two months later, in May. Though the demise of S.K. Pottekkat at Kozhikode had saddened Kalyanikuttyamma in Ayyaattumpilli, that sorrow had been drowned in the stench of Naraapilla’s shit-wallowing days and thus been invalidated. Those days of persistent hunger; it was at the time, when even the last grains of the oblation rice for Naraapilla’s obsequies were being picked off, that the poisoned hooch frothed in Vypin. The day after Jithen’s birthday, on the Chathayam day, the Vypin liquor tragedy happened, killing many and sending thousands to the hospital in critical condition. In one stroke, the waves of that news wiped off the horrific death of Naraapilla from the consciousness of the Thachanakkara folk. The names of Malayalis who celebrated the birthday of a venerable soul—Narayana Guru, who had pronounced liquor as poison—by drinking and dying were arrayed on the newspapers. Paanamparampath Nanu, whose tongue used to confuse Hiranyaakshan with Hiranyakashipu, was now able to use the same one to talk of ethyl alcohol and methyl alcohol without mixing them up, sitting in Pooshaappi Stores. The newspapers had explained the various compounds of alcohol in such detail to their readers. With unusual interest, cross-eyed Vengooran Thankappan read the list of people who had lost their eyesight in the tragedy. He could not have imagined then that the list had on it the name of the boy who would later come to marry his beautiful daughter—who, though past marriageable age, could not be married off as he did not have enough money for the dowry at the prevailing levels.

  Shantha, sister of Muringaattil Leela who committed suicide by drowning herself, was the life partner of Vengooran Thankappan. Their only daughter, Vasantha, was ogled at by all the young men of Thachanakkara because of her shapely body. Barber Shivan could still recollect the little girl with red ribbons tied to her curly hair, who had come to see her father’s new teashop, holding her mother’s hand, while the Eagles Club, headed by Vasudevan Nampoothiri, was still occupying one of the rooms in Kochu Parashu’s building. Whenever he marvelled that the same girl was thirty years old now, he would sigh deeply realizing that he had been wasting his life cutting hair
all the while. ‘Ssho,’ thinking about the distance he and his scissors had travelled, Shivan would say, ‘how time flies in a trice!’

  The folk of Thachanakkara, especially the young men, tried many ruses to ignore the onrush of time. One of them was the lewd meditations at the riverbank. The young men used to compete among themselves to pass time by watching their icon, Vasantha, bathe in Punneli kadavu, and indulge in lusting after her in secret. The soul of Leela, who committed suicide, unloved and unwanted, was taking its revenge on Thachanakkara through her niece. With their own sighs and moans drowned by the hissing sounds of the wind passing through the reeds behind which they sat, the young men shot their libidinous arrows at Vasantha’s bathing scene. Unconsciously imitating Kama, who used sugarcane as his bow, the left hand of these young men gripped the reeds tightly. In memory of the bulging promise of spring seen through the wet sarong tied around her chest, they rolled around in their sleep. However, none of them had the temerity to stand in front of Vengooran Thankappan and ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The times of Naraapillas who married Kunjuammas after seeing them bathe were over. For the noon shows in the cinema theatres in Aluva—Casino, Zeenath, Pankajam—movies with larger-than-life women were being shown. The old mores of a man-woman relationship, which started with a formal sighting of the girl by the prospective groom, had lost all its anxieties in the eyes of men who had access to a surfeit of exposed flesh and female forms. They kept lamenting about the inconveniences of ogling and lurking around real women, when their sizes were nothing compared to what were seen on the screens.

  It was during this period that Bhaimi, who used to come from Vypinkara with sea fish to Thachanakkara, told Muringaattil Shantha something special. When other women used to buy fish, when the beautiful maiden from Muringaattil only looked into her basket and walked away showing aversion, the broker in the fisherwoman woke up. One afternoon, after assuring her of her receptive mood, the old fisherwoman asked Vasantha’s mother, ‘Shall I give you a boy to marry your girl who’s overdue for marriage? He’s from our Vypinkara. They are an aristocratic Nair family. They are moneyed. Lands and fields on top of that. A lad strong of limbs. But then …?’

  Vengooran and his wife weighed the explanation given by Bhaimi of that ‘but then’ against their own perilous finances. They considered it their good fortune that the blind boy’s only condition was that the girl should be beautiful. Vasantha also liked the young man who came to see her in her tiny house, in the company of a grey-haired man. When she has handing over tea and biscuits, he turned his head towards the direction of her sound and she thought his eyes were lovely: there was not an iota of lust in those unseeing eyes.

  In the newly-built wedding platform in front of the Thachanakkara thevar, in the month of Meenam of next year, two weddings took place. Everyone in Thachanakkara participated in the weddings, which took place with an interval of seven days between them. In both weddings, more than blessings, sympathy was showered. The naïve women of Thachanakkara wept for the tragedies of a rich man, blinded in the hooch tragedy, marrying a penurious girl in the first case; in the second wedding, for a dark, epileptic young man marrying his lame cousin. Their husbands wiped clean the plantain leaves on which the feast was served, burped, and nit-picked on both the function and the feasts, laughing with derision.

  The twenty-one days that Govindan Master came and stayed in the New House to nurse Naraapilla, greatly influenced the future of Jithen, son of Chinnamma, and Radha, daughter of Thankamma. During the days when the young generation of Ayyaattumpilli were getting used to calling Govindan Master with the unfamiliar ‘Elder Uncle’, these two were the ones who got closest to him. Govindan Master was the first person who asked Radha to sing a song, and praised her for her talent. He gave the translations of some Russian novels he was carrying in his cloth shoulder bag to her for reading. During the breaks in the rain, they strolled through the empty compounds of Ayyaattumpilli. Govindan Master’s heart bled for Radha as he looked at the singer dragging her game leg on the damp grass, as she followed him.

  Govindan Master walked through the plots of land where the hundreds of saplings once planted by his brother Chandran had become big trees. At the western end of the plot, Govindan Master showed Jithen a coconut palm, which stood like a hapless peacock that had lost its feathers. ‘This was our areca-coco palm!’

  Jithen looked at that, remembering his grandfather’s betelnut cracker. He justifiably assumed that it was a hybrid of the coconut and areca palms, inasmuch as the knife for cutting the arecanuts was known as betelnut cracker. When he started imagining things about the nuts of that magical palm, Govindan Master explained to him that a coconut palm, which had the largest coconuts set apart only for seeding purposes, was called areca-coco palm. The coconut palm, on which coconuts for seeding matured. When Jithen told him how he misunderstood it as a mixed breed of the two palms and laughed, all of a sudden, Govindan Master went silent, reminded of another kind of mixed breed.

  Govindan Master, who stayed in the New House—this time, along with his son—for the fortnight till the sixteenth day obsequies of Naraapilla, called his sister one day and asked her, ‘Thankammae, did any one of you tell father about Narayanan earlier?’, a look of discovery flashing across his face.

  Thankamma shrugged, indicating negation.

  ‘Today it was that deed writer of yours who told me,’ Govindan Master said with a disbelieving perplexity, ‘that father had already granted this house to Narayanan in his will!’

  ‘That is excellent!’ Suppressing a start, which arose in her and making sure Chinnamma was nowhere close, Thankamma said, ‘Now he has to only get married! Shall we consider my poor handicapped girl, etta? How many times can she be decked up and displayed before men?’

  ‘It’s not that I haven’t thought about it,’ Govindan Master said after a long silence. ‘Isn’t he the spoken-for cousin of hers as per tradition? Didn’t you also marry your spoken-for cousin?’

  A low-level grumbling continued till the month of Meenam. As against the news of the beauty of Muringaattil getting married to a blind man, the shock of the handicapped girl of Ayyaattumpilli marrying her spoken-for cousin got attenuated. The month of Meenam arrived. When Narayanan and Radha started their cohabitation in the cleaned and lime-washed New House, their remarkable compatibility and love surprised the folk of Thachanakkara.

  It was the union of two loners who had waited apart, pining for love.

  After Geetha and Rema both stopped their studies within a gap of two years between them, having failed in English language in their undergraduate examinations, the studies of Jithen, now in his tenth standard, assumed an avoidable seriousness. Shankaran used to secretly feel proud about his son topping his class, despite his frequent asthma attacks. Under the mistaken impression that his son wanted to be a scientist, he used to bring bauxite powder in empty matchboxes from his factory, at least twice a year. In his misguided attempts to create glittering ink, Jithen mixed it with the blue ink of the Bril brand, and spoiled at least four pens irredeemably, filling them with that concoction. By the time he was fourteen, under the expert advice of his two older friends, he got immersed in experimentations for producing a shiny ink from his own body, without the need to add bauxite powder. However, in the moment of his first successful attempt, wild with joy, he lost his balance and, unable to see the results of his experiments, he went under, and ended up swallowing the water of the Aluva river through his nose and mouth. He was just learning to swim; keeping himself afloat with one hand, he was treading water and keeping himself busy looking at a woman bathing on the far bank of the river. The experiment succeeded the moment the woman, who was soaping herself, turned around and looked at him. He lost control, sank, and gulped water into his lungs.

  However, the wick continued to burn in him, refusing to be doused by any amount of dunking. On his fourteenth birthday, with the permission of his mother, he went to see the late-night movie in Pankajam theatre along wi
th his friends. Unnikrishnan and Babu, who were close to twenty years in age, were the birthday boy’s companions. But that night they did not reach the movie theatre. When Babu started saying in whispers about something more tempting, Jithen’s heart started beating loud enough to wake all of Thachanakkara. Babu had seen Vasantha and her blind husband get down from the bus at Thachanakkara in the afternoon of Thiruvonam day. If his guess was correct, they would be staying the night in the Muringaattil House with its disintegrating window panes. Unnikrishnan concurred in Babu’s opinion—who was speaking from experience—that the views through the cracks in the window panes were far superior to those on the screen.

  ‘If my sisters ask me to narrate the story of the movie what do I tell them?’ Jithen asked, in his eagerness to seek a way out of the plan.

  ‘Isn’t this for that?’ Handing Jithen a lyrics book, folded in four and stuck inside his pocket, which also contained the synopsis of the movie, Babu closed that loophole too.

  Thus, the three of them stood flat against the wall of Muringaattil, holding their breath and listening to the coughs of some unknown person from inside.

  They peeped into the house, which had no electricity, and were thrilled to hear a slow, yet mounting feminine moan from inside. A cot started to creak inside the house. Imagining the feminine grunts, which were now coming from inside, were Vasantha’s, the trinity outside stiffened in the darkness. As if on the point of climaxing with pleasure, invocations of God arose inside. The plea to be killed came. Then it went high-pitched, hit the floor, and stopped. Realizing that someone had got up and was lighting the lamp, Babu and Unnikrishnan jumped into the alley and disappeared into the night. Jithen tarried for a moment. He needed to sight the owner of the sounds. The light from the lantern inside showed the sight to him though the crack in the pane.