An old woman, swathed in a blanket, came towards the window, holding the lantern. She was still invoking God in the plaintive voice heard earlier. When he recognized that they were the moans of a dying woman laid low by age and sickness that he and his friends were eavesdropping on till then, Jithen was staggered. Coughing and spitting far through the ajar window, unknowingly, the old woman snapped at the spectator outside.
When Jithen reached home at midnight dissembling happiness at having seen the movie, the unintentional question his mother asked him, drove a dagger into his heart, ‘Now that you have seen it, aren’t you satisfied?’
The next day his mother told him that the aged mother of Muringaattil Shantha had caught a disease called chicken pox and Vasantha and her husband, who had come in the evening of Thiruvonam, had returned the same time, fearing infection.
Jithen never told the truth to his friends, who had swooned that night listening to the sounds through the crack in the window. Instead, he took mendacious pride in being elevated as one of the daredevils who was an eyewitness of the sex act of the beauty.
Without his own knowledge, he was adding his own name to the list of those afflicted by the blindnesses of the new era.
THREE
Fragmentation
28 October 1999
…Like a cobbler who ignores people without footwear, I am sitting with my needle and thread by the side of a highway overflowing with love and friendship. Any wonder that I find flower sandals repulsive?
Dearest girl, it’s after I fell in love with you that my feeling that I am a cruel man became a confirmed belief. Before that, I used to have this vain belief that I was someone great; had arrogantly believed that I could love the whole world, all by myself. However, that belief has abated somewhat now. When you start loving individuals, you start hating humanity; and vice versa.
Haven’t you felt that every man, to fight with himself, has to blow up trivial incidents? Similarly, isn’t there something enjoyable in treachery—though we pronounce the word treachery with a trembling heart? I don’t expect an answer. Without fearing one’s denigration of the status as a human being, no one would dare reply to these two questions in all honesty. Yes, if you think about it, you shall have to laugh through tears. The hapless man who can be injured by a mustard seed, lights mortars for enjoyment!
Do you know that every man is a child deep inside? A small child who cries standing in the festival grounds of life, lost in the sounds of the crowds and unnoticed by anyone. No one knows where the child in him has come from. But he is there. He is the elephant, the percussion ensemble, and the crowd of the festival. But he doesn’t know that.
My freshly-hatched feminist, ‘he’ refers to a human being; and in that, all ‘shes’ including you, have been subsumed.
In the land earmarked for him by his father, Govindan Master made a building, close to the alley, with three shops on the ground floor and a hall on the first floor. Thus, a new shopkeeper appeared four plots away from Kochu Parashu’s shop. Narayanan, the son of Govindan Master. The husband of Thankamma’s daughter Radha. The spitting image of the deceased Naraapilla.
Dividing the hall on the first floor into two, Govindan Master started a library and reading room, with the help of the Cooperative Bank of Thachanakkara. Before the inauguration, many hazarded guesses that it would be named Sulochana Memorial Reading Room or Naraapilla Memorial Reading Room. On this matter, in Pooshaappi Stores, people split up into two groups and held a debate under the leadership of Paanamparampath Nanu and Karunakaran Karthaavu. However, unknown to the others, Govindan Master had another old debt to pay. A memory that remained fresh about a man who visited Ayyaattumpilli in his childhood. A tribute to a guest whom his father had insulted by spitting ceremoniously into the crepe jasmine flowers in their yard, in front of his teary-eyed mother. When the two young painters, standing on the scaffolding in front of the parapet of the top floor with paint and brush, started writing the name of the reading room, it was one which was not in the memory of those gathered below. Nor did they have the courage to ask Govindan Master, who used to come from Cherai to Thachanakkara only on Sundays. The painters standing on the scaffolding, wearing clothes which were dotted with paints of many hues, first pressed a long thread dipped in indigo on the wall. Then stretching the thread, they drew broken double lines on the parapet. The children of the new generation read open-mouthed, the letters one of the painters had outlined with a pencil touching the borders on top and bottom: Kuttippuzha Krishna Pillai Smaraka Vijnanaposhini Reading Room.
Fleshing out the skeletal outline made with the pencil, three lines—‘Kuttippuzha Krishna Pillai’, the first line in middling blue, the next line ‘Vijnanaposhini’ in red with yellow border, and the third line, ‘Reading Room’ in brick colour—appeared in the sky. The new generation that lazily read the lines painted in blue did not understand that time was repaying, through a library, a debt to a great soul for committing his whole life, without family or progeny, to the cause of knowledge.
Aaminumma, who used to come to Ayyaattumpilli bearing tales from Elookkara and Kayintikkara and carry rice water back, had burped for the last time and become one with God. Many of the Muslim children, who used to trade in pomelos from Geethalayam, buying them at thirty paise, had flown to the blazing heat of Arab countries as soon as they became strong of limbs. Words such as passport and visa were uttered at least once a day in their relatives’ houses. The sweat those hardworking men spilt in foreign countries, turned to vapour and rose up, mixed with the monsoon winds, and rained in Elookkara and Kayintikkara as green currency. Shankaran, on his daily walk to the factory through that route, noticed new concrete houses springing up at the rate of one every morning on either side of the red-soil path leading up to the Eloor ferry point. Wearing ostentatious yellow and green lungis, these men on vacation used to buy fish from the vendors on bicycles without haggling. Jealousy and intolerance became rampant, running their roots into the mouldy degree certificates of the Nair youth of Thachanakkara, who eschewed all physical work. They translated that into ridicule. They spread tasteless jokes, making fun of religion, caste, and women, whom they considered inferior to them. Manikandan, the son of Paanamparampath Nanu, with a narrative skill which excelled his father’s, described to the young men, who had started thronging Narayanan’s grocery store, a letter which one of the mothers of Elookkara had purportedly dictated to a scribe, for her son in Dubai.
‘Right in the front,’ the mother, rubbing her feet sitting on the parapet and arranging in her mind matters according to their importance, is reported to have said to the young scribe, who had got ready with a pen and paper to transcribe the letter, ‘write then, I’m clothless.’
‘Umm, writed!’ the young scribe said after completing the opening lines.
‘Th’r isself,’ rubbing the scar on her leg, the mother narrated her next problem, ‘write, bit by dog.’
‘Aah, writed!’ adding the continuation, the young scribe said.
The rest of the story Paanamparampath Manikandan completed in a paroxysm of laughter. ‘The kid wrote it without leaving a word! What did the son sitting in Dubai read? His mother’s letter is full of ribaldry.’ With help of gestures, Manikandan repeated the lines of the letter, ‘Right in the front I’m clothless th’r isself bit by dog.’
The unemployed Nair youth who had congregated on the shop veranda roared with laughter. As if echoing each laughter set off by the invented story, the dog which had earlier bitten the mother’s ankle barked at Pankajaakshan’s gate.
Jokesters who found nirvana in creating such stories masquerading as humour, sprouted like mushrooms which needed no fertile humus, in Thachanakkara and Aluva, which enveloped Thachanakkara, and further south in Kalamassery, Ernakulam, and Kochi. The psyche of youth, which could create miracles in any line of creativity, confined itself to an art form called mimicry—which needed neither knowledge nor contemplation. That year, four smart young men, who came from Kochi for perf
orming in the temple festivities, dumped a new performing art called Mimics Parade in Thachanakkara. Their incredible mimicked voices were amplified a thousand times by the huge box speakers rented out from Aluva. A minority in the Devaswom Festival Committee, which had been struggling to bring back the long-ignored Kathakali to the temple grounds, laughed uncontrollably at the mimicry performance, and gave the nervous young men in their sandal-coloured uniforms, an advance for the next year’s booking.
One Sunday in April, Jithen was performing, for the benefit of his sisters, some of the mimicry acts he had seen the previous day at the temple. The voice of an Ottanthullal performer, made tremulous perhaps by the lack of audience, could be heard faintly from the temple, where the temple flag had been raised signalling the start of the annual temple festival. Behind Jithen, who was facing his sisters seated in the small veranda behind Geethalayam, Govindan Master appeared. After the unrepressed laughter of his sisters was over, hearing his elder uncle behind him, Jithen turned around. Thankamma, doubled up with laughter, and Govindan Master, unsmiling, stood watching him closely. He was ashamed that his elder uncle would have heard him mimicking the voices, and yet reasonably, expected some compliments.
Touching Jithen’s cheeks with fingers calloused from using chalks, Govindan Master said, ‘Child, did you like that programme so much?’
Jithen realized for the first time that addressing an adolescent with an incipient moustache as a child had such powers for belittling. He felt the fingers that touched his cheek were both trembling and burning.
‘Definitely, mimicking is an admirable skill. But the problem lies in what is being imitated and why it is being imitated,’ Govindan Master said in a voice which had in equal measure piety and trace of phlegm. ‘Do you know who is the first mimicry artiste in the world?’ he asked looking at Jithen and his sisters. As they blinked without an answer, Govindan Master narrated that story:
Once a group of Buddhist monks were accompanying Buddha, asking for alms along a city street. Flourishing commerce had made the place crowded like a festival ground. The original Bodhisattva was moving along, listening to his companion Anandan’s doubts and answering them with only smiles. Suddenly, breaking out of its enclosure, a rutting elephant emerged onto the street. Near the stalls of the vendors, danger loomed.
Seeing Buddha leaving the street and moving into a clump of trees by the side of the city, ignoring the plaintive cries of the crowd and the monks including Anandan, his disciples cried out, ‘Lord, are you forsaking us as danger approaches?’
There was no answer. Instead, from behind the trees, the trumpeting of a cow elephant was heard—an invitation to the rutting one standing on the street. With the tranquillity of one who has received a calming medication, the tusker walked across to the clump of trees, which was at a distance. The Lord who had trumpeted like a cow elephant behind the trees, reappeared now in front of the crowd, who were saved from being impaled on the elephant’s tusks.
After completing the story, Govindan Master said, ‘Every art has an invocation to save. It’s only souls who contemplate who can be its true sources. What you heard yesterday in the temple was the rowdy laughter of derision and defamation. It may get the crowd to laugh, but will weaken the soul of the individual. Remember one thing—art and the artiste should be the sanctuary of life. In that sense, every art is an enlightenment. And every artiste, a Buddha. I know, my son, you will be able to remember what I am telling you now!’
Geetha and Rema did not understand anything. Since Thankamma had got into Chinnamma’s kitchen as soon as Govindan Master had started his story, she did not have to hear it. However, Jithen could see a blazing old light hiding in the words of his uncle: sagacity was its name.
That coin, unimpressive to most due to obsolescence, fell with a happy, clinking sound into the money bank that was Jithen’s heart, which still being immature, was not yet in use.
When he was eighty, the second owner of Pooshaappi Stores, Kochu Parashu, after bequeathing the shops to his forty-five-year-old bachelor son, fell and died on the road. At the time of his death, Kochu Parashu was rich enough to give every inhabitant of Thachanakkara a feast on the sixteenth day of his death, as per the sapindi ritual of oblation to the manes. This was celebrated in a tent, which was put up though it was not the season for rain, with his portrait kept at the entrance, with incense sticks burning in front of it—which gave the wrong impression of a handsomeness which he did not possess when alive—and by sowing satisfied burps, which were created by the hearty feast. With that, a chapter, which, it was feared, would go on interminably, came to an end and a new one started.
With the coming of Narayanan’s store on the other side, sales had come down in Pooshaappi Stores. Kochu Parashu’s son Vishwanathan, who had become a riddle which Thachanakkara folk could not solve, sat silently in the store that was now into the third generation, unmindful of the tapering business returns. On the veranda in front of him, the lunatic Alamboori became a regular. Alamboori used to sit with his back to Vishwanathan. As he sat staring at the back of Alamboori with his torn shirt and the yellow nylon poonool, the past would create bubbles in Vishwanathan’s silence. They had both started the Eagles Club in one of the rooms of that building. It was from this oil-smudged till-box that Vishwanathan, dodged his father’s vigil and managed to smuggle out ten rupee notes, to fornicate with Lalitha of Chammaram. Vasudevan from Nedumpilli Mana, who was the president of Eagles Club and then of Arunodaya Club near the irrigation bund, now sat in front of him like a stinking scarecrow. An Alamboori, shunned by all and created by the silence of Vishwanathan, who was filled with self-loathing for having used that silence once as a shield for self-preservation when the police came to Arunodaya Club.
One afternoon, when no one was around, in an attempt to prevent a nervous breakdown, Vishwanathan called out to Alamboori seated with his back to him, ‘Daa, Vasudevaa…!’
He did not look back. On the verge of tears, Vishwanathan called again, ‘Alamboori!’
This time he answered. Displaying his stained teeth and rolling his eyes smouldering with insanity, Alamboori asked, ‘Who’s calling me from behind? Who? If it’s that reprobate Vasudevan from the Mana, tell him I am not here.’
The mad man lay on his back on the floor and laughed. ‘What’s the use of calling now? I am sick of smoking beedi butts. If you can, give me a full beedi and help! Enjoy my sizzling to death like this.’
That year, Jithen received the first punishment for considering love to be the first obstacle in life—at the end of an excursion during his undergraduate class. But then, he did not imagine that the incident would insinuate itself two years later into a story he was going to write in two hours. He also did not realize those days that creativity had the divinity to convert tears into laughter and vice versa.
The vehicle they were travelling in was going downhill slowly. All the singing and dancing and whooping had subsided. The return leg of every excursion is boring: lethargic like a siesta and heavy like death.
Sliding the glass with tinted film stuck on it, Jithen looked at the valleys on his right side. Why doesn’t looking at mountains and the sea never tire one?
Beyond the wire fences by the side of the road, oranges which could be reached and plucked. Depths which bore silvery clouds in their womb, seemed to invite the onlooker silently to dissolve into the emptiness.
She was in the seat right behind. Possibly dozing. When he turned his head as if without pre-meditation, she was smiling, half asleep. Some of her forelocks were caught in her eyelashes. In the breeze, a drizzle of single strands of her hair could be seen on her face.
‘Shall I come to your seat?’ she asked.
‘Um?’ He raised his eyebrows, with its meaning falling between come and do not come.
‘Just like that,’ she said, ‘to look at the mountains!’
‘You can see from there also.’
‘I can’t move this glass.’
Braving the bumpy ride,
she moved to Jithen’s seat. When the starchiness of the cotton skirt touched his arm, Jithen was irritated. You wouldn’t have come to sit and watch the hills, Jithen said in his heart. After this year-end trip, there are no more opportunities to sit by the side and confess. Cry, without anyone seeing and hearing, cry, begging for forgiveness!
‘Hic,’ she hiccupped. Before she could lean out of the window, the vomit fell on Jithen’s shirt. And, blown by the wind, on his face as well.
She had come only to vomit. Her puke stank like shit.
Smell of a cremated love.
Four
The Embodied
13 October 1999
…I got yet another reason this afternoon to hate navels.
I was summoned to the boss’ cabin, as he wanted to meet me. Acting as if he didn’t know I was standing in front of him, he kept on reading a thick book and simpered. Possibly that was the only book he has ever read. Guinness Book of Records. His lime-stained fingers were drumming on the glossy pages. The corners of his mouth were stained by the blood of betel leaves.
Offering the book to me with the page he was reading open, boss said, ‘An interesting record. For collecting the dirt from one’s navel in a bottle!’
I accepted the book without any interest. It is true. A guy has made that sickening record his own. The smiling navel-scavenger was shown in the picture. I remembered grandfather, who had made imprints of his own palms dipping his hands in his own shit. He was in his dotage. But this guy?
‘I told you, to make one’s mark in this world, anything is acceptable,’ Boss continued, pushing another arecanut piece into his mouth. ‘Purity of God … Isn’t that what you said that day? Your contention that leaving such marks would alone be creativity is utter idiocy!’
Looking at him with a bitter smile, I said to myself: working under you in this factory is also idiocy. Drummer monkey … That is an interesting toy for a kid for some years. But what about the one who manufactures it all his lifetime?
A Preface to Man Page 33