A Preface to Man

by Subhash Chandran

  Ann Marie, when we experience some things, when we see a place for the first time, don’t we feel it’s not the first time? My meeting with him today gave me the same sense of déjà vu. But today it was fatally prophetic. In my twentieth year, in a story I had written believing erroneously that I was a writer, I had encapsulated my life long ago! Alas, I didn’t preserve that tale!

  Vijayan, the second son of Poovamparampath Kochu Parashu, was the first one to buy a TV in Thachanakkara.

  He had gone to great lengths in the path of domesticity on which his elder brother Vishwanathan had failed to embark. By giving birth to two sons with a gap of two years between them, Vijayan’s wife had emulated her mother-in-law and ensured that Kochu Parashu’s lineage would continue. To strengthen the lineage, she educated her children in the English-medium school in Aluva. To ferry the children to and from school, a school bus came for the first time to Thachanakkara.

  One afternoon, crowding round an autorickshaw found halted in front of Vijayan’s house with two long steel tubes secured on its top, the children of Thachanakkara connected those tubes with the word Doordarshan. Vijayan disembarked from the vehicle with a big carton and after him came out a young man holding a small plastic bag. There was a debate among the children on whether the transparent plastic-topped thing in his pocket was a pen or a tester, which tickled electricity with its tail and grinned. In the long walkway to the new house built by Vijayan in the Poovamparampath land, the steel pipes were carried with a proprietary air by Vijayan’s children in an atmosphere with as much reverence as when the areca palm, meant to be installed as the flagpole in the Thachanakkara temple, was reverentially borne to the temple grounds. When some of the children milled around, trying to lend their shoulder to the pipes, Vijayan snapped at them with as much ferocity as he would at stray dogs.

  ‘Get lost, kids!’ The weight of the carton he was carrying reflected in his voice too. After pulling back a little, the children moved in again.

  After a short while, the steel tube appeared upright on Vijayan’s terrace like a thin flagpole of the new era. The thin aluminium tubes, with increasing lengths, fixed on another tube kept horizontal to the upright pole, piqued the interest of the audience consisting of Thachanakkara children. The crows of Thachanakkara, which were irreverent enough to perch even on electricity lines, were frightened by that antenna that rose into the sky and thenceforth kept a respectable distance from it.

  ‘Umm, enough, enough! Go home now!’ Vijayan gave the ultimate decree to the new generation of Thachanakkara peeping in from the window, gnawing at their nails. His ten- and twelve-year-olds stood sweating with pride. The eldest told the bunch of curious children who still remained at the gate, ‘We bought it to see the matches! Oh, what fun we are going to have!’

  On the way back from the school, one of his friends pointed out to Jithen the wonder called antenna, which was sticking into the sky, with its digits spread out. The silvery comb to bring under control the unruly mops of the hair of the coconut and arecanut palms. Jithen could never forget the first day he saw that antenna during his schooldays, even though, in the following years, antennae on upright poles on the crowns of the houses proliferated in Thachanakkara, standing like ships’ masts. He had to forge a friendship with the English-medium students of Poovamparampath, only for the sake of watching television. He handed over his long-time collection of matchbox labels to the younger child of Poovamparampath. It was one of those collections he had decided get rid of, since he had decided that he was a grown-up. Thus, in return for those moribund labels, he won the right to watch television with its moving images.

  He saw: hundreds of thousands of black and white termite wings were quivering in the glass case. Jithen’s new-found friend was untying his blue school tie. With a grown-up’s expression, he touched one of the knobs of the TV set and the termite wings turned to the white lines of a court. In the middle of the court was a net which touched the floor, on either side of which were men holding racquets and were dressed in white and dashing about, panting. They were wearing white shorts too. The ‘tock’ sound which arose when the racquet met the ball caused an unfamiliar joy in Jithen’s heart. ‘Aw, advantage!’ Stepping back a little from the TV, the friend said, ‘If you like, we can have a wager; Ramesh Krishnan will win this match as well.’

  Jithen was watching tennis and Ramesh Krishnan, who had a big posterior not normally seen in tennis players, for the first time. He was hearing the word advantage for the first time. Still, without any hesitation, he said, ‘Definitely, he will win this!’

  Ramesh Krishnan ran from corner to corner bearing his burden, sweating. There was silence in the house. Only the sound of the ball hitting the racquet resounded at irregular intervals, like the gong of a clock in disrepair. Thighs grew cold from sitting in the lotus position on the mosaic floor. When the friend went inside, calling out—‘Mummy, tea…’ Jithen pressed his fingers on the sofa-cum-bed by his side. The table cloth on the TV stand, the violet plastic flower on top of the TV, the wedding photo hanging on the wall, all appeared larger-than-life. They all appeared connected to this wonderful thing called television. They complemented one another. He saw a black, plastic umbilical cord going up from behind that wonder box and making the figure of a zero above the window, and then moving up changing the zero to six and moving out along the right angle of the ceiling. The silence was resounding. The ball kept meeting the racquet. He looked agape at the bag lazily thrown on the sofa and the black shoes kicked off by his friend. The shoes had been silenced by the smelly socks shoved into their mouths. Asthma possessed him with a sneeze. He got up and walked out slowly. He heard his friend plead with his mother over the hum of the fridge, ‘Mummy, some more time. Till brother comes back from his tuition.’

  ‘Um,’ the woman spoke. ‘Let it not be every day, do you understand?’

  The door handle too felt cold from the silence. God, the fourteen-year-old said, they do not know who they are shoving away!

  Once he was in the yard, he looked up again at the silvery comb of the antenna. When he saw the blue sky above it, his asthma eased.

  In the next few years, television reached more houses in Thachanakkara. Resembling the soft stem of the plantain on which an incense stick had been stuck, the high-rise antennae stood atop houses, emitting smoke-like clouds. Rendering Poovamparampath Vijayan’s black and white TV irrelevant, many installed colour TVs in the drawing rooms, financed by generous loans from the Thachanakkara Cooperative Bank. Under the impression that the height of the antenna was the measuring rod for the nobility of the TV set inside, many of them bought steel pipes longer than required and installed them atop their houses. Through these steel pipes, initially news, then a Hindi film songs programme called Chitrahaar, cricket, and later, Ramayana, leaked into the houses. Fed up with listening to the women narrating the story of Ramayana, when bathing at the irrigation bund, Chinnamma also bought a black and white TV. She had goose pimples looking at Rama and Ravana simultaneously shooting ten arrows at each other, the arrow heads standing still in the atmosphere for a long time facing each other, and then, to the accompaniment of instrumental music, dissolving. The next day she declared at the bathing ghat, ‘What if the TV was procured at a high price and with loan, the war scenes are so real!’

  The generation of Jithen passed through the serialized Ramayana featuring a simpleton actor called Arun Govil with his powdered face, then through Mahabharata which gave more importance to the swish of the costumes than to the precepts of Bhagawad Gita, and then through thousands of cricket matches played with mock competitiveness that hid the bribes and match fixings.

  Play predominated at this testing time when children evolved into adults. Television helped an invocation to spread throughout India, with perhaps more zeal than the phrase ‘Quit India’. From the open grounds of Thachanakkara, even Chinnamma of Ayyaattumpilli heard it: Howzzat? The new generation screamed the phrase without realizing its significance. In the close-ups in
the TV, umpires resembling Wellesley and Mountbatten kept negating the appeals, shaking their heads from left to right.

  Sometime during those years, reading the strange term ‘athletic genius’ in the newspaper, Govindan Master smiled sadly, sitting in his house in Cherai. After two decades, he would smile the same smile when he would hear the word ‘book market’. New-age words are born from conjoining those once considered opposites. It occurred to Govindan Master that words such as insight, which were uttered with extreme reverence, had disappeared from the language. ‘Body,’ he laughed alone, saying a line broken off from a sloka, ‘Body comes first, verily!’

  Jithen had fallen prey to the peculiar disease of falling in love with every beautiful woman that he came across. He was also in love with homely women. With them having no chance of enjoying ardent masculinity, he could, even in darkness, see the shadow of animal-like helplessness in their eyes. However, his feelings towards beautiful women were different. At twenty, his libido was uncontrolled enough to make him want to rape a beautiful woman in a public place and invite arrest.

  Jithen was not handsome. However, he had in him an innate aesthetic sense to create Earth out of Mars in a flash. The brightest example for his aesthetics was the short story he wrote within a mere two hours, which was world class due to its unique theme. In style, it resembled a Colombian author’s books, which he had read in the library started by Govindan Master in Thachanakkara. Spending one-sixth of his retirement benefits, Govindan Master had donated some more excellent books to the library. Most of them were by renowned foreign authors. In that one story Jithen had written during his lifetime, their influences were certainly present. The story, which overflowed from a two-hundred-page note with a red lotus on its cover, had as its protagonist an old troglodyte called Bharathan, who had divine powers.

  The story ran like this:

  Based on hearsay, a woman journalist goes to the mountains alone in search of a sanyaasi who resides there and is supposed to have the extraordinary power of recognizing the smells of colours. Though he had not received any creature after turning into a cave dweller, Bharathan welcomes this girl, young enough to be his daughter, with wild honey and tells her his quaint story without any trace of lewdness. The moment of his discovery that each colour had its own different smell was quite unexpected and magical: its origin was a wager he had laid with his friends as a student.

  To win the bet he had to reveal the colour of the underwear of a luscious girl whose ankles were good enough to hurt the Adam’s apple of the boys from too much swallowing. With the self-confidence born of the marijuana smoke provided by a friend in the hostel, who hailed from Wayanad, the seventeen-year-old pulled up the skirt of the beautiful girl from behind and produced a twin melon shape of light blue colour before his friends. That night, after leaving a note asking the college authorities to spare the young man who had destroyed her life, the girl consumed the red-tinted blue paint and turpentine, which her father had bought for painting their house, and after lying comatose for three days, died uttering her famous last words, ‘A real lover will never approach from the rear.’

  What about Bharathan who was responsible for her death? Using the wager money of two thousand rupees, he got a big painting made of her and hung it in the library; survived the legal tangles for abetting suicide; kissed the feet of her father and atoned for his sins; and then roamed all over north India like a sanyaasi. However, he was not able to become a sanyaasi. The reason was a special odour which had entered his brain through his nostrils from the momentary nakedness of the girl that was revealed under the mango tree in the college. Bharathan had known from his later experience that it was neither the smell of new or old fabric nor of the sweat formed between a woman’s legs. While dozing in the afternoon breeze, on the veranda of a shop in the North Indian metropolis known as the Pink City, he had an epiphany about that odour.

  ‘That was the smell of the colour blue!’ Waking up startled, Bharathan ran through the streets shouting like Archimedes.

  Thereafter, Bharathan honed his olfactory powers. He could smell a deeper smell with dark blue, than that of the light blue of that day. The wilted smell of yellow, the iron smell of red, the natural smell of the life-like green, all became distinct with hard practice. He understood that black smelt of death and white had the clean, transparent smell of sunlight. Coming to know of his special powers, a famous magician made Bharathan a member of a troupe of magicians touring worldwide, with a remuneration of two thousand rupees a day. His item was to predict the colour of the underwear of the women who came to see the show. The magician would knock Bharathan’s head with his magic wand and declare that he was bestowing on Bharathan the power to predict colours. After that, Bharathan, taking deep breaths, would strut in front of the rich and beautiful women seated in front of the audience, and would announce correctly the colour of the underwear each of them wore, including their hues, through the wireless microphone.

  However, as could be imagined, Bharathan could not continue in that job for long. Before long, Bharathan realized that he was deceiving himself by letting his extraordinary powers be prostituted by going along with the rigmarole of getting knocked on the head by the dry wand of his master to pretend that he had acquired the temporary power for smelling colours. Also, in his attempts to smell colours, he also had to suffer the stultifying smell of the venereal diseases of some of the rich ladies in the audience. Even that was bearable—till one day the master declared that Bharathan’s item was going to be expanded to include identifying the colours of men’s underwear too. When matters reached that level, Bharathan decided that solitary life incognito was better and returned to Kerala and found a mountain which was not listed by the Tourism Department. There he liberated his powers from underwear. He sharpened his powers to recognize the smells of not merely rivers, forests and hills, but also the smell of the subterranean springs bubbling deep inside the earth, of the clouds seeking to escape into outer space, of stars boiling with a sad sound.

  Jithen’s story continues: as she is about to climb down the mountain after taking photos of Bharathan to include in the article in the weekend edition of the prominent newspaper, the young journalist asks Bharathan teasingly, ‘Just for fun, can you guess my … colour?’

  He correctly answers the girl, who thought she was cleverer than him, and had tried to test the man with divine powers: ‘I can’t, because you are not wearing any!’

  The story ends with the embarassed journalist, being given a peroration, as in a classical drama.

  ‘That was not a guess just because I could not get the smell,’ Bharathan said with a smile. ‘Beautiful women who come to conduct interviews wearing miniskirts, even if they do not make any preparations, should at least take care to keep their legs together. Why should we resort to guessing about things which can be seen directly?’

  After reading the story and returning it to Jithen, Govindan Master said, ‘Now you should try for a bigger one. There should be Thachanakkara in it. You, me, and your grandfather should be in it!’

  Jithen looked once again at the picture of the lotus on the cover of the book. This story was about this flower. Now, one should write about the roots which sucked up the nutrients. That is what Uncle Govindan said: a book about the mud into which our roots run.

  Be the Brahma seated on the lotus, which blooms and rises from the mire which fills the navel of the present.

  One must create.

  FIVE

  Omnivorous

  2 September 1999

  …Yesterday I paid the first rent for our house. For the last few days of last month, I had to pay almost half a month’s rent. The house owner seems to have forgotten the ingress of water from the gutter. Or would he have thought that I deserved this wholly? The promise is that by the time you reach after our wedding, everything will be repaired. It is not going to be easy to find another place for one thousand rupees. I can see the displeasure on your face. And now, trying to be cheerful, saying,
‘No, no, there is nothing like that’.

  Dear Ann Marie, to entice you with a description of heaven, I am not inviting you to death. I think it is unfair to invite someone to my life without giving advance notice about such hells. An injustice like how God brought us into this world without our permission.

  I can see the sea, sitting in the office. To forget the bilge water of daily life, this sight is more than enough. If I keep looking at the largest of the water bodies created by God, I can forget myself. I do not know if I can call the gutter a water body. However, gutters have a pride of place among the civilized man’s greatest inventions. I can see these mini-streams, which bear the impure blood of the city, emptying themselves at various points into the sea, like tributaries of a river. In a way, this is a water colour painting of human life merging in God. (Or in the Void?)

  Oh, what am I getting at? Haven’t you heard that old Zen story? The caged tiger keeps going around in the cage, impatiently. A bird flying outside the cage asks, ‘What are you doing?’ The tiger says, ‘I am writing.’ The bird asks, ‘Writing? What?’ The tiger says, ‘Cipher.’ The bird becomes curious. ‘Why are you writing only the cipher?’ ‘You will not understand now,’ the harried tiger said, ‘If you lose your liberty, everything is just a cipher!’

  The Kuttippuzha Krishnapillai Memorial Vijnanaposhini Reading Room, established in Thachanakkara by Govindan Master, created a Sofia Begum. The best and the brightest among the women he had met in his entire life, Jithen summarized her thus in one of the pages of his diary, a habit which he had taken up for a short time:

  Sofia Begum: the only woman with both brain and breasts.

  Having recognized that he was a failure in maintaining a daily diary, it was also a revelation that his days were empty and uninteresting. As a child, he used to curse himself for not being born one of the heroes extolled in the heroic ballads of north Kerala, the Vadakkan Paattukal. During adolescence, he used to feel disappointed at the Indian Independence having taken place a quarter century ago. Now, at the start of his youth, he felt if he had been born at least two decades earlier, he could, at a minimum, have become a Naxalite. He could have filled the torn sack of his life with some action promoting common good. Recognizing himself as one jostling for space among a throng of youngsters caught in a life with nothing to look forward to beyond studies, job-seeking, marriage, and building a house, and dreaming of many ways of pleasuring themselves, his soul gagged. Without a person, philosophy, or movement to seek refuge in, time was getting crushed. In old places of moral rectitude everywhere, new greeds had been installed. Life was becoming empty without being able to find a decent soul as a friend or a mate or a guru.