A Preface to Man

by Subhash Chandran

  ‘Hah! Is that Kaali Pulakkalli?’ He smiled showing his gums, vain about his sense of hearing, which had become acute, as his sight went down. ‘When did you die?’

  Kaali who had a ravishing, bright smile during the days when she and Naraapilla used to conduct their sexual acrobatics in the anteroom of Ayyaattumpilli, now stood before Appu Nair as an old woman past eighty and laughed heartily. ‘Both of us aren’t dead yet, Lord,’ the old woman said. ‘Your niece in Ayyaattumpilli told me that you have lost your sight. Then itself I had thought that I must pay you a visit. Can you see who this is? You know my son Velayudhan, the dark kid who used to be with me in Naraapilla Lord’s anteroom? This is the third son of Velayudhan. We’ve come to invite you for his wedding!’

  The scene of the harvesting in the fields in Nedumaali appeared before Appu Nair. The cloth cradle hung from the young mango tree convulsed. In that, when the midday sun burned his tender thigh, the little Velayudhan cried, kicking and screaming.

  ‘Where?’ After sometime he withdrew his hands, which he had stretched expecting to touch and feel. ‘The third son of the kid who lay in that lungi cradle? Ayyo, haven’t I died still?’

  ‘Hah, great!’ The shadow, which was folding its fingers, counting, told Appu Nair, ‘Velayudhan’s eldest daughter—in pisheries; the second one—in phorest; the third—in police. Dey, he is that one, who’s come with me.’

  ‘Why is there a smell of cow dung?’ the shadow and sound in front of Appu Nair disappeared and instead odour predominated. He became anxious and pointed to the yard. ‘Who is that, Chokli who’s come with the stud bull? Or the buffalo of that heinous guy?’ The old man flared his nostrils. He felt that someone was showering semi-dried cow dung patties in the yard. Upsetting the spittoon under his cot, he tried to get up. He staggered up to the portico. Seeing the buffalo, which was standing in the yard swishing its tail after dropping fresh dung, for the last time in his life he went hari hara. The golden bell around the buffalo’s neck kept clinging. Appu Nair recognized whose vehicle it was.

  The three donation seekers for the Thachanakkara temple festival, who had come with the receipt book and notices, saw Appu Nair collapsing on the portico, just as they were entering through the gate of Peechamkurichi. There was no one else in the house at that time. Cursing the old man for hampering their donation drive, the men who came with the festival notice, started gathering people.

  Appu Nair was no more.

  The day Shashidharan, son of Pankajaakshan, was elected as the president of Thachanakkara Panchayat, Kalyanikuttyamma distributed rice and milk paayasam to all the Ayyaattumpilli houses.

  As she had become bowlegged from sitting down to milk cows, it had given the fifty-six-year old Kalyanikuttyamma a gait that made her sway from side to side. Coming to Ayyaattumpilli thirty-five years ago as a fashionable woman from Kochi, holding on to Pankajaakshan’s hand, gradually she too acquired the features of the Ayyaattumpilli stock. While during the initial years, her voice was hardly raised above a whisper, now she bellowed even at the cows like the Ayyaattumpilli stock. By the time her youngest son had started sending money from Pathankot every month, having joined the army, her earlier reservations against walking through the alleys carrying bundles of cut grass for the cows, had completely disappeared.

  Prompted by the desire to get rich quickly, when he had cut down all the fruit-bearing trees in their compound and planted rows of cocoa saplings received from the Village Block Office, it backfired on Pankajaakshan. Having learnt to climb trees in the extraordinary circumstances of having been forced to compete with squirrels, the bandicoots made clean holes in the cocoa fruits and devoured the white-covered seeds inside and exhibited their gratification. All over the compound, the cocoa plants stood ashamed with their noses and teats slashed, like Shoorppanakas. With the non-cooperation by the coffee plants, which he had imported from Munnar after being dismissed from service, and Devassy’s absconding after suffering losses at the brick kiln that he eventually abandoned, all avenues of Pankajaakshan’s income came to an end and he was left with the occupation of playing cards. Though he was always a loser in poker—which, for some obscure reason, was known as pannimalarthu, or flipping the pig, in the vernacular—he kept on playing, with the irrepressible optimism that he would win in the next hand. So, Kalyanikuttyamma had to slog all the while for not only putting food on the table for her three sons, but also for anteing up her husband’s wager money for the cards. Though he was of pensionable age, his health was still robust and one day, looking at his wife going to the cowshed with her swaying gait, carrying the milk pails on both hands, he sighed.

  ‘Poor woman, she ain’t good enough anymore!’ Sipping the rum that had been brought wrapped in his socks by his son during his first home leave, Pankajaakshan passed judgment on his wife, twirling his moustache.

  Pankajaakshan could not believe that the beauty who was with him in their honeymoon enveloped by the glass-panes of Munnar, was the old hag of now, staggering around, exhausted by backbreaking overwork. When he was struggling to bear inside him the image of his once-beautiful wife like that of a paramour, Kalyanikuttyamma of Kochi was finding varied reflections of her life in her cows’ milk, urine and dung in the cowshed, which now stood where Kunjuamma had been cremated.

  Her youngest son, joining the army, had mitigated the anguish of Kalyanikuttyamma, who feared that her three sons were growing up to be worse lazybones than their father. She would smile reading the letters sent by Soman, blowing up his tribulations during the training period in Pathankot. ‘My poor son!’ Kalyanikuttyamma would talk to the words carelessly flung on the inland letter by her son. ‘He was getting to enjoy the taste of living off my sweat here!’

  Her eldest son, Venu, was not able to find a job though he was thirty-five years old. His main occupation was standing close to the window and enjoying his reflection in a small handheld mirror. Venu was an ardent fan of singer Yesudas. He had transcribed at least five hundred songs of Yesudas in five notebooks and had learnt by heart at least half of them by singing them repeatedly. Around four o’clock in the evening, wearing only a lungi, and holding a glass of steaming tea in his hand, he would stand at the gate of his house. Looking at the nubile schoolgirls returning to their houses in Elookkara and Kayintikkara, he would slurp his tea with a hiss, and hum some of the songs. At those times, he would feel smug considering himself Yesudas, and also humbled by his readiness to practise at four in the evening standing on the concrete slab covering the gutter in which the sewage water was flowing to the Periyar river. However, the response of the girls to the singer was ever disappointing. They had given a nickname among themselves to the man who appeared with a glass of tea and hummed tunes, when they themselves were hurrying home from school, famished: Tea Demon. When the girls went by, muttering the nickname and suppressing giggles, misconstruing that as their coyness at the sight of his masculinity, Venu ripened his youth standing on that slab for many months.

  Venu’s younger brother Shashi had chosen politics as his playground, as a carry-over of his smelling the clothes of the women working in the brick kiln, hiding behind the coffee bushes, and watching, again surreptitiously, the stud bull of Chokli humping their jersey cow. Starting off as a leader of a band of men who used to mine sand from the river at Punneli kadavu in the dead of the night, shouting instructions to them from the riverbank, soon he spread his influence to daytime activities too. Shashi had divined that, by becoming the leader of the political party—the one which the sons-in-law of Ayyaattumpilli, Kumaran and Shankaran, had served so selflessly hoping for the prosperity of people of all the world—at least his own personal prosperity could be ensured. The old communists, including Kumaran and Shankaran, were stupefied by the sight of Shashi holding forth on the workers’ rights at the various public places in Thachanakkara, an exhibitionism much like the one undertaken by his brother Venu during the evenings with his glass of tea, standing on the slab. Once, when his credentials for becoming the leade
r of a party known to be one of the working class, he declaimed his irrefutable allegiance in front of thousands of the party followers in the temple grounds in Thachanakkara, with such vehemence that even Nature’s cardinal points took notice:

  ‘No one dare teach me about the workers and their sweat.’ Remembering the sweaty clothes of Rebecca that he used to savour, hidden in the coffee plants, Shashidharan said, ‘I have reached here only by having known all that, be sure!’

  Shashi had fed power into those words by tying in the soul of some comrade, who had fought with mere bamboo spears. Without realizing that he was enjoying even then the results of the sweat of someone else, the Thachanakkara folk used to whistle and cheer him on. Thus, in his thirty-third year, Shashidharan, the second son of Pankajaakshan of Ayyaattumpilli, took charge as the youngest ever president of the Thachanakkara panchayat.

  That day, Kalyanikuttyamma felt her cows were lactating more. She made milk paayasam using raw, semi-polished rice and sent it instead of milk to the eight houses in the neighbourhood. Geethalayam, which was next door earlier, was now two houses away. In the forty cents of land, which Chinnamma had sold at different times for meeting the wedding expenses of her daughters, outsiders had built two houses that stood like excrescences. The compound walls all around had made the topography of Ayyaattumpilli a maze resembling Ravanan’s fort. After handing over the vessel with the paayasam in her left hand to the wife of the youngest son of Thankamma, standing at the gate of the old house, Kalyanikuttyamma walked past the many compound walls, and Narayanan’s shop towards Geethalayam, with another vessel of paayasam in her right hand.

  ‘Chinnammae!’ Kalyanikuttyamma hailed, going round the house up to the kitchen door.

  Chinnamma appeared at the door, holding sheaves of coconut spathe, which she was going to insert into the sawdust stove.

  ‘Here, some paayasam,’ Kalyanikuttyamma said pleasantly, holding out the vessel, ‘for celebrating the kid winning the election.’

  ‘Oh!’ Flinging the spathe away, Chinnamma said with a scowl, ‘I thought Kalluchechi had come to give me a naazhi of milk free.’

  As Kalyanikuttyamma turned around, tired of such jibes, she also heard this: ‘Here also there’s a party worker! Dey, sitting and smoking his beedis, doing nothing, after quitting the job! Not having the money even to buy a gas stove! Hohoho!’

  Kalyanikuttyamma made haste. She had to deliver paayasam to six more houses.

  In the month of Medam, when the standard for the temple festival at Thachanakkara temple had already been raised, another death in the neighbourhood shook Jithen badly: the life of the childless Granpa Raambilla, who had become a solitary soul, following the death of his wife, and had ended up in the Aluva Government Hospital for sixty-four days, untended by anyone. That day, a phone message came to the UC College from the Government Hospital, for Jithen. As he was getting out of the Principal’s room after reading the scribbled news of the death left on the table, Jithen was asked, ‘How is the dead man related to you?’

  Sitting in the bus for Aluva, along with the three members of the students’ association, Jithen also thought about it: who’s the dead man to me? Last month he had described another deceased as the father of his mother’s sister’s husband. Otherwise, his grandmother’s brother. But how can this death be defined?

  ‘One who became all alone, an ordinary man!’ Jithen told his friends. ‘And because of that, our close relative!’

  That evening, accompanying the emaciated corpse in the ambulance from Aluva, Jithen had a nightmare with his eyes wide open: on the fifth day after the cremation, when everyone was gathered for immersing the bones and ashes of the cremated body in the water on the day of sanchayanam, Alamboori appears suddenly, grabs the earthen pot in which the bones have been kept, runs towards the irrigation bund, and laughs and claps his hands, after sending the pot floating in the waters of the bund.

  But that nightmare did not come true, despite no sane person coming forward to do the ritualistic submersion of the bones in the river.

  Despite the irrigation bund being the most suitable water body for Raambillapolice to dissolve in.

  Despite Raambillapolice becoming Alamboori’s father, morally responsible as he was for having created a new man called Alamboori, burying Vasudevan of Nedumpilli Mana.

  SEVEN

  Religious Rivalry

  5 November 1999

  …Yesterday too my boss started a fight with me. ‘There is no great place for humanism in professionalism!’ he tried to justify himself somewhere in our argument. ‘Possible,’ I countered, ‘but we are yet to start calling all inhuman behaviour professionalism!’ Probably because I went to bed with the thoughts of that showdown in mind, I had two nightmares in the night. Strange nightmares which translated emotional turmoil into a different state. I will end this letter by writing about those.

  First dream: Both of us were sitting, listening to ghazals. The singer sang with a pained heart:

  It feels good to cry by the walls,

  Looks like I too will end up mad …

  Suddenly, you leaned on my chest and started weeping. Our relatives and friends came and stood around and leaned over to look at me. That is when I understood: I was dead! I could see it all. Hear everything. But I couldn’t move. The old model tape recorder, swathed in black leather with only the record button in red, started to play another Hindi song:

  If there are no tears to shed,

  What is the fun in crying?

  You translated that into Malayalam in the old style, crying.

  From the other side of death, I was getting ready to say that, in translation, it had lost its soul. But by then the people were jumping in joy and congratulating the translated version.

  The second dream was this: A dance performance in the Town Hall by Yamini Machayya, a Telugu. The unparalleled sensuality of Bharathanatyam. Bewitching gesticulations which reached out to even the last row. Seductive face. Majestic beauty oozing from the movements of limbs. As I was leaving, I buy her from the organizers. Stuffing and mounting in an expansive posture and hand gesture, I install her on the veranda of the rented house.

  For the crime of insulting India’s performing arts, a gang of moral police encircle the house, armed and screaming obscenities.

  Jithen wrote his first poem in his thirteenth year. Even though it was written in the inauspicious thirteenth year, it was not a love poem. The theme of the eighteen-line poem, which was titled ‘The Well and the Sea’, was the angst of a small child who wished to attain greatness and yet doubted whether he deserved to be great. In a short story he wrote when he was twenty, other than undergarments, there was nothing on love. But in between these, when he was fifteen years old and seventeen years old, to be exact, Jithen wrote two love poems. The first one blindly imitated the style of a poet Malayalis had mostly forgotten about. A poem out of its time. Once, later in his life, when he got to read it again, mercilessly forgetting the anguish of the time he had written it, he laughed heartily. Looking at time making a farce of something which was genuinely admired once, he laughed again, shocked. The poem of his fifteenth year ran as follows:

  In the solitude of beautiful dreams, you

  I saw many a time, my beloved

  Why did you forbear, from speaking to me?

  Why did you not even caress me?

  Then, lines which were more laughable:

  If I am not desired at all, darling,

  In my dreams, could you not murmur?

  With your golden dreams

  May you bless this mortified soul!

  If rhyme more than love defined this poem, the poem written in the seventeenth year, showed a lover trying to be in with the times:

  The hibiscus plant beyond the window,

  A forlorn girl this

  Though draped in green plenitude,

  And wearing the heart outside

  How can love be felt, as my mind

  wanders searching for something …

>   Is sighting another fragrant flower

  Afar, the reason why?

  Nevertheless, in none of the many letters he had sent during the six-years of tumultous courtship of a girl called Ann Marie, and in the ten months after getting a job in the land of the Zamorin, was there a single line of verse. Life had presented him with such bitter experiences that he gave up not just versification, but poesy as a whole. He was taught the unforgettable lesson of unrequited love by a classmate of his, whom he had loved with melting heart and tremulous mind, by anointing him with vomit which smelt of faeces, during the return leg of a college excursion. And in the attempt to forget that, in his first tryst with a prostitute along with his friend, misfortune surfaced in the form of a pool of ammonia-smelling urine in the drawing room of some unknown man. His desire to enjoy the female form unseen, was stymied when God punished him by making him hear the whine of a sickly aged woman through a termite-eaten window pane. His poesy ended there. He found Ann Marie there. The turn in the life of that girl who was to join a convent and become a nun as soon as her graduation was over—caused by his love, his care, and his masculine protection, gave him the jitters. It happened more or less like the romance of Govindan Master of Ayyaattumpilli. Govindan Master had told him of a poetry contest that a magazine conducted forty years ago, as if only to bring them together. It was a sentence, more venerable than a poem, which someone had scribbled on a blackboard in UC College that brought Jithen and Ann Marie close. Jithen did not find anything in that petite girl, a graduate student of Malayalam, which made her desirable. It more or less ran contrary to the first encounter Naraapilla had in the temple pond of Thachanakkara with this grandmother. If it was the nakedness revealed through the wet clothes that tormented his grandfather, it was the spirituality which shone in the girl who was to become his wife that beckoned Jithen. That goodness, which Jithen had deemed women to be incapable of, called to him more than any nudity. That even upended his concept of women. She delayed her entry into the convent, a wish of her father, by following up her graduation with a post graduation and a degree in education. With the support of her brother, two years younger to her, she continued to wait for Jithen for six years. To avoid detection by her parents, she used to, after reading them, burn Jithen’s letters, sent in the name of her brother, Joshi, to the seminary where he was training to be a priest. However, from the day Jithen came to her home in Angamaly and asked for her hand in marriage, granted grudgingly by her father Varghese through a grunt, since her brother too supported her, she started preserving the letters of her future husband. But they were only one tenth of the letters he had sent her; the last forty letters, to be exact—the forty extraordinary missives, which she had salvaged, many years later in another place from the sewage water that invaded their rented house, and safeguarded for the rest of her life.