A Preface to Man

by Subhash Chandran

  He finally revealed his secret romance that he had cleverly hidden during the long years spent in applying for jobs, to his mother during the Vishu after he had landed the job. ‘Amma, you needn’t shout needlessly now!’ Jithen told his mother who was stirring the curry on the stove. ‘I am going to marry a non-Hindu girl.’

  A firecracker bomb went off in Thachanakkara temple, where the flag had been hoisted signalling the annual festival. The nerveless hand of Chinnamma dropped the ladle into the pot. Her hand got scalded in her attempt to take it out. He had come home for his first vacation after getting the job. Licking her scalded finger and tasting the curry using the ladle, and without looking at Jithen’s face, Chinnamma said, ‘Many have told me about you sitting and chatting with the Muslim girl from Elookkara in the reading room. If your fancy is to marry girls like her, I won’t have the likes of her in these premises!’

  ‘This is not a Muslim girl!’ Jithen said, ‘The girl you are talking of has got married and gone away. This is a Christian girl. Ann Marie, who has been waiting for me for six years, forsaking even Christ!’

  ‘Pthtoo!’ snapped Chinnamma fearsomely. The same snapping Naraapilla did when he heard of Govindan deciding to marry the out-of-caste girl from Cherai. But this one was more fearsome. It was not for out of caste, but out of religion!

  ‘See the fate of the guy here who married disobeying his father? With an epileptic son and a dead wife, now he has come back with books and a library, shamelessly! I will not permit it while I am alive!’ Chinnamma called out stridently to her husband, ‘Dey, did you hear this?’

  ‘I have told father,’ Jithen said, stepping out of the kitchen.

  ‘And…?’ Chinnamma asked.

  ‘He said let it be as per my wish.’

  ‘Pthtoo!’

  Ann Marie was the child Kalappuraykkal Varghese had promised for the Father in Heaven. But in her eighteenth year, the Lord Almighty made her sit alone one afternoon in an empty class in UC college, and changed the course of her life. She, who was to join a convent after her graduation, ended up obeying the call of life, which was more powerful than the call of God, and became the beloved companion of Jithendran of Ayyaattumpilli.

  Since she was born after the premature death of her two elder siblings, who were delivered before term, her father did not think twice before committing her to the convent. He had already decided that there would not be a suitable husband in the whole world for his daughter who was as beautiful as, and more energetic than, his wife. While taking Ann Marie—who had irises like white stone, inherited from her father, who was known throughout Angamaly as Cat-eyed Varghese—home from the hospital, he stopped at the church on the way, and without any provocation, made a brutal offering. ‘As my bride, this one’s mother destroyed her own life.’ Taking the child in his arms and shaking off his flip-flops, Varghese continued, addressing the church, ‘But I shall not allow her child to suffer the same fate! Here, from the Kalappuraykkal family, one more blessed bride for you!’

  Hearing that unexpected avowal, Varghese’s wife, Susanna from Kongorppilli, and her mother who was with them, were stunned.

  ‘If thy wish be that, thy will be done,’ Susanna said smiling at the church, the very next moment, more to Christ than to her husband.

  From the time they had converted to Christianity, the Kalappuraykkal family maintained their allegiance to Jesus Christ by offering a girl to the Church, in every generation. Varghese used to boast that when the Portuguese—who introduced pigs and boars to Angamaly, which were called pork locally—chose women as nuns for the Church in Angamaly, among them was the sister of his great-great-grandmother. In that claim, which had less historical accuracy and more of old wives’ tale, he always used to include the part about the pigs.

  ‘Why did the Portuguese bring pigs to our land?’ Ann Marie, as a child, asked her father.

  ‘That is their way in Portugal!’ Varghese said sitting on the parapet and drinking arrack. ‘All the garbage in their cities is cleaned by these pigs, no? No salaries to be paid, and when they are fattened with the garbage, they can be slaughtered in the kitchen and eaten too!’

  Varghese had made a habit of drinking at home, to get over the premature deaths of Ann Marie’s elder brothers, who perished before they could toddle. When the third child turned out to be a girl, he continued to drink on that score as well. By the time the fourth child, a boy, was born, arrack had diluted his blood. Intoxication sieved out the past from his soul and dumped it outside. The calluses formed in Ann Marie’s ears from hearing her father recite, as if from memory, the tales beginning with the advent of Thomas the Apostle landing at Kodungallur, were hard enough to resist even the call of God. Yet, since her verity was more divine than the vow made by her father, Christ was a friend to her from her childhood. The usage, the Bride of Christ, stirred an infatuation in her soul. The day her father told her about the Angaadi kadavu in Angamaly, which Thomas the Apostle reached via Mala from Kodungallur, she experienced Christ mingling in her blood. However, she could not suffer a string of people—starting with Thomas the Apostle to the young men who were shot to death in Angamaly during the Vimochanasamaram in the late-fifties against the communist rule in Kerala—turning out to be her father’s relatives in the alcohol-fuelled tall stories that he used to narrate.

  ‘Wasn’t Arnos Paathiri taught Malayalam by Kunjan Nampoothiri?’ Quaffing a mouthful of arrack, and winking his light-coloured eyes, Varghese would try to tie up history with the hem of his mundu. ‘One of the relatives of that Kunjan Nampoothiri is the first Christian in our family. Now, don’t you get the secret behind our complexion?’

  Varghese’s younger sister, Justina, who was fortunate to go to Italy, was the model woman for Ann Marie for all times. She used to await for the uplifting sight of her aunt, pure as Mother Mary and merciful as Jesus Christ, coming towards her house after alighting from the autorickshaw at the beginning of the path hidden by the rubber trees, once every three months. With the advent of Doordarshan, as a child of the new generation whose sight reached the poles, she could establish the resemblance between her habit-wearing aunt and bashful penguins. The line of Kalappuraykkal women enticed to wear the habit had come to an end with Justina, Varghese’s only sister. Though delivered by Susanna of Kongorppilli, Varghese had reckoned on Ann Marie, being his daughter, continuing with the tradition of donning the habit. That reckoning had come to nought on that day, in the empty classroom in UC College. The bearded young man standing at the door of the classroom asked Ann Marie, who had been sitting and copying out the notes from a friend’s, oblivious of his presence, ‘Who wrote this on the blackboard, is it you?’

  Ann Marie read the sentence, which had not caught her attention so far, off the board.

  ‘Man is the only creature that perishes before attaining full growth!’

  That was the Chemistry classroom. The students had gone for the practical classes. Even in the previous class session, there seemed no reason for such a sentence to be written on the board. Like another misplaced sentence, Ann Marie who was a student of Malayalam, was sitting in the Chemistry classroom and transcribing notes.

  She showed her open palms indicating ignorance. The melancholy eyes of the bearded young man smiled. ‘Then we should find out,’ he told her, ‘not who wrote this on the board, but who said this the first time!’

  They introduced each other giving names and course details. ‘I am Ann Marie, Malayalam BA, first year. I came looking for an empty room to transcribe notes,’ she said.

  ‘I am Jithendran,’ he said. ‘MA History, second year. Some unknown power brought me here. Perhaps to read this line; or else to meet you; if not, then for both!’

  Ann Marie thought she heard the bell toll in the church. And that the sunlight had dimmed outside.

  ‘Search and you shall find,’ he told her. ‘And if you come to know of it, tell me also. Among the things I have read so far, this is the most authentic sentence!’

  He turned
and walked back. She wrote down the sentence in her notebook. Underneath that she wrote a biggish J. Making it the common initial letter, she wrote Jesus Christ and Jithendran in two rows, and in different styles.

  ‘Search,’ she said to herself, smiling, ‘you’ll find!’

  Though both of them searched for two years in their own ways, they could not find the author of what was written on the board that day. But that sentence, which they had assumed to have forgotten forever, had to enter their lives once more. But by that time, they had got married and had become the parents of two grown-up girls. They had even become grandfather and grandmother. He was fifty-four years old and she was fifty years old. The words of that sentence, which had entered them from the blackboard of life, and whose authorship remained anonymous, were the last words of the middle-aged Jithendran.

  EIGHT

  Creation Song

  31 July 1999

  …Like lava into the weak throats of monomaniacal volcanoes, something rises and boils over, with a roar from my innermost soul. A non-somatic retching is troubling me. Can you imagine the anomaly of someone, after majoring in History and doing a post-graduation, becoming a supervisor in a toy factory? Beyond doubt, I am a true representative of the modern-day youth. An imbecile who’s making rubber monkey dolls, after forgetting all history. A counterfeit Brahma!

  Have you thought of toys other than from the perspective of a child? Definitely, the top-selling toy in the world must be the balloon. A child starts touching human life through a balloon. Isn’t every balloon a distended form of emptiness? A rubber edition of what Ezhuthachchan, the father of Malayalam poetry, called water bubble. If it is their fragile nature that makes balloons more childish than balls, the same reason lends them a philosophical quality. Have you noticed the sense of wonderment which reflects in the eyes of a child as it sees a balloon, which it has been knocking about, burst? At the time of death, once more that thought about life has to flash in every man’s soul: where did that thing of entertainment vanish as vapour?

  Even after going past his childhood, a man’s fascination with toys doesn’t end. Do you know how Gandhiji described the Eiffel Tower, which the world celebrated as a wonder? As Paris’s toy! Leo Tolstoy had declared earlier that the iron tower didn’t have an iota of art. In the vanguard of those who protested against the Eiffel Tower was the world-class storyteller Guy de Maupassant. However, it was our Gandhiji who found the mot juste for criticizing that folly in steel: ‘So long as we are children we are attracted by toys, and the Tower was a good demonstration of the fact that we are all children attracted by trinkets. That may be claimed to be the purpose served by the Eiffel Tower.’

  Girl, when the world is filling up with mere toys of objects and facts, I feel like throwing away my life!

  On his first visit, before getting into the old building, which stood facing the sea, with strange-looking maps on it’s walls drawn by the salt-laden sea breeze, Jithen tarried a while on the seashore. The waves, which were calmed by the tears of millions of years dropping on them, came, prostrated at the feet of humans whose longevity was only a few decades, and kept retreating.

  That was March 1999. As if on a clock, Jithen could track time looking at the sun on the eastern wall of the sky. Thousands of repetitions of this day—which rolls the sun up the invisible hill in the sky, and in the evening pushes it down this side into the sea and laughs and claps like how Naranathu Branthan, that beloved lunatic, did as his daily routine—await him. Jithen remembered: thousands of monkey dolls of the same size and colour, not yet manufactured, await him. The rest of his monotonous and dry life, untouched by creativity, awaits him like the pedlar on the seashore. Thinking about that, the twenty-seven-year old Jithen smiled with pain.

  The magician sea that amuses the spectators by spreading and pulling back his frothy handkerchief each time to reveal a clutch of yellow-legged crabs. The same sunshine that fell on Vasco da Gama five hundred years ago shone on the wet armour of the crabs and their tong-like pincers. One of the mother crabs, coming out of the children’s tales written by the sea, told a parable to its young one:

  ‘Why are you stepping sideways? Walk ahead and prove your straightforwardness to the world.’

  The young crab smiled. ‘Teach me how to walk straight,’ it said. ‘Mother, show me by walking yourself!’

  The mother crab started to flail, trying to walk ahead straight. Acknowledging that the habit of epochs was pulling it to the side, she stopped moralizing and withdrew into the waves.

  Jithen turned around and looked once again across the road at the institution where he was going to work. The sanctum sanctorum of drummer-monkey toys. Half an hour later, he found himself sitting in a chair in front of his boss, on its second floor. He was going to listen to his boss describe the toys, with the realization that the same exam-fever that used to afflict him from the age of five in the month of March, was being rekindled within him. He sat there nodding his head like a doll-man, looking at the betel-juice stained mouth of his boss.

  Assistant Creative Officer—that was his designation. Not merely his academics, even his creativity, which was noticed in the university, was a criterion for his selection. However, he knew that his designation notwithstanding, there was little scope for creativity in his job. The company only expected Jithen to play a supervisory role between ten in the morning and six in the evening. In between, he should test the tautness of the drumhead and whether the fully-keyed toy plays as long as claimed in the advertisement.

  ‘America, Hong Kong, and Japan are the best in the manufacture of such toys,’ his boss said. ‘There is a big difference in that the monkeys they make use cymbals. To tell the truth, this cymbal is only a variation of our own ilathaalam. Their monkeys are dressed in trousers with red and white stripes and yellow-coloured vests with red buttons. The eyes have big red circles drawn around them.’

  His boss continued the description. For Jithen, words of another world and another time, dropping off from another life, seemed to fill their glass-walled room. Words of deceit, like clods of earth of faux mass and like dry leaves devoid of any life. They started to rise up to his knees, his chest and his neck, and began to suffocate him.

  Taking the toy monkey left on the table by the attendant and caressing it like his own son, the boss said, ‘Taking away the cymbal from the foreign toys, I fixed a miniature chenda. A little bit of creativity!’ He displayed his betel-stained teeth. ‘With that, the sales of this guy doubled. Within India and outside, equally.’

  ‘Creativity?’ Jithen pricked his ballooning pride with a needle-like question, ‘How long will it take for him to evolve into a human?’

  The boss frowned. He jumped up, making the chair scrape the floor and said, ‘Come with me. Now I shall tell you about production.’

  The word ‘production’ sprayed red-coloured arecanut grits on Jithen’s forearm.

  After walking along the passage, Jithen climbed down the stairs behind his boss. His boss explained to him how the toy monkey, called Musical Jolly Chimp, made by a Japanese company fifty years ago, was resurrected in a company in Kerala as a toy playing a drum.

  ‘The machinery inside is the same, then and now,’ quoting a sloka, the boss shone his torch of erudition on to Jithen’s face. ‘Vasamsi jeernaani yathhaavihaaya, navaani gruhnaathi naroparaani … Like a man leaving out old worn-out clothes, and wearing new clothes when necessary … Haven’t you read the Bhagawad Gita?’

  Taking off from the last two syllables of the sloka, which sounded like nail in the vernacular, a joke which could be pegged to it flashed in Jithen’s mind, ‘Is this nail or screw, sir?’ pointing at a metal spot hidden in the fur on the back of a toy monkey he could lay hands on, Jithen asked.

  ‘Screw,’ the boss said, missing the joke. Knocking against the spiralling word, arecanut grits sprayed farther.

  As he lay in the room in the lodge that night, with the realization that the basic pitch of the cicadas in Thachanakkara and the lan
d of the Zamorin was the same, Jithen had an epiphany. The snippet of the sloka from the Bhagawad Gita, which was crawling like a worm in the daytime, was now growing wings and soaring. A flash of thought, which could neither be transcribed into the letters meant for Ann Marie or his mother, nor expatiated on intrinsically, as, for thousands of years, it was lying unsaid. Even in the last few centuries, when reading and writing had become popular, no one had verbalized it. There were debates and discourses on what was written and spoken, all the time and at all places. There was constructive criticism and destructive criticism on creativity. Studies and tributes on books containing original thought happened at least a thousand-fold. However, only one thing remained. And it was that which was blooming in all its fragrance within Jithen that night.

  It was an idea fundamentally against the Bhagawad Gita. Jithen imagined that the heart of the book he would write would be this. To coin a single phrase to connote the concept, which needed more time and energy to ponder over its ramifications, Jithen chose ‘Creation-Song’, or ‘Creation-Geetha’, to avoid over-complexity.