A Preface to Man

by Subhash Chandran

  In that hot and humid March night, after crawling into the newly put up mosquito net and sitting in the lotus position under the creaking ceiling fan, with the unbridled enthusiasm of his twenty-seven years, Jithen started to write down in his old, hardcover diary the concept that had only started toddling, along with directions for amending and developing it further later. What would have been recreated in his own inimitable flowing, poetic style in the novel, which he never got to write, would remain in its skeletal form in the diary, like this:

  We have discussed Arjuna’s dilemma over a thousand times. Sitting in our pooja rooms, we read about Lord Krishna advising a perplexed man, in the battlefield of a war that both sides considered righteous, that it is not a sin for the warrior to extinguish the lives of those arrayed against him, without having to ponder over their souls, which man can neither create nor destroy. Thus, we conveniently overlooked that in its narrowest sense at least, the Bhagawad Gita is a Song of Annihilation too. The quintessence of the Bhagawad Gita was the contrivance of converting one who turned away from violence, into a killer. Through thousands of years, riding on hundreds of interpretations, it became the fundamental testimony of a country, of a civilization. Both the guilty and the innocent equally lay his or her hand upon this Song of Annihilation, to take an oath in the courts that whatever he or she was going to say was only the truth. The case was not different with followers of other religions. Solely due to the reason that they were God-given, all the holy books were full of pronouncements and deeds against humanity. Thus, the insistence that man was the son of God remained, for thousands of years, contradictory. Considering that it was a strange power of creativity than intelligence, which was the factor behind elevating man as the only legitimate son of God from among the other creatures, which should be the moment of dilemma that should sadden man the most? The angst of the man who is unable to create should be more than the regret of the lone man about killing, as he stands between two groups facing each other, ready to battle, within the rule of nature of killing to eat. That would present a deeper and more intense authentic dilemma—than Arjuna’s. When an individual or a language or a culture stands lost, unable to give rise to any great creation; when a new generation passes through a period of mindless celebration and empty cores; when the modern-day Arjunans sit helpless, unable to undertake any original work in lines, colour, words, or music; we need a new song which will lay a hand on the shoulder to energize and exhort, to wake and create, rather than kill and win. A human song promoting creativity instead of all the belligerent and violent Bhagawad Gitas. A Creation Geetha, which can distil and preserve all the creative essences of the evanescent human life.

  Jithen spent his first Sunday after joining duty in the lodge itself. After writing a letter each to his mother and Ann Marie, he went out and breakfasted on dosas and tea. From the kiosk nearby, he bought a Mathrubhumi weekly and a movie magazine with a voluptuous south Indian actress on its cover. In the weekly, which lay unopened during the whole day, Jithen discovered accidentally in the night, a short story written by someone from Thachanakkara. He remembered Sofia Begum after a long time. He remembered her pointing out, while sitting in the Thachanakkara library, the young man from her college who used to write short stories. Jithen had no news about that young man’s life thereafter, even hearsay. Hoping to discover something about it, he read the story with interest. Unfortunately, the story gave no indication about the provenance or life of the author. It was a story about a famous painting of a renowned foreign painter. Jithen remembered reading a story by the young man in this same weekly, around the same time he was pointed out by Sofia Begum—it was about an earthquake somewhere in north India. Jithen felt an uncontrolled contempt for the newbie writer who could not dig up raw material for a story in Thachanakkara or even in Kerala. He lay with his eyes shut for some time, after closing the weekly. Then, rising, he made an entry in the diary using the word ‘mean’, and then having a rethink, he tore off the page. When he got up the next morning, he tore open the envelope containing the letter for Ann Marie, and added a few sentences. That was a note of confession. For many years, informing Ann Marie of such atonements was a habit. However, in the added lines he had made a change on purpose—he wrote that he had described one of his colleagues as a meanie, and not that he had done that with the short-story writer.

  After amending the date from seventeenth March to eighteenth March, he put the letter in a new envelope. It was the first letter he wrote to Ann Marie after getting the job. The first among the forty letters she had saved for her lifetime.

  NINE

  Abandonment

  12 November 1999

  …I am abandoning my attempts to write the book for two or three reasons. The first reason is the realization that a dreamer like me is incapable of narrating the story of the Ayyaattumpilli family and at the same time recording the sentimental history of Malayalis of over a century. If I am not able to bring in this one book, as per my dream, all the dualities existing on this earth—between man and woman; upper caste and lower caste; capitalist and worker; haves and have-nots; man and God; common man and creative mind; child and adult—and their connected emotions, it would be better if I don’t attempt it.

  Now even if I accomplish such a strenuous task, the trepidation whether it would be appreciated as much as it deserves, is one of the other main reasons standing in the way of the book being written. Like mosquitoes in a latrine, I see around me a lot of people who have constricted thoughts. They may be seeing man as one who can produce only excreta. The mosquitoes in latrines can define man as only one who wanders around everywhere, eats whatever is available, produces faeces and collects it in concrete receptacles. They merely need his blood. But they still consider it their bounden duty to evaluate him, though they meet him just once a day. The naïve mosquitoes cannot comprehend that, when he gets out every day, pushing open the door, his day of incredibly varied experiences is just beginning. I am aware that butterflies are also present in this world, not just mosquitoes. But tell me, have you ever seen a butterfly among Malayalis, recently?

  This letter is rather lengthy. I find it surprising that it was only after filling nine pages with my desultory daily activities that I thought of my novel. However, I shall close after writing the third reason for not writing the novel. I fear that the person, who ventures out on an arduous and intensively long creative effort as writing a novel after entering a life of domesticity, will only be a bad head of the family, a bad husband, and a bad father. An artist should be free of all such shackles—if he dreams of superior art. Do not reject it as the immature thoughts of a twenty-seven-year-old. If you try to prove me wrong, the loss is only going to be yours. Therefore, my girl, I am ready to sacrifice a great book only for loving you!

  Dear one, please forgive me for the arrogance of sending this letter without striking out these words. Though rather sombre, please understand that this is nothing but a reflection of human dignity.

  For the fish transported from the river to the glass bowl in the living room, its memories of the life spent in the river become a fable: a flowing story, written on water by someone for someone else. Now, with the feeling that it was not part of that story, it starts to enjoy the artificial security created in the still waters within the transparent bowl. It considers the rubber doll that sits nearby and spits out aerating bubbles, its relative. It feels proud without reflecting about the world view, which it never had but which it can now have by pressing against the glass of the bowl. It even develops a respect for the hand that throws down the feed at the appointed time. Thus, it slowly forgets its river.

  A fish can do that; but a human being cannot.

  As he sat in the glass case of his transplanted life and reminisced about Thachanakkara, he would get caught in the net of feeling that he was at both places simultaneously. He would start feeling that Thachanakkara was a book yet to be completed, or perhaps would never be completed, and that he was only one among the thousands
of sub-characters in that book. Some had torn out the page on which he appeared and had kept it elsewhere. One letter of the page ponders over that big book with torn pages.

  Jithen did not go to office that day because of asthma set off by such thoughts.

  When he went to Thachanakkara for the first vacation after getting the job, during Vishu, he presented a walking stick to Govindan Master. His mother had indicated in her letter that it was his seventieth birthday. Jithen remembered the green ebony persimmon walking stick his grandfather had hacked out for himself to support the stoop brought on by age. He realized with a shock that, nowadays, there were no people in Thachanakkara who stooped as they aged. It was not just in Thachanakkara; old age had wiped off its stoop the world over. Jithen had thought that stooping with age was the body bowing before mighty Time, when the body leaves its posturing after all the joyous dancing with life’s passions were over, recognizing the decay setting in. As time went on, the wisdom of that realization got attenuated. However, Govindan Master, who had completed seventy years, was missing among the old men of the new generation who dyed their hair and who, even with broken spines, leaned their body backwards without stooping.

  Happily accepting the walking stick presented by Jithen, Govindan Master said, ‘The proverbial third leg, no?’

  Narayanan’s daughter came and inspected the walking stick of her grandfather. She called out to her mother inside the house. Radha, who had greyed at forty, came with a knife and took the stick in her hand; as if he was still the child who used to hang on to her hand, she asked Jithen, ‘You have brought this for the lame me, haven’t you?’

  Uncle Govindan walked without the walking stick by the side of Jithen for some distance along the plot where the debris of the burst crackers of Vishu were scattered. ‘Have you decided?’ Uncle Govindan asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s been six years since it has been decided.’

  ‘Did you tell Chinnamma and Shankaran?’

  ‘Mother said she won’t be let into these premises.’

  ‘The same sentence which my father said! What about Shankaran?’

  ‘Fortunately, father is still a communist.’

  ‘Umm,’ Govindan Master said after sighing deeply. ‘Find a house for rent near your place of work. Then take her there. What is the name of the girl?’

  ‘Ann Marie.’

  ‘Convey to her the love of an old revolutionary. Love her till you die. There is no better walking stick than a heart full of love.’ he bowed down and picked up a fired flowerpot cracker which was lying steeped in the soil. He blew the soil off the flowerpot cracker, which had illuminated the darkness of the previous night, and handed it to Jithen, saying, ‘Remember always, life is only this much!’

  Carrying the corpse of that half-burnt cracker, Jithen stood alone for a while there.

  After the first rainy season, in which the sewage water had come into the house, Jithendran married and brought Ann Marie to the rented house in the land of the Zamorin. Four months had passed after shifting from the musty lodge room to the rented house. Jithen had got on rent, the half portion of a tiled house owned by a disease-ridden, moaning old man and his second wife, who had been abandoned by their children. The younger sister of his dead first wife was the second wife of the old man. It was her second marriage too. The old man, isolated by the death of his wife and the disowning by his five children, had taken her up, who had been alone for forty years after being prematurely widowed. His was a special case of misfortune. In the first few days of their cohabitation itself, the old man realized the fact that she was closer to the ever-open doors of death than he himself. The honeymoon had turned to embers even before it had started. He spent the rest of his life pottering around taking care of the moaning, bedridden wife. When his meagre pension was not enough for the household expenses and medicines, the rent paid by Jithen came to his aid. On either side of the separating wall under the age-blackened tiles covered by ripe-yellow and dried mango leaves, two types of honeymoon from the opposing poles of life were being staged.

  After midnight, when Ann Marie would stifle her sexual cooing, which she thought was excessive, by covering her mouth with her hands, Jithen would forcibly remove them.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he would say panting, ‘she’s moaning louder than you!’

  That was true. As taught to him by a crack in the window at Thachanakkara when he was fourteen, the moans of sex and death were surprisingly similar. Jithendran also saw them competing often with each other under the same roof.

  The new bride of Jithendran was one with the mien and heart of God. That made his life complicated and liveable at the same time. Ann Marie came with a simplicity which allowed her to survive with one dress and with the magical powers of feeding hunger and quenching thirst with only water. That was the greatest dowry someone like Jithendran could receive. The meagre stipend during his training period, created a tinny, ringing sound like that of coins given in alms in the emaciated piggybank of their honeymoon. However, she melted those boulder-heavy feelings of inferiority in his heart with mere smiles. After sleeping with Jithendran, who could not afford an alarm clock, she would get up at exactly five o’clock in the morning. When arising from the bed, she had neither rheum in her eyes nor signs of dried drool, which could be seen even in the faces of angels. She would kiss the trumpet-like ears of the sleeping Jithen—who lay like an aborigine run over by a truck after the previous night’s wild lovemaking—and then begin her daily chores, which would stretch till eleven in the night. Deaf to Jithen’s pointed remarks, dumb to the extent of making no complaints, and suffering him with the patience of God, she managed the household work. Till she signed on the wedding register, she thought that she was waiting for six years under the sentence written by someone unknown on the blackboard of the Chemistry classroom at the UC College. She was offering herself to a man who was more tortured than Christ, after she had been offered by her father to the Church. She had survived undeterred for six years, within walls at Angamaly made of conservatism, amidst clenched teeth and tears, for a life with Jithen. More than her love for Jithendran, there was something that was pulling her towards him: the anxiety that he would be orphaned without her. The belief she could transform his life from something insipid like water, to one spirited like wine, bubbled within her all those years. Till the mature intervention of her brother, Joshi, who had been anointed as a priest by then, won a grudging permission from her father for plighting her troth with Jithendran, she carried that relationship like a crown of thorns upon her soul. The three hundred and fifty-six letters sent in Joshi’s name to the seminary, were brought by him eight to ten at a time when coming home, and Marie Ann used to read them in secret and burn them. However, the forty letters sent to her home address in the ten months after Jithendran’s meeting with her father, she kept securely with her degree certificates. When all her certificates got wet and were destroyed in the sewage water, which invaded their rented house, she managed to salvage completely the forty letters and summarized notes of Jithendran’s novel. Along with Jithendran, who had given up completely on the novel, suspecting his capability for writing, she had to spend her life bearing those letters like seeds, which could be sowed sometime—first, through the first few months of marriage in straitened circumstances and then through the two-and-a-half decades with material wealth.

  During the initial months, Jithendran often wished that she would quarrel with him on some pretext. Like all husbands who surrendered to guilt, he too tried his best to find some fault in his wife during the honeymoon period. Naraapilla’s blood coursing through his veins made him suspect every iota of goodness in her. Quite needlessly, he compared her to his mother. Chinnamma of Ayyaattumpilli was one capable of raising hell singlehandedly, and put the Pandemonium to shame. Though his desire for peace was the reason for him to accept a job so far away and offered an uncertain training period and a paltry stipend amount, he found the peace that he now had quite unbearable. His tend
ency to shout in a manner surpassing his own mother surprised him. He used despicable words when the tea went cold because of his forgetfulness, after he had sipped the first mouthful hot and had left it: ‘Oblation to the manes,’ after spitting out words foreign to her, he trembled. ‘Were you carried here on your bier to give me this cold tea?’

  He slipped into greater self-loathing seeing his own desperate attempts to give the impression to his mate that he was undergoing sufficient mental torture and abuse to commit suicide.

  However, his attitude was not a complete put-on. The crux of his problems was in his inability to countenance that life would end with death. He was a soul capable of manifesting creativity above average. His aptitude for singing, which filled his bathrooms once in a while, was enough for him to win plaudits as well as the respect of a town. If the plots and concepts that he had imagined could be turned into a short story or a poem, he would be treated on par with any renowned litterateur. There were times when he indulged in self-congratulation, feeling that Michelangelo himself would have shaken hands with him if the sculptures he had dreamed up could be realized. He was sure that at least on some occasions, he did think that contemporary artists were worthless, not only because he was a cynical Malayali. He always made it a point to look down upon speakers, with a disdain they deserved, for having made a name for themselves as great orators merely by repeating the same thing over and over again. In short, he was getting despondent bearing collectively, all by himself, the many doubts which many young men, in many places, were undergoing in myriad ways. Jithendran used to pine for creating something by which he would be remembered in this world after his death and not for the reason of producing offspring alone; but smothered by a dark lethargy, which covered his times like the dark clouds of Karkkadakam and unable to follow his heart’s desire, he grew flustered. Though dejected by the people reproducing like mosquitoes in the new age, which was a pool of sewage water, and consequently deciding that he would remain childless, he still indulged in sex without remission. The number of used condoms he used to throw into the dilapidated toilet of his old house bore witness to this. Those exertions were born of a tragedy of not being able to recognize his extraordinary powers to create something new. His sexuality was merely the physical reinterpretation of his intense creativity. He was surprised by his unbecoming behaviour that he passed off as dictated by the circumstances, after he had reached the earth as a guest, invited to partake of celebrations of the body. He wished strongly to flee from the desire to create something during his lifetime which would survive his death. He tried to take refuge in the belief that time for all creativity had ended and such attempts were futile. He started feeling that, in the book that he was trying to create in the form of a novel, every line written about the new era was like something which had been translated inelegantly from another language and given to him. He feared thinking of the preparations that he had to do for writing about Naraapilla of Ayyaattumpilli, his life and times, and about Thachanakkara. The names of the huge trees in the lands of Ayyaattumpilli, the birds which sat and sang on them, the flowers which bloomed at its fences, all had disappeared from his mind. The couplet which his great-grandfather had created and his grandfather had recited to him as a mnemonic for names of the seven mountains, which had created Periyar river from their sweat, had also been forgotten by Jithendran for times to come.