The foxes forgot to howl that sexless night.
Twenty-seven nights went by in that fashion, repeating themselves. In the days between those nights, Jithendran’s future had been set.
To get into a consensus with the new life, Jithendran had to make only very little effort. When suggestions were sought for new ideas to take the company beyond the drummer monkeys, suppressing some of the spontaneous, irreverent thoughts, which sprang up in his mind, he shifted to English to don a mask of seriousness, and shook them out one by one—he began with the introductory statement that evolution from the monkeys is essential in the case of toys too; and since transactional power in money is in the hands of adults, the company should develop toys which would attract this segment as well. The company should concentrate on the miniature figurines of the geniuses, who were dead and gone. The company should take upon itself the onus of providing each head of the family with such life-like miniature dolls that would cater to his interest. For instance, if a person is interested in sopaanasangeetham, the company should be able to provide miniatures of one of its practitioners, standing and singing with an idakka. A scale model of idakka, hung with sixty-four woolly testicles, will hang from his shoulder. The song will flow out of the open mouth of the plastic miniature, which should be drumming on the idakka. Not just accomplished singers, but Kathakali artistes, danseuses, film actors, even litterateurs can be made as the new-age toys for adults. Jithendran made his point by thumping on the desk that he was sure that these dolls, which could be priced high, would take their place in the living rooms of modern homes if they were marketed as invaluable offerings to those householders who have not had the opportunity to meet such geniuses face-to-face or appreciate their art and craft adequately. If the list of venerable Malayalis were to be exhausted, then the company could do a national and international selection to create miniatures of dead geniuses.
When Jithen’s sham enthusiasm had scaled those heights, one of the white men sitting across from him got up, shook his hand and offered him a salary that was double of what he had expected, and invited him to take up the responsibility of leading the company from the next day itself.
After he had assumed the new post, twenty-seven days were being completed on that day. After making all the arrangements to move to the new apartment next morning, they were preparing to spend their last night in the rented house. The rain had been coming down heavily from the late evening onwards, with enough ferocity to drown the moans of the old, sickly lady on the other side of the house.
Around midnight, Jithendran woke up from a nightmare with a start. He saw the solar system shrunken into a small basket with the planets stacked crushingly in it like tomatoes. One of them, blue as if poisoned, was crawling with human worms. Suddenly a sinewy hand with white nails appeared and took it out and threw it into a gutter called the Milky Way. Realizing that one of the worms, which went flying out of it, was he himself, he opened his eyes, with a hollow feeling inside him. Hearing his heavy breathing over the sound of rain, Ann Marie also woke up.
Jithendran felt the floor with his right leg. His guess was correct. For the first time after their honeymoon had started, the water from the gutter was making its presence felt. He heard its wavelets even above the racket the rain was making on the tiles. Ann Marie had told him the day before how the hundreds of used condoms he had ejected into the toilet during his many months of stay in the rented house had blocked the toilet. He could guess that if the water from the gutter would continue to enter the house, the filthy pool it would create would contain his own excreta, flowing back from the toilet.
Before his foot could get more wet, he pulled up his leg. The couplet which his grandfather had taught him about the Periyar river, which flowed irrigating the faraway Thachanakkara, came to his mind. But he could not recall entirely the seven mountains which nurtured Periyar, mentioned in the couplet. He failed to recollect the name of the washerwoman with the beetle on her cheek, who used to wash clothes in Punneli kadavu for many decades. The names of the engineers mentioned on the plaque on the Marthaanda Varma Bridge, beneath the etching of the silver-edged conch, would not manifest themselves, however hard he tried. Neither could be recollect any of the stories, which he had heard so many times, about a teacher and his family who were tenants in the Ayyaattumpilli house. Imagining thousands of such details fleeing from the book he wished to write, he sat on the bed, panting and holding the hair on his chest. A primal lust to implant on the earth some sign of his existence, to extend his legitimacy beyond death, filled him. He undressed himself in a hurry and subjected his wife, who woke up from her sleep, to his will. It was their first act of copulation after marriage without prophylactics. Ann Marie’s eyes shining in wonderment of the experience could be seen even in the darkness by Jithen. A drop of water making its presence felt on his head made Jithen look up. Seeing a stream of water falling towards his head through a crack in the tile caused by its trembling in the thunder, he caught the water in his mouth, by stretching his neck back. It was the beginning of a mediocrity which would extend interminably till his death. He felt that his body was a torture chamber of clay with his soul enclosed in it, and suspended high over a thoroughfare. He felt an acute thirst amidst the torrential rain. Even in middle of his sexual thrusts, he stuck his tongue out and drank the water falling off his head. The thirst-driven Jithendran drank through his eyes, nose and mouth. Mixed in his centuries-old blood, a survival instinct was manifesting itself, uncapped. His excitement heightened. At the point of climaxing, more than at the seeds of life gushing from inside him, he snapped open-throated in the Ayyaattumpilli manner at death, which had been squatting inside him for twenty-eight years, staring at his soul, ‘Ppho!’
That sound, which emanated as if from a soul being torn asunder, was the mid-point of a life which went on for fifty-four years. That snap which was against a measly existence, was the mid-point of two centuries and two millennia.
Epilogue
Dawn was breaking.
Ann Marie had spent the night reading and rereading the words written twenty-six years ago, without bothering about their chronological order. She felt all the tiredness of travelling the distance of about a quarter century within a single night. Sitting amidst a bunch of old papers and a diary, she yawned, relaxed her back, and stretched her legs on the dark green bedsheet. She heard the joints of her fifty-year-old toes crack. As she saw the light of dawn seeping in without permission through the windows she had forgotten to close the previous night, she turned to the side, stretched out her hand, and switched off the light. The sight of the light at the top edge of the toilet door, like a straight line, made by a chalk, created the feeling that her husband was, as usual in the morning, standing inside and peeing, sleepy-headed.
Saddened, she switched off that light too.
Ann Marie started to arrange the letters lying on the bed. In each of them, comprising five to six pages, closely written on both sides, she had underlined certain portions with black ink. The lines she had left unmarked were those she could not understand fully or appreciate as a young woman: in some, five or six lines; in some, two or three consecutive paragraphs. Suddenly, an illusion of the book, which her husband had wanted to write flashed within her eyelids, intoxicated by the heady feeling the letters had stirred in her. She had hallucinations of the sentences which she had underlined, along with the dates and in the chronological order, being printed as the opening lines of each of the chapters of the book. She saw, as if in a flash, in the last chapter of that mythical novel a passage which had been written with blood from his right index finger and now was seen as a note in a brownish, almost black colour in one of the letters. Her head was reeling from the sensation of all the descriptions of the happenings in his village and the histories of his forebearers—which he had written in the hundreds of letters she had read and burnt fearing her father, during her six-year-long wait—crowding into the book. Though they were in the vernacular, she could not read the t
houghts and emotions replete in them. In the white pages, being flipped as if by a breeze, she could clearly see words like Kerala, Thachanakkara, Perumthachchan, Periyar and such standing out. And religion, Narayana Guru, caste, Gandhiji, Christian, communist, house, temple, pond, sea, siblings, shit … And in between all those words, singular thoughts and a wonderful amalgam of memories, which were simple and complex at the same time, like cave paintings.
Ann Marie stretched her hand to touch the book. When the palm her face was resting on between the two pillows on her lap slipped off her chin, she was startled awake. Segregating the letters and the loose papers, she secured them with rubber bands and left them on the bed. Keeping the diary, which showed signs of the wear-and-tear of twenty-five years, by the side of the heap of papers, she headed for the bathroom. Wearing a sandal-coloured nightgown, with the confusion of a moth still circling a flower despite dawn breaking, she walked barefoot over the new cool and slippery floor tiles. Her movements were affected more by the previous night’s sleeplessness than by incipient old age. Since she still felt that she was travelling trapped inside a yet-to-be written book, she used a finger, wetted with her spittle, to open the door of the bathroom, as if it was a sticky page which refused to turn. She recognized her silliness, and with a self-deprecating laugh entered the bathroom.
The void created in the world by the death of fifty-four-year-old Jithendran last September was, at the most, only as big as the air trapped inside this flat, which was lying unused. Beyond that, the void had nothing special to do with the twenty-seven other apartments in the building, or in the many apartment buildings which had filled Thachanakkara, or in between them the bungalows that stood proudly, rubbing their midriffs with their neighbours. The heads of the houses of each of them were trying to get ahead, competing with one another, leading lives that could not be very different from the life which Jithendran had set off on in his twenty-eighth year, a quarter century ago. The same life that Jithen had lived peacefully in another part of the world for the last twenty-five years: gossip, bragging; being judgmental; cursing society without reflecting on oneself; denigrating one’s own mother while singing praises of mother goddesses; an unjustifiable estimation of one’s own children and abhorrence of others’ children; friendship with neighbours with the smiling incisors hiding the grinding molars behind; the schadenfreude of seeing respected people in society being maligned in the press; the inability to compliment another person to his face; declamations that all societal values had been undermined, in order to hide the guilt of one’s own goodness drying up inside; with aging, despite the lack of faith, stumbling in devotion confined solely to the gods of one’s own religion; the insistence that only another man’s sexuality is pornography; the despondency from the feeling that one is deserving of greater things than what has come by; and above all this, a scorn nurtured inside for every soul outside the ambit of one’s own four-member family…
In his fifty-fourth year, impelled by an unexplained urge to be in the land of his birth, after leaving his job, when Jithendran moved to an apartment in Thachanakkara, he did not encounter any dissonance anywhere. When he saw the people around him live in the same manner that he did, with the same false prestige, marking time to an invisible drum with the same rhythm and duration, he did not find it unnatural. The new generation of Thachanakkara did not recognize him. The scattered few of the Ayyaattumpilli lineage who remained, need not have felt for Jithen anything more than a sympathy in the guise of a weak affection for one of them who had migrated to somewhere far away after marrying a Christian girl, many years ago. Standing on the balcony on the eighth floor of the apartment building, which now stood on the ground on which he used to play cricket and which now towered higher than any of the sixers hit then, Jithendran could see, beyond three or four more tall buildings that bore the banners of clothes put out for drying, the land on which the clutch of houses called Ayyaattumpilli once existed. Looking at the skyscraper coming up amidst dust and smoke raised by the groaning machinery on that arena where Naraapilla and his wife and their successors played out their grand drama of life and death with a flourish, he would sit on the balcony, sipping tea. The scene of a lame girl with a songbook in her hand, and a snotty-nosed, shorts-wearing boy hanging onto her skirt, walking through the grounds, would flash before his eyes on the screen put up by the dust. He would hear the sounds of many throats calling out his name with many intonations from the past, over the growl of the concrete mixer: Jithaa! Jithen! Daa Jitho! Their pitch would change depending on whether it was summer or the rainy season. On the dilapidated steps of Time with missing stones, Jithen would see the wails following each death in Ayyaattumpilli amalgamated in the atmosphere like the photos of a conflagration taken from many angles—still photos of the bellowing. The sadness would pile up within Jithen, like the one felt for the floodwaters that, once in a while, would start from the river, reach the floor of the house, exchange pleasantries with the children of Ayyaattumpilli, and then recede, which conversely made only the grown-ups happy. At that point, he would roll up his sails of memories and turn back. He would start imagining that the burqa-clad, middle-aged woman sitting in the back of the luxury limousine zipping along the widened roads to Elookkara and Kayintikkara was perhaps the girl who did not wear a veil and, once upon a time, went around collecting strange world facts for writing her novel. Unable to recollect her name, he would become flustered. Pity, he would tell himself. When she did not write that book, this is what she did: obliterate her memory from Time. When he saved himself from a book, this is also what he did.
At those times, he would feel nauseated by the thought that he was dangling, hung eight storeys high at a crossroad, and his grandchild’s diaper, shoved inside his underwear, would become damper.
On such a Saturday when he decided to have alcohol instead of tea, afraid to sit in the balcony, he went in, towards Ann Marie.
‘I have this strange feeling, Ann Marie,’ he told his wife as he arrived in the kitchen to fetch the drink, not knowing that it was the last day of his life. ‘Your Bible says that God made Man in his image.’
‘My Bible?’ she asked. ‘When did it become my Bible alone? All right, tell me what you feel!’
‘Oh, sorry!’ he said. ‘The matter is this: if God were to read it, he would be the one to laugh the hardest. Because, more than anyone else, God knows that man is not at all his son!’
‘The man searching for the alcohol bottle in the kitchen certainly may not be the son of God,’ Ann Marie said. ‘But do you want to make such a judgment against all men? Is this the same man who went to war with his boss over the usage of “As creative as God himself!”?’
Jithendran seemed not to have heard that. He chose a bottle from the top of the shelf, with his eyes closed.
Even before he opened the bottle he was intoxicated as he was reminded of his youth and said, ‘Ann Marie, man is the bastard child of the Devil! The mischief done by the Devil the day God was resting! When he hears that man has the features of God, the Devil must be laughing. Now the only thing for God to do is keep quiet: to avoid a household devastation that would be as destructive as a battle of planets!’
As he left bearing the glass, the bottle, and the cashew nuts, Ann Marie was overcome by the desire to write down that concept somewhere. The synopsis of the twenty-six years enveloped in darkness. She also heard her husband’s curse from the living room, angrily shutting down the TV after checking the various channels.
She realized that her husband had started viewing every facet of human life darkly. He was a wick smouldering without oil. He was about to be extinguished.
It was ineluctable for people like that.
Hearing the calling bell, Ann Marie hurried to the living room. Since she had left her spectacles in the bathroom, she bumped her knee twice on the way. She ignored the calendar of the year two thousand and twenty-six scraping noisily against the wall and hastened to open the door. Suddenly, the calendar fell off its nail right i
n front of her. Without waiting to put it back, she looked through the peephole. She was shocked for a moment to see a middle-aged man resembling the person who had died last month, standing on the other side of the door. She rubbed her eyes and looked again.
When she realized that it was not her husband, she opened the door.
‘May I come in?’ asked the visitor, who was holding a book in his hand, in a voice that was not familiar. Ann Marie invited him in silently. Though he had come up to the seats, without sitting down, he offered the book in his hand to Ann Marie. ‘I came to give you this,’ he said, ‘a novel in which you are also a character!’
For a moment her breathing stopped. Accepting the book with a trembling hand, she read its title:
A PREFACE TO MAN
When she opened the cover page, after flipping through four or five pages, she was stunned to see printed, within quotes, a passage she had underlined the night before in one of her husband’s letters:
If a human child, who is born fearless, independent, and above all, creative, ends up craven and bonded in sixty or seventy years, spending his creativity solely for procreation, and finally dies as a grown-up child in the guise of an old man, and if this is called human life, my beloved girl, I have nothing to be proud of in being born as a man.
She raised her head and looked at him in disbelief. Picking up the calendar from the floor and rolling it up, he said, ‘I am from this place. Perhaps your deceased husband may have known me. For a long time, I have been writing this book for him. A long tale about your husband and his family history!’
‘But…’ she tried to say something. ‘But…’
‘I know.’ He turned and looked back, located the nail from which the calendar had fallen off, and said, ‘For the last twenty-five years you were away. But that doesn’t matter.’ He continued after hanging the calendar back on the nail. ‘Those years are not in this book. I have left the space empty here for the readers to add their own lives and fill in the blanks.’
A Preface to Man Page 40