‘Can’t you clean this table up, once in a while?’ Vasanthi would shout. ‘Was this how you kept your table in the office too?’
He would just nod in reply. As his room in the office had visitors coming in, he had to keep his table fairly neat. Offices had to follow certain rules. And so, Aravindan used to enjoy the lawlessness of his working table at home.
Vasanthi stood at a distance and watched him go about the arrangements with an element of curiosity. She did not understand what it was about. It was Gayathri who revealed the big secret. ‘Achachan was going to write stories.’
Raghu and family were leaving for Adayar that evening. Professor Appa’s schedule demanded that they report at Adayar that day itself. Raghu had extended the day as much as possible and arranged to catch the last flight to Chennai.
The night before, Gayathri had listened with great interest to her grandfather’s tales of Muchiri. She made him promise that he would tell her the rest of the stories when she returned from Adayar. That was a relief. At least one person wanted to listen to his stories. His wife and son were not interested and he did not have friends here who would listen to such stories.
His stories. Aravindan felt like laughing when he thought of that. Were these stories? Had he become a writer finally? He felt he owed a debt of gratitude to Ramabhadran. He had reassured him about the beauty of the first born.
Aravindan had always been impressed by the interest taken by Seshadri in forming Gayathri’s tastes, right from the time she was a baby. He would keep telling his daughter that children should be taught tastes right from birth. And not just in food, but in everything. When the child had to stay in Mumbai for the first two years of her life because of his wife’s illness, Seshadri had really suffered. He well knew the value of those lost first years when habits are formed. Regular prescriptions for each stage of Gayathri’s growth kept arriving from Adayar from then on. Vandana, who saw her father’s words as direct communications from God, lived them to the letter. Aravindan had learnt from the beginning not to intervene in such things. Right from the marriage to seemantham and the ceremonial pulikudi, Professor Appa had directed the activities.
‘Try not to draw definite patterns in the minds of children at this young age,’ Aravindan had once told Raghu. At that age, when they know nothing, they would start drawing unnecessary associations through names, through clothes, through customs. Allow them to draw in some fresh air outside these closed walls. When they grow a little older, they will choose what they want.
Where the name was considered, Aravindan had to be a little stubborn and disobliging. When the name Abhirami was vetoed by Aravindan, right at the beginning, the families in Adayar and Malad started disputing. Let them make her half a Tamilian but not a full one. Though Vasanthi and Vandana’s mother, who looked like a black and white photograph when together, did not interfere, Professor Appa was not willing to give up. Raghu was really in the soup. Finally, ten minutes before they left the hospital, the gynaecologist who had attended Vandana suggested the name Gayathri. They had to give the name before leaving the hospital.
When Gayathri started calling him thatha, Aravindan stopped it. He would be called achachan. After all, Gayathri had another full-fledged thatha.
Her thatha had strictly laid down the paths in which her tastes should be developed. Besides learning Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam, she should start her reading not through English comics but through the retelling of the Puranas. Not the illustrated version or the narrative CDs but through small books. Children should learn to chew and eat, not just swallow. Internet and the cartoon channels were allowed during the vacation, but only to a limited extent. Though Raghu had at first laughed at the effort when Bhavan’s Journal and different children’s books started reaching Kuwait, he soon understood the value of it. Aravindan too. What Professor Appa had said was true. Gayathri was developing tastes that were unusual in children of her age.
Professor Appa had repeatedly said something that Aravindan had also agreed with. Don’t send Gayathri out into the battlefield of entrance examinations the moment she finished her twelfth standard, like the usual Gulf parents. She would have found out what she wants to do by that age.
Aravindan remembered what the Professor had said once, with a shade of guilt. ‘I couldn’t give my children any attention when they were growing up. At least, with this granddaughter…’
Aravindan thought that if was applicable to him as well. He could not do anything to shape the tastes of his own children. At least, with this granddaughter…
Vandana knew that her father was speaking of her younger brother in London when he spoke of such things. He was brilliant. He had chosen a Jewish girl from Ireland as his companion. A girl who was four inches taller than him, who had no looks to speak of, and wore thick glasses. Vandana knew that her daughter was expected to carry the weight of tradition that her brother had refused to.
‘The old man is nuts. Better keep a pair of ear plugs with you; when you meet him. I do just that,’ his brother-in-law had warned Raghu right at the beginning.
Professor Seshadri, who was revered by three generations of students in the Pachaiyappa’s College, was just an ‘old man’ to his son. Still, whenever he spoke to Gayathri, who was in the fifth standard now, Aravindan felt that there was a lot in what he said.
Some of the questions that Gayathri had asked as she lay listening to the stories of Muchiri had given Aravindan trouble. They were mostly about Manikkan and Kichan. And about the Greeks who came in sailing vessels to the shore. Why was it like that? Why couldn’t it be the other way around? Could such things have happened then? Was it so easy to cross so many seas in a sailing vessel?
These were questions that were not natural for a ten year old who had started watching the cartoon channels. That was one of Vandana’s major complaints. ‘This girl asks questions that are not appropriate for her age. She is reluctant to obey her elders. We didn’t grow up like this.’
Aravindan would console her then, saying that it is the age of questions and doubts. It was better to have questions than to obey unquestioningly. Whatever it was, Gayathri would not be like Vasanthi or Vandana. One day, perhaps, she would have some questions to throw at her strict thatha’s face. Though unused to rebellious questions, he would have to listen to them.
Aravindan felt that when she returned, with Manikkan and Kichan growing in her mind during her stay in Adayar, she might have more questions. And those questions might even make him rewrite some of what he had already written. He was reassured that besides Ramabhadran and Padmavathi, there was one more person to read him, to listen to him, perhaps, even correct him—ten-year-old Gayathri. He would have to learn to soften the contours of the story to make it acceptable to those ears as well.
Once Raghu and his family left for Adayar, Aravindan withdrew into the privacy of his study. He felt that a new world was opening out before him. A world without boundaries, very unlike the one with clear-cut demarcations he had lived in when he had his job with the shipping company.
Vasanthi was worried, not knowing what was happening behind the closed doors of the study. Aravindan sat there for hours, completely detached from what was going on in the household. He had earlier accompanied her on shopping trips or even just to wander in the malls. It was as though he left all that completely to her now.
One weekend, her relatives from Ottapalam, Nenmara and Kollengode came. Among other things Valsettan commented, ‘Aravindan, this was a little too much. To stay alone in the village for so long…’
‘It is my birthplace, Valsettan. I have a strong tie to it.’
‘That’s true, but to leave Vasanthi alone here…’
‘She wasn’t alone, Valsettan. I knew you people were all here to take on the responsibility.’
Though Valsettan was pleased with that bit of flattery, Unniettan had something more to say. ‘Still…so many days… looking at people digging into the mud. And here, there wasn’t anyone to meet the child
ren when they came down from Kuwait.’
‘Raghu knows the way here, doesn’t he? He grew up and studied in Malad. Actually, I went to the place where they were digging into mud only on two days. They have more or less finished this season’s digging.’
‘I see. That’s great,’ Unniettan too loosened up. ‘So you don’t have to go to that place again, do you?’
‘I may have to go again, Unniettan. It is my birthplace after all.’
‘That’s true, Unniettan,’ Valsettan added. ‘Aravindan is not like us, he has ties with his own place even now.’
Aravindan knew that this was the problem with Vasanthi’s relatives. Most of them were second-generation Mumbaikars. Unniettan’s third generation was split into two, with one half in the US and the other in New Zealand. Valsettan’s children were scattered over the Gulf, Germany, Delhi and Bokaro. They themselves did not have deep roots in their native places to call it their place. Once in a while, an invitation to a wedding or the information of a death would come. Then, they would sort through the surface soil and see how deep and strong the ties were. If the relationship was fairly well-rooted there would be discussions about sending a representative. Though some of the boys had got married at Guruvayur, it was because of the insistence of the girls’ people.
Vasanthi who had been listening to the conversation with interest, burst the bomb suddenly, ‘Aravindettan has returned from the village with an illness that is not easily diagnosed by doctors.’
‘What is that, Aravindan?’ Unniettan and Valsettan asked equally anxiously.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ Vasanthi elaborated. She explained that Aravindan did not involve himself in anything connected with the household, and that he shut himself up in his study most of the time. As they had not heard of an illness like that, the relatives from Nenmara, Ottapalam and Kollengode did not say anything. Vasanthi explained further, ‘He says, he is writing.’
The relatives were relieved. ‘He had been working in a responsible post for a long time, after all. One can’t stop working just because one comes away from a job. He must have got some part-time accounting job. That was not difficult in Mumbai.’
‘Accounts! Who me?’ Aravindan was a little irritated. ‘I was always bad at it. And to start doing such things at this age…’
‘What is it, then?’
Aravindan did not say anything clearly, just smiled. As soon as they had gone, he returned to his study with relief.
Aravindan was finding a new path opening before him. Perhaps, what he wrote from now on would be just for one person, just for Gayathri. It would pass through her to the future generations. What he had started writing without knowing had acquired a new meaning. If what fell into her ears did not dry up completely for a while, she would want to read the rest of it. She would learn Malayalam to read that. And so, through her, at least some of the future generation would learn language. They would learn the language to know an ancestor who had passed away long ago, to remember him.
That was Muchiri’s strength, the strength of the place, the strength of times past.
What had started as random jottings was now becoming a huge responsibility. He now had to account to the future generations, whom he would never see, for each word uttered by him now. And so this task became a burden and a possibility.
He sat for a while with his eyes shut. Where did those sights come from, those sounds? A place was awakening from the layers of centuries, of millenniums. And some creatures with it.
Muchiri.
Playing and laughing, wounding and tempting, Muchiri lay before him. Opening out the layers.
As he sat down again to write, he felt that excitement again. As though the words and sights that he had believed would come to him only in the little circle of dim light, cast by the table lamp in the village, had followed him here. He realised that he could not turn away from this. He forgot everything, he thought of everything, and continued to write.
One night, on one of his usual telephone calls Raghu said that Gayathri had something to ask him.
Gayathri’s voice came loudly through the phone, ‘Achachan, why is it that Manikkan did not like to cultivate pepper?’
Aravindan was stunned. This was a question that he had asked himself. When all the farmers in Muchiri had started growing pepper when they found how fond the Greeks were of it, why did Manikkan, the foremost among them, stay away from it?
It was only he who did not go in the forests of the kurinchi lands to grow pepper. When others stopped cultivating grains and planted the creepers of pepper in the fertile maruthu lands, he did not join them. He said that he would not grow pepper in the fields that should bring forth grains to feed the people. He told Kichan, ‘I did not tame this soil, I did not start cultivating this land on seeing the Yavana gold. My land should first feed my people. After that, I’ll worry about Yavana gold.’
It was as though Manikkan’s voice crossed centuries and fell on his ears. As though the figure of that archetypal farmer was growing larger in the midst of the new-fangled arguments for cash crops.
Manikkan was growing, seeking answers to the new questions, through Gayathri’s doubts. And through him, others too.
Aravindan told himself that he was not trying to capture a period now, but a rich culture.
He started writing.
He continued to write.
PART TWO
Kichan, who knew a lot, did not know one thing—his own name.
When Uzhavan Manikkan called him ‘Kichan’, he became Kichan. When Manikkan’s father called him ‘Velumban’, he became that. After years, when Manikkan’s wife, Valli, changed Kichan to ‘Kichu’, he answered to that as well. Kichan had never felt the need for a name of his own. This was enough to be called and to answer to. One could even do with a few gestures.
The people of the place had seen him first as a small shadow in the midday sun, using a spade in the fields that belonged to Uzhavan Manikkan. No one asked from where he had come. Actually, he did not know that himself. Manikkan used to say that Kichan had come from across the river when he was very small. Valli would say that he had sprouted like a wild mushroom in some season of heavy rains, when lightning pierced the earth. ‘Just look, he is the colour of lightning, a bright mushroom. The kind of fair skin that is not seen anywhere in this place.’
He was the sprout of some Yavana, which was why his ways were different. Manikkan’s father had no doubt about that. And he had a special soft corner for him because of this. Manikkan often felt like laughing when he saw his father put him on his lap even after he grew up. And to add to it, his father had never petted his own true son like this. Perhaps, the wanderer became such a pet of his father because he had this unnaturally white skin. Even one’s own son is derided if his skin is not fair.
Manikkan’s father would hold the boy close to his chest, put a piece of meat in his mouth and say, ‘Eat, Velumban. Eat till you grow fairer, eat till you grow fatter. One day, you will cross the seas when the tides turn favourable.’
His father had no doubts about that. When the sea called, Velumban would board a ship and reach the other shore. He had not come there after crossing a river, he had come after crossing the seas.
Manikkan knew that a boy who drove the bullocks across the fields could not go back to become a Yavana, even if he had the colour of the guava wood after the bark is peeled. He knew that the seas would never call him. But, he did not bother to correct his father. After all, these were the dreams of an old and feeble man.
It was Manikkan’s father who fondly poured the first drops of toddy into Kichan’s throat. ‘Drink my son Velumban. Drink and grow fair; drink and grow rosy. When you get back to your own land, the land of the people of fair skins, you shouldn’t have any trouble in mixing with them.’
Manikkan’s father was as dark as dark could be. He had seen a white man for the first time at the beach when he was a young man. He saw him in the form of an apparition, and that too in broad daylight.
/>
The figure was lying on its back on the sands of the beach, enjoying the hot midday sun. Manikkan’s father had looked at him from a distance. That was when he realised that the figure did not have legs. It was all white below the waist. Did it have horns like a bull? He bent this way and that way to get a good look, then stayed there for a while, looking. As he looked, his doubts increased. Had the apparition, which generally came out after nightfall, started coming out during daytime too? Though he was afraid, he took a couple of steps forward. Ready to turn and run at any moment, he took a few more steps forward.
He realised that it was something like a man. Still, how could a human body be so fair? Fair like buffalo milk into which a few drops of blood had fallen. The creature was lying with its eyes closed. Its chest was rising and falling gently.
As he stood there, too scared to go closer, a coconut frond fell behind him with a great noise. The figure, which startled awake, saw some very white teeth before him. And a very dark body surrounding those teeth. When he tried to wave it closer, the black form moved backwards.
He stood there stunned for a moment, and then turned and ran. Manikkan’s father heard the loud laughter of the apparition from behind as he ran.
Anyway, this gave his father a story to tell for some days to come. When someone told him that the form he had seen on the beach had been a Yavana, who had come to trade, Manikkan’s father had a question for them. If it were a Yavana, wouldn’t he have legs? And that laugh? Did the Yavanas laugh like that? When everyone who heard the story started laughing at him, he felt rather bad. He was rather ashamed to admit that he had not seen a single Yavana even though it was many months since the ships started coming.
‘But Yavanas were not human beings, which was probably why the figure had laughed like that.’ When someone put in that comment, Manikkan’s father felt better. Anyway, since that day, all Yavanas had become velumbans or fair ones to him. He felt rather proud that one of them was now in his own hut.
The Saga of Muziris Page 17