by Anita Nair
‘A thick forest,’ said the doctor, ‘traps and keeps its rainfall. It seeps through the floor into the subsoil and feeds the streams during the rainless period. Forests are great natural reservoirs. But today, with so many gone, 80 per cent of the monsoon rainfall simply runs away into the sea. This means that if next year’s monsoon fails, or is late, there will be intense personal suffering. Once again people must go thirsty and hungry. There will be a 40 per cent drop in our agricultural output and that affects people right down the line, from the State Treasury to the humblest peasant.’
Suddenly the lights went out, came on again and then, for several minutes, flickered weakly and erratically. Mrs Das gave a loud, contented laugh. ‘That is the monsoon!’ she cried. ‘Just as I remember it. All is back to normal!’
Charlis and I
Shashi Tharoor
This extract is taken from India: From Midnight to the Millennium, published by Penguin Books India.
I was about eight or nine when I first came across Charlis.
A few of us children were kicking a ball around the dusty courtyard of my grandmother’s house in rural Kerala, where my parents took me annually on what they called a holiday and I regarded as a cross between a penance and a pilgrimage. (Their pilgrimage, my penance.) Balettan, my oldest cousin, who was all of thirteen and had a bobbing Adam’s apple to prove it, had just streaked across me and kicked the ball with more force than he realized he possessed. It soared upward like a startled bird, curved perversely away from us, and disappeared over our high brick wall into the rubbish heap at the back of the neighbour’s house.
‘Damn,’ I said. I had grown up in Bombay, where one said things like that.
‘Go and get it, da,’ Balettan commanded one of the younger cousins. Da was a term of great familiarity, used especially when ordering young boys around.
A couple of the kids, stifling groans, dutifully set off toward the wall. But before they could reach it the ball came sailing back over their heads toward us, soon followed over the wall by a skinny, sallow youth with a pockmarked face and an anxious grin. He seemed vaguely familiar, someone I’d seen in the background on previous holidays but not really noticed, though I wasn’t sure why.
‘Charlis!’ a couple of the kids called out. ‘Charlis got the ball!’
Charlis sat on the wall, managing to look both unsure and pleased with himself. Bits of muck from the rubbish heap clung to his shirt and skin. ‘Can I play?’ he asked diffidently.
Balettan gave him a look that would have desiccated a coconut. ‘No, you can’t, Charlis,’ he said shortly, kicking the ball toward me, away from the interloper who’d rescued it.
Charlis’s face lost its grin, leaving only the look of anxiety across it like a shadow. He remained seated on the wall, his leg—bare and thin below the grubby mundu he tied around his waist—dangling nervously. The game resumed, and Charlis watched, his eyes liquid with wistfulness. He would kick the brick wall aimlessly with his foot, then catch himself doing it and stop, looking furtively at us to see whether anyone had noticed. But no one paid any attention to him, except me, and I was the curious outsider.
‘Why can’t he play?’ I finally found the courage to ask Balettan.
‘Because he can’t, that’s all,’ replied my eldest cousin.
‘But why? We can always use another player,’ I protested.
‘We can’t use him,’ Balettan said curtly. ‘Don’t you understand anything, stupid?’
That was enough to silence me, because I had learned early on that there was a great deal about the village I didn’t understand. A city upbringing didn’t prepare you for your parents’ annual return to their roots, to the world they’d left behind and failed to equip you for. Everything, pretty much, was different in my grandmother’s house: there were hurricane lamps instead of electric lights, breezes instead of ceiling fans, a cow in the barn rather than a car in the garage. Water didn’t come out of taps but from a well, in buckets laboriously raised by rope pulleys; you poured it over yourself out of metal vessels, hoping the maidservant who’d heated the bathwater over a charcoal fire had not made it so hot you’d scald yourself. There were the obscure indignities of having to be accompanied to the outhouse by an adult with a gleaming stainless-steel flashlight and of needing to hold his hand while you squatted in the privy, because the chairlike commodes of the city had made you unfit to discharge your waste as an Indian should, on his haunches. But it wasn’t just a question of these inconveniences; there was the sense of being in a different world. Bombay was busy, bustling, unpredictable; there were children of every imaginable appearance, colour, language, and religion in my school; it was a city of strangers jostling one another all the time. In my grandmother’s village everyone I met seemed to know one another and be related. They dressed alike, did the same things day after day, shared the same concerns, celebrated the same festivals. Their lives were ordered, predictable; things were either done or not done, according to rules and assumptions I’d never been taught in the city.
Some of the rules were easier than others to grasp. There were, for instance, complicated hierarchies that everyone seemed to take for granted. The ones I first understood were those relating to age. This was absolute, like an unspoken commandment: everyone older had to be respected and obeyed, even if they sent you off on trivial errands they should really have done themselves. Then there was gender: the women existed to serve the men, fetching and carrying and stitching and hurrying for them, eating only after they had fed the men first. Even my mother, who could hold her own at a Bombay party with a cocktail in her hand, was transformed in Kerala into a dutiful drudge, blowing into the wood fire to make the endless stacks of thin, soft, crisp-edged dosas we all wolfed down. None of this had to be spelled out, no explicit orders given; people simply seemed to adjust naturally to an immutable pattern of expectations, where everyone knew his place and understood what he had to do. As someone who came from Bombay for a month’s vacation every year, spoke the language badly, hated the bathrooms, and swelled up with insect bites, I adjusted less than most. I sensed dimly that the problem with Charlis, too, had something to do with hierarchy, but since he was neither female nor particularly young, I couldn’t fit him into what I thought I already knew of Kerala.
We finished the game soon enough, and everyone began heading indoors. Charlis jumped off the wall. Instinctively, but acting with the casual hospitability I usually saw around me, I went up to him and said, ‘My mother’ll be making dosas for tea. Want some?’
I was puzzled by the look of near panic that flooded his face. ‘No, no, that’s all right,’ he said, practically backing away from me. I could see Balettan advancing toward us. ‘I’ve got to go,’ Charlis added, casting me a strange look as he fled.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ I asked Balettan.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ he retorted. ‘What were you saying to him?’
‘I just asked him to join us for some dosas, that’s all,’ I replied. Seeing his expression, I added lamely, ‘You know, with all the other kids.’
Balettan shook his head in a combination of disgust and dismay, as if he didn’t know whether to be angry or sad. ‘You know what this little foreigner did?’ he announced loudly as soon as we entered the house. ‘He asked Charlis to come and have dosas with us!’
This was greeted with guffaws by some and clucks of disapproval by others. ‘Poor little boy, what does he know?’ said my favourite aunt, the widowed Rani-valiamma, gathering me to her ample bosom to offer a consolation I hadn’t realized I needed. ‘It’s not his fault.’
‘What’s not my fault?’ I asked, struggling free of her embrace. The Cuticura talcum powder in her cleavage tickled my nose, and the effort not to sneeze made me sound even more incoherent than usual. ‘Why shouldn’t I invite him? He got our ball back for us. And you invite half the village anyway if they happen to pass by.’
‘Yes, but which half?’ chortled Kunjunni-mama, a local la
yabout and distant relative who was a constant presence at our dining table and considered himself a great wit. ‘Which half, I say?’ He laughed heartily at his own question, his eyes rolling, a honking sound emerging from the back of his nose.
I couldn’t see why anyone else found this funny, but I was soon sent off to wash my hands. I sat down to my dosas feeling as frustrated as a vegetarian at a kebab-shop.
‘Who is Charlis, anyway?’ I asked as my mother served me the mild chutney she made specially since I couldn’t handle the fiery spiced version everyone else ate.
‘I don’t know, dear, just a boy from the village,’ she responded. ‘Now finish your dosas, the adults have to eat.’
‘Charlis is the Prince of Wales, didn’t you know?’ honked Kunjunni-mama, enjoying himself hugely. ‘I thought you went to a convent school, Neel.’
‘First of all, only girls go to convent schools,’ I responded hotly. ‘And anyway the Prince of Wales is called Charles, not Charlis.’ I shot him a look of pure hatred, but he was completely unfazed. He soaked it in as a paddy field would a rainstorm, and honked some more.
‘Charlis, Charles, what’s the difference to an illiterate Untouchable with airs above his station? Anyway, that’s how it sounded in Malayalam, and that’s how he wrote it. Charlis. So you see how the Prince of Wales was born in Vanganassery.’ He exploded into self-satisfied mirth, his honks suggesting he was inhaling his own pencil-line mustache. I hadn’t understood what he meant, but I vowed not to seek any further clarification from him.
My mother came to my rescue. I could see that her interest was piqued. ‘But why Charles?’ she paused in her serving and asked Kunjunni-mama. ‘Are they Christians?’
‘Christians?’ Kunjunni-mama honked again. ‘My dear chechi, what do these people know of religion? Do they have any culture, any traditions? One of them, that cobbler fellow, Mandan, named his sons Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Can you imagine? The fellow didn’t even know that ‘Mahatma’ was a title and ‘Nehru’ a family surname. His brats were actually registered in school as M. Mahatma Gandhi and M. Jawaharlal Nehru. So of course when this upstart scavenger shopkeeper has to name his offspring, he went one better. Forget nationalism, he turned to the British royal family. So what if they had Christian names? So what if he couldn’t pronounce them? You think Charlis is bad enough? He has two sisters, Elizabeth and Anne. Of course everyone in the village calls them Eli and Ana.’
This time even I joined in the laugher: I had enough Malayalam to know that Eli meant ‘rat’ and Ana meant ‘elephant’. But a Bombayite sense of fairness asserted itself.
‘It doesn’t matter what his name is,’ I said firmly. ‘Charlis seems a nice boy. He went into the rubbish heap to get our ball. I liked him.’
‘Nice boy!’ Kunjunni-mama’s tone was dismissive, and this time there was no laughter in his honk. ‘Rubbish heaps are where they belong. They’re not clean. They don’t wash. They have dirty habits.’
‘What dirty habits?’ I asked, shaking off my mother’s restraining hand. ‘Who’s they?’
‘Eat your food,’ Kunjunni-mama said to me, adding, to no one in particular, ‘and now this Communist government wants to put them in our schools. With our children.’ He snorted. ‘They’ll be drinking out of our wells next.’
A few days later, the kids at home all decided to go to the local stream for a dip. On earlier Kerala holidays my mother had firmly denied me permission to go along, sure that if I didn’t drown I’d catch a cold; but now I was older, I’d learned to swim, and I was capable of towelling myself dry, so I was allowed the choice. It seemed a fun idea, and in any case there was nothing better to do at home: I’d long since finished reading the couple of Biggles books I’d brought along. I set out with a sense of adventure.
We walked through dusty, narrow lanes, through the village, Balettan in the lead, half a dozen of the cousins following. For a while the houses we passed seemed to be those of relatives and friends; the kids waved cheerful greetings to women hanging up their washing, girls plaiting or picking lice out of each other’s hair, bare-chested men in white mundus sitting magisterially in easy chairs, perusing the day’s Mathrubhumi. Then the lane narrowed and the whitewashed, tile-roofed houses with verdant backyards gave way to thatched huts squeezed tightly together, their interiors shrouded in a darkness from which wizened crones emerged stooping through low-ceilinged doorways, the holes in their alarmingly stretched earlobes gaping like open mouths. The ground beneath our feet, uneven and stony, hurt to walk on, and a stale odour hung in the air, a compound of rotting vegetation and decaying flesh. Despair choked my breath like smoke. I began to wish I hadn’t come along.
At last we left the village behind, and picked our way down a rocky, moss-covered slope to the stream. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this, a meandering rivulet that flowed muddily through the fields. At the water’s edge, on a large rock nearby, women were beating the dirt out of their saris; in the distance, a man squatted at a bend in the stream, picking his teeth and defecating. My cousins peeled off their shirts and ran into the water.
‘Come on, Neel,’ Balettan exhorted me with a peremptory wave of the hand. ‘Don’t be a sissy. It’s not cold.’
‘Just don’t feel like it,’ I mumbled. ‘It’s okay. You go ahead. I’ll watch.’
They tried briefly to persuade me to change my mind, then left me to my own devices. I stood on the shore looking at them, heard their squeals of laughter, then looked away at the man who had completed his ablutions and was scooping water from the river to wash himself. Downstream from him, my cousins ducked their heads underwater. I quickly averted my gaze.
That was when I saw him. Charlis was sitting on a rocky overhang, a clean shirt over his mundu, a book in his hand. But his eyes weren’t on it. He was looking down at the stream, where my cousins were playing.
I clambered over the rocks to him. When he spotted me he seemed to smile in recognition, then look around anxiously. But there was no one else about, and he relaxed visibly. ‘Neel,’ he said, smiling. Aren’t you swimming today?’
I shook my head. ‘Water’s dirty,’ I said.
‘Not dirty,’ he replied in Malayalam. ‘The stream comes from a sacred river. Removes all pollution.’
I started to retort, then changed my mind. ‘So why don’t you swim?’ I asked.
‘Ah, I do,’ he said. ‘But not here.’ His eyes avoided mine, but seemed to take in the stream, the washerwomen, my cousins. ‘Not now.’
Bits of the half-understood conversation from the dining table floated awkwardly back into my mind. I changed the subject. ‘It was nice of you to get our ball back for us that day,’ I said.
‘Ah, it was nothing.’ He smiled unexpectedly, his pockmarks creasing across his face. ‘My father beat me for it when I got home, though. I had ruined a clean shirt. Just after my bath.’
‘But I thought you people didn’t—’ I found myself saying. ‘I’m sorry,’ I finished lamely.
‘Didn’t what?’ he asked evenly, but without looking at me. He was clearly some years older than me, but not much bigger. I wondered whether he was scared of me, and why.
‘Nothing,’ I replied. ‘I’m really sorry your father beat you.’
‘Ah, that’s all right. He does it all the time. It’s for my own good.’
‘What does your father do?’
Charlis became animated by my interest. ‘He has a shop,’ he said, a light in his eyes. ‘In our part of the village. The Nair families don’t come there, but he sells all sorts of nice things. Provisions and things. And on Thursdays, you know what he has? The best halwa in Vanganassery.’
‘Really? I like halwa.’ It was, in fact, the only Indian dessert I liked; Bombay had given me a taste for ice cream and chocolate rather than the deep-fried laddoos and bricklike Mysoor-paak that were the Kerala favourites.
‘You like halwa?’ Charlis clambered to his feet. ‘Come on, I’ll get you some.’
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p; This time it was my turn to hesitate. ‘No, thanks,’ I said, looking at my cousins cavorting in the water. ‘I don’t think I should. They’ll worry about me. And besides, I don’t know my way about the village.’
‘That’s okay,’ Charlis said. ‘I’ll take you home. Come on.’ He saw the expression on my face. ‘It’s really good halwa,’ he added.
That was enough for a nine-year-old. ‘Wait for me,’ I said, and ran down to the water’s edge. ‘See you at home!’ I called out to the others.
Balettan was the only one who noticed me. ‘Sure you can find your way back?’ he asked, as my cousins splashed around him, one leaping onto his shoulders.
‘I’ll be okay,’ I replied, and ran back up the slope as Balettan went under.
Charlis left me at the bend in our lane, where all I had to do was to walk through a relative’s yard to reach my grandmother’s house. He would not come any farther, and I knew better than to insist. I walked slowly to the house, my mind full of the astonishment with which his father had greeted my presence in his shop, the taste of his sugary, milky tea still lingering on my palate, my hands full of the orange-coloured wobbling slabs of halwa he had thrust upon me.
‘Neel, my darling!’ my mother exclaimed as I walked in. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been so worried about you.’
‘Look what I’ve got!’ I said proudly, holding out the halwa. ‘And there’s enough for everyone.’
‘Where did you get that?’ Balettan asked, a white thorthumundu, a thin Kerala towel, in his hand, his hair still wet from his recent swim.
‘Charlis gave it to me,’ I said. ‘I went to his father’s shop. They—’
‘You did what?’ Balettan’s rage was frightening. He advanced toward me.
‘I—I—’