by Anita Nair
Ravi sought to share his fears with Madhavan Nair—the Onam recess would last a fortnight. Would the children come back to dreary routine after that spell of freedom?
‘If I were their age, I wouldn’t!’ Ravi said.
‘You lost your childhood somewhere along the way, Maash. I hope the children find it for you.’
As they parted Madhavan Nair said with some hesitation, ‘There is one more pupil for you if you can take a risk.’
‘A risk? Who’s it anyway?’
Guilt and remorse made Madhavan Nair suggest it to Ravi. Some days ago Appu-Kili’s mother Neeli was at his shop waiting for him to put the finishing stitches to a blouse he was making for her. She sat there bare-breasted, watching the dressmaker anticipate the contours.
‘There, there!’ she said suddenly. ‘See, O Venerable Nair …’
On the other side of the square there were children at play. In their midst stood the cretin, taller than them and clad in conspicuous motley. Madhavan Nair remembered how she broke down as she pointed to Appu-Kili and said, ‘Look at my son!’
It was just the other day that Madhavan Nair had made him that weird toga with scraps of cloth. He had scissored out a Gandhi and a sickle-and-hammer from discarded gunny bags, and stitched them on either side of the toga.
‘If only you could tell the Maeshtar …’ Neeli sobbed.
Madhavan Nair saw the tears fall on her bare breasts.
‘I shall speak to the Maash, Neeli.’
‘Not to teach my Appu but to stop him from roaming with children.’
When they reopened after the festival break, Ravi was pleasantly surprised to find the school had survived the vacation … Madhavan Nair arrived chaperoning Appu-Kili. The children crowded round the cretin who was neither man nor child. Ravi herded them back to their seats, taking care the dragonfly, the cretin’s constant companion, was not lost. He drew the Parrot aside and asked him gently, ‘Like to join the school, Kili?’
Madhavan Nair raised his hand to discipline the children, ‘Quieten down, evil ones! You are upsetting my Parrot!’ And to Kili, ‘Didn’t you hear what the Maash-Etta asked you? Speak, O Parrot of the Palms!’
Appu-Kili stood looking indifferent, his gaze on his toes.
‘Why are you afraid?’ Madhavan Nair reasoned. ‘Isn’t it our own school?’
That did not reassure the Parrot. The children in the school were all his playmates, they made signs of encouragement. From the benches came hushed invitations: Come, Kili, come here, sit near me! As Madhavan Nair turned to go, Appu-Kili let out a howl, ‘Take me with you, Madhavan-Etto!’
‘O avian!’ the tailor despaired, ‘you have put me to shame!’
Madhavan Nair took four coppers from his purse and asked one of the pupils, Alam Khan, to go and get some murukkus. He told Kili that the teacher would give him the murukkus if he sat quietly and did his lessons. Appu-Kili cheered up.
Ravi whispered, ‘Madhavan Nair, my life is in peril. This prehistoric pet of yours …’
‘Have no fear, Maash.’
Ravi found the child-man a place next to little Sohra.
‘Sohra will take care of you, my winged being!’ Madhavan Nair said, and added this parting advice. ‘Study well, and become an engineer.’
‘He will!’ the class responded.
As Ravi turned to write out a sum on the blackboard, Sohra drew Kili close and passed him a sweet berry.
‘Don’t be afraid, Kili, I’m with you.’
During the Onam vacation cobwebs had gathered in the seedling house, and Ravi set apart a day for teacher and pupils to clean up the school. It became a war on the spiders. Adam drew a line on the floor with chalk and laid out the dead spiders. Appu-Kili picked up the biggest of them and tried to breathe life into it.
‘Saar, Saar,’ Kunhamina asked, ‘how big are the really big spiders?’
Ravi pointed to the dome of the mosque, and said, ‘That big.’
‘Yaa Rahman!’
The spiders in the crevices of the walls were brown, and were only as big as an outspread palm. But outside, in the forests of the rain, they were born to power and splendour. Like the kings of old they revelled in the hunt. And in the teeming nights of fear they rose like stars of the nether dark … Ravi told the children the story of the spiders, how after they made love the female ate up her mate. The children could not believe that such bloody dynasties ruled over Khasak’s peaceful grass and fern. Then Karuvu stood up and said the male spider was paying for his sins in an earlier birth. The children knew it was karma, the class was now unusually quiet.
The story of karma ended, but Ravi had set the children on a magic trail. They refused to do sums and recitations, and for the next two days Ravi did nothing but tell them stories of plants and animals. It was during one of these heady lessons that Kunhamina brought a hedge lizard to the classroom. The lizard made no attempt to escape.
‘Hurt it, have you?’ Ravi asked Kunhamina.
‘No, Saar. Just doped it with castor sap.’
The lizard took a few unsteady steps on Ravi’s table, then gave up, and looked around in ancient derision. Kunhamina had reckoned that Ravi would be pleased with the catch, but froze when she sensed his displeasure.
‘Will it die?’ Ravi asked Kunhamina. She wouldn’t answer, but the rest of the class spoke. The castor sap, said Madhavi, was like the liquor they made in Khasak, it killed only when one had too much of it. Adam said hedge lizards were used in sorcery, he terrified himself with the thought of saturnine deities called up by the sorcerer. No child of Khasak was friends with the hedge lizard, said Karuvu, because it sucked the blood of children, sucked it through the air from afar. One realized it only when one watched the lizard’s head suddenly turn crimson, the sign of the vampire.
There was more about the hedge lizard—the evil spirits exorcised by the astrologers went into exile riding the hedge lizard. They wouldn’t say anything more as it was Khasak’s secret.
Ravi and the children were engrossed in the stories and no one had noticed Kunhamina sobbing.
‘Kunhamina,’ Ravi said, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
That only made the sobbing worse. Tears brought the surma down in patches over her cheeks, and the silver anklets chimed as she moved her legs disconsolately under her desk. In the meantime the lizard recovered, and with one last look at everyone, stalked out of the classroom towards the hedges. Kunhamina smiled.
That day Ravi told the children the story of the lizards. In times before Man usurped the earth, the lizard held sway. A miraculous book opened, the children saw its pages rise and turn and flap. Out of it came mighty saurians moving slowly in deep canyons after the dull scent of prey, and pterodactyls rose screaming over their nesting precipices. The story was reluctantly interrupted for lunch; after hurried morsels the children raced back to school and huddled round their teacher. The pages rose and fell again … Long before the lizards, before the dinosaurs, two spores set out on an incredible journey. They came to a valley bathed in the placid glow of sunset.
My elder sister, said the little spore to the bigger spore, let us see what lies beyond.
This valley is green, replied the bigger spore, I shall journey no farther.
I want to journey, said the little spore, I want to discover. She gazed in wonder at the path before her.
Will you forget your sister? asked the bigger spore.
Never, said the little spore.
You will, little one, for this is the loveless tale of karma; in it there is only parting and sorrow.
The little spore journeyed on. The bigger spore stayed back in the valley. Her roots pierced the damp earth and sought the nutrients of death and memory. She sprouted over the earth, green and contented … A girl with silver anklets and eyes prettied with surma came to Chetali’s valley to gather flowers. The Champaka tree stood alone—efflorescent, serene. The flower-gatherer reached out and held down a soft twig to pluck the flowers. As the twig broke the Champaka s
aid, My little sister, you have forgotten me!
The children had gone home. Ravi closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair and abandoned himself to the charmed weariness. Around him rose the scent of incense, and the sound of bells and cymbals.
Vedan Uddharate Jagannivahate—the sloka celebrating the avatars of the Lord, evolute incarnations from fish to boar to man and deity resounded over everything.
The moment passed. Ravi, now awake, looked out. The sun was setting over Chetali’s valley. The sunset filled the seedling house with the warmth of a sensuous fever.
Butter Chicken in Ludhiana
Pankaj Mishra
This extract is taken from Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India, published by Penguin Books India.
When the rain stopped, I took a taxi to Kottayam. I went via Cochin, where I had planned to stop awhile and eat. But I had misremembered the distances between these places, with the result that I reached Kottayam very late in the evening.
The traffic was light: an occasional truck or car. There was an almost uninterrupted series of settlements along the road, mostly residential buildings, clean and well-tended, nestling amid banana and coconut trees, and completely without the desolating quality of roadside towns in the North. At larger settlements the road broadened instead of narrowing; no part of it looked encroached upon. And the women outside easily outnumbered men: mostly long-skirted, college-going girls with fresh flowers in their hair and books pressed to their bosoms, who giggled and pointed indecisively when asked for directions.
The road after Cochin—where I ate a hurried meal at Woodlands—suddenly deteriorated. The car lurched from side to side as it went over potholes; passing buses churned up thick clouds of red dust behind them. Then, just as suddenly, the road improved. The land here was hilly and less populated, the few houses were set well back from the road, and the vegetation was denser. Large fenced-in rubber estates lay on either side, with, sometimes, a shaded uninhabited-seeming bungalow on top of a hill. Teak forests and coffee plantations intervened to lend a few more shades of green to the scenery. Going endlessly up and down the twisting deserted road felt, in my fatigue-induced daze, like slowly penetrating to the core of an exceptionally lush and welcoming landscape.
At Kottayam, I checked into a hotel on the busy K.K. Road, quickly bathed, and then went out for a short walk.
I had noticed, while looking for my hotel, a number of new-looking readymade-clothes shops, their pastel interiors gleaming behind glass doors and windows, conspicuous in a street full of churches and old-fashioned, open-fronted shops. It was where I now went.
The shops—some called themselves ‘boutiques’—were, as I had thought, new, and, without exception, deserted. I went into one with the bright name of ‘Pretty Joanne’. The shop staff looked up with wide-eyed interest as I walked in. The interest turned into suspicion as I examined some outrageously gaudy ‘designer’ versions of the North Indian salwar kameez. Soon, one of them was breathing down my neck and demanding to know what I wanted.
‘Just looking,’ I said.
‘But this is ladies boutique,’ he said.
I hadn’t known that. With as much dignity as I could muster, I made a quick exit.
I didn’t go into any of the other shops, and merely observed them from the road, especially the people manning them, who, listlessly looking out from amid their brilliantly-lit enclosures, gave off a strange forlornness. It couldn’t have been just the strain of waiting interminably for customers who never arrived. It was more the alienness of their setting: these shops which with their clean-cut lines, their dust-free interiors, their glass fronts, their air-conditioning, created an oppressively unfamiliar world for their inhabitants in a small place like Kottayam. It was something I thought I could recognize from the past. I had been living in Allahabad when its first ‘fast-food’ restaurant opened in 1987. The owner had been inspired by Nirula’s of Delhi—inspired in turn by McDonald’s of America—and he strove to recreate it in every way he could in Allahabad—down to the plastic vines and plants. But what at first looked strange and incongruous in Delhi was even more so in Allahabad. There were prospective customers I knew who would not dare to step inside the restaurant for fear of being intimidated and embarrassed. And the staff, most of whom were locals, had not ceased for months to give an impression of total unease in their alien Americanized surroundings, always looking, in their jaunty peaked caps and monogrammed uniforms, like people trapped in an overly elaborate and pointless masquerade. In the morning, I called upon Mrs Mary Roy, famous litigant, and, currently, Principal of Corpus Christi School, Kottayam.
Mrs Roy, in a celebrated court case in the mid-eighties, had taken on the entire Syrian Christian Church, and won. She had contested the legality of a pre-independence Succession Act that denied women their rightful share in paternal property, allowing them only a pitiable fourth of the son’s share. Amazingly, this Act, which stood automatically repealed after India became a republic in 1951 and promulgated its own Succession Act, had been allowed to govern property distribution for thirty-five more years. Finally, Mrs Roy took up the cudgels on behalf of Syrian Christian women, and filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court. That was in 1983. In 1986 came the historic judgement declaring the old Succession Act null and void.
The litigation attracted a fair amount of publicity, even if hardly as much as the coterminous Shah Bano case. Emerging from relative obscurity, Mrs Roy became for some time a national figure, her bold views on men, marriage, and feminism featured prominently in women’s magazines.
And I first thought I had not properly realized the true extent of her fame when I tried calling her and found that she was as well-shielded from nosey journalists as any Bombay filmstar.
Three different voices interposed themselves between Mrs Roy and me. The first one told me that Mrs Roy was ill, and therefore unable to meet me. However, it asked for my hotel number in case, the voice said, Mrs Roy felt better and inclined to see me.
The call came ten minutes later. It was another voice this time, demanding to know, in not very clear English, my credentials.
I explained. I said I had come with an introduction from Mrs Roy’s daughter, Arundhati—a Delhi-based filmmaker, whom I had briefly met through a mutual friend—and if Mrs Roy wasn’t too indisposed, could I at least speak to her on the phone?
But this was almost instantly rejected, and the voice resumed its questioning. How did I know Arundhati? What kind of book was I writing? Why did I specifically want to meet Mrs Roy?
I patiently answered. Then the voice broke off without explanation.
There was another call after just five minutes. It was the third voice. The interrogation began anew. What was my book about? Why …
I replied with weariness and a growing impulse to put the phone down.
Finally, I was told to come round in an hour’s time. I was given directions to Corpus Christi school; I was warned not to pay more than ten rupees to the autorickshaw driver.
Contrary to what I was told on the phone, Mrs Roy, when I was finally ushered into her office, turned out to be in reasonably good health. She was a large matronly woman in her late fifties, with prominent black bags under her eyes, an affable manner, and an impish smile that was startlingly like her daughter’s. Unlike her three assistants, she asked me no questions at all about myself. Perhaps, she was satisfied by what she had been told by them. Perhaps—and this seemed more likely after three hours in her company during which she addressed me variously as Pankaj, Pradeep, Sunil, and Ashok—she was simply incurious about someone who after all was only the latest in a long line of interviewers.
She said she was going out to the bazaar for some urgent shopping. Would I mind accompanying her? We could talk on the way, she said.
She wondered, as we walked out to the waiting car, why I was interested in Kottayam. She said, ‘It is such a backward small town. Nothing happens here.’
But that was only a b
it of instinctive self-deprecation before the visitor. For soon after, in response to my mentioning the readymade-clothes shops I had visited the day before, she said, ‘Oh, Kottayam is a very modern place. You’d be surprised. All these people are incredibly rich. There is a lot of money in this town, even if it’s not too apparent.’
And once we were out, and driving into downtown Kottayam, her manner changed, became more expansive. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing to a church, ‘the church has some of the most valuable property in Kottayam. Do you know there are about five hundred bishops in Kottayam alone? They are always fighting each other because all of them have such grand notions about themselves. They even dress like the Pope!’
And when I made a remark about the number of women I had noticed wearing salwar-kameezes, something that seemed to me an interesting departure from traditional modes of dress, she said, ‘But you know, this part of India was always very different in these matters. We had women going around bare-breasted before the British came and put an end to that. There was a whole agitation against the British on this issue.’
Later, as we waited for the girl who drove us to find some parking space, she said, ‘Arundhati is thrilled by that girl. She came from a very poor background, but look at her now: how self-confident she is.’
I followed Mrs Roy on her shopping round. Despite what I had heard about her unpopularity, she appeared to be a well-respected figure. We went first to a large saree store where the men behind the counters rose to their feet as Mrs Roy walked in.
One of them, a tall, spry, spiffily-dressed young man, was her ex-student. We were introduced. His name was Vasudevan. He asked me what I was doing in Kottayam.