by Anita Nair
Suddenly, through the corner of my eye, I saw someone at the far end of the courtyard. In great surprise I stopped. Without turning around, making up for my embarrassment with a gravity of tone, I asked, ‘Who is there?’ No answer. I turned slowly. A young woman stood regarding me with one hand on the circular parapet of the well, and the other pressed to a spot on her right thigh. The pain that she had perhaps forgotten as she watched my sky-leaps now returned to her face. She said, ‘I fell down and something happened to my leg. I can’t bear the pain. Could you take a look at it, Vaidyare?’
‘Has anyone come with you?’ I asked.
‘No one,’ she said.
‘Go and bring someone. I don’t usually treat women.’
‘I can’t walk, Vaidyare,’ she said, ‘and I don’t have anyone to fetch. There’s only my mother, she is old and can’t walk.’
Uncertainly, I asked her, ‘How did you fall?’
‘When I climbed the stone wall to pluck the black mother shrub for my goat, a stone broke loose.’
I liked that. I whispered, ‘Black mother, fair daughter. Daughter’s daughter, fairest of the fair.’ I muttered under my breath, ‘You’re a smart woman, you’ve answered a riddle1 I did not ask.’
‘Come here,’ I said, ‘let me see.’
She came limping across the rain-splattered courtyard, through the fresh scent of the rain, and sat down at my usual spot. She leaned back on my glistening pillar. Lifting her right leg with both hands, she placed it along the wood of the veranda, as I would have done. I wanted to shout, that’s my place, it’s I who sit there! Instead, I continued to stand in the courtyard and watch her anxiously. She began to sob. She sat there and wept in many soft notes which I had never heard before. Her hair, which had come undone, enveloped my shining pillar like a dark cascade. Her tears fell on the edge of my veranda, shattered, and flowed down into the wells of the hungry antlions, carrying the flavour of salt and sorrow. I stood silent in the courtyard, watching her forge a friendship with pain. At the same time, an intense desire possessed me to rush to my place and sit there. I controlled myself and whispered to the antlions, ‘My friends, do not swoon in the salt of her tears. Escape to the waters of the springs beneath. Swim away like tortoises.’ After a while, she stopped weeping and wiped away her tears. She gathered up her hair which had fallen loose on her face. Then she rolled her mundu up her thigh and showed me where it hurt.
The tumult of a world crashing filled my ears as I approached her and examined her thigh. There was a black and blue mark.
‘Isn’t your pain gone?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t your pain drain away with your tears?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I was crying for all of myself, not only for my pain.’
I said nothing. I took the softness of her thigh in both hands and pressed my fingers to it. The sunshine, the wind, the moving shadows, the dancing branches of my medicinal plants, all accompanied my fingers in their journey in quest of her pain. I did not look at her. I turned my face to the clouds in the sky, to the jungle and to the homes of the antlions. Her thigh, which was washed in pain and tears, lay pliant in my hands. O my antlions, I whispered, look at my condition! I saw they were out walking; they sauntered slowly through their gardens of dust like ancient creatures. Suddenly, I came back to myself; I knew I must act. I rolled my eyes. My beard flew up lethally. I stared at her with a hard and cruel look. The nerve that had gone astray beneath that black and blue mark trembled under my fingers. Keeping a tight hold, I roared, ‘Would you like to die, woman?’ The words, you lose a hundred points, waited on the tip of my tongue. My eyes awaited the bewilderment, dejection and defeat that would fill her face. At that moment, wiping the tear stains from her face with one hand, she asked me, ‘Did you like to be born?’
I felt suffocated. It seemed to me that her errant vein was squirming out of my grasp. I held on to her thigh as if for support. Someone answering my riddles! My next roar faltered, ‘Are you afraid to die?’ And the words, you lose a thousand points, waited on the tip of my tongue. She asked me calmly, ‘Were you afraid to be born, Vaidyare?’ Her thigh, with its fine dark hairs, lay in my hands like a sleeping child. ‘You owe me a hundred points,’ she said. Then, covering my hands with her two palms and pressing them to the quietude of her thigh, she said, ‘Heal me, Vaidyare, or else you lose a thousand points.’
Today, in my plot of land where jungles had been, a vegetable garden tosses in the wind and sunlight. My herbs flourish safely behind a bamboo fence. Those who come to consult me sit on benches on the veranda which was once the garden of my antlions. It is long since they fled from those dusty floors, now polished with cowdung mixture. They live on, under the awnings in my backyard. On the rolled-up end of a tiny thread dangled into the pit, I caught one of them and showed it to my year-old son. Then I returned it to the solitude of the dust and whispered to my child, ‘My son, you’ll never know their companionship. Nor will you know how the jungle can enfold and protect you. No girl thief will ever come prowling to steal your kacholam. My son, may God bless you and help you to invent riddles more difficult than those I invented.’
—Translated from the Malayalam by A.J. Thomas
Footballer
Ravi Menon
The passion that soccer triggers, and the number of people that fall prey to its hypnotic appeal, are all too staggering.
Citizens of Peringotupulam, a tiny hamlet in Malappuram district in north Kerala, would vouch for that. They had joined hands recently to build a 50m long bridge across the Kadalundi River just to watch the games going on in a seven-a-side football tournament at a nearby township.
‘We had to travel over ten kilometres to reach the MSP ground in Malappuram town, where the tournament was being held. Now we trudge just a kilometre,’ said a Panchayat member of Kodur, where the village is situated. ‘Being a village of football-crazy men (and women), we just could not resist the temptation.’
The man was not joking. The words, coming straight from his heart, rightly sum up the soccer fever in Kerala. For the middle-class Malayali, football is a game like no other. From the sunny beaches of Kozhikode to the star-spangled ‘sevens’ fields of Malappuram, and from the dark and narrow lanes of Fort Kochi to the pastoral highlands of Munnar, it is an integral part of life itself. It is perhaps this profound involvement that has brought to bloom a galaxy of talented players from this state over the past few generations.
Some of them are real touch artists who have the delicate skills of ballet dancers, and the killer instinct of the merciless picadors of the bull rings. Footballers who play the game for the sheer joy of it, like that ebony antelope from Thrissur, Iyinivalappil Mani Vijayan.
Vijayan, undoubtedly the most popular footballer to have emerged from the state, has become a role model for every Malayali sportsman desiring to shrug off his inhibitions and march shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the country. Watching him on the move—sending those adroit passes which pack so much cunning and control, or making those fluent dribbles, in the manner of a master swordsman making his cuts and thrusts, or getting to striking range and rifling the ball home—is to know what football is all about.
Vijayan’s humble beginnings and rags-to-riches story have attained folklore status in Kerala, where icons are seldom made or accepted. It’s been a long journey for him, from playing with a thunippanthu—pieces of cloth tied together to form a ball—in the dried-up paddy fields of Thrissur. Born in 1970, to a family of agricultural labourers in Kolothumpadam, on the outskirts of Thrissur, Vijayan experienced the hardships of penury during his childhood.
Trapped neck-deep in poverty, the family of four (Vijayan has an elder brother named Biju), trudged along till the death of the father, when Vijayan was just eight. The mother, Kochchammu, worked as a daily wage-earner in the fields and took up small jobs here and there to feed her children. Vijayan gets a lump in his throat whenever he recalls those dark days when his mother used to go to bed on an empty stomach after feedi
ng her kids. The pangs of hunger, however, failed to deter the carefree and spirited son whose only passion was football.
Like the Dutch football legend Johan Cruyff, Vijayan dedicates his goals to his mother. Cruyff’s mother, a cleaning woman in Amsterdam, had her dreams cut out for her. She used to pause now and again in front of the massive Ajax football stadium to be transported to another world. A world where, in the scheme of things populating her dreams, her little son would be a soccer star. Before her son was ten years old, she would stubbornly ease him out of the cosy comfort of his bed and drag him along to the stadium. ‘There my son, watch them practise. You can do it better than any of them,’ she would tell the little Johan.
Kochchammu, on the other hand, was less ambitious. ‘She did not even know what the game of soccer was all about. She just wanted us to grow up and make a decent living,’ recalls the footballer. ‘Her dreams ended there.’
But Vijayan’s didn’t. At twelve, he was selling soda and cigarettes to the crowds at Thrissur’s Municipal Stadium, the venue of the Santosh Trophy National Football Championship in 1982. ‘The money earned was too meagre. Still, I was happy, as I could watch the games without paying for the tickets.’
It was the youngster’s soccer skills and his burning desire to excel that caught the attention of Prof M.C. Radhakrishnan, the then secretary of the District Sports Council who helped him get into a three-year coaching camp conducted by the council.
‘Radhakrishnan sir was also generous enough to arrange food for me at the nearby Triveny Hotel,’ recalls the player with gratitude.
At the camp, Vijayan was lucky to come under the tutelage of coach T.K. Chathunni, a former international defender who sensed class in the body language of the lean, hungry-looking lad. Chathunni later helped the boy land a job with the Kerala Police, where he found a godfather in the sports-loving Director General M.K. Joseph.
RISE TO STARDOM
‘The realization that I could make a living out of soccer came the day I got my first pay packet from the police,’ says Vijayan. ‘Never before had I seen so much money. I still remember rushing home to share my joy with my mother and brother. It was the first day of celebration in our life.’
The celebrations, in fact, had just begun. Vijayan justified the DGP’s high hopes in him by helping the Kerala Police to two triumphs in the prestigious Federation Cup inter-club championship. He ventured to Kolkata, to Mohun Bagan, and after that to Punjab’s Jagjit Cotton Textile (JCT) Mills. Interestingly, from 1990 till 1996, he remained a member of the winning team in the Federation Cup, representing Kerala Police twice, Mohun Bagan for three years and JCT Mills for the next two years. Later he returned home to don the colours of FC Kochin, the country’s first-ever professional club.
But the Kolkata maidan remained a passion somewhere deep within him, always beckoning him with its beguiling charm. He could not resist the temptation to return to the Mecca of Indian soccer when East Bengal came up with a tempting offer.
Vijayan believes that it was his stint in Kolkata that groomed him into a fearless professional footballer. He still regrets his decision to return to Kerala, after his maiden season with Mohun Bagan in 1991. ‘I went back to Kerala on the assurance of Kerala Football Association that they would help me build a house of my own. But strangely enough, the monetary benefit was outrageously negligible, compared to the promises made,’ he recalls.
Vijayan, who returned to the maidan a disgusted man the next year, was indebted to the Bagan management for extending him a helping hand when it mattered most—to build a house for him and his family in Thrissur.
Vijayan, addressed affectionately as ‘Black Pearl’ by his fans, made his debut for the Indian juniors in the Police Cup in Maldives (1990). Later he represented the senior team in the Super Soccer series against the PSV Eindhovan, and the Pre-Olympic tournament. For the next ten years he was a regular in the national squad, playing for the country in the qualifying rounds of the World Cup and the Olympics, the Jawaharlal Nehru Gold Cup, the Asian Games, the Asian Cup, the SAF Games, the SAFF Cup and the Sahara Cup.
BAPTISM BY FIRE
28 July 1993 was a red-letter day in Vijayan’s career. ‘It was a sort of baptism by fire for me,’ recalls the player who scored Mohun Bagan’s breathtaking match winner against East Bengal, when the traditional rivals met in the Centenary IFA Shield in Kolkata. The teams were locked 1-1, when Vijayan scored off a dead-ball. Having earlier blasted home Bagan’s equalizer, he curved the ball around a seven-man East Bengal wall and beat the goalkeeper to give Bagan the game.
Vijayan was elevated to the status of a demigod when, a few days later, in the semifinal against Mohammedan Sporting, he converted a cross with a spectacular back volley from forty yards, a beautiful goal that revived memories of Shyam Thapa’s brilliant reverse kick goal that stopped East Bengal in 1978.
Which was his favourite goal?
‘Perhaps the one for JCT Mills against the Malaysian club Perlis in the final of the Scissors Cup in 1996,’ says Vijayan. ‘It was yet another back volley, this time off a well-angled cross from Tejinder Kumar. The goal was memorable because it gave us the match and the title.’
And his worst experience on the field?
‘Certainly the penalty miss against Kerala in the 1992 Santosh Trophy at Coimbatore. I was playing for Bengal then, and had been under severe psychological pressure, since the entire crowd was crying for my blood. A majority of them were Malayalis and they hated me for “deserting” my homestate to play for Bengal.’
One moment that Vijayan cherishes is the 12th-second strike against Bhutan in the South Asian Federation Games in 1999—a goal that has graced the soccer annals as one of the fastest goals ever scored in an international match. The scintillating effort by Vijayan eclipsed former England captain Bryan Robson’s 29th-second goal against France in the 1982 World Cup. It also bettered another fast-scoring effort which came in the final of the 1974 World Cup, when Johan Neeskens slammed in a 78th second penalty, after Holland’s Johan Cruyff was brought down in the box by West German Uli Hoeness.
Vijayan is so wonderfully versatile that it has always been impossible for him to play just one assigned role—upfront, midfield, or even defence. At his peak, he played everywhere, with the same kind of energy and skills. A man aware of his own gifts, Vijayan also understood the potential of other members of his team and helped them play to their peak.
A NEW CAREER
In the twilight years of his career, Vijayan has entered a new domain, a new passion that has been as challenging as the game of soccer. He made his debut as an actor, playing the lead role in director Jayaraj’s National Award-winning film ‘Shaantham’.
‘It was at a function held in Thrissur that Jayaraj made the stunning announcement that he had plans to cast me in his next film,’ recalls Vijayan. At first I laughed it off as a simple joke. Surprisingly, Jayaraj was quite serious. He wanted me to act, and he meant it too.’
After ‘Shaantham’ and Aakashathile Paravakal’, the footballer is likely to don the greasepaint for a few more films. ‘I really enjoy my film career. But that doesn’t mean that I am fed up with soccer. Soccer is my first love and will remain so forever. It’s the game that made me what I am today. How can ever I forget soccer?’ asks Vijayan, who stays in Chembukaavu near Thrissur, with his wife Raji—a dancer—and his children Aaromal, Aarcha and Abhirami. After retirement I will get more time to spend with the budding talents at my soccer academy,’ says the footballer who launched the I.M. Vijayan Sports Foundation in 2000, with the aim of imparting specialized training to aspiring footballers.
Vijayan is not merely a soccer maestro appealing to the romantics with his wizardry and inventiveness in the middle. He is also a go-getter, one who loves to set his goals and chase them all alone.
There is no shortcut to glory. It’s a steep and gruelling climb with its share of dreams and nightmares. Vijayan is a man who has learnt it the hard way. ‘I have no regrets. Soccer has giv
en me more than what I deserve. Without soccer, perhaps I would have ended up as just another street kid in Thrissur, wondering where his next meal would come from,’ Vijayan says with an innocent smile.
On the Banks of the Mayyazhi
M. Mukundan
This extract is taken from On the Banks of the Mayyazhi, published by East West Books.
The rains had long been over and the month of Karkatakam had started.
Damu Writer was very ill, he could not perform the annual bali rituals for his dead ancestors on full moon day. He was ill all the time now. Apart from his chronic asthma, he had developed other ailments like a backache and swelling of the limbs.
Two more days to full moon. ‘I can’t do the bali rituals. May the dead forgive me,’ said Damu.
‘Let Dasan do them if you can’t,’ said Kurambi Amma. Dasan, the only other man in the house, had never performed these rituals before.
When everyone insisted, he consented to perform them.
The bustle in the kitchen started the day before full moon. Many kinds of payasams had to be prepared for the dead ancestors.
Girija got up at dawn and had a bath. Her hair still wet, she served the payasam on banana leaves, filled a vessel with water and went to the southern room, which was kept apart for the ancestors. Kelu Achan’s bones were preserved there in an earthen pot, under the cowdung-smeared floor.
‘Think of your grandfather, little one, keep his image in your mind,’ said Kurambi Amma, coming up to the door. Girija invoked her grandfather, who had died of a snake bite long before she could remember, and placed the payasam and water on the floor.