by Anita Nair
When they reached the tree, Vijai was surprised by its size. It was nearly as tall as him, though it stood bent almost parallel to the ground, its trunk twisted and contorted into grudging submission by the wind and rain. Moss furred the silver oak’s dwarfed, misshapen branches and trunk. The leaves stood out in dull flashes of grey-green.
‘It’s beautiful, son, just like a real bonsai.’
Vijai said, ‘I told you, didn’t I?’
He made a slashing movement with the knife he carried and his father said, ‘Careful.’ It was quite dark now and the wind had dropped. His father gave the tree an experimental shake. It did not move. He picked up the shovel from where he had dropped it and began loosening the earth around the tree. The ground was hard and unyielding, and the tree was firmly rooted. His father removed the jacket he wore and Vijai could see the sweat popping up on his bare forearms.
Vijai watched his father uncover the tap root, which was almost as thick as the trunk. The digging seemed to go on forever, and Vijai grew anxious again. He wondered what his mother would say, and he remembered with fear and shame the incident on the previous hill. What had possessed him? How could he have dared abuse his father? For a dirty, ugly old tree? He was suddenly angry and swung his knife at the tree. It glanced off one of the branches; white gleamed where the knife had struck. He kicked the tree. ‘Easy, son,’ his father said.
‘No Dad, let’s go home. This horrible tree …’ He was close to crying.
‘Stop it now. Behave yourself.’ There was an edge to his father’s voice. He straightened and put the shovel down. He didn’t look at Vijai, and when he spoke, his voice was quiet. ‘I hope you realize you can’t lose your temper every time things don’t go exactly the way you want them to. You won’t be a boy much longer, Vijai, and it is my dearest hope that you will grow up to be strong, determined, successful … But the only way that is going to happen is if you learn how to deal with adversity and situations that test you. They will make a man of you, but only if you stand up to them. Look at this tree. It started with nothing—poor soil, blasted every day by the wind and the weather, but just look at it, it will survive till the end of time, whereas its fellows, well-watered and nourished and living the good life will go down in the first storm …’ His voice trailed away. He seemed very tired. Vijai wanted to go to him, touch him. Instead, he stood quietly where he was. A moment, two, then his father bent to work again.
Eventually they took the root off, as far down as they could. As the tree began to topple over, his father wrestled it to the ground. ‘Christ, it’s heavy,’ he said. ‘Can you get the shovel, son? I’m going to need both hands for this one.’ Vijai picked up the shovel and stuck the knife into his belt. His father hefted the tree on to his shoulder and set off down the hill. As he followed, Vijai looked at the tree, its branches with their plumed tufts of leaves swaying with his father’s stride. The tree would look good in the garden. He looked back to where it had been. Mist slid silently over the spot; he couldn’t even see the gashed earth where they had dug so recently.
When they got home, they rousted the mali from the servant’s quarters and installed the bonsai tree in an old kerosene drum. Then Vijai and his father scurried into the house to change for the party. Like children anticipating adult ire for some small offence, they crept down the silent passage to their bedrooms, shutting the doors behind them ever so softly.
The party was a disaster; Vijai’s mother was even more fluttery than usual and spoke to his father only when it was necessary. She ignored her son altogether but he didn’t mind too much, preoccupied as he was by everything that had preceded the party.
Later that night, before dropping off to sleep, Vijai ran the evening’s adventure through his mind once more. It remained as clear and precious as when it had taken place, and he had a vague idea that he would be able to call it up whenever he had need of it. He spent the next day painting the drum with a can of silver paint that he had found in the garage. As a final flourish, he painted a broad red band round the middle. They installed the tree at the entrance to the driveway.
A few days later, he left for school. His mother, who had broken her silence only the day before his departure, packed his trunk as usual.
When he came home the next year, Vijai was glad to find the bonsai tree still in place in the driveway. The silver paint on the drum had dulled and the red stripe had faded, but there were more leaves on its tiny branches. Vijai spent a few mornings watering the tree and admiring its tortured beauty. Then the monsoon rains came, and he spent most of his time indoors studying for his exams.
A fortnight after the monsoons broke, it was time to leave for school. They set off early as their progress would be slow on the ghat road made treacherous by the unending downpour. As the car turned out of the driveway, its headlights picked out the bonsai tree briefly, the deformed branches ghostly in grey rain.
Mundu, Meesha, Kumbha, Koda: The Sartorial Splendour of the Malayali Male
Geeta Doctor
It must be the lush tropical climate.
After a season of rains, the moist red earth teems with a cacophony of green. Heart-shaped leaves of caladium spotted with white, pink and red vie for attention with slender tapioca plants hiding their swollen tubers under the ground. Spongy ferns fill the crevices that have not yet been occupied by the violently coloured creatures that chirp and crawl, and climbing vines creep along tree trunks, buttonholing the passer-by with tiny bursts of orange and white flowers. Under the surface of the water that has flooded through the canals and backwaters, the karimeen flips over on its side and in a fatal display of vanity, allows itself to glitter against a sudden beam of sunlight, only to be caught.
Is it a wonder then that the male of the species, the Malayali Male or MM as we shall call him, should be just as filled with a keen devotion to the spectacle he presents to the world around him? When he steps out into the world he is flamboyantly arrayed in a fine white mundu, a rectangular length of cloth wound round the waist and tied correctly, if he is a Hindu, to the right side. The Muslims, or moplahs, show their preference by knotting their mundu to the left. The MM’s meesha, or moustache, has been trimmed and polished to regimental perfection. His waistline, kumbha, protrudes ever so lightly over the bulge of the tucked-in end of his mundu, where he keeps his money purse, to indicate to the world that he is a man of substance. He has had his breakfast of puttu and crab curry that morning. To complete the picture, no self-respecting MM would ever step out without his koda, his black umbrella, furled as tightly as a morning glory bud that has yet to burst out in the sunlight.
At this time of the early morning, bathed and fresh, the MM is a sight to behold. He is as full of pride and a splendid sense of exaltation as a green tree-frog sitting on the uppermost branch of a tree and distending its neck in a booming croak that alerts his mates that an important individual has just arrived. The MM stops when he meets a fellow citizen, delicately flicks up the end of the mundu and enquires politely, with that portmanteau word, ‘Pinhe?’ It could be translated to ‘What gives, old cat?’ or ‘So then?’ or even ‘Top of the morning to you!
Outside of his home state, the MM is a timid creature, somewhat ordinary, even obsequious in his ways. At the Dubai airport for instance, where fortune and a blood relative have placed him behind a glass counter full of Seiko watches, he smiles a trifle too readily, betraying the typical Kerala male’s weakness for a mouth a little too full of teeth. It could be that he is ill at ease in his readymade terylene suit and white shirt two sizes too large for him that he has just borrowed from his cousin-brother, and smiles broadly to distract attention from these constraints. He might even make a gesture that involves cupping a hand in front of his mouth to hide his smile, somewhat in the manner of a refined Geisha entertaining a client and holding her fan politely in front of her face, to indicate merriment.
In his case of course, the grin and the gesture are a sign of embarrassment. He comes from an environment that in th
eory is so fertile, that no MM is ever expected to coarsen his hands with work. That’s why he holds up a delicate hand. If he has started to earn a living, it’s only for a couple of years, until he can get back to his native soil and let the women of the household take the responsibility for allowing him to enjoy the privileged life of a male born in a tropical climate. In an ideal world, the MM reclines in the comfort of a veranda, on an easy chair, wearing a fine white mundu and shaking his legs at the knee joints as though he were playing an imaginary accordion with his thighs. It is for such moments of bliss that the MM is willing to struggle under strange skies to make his packet of money and return home. He is a dreamer with a built-in accordion player between his legs.
The rich Gulf-returned king-makers who return periodically to recruit young nephews and delinquent cousin-brothers for the job market in whichever country is open to them, are the nerves and sinews of the Kerala brotherhood of bachelor boys who seem to be everywhere. They are forced to leave home to make their fortunes in whichever part of the world affords them a bed and a shared lungi. The lungi is the badge of the de-racinated MM. The first time he affects a lungi might be as a comrade-in-arms as a newly liberated student learning to give up bourgeois values of ownership and identify himself as a prole, willing to live in a sloppy lungi, worn by a common student collectorship. The next time round it could be while sharing a common chumri, or hostel room or dormitory, with others who are on the ladder of opportunity offered by the system of capitalist enterprise. The lungi is their badge of freedom, the only moment when they can revert to being the carefree laid-back lads that they used to be in their ancestral homes.
The lungi is to be worn in the real world or at night. It’s a mere tubular piece of checked or striped woven cloth, nowadays even a cloth printed in post-modernistic batik designs of virulent colours that is treated with the contempt that it deserves. It’s actually borrowed from the Tamils next door and as everyone knows, the innumerable uses to which the Tamil subjects his lungi, from towel to turban to bed sheet at night, is not worth contemplating. Why, even when he decides to take his life, he twists his lungi into a rope and hangs himself from the nearest branch and when a kindly neighbour cuts him down, the same bit of cloth is used to drape the corpse.
The mundu, on the other hand, is a sacred piece of white cloth to be worn on returning to the family hearth. The more exalted the person, or the occasion, the finer the cloth. The marriage mundu for instance is of such a fine quality, so diaphanous, that even when it is worn in the form of a double mundu, that is a longer version of the single mundu, folded to a double thickness, it is possible to catch glimpses of the brand and style of underwear affected by the bridegroom. Who knows, maybe like the famous advertisements for a particular style of bras that used to portray the wearer in all kinds of improbable situations wearing her ‘maidenform’ bra, the Malayali bridegroom might also be saying to himself, ‘I dreamt I was getting married in my Y-front Rhinoceros brand underwear!’
For the fact is that traditionally, the MM likes to appear with the least amount of clothes possible. Again, it’s the climate. In such a warm, humid atmosphere, the male body, lightly glazed with a residual film of coconut oil, actually looks quite delectable with just a mere wisp of clothing.
‘The natives cannot understand why Europeans clothe themselves to such an extent in India,’ writes an early visitor to Kerala. He goes on to add, using his own spelling for a member of the Namboodiri community, ‘A Namboorie visiting the house of an European gentleman, after meditating for some little time, suddenly pointed to a wine bottle which had a worked cover, and exclaimed, “Well, you are a curious race of people, not only do you clothe yourself from your head to your feet, but put clothes upon your wooden table and petticoats on your bottles!”’
What is equally interesting is the impression made by the Zamorin of Kozhikode, at that time one of the most powerful rulers on the Malabar coast, when he received the Portuguese adventurer Vasco da Gama at his palace.
‘He was a very dark man,’ says the account rendered by Da Gama’s entourage. ‘Half-naked and clothed with white cloths from the middle to the knees; one of these clothes ended in a long point on which were threaded several gold rings with large rubies which made a great show.’ The description then lists with a growing sense of amazement, the quantity and variety of jewels that the Zamorin wore about his person. He had a diamond ‘the thickness of a thumb’ that hung pendant from the arm bracelet on his left arm, while around his neck, falling to the level of his waist, he wore a double strand of pearls the size of hazelnuts, we are informed. This was quite apart from the rubies, the emeralds, the pearls and gold earrings that he wore around his neck, in his hair, and pierced ear lobes. In short, the Zamorin might have been naked, but he carried his treasury about his person.
The Portuguese upstart, on the other hand, was dressed from head to toe in the manner of his country in lavish silk gown, cape, leather boots, and a feather waving on his hat. It’s not surprising that this encounter led to a certain misunderstanding. ‘The Zamorin,’ we are told, after watching Da Gama and friends drink the water that had been given to them to wash their hands, ‘then sent for figs and fruit for them to eat, and laughing most immoderately at them whilst so engaged, Da Gama became nettled and declined to enter into any conference, unless conducted to a more private room.’
More to the point, however, is that Kozhikode was at that moment in time, the trading post for the finest cloth produced in the Coromandel. The calicos and muslins were as delicate as the morning dew lying upon the grass, as sheer as the wings of the dragonflies alighting upon the surface of the water-lilies thrusting their heads out of the bathing ponds. This was the favoured garment of the royalty and if today the MM affects the same delicately woven fabrics, it’s only on special occasions, weddings for instance, or ritual appearances at the temple.
The kasavu mundu, or gold-bordered cloth that is worn by MMs on festive occasions, as they troop into the temples, bare bodied from the waist upwards, with perhaps just an upper body cloth (angavastram) loosely draped about the shoulders, a gold chain around the neck, is quite a spectacle. Accompanied by the blowing of conches, gorgeously lit brass lamps, the swaying ambulatory movement of the temple elephant, whose skin contrasts just as effectively with lavish gold ornaments as it is led around the outer passage of the temple, the mundu-clad procession takes on an epic quality.
‘The moment I get back to Kerala I automatically slip into my mundu. It’s only then that I feel that I am a true Malayali,’ explains a trim, elegantly dressed hotelier, who could not be more distant from such primitive spectacles in his daily life. ‘I think the first time I wore my mundu was when I was around six. It’s a rite of passage. I had to get into one for some wedding that we were attending in my grandfather’s house because all my cousins were wearing mundus. I had to wear a belt to hold it up, but not anymore. When I look back at all the more important occasions of my life, I have worn a mundu, so it’s very much a part of who I am.’
The MM is never content to just let his mundu hang; he uses it to convey a whole range of signals. There is for instance, the simple half-hitch signal. The wearer stands at ease, legs slightly apart, with his mundu hanging down, then he gives a casual back leg flick and in the same instant grabs the fabric from the lower edge and knots it loosely in the front. As performed by the famous actor Mamooty, whose sartorial language conveys more than any script that a writer could invent, this is the MM at his most confident. ‘Why don’t you come and see me sometime, babe?’ he seems to be saying.
On the other hand, a forward kick of the mundu, causing it to fly up, like a subdued Bruce Lee kickboxing blow, is inclined to be a warning gesture. The knot is much more briskly tied; the mundu now becomes a tight shield of self-defense around the wearer’s waist. ‘Don’t mess with me, brother,’ he seems to be saying. Or if he has girded his mundu taut in front of a comely maiden who happens to be passing by, the message is much more explicit
. It’s a prelude to all those heavy breathing Malayalam flicks that go under the title of ‘Her Nights’.
For, unlike his male counterparts in the rest of the country, the MM is fully aware of his tenuous position in the richly pulsating landscape of continually proliferating life that surrounds him. The endless stories of husbands who returned home to their temporarily linked partners, only to find, Freud be praised, another MM’s spear, sword, or pair of slippers outside the door, are just an indication of the insecurity that the MM has to face. He has to shape up or face up to the fact that someone else will take his place. It’s not so much a question of infidelity as availability, an excess of males in a closely guarded society of family members who cross-pollinated, until very recently, only within a carefully observed hierarchy of available females, controlled by an implacable matriarchy.
It’s the mothers, aunts and grandmothers who control the destiny of the pampered males in the typical Malayali family. They see to it that he has his daily Malabar banana, his egg fried and sunny-side up—‘Moneh, have you had your mutta?’—with his breakfast delicacies, the steamed and boiled quota of starch, and that last thing at night he retires to bed with: a warm and milky, malt-flavoured drink.
‘My son will not go for his bath unless I lay out his clothes. Now I hope his new wife will do that for him,’ says a proud mother. One twitch of his mundu and he will be back at her side.
Much as the Victorians raised or doffed their hats to members of the opposite sex, or to those who were socially superior, or older and more influential in subtle ways only explicable to the doffer of hats, the MM raises and lowers his mundu in similar fluctuations. ‘Sometimes, to save myself the bother, I just wrap one end of my mundu around my finger,’ explains a young MM. ‘It makes it easier for me to walk. At the same time, I am showing respect for any of my elders that I might meet along the way.’ For some of the famous Malayali actors, showing off their well-rounded calves between the folds of their tied up mundu is the equivalent of a heroine displaying her cleavage.