Where the Rain is Born: Writings about Kerela

by Nair, Anita

  Just passing through, I said.

  But there is nothing here, he said.

  That was the second time in a day that I had heard this. ‘But how can this be true?’ I tried to protest, ‘the largest-selling newspaper in India has its offices here. Then, it is the centre of Malayalam publishing. You have the Syrian Christian community here, so many denominations, so many churches. It is a fascinating place.’

  Mrs Roy looked amused at my response. Vasudevan permitted himself a brief smile.

  ‘That is all for tourists,’ he said. ‘For people who live here there is very little.’

  Mrs Roy told me more about Vasudevan as he busied himself with her order. He was one of her success-stories. After graduating from her school, he had gone on to study at Sydenham College in Bombay. He had then come back to take charge of his father’s saree shop.

  The saree shop, she added in a lowered voice, had fallen on bad days lately. There were three floors in all when the shop first opened, and it had a monopoly on the wedding-saree business. Now, after the opening of Rehmanika in Cochin, it had gone into rapid decline. Just as it had decimated other saree-businesses in the region ten years ago, so it was being decimated by Rehmanika now.

  I had been to Rehmanika on a previous visit to Cochin, attracted by its claim to being the largest saree store in Asia, and had come away quite impressed. It was gigantic all right, but it was also generous. Instead of being unceremoniously ejected, a casual stroller like myself had been presented with a soft-drink. In the air-cooled waiting space for impatient males, there had been a stack of the very latest magazines.

  Vasudevan, overhearing me talk about Rehmanika, piped up: ‘Do you know it is owned by a man from Kottayam?’

  Mrs Roy turned to me and said, ‘Didn’t I tell you? People think big in this town.’

  She asked Vasudevan to show me round the shop. He looked hesitant. The reason became quickly clear: there was nothing to see.

  We went up unsteady wooden stairs to a dark hall full of dusty overturned furniture and musty smells. Vasudevan switched on the light. I looked. He waited. I thought hard of something to say.

  Some time elapsed before Vasudevan said, ‘This floor was operational until sometime back. Now we are trying to turn it into a readymade clothes section.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  We stood there in some embarrassment, both of us at a loss for words.

  Then, as we were going down the stairs, Vasudevan said, apropos of nothing, ‘Actually, I am from Bombay.’

  But he wasn’t. He had only studied there. I knew that already from Mrs Roy.

  Slightly puzzled, I said nothing. There was a strange poignance in his claim. It was intended for me: the visitor from the metropolis. But I didn’t realize this until much later.

  It must have been as a young man full of promise that he travelled to Bombay. His years there, in the company of other big-thinking students, must have further enhanced his ambitions. And things might have seemed to be going his way when he came back to his father’s flourishing business in Kottayam.

  But then Rehmanika had arrived, and forced his shop into decline. It could not have been an easy thing to take for a man whose notions of success were formed in Bombay, and who probably always thought his proper place was there. It must have revived all his latent dislike for small-town efforts. And it must have revived his desire to reconnect himself with the larger world, a desire which, in the present circumstances, couldn’t go beyond an attempt to distance himself from both Kottayam and the failure the upper floor spoke of.

  Back at her office, Mrs Roy told me about her continuing harassment by fundamentalist elements within the Syrian Christian Church. It didn’t seem likely that they would ever forgive her. Most recently, they had denounced as blasphemous the Lloyd-Webber play Jesus Christ Superstar which the children at her school had put up. On their prompting, the District Collector had raided the school twice to prevent the play from being staged. A close contact in the police department had warned her that drugs might be planted on the premises during the raid, and she had had to take anticipatory bail in order to avoid arrest.

  She pointed out the anticipatory-bail order to me. It had been framed and hung just above her chair.

  ‘Look carefully,’ she said. ‘Do you see something strange in it?’

  I couldn’t. it was too far from me to read.

  ‘Look carefully,’ she said, with a triumphant note in her voice. ‘It is an order without any dates on it!’

  She received a regular supply of hate-mail. Much of it concerned her daughter, Arundhati, who had outraged fundamentalist opinion by openly living in sin with a Hindu man in Delhi. She was alleged to be promiscuous, flitting from one man to another. Others thought her a prostitute. All concurred in thinking her a morally debased woman.

  ‘All this small-town pettiness,’ Mrs Roy said, ‘I am so glad I sent my daughter out of Kottayam. I didn’t want her growing up here.’

  As we talked, a maidservant came in, wearing an immaculately clean apron, and holding a tray with two glasses of Thums Up. While I took an occasional sip from my glass, Mrs Roy never even touched hers. As the afternoon wore on, she grew more voluble, and I was called upon to say less and less. Her range of topics expanded; she turned out to be full of opinions on a variety of subjects.

  A common strand ran through them: her desire to separate herself from Kottayam and its backwardness. It wasn’t easy to understand at first how she differed from Vasudevan in that. But then, unlike him, she had no cravings for metropolitan success. She was a well-established prominent citizen to Kottayam, the principal of a prestigious school. In however mixed ways, Kottayam offered her a stable existence; the place could even be, as I had seen, a source of pride. Her wish to be distinguished from it clearly had different roots. And it mostly seemed as if by repeatedly emphasizing the stultifying aspect of her surroundings, she was trying to throw into even sharper focus her own struggles for an independent modern identity. Kottayam and its backwardness were, in effect, merely the backdrop—albeit, an essential one—to a long and difficult process of self-creation.

  The locals, who had witnessed it from close quarters, could take it for granted; it was the outsider, to whom it wasn’t always apparent, who needed to be told about it. Thus, the manifold opinions, which were like cryptic assertions of her independence and modernity.

  She talked about sex. She thought it a wonderful thing, and deplored the Christian attitude to it. ‘I think Hinduism has a much more positive view on this. I mean, they even tell you how to have sex. And, look at Krishna! How sexual he is!’ she said.

  She talked about television. She liked the new satellite-TV serials. ‘Serials like Santa Barbara and The Bold and the Beautiful are so much better than anything on Doordarshan. The story is all trash of course, but they are technically very good.’

  Technically very good?!! Santa Barbara and The Bold and the Beautiful?!!

  It seemed a strange thing to say, coming from the mother of a fairly accomplished filmmaker.

  But just before I left, she said something even stranger. She said, apropos of nothing, with an unexpected passion in her voice, ‘I think white people are a curse on mankind. Wherever you look, they are busy causing destruction to something or the other. And they think themselves so superior to everyone else! They are really awful!’

  I was still pondering over that remark when I went to Kovalam Beach and found a good reason why white people, for admittedly no fault of theirs, could soon find themselves resented by more Indians.

  On a previous visit to Kovalam with a friend I had noticed a hotel called ‘Searock’. It was right on the beach, closer to the water than any other hotel. We were then staying at the Hotel Rockholm, a far more clean and pleasant place, but slightly expensive; and we had decided to ask at the Searock, which we knew to be cheaper, if there was anything there for us.

  A tall broad-shouldered man with a gruff stentorian voice and absurd accent had met us
at the reception. No, he had boomed out. There were no rooms available at his hotel. He had full bookings for the entire season.

  It was then the month of October; the season hadn’t even commenced. And, I knew that irrespective of which month of the year it was, the hotels in Kovalam were never quite full.

  There was something else going on, and a British couple I met on a train had confirmed my suspicions. The Searock, they said, didn’t admit Indians. They had come to know this from a French couple on the beach, who were also staying at the Searock and who fully approved of its policy of barring Indians. The British couple, to their credit, had been horrified by such blatant racism. They had left Searock the same day and moved into another hotel.

  I had heard about similar hotels in the Caribbean, the playgrounds of rich white Americans, where local blacks, no matter how wealthy, were not welcome. And it had seemed a distinctive feature of the Caribbean’s tourist economics: the self-abasement before foreigners, the frantic wish to please at any cost, the desire to be more white than the whites, the lust for dollars, the distrust and contempt for one’s compatriots.

  But India wasn’t a tourist economy—at least, not yet. All the more disturbing, then, it was to know about places where the shoddy practices of poor parasitic nations had crept in. In India, they were an unpleasant reminder of old colonial hierarchies: whites at the top, Indians somewhere at the bottom, finding their own different levels of degradation. They spoke, at least in certain quarters, of the growing damage, after just forty-seven years of independence, to national self-esteem; and they were the unexplored darker side of globalization, the social consequence of joining the global market as a pavement beggar.

  It was the same man at the Searock’s reception when I went in. He had two friends with him this time: as tall and broad-shouldered as he was, and with the manner of bullies.

  It was some time before he noticed me, standing there with my rucksack.

  ‘Yes? What do you want?’ he boomed out.

  I said I was looking for a room.

  ‘Single or double?’ he asked.

  ‘Single,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, with an air of finality, ‘we have no single rooms.’

  I persisted. ‘What about a double room?’

  ‘We have them,’ he intoned, ‘but they are too expensive.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Two hundred rupees a night.’

  ‘That’s fine by me,’ I said. I was expecting a much higher tariff.

  But he wasn’t listening to me. He had already turned to his friends and was conversing with them in rapid Malayalam.

  I said in a louder voice, ‘I’ll take the room.’

  He turned and looked at me, impatience writ large on his face. ‘You take my advice and go to the main beach,’ he said, in a commanding voice, ‘you’ll find much cheaper places there.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘but I like it here.’

  For some reason, he didn’t offer any more resistance. He did look vaguely regretful as I signed the register and paid out the advance, as if berating himself for not having told me that the entire hotel was booked for the season.

  I was walked over by a servant to a small room at the end of the corridor facing the reception. The two beds left barely enough space to stand; in the bathroom was a torn towel with a scruffy surface, and a small bar of Hamam soap. I quickly undressed, and went in to bathe.

  Two minutes later, the light went out. I finished my bath, dressed, and went out to the reception. The man smiled when he saw me, and exchanged a look with his friends.

  ‘Yes? What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘There is no power in my room.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘There is some fault in the fuse. It will come back after two hours.’

  I walked back to my room and lay on the cool bed. It had been a long and tiring journey from Kottayam, and I was tired, I must have drifted off into sleep, for when I woke up it was fifteen minutes later, with the sounds of heavy pounding coming through the thin walls from the adjacent room. The noise was deafening; I must have woken up almost immediately after it started.

  I got up and went out to the reception. He was still there, but without his friends, and there was a stern expression on his face.

  ‘Yes? What do you want?’ he asked.

  I told him about the hammering sounds, and how they had disturbed my sleep.

  ‘That will go on,’ he said. ‘My work cannot stop.’

  ‘Do you have any other room?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  I looked at him; he, at me.

  And then without any warning, he took out two hundred rupee notes from his shirt pocket, and, handing them to me, said, ‘I told you in the beginning. Take your advance back, and find another hotel. This is not the right hotel for you.’

  I checked into another hotel, slept, wrote in my notebook and read an old collection of stories by Vaikkom Mohammed Basheer that I had picked up in Kottayam.

  Later on the beach I ran into someone I knew from my last visit. He was a sixteen-year-old boy from a nearby Muslim fishing village. He had dropped out of school at an early age, and, while I was there, seemed to spend all his time soliciting beach-side tourists for business.

  The business he offered was deep-sea scuba-diving. The vision he painted of it was exact in its details: the motor-boat drive before dawn, the lonely spot miles away from the shore, the Made-in-Germany scuba-diving equipment awaiting one in the boat, the army of expert swimmers ready to help in case something went wrong.

  Moving from person to person on the packed beach, he retailed the same vision, making it all somehow sound like child’s play. But I don’t believe he ever got any customers. The reason was obvious at first glance. For such a glamorous-sounding sport as deep-sea scuba-diving, he was an extremely unconvincing salesman in his torn vest and lungi, all of whose talk about motor-boats and Made-in-Germany diving equipment could seem to be part of the idleness of the beach.

  I met him everyday while I was there. He talked of different things to me after I had quickly discounted myself as a prospective scuba-diver. His ambition was to go to Saudi Arabia, and earn a lot of money there. Many people he knew had already done so, and he was determined to emulate them. As for now, he was content to earn a little money here and there, doing odd jobs.

  I never asked him what those odd jobs were, but toward the end of my stay he gave me a truer idea of them. He asked me one day if I liked boys or girls.

  I didn’t at first understand the true import of his question.

  ‘Both,’ I said.

  ‘Boys,’ he said, ‘you like boys?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, still not understanding.

  He said, ‘You want to fuck boys?’

  So great was the shock that I couldn’t bring myself to say anything for some time. I saw him looking expectantly at me, without fear, without embarrassment. It was clearly not the first time he had asked someone that question. I finally managed to weakly blurt out, no. He appeared content with that, and did not offer me girls in place of boys. It was possible, of course, that there were no girls to offer, that there was only him and a few other boys who, struggling with desperate poverty, had fallen back on an ancient profession.

  He was in the water, a few feet to my left, when I saw him. He was with a tall skinny girl in a fluorescent-green bikini, whose hand he held onto tightly as they dived headlong, shrieking with delight, into the base of a looming wave. He saw me, and his face broke into a smile of recognition, but he appeared unwilling to let go of the girl’s hand and swim over to where I was.

  He did so after the girl left. He had grown slightly since the last time I saw him. There were the wispy beginnings of a moustache above his upper lip; an Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat; his shoulders looked broader. And he was wearing a skimpy Speedo swimsuit, a gift, no doubt, from one of his tourist-friends.

  ‘See that girl,’ he shouted above the roar of crashing wave
s, pointing to the figure wading back to the beach, ‘she’s from Israel. She’s my girlfriend.’

  ‘What about Saudi Arabia?’ I shouted back.

  But the sarcasm, in poor taste as it was, was lost on him. His blank face told me he had forgotten about Saudi Arabia, forgotten that he once wanted to go there. It was part of the now-discarded fantasy about motor-boats and scuba-diving; it had never meant anything.

  We didn’t talk much. He looked restless and distracted, eager to get away.

  I commented on that. ‘You look like a busy man,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yes, very busy,’ he said. ‘Too much people wanting me these days.’

  The imprecise English inadvertently expressed a kind of truth. Business had finally boomed. From being one who solicited, he had rapidly moved to being one who was solicited. He didn’t have customers any more; he had girlfriends. And he was only seventeen, his body yet to achieve its full muscular development, yet to ripen into the bronzed glory which for many winters to come would keep finding new admirers, if not also bring old ones back to these shores.

  The Expanse of Imagination

  Jayanth Kodkani

  Flirtations with persona

  The other day I showed these lines to a colleague.

  ‘What does your face look like?’

  ‘Longish and fair. My hair is trimmed. I’m a little bald.’

  ‘And eyes?’

  ‘Rather small, elephant eyes.’

  ‘Mine are large elephant eyes. Your chest?’

  ‘Somewhat broad.’

  ‘My chest is full too. And your waist?’

  ‘It’s trim.’

  ‘My waist? Well, I wouldn’t want to tell you!’

  ‘It sure must be like a barrel! I could scratch and tear you to pieces.’

  The colleague snickered like a schoolboy and said, ‘So what have you been doing in chatrooms?’ He deduced it was cyberspace dialogue. An activity that not only helps create a virtual persona but also allows flirtations with fabricated identities. Behind unseen walls. Where people play ‘yours’ and ‘mine’ with their own selves, inhabiting the realms of their creations.