Where the Rain is Born: Writings about Kerela

by Nair, Anita

  It was only when Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagawathar placed a ponnadai (shawl) on him at a concert that the more liberal among the classical singing community (read: Brahmins) began to accept Yesudas. The singer was determined to plough a lonely furrow. On the one hand he was a popular singer, on the other a serious Carnatic musician who put in hours of practice everyday. He gives two different types of concerts, therefore—as a popular musician and as a classical one. As a cricket fan, he cannot be unaware of the cricketing analogy—it is as if he is a leading player in both one-day cricket and Test cricket. ‘Classical music is where all music begins, as well as what all music aspires to,’ he says before going into a highly personalized (and picturesque) explanation of what the musical notes mean to him.

  ‘Sometimes I am accused of making classical music too accessible by my style of singing. I take that as a compliment. If I can have the ordinary man humming pavanaguru or vatapiganapathim, then that is an achievement.’ The two-way traffic initiated by Yesudas must rate as one of his most important contributions to music: on the one hand raising the tenor of popular music by using classical techniques, and on the other making classical music accessible by using popular techniques. It is useful to remember that in the Western classical tradition, the distinction didn’t exist. Mozart’s music was popular; it was played in bars and the marketplace during his lifetime.

  ‘I try not to record any movie songs during the music festival season in Chennai,’ says Yesudas. That is, December-January. He is a sought-after performer in all the sabhas. There is another reason too. ‘I tend to get angry and a bit impatient when recording some of the modern songs, and I like to keep my mind clear during the period,’ he says.

  In recent years, the sabhas have been paying obeisance to mammon. Sponsors have made passes available to their near and dear ones, resulting in much noise off-stage. Often children run about in the auditorium, unmindful of the performance on stage. At a recent show, Yesudas hit a high note, kept it there, and chided these children (and their parents) in an aside. Point made, he went back to the note and continued where he had left off. It was sheer genius. So too was his performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

  ‘I sensed the presence of the many gifted musicians who had performed there before me,’ he recalled. ‘I thought of my gurus, I thought of all the things that had to fall in place before I could get there. Once the concert started, my mind was clear of everything else.’ And when he sang the hit from the movie Nadi, he threw a bridge across generations. Many who were children in the sixties when the song was first aired are now in positions of authority in the UK. The identification was complete. They had gone through school and college, early jobs and marriage and children, but the song hadn’t changed. Neither had the singer. Like many Yesudas songs, it helped the listener find a mooring. In Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust has his hero’s memories flooding back to him on tasting a kind of cake with his coffee. The smell, the taste, brought it all back. For Malayalis the world over, a Yesudas song does the same thing. Memories come flooding back. It is impossible to listen to ‘alliyambal …’ Without being transported away from the present. This is incidentally one of Yesudas’s own five favourite songs (the others are kannuneermuthumai, manikyaveenayumayen, parijatham and pramadavanam).

  Curiously, these are some of the favourites of the modern generation too. Sons hearing their fathers sing (every Malayali is at least a bathroom singer) accept these songs as part of their own lives … and so it goes on.

  ‘I am like a child playing with pebbles on the sand with the vast ocean of music in front of me,’ says Yesudas, trying to put his achievements in perspective. Perhaps. But for the rest, he has provided a glimpse into divinity. To paraphrase Goethe, when the mind is at sea, an old song provides a raft.

  Mattancheri in Manhattan

  Ayyappa Panikker

  This poem is taken from Days and Nights, published by National Educational Research Centre, Thiruvananthapuram.

  The Yogi, who revised ever so little

  the map drawn on the walls of the urinal

  by the night-walkers of the mind,

  picked his teeth with his imagination.

  His armpit swallowed the tip of the dhoti

  that wrapped his friend who scratched his bum;

  the boy who watched the pendulum swing

  was convinced it was twelve on the clock.

  Looking for week-end fortunes,

  the cat came today—not a mere tomcat;

  stones and thorns are there: like greed

  writhing in the flesh sticking to bones.

  We thought it was just fiction that

  once at an extreme moment of need

  Sage Shankara turned into Amaruka,

  sat down in suspense and held his breath.

  The buses have all left. The wick of light

  at the jetty has been put out. Kunjiraman’s

  bidi shop is shrunk and shut, the city smells

  embrace and hug his nostrils never shut.

  The piece of bread smeared with grease

  and the shrivelled testes of the old bull

  Mudaliar chews at length and swallows,

  softened by beer in the dining hall.

  The mongrel roams looking for company;

  its feet pursue the paths it fancies.

  School girls who have broken the hymen

  lie around with their legs entangled.

  Thanks to the devil, there is some link

  with clothes around the shrinking waist.

  Hair and breasts loose, with these scents

  clutter on the road the flower children.

  Dream within sleep or sleep within dream?

  O do not tell me the truth, please; cover

  the six-fold philosophical visions of

  your breasts with a bark: mere humans are we.

  Over the ebb tide flutters the sanitary napkin

  thrown by the baby moon from the mansion.

  The land tapers towards the backwaters;

  partners in their sleep keep humming.

  Although Wall Street maintains vigil,

  the trade winds are hit by nightmare talk.

  Standing on his head, the madman watches

  the Empire State at his feet with scorn.

  The girl slumbers at home, the wild snake

  having tasted the street boy crosses over

  freedom’s altar aided by drugs in a lotus posture.

  All ancient tales are stuck in the throat

  of the snake whose eyes are ears too,

  but if you dance a round on it, will vultures

  sprout wrath in their beaks, talons and eyes?

  See the scientist dancing across the waves

  when the sea rages, with his forked tongue

  shooting at the wind-swept festoon of water drops.

  The Moor’s Last Sigh

  Salman Rushdie

  This extract is taken from The Moor’s Last Sigh, published by Jonathan Cape.

  In August 1939 Aurora da Gama saw the cargo vessel Marco Polo still at anchor in Cochin harbour and flew into a rage at this sign that, in the interregnum between the deaths of her parents and her own arrival at full adulthood, her unbusinesslike uncle Aires was letting the reins of commerce slip through his indolent fingers. She directed her driver to ‘go like clappers’ to C-50 (Pvt) Ltd Godown No. I at Ernakulam dock, and stormed into that cavernous storehouse; where she momentarily stalled, unnerved by the cool serenity of its light-shafted darkness, and by its blasphemous atmosphere of a gunny-sack cathedral, in which the scents of patchouli oil and cloves, of turmeric and fenugreek, of cumin and cardamom hung like the memory of music, while the narrow passages vanishing into the gloom between the high stacks of export-ready produce could have been roads to hell and back, or even to salvation.

  (Great family trees from little ’corns: it is appropriate, is it not, that my personal story, the story of the creation of Moraes Zogoiby, should h
ave its origins in a delayed pepper shipment?)

  There were clergy in this temple too: shipping clerks bent over clipboards who went worrying and scurrying between the coolies loading their carts and the fearsomely emaciated trinity of comptrollers—Mr Elaichipillai Kalonjee, Mr VS. Mirchandalchini and Mr Karipattam Tejpattam—perching like an inquisition on high stools in pools of ominous lamplight and scratching with feathered nibs in gigantic ledgers which tilted towards them on desks with long, stork-stilty legs. Below these grand personages, at an everyday sort of desk with its own little lamp, sat the godown’s duty manager, and it was upon him that Aurora descended, upon recovering her composure, to demand an explanation of the pepper shipment’s delay.

  ‘But what is Uncle thinking?’ she cried, unreasonably, for how could so lowly a worm know the mind of the great Mr Aires himself? ‘He wants family fortunes to drownofy or what?’

  The sight at close quarters of the most beautiful of the da Gamas and the sole inheritrix of the family crores—it was common knowledge that while Mr Aires and Mrs Carmen were the incharges for the time being, the late Mr Camoens had left them no more than an allowance, albeit a generous one—struck the duty manager like a spear in the heart, rendering him temporarily dumb. The young heiress leaned closer towards him, grabbed his chin between her thumb and forefinger, transfixed him with her fiercest glare, and fell head over heels in love. By the time the man had conquered his lightning-struck shyness and stammered out the news of the declaration of war between England and Germany, and of the skipper of the Marco Polo’s refusal to sail for England—‘Possibility of attacks on merchant fleet, see’—Aurora had realized, with some anger at the treachery of her emotions, that on account of the ridiculous and inappropriate advent of passion she would have to defy class and convention by marrying this inarticulately handsome family employee at once. ‘It’s like marrying the dratted driver,’ she scolded herself in blissful misery, and for a moment was so preoccupied by the sweet horror of her condition that she did not take in the name painted on the little block of wood on his desk.

  ‘My God,’ she burst out when at last the white capitals insisted on being seen, ‘it isn’t disgraceful enough that you haven’t got a bean in your pocket or a tongue in your head, you had to be a Jew as well.’ And then, aside: ‘Face facts, Aurora. Thinkofy. You’ve fallen for a bloody godown Moses.’

  Pedantic white capitals corrected her (the object of her affections, thunderstruck, moon-struck, dry of mouth, thumping of heart, incipiently fiery of loin, was unable to do so, having been deprived anew of the power of speech by the burgeoning of feelings not usually encouraged in members of staff): Duty Manager Zogoiby’s given name was not Moses but Abraham. If it is true that our names contain our fates, then seven capital letters confirmed that he was not to be a vanquisher of pharaohs, receiver of commandments or divider of waters; he would lead no people towards a promised land. Rather, he would offer up his son as a living sacrifice on the altar of a terrible love.

  And ‘Zogoiby’?

  ‘Unlucky.’ In Arabic, at least according to Cohen the chandler and Abraham’s maternal family’s lore. Not that anyone had even the most rudimentary knowledge of that faraway language. The very idea was alarming. ‘Just look at their writing,’ Abraham’s mother Flory once remarked. ‘Even that is so violent, like knife-slashes and stab-wounds. Still and all: we also have come down from martial Jews. Maybe that’s why we kept on this wrong-tongue Andalusian name.’

  (You ask: But if the name was his mother’s, then how come the son …? I answer: Control, please, your horses.)

  ‘You are old enough to be her father.’ Abraham Zogoiby, born in the same year as deceased Mr Camoens, stood stiffly outside the blue-tiled Cochin synagogue—Tiles from Canton & No Two Are Identical, said the little sampler on the ante-room wall—and, smelling strongly of spices and something else, faced his mother’s wrath. Old Flory Zogoiby in a faded green calico frock sucked her gums and heard her son’s stumbling confession of forbidden love. With her walking-stick she drew a line in the dust. On one side, the synagogue, Flory and history; on the other, Abraham, his rich girl, the universe, the future—all things unclean. Closing her eyes, shutting out Abrahamic odour and stammerings, she summoned up the past, using memories to forestall the moment at which she would have to disown her only child, because it was unheard-of for a Cochin Jew to marry outside the community; yes, her memory and behind and beneath it the longer memory of the tribe … the White Jews of India, Sephardim from Palestine, arrived in numbers (ten thousand approx.) in Year 72 of the Christian Era, fleeing from Roman persecution. Settling in Cranganore, they hired themselves out as soldiers to local princes. Once upon a time a battle between Cochin’s ruler and his enemy the Zamorin of Calicut, the Lord of the Sea, had to be postponed because the Jewish soldiers would not fight on the Sabbath day.

  O prosperous community! Verily, it flourished. And, in the year 379 CE, King Bhaskara Ravi Varman I granted to Joseph Rabban the little kingdom of the village of Anjuvannam near Cranganore. The copper plates upon which the gift was inscribed ended up at the tiled synagogue, in Flory’s charge; because for many years, and in defiance of gender prejudices, she had held the honoured position of caretaker. They lay concealed in a chest under the altar, and she polished them from time to time with much enthusiasm and elbow-grease.

  ‘A Christy wasn’t bad enough, you had to pick the very worst of the bunch,’ Flory was muttering. But her gaze was still far away in the past, fixed upon Jewish cashews and areca-nuts and jack-fruit trees, upon the ancient waving fields of Jewish oilseed rape, the gathering of Jewish cardamoms, for had these not been the basis of the community’s prosperity? ‘Now these come-latelies steal our business,’ she mumbled. ‘And proud of being bastards and all. Fitz-Vasco-da-Gamas! No better than a bunch of Moors.’

  If Abraham had not been knocked sideways by love, if the thunderbolt had been less recent, he would in all probability have held his tongue out of filial affection and the knowledge that Flory ’s prejudices could not be argued away. ‘I gave you a too-modern brought-up,’ she went on. ‘Christies and Moors, boy. Just hope on they never come for you.’

  But Abraham was in love, and hearing his beloved under attack he burst out with the observation that ‘in the first place if you look at things without cock-eyes you’d see that you also are a come-lately Johnny’, meaning that Black Jews had arrived in India long before the White, fleeing Jerusalem from Nebuchadnezzar’s armies five hundred and eighty-seven years before the Christian Era, and even if you didn’t care about them because they had intermarried with the locals and vanished long ago, there were, for example, the Jews who came from Babylon and Persia in 490—518 CE; and many centuries had passed since Jews started setting up shop in Cranganore and then in Cochin Town (a certain Joseph Azaar and his family moved there in 1344 as everybody knew), and even from Spain the Jews started arriving after their expulsion in 1492, including, in the first batch, the family of Solomon Castile …

  Flory Zogoiby screamed at the mention of the name; screamed and shook her head from side to side.

  ‘Solomon Solomon Castile Castile,’ thirty-six-year-old Abraham taunted his mother with childish vengefulness. ‘From whom descends at least this one infant of Castile. You want I should begat? All the way from Señor Leon Castile the swordsmith of Toledo who lost his head over some Spaini Princess Elephant-and-Castle, to my Daddyji who also must have been crazy, but the point is the Castiles got to Cochin twenty-two years before any Zogoiby, so quod erat demonstrandum … And in the second place Jews with Arab names and hidden secrets ought to watch who they’re calling Moors.’

  Elderly men with rolled trouser-legs and women with greying buns emerged into the shady Jewish alley outside the Mattancherri synagogue and gave solemn witness to the quarrel. Above angry mother and retaliating son blue shutters flew open and there were heads at windows. In the adjoining cemetery Hebrew inscriptions waved on tombstones like half-mast flags at twilight. Fish a
nd spices on the evening air. And Flory Zogoiby, at the mention of secrets of which she had never spoken, dissolved abruptly into stutters and jerks.

  ‘A curse on all Moors,’ she rallied. ‘Who destroyed the Cranganore synagogue? Moors, who else. Local-manufacture made-in-India Othello-fellows. A plague on their houses and spouses.’ In 1524, ten years after Zogoibys arrived from Spain, there had been a Muslim-Jewish war in these parts. It was an old quarrel to revive, and Flory did so in the hope of turning her son’s thoughts away from hidden matters. But oaths should not be lightly uttered, especially before witnesses. Flory’s curse flew into the air like a startled chicken and hovered there a long while, as if uncertain of its intended destination. Her grandson Moraes Zogoiby would not be born for eighteen years; at which time the chicken came home to roost.

  (And what did Muslims and Jews fight over in the cinquecento?—What else? The pepper trade.)

  ‘Jews and Moors were the ones who went to war,’ old Flory grunted, goaded by misery into speaking a sentence too many, ‘and now your Christian Fitz-Vascos have gone and pinched the market from us both.’

  ‘You’re a fine one to talk about bastards,’ cried Abraham Zogoiby who bore his mother’s name. ‘Fitz she says,’ he addressed the gathering crowd. ‘I’ll show her Fitz.’ Whereupon with furious intent he strode into the synagogue with his mother scrambling after him, bursting into dry and shrieky tears.

  About my grandmother Flory Zogoiby, Epifania da Gama’s opposite number, her equal in years although closer to me by a generation: a decade before the century’s turn Fearless Flory would haunt the boys’ school playground, teasing adolescent males with swishings of skirts and sing-song sneers, and with a twig would scratch challenges into the earth—step across this line. (Line-drawing comes down to me from both sides of the family.) She would taunt them with nonsensical, terrifying incantations, ‘making like a witch’: