by Nair, Anita
Now it would be shocking. A Hindu Civil Code, applied equally all over the country, has been unfair to Kerala in that even the vestiges of matrilineal power have disappeared. Where will the matriarchs be in a generation? Those cylindrical white-clad ladies who strode on the front verandas like colossi? Younger women all over Kerala now seem to favour the shapeless pastel-coloured night-dress (horridly called a maxi) which makes such a blot on the landscape. The blouse and long skirt were much more sightly. Even a burkha would be an improvement.
Modernity has come too rapidly, as it has all over India, before we have had time to adjust. In a generation, I dare say, there will be practically no one who cannot read and write; and I also dare say we will have little need of those skills. The folklore of Kerala is fortunately well preserved, and so are the performing arts, though few Malayalis can afford any more to see a really first-rate Kathakali performance. The problem remains how to reconcile those arts and skills with the demands of daily living—with, if you like, the Gulf, the Party, and the Church.
An hour or so before dawn every morning my cousin rises, bathes in the kulam or water tank some hundred metres from the house, and plucks fresh flowers in the garden. He then sits in the veranda—really a commodious room open on three sides, with long wood-topped benches along two of them, worn smooth and shiny by the years—and weaves them into garlands. A deft twist of the fingers and another flower, or a small bunch, or a leaf, is held firm.
He has been doing this unaided for some ten years, since his father fell ill. Sometimes, if my father is on a visit, he has help. There was a time when there would be six or seven men making the garlands, my uncle leading them and firing off his sharp jokes. The flowers are for the little temple to Bhagavati just beyond the gate-house. After my cousin there will be no one left to gather the flowers and weave them into garlands, but the temple will carry on without my family’s help as it has for centuries with it.
Sitting at dusk on the old-fashioned wooden stile of the gatehouse, which keeps out cows and village dogs, I can look at the temple and give way to sentimentality. Right opposite there is a huge old banyan rising from a four-feet-high plinth. Looking the opposite way from the temple, there is a long uninterrupted vista of fields running past the village tank to lose themselves at the feet of the hills. The hills, in Kerala, are never far away. The view used to be a soothing one; but three years or so ago, a returnee from the Gulf built a spanking new house just next to the tank, and it doesn’t quite fit in. Neither do the loudspeakers in the branches of the banyan, put there in about 1990 to compete with the muezzin’s call. The bhajans’ blare at 5.30 a.m. is hideous.
Three times a week the local RSS shakha drills beneath the banyan. The pramukh barks out his commands in Hindi, and the devotees turn and bend and swing their arms smartly. Excellent training for the fifteenth century. However, it is quite late by the time they begin, and perhaps the boys—they are scarcely more than that—have just come back from their training for the twenty-first century at a computer institute in the rather bigger village on the state highway two kilometres away.
And again I ask myself, What right have I to comment? I don’t even live here. I don’t even know who the local representative is in the Panchayat, the Zilla Parishad, the Assembly, the Lok Sabha. I don’t even know what a day-labourer is paid. My cousin knows all that and much more, he is influential—though he doesn’t mix in politics—and he is, if not contented (I have no means of knowing), at any rate accepting.
My sentiment and folly lead me to think it would be an evil if a tradition of weaving garlands for Bhagavati were to die, and an evil if the shakha were to become part of village life. But thinking the first an evil is itself backed by a long history of evil. Such is the confusion that Party, Church and Gulf—and Bhagavati—make in my mind. Besides, these boys may be pioneering a tradition too. A century from now some local stripling might say with pride, and just pride, ‘My great-grandfather was the first shakha pramukh in this village.’ And the old house may no longer stand; a Gulf returnee may have purchased the land, cleared it of all that rubbish and built a virtual reality park there, or a cyber stadium, or a rocket-taxi rank.
My stake in Kerala is made up of ephemeral what-nots, not solid quids and quos. That is why I wish I was sitting again in my shorts on the cool earth floor, with dusk deepening about me, mortally afraid of the night and chanting ‘Narayana-Narayana’ with increasing conviction. And with a mind to comprehend the loss soon to be mine. At least, I don’t wish it, but I wish that I could wish it.
The Mountain that was as Flat as a Football Field On Top
Anita Nair
This extract is taken from The Better Man, published by Penguin Books India.
From behind the Pulmooth mountain, the sun peeped out surreptitiously. The trees were wreathed in cobwebs of gossamer mist; the paddy fields shivered in the chill of the dawn breeze and the cocks waited anxiously in their coops. One by one the cocks raised their heads and searched the air for the warmth of the sun’s lips. Unable to contain their impatience any longer, they puffed their chests, stretched their throats, and crowed lustily, beckoning the sun to make intimate contact with their proud red combs.
The sun took a deep breath and began its morning chores. With a long-handled sunbeam, it dusted the veils of mist off the trees. Then it set about warming the paddy tops before knocking on the doors of the various coops. The air filled with a faint throb that grew in intensity as it came down the hill: Duk. Duk. Duk. The thumping of Majid’s Royal Enfield Bullet as it wound its way down the dirt road to his house. Parrots raked the skies with their screeching, and doves gurgled from within the hollows in the walls of the well.
Shankar removed the wooden planks with which at night he turned his tea shop into a matchbox. As the planks went down, the sun darted in crumbling the mask of the night. Shankar liked to watch the sun frolic in the tea shop.
He took out the two wooden benches and positioned them at the entrance. He hung up the plantain bunches which the sun eyed lasciviously. He tuned the radio for the early morning news broadcast. Minutes later the samovar began to hiss. Shankar’s Tea Club was open for business.
Shankar rinsed out the glasses and arranged them in sentinel rows. The sun, tired of caressing the plump, inert contours of the plantains, turned its attention to the glasses. Born coquettes, the glasses sparkled when the sun flirted with them. A fickle admirer, however, the sun disappeared when the first bus from town ground to a halt outside Shankar’s tea shop. Shankar walked to the bus to pick up the bundle of newspapers that arrived in the bus every day, and plonked it on the counter from which he surveyed his domain.
Shankar’s Tea Club stood at the crest of the hill. Opposite it were the few shops that catered to the needs of the village. A fish shop that sold various kinds of dried fish. An all-purpose store that stocked rice, sugar, tea, oil, bolts of cloth printed with gigantic flowers in oranges and mauves against lush green leaves, notebooks, batteries, and even condoms. A rice mill, the barbershop, and a little cubbyhole in which the lone tailor of the village cut and sewed. The last three shops were all housed in the building Hassan had built some years ago when he came back from Kuwait for good during the Gulf War. A hundred feet away, as if distancing itself from all such commercial activity, stood the post office.
Achuthan Nair had always believed himself to be a progressive soul. Long before the village had even heard of a new-fangled idea, he would have assimilated it into the fabric of their lives. When a post office was sanctioned for Kaikurussi, he took it upon himself to make everything possible to hasten its arrival in the village. He built a two-room house at the bottom of the garden and this, he decreed, would house the Kaikurussi post office. No one dared ask why not somewhere else more convenient to the whole village. And from that hub soon, one by one, the rest of the shops sprouted.
Many years later, when the people who ran the two buses that plied to and fro between Kaikurussi and the town came to inspect the r
oute, they looked at the motley collection of shops and jeered, ‘The city, ha!’
The name stuck. It rolled off the tongue easily. It was so much simpler to say, ‘I’m off to the city for a tea and a beedi’ than ‘I’m going to the shop opposite Shankar’s Tea Club for a beedi’. If Shankar resented losing his landmark status, he hid it well. After all, as people waited for the bus, they strolled in for a cup of tea and some gossip. The house stood halfway up the hill, crouched on the land like an old man bent over. Aging by the minute, but seemingly indestructible by time. Mukundan looked at the house and tried to fathom what it was about it that disturbed him so. The cobwebs had been pulled down, the dust swept away, the floors mopped, and the woodwork made to gleam. And yet the house continued to wear the look of a chronic sufferer. Its gloom enhanced by the trees that crowded around it like commiserating aunts. A beard of unkempt grass almost thigh-high covered the terraced hillside that was broken only by gnarled old trunks of trees that neither bloomed nor bore fruit.
For a moment Mukundan thought the house raised its hooded eyelids and peered at him. Now that I have you in my clutches once again, there is no way you can escape, it seemed to say with diabolical pleasure. He shook his head in annoyance and told himself not to be silly. He decided to go down the hill. There was a certain pleasure in breaking off a dried old branch from a tree nearby and swinging it like a machete through the grass as he tried to trace a forgotten path.
‘Why don’t you use the road?’ Krishnan Nair called out. Mukundan pretended not to hear him and walked on.
The grass scratched his calves as he stumbled over the stones. Suddenly the hill became steeper, ending abruptly in a high precipice of mud. Beyond it was a deep ditch. Alongside, the road ran on less dangerously. He wished for a moment that he had chosen the road.
The fields were everywhere. Endless shades of green that stretched into the horizon on one side and the foot of the Pulmooth mountain on the other. Speckled only with the bright blouses of the women as they stood ankle-deep in water-logged mud and pulled out the young paddy plants. When a breeze blew, the tops of the paddy rippled and turned the sheets of sedate jade into gleaming splashes of emerald. He knew that soon the sun would disappear behind thick grey clouds that would frown down unrelentingly. Then it would be time to seek the dry confines of the house. Until then he would stay here and look at the view he had banished from his memories for many years now.
Mukundan leaned against the trunk of an old tamarind tree. His left foot firmly planted in the mud, his right one sidling, in the manner of a furtive crab, on the dune-like indentations of the bark. For the past one week, he hadn’t strayed from the boundary of the house. He had examined everything and everyone from a distance. It was as if he knew that if he were to let in a wave of warmth or a sense of bulk, then he would lose this dreamlike trance he had drifted into. In this hazy world, there was no room for cumbersome thoughts.
He turned the leaves over with his stick. When his eyes lit on a grey curve, he lazily pondered, Was it a twig or a dried leaf?
He looked around him thoughtfully. What is it about age that shears everything around of its grandeur? It was as if by simply growing old, he had dwarfed the universe and robbed it of its awe-inspiring qualities. Even the Pulmooth mountain was no longer that huge mountain that reached into the sky insurmountably.
There was a time when the wooded slopes and steep paths of the mountain were forbidden to him. ‘Little boys are not allowed to climb the Pulmooth mountain. For once you have climbed it, then in the eyes of the village you are a man. Which means they will expect you to do manly things,’ Krishnan Nair had told him each time he begged to be taken along on the eve of the harvest festival.
He had to wait till he was twelve before he was allowed to join the men when they trudged up the mountain on the day before Onam. The muscles in his calves had ached as he trekked up, but he had refused all offers of help. He had waited for this for a long time, dreaming of the day he would scale the Pulmooth mountain and see for himself the wonder of the mountaintop; he had heard the men describe it time and again. And then when they were on top of the mountain, he felt a sweep of disappointment cloud his vision. It was as flat as a football field.
‘Do you see that?’ Krishnan Nair pointed out to him a strip of water that slimed through the brown fields of the neighbouring village several miles away. ‘That’s the Kunti river.’
Mukundan didn’t know what he had expected to find there. But in his imagination the top of the mountain had been a peak that spiked high into the sky beyond everyone’s reach. A needle’s point that only he would be able to scale. And he dreamed of the villagers describing his valiant efforts to his father. Of how Achuthan Nair would ruffle his hair affectionately and say to him, ‘I’m proud of you, my boy. Who did I say I’m proud of?’
Mukundan along with the rest of the village knew that Achuthan Nair ended every conversation with a question. The listener was meant to answer the question so that Achuthan Nair knew for certain that the gospel truth of his words had been understood by the inferior intelligence of the person standing before him. But this time Mukundan would have gushed happily, ‘Of your son. Of me.’
The flat brown plain almost made him want to cry. He swallowed and retorted, ‘It looks like a gutter to me.’
Krishnan Nair placed a hand on his head and swivelled him around to face him. ‘It is all in your mind. If you want to look around you and see mountains, forests, and oceans, you will. Or else you will see little mounds of earth, sparse bushes, and piddling streams.’ A peacock screamed and rose in the air.
Mukundan moved away from the rest of the men and went to sit on a cashew tree bough. And as he sat there, he watched the magnificence of the landscape grow. There was a world beyond the valley he lived in. A world he would someday escape to. Far away from his father. Far away from the village.
The next time he climbed Pulmooth mountain, Meenakshi went with him. They had sneaked out in the afternoon so that Meenakshi could see for herself this splendid world he had described to her. By the time they reached the top, sweat was running down their backs and they were panting with thirst. But they forgot all about parched throats and aching legs as they looked down on the rest of the world. In a voice hushed with awe, Meenakshi whispered, ‘Someday, I’m going that far.’ And she pointed to the horizon that shimmered in the heat.
‘Me too,’ he whispered back.
They sat in the shade of a cashew tree catching their breath. ‘Do you think that life will be different elsewhere?’ Meenakshi voiced the doubt that had niggled in his mind ever since he had glimpsed heaven from the top of Pulmooth mountain.
‘I don’t know,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘But it must be infinitely preferable to this.’
‘I guess we will never know until we leave.’ Meenakshi stood up. It was time to go back. If they were missed and someone found out what they had been up to, there would be endless recriminations and accusations.
They ran down the hill. A boy in a pair of khaki shorts that owed their existence to a pair of trousers long discarded; a girl in a skirt patterned with flower sprigs, a shabby pink blouse, and two long shiny plaits. At the bottom of the hill, they stopped for a drink of water from a well by the paddy fields. The water was cold and sweet. They gulped down mouthfuls, sluiced their faces, hands and legs and then by silent consent went back separately.
Other children had brothers and sisters, companions to share their giggles and nightmares with. The wonder of a peacock’s feather, the triumph of bringing down a mango with one perfectly pitched stone, the agony of scraped knees and splinters under the skin. Mukundan had Meenakshi—his girl cousin once removed; companion and soul mate. They crawled together as babies. They paddled together in the pool and when they were a little older, they learned to swim together. Diving from the top of the stone wall, slicing through the water and surfacing at almost the same moment from different corners of the pool. When they were three years old, Ezuthachan, who
ran the local primary school, was invited to conduct their vidyarambham ceremony. With a gold ring, he traced the sacred letter Hari Sri on their tongues and guided their forefingers through a plate of raw rice to form the letters that invoked the blessing of the gods. By word and deed, they were deemed fit and old enough to acquire learning. And so together they began studying the alphabet, sharing a book and a necklace of consonants and vowels. They recited the multiplication tables and long poems about steam engines in one breath. They knew each other’s bodies and minds as well as they knew their own.
And then suddenly one day they were considered to be too old to spend so much time in each other’s company. Mukundan was given a room to himself. He was asked to put aside his short pants and switch to a mundu. He was encouraged to bathe with the rest of the men and asked to stay away from the pool when the women bathed. As for Meenakshi, she was forbidden to go wandering around the fields and cashew groves as she once used to in Mukundan’s company. ‘Put aside your books and fancy talk. It is time you learned to cook,’ her mother nagged. She frowned whenever she saw them huddled together and invented excuses to separate Meenakshi from Mukundan. When Mukundan came looking for her, she would whisper into Meenakshi’s ear that it didn’t matter whether the leaf fell on the thorn or the thorn fell on the leaf, it was the leaf that was hurt for life. So sprang a distance between them, which they furtively tried to bridge. And because their meetings were so infrequent, they began to function as two separate beings.