by Nair, Anita
If the continual lowering and raising of the mundu in social situations reflects the sensitive feminine side of the MM, the bristling moustache, the prominence given to a display of the fine upper body, the kumbha or belly included, and the somewhat aggressive posturing with the koda, or black umbrella, reflect his instinctive understanding of the need to show off the masculine element. It’s the outward man.
‘A Malayali man without a meesha is like a boiled egg without salt,’ explained a fond mother. That being the case, it’s quite extraordinary how frequently the style for moustaches has changed. In the era of David Niven, when the heartthrob of the Malayali screen was Prem Nazir, the fashion was for a pencil moustache, known as a ‘podi meesha’. A little earlier, the trend had been for the bottlebrush variety, the most famous exponent—besides a certain vile German dictator—being Charlie Chaplin. From those minimalist times, the fashion has changed to include the massive congee strainer moustache affected by Mamooty. Or, in the style known as ‘Komban meesha’, one that sweeps and curls along the edge of the upper lip, like the horn of a bull.
In the era of black and white films, the trend was also to plaster the surface of the face with a layer of Cuticura powder, and the soap of choice amongst a certain class of MMs was always ‘Pears’ which was pronounced as ‘Peers’. No doubt they felt that they would be elevated to Peers of the ruling British class if they persisted in using British goods. Their moustaches were blackened to Salvadore Dali standards and in every MM’s personal vanity case, there would be a tiny pair of scissors with pointed ends, made only in England, that would be wielded with all the skill and fetish of a Samurai learning to trim the eyelashes of an enemy, using just his broadsword.
That perhaps is where the answer lies. In his original state, the MM was very much an aficionado of the martial arts; he could leap about the air with amazing skills. His every joint and muscle was oiled and exercised to such a pitch that even today in certain parts of North Malabar, songs are sung and stories told about the extraordinary feats of valour by a hero such as Tacholi Othenan. The Japanese tradition of warrior or Samurai is but another term for the old Zamorin traditions of Kozhikode. He was also known as the Samuri, or Samuthiri, and he was surrounded by a shining army of bare-bodied warriors who could fight with a sword ‘as bright as a drop of water’, a shield ‘of cow’s hide as large as a portion of a cloud’.
In his heart, the Malayali Male is a warrior, a homegrown Samurai. When he steps out into the world, freshly oiled and bathed, encased in a starched white mundu, holding aloft his shield and sword, for one bright instant he becomes that Samurai, and the past becomes the present. He is a wonder to behold!
Siddharth Das
The Town they Come From
C.P. Surendran
The day was a high vault of gray steel. He should have got hold of an umbrella. But if he did, he wouldn’t have felt free. Should he walk, or should he catch a three-wheeler to Geetha’s place? By a rick he’d be at her place in less than ten minutes. Too short a time to brace for the occasion. A walk across the paddy fields, and over the narrow bridge leading to the main road and her house, would calm him down.
Ramu glanced at his watch. It showed ten past three. She must be sleeping, he said to the fields flying in the moist monsoon wind. He picked his way over the narrow ridge separating large squares of paddy fields, and set his foot on the bridge just as the sky gave in, each drop a whale’s spout. He thought of running for cover, but the nearest tree was in the dream he’d had the night before. There was nothing to do but surrender to the pouring rain. He stood and took it, grinning at the cold, his shirt bleeding blue, his hair plastered, his love burning him up from inside through the cold, lightning couched in cloud, his fear drying him up, his heart racing ahead of him like a ripple before the wave, his desire slowing him down like a stone, a state of suspension where everything was at once possible and then again not; he was a whole meteorology of excitement.
Ramu leaned over the railings of the bridge. Below, the level of the river was rising in the rain, and in a few minutes he would be able to touch its muddy waters. Maybe a fish or two would then cross the bridge, having come to it. He stood there till the river rose to the level of the bridge and the muddy water lapped over and across his feet. Then he made his way forward, an exodus of one. The sea parted, and he trod the bed wet and soft and wrinkled, towards the Promised Land.
At Geetha’s place, it was quiet. Were they all sleeping, Jew and gentile, in the holy city of Jerusalem? He trapezed the polar distance in his head between pressing the bell and knocking on the door, and settled on knuckles. Perhaps he could knock with such ardour, only she would hear him. Be my love’s lone bat. She would know it was he, come to claim her, her hero-lover lost in the mists of time and found again, emerging from a veil of rain centuries later, knocking at her door with tremulous hands, love-lorn fingers seducing music from dead wood, a tattoo of sounds of longing and desire and terror, a high symphony of the spirit only she could hear. Ramu knocked, paused to sum up a sad smile of ripe hurt to wring from her heart the warm blood of pity. He forgot to fix it in place as the top green square of the four-part door opened, and an old bald head furrowed like sand framed itself in the vellum of space, the sanatorium pallor of the face stark against the shuttered dark of the hall.
‘Yes?’ said Geetha’s grandfather.
Sonovabitch, Ramu thought. He wants me to tell him who I am all over again, for the sixth time in as many weeks.
‘Yes,’ the old man asked again. He had developed, on the instant, stilettos for vocal chords.
‘It’s me, Ramu,’ said Ramu. He was astonished at the claim he was making. Was he Ramu? What did being Ramu entail? Wasn’t trying to be Ramu a risk to his life?
‘Ah, yes,’ the old man said.
‘Well?’
‘Yes?’
‘Is Geetha home?’
‘She could be.’
‘I thought I’d drop in and meet her…’
‘Just like that, eh?’
‘Well…’
‘What do you want to see her about?’
‘It’s about a candle.’
‘A candle?’
‘Yes, a candle. It burns between my thighs.’
The old man frowned. ‘Are you trying to be smart?’
‘I guess.’
‘Been plenty smart myself in my days.’
‘Imagine.’ This was futile, Ramu thought. He should put a stop to this nonsense, irony and all, salvage the wreck of the evening from the choppy waters of this dialogue. He felt ashamed at losing his cool so fast, for accelerating into rudeness so quickly. He looked up at the old man with plaintive eyes. But he saw age was turning ugly with anger, and so said, helplessly, ‘Old men must act their age.’
‘You stand there, flooding my porch and teaching me manners?’
Ramu looked down at his feet, and saw from his trousers dripping onto the floor the map of Africa. Was he responsible for this artwork? What was he doing here on this rainy day, looking for a love that, in the final count, was as ephemeral as these raindrops, picking up an argument with an old man who like him might drop dead even as he turned towards his armchair? The idea of death, that termination was possible at this very moment, rendered all enterprise absurd. Human life was accidental. That was only part of the problem. The more painful part to confront and survive was that it would end, and that it would end anytime. Surely, then, no relationship could warrant the respect of design? Surely, then, no single experience could be considered central to one’s evolution?
‘I’m sorry,’ Ramu said, and turned towards the gate. Oh, I feel sad, the kind of sadness that sits immovable at the heart of a stone. Ramu walked down the lane running with water. Ah, ever to walk this lane with such sadness, he exclaimed to the ten hard-working little men down below. He wiggled his toes. I’m the king of all my woes.
He turned right at the corner of Warriam lane and walked slowly up the deserted Library Road towards th
e Town Hall. He sat on the wide steps leading to the Public Library on the ground floor. The sky was low, like a black canopy ripped loose from its moorings. A heavy wind blew the leaves back, and the trees reared back to their last bone. Why is there nothing between the sky and the trees? A large castle in flight would do the occasional sheltering trick, wouldn’t it?
‘Ramu.’
He turned. It was Geetha.
‘Mon sembable, mon frere,’ Ramu said.
‘Don’t tell me what it means.’
‘Oh, it just means I love you.’
‘I’m sure not.’
‘Does it matter? It’s a line from one of my cousins, and the wonderful thing about it is that it can mean anything, just like all good lines.’
‘When did you get back from Kozhikode?’
‘Last night. Really, this love that I bear for you…’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s very beautiful.’
‘I am sure. How is your new teaching job?’ She smiled, pink, pliant lips opening to reveal pearls in the purse of her mouth.
Do not cast them before a swine, Ramu screamed in his throat, but said in a difficult whisper, ‘A grief ago I was at your place.’
‘Oh, Ramu, poetry is wasted on me.’
‘Oh, it’s not mine, really.’
‘Whatever.’
‘I’m afraid I was rude to your grandfather.’
‘My grandfather. What did you do to him that you wouldn’t want to be done to you?’
‘I had words with him.’
‘Regarding me, of course?’ Geetha sighed.
‘Regarding you. I asked to see you. He was not interested in true love.’
‘Was he an impediment to its course?’
‘Yes.’
‘Never mind. And here we are, anyway.’
‘I love this rain.’
‘It’s a beautiful rain, though we have no hand in it.’
‘You believe in Tansen singing his art out and the rain arriving on call?’
‘The power of music and all that?’
‘Something very like that. You know, hope? Will? That things can happen for no other reason than a wish.’
‘Why do you wish to have me?’
‘Isn’t love independent of all wishes? A state of affairs, a situation, over which you have no power?’
‘I think you’re mad.’
‘I think this is, after all, a lovely day, despite your grandfather.’
‘Be nice to him. He’s my favourite grandfather.’
‘Yours maybe, but not mine.’
Geetha glanced at him, and smiled. And he thought, I love her. A love hard as a diamond, the genuine final product of his spurious feelings. Something he could reach out and touch even, and reaching out and touching it and not reaching out and touching it, both hurt him. But, unlike everything else, except perhaps for the shock of his birth, he knew it was there. No question. It was knowledge. And its completeness was so exhilarating, even death could be laughed at.
‘Care for a stroll?’ It seemed to him a simple enough question. He could put it in words, and not be misunderstood.
‘In this rain?’
‘Well, I’m wet to my teeth anyway. And you have a nice little umbrella, I see.’
‘Well, all right, maybe a short walk home then, because I really have to rush.’
‘All right,’ he said, and got up from the wide steps of the library. A gust of wind made his bellbottoms flap against his shin like the ears of an elephant. Ah, this wind blows me into mahout land.
‘Why are you walking as if you are sitting on a horse or something?’ Geetha asked.
‘An elephant, not a horse.’
‘Well, I don’t like the idea of you riding an elephant while I humbly walk by your majesty’s side.’
‘Majesty? Mahout is more like it.’
‘You are embarrassing me.’
‘All right, then,’ Ramu said, and straightened his legs.
‘Thank you.’
They walked past the stadium where children were playing football in the rain and cut through its back entrance towards Geetha’s house. She seemed remarkably dry under the umbrella except for her feet and ankles and they looked flower-fresh under the running water. Witch. Which is why.
‘You want to come in under the umbrella?’
‘No,’ Ramu said, watching a crow, heavy with the black rain, alighting on Geetha’s umbrella. It was a Japanese umbrella of red silk, igniting at irregular intervals in clusters of white roses. The crow sat right on top of the umbrella, and just gazed all around. It was a crow of magisterial regard. Some dead judge, no doubt. His friend George’s father? Geetha looked exotic, like a portable landscape. No warmth in her invitation, Ramu thought.
‘There’s a judgmental crow riding on your umbrella,’ Ramu said, as they approached Geetha’s house.
‘I know,’ Geetha said.
‘Oh, you did?’
‘Yes, I thought, let it ride.’
‘Is poetry the mystery of a thing, or its common truth?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
They were at the gate of her house. As she opened the gate, the crow took off.
‘Your grandfather doesn’t like crows either?’
‘You want to come in?’ Geetha said, one hand on the gate.
‘No,’ Ramu said, wishing he were a crow. Life might be simpler.
‘When are you off to Kozhikode again?’
‘Monday, I guess.’
‘So long then.’
‘Right,’ Ramu said. I wish I hadn’t met you, you beautiful polite bitch. ‘I’ll be along, then,’ he said, without looking at her. Geetha gazed at him through the grillwork of the window. There was so much rain between him and her. She stayed at the window till he turned the corner, and then drew the curtains.
Ramu walked towards the bus stop. He wished the rain would stop for a moment, so he could take off his shirt and wring it. A cup of tea to collect my thoughts? he asked the darkening air. He made his way to Banana Krishnan’s.
Krishnan’s shop was a tiny affair raised on six short bamboo poles, planted into the low paddy field on the side of the road. The shop was crammed with yellow, red and green bananas hanging from their stalks from hooks and rope-loops. Krishnan stayed mysteriously behind the banana screen, and once in a while added his face to the wonders of the world by rudely forcing the bananas apart with his strong hands. It was a famous face. Big, dark, luminous eyes parted by a bulbous nose; the rest of the gleaming face was lost in the pitch-dark forestry of his beard. Krishnan’s thick, red, paan-soaked lips constantly moved, as if in flight from the persecution of their own debauched habits.
‘Hello,’ Ramu said from this side of the hanging wall of bananas. ‘Anybody home?’
‘No,’ Banana Krishnan said. ‘Who’s it?’
‘It’s me, Ramu.’
Krishnan stuck his face out. ‘What’re you doing out in this rain? Running after that girl with your distended dick?’
‘You got a cup of tea for me?’
‘We got better. Come on in,’ Krishnan said, opening the flimsy excuse of a door on one side.
‘Here,’ said Krishnan dragging a stool from a corner of the shop for Ramu to sit. ‘In a minute,’ he said, lighting a lantern and hanging it on a hook. It swung for a minute in the wind, and then steadied. ‘I got the right thing for you here,’ he said. He got up from the small blue trunk on which he was sitting, opened it and brought out a bottle of arrack. ‘Good stuff. Like Smirnoff.’ Krishnan twisted the cap open and handed the bottle of hooch to Ramu. ‘Here, just smell.’
Ramu brought it up to his nose. ‘Ahhh! Just like Smirnoff.’
‘You need to change into something dry, kid,’ Krishnan said. ‘Or you will come down with a cold.’ He ferreted about inside the trunk again, and this time produced a lungi, a pink synthetic silk on which white boats sailed under a full moon.
Ramu peeled the drip
ping clothes off his body. He wrapped the lungi around him, lifted a slithering corner of it and used it like a towel to dry his hair. ‘Are you a much travelled man, Krishnan?’
Krishnan sat down on the floor. He poured the arrack into two glasses, and handed one to Ramu. ‘Here, drink it up.’
Ramu held the glass in one hand against the lantern. Deep inside, in its liquid heart, a flame shone. He tossed it down. ‘This is strong stuff.’
‘Yeah, sort of lights your torch.’
It was cosy inside the shop. Raindrops fell on the tin-roof and were muffled by the tarpaulin stretched over it. It was like sitting inside a drum while a percussionist played on it without conviction. ‘It’s like sitting in a drum,’ Ramu said.
‘We are all sitting inside one drum or another,’ Krishnan said. ‘And no, I’m not a much travelled man.’
‘I want to travel a lot.’
‘I guess you can’t afford to fall in love, then,’ Krishnan said, pouring out another glass of arrack for Ramu.
‘Why’s that?’
‘You want to travel a lot, you’ve got to be light in your mind and luggage. Love’s a burden.’
‘Have you been in love, Krishnan?’
‘Twice.’
‘What happened?’
‘Oh, you don’t want to know, really.’ Krishnan put his glass aside, conjured up two eggs from the inexhaustible blue trunk and put them to boil on a kerosene stove. ‘You’ve fallen for that Geetha girl, haven’t you?’ he said, pumping the flame to a hissing blue jet.
‘Yes.’ And I’m drunk, Ramu thought. He no longer felt the cold. A warm flush of elation, that he was part of the freedom of life in general, put him out of his mind. The physicality of his being jolted him like a friendly thump on his back. He no longer worried. Everything would shape up. What was he worried about, anyway? To hell with Geetha. To hell with every one. ‘This is better than Smirnoff,’ he said, shaking what was left in his glass against the light from the lantern. The glass threw a long shadow across the floor. ‘Yes, I love her,’ he said. ‘The trouble is, I don’t know if she loves me.’