The Legends of Khasak

  The tailor really had not meant to taunt the old man who now sat on the load-rest to receive the crude mockery of the whole village.

  The conversation inside the shop turned to migrant fish. The fish entered the brook, swam upstream, and crawled over the mire to breed in the Araby tank.

  ‘All you have to do,’ Aliyar was telling Madhavan Nair, ‘is to take a gunny sack and gather them. At night if you show a light, they come to you in shoals.’

  ‘Good,’ said the decrepit voice from the load-rest, ‘I am ready!’

  Aliyar peeped out of his shop to look up at the load-rest. He said, ‘Nobody asked you.’

  ‘Hai, hai, Aliyar ...’

  Kuppu-Acchan did go fishing on rare occasions, all by himself. Tired of the slime of gossip, tired of his grotesque perch, he would get down from the load-rest and walk beside the brook, walk a long way upstream in the sun, and stand in knee-deep water like the sarus crane. The fish would swim by, the curious little ones would nibble at his shins. Kuppu-Acchan would stand still, fish-trap still nestling in the crook of his arm, terrified and elated by what he saw. The fish would slip by like all young and cunning things; yet as he watched the sky reflected in the water, he would be the rider of the sky again, and now what slid past his shins would not be fish but shoals of little clouds.

  Kuppu-Acchan overheard Aliyar talking to Madhavan Nair about the migrant fish. He got down from the load-rest and walked about in the mild sun. In the evening he came up to the seedling house and said abruptly, ‘Maeshtar, you are eating with me tonight.’

  ‘My food is cooked already.’

  ‘Oh, no! Tonight it will be fish curry in my little home. I can carry away your cooked food so it does not go waste.’

  ‘Kuppu-Acchan, do you insist?’

  Kuppu-Acchan had already gone in and packed the food. There was nothing Ravi could do but go.

  Night had fallen when he got there. Ravi sat down on a mat spread out on the narrow veranda. Kuppu-Acchan turned towards the room that opened on to the veranda and called out, ‘My little girl, see who has come to supper.’

  The woman peeped out, then emerged in informal attire, a short mundu and brassiere.

  ‘Kesi, my daughter-in-law,’ Kuppu-Acchan introduced her. She brought water in a bronze kindi for the guest to wash his hands and feet.

  ‘Kutti,’ Kuppu-Acchan said, ‘would you like a drink— jasmine moonshine?’

  Confectioner’s flavouring essence; Ravi was hesitant.

  ‘There is nothing to fear,’ Kuppu-Acchan said.

  ‘It is a safe drink,’ Kesi added her reassurance.

  She brought three china bowls. Ravi waited.

  ‘I forgot all about it,’ Kuppu-Acchan said, grinning obscenely.

  ‘Forgot what?’

  ‘The drink—I forgot to get the drink.’

  ‘We needn’t drink, Kuppu-Acchan. It is all right with me.’

  ‘Oh no!’ said Kuppu-Acchan, rising. ‘I can’t dishonour my guest. Give me ten rupees, Maeshtar-kutti.’

  Ravi handed him the money, perplexed, and watched his host hobble away into the dark. When the old man was gone, Kesi came over and sat on Ravi’s mat.

  ‘He talks of you so much,’ she said. ‘He has long wanted to bring you over for a meal.’

  Ravi mumbled formal thanks, the conversation meandered. Ravi asked her, ‘When will your husband return?’

  ‘He is in the Tamil country, up in the mountains, plucking tea leaves. No one knows when he will come back. He wasn’t staying here anyway. Closer to his mother. The old one was alone here, so he brought me over some time ago.’

  Kuppu-Acchan returned with a large bottle of pernicious wash.

  ‘Do you want a sip, girl?’ he asked Kesi as she unhooked and hooked her brassiere to be as properly dressed as possible.

  ‘Hai, hai! Isn’t Appa making me naughty?’ she giggled.

  ‘If the bootlegger has used too much varnish,’ Kuppu-Acchan said, ‘we are all dead or stricken blind. So take a neat, quick gulp, Kutti!’

  They drank generous mouthfuls. Ravi savoured its infamy and said, ‘It feels great, Kuppu-Acchan! We can see and we aren’t dead.’

  Suddenly Kuppu-Acchan stood up again. ‘I’ve forgotten ...’

  ‘Forgotten what?’ asked Ravi.

  ‘The fish,’ Kuppu-Acchan said. He took the bamboo fish-trap off the hook and was gone again ... When he reached the teashop it was deserted. Aliyar was inside tallying the day’s accounts. The samovar had died down.

  ‘O Muslim,’ Kuppu-Acchan asked, ‘where is my little Nair?’

  ‘The tailor said he didn’t want to fish. I too am in no mood.’

  ‘You were the ones who got me into this ...’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Kuppu-Acchan collapsed into his familiar knots, and sat on the doorway to nag Aliyar. The final tally was done and Aliyar turned on his tormentor. Then, unable to stand the low drumming monotony of the torment, Aliyar gave in.

  The two set out for the Araby tank.

  ‘Old one,’ Aliyar said, ‘do you know where we are going? To the Araby tank. The place is choking with ghosts.’

  ‘Hai, hai, O kin of Sayed Mian Sheikh, don’t scare me this night.’

  They were now near the burial ground of the Muslims.

  ‘O shaven-headed Muslim...’ Kuppu-Acchan nagged.

  ‘What’s it? And stop talking about my scalp. It touches my religion and I might decide to kill you.’

  ‘I shall not talk of it, round-head. But the night is getting cold.’

  ‘What else can the night do?’

  ‘Hai, hai! It is drilling into my bones.’

  ‘Who invited you?’

  ‘Wait here, round-head! Let me rush home and get my blanket!’

  ‘This is crazy!’

  The mist was descending and Kuppu-Acchan began to shiver and rattle. Hands crossed over the chest and clutching his shoulders, he walked on behind Aliyar. He sustained himself on fantasies of Kesi and Ravi, like he had done for so long with Kallu in the rivulet, its malice and obscenity compounded with the lashing cold and darkness. Kuppu-Acchan tottered along and cursed.

  ‘Round-head, shaven-scalp, good Muslim ...’

  It was then that an unearthly voice spoke from the burial marshes:

  ‘Stop!’

  This was followed by a deep-throated chant.

  ‘Who is that?’ Aliyar asked.

  ‘It is me ...’

  ‘Oh, the Khazi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  In the faint light of an oil lamp they saw the Khazi’s looming form. The Khazi held up his hand in caution, and said, ‘Hush! There is a djinn here.’

  Kuppu-Acchan froze.

  ‘Be not afraid,’ the Khazi reassured, ‘just stand where you are, and do not swallow your saliva.’

  Kuppu-Acchan did just that, he swallowed. All life drained away. After a little while the Khazi said, ‘The Revered One has departed.’

  Aliyar and the Khazi exchanged pleasantries. Kuppu-Acchan replied with funereal nods and grunts. When they had gone a little way, Kuppu-Acchan started to whine again.

  ‘Ya Allah!’ Aliyar swore. ‘What is it this time?’

  ‘Let me go home, beef-eating round-head, and pick up my blanket.’

  ‘By then the fish will be asleep. We will have to wake them up.’

  ‘I’ll be back in a moment ...’

  ‘Go, go, and cadge a drink from some sleeping bootlegger.’

  Kuppu-Achan walked back home ... Kesi’s door stood shut, but there were wide cracks in the wood. A small wick lamp dimly lit the room. Kuppu-Acchan peeped in, a long and bitter look. Ravi’s torch and footwear were in the veranda. Kuppu-Acchan turned away and came to the bottle in which there still was much wash left. He drank in deep draughts, then picked up his old blanket, wrapped it round, and set out to the Araby tank, aflame with intoxication and terror ... Aliyar was not at the spot where he had left him. He reasoned that Aliyar must have gone to the Araby
tank all by himself.

  When Kuppu-Acchan reached the tank, he realized that Aliyar had deserted him, abandoning him to the poothams and djinns. This was betrayal. Kuppu-Acchan called out into the night, ‘O Aliyar! Where are you?’ The night was climbing on to the evil hours; the kabandhas would soon be here to frolic in the tank.

  ‘Ooooh Aliyaaaar!’

  As if in reply, a wind blew in from the graves.

  ‘Betrayer! Sinner!’ Kuppu-Acchan began to cry; he wanted to get away, but the demons would be after him soon. Then he heard the bubbling noises of the fish at play. He faintly remembered something about fish curry.

  Kuppu Acchan edged towards the tank and stood gazing at the phosphorescent water. Silently he called out to the fish, and the fish heard him—a big-headed old denizen rose to the surface and swam towards him. Kuppu-Acchan leaned forward with the fish-trap. The bank he stood on was sodden. It gave way.

  Kuppu-Acchan thought the skies had fallen all round him. The blanket sponged in the water and grew heavy like lead. He struggled long for breath and balance, and finally clambered to safety. Covered with the wet blanket and moss, Kuppu-Acchan sat on a rock like a kabandha and raised a great lament:

  ‘Help me, somebody! I am dying!’

  The Eastward Trail

  The natives of Khasak were not fond of travel, but the Pandarams were a visible exception. An immigrant community which had come in through the Palghat pass centuries ago, they were sworn to mendicancy and ascetic nomadism. Time diluted these observances; the Pandarams went back through the pass on their annual ritual pilgrimage. Clad in saffron, they were received with hospitality and reverence and given generous alms.

  The Pandarams preserved some tokens of their history—the tuft of hair at the back of their heads, and the Tamil language which, mixed with the host language, resulted in hilarious oddities.

  When on these pilgrimages, like the saffron they donned, they assumed new names as well—names taken from myth and legend—and acted like gods out of a long lost pantheon. The god-walk took half the year at the end of which the Pandarams came home to Khasak with their considerable earnings.

  They had a secret skill which did not go well with holy mendicancy—trapping birds. In Khasak this caused no embarrassment. The wastes around Khasak were full of quail and partridge, and the holy mendicants spent the second half of the year living on bird meat and illicit toddy.

  The Pandarams were great fabulists, because they had nomadic minds. They spun endless tales about the Tamil country while they waited in the liquor den for the quail to fry crisp on the fire. In these tales the pilgrim progressed over unrelieved chalk-stone landscapes under a relentless sun, but at the end of a day’s journey there was always a village, a woman, a god. Kuppu-Acchan joined the listeners sometimes, and even the mullah, to whet profane curiosity.

  Gopalu Panikker, the village astrologer and teacher of the alphabet, was an incongruous presence in a liquor den, and more so as he sat listening to an unlettered mendicant. However, Gopalu had time on his hands now, since the astrologer’s teaching method found fewer takers with each passing day. The method belonged to the classical world; the children wrote out the letters on spreads of sand and chanted them in a dirge. They wrote with their forefingers on which they wore a dried gourd for protection. Eight long years of this unhurried ordeal, after which nothing short of decapitation could permit the scholar to regress on his phonemes. But the new school of the District Board made the child literate in a matter of months. Gopalu lamented in bleak prophecy, ‘What learning is this? Our country is ruined!’

  The country was of course Palghat, from whose fabulous metropolis barefoot kings had reigned over a twenty-mile radius in olden times. That once-sovereign country now chose to learn the alphabet in six months instead of eight gruelling years; Gopalu sensed the end of civilization. Those who sat in the den and listened to his words of doom—Kuppu-Acchan, the mullah and the bootlegger Mayandi himself—were sorry for the country and its uncorrupted province, Khasak. But Mayilvahana Pandaram was not unduly concerned. He was an itinerant, and if Khasak was doomed, there was always the country of his origin to go back to.

  Gopalu had questions to ask, the questions squirmed within him, he couldn’t voice all of them as that would amount to admitting to the collapse of the family’s guild. Casting covetous eyes on the browning meat, Gopalu, vegetarian and pundit, asked, ‘O Mendicant, what be the truth of your journeys?’

  The truth unfolded in unending spectacle—villages over which gods stood guard, enormous terracotta gods painted bright against the austere rockscape. These gods came riding the East Wind and tapped awake the mendicant of Khasak.

  ‘O Astrologer,’ the Pandaram concluded, ‘it is a call hard to resist.’

  On many nights Gopalu listened to the wind; there were only the deep growl of palm fronds, no god rode the wind for the distraught astrologer ...

  Finally, he went to Palghat town to visit a fellow-astrologer to explore ways to restore the eight-year regimen to its old primacy. He stayed a week. When he came back home, he felt that something ominous had happened while he was away.

  ‘Where is our son Ramankutry?’ he asked.

  Lakshmi, his wife, met him with stony silence.

  ‘Has he joined the Board’s school?’ he persisted, ‘Who got him enrolled?’

  Not a word came from Lakshmi. Nor did she feel any guilt for what she had done when Gopalu was away. She had taken a step which brooked no turning back, she had taken the thimble off the child’s deformed digit and stormed into the school. ‘Maash,’ she had told Ravi, ‘teach him English. Make him a big man.’

  She kept the image of the big man a desperate secret, hidden deep in her mind and memory—her town cousin Raghu Nandan who worked as a clerk in a government office. She wanted Ramankutty to matriculate in a suburban school and become a clerk like her elegant cousin. She wanted him to come home riding a Raleigh bicycle, wearing rimless glasses, a fragrant cigarette between his lips.

  Intuition knows no secrecies; Gopalu Panikker confronted his wife, ‘Tell me who gave you this advice—Raghu Nandan?’

  Lakshmi began to sob. Now it was Gopalu’s turn to be silent.

  He did not pull the child out of school. The silence in the family lasted four days. On the fifth day he broke the silence to take leave of his wife, ‘Lakshmi, I shall return soon.’

  He set out before dawn, his personal effects in a satchel, lighting his way with a palm-fibre torch. Lakshmi stood behind the gate, stood a long while, until both torch and traveller disappeared into the sunrise. ‘O my tamarind goddess,’ Lakshmi prayed, ‘be with him.’

  Nobody knew where Gopalu had disappeared. Lakshmi gave perfunctory replies to queries, which nobody believed in any case.

  ‘I can’t see Gopalu returning in a hurry,’ Kuppu-Acchan spoke from the load-rest. ‘Not that it concerns me ...’

  Aliyar heard this chance utterance and forgot it, but it came back in wild imaginings of catastrophe, in all of which the astrologer invariably perished. Gopalu owed the teashop a few rupees, this money would evaporate if those fantasies came true. So, slyly one evening, Aliyar chaperoned Lakshmi along the foot tracks unsolicited. ‘O astrologer’s wife,’ he said, ‘the good astrologer owed ...’

  Lakshmi preempted Aliyar’s proposition, ‘You are not the only one,’ she told him, ‘he owes a lot of money to lots of people. I would have paid off everyone, O Aliyar, had I the money.’

  When the mullah came to know of this he reprimanded

  Aliyar.

  ‘I ought not to have done it, Mollakka,’ Aliyar admitted.

  ‘Put it down to Allah’s credit.’

  In the third month Gopalu returned under cover of night, and by midnight a cloud of subtle odours lay over Khasak. They rose from Lakshmi’s kitchen. A fortnight, and Gopalu was gone again. And since Lakshmi was reticent, the others could not resist the temptation of the whispered word. Kuppu-Acchan quoted anonymous informants who claimed to have see
n the astrologer work in the meanest of stations—as a butcher and pedlar of beef. Lakshmi ignored this purposeless malice, and walked about Khasak flaunting a necklet of gold with a pendant of phoney rubies.

  The cattle broker Ramacchar was yet another exception to the inertia of Khasak; once every month he travelled to the Tamil town of Pollachi to trade in its famous cattle fair. He went by bus and barely managed to salvage the money spent on bus fare and food. The market was chaotic; countless animals were bought and sold, and in the dung and dust and whirling noise, the touts conned or terrorized, and snatched commissions from deals they had nothing to do with.

  Ramacchar was an innocent tout; the deals he muddled that day left him penniless and famished in that alien town. It was then that he found himself face to face with the sage in saffron.

  ‘O Astrologer!’

  ‘Ha, Ramacchar, my countryman!’

  Gopalu Panikker embraced Ramacchar and took him to a teashop where he treated him to the delights of Tamil cuisine—tea and roasted patta, ants that grow wings during seasonal changes. Ramacchar listened to Gopalu’s story.

  ‘I am widely respected here,’ the astrologer said, ‘for my healing spells.’

  ‘The ones that wouldn’t work in Khasak?’ Ramacchar asked with a mischievous smile.

  ‘True,’ Gopalu said in the humility of success and contentment. ‘Now let us go to where I stay. It is three miles away, can you walk?’

  Ramacchar belched.

  ‘O Astrologer, your roasted moth has given me wings.’

  In a settlement three miles away from the market a gentlemen-farmer had given Gopalu half of his sprawling manor to use, for counselling and sorcery ... Gopalu cut short his work in the market, and set out homeward with Ramacchar. On the way he cautioned the excited cattle tout, ‘Rama, none of our old familiarity in the presence of my patron. A little discretion ...’

  Ramacchar took on an obsequious stoop as he trailed behind the saffron-clad one ... Gopalu walked into the farmhouse chanting mantras. He introduced Ramacchar to his host, ‘My old disciple Ramananda ...’ The farmer greeted them with folded hands and words of reverential welcome.