‘Your Master has been of great help to us,’ the farmer said. ‘He has rid this village of many evil spirits.’
Ramacchar, now Ramananda, bowed, ‘His spells are mighty. There are many more spirits to be exorcised, I presume?’
‘Indeed there are, holy one.’
The astrologer and the cattle tout lay down for the night, but neither slept, so they talked into the small hours. It was thus that Gopalu heard of his daughter’s illness.
‘It was typhoid, O Astrologer. She has recovered beautifully.’
‘Did she suffer much, Ramacchar?’
‘I hate to say it, but she did.’
Ramacchar told Gopalu how Kuttadan the oracle treated little Rukmini with his spells and later the mullah with Muslim spells, yet the fever raged. Then Ravi went all the way to the township of Kozhanasseri for those colourful capsules ...
‘Ravi who?’ Gopalu asked. ‘The Maash?’
‘Yes.’
What wandering, what weariness! The clay wick lamp thinned away. Gopalu thought of the children, the women and the withered elders; Khasak lay in the far reaches of the night.
‘O Astrologer, have you gone to sleep?’
‘No, Ramacchar.’
At that moment Ramacchar felt a tide of goodness rise and reach out to the astrologer’s sorrow.
‘I am finished,’ Ramacchar said and broke down. ‘I could strike no deal and I have spent my last copper. Save me, O Astrologer!’
It was thus that Ramacchar the cattle tout became Gopalu’s fellow-sorcerer. On the first day at the manor, Ramacchar rose early and bathed and, smeared with sacred ash, went into the audience room.
Gopalu, who came in a little later, was amazed. Ramacchar had put up a mighty montage of fetishes—fish bone, tortoise shell, betel leaves, red hibiscus flowers, many kinds of grain.
‘Who taught you all this?’ Gopalu asked in a whisper.
‘Your grace, O Astrologer!’
And they waited for custom. A dozen or so people came for trivial fortune-telling; the collection was modest. In the afternoon a Tamil woman came with a difficult request. Her husband had left her for a mistress, could the great sorcerer of Khasak concoct a love potion which would bring him back? Gopalu looked in disdain at the neat wad of notes the woman had set down at his feet. He cast the cowrie shells to divine the future, desperate about the present, helplessly listening to his fellow-sorcerer improvise mantras and compose a litany of conjecture.
Gopalu put the cowrie shells back, and addresed the woman. ‘We see a way out. Come back to us after three sunrises.’ The woman was gone. Gopalu sat distracted and looked up at the parodist standing beside him. ‘She wants a love physic,’ Gopalu said. ‘What shall I give her? Cartwheel grease?’
After the profanity of parody came a prayer; Gopalu poured out a ladleful of honey into a copper dish, he kept his hands on the dish and prayed to no god but to Khasak which breathed recovery into people; in that mute and wordless prayer Gopalu saw little Rukmini, the pallor still on her face. He had consecrated the potion with the sorcery of caring and sorrow.
He would give it to the woman when she came for the love potion.
Misfitting Phonemes
Kuttadan, the oracle of the goddess Nallamma, sat basking by the brook. He saw Gopalu Panikker’s son Ramankutty moving suspiciously among the screw pine bushes. He walked over to the boy, and made conversation, ‘Is your father back from the Tamil country?’
‘Yes,’ replied Ramankutty.
Kuttadan could sense the boy’s caginess.
‘A pooja, is it?’
‘Well, nothing really ...’
‘Why then the lizard? Aren’t you hunting one?’
An eight-year-old, even if he is a sorcerer’s son, cannot keep a secret too long. So Ramankutty came out with the story, which Gopalu did not want revealed to the villagers prematurely.
‘One of those ghosts,’ said Ramankutty.
‘Oh—’
‘It has entered a man. A rich man.’
‘A man from the Tamil country?’
‘Yes. And he has a rice mill and a car.’
Something rose inside the oracle, something fluid and angry and tangible, like rancid palm brew, it exploded inside opaque memories. Overcoming it, Kuttadan said, ‘That is good news. So let us get a big one. There ...’
On a tree stump sat a fat lizard in all his regalia, a scion of the vanished saurians.
‘Let us get him, Ramankutty!’
‘Stay, fat-head!’
‘Charge!’
When the assault came from two sides, the lizard nodded his crested head and began clambering off the tree stump. Kuttadan cast his upper cloth like a net and caught the slow-moving creature. He secured it in Ramankutty’s cloth bag and said, ‘Tell your father it is a gift from me.’
‘A real big one,’ Ramankutty said gratefully, ‘like a crocodile.’
The sorcerer’s son went home, and Kuttadan climbed down the bank for a bath. The water was pleasantly warm. After the bath Kuttadan went to the mud-walled shrine of his goddess and sat before her grotesque image. It was in this chaste hungering, day after day, that he had worshipped her for ten celibate years ... As he sat before her that day a single thought spiralled through his mind: people come from far away to see Gopalu Panikker.
‘Read this, dullard!’
Kuttadan heard the the voice of his dead teacher Rama Panikker ...
Kuttadan could read letter after letter but he could never join them to build a word. Rama Panikker had not spared the rod, but it had only added to Kuttadan’s stupefaction.
One afternoon, pursued by disjointed skeletal letters, Kuttadan was walking past Rama Panikker’s house. It was in the yard of this house that the letters were taught in the morning. Lakshmi, the teacher’s daughter, was standing at the gate, sunning herself after her bath, the fragrant paste of sandalwood on her bare breasts, tiny in pubescence. She smiled at Kuttadan.
‘Shall I teach you?’ she asked.
The more he wrestled with words to fashion a response, the more uncouth they became, ‘We? Alone, together?’
‘Yes,’ Lakshmi said, her smile still serene. ‘There is no one at home.’
He followed her into a room that smelt of decaying palm-leaf texts. She made him sit beside her and wrote out the letters for him. The dismal veil was on him again, and he had failed to comprehend word and letter together. Lakshmi sought to punish him. Nimbly she parted his mundu and let her foraging fingers loose on his thighs. Then she began pinching him. It hurt, yet he wanted her to pinch him more.
‘Angry?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Where is it? Let me see ...’
She parted his mundu again, hungrily spotting the red crescents on his flesh, feeling them, counting them playfully.
‘Will you tell anyone about this?’ Lakshmi asked.
‘No.’
He gave up words and letters for good, and turned away from script to the mysterious unbounded sound, to the voice of his goddess that rumbled inside his unknowing self. Since then he had passed by that gate many times. Lakshmi was always there sunning herself, but she showed no sign of recognition. There was something he wanted to tell her, but even as the words formed, the phonemes slipped away.
Lakshmi became Gopalu’s wife ... A rich miller from far away was coming to Gopalu to be exorcised ...
‘Vango! Vango!’ Gopalu Panikker welcomed the miller in Tamil to put him at ease. The swarthy giant from the Tamil country looked cowed by the evil spirit that was inside him. Gopalu comforted him and seated him on a mat. It was the dark quarter of the night before moonrise. Cicadas and an assortment of insects drummed the night into muted unrest.
The miller and the astrologer sat down to eat. The miller looked greedily on Lakshmi’s wrist and palm as she ladled out rice and curries: the women of Palghat were bought off by rich Tamil men for their form and light complexion. The miller had heard about them, he had also heard about the sorce
ry of Khasak, about its cantos both black and benign.
Midnight. A tiny tongue of wild fire sprang to life on Chetali’s slope.
‘Good omen,’ Ramananda said.
‘Shambho Mahatman,’ Gopalu chanted in undertones, ‘Sayed Mian Sheikh!’
Gopalu, Ramananda and the miller made their way to the funeral marshes. At a signal from Gopalu, Ramananda began to call out to little gods and friendly demons, an insane invocation, coupled with dire threats to the spirit that possessed the miller. Gopalu waded into chest-high funereal vegetation beyond which were the renuncient grounds garlanded with bone and plastered with ancestral ash.
Ramananda had softened the miller with generous draughts of liquor and blinded and choked him with incense. Ramananda walked farther over the dried bank of the marsh and waited for the final command from the great sorcerer.
‘Go!’ said Gopalu.
Ramananda bent down and cast the offending spirit into exile. At that very moment the miller saw a small flame light up on the bank of the marsh. The miller looked on amazed at the exorcised spirit burning away as it fled.
The sorcerers and the miller left; a lone man rose like the truth from the marsh where he had lain hidden. It was Kuttadan the oracle. He picked up the lizard, that morning’s catch, and gently uncoiled the strip of half-burnt cloth from its charred tail. The oracle peered into the eyes of the lizard, into its ancient riddles. For one stupefying moment he thought it was not the lizard he saw but the transmigrant spirit. He did not want it to live, he strangled it.
Kuttadan stood on the marsh of death a long while holding the dead lizard. Then he felt that inexplicable effervescence inside his head again. He was seized with a wild desire to chase the miller and confront him with the lizard. But the next instant, the effervescence gave way to moonlight and mist’he saw the fine muslin and the red hibiscus. He felt the fingernails imprinting the little red crescents on his thighs.
‘Did it hurt? Will you tell anyone?’
The seal of secrecy on the unjoinable phonemes!
Kuttadan flung the little corpse into the night. It landed amid the mould and marsh of a million endings.
The Festival
After that night, the night of the burning lizard, Kuttadan locked himself inside the shrine. He sat in blind and fierce tapas before Nallamma, the Goddess of Smallpox. News of this penance spread in Khasak and soon to the villages beyond the paddies. On the seventh day Kuttadan flung open the door of the shrine and came out upon Khasak with oracular cries. He smote his head with the curved sword of the goddess. Oracles did smite their heads in frenzy and infliction, but the cuts seldom went deep. What Khasak now witnessed was not just ritual: the sword left yawning gashes across the scalp and blood clotted on the oracle’s matted hair ... In the days that followed Kuttadan did not cease chastising his flesh. He walked over a bed of live cinders.
‘Truly,’ said the witnesses, ‘the Sheikh has blessed him. Now we shall hear the Devi who has possessed him.’
Kuttadan’s frenzy abated, but painful like the sword’s edge, scorching like the fire-bed, one insistent memory pursued him, blotting every other. There, amidst the abysmal bafflement of the phonemes stood the girl after her bath, the pavu mundu round her waist, the red underclothing showing through the diaphanous wrap like a hibiscus flower. In the lunacy of his penance he wrapped the mundu around the goddess’s waist. He prayed until the red hibiscus blossomed beneath her granite navel.
Kuttadan’s little temple grew out of dereliction into a place of trance and prophecy. The goddess spoke through her oracle two days every week, sometimes oftener ...
On a Sunday, after breakfast, Ravi reclined in an easy chair. He was at peace, and into that stillness came noises from far away, the cry of pain, of ecstasy, as the sword cleaved the flesh. The rhythmic clangour of bronze anklets blended with the oracle’s cry. Ravi listened with rapt attention, and the cry sounded even more distant as he listened, as though the sword of the oracle was calling him to an unknown wilderness for cleansing and baptism.
That evening he told Madhavan Nair, ‘Let us go to Kuttadan’s shrine. Say, the coming Sunday?’
‘To hear the oracle?’
‘Well, yes.’
Madhavan Nair smiled and was curious.
‘But why, Maash?’
Why was he going to the shrine, Ravi asked himself, why to a little hole in which stood a weird idol? Ravi sensed a great love welling within him. Devi, Ravi despaired, why have you chosen this lowly incarnation? Had she sought refuge from her own awesome cosmic self in the womb of Khasak? He thought to himself he was her kin, and would discover their twinhood in this intimate sanctuary. Then would he share his sorrow with her, the placental sorrow, generation after generation; as he thought this, the sorrow spilled over to become the sorrow of karma, it was the scar of the sinner, the orphan’s pining, the despair of the one who thirsted for knowledge.
Ravi never made that pilgrimage.
‘Poor Kuttadan has come by money at last,’ Madhavan
Nair observed on one of their strolls through the fields.
‘Then his goddess must be real,’ said Ravi.
Devotees from Khasak were soon outnumbered by those who came from outside. There were offerings in kind to be managed, accounts to be kept. Kuttadan acquired a handyman, Theinagan, who had once worked with the timber-thieves on the mountains ...
One day, after a whole crowd of migrant canal-diggers had visited the shrine, put money into the hundis and gone, Kuttadan sat cross-legged in the shrine and pondered over many things.
‘We are no longer a little shrine,’ he spoke to Theinagan with great solemnity.
‘True, O Oracle.’
‘We are a temple. We must have an annual festival.’
‘We must, O Oracle.’
The core of the festival consisted of the mounted dancers, masked men in Kathakali costumes wearing enormous tinsel crowns, carried atop bamboo platforms on which they stood grimacing and yelling. There would be pipes and drums, and fireworks in the evening. At midday there would be a slaughter of chickens and a display of oracular frenzy.
The day of the festival arrived. Ribbons hung over the Mosque of the King and Maimoona’s shop-front, garlands decorated the slender neck of Madhavan Nair’s Singer sewing machine. By late forenoon a crowd had gathered in the central square, idlers from the nearby villages, and of course the grateful canal-diggers. Pedlars wove through the crowd, rustic toy-makers, sellers of cheap and abrasive cosmetics, women with trayfuls of knick-knacks. Both the mullah and the Khazi came to the shrine and burnt incense sticks. All was set for the festival, for the goddess to lead her oracle to the heart of Khasak.
Inside the shrine, Kuttadan donned the scarlet saree of the warrior goddess who would descend on him at any moment now. The worshippers would not be allowed to get too close to the shrine at such a time, but Madhavan Nair sought to have a word with the oracle.
‘The venerable tailor-Nair seeks the Bhagavati’s blessing,’ Theinagan whispered, conveying Madhavan Nair’s request.
‘What might be his affliction?’ the goddess enquired.
‘He waits outside.’
‘Ask him to come in.’
Madhavan Nair entered and bowed.
‘What is it, Venerable Nair?’ the goddess asked.
‘It is for the Maash that I come, O Mighty Goddess.’
‘We are pleased,’ the goddess said, now fully come into Kuttadan’s mortal frame, ‘the Maash can come.’
‘I shall bring him when the frenzy mounts.’
‘Yes, that is better. And let the world know that great people seek Bhagavati’s protection.’
Madhavan Nair left. Theinagan peeped in again.
‘O Mighty Goddess,’ he said, ‘they are townsfolk. The frenzy must be spectacular, so that more schoolmasters will come to your altar.’
‘Of course they will come.’
Now Theinagan was caught between two worlds.
‘Yesterday,??
? he said, ‘the oracle’s mortal frame was troubled by a headache. We should not let that happen today. I have brought an offering of illicit brew, it is Chatthelan’s very personal blend.’
‘The Bhagavati needs no such stimulation.’
‘Of course, Mighty Mother.’
The goddess grew thoughtful. ‘What about the sulphate?’ came the query from the other world. ‘We presume the old sinner has not blended it with too much manure.’
‘Just the right mix, O Mighty Goddess.’
Theinagan brought in pots filled with the chemical that cheers.
‘Keep it there in the corner,’ came the command, ‘and let the dancers partake of it, and those that carry the dancing platforms.’
Kuttadan himself drank generously, and found it good.
The dancers came in their regalia, crowns on their heads, crowns firmly fixed with twine and gum. They entered the shrine one behind the other, drank in haste and in large quantities and left. The oracle’s mortal frame sat cross-legged on a wooden stool, the mortal brain ratiocinated, the wayward phonemes, the diaphanous mundu, the crescent marks, the occult lizard. Soon the regressing mortal habit passed. Outside, a giant cracker exploded, and the goddess reponded with the oracular roar, ‘Aaaaaaahhhh!’
The outcaste dancers replied from atop their platforms, ‘Hooyyah!’
The festival began. Theinagan peeped in again and, raising his voice over the drums, supplementing speech with grimacing lips, said, ‘The Maash is coming.’
The oracle’s mortal frame stamped the ground, the bronze anklets clanged, the cry of the oracle resounded from the shrine again. The crowd waited, breathless. But something unforeseen was happening—the manifest goddess, as she cried out again, was also mysteriously making her presence felt on mortal innards. Kuttadan stood leaning on the sword, his legs striving in vain to twine round each other, like a woman in travail. Theinagan could see that the oracle was trying to say something, but the phonemes were lost in eddies of pain. A slimy serpent was coursing through his guts, the miraculous creature of the sulphate. In demented syllables the oracle gave Theinagan the message to be communicated to the crowd, ‘No manifestation—Bhagavati—angry—tell—’