Theinagan raced out with the precious words: ‘There is no festival, the goddess is angry!’
The crowd was in tumultuous disarray, all the platforms were down on the ground and the dancers squatted on them more dead than alive, abandoning themselves to their own helpless mess and stench. No one heard Theinagan’s precious words. Three crowned dancers were racing towards the fields, chased by dogs. O Mighty Goddess, Theinagan lamented, why have you undone us? As though in reply, a noise rose from his innards, the conch call of the avenging goddess; he pressed his palms hard on his stomach, but nothing could stop the cosmic deluge. Theinagan too followed the dancers, running for the fields.
The crowd was gone, and so too the dogs. Ravi stood, looking out towards the screw pine bushes where Appu-Kili hunted his dragonflies. Behind the bushes crouched the dancers, he could see only their tinsel crowns as they glittered in the sun.
Scent of the Flower
Ravi lay awake the next morning. The gruesome comedy of the festival came back to him in a tide of disgust—the shame of men squatting to defecate behind scant cover, their tinsel crowns glittering above the bushes. Soon these became images of sadness. On their usual walk that evening Madhavan Nair told Ravi, ‘You haven’t heard the whole story, Maash. It was Kuppu-Acchan’s dirty work. He got Chatthelan to put in a lot more of that sulphate than the guts could stand. The poor bootlegger innocently went along without realizing that the drink would become an instant purgative.’
‘God!’ said Ravi, ‘Why did Kuppu-Acchan have to do it?’
‘His idea of a practical joke.’
Ravi walked beside the tailor in silence. He had seen a celestial war, the undoing of a goddess.
‘I want to visit the oracle,’ Ravi spoke after that silence, ‘this Sunday.’
‘After all that has happened, Maash?’
‘Yes.’
What strange ways this young man has, Madhavan Nair thought ... Sunday was three days away; Ravi kept those days to himself. He walked the sunsets all alone, and saw the gods of Khasak in the twilight. They stood guard over the follies of men. He saw them in the cavernous interior of the mosque, in the luminous breath of the mouldering dead, on the great tamarind tree, inside the serpent statuettes, beside desolate tracks. What was the mystery they guarded? The palm grove that stretched without end, the twilight neither sunrise nor sunset could resolve? Perhaps this was his sin and his divinity, and the gods and goddesses its witnesses.
Sunday. As Ravi and Madhavan Nair set out from the school, Appu-Kili followed them.
‘Why do you want to come, Kili?’ Madhavan Nair discouraged their ward.
‘Go catch dragonflies, Kili,’ said Ravi more softly.
Appu-Kili did not smile as was his wont. He looked dejectedly in the direction of Kuttadan’s shrine.
‘It’s all right,’ Ravi gave in. ‘Come along with us, Kili.’
The shrine was deserted. Kuttadan was nowhere to be seen, though it was the hour of the frenzy. A red-crested rooster strutted about in the yard over the accumulated trash. The door of the shrine was ajar. Ravi turned to Kuttadan’s house. The freshly thatched palm fronds hid much of the veranda. Ravi bent beneath the fronds to peep in. There on the glazed mud floor sat Kuttadan’s aged mother.
‘Where is the oracle?’ Ravi asked. Madhavan Nair repeated the question a little louder.
Slowly she turned an unseeing gaze on them, wrinkles radiating from twin foci of cataract. Appu-Kili was uneasy. He said, ‘Etto, let us go!’
‘Shhhh!’ Madhavan Nair silenced him. Appu-Kili groaned.
‘There, there!’ the tailor cried out. The oracle, hiding all this while in a pit behind the house, sprang up and ran across the yard. He carried the curved ritual sword. Ravi and Madhavan Nair stepped aside. Kuttadan gave an oracle’s cry, ‘Haaaarchhhh!’
The crested rooster flapped himself up to the roof and crowed in alarm. Kuttadan began to smite his head; Nallamma, queen of the viral hosts, had seeped out of the idol and possessed the body of her oracle.
‘Parighatam!’ Kuttadan raged, ‘Parighatam!’
Parighatam, the corrupt form of parihasam, mockery! The oracle took a fistful of sacred ash from the shrine and flung it on Ravi. Ravi broke into a cold sweat. The frenzy ended, Kuttadan entered the shrine and bolted himself in.
Back in the seedling house, Ravi felt his heart beat faster. Madhavan Nair helped him to the easy chair, and stood near him in some anxiety.
‘Better?’ the tailor asked.
Ravi smiled.
‘One of those passing fits,’ he said.
Ravi rested and was soon well again.
‘I’m thirsty,’ he said, ‘for water and air. I need a walk.’
‘Do you feel well enough to walk?’
‘I’m fine.’
The two walked past the lotus pond and over the ridge; they crossed the rail track of the east-bound train. Beyond the rail track was a grove where, on aged mango branches, owls dreamed and nodded; and further down were the teak forests. Monkeys, a whole clan, were crushing tender shoots of the teak into a red paste which they smeared on their faces ... From an elevation Ravi looked down. A picturesque village nestled amid the foothills.
‘What place is this, Madhavan Nair?’
‘Never suspected it was there, did you, Maash?’
‘These hills do spring surprises.’
They climbed down to the painted valley.
‘This village has no name, Maash. It is a fugitive place.’
At the entrance to the settlement stood a derelict shrine.
Madhavan Nair gave the door a gentle push, a panel fell to the ground.
‘My poor dear god,’ he said, ‘the termites are upon you!’
Smoke rose from one of the huts, from a pit of fire in the front yard over which bubbled a big vat of rancid wash. A sturdy, middle-aged woman stood stoking the fire. Madhavan Nair called out from the bamboo gate, ‘We are parched—give us something to wet our throats.’
‘Won’t you come in and sit down, Venerable Nair?’
Ravi and Madhavan Nair seated themselves on little mats.
‘I shall be there in a moment,’ she said, and gave the wash a final stirring. She lifted the vat off the fire and set it down to cool. Sweat glistened on her bare breasts and trickled down their cleft. She trotted off into the back of her hut, and returned with a bottle of arrack and two cracked china vases.
‘It is fresh,’ she said, ‘almost warm.’
‘And what do you have to go with it? My friend here is the Maash of our new school,’ and then Madhavan Nair went on to introduce her to Ravi, ‘She is Kodacchi, the old faithful.’ Kodacchi gave the newcomer a special smile of welcome, and asked Madhavan Nair, ‘Would he like dried goat’s gut?’
Ravi looked at Madhavan Nair helplessly.
‘He finds it barbarous, my girl,’ Madhavan Nair told her, and to Ravi, ‘You’ll enjoy it, Maash.’
Kodacchi produced a yard-length and roasted it over the fire.
‘Delicious,’ said Madhavan Nair savouring a piece.
‘When is your husband coming back from the Tamil country?’ Madhavan Nair resumed the conversation.
A two-year-old child began crying inside the hut; soon it crawled out and peeped at them in alarm. Kodacchi picked it up and pressed her breast into its mouth to keep it quiet.
‘He may come back in two months,’ she said, ‘maybe in a month. He has taken a good measure of the black stuff to sell this time.’
‘He goes over the mountain, Maash,’ Madhavan Nair said with generous admiration, ‘and dopes half the Tamil country. What do you do with all the money he brings in, Kodacchi?’
Her eyes glinted with rustic coquetry. ‘I never see it anyway.’
No one moved or spoke in the other huts ...
The sun was setting when Ravi woke out of a sleep heavy as that caused by an opiate. A strange scent permeated the room, fetid and sensual, like rotting chrysanthemums. The mat smelled of the flower, and s
o did the woman lying beside him. He mopped the scented sweat from the brown spread of her body.
‘Are you feverish, Kodacchi?’
Maybe not a fever, he thought, but the warmth of the body’s arousal. Her flushed face was pressed close to his, it blotted out the sky and the menacing dusk ... Ravi heard the whistle of trains, the dull clatter of rails; it was the journey again. Into its great weariness dissolved the hut, the woman and her infant child. In the far valleys the spirits of evil danced round the unclean dead. Their bronze anklets clanged to the rhythm of the oracle’s curse: Parighatam! Parighatam!
The sleep again, and the strange waking. He felt cold crystals all over his body. He tried to touch them but the effort brought on searing pain.
He saw a bangled hand extend towards his face and pour a soothing fluid into his eyes. He could not see anything more, vision was lost in an arc of darkness above. Now he lay resting his head on her lap. He counted the floating husks of the Kalpaka.
Ravi groaned, ‘Ma!’
‘Do not move,’ she said.
Slowly the eyes cleared, wet and cold. Ravi saw Maimoona seated beside his mat.
‘Where am I?’
‘In the Mosque of the King,’ she said.
A bicycle bell sounded outside. Someone was leaning a bicycle against a wall. Someone was carrying a load into the room.
‘Nizam-Annan,’ Maimoona said.
‘Tender coconuts,’ the Khazi said, coming in, ‘let him have one right away, Maimoona.’
‘Tender coconuts?’ Ravi asked.
‘Lots of them. Help you to get well soon.’
The sound of drums came from the heart of the village, and the prayer, the frenzied cry to the Goddess of Smallpox, ‘Deviye, Ammae!’
The crystals, dreaded pustules, burst. The oozing pus was the goddess’ sacrament. It was from this sacrament that the scent rose, the scent of chrysanthemums blossoming in the night.
The Dalliance
Chrysanthemums. They blossomed everywhere, in Khasak, in Koomankavu, in the valley of Chetali; the wind bore their heavy scent. The pariahs carried away the unclean dead, they hobbled in insane glee beneath the weight of dripping corpses.
‘Let us hear what the astrologer has to say—’
‘The signs are benevolent. Devi is pleased—’
‘Let us hear our dear Khazi—’
‘The pustules have sprung in the right places—’
‘Deviye, Ammae!’
Ravi heard these snatches of conversation. He scanned the images, part real, part dream. He saw the faces encircling him—Maimoona, Madhavan Nair, the Khazi, Gopalu Panikker. There were others, but the curtain fell before he could put the pieces together. Now he was dreaming of the journey—the delirious return from the fugitive village, a walk like that of the Devas who walked without touching the earth.
The wind carried in the sound of ritual drums from far away; the drums died down, Ravi was bathed in sweat. Someone was wiping the sweat away, strong hands over him; his father! He is better, he heard his father say, the fever has come down.
He was asleep again, now he is on his evening walk holding on to his father’s little finger playfully. Along the tracks of sunset purple, the coffee bushes are afire with twilight.
See the little bird there, son?
Yes, Papa.
He is the tailor bird. Do you see his little house?
Yes, Papa. A house of sewn leaves.
As they walk away Ravi asks, Do the tailor birds’ eggs have spots, Papa?
Little blue spots.
He thinks of the little blue spots, and is amused. He nestles like a fledgeling against his mother’s belly. She caresses his eyelids; My little star, she says, do you know whose these eyes are?
Whose, Ma?
Papa’s.
And my nose, Ma? Mamma’s.
And the eyebrows? Papa’s.
The ears?
Mamma’s and Papa’s.
Mother scoops him up in a rejoicing embrace. As she sets out on her last grand journey into the noontide mirage, she gives him this message—all this is your precious inheritance.
Then the redemption of death, and the curse of rebirth.
Chittamma, he says, are you crying?
I cannot face it, she says.
The sin?
It is like dying.
Ravi kisses her on her downy upper lip. What is remorse, he asks her.
There, over there, she says, listen.
It is the sound of his father’s wheezing as he lies paralysed and asleep.
Ravi looks out of the window, the moon has risen over the valley, its light upon the coffee plants. Ravi remembers his walks among those plants.
Chittamma, he says, let me go to my room.
She bars his way. Ravi tells her sternly, Put on your clothes.
Then the farewell. His forehead pressed against father’s feet, softly, without waking him, Ravi utters a silent prayer, Father who gave me these eyebrows and these eyes, I give up this nest of sewn leaves, I journey again. Bless my path.
‘The rain has saved our Maash,’ Ravi heard someone say, ‘now the pustules will subside.’
‘Merciful goddess!’
The fever was gone, Ravi felt curiously weightless. There were tiny stabs of pain when he turned on his mat and crushed the pustules prematurely ... In another seven days Ravi was well enough to speak.
‘Maash,’ Madhavan Nair said on his morning visit, ‘you have received the Devi’s grace. I can’t believe you are getting well so soon.’
Ravi smiled.
‘Did you see the tender coconuts my uncle has sent you?’ Madhavan Nair asked.
‘He has sent a whole plantation. Does it mean a pardon?’
Madhavan Nair laughed. ‘Far from it,’ he said. ‘The war has entered another plane. He is angry with the Muslims for keeping you in a mosque! I asked him, where else? He is just angry with the Muslims.’
‘Your uncle is crazy. A crazy old man with a heart of gold.’
When the pustules erupted on Ravi it was Sivaraman Nair who found Ravi’s plight distressing and wanted him moved to a home where he could be looked after. There was something else that worried the landlord as it did the others; the summer recess had begun early because of the epidemic, the children stayed home caught in the enveloping terror, and if Ravi lay in the seedling house any longer, the splendrous phantoms of the epidemic would linger on and scare the children away from the school altogether. Sivaraman Nair found it hard to locate a willing host for the ailing master; it was when they sat round and despaired that the Khazi burst upon them in anger and said, ‘The Maeshtar will stay with me. In my haunted home!’
The village was one vast flower-bed. Nallamma strung garlands of pus and death, she raised bowers of deadly chrysanthemums; the men of Khasak saw her and lusted, the disease became a searing pleasure in which they haemorrhaged and perished. Little children died as she suckled them in monstrous motherhood.
Ravi was well on his way to recovery. One day as Maimoona stooped over him to drop breast milk into his eyes, he said, ‘A little later, Maimoona. I’m sorry I make you do these intimate jobs.’
‘It is Janaki’s breast milk, not mine.’
They laughed.
‘But I’m really worried that you move so close. What if you catch the disease?’
‘I have got Nizam-Annan’s talisman round my waist.’ She continued, her voice wavering, ‘I also got myself vaccinated.’
‘Have many others got vaccinated too?’
‘Yes, a good many. Shame you didn’t. What kind of school maeshtar are you?’
‘I wanted to experience death.’
‘There is time ahead of you, all the time you need for many deaths. Now let me drop the milk into your eyes.’
‘Wait ...’
Maimoona held back the dropper.
‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.
‘Your hands,’ Ravi said, ‘I would have hated to see them scarred.’
Maimoona rolled up her sleeves as far as they would go. Ravi gazed on the blue filigree of veins.
‘Why do you stare so hard?’ She was petulant.
‘I was looking at those blue veins.’
‘You shouldn’t. While this disease is on you, Nallamma is your mistress. And she is a very jealous one.’
The scabs began to fall. Ravi was ready for his first bath. The Khazi prayed, the mullah sent the gram and the medicinal turmeric and neem paste to be used in place of soap. Madhavan Nair took charge of the bathing.
‘I didn’t want to tell you all this while,’ the tailor said, ‘Kuttadan ...’
For some reason Ravi knew what was coming.
‘Is he gone, Madhavan Nair?’
‘Yes, Maash.’
‘The goddess has been harsh.’
Madhavan Nair paused as he poured warm water over Ravi. He said, ‘I wouldn’t say so. She granted him lasting love.’
Madhavan Nair recounted other tragedies. Kuppu-Acchan had lost his eyes—those two sentinels of fiction and scandal were now pits of blood, Devi’s crushed crystals. There would no longer be the bird of gossip perched on the load-rest, no more the sarus crane gazing bewildered at the sky reflected in the shallow water.
Ravi had seven baths and the last trace of the disease was washed away. Yet he stayed on in the haunted mosque. The Khazi moved to another ruined mosque. The days wore on. The epidemic was in retreat, dragging its last victims along ...
One noon Ravi lay listening to the summer wind as it blew cleansed and free through Khasak. He took out a bottle of potent arrack hidden in a corner.
‘Shall I pour some for you, Maimoona?’
‘Chi! Chi!’ She turned her face away.
As Ravi took a sip, Maimoona looked on, concerned.
‘I am not ill any more,’ Ravi said.
‘But this spirit is deadly,’ she said.
He took another sip. ‘How is the mullah?’
‘He wants very much to see you, but his big toe hurts, and it is marshy and slippery here ...’