The Legends of Khasak

  ‘The toe? Where the sandal pinched?’

  ‘Yes. Nizam-Annan has gone to Kozhanasseri to get medicine.’

  The liquor seeped down like a slow, soft fire.

  ‘Maimoona,’ Ravi said, ‘those blue veins—’

  He paused awkwardly. Maimoona rolled up her sleeves playfully.

  ‘Isn’t that dress too tight? For summer?’

  She did not reply. She rose to go.

  ‘Stay on,’ he said.

  ‘No. I must go!’

  ‘It is hot outside ...’

  She walked down to the Araby tank; Ravi lay in the cool of the mosque and let his gaze wander over the tank and the wastes beyond, haunted places which the villagers still avoided. He witnessed Maimoona’s bath in the haunted waters ... In the potent quiet of the noon, Maimoona came back to the mosque, her clothes washed and wet, drying on her body. Ravi pointed to a clothesline inside the room. One by one, she took her wet clothes off and hung them on the line to dry. When she had put all of them away, she turned round and stood before Ravi. He saw the blue veins spread delicately from arm to shoulder, from thigh to navel. The Khazi’s talisman hung from a black thread round her waist. Ravi held the talisman between his fingers.

  ‘No harm will come to me,’ she said, ‘as long as it is round my waist.’

  With a smile Ravi undid the knot. She did not resist as he put the talisman away. She looked dreamily at her clothes on the clothesline and said, ‘It is just a month after your illness. I wonder if it is all right—’

  It was late afternoon when both of them got up. There was still some arrack left, Ravi held out the bottle for her. She sucked in noisy and eager mouthfuls. As she turned to go she reminded him, ‘Take care of yourself.’

  Peace descended on Ravi; he was now the helpless infant god, afloat on the deluge, lying on a pipal leaf, the Creator forever beginning his sorrows anew.

  The Song of the Sheikh

  Chand Umma came to the Mosque of the King where Ravi was convalescing. Ravi looked at her scarred face; he said, ‘You shouldn’t have come. I can see you need more rest.’

  ‘Allah did not will it,’ she said. ‘I could not come when you needed me.’

  Both fell silent. Then Ravi asked, ‘How are the children?’

  Chand Umma broke into convulsive sobs.

  Ravi sat up, full of anxiety.

  ‘My Kunhu Nooru, my son—’ she spoke through her sobs.

  ‘Chand Umma!’

  ‘My son is not well at all.’

  Ravi took his first unsteady walk to the village that morning, to Chand Umma’s house ... Kunhu Nooru and Chandu Mutthu lay on frayed durrees spread on the floor.

  ‘Anno!’ Chandu Mutthu greeted Ravi, irrepressible as ever. ‘Salam!’

  ‘Salam, little one!’

  A wind swept down and the thatch shook, the brittle fronds rose and fell like ticks on a wheezing dog. Ravi knelt beside Kunhu Nooru and felt his forehead. A low fever simmered. The pustules had drawn themselves inward, into the inner body. Where the pustules had been, there was now a dull red rash like flower-beds on distant hillsides, deceptive and deadly.

  ‘Kunhu Nooru!’ Ravi called to him. A feeble smile flickered across the boy’s face. He was hidden far away behind the smile, a distant listener inside a mysterious fortress.

  A gleaming blue fly flew in with a loud drone; it brought no happy tidings. It flew round Kunhu Nooru in wide circles. Chand Umma looked at this droning messenger, aghast. Like her child’s eruptions, she withdrew into herself. Ravi had brought oranges for the children; as she peeled an orange she felt that the fruit and her fingers were an unfathomable distance away.

  Chandu Mutthu remembered the chocolate.

  ‘Anno,’ she asked, ‘will you bring some more?’

  ‘I shall,’ Ravi said.

  ‘With silver paper?’

  ‘Yes, my little one.’

  Kunhu Nooru died that night. Chand Umma told Chandu Mutthu that Ravi had taken her brother to the seedling house.

  ‘Umma,’ asked the little one, ‘has the boy got well?’

  ‘Yes, my precious.’

  ‘Now he will grow big, won’t he, Umma?’

  Chand Umma went to her backyard. She slammed her forehead on the trunk of a papaya tree, flew at the tree again and again, demented. There was no pain, there were no tears. She came back into the house, her eyes glinting with anger. She sat beside Chandu Mutthu. She sat waiting.

  Two days later Chandu Mutthu told her mother, ‘Look at me, Umma. I am well, am I not, Umma?’

  Chand Umma took her child’s tiny palms into her own and looked long at her face. The pustules had grown inwards. The wily, haemorrhagic malady. On the child’s face and neck, arms and shoulders, barely visible, lay the sovereign rash.

  ‘Who brought the oranges, Umma?’ asked Chandu Mutthu in a feeble voice.

  ‘Maeshtar-Annan.’

  ‘Will he bring chocolates?’

  ‘He will, my little one.’

  ‘With silver paper, Umma?’

  ‘With silver paper.’

  ‘Umma—’

  ‘What is it, my child?’

  ‘In the yard, Umma—’

  ‘What, my precious?’

  ‘The boy has come, Umma. He is calling me out to play.’ Then she looked into the night and said, ‘Boy, get that big black dog out of my way.’

  At midnight the villagers heard it, the song of the Sheikh’s chosen insane: ‘I shall take you in my arms. I shall not give you up to the yawning earth!’

  Allah-Pitcha, sleepless because of his sore toe, sat up and listened. Thithi Bi said, ‘It is the Wandering Fakir!’

  The Wandering Fakir, Chand Umma’s father, had fled the curse of the tamarind goddess. His milk-white beard reaching down to his waist, the dust and bruises of many roads on his feet, he went past the sleeping homes and shops of Khasak. He stood on a crest of rock and looked towards the house of his blemished daughter ...

  A din of voices awakened Ravi in the morning: aged men pleading aloud, women wailing. Madhavan Nair came to the mosque soon after.

  ‘If you feel you can walk,’ he said, ‘come with me, Maash.’

  ‘What is the noise, Madhavan Nair?’

  ‘Chandu Mutthu is dead.’

  ‘Madhavan Nair,’ said Ravi sitting back on his bed, ‘rest yourself.’

  The words came out of him inspired, full of the poise of death. Ravi lit the stove and put the kettle on.

  ‘Let us have some tea first, Madhavan Nair.’

  ‘You are wise, Maash. There is no use racing with death.’

  They drank their tea unhurriedly, and set out to Chand Umma’s house.

  The crowd had dispersed. One group was over the ridge, headed for Chetali, raising peasant war cries. The Muslim elder, Ponthu Rawuthar, stood guard at Chand Umma’s gate.

  ‘Ponthu Rawuthar Anno, what is happening?’ Madhavan Nair asked the elder.

  ‘I do not understand, Madhavan. I do not.’

  Aliyar came up to them and said, ‘Come with us!’

  Ravi and Madhavan Nair fell in with the last stragglers moving towards the mountain. Those who led the crowd called out, cupping their palms around their mouths, ‘Give us the mayyat, Fakir! Give us the body!’

  When they had covered some distance, they caught sight of the Wandering Fakir. He walked a hundred yards ahead, a wild, enormous man carrying Chandu Mutthu’s little corpse in his hands.

  ‘O Fakir ...’

  When the chasing crowd got closer, the fakir shot stones at them from his sling.

  ‘Give it up, Fakir! Give us the dead body!’

  The stones deterred the crowd. Madhavan Nair stopped and stepped aside.

  ‘Maash,’ he said, ‘the ancient one has got me.’

  Blood showed, a cosmetic dot on the forehead; soon it became a trickle.

  Ravi mopped it with his kerchief.

  ‘God should have spared us this gruesome scene, Maash.’

  The early
sun worked on Ravi like a hallucinogen.

  ‘Madhavan Nair,’ Ravi said, ‘Hold me!’

  Ravi spun round losing balance. He held on to an Arali tree. His eyes darkened, he retched and threw up the undigested tea and bile.

  Ravi sat down in the shade of the Arali tree.

  Madhavan Nair stooped over his friend.

  ‘Better, Maash?’

  ‘Let us go back.’

  They plodded back to the village.

  Far away the cry still sounded faintly, ‘The body! The body!’

  The fakir threatened to throw a spell on his pursuers. That slowed down the crowd, and finally sent it back dispirited.

  The fakir climbed on to the Sheikh’s mazar. He laid down the beloved body amid the minarets of rock. He sat beside it and sang a lullaby of death. Anyone who dared intrude was met with stones from the sling. The wake lasted five nights. On the sixth day it was Appu-Kili who came down the mountain.

  The villagers went up. The fakir was gone. Chandu Mutthu lay there, a puddle of melting flesh beside the crypt of the Sheikh.

  That afternoon Ravi, escorted by Madhavan Nair, returned to the seedling house. Appu-Kili accompanied them.

  Looking at his ward the tailor said, ‘O Valmiki, saint of the anthill! Go to the brook and wash. There are termites crawling all over you.’

  When Ravi entered the seedling house, he felt he had strayed through many births to reach this haven once again. The book half-read, the ink bottle, the shaving set, the teapot and cups—everything was where he had left it.

  A subtle scent pervaded the room, the gentle incense of the traveller. It was the journey of things unmoving and inert, a journey through time. As he wiped the dust and aired the room, he was sad that he had disrupted an incredible pilgrimage.

  The Conversion

  And summer was over; dew glistened again on the morning grass of Khasak. The school reopened.

  Ravi glanced through the register lying in front of him; he had underlined some names in green—the names of those who wouldn’t be coming to school anymore: Vavar, Noorjehan, Uniparathy, Kinnari, Karuvu. He had only underlined the names, he couldn’t bring himself to cross them out. Like the fakir who kept his dead grandchild on the mountain and would not give her up to the grave-digger, Ravi kept the names. The lines of green became the little windows of his temple through which he gazed, listless. Outside, sun and dew, grass and palmyra, in repetition and rebirth, in endless becoming, sorrowless and without desire ...

  Ravi looked up from the register at the places where the dead children used to sit. He did not call the roll that day.

  During the epidemic Appu-Kili had gone off to the mountains where his hair had grown long and matted. He came back to school with lice multiplying in its knots. The lice grazed about and at times herds of them crawled out in search of other heads.

  Ravi was teaching history and he thought the example would come in handy.

  ‘The Aryans came in exactly this manner,’ he told the children. ‘They came driving their herds of cattle looking for fresh pastures.’

  The matter of the lice did not stop with history. That evening Cholayumma, Kunhamina’s mother, had given her a bath and was dressing her hair with scented oils when a louse jumped out.

  ‘Where did that louse come from?’ Cholayumma asked.

  ‘That was Appu-Kili’s louse, Mother,’ Kunhamina said. ‘It must have come like the Aryans.’

  ‘What are you blabbering about, child?’

  Kunhamina told Cholayumma the story of the Aryans. It did not impress her. The next day Cholayumma complained to Ravi. Appu’s knotted locks must be shaved off, that was the only way to get rid of the lice. Ravi had no desire to offend the Parrot. So he asked Madhavan Nair to put the proposition to him as gently as possible. Surprisingly the Parrot agreed without resistance ... When Appu-Kili got to the barber’s shop one of the mendicants was having his head shaved leaving a tuft at the back.

  ‘Shall I give you such a tuft, O Parrot?’ the Hindu barber asked in passing.

  ‘See mine,’ encouraged the mendicant. ‘Do you know what—if you keep one they will give you their daughters to wed.’

  The Parrot turned on his timeless grin, ‘Get a girl?’ He told the barber, ‘I wan a tuff.’

  And when the Parrot was leaving tonsured, save the tuft dangling behind him, the barber gave him this advice, ‘If ever you fall off a tree, pull yourself up by the tuft.’

  Appu-Kili stood before Madhavan Nair, the grin still on his face.

  ‘Look at me, Madhavan-Etto!’

  Madhavan Nair was angry at first, he disliked anyone having a joke at the Parrot’s expense, but he couldn’t hold out for long against its charming absurdity. Matters of destiny, he said to himself.

  ‘Ayyo! My Parrot!’ he said. ‘One needs the thousand eyes of Inderjeet to see you!’

  The next day there was chaos in the school. It became difficult to restrain children wanting to decorate the tuft with flowers and berries and silver paper. Only Kunhamina kept away—she was sad that her mother and the louse had brought all this on Kili.

  Ravi was writing out a sum on the blackboard; when he turned round, he found Kunhamina in a state of distraction.

  ‘What is it now, my little one?’

  She did not respond.

  ‘Tell me,’ Ravi said again.

  She began tentatively, ‘Oh, Saar ...’

  Ravi waited. Kunhamina found the words at last, ‘Do lice have souls, Saar?’

  He paused, then said, ‘If we have souls ...’

  ‘We have, Saar.’

  ‘Then, I suppose, so do lice.’

  Ramankutty interceded, ‘Lice do have souls, Saar.’ That decided the matter because he was the sorcerer’s son.

  Kunhamina wanted to know more, ‘What will Appu’s lice be in their next lives?’

  Will they be reborn as lice? Or will they return as people or wild elephants and whales or little microbes? Ravi’s mind suddenly went back to the jasmine-scented night when he had taken leave of his father in silence and stealth. Will you, my father, come back to me in another birth, if you have sins to wipe out? And who does not sin? Will you come back to me as the creature I detest most? There on the wall it clung, its eight legs stretched, looking at him with eyes of crystal in love and uncomprehending grief. He crushed a piece of paper into a ball and threw it at the spider. The spider ran around in wild circles, and again came to its mindless trance on the wall. Ravi swatted it with his sandal. It stayed on the wall, a patch of broken limbs and slime and fur. Ravi stood a long while in contemplation. Gratitude welled up inside him, the gratitude of procreated generations. He shivered and the sandal fell from his hand. What an offering to dead ancestors, what a shraddha!

  And now he turned to Kunhamina’s question, ‘Frankly, my little one. I don’t have the answer.’

  But the children had the answer. They knew that those who went away had to come back, and Vavar, Noorjehan, Uniparathy, Kinnari and Karuvu would be fair babies again. They told Ravi the legends of Khasak, of those who had come back from the far empty spaces, of the goddess on the tamarind tree, of Khasak’s ancestors who, their birth cycles ended, rose again to receive the offerings of their progeny; then like the figurines on the throne of Vikrama who narrated the idylls of the King, each child told Ravi a story:

  Kunjuvella was the daughter of Nagan the toddy-tapper and Thayamma. When she was five they had gone to visit their relatives in Koomankavu. While there Kunjuvella died. The same year in Koomankavu, Kannamma, the wife of Ayyavu, gave birth to a daughter. They called her Devaki. Even as a little child Devaki would spend hours gazing vacantly recalling something real and inscrutable. Kannamma would put the child on her lap and ask, ‘What is the matter, my child, that you sit and brood?’ The child would say, ‘I am thinking, mother.’ On her fifth birthday she had told Kannamma, ‘Mother, I have another mother.’ Kannamma had not taken much notice of this. Five-year-olds knew no limit to fantasy. But Devaki kept
insisting and weeping. She wanted to see her other mother. She led the way and the family came to the house of Nagan and Thayamma. ‘That’s my house,’ Devaki cried out from the gate. She recognized every nook and corner. She found an old peashooter hidden away in the attic and rejoiced at the sight of her old plaything. ‘Mother,’ she asked Thayamma, ‘where is Father?’

  Thayamma wept. She stretched her hands across the awesome void to hold this child of hers. ‘Father has gone,’ she said, ‘he fell from the palm tree.’ The watching women wiped their tears; Devaki did not understand, wasn’t hers a simple home-coming?

  She asked Kannamma, ‘Mother, don’t you remember that day at the pool?’

  Kannamma asked, ‘Which day?’

  ‘That day, that day, many days ago when you were bathing, didn’t I come to you on pattering feet?’

  Memories came back to Kannamma. She remembered bathing in the pool at sunset, and a funeral procession passing by. That was five years and ten months ago ... As Devaki grew up these memories weakened, soon they were lost altogether in profane and worldly torrents ...

  Two days after Appu-Kili began to wear his tuft there was a Muslim festival. Muslim children, their heads shaven and scented, appeared in joyous and colourful crowds before the mosque. Appu-Kili would never miss a festival.

  ‘Hey, Parrot!’ the Muslims greeted him, ‘but what is this handle at the back of your head?’

  ‘Get a girl,’ the Parrot grinned.

  ‘Yaa Allah! What have the Hindus done to your head?’ the Muslim boys said. ‘Surely the mendicants are the culprits. With a tuft like that you will become a mendicant and that is not the surest way to get a girl.’

  The Parrot stood bewildered, yet smiling.

  ‘Shave it off,’ the Muslims said, ‘shave your head clean.’

  ‘Get a girl?’

  ‘What have we been telling you all this while? You just shave that knot off and go ask Maimoona Akka to marry you.’

  The Parrot grinned until his cheeks disappeared. The Muslim children took him by the hand and led him to the Muslim barber. When the tuft was shaved off, one of them said, ‘Now that it has gone this far and he is going to marry Maimoona Akka, why not convert him? How about it?’