The Legends of Khasak

  ‘Of course,’ the Muslim barber agreed.

  Freed at last from pagan connections, the Parrot walked out grinning. Somebody brought a frayed fez cap and put it on Appu-Kili’s head.

  In the evening Ravi had just lighted the lamp and got into bed to read when Maimoona stormed into the room.

  ‘Both master and pupils are becoming riotous,’ she said.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Keep that lunatic under control.’

  ‘Which lunatic?’

  ‘That Parrot of yours!’

  Ravi shut his book and sat up. While he was raising the wick, she said, hiding her charm beneath her anger, ‘I won’t speak to you again.’

  Madhavan Nair came in as she was leaving.

  ‘What did the houri come for, Maash?’

  ‘Something about the Parrot. We’ll find out tomorrow.’

  Madhavan Nair sat at the foot of the bed.

  ‘Haven’t you heard it, Maash? The Parrot has been converted.’

  ‘My God! Into what?’

  ‘Need you ask? The Fourth Way, Islam.’

  Through the window the Parrot jumped in, the fez cap on his head ...

  The next day Sivaraman Nair walked through Khasak in great agitation. ‘Have the infidels gone this far?’ He coughed and stumbled, he stood before the school and called out, ‘Maash, this is not good. There is still something called Hindu civilization. That cannot be shaved off.’

  ‘But Sivaraman Nair,’ Ravi tried to calm him, ‘was it any of my doing?’

  ‘But this is definitely not good. You mustn’t be led astray by that Madhavan. He is the one who has disgraced the family. He is a Communist.’

  At the foot of the big banyan tree in the square of Khasak, the people were merrily discussing the Parrot’s choice of religions. Massaging his feet with oil, the mullah argued that once a convert, neither man nor parrot had the right to go back. The Khazi declared, ‘We will go by the majority.’

  The majority was yet to make its decision known. Appu-Kili sat in the front row of the class wearing the frayed fez cap. As a Muslim they had given him a new name—Appu-Rawuthar. Ravi did not call Appu’s name while calling the roll. He decided to wait until he knew the majority’s verdict.

  Sivaraman Nair wrote out a long petition to the School Inspector. Ravi was creating religious strife in Khasak, leading minors astray. He concluded the letter with words picked out of an old petition: For which act of kindness it is my bounden duty ever to pray.

  Within a few days the panchayat’s verdict was known. The Parrot was to be allowed the freedom of both religions. For certain days of the week he could be a Muslim. For the rest he could be a Hindu. If necessary, Hindu, Muslim and Parrot all at the same time.

  When months passed and Appu’s fez wore thin, when his hair grew long and matted, the lice were born there again. They came pattering on little feet. Vavar, Noorjehan, Uniparathy, Kinnari, Karuvu and all. Their fathers and mothers did not know them. Among the karmic wefts of hair, they sat grieving and waiting.

  Ravi lay down to sleep. Through the window, the sky shone and shivered. Oh God, to be spared this knowing, to sleep. To lay one’s head down, to rest from birth to birth, as forest, as shade, as earth, as sky ... The knowing eyes grew heavy, the lids began to close. Leaving their skies the stars descended on the screw pines to become the fireflies of Khasak. Out of these infinities a drizzle of mercy fell on his sleep and baptized him.

  The Cry of the Muezzin

  Early that morning the Khazi came to the seedling house. Ravi was awake in bed.

  ‘Maeshtar!’

  ‘Come, come, Khazi.’

  ‘A matter of some urgency,’ said the Khazi without stepping in. ‘Can you spare five rupees?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  Ravi got up and took out the money. He did not ask what the money was for; the Khazi volunteered the information, ‘We are taking Mollakka to Palghat. To the hospital.’

  Ravi remembered seeing the mullah two days ago in the fields, much to his own embarrassment—the priest was squatting behind the screw pine bushes to ease himself. He had looked helpless, his eyes dull like old porcelain ... Now Ravi asked the Khazi, ‘The lesion where the sandal pinched?’

  ‘The same lesion, Maeshtar. It will not go.’

  ‘Sit down, my friend. I shall come along with you. But let me make some tea.’

  ‘We can save time if we went over to Aliyar’s instead.’

  So they had a hurried breakfast at the teashop.

  ‘Sivaraman Nair has spared his bullock cart,’ Aliyar informed them. ‘It is ready.’

  Ravi and the Khazi were soon on their way to the mullah’s house.

  ‘Who cooks for you now?’ the Khazi asked Ravi, remembering the tea Ravi had offered to make.

  ‘I do it myself,’ said Ravi.

  ‘Poor Chand Umma! What a curse!’

  ‘Surely the curse must end some time.’

  ‘The gods are often more unwise than men.’

  Sivaraman Nair’s bullock cart stood waiting in the mullah’s yard.

  ‘He has sent us his best bullocks,’ the Khazi observed.

  Ravi had been to the mullah’s house before, but only now did he fully feel the poignancy of its decay ... The mullah lay on a mat, his toe bandaged with oil-soaked rags. Ravi sat down beside him and stroked his forehead.

  ‘We will pray that you get well soon, Mollakka,’ Ravi said.

  A smile flickered across the face of the priest.

  Thithi Bi spoke from behind the half-closed door, ‘This is what the old sandal has done.’

  ‘True,’ Ravi reassured her, ‘it is a shoe-pinch. Nothing to worry about.’

  Even as he uttered the words, Ravi realized the lesion had been on the toe for many months. The Khazi undid the crude bandage, Ravi saw the bloodless and quiescent lesion the size of a silver rupee.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ Ravi asked the Khazi.

  ‘It doesn’t.’

  ‘It is the poison of the leather,’ Thithi Bi said, wanting to believe her own words. The mullah groaned.

  ‘Don’t hesitate, Umma,’ Ravi said, ‘if there is anything I can do ...’

  Thithi Bi choked. She said, ‘You have been generous, Saar. He never tires of talking about you.’

  The Khazi reached out to a shelf on the wall and took down a bottle of medicine. With much effort the mullah sat up, leaning on the Khazi, and drank the bitter concoction like an ailing child. He turned for a moment to look at the Khazi in grateful reminiscence ...

  The cart returned at dusk, homing in on the village over the parched fields, tossing its hood as it climbed on to the square. There was a small crowd in front of Aliyar’s teashop—Madhavan Nair, Gopalu Panikker, Ponthu Rawuthar and some others. Madhavan Nair waved the cart to a halt, Sivaraman Nair’s fast bullocks reared their heads and panted.

  ‘Where is the mullah?’ the tailor asked.

  Getting down from the cart the Khazi answered, ‘We have put him in the hospital.’

  ‘What did the doctor say?’ Aliyar asked.

  ‘He will medicate and watch, and then tell us.’

  ‘Accursed footwear!’ the outcaste Malli said in dismay.

  ‘Cursed indeed. It grew fangs like the hamadryad.’

  ‘The snake dwells in our sandals and our belts.’

  ‘Even our fingernails can become the fangs of the snake.’

  ‘Truly said.’

  The mullah had been in the hospital for ten days now. Thithi Bi had moved to Palghat; she joined the many squatters on the veranda of the ward, keeping vigil day and night, snatching moments of fitful sleep leaning on the thin pillars.

  Sunday. Ravi and Madhavan Nair set out for Palghat town. They found the mullah better. He could sit up, he could speak a little. Ravi held his hands, the mullah smiled.

  ‘Mollakka,’ Ravi said, ‘I have brought oranges.’

  The mullah smiled again, the smile of a stranger.

  ‘I have no desire, K
utti,’ he said.

  The smell of disinfectant canopied the ward like the scent of many flowers. Beneath it waited the weary travellers into the unknown. They did not know one another, they exchanged the obscure farewells of strangers.

  ‘I will be well in a week,’ the mullah said.

  ‘You surely will,’ Madhavan Nair encouraged him. ‘It is the work of an ill-fitting sandal after all.’

  As they took their leave the mullah held them a little while longer—he needed to speak. Who was sweeping and cleaning the school? Ravi tried to put him at ease. But the mullah spoke on, each syllable drawn out painfully. He had taken wages and had not worked, but he would make amends, he would be back in a fortnight. Until then Ravi should ask Ponthu Rawuthar’s daughter Rokkamma to come and sweep. He must tell her it was the mullah’s word. Exhausted, the priest sank back. The mask of the stranger was back on and his face receded into the enchanted distance. The wages, reckoned across this void, became a karmic debt.

  Outside the ward Ravi and Madhavan Nair spoke to the doctor. It confirmed what Ravi had suspected. The doctor told them that a tissue sample had been sent to the big hospital in Vellore for pathological examination, and nothing could be said until the result was known, but malignancy was a fair guess.

  Ravi and Madhavan Nair got off the bus at Koomankavu and began the walk home ... Far away from Khasak, medicine men trained their all-seeing scanners on a cell of the mullah, the cell was an entity, a planet of the microcosm, it had its own aeons of time, and life sprouting on its land and in its water. This was cancer, the needless violation of inert surfaces. Even as the two of them walked along the winding footpath, through the palm groves and across rivulets, the earth-cell rejected the violation, and the cosmic toe twitched in deceptive, painless malignancy.

  They were nearing Khasak.

  ‘Maash,’ Madhavan Nair asked, ‘what is this illness?’

  ‘Existence, civilization—’

  ‘Surely, you are not jesting?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What is the remedy?’

  Ashahado Anna la Ilaha Illallah wa

  Ashahado Anna Mohammadur Rasoolallah.

  The muezzin’s cry!

  ‘Who is that, Madhavan Nair?’

  ‘The Khazi.’

  Hayya Alas Salat

  Hayya Alal Falah

  Alla ho Akbar

  Alla ho Akbar

  Nizam Ali was making the prayer call for Allah-Pitcha after seven years of estrangement.

  The Mask of the Stranger

  The muuezzin’s cry subsided in Ravi’s dhyana, he now hearkened with his inner ear:

  There is no God but the Omnipotent One

  Come to this tabernacle and worship Him!

  Ravi thought of Khasak’s house of prayer, the sad brooding mosque, its attic breeding bats and vermin, and its mullah silenced by a dreaded disease; Ravi heard anguished generations of priests calling to worshippers. The gravestones kept no count, they softened and crumbled over men changing to mould and marsh. Ravi could not sleep, he rose restless. He looked out: a dull moon lit the mist, the last of the ferries were torching through the night.

  Ravi got out and walked into the sleeping village. He knocked on the tailor’s door. Madhavan Nair opened the door and then tottered back to bed.

  ‘Get up!’ said Ravi.

  Madhavan Nair rubbed his eyes, yawned and smiled.

  ‘You, Maash?’ he said. ‘What is the time like?’

  ‘It is just eleven. And I am thirsty.’

  ‘I have nothing left.’

  ‘Then let us wake the bootleggers.’

  Madhavan Nair tilted the earthen jar in the corner for a cupful of water and doused his eyes and forehead.

  ‘Is this journey necessary, Maash?’

  ‘Come, let us go.’

  ‘To the bootlegger?’

  ‘Not straightaway. Let’s go to your uncle’s.’

  ‘My uncle’s?

  ‘I want to go to bed with that cousin of yours, the cousin you didn’t make.’

  Madhavan Nair laughed, a brief and bitter laugh. He said, ‘She is all yours.’

  ‘I am sorry, brother.’

  They held hands and walked like children to Chathelan’s distillery and home. From a bare ten feet away came the sound of heavy breathing. Ravi fancied entwined and sweating bodies, he was swamped by the onrush of the images of sin.

  ‘O Chathelan!’ Madhavan Nair called out. The bodies disentangled themselves, the billowing breath fell into a softer rhythm.

  ‘Who is that?’ Chathelan’s woman asked.

  A chimney lamp lit up in the veranda dispelling the deep-breathing mystery, and soon Chathelan came out of the hut.

  ‘Sorry, Chathelan, our Maash wants a drink.’

  Chathelan was evasive—there was a bottle of freshly distilled arrack, but it was for the Village Officer.

  ‘Come on, Chathelan,’ Madhavan Nair coaxed the bootlegger, ‘the Village Officer can wait. Here is a rupee over the price.’

  ‘How can I deny the tailor and the teacher?’ said Chathelan and went back to get the bottle.

  As they walked away with the freshly distilled spirit Ravi suggested, ‘Let us give Kuppu-Acchan a drink.’

  ‘Should we, Maash?’

  ‘Let us—’

  ‘If you so desire—’

  Kuppu-Acchan sat up on hearing the footfalls; he scanned the night with his pits of darkness and listened; ‘It’s us,’ Madhavan Nair announced.

  ‘Madhavan? Maash?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is the night far gone?’

  It was a pleasantry; Ravi was aghast.

  ‘Kuppu-Acchan,’ Madhavan Nair said, ‘we have brought a bottle of arrack. We would like you to share it with us.’

  He smiled in the direction of the voices, and slowly felt his way to the door of the room where Kesi slept.

  ‘Get up, my child—’

  ‘Hai, hai! You won’t let me sleep—’

  Madhavan Nair lit a wick lamp in the room. Kesi had rolled off the mat onto the smooth floor, her bodice and mundu had slipped from their places.

  ‘Kesi—’

  ‘Hai, hai—’

  The moon had set when they left the house, the wind had cleared the mist and the stars shone as in a luminous nightmare.

  ‘Madhavan Nair, did you look at the old face?’

  ‘It was sad.’

  ‘Beyond the sadness—’

  There was quite a quantity of the arrack left, and they decided to drink it beneath the palms.

  ‘There was something on that face, Madhavan Nair. Sights that the blind can see ...’

  The roving eyes of blindness haunted Ravi, sockets of blood and rheum, the eyes of transcendent seeing. Faces surrounded him, each with its mask of indifference ... He remembered his journey to the ancestral village where his grandfather lived. The short walk from the road led him through picturesque countryside. Then, ahead of him, he saw his grandfather on his morning walk. Ravi hastened and overtook him.

  ‘Grandpa!’

  The old man stopped and turned slowly.

  ‘Grandpa, it is me, Ravi.’

  The old eyes groped for focus, and over the slavering lips spread the smile of an ancestor gone away.

  What did that smile mean, Ravi was destined to wonder during his desolate journeys. Was it love? Or the ennui of recurrent being which amused and distressed the baby in its cradle? Or was it the passion of the seaside vigil, the wait for the last wave? Ravi did not seek to violate the mystery, he was content to recognize the mask of the stranger ...

  ‘Let us sit down here, Madhavan Nair.’

  ‘Hand me the bottle, Maash.’

  They sat on the moist grass and drank out of the bottle.

  ‘Maash,’ Madhavan Nair reminisced, ‘it was here, amid these palms, when I was away studying Vedanta, that my mother played the harlot ...’

  The east wind began to blow, it was past midnight. Khasak lay asleep. Madhavan Nair w
ent on, ‘I slipped away when I was twenty-one. My mother was thirty-five, she had delivered me when she was just fourteen, and was widowed early ...’

  She had not wanted him to go. She was young, looked younger than her years, and had a voluptuous body.

  ‘If you leave me and go,’ she had told him, ‘I will be all alone.’

  But Madhavan Nair could not find rest in that house. He resembled his father down to the finest detail—his mother had once said this in joy, but soon he found her saying it in resentment and fear. In their little hut he could find no sleep, nor could she ... When he came back after five years spent with his blind Guru, there were guests in the house, drunken and riotous. When those men were gone, his mother had taunted him, ‘So you studied Vedanta, my son?’

  Madhavan Nair thought of blind Kuppu-Acchan who had still not tired of seeing, and of his Guru to whom blindness had given the vision of peace. Madhavan Nair could not solve the puzzle, he was content with the day and night, he saw butterflies mating in the sunlight, he saw the rain, the brook, the mountain, he saw disrobed thighs vibrate with the rhythm of death. Each seen object drained away the meaning of seeing ... Ravi and Madhavan Nair were on a magic stairway to a house of sin when the cock crowed and the hour of enchantment ended. The stairway disappeared.

  It was not yet dawn. Ravi rose and stood on unsteady legs in the palm grove. He saw the dark silhouette of the mosque far away. With his hands pressed against his temples, he bitterly called the muezzin’s cry:

  Allaho Akbar!

  Allaho Akbar!

  Madhavan Nair was asleep on the moist grass. Ravi looked round, the abodes of God and men had vanished, there were palms all round, only palms, which once yielded the brew of forgetting and bliss.

  What was left in him was bile, the residue of prayer. Ravi bent forward and retched.

  The Feast of the Ancestors

  Once every three or four years Khasak feasted its ancestors. Muslims and Hindus prayed and ate together. Then at night they congregated in the arid waste behind the mullah’s mosque and talked about other worlds. They felt the presence of their beloved Sheikh, he walked along the pathways of Khasak communing with the ancestors. Four years had gone by since the last feast; the Khazi went into retreat in the Mosque of the King. The privileged few who had access to the mosque brought back vivid accounts of austerities. On the fifth day of penance, a Sunday, the Khazi emerged intense and fevered, and ordained the fifteenth day from then as the day of the feast.