‘They say you are going away,’ she said, ‘Is that true, Saar?’
Ravi laid his hand over her head in blessing.
‘Won’t you come back, Saar?’
The fish with a silver crest and red spots hibernated in the crevices of Chetali for long years, said the villagers. This was the messenger of the Sheikh, and it swam down in times of elemental catastrophes. On an evening when the rain let up, bathers in the brook saw the crested one.
The great wind began the next night. For two nights and two days it blew without mercy, it blew the thatches away, while children cried and their parents prayed. Black palms were uprooted, sturdy tamarind branches torn away.
Then both wind and rain calmed. In that gentle interlude, Ravi and Madhavan Nair took a walk on the hills. Khasak lay wrapped in the sunset, cleansed, dry. The sky hung low, holding back its colossal power. Neither the teacher nor the tailor spoke of the school.
‘Where will Kili sleep, Madhavan Nair?’
‘In my shop, Maash.’
They began their walk back. They had a glimpse of the fugitive village.
‘I can’t believe Kodacchi is dead,’ Ravi said, reminiscing.
‘What a name! What did you say it meant?’
‘Woman of the mountain mists.’
Fringes of conversation. Trivia. They kept themselves away from its core. They spoke of fireworks and films.
They parted at the gate of the seedling house. Ravi opened the gate and went in. Madhavan Nair walked over the rise into the village. Neither of them looked back.
Madhavan Nair felt an impulse to go back, to be with Ravi a little longer. Meetings and partings, the torn shreds of Time ...
Ravi rose early. It was still the hour of the Morning Star. He took care not to wake up Appu-Kili who was fast asleep in the corridor. Ravi kept the corridor open and came back to the two rooms of the seedling house. He slipped his letter of resignation into the attendance register. He had told Madhavan Nair not to come, he didn’t want a farewell. The key to the school could be found on the door-frame.
Ravi stood before the locked door for a moment, eyes closed, prayerful. Father! he said. Father of my eventides, my twilight journeys, allow me to go. I leave this nest of sewn leaves, nest of rebirth.
Ravi walked out, his meagre belongings in a satchel. The rain fell on his outspread umbrella, it fell first in a mere patter, then drummed on the taut taffetta. The rain grew heavier, the monsoon rain without thunder and lightning ... Ravi reached Kooman-kavu.
The rain was a steady downpour, a low dome of white opacity. The storm had been more savage in Koomankavu, the mounted shacks had all been blown away, and no one, nothing, moved in what had once been a little bazaar ... There was still time for the bus to come. Ravi surveyed the scene of the great quiet and stood near the bus shelter, now a heap of sodden clods. He played with the clods, prising them apart with his feet.
Ravi looked with fond curiosity at the little blue and black apparition that slithered out of the clods. The blue-black one looked up at Ravi, conversing with its flickering tongue. Ravi saw the tiny hood, outspread now. Infant fangs pierced Ravi’s foot. Teething, my little one?
With a last playful flick of its forked tongue, the snake slid back into the alleys of wet earth.
The rain, nothing but the rain. White, opaque. The rain slept, it dreamt. Ravi lay down. He smiled. The waters of the Timeless Rain touched him. Grass sprouted through the pores of his body. Above him the great rain shrank small as a thumb, the size of the departing subtle body.
Ravi lay waiting for the bus.
An Afterword
It was an almost magical journey. The villagers of Thasarak were giving me a reception decades after the success of my book Khasakkinte Itihasam, translated here as The Legends of Khasak. For one evening in their drab existence they were no longer the peasants they were, but characters waiting to felicitate their author, faery people opening the portals for their conjuror. We drove along the bank of the irrigation canal, an interminable journey, mystic, wonderful; even the scarlet sunset seemed a seal of the time-warp of Khasak.
It had all begun this way: in 1956 my sister got a teaching assignment in the village of Thasarak. This was part of a State scheme to send barefoot graduates to man single-teacher schools in backward villages.
Since it was hard for a girl to be on her own in a remote village, my parents had rented a little farmhouse and moved in with my sister. Meanwhile I had been sacked from the college where I taught. Jobless and at a loose end, I too had joined them in Thasarak, to drown my sorrows.
I had grown up in the countryside, mountain country in fact, where my father had commanded a hill-top camp of the armed constabulary. There were no good schools within manageable distance, and even the primary school of the Moplahs (Muslims) in the valley, which I had eventually joined, was a rundown outfit. And the climb up and down the hill was too much for me—I was a frail child—so I had dropped out and sailed through my childhood on fairy tales. Destiny had been readying me for Khasak.
Towards the end of my days in the college, I happened to share the platform with the President of the Malabar District Board at a teachers’ meet. After the function the President offered to drop me home, and during that drive we began talking of new writing in Malayalam. Both of us were communists, card-carriers, and naturally we began a dreadful class analysis. I had published two long stories depicting imaginary peasant uprisings in Palghat; commenting on them the Comrade-President said, ‘They were good stories, but I wish you could write something with more Inquilab* in it.’
That precisely was what was occupying my mind then. Revolution. I was familiar with the Palghat countryside with its landscape of paddies and its hilarious dialects. I could put together a hundred episodes with ease, choose from a dozen locations. The city-bred schoolmaster coming to the village was almost a made-to-order catalyst. I told the Comrade-President that I was working on something, and wanted to fine-hone my pilgrim-revolutionary to perfection. He was pleased and said he would wait for the book.
It was then that tragedy from afar shattered the carnival of liberation. In Hungary, they tricked and shot Imre Nagy. It blew my mind. I turned away, I began my uncharted journey.
Looking back, I thank Providence, because I missed writing the ‘revolutionary’ novel by a hair’s breadth. Had I written it, I would have merely made one more boring entry in Marxism’s futile, repetitive bibliography.
And then I was gasping for fresh air, a whole skyful of living breath. Polemics, even history, did not matter anymore. I plumped for plants and flowers, and a place like Khasak. Destiny was in command, Khasak was waiting.
Once the spell was broken the rest was easy. The Stalinist claustrophobia melted away as though it had never existed. Ravi, my protagonist, liberation’s germ-carrier, now came to the village and re-entered his enchanted childhood. He was no longer the teacher, in atonement he would learn. He would learn from the stupor of Khasak.
With that decision the architecture of the novel changed, the language changed, in a way that surprised even me. They say that the Malayalam language has never been the same again. I cannot vouch for that, but certainly the book taught me this—no language, however physically confined, however historically deprived, is left without springheads of regeneration. There is as much narrative potential in Malayalam as in the imperial languages. Khasak has given that assurance to successor generations.
I have strayed into the theory of post-decolonization diglossia without intending to. Let me get back to the story of Khasak, not the legends.
Thasarak, as Malayalam place-names go, was a quaint and unusual name. It was mesmeric—maybe with my rejection of materialism I was in the right state of internal enchantment to be mesmerized. I coined the fictional name, equally out of the ordinary—Khasak. A few other names haunted me as well. Allah-pitcha the mullah, and of course Sayed Mian Sheikh, the spirit-guardian of Khasak, which I improvised from the name of the djinn the Khazi invoke
d during seances.
The djinn bore the name Sayed Sheikh Hassan Mastan and resided in Arabian oases. Within days of my coming to Thasarak I had made friends with both the Khazi and the mullah. It was a remarkable innocence that made the Khazi let me into the hermetic secrets of Thasarak. He began telling me one day how difficult it was for the Sheikh to travel all the way from Arabia to the supplicant devotee in Thasarak.
‘Spirits of evil,’ the Khazi said ‘their evil eyes have to be shut. The Sheikh blindfolds them.’
The Khazi grew conjectural when the story touched corporeal details, beginning with his first encounter. I corrected him on a few slips, but that didn’t matter in the perennial epic of Khasak. The incongruities caused no embarrassment. Will the Newtonian physicist be upset by the Einsteinian equation? Truth is light splintered through a prism and that gave me the idea of the astrophysicist who turns away from the outer universe to the space within. The Khazi’s sorcery was no less tenable than the Big Bang theory. What obtained in Thasarak was a playful interface between being and beyond being.
This interface was all that Thasarak contributed to The Legends of Khasak. The rest was the routine work of the fabulist. But that one contribution was enormous, it restored my freedom to mourn Imre Nagy.
Another contribution, less apparent then, was the villagers’ attitude to time, which, even as I succumbed to it, I confused with the lethargy of my own joblessness. But no. It was a positive input. The people of Thasarak were in no hurry. Theirs was another Time, the duration of faster-than-light tachaeons come home to rest.
In that sense The Legends of Khasak is a ballad of re-enchantment. Lots of visitors come now to Thasarak—academics, young and curious people, the book’s cult readership. If they come looking for the Khasak software they are bound to go back disappointed, because the Legends is not the story of Thasarak.
The villagers themselves do not mind this attention. The Malayalam original shot into prominence many years ago, and even today it is a best-seller. The villagers too have kept the happenings alive. They are lost in a kind of collective narcissism. As I walked into the reception long years after my eventless stay in Thasarak, a Muslim youth crushed me with a hug, he was crying.
‘Kili-Annan,’ he sobbed, ‘is dead.’ My character Appu-Kili, a prop of the novel, was created after no Thasarakkian model. He was the embodiment of a childhood memory. But I did not want to violate the villager’s boon of love.
Practically every villager has identified some situation which gives him or her entry into the fictional personae. The Khazi, now the Imam of the prosperous mosque in Palghat town, summed it up for me. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘these things are willed by God.’
Indeed they are. As I stood up in the dusk to talk to the semi-literate audience that filled the tiny yard, I sensed the ballad of Khasak emanating from them, infinitely richer than anything I could create and celebrate. I recalled too the handbill they had printed for the occasion. In it they had designated me the son of Thasarak.
Son indeed, merciful Allah! The son in whom You are well pleased.
The Second Coming
* Though literally Bouddha meant a follower of the Buddha, Hindu upper castes used it loosely for any other religionist, here the Muslim. mullah asked one of the elders, ‘So, it’s true?’
An Afterword
* revolution
Author’s Note
This Is my first novel. Written originally in Malayalam as Khasakkinte Itihasam, it made its appearance as a serial in the Mathrubhumi Weekly in 1968, and as a book in 1969, published by Current Books, Trichur. The actual work on the novel was begun in 1956, and one of its chapters was printed prematurely in the Mathrubhumi Weekly in October 1958. The final form of the work was delayed due to a number of reasons. The book in Malayalam, currently published by D.C. Books, Kottayam is now in its twenty-first impression.
⋆
It has been difficult translating this book. It is full of dense images of nature, old folk customs, evocations of caste differences, the rich play of dialects, all of which are difficult to render into English. So much has been lost, there was no way it could have been salvaged. I have tried to make the narrative depend on its own energy as much as possible, and preserved the pace and rhythm of the original.
Rustic Malayalam is courteous, even when it is familiar. Thus forms of address establish a tone of friendship.
Maash in Malayalam is taken from School-master in English; Kutti, literally child, is a mildly affectionate way of addressing a younger person and is sometimes part of a name; Yajaman, the servant’s appellation for his master, is a placatory form of address; Attha, Umma are in the Muslim patois, father, mother. Umma is also how a Muslim woman is addressed; Acchan (fem: Acchi) is a term of respect used for older people and is usually suffixed to names. Also Ettan, Etta, Annan; Poothams are familiar demons and are, at times, comical.
⋆
For helping with the making of this translation, there are some people I’d like to thank. First, my nephew, Paul Vinay Kumar, for keeping track of the translation schedules. Also, Ms Shobha Ramachandran for typing out the novel without errors.
New Delhi
July, 1997
O. V. Vijayan
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in Malayalam by Current Books 1969
First published in English by Penguin Books India 1994
Copyright © O.V. Vijayan 1991, 1994
Translated from the Malyalam by THE AUTHOR
Cover painting Risky Lives by K. Rajaiah
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-01-4306-367-4
This digital edition published in 2013.
e-ISBN: 978-93-5118-009-8
For my father
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above-mentioned publisher of this book.
O. V. Vijayan, The Legends of Khasak
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