Allah-Pitcha’s mind went back to the panchayat of the week before, to which he had summoned the Muslim elders. They came, their beards dyed red to show their orthodoxy. A few young men drifted in too. They all gathered beneath the banyan tree which stood at the centre of the village square. The mullah, seated on the brick-paved platform around the foot of the tree, spoke to his congregation of the perils of the new school, its angular letters and its reckoning used in forbidden usury. The mullah evoked fearsome visions of the insanity of the new learning, the anger of the Sheikh and his second coming. Khasak had two schools—the madrassa where the mullah taught the Koran, and the ezhutthu palli, literally the house of writing, run by a family of hereditary Hindu astrologers. The schools never competed.
At the panchayat there were whispers of dissent from the young.
‘Speak out!’ the mullah said.
‘It struck me,’ young Kassim said, ‘if the sarkar sets up the school, who among us can wish it away?’
Kuppu-Acchan, the village gossip perched on the granite ledge in front of Aliyar’s teashop, known in common parlance as a load-rest, on which pack-carriers of old rested their loads, said to no one in particular, ‘What do you people say? Will it work?’
The school was not without its partisans—Sivaraman Nair the landlord, his nephew Madhavan Nair the village tailor, Zulfiqur Hayat, the cousin of the first native to trade beyond the frontiers of Khasak. Kuppu-Acchan altered his position to catch the attention of a passing red-beard, ‘Who can run this school if the people don’t care for it?’ Hardly had he finished this taunt when Sivaraman Nair, bare-chested, a bunch of keys hanging from his girdle as the landlord’s insignia, came up to Kuppu-Acchan’s perch and whispered, ‘Kuppu, remember your promise, won’t you?’
‘You can depend on Kuppu, Venerable Nair.’
‘Ten admissions ...’
‘It’s done.’
‘Can you make it fifteen?’
‘Be at peace, Venerable Nair. A promise is a promise.’
‘The school will need many more than fifteen children to save it from closing down.’ Sivaraman Nair drew closer, ‘The Bouddhas* are against us.’
With a discreet wink Kuppu-Achchan alerted the landlord that the Bouddha elders were headed this way after the panchayat. Leading them was Allah-Pitcha. The mullah entered Aliyar’s teashop with a few elders who were his confidants, and since there wasn’t room enough, the rest of the crowd remained in front of the shop. The ‘True,’ the elder answered.
The mullah muttered in disbelief, ‘Nizam Ali is back ... Where is he?’ The mullah said this in a barely audible tone. The listening elders were distressed.
The Story of the Return was put together from its fragments. Nizam Ali had arrived four nights ago, walked over marsh and scrub and disappeared into the Mosque of the King, a haunted ruin.
‘He has made it his home,’ the villagers told one another, ‘he has tamed the spirits.’
None of these accounts had reached the mullah but memories flooded the old man’s mind, unbecoming memories, of a boy of sixteen with a girl’s lips and curls like tendrils that framed his face. This was no time to reminisce, but to confront the heresy; Nizam Ali had come back to Khasak as the self-proclaimed Khazi, the sorcerer of the Sheikh, an authority never known in the village before. The mullah asked again, petulant as a child, ‘Why did no one tell me? No one among you ...’ The old red-beards wouldn’t reply. ‘And you, Aliyar?’ the mullah picked on the young man who owned the teashop, ‘You knew too?’
Aliyar, his protege, sulked behind the samovar. Suddenly the mullah felt incapacitated, ahead of him lay an occult duel between priest and pretender. Allah-Pitcha had had these manic fits before, and Thitthi Bi his wife had sorrowed with him, but she refused to be jealous; jealousy over a boy was unbecoming.
The mullah stooped over his tea. Insane images rose and fell in his mind—the Khazi destroying the old order, the new school overthrowing hallowed myths, the pinch of the sandal on his big toe turning into a sore that wouldn’t go away ... The tea turned cold. The crowd from the panchayat thinned away, but now another, larger crowd was heading for the teashop, young men and boys moving in fluid circles round their new leader. The mullah rose and went out into the yard.
‘Nizam Ali!’ the mullah was face to face with the apostate.
‘Khazi,’ his former novice corrected him sternly. Allah-Pitcha reeled; finding his voice again he said, ‘Nizam Ali, are you the Truth or the Deception?’
‘The Truth.’
The mullah waited in vain for an augury, the clicking of a lizard, a gust of wind carrying disembodied voices, a scarf of blue cloud across the magic mountain. Feebly, and in pain, he said, ‘Imposter! You are possessed by an unclean spirit.’ He scooped up a fistful of dust, chanted a spell over it and hurled it at Nizam Ali. In the effort of the throw, which missed the Khazi, the mullah swayed and would have fallen had Aliyar not held him. During all this Nizam Ali stood his ground smiling.
The mullah, downcast, went back into the teashop. He then asked one of the faithful red-beards, ‘Did the erring one speak of the school?’
‘He did, and with much vehemence.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said that the spirit of the Sheikh was not angered over the school, and that he, the Sheikh’s Khazi, would plant the school like a sapling.’
The mullah sat awhile telling his beads. Then he spoke, ‘In this school our children will be confounded by kafir knowledge. How can anyone planting such a sapling be the Sheikh’s Khazi?’
The mullah sipped his tea, now bitter, and in the next instant spat it out in a burst of spray. He turned his fury on Aliyar. ‘Dog, shameless dog!’ he screamed. ‘Mixing the kafir milk powder in the tea!’ Swearing, whimpering, drooling, he seized cups and glasses and began flinging them out into the yard in a frenzy.
‘Mollakka!’ a cool voice called to him from the yard. Then Nizam Ali strode into the teashop, kicking a barricade of benches aside. The mullah sat down, undone; the intruding sorcerer loomed over him. The mullah heard the stern whispered command, ‘Calm down, Mollakka!’
In the madrassa, the mullah stood beside the terrified Kunhamina as if in deep meditation, tears wetting his shirt-front. Then laying his hand on Kunhamina’s head, he said, ‘You won’t repeat this, will you, O Bilal?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Sit down.’
The children were bewildered. Why did the mullah pardon her, why did he stand so long near Kunhamina, and why did he weep?
‘And now, tell me,’ the mullah said, ‘will you go to the kafir’s school?’
Grateful for the reprieve, Kunhamina was prepared to promise anything, ‘I will not go.’
‘Swear by the Sheikh.’
‘By the most Holy Sheikh,’ and she added on her own, ‘by the Badrins, by the Prophet ...’
‘Swear by Mariyamma.’
Mariyamma was the Goddess of Smallpox, worshipped by the Hindu lower castes who appeased her with toddy and obscene song. The mullah was taking no chances.
‘By Mariyamma,’ the girl chanted, again adding gratuitous divinities to her oath. ‘By the goddess on the tamarind branch, by the snake-gods—I will not go to the kafir’s school!’
The mullah returned to his low stool, the seat of the chronicler till this his sixtieth year. Forty years he had walked the mountain path, singing the glory of the Sheikh, forty years to infirmity. From the big toe of the wayfarer, the lesion, almost forgotten, sent up its dull signal of pain.
The Priest
Twelve mosques in ruin, a desolate ring round the village; in them lay stagnant the infinite time of Khasak. Legend had it that pagan deities sought to rebuild the oldest of them. But the deities were sworn to build only in the dark, and complete their task before day broke. Demon spirits who turned themselves into roosters crowed when it was still night, which confounded the deities, who fled, abandoning the incomplete edifice. A curse lay on the mosques and after the deiti
es were thwarted no one, and certainly no human, could finish building any of the houses of worship, least of all the most ancient of them. If you asked the villagers how old the mosque was, they would reply, ‘Millennia.’ Through these interminable years the moss had softened the bricks until the mosque was a print of outlines in the marsh.
The twelfth mosque, called the Mosque of the King, was the most recent of the ruins. Its walls and roof covered with picturesque disfigurement, the mosque exuded the dismal well-being of an antique. It overlooked the Araby tank, a pond of crystal water, to which kabandhas, beings dismembered in ancient wars, came to bathe their unhealed wounds. In the thirteenth mosque, Allah-Pitcha led the prayers.
The mullahs of Khasak were a line of foundlings, all adopted in unusual circumstances. So when Allah-Pitcha came upon the beautiful boy on the slopes of Chetali, he thought his own search for a successor had ended. That was twelve years ago, when his daughter was sixteen. The boy was as old as she. He stood clad in just a torn strip of cloth through which the mullah saw his thighs and their delicate down.
‘What brings you to the Sheikh’s valley?’ Allah-Pitcha asked.
‘Snakes,’ the boy replied. ‘I come to catch them.’
‘What kind of snakes?’
‘The hooded ones, the reptile princes.’
‘For what purpose?’
The boy did not answer, he merely stood before the priest and smiled.
‘What’s your name, O ill-begotten one?’ the mullah then asked.
‘Nizam Ali.’
‘Are your Attha and Umma living?’
‘Neither of them.’
‘A home?’
‘None.’
The boy smiled, the ageing priest stroked his dimpled cheek. The mullah looked up again, and now there came the sign from Chetali, a wind in the deep dark thickets and a flashing scrub fire which spewed down wisps of cloud-blue smoke over the slope. The priest stood gazing at the mountain a long while. When his trance ended, he found the boy still before him but now he held a green snake writhing in his hand, the snake of the bushes which spat venom into the eyes of the unwary.
‘Why didn’t you catch the reptile prince?’ the mullah asked.
‘Because,’ the boy replied, ‘even this one can grow to be as venomous.’
‘Truly said. But when will that be?’
‘When its hour draws near.’
‘Let the evil one go back into the bushes for now,’ said the mullah.
The boy did as he was told, he let the snake down and it slithered away.
‘Now follow me,’ the mullah said. Chanting holy verses Allah-Pitcha came home with the beautiful boy in tow. That night no one slept ... Nizam Ali became part of the family. Thithi Bi would cook buffalo meat and make paththiris, which she spread before the boy for supper. She would melt lac for him to massage his body with; he would stand amidst lush flower-beds in the evening sun to let the lac sink in and make his skin soft and glowing ...
Three years went by. One day the mullah noticed that Nizam Ali’s head hadn’t been shaven. The devout Muslim shaved his head to distinguish himself from the pagan, and Allah-Pitcha had instructed the Ossan, the Muslim barber, to give his ward the ritual shave on the night of every new moon.
‘I see your hair’s grown long,’ the mullah said. ‘Didn’t you go to the Ossan?’
Nizam Ali smiled, ‘I forgot.’
‘Better have it done soon.’
Allah-Pitcha had to go to Koomankavu the next day. He returned at night to find Nizam Ali gazing into Maimoona’s cracked mirror; he was carefully tending the incipient curls. The mullah held back a feeble reprimand ... The hair grew on. There were others who weren’t kafirs and yet wore their hair long—Alam, Amir, Mohiyuddin and Attar. Attar had been the first to succumb to temptation. Years ago he had dropped out of the madrassa and become a vagabond. Later he had set up a little business and begun to make money. In the little thatched house he had acquired in Koomankavu which Attar called his ‘factory’, ten starved and ill-paid men sat from dawn to dusk, rolling beedis. Attar had cast his lot with Iblis the Devil and he wouldn’t pay his workers their rightful wages. The mullah remembered the drop-out with a measure of bitterness and wondered what pestilence he carried in his hair—dandruff, lice? He was determined that that should not be Nizam Ali’s way. Thithi Bi had tried to reason with her husband. After all weren’t more and more young believers taking to pagan hairstyles without giving up their faith?
‘But it’s wrong,’ Allah-Pitcha had said. ‘He is Khasak’s next mullah.’
He shook his head and went on in passive misery, ‘It’s wrong! He’s to wed Maimoona.’
The words had spilled out of him, and sounded unreal. In fact Maimoona’s wedding was the last thing on his mind; he was troubled instead by a vision of soft tendrils curling round a face in a mirror, hair more voluptuous than Maimoona’s locks, or Thithi Bi’s, hair forever growing and reaching out as vile temptation.
Soon the mullah had another journey to undertake—to the village of Athicode where his second wife lived, whom he never failed to visit once a year. He would be gone for four or five days and, since in Khasak the mullah served as muezzin as well, he entrusted the call for the five namazes to Nizam Ali ...
The mullah returned to find that for five days Khasak had gone without the muezzin’s call. The priest was seized with rage, and he turned on Maimoona.
‘Where is he?’ the mullah demanded.
‘Who, Aththa?’
‘You dare ask me who, you Iblis?’
Allah-Pitcha stormed out of the house and walked straight to the mosque. Black hallucinations dimmed his sight; there was a noisy wind on the palm fronds. He climbed up to the disused storey, where it was dark both night and day. Tiny bats flew in frenetic circles, screeching. On the balcony, fists clenched and pressed against his temples lest the veins in them burst, the mullah let out a long cry: Allaho Akbar! Allaho Akbar! Ashahado Inna la Ilaha Illallah! It was between the fajir and zohar namazes, between the morning and the forenoon prayers, an untimely call. It reverberated through Khasak, a cry of sorrow.
The mullah sat down drained, trembling, on the cold dark floor, calming himself with his beads. After a while, he rose and walked over the grasslands between the mosque and the village. In the mosque’s graveyard he saw Nizam Ali, seated on a gravestone, basking in the warmth, his hair like a halo in the sun.
Nizam Ali had not come home for supper that night, and the mullah himself sat on the steps, disinclined to eat. Tired of waiting for her husband, Thithi Bi ladled out wet, sour rice in a china bowl. ‘Maimoona,’ she said in a whisper, ‘take this to Attha.’
Maimoona spread the little mat on the floor of the corridor and lit the wick lamp. ‘Attha!’ she called, timidly. There was no answer. Maimoona set the bowl down near the mat and withdrew silently. Neither woman dared intrude on these rare moments of rage of the old man. Presently they heard the sound of porcelain shattering. Then they heard his footfalls recede down the corridor, through the veranda and across the yard.
Thithi Bi cried herself to sleep, but Maimoona neither cried nor slept. Outside, the moon was full, and the wind blew eddying moonlit mists down the mountain pass. Over its torrent she heard her father singing in the wilderness the song he had written—a tired, baffled lament:
‘I have sung the Bismi
I begin my verse
Allah give me grace
To sing of the Prophet’s battles.’
Nizam Ali left Khasak the next day to become a beedi-roller in Attar’s ‘factory’.
The Houri of Khasak
After he left Khasak, Nizam Ali never stepped into the village again; nor did the mullah enter Koomankavu on his rambling journeys. Nizam Ali kept himself to the run-down shed which was Attar’s, ‘factory’, where ten workmen sat rolling beedis. Attar and his wife lived in the mud-walled house behind the shed. Nizam Ali rolled faster and better than the nine others. Stooped over his bamboo tray, he worked into the
small hours, and never asked for higher wages, all of which pleased Attar who fed him and let him sleep in the shed. Two years went by and, for the mullah, the distance between his home in Khasak and the workhouse in Koomankavu became a chasm he dared not cross. Thithi Bi saw her daughter growing up, maturing visibly each day, impatient and challengingly beautiful like no woman Khasak had seen. Thithi Bi pleaded with her husband, ‘Go one day to Koomankavu and talk to the boy. We are old, mellow enough to forgive.’ There was no pride left in the mullah, only sorrow. He muttered a now familiar chant, ‘It’ll never be the same again!’
Thithi Bi had never seen her husband so broken; she saw in his pouchy eyes and drawn cheeks the first signs of aging. He had frequent fevers nowadays. She told herself that she would feed him medicated chicken broth once the rain settled to a healing tenor; but she also knew she might never be able to put by enough coppers for the price of chicken.
‘Just once,’ she repeated, ‘try and visit him there.’ In a voice full of tenderness he said, ‘No, Thithi Bi.’ She had never heard this voice before, the new assonance in which he called her name. It touched her deeply. She came over and sat beside him, and put her fair arms around his shoulders. Later, when she went to the backyard to tend the plantains, she saw Maimoona coming home with a pitcher of water. Her thattan, the traditional scarf with which Muslim women covered their hair, had slipped; it hung limply behind her. This was apostasy. But the thattan was more than an observance; women’s hair, if left uncovered, brought astral beings down in lust. Of course the kafir women walked about with their hair uncovered, and at times even their breasts bare. Thithi Bi had no doubt that the flying Gandharvas, the sky-people, had sired satanic offspring in them. Maimoona pulled the thattan over her head in casual deference to the presence of her mother. It slipped again, as casually. Thithi Bi did not admonish her, but gazed helplessly on this devastating beauty born of her flesh.