The Legends of Khasak

  Maimoona walked with power and abundance, sleeves rolled up to bare her arms, revealing the translucent skin beneath which the blue veins were a gorgeous filigree. Often Maimoona turned her charms on her pursuers, reducing them to blushing juveniles. She was the sacrificial mare no one could lasso.

  In the fifth year of his migration to Koomankavu, Nizam

  Ali set up his own enterprise with two hired hands. It was rumoured that Attar’s wife had given him the money to get started, though no one knew for certain. But Attar and his wife had had a noisy row out in the street.

  Beedis came in conical packs of ten, and though it was the same tobacco wrapped in the same leaf, the innumerable little ‘companies’ sported their own labels, and connoisseurs staked their preferences for their favourite brands. Attar’s pack of ten had around it a band of coloured paper on which was printed Attar’s photograph with the legend, God bless M. Attar Photo Beedi. It had cost Attar time and money. He had gone to Palghat town to get himself photographed in a hired coat and tie and fez. Attar’s wife had said he appeared uncomfortable in print, but Attar was obsessed with his picture. Sometimes, overcome with this self-love, Attar would go behind overgrown thickets and in that privacy commune with his own printed face, secretive and sorrowful, captured with such fidelity in black and violet printer’s ink.

  For seven years Attar’s beedi had been popular in those parts. Now the upstart was challenging him by entering the fray with his own trade mark, Sayed Mian Sheikh bless Nizam Photo Beedi. And the maverick brought to the battle something Attar had not dreamt of—advertising! On the walls of Koomankavu, on the little culverts, across quarried rocks, misspelt slogans in large letters appeared overnight, emblazoned with turmeric and charcoal, Nizam Photo health-giving. Makes you hungry, incinerates even putrid food

  stuck in the gizzard! Under cover of night Nizam Ali had hundreds of his beedi wrappers scattered along the footpaths and in the morning the campaign burst upon the villagers. Maimoona picked one up and treasured it; how different, she thought, from the tense and ugly Attar! Nizam Ali smiled in print with the ease of one born to it, his mouth seductive, curls of hair down his temples in blue rolls, his shirt unbuttoned.

  Then the exile ended. Nizam Ali came to Khasak during the Eid festival, dressed in colourful silk, his broad, many-pocketed canvas belt showing through a diaphanous shirt, identical red scarves round the head and neck and peeping out of the breast pocket, sandals on his feet that were designed to squeak while walking, and a long electric torch flaunted at midday as a symbol of prosperity. Nizam Ali, now Nizam Ali Muthalali, an owner of wealth, mingled with the admiring crowd. Kassim and Haneefa, Ubaid Dawood and Ussamat, the smooth-cheeked wastrels of Khasak who trailed the houri these days, faced Nizam Ali in trepidation and hopelessness. Kassim spoke for them, ‘Nizam Anno, have you come back for good?’

  ‘What a question!’ Nizam Ali said. ‘Do you think I could leave my factory to take care of itself?’

  Nizam Ali sat on a bench inside Aliyar’s teashop, legs crossed in the lotus posture, while an admiring throng fretted in the yard. Nizam Ali Muthalali treated everyone to tea and crisp murukkus.

  Great monsoon clouds radiated heat from afar. Maimoona stood in waist-deep water, bathing, splashing in the clear waters of the Araby tank. The tank and the Mosque of the King on the rise over it were haunted. In the wars of a different age, the Arabs had put renegades and infidels to the sword and flung their dismembered bodies into the tank. Even now the kabandhas were believed to return to the tank in the dense night and at desolate noontide. Maimoona bathed alone, bare-breasted, and watched the soap bubbles wink red and blue. In the paddies far away two women were transplanting seedlings, there was no one else in sight. The wind was still, the mirage swelled in tides over the banyans. Maimoona climbed out of the water and walked up the rise, the wet clothes clinging to her body; she trod on thorns but felt no pain on this delirious journey. It was dark inside the Mosque of the King, yet she made out the looming silhouette that stood waiting.

  ‘You will catch a cold in these wet clothes,’ Nizam Ali said, ‘put them away.’

  The news stunned Khasak: Maimoona was to be married off!

  In the congregations beneath the banyan and in Aliyar’s teashop there was utter disbelief. Every man in the village had bound this mare in his fantasies ... The wedding guests gathered as for a funeral. The knock-kneed groom tottered in, his jowl thrown into waxen relief by the wedding shave: Chukkru the diver, called ‘Diving Fowl’ in Khasak and the adjoining countryside, felt neither joy nor anxiety as the mullah made him chant the verses which gave him for wife the houri of Khasak.

  That night a frenzied traveller stalked out of Khasak. No one saw him go. It was a night blacker than other nights, the skies low, laden with the imminent monsoon. The traveller caught glimpses of his path as lightning blazed and exploded. That was no path for men but for djinns and iffriths. Nizam Ali strode on. Chetali was soon far behind him.

  After the Lost Years

  Nizam Ali was gone, nobody knew where. His two hired hands went on rolling the clumsy little cigarillos, but there was nobody around to give them wages. After a week they shut down the ‘factory’, and morose and masterless, sought other employment. One joined Attar and the other took to illicit distilling.

  Two years after his mysterious disappearance Nizam Ali strolled into Koomankavu’s bazaar as if he had never been away. He went up to Attar and asked coolly, ‘Can I work for you?’ Attar could have killed him for all those private and rancid humiliations. Instead he chose a devious path. He took Nizam Ali in so that he could harrass him at will, so he could withhold his wages and watch him survive on the meagre food the teashops served, so he could singe the locks and starve the seducer’s face thin. And indeed wear him down in many other ways.

  ‘Very well,’ Attar said, ‘but I don’t want any more nonsense.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Nizam Ali replied, ‘and when Nizam promises, the promise is kept.’

  ‘You can’t sleep in the factory like you used to. Look out for a place.’

  ‘Nizam is like the wind. He blows, he dies down.’

  ‘Stop this loose talk.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  Later that evening Attar’s wife Sohra Bi, trying to sound casual, said to her husband, ‘They say he has grown his hair long like a woman.’

  ‘Shut up, you bitch!’ Attar exploded.

  Nizam Ali kept his word. In a frenzy that baffled even Attar, he rolled twice as many beedis as the others did, beedis of perfect tautness. Attar watched those beautiful fingers working in a rage ... Months went by, and the rage abated. Then a small red board appeared on the door of Nizam Ali’s one-room hut. Scribbled in tar across the red was this legend: Koomankavu Beedi Workers’ Union. Seven of Attar’s workmen joined the Union. These men gathered at odd places, secretive and wise; partisans from Palghat town came to them and read out dim prophecies. They said a spectre was haunting Europe. ‘Do you know what a spectre is?’ the ideologues asked the beedi-rollers.

  ‘We know, comrades,’ Koomankavu’s new proletarians replied. ‘We have djinns and poothams here.’

  ‘You are not listening, comrades.’

  ‘There are even more spectres in Khasak than ...’

  On the twenty-first of January they observed Lenin’s birth anniversary; on another day a dozen men marched in procession, the first procession Koomankavu had seen.

  Muslim trade-unionists visited Attar and told him these processions were evil and their slogans satanic. The right-wing Congressmen had an even more scary story, they said the Russians were coming. Attar listened quietly. He knew better, it was a private knowledge he chose not to share with anybody. It was more a war of the spirit than of class. Attar had struggled hard to make his money—God was his witness—and with that money he had built an attic over his tiny home. The second storey was the signal to all men that he was a muthalali, an owner of wealth. ‘Malika’ meant a two-storeyed house, and from t
hat he took the ‘M’ that was to precede his name, M. Attar, Malikakkal Attar Muthalali, the capitalist who lived in the two-storeyed house. He ignored the satanic peril, and worried even less about the Russians. All that mattered to him now was the invisible enemy which was forever seeking to push him back over the brink, to his childhood of poverty. Attar had resisted, now he would overcome. This was the heroic hour.

  He dismissed Nizam Ali.

  With that the strike began. Back in Khasak, the people looked on in fascination and concern at this war between their expatriates. Processions went round Koomankavu, went round and round not knowing where to go. All old red lungis were torn into flags for the processionists, and the vanguard carried the Koran and a portrait of Stalin. Slogans ripped the peace of Koomankavu:

  ‘Anglo-American exploitation—Murdabad!—

  ‘Oppressor M Attar—Murdabad!’

  ‘Inquilab—Zindabad!’

  Tanka, who carried basketfuls of jaggery from Khasak to Koomankavu, was witness to all this and brought some of the insurrection home.

  ‘Can you guess who leads it all?’ She was ecstatic. ‘It is him!’

  ‘Nizam Annan?’ asked Maimoona.

  ‘Yes, my houri.’

  Maimoona giggled and reddened ... The insurrection took a grave turn on its fifth day when Attar thrashed a striking worker and badly bruised him. Attar himself was satisfied that he had acted within the hallowed laws of property and awaited the arrival of the police with much optimism. The police came in khaki fatigues and red berets. Attar had no doubt they would compliment him for what he had done for the law. He went out to receive them. They promptly arrested him and Nizam Ali and took them in handcuffs to Palghat town. The ‘factory’ collapsed, creditors seized the stock of beedis and unrolled tobacco. Soon a big manufacturer from Palghat town opened a branch in Koomankavu. With that ended both the insurrection and Attar’s dreams of a trading dynasty.

  Nizam Ali lay beaten black and blue inside a police cell. He rose with the dawn winds in a slow resurrection. The charges against him were grievous—collusion with a foreign power, war against the state, incitement to murder. Nizam Ali found all this ignominy bearable, but not the pain which alternated with merciful patches of oblivion. Through the rhythms of pain and blankness, this question nagged him—what were the police doing in his war with the mullah?

  Dawn lit the cells. Nizam Ali levered himself up by holding on to the prison bars. He heard the cock crow outside and for a moment gave himself the freedom to fantasize—was this the bird of dawn crowing from Khasak? With a great effort he kept standing and hailed the first policeman who passed, ‘Yajaman, I have a request, a humble prisoner’s request.’

  ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘I want to speak to the Inspector-Yajaman.’

  Nizam Ali found himself standing on shaky legs before the Inspector.

  ‘Yajaman,’ Nizam Ali said, ‘I quit all this.’

  The Inspector eyed the prisoner with curiosity.

  ‘Wisdom dawns late,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that so?’

  ‘Yes, Yajaman. Such is maya.’

  This surely was a political detenu with a difference. The Inspector smiled, ‘Maya?’

  ‘Yes, Yajaman. The unreal aspect of things. But the maya has ended. The Old One visited me in the cell last night.’

  ‘The Old One? In the cell?’

  ‘Yes, Yajaman. Sayed Mian Sheikh.’

  The Inspector turned to the constable.

  ‘What’s this I hear? Someone in the cell, without permission ...’

  The constable was puzzled. Nizam Ali hastened to intervene, ‘Yajaman, it is a djinn, a ghost ...’

  The Inspector sighed in relief, leaned back in his chair and spoke to the constable in admonition, ‘You men will never learn! Must you beat them on the head?’ Turning to Nizam Ali who stood in a trance, the Inspector said, ‘Sit down on the chair. Now will you make us lock you up again?’

  ‘Insha Allah, there will be no more trouble on my part. Mian Sheikh will guide me wisely.’

  ‘Who? The ghost?’

  ‘Yes, Yajaman.’

  ‘Now listen, Ali. I shall read out this statement to you. Will you sign it?’

  ‘Yes, Yajaman.’

  The Inspector took out a frayed yellow sheet from a pile of government stationery, and wrote out a document for the renegade: I, Nizam Ali, do hearby pledge to eschew violence and to work for a change of government only through constitutional means, and ...

  Nizam Ali held out his left thumb which the Inspector inked. When the thumb impression was made, Nizam Ali said hesitantly, ‘A request ...’

  ‘Certainly,’ the Inspector said.

  ‘Below my name and thumb impression ...’

  ‘Yes, Ali?’

  ‘Add the word Khazi.’

  ‘Certainly. But what does that mean?’

  ‘The Old One ordained me last night, I am his Khazi from now on.’

  The Inspector felt expansive as one does when dealing with the gently insane.

  ‘As you wish, Ali,’ he said. ‘Now get back to your cell and relax. Tomorrow or the day after we’ll drop the charges.’ And he turned to his constable, ‘Get some herbal oil and bathe him in plenty of cold water.’

  Nizam Ali cast his dusky eyes on the Inspector and chanted a benign spell, ‘Al Hamdo Lillahe Rabbil Aalemeen. Ar Rahmanir Rahim. Malike Yaumiddin ...’

  Nizam Ali walked over the rocks of Chetali with the crisp tread of a mountain goat. He sensed the nearness of the forbidden beehives, he bowed before the crypt from which the Sheikh rose to protect the living and the dead of Khasak. Nizam Ali stood on Chetali’s peak, gazing up, his hands spread like the wings of an eagle. The wind blew free, and marvellous little beings rode past him in flimsy sky-canoes. Nizam Ali leapt up into the sky which seemed within reach, and the next moment he was plummeting down through wind and cloud.

  After a while, he rose from the soft damp earth. He did not know how long he had lain there. In great pain he began his walk towards Khasak ... His unearthly chant alerted Khasak; some elders caught a glimpse of a gaunt figure walking over the burial marshes and disappearing into the Mosque of the King.

  ‘The Ordination!’ the elders whispered among themselves. Word went round of an occult presence in the village, but it did not reach the mullah who was lost in long and solitary prayer in the mosque that night ... On the fifth day Nizam Ali strode into Khasak and stood beneath the great banyan. That was the day of Allah-Pitcha’s disastrous palaver over the school.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me of his return?’ the mullah cried. Ponthu Rawuthar, the elder who was by then his only listener in Aliyar’s teashop, merely shook his head in sorrow.

  Outside, the Khazi, the first one Khasak ever had, sermonized to the faithful.

  The Schools

  The Khazi went among the people, spreading the glad tidings of the Sheikh. The mullah had barred the children from the school, now the Khazi commended its new learning. What was the Khazi’s power? What but the miraculous signs? Midnight baths in the cursed tank, the taming of the spirits in marsh and mosque, fetishes scattered amid gravestones.

  ‘What is the Khazi’s truth?’ the troubled elders asked one another.

  They recalled the spell the mullah had tried to cast on Nizam Ali. They had seen the spell fail.

  ‘The Khazi’s truth,’ they told themselves, ‘is the Sheikh’s truth.’

  ‘If that be so,’ troubled minds were in search of certitude, ‘is Mollakka the untruth?’

  ‘He is the truth too.’

  ‘How is it so?’

  ‘Many truths make the big truth.’

  In the seedling house, Ravi was trying to calm the landlord who had burst in, greatly agitated.

  ‘The Bouddhas are against us,’ Sivaraman Nair whispered.

  ‘Let them be.’

  ‘They are holding the children back.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  Sivaraman Nair quietened, but he was still
panting. Then, on second thoughts he said, ‘It is just as well, Maash. Better to have them on the other side.’

  It was then they saw the lithe figure slouching in the shade of the tamarind tree.

  ‘Assalam Aleikum!’ the visitor greeted them from a distance.

  ‘Waleikum Salaam!’ Ravi returned the greeting.

  ‘May I approach?’

  ‘Please do ...’

  He walked up with a springy stride, a dappled apparition emerging from under the tamarind’s porous canopy.

  ‘I am Sayed Mian Sheikh’s Khazi.’

  ‘I’m the District Board’s schoolmaster,’ said Ravi, not quite knowing what to say.

  Hair parted and combed down to his shoulders, his locks feminine and dark, the Khazi stood there tall and strangely elegant.

  ‘I bring you Sayed Mian Sheikh’s blessings,’ the Khazi said. ‘Your school will prosper.’ And then he was gone as abruptly as he had come.

  ‘Tell me, Sivaraman Nair,’ Ravi said, ‘who’s this Sayed Mian Sheikh?’

  Sivaraman Nair was embarrassed; the Sheikh’s Khazi pledged Bouddha support to the school at the very moment he was raising the Bouddha issue. Fortunately Ravi was not bothered about these undercurrents of animosity. He was merely curious.

  ‘Don’t be afraid, Maash,’ Sivaraman Nair said.

  ‘I’m not afraid. But who is he?’

  ‘He is ... he is a ghost.’

  ‘A ghost!’ Ravi laughed and stretched in his chair. He lit a cigarette. Sivaraman Nair did not like this profane disrespect.

  ‘The ghost is real, Maash,’ said the landlord, ‘and he is a Muslim ghost, an unclean one. But as I’ve said often, it can’t touch us if we Hindus stick together. The Devi of the temple in Kozhanasseri can make this Muslim spirit defecate in terror.’

  At that triumphant prospect Sivaraman Nair broke into verse: