Madhavan Nair had spread the word that Ravi was a Bachelor of Arts. ‘Impossible!’ commented the mullah when he heard it. With a bachelor’s degree one could get bigger, better jobs. In the meantime Aliyar made a discovery. On weekends he went to Palghat town to replenish his stocks and buy old newspapers from the garbage dealer. Paper to pack the vadas in, Aliyar would say, though few believed him, because invariably the papers were ones that carried pictures of women in scanty clothing. Once when Ravi was passing by the teashop Aliyar had called him in, ‘Maeshtar, could you tell us what is in this newspaper?’
Ravi stepped in and took the paper from Aliyar and glanced through it.
‘This woman with nothing on, what is it all about?’
Ravi handed back the paper, it was an old German tabloid.
‘I can’t read this,’ he said.
The conversation froze.
Later, Aliyar sent for Appa Mutthu, the most educated young man in Khasak, one who had failed in the eighth standard in Kelan’s school.
‘Read it, O child of Satan!’ Aliyar said.
Appa Mutthu brightened at the sight of the pin-up, and read with noisy confidence, ‘Ell ... Cee ... Peeee ...’ He read on with great seriousness, as if he were breaking a cryptogram. His audience wanted to know more, they asked him where it was that women went about stripped. Appa Mutthu concentrated.
‘Ooo ... Eee ... hey, there is something wrong here, there is an upside down V over this O, and this E sports a tuft ...’
‘Tell us about the woman.’
What kind of Bachelor of Arts was this, who couldn’t read what Appa Mutthu could? The story of Ravi being a doctor’s son too must be a lie. It was Madhavan Nair who had told them that Ravi’s father was a doctor in a big plantation. ‘A lie!’ said the mullah. It was simple reasoning that a young man with that kind of parentage wouldn’t teach in a village school.
‘Please, let us grant there could be some truth in all this,’ said a voice from outside. The gossip-bird, Kuppu-Acchan, perched on the load-rest, had been listening.
‘Truth?’ the mullah said. ‘It is a fraud!’
‘Maybe he is the son of a lesser kind of doctor, a homavathi perhaps.’
A homavathi, Khasak’s slang for a homoeopath, was held in contempt because he dispensed sugar pellets for all ailments.
‘A confidence trick,’ the mullah said.
It was dark. The mullah put down his lantern on the culvert wall where the pathway forked. He stood there, his mind vacant. Madhavan Nair, passing that way, tapped him awake.
‘What foolish plan now?’ he taunted the priest.
‘None.’
Madhavan Nair looked at the mullah’s shirt, a patchwork of yarn that had decayed with age. He felt sorry for him and said, ‘Stop playing games.’
The mullah protested feebly and stuttered, ‘What ... what have I done?’
‘Nothing,’ said the tailor, ‘it is Kelan who’s doing it. For every child you stop from the Board’s school Kelan pays you a bribe. If you stop a sufficient number our school will close. Who will bribe you then?’
Madhavan Nair let go of the mullah’s arm and walked away towards the fields. The mullah saw the light in the school window. On most evenings he passed by that light. He did so today as well. Wearily, he turned towards the village square ...
Maimoona had converted her veranda into a little shop where she sold odds and ends of grocery. The mullah saw her seated in the light of a pendent lamp. Pretty as a malic, an angel, he thought as he blessed her silently ... He came and sat down on the bench laid out in front of the shop. Maimoona did not look up.
‘Maimoo,’ he enquired, ‘hasn’t Chukkru got back yet?’
‘No,’ she answered curtly.
‘Is the pain in your hips any better?’
‘Mmm.’
The mullah lingered on, unable to make conversation. He watched a few fragile moths fly and burn their wings on the pendent lamp.
‘Maimoo, my child,’ he said after a difficult silence, ‘can you give me a quart of coconut oil? I shall pay you soon.’
‘There isn’t any oil to spare.’
‘Your Umma’s hair has become dry ...’
‘Go away, Attha!’
‘Well,’ the mullah spoke in an even feebler voice, ‘then I shan’t trouble you. Look after your hip pain, take some herbal potion.’
The mullah rose, took another sullen round of the village and walked back towards the school. Ravi saw the wandering light, the magic lantern moving towards the school ... The mullah coughed to make Ravi aware of his presence.
‘Come in,’ Ravi said. The mullah stepped in hesitantly.
‘What a pleasant surprise!’ Ravi said.
‘Assalam Aleikum!’
‘Waleikum Salaam. The great mullah of Khasak is ignoring his guests.’
The mullah, slowly and with much effort, folded himself to sit cross-legged on the floor at the foot of the cot on which Ravi was resting.
‘Sit up on the cot, Mollakka.’
‘I’m comfortable here, Kutti.’
The mullah put out the lantern to save kerosene.
‘What are you reading, Kutti? Is it a Veda?’
‘Oh, no! This is just a story.’
‘What class has one to study to understand this book?’
Ravi laughed, ‘Well ...’
‘Is it in English?’
‘Yes.’
For a moment the priest withdrew into himself to make an entry in a dark book of memories.
‘Have a cigarette, Mollakka.’
‘No, Kutti. I have a beedi. Cigarettes do not suit my throat. Or, well, I might as well smoke the cigarette as you offer it in friendship.’
The mullah held the cigarette between thumb and forefinger and burned it out in avid pulls.
‘I have come to talk about a certain matter,’ the mullah said, ‘and it is in your hands.’
‘I’ll be happy if I can be of any help ...’
‘I heard you were looking for a low paid maintenance person, a masalji.’
‘Oh, yes. I need one to sweep and swab the school. It’s too much for Abida, so I decided she’d just do the cooking. The District Board will pay five rupees a month, it isn’t much. Know anyone who could do the job?’
‘I ... I will do it.’
The mullah’s voice was hardly audible, and Ravi was embarrassed. The job was looked upon with a certain disfavour. Not quite knowing what to say, Ravi said, ‘As you wish, Mollakka.’
‘Now I will take leave.’
The mullah rose. He took one stick from Ravi’s box of matches and lit his lantern.
The First Lessons
The rains were over, the skies shone, and Khasak readied itself for Onam, the festival of thanksgiving. Children went up into the hills at sunrise to gather flowers. For ten days they would arrange colourful designs in their yards with flower petals to welcome the deities of the festival. Ravi heard the children sing on the hillsides, and for a fleeting moment they touched him with the joy of a hundred home-comings. The moment passed, and once again he was the fugitive. A fugitive had no home, and a sarai no festival.
Ravi sought to share his fears with Madhavan Nair—the Onam recess would last a fortnight. Would the children come back to dreary routine after that spell of freedom?
‘If I were their age, I wouldn’t !’ Ravi said.
‘You lost your childhood somewhere along the way, Maash. I hope the children find it for you.’
As they parted Madhavan Nair said with some hesitation, ‘There is one more pupil for you if you can take a risk.’
‘A risk? Who’s it anyway?’
Guilt and remorse made Madhavan Nair suggest it to Ravi. Some days ago Appu-Kili’s mother Neeli was at his shop waiting for him to put the finishing stitches to a blouse he was making for her. She sat there bare-breasted, watching the dressmaker anticipate the contours.
‘There, there!’ she said suddenly. ‘See, O Venerable Nair ...’
On the other side of the square there were children at play. In their midst stood the cretin, taller than them and clad in conspicuous motley. Madhavan Nair remembered how she broke down as she pointed to Appu-Kili and said, ‘Look at my son!’
It was just the other day that Madhavan Nair had made him that weird toga with scraps of cloth. He had scissored out a Gandhi and a sickle-and-hammer from discarded gunny bags, and stitched them on either side of the toga.
‘If only you could tell the Maeshtar ...’ Neeli sobbed.
Madhavan Nair saw the tears fall on her bare breasts.
‘I shall speak to the Maash, Neeli.’
‘Not to teach my Appu but to stop him from roaming with children.’
When they reopened after the festival break, Ravi was pleasantly surprised to find the school had survived the vacation ... Madhavan Nair arrived chaperoning Appu-Kili. The children crowded round the cretin who was neither man nor child. Ravi herded them back to their seats, taking care the dragonfly, the cretin’s constant companion, was not lost. He drew the Parrot aside and asked him gently, ‘Like to join the school, Kili?’
Madhavan Nair raised his hand to discipline the children, ‘Quieten down, evil ones! You are upsetting my Parrot!’ And to Kili, ‘Didn’t you hear what the Maash-Etta asked you? Speak, O Parrot of the Palms!’
Appu-Kili stood looking indifferent, his gaze on his toes.
‘Why are you afraid?’ Madhavan Nair reasoned. ‘Isn’t it our own school?’
That did not reassure the Parrot. The children in the school were all his playmates, they made signs of encouragement. From the benches came hushed invitations: Come, Kili, come here, sit near me! As Madhavan Nair turned to go, Appu-Kili let out a howl, ‘Take me with you, Madhavan-Etto!’
‘O avian!’ the tailor despaired, ‘you have put me to shame!’
Madhavan Nair took four coppers from his purse and asked one of the pupils, Alam Khan, to go and get some murukkus. He told Kili that the teacher would give him the murukkus if he sat quietly and did his lessons. Appu-Kili cheered up.
Ravi whispered, ‘Madhavan Nair, my life is in peril. This prehistoric pet of yours ...’
‘Have no fear, Maash.’
Ravi found the child-man a place next to little Sohra.
‘Sohra will take care of you, my winged being!’ Madhavan Nair said, and added this parting advice. ‘Study well, and become an engineer.’
‘He will!’ the class responded.
As Ravi turned to write out a sum on the blackboard, Sohra drew Kili close and passed him a sweet berry.
‘Don’t be afraid, Kili, I’m with you.’
During the Onam vacation cobwebs had gathered in the seedling house, and Ravi set apart a day for teacher and pupils to clean up the school. It became a war on the spiders. Adam drew a line on the floor with chalk and laid out the dead spiders. Appu-Kili picked up the biggest of them and tried to breathe life into it.
‘Saar, Saar,’ Kunhamina asked, ‘how big are the really big spiders?’
Ravi pointed to the dome of the mosque, and said, ‘That big.’
‘Yaa Rahman!’
The spiders in the crevices of the walls were brown, and were only as big as an outspread palm. But outside, in the forests of the rain, they were born to power and splendour. Like the kings of old they revelled in the hunt. And in the teeming nights of fear they rose like stars of the nether dark ... Ravi told the children the story of the spiders, how after they made love the female ate up her mate. The children could not believe that such bloody dynasties ruled over Khasak’s peaceful grass and fern. Then Karuvu stood up and said the male spider was paying for his sins in an earlier birth. The children knew it was karma, the class was now unusually quiet.
The story of karma ended, but Ravi had set the children on a magic trail. They refused to do sums and recitations, and for the next two days Ravi did nothing but tell them stories of plants and animals. It was during one of these heady lessons that Kunhamina brought a hedge lizard to the classroom. The lizard made no attempt to escape.
‘Hurt it, have you?’ Ravi asked Kunhamina.
‘No, Saar. Just doped it with castor sap.’
The lizard took a few unsteady steps on Ravi’s table, then gave up, and looked around in ancient derision. Kunhamina had reckoned that Ravi would be pleased with the catch, but froze when she sensed his displeasure.
‘Will it die?’ Ravi asked Kunhamina. She wouldn’t answer, but the rest of the class spoke. The castor sap, said Madhavi, was like the liquor they made in Khasak, it killed only when one had too much of it. Adam said hedge lizards were used in sorcery, he terrified himself with the thought of saturnine deities called up by the sorcerer. No child of Khasak was friends with the hedge lizard, said Karuvu, because it sucked the blood of children, sucked it through the air from afar. One realized it only when one watched the lizard’s head suddenly turn crimson, the sign of the vampire.
There was more about the hedge lizard—the evil spirits exorcised by the astrologers went into exile riding the hedge lizard. They wouldn’t say anything more as it was Khasak’s secret.
Ravi and the children were engrossed in the stories and no one had noticed Kunhamina sobbing.
‘Kunhamina,’ Ravi said, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
That only made the sobbing worse. Tears brought the surma down in patches over her cheeks, and the silver anklets chimed as she moved her legs disconsolately under her desk. In the meantime the lizard recovered, and with one last look at everyone, stalked out of the classroom towards the hedges. Kunhamina smiled.
That day Ravi told the children the story of the lizards. In times before Man usurped the earth, the lizard held sway. A miraculous book opened, the children saw its pages rise and turn and flap. Out of it came mighty saurians moving slowly in deep canyons after the dull scent of prey, and pterodactyls rose screaming over their nesting precipices. The story was reluctantly interrupted for lunch; after hurried morsels the children raced back to school and huddled round their teacher. The pages rose and fell again ... Long before the lizards, before the dinosaurs, two spores set out on an incredible journey. They came to a valley bathed in the placid glow of sunset.
My elder sister, said the little spore to the bigger spore, let us see what lies beyond.
This valley is green, replied the bigger spore, I shall journey no farther.
I want to journey, said the little spore, I want to discover. She gazed in wonder at the path before her.
Will you forget your sister? asked the bigger spore.
Never, said the little spore.
You will, little one, for this is the loveless tale of karma; in it there is only parting and sorrow.
The little spore journeyed on. The bigger spore stayed back in the valley. Her roots pierced the damp earth and sought the nutrients of death and memory. She sprouted over the earth, green and contented ... A girl with silver anklets and eyes prettied with surma came to Chetali’s valley to gather flowers. The Champaka tree stood alone—efflorescent, serene. The flower-gatherer reached out and held down a soft twig to pluck the flowers. As the twig broke the Champaka said, My little sister, you have forgotten me!
The children had gone home. Ravi closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair and abandoned himself to the charmed weariness. Around him rose the scent of incense, and the sound of bells and cymbals.
Vedan Uddharate Jagannivahate—the sloka celebrating the avatars of the Lord, evolute incarnations from fish to boar to man and deity resounded over everything.
The moment passed. Ravi, now awake, looked out. The sun was setting over Chetali’s valley. The sunset filled the seedling house with the warmth of a sensuous fever.
The Well Within
Chukkru was fifty when he married Maimoona. He looked only sixty, commented Kuppu-Acchan viciously ...
Chukkru followed an unusual calling. He dived and retrieved things fallen into wells. A pulley or a battered bucket, a pitcher of copper or bronze,
at times a gold or silver ornament. Often there was nothing to be retrieved, but he wandered from well to well and from village to village, over desolate paths and distances. Those were times before there was piped water, and there were wells in almost every house—the more prosperous the family the deeper the well. Chukkru ranged over the Palghat countryside, by now familiar with the cry of his calling—a long, sad drone in which pots and pans lay lost as in the slime of wells. They called him the Diving Fowl.
In the years of perilous diving, Chukkru’s name atrophied, he became a diving fowl; Kuppu-Acchan said that the fowl would peck grains of rice if one were to throw a fistful in his path.
When the marriage was fixed the villagers said it would never really take place and if at all it did, the bride wouldn’t stay long. But these fond expectations were belied. Maimoona walked unperturbed into wedlock. There was no honeymoon; the Diving Fowl left Khasak before dawn the day after and came home after midnight, covered with leeches and moss. Maimoona picked his skin clean and put him to sleep across her navel. She woke up to her days as usual and walked across the square, the thattan slipping from her hair, sleeves rolled up in grand display.
And she sat in her shop, more for gossip and amusement than for gain; she spent hours there with her friend and confidante, Thanka the jaggery-seller ... Abida had grown up watching Maimoona from a distance, and like most girls her age, was stricken by a strange love for her beauty. But when Maimoona moved into their house, Abida felt a greater loneliness than before. It was hard for her to consider the newcomer as a stepmother; Maimoona was just seven years older. Abida couldn’t call her ‘elder sister ’ either.