It was midnight. The moon dimly lit the pathways; there was no mistaking the evil silhouette far away, the peak of Chetali! Suddenly its contours began to change. To Kuttappu it looked like an old Muslim dervish in a gigantic balaclava. The power of the illicit elixir wore away. Now the clip-clop of the chasing cavalry was loud and clear! The Tiger sweated. The djinns of the Sheikh were right behind him. The Tiger tried to cry for help, but his voice sank. The djinns were coming! Where was Khasak? Home? Kuttappu-Nari hurtled through the moonlight in blind and calamitous flight.
The Twilight
Kuttappu lay tossing in delirium. Helplessly, Kali and Neeli went to the Khazi. The Khazi sat in padmasana, the lotus posture. He looked up with soft brown eyes at the women. After a long while he spoke, ‘You may now depart!’
Was it pardon or dismissal? The sisters were bewildered. Neeli wanted to talk, to ask. But the stagnant gloom of the mosque intimidated her.
‘Go!’ said the Khazi, ‘Justice will be done. Go!’
At noon the Khazi rose from his padmasana. He burned incense over the nameless graves around the mosque, and took the winding footpath to the village.
An agitated villager informed him, ‘O Khazi, the Tiger is dead!’
The Khazi headed for Neeli’s house ... He stood for a moment at her gate. A deep tremor ran through him. He mumbled a mantra and raised his hand. Then abruptly, he turned and headed back to the marshes.
The following month of Chaitra was the time of flowering and renewal. Twenty years had passed since Neeli had brought forth her cretin son. When the Khazi came as usual to bless the hut, Neeli whispered to him in anxiety, ‘O Khazi ...’
‘What ... what ails you?’
He saw a shaft of sunlight fall on her lips, saw the lips glisten. She said, ‘I am unwell.’
The Khazi grew thoughtful, and was silent. The next day he brought her sweet and bitter concoctions ... Chaitra turned to harsher seasons. Neeli’s sickness was no longer a distant alarm, she cried out in despair, ‘O Khazi!’
He brought rare leaves and roots from Chetali and fermented them.
‘Will I be well again, O Khazi?’ she asked, savouring the dregs of pleasure.
‘You will, Insha Allah.’
Midnight. A mild pain started below her navel, then suddenly it tore through her; Neeli let out a savage cry. The lanterns of Khasak lit and moved towards Neeli’s hut. Neeli was rolling naked in a pool of blood. She passed away at dawn. They laid her to rest beside the Tiger.
Appu-Kili slipped out of the house. No one missed him. He sneaked into the dense thickets beside the burial ground and hid there during the day. When night fell he came out and slept beside Neeli’s grave. It rained intermittently, and when it stopped, water held in the leaves came down in large drops, piercing cold. He listened to the Kalan Kozhis, nocturnal birds whose eerie call was an omen of death. They perched on branches overhead and crooned to him.
Two days later, Ravi and Madhavan Nair found Appu-Kili’s sanctuary. He was covered with the mouldering mud of the graveyard.
‘You look ill, little one,’ Madhavan Nair said.
Ravi laid his hand over Kili’s forehead.
‘Doesn’t feel too good, Madhavan Nair,’ he said, and stooping over the dwarf, asked, ‘Why did you sleep out here, Kili?’
Appu-Kili smiled but said nothing.
‘Rise, my winged friend,’ Madhavan Nair said, ‘let us go.’
Appu-Kili began the walk back holding on to Madhavan Nair’s and Ravi’s forefingers. As soon as they reached the seedling house Ravi wrapped Kili in a blanket, put him to bed in the corridor, and made a cup of steaming coffee. Ravi began rummaging in his medicine chest.
‘What are you looking for, Maash?’
‘Some medicine for the fever. Can’t find any.’
‘You can give him tablets if you wish, Maash. But I would recommend no medicine.’
Ravi held the thermometer to the light. The mercury stood at a hundred and four.
‘Kili!’ Ravi called him.
Kili did not open his eyes. He smiled wearily.
Madhavan Nair raised Kili up and Ravi held the coffee to his lips. Kili drank and was asleep again.
‘No medicines, Madhavan Nair? What then?’
‘Call Kuttadan. These oracles blow away the spirits.’
‘But where are the spirits?’
‘Right here. Inside the Parrot himself.’
The tailor’s attitude worried Ravi. ‘This is serious, Madhavan Nair, a temperature of a hundred and four.’
Madhavan Nair sat beside the sleeping dwarf.
‘I think there is a doctor in Kozhanasseri,’ Ravi said. ‘Let me go there and get some medicine.’
‘I wouldn’t do it, Maash.’
‘It’s a big responsibility. Let us at least tell his people.’
‘His people? The Parrot has no people any more.’
After school Ravi borrowed Aliyar’s bicycle and pedalled to Kozhanasseri over perilous tracks ... It was night when Ravi came home with the medicines. A bizarre tableau awaited him. The school yard had been prepared for a ritual, and was lit by large oil-lamps. Appu-Kili sat cross-legged on the ground, and beside him, Madhavan Nair beat a steady tattoo on an ancient drum. In the midst of all this stood Kuttadan clad in a red sari, the raiment of his goddess. The tattoo rose, and as it reached its crescendo Kuttadan smote his head with the curved sword of the oracle. The Devi had possessed him, she spoke in his voice, ‘Do not grieve, Neeli-Achchi! And do not tarry here any more!’
Ravi leaned the bicycle on the wall, came over and sat down near Madhavan Nair. Blood clotted on Kuttadan’s sword; the voice went on, ‘Do not cry, Neeli-Achchi! This cretin is our child. We will not let him be hungry. Go in peace.’ And the final astral command, ‘Go, go!’
Appu-Kili had fallen flat on his back. Kuttadan laid down the sword and danced, there was gaiety in his mystic steps. Then he stopped dancing, picked up his sword and went home. The villagers too dispersed. Ravi and Madhavan Nair carried Appu-Kili back to the corridor. Ravi felt the boy’s forehead, the fever had gone. He put away the medicines on the window-sill.
‘Did you tell the tree-fellers and their women?’ Ravi asked Madhavan Nair.
‘I did.’
‘No one came for the exorcism?’
‘No one, no one.’
The tailor’s mind wandered over many things, and he said, ‘Poor Neeli had sorrowed much over this cretin. The bond is hard to undo, Maash. She will come again.’
Outside, somewhere in the thickets of the night, her sorrow unassuaged, Neeli paused in her journey. She turned, she looked back. Appu-Kili’s limbs twitched, and he spoke in his sleep.
With the passing of Kuttappu and Neeli, things began to fall apart. Kali eloped with Pachi’s husband. Ramacchar the cattle-broker reported seeing the fugitive couple in a village on the Tamil border. Pachi did not want to stay on in Khasak in shame and loneliness. She moved to the dam site ten miles away, looking for work in the quarries. Days after, Nachi decided to follow her younger sister. That was the last Khasak heard of them. It was rumoured that both were killed in a rock blasting. Another version, spicier, said that both the sisters had been lured by a wily southerner and the trio had fled south. Kochi was taken ill with a uterine disorder, she died bleeding in the big hospital in Palghat town. The large family that once filled the hut was suddenly reduced to two tree-fellers, who, their wives gone, became strangers to each other. They brawled and rioted; the disowned Parrot would look on for a while, and then walk away. Soon, like the last of the elements breaking away from a lifeless body, the two woodsmen went back to their faraway native villages. Appu-Kili wandered about in Khasak. The villagers were pleased to feed him. He went round the little shops that bounded the village square and picked the things he needed, a chunk of palm jaggery from the grocer, a murukku from Aliyar’s teashop. Only Maimoona would shoo him away when he asked for beedis. ‘Pig!’ she would say, ‘go look for stubs!’
&nbs
p; That was repudiation, it would make him cry ... Orbiting purposelessly, Appu-Kili would come again and again to the abandoned hut. If it pleased him he would enter, and stay for a while. One night the rotted thatch caved in, and the mud walls gave way. The next morning Appu-Kili came to Madhavan Nair’s shop and sat amid the litter of cut pieces.
‘You lost your home, little one?’ Madhavan Nair consoled the Parrot, ‘stay with me.’ Kili had not come as a guest or supplicant anyway. Kili salvaged an old bed cover and promptly asked Madhav-etta to tie him a cradle. Madhavan Nair knotted the ends of the cloth and hung it from a tamarind branch. It was a cradle big enough for an ox; the child-man lay in it, feet sticking out, and rocked himself to sleep.
Madhavan Nair sat at his sewing machine and looked on the absurd spectacle. He remembered his own childhood, long before his uncle Sivaraman Nair had disowned him’he recalled how he and his cousin Kalyanikkutty played ‘father-and-mother ’ under the tamarind trees with pebbles for children and bits of torn cloth for cradles. Dream-children, far, far away. One night the old bed cover gave way. When he woke up, Madhavan Nair saw Appu-Kili squatting beside the heap of cloth that had been his swinging home till some time ago.
‘O Avian!’ the tailor said, ‘how did this come about?’
Aliyar, cleaning his shop for the morning, called out across the square, ‘The Parrot had eaten too many vadas last evening—the cradle couldn’t take it.’
‘O Muslim! Do not say such vile things. There must have been an earthquake last night. Nothing short of it could have torn this cloth.’
‘Of course,’ laughed Aliyar, ‘that is more likely. Khasak hasn’t had an earthquake for a long, long time.’
That bed cover was the last length of cloth he had. Madhavan Nair sat worrying.
‘Parrot,’ he said, ‘would you settle for a perching place?’
Appu-Kili smiled and nodded.
That evening Madhavan Nair came to the school with Appu-Kili. He called out from the gate, ‘Maash! Would you give us a perching place?’
‘What happened, Madhavan Nair?’
‘The earthquake ...’
‘The earthquake?’
‘Yes. It ripped the cradle.’
Madhavan Nair’s shop had just the space a man needed, it couldn’t accomodate another, so could the winged one perch in the school?
‘Alone at night,’ Ravi said, ‘should he decide to peck me ...’
‘Have no fear, Maash!’
Madhavan Nair left Kili with Ravi and went back to his shop. He called again the next evening to see how the perch was working.
‘I have a wonderful companion now,’ Ravi said, ‘one who is utterly devoted to letters. Look—’
On the blackboard, over the walls, across the veranda, wherever there was space for graffiti, there appeared the enchanted repetition of the Malayalam consonant, ‘Ttha’, written as a rounded ‘O’ Madhavan Nair stared in amazement.
‘My Parrot!’ Madhavan Nair called out.
Appu-Kili came bounding from behind the seedling house, hands full of chalk and coal.
‘O noble bird,’ Madhavan Nair said, ‘you have done our nation proud ... Now listen, Maash. Who says my Kili isn’t intelligent? I taught him this one letter almost ten years ago ...’
‘Incredible!’
Appu-Kili went back to his murals, Madhavan Nair made himself comfortable in the easy chair while Ravi sat on the steps leaning on propped up pillows. Madhavan Nair said, ‘Sometimes I think we need to learn just one letter ...’
‘True.’
‘I don’t say that in jest, Maash.’
Madhavan Nair was remembering his Guru. In the village of Mannoor an unlettered knife-smith went blind. He sat listening to the grind of the honing stone as his apprentice fashioned the knives. The blind one listened to the great dark; people came to him, scores of them, with their afflictions. He discoursed on texts he had never seen, and told his devotees to go back to their homes and see beyond the delusion of seeing ... Madhavan Nair concluded his reminiscences, yet they sat on entranced. The dusk silted on the palms of Khasak.
‘Look!’ Ravi said.
Appu-Kili stood at the school gate watching tides of homing parrots.
‘This little one,’ Madhavan Nair said, ‘for him it is always the sunset. And he has no nest to reach.’
‘Who reaches?’
‘True, Maash. No one really does.’
The cretin stood in the twilight of births and deaths. He stood alone. The last flight of parrots receded over the horizon.
The Inspection
A year went by. The school opened after the summer break, its strength a fluid twenty. Ravi had spent the holidays in Khasak, trekking up the hills with Madhavan Nair, or sitting up late telling Appu-Kili stories.
Now, he was readying the school for the annual inspection, which was taking place earlier than usual. The Inspector was new. ‘What’s he like?’ Madhavan Nair wondered. ‘Strict or lenient?’
‘For all I know,’ Ravi said, ‘he might say, close it down, there aren’t enough children!’
‘They inflate the rolls—the teaching shops. Can’t we put down a dozen dummies on the rolls?’
‘The Inspector comes precisely to make sure the rolls aren’t faked. And I can’t bribe him like the teaching shops do.’
The Inspector of Schools was coming—the word went round. In the outlying slums of untouchables they mistook it for the dreaded vaccinator’s visit. The pariah children hid behind hayricks. But in Khasak itself the mood was festive, the front yards of the shacks and the houses around the square were swept clean, and women put on their finery.
Into this carnival walked a frail old man. The black and silver stubble on his shrivelled cheeks was days old, the customary coat was frayed and clumsily mended. Shod in sandals of crude buffalo hide, he took each step timidly, almost apologetically. This was a poor materialization of the State. Khasak felt let down.
It was the Inspector’s peon who salvaged the spectacle for Khasak. He wore a red canvas sash with tassels at the ends, and an outsized brass medallion pinned to it which carried the State’s emblem and the legend: Peon. Peon, servitor, unarmed foot-soldier.
‘That man with the red decoration,’ Aliyar observed, ‘surely he has more powers than the Ispaekkettar.’
‘Who can doubt it?’ Muthu Pandaram, the saffron-clad mendicant, said. ‘Look at the shine of brass!’
‘This is no Ispaekkettar,’ Kuppu-Achchan commented from the load-rest, ‘not a real one.’
‘Then what is the reality?’ someone from inside the teashop asked.
‘It is like the salamander. The hedge lizard, when it’s old, and urchins haven’t got it, turns into a salamander. So does a maeshtar—when he grows very old, he turns into this kind of an Ispaekkettar.’
‘Of course,’ Alla-Pitcha spoke from the corner he had withdrawn into, ‘such is the truth of the salamander.’
Suddenly the tea-drinkers were aware of the mullah’s presence. Mutthu Pandaram asked, ‘Mollakka, aren’t you calling on the Ispaekkettar?’
‘No!’ the mullah said.
True, he was a part of the school’s paraphernalia, and drew a monthly wage. But the battle of the schools, its indelible memories came back to the mullah and ‘No!’ repeated the priest of Khasak.
The Inspector sat down and dusted the soles of his feet, rubbing them against each other as peasants do.
‘A bad headache,’ he said, looking up at Ravi.
‘Would you like some aspirin, Sir?’
‘No, thanks! It was this long trek, and the sun ...’ The Inspector turned in his chair and pushed the window behind him wide open. ‘Fine breeze,’ he said. ‘And, oh, look what you’ve got out there ...’
‘Lotuses,’ Ravi said.
The Inspector smiled. Ravi had worked for days to update the registers and documents, and these he set down before the Inspector.
‘I shall sign them all anyway,’ the Inspector said. ‘Let the chil
dren go home.’
Ravi dismissed the class and told the children the day after was a holiday too, as it always was after an inspection. For a while the children lingered on in the yard, then spilled away and were gone.
‘Sit down, Maash!’
They sat together talking of generalities, of schools and teaching shops.
‘Where are you from, Maash?’
Ravi didn’t answer. Where am I from, and where am I now, he asked himself, whose face do I see, and whose is this black and silver stubble?
‘Prop up the pillows, son,’ Ravi heard the dear voice.
‘Lean on me, Papa.’
Tardy joints, unwilling tendons.
‘Are you comfortable, Papa?’
‘Yes, son.’
Ravi could feel the pain his father was concealing. The stubble had grown over two days.
‘Shall I give you a shave, Papa?’
‘The nurse will do it.’
‘Which part of Kerala?’ the voice of the old Inspector again.
‘Oh, well,’ Ravi said, ‘our family is from Pattambi, that’s not very far away.’
Ravi went into the corridor and came back with a trayful of oranges.
‘To beat the heat, Sir.’
After an orange, the Inspector resumed, ‘Have you been to the training school?’
‘Haven’t considered it ...’
‘Trained teachers are paid reasonably well these days.’
‘I suppose so.’