The Inspector leafed through the registers desultorily. ‘Maybe you’re planning to go to college,’ he said. ‘It’s getting quite expensive though ...’
‘In a sense I’ve finished college ...’
‘Done your college? Then what are you doing here, with this job for matriculates?’
‘I didn’t take my exams. I was doing an honours course.’
‘Where did you go to college? Palghat?’
‘Tambaram.’
‘The Christian college?’
The college had an unusually beautiful campus, stretches of shrub and jungle in which hare and porcupine thrived. The teaching and the residential blocks were jewel-red islands amidst this overpowering green. There were clearings covered with grass, like carpets of priceless cashmere.
‘What honours were you doing?’
‘Astrophysics.’
The lights of the lab came back to Ravi, the lenses that sought to look out far, very far, and the abyss which looked back through every aperture.
‘Parents alive?’
‘Lost ray mother very early. My father used to be a doctor in a plantation. For some years he has been ill. I’ve a stepmother, and two stepsisters studying abroad ...’
Suma and Rama, the stepsisters, looked out of the family album with the eyes of strangers. Where had he left that album, where in the hollows of the unquiet mind had he abandoned his sisters?
‘I had a daughter, Maash ...’ the Inspector said.
Two wanderers, they were meeting in this caravansarai and exchanging sad biographies. The old man told Ravi about his daughter, the talented first-born for whose sake he had stopped his other children from going beyond school—he could afford to see only one child through university. In the weeks before the final examinations, Dhatri wouldn’t put the books away. She would read far into the night, sometimes into the next dawn. With just a week to go, fatigued beyond endurance, Dhatri nodded asleep at the sight of print. She would shake herself awake, and smile to cheer her father who stayed awake with her through those gruelling nights. One night Dhatri went out into the yard to where the well water was kept in large earthen urns. The father heard the sound of water being poured, he peered out. ‘Dousing your head?’ he was aghast. The girl said, ‘Can’t get the sleep off the lids, Father.’
He thought of her heavy tresses and how they would be difficult to dry in the night.
‘Shall I mop your hair for you, my little one?’
‘Oh, no, Father. You go in and sleep for a while.’
‘Take care to dry you hair well.’
He heard her laugh in reply, a tired, indulgent laugh. When he came back to their little study, he found Dhatri slumped over the table, fast asleep. The next evening she complained of a pain in the chest. The pain grew, the inflammation galloped through the lungs. Dhatri was dead.
‘You said your father is ailing, didn’t you, Maash?’
‘Yes, Sir. It’s a rheumatoid condition. Half the body is paralysed.’
‘Pain and dependence ...’
‘The way everyone goes.’
The Inspector smiled again, turned towards the registers to attest all the absurd and voluminous information they held.
‘Does your father stay in Pattambi?’
‘No, Sir. We have a house in Ooty, in the hills, built during my father’s plantation days ...’
The land around the house was a generous expanse, a whole hillside. A neat drive took you to the porch. Inside the house were sculptured woodwork, carpeted flooring, hand-cut crystal, and a grand piano that had been silent for years. It was in this house that he had sinned with his stepmother. He was at college then; he had come home for the holidays. That was ten years ago.
‘Maash,’ the Inspector said, ‘I can’t imagine a bright young man like you not taking the exams. An honours degree all packed and waiting to be picked up! I’d like to see you in those robes, holding the scroll.’
Ravi remembered the visiting professor, the Princetonian, who had called him over to the college guest-house one day.
‘That paper of yours,’ the visitor said, ‘your professor passed it on to me ...’ The bass voice and the grin spreading across the wide jaws were friendly.
‘Engrossing,’ the visitor went on, ‘although I suspect your basic physics is all wrong.’
‘I’ve never been strong on my facts, Sir.’
‘But do you realize you aren’t pitting Hindu wisdom against Western science? You’re doing something more audacious. You are using your own wisdom.’
They had talked and ranged over dim riddles, and it was as if the Ganga had risen before them as the deluge, as time; in her mystic reaches the Truth lay hidden.
An evening in their favourite clearing on campus. Padma, his class-mate, told Ravi, ‘The Princeton person came home, and he and papa talked most of the time about you. He feels you are a one-man revolt against all post-Galilean science.’
Padma’s father was Ravi’s professor. Ravi’s despair had begun anew: I am destined not to know and yet this curse is on me—the knowledge that Truth is, and that it is forbidden to man. In pain and sorrow he had turned to his childhood and the noontide wrapped him in its fiery gold. There was no seeking, the skies were lucid and loving again, love came in visions of Kalpaka husks and diademed serpents.
‘What does the American want to do to me, Padma?’
‘Feed you, fatten you, I suppose.’
‘Padma, if I do not get through this examination?’ She was annoyed.
‘Here I give you good news, and you tease me wickedly in return.’
‘Padma ...’ he began helplessly. He spoke within himself, what am I trying to accomplish scanning galactic distances and reading the bands of colour split out of stellar lights by lowly prisms? Doesn’t my sin lie within?
The exams, their feverish nearness. The hostels stayed awake. Ravi lay down, giving himself up to the caverns of the sky.
Days later.
‘My moody lover,’ Padma said, ‘let me take you out tomorrow. The sea breeze will do you good.’
‘The Marina?’
‘Further up, near Luz. Out there it isn’t too crowded. The old people are dining out.’
On the sands, the next day’
Ravi pulled out a letter and gave it to Padma. I’m not too ill, my son, it read, though things go spinning at times. Days go on, one day like any other. Your Chittamma wheels me into the veranda to watch the sunset. More than my illness, another, greater sadness is on me when I see the sun go. What am I sad about? All twilight is sadness ...
The dusk grew darker, colder. A flight of night birds high above caught the city’s glow and shone like dim meteors ...
It was afternoon when Ravi and the Inspector reached Koomankavu. The last bus to Palghat town was waiting. They treated themselves to glasses of sherbet mixed by the talkative vendor.
‘You in this lost village,’ the Inspector said, ‘strange are the ways of destiny, Ravi.’
Strange indeed; untrodden paths called to Ravi with mesmeric power. The night before the examination, he slipped out of the hostel. The journey had begun.
The journey into the vast unquiet universe, watched by faces in railway compartments, tolerant and incurious. In the nights Ravi curled up on luggage racks and slept to the soft beat of the rails. The names of railway stations changed, their scripts changed. Then on the road, up the high ranges, past hairpin bends in gasoline-perfumed buses. The roadway dust changed colour, sunrise and sunset changed places, directions were lost in an assailing infinity. The journey took him through cheerless suburbs, through streets of sordid trades, past cacti villages and lost townships of lepers, and ashramas where, in saffron beds, voluptuous swaminis lay in wait for nirvana. And at last, this respite, this sarai in Khasak ...
‘We should see each other again,’ the Inspector said.
Ravi held the old man’s hands, the gnarled, suffering palms.
‘Certainly, Sir.’
‘I retire in the middle of this
year.’
‘You’ll still be in Palghat. It’s no great distance.’
‘One never knows, Maash. The ones who stay near are at times the farthest to reach. Who knows, this might well be our last meeting!’
They laughed. The Inspector and the peon boarded the waiting bus.
‘How is the headache?’
‘The winds have cured it.’
‘Namaskaram!’
The bus moved. Ravi waited for the dust to settle. He bought a bundle of palm fibre torches, and began the long trek back to Khasak. Soon it was dark. Ravi lit a torch and waved it in the wind. It broke into a brilliant flame.
The brook was still warm when Ravi got back. He undressed and sat immersed in the brisk current for a while, then rose and took the footpath to the seedling house ... As he went to bed, the cry came through the silent night.
Allaho Akbar!
Allaho Akbar!
That was the muezzin’s call for the last prayer. God, Ravi said, in a voiceless chant. No longer was that word harsh or distant. He rose for a draught of water, came back to bed and was quiet. The muezzin’s call had punctuated his turbulence.
Outside, the night lay inebriated with its vastness. The wind was on the palms of Khasak. Beyond the reaches of the village late wayfarers waved their fibre torches, pulses of flame and ember. Like stricken spaceships signalling distress with their incandescent antennae, they continued their desolate journey.
Dragonflies
Sivaraman Nair didn’t come to greet the Inspector, his interest in the school had waned. Every little thing soured him. He walked about carrying brittle angers whose causes he could not determine. He needed someone to blame it all on. He chose the Muslim. But he found no listeners—neither Hindu nor Muslim was prone to quarrel, as both their religions teemed with the same tender absurdities. The history of Khasak was the great oral legend; that, and a shared indigence held Khasak together. With the coming of the school, Sivaraman Nair had cheered up, here at last was a symbol, a centre, for his angry fantasies. The mullah was against the school, yet the school survived. Ravi was unaware of this private battle. The young teacher had even struck a deal with the mullah, allowing time for the Muslim children to come to school after they had done their Koranic lessons at the madrassa. Sivaraman Nair’s disenchantment grew when he found Ravi fraternising with Madhavan Nair, the wayward nephew who had disgraced the family by becoming a tailor, an artisan. Sivaraman Nair’s visits to the school grew less frequent.
Ravi was pleasantly surprised, therefore, when the landlord appeared at the bamboo gate, opening and closing it with great deliberation. One look, and Ravi sensed trouble. The old face was wracked with incoherent grievance. Sivaraman Nair declined the chair Ravi drew for him and sat down on the steps instead, partly in protest and partly for the warmth of the sunset on the stucco. Ravi came over and sat down beside him.
‘You don’t look too well, Sivaraman Nair,’ Ravi said.
‘How can I be?’ came the mystifying retort.
Sivaraman Nair began to pant and sweat, the blood rushing inside him. A middle-aged Muslim woman was at the well, drawing water for Ravi’s improvised bath and kitchen.
‘Who is she, Maash?’
‘Chand Umma, my servant.’
Sivaraman Nair paused to make a notch in his memory, and after a few bitter and speechless moments, turned on Ravi, ‘So it is a Bouddha woman again ...’
‘Yes. And it is no fault of mine—not that I have anything against Muslims. I told you I wanted a servant, you couldn’t find me one.’
Sivaraman Nair realized the fault was his, and embarrassedly diverted the conversation. ‘Sometimes I wonder if your District Board is bankrupt. Can’t they employ a caretaker on a sensible wage?’
‘The Board is stupid, they make a niggardly grant and expect me to hire the school’s all-purpose handyman ...—
‘And where is that money?’
‘You know where, Sivaraman Nair. The mullah is our handyman’on paper.’
‘And you pay him the grant money, and spend out of your pocket to hire this servant—’
The logic was becoming more and more muddled.
The conversation flagged again until Ravi asked impatiently, ‘Sivaraman Nair, what are we talking about?’
‘About infidels, about Yavanas, Bouddhas, your new-found kin.’
Ravi laughed in relief.
‘Don’t laugh, Maash. Hand me that money, I shall buy oil and anoint the snake gods who could take away your sins.’
The woman had finished for the day. Sivaraman Nair watched her go, gazing at her manically. Soon he too rose to leave. He walked across the yard, stumbling beneath the burden of his own body. His anger, his confusion wasn’t about the school or domestic help any longer, but was the residue of unknown and insane wars.
It was Madhavan Nair who had sent her to the seedling house. Chand Umma stood before Ravi, a pale and sad woman with dark patches on her cheeks and around her eyes, marks of the underfed.
‘Umma, can you help me with the cooking?’ Ravi asked.
‘I can, Saar.’
‘You may eat here if you like.’
She had not expected that—she was overwhelmed, and stood caressing the unkempt hair of her little son who hid behind her.
‘My first born, Saar,’ she said bashfully.
‘Your name, young man,’ Ravi said.
‘Tell the Saar,’ his mother coaxed. The boy peeped out and answered, ‘Kunhu Nooru.’
‘Good boy,’ Ravi said, ‘how is it that I don’t see you in the school? How old are you?’
‘Eight,’ the mother answered.
Ravi noticed the boy had no shirt, and all he wore was a strip of threadbare cloth round his waist. Ravi took out some money and gave it to Chand Umma.
‘This is for a shirt and shorts,’ he said. ‘Give it to Madhavan Nair and tell him I want it done soon. And I’m putting Nooru on the rolls right away.’
The teacher and the mother and son fell silent for a while. Then Chand Umma spoke, her voice tremulous, ‘We are under a curse, Saar.’
‘Curse?’ Ravi laughed. ‘I’ll take care the curse does not follow Nooru to school.’
‘Yaa Allah!’ she said.
The next evening Kunhu Nooru presented himself in his new shirt and shorts. Trailing behind him was his four-year-old sister Chandu Mutthu, with no clothes on.
‘Sorry, little one,’ Ravi said, ‘I left you out. I’ll tell
Madhavan Nair to make some frocks for you.’
‘Don’t want,’ Chandu Mutthu lisped.
‘Don’t want the frocks?’
‘Give it to the boy.’
‘Don’t you like frocks with printed flowers?’
‘Let the boy grow up fast.’
Chand Umma stood watching, listening. She broke into a shrill laugh, then wiped away her tears. She said, ‘It is her nature.’
At home, where they made do with thin rice gruel most of the time, Chandu Mutthu would dip her hand into her earthen bowl, gather up the little sediment of rice grains and put it into Kunhu Nooru’s bowl.
‘Umma,’ she would tell her mother, ‘let the boy grow up fast.’
‘Insha Allah, my little one,’ Chand Umma would say, ‘and then all your sorrows will end.’
‘When will the boy grow big, Umma?’
‘By the next Eid, my child.’
‘When is the next Eid, Umma?’
‘After four moons, my precious.’
And so they waited, mother and daughter, for the boy to grow up ...
Soon Kunhu Nooru had his slate and pencil. He sat by the little oil wick doing his homework. Chand Umma stood in the weak shadows of the lamp and watched her first-born write on the framed slate, rub and write again, letters, numerals, none of which she understood. She stood a long while, lost in the wondrous happenings in their home. Kunhu Nooru felt her adoration on his skin and hair, and was uneasy.
‘What’s it, Umma?’
‘Noth
ing, my precious.’
Ravi was reclining in his easy chair after school. Chandu Mutthu had curled up on the steps and was watching her mother’s dreary walk to the well and back.
‘Umma ...’
‘Yes, my child?’
‘Tired, Umma?’
‘No, my little one.’
Chandu Mutthu repeated the questions each time her mother walked back with the filled pitcher.
‘Umma ...’
‘Yes, my sweet?’
‘When the boy grows up, you won’t have to carry water, Umma?’
‘Insha Allah, my precious.’
‘When will it be, Umma?’
‘When we see the next Eid moon ...’
Ravi lay in his easy chair, listening. By now he was familiar with this engrossing dialogue of hope and the magic calendar of the moons.
Once on a weekend he bought chocolate at the small township of Kozhanasseri. He gave four pieces each to brother and sister. Ravi teased, ‘Chandu Mutthu, don’t you want to give away your share to the boy?’
Chandu Mutthu hesitated, then after deep thought held out one piece for Kunhu Nooru.
‘Little one,’ Kunhu Nooru said, ‘you keep your share.’ Relieved, she withdrew the chocolate. Ravi laughed.
Chand Umma came in to sweep, in time to witness the temptation of the little one. A tender sadness filmed her eyes. She said, ‘Don’t get them used to chocolate, Saar. When you move out of here, my children will fret and pine.’
Days went by, the patches on Chand Umma’s cheeks began clearing, and soon disappeared altogether, the skin cleansed deep.
Sivaraman Nair came again, a month after the last angry visitation.
‘I thought you had forgotten your way here,’ Ravi said, making a bid at small talk, but Sivaraman Nair was in no mood for pleasantries.
He asked bluntly, ‘So she is still here?’
‘Who?’
‘The Bouddha woman.’
‘Yes,’ Ravi was defiant.
‘Maash,’ the landlord began ominously, ‘I have come to tell you something, though it is none of my concern. Why are you living with this Muslim woman?’
Ravi was aghast. ‘Who’s spreading this damned lie?’