THE DARK CLOUDS IN THE HORIZONE OF THEIR MIND

THE DARK CLOUDS IN THE HORIZONE OF THEIR MIND

THAT year monsoon had started two weeks earlier than usual before the month of June. It had been lashing out at our village upsetting and forcing all the inhabitants of that hilly village to stay back at home and enabling them to spend the whole day with their family members. The courtyard in front of my house was full of rainwater. It would be flooded when it rained only for ten minutes incessantly. It was my father who, in his healthy days, diverted the rainwater with mud colour from the front courtyard to the southern sloping yard of my house. Now he could not do it even if he desired to. He was in the evening of his life.

That day he was sitting on a bench, which I had seen from a time immemorable, in our front veranda chewing his betel mixture with a chest of betel on his side. He was gazing on to the water that was increasing in a high altitude on the courtyard. There were wrinkles of disgust to something unknown on his face.

‘Is there nobody here to divert this mud water from the courtyard?’ he asked to nobody turning his head towards the door which was invariably open.

He knew nobody would be there to listen to him. Nevertheless he was restless as he stared to the water which circled roundly with its froth and bubbles and the yellow coloured leaves of jack tree along our boundary fence of bamboo branches.

‘A coconut be broken. I need coconut milk for Sambaar. There is no more broken coconut here’ my wife called out to me from the kitchen where she was involved in the food preparation for lunch.

I looked back from the side veranda, where I was sitting, to the kitchen withdrawing my eyes of eagerness from the rain, which was now a drizzling.

She knew that I preferred vegetable to anything else. Since my father was very adamant to fish curry, she was compelled to toil in the kitchen from morning to lunchtime. Otherwise it would have been easy for her preparing only one curry and fried pappad with some other kind of salad. At times I would help here in the kitchen. But on such occasion I could read in her eyes that she was doing an unforgivable mistake in her lovely life. Even if she said to me that it was her duty to prepare the food in the house, I would not pay any attention to her. And I would be prepared for a battle of philosophy with her. But it was not in her nature to confront with me in any argument.

‘Let the coconut be broken very fast. I have got a lot of other things to do’ she said in an imploring voice coming out of the kitchen.

I could comprehend her impatience. I went to the side room, of which walls were not plastered, to choose a nice one from the piles of coconut in the corner. While I was going to that room, I saw my mother sitting at the doorway and collecting the fruits in a vessel plucking from a broken jackfruit.

‘Why do you pluck out these fruits that are not ripe enough?’ I asked her out of my anxiety.

‘This fell down in the heavy wind and rain yesterday night’ she said breathing casually.

It was a strong wind as she said, I thought. It began when I was rolling up the night-gown of my wife to make love to her in the pale yellow light of zero watt electrical lamp just before midnight. Out bodies vibrated with passion of love. Nature too vibrated outside with the strong thunder and wind. We got up at once and ran out of our bedroom to bring in the dresses that she had left in a line to be dried. By the time we came back, cool had crept into our veins. Apparently it was a windy cold night yesterday, I smiled to myself.
I proceeded to the side room to bring the coconut to be broken. I had to withdraw my hand while I was searching for a nice fully mellow coconut. A mouse leapt out of the heap of the coconut and ran away screeching.

‘There might be a snake somewhere here if there was a mouse’ my reasonable mind whispered softly in my ears. My wife had seen a snake in the kitchen one day, she had said to me.

‘Fuel logs should not be kept in the kitchen. If any snake comes and settles under them, nobody will be aware of it’ I cried in a voice enough to be heard by my wife in the kitchen.

I knew certainly that an answer would float towards me. Usually my mother supported her in such matters.

But now my wife herself said ‘Where are we to keep all these logs in this rainy season?’

My mind began to conceive the indignation behind that logic sentence. She had many times tried to express her ambition to own a new house with all the facilities before through such sentences.


‘Our child runs about here all. If something happens, what can be done? The house is not secure enough. I thought it would be very easy to build a new house when I flied first to the gulf. But it was all illusionary dreams, I knew now. Years have only days’ span in the gulf countries. “I shall work there maximum five years, then I will turn up here back and can do something for our livelihood” I had consoled Bhavani looking deeply in to her eyes, which had been drenched and swollen with tears on the previous night of my first journey to the gulf country. Now it is more than ten years….! Every year thirty sweet days are spent with my wife and child and everybody around me. All my love, grieves, happiness and lovemaking with my wife are bounded within these thirty days’ cubicle. And go back for another battle with anxieties and toiling and struggling in every way, mentally and physically.’


My mind was aflame inside with worries of inability. Outside the rain faded away like a child who had slept after crying a lot for nothing. I moved off to the eastern courtyard, where there was a pointed spike that we used to remove the hairy husk of coconuts.

The husk of the coconut I chose was not thick enough. It was from a coconut tree, which gave its harvest once in a year, on southeast corner of the vast land where our house stood. My father used to make ditch around the coconut palms and put the mixture of green leaves and cow dung just before the monsoon started every year. Nobody was there to care such things now.

All the coconut palms around my house, which once yielded coconuts to us in profusion, became barren and exhausted with years. The shop, which was run by Mohmed Hajiyar near the flourmill, was the only way to get all the articles including coconuts. My house also became a consumer home as well as our state. I had an immense alacrity in agriculture in my younger days growing green chilly plant and banana palms. The areca tree, which I had looked after pouring water while I was young, had fully grown near the eastern boundary fence of our compound.

My mother picked up the scattered betelnuts that had fallen down from the areca palm on the ground. She made them dried in the sun and gathered in her chest, in which she kept her belongings. In the rainy season she took them out and immersed in the water to make them soft for her betel mixture.

When she broke them open after keeping in the water half an hour, our house immolated in the stench of rotten eggs. My father would become rather too irritable when he detected this foul odour by his sagacious nose.

‘Why do you use this foul betelnut for your mixture?’ I asked her one day showing no signs of irritation on my face.

She gave me a giggling disclosing her mouth, which had no incisors, in response.

I had a great crave for chewing betel mixture when I got on vacation, but the foul smell of the betelnut still restrained me away from it.


‘Have you completed husking it off?’ Bhavani inquired peeping out of the kitchen, bringing me back to the consciousness.

‘Don’t be hasty’ I said making my voice a little rough.

I could hear sounds of vessels clanging together from the kitchen. I could read Bhavani’s mind from a distance outside. She was angry in being my late to get what she wanted me done. I began to do what I was asked. I broke the coconut hitting hard on the hairless shell with a heavy chopper, letting its juice ooze through my left-hand fingers.

‘Bhavani, take this’ I said to my wife, who was busy in the kitchen, standing at the out side doorway of our kitchen.

I was trying to keep the chopper safely in the folds of roof tiles in the lowest row when the noises of a pandemonium hit upon my eardrum floating in the western wind from a little distant away. I rushed up to the gate and threw it open looking frantically to the place whence I could hear the noise. I saw my mother standing there with a vessel in her hands. She was talking sizzlingly to those who were around her. I could not make out the reasons for it until I approached them closely.

‘What is the matter with you all?’ I asked amazingly to all of them who looked at me with some wrinkles of contempt on their faces.

I stared inquisitively at my mother in whose hands there was a pot full of jackfruits that she had plucked off sitting at the main doorway of our house.

‘I thought I would give these fruits to her children’ my mother said as if I had asked a direct question to her, pointing to the stout woman with a considerable height among the crowd.

It was Devaki who worked in a quarry. From this quarry, earth was taken to our paddy field in little country-made boats in rainy season to make irrigation channels and in summer season it was taken in lorries for the road development works in our Panchayat. Although Devaki worked the whole year, paucity of sufficiency existed in their family. My mother was a little worried about their children who dressed in rags. She helped them whenever she could, giving this and that. With this purpose in mind, she went there dragging her left leg, which was paralysed, all the way she went.

‘We know when you became so rich’ said Devaki frowning her brow.

I could not make out what forced her to have said so. But I felt snubbed. I could not comprehend what she meant by saying so. The previous day there was an argument between them and my mother about the newly telephone line to be drawn under ground along their courtyard boundary. They, who seemed to have no use of a telephone, had protested against the trench being dug along the street of four meter in wide to our village. They knew that it would be a hindrance for them to grow any plant along the boundary line of their courtyard once the trench was dug.

My brother approached Panchayat Sabha next day. He procured an authorised letter imploring the people to let the trench be made and make no hindrance to the tele-communication department people in their activities to make our village connected with the world. It remained mysterious why they stood together against the trench being made. Their hue and cry subsided gradually and atmosphere became clear. But in the horizon of their minds, the dark clouds of hatred and enmity began to form to its dirtiest dimension against my brother and family in all. The commotion I heard was the thundering of those clouds hitting each other when it began to pour out.

‘Come back home. It is not wise of you to talk such trifles with these people.’ I said to my mother who insisted to be left alone. I cajoled to extract her out of the place. But all of my effort was futile. She was stubborn. I got cross with her.

‘Let me talk to them. They won’t eat me alive. You can go and do your work,’ she said looking fiercely at me with two old red eyes.

‘Your father brought me here as his wife forty-five years back. I know well everybody in this village. Nobody has said a bitter word to me until now. It is a fact that I haven’t given any chance to them,’ she began narrating her old days. She seemed to brag that she was a person recognised by all in our village.

The village, where my mother was born to her ancient parents as their eldest child in a mud-wall hut near roadside, was about ten kilometres away across a wide paddy field. There was a Christian church alongside the field. It was the idol of Mother Mary that people worshipped there. We called her ‘Poonchira Muthi’. The annual festival of that church was known as festival of jackfruits. In my younger days, I used to stay some days in my mother’s house when there was no school. When I went to my mother’s house with my mother by the church, I pestered my mother to give two paise to invest in the donation box which was fixed with cement in front of church veranda. After flicking the money in through the slit, I stood for a few moments with my palms in salute at the opened big door of main hall where ‘Muthi’ stood with a serene face trying to pacify the world.

‘Kannan, come fast, it is getting late. We have still a long way to go’ my mother called me from behind.

I ran after my mother who had carried a cloth bag full of betel leaves and arecanuts for my grand mother. My grandma was so smart even in those her ending days that she got up early morning every day and went to clean the front yard and the used bottles of a nearest toddy shop from where she got a monthly income of ten rupees. Invariably she brought to me after her work, while I was there, three pieces of velleppam, with some sugar sprinkled on them, wrapped in a piece of newspaper. I munched them with great relish sitting on a bench with a glass of black tea made of jaggery. At times she give me ten paise. With that money I went to Vaidiar’s shop, which was a hut shop in the junction, of peppermints and sweet cakes of peanut in the glass bottles, dark with dirt. He took the money in advance and examined it with a close look to confirm that anybody was not cheating him. When he had invested the money in his cash box, which was made of wood, he gave me sweets with a hand that had wrinkly fingers and dirt under its nails. I was not bothered about his dirt stained hands but enjoyed the sweets with the odour of sacred ash that he had smeared on his brow and the body.

It was to his shop that I one day went with my cousin brother walking seven kilometres from a place where we had been taken with our aunts when they went for their agricultural work.
‘Kannan, take rest in the shade under that coconut tree with Shaju,’ my aunt, who was unmarried, cried from the field before she began working.

We lounged under the coconut tree with Mohanan whom they worked for. He was a pot-bellied man with enough tall. He gave us vada with black tea that he had brought in a jug from his house. He asked us benignly about our school and teachers. I told him about an old woman whose house we used as our mess hall.

When the bell rang for the lunch, we ran to her house to get a place with our hanging tiffin box. She was very fond of children. We called her ‘Amooma’. She gave us gruel water to drink with our rice. Unkindly she told us off when she saw any bit of rice in the place where we had sat and had our lunch.

‘Clean the place when you have finished your lunch,’ she reminded us wearing a serious look on her face.

As he had heard me narrating this anecdote of her, he seemed to be so thrilled that he probed his pocket and gave me one rupee.

‘You can buy sweets with this money, run to the nearest shop, run,’ he said to us looking the women, who were busy with their work in the field.

I rose to go with my cousin who was aghast when he saw the one rupee note. We went to the nearest shop where there were no orange taste sweets.

‘What can we do now?’ I gazed at my cousin with the question in my eyes.

‘We will go to Vaidiar’s shop.’ Only when I had stared at him with such a question in my eyes did he say his answer at once.

In a few minutes we found ourselves in the tarred main road leading to the shop near our uncle’s house. It felt ridiculous for us to turn back to the same place whence we came to buy the sweets. We planned to go back to our uncle’s house instead of going back. When our grandma, who was grinding the arecanut with betel in a small wooden mortar sitting on the bench, saw us coming, she came to us running in perplexity.

‘With whom did you both come back?’ she asked with a bizarre solemnity on her face. We had never thought that she would be capable of wearing such a figure in her life.

We explained our journey seeking for sweets until we came to Vaidiar’s shop. From her facial express, we could understand that she was totally upset. She might have thought that we had been utter moron boys.

In the evening it was storm of uproar in the house. When we were not to be seen, they did not wait for the time that they used to stop their work. Our aunts were in between the devil and the sea. They cried calling us and dashed to the house. When they stormed into the house, we had been imbibing our black tea of jaggery with some fried rice mixed with coconut that our grandma gave us.

‘Who said you to come here all the way alone?’

We startled and looked back. That was a roar as if from a lion when he saw his enemy. In the embarrassment I spilled my tea in the dress. A stick was ordered to be brought for our punishment. Thanks to the deft interruption of our grandma, we could be saved from the merciless beatings.

‘Who would have known if something had happened?’

My aunt was shivering with the force of her excitement and angry against us. We knew the situation had been growing thick around us with concerns and sighs.

We finished our tea as soon as possible and withdrew ourselves to the south courtyard, where there was a guava tree, to play our games. Still a wave of commotion rippled around us for a long while. When the golden rays of the setting sun touched our bare bodies through the coconut leaves, we gave up our games under the guava tree. We toiled into the house with dusty trousers.

The commotion was still there, but the source whence it came brought me back to my sense. But it was my mother who was subjected to the attack by the women around her. I said, ‘You stop talking and come home’ to put an end to this meaningless fighting. But she was so adamant that I had to resort to some forcible handling. I grabbed hold of her wrist and pulled her but she moved not an inch. There was no other option but to carry her in my arms. She struggled to wriggle out of my hands. The more she became adamant the stronger I became in carrying her home. I seated her on our bench in veranda.

That day she did not eat anything but spend the whole day in sitting on the bench like a statue. My wife called her in when the food was ready. My mother looked at her fiercely. She pretended as if she were in some other world.

‘If she does not want the food, you wash all vessels and stack in the rack, daughter’ my father supported my wife.

But somehow an arrow darted through my heart. I approached my mother and coaxed her to take the food. Like a child, she shrugged her shoulder. I too could not take my food that my wife had left in the kitchen under a steel plate. Late in to that night I lay awake on the bed with my wife snoring on my side. Eventually when I the slumber stroked me, oblivious nightmares terrified and appalled me. I opened my eyes to see my wife sleep soundly with her night-gown rolled up to the pelvic part of her body. I got out of the bed and tiptoed to where my mother had slept. I stared to the bed on which my mother slept but the warmly darkness hid my vision. I walked back to my bedroom and shut the door behind me without noise.


Venkitangu.
25 November, 2005