THE UNHEARD PANG OF AN EXPATRIATE

‘SOMEBODY WAS CLEANING the front courtyard of my house. I, laying on the verandah on a grass mat, could not see her face since she was pacing towards the boundary fence cleaning with the broom, which was made of ribs of coconut leaves.

I pulled the loincloth, which I used as a blanket in the night, that I was wearing, over my face to get warmth from the morning foggy cold.

For a few seconds, the sound of the broom, pushing the dried leaves of jackfruit tree that had been on the boundary line of our land, disturbed my slumber before I dived into it again.

“Don’t you have to go to school today?” a woman’s voice asked from over my head.

“Yes, I have to.” I replied in my half sleep, without removing the blanket off me.

All of a sudden she began to beat me with the ribs of coconut leaves, that she had taken off the broom in her hand.

I pulled the loincloth off my face and sat on the mat, bringing me to the normal state of mind.’

It took me some time to realise that it was a mere dream. Rubbing the eyes I glanced to the alarm. The alarm, which I had kept just near my pillow, had been pushing the time on silently with its tick-tick sound.

As always I was late that day also. I slid out of the blanket and took out the air-tight plastic box, in which I had kept my tooth brush and paste with a small scissors that I used to set my moustache, from the beneath of my almarah.

The bathroom was not engaged fortunately. Within no time I did my formal needs. When the cold water fell on my face from the shower bulb, my swollen eyes without enough sleep panged severely. How pleasant it would have been if I could have stood still a little while under that stream of shower!

I put on my trouser and shirt that had been ironed well the previous day. As I found myself ready to go, I pulled locked the main door of my flat slinging the bag on my shoulder. I strode with long pace to the place whence my colleague would pick me up.

I had to wait a little for my colleague to come as if I were not late. It occurred to me that I could not call my home that morning when I took my mobile phone out of its leather sheath to make a reminder to my colleague.

Every morning I used to call my home to know my mother’s state of health. She had been bed-ridden for a few months. I dialled my home telephone number and held the phone close to the ear for someone to speak at the other end.
It was my wife who usually attended my call. When the phone rang, she dropped the dress that she had been washing and came to the main hall where we had kept the phone.

“Good morning”

“Good morning”

“How is your mother, is she feeling better?”

“She is as quiet well as before,” said my wife not to worry me.

But I could hear through the phone the pathetic wail of my mother lying on her bed. I had never heard her sob her heart out in this way in my life. I became out of sorts and frozen for a few minutes. I did not know what to say.

“Hello, are you there?” my wife screamed from the other end.

“Oh, yes, I will call you later.” I did not tell my wife why I disconnected the phone. She might have known it since she knew me well.

Keeping the phone back in its sheath, I advanced forward to board my colleague’s car, which had been pulled up by then. I strode fast and got in.

“Morning”

“Morning”

The traffic on the road was hellish. My bosom friend under the driving wheel was so tense that he did not bother to talk to me anymore.

There was a time when my mother did never let her eyes well up with tears. She suffered all the pains that a human being could never suffer, mutely. She never ticked her children off even if they did not help her in the housekeeping.

In the morning she woke up at a time when her neighbours slumbered, snoring with their hands between their thighs. All the empty buckets and vessels, she filled with water that she fetched from our well without a stone wall, which would be drained in the summer season.

In the yellow light of kerosene lamp, she cooked rice and the breakfast for us before we got up in the morning. She brewed black tea of jaggery. Invariably she kept a mug full of tea separate for my father. She did not address my father calling his name but a particular sound she made instead of calling his name. When she spoke about him, she referred to him as ‘father of Kamala’ who was my sister.

After doing all these work swiftly, she went to a muslim family, which was three houses away beyond ours, to clean their courtyard for which they paid her monthly fifty rupees. When she came back after her daily job, she brought two pieces of puttu, made of rice flour, given to her from that muslim family to take with the coffee, wrapped in a plantain leaf.

By the time she came back, I would be woken up, waiting for something to be given to me. She gave me this puttu, wrapped in the plantain leaf, with a lota of jaggery black tea. Being myself the last one in my family, my brothers would never trespass into this privilege of mine.

There was a hill beyond the muslim mosque that I went with my gang of friends to empty my bowels after my breakfast. The hilltop was thick with the cashew nut trees. To the lowest branches of the trees we climbed up and whence we emptied our bowels to the ground letting faeces shatter everywhere down through the twigs.

When the preceptors of the mosque ventured out to pluck the raw cashew nuts from its fruits in holidays, they unknowingly stepped on our excreta, which diffused a nasty smell all over there. They tried to trap us red-handed but we were cunning enough to dodge them. They incessantly complained to our parents who had no time to reprimand us having gone to the paddy field for their daily toil.

My mother went to the rice field with her white towel tying round her head and her tiffin box with a handle full of gruel of rice. We did not enjoy the luxury of having paddy field of our own. But we enjoyed a lot the luxury of toiling in the paddy field.

It was my father who was absolutely in charge of acres of paddy field of a Bhramin landlord. My mother accompanied my father working in the paddy field uprooting the weeds out of the rice plants in this landlord’s field. They set off early morning and roosted at night.

Even if she was toil-torn, my mother went with a cloth bag to the ration shop to buy our share of rice in the evening. Occasionally I was persuaded to follow her, who promised some cornball or orange tasted sweets. I went with her blissfully wearing my trouser with small holes on the backside.

Very close to the ration shop, there was a teashop with thatched roof. It was where my father waited for my mother to come with her bag and the tin can for the kerosene for our lamps, which were made of aluminium bottle that my father brought back after using the insecticide in it in the crops. The shop was run by someone in Nair community, whom we called ‘Chemmeen’ for he was bent forward like a shrimp. His shop was well known for the Pathiri he made.

The teashop owner generally invited me for the tea instead of my father who would smile at me sitting in a corner of the bench. I would scamper into the shop and sit in a dusky corner on the bench with my mother devouring the fried Pathiri with coconut milk mixed with sugar.

Before I finished my tea, my mother would go to the vegetable shop, keeping the passbook on the table and tin can under it in the ration shop. From the vegetable shop, which was run by an albino, she bought pumpkin and tomato and of course, her betel and arecanut in bundle. The fishermen sold their fishes sitting on the sidewalk, some in small thatched hut built above gutter that was covered with slabs, and others in open air. In the late hours they would naturally want their business to be stopped giving the rest of the fish in cheap price.

I would plead with my mother, “Mother, it seems very cheap, we had better buy a little”

“Who is there to prepare it now?” she would protest sometimes.

As an after-thought she approached the fishermen, who were sitting with their different kinds of fishes spread on the planks along the sidewalk. We would buy sardines draped in the leaves of teak.

It was always late and dark when we came back from the junction carrying all these things on my mother’s head. My sister, Kamala, would come running to the gate, which was steep and uneven, when she heard us coming, with a kerosene lamp in one of her hand and the other covering the trembling flame not to extinguish in the breeze.

The cloth bag, full of essential commodities, she would hand over to my sister who had a great many school homework to be done. It was Kamala who had to prepare curry with the sardines.

My mother would go slap-bang with her betel box to the verandah where there would be my father waiting for the enjoyment of a betel chewing. They discussed world issues until they came down sharply on my auntie, who was a divorcee with her two daughters and staying with my grandfather two yards away. She suffered everything with great deal of passivity. One day my auntie got herself prepared to retaliate.

“I am staying with my father in his house, not in your house. Why do you come then to reproach me?” my auntie shouted standing in her kitchen from where she got an uninterrupted view of our verandah.

In response to this, my father spat roundly his blood-coloured betel mixture to the front courtyard of our house. The next day my sister had to scrub the mark off the ground with water mixed with cow dung.

No one dared to question what my father had done because my father was the last word in my family. He did never bow his head in front of anybody even if there was a lot of situation, in which any body would do it, in his life. Till the day when he bade farewell forever to this world, he made great efforts tirelessly to protect his family.

If my father was an oil-lamp, used in ceremonial occasions, my mother had been the flame in that lamp, connected each other in its literally meaning. She followed him everywhere and in everything. They went together to Koduganlloor temple festival Bharani, which fell on in the malayalam month of Meenam. On the way they together drank toddy with crab curry in the toddy shop and sang obscene eulogy praising the goddess in the temple. The coconuts they took with them, they hurled violently to the threshold that was on top of the sanctum sanctorum of the temple. They splashed turmeric powder they had on the idol of Vasoorimala, another goddess whom they believed as the creator of smallpox. The goddess should be pleased with the turmeric powder to have mercy upon the people, they believed.

On the way back to home, they went to Thiruvullakkavu, where why they went I didn’t know. Again they went toddy shop crawling. At times I was considered to enjoy a half glass of toddy with boiled tapioca mixed with red chilly. They bought me from the utsava parambu, a red colour spectacle through which I saw the world in red colour. Carrying a lot of things on my mother’s head, we got down proudly from the bus K.K. Menon, which ran in between Guruvayoor and Kodungalloor, at Venkitangu junction.

After a few years they stopped going there owing to some unknown reason. They went together to Karuvanthala Pooram festival with their children and spent the whole night there in the land strewn with coconut trees around the temple. My mother took with her a mat made of the pandanus leaves to sit in like my village people. She believed it obligatory to sleep once in a year in the land around the temple to be blessed by the goddess.

“The goddess is the incarnation of Kali” they said.

“The sword of oracle of the temple was taken away once following the government order not to use any sword without government authorisation and presented it before the court of law. The sword shivered itself as if by an invisible power in the court of law while the trails and the judge was forced to give it back to the temple authority,” my parents expounded to us intending to convince the prowess of the goddess when we refused to go and spend the whole night during the festival.

Even if there was nothing to see at night, it seemed inevitable for them to take their children and let them be blessed by the prowess of devi to protect them from all the disastrous disease. That was why they took us to sleep in the kingdom of such powerful goddess, if said in their language.

The next day before we had left the temple, my mother bought different sorts of sweets including halvah and dates, which was, fully covered with flies and dust, spread in the open dust-clouded atmosphere day and night.

It was my mother who kept the sweets in different pots separately when back at home. She never forgot to give to my eldest sister a cloth bag full of dates, halvah and parched rice when she went back the next day of the Pooram to her husband’s house. The next two, three weeks I drank tea in the morning with parched rice soaked in the tea. My mother had taken me to ‘New Sofia Wear House’ in the junction to provide with a new shirt and trouser of blue colour. Wearing the new dress that my parents had bought for Pooram, I went to school. For a few weeks I was very cautious not to spill the juice of cashewnut fruits when I devoured them on the way back to home from school.

But in the school one of the boys, who sat behind me in the class splashed blue ink on my new shirt from his pen. I got to know it when the girls giggled suppressively. I complained to Deveki teacher who was our class teacher in sixth class. She approached to them who were behind me. Nobody seemed to take over the guilty of sprinkling the ink on my shirt. The teacher turned disappointedly, not being able to find out who did the treacherous act, to the black board where she wrote ‘Rama killed Ravana’ in English, that was what she was teaching to make us the english. She taught us the hair splitting rules of English grammar. Rama or Ravana were not there in my mind then. I was wandering in thought for the boy who had splashed the ink on my back.

“What is this? How happened this?” my mother asked curtly to me when she saw the ink splash on my shirt.

“I don’t know, someone did it deliberately sitting behind me in the class” I tried to evade the arrows of her questions, drinking my black tea with rice that had been fried in the earthen fry pan.

I took out my father’s white towel, which he invariably used to put on his shoulder when he went to the junction, and dashed to the rice field, which was full of water, to swim with my friends. I could hear my mother screaming behind me to remind me about the white towel not to be dirtied.

When my father came home that evening he discovered his white towel to have discoloured. He hauled a twig of the tamarind tree that stood to the southern side of our house. And he beat me mercilessly on my thighs. That night I did not eat to make them know my protest. But next morning I had to wake up so early to search stealthily in the kitchen for the stale food of the previous night.

Taking a pinch of burnt husk of paddy from a broken plastic bucket, slung from the eaves, to clean my teeth, I went to the well, from which my mother was drawing water.

“There is rice in a pot near the hearth in the kitchen and the curry is also there” she said to me with some wrinkles of tease on her face, knowing me very well.

I preferred ground green chilly mixed with small onion and salt added to a little drop of coconut oil to any other curry when I devoured the stale rice. Just about everyday my mother thought it obligatory to put aside my share in a tight pot for the next morning. I did not like coffee or tea in the morning.

My stomach ached when I thought about it even after these long years abroad.

When he saw me quietened, my friend asked “What are you at, man?”

“Nothing, simply my mother flashed my mind.” I said staring to the glaring road in front of us through the windshield.

“Is she alright?” taking a glance in the rear-view glass, he asked.

“She, uh, doesn’t sound to be quiet well.”

I said to him that I had phoned that morning and heard my mother groaning. He exhaled a long sigh and drove passively. It was a very hot day. In the cloudless sky the sun burnt itself roundly and furiously. Even the freeze got too scared to move in his fury. But I did not feel the burning sun above me. For the burning I felt inside me was stronger than that.

It was not a busy day. I could come home a little earlier. There were some dirty-stained dresses, which I had dumped in a bucket kept in the bathroom, to be washed. Almost an hour I needed to wash all the dresses, drenching myself with perspiration in the humid condition of the bathroom. Carrying all the dresses that had been hand washed in a bucket I ascended the stairs to the top of our flat, where there were a great deal of lines in criss-cross for the clothes to be dried. Besides them there were dish antenna of different sizes in plenty.

It was when I began to spread the clothes that the mobile phone in my trouser pocket shrieked.

“hello….?”

“Is it …..”

“Yes, it’s me”

“I am sorry, it’s a bad news. Mother is no more.”

I felt my heart in my throat. Words blocked my windpipe. Breathing air refused to enter my lungs. Tears blurred my vision as well as my sense of reason. For moments I became paralysed with the phone in my hands. When I recovered from the shock, I stepped down to my flat with the bucket of clothes. As I opened the door and entered, the pang in my heart broke its strings. Someone made me sit on a chair.

My generous colleagues arranged the air ticket and passport to be brought to me. With them in my hands I flew back to India to be present in the funeral rituals of my mother whose motionless body, with no marks of sufferings, draped in white clothe, flashed through my mind.

It was early morning when I arrived there. Not to make me cry no one cried when I trotted down the stone steps of the gate. The smell of joss stick wafted towards me. The smell that had a smell of death. The smell of my mother’s death.



RAJAN VENKITANGU
15 DECEMBER 2007.