Thursday, June 27, 2013
Monday, December 8, 2008
SMALL THINGS BECOME SWEET MEMORIES
IN my younger days, I enjoyed going to school with my friends carrying books, bound with an elastic band, on my shoulder. There was four kilometres’ journey to tramp. We set off very early in the morning from house. Dragonflies and flowers along the street attracted us. We were not worried about time. Anxiety to get in the school on time didn’t prevent us to peep through the gate of a big house, in front of which there was a garden and ask whether we could get some ‘Unda Thechi Poovu’. If we were allowed, we would be delighted that day to decorate the pale flower vase, which was kept always in teacher’s room when it was not used, with the flower and keep on the teacher’s table.
At times it would be after the proclaimed time when we reached school. In such days we did not use the main gate to enter into school compound. There was an access on the right side of the school premises. We entered inside by that way on such occasions. When we approached the main gate every morning, we would be flooded in the wave of a classic music from ‘Sree Mukundha Restaurant’. The restaurant was wealthy of tasty foods. The smell of Saambaar, spread in western wind, made our mouth watery. It fascinated many strangers to its dining tables and made the small coffer full with dirty one-rupee notes. It was the delicious foods that invited people to the eatery than a tin board which announced ‘Meals Ready’, hung on the side of restaurant threshold. Teachers in my school spoke in praise of the old man who cooked everything in the restaurant. He was a short and fat man with a paunch from Nair community. He did not wear a shirt to conceal his hairy body but a loincloth around his waist. Chewing their breakfast, teachers discussed about his talents sitting in the teachers’ room where I went frequently to collect chalk piece and duster for my class teacher. My class teacher was also a regular customer of the restaurant. She had even an account there. Every morning by ten o’clock she would command, ‘Balu, go to Mukundha and bring the parcel you are given’. It was Balu whom she invariably asked to go and fetch her breakfast. Some days she even dared to tell him to go to her house that was two kilometres away and bring her lunch. Balu was happier to go outside and roam about than sitting in the classroom. He was not so smart in the class but outside he was a hero. Our class teacher did not say anything against when she knew that he had taken a bicycle on hire from ‘E.V.K. Sound’ and cycled to her house along the road that was busy with flying buses. In those days I did not know the rudiments of cycling. One day Balu invited me to ride on the bicycle but I was afraid. I said that I would be happy to sit on the back carrier instead of riding alone. When I tried to climb up to sit on the carrier, Balu lost his balance and we both fell onto the road. After that I gave up even the idea of riding with another person on a bicycle for a long time. But he continued to go home on bicycle to have his lunch and fetch my class teachers’.
We used to bring our lunch every day. Behind our school there was a house where we went to have lunch as if to a dining room. In the small veranda we pupils sat in circle and ate our lunch sharing everything amongst us. The old lady in that house would give us gruel water. She would clean the place where we sat and had our lunch. Why she did all these things for us students, I didn’t know. In our school there was no water pipe but there was a well with stonewall around it. After lunch there would be a melee almost every day to wash our tiffin boxes near the well. Many students returned home without their tiffin boxes being lost them into the well in the commotion. Often we went to the nearest pond, which would be drained in summer season, to wash our tiffin boxes avoiding a fight. We had to do away with going to the pond after we had seen the dead body of a person who was said to be a patient suffered from fit.
After lunch, pupils engaged in games. But I went to the nearest house where they broke coconut and collected the coconut water in a cauldron. Taking a half piece of the broken coconut, I would drink some coconut juice. All the front yard of that house would be full of broken coconut to be dried in the sun. The smell of copra would penetrate our nostrils when we got there. In those days copra business was a profitable one. In our village everybody went to work in coconut plantation in season. People, who owned coconut plantation, got a good income. My father worked continuously one month in a landlord’s plantation every year. At that time he could give me how much I asked to give. In the morning there would be boiled tapioca for our breakfast. Our belly would be filled enough when we went to school. By the time we left for school, my father might have gone for work somewhere. When he was at home, he would remind us “Go along the side of the road. The road is full of vehicles.” I was calmer and quieter than my elder brother who took every chance to be a villain. Once he threw a granite stone to the beneath of a running bus. The bus suddenly came to a halt and the bus conductor charged out towards us. When we saw him charging to us, we tried to flee away. But alas! He captured us and scolded roughly. I began to shiver all over and my eyes became blurred with tears. He even threatened that he would take us to police station. If he took us there, we would be put in jail, I thought instantly. What to do then? I was so upset that I could not even cry. Passengers in the bus peeped out at us. Someone said, “Hey, we are late already. They are children, let them go.” We were so escaped because the passengers did not have enough time to spend. Not having enough time would save us sometime. Such an incident happened in one of those days. In our village almost all the houses that time did not have a privy on their land. People went to relieve themselves to the nearest hill top in the morning. They would sit behind the bushes to empty their bowels. One day when I went to the hill top to engage in the same process, I took a beedi from my father’s shirt pocket. While I was enjoying smoke from the beedi, my elder sister came that way and saw me smoking. She did not tell me anything hard but said this matter had to be taken to our father. I felt a sort of bitterness in throat. For she was busy with kitchen work, she did not come to the front veranda, where my father used to sit and chew his betel mixture, to tell the story to my father. And I was saved so from such a predicament. Otherwise he would have manhandled me the way I deserved.
My sister was so busy that she did not get enough time to go through her daily school lessons. She had to wash our dresses and prepare our dinner after getting home from school. It would be dark in the evening as my parents reached at home after their tireless work in paddy field. If there was no school, my parents coaxed my sister to work with them in the field. I heard them advice my sister that it was necessary for a girl to learn everything before she went to other family. They took me also in the days there was no school. I was in ecstasy to work in the soil. I went to field with my father when the sun rays broke out in eastern sky in the morning. He gave me an old hoe and the new one he took. “Be careful when you break the earth” he said. But I shrugged it off. It happened as he had warned me. I got injured with the hoe. I went to the hilltop instead of going to consult a doctor and plucked some green leaves of a ‘communist pacha’, a wild plant growing in disused land, pressed in my palms and put it on my injured foot. Within no days the cut healed up without leaving a scar. My father worked in paddy field from dawn to dusk perspiring enormously. On his way back to home in the evening, he imbibed toddy in comfort with fish curry from the toddy shop. Yet he did not forget to keep aside the small amount that his children asked for some days ago to buy books. Chewing his betel mixture in the light of a kerosene lamp, he would retell every night about his days of schooling and how he had to discontinue it........!
It was hardly surprising that he had to discontinue his study. In those days famine lashed out its whip on our village mercilessly, he said. No one wanted to send their children to school. They wanted them to work in the soil and bring the bread. My father’s story was not different. “Today, you have everything. TV set, refrigerator, motor to pump out the water from the well, even a privy. You don’t have to go to hill top to empty your bowels as we used to” he often reminded us. “Now you are showering in the bathroom. Not even a pond in our village.” In the morning I went to the pond to bathe before I went to school. Often it was late when I returned from the pond. After my school occasionally I would visit ‘Yuvarashmi Arts & Sports Club’ in our village. In rainy season the club would be crowded almost the whole day, people playing caroms and tabla. Even in the veranda people would be milling around the players of chess. The teashop near the club reaped a nice harvest in those days.
In rainy season our villagers, who were workers in soil, had almost no work. They spent their daytime relaxing with a cup of tea in the teashop near the club. On August 15th club dignitaries organised to hoist our national flag and chanted ‘Ki Jai to Bhaarat Maatha and Gandhi’. No leaflets about freedom fighting or fighters were distributed but sweets and paayasam. We sang the national song in chorus with flower showering from the hoisted tricolour flag. To know about those who laid their lives for our motherland, we did not have a library or a reading room. Even today our village did not flower with a library.
RAJAN VENKITANGU,
08 December 2008
At times it would be after the proclaimed time when we reached school. In such days we did not use the main gate to enter into school compound. There was an access on the right side of the school premises. We entered inside by that way on such occasions. When we approached the main gate every morning, we would be flooded in the wave of a classic music from ‘Sree Mukundha Restaurant’. The restaurant was wealthy of tasty foods. The smell of Saambaar, spread in western wind, made our mouth watery. It fascinated many strangers to its dining tables and made the small coffer full with dirty one-rupee notes. It was the delicious foods that invited people to the eatery than a tin board which announced ‘Meals Ready’, hung on the side of restaurant threshold. Teachers in my school spoke in praise of the old man who cooked everything in the restaurant. He was a short and fat man with a paunch from Nair community. He did not wear a shirt to conceal his hairy body but a loincloth around his waist. Chewing their breakfast, teachers discussed about his talents sitting in the teachers’ room where I went frequently to collect chalk piece and duster for my class teacher. My class teacher was also a regular customer of the restaurant. She had even an account there. Every morning by ten o’clock she would command, ‘Balu, go to Mukundha and bring the parcel you are given’. It was Balu whom she invariably asked to go and fetch her breakfast. Some days she even dared to tell him to go to her house that was two kilometres away and bring her lunch. Balu was happier to go outside and roam about than sitting in the classroom. He was not so smart in the class but outside he was a hero. Our class teacher did not say anything against when she knew that he had taken a bicycle on hire from ‘E.V.K. Sound’ and cycled to her house along the road that was busy with flying buses. In those days I did not know the rudiments of cycling. One day Balu invited me to ride on the bicycle but I was afraid. I said that I would be happy to sit on the back carrier instead of riding alone. When I tried to climb up to sit on the carrier, Balu lost his balance and we both fell onto the road. After that I gave up even the idea of riding with another person on a bicycle for a long time. But he continued to go home on bicycle to have his lunch and fetch my class teachers’.
We used to bring our lunch every day. Behind our school there was a house where we went to have lunch as if to a dining room. In the small veranda we pupils sat in circle and ate our lunch sharing everything amongst us. The old lady in that house would give us gruel water. She would clean the place where we sat and had our lunch. Why she did all these things for us students, I didn’t know. In our school there was no water pipe but there was a well with stonewall around it. After lunch there would be a melee almost every day to wash our tiffin boxes near the well. Many students returned home without their tiffin boxes being lost them into the well in the commotion. Often we went to the nearest pond, which would be drained in summer season, to wash our tiffin boxes avoiding a fight. We had to do away with going to the pond after we had seen the dead body of a person who was said to be a patient suffered from fit.
After lunch, pupils engaged in games. But I went to the nearest house where they broke coconut and collected the coconut water in a cauldron. Taking a half piece of the broken coconut, I would drink some coconut juice. All the front yard of that house would be full of broken coconut to be dried in the sun. The smell of copra would penetrate our nostrils when we got there. In those days copra business was a profitable one. In our village everybody went to work in coconut plantation in season. People, who owned coconut plantation, got a good income. My father worked continuously one month in a landlord’s plantation every year. At that time he could give me how much I asked to give. In the morning there would be boiled tapioca for our breakfast. Our belly would be filled enough when we went to school. By the time we left for school, my father might have gone for work somewhere. When he was at home, he would remind us “Go along the side of the road. The road is full of vehicles.” I was calmer and quieter than my elder brother who took every chance to be a villain. Once he threw a granite stone to the beneath of a running bus. The bus suddenly came to a halt and the bus conductor charged out towards us. When we saw him charging to us, we tried to flee away. But alas! He captured us and scolded roughly. I began to shiver all over and my eyes became blurred with tears. He even threatened that he would take us to police station. If he took us there, we would be put in jail, I thought instantly. What to do then? I was so upset that I could not even cry. Passengers in the bus peeped out at us. Someone said, “Hey, we are late already. They are children, let them go.” We were so escaped because the passengers did not have enough time to spend. Not having enough time would save us sometime. Such an incident happened in one of those days. In our village almost all the houses that time did not have a privy on their land. People went to relieve themselves to the nearest hill top in the morning. They would sit behind the bushes to empty their bowels. One day when I went to the hill top to engage in the same process, I took a beedi from my father’s shirt pocket. While I was enjoying smoke from the beedi, my elder sister came that way and saw me smoking. She did not tell me anything hard but said this matter had to be taken to our father. I felt a sort of bitterness in throat. For she was busy with kitchen work, she did not come to the front veranda, where my father used to sit and chew his betel mixture, to tell the story to my father. And I was saved so from such a predicament. Otherwise he would have manhandled me the way I deserved.
My sister was so busy that she did not get enough time to go through her daily school lessons. She had to wash our dresses and prepare our dinner after getting home from school. It would be dark in the evening as my parents reached at home after their tireless work in paddy field. If there was no school, my parents coaxed my sister to work with them in the field. I heard them advice my sister that it was necessary for a girl to learn everything before she went to other family. They took me also in the days there was no school. I was in ecstasy to work in the soil. I went to field with my father when the sun rays broke out in eastern sky in the morning. He gave me an old hoe and the new one he took. “Be careful when you break the earth” he said. But I shrugged it off. It happened as he had warned me. I got injured with the hoe. I went to the hilltop instead of going to consult a doctor and plucked some green leaves of a ‘communist pacha’, a wild plant growing in disused land, pressed in my palms and put it on my injured foot. Within no days the cut healed up without leaving a scar. My father worked in paddy field from dawn to dusk perspiring enormously. On his way back to home in the evening, he imbibed toddy in comfort with fish curry from the toddy shop. Yet he did not forget to keep aside the small amount that his children asked for some days ago to buy books. Chewing his betel mixture in the light of a kerosene lamp, he would retell every night about his days of schooling and how he had to discontinue it........!
It was hardly surprising that he had to discontinue his study. In those days famine lashed out its whip on our village mercilessly, he said. No one wanted to send their children to school. They wanted them to work in the soil and bring the bread. My father’s story was not different. “Today, you have everything. TV set, refrigerator, motor to pump out the water from the well, even a privy. You don’t have to go to hill top to empty your bowels as we used to” he often reminded us. “Now you are showering in the bathroom. Not even a pond in our village.” In the morning I went to the pond to bathe before I went to school. Often it was late when I returned from the pond. After my school occasionally I would visit ‘Yuvarashmi Arts & Sports Club’ in our village. In rainy season the club would be crowded almost the whole day, people playing caroms and tabla. Even in the veranda people would be milling around the players of chess. The teashop near the club reaped a nice harvest in those days.
In rainy season our villagers, who were workers in soil, had almost no work. They spent their daytime relaxing with a cup of tea in the teashop near the club. On August 15th club dignitaries organised to hoist our national flag and chanted ‘Ki Jai to Bhaarat Maatha and Gandhi’. No leaflets about freedom fighting or fighters were distributed but sweets and paayasam. We sang the national song in chorus with flower showering from the hoisted tricolour flag. To know about those who laid their lives for our motherland, we did not have a library or a reading room. Even today our village did not flower with a library.
RAJAN VENKITANGU,
08 December 2008
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
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.
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.
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
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
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