by K R Meera
He spoke as if this was a regular conversation. I felt like crying. His room looked the same as all the other rooms he had inhabited everywhere else. The clothes line had towels with red dirt stains. The room was filled with the odour of moisture.
‘You look so different now, Prema,’ he said as he unfurled a straw mat for me to sit down upon.
‘I am getting on in age. Aren’t I?’
‘In my mind, you are still that fifteen-year-old girl. You were always so stubborn.’
‘In my mind you are still that old “Croc” Yudas.’ I peered at him in fatigue. ‘Do you still pull dead bodies out of water?’
Yudas’s face turned pale. He didn’t answer that question.
‘You still don’t like to talk about it, do you?’ I inquired, drawing satisfaction from my ruthlessness.
‘Nothing like that.’
He pulled out a beedi tucked in a plastic cover and lit it. The room was filled with the pungent oppressive smell of ganja.
He said, ‘There isn’t much to talk about. Is there?’
‘Isn’t there?’ I asked vengefully. ‘I thought that is the only thing you could really say something about.’
Yudas looked at me with a tired face. ‘You are upset with me, Prema. Aren’t you?’
‘I love you.’
He was flustered.
‘I thought about that,’ he said. ‘And I haven’t been able to get that. Why do you love me?’
‘Why do you recover dead bodies?’
He didn’t respond.
‘Do you still yell “Long Live the Revolution, mongrels!” when you bring bodies back?’
He laughed timidly. ‘Sometimes. It’s just a habit.’
‘How about “Victory to Naxalbari”?’
‘That too is no more than a habit.’
‘Loving you is the same for me. A habit.’
I wiped away my tears with a corner of my sari. I was exhausted. I am almost thirty-six now. Thirty years after the Emergency, I thought to myself. Thirty years after Kakkayam. I can’t take it any more. I am tired. Yudas is ageing.
‘I am an old man now,’ Yudas said, throwing away the beedi he had been taking long drags from. ‘Time to let go of everything.’
I fell asleep watching him. When I woke up, my stomach was burning. The pain of the ulcers flared again. Solitary frogs croaked in the swamp. The day passed very quickly. By dusk he appeared to have become a little weaker. He repeated a few times how he hadn’t expected me to be the night-time visitor.
‘So were you mad or sad when you came to know it was me?’ I asked feistily.
‘I am not going to argue with you, Prema.’
‘Oh! Do I need to argue with you now? What ruse do you have this time to run away from me? I’ve paid your debt. You threw Sunanda into a gorge. I recovered her niece from another.’
Rage filled my body and I felt blood in my mouth.
‘I can’t do this any more, Yudas. There is no more debt to repay.’
Yudas sat motionless, silent.
‘You are right,’ he whispered at last. ‘There is no more debt.’
Tears welled up in my eyes.
‘I have nowhere to go … I will not let you get away from me either. I am almost thirty-six years old now. I have been chasing you since I was fifteen. I am tired of it. I don’t think I will live much longer …’
My voice cracked. He kept gazing at me.
‘Prema, that … No … That won’t work …’
‘I lost my beauty, my youth … All gone! You don’t even want to see my face … That is why you stay away from me … You’ve never even loved me …’ I blurted out addressing no one in particular. Yudas’s eyes became moist. He came and sat next to me.
‘You are a good girl. I am an old man, aren’t I? A fifty-year-old man. I can only ruin your life, along with mine.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Are you crazy?’
I suddenly laughed and leaned on his chest.
‘Long Live the Revolution …’ I said.
He hugged me, drawing me close.
‘You are still a child.’
I laughed, resting my cheek on his chest. My eyes were damp again.
‘This world needs us.’
He didn’t say anything. He just kept looking at me with compassion. Dusk was settling outside. My love for him grew stronger. Being a virgin at the age of thirty-six could only mean stupidity. He was my man. I was tired of hauling this ageing body like a crocodile trudging along the shore.
‘Sometimes I feel like I should die,’ I told him. ‘When I die, it should be by drowning. And you ought to be the one to recover my body. That is my only wish.’
‘Stop talking crazy, Prema.’
He stood up and began pacing back and forth in distress. I rested my chin on my knees and watched him from where I sat on the mat. When I asked if he was still lecturing local boys on love-making, he smiled apologetically. Then he pulled out a bottle of liquor, downed a couple of gulps, and served me a plateful of cold rice and gravy which he may have cooked before noon. I ate it with tears in my eyes. It felt like the last supper. After dinner I lay down with my head on his lap as I had always done.
‘Please don’t leave me behind,’ I pleaded with him.
‘You should stop loving me.’
This time he didn’t cry, but his voice broke.
After a long time the chimney lamp in the room went out suddenly. The yellow lights of the houseboats flickered in the distance. He began to speak in a whimpering voice. ‘You haven’t figured me out. You don’t see my heart. I am a prisoner of my memories for life. There is no escape for me. It is a camp for torture. You don’t know, Prema, but my memories have been brutalizing me. I don’t have any respite from them. I have betrayed. I can’t take back the secrets I divulged. I am cursed, Prema. You cannot love someone like me. They beat Sunanda to pulp. Her voice still echoes in my ears. She never cried. When the pain became unbearable, she would heave a little. At other times she would grunt. She was at war with herself. What courage she had! I have not seen a woman like her since.’
I was distraught. ‘You have no eyes to see who I am,’ I complained.
‘You aren’t like that,’ he was saying. ‘A little child. You have the heart of a flower. She was just the opposite. An iron rod. She didn’t bend even when she was on molten fire. You never saw her face. You never saw the face that clenched down insufferable pain. Lord! How could I betray her? How could I even point my finger at her? I shouldn’t have given her up even at the cost of my own life. What kind of a man am I? Was I ever one? I am a beast. Or the devil. You don’t know. I haven’t been able to kill my hunger ever since, nor quench my thirst. I need to drink water all the time. I have tried to immerse myself in the lake to drink water to at least wet my throat. But no. My throat doesn’t even feel it. The drought in my mouth doesn’t end. It is an unbearable state to be in. That is why I keep drinking alcohol. When I do, deep in my throat, there is a burning sensation. As if it is on fire. Let my gasping throat scorch in the fire. After we were tortured, I’d feel the same burning sensation when I urinated. Did you know that when you are beaten from head to toe, urine doesn’t come out of your body, instead you pee blood. Thick red blood.’
Lying on his chest, I had the salty taste of blood in my mouth. A whimper sprang up in my heart again. ‘To hell with fascism,’ I said. ‘Total Revolution Is Our Goal.’
He tightened his arms around me.
‘My poor little girl. It feels like I may have betrayed you too. I shouldn’t have, no?’
‘Why did you come to my village?’ I asked.
‘I had no real destination. I was on the road for a long time. I liked the lake when I saw it and I stopped there. I could only live in the vicinity of water. I’ve lost many things in my life to water, things that were dearest to me. I have to recover them. I’ll dive in every cranny to get them back for the sake of the world.’
His voice cracked. I noticed hi
s heartbeats didn’t have the old timbre any more. I could clearly make out the broken tenor. I asked if he had ever gone back to Kakkayam.
Unsettled, he blurted out, ‘Me? Again in this life?’
‘I did. I took everything you flung away in the gorge. Now we must go there together, for no particular reason.’ I pulled him closer to me. Perhaps these knots that constricted us would unwind by themselves.
I spoke to Yudas about my father. About how he had even begun to lose his ability to talk. I recalled those times when he had roared ‘BLOODY ROTTEN SCUM OF AN ASS-IMPALER’ and hurled my mother and me by our hair. I spoke about ‘Beast’ Parameswaran and the letter my father had written to him.
Yudas was sympathetic. ‘Some folks are like that,’ he said. ‘Ear-splitting screams of pain from a fellow human give them a thrill. Spilling others’ blood excites them.’ His eyes welled up and he continued, ‘I remember the face of a policeman who pierced nails into the inmates’ fingers. He’d try so hard to contain his potbelly as he went down on his knees. He took the greatest care when drilling nails through each finger. You should have seen the fury and frustration on his face should the inmate’s body jerk and recoil. Most of them came to torture us in a semi-conscious state after getting drunk. They were like automatons. It was hard to believe all of those things that happened. Not any more though.’
He lay his head in my lap and watched me, his eyes shining in the murky light. I felt as though my chest which had been under a spell of great drought for years had suddenly cooled. He had never shown such intimacy towards me until now. I was blissfully imagining that he would finally take me as his woman. We had shared something; a give-and-take was happening between us. I laughed merrily like a fifteen-year-old. I empathized with my old feudal Naalukettu at the same time. It could while its time for a little longer. Or my younger brother could offer it to the Pentecostals for their charismatic prayers. Believers in their sufferings would speak in tongues; retell holy witnesses; cry and holler begging God’s mercy. I’d amused myself imagining what it would be like if my father were to live in that time in the future. God might bless my father with another opportunity to hear screaming human beings to his heart’s fill. He may be baptized in the water at the lake—in the impervious slimy green water. I probed Yudas’s dishevelled ochre locks with my fingers to caress them. The memories of water in the lake Yudas and I swam in had warmed my heart. The same water from where he pulled me up like a kingfisher yanking out a pearl fish. Yudas slowly closed his eyes, and I watched him slide into sleep involuntarily.
I empathized with myself and Yudas. We were just two ill-fated people. I gently stroked his chest. His chest was covered in blood clots. Every time he inhaled, his groans became louder. If he went back deep in the water, he wouldn’t be able to hold his breath for long any more. The water thrust with greater pressure with each passing year. The force from the pressure could pin him down and crush his ribcage in the end. He might lose all his strength and fall apart. The fire in a defeated warrior would never die out. His ribcage would not have known what leisure was. The burning hearts of those who fell in love with the vanquished would never cool.
I stayed awake, watching over Yudas. He would slip away if I slept even for a moment. How many more years would I have to wander to find him again? How many more reservoirs would he have to swim, flailing in his attempts to recover what he lost in the water? My lake was lucid. The dusk had showered it with gold coins minted from sunbeams. Moonlight had poured molten diamonds into it. A trove of enigmatic secrets lay snuggled in the lake’s depths, tucking their flaps above their heads, beneath the nests of grinning chromides.
I will take him to my shore when he wakes up. In the agony borne out of broken ribcages, who knows if it will be he or I who tosses the other into the lake. One of us would have to be on the lookout to dive and recover the
The Gospel of Yudas dead body. When the body, bitten by fish into a human coral, arrives at the bank, one would have to stay awake in order to drape the dead in white clothes and burn incense sticks.
One of us, or perhaps all of us.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It was during a women writers’ meeting in Delhi, while waiting to listen to the famous Gloria Steinem, that my dear friend and noted Malayalam poet Anita Thampi touched the core of this novel in one sentence. ‘I have heard of a Naxalite who suffers from the crushing guilt of outing what he knew when the police brutalized him.’ She didn’t say anything more. But in that one moment, I had experienced this book. Although I didn’t write the book until several months later, I am grateful for that one line and the friendship that has lasted till date.
There are not enough words to thank Madhu Mash, theatre activist, who shared memories of the Emergency and accompanied me to Kakkayam, and K. Venu, former Naxal leader and social activist for the slogans used in this book.
After the publication of Hangwoman, the translation of Aarachar, R. Sivapriya, then commissioning editor at Penguin, had asked about my next book. My dear friend Dr Piyush Antony and her brother Dr Amal Antony have always wanted to see ‘Yudasinte Suvisesham’— Gospel of Yudas—in English. I suggested Yudas to Siva and she immediately commissioned the book and handed it over to Ambar Sahil Chatterjee. Thank you, Siva, Piyush and Dr Amal.
I haven’t met Rajesh Rajamohan in person yet; we only spoke over the phone. Rajesh took time out of his busy schedule to work on the book only out of his love for the art of translation. Heartfelt gratitude to Rajesh for having recreated Yudas’s and Prema’s travails in English.
The book was made possible on schedule only due to the efforts of my editor Ambar, who became a close friend in a very short time. My dear Ambar, thank you so much!
I am yet to meet Shatarupa Ghoshal in person. She was the copy editor for Hangwoman too. My words, despite being in the garb of another language, are safe in her hands. Thank you, Shatarupa.
The creators of the book’s incredible cover are Meena Rajasekharan, the cover designer, and Ranganath Krishnamani, the illustrator. My heartfelt gratitude to them.
My special thanks to Prasad Lakshmanan, the editor of Kalakaumudi, who published ‘Yudasinte Suvisesham’ in its entirety; my dear friend P. Muraleedharan; and S.P.C.S, the publishers.
GLOSSARY
Incha: A natural substitute for artificial toilet soaps, traditionally used for bathing after oil massage. It is extracted from the bark of the forest climber Acacia intsia.
Mash: A teacher; a respected person.
Naalukettu: A traditional Kerala house with a central courtyard, where rich upper-caste feudal lords lived.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THE TRANSLATOR
K.R. Meera made her mark in Malayalam journalism in 1998 when she won the prestigious Journalism for Human Rights award instituted by the People’s Union of Civil Liberties for an investigative series on the plight of women labourers in Kerala. Later she won the Chowara Parameswaran Award instituted by the Kerala Press Academy, the Deepalaya Child Rights Award and the British Chevening Scholarship for Young Indian Print Journalists, 2005. She quit her job to become a full time writer in 2006.
Meera began writing fiction in 2001. Her first collection of short stories, Ormayude Njarampu (2002), won several prestigious awards, including the Ankanam Sahithya Award, Lalithambika Antharjanam Award for young writers, the Geetha Hiranyan Endowment Award of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi and the Thrissur Kerala Varma Katha Award. Her second collection of short stories, Moha Manja, won the E.V. Krishna Pillai Smaraka Piravi Award. Her short novel Karineela won the Thoppil Ravi Smaraka Katha Award. Her short story Guillotine won the P. Padmarajan Award and the V.P. Sivakumar Memorial Keli Award in 2008. Ave Maria won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for the best short story collection published during 2006–08. She was shortlisted for the Confederation of Tamil Nadu Malayali Associations (CTMA) Literary Prize in 2012. Aarachar won the Nooranad Haneef Memorial Novel Award in 2013, the prestigious Odakkuzhal Award, the coveted Vayalar Ramavarma Award along with the
Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for the best novel in 2014 and the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award for the best novel in Malayalam in 2015.
Yellow Is the Colour of Longing, the translation of the story Moha Manja by J. Devika was selected as one of the three stories representing South Asia by the prestigious feminist journal Feminist Review published from London. In 2011 Penguin India brought out a collection of fifteen short stories by Meera, titled Yellow Is the Colour of Longing (translated by J. Devika) which was shortlisted for the Economist-Crossword Translation Prize.
Hangwoman (2014), the translation of Aarachar by J. Devika, published by Penguin India in 2014, has received rave reviews from national media and critics. The novel found place in several Best of Fiction 2014 lists across the media and was also shortlisted for the DSC Literature Prize 2016.
Aa Maratheyum Marannu Marannu Njan was translated by J. Devika and published by Oxford University Press in 2015 as And Slowly Forgetting That Tree.
Meera’s stories have been rendered into Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Hindi also.
She lives in Kottayam with husband M.S. Dileep, a journalist, and their daughter, Shruthi.
Rajesh Rajamohan has been working in the IT industry for almost two decades. He has translated Litanies of Dutch Battery, a major work of fiction by N.S. Madhavan, which won the Vodafone-Crossword Prize for Best Translated Fiction in 2011, and was shortlisted for The Hindu Literary Prize and longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize the same year. He has translated other works like Karmayogi, the widely acclaimed biography of E. Sreedharan. Rajesh lives in Pennsylvania, USA with his family.
ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Poison of Love Translated by Ministhy S.
‘The Poison of Love, an intense, dramatic novel written in spare, well-crafted prose, delves into the most terrible, bitter, corrosive emotion that can pass off as love … A deep, dark tale’ The Hindu
