The Legends of Khasak

by O. V. Vijayan

  ‘Aren’t you living with her?’

  ‘But who told you this lie?’

  ‘Let it be anybody. Haven’t you put her up in this seedling house of a school? Why don’t you own up?’

  ‘Own up what?’

  ‘Whatever,’ Sivaraman Nair slunk back into the refuge of senility. He rose to go, but paused to mop the profuse sweat that showed on his close-cropped hair and the nape of his neck.

  ‘O Mahamaya!’ he muttered, ‘what foul sins am I destined to witness!’

  For a moment Ravi contemplated calling Sivaraman Nair back’he could reason it out with the enfeebled patriarch. Then, realizing the futility of the exercise, he sat down to watch him go.

  The day after was a holiday. Chand Umma came a little before midday to cook. Ravi followed her into the corridor which was his kitchen as well as bedroom. Ravi sat down on the cot. Chand Umma stooped over the stove. She was tense and did not look at him.

  ‘Umma!’ Ravi sought her attention. For some reason she had anticipated it and came and stood before Ravi without demur.

  ‘Sit down.’

  She chose to sit on the floor.

  ‘What’s this lie I hear about us?’ Ravi asked. ‘Who has told Sivaraman Nair that you are my mistress?’

  ‘Kuppu-Acchan,’ she said in a low, parched whisper.

  ‘What has Kuppu-Acchan got against me?’

  ‘It is his nature.’

  The stove had gone out.

  ‘Let me go light the stove,’ she said.

  ‘Sit down!’

  The sun came in through the solitary glass tile on the roof. The light fell in an epiphanic beam on her face where the patches had given way to pure translucence.

  ‘How long ago was it that you lost your husband?’

  ‘Four years. Soon after I had delivered Chandu Mutthu.’

  As she said this a great sadness was on her face, the veil of the obscure curse ...

  It had happened in the lost time of Khasak, but it lived on, a brooding, avenging sorrow. The great tamarind tree which stood on the edge of the burial marsh was witness to that sorrow. Old beyond reckoning, Khasak believed the tree wouldn’t die until it was redeemed in some way. It was beneath this tree, in that lost time, that an old, widowed astrologer and his daughter had built their hut. A company of white cavalry came there in search of water for their camels. They killed the old star-watcher and raped the daughter. They left her to die on the marsh and went towards the mountains, but as they reached the foothills, scorpions crawled into their battle fatigues and black cobras bit the camels. Camels and riders perished in the wild, and the loam of the mountain settled over their bones. The dead girl rose from the marsh and made the tamarind tree her abode. Worshipped as a Devi, she was the guardian of the chaste. The tamarind tree grew to enormity and, despite its great age, bore fruit in abundance. There were wandering tamarind merchants and their climbers and sellers, who came from Koomankavu and elsewhere, and the harvest overhead was rich, yet few dared to climb up. For the trunk was covered with slippery lichen and the canopy infested with venomous ants. But if the climber had a chaste wife the Devi would turn the lichen into firm footholds, and the ants would make way. The men did not want to be brought to the test, so each season the sweet and sour fruit fell into the marsh or was eaten by flights of bats ... Four years ago, Chand Umma’s husband had stood at the foot of the tree and looked up. He was dazzled, there was a fortune to be plucked. He began to climb. The villagers found him the next day sprawled over the edge of the marsh, blood still oozing from the splintered skull and hordes of ants, glimmering violet and magenta, marauding over the eyes and genitals. It was on that day that Chand Umma’s father left Khasak to become a wandering fakir.

  This punitive widowhood brought on exclusion, and unbearable loneliness. It was custom for the villagers to help each other mend the thatch of their roofs, but now none came to mend hers. The rotting palmyra fronds of the thatch flapped in the monsoon winds, and lightning filled the hut with cold blue fire. In this hut the mother and daughter prayed for the boy to grow up ...

  Ravi made Chand Umma tell the story all over again. The epiphanic sunbeam vanished. When the recital was over, Ravi asked, ‘Umma, do you believe the Devi was punishing you?’

  She met his gaze with stern and accusing eyes. Then courage gave way to shame, and Chand Umma was seized with a spasm of crying. Ravi lifted her chin up, he found himself wiping her tears from around her eyes and her cheeks. He held her by the shoulders and tried to seat her on the cot. Chand Umma disengaged herself and stood leaning against the wall, her chest heaving. Ravi could not reckon how long that tableau lasted. She came over and sat beside him.

  Ravi laid a gentle hand over her shoulder.

  ‘You do not know, Saar—’ she began.

  ‘Do not know what?’

  ‘The sorrow of little children.’

  Ravi’s hand slid down from her shoulder. It was a calm noon outside, and from within its wondrous hollow came the noises of children at play, the strange warbling of a migrant bird, the tired creaking of an ungreased cart-wheel. She snuggled closer, cheerlessly.

  ‘Umma!’

  That was Kunhu Nooru, standing at the entrance to the corridor. Chand Umma got up from the cot. She looked at the dead stove.

  ‘I go now, Saar ...’

  She did not cook that day.

  Ravi walked down to Aliyar’s teashop. The aappams smelt of the toddy the dough was leavened with. Kuppu-Acchan was basking on the load-rest.

  ‘Let us have some tea together,’ Ravi invited.

  ‘Aayee, aayee!’ the carrier of tales said, ‘Not for me.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’

  ‘Well, if you insist—Aliyar, take out a couple of aappams as well.’

  ‘Here, hungry ghost,’ the teashop keeper put the aappams and tea on the load-rest. Kuppu-Acchan fell upon the food and drink greedily, his face contorted. He called out to Ravi inside the teashop, ‘Kutti, the sun is mild, and the brooks are full. Shall we go fishing?’

  ‘Not me, Kuppu-Acchan,’ Ravi answered.

  ‘This is the time when the big fish come up for the sun.’

  ‘Leave me out, Kuppu-Acchan.’

  Ravi stepped out of the teashop. He paused to take a closer look at Khasak’s frail slanderer.

  ‘Merry fishing, Kuppu-Acchan!’

  Ravi walked away towards the paddies. Appu-Kili was hunting amid the screw pines for dragonflies.

  ‘Wan daagonfies, Etto?’ Kili asked with his abysmal lisp.

  ‘Not now, my Parrot,’ Ravi said, patting the cretin’s enormous head. ‘Bring me one when you come home to sleep.’

  As he walked Ravi went over the events of that day again, the desire, the apathy and fulfilment, the invasive curiosity. Where was he, and what was he in this bewildering swirl of live and dead happenings?

  Ravi walked over the ridge; overhead, a million dragonflies sallied forth into the bland sun. Memories of the dead, the dead pining for miraculous reprieves. Ravi walked beneath the canopy of little wings. Khasak lay dreaming all round him. In that experience he prayed for an end to Chand Umma’s curse. The ridge stretched before him becoming infinite, spanning recurrence and incarnation.

  The Ruins

  No one remembered the Kuppu-Acchan of the past, youthful Kuppu the toddy-tapper; no dragonfly carried the memories of the living. Kuppu-Acchan himself found recollection burdensome ...

  A mid-noon fifteen years ago in Kuppu’s toddy-shop. Custom was thin and Kuppu full of misgiving. As he sat gazing far out across the yellowing paddies, he caught sight of the postman, Kelu Menon, walking down the ridge towards Khasak.

  He walked into the shop and sat down to a mugful of toddy and a length of roasted goat’s gut.

  ‘Can’t think of a better refreshment,’ said Kelu Menon cheerily, ‘but how long will you keep this open?’

  Kuppu’s wife Kallu peeped in from the living quarters at the back. ‘We will not close this down,’ she said.r />
  Kuppu said nothing.

  ‘This is the new law,’ said the postman, speaking now as part of the government. ‘We can’t let the law be disobeyed.’

  Days after this, Kuppu walked beneath the palms at sunset. He touched the palms and divined the sap flow, up the trunks to the buds on top. He tapped the sap and brewed it into sweet-sour toddy. He sold this toddy in his little shop. A trade, an honest and fearless living; try as he might he could not understand why anyone should make it impossible. He sadly watched the magnificent palms turn to silhouettes in the onrushing dusk.

  Kuppu kept his shop open. No one came there to drink anymore. Kuppu roamed the palm groves; he could climb and tap twenty palms a day; he wore the tapper’s mark of power—callouses the colour of gold on his hands and chest.

  The villagers dared not reason with him; the only one he would listen to was Madhavan Nair, younger than him by many years. They respected each other as skilled workers, free people. When Madhavan Nair saw Kuppu that evening amidst the palms, he realized he was witnessing a mime of torment, the palm-climber’s passion play.

  ‘I have done much wrong in my life,’ Kuppu began.

  ‘Who hasn’t?’ protested Madhavan Nair.

  ‘I have. But I haven’t taken a life. I nearly did it last evening. Can you guess what Mayandi advised me to do?’

  The tailor stood still, listening.

  ‘Mayandi wants me to brew fake toddy from waste and poison ...’ said Kuppu in a great rage.

  Kuppu stood leaning against a palmyra; Madhavan Nair marvelled at the tapper’s musculature and at the honour of the toiling man. The palm winds quietened Kuppu.

  They walked in the cool night; the tailor talked and reasoned.

  ‘What should I do?’ asked the tapper again.

  ‘Close it,’ said Madhavan Nair gently.

  And so ended the epic of the toddy-tapper, an epic from other times, when flying serpents rested on palm tops during their mysterious journeys. The tapper made an offering of sweet toddy to please these visitants. He left flowers at the foot of the palm for the clan’s well-being. In those times the tapper did not have to climb, the palm bent down for him. It was when a tapper’s woman lost her innocence that the palm ceased to bend ...

  Kuppu’s wife Kallu was from Yakkara, a village a few miles from Khasak. The daughter of a prosperous tenant-farmer, she was the youngest of seven sisters; the farmer had married off six of them, and when Kallu’s turn came, there was little left of the family’s gold and money.

  That was how she came to Khasak as the bride of a tapper, one whose station was lower than that of a tenant-farmer. A bride of fourteen, she had come away from the roomy family farmhouse, the yard around it, the stables where the grey buffalo calves would shake their heads and flare their nostrils in recognition. She found her husband a loner and the house beset with dust and cobwebs, moss and trash. She suppressed a sob, and swore she would move her man to decisive enterprise. Within weeks of the marriage Kallu said, ‘Let us take some land on tenure.’ Kuppu was mindful of every wish of the child-wife, though he hated the feudal humiliation of tenancy. He went into it for her sake, but gave it up at the very first harvest when the landlord spoke rudely to him. Still Kallu would not give up.

  ‘There is a toddy shop here,’ she told him in bed one night, ‘that closed down long ago. Let us bid for it.’

  Kuppu found her irresistible, but equally compelling was the call of the wind-swept palms that resounded in the night.

  ‘I cannot give them up,’ he said. ‘They love me.’

  Kallu pulled back to see him better, this man who turned his enormous power into tenderness. Then she drew him close and giggled, ‘I am jealous!’

  Kallu fancied the palms as big black giantesses tossing their locks in the wind.

  ‘I will tap,’ he said.

  ‘We will have both,’ she said. ‘I can see to the shop when you are on the palms.’

  For her the toddy-shop was a mark of class. Of course it was classier to be a farmer, but she had heard of men who got rich vending toddy. In this ceaseless fantasy she became rich, and dressed the way the rich did; ornaments glittering all over her, she went to Yakkara, to her father’s farm, to the calves which snorted in fond memory ... The shop dragged on for years on inadequate custom, and Kallu never made that jewelled journey.

  After the shop was closed down, Kuppu set out for the palm grove one morning, in tapper’s attire—the shield of buffalo hide for the chest, the broad knife in its scabbard hung at the back from the girdle. The mullah, on his morning walk through the fields, was alarmed by this armed apparition.

  ‘Where are you going, Kuppu?’ he asked hesitantly.

  Kuppu was jolted by this query from the world of reality.

  ‘Aw,’ he said, ‘to cut fronds ...’

  That was not the season for mending thatches, but the mullah questioned him no further. He turned to watch the tapper walk away, and said a prayer to save this man of honour from relapsing into hallucination. In the grove, Kuppu climbed his favoured palm, the queen among his black mistresses; he sat astride the stem of a frond, contemplating nothingness; the wind spun the mountain mists around him, and the earth seemed far away ... In the house below, Kallu dusted the big earthen urns which had once held the brew of their labour and hope, now destroyed by the Temperance Law and the bootlegger. The smell of toddy still lingered in the long-dried urns, perhaps its astral replica; sadness came over her. She went into the backyard and looked over great distances, she fancied she saw the little bridge in Yakkara, the gate of her father’s farm, the fruit trees along the hedges, the stable which housed her mute kin. She stepped back into her own house again, into its stark solitude. Her husband would not climb down from the palm until the insane spell was over. Her teenaged son worked in a tea plantation in the hill country. Soon even the spectral scent would dry in the urns. The little jewellery she had brought with her was either pawned or sold. Now it felt like an unburdening. All that was left were her silver anklets. She tucked them into her tiny betel basket. She looked out on the front yard—the old slippery moss had returned. Kallu had come in through the front door. She went out through the back. With memories left behind like the pawned jewels, Kallu left Khasak.

  The Palghat countryside was in the throes of temperance. Soon primitive alchemists took over the inebriation trade. Brewing and distilling began with substances picked up at random, from confectioners’ essences to insects and vermin. Attendance dropped in the rural schools, and often when a teacher asked why a certain pupil had not turned up, the children would answer, ‘He’s gone hunting centipedes, Saar!’

  The most popular drink was fermented wash blended with ammonium sulphate, which the government generously distributed as manure. It came closest to natural toddy. However, there was one embarrassing hazard with the sulphate brew—an overdose of the chemical brought on an upset stomach instantly.

  Kuppu stood alone in this welter of deceit, he cursed the Temperance Law as the mother of anarchy. Kallu was its victim. His long spells of hallucination ended, he withdrew into his hut. He hung the chest armour and the tapper’s knife on the wall, and never touched them again, and in good time big hairy spiders found a home behind the uncured hide. In the hut that was once their home and toddy shop, Kuppu lay down for days on end in the gathering dust and litter, for days on end he went without food. Then, he wandered through Khasak, at each appearance looking thinner and more desiccated than at the one before; no one took note, no dragonfly carried the memories of the living. Sometimes if the wind swept him on, he went up to Chetali. He came back, and gave himself up to the contemplation of the image that was to be the only image in his mind for years to come. Kallu’s parents were dead, leaving behind a rheumatic grandmother. Kuppu worked himself into an insane despondency in which he could see things the way he wanted to; he saw Kallu bathing in Yakkara’s rivulet, seated on the rocks now, sun-drying herself, bare-breasted, with a scanty towel drawn round her waist,
like Narayani. The boys from the nearby tile factory loitered beside the rivulet, they ogled and whistled. They whistled in the nights around the house of the rheumatic grandmother. Kallu in the rivulet haunted Kuppu. The image rotted in his mind and then seeped out to envelop him. Kuppu curled up and slept through fifteen years of decay ...

  No one knew for certain when he appeared on the load-rest in front of Aliyar’s shop. It was as if he had always been there. A lock of sick brown hair falling over his forehead, cheeks drawn into the of his face toothless cavern, head tucked in between bent knees, infinitely old, he picked on passers-by or those inside the teashop and began some salacious story.

  ‘You know,’ he would start off, ‘Pangelan’s wife is with child, the ninth month, and poor Pangelan has so much work in the Tamil country that he has been away for almost two years. Of course, none of my concern ...’

  Kuppu-Acchan could almost see the scandal sail downwind, see it flower and multiply. Often Aliyar took out a pot of bitter tea and odd bits of crispies, and clapped his hands. ‘Come and peck, old crow,’ Aliyar would say, affectionately endowing the village gossip with the mystic powers crows possessed and for which reason food was offered to them in ancestral propitiation rites.

  A day after Sivaraman Nair accused Ravi of living with his servant, Madhavan Nair walked up to the load-rest with this taunt, ‘So you can’t resist a juicy lie, can you?’

  ‘Hai, hai, Madhava! Wasn’t I talking to the wind?’

  ‘Just stay on the load-rest, and keep your fist closed tight.’

  ‘What else?’ Aliyar spoke from behind the samovar. ‘If he opens his fist his soul would fly away!’

  ‘Very well,’ Madhavan Nair said, ‘have some tea. Aliyar, that’s on me.’

  ‘Hai, hai! Why don’t you get me a murukku to go with the tea?’

  ‘Are you turning into another Appu-Kili?’

  Khasak was used to teasing Kuppu-Acchan. An ugly grin spread through the stubble beneath the beaked nose, for one brief moment, like a cinder fanned by a freak wind. Inside the teashop, Madhavan Nair was touched by memories of the palm grove, of the magnificent toddy-tapper who stood like an angry sentinel over the honour of his calling.