When he said this, and the way he said it, Aravindan thought it was fun. As though he had got back the rural way of talking that he had lost. He had grown a new tongue over the years. Not just a new tongue, new ears too.
Ramabhadran introduced his son, ‘This is the younger one. He’s an engineer at InfoPark. Though they’re well paid, there’s no time or certainty. He comes and goes anytime. It was very difficult to get him to take a day off. I have a driver, whom I usually call, but he was not available today.’
‘Why did you bother? I could have taken a taxi.’
‘No. This is something I enjoy. I like meeting people who are visiting me. I never go to see them off, though. That makes me feel sad.’
Kuttan tried to explain his difficulty, in between. ‘It is always tough for us in the IT field, Uncle. We have to follow the time schedule of the Westerners.’
‘I know,’ Aravindan nodded. Your clock is set by the foreigners.’ The car moved at a fairly good speed.
‘Don’t drive so fast, Kuttan. Though the car is ours, the potholes belong to the government. You know with what care they look after them!’
Though Aravindan was again worried that Ramabhadran may start laughing, that did not happen.
Ramabhadran had somehow passed his tenth and got into the polytechnic at Kalamassery, to do mechanical engineering. But he left even before completing a year. The problem there too was the question of equations. He complained that the masters who taught him did not know anything about machines.
‘They only know how to throw up what they’ve learnt by heart from the text books. What is education? You have to teach the students something that they don’t know. And how can people who don’t care for machines teach mechanical engineering? Machines are organisms like us as well.’
From there, he went straight to an uncle in Trichinopoly or Tiruchirappalli. He worked in an engineering company for some time. There too, the old question of ‘understanding’ cropped up. When he discovered that some of the parts of the machine, to be shipped to the UK, designed by the IIT-ian Rao, were asymmetrical, things became more complicated.
Aravindan remembered what Ramabhadran had said at that time, ‘He’d done such a stupid thing. The white man would have thrown it into the sea. You can’t even ask Rao why he had done what he did. His face would grow red. He’d start speaking a peculiar sort of English; a sort of English that we people from Kochi are not used to. When you have a big degree and studied in a big college, that’s probably the way you speak.’
The head of the engineering department was a member of the royal family of Nilambur Kovilakam. He was very fond of Ramabhadran.
‘Do you need to be so rude, Ramabhadran?’ he had asked affectionately.
‘How can you ask me that, sir?’ Ramabhadran was surprised at the question. ‘Whether it is a machine or a thing that is alive, the parts have to match each other, don’t they? It’s the law of nature. Similar to cosmic balance. If you have just one and half nose and two and three quarters ears, even a member of the Nilambur Royal Family won’t be able to cope, will you? The whole universe exists on the basis of some law of compatibility, doesn’t it? It’s when the pancha bhoothas, the five essences, space, air, water, fire and earth, do not balance that you get tsunamis and floods and lava flowing.’
The Nilambur Thampuran had no reply to that.
‘But Ramabhadran, Rao is a rank holder from the IIT and has got admission for MS in the MIT. With scholarship too. He’s just waiting for his papers to come. A typical ivy-league boy.’
‘IIT and MIT are all right. But it would be better for the company to pray that his papers come without delay.’
Thampuran knew that there was no point in arguing with Ramabhadran. But a large order to be supplied overseas was held up due to this difference of opinion.
Finally, Ramabhadran himself came to Thampuran’s rescue. He asked, ‘This job in the company is worth only a quarter sheet of a paper, isn’t it?’
Thampuran nodded without saying anything. A quarter sheet of paper was more than enough to write a resignation letter.
Ramabhadran had learnt some new words during his stay at Trichinopoly: wave length…frequency…tuning! That was what had gone wrong between him and the Telugu chap, he explained. When he returned home all he had was the old Morris Minor car; and the courage given by the two acres of coconut palms that had just started bearing fruits.
‘Do you remember that old Morris Minor car of mine?’ Ramabhadran asked. ‘The one I had brought from Trichinopoly?’
‘Of course,’ Aravindan laughed. Ramabhadran had gone to great pains to run that car, which was liable to catch a cold or cough at the least pretext.
Ramabhadran’s craze for cars started with the old Ford he bought from Dr Kunjan Pillai, who had been practising at Salem. After he retired, he set up a dispensary in the village and brought the car with him.
People were reluctant to get into Ramabhadran’s car, though. It would stop suddenly, in the middle of nowhere. Ramabhadran would then pat his passenger on the back and request, ‘You could put your hand to it and give it a push, couldn’t you?’ If that did not work, he would step out with the crank handle. Children gathered to watch Ramabhadran poke that rod into the engine and make it roar. Father and his sons repaired it again and again, and finally they gave it for slaughter to a hardware shop owner in the Broadway.
‘It was a well-born vehicle, but what can you do if it won’t run?’
Aravindan too agreed with that. A car that did not run was definite to end up in a salvage yard of a hardware merchant.
The two boys of Ramabhadran studied well. Both of them were also crazy about machines. The elder had gone off to the US, but Ramabhadran had managed to hold on to the second one, who worked in the InfoPark at Kochi for the moment.
When Aravindan laughed to himself, Ramabhadran looked at him as though to ask him: What is it Aravindan?
‘Nothing. I just thought of that old ingalamlavatakam.’
Ramabhadran had forgotten that old joke.
Carbon dioxide was called ingalamlavatakam and nitrogen was pakyajanakam. Equivalent of common terms in science sounded jarring in chaste Malayalam. However much he tried, Ramabhadran could not pronounce ingalamlavatakam. After saying ‘inga’ he would be confused and would be trying to finish the word somehow.
The master did not have the patience to wait for the whole word. He would shout, ‘What is this ingu…ingu…? Are you a baby to ask for ingu or baby food? Tell Sambhu Namboodiri to see that you clean your tongue properly with a fresh frond-stick.’
When he remembered that, Ramabhadran also started laughing. It wasn’t the old laugh, it was softer.
‘I remember. I don’t think I would be able to pronounce it even now. Carbon dioxide is just fart. Imagine if it becomes more difficult to say it than to let it go. Anyway, the present generation has it easier, I think.’
They had passed out from Union Christian College, by then. Aravindan could not help thinking of the old journeys in the ‘Student’s Special’. The old Comet vehicle had just one long seat on the left side. At the front end, near the driver, there was a box. That box seat was reserved for Bharatan. It would be left vacant till Bharatan got into the bus, dhoti folded up and mouth filled with betel leaves. He had taken four masters degrees and become the principal of the Maharaja’s College. Even then, his dress remained the same—a crumpled old kurta and folded dhoti.
Aravindan heard Ramabhadran’s voice, in between. He was saying, ‘You can stay with me if you don’t mind. Only Padmavathi and I are at home these days. This fellow stays at Ernakulam usually.’
‘No need, Ramabhadran. Appukuttan has made all the arrangements. A house belonging to a distant relative is lying vacant. I thought I’d stay there. My mother trusted Appukuttan so much, she’d listen to no one else….’
‘All right. I was just telling you that you could stay with us. The only problem is that we are vegetarians. By the way, I didn’t ask you, w
hat is this sudden trip about? Last time you came, you had brought your wife.’
‘Nothing in particular. Perumal had rung up from Madurai. He’s an old friend, my room-mate when we were in the Maharaja’s. He’s supposed to be a famous historian now. He’s coming here to look at some project. When he rang up and asked whether I would like to join him, I felt like coming along too. Vasanthi is not interested in anything like this. It is a long time since I saw Perumal too.’
‘Must be Muziris,’ Kuttan said.
‘Yes.’
‘They say that when they dug in Pattanam, they found some Roman coins and some amphorae artefacts, and things like that. There was also a boat, tied-up.’
‘It is wonderful! Though we’ve always heard that Kodungallur had a great history, I hadn’t thought it was so great. It isn’t a joke to be digging so much to get all that information. They’re talking of making the Paliyam palace, a museum. There’s also talk that the Kottapuram market is going to be given a facelift.’
‘They say Muziris had been a great port on the western coast. Ships berthed there two thousand years ago. Greeks and Romans and Arabs came here in search of our pepper. And so the old Muchiripatinam became Muziris in their language.’
‘They must have made our pepper popular in the West.’
‘Possibly…kashayam, the liquid pepper extract that we used here. When it became a life-saving medicine as well, pepper became even more popular. The search for our western coast became the search for a spice route.’
‘God!’ Ramabhadran’s eyes opened wide. ‘To tell you the truth, Aravindan, I was never interested in history. The same old tales—be it kings fighting for no reason among themselves, or picking up princesses for marriage from various countries, or building rest houses all over the country side, or planting shade trees—enough to put one to sleep. It was a wonder that I got ten marks for the exam. But now, when I hear of things like this, it sounds interesting. The only thing is, I can’t help wondering how much of it is fact and how much is made up.’
‘Quite a lot is probably made up. These don’t have nuts and bolts in the right places like your machines have. What we get as history is coloured by interpretations and misinterpretations. And so people in positions of power have from time to time interfered and messed with it. It is not easy to keep history safe from the hands of such people.’
‘I’ve heard the history of our Paliyam interpreted in so many different ways.’
‘It is said that nothing is history, until it’s proven. It is almost impossible to search out the little bit of truth that is mixed up with all the stories and guesses.’
It looked as though Kuttan had not heard his father’s request to reduce the speed. He was keeping time on the steering wheel in rhythm with the Hindi tune he was humming.
‘You can make out that music is not really his thing from what you hear! He came very late, last night. This singing is to make sure that he does not fall asleep.’ Ramabhadran whispered.
Though the road had been widened, there were many more vehicles of all kinds, and most of them did not seem to have any concern for the rules of the road.
‘It is a wonder. Ever since they made this road a part of the national highway, it has become more and more crowded,’ Ramabhadran grumbled. ‘One can go up to Mangalore by this road. It is a more convenient route to Guruvayur as well. They say that a coastal railway line will come soon. Who knows? In this place of ours, what you don’t hear is likely to be the correct news.’ It was a place frozen in time. Once new paths come, new roads and access will change the whole place, Aravindan thought. Soon there would be shopping malls and multiplexes in the place. The people who migrated from the stifling crowds of the cities to villages were always in a hurry to convert the village into a city. On one side, you have people digging deeper and deeper to regain an old lost city. On the other side, you have villages, making haste to become cities.
The crossroads looked the same. There were a few new shops. Only the old name boards and the faces of the people in the shops had changed. Earlier, when there were hardly any buses through these roads, transport to Chendamangalam depended on Pillai’s shuttle taxi. The fare was only twenty-five paise. The only problem was that when the belly of the taxi was swollen with ten or twelve passengers, those sitting on the sides had to have a firm grip on the door—just in case it opened, while the car was moving!
Their car now turned around a bend. The road smelled of fresh tar.
Aravindan had heard that it was at this junction that the police vans had been blocked during the Paliyam Satyagraha. The leaders stood on the bonnet of the stopped police vans and gave speeches that further incited the people. Finally, there was a lathi charge and the people scattered here and there.
Aravindan could remember seeing some Tamil movie in the Union Talkies (or was it Sriram?) nearby—a movie with Thyagaraja Bhagavathar and N.S. Krishnan and T.A. Madhuram. Was it Sivakavi? On a visit to Pune, years later, someone had shown the Yerwada Central Jail where Bhagavathar and Krishnan had been incarcerated in the Chandrakantham murder case. Apparently, there used to be a crowd of Tamilian fans outside the jail gate, waiting to catch a glimpse of the stars.
Suddenly, he could see Ayyappan’s wooden bridge below and reminisced about old days. There was water in the river still. Boats carrying coconut husks moved westwards. There was also a small fishing boat. There was a fisherman with a cap-umbrella in it. When the new concrete bridge was built across the river, the road had to be raised. Those days there were small bridges to the islands that had been connected by ferries. Earlier, there used to be a boat jetty; here and there, on cement benches and shop verandas people waited for the boat to the east.
‘It’s so much more convenient now that this new bridge has been built,’ Ramabhadran was saying. ‘I was always terrified when the bus climbed on that old rattle-trap bridge. Was this bridge there when you came last time?’
‘No.’
In his childhood memories, this river had been the boundary between two kingdoms. South of the river was Travancore and to the north lay Kochi. There were boundary stones, here and there. Aravindan could remember the guards who manned the boundary. When the people of Kochi had exhausted the wheat and corn supplied during the days of food-rationing, there was rice to be brought in from Travancore, at a higher price. But toll had to be paid to bring the rice from Parur. Similarly, tobacco was a controlled substance in Travancore. Across the border, the tobacco that came from Kodungallur would sell at thrice the price. The rate was one basket of rice for one-hand length of tobacco. The toll gates became a great source of income for the guards.
The heroine and hero of one of the famous love stories of that time, Kizhakkumpuram Ahmed of Kochi and Paruthara Sarojini of Travancore, used to meet in a small hut under the bridge, right on the boundary line between both the countries. Ahmed smelled of tobacco and Sarojini of newly pounded rice. Even when Sarojini tempted him from across the river, Ahmed did not have the courage to cross over to Travancore. He was a known smuggler and a boundary was a safer meeting point.
Good old boatman Devassy from Mekkad, always high on alcohol, used to shout at the customs guards while ferrying people across the river: ‘You toll collectors, you sinners…’
It was only in 1949, when Travancore and Kochi joined to form one state that those customs houses were pulled down.
The soil looked fertile on both sides. Coconut trees seemed to be thriving. Their heads that bent to the river were heavy with large bunches of coconuts.
The road that had had a facelift with fresh tar, looked very different. Earlier, it used to be a mud road, its edges crushed by heavy lorries that carried stone to the south. Every yard had its own potholes. Once the rains came the potholes were filled with reddish brown water. In summer, the road spewed dust. The government bus would come with a great roar through the dust, like a tusker that never bathed. When they heard the roar from afar, people would run away. It would take a while before the red mist c
leared. Although, there were loud promises before every election about early repairs, nothing really happened. The granite chips, which lay in heaps on the roadside, continued to stay there, waiting for the labourers, who never arrived. Some of it vanished into the sacks in neighbouring households. Some of it took life when the rains came. They flowed with the water on to the road.
When he directed Ramabhadran to the house arranged by Appukuttan, Aravindan was doubtful about the access. ‘I don’t think the car can reach the house. Just stop at the turning, I’ll walk rest of the way. It’s only a short distance.’
‘What do you think you’re talking about?’ Ramabhadran could not help laughing. ‘There isn’t any household that doesn’t have a car or a bike, today.’
He proved to be right.
In the rainy season, Aravindan used to wade through knee-deep water to go to school. Even those small lanes now had the dark face of tar. The lanes through which small pushcarts were hard-pressed to pass, now let small trucks through.
‘One name comes to my mind whenever I come this way,’ Ramabhadran turned round and said softly. ‘Manakkodath Ammalu. She had a reputation. She was good-looking, with more than enough in the proper places. That Sudharma, in the anganwadi, came nowhere near her…’
Aravindan nudged him from the back. Ramabhadran seemed to have forgotten that his son sat next to him. Kuttan was trying hard to control his laughter.
Appukuttan was waiting outside the house. ‘The plane was late, wasn’t it?’
‘A little. Since Ramabhadran was waiting outside, I had no problem.’
‘Everything has been arranged,’ Appukuttan picked up the suitcases and said. ‘Achumman is inside. He’ll take care of everything. Just tell him what you need. And I’m here too, at Manakkodam. You better save my mobile number on your phone.’
Appukuttan gave the telephone number. He had a new and sparkling cell phone in his hand. He added, ‘You had better give me a missed call, so that I have your number too, Aravindettan.’
‘All right.’
The Saga of Muziris Page 3
