A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  There is a mosque close by, a few hundred years old, I am told by a young man from the area who walks along with us. The sloping roof is red-tiled and flat-topped, in traditional Keralan style, which is unlike the typical Middle Eastern domed and arched style now common to new mosques in Kerala, and indeed everywhere. We go to another mosque, where the tops of the walls are trimmed with colourful floral designs. There are Quranic inscriptions etched on the walls inside. On one wall, however, an unpainted area of one by two feet contains an inscription. No one can say what the script is, what the language. No one cares. But we are brought an old Quran with beautiful calligraphy, partly coloured, on yellowed paper. A thousand years old, I am told, but it looks, to my admittedly untrained eye, not more than two hundred. The young man with us, fair, handsome, and of medium height, is called Aziz. He sounds cynical about the old folk, sings a popular Hindi film song as we walk, though his knowledge of Hindi and of English is next to none. At the mosque, he easily introduced my companion, a Hindu, as Abdullah, thus avoiding complications.

  He takes us to his house, which is a traditional one, I gather. It is walled, and the entranceway has a red-tiled roof. Inside the entrance is a courtyard, beyond which is the house, which also has a red-tiled roof. The house has a verandah, and large spacious rooms, some of them empty of furniture, and it is cool and dark compared to the sun-drenched street outside.

  From here he takes us to the home of a prominent local family. There is a somewhat surreal quality to the experience. The young man speaks in Malayalam, my companion translates in the simplest of terms, and I follow where I’m taken. For the guide I am a “foreign,” someone special, and perhaps this is how he gets us admitted to the house of an eminence. At the entrance there are two photos of ancestors proudly displayed. On the verandah wall are more photos, and framed letters. The verandah has chairs to sit on, and a telephone. There is a mosque adjoining the house. We meet here a father and son, both very fair, wearing lunghis. They claim descent from the Prophet, their ancestors having arrived from Aden about a thousand years ago to preach.

  There is an old bench in the courtyard, where, it is claimed, the eighteenth-century Mysorean Muslim ruler Tippoo Sultan once sat. The old shaikh whose home we are in is some kind of a doctor, who heals mental cases.

  The Sultan of Beypore, as he is affectionately called, is the other grand old man of Keralan fiction: Vaikom Muhammad Basheer. There is a photo I have seen showing Thakazhi grabbing Basheer in an affectionate armhold around the neck, from behind; another shows these two and a few other writers all seated, wearing milk-white lunghis and overshirts, staring at the camera. This would be after India’s independence, the writers are in their forties. Basheer sports a black moustache.

  His fiction is modernist, with dialect and multiple voices cutting into the narrative. The stories and novels are short and full of humour and irony. There is a facility in his style, an easy grace, that makes even the presence of a goat in a story into a revelation about family and communal life in Kerala. In his stories he scorns convention, albeit in his charming way, and perhaps this is not surprising, for it is convention and tradition of which he has been a victim. In their backgrounds and life experiences, the two friends, Basheer and Thakazhi, could not be more different. If Thakazhi has the mud of his ancestral land on his feet, Basheer has on him the dust of city streets, British jails, and the highways of India.

  Beypore is a settlement a little to the south of Calicut, where I arrive at mid-morning on the passenger seat of a motorbike to pay my tribute. A single telephone line leaves the main road, goes to the writer’s house, which is typical of the area, with a garden and a raised verandah in the front. He sits bare-chested on the verandah on a makeshift bed with sheets and three pillows, looking emaciated, all skin and bones, the collarbones bulging. The very sight of him is intimidating. “I am about to die,” he says matter-of-factly. He is quite bald, with only a few hairs at the back of the head and a grey stubble on the chin. He leans forward as he sits, his long arms outstretched, his knotty fingers spread out. He reminds me so much of Gandhi. Every little while, he stops, looks distracted, and seems to hum a tune; but it is to breathe that he does this. He suffers from acute asthma.

  We sit facing him. Behind us is a breathing apparatus with some odds and ends. Beside him is an oxygen tank. A built-in cabinet in the front room of the house is full of medicine bottles. The smell of medicine predominates.

  His wife brings us some tea. He barely manages to gulp down a couple of sips, spits out some, puts down the glass partly full.

  He’s been here about thirty years, he says, having moved from Vaikom, the family home. This is his wife’s home. Her parents had died and there were her siblings to care for. The house is nice outside, but inside it is very modest—no rug or linoleum, old, makeshift furniture, no fancy lighting or artifacts.

  He says there are two books he would still like to write. One, a book of stories; another, a book on creation. But he can’t, physically. He’s on the verge of dying.

  He brings out a spray and inhales. It’s not much use, his wife says.

  No, he’s not travelled much outside India, except for the Middle East and the coast of Africa—he’s vague about this, reluctant to say much, I sense. But he travelled ten years throughout India, up to the Himalayas, became a sanyasi, someone who’s renounced ordinary life. Then he returned and became a freedom fighter, followed Gandhi. He went to prison several times, many times spent nights in the lock-up, was beaten and tortured. For that, along with other freedom fighters, he receives a monthly pension from the Indian government.

  I ask him about the recent “disturbances,” the violence following the destruction of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya.

  “I didn’t give it a thought,” he says. “Fifteen years ago, when the question of Ayodhya came up, I said give it back to the Hindus. No Muslims live there. In Spain, Muslims ruled for some hundred years, what happened to the mosques? Ayodhya is a silly affair.”

  “There’s no difference between northern and southern Muslims,” he says.

  How mistaken he is, I think; there are different kinds of Muslims even in Kerala. But perhaps this is what he would like to believe. Like Thakazhi saying there is no difference between the north and the south. A refrain repeated much more in the south than in the north.

  “Muslims are fools,” he goes on. “Out of one country they are now in three countries which are enemies with each other. Jinnah was not a Muslim. He drank, ate pork; he came from the Bohra community, who can marry their own sisters…” Here he displays an ignorance and a prejudice. Jinnah was not a Bohra, and the Bohras in any case do not marry their sisters.

  “God bless you,” he says, as we take our leave.

  On my last day in Calicut I go to visit my companion’s family. The father is a simple middle-class engineer, fair and lean, somewhat proud to be a Namboodiri Brahmin. According to him, many of the Muslims in Kuttichura are converted Namboodiris, the conversion having happened as recently as the early twentieth century due to a conflict. He proudly shows me the special features of his house, designed by him using basically sound principles: windows without frames but with bars, inner doors decorated with a laminated printed cloth, tiles on the ceilings, a high ceiling in the centre of the house to let the warmer air rise up. The dining area is a raised platform at which the three of us are served, vegetarian of course, the women keeping to themselves.

  Fifteen minutes to my train’s departure time, my companion is ready to take me on his motorbike to the railway station. We seem to be cutting it close, but to my great surprise and irritation the father brings out his own bike and suggests we stop on the way to listen briefly to a music concert. I am the type who arrives at a train station half an hour early, he is obviously the type who arrives just on time, and I get anxious. This last-minute plan seems to court disaster; if I miss my train, I will have to re-book, spend another night in a dingy hotel, and delay or cancel my plans in Trivandrum. But t
here is no choice, and so we race through the evening traffic on our impossible venture.

  The concert turns out to be in a school hall, and it’s a Carnatic recital of songs by Thyagaraja. And I, who came to it impatient and a little angry, not expecting much from such a setting and ready to depart as soon as I took a peep inside, am completely bowled over by the beauty of the singing and the music, performed by three or four musicians in the far front of the hall. It is a lesson in humility, patience, and sense of humour. We stay longer than intended, and at the station I have to run to catch my overnight train. But once I have deposited myself in my second-class seat, staring out at the darkness and listening to the clackety rhythm of the rails, I feel an overwhelming sense of elation. Trust a bit of music to lift you up in the most unexpected of circumstances.

  I learn later from an amused and happy Paniker, who shared a room with him once, that Basheer was an excellent cook and loved tea. He listened to Paul Robeson and K. L. Saigal.

  Thakazhi, on the other hand, was a miser.

  I finish reading Thakazhi’s Chemmeen in an Indian edition I have picked up in Trivandrum. It’s a slim novel, one of his shorter ones, a story about the romance between a girl from a Hindu fishing village and a Muslim boy. A tragic tale, simply told, in which customs and taboos—internalized taboos, as well as those enforced through family and neighbours—work with the immutability of fate. Breaking a taboo in such a setting is to court disaster, which for fisherfolk is meted out at sea. What would have happened if the young couple had run away together to live in a city? Could they have run away? I have met many Hindu-Muslim couples, but there are few fictional and hardly any cinematic treatments of this phenomenon, even though in Bollywood Muslim actors regularly play upper-caste Hindu men, and in their real lives marry Hindu women. This is a subject fraught with sensitivities. Recall the phenom in Gujarat who uses goons to break up mixed marriages in order to save the Hindu nation. Why, I was asked passionately once, could Muslim men marry Hindu women, and not the other way around? This seems a common perception, especially since orthodox Muslim women live sheltered lives and could not possibly come into contact with Hindu, or indeed any, men. Among the mixed couples I have come across, however, the women have been of either community.

  Basheer, it turns out, had a passionate love affair with a Hindu Nair girl. This I discover much later after my visit to see him, in a brief biography introducing an English edition of his stories. The young woman’s parents threatened to kill themselves, and Basheer pleaded with her to give him up and marry the man of her parents’ choice. The experience took its toll on Basheer, “leading him to intemperance of an alarming nature,” says the introduction to Basheer Fictions. What form this intemperance took, the introduction doesn’t say. Basheer married later, when he was fifty.

  Every year from November to January thousands of men, many of them wearing black lunghis round their waists and bare-chested, are seen on the railways on their way to make pilgrimage at the Sabarimala temple of Lord Ayyappa. When I suggest to my friend Hussein that we undertake this journey, even though the pilgrimage season is over, and he consults with his friends in Varkala regarding my crazy-sounding proposal, there is a deal of objection. Climbing the mountain in the heat is hazardous, I am warned; if I go, I should leave early in the morning and take plenty of rest on the way; and so on, until I am ready to give up the idea. But finally they agree, they will indulge my wish. Hussein thinks much of me. My letters to him from Toronto, I have learned from his friends, are a source of pride for him.

  We leave from Varkala at 4:30 a.m. With us is a railway station master, who has called in sick to accompany me and see the site for himself. He tells me that a Muslim (he is one, too) from Varkala had done the pilgrimage and been ostracized afterwards by his mosque. And so I am his ready excuse, it’s for my sake he’s going there.

  The full pilgrimage requires a kind of preparatory ritual of forty-one days—a fast, abstention from sex, meat, alcohol, etc., sleeping on a hard surface. The pilgrims are required to take a black bundle, carried on the head and representing their sins, which will be left behind at the temple. The bundles contain offerings, usually rice and coconut, so the value of the collections during the pilgrimage must be enormous.

  Ayyappa, born of the gods Shiva and Vishnu, the latter of whom had taken the female form of Mohini to give birth, was found by the childless King Rajasekara as an adorable baby on the bank of the Pampa river. He was brought up as Manikandan, a gifted child, and considered the heir to the throne; but meanwhile the queen gave birth to her own son. Encouraged by the prime minister, she pretended to have a sickness which could be cured only by drinking a tigress’s milk. An impossible proposition, who would milk a tigress? The foundling Manikandan, as expected, volunteered to go to the forest and fetch the milk. He would have met certain death had he been an ordinary prince. But he was not. On the way he met and killed the evil Mahishi, a deed that accorded with prophecy, and returned to the palace in the company of gods and goddesses, who had all taken on the forms of tigers or tigresses. Manikandan’s identity as the god Ayyappa was thus revealed. The king had been a father to him and therefore Ayyappa told the king to ask for a boon. Rajasekara requested him to indicate a place where a temple could be built in his honour. Ayyappa drew his bow and let fly an arrow. It fell on the hill where the ascetic Sabari had once lived, where Rama had once passed. This became the site of Sabarimala.

  Rajasekara, of the Kulasekara empire of Kerala, lived in the ninth century, so this legend of Sabarimala is quite recent. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims visit the site every year. Any male, and any female not in her childbearing years, irrespective of caste or creed, can go up to glimpse the god and attain his darshana. Before going up, the pilgrims are required to visit a mosque in Erumeli, a nearby town. And up on the mountain, beside the main temple, there is a shrine to a Muslim saint called Vavar that the pilgrims attend.

  Why then would Hussein and his friends hesitate to take me up to Sabarimala? The answer lies in the recent hardening of attitudes.

  Our taxi climbs a steep hill on a quiet, winding highway. There’s not a soul in sight. On one side of us, a forest valley, the meandering Pampa river sometimes visible. On the other side, thick vegetation; at one point columns of tall rubber trees, at another, straight, sleek-trunked teak. Parallel to us, at the same height, puffs of cloud across the valley. We realize that we are in a cloud ourselves. The visibility is low, some seventy yards at most. Sharp, clear calls of the birds. The Pampa flowing below in the valley.

  The natural Keralan reserve I had seen among my companions now dissolves, and there is, in the small-town companionship of friends, much giggling and teasing. The driver, near retirement—he’s fifty-five—has jet black hair, presumably dyed. He can’t see well but will not wear glasses. He spent fifteen years working in the Gulf, and upon his return, flush with money, bought this car. He also has another job.

  The station master, who generously put me up for the night, giving me a room probably used by someone else, has a nice large two-storey house. But it has such rudimentary furniture as would suit a mud house, giving me the impression that nothing more can be afforded for the time being.

  In olden days the journey to Sabarimala was undertaken on foot, through the forest. Legend has it that those who had not observed the preparatory rituals would be picked off by the tigers and leopards. But now there is this road, smooth except for the odd interruption, which takes us straight to the town of Pampa at the foot of Sabarimala.

  The town has numerous “hotels,” canteens roofed with thatch for the pilgrims to rest at and purchase refreshments. Two of them are open but almost empty. In the distance, rows of public toilets, one rupee per head, as a large sign says.

  The place has not been cleaned since the last pilgrims left about a month ago. Litter lies all over, plastic and paper of all kinds. There is a stench of rotting fruit. The alleys between the hotels serve as garbage dumps, and the ground is covered with
animal turd. It’s not obvious at first what animal is responsible, then comes a braying sound accompanied by rhythmic groans, and we realize that it’s donkey turd around us and a copulation is in progress. The donkeys are used for carrying sand for building in the area, and perhaps also for carrying up pilgrims.

  There are flies in abundance. The pilgrims may have left, but the flies have only multiplied. And how they cling.

  Two of my companions now spend an hour hiring a tractor to take us up the mountain. A noisy tractor with four chattering people going up to a pilgrimage site somehow doesn’t sound attractive to me. I tell my companions that I prefer to hike up. The time factor is mentioned to deter me, but I persist, saying they have already wasted an hour. Finally the station master and I walk up with a guide, the other two drive away ahead of us.

  There are canteens, now empty, to either side of us as we walk, the path littered with plastic wrappers, paper, cardboard, juice boxes. But the climb is relentlessly steep, so that one has to rest. After a mile or so, the track flattens, and there are fewer stalls around. The land drops steeply away on either side here. The guide points to a ravine, saying, Sabari peed there once with such great force that the land gave way. There is indeed a fast-moving stream below; I don’t know if it signifies anything. All around us, green dense forest. There are sounds in the bushes and trees—birds, wildfowl, a brown furry-tailed thing of which only the tail is glimpsed, a red and black squirrel. The trees are huge, the red earth soft. Two stones, one large and one small, are kept in an enclosure, and they symbolize the story that Sabari was once turned into a stone by a rishi, until Rama on his journey in the forest came upon her and released her. I have not been able to corroborate these stories about Sabari since. Across the valleys, other mountains. No sign of habitation, but an electric cable has discreetly followed us and becomes visible. After a couple of miles, tube lights appear at regular intervals on the trees to light the way of the pilgrims in the dark. The sight of thousands walking, clad in black, carrying two bundles each, chanting to Lord Ayyappa must be inspiring, electricity and juice boxes notwithstanding.