I remember the morning when my razor blade had made a cut on the wart, which bled a little. Suma thought it was a mole, a sign of luck, and it seemed to excite her while we made love. It was many days later, in bed with me one night, that she asked, ‘Do you think this is contagious?’
‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘It’s just a wart.’
‘I was wondering . . .’
‘I’m positive it isn’t.’
‘Still it is better to remove it. We ought to be telling Aechchu Menon.’
We forgot this conversation. Aechchu Menon was the young surgeon, whose clinic was six or seven miles away. He lived close by, a mere mile if you took the bridle path over the hill and the stretch of paddy, but quite some distance by road. I could have walked over to his house, but had felt reluctant. I was confident that my body, the child of gentle generations, would get back its wholeness through the benediction of leaf and root. In my house there was a crypt-like chamber where much wisdom had been stored away, inscribed on palm leaves; there, one day, I searched for the cure which would rid me of my excrescence. The sage Dhanvantari had laid it down; I walked towards the stream beside which were the dense herbal beds. I plucked the leaves and roots I needed and brought them home.
When Suma saw the green pulp of the medicament over the wart, she said, ‘I’d rather you got it scissored away.’
Unni, my eight-year-old, overheard her and seemed upset. I drew him close.
‘Don’t scissor it away,’ he said.
‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.
‘It will hurt.’
‘As you wish,’ I said, and smiled. ‘We shall try these medicaments.’
These snatches of memory come alive without sequence . . . Now the wart had grown large, with a glistening scab around its stem. One night, making love, I found Suma’s play reluctant and her climax impersonal. Suma who lay with her eyes closed seemed far away. Something told me that she had made love not to me but to my other self, the one without the wart, an adulterous fantasy which sank me in despair. I sought to get back to her with a show of concern.
‘Suma,’ I said. ‘Are you not well?’
‘I’m all right,’ she said, ‘just tired.’
‘Shall we tell Aechchu Menon?’
‘There is no need.’
‘Shall I give you one of my potions?’
‘No,’ she said, and turned away, a gesture the import of which I had no desire to understand. These bouts of distemper passed, and I revived . . . Ours was a country mansion, a granary fortress a hundred years old. Our estate had dwindled, but there was enough to ensure a life of leisure and contemplation. I did not know the extent of the lands nor how much grain they yielded, but Chaaththan, the head serf kept count of things for me as had his father for mine. Suma disapproved of this, complaining often of my ineptitude, but I would tell her that Chaaththan knew better. Everyday I would rise early and bathe, and say my beads, and sit down to spin. Unni would soon be off to school and Suma to the kitchen; when I had spun for the day, I would wander over the extensive lands that lay around our house, taking in its compassionate noontide, its gentle browning of leaves, its bird noises and the ancestral camaraderie of its snakes. Towards the far south of the compound was the giant banyan and the barren patch where my fathers had been cremated. Here I would sit and marvel; soon it would be time to eat and then to lie down for a little sleep in the afternoon. In the evening I would take Unni for a long walk which ended in the temple of Shiva, where the priest would have kept for Unni his share of the consecrated offering, the palm sugar and fruit and coconut. Thus were my days spent in peace.
During one such visit to the temple, Unni stood for a long time before the idol, his eyes closed and palms joined. He opened his eyes when the old priest came up with the offering and tapped him on his shoulder.
‘Should we watch the waterfowl?’ I asked as we stepped out of the temple.
‘Yes,’ said Unni.
This too was another ritual of ours, a secret covenant; we would sit on the stone steps of the temple tank, their sunset granite warm, and the face of water mystic, the migrant waterfowl seared furrows of phosphorescence across it. As usual, we were alone.
We heard the last gongs from the temple; the sanctum was being closed. Unni had lain on the stone, his head on my lap and was soon asleep in the gentle tank breezes. I let him sleep on; the moon had risen when he got up, and the mist was falling. On our way back I asked him, ‘Unni, you prayed long today. What did you ask the Lord?’
‘To make me a good child,’ he said.
‘And what else?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s a secret.’
‘It doesn’t have to be a secret, Unni. What’s it?’
‘I shouldn’t tell it to anyone, or it won’t come true.’
‘Not really,’ I coaxed him. ‘It doesn’t always have to be so.’
‘Well then,’ he said. ‘I asked the Lord to take your wart away.’
Involuntarily I felt below my lower lip. The wart had grown, its hem of ooze become wider. When we got home, Suma said reproachfully, ‘You’ve kept the child out in the cold so long. The mist is condensing.’
The next evening Unni complained of a sore throat. Suma did not fail to remind me of my negligence.
‘Suma,’ I said, ‘children do catch these colds. A little soup of pepper should make him all right.’
‘I suppose you would like the cold to become a fever.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Can’t you show him to a doctor?’
I didn’t have a car, and had I walked Unni all the way to Aechchu Menon’s house in the evening, surely his cold would get worse; for it would be well past sundown by the time the doctor returned home, the dew would be falling thick over the hill. There were of course the herbs, but Suma was insistent.
‘Let the child stay home,’ I said. ‘I could go and get the medicine from the doctor.’
‘Forget it,’ said Suma. ‘I’ll make the pepper water.’
‘But Suma,’ I pleaded, ‘this is too trivial an illness to call the doctor over.’
‘Who’s arguing? If that’s the way you feel, you don’t have to call him.’
She spoke with sullen vehemence; silently I went out of her presence and set out for the doctor’s house. I waded across the stream, and reaching the hilltop, stood awhile to breathe in the free breezes; the sun had set and the sky was lit with a scarlet afterglow. The village was quiet, its winds free; the hill stood like the incarnate Shiva, and the birds flitted against the red, wind-blown clouds that were his matted hair. But soon amidst these hills and sunsets I would be enslaved by fear and my sorrow imprisoned without communion. To you who watch the rise of the hill and the calm of the sunset, I say this: fear will return to hunt again amid the trees of this hillside, that is why these brief moments of communing are precious . . . As I went downhill I felt the wart with a new sense of foreboding.
Aechchu Menon was back from his clinic already.
‘I finished early today,’ he said.
I sat uneasily in a chair in front of him. The young doctor made me conscious of my crumbling manor and my ignorance; he was the son of a family of parvenus, the first man in our countryside to have mastered the medicine of the English.
‘Doctor,’ I said, ‘Unni has a cold.’
‘A cold? That’s nothing to be upset about,’ he said with a smile. ‘I hope he isn’t running a fever.’
‘No.’
Aechchu Menon went into an ante-room, returning soon with a strip of packaged pills. I took the pills from him and slipped them into my pocket and said hesitantly. ‘You must pardon me if I cause you inconvenience, but it’s because of Suma’s insistence. Could you come home?’
‘Certainly. We’ll drive down.’
I felt guilty about the drive in particular, because unlike the trek over the hill and across the paddies, the road was a long detour. Soon we were on our way . . . Suma met us on the doorstep. She
apologized to the doctor, and he mumbled a pleasantry. Aechchu Menon followed Suma into the bedroom and I went in after. Unni lay under a blanket. He woke up and smiled at us.
‘That’s a naughty child,’ said Aechchu Menon. ‘Did you play about in the water?’
‘No,’ said Unni, ‘I just sat watching the waterfowl.’
‘It was the mist,’ said Suma. I sensed the secret bitterness in her voice. Aechchu Menon laughed.
‘My kinsman here,’ he said, bantering, ‘believes in remedies of rain and dew.’
Words rose within me only to ebb away; what could have I said about the gentle realm of leaf and root, of the secret covenant between father and son listening to the gongs of Shiva and watching the waterfowl streak through the dusking water?
Unni had fever that night. The fever lasted five days. In his fever, he threw his arms around me and said, ‘Father, you won’t let them cut up your face, will you?’
‘Why do you keep thinking of it, son?’
‘I’m afraid.’
‘If it makes you afraid, we shall not let them operate.’
‘We shall get medicine from the hillside.’
‘We’ll do that, little one. Now go to sleep.’
Today, I recall my words in sorrow, and know, my son, wherein I had failed you. You were pure and young, ignorant of the ways of the microbe; I ought to have armed you with that knowledge . . .
Suma had barred me from nursing Unni. ‘Stay away,’ she said. ‘Do you want the child to catch the disease?’
My hand rose to my wart, it was sticky with the ooze. I withdrew to the bath and washed the ooze away, then looked in the mirror. The wart had grown the size of a gooseberry. Unni got well in a fortnight. Aechchu Menon had visited him everyday during his illness, and even after he recovered made it a practice to visit us and enquire after the child.
The wart was now growing faster. One night I woke in great pain. The ducts of the wart had given away; I had the sense of all enormous slush, like the yellow ooze of riven rocks. I felt the wart, and realized that it had grown alarmingly. When it was morning I made my way to the hillside and plucked the leaves I needed, pulled out the rarest of roots, and together ground them into medicament invoking the grace of Dhanvantari. But now the wart seemed to suck in the very medicament, to feed on it and grow. Soon it grew to the size of a lemon. If I dropped my gaze, I could see its shadowy contours; the pace of growth quickened. I realized too that though Aechchu Menon kept visiting us he talked of the wart no more.
Imperceptibly a change had come in my relations with people. It was a curious idler first, a man I encountered in the village library who stared hard at me; then another and another and another, until I found myself driven gently but relentlessly into a prison of their awareness of me. Still I could have carried the wart, now as big as a tomato, in the hammock of my lip, and trudged to the hospital in the town, but barring my way was all that I and my forebears had lived by. And now Suma began to stop my son coming near me.
‘It’s a disease,’ she told Unni. ‘A contagion.’
I chose not to hear my son’s reply, the strength for that knowing had gone from me, and slowly I climbed up to the panelled attic, which would henceforth be my home . . . One night in the attic, lying on the ancient cot of rosewood, I communed with the ancestral shades around me. My fathers, I said, these riversides and mountain slopes bear witness to your freedom, and yet what has befallen me, your offspring? You bequeathed to me the precious palm-leaf with its arcana of healing, and yet why have these leaves and roots failed to prevail over this invading spore? In the aged panelling, and in the walls of our sprawling home, they awoke and listened and answered me with a great tide of sadness.
I lay long thus in the stream of my fathers, when I was aware of someone moving stealthily through the attic’s dark. It was Suma. I rose and moved towards her. She had an earthen pot in her hands.
I took the cold bowl from her and smelt the aromas of Dhanvantari’s medicaments.
‘Merciful Lord,’ I said.
‘I got them from the vaid. This is his prescription. Take it.’
A multitude of beneficient things were within me, they lit me with cool and gentle lights; so she had gone to the vaid despite her awe of the apothecary, she had come up to the attic overcoming her revulsion of the giant carbuncle that sat on my lip. I threw my arms around her; she did not resist, but when I bent over to kiss her, she said, ‘We should not. It is not for me, but for our son that I deny you so.’
‘Suma,’ I said, ‘this is no contagion. This is a wart.’
‘It’s a wart,’ she said.
‘Come,’ I said.
She stood reluctant in the dark, then barred me gently. When I took her face in my palms, her cheeks were wet.
‘Oh, God!’ I said.
With a sob she came down on her knees, and unable to lift her up, I sat down beside her.
‘Unni does not eat,’ she said. ‘He’s pining away.’
My memories fade here, it is merciful they do; I remember that unspoken words moved on like a procession of termites from me to her and from us to our child, until the termite tracks were deserted and there were nothing but the attic’s dark and the earthen bowl which held Dhanvantari’s gentle medicament. I sat awhile to gaze into the vessel and be overcome again by weariness and sleep. I woke again, the moon had risen in the window. The ancestral shades on my walls were now vibrant. I rose and paced my prison with the righteousness of my fathers. It was then that the moon shone in on an ancient razor’s edge. My great-uncle Koppunni had shaven himself with this blade and here amid derelict artifacts it had lain these long years. The knife blazed, and I remembered my great-uncle. We were gentle and pious people, but our genealogy was punctuated by proud and regal ancestors as well. Koppunni Nair was one such. He had stridden the hillsides in the rain, and grown to power in the green nutrients of the recurring seasons. I could see him sit down before the serf-barber for the ritual tonsure; this was the knife, on no other did the barber use it; it cleansed the scalp round his tuft and the base of his phallus, so that he was shorn anew into nakedness and would romp down the hillsides to seek out wedded matrons and in them sow the seeds of bastard sovereignty; and their children, in the unknowing of their ancestry, would chase and mate with one another. The wildness of it roused me, and I went to the shelf in the panelling and picked up the knife glistening in the moon. I did not know what followed; perhaps the knife and its power compelled me. The suicidal violence of my great- uncle welled up within me along with the futile resistance of the gentle and the pious, and in that great mingling I held the wart with my left hand and with the right drew the knife along its stem.
The swoon must have lasted months. When I came to, it was another season in the skylight. Instinctively, I raised my hand to feel the wart. There it was, defiant and invincible. It was the size of a coconut, and around it, like stalagmite or coral, was glistening scab and fester.
Chaaththan came up to the attic. ‘We had given you up, master.’
‘Chaaththan . . .’
‘What is it, my master?’
I lay for a while in silence, to regain my words.
‘How long,’ I asked at last, ‘did the swoon last?’
‘Three months, master.’
In the corner of the attic I saw heaps of drying herbs and felt their gentle aromas.
‘Have you been nursing me with these?’ I asked.
‘You’ve taught us to minister thus, my master.’
‘Chaaththan . . .’
‘Yes, my master.’
The words as they formed inside me sounded portentuous, I held them back awhile, then spoke them trembling.
‘Chaaththan,’ I said, ‘where is Unni?’
Chaaththan did not reply. He rose from the cross-beam of the doorframe he was sitting on, and slowly walked to a cupboard in the panelling, and took out a sealed letter from a casket within.
‘Here, master,’ he said, ‘this is the mistress’s
letter.’
‘The mistress’s letter?’ I repeated, incredulously.
Chaaththan looked away and was silent; I tore open the cover and read; in disbelief I skated back and forth over the rounded script. I am going, she had written. You and I can only console ourselves that such is our destiny. I am going away to a far country with Aechchu Menon. I shall put no more in words, lest it cause you more pain. I ask your forgiveness, so does he . . . Unni will live in my ancestral home, my brothers will look after him. Afflicted as you are, I shall not burden you with his care . . .
Darkness descended on my eyes, and as they cleared, I felt the wart twitch . . . On the walls the ancestral shades had fallen quiet. I looked for Koppunni Nair’s knife, but it was nowhere to be found.
Slowly, like the fading and oncoming of seasons, I experienced a new quiet and a new acceptance. I came down from the attic, and every day at dawn I walked over the grass in the garden wet with the night’s dew. Before the sun was up Chaaththan would come to me with the goings-on in the fields and the orchards, and do the reckoning. After that his young sister-in-law, Naani would bring in the milk, steam a banana for my breakfast, cook for the day, and depart. Sometimes at night, Chaaththan would come up to find out how I was keeping. That was the last thing for the day, after which I was left alone with the wart. The old house sprawled, enormous and cheerless, its rooms far flung, inaccessible like far provinces, where the vermin multiplied and broke the sleep of my fathers with malefic noises . . . The wart grew larger.
The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories Page 20
