Chaaththan’s concern was now slackening, and Naani began slipping up. I questioned her when she turned up after one of her truancies; after much insistence she answered, ‘There was work at home.’
It was folly to question her further, it was folly for me to demand anything, I told myself. I remembered Suma’s great reluctances, the freezing love-play, the nights which gave us the final knowledge of our alienation. I was thinking of Suma again. What at this moment might she be doing? The sun was climbing high, and soon it would be noon, when in the land of her refuge it would perhaps be midnight. Starting out of her sleep now, she was making love again; I sensed the wet of her lips, the felt and unseen breasts, the thighs, and the fair disc of the belly rising to meet the man’s desire again and again. And then the interminable sleep, the interminable nakedness. I must have sat still for a long while, all this smouldering and dying within me. Naani had left.
All day long I chased Suma’s memory with horrendous lust. As the night advanced I quietened, and in its place came a great tenderness for my son, and like a little boy, I cried myself to sleep . . . Early next morning, I walked out of my compound gate and waded into the stream. There were no other bathers, nor any people in sight. I stood naked in the flowing water. Only my face had been claimed by the wart, my body was still mine, and limb by limb, it was sturdy and beautiful.
The wart was now a slab of meat. I felt the burden within as well; in vain I sought a place in my mind where I could rest it awhile. Thus I went one day to the boundary fence, beyond which lay the serfs’ tenements. It was noon already, and I had not eaten since morning. I called out for Naani. She came to the fence.
‘Has Chaaththan gone to the fields?’ I asked her.
‘Yes, my master.’
Naani was now looking hard at the wart.
‘My master,’ she said, ‘it has grown big.’
We stood on either side of the fence, we stood close to each other.
Then I asked her, ‘Naani, why have you stopped coming?’
‘The chores at home,’ she answered without conviction.
We fell silent again.
‘Naani,’ I said, ‘did Chaaththan stop you from coming?’
‘Yes,’ she mumbled.
‘Did he say it was contagious.’
Again, sadly, she nodded.
Naani was young, and beautiful in the manner of aboriginal women, her limbs strong and her skin the deep colour of honey, her lips black and glistening a healthy wet, windblown ringlets about the temples, the hair of an ancient race. Then as I stood looking at her, the wart’s crust cracked and there was a great gush of ooze. Paralyzed, I stood by the fence.
On an impulse, Naani pulled off her upper cloth and held it towards me.
‘Take this, my master,’ she said, ‘and wipe it.’
I took the proferred cloth, her bared breasts now basked in the sun. I wiped the ooze with the fingers and returned her the cloth unsoiled.
‘Naani . . .’
‘Yes, my master?’
‘Will you come?’
She did not reply.
‘Naani . . .’
‘Yes, my master.’
Silence again.
‘Naani . . .’
‘Yes, my master?’
‘Naani,’ I asked her again, ‘will you come to work?’
Quietly she said, ‘I shall.’
I lumbered back into the house and sat behind a fretted casement and waited. I did not have to wait long; I saw her crossing the yard. She entered the room uncertainly and stood before me.
‘Naani . . .’
‘Yes, my master.’
‘Are you repelled?’
I bent my head and averted my gaze, she did not reply.
‘My master,’ she said, ‘when is the mistress coming back?’
‘She is not coming back.’
Naani asked me nothing more; her eyes wandered. about the room, and soon she was aware of nothing but the little things, the cobwebs, the drying peel of banana, the crumpled ball of paper in the corner. She picked a broom and began to sweep.
‘I am back, my master,’ she said. ‘Be at ease.’
‘Naani . . .’
She leaned the broom on the wall and came over to me. I had premeditated nothing that I might tell her, but I found myself saying, ‘I want to bathe. I want a warm bath.’
She moved into the inner rooms, noiselessly. Soon there rose the scents of medicinal oils warming over the hearth. She came back and called me, ‘Your bath is ready, my master.’
I walked towards the bath, and she followed me with the oils and the pulp of gram. She entered the bath after me, and began to rub the oils on my hands and legs.
‘My master!’ said Naani.
I was crying. She pressed my face against her belly, and in my sorrow and dependence I began disrobing her. She pressed me harder against her body’s transluscence of honey. I closed my eyes, and behind the shelter of those lids I was whole and handsome again . . . My eyes closed, I kissed her on her parted lips, my sorrow spilled over her and was spent. The wart twitched.
That night, for the first time in many nights, I slept deep. When I woke up the next morning I found the wart grown inordinately. I could hardly lift my face, and I began walking about the house with my head bent, with the sorrow of a lowly hog. Thus I went to the mirror, and in great pain raised my face to it. As I studied the image, I saw a red slit across the wart, and two black spots. For a moment I was relieved; I thought the wart was sappurating and bursting.
In this renewed hope that day, I plucked more leaves and roots and ground them into medicament. When I spread it round the wart, it smarted as it had never before, and I had the uncanny feeling that it was moving and wriggling. When the medicament dried and peeled away, the wart appeared even larger.
About ten days after Naani had given me the bath, it became difficult for me to hold myself up. When she brought me my milk one morning, I was lying crushed by the weight of my face.
‘Are you in much pain, my master?’ asked Naani.
I made a vain attempt to rise, then gave up and lay down.
‘Let me hold you, my master.’
She held me and propped me against the cushions.
‘I can’t bear this burden anymore,’ I said.
She pressed the palm of her hand between her large breasts, eyes closed; I saw her lips move in prayer. After that she disrobed me gently, and keeping her eyes away from my disfigurement, began caressing my healthy members. A great desire rose in me, swamping the pain and the burden of excrescence; I desired Naani to anoint me, desired that we should anoint each other on the cold tiles of the bath. Soon we were covered with Dhanvantara, the ancient unction of the sage, we went down on the floor like twining serpents. Thus does the unfree man seek freedom, in lust; like the condemned prisoner who spends his last moments not on God but mating with empresses in his fantasy. There occurs one moment when someone peeps into your prison cell and tells you he can cut away the tumid flesh; but you turn away to your roots and leaves, like the condemned one to his empresses; the moment has slipped by, never to occur again . . . I was preparing to make love to Naani when the wart twitched violently, and I fancied I heard a noise like a fish plummeting into water, and a scream of pain rose from Naani.
Piercing through the pus and scab, an enormous phallus had come out of the wart. I fell away, but felt a miraculous power pulling me up. It was the wart, drilling down beneath my scalp and holding me up in an unseen lasso. I found myself lying on Naani once again, my face on her underbelly. I felt the black phallus rise; the wart was taking Naani!
I am appalled by the enormity of my sin as I recollect how the wart had risen and fallen over Naani, carrying her to a tumultuous climax, and how I had shared the experience with the wart. I had till then considered the wart an alien impurity, but from now I was to know that this thing which I had fostered with nutrients of my body and folly of my piety, was the flesh of my flesh. The interminable orgasm
caused a sleep to come over me, and when I awoke my limbs had grown cold on the tiles of the bath. I sat up with great effort. The cheerless dusk and the cold tiles filled me with a sense of derelict things. Then I realized that Naani might catch a chill if she slept long on the floor.
‘Naani,’ I said, shaking her, ‘wake up! You’ll freeze.’
The violence of the orgasm had apparently exhausted her, and, lips slack, thighs apart, the palms of her hands resting on her breasts, and blood and ooze drying below her navel, Naani slept. Then once again the wart’s lust became mine. My senses spun, and I drifted into a swoon.
It must have lasted many days; it was a strong stench that awakened me. I sat up and looked at Naani; nothing had changed in the tableau of rape: the parted lips and thighs, the palms resting on the breasts. I touched her thighs, the flesh had begun to rot, and as I took my hand away, I heard an eerie laugh like the cackle of a woodpecker. I was alone with a corpse and its mortuary odour. The unseen woodpecker laughed again. Fear gave me the energy to rise and move; I went up to the mirror to take a look at the wart. It hung from my lower lip like a sea turtle. The red patch I had seen and which I had mistaken for an inflammation and possible decline, now opened up into a mouth, and the black dots into a pair of eyes, vampire lips drooling spit and pus, and little eyes winking at me from the mirror. The lips moved now, and once again I heard the spectral cackle of the woodpecker. As I listened intently the cackle defined itself into words of frenzied and obscene abuse.
Now the last spaces of my freedom vanished, the spaces I had conjured with my desperate lust. The prison closed round me once again, and I was left alone with the wart, my prison warden. And now the wart began to communicate to me its commands, helplessly I obeyed. Whenever I failed to decipher the woodpecker’s cackle, the wart squirted pus on me. With patient industry I trained myself for this new listening, and soon I was lost to the speech of free men. Tugging with secret reins at my mind, the wart now put me to work. There was a lumber room on top, and one night the wart commanded me to climb up there. It was pitch dark inside, but pointers of a denser darkness led me on. Disturbed out of their ancient trances, tarantulas spiralled dizzily up my legs and down and away. The wart directed me to rummage in the junk. I thrust my fingers amid sodden and rusted things, amid hidden venoms, until at last I touched cold steel. It was Koppunni Nair’s razor. I could not figure out how it had got to the lumber room. The wart directed me to pick it up. We climbed down the lumber room with the weapon.
There was a pall of mist outside, the moonlight full of disquiet. I remembered my fingers tightening round the handle, I remember the first paces of a murderous sleepwalk; then the long swoon took over. When I awoke the knife was still in my hand, and I was covered with black and red stains. The wart asked me to get up: we walked to the old well. It directed me to fling the knife into the well. As the knife shot through to the depths and pierced the deep lens of water, I sent up a prayer to my ancestors. The wart crouched and listened, and desecrated my prayers. I sought consolation in the knowledge that the wart was still my excrescence, that it had once been a lowly knot of ducts on my lip. At that the woodpecker’s cackle spoke, not in my ear but within my mind, you transgress the law.
Wherein do I transgress? I asked.
Memory, the wart said. Memory is a crime against history.
I spoke with sadness into my mind, you were born of my flesh. Why did you take away my freedom, the freedom of the one who gave you your being?
The wart writhed in great rage, and flung searing lances of pain into my bloodstream.
Spare me, spare me, I cried out.
When you speak to me hereafter, the wart said, you must call me your brother.
Brother, I said.
Not that way, the wart said.
Teach me how? I asked.
In this manner, the wart said. It gave me the knowledge of willing servitude. Brotherhood was a word of freedom, but from now on, words would change, and so would everything that came from the sacred grottos of the mind.
That night the wart ordered me to the gate of our manor: from some distance away came the noises of people. There were policemen with red berets on the rampage. I remembered the knife and the blood on my palms; a great distress came over me, and I asked the wart, where is my loyal serf, and where is his wife?
You need not know, the wart said severely.
I need not, I repeated. Brother, I called the wart, in a snivelling of the mind. I accepted my sovereign.
I knew the wart smiled. Good, it said. It’s time to feed. Move on to the bath.
The stench in the bath had grown so dense that it was the colour of the moss of death, of a death unredeemed by rebirth. I dragged myself inside. The wart asked me to lie down on Naani’s corpse once again for the funereal mating. The wart kissed the black parted lips, then I heard a noise like the snip—snipping of barber’s scissors. Naani’s lips vanished, I knew the acid taste of rot. A skeletal grin flashed where the lips had been, soon the eyes and cheeks and nose disappeared, and then there was a noise of the crushing of bones and of their softening in the alchemy of spit. Then followed the monotonous slurping of treacle. When it was over, I was given the command to rise.
I stood on the tiles of the bath. Naani lay headless at my feet, her thighs apart and her hands folded over the swollen nipples. Like a delicate pall over it all was the patina of mold. From all over her underbelly came fearsome secretions, while within it grew the foetus of death.
To the mirror now, the wart said. Now I saw the wart had sprouted supple tendrils, hands of the wart!
God, I said.
No sooner had I uttered that word, the javelins burned through my blood and my endurance gone, I cried out in supplication, brother, brother! The javelins were called back.
Brother, my just and all-powerful brother! I chanted. The wart was pleased.
With its new-grown hands the wart began to hunt; it gave chase to wild cats and the bandicoots, from the lumber rooms it caught the bats, preyed on them. The headless corpse had by now become a frothing, bubbling puddle. The wart mated with it again and again.
One night my thoughts dwelt on Suma and Unni with an intensity I had never before experienced. I sought them in the scalding darkness of my sorrow, I floundered and fell, and, wept. The wart listened. Once in every man’s lifetime, once perhaps, his sorrow rises to enormity, and like the will of a king, sweeps away everything before it. This was my moment of my grief and power. The wart stood by and watched. When my lamenting subsided, I waited for the punishing javelins. They never came. Now the stench too had gone; after one last union the wart had licked up the puddle with great gluttony. The javelins never came, but I was to be punished yet; all nutrients were withheld from my bloodstream. Within me grew a hunger like an unseen fire that licks through mountain crevices. I began dwindling fast, even as the wart grew by leaps and bounds; I became a mere appendage. Then one day the wart battered down the doors of our chamber of palm-leaf manuscripts and sought the arcana of Dhanvantari. The wart was then lost in study for a while, after which it went out to the hillside for leaves and roots. I watched it make the medicament and lay it thick around the stem of my dimunitive body. There was searing pain, followed by numbness and sleep.
I woke up amid flaming dandelions, the sun was bright overhead and the wind blew with the aroma of living plants. I realized I was in my garden. I saw an enormous creature roll in from behind the house. It was the wart! The medicaments had worked, and I had shrivelled and fallen off the wart’s great body. There was a weird change in the scale of things, the grass blades were like towers and dragonflies descended on them like airships. I had shrunk to the size of a worm.
The wart rolled about in the garden. The sun climbed to a blazing noon, then set and rose again. The spiders hunted amid the grass. The wart was growing and changing. Its black hide shone. It had four legs, great flapping ears, a trunk and a pair of tusks. The wart had become an elephant.
Down the h
ill came a band of brahmins, and saw the elephant frolicking in the waters of our stream.
‘A truly majestic elephant,’ they said.
The temple could use him for the procession.’
‘Whose elephant is it?’
‘Koppunni’s.’
‘Koppunni was indeed a connoisseur.’
‘Look this way, elephant . . .’
In my worm’s voice thin like a pupal thread I cried out, pious brahmins, this is no elephant, this is a microbe. I shall tell you its tale. But the brahmins were gone. The wind rose and the dead leaves rustled.
The elephant took the offerings of the temple, the fruit and the palm sugar and the tender fronds of the coconut, and on its back glittered the idol of the temple god. The sorrows of the pious and the gentle were forgotten, and so too the death scent of the merciful woman. But I had my freedom, the freedom of the castaway. The wart had given me my freedom, the wart, my prison warden. Then like a deluge came the awareness of the living force which fulfilled itself as much in the toxic microbe as it did in the seeds of life. Skies unfolded in my tiny head, and in them shone a benevolent sun.
Om bhoor bhuva swawaha
Tat savitur varenniyum,
Bhargo devasya dheemahi
Dheeyo yonah prachotayat
Almighty Light, pervader of the earth and the sky, of the gross and the subtle, illumine my intellect . . .
Once again, the leaf and the root of the gentle exuberate in the bounty of the sun.
It was in my folly, my Lord God, that I forgot your perennial becoming. You are the prisoner’s door.
Translated from Malayalam by the author
The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories Page 21
