by Anita Nair
‘The woman has no name,’ Sara interrupted him. ‘And yet you claim her tainted blood is yours. Have you no shame to make your mummy weep? And all for a rich girl’s love, Abraham, I swear. It stinks, and by the way, so do you.’
From Flory Zogoiby came a thin assenting wail. But Abraham’s argument was not complete. Consider this stolen crown, wrapped in rags, locked in a box, for four hundred years and more. If it was stolen for simple gain, would it not have been sold off long ago?
‘Because of secret pride in the royal link, the crown was kept; because of secret shame, it was concealed. Mother, who is worse? My Aurora who does not hide the Vasco connection, but takes delight; or myself, born of the fat old Moor of Granada’s last sighs in the arms of his thieving mistress—Boabdil’s bastard Jew?’
‘Evidence,’ Flory whispered in reply, a mortally wounded adversary pleading for the death-blow. ‘Only supposition has been given; where are hard-fast facts?’ Inexorable Abraham asked his penultimate question.
‘Mother, what is our family name?’
When she heard this, Flory knew the coup-de-grace was near. Dumbly, she shook her head. To Moshe Cohen, whose old friendship he would, that day, forsake for ever, Abraham threw down a challenge. ‘The Sultan Boabdil after his fall was known by one sobriquet, and she who took his crown and jewels in a dark irony took the nickname also. Boabdil the Misfortunate: that was it. Anyone here can say that in the Moor’s own tongue?’
And the old chandler was obliged to complete the proof. ‘El-zogoybi.’
Gently, Abraham set down the crown beside defeated Flory; resting his case.
‘At least he fell for a pushy girl,’ Flory said emptily to the walls. ‘I had that much influence while he was still my son.’
‘Better you go now,’ said Sara to pepper-odorous Abraham. ‘Maybe when you marry you should take the girl’s name, why not? Then we can forget you, and what difference between a bastard Moor and a bastard Portugee?’
‘A bad mistake, Abie,’ old Moshe Cohen commented. ‘To make an enemy of your mother; for enemies are plentiful, but mothers are hard to find.’
R. Prasanna Venkatesh/Wilderfile
Sesame Seeds, Flowers, Water
Lalithambika Antherjanam
This extract is taken from Cast Me Out If You Can, published by Stree.
Amme! I have come back. It is your second death anniversary today. The handful of sacrificial rice I hold in my hand was invoked from the heavens into the sacred tree and then into this darbha grass. I mix it with sesame seeds, flowers and water and offer it to you. I pick up some more sesame seeds and flowers, then water and sandalwood paste. Will you accept this offering? For we have nothing else to give you now.
Have we really nothing else to give? I have thought about this ever since the day you left us. What if I pour all my memories into this offering of sesame seeds and water …? Have you really left us, Amme …? I feel you are always with us now. When you were alive, I did many things of which you disapproved, certain that you would forgive me. But now I pause before I do or say anything and ask myself: Would you have condoned this, could you have borne it? And so, Amme, I have at last become the kind of daughter you wanted me to be.
I often wanted to write about you. Would you have liked me to? You had kept the article and the poem I had written about Achan with such care, I found them in the sheaf of papers you handed over to me at the end. My horoscope was there too, and a notebook that contained pieces I had written as a child. I hope you will forgive my temerity—among the papers that I have collected to hand over to my children and grandchildren, I want to include this article, in which I recall you with deep emotion.
Is it possible to write about you? No, not really. This is not because I consider it difficult to express the greatness of motherhood. I think that era is over, and motherhood is no longer held in high esteem. There are mothers who behave as if their children were mistakes that they should not have made. Still, everyone has a mother, for the age of test-tube babies has not yet arrived. There are all kinds of mothers, from those who love and chastise their children to those who expect to be compensated for the agony of childbirth. Motherhood is an eternal truth, and also an ordinary occurrence. Why then should a sixty-four-year-old woman like me mourn a mother who was over eighty when she died? I do not merely mourn you, Amme. I think, and remember, and the memories go back over six decades. I put them down here, Amme, as they spill out of my mind—for your daughter has this unfortunate habit of wanting to record everything she thinks and feels, since she happens to be a writer. I know you cannot read this with your mortal eyes. But I am certain that you will understand why I have to do this. After all, you told me yourself once that death opens the doors to all realms of knowledge.
I know of the deep emotional bond that exists between a mother and a child, even while the child is in the womb, for I am myself a mother of eight. We look forward to our children with intense hope and longing, and communicate with them powerfully at many levels—through contemplation, sight, touch, and the processes of thought. They claim us totally. We live in a state of being dominated by prayer and hope, almost like penance. Even when a woman conceives after having decided to have no more children, the baby begins to enchant the mother once it quickens in the womb. I was not your eldest child, Amme. But since I was born after you had lost two babies, I became dearer to you than if I had been your first. You always told me that the sex of the baby you carried within you never troubled you and that you did not care whether it was a boy or a girl, even when you ate the butter blessed in the temple, or chanted the special prayers that would ensure you bore a son. You wanted a baby so that you could be a mother, that was all. You wanted the child to live, to be intelligent. That is all you asked for when you prostrated yourself before the Devi, half an hour before the baby was born.
And so you had a child, a girl. She was not as fair-skinned as you, nor was she pretty. But she tried very hard to be clean and presentable. Although I did not fulfill many of your prayers and hopes, I did give you satisfaction in one respect: I was intelligent, and you always said I had a prodigious memory. If I was told to learn four verses from the Manipravalam, I learned and recited fifteen. I learned everything you taught me, Amme, and this is still the basis of all I know (none of the bits of useless knowledge I gathered stayed with me). When I was a child, we used to recite akshara slokams and samasyas to each other. Whenever you told me a story, you asked me to repeat it to you. But you never imagined, even in your dreams, that I would become a writer, nor did you think of making me one.
All your life, you were afraid of other people, of what they would think or say. It made you very sad when I said it did not matter what they said or thought. But you were never afraid of imparting knowledge to me. My childhood companions were the books you gave me, the newspapers and magazines you filed away for me: Bhashaposhini, Lakshmi Bai, Rasikaranjani, Atmaposhini. You arranged them in meticulous order, from the earliest issues. You even kept issues of Swadeshabhimani for me because it was the paper that sparked a revolution in your youth. Its courageous editor and his family were held in great respect because they had opposed the government fearlessly and been punished for it. Indeed, the matter was discussed so passionately at home that your three-year-old daughter was heard to exclaim, ‘What a pity the editor was exiled!’ You kept copies of prohibited books like Parappuram and Udayabhanu for me until I was old enough to read them. Was it because your daughter had access to such books that she later walked so easily on dangerous terrain and became a rebel?
You talked to me about Sita and Savitri, Yashoda and Shilavathi.
We played in the forest with the little Krishna and the incidents of the Manipravalam filled my thoughts. Dreams, imagination and expression were my world. I did not even recognize the occasional assaults reality made on that enchanted world for what they were.
As I grew up, I also watched you tremble in fear. Your very nature was to be frightened of ‘don’ts.’ I ha
d long, thick hair like yours. I remember how sad you were that you could not weave jasmines and roses into my braid. In those days, it was a great sin for an unmarried namboodiri girl even to think of wearing fragrant flowers in her hair. Only her husband could put flowers in her hair, on the fourth day of the wedding, when they were alone together for the first time.
Tradition dominated you and you were terrified of calumny. You were afraid of the disapproval of your elders and teachers. I wore a skirt and blouse at home, but you made me take them off when we visited my uncle’s house and insisted that I wear only a palm-leaf konam and a fine mundu, because you feared the grandmothers. You longed to send me to school, but could not. When your grandfather’s brother was alive, he had sent you to school. No one had ever dared oppose him, for he was a powerful person with the authority to function as a smartan or a vaidikan. However, the school you went to was reserved for upper-caste children, in the precincts of the temple. Life was very different for your daughter, who was born in this forest fortress and who had to spend her life within it.
Every day, when my lessons were over, I came to you. We had only each other for company: me for you and you for me. Do you remember one of the amusing games we used to play? You recited a stanza and I had to guess the poet from its style. Then I would recite something and you would guess who had written it. And so they all joined us in our room: Venmani, Sivolli, Oravankara, Naduvam, Kunhukuttan, Ulloor, Vallathol. I recognized most of the poets from the nature of the poem. You sometimes recited one of your own verses, or one of Achan’s, and I did not guess correctly. So the days went by.
Then Muthassan died. Achan became the head of the household. When Muthassi died, you became the head of the household. When I think of it now, I want to laugh and cry at the same time—how could a timid, submissive, docile woman like you command a huge extended family like ours, with its innumerable servants, guests and relatives? It was an unbearably sad situation for you. You had to cook and serve two or three paras of rice at every meal. No one was allowed to enter the kitchen except you. And if you left it, you could only go as far as the room of the deities. And of course there were babies every year. Even with a child in the womb and another at your breast, you worked tirelessly.
Our ways separated eventually. You went to the kitchen and I to the reading room. My reading material changed. I read day and night, pondered, dreamed. For the first time, our opinions began to differ. Over the next few years, you did not understand me, nor I you. I had the courage to rebel against the customs you feared. Even if you broke with tradition without meaning to, you trembled for the consequences. Do you remember how you screamed and ran away, the day you almost collided with the priest?
You had to rush all the time from the kitchen to the nalukettu in the course of your housework, a distance of about a furlong. One day, Kittan Potti entered with the rice from the naivedyam and, in your hurry, you almost ran into him. Both of you were terrified. Hardly aware of what you did, you screamed, ‘Ayyo—’ and ran away. You were worried. Had a man other than your husband touched you? Had he seen your face? That agonized ‘Ayyo’ was part of you.
You liked me to write, but I was careful never to show you what I wrote because I was convinced that I was doing something wrong. And I was worried that you would not like the things I wrote about. Once, the teacher who coached me at home slapped me because my sums were wrong. He then discovered a heap of poems I had written. After Achan and his brothers laughed over them, they gave them to you. You kept them under your mattress, to read them later. I hunted them out and burned them. You said sadly to me, ‘So many people read them, and you still wanted to hide them from me.’ I thought the whole world was my enemy. Whenever my opinions differed from yours, I was careful to keep the fact secret from you. I could not help it, Amme! I wanted another sort of life, with more freedom. I longed to move from the shade of the anterjanam’s umbrella into the bright sunlight. You must have grieved very deeply when I finally did so, you, who screamed because Kittan Potti almost touched you! What hurt you most of all must have been my insistence on doing what I wanted to do, regardless of what others thought.
I often think of what one of the well-known writers of the younger generation said: ‘Whenever I see my mother look as bewildered as a doe that has given birth to a monkey, it makes me laugh.’ I cannot help it, Amme, the laughter is part of the dilemma I find myself in.
I remember the blend of shyness and pain with which you posed for a photograph when Achan dragged you to attend a meeting of the anterjanam’s association. When Achan broke your bell metal bangles to give you golden ones instead, you sobbed uncontrollably, as if he had broken your mangalyasutram. That day, you did not eat till he gave you permission to wear a bell metal bangle with each of your gold ones.
I remember how you went to Kollam with Achan when he was sick, in a closely curtained car, and how, when you arrived there, you jumped into a well to have a dip because you believed you had been polluted by the journey. Tanks or wells were all the same to you—you were called a water creature when you were a child.
The day I abandoned the system of seclusion, you beat your head and wept. You lamented as if your daughter had died, or been cast out …
So many memories stab my heart. Slowly, you became used to it all, and you came to terms with the times you lived in. You did many things that you once thought were sins. Once you even said to me, ‘I hurt you so much that day, I believed I was concerned about what was good for you. It doesn’t matter, everyone is happy now.’ It doesn’t matter, Amme. I hurt you very much too, and both of us shared the pain. And I think I was not hurt as deeply as you were. What matters is that we have the satisfaction that we achieved Sree Narayana Guru’s ideal: ‘What you do for your own happiness should ultimately make everyone happy.’
After Achan died, you lived like an ascetic, and now your mind was entirely on your children. Eventually, all human beings became your children. Your affection flowed equally over animals and birds, trees, and creepers. You would often give the rice served on your plate to someone who you thought was hungrier than you, and starve. You would tell us that it was against the rules of a fast to cook and eat again. When I was a child, I saw you observe five consecutive days of fasting because they happened to fall in a row—Monday, Ekadashi, Pradosham, full moon and Sivaratri, in that order. On all those days, you cooked and served the usual three paras of rice. All sorts of people enjoyed your hospitality—fugitives, escaped convicts, high officials and representatives of the people, the rich and the poor. The local schoolchildren wept bitterly when they heard of your death, and someone remarked, ‘Our “care centre” is gone.’
I wanted some of your poems to be published for my sashtiabdapurthi, or sixtieth birthday. By that time, many of the pieces you had composed as a child had disappeared. Poems were for you flowers for the prayers that blossomed everyday. Poems of praise occurred to you when you stood before the deity for your daily worship, with your eyes closed. You forgot some of these verses later, others stayed in your memory. Many were in praise of the deities—Kasi Vishwanathan, Annapurna, Rama; but they wee not only on devotional subjects. You wrote a hymn that extolled the value of principles that went beyond religion and caste in your eighty-second year, and even recorded it for us.
You were born in the month of Medam, when the star Rohini coincided with Akshaya Triteeya. We completed the last day of that year’s Saptaham in time for your sathabhishekam. When we all sat together that day, four full generations—you, your children, your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren—I suddenly noticed a difference in you that made me want to weep. There was an expression I could not define, in those eyes that had seen a thousand full moons. You seemed to have gone away from this world, to be beyond joys and sorrows. You said to us: ‘Enough. No more. Let’s stop now.’
Yes, it was true, you were ready to die. There is for death, as for birth, a state of ripeness, of maturity of age and experience. I agree that it is best for on
eself and for others to die at that stage of life, and that was what you wanted. Why, then, did you force yourself to survive a whole week on a few drops of thirtham, denying yourself all food, without letting any of us know? You had a problem with your heart, and you had already become so weak physically. You were certain that you would die without falling ill, because you had never sinned. You had often told us that disease was a consequence of sin! We tried to argue, to tell you that Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Ramana Maharshi and other holy men like them had fallen ill during their lives and submitted themselves to medical treatment. And you had often said that the body is the first entity to which one owes a duty.
In the end you allowed modern medicine and its needles to inject new life into your veins. Meanwhile, you meditated on the infinite, the great universal power and, oblivious to physical exigencies, you lay as light and weightless as a sliver of rust floating upon water. It was as if you slipped back into your childhood in the month that remained. You told us so many stories of that time, about your grandfather’s brothers, who were all scholars and poets, one of whom had received the Veerashrinkhala from the Maharaja. About the poems that one of the most learned amongst them wanted to teach his disciples, which you learned and could recite before they did, and how you were given a gold-bordered saree as a prize. About how your father married your mother—he came to your sister’s wedding as the bridegroom’s companion, heard a young girl sing somewhere in the inner rooms of the house and was enchanted by her voice. So he found out who she was and married her. You told us about all the poems that you and your friends wrote and recited, and about your childhood friend, Lakshmikutty Varasyar, the mother of Madassery Madhava Variar.
