by Manu Joseph
Thoma Chacko always knew that this is how it would be, this is how the news of his father’s death would be broken to him – that the day would begin like any other day, that he would be in school and his mother would suddenly appear looking like a maid, pretending to be calm, and take him away to a hospital without revealing much. But he would never have guessed that when the day he feared the most arrived, he would be in a purple velvet frock.
It is the dress rehearsal of the school play and he is in the main hall. He is, as usual, an extra, but this time a female extra, one of the many girls in frocks waiting with their right hands on their left elbows for the king to arrive. Rufus Sir has told all the lady extras that they must stand with their legs together. ‘That’s how girls stand,’ he says. Everybody knows that Rufus Sir enjoys beating up boys when they are dressed as girls. So Thoma does not let his mind wander, he does not want to give him any excuse.
When Thoma hears her the first time, he knows that he is not imagining it but he pretends that he has not heard her. He can see his mother standing at a great distance, in the doorway, with the headmaster. She has dressed in a hurry and he is surprised how cheap she looks. ‘Thoma,’ she says again.
As he walks down the large empty hall and the strong, grim figure of his mother approaches, Thoma is sure that his life is about to get worse. ‘Thoma, where is your uniform?’ she says.
‘It is in the class.’
‘We don’t have time, you have to go this way.’
‘What happened?’
‘Your father has had a heart attack. He is in the hospital.’
She tells the headmaster, ‘I rushed out of my house without taking any money. Would you have a hundred rupees for the auto? I have to go to GG Hospital.’
‘I have nothing, madam,’ the man says. ‘And the office deposited all its cash in the bank in the morning.’ He screams to the assembled cast, ‘Does anybody have a hundred rupees? It is an emergency.’
There is silence.
Mariamma takes her son’s hand and walks. Thoma hears a boy whine, ‘Sir, that is my sister’s frock he is wearing. I have to take it back today.’ They walk at a steady pace towards the school gate. There is an auto waiting for them outside. The driver looks annoyed. ‘You can’t make me wait that long,’ he says, ‘this is not your car.’
They ride in silence. Thoma allows the gloom to fill him, he sees his father in the mornings, when he is a clever, elegant man. Thoma is proud that his father is not an ordinary person on an old scooter. He is not a bank clerk carrying a lunch box to work, he is not just anybody. His father is a journalist. When important things happened in this country, Ousep Chacko used to be there, taking notes. He appeared on TV once, very briefly, to say something about a politician whose name Thoma has forgotten. Everybody saw him and everybody said, ‘Thoma, we saw your father on TV.’
‘Is he dead?’ he asks his mother.
‘They won’t tell me,’ she says.
‘He is dead, isn’t he?’
‘I don’t know, Thoma.’
His father had a complicated relationship with their Mustang TV. He tried many times to take it away and pawn it. Some days, when he was about to set out for work, he would stop and stare at the TV for a long time, making an elaborate plan in his head. Then he would lift it from its stand and take it to the door with great care as if it were a fallen child he was taking to the hospital. But he would always return it to the stand, smile at Thoma and pat his face. One day his father brought a muscular man along who carried the TV away in a tight hug. Ousep was about to follow the thug but he stopped in the doorway and looked at Thoma. ‘We are just taking it for repair, Thoma,’ he said. The TV never came back. But at least his father had the heart to lie. It is the sweetest memory he has of his father. It was a moment of love, who can deny that?
His father wanted to be left alone most of the time. Some fathers are like that. But Thoma knows that there were times when his father wanted to be included in the antics of Unni and his mother. Thoma is sorry today that his father was never allowed any easy entries into family life. Unni and his mother knew how to punish him and they always did.
Thoma remembers a Sunday afternoon from a distant time when he woke up from his nap and began chatting with Unni, who was working on a comic. Unni did not say anything, which was not unusual. When he was working he did not get distracted. But Thoma was so annoyed at being ignored he said, ‘Can you hear me?’ Unni did not turn. Thoma tried to distract him, even poked him a few times, but Unni could not see or hear or feel his brother. Thoma began to suspect that he had become invisible. When he rushed to his mother to confirm it she, too, could not see him or feel him. But he could see that she was trying not to laugh. Was it a prank? It was natural that Thoma would consider his father the ultimate test of his invisibility. He stood at the door of his father’s room and mustered the courage to sing a song, but Ousep could not hear him. Thoma kept inching into the room and finally stood in front of his father, but Ousep looked right through him. Thoma put his hand on his open mouth and ran outside, screaming, ‘I am gone, I am gone.’ Unni was watching this from the hall. He hugged Thoma and told him that it was just a prank. Thoma was so relieved he laughed insanely, his eyes still wide and terrified, which made his mother hold her stomach and shake with laughter. Ousep stepped out of his room to laugh with them and be included; after all, he had figured out the game from the commotion in the house and had played along. But when he appeared, they went inside in a huddle to laugh privately. Thoma is sorry they did that.
The ride in the auto is long and slow. Thoma looks at the harsh light of day outside, an incandescent plane in the sky, vehicles going somewhere, men hanging from the window bars of buses, people laughing, waiting, running. He hopes his father is still a part of all this, he hopes Ousep Chacko will walk again, with his brisk morning strides.
Finally, his mother asks the driver to stop. Thoma is confused. They are not at the hospital, they are outside an apartment block.
‘You said GG Hospital,’ the auto driver says.
‘I have to go and fetch someone,’ she says.
‘You have to come back fast,’ he says. ‘This is not your car.’
She takes Thoma’s hand and marches into the concrete entrance of the building. The watchman decides not to stop them, possibly because Thoma looks like a flamboyant modern girl going somewhere important with her maid.
‘Where are we going?’ he asks.
‘Thoma, it is like this. There was no money at home and I rushed out in a state. So we have no money for the auto.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘We must do what we have to do,’ she says.
They go to the rear portion of the building, climb the wall and jump into a quiet lane on the other side. ‘What we are doing is wrong, Thoma, but we didn’t have a choice,’ she says. ‘Jesus knows.’
As they walk swiftly down the back lanes, hand in hand, throwing nervous glances at the autos passing by, Thoma sees men looking at him in a way he has never seen them look. They are not trying to make up their minds, they are sure he is a girl. They look at his chest, at his crotch, at his arse. They are looking at him as if he is an ancient familiar foe from whom they would like to take something. Thoma feels humiliated. They look at him and spit unconsciously. He is reminded of what Unni had said. ‘I have done research, Thoma, a lot of research over many weeks. Men in Madras spit all the time but the chances of them spitting when they see a young girl are seventy-eight per cent higher than when they are not looking at a young girl. When they see a girl, they don’t even realize they are spitting.’
When they reach GG, the huge reception hall is crowded, and they stand there wondering what they must do. His mother asks a nurse something in Malayalam. The nurse then leads them to the lift. In the lift she looks carefully at Thoma.
‘I am a boy,’ he says, ‘I was rehearsing for a school play.’
‘You are a very beautiful boy,’ she says, which
makes Thoma happy despite the circumstances. She leads them to the longest corridor he has ever seen. He is stunned by the affluence of this place and he is proud that his father somehow managed to land here and not in some dreary government morgue.
The nurse consults with other white frocks and takes them through a network of clean beautiful corridors. ‘He is in 401,’ the nurse says, ‘that’s the one.’ As they walk down the final corridor, his mother clutches his hand.
They are almost jogging now, which makes the nurse jog too, though she does not want to. She opens the door of 401 and takes them in. Thoma has not seen a more luxurious room. Everything is white and expensive and there is a deep elegant silence in the air. How can anybody have the heart to die in a place like this?
He sees his father lying in a green gown on a thick comfortable bed. There are some wires shoved up his nose, which must mean that he is alive. The nurse studies a bunch of papers hanging from his bed. ‘He is all right,’ she says. ‘He is all right, Mariamma. He is very weak but he is going to be fine. He is going to be asleep the whole day though.’
His mother begins to cry but she has no desire to go and touch her man. Thoma wants to hold his father’s hand but feels too shy to perform an act of love. ‘Who brought him to this expensive place?’ his mother says.
‘His office people,’ the nurse says. ‘He was in his office when it happened.’
‘Who is going to pay for all this?’
‘His office, from what I can see. Mariamma, don’t you worry. You can go home this evening and come back tomorrow morning. He is not going to wake up before morning.’
More nurses come in, all of them fully grown women in white frocks. Like Thoma and his father, they too look as if they are extras in a bad play. A fat doctor walks in smoking a pipe. He studies Mariamma and figures that she is not important. He mumbles that her husband almost died, and he goes away. The nurses follow him, leaving Thoma and his mother alone. They stand together in discomfort, looking at the ceiling and the walls, as if they are in a rich stranger’s home.
Ousep’s trousers are hanging on the wall. Mariamma extracts his wallet and a bunch of papers, which are neatly folded. She arranges the papers and searches for a place to sit. But something about what she is holding makes her freeze and she forgets to sit. It looks like one of Unni’s comics, but Thoma has never seen this one before. His mother looks disturbed as she turns the pages. When she comes to the image of a man giving a thumbs-up sign, she drops the comic in shock, or maybe the pages just fall for no reason at all. She is a person who drops things. She picks up the comic and looks carefully at the man. When she reaches the final page, Thoma is surprised to see a giant image of his mother in full flow.
‘What’s this?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know,’ she says.
She takes all the money in the wallet but leaves the comic behind. They take a bus back home. It is when they walk through the gates of Block A and all the boys who are playing begin to laugh that Thoma is reminded of his dress. He looks up at the balconies, at the men and women who are standing there. They do not laugh. They probably know about the heart attack and they wonder what has happened. Thoma is reminded of the time when he and his parents had returned from the church. It was a day like this. They had gone somewhere as a family and returned one person short.
He looks up again to check whether Mythili has seen him in this condition but there is only her mother standing there. As they walk up the stairway, doors open and the women step out. They ask Mariamma what happened and they hold her hand and ask her to be brave. Later, they come to his home, one after the other, with hot food and fruit and coffee. Even Mrs Balasubramanium comes with many things on a plate. His mother puts it all on the table, and at some point in the evening, when they hear another doorbell, she says, ‘This man should have a heart attack every day.’ And they have a good laugh.
5
Philipose, Philipose
OUSEP IS NOT DREAMING, he is sure about that, even though he is asleep and what he sees is a world in which Unni is not dead. Unni is not dead because he is not born yet. The world before Unni Chacko, according to Unni Chacko himself, ‘is the strongest evidence to support the ridiculous hypothesis that life will continue as usual after I am dead’.
Mariamma is young, beautiful and has been married for three months. She goes through these days with somewhat exaggerated glee, like an amateur lover. When he cracks a joke she runs away covering her mouth, she serves him food with a flourish of her hand, cleans his ear with too much care, as if she is repairing a watch. She lives with him in a large house that smells of red earth and bananas, and is surrounded by high palms and plantains and jackfruit trees. It is the office accommodation of the Weekly in Kottayam. He is among the brightest journalists in Kerala, and the youngest columnist anyone has ever known, whom politicians and bishops visit. Priests quote him in their Sunday sermons, even Protestant priests. Publishers, who have read his hugely popular short fiction in the Sunday magazines, beg him to write a novel.
Mariamma enjoys her new life, she sings love songs to herself, names the calves born in other houses, reads anything she can find. She translates One Hundred Years of Solitude into Malayalam. Small portions actually, and she does it out of love for the great Marquez. Her translation is good but there are words she skips; she says those words do not exist in Malayalam. He tries to think of synonyms to impress her but she is right, those words do not exist. And some objects in Marquez’s story remain blank gaping spaces in her prose.
She forces Ousep to go to church with her every Sunday; they walk together in their best clothes on narrow, wet, winding roads, talking and laughing, and fully aware that neighbours are watching from their windows – narrowing their eyes, craning their necks, fanning their stomachs, moving their jaws and whispering things to others. Ousep feels vulgar to be so happy in plain sight; he feels as if he is walking through a famine, eating a large fried fish. But then that is how they were, Ousep and Mariamma, young and happy in an unremarkable way. Who would believe it, once they were like anybody else?
She is shameless when they make love, which is often, and when they are this way the air is filled with the calamitous sounds of a woman who appears to be mourning the destruction of furniture. She stops now and then to give precise instructions on how he must proceed. But when they lie spent, she turns quiet and melancholic, even bad-tempered, and she is the first to leave the bed. That, innocent Ousep imagines, is how women are. He imagines that he fills her with so much tumult that she must retrieve herself in private. He begins to strut around his life thinking that there is something extraordinary about him as a lover, a suspicion he always possessed. How else can a girl collapse so completely in his embrace? When he sees new brides walk with their men, he is surprised at how they can be so happy, as happy as Mariamma Chacko. It seems odd to him that other men, the simple men, men who are not writers, they too can make their women laugh, make them glow.
Relatives and friends visit every day, there is much laughter and happy commotion in the house. Some evenings, white Ambassador cars with red lights on top are parked outside their home. The deputy collector asks Mariamma, not entirely in jest, ‘Considering everything, how tough the world is on women, would you still like to be a woman in your next life?’ She gives a gentle tilt to her head and asks, ‘And what is the other option?’ There is an explosion of laughter in the room.
Too much happiness, she tells Ousep. She says it with a hint of fear in her voice. She is sure that some visitors, his relatives especially, leave behind enchanted things to bring doom to their home and end their joys. She is right, she finds black coins and chicken bones hidden in the nooks of the iron gates of their home. There are things written on them, threads tied to them. She laughs because she is not superstitious. She collects them and puts them in a box. One day she finds a copperplate with inscriptions buried in the land that runs around their home. Another day she discovers a vial of dark oil in the grounds. She col
lects them all, keeps them safe, as if they are precious relics of human nature. Which they are, in a way.
Ousep goes to work around noon every day; Mariamma stands at the gate and watches him go down the red-earth path that runs in the shade of immortal trees. He looks back several times and they laugh, always, at their juvenile love. They are the couple who would stretch their arms and run towards each other in a sunflower farm, though they have never done that.
Ousep has stopped drinking. It is a tradition among Malayalee men to stop drinking after marriage. But slowly, like the rest, he resumes with small innocuous nips. Mariamma does not mind because she is yet to know him well. She has not seen him on buckling knees, seen him sway like a fool or on the arms of other men. But there is a lot about her that Ousep does not know. She too has abandoned something that really cannot be given up.
The first time he hears the voice is at dawn. He is stirred from his sleep by the unfamiliar sound of a woman’s deep whispers that break into soft howls and more whispers – ‘Just a girl, I was just a girl, Mother, a girl can tell her mother some things, can’t she?’ Ousep follows the voice, which leads him to the kitchen doorway. He sees his young wife standing with her lips curled inside her mouth, her head tilted. Her finger wags. Nobody has told him that she becomes this way sometimes. It is now clear why the rubber merchant had given away his daughter to the son of a pauper farmer. He was not mesmerized by Ousep’s prose as he had claimed. He had found a fool. But what Ousep feels at that moment as he stands outside the kitchen is a wounded affection for his woman.
Mariamma is studying the burnt bottom of a large aluminium vessel and she is saying, ‘You could have said something, Mother, just anything. So what if the boatman heard?’ She is shocked to see him in the kitchen doorway. She is so ashamed she begins to cry. He asks her why she is this way. He will ask her the same question in the months to come and, on occasion, in the years to follow. She will tell him that she was always this way, she will tell him that she cannot help it. ‘But I am not mad, I am actually a happy woman,’ she will say. She will try to control herself, be the girl she was in the first light of marriage but she will slip into the trance every few days, especially when she imagines she is alone.
