Where the Rain is Born: Writings about Kerela

by Nair, Anita

  ‘I—I—’

  ‘Went to Charlis’s shop?’ He loomed over me, the towel draped over his shoulder making him look even older and more threatening. ‘Took food from Untouchables?’ I began to shrink back from him. ‘Give that to me!’

  ‘I won’t!’ I snatched the halwa away from his hands, and as he lunged, I turned and ran, the precious sweet sticky in my grasp. But he was too fast for me; I had barely reached the yard when he caught up, seized me roughly by the shoulders, and turned me around to face him.

  ‘We don’t do this here, understand?’ he breathed fiercely. ‘This isn’t Bombay.’ He pried my hands apart. The halwa gleamed in my palms. ‘Drop it,’ he commanded.

  ‘No,’ I wanted to say, but the word would not emerge. I wanted to cry out for my mother, but she did not come out of the house.

  ‘Drop it,’ Balettan repeated, his voice a whiplash across what remained of my resistance.

  Slowly I opened my hands outward in a gesture of submission. The orange slabs slid reluctantly off them. It seemed to me they took an age to fall, their gelatinous surfaces clinging to the soft skin of my palms until the last possible moment. Then they were gone, fallen, into the dust.

  Balettan looked at them on the ground for a moment, then at me, and spat upon them where they lay. ‘The dogs can have them,’ he barked. He kicked more dust over them, then pulled me by the arm back toward the house. ‘Don’t you ever do this again.’

  I burst into tears then, and at last the words came, tripping over themselves as I stumbled back into the house. ‘I hate you! All of you! You’re horrible and mean and cruel and I’ll never come back here as long as I live!’

  But of course I was back the next year; I hardly had any choice in the matter. For my parents, first-generation migrants to the big city, this was the vital visit home, to their own parents and siblings, to the friends and family they had left behind; it renewed them, it returned them to a sense of themselves, it maintained their connection to the past. I just came along because I was too young to be left behind, indeed too young to be allowed the choice.

  In the year that had passed since my last visit, there had been much ferment in Kerala. Education was now universal and compulsory and free, so all sorts of children were flocking to school who had never been able to go before. There was talk of land reform, and giving title to tenant farmers; I understood nothing of this, but saw the throngs around men with microphones on the roadside, declaiming angry harangues I could not comprehend. None of this seemed, however, to have much to do with us, or to affect the unchanging rhythms of life at my grandmother’s house.

  My cousins were numerous and varied, the children of my mother’s brothers and sisters and also of her cousins, who lived in the neighbouring houses; sometimes the relationship was less clear than that, but as they all ran about together and slept side by side like a camping army on mats on the floor of my grandmother’s thalam, it was difficult to tell who was a first cousin and who an uncle’s father-in-law’s sister’s grandson. After all, it was also their holiday season, and my parents’ return was an occasion for everyone to congregate in the big house. On any given day, with my cousins joined by other children from the village, there could be as many as a dozen kids playing in the courtyard or going to the stream or breaking up for cards on the back porch. Sometimes I joined them, but sometimes, taking advantage of the general confusion, I would slip away unnoticed, declining to make the effort to scale the barriers of language and education and attitude that separated us, and sit alone with a book. Occasionally someone would come and look for me. Most often, that someone was my aunt Rani-valiamma.

  As a young widow, she didn’t have much of a life. Deprived of the status that a husband would have given her, she seemed to walk on the fringes of the house; it had been whispered by her late husband’s family that only the bad luck her stars had brought into his life could account for his fatal heart attack at the age of thirty-six, and a whiff of stigma clung to her like a cloying perfume she could never quite wash off. Remarriage was out of the question, nor could the family allow her to make her own way in the world; so she returned to the village house she had left as a bride, and tried to lose herself in the routines of my grandmother’s household. She sublimated her misfortune in random and frequent acts of kindness, of which I was a favoured beneficiary. She would bring me well-sugared lime-and-water from the kitchen without being asked, and whenever one of us brought down a green mango from the ancient tree with a lucky throw of a stone, she could be counted upon to return with it chopped up and marinated in just the right combination of salt and red chilli powder to drive my taste buds to ecstasy.

  One day Rani-valiamma and I were upstairs, eating deviled raw mango and looking out on the kids playing soccer below, when I saw something and nearly choked. ‘Isn’t that Charlis?’ I asked, pointing to the skinny boy who had just failed to save a goal.

  ‘Could be,’ she replied indifferently. ‘Let me see—yes, that’s Charlis.’

  ‘But he’s playing in our yard! I remember last year—’

  ‘That was last year,’ Rani-valiamma said, and I knew that change had come to the village.

  But not enough of it. When the game was over, the Nair kids trooped in as usual to eat, without Charlis. When I asked innocently where he was, it was Balettan, inevitably, who replied.

  ‘We play with him at school, and we play with him outside,’ he said. ‘But playing stops at the front door.’

  I didn’t pursue the matter. I had learned that whenever any of the Untouchable tradespeople came to the house, they were dealt with outside.

  With each passing vacation, though, the changes became more and more apparent. For years my grandmother, continuing a tradition handed down over generations, had dispensed free medication (mainly aspirins and cough syrup) once a week to the poor villagers who queued for it; then a real clinic was established in the village by the government, and her amateur charity was no longer needed. Electricity came to Vanganassery: my uncle strung up a brilliant neon light above the dining table, and the hurricane lamps began to disappear, along with the tin cans of kerosene from which they were fuelled. The metal vessels in the bathroom were replaced by shiny red plastic mugs. A toilet was installed in the outhouse for my father’s, and my, convenience. And one year, one day, quite naturally, Charlis stepped into the house with the other kids after a game.

  No one skipped a beat; it was as if everyone had agreed to pretend there was nothing unusual. Charlis stood around casually, laughing and chatting; some of the kids sat to eat, others awaited their turn. No one invited Charlis to sit or to eat, and he made no move himself to do either. Then those who had eaten rose and washed their hands and joined the chatter, while those who had been with Charlis took their places at the table. Still Charlis stood and talked, his manner modest and respectful, until everyone but he had finished eating, and then they all strolled out again to continue their game.

  ‘Charlis hasn’t eaten,’ I pointed out to the womenfolk.

  ‘I know, child, but what can we do?’ Rani-valiamma asked. ‘He can’t sit at our table or be fed on our plates. Even you know that.’

  ‘It isn’t fair,’ I said, but without belligerence. What she had stated was, I knew, like a law of nature. Even the servants would not wash a plate off which an Untouchable had eaten.

  ‘You know,’ honked Kunjunni-mama, tucking into his third helping, ‘They say that boy is doing quite well at school. Very well, in fact.’

  ‘He stood first in class last term,’ a younger cousin chimed in.

  ‘First!’ I exclaimed. ‘And Balettan failed the year, didn’t he?’

  ‘Now, why would you be asking that?’ chortled Kunjunni-mama meaningfully, slapping his thigh with his free hand.

  I ignored the question and turned to my aunt. ‘He’s smarter than all of us, and we can’t even give him something to eat?’

  Rani-valiamma saw the expression on my face and squeezed my hand. ‘Don’t worry,�
� she whispered. ‘I’ll think of something.’

  She did; and the next time Charlis walked in, he was served food on a plantain leaf on the floor, near the back door. I was too embarrassed to hover near him as I had intended to, but he seemed to eat willingly enough on his own.

  ‘It’s just not right!’ I whispered to her as we watched him from a discreet distance.

  ‘He doesn’t mind,’ she whispered back. ‘Why should you?’

  And it was true that Charlis probably ate on the floor in his own home.

  When he had finished, a mug of water was given to him on the back porch, so that he could wash his hands without stepping into our bathroom. And the plantain leaf was thrown away: no plate to wash.

  We returned to the game, and now it was my turn to miskick. The ball cleared the low wall at one end of the courtyard, hit the side of the well, teetered briefly on the edge, and fell in with a splash.

  It had happened before. ‘Go and get it, da,’ Balettan languidly commanded one of the kids. The well was designed to be climbed into: bricks jutted out from the inside wall at regular intervals, and others had been removed to provide strategic footholds. But this was a slippery business: since the water levels in the well rose and fell, the inside surface was pretty slimy, and many of those who’d gone in to retrieve a floating object, or a bucket that had slipped its rope, had ended up taking an unplanned dip. The young cousin who had received Balettan’s instruction hesitated, staring apprehensively into the depths of the well.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Charlis said quietly. ‘I’ll get it.’ He moved toward the edge of the well.

  ‘No!’ There was nothing languid now about Balettan’s tone; we could all hear the alarm in his voice. ‘I’ll do it myself.’ And Charlis, one half-raised foot poised to climb onto the well, looked at him, his face drained of expression, comprehension slowly burning into his cheeks. Balettan ran forward, roughly pushing aside the boy who had been afraid to go, and vaulted into the well.

  I looked at Rani-valiamma, who had been watching the game.

  ‘Balettan’s right,’ she said. ‘Do you think anyone would have drunk water at our house again if Charlis had gone into our well?’

  Years passed; school holidays, and trips to Kerala, came and went. Governments fell and were replaced in Kerala, farm labourers were earning the highest daily wage in the country, and my almost toothless grandmother was sporting a chalk-white set of new dentures under her smile. Yet the house seemed much the same as before. A pair of ceiling fans had been installed, in the two rooms where family members congregated; a radio crackled with the news from Delhi; a tap made its appearance in the bathroom, though the pipe attached to it led from the same old well. These improvements, and the familiarity that came from repeated visits, made the old privations bearable. Kerala seemed less of a penance with each passing year.

  Charlis was a regular member of the group now, admitted to our cardplaying sessions on the porch outside, joining us on our expeditions to the cinema in the nearest town. But fun and games seemed to hold a decreasing attraction for Charlis. He was developing a reputation as something of an intellectual. He would ask me, in painstaking textbook English, about something he had read about the great wide world outside, and listen attentively to my reply. I was, in the quaint vocabulary of the villagers, ‘convent-educated,’ a label they applied to anyone who emerged from the elite schools in which Christian missionaries served their foreign Lord by teaching the children of the Indian lordly. It was assumed that I knew more about practically everything than anyone in the village; but all I knew was what I had been taught from books, whereas they had learned from life. Even as I wallowed in their admiration, I couldn’t help feeling their lessons were the more difficult, and the more valuable.

  Balettan dropped out of school and began turning his attention to what remained of the family lands. It seemed to me that his rough edges became rougher as the calluses grew hard on his hands and feet. He had less time for us now; in his late teens he was already a full-fledged farmer, sitting sucking a straw between his teeth and watching the boys kick a ball around. If he disapproved of Charlis’s growing familiarity with all of us, though, he did not show it—not even when Charlis asked me one day to go into town with him to see the latest Bombay blockbuster.

  I thought Charlis might have hoped I could explain the Hindi dialogue to him, since Keralites learned Hindi only as a third language from teachers who knew it, at best, as a second. But when we got to the movie theatre, Charlis was not disappointed to discover the next two screenings were fully sold out. ‘I am really wanting to talk,’ he said in English, leading me to an eatery across the street.

  The Star of India, as the board outside proclaimed, was a ‘military hotel’; in other words, it served meat, which my grandmother did not. ‘I am thinking you might be missing it,’ Charlis said, ushering me to a chair. It was only when the main dish arrived that I realized that I was actually sitting and eating at the same table with Charlis for the first time.

  If he was conscious of this, Charlis didn’t show it. He began talking, hesitantly at first, then with growing fluency and determination, about his life and his ambitions. His face shone when he talked of his father, who beat him with a belt whenever he showed signs of neglecting his books. ‘You can do better than I did,’ he would say before bringing the whip down on Charlis. ‘You will do better.’

  And now Charlis was aiming higher than anyone in his family, in his entire community, had ever done before. He was planning to go to university.

  ‘Listen, Charlis,’ I said gently, not wanting to discourage him. ‘You know it’s not going to be easy. I know you’re first in class and everything, but that’s in the village. Don’t forget you’ll be competing for places with kids from the big cities. From the—convents.’

  ‘I am knowing that,’ Charlis replied simply. Then, from the front pocket of his shirt, he drew out a battered notebook filled with small, tightly packed curlicues of Malayalam lettering in blue ink, interspersed with phrases and sentences in English in the same precise hand. ‘Look,’ he said, jabbing at a page. ‘The miserable hath no other medicine / But only hope.—Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, III.i.2,’ I read. And a little lower down, ‘Men at some time are masters of their fates; / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’ Charlis had underlined these words.

  ‘Whenever I am reading something that inspires me, I am writing it down in this book,’ Charlis said proudly. ‘Shakespeare is great man, isn’t it?’

  His Malayalam was of course much better, but in English Charlis seemed to cast off an invisible burden that had less to do with the language than with its social assumptions. In speaking it, in quoting it, Charlis seemed to be entering another world, a heady place of foreign ideas and unfamiliar expressions, a strange land in which the old rules no longer applied.

  ‘For the Colonel’s Lady an’ Judy O’Grady,’ he declaimed at one point, ‘“are sisters under their skins!”—Rudyard Kipling,’ he added. ‘Is that how you are pronouncing it?’

  ‘Rudyard, Roodyard, I haven’t a clue,’ I confessed. ‘But who cares, Charlis? He’s just an old imperialist fart. What does anything he ever wrote have to do with any of us today, in independent India?’

  Charlis looked surprised, then slightly averted his eyes. ‘But are we not,’ he asked softly, ‘are we not brothers under our skins?’

  ‘Of course,’ I replied, too quickly. And it was I who couldn’t meet his gaze.

  The following summer, I was sitting down to my first meal of the holiday at my grandmother’s dining table when Rani-valiamma said, ‘Charlis was looking for you.’

  ‘Really?’ I was genuinely pleased, as much by Charlis’s effort as by the fact that it could be mentioned so casually. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He came to give you the news personally,’ Rani-valiamma said. ‘He’s been admitted to Trivandrum University.’

  ‘Wow!’ I exclaimed. ‘T
hat’s something, isn’t it?’

  ‘Untouchable quota,’ honked the ever-present Kunjunni-mama, whose pencil-line moustache had gone from bold black to sleek silver without his ever having done a stroke of work in his life.

  ‘Reserved seats for the Children of God. Why, Chandrasekhara Menon’s son couldn’t get in after all the money they spent on sending him to boarding school, and here Charlis is on his way to University.’

  ‘The village panchayat council is organizing a felicitation for him tomorrow,’ Rani-valiamma said. ‘Charlis wanted you to come, Neel.’

  ‘Of course I will,’ I responded. ‘We must all go.’

  ‘All?’ snorted Kunjunni-mama, who was incapable of any action that could be called affirmative. ‘To felicitate Charlis? Speak for yourself, boy. If you want to attend an Untouchable love-in organized by the Communists who claim to represent our village, more’s the pity. But don’t expect to drag any members of the Nair community with you.’

  ‘I’ll come with you, Neel,’ said a quiet voice by my side. It was Rani-valiamma, her ever-obliging manner transformed into something approaching determination.

  ‘And me,’ chirped a younger cousin, emboldened. ‘May I go too, Amma?’ asked another. And by the next evening I had assembled a sizable delegation from our extended family to attend the celebration for Charlis.

  Kunjunni-mama and Balettan sat at the table, nursing their cups of tea, and watched us all troop out. Balettan was silent, his manner distant rather than disapproving. As I passed them, I heard the familiar honk: ‘Felicitation, my foot.’

  The speeches had begun when we arrived, and our entry sparked something of a commotion in the meeting hall, as Charlis’s relatives and the throng of well-wishers from his community made way for us, whispers of excitement and consternation rippling like a current through the room. I thought I saw a look of sheer delight shine like a sunburst on Charlis’s face, but that may merely have been a reaction to hearing the panchayat president say, ‘The presence of all of you here today proves that Charlis’s achievement is one of which the entire village is proud.’ We applauded that, knowing our arrival had given some meaning to that trite declaration.