Where the Rain is Born: Writings about Kerela

by Nair, Anita

  It shocked the doctor when you told him that it was really best for him to administer drugs that would ensure quick death for bodies that were wasted with age and disease.

  You told me that the tulasi branches you had collected over the years and stored in the attic should be used to make your funeral pyre. The old box that had once held palm-leaf manuscripts was filled with blocks of sandalwood for the same purpose. You had stored enough Ganga water too, for the last ritual bath. You wanted everything finished as quickly as possible. You told me I was the only person who would have to cope with the loss of a mother, referring perhaps to the commonly accepted notion that both daughter and daughter-in-law are equally related to a mother. After speaking to me of all these things, you said, ‘Go now. We will meet again if we are destined to, when my time comes.’ And you allowed me to leave.

  What is this thing called destiny, Amme? How is it decided? Tell me! What power brought me the news, to a place nearly one hundred and twenty-five miles away from where you were, at one o’clock on the night of 16 October 1971? Someone told me later that you called out to me at the very moment when I knew. I started by car before daybreak, and rushed to you. When I arrived, you had had your bath and drunk your kanji. You looked very happy when I saw you, with your hand resting on your great-grandson’s head in blessing. I said, ‘Amme, I am here.’

  ‘Good! I knew you would come. I have so much to tell you. But I am so tired. I have finished now with this life. I have promised the Devi that I will offer her payasam made with five measures of milk if she grants me a quick death. You must make her that offering. And you must give Kali a mundu.’

  You looked at your son-in-law and said, ‘I will die today or tomorrow. Let her stay with me till then.’

  You died that day. I promise to be born as your daughter again in my next life, Amme, to listen to all that you have to tell me. But will I have the good fortune to be born again as your daughter, Amme? Will you have to be born again at all, Amme? I know that you are going to be one with the Great Mother, just as you wished. Give me the vision to look at that Mother as my own, through all my successive lives.

  Your lips murmured Bhagavan’s name and your fingers moved ceaselessly to count the number of times you said it. You were quite conscious. You were radiant with an inner light. Then you opened your eyes, at five in the evening, and asked what time it was. You told me to open all the doors, light the lamps, and lay you down on the floor. The light of the setting sun suffused the room. Even so, Amme, I did not understand. Someone had brought me an issue of the Malayalanadu magazine that carried Madhavikkutty’s autobiography. It lay on my lap as I looked at you. Suddenly, the horizon rumbled and the earth pitched around me. I have a heart ailment, and I had travelled a long distance. What did you murmur, was it ‘water’ or ‘Narayana?’ You swallowed a mouthful of Ganga water, shuddered, and drew a deep breath. Then there was utter quiet.

  People began to gather. Telegrams were dispatched, cars drove up to the house. What had to happen had happened. The children had one more responsibility—performing the funeral rites. When I sat at the feet of your still body, wrapped in an unbleached mundu, I felt nothing. I did not want to cry, or sigh, or even pray. I felt numbed, beyond joy and sorrow, caught in the kind of cosmic stillness that marks the end of a yuga or an era. At the height of deep emotion there is a feeling of utter emptiness.

  Was it only my physical weakness that had led me to imagine the roaring of the air around me? Was it my blood pressure? Or was it what you used to tell me it was, Amme, did the chariots of the divine messengers come to take you? Who knows! We can only guess the truth. The moment when God becomes a human being and then becomes God once again, that is the moment of death. All human beings are a part of God. But can all human beings enter into God? Can the human soul (or human reality), which has moved from life in the world to the life beyond, come back? I don’t want to think about it any more, Amme! I will never be able to find an answer, so let this question, which has been asked from the beginning of time, remain a question.

  Before I end this piece, however, I must describe a very worldly incident that took place that night. Kali was a poor harijan who still believed in old traditions. Although the laws of untouchability had been abolished, she hesitated to come anywhere near us. She would stand in the courtyard, you would be in the veranda, and you would both talk for hours at this distance from each other. You had a very special affection for her—perhaps because she was the same age as the first baby you lost. Shaken by the news of your death, she rushed into the nalukettu, crying loudly, ‘My thampuratti, I’ve lost everything I had!’ She beat her head, fell senseless at the feet of the body and began to roll on the ground. Her relatives came and carried her away. What was the nature of Kali’s bond with us? Is it amongst people like her that you will be born again?

  I gave the Devi the offering of milk payasam that you had promised her, to ensure a quick death for yourself, Amme! And I gave Kali her mundu too.

  An era ended with you, Amme. I don’t think that I can ever be its representative, for each generation has its own individual reality. And yet, I too am a link in the hereditary chain of universal motherhood, which was established from the beginning of time and which reached down to you, Amme. Its nature has permeated my blood vessels, my senses, my life. I know that motherhood is a universal truth. And so let me place this offering of sesame seeds, flowers and water here with the courage and conviction that I have understood this truth, for the souls of all the mothers that have died, on behalf of all the mothers who are alive. Come, in the form of my mother, and receive it!

  The Garden of the Antlions

  Paul Zacharia

  This story is taken from Bhaskara Pattelar and Other Stones, published by East West Books.

  On a piece of land overrun by wild growth, by the shore of a stream, I lived like a chameleon in a bower of leaves, hiding and prowling, camouflaged and contented. My house was like a mound of dead leaves heaped among the vines and green foliage. Along the edge of the courtyard, crowded with weeds and grass, flourished my medicinal plants, as if some unseen power had rescued them from the jungle outside. Only I knew the dividing line between them and the jungle—and once, a little girl thief too!

  The old wood of my walls had turned black, white and green, under the growth of moss and lichen. In a corner of the kitchen were two hearths, a few earthen pots and pans and two plates. On one flame I prepared medicated oils and liniments, and on the other lunch and dinner. The veranda had not been surfaced and polished with cowdung for years and was filled with dusty holes in which antlions had made their little pit-like wells, at the bottom of which they lay in wait for their lunch and dinner. When a good many wandering insects had vanished without a trace into the fine dust of these traps, as if into a bottomless abyss, an occasional antlion would climb out and saunter around. Watching them promenade in their garden—my veranda—I would try to imagine the solitude at the bottom of their dusty wells.

  My favourite seat was at the base of a pillar that stood on a length of wood running along the edge of the veranda. The wood had become very smooth at the place where I usually sat and so had the pillar I leaned against, which gleamed invitingly with oil and sweat. Lounging against the pillar with my legs stretched along the wood, stroking my long beard which hid a stray silver hair or two, exuding a fine aroma of liniments, oils and salves, I would await my patients. I loved patients.

  I could hear each patient and his party from a distance as they made their way through my jungle, whispering, parting the leaves and shaking the branches. I would then get up from the veranda, go inside and watch them through the slit of the closed window as they entered my courtyard.

  ‘O, Vaidyare,’ they call in a low, hesitant voice. I do not answer. They stand there, regarding my shut doors anxiously. They call again, but all is silence. They speak amongst themselves in disappointment and continue to stare at my shut house. I whisper to no one in particular: ‘The broken limb
is patient, it is the mind that is impatient. Calm your minds, my dear fellow human beings!’ I resume my vigil. They squat for a while in the courtyard, stand up again, clear their throats and call out, ‘O, Vaidyare!’ There is only silence. After a while one of them says, ‘I don’t think Vaidyar is coming out today. We’d better go!’ Some patients go away with their companions. But a few refuse to leave. ‘No, I am going to wait. You can go.’

  On one occasion, the companions had thus gone away leaving behind in the courtyard a young man with a sprained arm. He stood there, listening miserably to their voices moving farther and farther away. He waited, lost and fearful, gazing expectantly at the silent face of my house. Then I opened the door and came out. ‘Quickly, clap your hands!’ I said. ‘Clap so that your companions can hear you! Clap and call them back! Tell them that Vaidyar is here!’ For a moment he stood gaping at me. Then, his face registering agony, he tried to raise his sprained right arm to clap, but it fell back limply. I shouted, ‘Clap! Clap your hands and call them! They have to come back!’ Once again he raised his sprained arm a little, but lowered it, unable to bear the pain. I clapped my own hands and said, ‘Like this! Louder and louder!’ He tried painfully to mimic the motions of my hands. Looking at his face and roaring with laughter, I clapped again. My clapping hands lent sound to his agonized mime. I clapped, looking at the rising moon. I clapped so that the yakshis atop the palmyra could hear me. I clapped towards the other-worldly visitors who prowled behind the clouds. ‘Come down to these green leaves, to this soil, to this dusk. This is our earth! Come! Here is pain, and here is relief!’

  Walking up to the young man, and standing behind him, I held his arms in my hands and made him clap, lifting, dropping and pushing his arms around. Flocks of homing birds glided above. Winds bent towards the sunset, swirled around us. The face of the early moon floated through the clouds like a ritual mask. And I heard, like the grand percussion of many drums, the footfalls of the antlions strolling along the garden of my veranda. I felt the young man’s pain-racked body regaining strength in my arms. Crushing him in a bear hug, I led him to the veranda and sat him down. I kissed him on the crown of his head with my beard spreading all over his face. I said, ‘You are healed. You can go now.’ Under the moonlight, his body slipped away like a shadow through my herbs. Then I heard a sound from the path beyond the honeysuckle thickets, a message that came darting through the green leaves—a handclap. Jumping down into the courtyard, I too clapped loudly. His hands replied from beyond the stream. Then, through the distant coconut groves, the farewell claps faded. And I had even forgotten to pose him a riddle! In wonderment, I squatted on the moonlit lawn and burst out laughing.

  Except for patients, the only people who crossed the wilderness that was my piece of land were the village school children taking a short cut. The hushed whispers that rose from the foliage, the soft footfalls over the carpet of moist leaves and the hurriedly suppressed jingling of their tiffin carriers were the only hints of their passage through my dark empire. Sometimes they would suddenly forge a bond of fear amongst themselves, imagining that I was charging behind them with bloodshot eyes and flowing beard, and they would flee in unison, raising a commotion, crashing through the thickets.

  One day, while grinding medicines for a liniment behind the shut doors of my house, I heard a footfall in the courtyard. I peeped through the slit of the window. In the dusk outside, among my medicinal plants, stood a little girl. Unawares, she was staring right into my hidden eyes. From my secret position, I looked at her and smiled. She slowly took a step into the courtyard and looked around her, not for a moment withdrawing her attention from the shut house. I joyfully nodded my head at her from my hiding place. I beckoned to her. I made faces at her from my secret place, showing all my teeth. In a sudden burst of daring, she climbed onto the lower veranda and ran her fingers over the shining smoothness of the place where I usually sat, startling me. She also felt the gleaming pillar with her hands. As I watched breathlessly, she moved back to the courtyard and approached my well. Filled with a strange anxiety, I stood watching her. She picked up a pebble and dropped it into the well. The sharp, distant sound of the pebble hitting the water reached my ears. I was tempted to rush out, but I continued to stand there, clasping the window bars, even while I yielded to the thrill of the invitation that the clear, tiny sound brought me. ‘Hey, you,’ I whispered, ‘how dare you disturb the peace of my home?’ Suddenly, swift as a heifer, she bolted down the courtyard and entered my patch of medicinal plants like a whirlwind. Scooping up the leaves of the kacholam plant with both hands, she went crashing through the thickets and was gone! I stood stupefied for a moment, unable to contain my amazement. Then I jumped into the courtyard, laughing and shouting. ‘Come, one and all! A little girl thief! A little girl thief stealing kacholam. Catch her!’ I heard her splash across the stream. I raised the tip of my beard towards the moon which was climbing the sky beyond the trees and danced, roaring, ‘O little girl thief, why did you steal the kacholam? To heal whom? Be blessed with the greatest powers of healing, my little thief-doctor! May God protect you.’ Then, as I sat down in my usual spot, which her soft hands had touched, and leaned against the pillar which her tiny fingers had stroked, a tenderness and peace floated down the waves of moonlight and embraced me.

  The sky visited my dark house as raindrops and sunlight, filtering through the holes in the mouldering palm leaf thatch. The raindrops made craters on the floor, and the antlions dug still more wells in them, spouting fountains of dust. The sun dived into the inner rooms of my home through the holes, beamed down from the rafters and danced on the floor in darting circles. My liniment bottles, the bundles of herbs and roots, the torn mat, the blanket and pillow, all would momentarily bear the stamp of sunlight’s swift feet. For the rest, the interior of my house was filled with a delicious darkness, and my land with the lovely peace of branches and leaves. Seated on the veranda, leaning against the old pillar, I would watch the somnambulist moon in its candlelight procession, the trembling stars, and the waves of light amongst the clouds that reared their heads in the sky. Like a spider, the life of this solitary Vaidyar wove long webs, stretching from the base of the old pillar to the heights of the bunched stars.

  I loved patients. I loved them through the melting tenderness of my liniments and the infinite patience of my fingers, understanding the screams of pain of the broken bone and the bruised nerve. Who is a masseur-physician? Even as he inflicts pain on the medicine-anointed body, he fondles it. In the consolation of his hands, as the patient re-embraces his own body, forgiving it and bearing with its bruises and pain, the crushed bone and fatigued muscles rejoice and grow whole again. The human being hides behind the skeleton and the skeleton behind the human being. Through the bone, vein and sinew, I seek the human being. Through the nerve, I listen to the laughter and lamentation of the soul.

  How beautiful my solitude was! How wonderful were my disguises! What fine games of hide and seek I played with people, until they surrendered to themselves!

  My crumbling house and cratered floors, my wifeless and childless home and the weed-covered land, and the sudden riddles I threw at people, terrified them. The riddle was my last resort. The jungles on my pathless land filtered people like a sieve. The silence of my home bent them like a liniment to my purpose. My riddles demolished their changeless minds. How many trips they had to make through my forest until they accepted against their will that the broken arm and crushed leg were themselves.

  As my thumb probes deep into the bruised nerve, I shout at the patient, ‘The one who makes it does not use it, the one who uses it does not know it, what is it? Answer quickly!’ The patient’s face, ready to register pain, stiffens as if it has been slapped. I ask again, ‘Do you know what it is?’ He answers, ‘No, Vaidyare.’ ‘Think hard, think hard!’ I say. By this time, my fingers have released the tangled nerve. And he gropes in vain in the cellars of his childhood for the answer, alarmed, unmindful of the pain. I shout, ‘
The answer is: a coffin. You owe me ten points.’

  Everyone is afraid of the moment when the fractured bone is set. Everyday, before the massage is begun, the patient asks, ‘Vaidyare, are you going to set the bone today?’ ‘No,’ I answer. Even on the day when I am going to set the bone I say, ‘No.’ When I feel in my fingers the broken parts preparing to unite again, I bellow at the patient, ‘Does the pot know the taste of the curry?’ The patient starts and stares at me in helplessness. ‘Do you know the answer?’ I roar again. ‘No,’ whispers the patient. I shout, ‘You owe me ten points!’ I ask again, ‘Can you sit on the mortar and cry, oh, the pestle is descending?’ In my hands, the broken bone comes together. ‘You lose twenty points,’ I roar. The patient, unable to answer, sits gaping at me, thinking of the inexplicable thirty points he owes me.

  They feared me as they would a lone tusker. I was invincible. Ha! Ha! Ha! But no one knew that I was a lone tusker only in those gardens of the poor antlions.

  So there I was, standing one day in the dazzling sunlight of the courtyard, combing my beard. A passing summer shower suddenly tattooed the dusty lawn. The air was filled with the fragrance of the heady mixture of earth, rain and sunlight. I stood happily in the courtyard, breathing in the smells, waiting, like my herbs and jungles, for the grand arrival of the rains, thinking of nothing, my mind flying free like a floating leaf. There was a sudden gust of wind. Behind it came a luminous drizzle from the rainclouds that rushed across the sunny sky. I wanted to leap into the joyous wind, the rain and the fleeing clouds. ‘Here I come!’ I jumped, my arms lifted, to touch the clouds. ‘Aha! Aha!’ I screamed. ‘Take me too!’