by Nair, Anita
That was Lenin then.
Now he had a house and a Bajaj scooter. A wife and an issue.
Rahel handed Comrade Pillai back the sachet of photographs and tried to leave.
‘One mint,’ Comrade Pillai said. He was like a flasher in a hedge. Enticing people with his nipples and then forcing pictures of his son on them. He flipped through the pack of photographs (a pictorial guide to Lenin’s Life-in-a-Minute) to the last one. ‘Orkunnundo?’
It was an old black and white picture. One that Chacko took with the Rolleiflex camera that Margaret Kochamma had brought him as a Christmas present. All four of them were in it. Lenin, Estha, Sophie Mol and herself, standing in the front verandah of the Ayemenem House. Behind them Baby Kochamma’s Christmas trimmings hung in loops from the ceiling. A cardboard star was tied to a bulb. Lenin, Rahel and Estha looked like frightened animals that had been caught in the headlights of a car. Knees pressed together, smiles frozen on their faces, arms pinned to their sides, chests swivelled to face the photograph. As though standing sideways was a sin.
Only Sophie Mol, with First World panache, had prepared herself, for her biological father’s photo, a face. She had turned her eyelids inside out so that her eyes looked like pink-veined flesh petals (grey in a black and white photograph). She wore a set of protruding false teeth cut from the yellow rind of a sweetlime. Her tongue pushed through the trap of teeth and had Mammachi’s silver thimble fitted on the end of it. (She had hijacked it the day she arrived, and vowed to spend her holidays drinking only from a thimble.) She held out a lit candle in each hand. One leg of her denim bellbottoms was rolled up to expose a white, bony knee on which a face had been drawn. Minutes before that picture was taken, she had finished explaining patiently to Estha and Rahel (arguing away any evidence to the contrary, photographs, memories) how there was a pretty good chance that they were bastards, and what bastard really meant. This had entailed an involved, though somewhat inaccurate description of sex. ‘See what they do is …’
That was only days before she died.
Sophie Mol.
Thimble-drinker.
Coffin-cartwheeler.
She arrived on the Bombay-Cochin flight. Hatted, bell-bottomed and Loved from the Beginning.
Hangman’s Journal
Shashi Warrier
This extract is taken from Hangman’s Journal, published by Penguin Books India.
‘Tell me about your family,’ the writer asked. ‘What do your brothers do now?’
‘Raman is gone … His children don’t write, we don’t have the habit. But we meet once in a while, at festivals or weddings or funerals. Paraman lives near by. He never married, and he lives alone. He’s the caretaker of a small house here.’
‘In those days large families were common … It’s strange that you had only two brothers.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Mother was ill sometimes, I suppose that must be why. I never thought of it.’
‘Write about it, then. I’d like to know.’
He told me a bit about how to recall an image, to concentrate on it and write it out. Then he finished his coffee, and as he got up to leave, something popped into my mind. A small memory of someone challenging my father. A friend who said, ‘Guess my weight. If you get it right, to within a kilogram, I’ll admit you’re a better judge of weight than I am.’
Father won his bet that day. That was, after all, part of his job, guessing a man’s weight. I, too, learnt it. ‘Guess what,’ I told the writer. ‘I just remembered something.’
He stopped, then sat back down on the concrete. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘You weigh eighty-six kilos.’
‘A little more, actually,’ the writer replied. ‘But you’re only a kilo away.’
‘Right. And you’re … Ummm …’ I stopped. I can no longer calculate as fast as I used to. ‘Shall I say how tall you are, in feet and inches?’
‘Of course,’ he smiled.
‘Five feet nine inches. A little more, maybe, but less than five ten.’
His jaw dropped. ‘That’s pretty exact,’ he said. ‘How did you get that close?’
‘Practice,’ I replied. I had done it over a hundred times, after all. These judgments were the heart of the hangman’s art.
The drop. The drop was everything. I wrote about it. I wrote what I could about it, and was happy with what I wrote. So I copied it out separately, and when the writer came next I gave him the clean copy I had made. ‘This is for you to keep,’ I told him. ‘This is the best of what I’ve done so far.’ He read it carefully, not struggling too much with the Tamil script, I could see. He finished it and said nothing. He folded the sheet and put it in his shirt pocket. He kept that piece. I knew it was good.
After I wrote about the drop I found that I could not think of anything to write.
I told the writer about this. He came regularly, and we went for longer and longer walks as the days grew longer. There was no sign yet of the rains: memories came, of long scorching summers, but they were only memories. Few starved these days. On these walks we kept quiet most of the time, talking rarely of writing, but mostly of other matters that he thought might help me find something in my mind worth writing about.
‘Next time I come,’ the writer said one day, ‘will you show me where you met your teacher? Show me your favourite places. Would you like that?’
‘Yes. We’ll do that. I might remember things … But why wait for next time? Let’s go now, for a bus ride.’
‘Where?’ he asked, a little surprised by my enthusiasm.
‘To a temple. To meet a friend.’
‘Which temple?’
‘A Bhadrakali temple. The one where we used to go before a hanging. We’ll meet the ringmaster in one of the little sideshows.’
We walked back along the canal to Parvathipuram. The packed earth road beside the canal joined the main road near a bridge, which is only a couple of hundred yards from the bus stand. At the bus stand we found the bus we would take, Number 31, which takes a circular route, starting here, going on to the bus stand at Vadassery, and returning here for a fifteen-minute break before starting off again. At this point the bus is usually empty: further on it fills up.
The bus started with a jerk, and all the seats filled up at the first stop, near the bridge. It proceeded jerkily on, getting more and more crowded, and when the conductor came along to give us tickets he had to push his way through a thick crowd. We shoved our way out of the bus at Vadassery, and from the junction near the bus stand we took the road that curves downwards towards SMRV school, one of the oldest schools in the district. About a quarter-mile down the road we took a lane to the right, a narrow, crooked, cramped lane, down which we could see rows of cramped old houses. All the buildings in this area seemed ancient—whitewashed squat buildings with tiled roofs blackened by the sun and the rain, and tiny windows fitted with wooden bars.
When I passed through here I went back twenty years in time, it had changed so little. We went past the school, which was built in the nineteenth century, and the bunch of old houses, then round a corner where there were fields to the west and a tiny temple to the right.
The temple door was shut, and a man in a small shop—a new one, less than five years old—at the corner told us to come back next morning. But this was familiar territory for me. I had been visiting this place off and on for the past nearly seventy years, and the older people knew me. We went around to the side of the temple compound, and I opened the small rusty gate at the side.
The gurukkal wasn’t there but his wife was. This wasn’t my gurukkal, of course—Ramayyan Gurukkal, who had been the priest here during my father’s day. Ramayyan was gone now. When I replaced my father as the aratchar, he was the one I could visit any time. Ramayyan’s son Kuppan runs the show these days, but he doesn’t have the depth or the devotion of his father. I introduced the two, the writer and Kuppan, and the writer asked the gurukkal to do a small puja in his name. I saw a fifty-rupee-note change han
ds, and Kuppan bent to put it away. In the moment he bent over he looked exactly like his father.
I miss Ramayyan. He was one of those, like Maash, who made the silence bearable. I still remember the first time I saw him. I was a child then.
The temple is dedicated to our deity, Bhadrakali, the angry face of Parvati, wife of Shiva. This is my first visit to the temple. I am with my father, and he is going there to sacrifice a rooster to the goddess before going to a hanging, as is the hangman’s custom of the day.
I don’t understand why he is taking us along, me and my elder brother Raman. But we go without protest, because he takes us out so rarely that any outing with him is a pleasure. We are usually in bed by nine in the evening and up by six, but on this chill morning Father has woken us at four, when the starlight is still bright and the moon long gone. He has woken mother, too, and she has coffee ready, coffee to wake us up, coffee so hot that it scalds my mouth.
We bathe in the pond, finding our way by the bright starlight. As we wash we disturb the moorhens that nest at the far end of the pond, and they in turn wake the crows roosting in a tree nearby. I start when the cacophony shatters the stillness of the morning, and drop the slippery soap in the dark, cool water. Father puts his hand in the water and finds the soap, handing it to me without a word.
We finish our bath and leave home before dawn, clothed in fresh clothes, new off-white mundus for both Raman and me. We walk half-blind in the deepening mist of December, through the paddy fields to the broad tarred road which leads to town and to my school. Father carries a large white rooster by its legs—its wings and legs are tied together—and we can hear it cluck in bewilderment.
The road is deserted at this time, but as we walk we see the dim lights of faraway kerosene lamps in huts by the fields: people are coming awake. In the mist the dark is menacing, and I hold on to Father’s thick and callused thumb for fear of losing sight of him. From this point, where we reach the tarred road, it is six kilometres to the temple, which lies by the fields near SMRV school, which is older than the prison at Poojapura, Father’s workplace.
We reach the temple just after first light, the mist beginning to lighten in the faint sunshine. A slice of golden sun above the fields lights up the moment of excitement: I look forward to sharing something—anything—with my father, for it is a sign of growing up.
The temple door is closed but Ramayyan Gurukkal lives right next to the temple, in a two-room house with a low-roofed veranda in front and basil growing by the gate. Father coughs as he swings the small cane gate open, and Ramayyan comes to the door to see who it is. I hesitate at the gate. Father takes my hand to lead me in. The touch of his hand, hard and square and at that moment incredibly gentle, is reassuring, and I follow him in without fear.
The six adiyaans are already here, some of them are members of the original aratchar line. Father said last night that they had already done a puja at their own temple in Bimaneri, where the family’s ceremonial sword is kept. They are aloof, their manner a strange mixture of respect and contempt that I don’t understand. They don’t seem to respect Father much and that I can’t understand at all. I wonder why Father tolerates them. In his place, I would not speak to them. I wouldn’t even let them into the temple to watch.
The flames in the brass lamps in the shrine flicker in the breeze as Father smears ash on his forehead before bowing to the fearsome icon of the goddess. Ramayyan Gurukkal, young and recently married, speaks to him briefly. He goes into his house and brings out a little cloth-wrapped bundle of flowers, and Father hands him a bottle of liquor and the rooster.
Ramayyan is short and stocky, with his stiff hair cropped short. He has sandal and ash on his chest and upper arms and on his forehead. He wears a thin cloth towel wrapped firmly about his waist, it is so thin that one can make out the outline of the loincloth that he wears under it. His chest is bare and hairless, and he has a few days’ stubble on his face. He holds the bottle and the rooster before him in his square, strong hands and mutters some mantras in Sanskrit. When he stoops to put the bottle down he bends smoothly at the waist. Over the rooster he says some more words in Sanskrit before handing it back to Father.
I have seen a rooster being killed before—on feast days, a cousin or even my father would wring its neck in the backyard. One moment the creature would be alive, and dead the next. But what I see at the Bhadrakali temple is strange. Father holds the rooster between his legs, with its feet under his own and its head in his left hand. Then, suddenly, he beheads the rooster cleanly with a single diagonal stroke of a large knife that the gurukkal has given him. The head comes away in his hand.
I had always thought that a rooster would lie still after having its head cut off. But it doesn’t: in the dim light the blood spurts blackly from its neck, and its wings flap, strongly at first, then weakly as its lifeblood ebbs away. I step back in fear: here is a dead creature showing all the signs of life.
Father still has the rooster’s feet firmly under his own. If he were to let go, I’m sure the headless rooster will run blindly away. Even with him holding on, it struggles for several minutes while the gurukkal chants his violent mantras, the like of which I have not heard at any other temple. His breath comes in brief explosions as he speaks the first syllables of the invocation of Bhadrakali. I can see the strange wildness in his eyes and I shrink from it.
The puja takes an hour. When I have got over my fear, the chanting and the fresh blood on the ground seem inconsequential: the sun is up, and the herons feeding in the fields outside seem more important. After the puja Father rises from his seat on the floor. Ramayyan stands up before him and blesses him, and then the rope that Father had put in his bag, with the bottle, as we left home. By this time it is broad daylight and when we go out, to Ramayyan’s house, I can feel the warmth of the sun on my back bringing out sweat. Ramayyan’s wife offers my brother Raman a banana for the two of us to share, and we sit on a cot in the long verandah outside the house to eat it.
Father puts the rope back in the little bundle that he carries with him to hangings. The bundle contains what little he will need for a night at the guest house in Trivandrum, including a fresh shirt. He never carries a toothbrush because he prefers a veppu twig instead, or a fistful of charred rice husk which is commonly used in these parts.
He picks up the rooster, too. Later in the day it will be cooked. Father will have a share of it, and of the contents of the bottle.
Father leads us back home to where Mother waits nervously. ‘Give them coffee,’ he tells her. ‘They watched it quietly. They’ll learn.’
After he leaves I think of what he did to the rooster. I have got over my fear, and wish that I could behead a rooster the way Father did it, with a single clean stroke of the knife. I decide that I will do it one day, no matter what I do for a living.
After I became a hangman I performed this ceremony with the rooster a hundred and seventeen times. As a boy I had wanted to behead a rooster as expertly as my father did. But thinking of the times when I went to the temple before the hangings, I remember looking at my adiyaans standing lined up with me, and the people from the original aratchar family, and wishing I didn’t have to do it. But it was part of the ritual, and I went through with it for form’s sake.
For form’s sake? I’m not so sure.
Rakesh Haridas
Those Were the Daze
Shreekumar Varma
I was ten when I was introduced to a broken legacy.
Schooling in Chennai was a no-nonsense affair, riotous and ordinary. During one of my vacations, I was taken to Attingal, some twenty miles from Thiruvananthapuram. There we were welcomed into the old family temple with traditional honours, mind-boggling for a schoolboy. For the first time I was confronted with the trappings of royalty. Shirtless and sweating, wearing a brand-new gold-bordered dhoti, I was horrified to find the probing gaze of a couple of hundred locals focused upon me. My mother, aunt and sister bore the limelight far more gracefully.
/> There were pipes blowing, and drums. Our grand procession made its way from the palace buildings to the temple. I was in the forefront, a most uneasy exhibit. My eyes were rooted to the ground. My hands clutched a rebellious dhoti. Each step was torture. This was almost twenty years after Independence, and the crowd followed with more curiosity than reverence.
We were almost there when I gazed up and spied a large cow surveying me coldly. She had broken through the crowd and was blocking our path. My terror was complete. I was sure the temple authorities had deliberately thought this up to crown their inflictions. We stared at each other for a tense moment. Her horns looked magnificent and devilish. I vowed I’d never again baulk at going to a temple. My prayers hit home. The cow’s eyes seemed to melt. A cool breeze sailed in, bringing relief from the heat. As I thanked the deity with all my heart, she lifted her head and trotted forward. I retreated with a shrill cry, right into the temple officials bearing their paraphernalia. We collided painfully, upsetting a couple of ritualistic vessels. That was the first time I remember being involved in a royal do.
I was out of the palace in Thiruvananthapuram before I turned four. During vacation trips from Chennai, I wandered about its large airy rooms, the vast grounds. I would then wonder about the complications of a ceremonial life. You couldn’t step out of the building without an attendant retinue of liveried servants. My mother mentioned the embarrassment of parading down the grounds on festive days, attendants in tow, heralded by piped music, as she and her sister proceeded to the tank for a ritual bath. If this was royalty, I thought, give me a quick shower any day.
And yet there were state dinners where the guest-list included magical names like Tagore and Nehru. Where, despite the teeth-crunching formality of etiquette, it was fun to be pampered and fed. Marriages went on for full seven days, replete with religious ceremonies, entertainments, processions and feasts. Being a member of the royal family was like being a favourite bird in a golden cage. You were watched and humoured and spoilt and loved. It was only when you were alone with yourself that you remembered the cage.
