Something Barely Remembered

waiting

It was the dry bare-bones of a long summer. I walked in the dust, with the hot winds blowing around me, paper scrapping in the alleys, the city deserted in the glare of the afternoon sun. I walked to the old fort. It was green and cool, the grass growing wild, the moat a little murky, but glistening silver where it escaped the shadows of old mortar. I heard the strange guttural calls of water birds, and the summer became at once another. I was seventeen then. The memory became an incandescent bubble in which I lay, slothful.

I don’t know how long I had been lying in the shadows of the old peepal. Vulture droppings had made the tree alien, and I sensed the death in the old tree – its gnarled roots were exposed like the knees of crones, and its scabby trunk veered upward. A million tiny ants crawled out of a hole and marched in single file around and around its base.

I knew it was madness to stay, but the tentacles of time caught me – the fort so old and unknown, spoke to me in a hundred ways. It was dusk when I arose and saw to my surprise that I was not alone. The man was tall, with the narrow brown eyes that I had known once before, both laughter and arrogance in them. He was older by twenty years, and I felt a deep sense of dread.

‘So you still come here.’

‘Yes, sometimes – when it gets too hot.’

He pointed at the steps where we had sat, those long years ago in our childhood.

‘Do you remember the flies? They used to circle us,’ he said.

‘Kings and horses, I remember, but not the flies,’ I laughed, looking at him, forgetting the years in between.

We had sat on the steps many times with our hands locked together, afraid to make love because I was too young to ask, and he, old-fashioned, knew we were not destined to marry. I remembered the dreadful intensity of our eyes as they looked into each others’, the world sailing past, and yet beyond it – a laughter which would redeem us, would allow us to jump down and go walking barefoot over the ancient graves and the jagged ends of broken walls.

‘Why did you go away like that?’ I asked him.

‘You were too young for me. You understood nothing about me.’

‘Are you married now?’

He took out a smooth black wallet, and from it pictures of his large, lovely wife and his perfect children. They were American, all of them. So was he, down to his Reebok shoes and his wine-coloured tie.

‘I missed you,’ I said.

‘You should have written.’

‘You left no address.’

He held my hands again.

‘Give me a hug.’

It was so American, so casual and innocent, that I had to hold him. His body felt the same, but it was softer, older – a body which did not have the tautness of desire, but had known love and the gentleness of wife and children, safe house, a big golden dog to walk to the woods.

We disentangled, and he smiled at me. It began to rain, and we went our different ways without looking back. It was too late to ask him ‘What did you do?’ Nor did he question me: ‘What have you become?’ or ‘Do you still live in the same house?’ Perhaps it was because we understood that our worlds could not meet, that in our tenuous and placid worlds the other was only a shadow.

My work on Carson McCullers had come to a standstill. I had no way of deciphering the silences in the narratives. McCullers had lived the world I had known and felt as a child.

I had read her short stories over and over again, and all the poignancy of childhood, of unutterable desires, of loneliness and of wanting, came back to me. I had a McCullers complex, and it ran deep. I applied for a grant and went to a university town in America. No, I told myself, it’s not in the hope of seeing Karan again, it’s just a coincidence that I know he lives there too.

The city I lived in during that summer was large and open and cold. Brownstone buildings, no trees. Billboards. Greek cafes. Bookshops and an aquarium, with an eleven-dollar entrance fee where I would go when I was lonely to look at the fish, and be crushed in the whirlpool of people. It saved me from the alienation of the neutral city. Americans had children. I realised this when I went to the aquarium. I suppose, in my heart, I hoped that I would meet my childhood friend again, his beautiful wife with the yellow hair and the children who looked like his mother from Jullundar. Where else, living in a city which didn’t really respect children, would he take them?

Then one day, I saw them. It was exactly as I had imagined. He was carrying his daughter aloft on his shoulder, safe from the crowds; his wife and son were behind, carrying bags of popcorn and wild-coloured umbrellas. It was raining outside, their hair was shining with rain drops in the blue dark, the artificial underwater world of the aquarium.

‘Karan!’ I said, ‘Do you remember me?’ I was good at subterfuge.

‘Elizabeth! Of course, meet my wife Gina, and these are my kids. What brings you here? Where are you staying?’

‘At the University.’

‘Here? You’re on a trip?’

‘I live here.’

His wife looked at me, and smiled, and held my hands, and said, ‘You must come for lunch on Sunday. It’s not often that Karan meets friends from India.’

‘I’d love to, but I’m leaving for home tomorrow, for Kerala. You remember my home country, Karan.’

‘Yes, I took Gina there soon after we were married – boat rides across the backwater and all that. But then it rained – like mad – and we could find nothing that she could eat except bananas. It’s wild rain forest, your homeland. I never imagined. I couldn’t cope with those spiders though. You’re leaving tomorrow? That’s a pity. We must keep in touch.’

He gave me his glossy visiting card, and his children, standing there, smiled and smiled at me, while his wife chattered about English studies and India. Neither of them had heard of McCullers and thought her a man. We walked together around the glass cases of the aquarium where large and well fed sharks swam in circles and in boredom, looking at us with dull-mirror eyes, wishing they were hungry and the sea was open.

Karan and I looked at each other when one circle around the alive and entombed fish was done, and the floodgates of memory opened again. The crowds separated us from his family.

‘You still love me, don’t you? I should have waited.’

‘I’m leaving tomorrow,’ I said, wiping my tears, carefully, in case the colours smudged.

‘You’re not. You always were a terrible liar. You came here looking for me. This is your idea of revenge. Well, this time, it’s goodbye,’ and he strode away back to the waiting half circle on the other side of the exhibits.

It was raining again, as my taxi left the city down the dark and gleaming roads. I would be back in the Fall, I had a teaching fellowship in New York, but meanwhile I would accept Benjamin’s offer of marriage. I would go back to the old cardamom estate, and to my father’s brother who would ask for Benjamin on my family’s behalf, for me. Ben had waited too long.

* * *

Benjamin’s estate was next to ours, and our families had always planned that we should marry. He had waited for me – waited and waited, I should say – but I was so hopelessly in love with Karan that it seemed that I would never come out of it. But now I had. I felt I had. When I told my Uncle that I was ready to marry, he laughed and said, ‘You’re thirty. Who shall I ask?’

‘Benjamin,’ I said.

‘Benjamin? But he was married last summer when you went to America. Why did you go? He asked you to stay.’

‘Oh hell,’ I said, involuntarily. We don’t speak like that in front of our uncles.

‘Don’t be silly, Eli. You shouldn’t talk like that. We’ll find someone else. Lucky that you have property or else it would have been impossible, even if you were ten years younger which you’re not. We’ll find a boy who is already in the States or in the Gulf. I’ll talk to the broker.’

‘The broker?’

‘Yes, you just pay him a commission on the dowry you plan to give at betrothal. How much are you going to give – rather, what shall we say we are giving?’

‘Uncle, I’m going back to Delhi today. I don’t think I’ll marry this summer.’

‘You really are insane. I told my brother not to over-educate you. Just look at you. Dressed like a man. Pants. Even a belt. And your buttocks showing. Can’t you pull out your shirt at least. And lipstick. Someone will think you’ve gone mad. Well, go see your grandmother. She’s been waiting to see you. I can’t drive you out to the airport today. I have work on the plantation. You go tomorrow.’

Uncle was furious. He looked at me through narrow, cynical eyes, denigrated everything I was or had done. I fled to the small dark room with its low entrance, where Grandmother lay resting. It was a pretty room, though so shadowed I could hardly see her. The smell of paddy boiling in large urns came wafting in from outside. There were small square windows with delicate white cotton drapes. I could see the workers threshing the grain. Her bed was narrow, but made of dark glossy redwood with elaborate canework at the head where she was propped up reading her Bible. I sat on the bench near the window waiting for her to look up.

‘And Jesus wept,’ she said, ending the lesson.

‘Hello, Ammachi.’

‘Eli, so you’ve come. Not even a postcard. Benjamin wanted to invite you for his marriage, but we didn’t even have your address. How can you disappear like that?’

‘I left the address with Uncle,’ I said, smiling at her. Her collarbones stood out sharp and clear from the edges of the large clean white blouse she always wore.

‘He said he didn’t have it. The important thing is, you didn’t write. What have you been doing? Look at your hair. Like a hen’s tail. And no earrings. People in America seem as badly attired as people in Delhi. Have you eaten? We’ve made three kinds of fish for you. It’s so wonderful you’ve come back. We must find a boy for you … Your father’s left you enough money, thank God!’

‘I’m leaving tomorrow. I have to get some books from the house in Delhi, and then I’ll go back to America.’

‘You’re leaving tomorrow? But you’ve just arrived. You always lacked common sense. That’s why it’s so difficult to get you married off. Benjy was such a good man. He would have looked after you well. But what’s the use. A boy needs someone who can cook and clean, not someone who reads all the time.’

‘I’m thirty, I don’t need a boy. I have to go. I must go. I find the rain oppressive. My books are already damp, by tomorrow the gum holding them will have gone completely.’ I was almost weeping.

‘Rain, oppressive? But without rain things don’t grow. It’s true that there is no fish, in the rains the fish just disappear. Where do all the fish in the sea go? Ouseph says that it’s dangerous to fish. I’ve never been near the sea, so I won’t know. Eli, we were lucky today. We made three kinds of fish for you. Go and eat, you’re tired.’

‘I hate fish,’ I said stonily.

‘You’re just like your father. He was my favourite. Your uncle is not at all like him. I really had to talk your grandfather into giving your father that chunk of properly. Your uncle is still mad with me. And your grandfather kept saying, “But he’s a teacher. What’ll he do with money? He doesn’t know how to invest.” Anyway, you’re taken care of. But one thing, Eli, if another year goes by, no one will marry you. Oil your hair at least, it’s gone copper.’

‘I don’t want to marry, I want to study.’

‘But you’re thirty. How can you keep studying? Anyway, go and eat. I’m tired.’

She put her beautiful silver head on the pillow, and her creased soft face looked tired.

‘Come and see me before you go. I’ll give you a bottle of Kashayam. It’s made of gooseberries I cured ten years ago. It will make your blood flow.’

‘I wouldn’t touch it. The last concoction you gave me made my head swim.’ I bent to kiss her.

‘Thin-blooded, that’s why,’ she said, blessing me, with her dry papery old hands on my head and my cheeks.

I went out into the bright monsoon sunlight. After the rain, because the atmosphere is clean, the light is always strong.

Centipedes crawled out from beneath stones and locked in coitus. They looked like they would multiply at great speed and take over the land.

I looked at my thin flat stomach covered by my olive shirt. Would I have children? Was it important? Would I love a man again, and keep a house, and forget the eternity of waiting that I had just passed? I went in to eat my three kinds of fish for lunch.

summer, and then the rain

The mango trees were in bloom as he came home that summer. They splayed out over the roof of the house, and he knew that later, as it grew hotter, the fruit would hang green and heavy, and then become golden in the chests of dark teakwood.

His sister opened the door. When he looked at her he knew that the summers had passed without their knowing. His first remembrances were of her as a child – thin, with slanting black eyes, like all the women in his father’s family: the many aunts who had dominated his childhood. Her face had a strange beauty, translucent almost, but she did not smile at him.

‘What’s happened to you,’ she said. ‘You look sick.’

‘Came home to die, didn’t I tell you that. You never reply to any of my letters.’

She said nothing but took him into the large dark rooms of their ancient home. The taravat, as his mother called it, always reminded him of the long Biblical genealogies his father had made him read by candlelight. How tedious it had seemed, this preoccupation with ancestry, with sonhood, with naming. He was glad he had no property to congeal in inheritance, no child to take over the preoccupation of being an ‘old line’. Under this roof Ivan begat Yohan and Yohan begat John, and John begat Yohan and Yohan begat Yohanan, century after century with deliberate certainty. He thought of his sister, and the silence that followed her birth. At that very moment, when no bells clanged, and no sweets were made with jaggery and rice, he had resolved to end this torment of patrilineality once and for all. He would not marry.

At work his friends used to ask him, ‘How can you have such a name, “Ivan”?’

‘Ivan is my father’s name, Malayalam for John – may be Syrian, or Greek, who knows? – our ancestors were baptised by St Thomas, the disciple of Christ, and so we have the names of Jesus’ friends and followers.’

‘What is the unpronounceable name you hide in the initial V?’

He would say, ‘Vazhayil – the name of our house,’ and his terseness always surprised them.

He never wanted to share Vazhayil with anyone. The dark cool interiors filled often enough the labyrinths of his own memory. He remembered, too, with a certain detachment his father’s hands with their three fingers missing – chopped off by a neighbour’s kitchen knife in a mango orchard. The neighbour was his father’s brother’s son, Thoma. They still talked to one another, now that his father was dead, and curiously Ivan bore no grudge.

He put his bags on the bed, and listened for a moment to the creaking – a circular creaking – and asked what it was.

‘It’s the fan,’ said his sister from the kitchen. ‘Don’t you remember? Father had it put in in 1937.’

He looked up and saw it dangerously veering in a circular motion. Its flat blades were painted cream and black wires threaded across a wooden ceiling. A naked light bulb hung dangerously close, swinging in vicarious motion. Outside the crows were calling out near the kitchen. It was still morning.

‘How was the journey?’

‘It was hot, but it rained once. I couldn’t eat anything.’

At the table, as she put out the food for him, he looked at her closely. Her face was deeply lined, and on her hands the veins stood out, deep and thick and blue, like the outlines of bare trees. She poured out his tea. Why was it so thick, he wondered, like some viscous soup.

‘I made it just the way you like it,’ she said, stirring the tea leaves continuously.

He did not reply.

‘It’s Lent, isn’t it?’ he said, looking at what she had cooked, for there was no meat or fish.

‘For me, it’s always Lent.’

‘Oh God, no.’

‘I’ll cook for you if you like, but you will have to pay. You know my finances, I can hardly manage.’

‘Is that why you don’t eat, then?’

‘No, I like to keep the fasts. Now for me, every day is holy and every day I take the Eucharist.’

‘You must be the only one in the village then.’

‘The churches are always crowded. You left the faith. Joined the Communists? Father said you even had a membership card. Here things are the same. It’s you who changed … Eat now, I will ask Pappenchettan to buy fish from tomorrow.’

‘I can’t eat much, but it’s something I remember of our childhood. With tamarind?’

‘Yes.’

He slept the whole afternoon, and is body rested against the golden reed mat preserved from his mother’s time. The edges were frayed, but the softness was wonderful. He felt as if he were sleeping on fresh-smelling hay, and when he awoke it was dark and raining outside. Annama had lit the lamps, for the lights had gone, snapped by the storm. The fat brown beetles he remembered from his childhood were buzzing around the flames.

He went out onto the porch. His feet were bare and he could feel the gravel brought in from some ancient riverbed. Each stone was small and round, smooth, and yet harsh at the same time under his feet.

He walked down to the canal where the tributaries of rivers moved around the town like silver coiled snakes.

The lights of the street shone on the water and he stopped to light a beedi.

‘Ah! Ivan, is it you?’ It was his cousin.

‘Yes, I came this morning. How is Eliyamma?’

‘In good health. Let us walk together. I heard you were sick. Cancer. Is it true? You look much the same.’

‘Three months, they said.’

‘Well, we all have to go. When they put the earth on you, how will you care?’

‘Is there any room in the cemetery? I heard you could not buy land anymore.’

‘Oh, be buried with your father.’

‘No, we never got on. You know I hated him.’

‘That’s why you still talk to me. Those three fingers I took off him. I still dream about it. They lay in the corner of the field for quite some time. And it was all about a square of land smaller than a kerchief.’

‘Don’t think about it.’

‘Will I see you in church tomorrow?’

‘No, I hate the old priest. Why can’t he throw off his long beard, those black robes. Is he closer to Christ because of them?’

‘Still the same Ivan. Drink from the holy cup. Your disease will go.’

‘My father drank from it every Sunday and his fingers never grew.’

‘All right then. Tell Annama that I will send the man to fell the coconuts tomorrow.’

Ivan watched Thomas as he moved away into the darkness of the narrow lane. He was still burly at sixty-five, his legs showed the clear blue network of veins as he strode with his mundu hitched above his knees. His teeth, though betel-stained, were strong. There was something coarse about him, a little brutal, and yet his features, typical of all of them – hooked nose and broad brow – still had the old grace. Thoma had wanted to marry Ivan’s sister, but the old man their father, had thrashed him with a walking stick. Thoma was seventeen years old then – not likely to forget that thrashing.

Annama had told Ivan about it, many years later. She too had not married. Their father had died, and their mother wanted Anna at home with her. Ivan had tried to persuade Anna that she should allow him to arrange a marriage for her – some widower perhaps who would not object to her age. It was then that she told him the story of Father’s anger.

‘He shouted all day and all night. He ate nothing. He flung food off the table. Poured buckets of water on our beds so that we could not sleep. He would say again and again, ‘Filthy, filthy! Seven generations must pass before blood can be shared again. If he looks at you once more. I will finish him.’ I can’t forget Father saying all this. It was a sin to love Thoma. I could not commit it. But I cannot marry anyone, then.’

So the thrashing had taken place, and its retaliation. Annama never spoke to Thoma, but nevertheless he showed his love in many small ways. She never refused him, but it was understood that Jesus would judge them, and the silence between them was understood by their larger family. Ivan was sick of all that.

He would bang his fists on the table and shout.

‘Not Jesus. What do you mean, “Jesus is coming”. It’s the bomb … the bomb will come.’

‘Jesus will come. It says so in Revelation. Your Bible is still here. I’ll get it for you.’

He could see his Bible, childhood’s text – yellow, paper crackling, backbone frayed, faded leaves and flowers of a long gone summer still keeping place.

‘Annama, the disease will wipe me out, the bomb will wipe out the earth. Where is Jesus in all this? I’ve got a translation of Orwell’s 1984. Here, take it.’

‘Jesus will be there. I believe. The sheep will be separated from the goats.’

‘You be the sheep and I the goat?’

‘No, Ivan, you are a good man. You will not be sent away.’

‘Don’t forget, I want the cheapest coffin, and no lining. Mango wood will do, and no cross.’

‘Ivan, you will go as befits the status of Kochumathu’s son.’

There was no arguing with her. He would get up from the table. The pain beginning to sear him again had become a blinding preoccupation, an obsession, a desire for calm that would never be satisfied. In some strange way all that remained of his days in this old house in the ancestors’ village, were the memories of childhood overlapping with the pain that engulfed everything.

When the end came it was early in the morning. He saw the sun rise, and felt the air cool on his body. The trees were dark and soft with rain. The earth would be wet. He had a sudden longing to walk barefoot to the canal, and to look into the water for one last time. He heard Annama moving around – shuddering into wakefulness. He saw the purple orchids, the large white spider lilies, heard the fluttering of pigeons. And that was all.

something barely remembered

When Chako came to live in a small village in the hills of North Malabar, the people took to him at once. He was a tall man, thin, a little stooped, and his beard was so long it touched his chest. That was unusual in that area, where men were clean shaven. He found a place to stay in a household which consisted of a man called George, and his little daughter Anna. Chedathi, an old woman living in the outskirts of the village, could come to cook for them and wash clothes. The house was never dusted; it was always dark, littered with clothes, Anna’s books and papers, many stray cats and George Saar’s leather-covered account books. Strangely enough, there were no flies.

George Saar had never known Chako before, but while climbing down the slope from the church, where he spent every evening doing the accounts, he heard a slither behind him. Chako in his clean white mundu, hitched above his knees, umbrella under his arm, had slipped over some red gravel.

‘What is it, missed your step?’

‘I come from the paddy lands. Not used to this.’

‘Who do you want to meet?’

‘I’m a doctor, a green herbs man.’

‘You won’t get any custom here. Everyone makes their own medicines.’

‘No, no, I have come to collect them.’

‘Don’t you leave that to your assistants?’

‘I’m writing a book. Everyone in the West wants our knowledge, we must share our ancient texts. I’ve come to draw pictures of the plants, and then if I find a nice place to stay, I’ll do the writing here as well.’

George Saar took him to his house, and then almost at once asked Chako if he would like to live with them. Chako looked at the man. He had a strangely effeminate face, eyes very large and melancholic and a blue haze on his morning-razored face. It was a face that seemed to float in water, drowning in some unformed and congealing grief.