My Story Read online

  Kunji, accompanied by a servant, bearing two Dutch trunks painted red and gold, made her way towards home, the principality of Alengad which included Alwaye but was made to change her route by an amorous chieftain who brought her over to his village and married her. He was well-versed in Astrology and Architecture. He chose the site for the Nalapat House and designed it.

  To the east lay lush paddy-fields and also to the north. From the west the blue and frothy Arabian Sea roared at night. Near the snake-shrine was the rare Nirmatala tree which burst into bloom every summer with large butter-coloured flowers that filled even the inner rooms with perfume.

  When we went there as children, the Nalapat House had seven occupants, not counting the servants. My grandmother, my aunt Ammini, my grand uncle, the poet, my great grandmother, her two sisters and Mahatmaji.

  Will Mahatmaji approve, whispered the old ladies of the household to one another at the beginning of any activity. It was as if Mahatma Gandhi was the head of the Nalapat House. His photographs hung in every room. Even the servants felt his presence in the house and began wearing Khaddar.

  My grandmother spun Khadi yarn on a thakli holding it aloft over her head in the afternoon, while the others slept and the old windows creaked in the heat. She was plump, fair-skinned and good-looking. Her throat, whenever I nestled close to her, smelled of sandalwood. She told me of the trip the ladies of the family once made to Guruvayoor to donate their jewellery to the Harijan Fund.

  Mahatmaji had talked in Hindi and in English which they could not anyway understand, but his smile hypnotised them. All the jewellery was given away. I thought of Gandhiji as a brigand, although I did not speak my mind then. I thought it his diabolic aim to strip the ladies of all their finery so that they became plain and dull. Austerity seemed meaningless at that time of my life. And, a cruel practical joke!

  My aunt Ammini was an attractive woman who kept turning down all the marriage proposals that came her way. She wore only white Khaddar and did not use oil on her wavy hair. She chose to lead the life of an ascetic, but when she was alone in her bedroom facing the fragrant Parijatam tree she sat on the window sill and recited the love-songs written by Kumaranasan, whose poetry was fashionable then. It was while listening to her voice that I sensed for the first time that love was a beautiful anguish and a thapasya...

  My grand uncle Narayana Menon was a famous poet-philosopher. He occupied the portico where the easychairs were placed and the table with heavy books. There was above his chair a punkah made of wood and covered with calico ruffles, which a servant seated far away could move by pulling on its string. Beside his chair was a hookah which my grand-aunt meticulously cleaned every morning. Grand uncle looked every inch a king, although he did not have enough money even to buy the books that he wished to read.

  To the south of the portico was the grilled library ruled by an ill-assorted group consisting of Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Havelock Ellis and Varahamihira. The Nalapat House had the finest library of palm leaf manuscripts, most of which were written in the Vattezhuthu that probably came to Malabar from the Phoenicians.

  My grand uncle must have been a lonely man, for he had no friend living nearby who could discuss with him the subjects he was interested in. With the callers he talked about the petty scandals floating about in the literary world and laughed engagingly, clapping his pink palms. He was witty and eloquent and even toward the end of his life when cataract made reading impossible, he remained cheerful, trying to turn his attention to the study of classical music.

  At my grand uncle’s evening durbar there were occasionally brilliant grammarians and writers who came from long distances to stay with him, but they were tongue-tied, and awed by his presence.

  5

  The Scent of Ambergris

  My great grandmother’s younger sister was a poetess. I read her verses only thirty years after she died. When I went as a six-yearold to stay with the old people at Nalapat, she was lying paralysed in the dark bedroom next to the servants’ quarters. She lay like a broken doll, a pale-faced toy, thrown haphazardly on the bed by a child in a hurry, but her eyes, miraculously left unclouded by the disease, moved continually, feeding themselves with an odd fever and greed on those who came near her.

  When the feeding was done and the rubber sheets changed, the adults of the house left her alone, murmuring, go to sleep. But sleep seemed alien to her, for even at midnight while my grandmother sleepily walked to the kitchen to fetch me a glass of water I used to look in and find the sick one’s limpid eyes wide open. Her name was Ammalu. It was not seemly for a Nair child to call an aged relative by name but I called her Ammalu. She could not protest anyway. Quite often on holidays I sat on her bed, on the squeaking rubber sheets, telling her of my classmates. At times her lips trembled a little as though she wished to make a comment but no sound issued forth. She communicated with her eyes, within which little flames leapt up each time I entered her room and took her hand in mine.

  The old ladies of the house told me of Ammalu’s passion for order. She was a spinster who chose to remain unmarried although pretty and eligible. She was finicky about cleanliness and bathed thrice a day. It was difficult to find her at any hour of the day without a dampness in her hair, and without a spring of basil in its curls. She read profusely and scribbled in the afternoon while the others had their siesta behind shuttered windows, lying sprawled on thin reed-mats on the cool black floor. She spoke very little and went out only to attend the annual Ekadasi festival of the Guruvayoor temple. Sitting concealed behind the wooden rails of a verandah she watched the procession of caparisoned elephants which thrilled her. The tattoo of the temple drums and the wail of the sacred conch, she heard with a smile. She was deeply devout and spent the grey hours of dusk in prayer.

  Finally the cold baths destroyed her. Paralysis struck her without a warning during the monsoon while she had just got out of the pond after her morning bath. She collapsed in a heap emitting a loud scream. This cry, agonised as a tortured bird’s, was the last sound she produced in her life. For two years, until I came on the scene, she lay still, enjoying the companionship of the sparrows that flew into her room, tweeting comfortingly. I became her cherished friend, for there was nothing that I could not tell her. If she smiled a smile at all, behind that closed face of hers, I saw its gleam in the eyes.

  One day when I returned from the Elementary School where I had been admitted, I saw her lie all wrapped up in unbleached cotton, on the floor inside a large rectangle decorated with grains of rice and burning wicks nestling in coconut-halves. What is she doing here, I asked my grandmother. Only the pale face was visible, and the eyes were closed. Prostrate yourself at her feet, said my grandmother, she is leaving us. Ammalu is dead, whispered my brother. Then we were hustled out and told to stay upstairs until the next morning. I missed my evening monologue with the paralysed one.

  Won’t she ever get up from there, I asked my brother. You are a fool, said my brother, she is dead and soon they will burn her. Then I broke down. They were already cutting down the heavy branches of the mango tree that stood as a sentinel outside her window and before dusk we saw the white smoke rise up in the southern compound near the damson tree. The south-west breezes wafted in, burdened with a sweet stench of human flesh. Is Ammalu burning there, I asked my brother, and he solemnly nodded.

  Nearly a year ago I returned to the Nalapat house, a middle-aged woman, broken by life’s bitter trophies, and found among the old books some containing Ammalu’s poems. I dusted the notebooks and carried them up to my room. Most of the poems were about KRISHNA. To Him she had been faithful. My chastity is my only gift to you, oh Krishna, she wrote in her last poem. Her writings disturbed me. I felt that after thirty years she was trying once again to communicate with the world and with me. There are no photographs to refresh my memory. Only the leaves of her books, yellowed like autumn-leaves lying on my desk, and a wooden chest which once held her clothes. And in the secret drawer of her writing box, a brown bottl
e shaped like a pumpkin that smells faintly of Ambergris...

  The Nairs believe that the dead return for their treasured possessions and therefore they throw away or gift away to the poor the clothes and other possessions of the dead as soon as the cremation is over. The good ornaments are hastily melted and reshaped for the living, changing the design so totally that the ghost-owner does not get a chance to stake a claim. When we die, we die. On the site of my pyre my sons shall plant a coconut tree. Then some day one of my descendants may go up to the tree and rub her palm against its bark as I went up to poor Ammalu’s tree and caressed it, murmuring futile message to the dead...

  6

  The Village-School

  When I joined the Elementary School at Punnayurkulam, which was only two furlongs away from the Nalapat House, I felt that I had died a cultural death and was getting reborn into another kind of world where the hard-eyed British were no longer my co-rivals.

  The children of our own field-hands and carpenters, dressed only in thin towels, were my new school-mates. One of them, the boy who shared a bench with me was Velu, who was always bleary-eyed and had sores all over his body. His parents were respectable beggars who used to visit our house every morning for a handful of rice. Velu was yellow with malnutrition. On birthdays we used to organise a beggars’ feast for which Velu used to come, tugged in by his father who twisted his ears to show off in front of us his parental privileges.

  Two wooden pots of rice-gruel were placed in the compound under the largest mango tree and a cauldron of red curry. For the children there would be as an added delicacy, a big salted mango which the maidservants ladled out from the old tall urns that were kept inside the pantry. Give another mango to Velu, I used to shout to the servants who were in charge of the distribution, give more gruel to Velu, give more of the curry...And,Velu, the sore-eyed, many-scabbed guest, would flash a friendly smile in my direction.

  Another school-mate was plump Devaki, who once wrote me a love letter and handed it to me most furtively, hiding behind the school privy. “Don’t read it now,” she said, “take it home and read it when you are alone. I have unloaded my mind, my heart and my soul.” I was mystified by the words. When I reached home and my grandmother found the letter in my pocket, she did not allow me to read it beyond the opening sentence, “my dearest darling.” My grandmother was very upset. She told me that I was not to associate with Devaki who had proved herself to be wicked, writing such letters to innocents like me.

  After the week-end when Devaki asked me for a reply I lied to her that I was not yet proficient enough in Malayalam to be able to write a letter and that probably before the year was out I would be writing her a long loving letter. She grew bored with me and turned for emotional solace to an older girl. They exchanged love letters in the privy every morning for months until one day the Maths teacher caught them at it and scolded them.

  There was a boy in the eighth standard which was adjacent to my class in the same dusty hall. He was considered an outlaw by the teachers who took a sadistic delight in punishing him everyday. He was handsome and had a dimple on his right cheek which appeared only when he smiled. I could hardly take my eyes off his face. I was so infatuated with his charm. Once when he wrote some obscenity at recess on the blackboard, the classmaster slapped him hard. I could, from my class, see the red weals on his cheek. Govinda Kurup, the outlaw, merely smiled and muttered something to his benchmate, making him blush and hang down his head. Get out of the class, shouted the angry teacher, Govinda Kurup, leave the class immediately. The boy kilted up his dhoti and walked away whistling. At that moment I wanted to follow him and tell him that if he were wicked, I was fond of wickedness too...

  One day I told my grandmother, lying close to her at night, I want to marry Govinda Kurup. Don’t be stupid, said my grandmother, but she laughed and seemed amused. One afternoon during our summer vacation, we were seated on the ledge of the snake-shrine playing with dice when we saw Govinda Kurup enter the gate and walk towards us. There were six of us, my brother and I, and four of our cousins who lived nearby. I do not know what prompted Govinda Kurup to enter a stranger’s house, but he seemed to be in high spirits, and started to tell us of a practical joke he played on the Sewing Mistress of the School.

  When his voice rose in enthusiasm I was terrified, for I knew that my grand-uncle did not like to be disturbed in his siesta. A few minutes later grand-uncle did come down to roar at the intruder. Who is this urchin, shouted grand-uncle, who invited him here? My grand-uncle, although a poet and a philosopher, was an utter snob. He believed in prescribing for the lower middle classes and the poor a decorum that we, by the happy fact of our high descent, did not have to observe. He showed them their places. He was also impatient with people who were unintelligent. But he was kind to the children of the family. He used to bring us from Trichur copying pencils picked up from his publishers.

  My grand-uncle liked to see women glamorized with jewels and flowers. His second wife, my favourite aunt, was never seen even at night without her heavy jewellery, all gem-encrusted and radiant, and the traditional cosmetics of the Nair woman, the dab of turmeric on the cheeks, the sandal-line on the forehead, the collyrium in the eye and the betel in the mouth. She used a perfume that was popular then with the Muslims, called Otto dil Bahar. Her house, the Ambazeth House, was the first large house to sprout in the vicinity of ours. She was the daughter of a very wealthy Zamindar who believed in sending his children off to Britain to pick up their education, so she could have made a much more gainful marriage, but for the fact that she had leucodermic spots on her body which she kept concealed for some years taking baths in the bathroom, while the other ladies splashed about merrily in the family pond.

  When the spots spread to the arms she confided in my grand-uncle who married her out of compassion. There developed between the two a strong bond that was radically sex-based. My grand-uncle had written at that time a book on sex, the ‘Rati Samrajya’ which was an academic study based on the writings of Havelock Ellis and the Indian sexologists.

  I have heard my grand-uncle tell his wife that she was the most empty-headed woman he had known. She used to laugh melodiously at such comments. At night she enslaved him with her voluptuous body. So she could well afford to humour him in the day. Each night she came to our house accompanied by her maids and a lantern, looking like a bride. And, she walked up the steep staircase of the gatehouse to meet her famous husband in their lush bedroom, kept fragrant with incense and jasmine garlands...

  7

  The Feudal System

  Until my wedding-night I did not have the slightest knowledge of what went on between men and women in the process of procreation. Sex was not a fashionable word then as it is now, but its followers were certainly not inactive.

  We had at the Nalapat House a kitchen-maid who used to flirt continually with the cook who had decided anyway to make her his wife as soon as his chit-fund matured to render him rich enough to buy the wedding finery. The marriage of the Nairs, particularly that of the poorer ones, was extremely simple, the ritual lasting only a minute or two, for, all that the man had to do was to hand over to the woman a length of cloth and when she accepted it she became his wife.

  Cloth was presumably an expensive commodity in olden Malabar and was precious. It was not easy then for the heads of the matriarchal families to clothe daintily the nieces, although the girls required only two and a half yards as underwear and two yards as overwear. The breasts were covered solely by the heavy necklaces they wore.

  Our cook planned to take a trip to the bazaars of Trichur to pick the bridal muslins and he kept prating on and on about his exotic plans until the girl’s patience grew thin. It was during this period of discontent that her swinging gait caught the fancy of a rich relative of ours who began to lure her into a vacant house every noon to coax her to part with her morals. When his ardour grew he began, Profumowise, to write little missiles of letters shooting them at her while she walked beneath his
balcony. One of those cloying despatches fell into the hands of my grandmother who promptly dismissed the girl from our service.

  The cook then began to steal out in the evenings to visit and console the erring wench. One day while he was returning from a temple-festival the rich man’s henchmen pounced upon him and throwing rocks at him, wounded him. He came to our house stumbling over the steps, blind with the blood flowing into his eyes and on to his naked chest. My grandmother was horrified. She thrust a fistful of granulated sugar into the wound on his forehead, stemming the flow. He mumbled his rival’s name and fell asleep on the wooden garner in which we stored the oilcakes for our cows. In the morning there was only some congealed blood on the garner where he lay and he had vanished.

  When my grandmother sent a servant to his village to seek him out his parents told him that he had not come there at all. The servants scraped the blood off the garner with a knife and washed it with some water mixed with cow-dung. It was as if some wild beast, a carnivore, had come there in the night and had had its kill. The rich man stopped seeing our former kitchen-maid and soon married a moon-faced cousin who quarrelled with him every night, sobbing so hysterically that his uncles had to knock at his bedroom door and intervene.

  No wonder the women of the best Nair families never mentioned sex. It was their principal phobia. They associated it with violence and bloodshed. They had been fed on the stories of Ravana who perished due to his desire for Sita and of Kichaka, who was torn to death by Draupadi’s legal husband Bhima only because he coveted her. It was customary for the Nair girl to marry when she was hardly out of her childhood and it was also customary for the much older husband to give her a rude shock by his sexual haste on the wedding-night. The only heroine whose sex-life seemed comparatively untumultuous was Radha who waited on the banks of Jumuna for her blueskinned lover. But she was another’s wife and so an adulteress. In the orbit of licit sex, there seemed to be only crudeness and violence.