Where the Rain is Born: Writings about Kerela Read online

  Edited by Anita Nair

  WHERE THE RAIN IS BORN

  WRITINGS ABOUT KERALA

  Contents

  Introduction

  Anita Nair

  1. The corridor

  Balachandran Chullikkad

  2. Chasing the monsoon

  Alexander Frater

  3. Charlis and I

  Shashi Tharoor

  4. Marthanda Varma

  C.V. Raman Pillai

  5. The village before time

  V.K. Madhavan Kutty

  6. Chemmeen

  Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai

  7. Grandmother’s funeral

  Jeet Thayil

  8. In search of doubting Thomas

  William Dalrymple

  9. The blue light

  Vaikom Muhammad Basheer

  10. Fool’s paradise?

  Ammu Joseph

  11. Where ‘everything is different’

  Abu Abraham

  12. The first lessons

  O.V. Vijayan

  13. Butter chicken in Ludhiana

  Pankaj Mishra

  14. The expanse of imagination

  Jayanth Kodkani

  15. Karkitakam

  M.T. Vasudevan Nair

  16. The voice

  Suresh Menon

  17. Mattancheri in Manhattan

  Ayyappa Panikker

  18. The moor’s last sigh

  Salman Rushdie

  19. Sesame seeds, flowers, water

  Lalithambika Antherjanam

  20. The garden of the antlions

  Paul Zacharia

  21. Footballer

  Ravi Menon

  22. On the banks of the Mayyazhi

  M. Mukundan

  22. The power of one

  Bill Aitken

  24. God’s own country

  Arundhati Roy

  25. Hangman’s journal

  Shashi Warrier

  26. Those were the daze

  Shreekumar Varma

  27. Ancient promises

  Jaishree Misra

  28. The thief of memories

  Vijay Nambisan

  29. The mountain that was as flat as a football field on the top

  Anita Nair

  30. Stalinist and Indian: E.M.S. Namboodiripad

  Ramachandra Guha

  31. The bonsai tree

  David Davidar

  32. Mundu, meesha, kumbha, koda: The sartorial splendour of the Malayali male

  Geeta Doctor

  33. The town they come from

  C.P. Surendran

  34. The swamp

  Kamala Das

  Notes on contributors

  Copyright acknowledgements

  Footnotes

  Karkitakam

  The garden of the antlions

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright Page

  Introduction: Making Do

  Anita Nair

  This much is certain: it is impossible to get two people in Kerala to agree upon anything. Give them a subject—nuclear weapons, the American Presidential elections, earthquakes, Maxim Gorky, or the family next door and they will argue about it with as much acumen and aplomb as any star attorney in a TV soap would. And yet, bring up the principle of make do and everyone will hasten to agree that it is the only way to survive Kerala. Make do is the deity everyone worships. Make do is the reason why the average Malayali goes through life convinced that he is the liveliest, shrewdest and most intelligent of all Indians. This despite the high rate of lunatics and suicides. Make do is just about the only thing a Malayali does with little rancour or debate.

  Each time I go home to a little village called Mundakotukurussi in Kerala, this business of make do confronts me with a sly giggle, starting with the jeep that jumps and leaps, screeches and roars in turns as it crunches up miles between the railway station and my ancestral home. If there was a road once, it exists in the memories of the residents of the village as a few mounds of gravel patched with tar. Right now, they have learnt to make do with a well-trodden path wide enough for a jeep to negotiate and navigate through.

  How omnipresent the principle of make do really is I discovered on my last trip home. When I reach my parents’ house, it is to discover that the power is off. The level in the water tank is low. Around the house are clusters of giant plastic drums and traditional bronze vessels. This being the month of October, when the power fails, the rains have been known to oblige. I take a deep breath and look around me. Nowhere else in the world have I seen so many hues of green. The velvety green of the moss on the wall. The deep green of the hibiscus bush. The dappled green of the jackfruit. The jade green of the paddy…Leaves. Parakeet’s wings. Tree frogs. The opaque green of silence. In the evening, darkness will run amok on this canvas of green and it will be time to visit the temple where make do reigns supreme. Muthasikavu or the grandma’s grove is a little shrine edging the village. My grandfather re-built the broken down temple. Since none of the idol-makers could comprehend what it was he wanted hewn out of stone or fashioned in metal, he set up a sandalwood pedestal and made do. In the Muthasikavu, there is no deity. Only a lamp that glows from within the sanctum sanctorum. You make do with what your imagination can conjure up and that is the face of divinity. In this village that has neither a guardian deity nor a regular place of worship, they have learnt to make do with this family shrine. And so when they require divine intervention, they make their request to the old lady of the grove. The drummers begin to tune their instruments in preparation for the Velluchapad. The oracle is a tall lean man with gaunt cheekbones and eyes that burn. His hair is wet and straggly after the ritual bath and hangs to his shoulders. He walks into the temple with giant strides and breaks into a guttural scream every few minutes. The drumbeats drown all thought and the Velluchapad begins to dance. As abruptly as the dance began, it ends and the Velluchapad begins to run, circling the temple. His body trembles and he flicks his wet hair with a toss of his hand as if to signal that now he is possessed by the force of the temple. Sometimes the divine power refuses to let go of the Velluchapad and then he begins to slash his head till blood drips down his nose. Slowly his body loosens and the clenched-in look on his face dissipates. Being a Velluchapad, I decide, takes a lot of making do. It can’t be easy being a repository of divinity; pitching yourself into a state of nervous energy, cutting your head open to appease a savage god; all to keep a family fed and clothed. There is enormous prestige attached to the position but these days, Velluchapads have few rituals to officiate at and hence have to make do with alternate sources of income. This one is an electrician’s assistant by day.

  I trudge the narrow path back home. The power goes off. It comes back in a minute and then goes off again. On and off, on and off. Three times is a signal to indicate that the power won’t be switched on till next morning. Little lanterns shaped like glass eggs light up rooms. In more affluent homes, the emergency light comes on. There are no harsh surprises, none of the not-knowing-what-to-do. Palm leaf fans and mosquito nets; transistor radios that will bring the world into the homes even if the TV can’t; candles in saucers and generators. With these the village will make do till morning or whatever time the power chooses to return.

  I sit in the veranda and watch the rainfall. A frog leaps joyous with wetness. A baby scorpion scuttles out; flooded out of its dry home, it seeks refuge in a crack in the floor. In the morning, coconut clusters that would have sagged from the assault and battery of the storm will be propped up and tied. Rotten plantain trees will be uprooted and new ones planted. The land will be repaired. Nature that kills will also heal. And perhaps it is based on t
his seminal knowledge that the principle of make do thrives. Kerala when offered to the world is a package wrought of colour, traditions, dainty foods, coconut lined lagoons and marvellous beaches, where green and light, 100% literacy and ayurveda, boats and elephants, all find their place. God’s own country, the brochures tell you. If you’ve been there, you’ve been to paradise, they cajole.

  What of the total lack of industry, high unemployment, a competitive and conspicuous consumerism, bureaucracy, corruption, or the stifling conservative attitudes, the average Malayali asks. Does the world really know what Kerala is all about? Only if you have lived here will you understand, I am told again and again. As I collated material for this anthology, it is this I sought. Writers who have a congenital craving to want to read between lines and see beyond what is on display. To probe beyond the surface and tap into the seams of everyday. To shrug aside recycled nostalgia and to see Kerala for what it truly is. Voices that haven’t succumbed to the sheer beauty of Kerala and who have been able to decipher, if not appreciate, the conundrum that Kerala is. A repertoire of voices that either in English or in Malayalam, in essays, fiction and poetry, have made definite forays into understanding Kerala.

  The Corridor

  Balachandran Chullikkad

  On the cold floor of the

  corridor

  poems like headless bodies

  smeared in blood and phlegm

  lie scattered.

  Ants come in hordes

  and drag them away

  to store as food

  for dreamless winters.

  Once in a while

  The tired steps of a

  Death-song

  Climb up the stairs

  When darkness and sorrow

  Fill the corridor.

  Inside a room

  the bleeding heart of a

  gramophone

  groans with pain,

  a love-lorn Saigal

  on wings wet with liquor

  wafts along the corridor

  like a delirium-dazed dream.

  From the bath shower

  the sad sound of a violin

  overflows like a blue river

  carrying the abandoned body

  of summer.

  A drunk shadow

  comes walking

  along the corridor

  with faltering steps,

  knocks at every door and

  calls,

  his own door has shut behind

  him, shut for ever

  as eyelids in death.

  —Translated from the Malayalam by N. Kunju

  R. Prasanna Venkatesh/Wilderfile

  Chasing the monsoon

  Alexander Frater

  This extract is taken from Chasing the Monsoon, published by Penguin Books India.

  2 JUNE

  The wind woke me before dawn. It came from the south-west with a curious singing note, steady and melodic. A deeper accompaniment was discernible in the background which, at first, I took to be breaking seas. Thinking they were breaking outside my window I went to investigate but found only the wild thrashing of coconut palms.

  I returned to bed but couldn’t sleep. The monsoon seemed to be on its way and my journey in its company could commence. The fact that it had finally made its move was one worry less, but new doubts began to assail me over the travel arrangements. An eccentric monsoon, starting and stopping at whim, perhaps making unscheduled diversions, would make life very complicated. And what was happening about the Cherrapunji permission? I made a mental note to call Delhi but then, remembering I would have to use the Indian telephone system, immediately cancelled it. That problem could be faced nearer the time.

  Dawn revealed a deep cumulus overcast and flayed, streaming coconut fronds. The crows had been blown away (even now they were probably hurtling backwards, wildly cawing, over Goa) and replaced by flights of brown sea eagles. These had taken up station fifty feet above the brow of the cliff beyond my window, ranged along it like sentinels, perfect flying machines hanging almost motionless as they waited for fish in the boiling sea below.

  Half a mile out men waited for fish in fleets of flimsy, high-prowed canoes which, later today, Julius Joseph would order ashore; spinning like compass needles they kept vanishing beneath the huge swell and reappearing, dizzyingly, far from where they started. Periodically a sunbeam touched the dark sea and ignited it in a wild, irradiating flash.

  The bay below my hotel had become a white tidal race, the waves surging up the beach and over the road. A foolhardy cyclist venturing on to the road with a milk pail was knocked flat. Hoisting the bike shoulder-high he staggered on, pail in the crook of an arm, surf surging about his ankles. The coast, running north for many miles, lay semi-obscured under an opaque ribbon of spray which, touched by those sunbeams, briefly glittered with a rainbow luminescence.

  ‘Monsoon coming!’ said the waiter at breakfast.

  ‘When?’

  ‘I think this afternoon.’

  I nodded, unsettled by the behaviour of my watch, a 25-year-old Swiss Omega which, ever since I had owned it, lost precisely 4½ minutes a day. Nothing could apparently be done about this; a droll Zurich expert to whom I once showed it said the 4½-minute lapse lay so deep in the mechanism it was more a matter of metaphysics than watchmaking, accessible to God perhaps, but not to him. This morning, though, routinely checking it against my undeviating electronic alarm clock as I strapped it on, I noted with astonishment that it was running eight minutes fast. Such a bewildering development, I decided, must have been caused by charged particles or a strange force field moving up in the van of the burst.

  Still preoccupied I walked to the village through salvoes of flying vegetation, bought a paper and took shelter in a coffee shop. ‘Monsoon Due in 48 Hours’ proclaimed a front page headline. The story, filed in New Delhi and dated the previous day, said:

  Though there have been some pre-monsoon showers in certain parts of southern India in the last few days, southwest monsoon is likely to break out in its normal run along the Kerala coast in the next 48 hours.

  Giving the information on the basis of satellite imagery of monsoon conditions, Dr N. Sen Roy, Additional Director of the Meteorological Department, said once the monsoon breaks out of Kerala it would spread to the neighbouring Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and other States in the next week.

  UNI adds from Trivandrum: Conditions are becoming ‘favourable’ for the onset of the south-west monsoon over Kerala and Lakshadweep during the next three days, meteorological sources said here today. It said that isolated heavy rain was likely to occur over Kerala during the next 48 hours.

  If it arrived here today—or tomorrow—when might it be expected in Cochin, my next stop on its route? Julius Joseph must now be one of the most sought-after men in South India but, even so, I would soon need a word with him. A voice said, ‘Well, well, sod this for a game of soldiers!’ and my bespectacled friend from the bus parked himself on the bench opposite, grinning.

  I was pleased to see him. ‘What are you late for this time?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing. I am taking day off. All it will do is make me one day later for all things for which I am hopelessly late already.’ He laughed and placed a dog-eared school exercise book on the table. ‘Today I am sitting here writing.’

  ‘Writing what?’

  ‘A short story, sir. That is my trade.’

  I said I had once written short stories too and we talked happily of the problems of finding good beginnings, credible endings and themes that lent themselves to the subtle brush strokes of miniaturists like ourselves. He told me he admired the work of Maupassant, Chekhov, John Cheever, William Trevor and Rabindranath Tagore.

  The Trivandrum bus would be leaving in a few minutes. I finished my coffee and asked what story he would be working on today.

  ‘It is based on a true incident,’ he said. ‘About local farming village with bad water shortage. A dozen girls went into the paddy fields with
a priest, took off their clothes and danced naked. The girls are doing this quite willingly, you understand—it is traditional dance to bring rain. But nudity is illegal in India so police are coming along and arresting them.’

  ‘And did they bring rain?’

  He smiled and tapped his nose. ‘Read the story! I am giving it twist in tail!’

  Aboard the bus I opened the paper again. Water shortages remained very much in the news. The Andhra Pradesh government had begun transporting water in special trains, with celebrations attendant upon the departure of the first, aarti being offered and coconuts broken as the fifty-tanker ‘rake’ set off. And here, by way of a contrast, was a report about the Delhi authorities going under water to look for shipwrecks near Lakshadweep. ‘Archaeologist S.R. Rao said that the search for treasure-carrying vessels would be taken up only after the monsoon.’

  The mood at the Meteorological Centre was like that in a theatre before the curtain went up on an important first night. People moved with quickened tread and an urgent sense of purpose. Mr Rajagopalan, the Director, came pacing by with furrowed brow and hands clasped behind his back, the leading man mentally rehearsing his lines. He didn’t remember me, and looked startled when I interrupted his reverie. ‘We are talking hours and minutes now!’ he declaimed. ‘Hours and minutes!’

  Julius Joseph stood outside his office, speaking to an attentive young assistant. The lines of worry had vanished from his face; he suddenly looked as relaxed as someone back from a long holiday. ‘Tell them to be here at four o’clock for an official announcement,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sir!’ said the young man, rushing off.

  ‘That’s for the local media,’ said Mr Joseph, smiling. ‘To put them out of their misery.’

  ‘So today’s the day,’ I said.

  ‘Undoubtedly—though, as is customary, we will not formally announce it until tomorrow. We think it will arrive between 3 and 3.30. This morning the wind was gusting at 40 knots from the south-west—the classic prelude to the burst.’

  ‘When will it get to Cochin?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’