When the bus came to its final halt in Koomankavu, the place did not seem unfamiliar to Ravi. He had never been there before, but he had seen himself coming to this forlorn outpost beneath the immense canopy of trees, with its dozen shops and shacks raised on piles; he had seen it all in recurrent premonitions—the benign age of the trees, their riven bark and roots arched above the earth.
The other passengers had got off earlier and Ravi sat alone in the bus, contemplating the next part of the journey as one does an ominous transit in one’s horoscope ... The ride was long and gruelling. Ravi left Swami Bodhananda’s ashrama very early in the morning to be on time for the cross-country bus. He woke only the ashrama’s handyman, and of course the Swamini, one to carry his scant luggage and the other for a hurried farewell. Unwittingly he wrapped her saffron dhoti round his own waist. He realized the awkward mistake only after he had come a good way. The morning star rose. On either side of the footpath, tree and shrub and crag seemed alive in the thinning mist, like breathing embryos ...
‘Here is someone to carry your luggage,’ the conductor said to Ravi.
Ravi stepped out of the bus, still wrapped in thought; and the earth seemed to slip away from under his feet.
A breeze rustled the banyan leaves.
The box and bedroll were hauled down from the roof of the bus. Ravi fixed his gaze on a patch of grime on the bedroll; everything else dissolved round him in a sensuous eddy.
‘Where to?’ asked the old luggage-carrier who had waited patiently for the young man to come out of his reverie.
‘Oh,’ said Ravi, ‘to Khasak.’
The old man was about to lift the luggage, when Ravi told him to wait. ‘Someone’s selling sherbet there, let us refresh ourselves.’
The old man declined with peasant ceremony, but Ravi took him along anyway to the shack that sold sherbet. Ravi asked for the drink and sat on the bench in front of the shop, which too was a fixture on piles. He looked around, taking in the scene; the road ended in a circular patch of turf, encircling which stood the mounted shacks. Behind them were mud houses lost in the green of planted vegetation—pulses and plantain, and gourds which ripened on thatches.
The sherbet vendor had washed the glasses and uncorked the syrup when Ravi, from habit, asked for ice. The vendor smiled and said, ‘You won’t need any ice, sir.’ True, Ravi realized as he took a sip. The earthen pot had chilled the water and given it the tangy taste of the monsoon’s first shower. Ravi sat over another drink and desultorily scanned the knick-knackery in the shack. Behind the vendor’s perch hung a large print depicting the tortures of hell. Has that print lain in wait for me, Ravi wondered, behind crazed jars and gothic lemonade bottles with deep green irises? In a corner was a phonograph with a little dog embossed on its horn; mists of memory rose from its damp, rusted flues and spoke to Ravi in sad and tender voices.
‘Where might you be going?’ asked the vendor.
‘Khasak.’
‘Visiting relatives?’
‘No. I’m going there to teach.’
‘Teach? In Khasak? There isn’t a school there, at least there wasn’t till the other day—’
‘One of the District Board’s new single teacher schools. I am supposed to get it started.’
The vendor paused, took a closer look at the traveller, and said, ‘Thought you were in the Congress.’
His eyes were on Ravi’s saffron dhoti. Congress partisans who roamed the countryside during the freedom struggle wore homespun dhotis dyed saffron; many still wore them as a fad.
‘Not at the moment,’ Ravi said, laughing, ‘and this isn’t Congress saffron, it is saffron from an ashrama.’ At the mention of the ashrama the vendor’s palms joined in involuntary salutation ...
Ravi set out. The old man led the way. They left the bazaar of shacks behind them and walked along a lane cut between deep embankments which soon opened out into a valley. Wild tulsi scented the air.
‘How far is it, dear Elder?’
‘Just a little walk.’
‘Is the load heavy?’
‘Loads are loads always.’
‘We can take turns, I’d like to help.’
It was noon and the wind lay spent over the swooning earth.
Ravi’s memories of his childhood always began with noontide. He sat alone on the veranda of their house on the hilltop. The hill sloped down in flanks of shimmering yellow grass to the valley of coffee below. After the valley, it rose again to the skyline on which diminutive pines swayed in the lucid mirage. His most cherished memory was of the sky-watch, a pastime in which his mother joined him, though not often, as she was big with child. She told him stories of the Devas. These dwellers of the sky drank the milk of the Kalpaka fruit, their elixir of immortality, and flung the empty husks down to the earth. If you gazed on the sky long enough, you saw the husks as transparent apparitions. The sky at noon was full of them. Ravi saw them slide over glistening cloud-hems and pass softly over pine and rock and grass. He watched, leaning on Mother’s belly as she reclined on a couch.
‘Thirteen!’ Ravi whispered, unable to contain his excitement.
‘Ah, my child,’ Mother said, ‘what did you do to them?’
‘Counted them, Ma.’
The shy apparitions vanished. The sky was deserted now, save for a lone crested vulture navigating the precipices of space.
‘My little star,’ Mother said during one such vigil, ‘don’t lean too hard, you might hurt your sister.’
Little sister, pretty tadpole, who had dreamed and slept long inside Mother’s big toe! She had slithered up since to Mother’s belly, but he was not fated to see her; Mother took the little one with her on a strange palanquin. Many people moved in and out of the house that day, men who pruned the coffee bushes, nurses who assisted Father in the plantation’s infirmary, people he’d never seen before. The palanquin was being readied; Ravi remembered the dirge, the perfume, the flowers and incense. It was noontide, the husks were falling. Mother lay asleep in deep and wondrous peace. As the palanquin rode out of the house, the nurses held him back, gentle hands turned his face away. He did not resist, for he had foreseen this journey down the grass, across the emerald green valley, past the undulant pines.
The covenant ended when his stepmother, his Chittamma, arrived. At noon she had her seista inside, and Ravi sat alone on the veranda, not wanting to watch the sky, uninterested in his toys. Those were his Cinderella days, a period of orphanhood; one day, turning away from the hollows of the sky, he looked towards the miraculous horizon. It was then that they came riding the golden surf of the mirage—the winged and diademed serpents, calling him to play ...
‘The rains haven’t come yet.’ It was the old man speaking. ‘Maybe the monsoon will fail us this year.’
‘Ah, there’s no telling.’
‘It was floods last year.’
They must have gone about three miles and the old man said there was as much more to go. They had been climbing for some time now, and looking back, Ravi could see the dull little specks that were the roofs of Koomankavu. Ravi paused; the bus was driving back to Palghat town.
‘Tired?’ the old man asked.
‘Oh, no.’
‘Something made you sad?’
Ravi smiled. The old man said, ‘Let’s move on, Kutti.’
The path sloped down again, and Koomankavu was lost to view. The sun had dipped past its zenith; the wind rose again, no longer a gentle breeze but the east wind which blew in through the mountain pass, wild and tumultuous on the palmyra fronds. ‘Ah, listen!’ said the old man, stopping suddenly in his tracks; a high bird-call above the wind. The Maniyan prophesying rain!
‘Perhaps I was wrong about the rains after all,’ the old man said with obvious relief. He could go on and on about the rains, the slightest response sustained his animated monologue. The rains, he said, had always tantalized man. ‘Isn’t that maya, Kutti?’ Maya, of course, the cosmic delusion; Ravi knew it was his saffron! For a moment he had a frivolous impulse to play the mystic; he smothered it. No, not on this journey of many lives, this journey of incredible burdens. Let me reach my inn, the village called Khasak. Now Ravi sought to answer the question on maya, ‘I suppose so.’ The bland answer dampened the old man, but only briefly; soon enough he said, ‘They’re talking of a dam, but can a dam make the skies rain or turn back the flood?’
‘Dams do help ...’
‘One doesn’t know,’ muttered the old man, ‘one doesn’t!’ He was deeply disturbed by the big machine with arms and mandibles which moved loads of earth and chewed serene rocks into jelly. Could man pit his skills against God’s will?
‘Here we are, Kutti,’ said the old man in pleasant anticipation of laying down the baggage, ‘this is Khasak!’ As a streamer of cloud moved away, red roof-tiles gleamed through dense greenery. Ravi was aware of a mélange of sounds and sights—a mother calling her daughter home, the arcane name stretched out like a melody; whistling pigeons and hosts of other querulous perchers in the green; a water buffalo, its horns raised in alarm at the sight of strangers; the swift-flowing brook, its banks aflame with flowering screw pine; a flight of complaining crows rising in the distance like pterodactyls into the crystal arches of the sun.
Behind Khasak stood the mountain, Chetali, its crown of rock jutting over the paddies below. Wild beehives, one waxed to the other, hung in immense formations underneath the rock, inaccessible to man.
The District Board had leased a house for the school, a modest dwelling of two rooms and corridor, with a large yard shaded by tamarind trees. It stood on the outskirts of the village and belonged to Sivaraman Nair, the impoverished feudal chief of Khasak, who until the last crop, had used the shed to store seedlings. He had been waiting since noon for the teacher’s arrival.
‘This is our first real school,’ he said as he gave Ravi the keys, ‘and you are our first schoolmaster.’
Ravi took possession; so this is my transit residency, my sarai. Ravi went in; the scent of mould and mildew hung heavy in the air.
‘It needs living in, Maash,’ Sivaraman Nair said, embarrassed about the mildew.
As the school was his property, he had paid for a blackboard, a table and chair, and a couple of benches. To these he had added a personal touch—framed and colourful pictures of Gandhi, Hitler and the monkey god, Hanuman.
‘An officer of the Board was here the other day,’ Sivaraman Nair said. ‘He suggested that you stay in the school. Or else I would have put you up in my own house.’
‘I have a lot to thank you for already, Sivaraman Nair. In any case, I wouldn’t want to impose myself on you.’
‘I hope you’ll be comfortable here. If there’s anything you need, you can always walk across. My house is just outside the village.’
When the landlord left, a small crowd closed in, boys and girls and women suckling babies. In this crowd stood a dwarf, holding a leash of yarn at the end of which fluttered a green dragonfly. It was hard to tell his age, his torso full grown, hands and legs stunted, his face large with horsey jaws. Ravi didn’t want to fraternize too quickly but the children were shoving the dwarf towards him, and so in the age-old colloquy of the primary school he asked, ‘What’s your name?’ The dwarf stood smiling. The children egged him on, ‘Tell him, O Kili!’ After much cajoling, the dwarf answered in a voice that mixed an old man’s gutturals with the lisp of a child, ‘Appu-Kili.’
Appu-Kili, Appu-Parrot, the name disarmed Ravi. ‘A parrot, are you?’
‘Yes, Saar,’ the children answered on the dwarf’s behalf, volunteering other information too. ‘He lisps, Saar. He catches dragonflies, Saar. He likes spiders, Saar.’
‘Now go home,’ Ravi said. ‘See you on Monday. You’ll come to school, all of you, won’t you?’
The children spoke in chorus, like so many anklets; these silver voices were soon to soothe his sorrow. They replied together, ‘We shall come, Saar!’ They went away. And then the women, their breasts spilling out of their babies’ lips.
Ravi unpacked his meagre belongings and looked round for places for them; he herded away the reluctant roaches from the window-sill and stacked his books there, pulp and scripture. Settling other odds and ends as best as he could, he sat down on the rickety chair. His calves hurt, his bones ached, the pain travelled through them, travelled dully through his mind ...
The rocks were warm with sunset as Ravi walked barefoot to the brook for a bath. Two women bathed downstream, waists and bosoms covered precariously with towels, their thighs dark in the twilight. Ravi sat on the stream’s bed of pebbles with the rich warm rush of the water swirling over his shoulders. The town lay far away in the fading vermilion of the horizon ... Ravi turned to look again at Khasak, now starlit with kerosene wicks, and beyond Khasak, at Chetali’s looming promontory.