Seated in the madrassa, Allah-pitcha the mullah taught the children of the Muslims the saga of Khasak. Long, long ago, in times now unknown to man, there came riding into their palm grove a cavalcade of a thousand and one horses. The riders were the Badrins, warriors blessed by the Prophet, and at the head of the column rode the holiest of them all—Saved Mian Sheikh. The full moon shone on the thousand steeds of spotless white. But the horse the Sheikh rode was old and ill.
Each generation of young listeners would ask, ‘Why an ailing mount, Mollakka?’
And the mullah would repeat, ‘Where is succour for the old and dying except in Allah and his beloved Sheikh?’
When the old horse could go no farther the Sheikh signalled his warriors to stop. In the last watch of the night, as the moon set, the faithful animal died and was buried in a palm grove. It is said that he rises from his unmarked grave, rises with the wind, and those who listen in grace can still hear his unsteady footfalls as he canters to the rescue of the lost, often helping them across the wooded mountain pass ... The thousand riders dismounted and pitched their camp in the palm grove. The people of Khasak trace their descent from those one thousand horsemen.
Today the Sheikh sleeps in a rock crypt on top of Chetali. Mortal eyes are yet to discover its exact location. Both the Muslims and the Hindus of Khasak look upon the Sheikh as their protecting deity.
Said the mullah, ‘When we are bent with age, Allah will come and sit on our backs. The Almighty will straddle the infirm and the destitute, as His hosts stand by in veneration.’
The odour of sweat rose from his threadbare shirt and overwhelmed the mullah with the nearness of the Merciful Rider. Like Allah’s mangy mount, the mullah looked round at his pupils gathered in the madrassa and asked, ‘Whose turn is it today?’
The children brought the mullah’s breakfast by turns; it was Kunhamina’s turn that morning. Her mother had made vellayappams, rice pancakes puffed with sweet-sour palm toddy, rolled them in banana leaves and stuffed the package into the girl’s satchel. Kunhamina’s way to the madrassa lay through a patch of woodland, where a clump of Arasu trees shed their flowers over the footpath. That day it looked as if the trees had rained flowers; Kunhamina stood admiring the floral carpet, when a flock of foraging peafowl swooped down around her. Charmed, and hardly realizing what she was doing, Kunhamina undid the package, broke the pancakes into flakes, and fed them to the peafowl. When she was done with the last bit, she rubbed her palms clean and turned to go. But the crested king-fowl hopped behind her for more.
‘Finished, Peacock-Saar!’ she said. The bird chased her and pecked her on the calf. It hurt and bled a little, but she was jubilant, she had something to tell them at the madrassa; she had been pecked by a real peacock! She told Kholusu and Noorjehan.
The spell was broken when the mullah asked whose turn it was. The preening imperial peacock and the rain of flowers vanished; Kunhamina stood up, a delinquent ten-year-old amid the cacophony of the madrassa. The mullah rose and came over to her. The children watched the mullah’s cane, and grew tense. But the priest did nothing, he just stood there, lost to the world around him ...
Allah-Pitcha’s mind went back to the panchayat of the week before, to which he had summoned the Muslim elders. They came, their beards dyed red to show their orthodoxy. A few young men drifted in too. They all gathered beneath the banyan tree which stood at the centre of the village square. The mullah, seated on the brick-paved platform around the foot of the tree, spoke to his congregation of the perils of the new school, its angular letters and its reckoning used in forbidden usury. The mullah evoked fearsome visions of the insanity of the new learning, the anger of the Sheikh and his second coming. Khasak had two schools—the madrassa where the mullah taught the Koran, and the ezhutthu palli, literally the house of writing, run by a family of hereditary Hindu astrologers. The schools never competed.
At the panchayat there were whispers of dissent from the young.
‘Speak out!’ the mullah said.
‘It struck me,’ young Kassim said, ‘if the sarkar sets up the school, who among us can wish it away?’
Kuppu-Acchan, the village gossip perched on the granite ledge in front of Aliyar’s teashop, known in common parlance as a load-rest, on which pack-carriers of old rested their loads, said to no one in particular, ‘What do you people say? Will it work?’
The school was not without its partisans—Sivaraman Nair the landlord, his nephew Madhavan Nair the village tailor, Zulfiqur Hayat, the cousin of the first native to trade beyond the frontiers of Khasak. Kuppu-Acchan altered his position to catch the attention of a passing red-beard, ‘Who can run this school if the people don’t care for it?’ Hardly had he finished this taunt when Sivaraman Nair, bare-chested, a bunch of keys hanging from his girdle as the landlord’s insignia, came up to Kuppu-Acchan’s perch and whispered, ‘Kuppu, remember your promise, won’t you?’
‘You can depend on Kuppu, Venerable Nair.’
‘Ten admissions ...’
‘It’s done.’
‘Can you make it fifteen?’
‘Be at peace, Venerable Nair. A promise is a promise.’
‘The school will need many more than fifteen children to save it from closing down.’ Sivaraman Nair drew closer, ‘The Bouddhas* are against us.’
With a discreet wink Kuppu-Achchan alerted the landlord that the Bouddha elders were headed this way after the panchayat. Leading them was Allah-Pitcha. The mullah entered Aliyar’s teashop with a few elders who were his confidants, and since there wasn’t room enough, the rest of the crowd remained in front of the shop. The ‘True,’ the elder answered.
The mullah muttered in disbelief, ‘Nizam Ali is back ... Where is he?’ The mullah said this in a barely audible tone. The listening elders were distressed.
The Story of the Return was put together from its fragments. Nizam Ali had arrived four nights ago, walked over marsh and scrub and disappeared into the Mosque of the King, a haunted ruin.
‘He has made it his home,’ the villagers told one another, ‘he has tamed the spirits.’
None of these accounts had reached the mullah but memories flooded the old man’s mind, unbecoming memories, of a boy of sixteen with a girl’s lips and curls like tendrils that framed his face. This was no time to reminisce, but to confront the heresy; Nizam Ali had come back to Khasak as the self-proclaimed Khazi, the sorcerer of the Sheikh, an authority never known in the village before. The mullah asked again, petulant as a child, ‘Why did no one tell me? No one among you ...’ The old red-beards wouldn’t reply. ‘And you, Aliyar?’ the mullah picked on the young man who owned the teashop, ‘You knew too?’
Aliyar, his protege, sulked behind the samovar. Suddenly the mullah felt incapacitated, ahead of him lay an occult duel between priest and pretender. Allah-Pitcha had had these manic fits before, and Thitthi Bi his wife had sorrowed with him, but she refused to be jealous; jealousy over a boy was unbecoming.
The mullah stooped over his tea. Insane images rose and fell in his mind—the Khazi destroying the old order, the new school overthrowing hallowed myths, the pinch of the sandal on his big toe turning into a sore that wouldn’t go away ... The tea turned cold. The crowd from the panchayat thinned away, but now another, larger crowd was heading for the teashop, young men and boys moving in fluid circles round their new leader. The mullah rose and went out into the yard.
‘Nizam Ali!’ the mullah was face to face with the apostate.
‘Khazi,’ his former novice corrected him sternly. Allah-Pitcha reeled; finding his voice again he said, ‘Nizam Ali, are you the Truth or the Deception?’
‘The Truth.’
The mullah waited in vain for an augury, the clicking of a lizard, a gust of wind carrying disembodied voices, a scarf of blue cloud across the magic mountain. Feebly, and in pain, he said, ‘Imposter! You are possessed by an unclean spirit.’ He scooped up a fistful of dust, chanted a spell over it and hurled it at Nizam Ali. In the effort of the throw, which missed the Khazi, the mullah swayed and would have fallen had Aliyar not held him. During all this Nizam Ali stood his ground smiling.
The mullah, downcast, went back into the teashop. He then asked one of the faithful red-beards, ‘Did the erring one speak of the school?’
‘He did, and with much vehemence.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said that the spirit of the Sheikh was not angered over the school, and that he, the Sheikh’s Khazi, would plant the school like a sapling.’
The mullah sat awhile telling his beads. Then he spoke, ‘In this school our children will be confounded by kafir knowledge. How can anyone planting such a sapling be the Sheikh’s Khazi?’
The mullah sipped his tea, now bitter, and in the next instant spat it out in a burst of spray. He turned his fury on Aliyar. ‘Dog, shameless dog!’ he screamed. ‘Mixing the kafir milk powder in the tea!’ Swearing, whimpering, drooling, he seized cups and glasses and began flinging them out into the yard in a frenzy.
‘Mollakka!’ a cool voice called to him from the yard. Then Nizam Ali strode into the teashop, kicking a barricade of benches aside. The mullah sat down, undone; the intruding sorcerer loomed over him. The mullah heard the stern whispered command, ‘Calm down, Mollakka!’
In the madrassa, the mullah stood beside the terrified Kunhamina as if in deep meditation, tears wetting his shirt-front. Then laying his hand on Kunhamina’s head, he said, ‘You won’t repeat this, will you, O Bilal?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Sit down.’
The children were bewildered. Why did the mullah pardon her, why did he stand so long near Kunhamina, and why did he weep?
‘And now, tell me,’ the mullah said, ‘will you go to the kafir’s school?’
Grateful for the reprieve, Kunhamina was prepared to promise anything, ‘I will not go.’
‘Swear by the Sheikh.’
‘By the most Holy Sheikh,’ and she added on her own, ‘by the Badrins, by the Prophet ...’
‘Swear by Mariyamma.’
Mariyamma was the Goddess of Smallpox, worshipped by the Hindu lower castes who appeased her with toddy and obscene song. The mullah was taking no chances.
‘By Mariyamma,’ the girl chanted, again adding gratuitous divinities to her oath. ‘By the goddess on the tamarind branch, by the snake-gods—I will not go to the kafir’s school!’
The mullah returned to his low stool, the seat of the chronicler till this his sixtieth year. Forty years he had walked the mountain path, singing the glory of the Sheikh, forty years to infirmity. From the big toe of the wayfarer, the lesion, almost forgotten, sent up its dull signal of pain.