The Khazi went among the people, spreading the glad tidings of the Sheikh. The mullah had barred the children from the school, now the Khazi commended its new learning. What was the Khazi’s power? What but the miraculous signs? Midnight baths in the cursed tank, the taming of the spirits in marsh and mosque, fetishes scattered amid gravestones.
‘What is the Khazi’s truth?’ the troubled elders asked one another.
They recalled the spell the mullah had tried to cast on Nizam Ali. They had seen the spell fail.
‘The Khazi’s truth,’ they told themselves, ‘is the Sheikh’s truth.’
‘If that be so,’ troubled minds were in search of certitude, ‘is Mollakka the untruth?’
‘He is the truth too.’
‘How is it so?’
‘Many truths make the big truth.’
In the seedling house, Ravi was trying to calm the landlord who had burst in, greatly agitated.
‘The Bouddhas are against us,’ Sivaraman Nair whispered.
‘Let them be.’
‘They are holding the children back.’
‘Don’t worry.’
Sivaraman Nair quietened, but he was still panting. Then, on second thoughts he said, ‘It is just as well, Maash. Better to have them on the other side.’
It was then they saw the lithe figure slouching in the shade of the tamarind tree.
‘Assalam Aleikum!’ the visitor greeted them from a distance.
‘Waleikum Salaam!’ Ravi returned the greeting.
‘May I approach?’
‘Please do ...’
He walked up with a springy stride, a dappled apparition emerging from under the tamarind’s porous canopy.
‘I am Sayed Mian Sheikh’s Khazi.’
‘I’m the District Board’s schoolmaster,’ said Ravi, not quite knowing what to say.
Hair parted and combed down to his shoulders, his locks feminine and dark, the Khazi stood there tall and strangely elegant.
‘I bring you Sayed Mian Sheikh’s blessings,’ the Khazi said. ‘Your school will prosper.’ And then he was gone as abruptly as he had come.
‘Tell me, Sivaraman Nair,’ Ravi said, ‘who’s this Sayed Mian Sheikh?’
Sivaraman Nair was embarrassed; the Sheikh’s Khazi pledged Bouddha support to the school at the very moment he was raising the Bouddha issue. Fortunately Ravi was not bothered about these undercurrents of animosity. He was merely curious.
‘Don’t be afraid, Maash,’ Sivaraman Nair said.
‘I’m not afraid. But who is he?’
‘He is ... he is a ghost.’
‘A ghost!’ Ravi laughed and stretched in his chair. He lit a cigarette. Sivaraman Nair did not like this profane disrespect.
‘The ghost is real, Maash,’ said the landlord, ‘and he is a Muslim ghost, an unclean one. But as I’ve said often, it can’t touch us if we Hindus stick together. The Devi of the temple in Kozhanasseri can make this Muslim spirit defecate in terror.’
At that triumphant prospect Sivaraman Nair broke into verse:
‘It is not the damned shaven head that
will wear the crown of Bharat.’
He went over it again in silence, and laughed, and said, ‘Kalyanikutti, my daughter, taught me these lines, Maash. Isn’t the poet right?’
‘Absolutely.’
But alone on his way home, Sivaraman Nair turned compulsively to gaze at the mountain; a cloud had darkened the wild beehives ... When he reached home, his wife Narayani was on the veranda with nothing on but a wet and threadbare towel round her waist. She was spreading sandalwood paste on her body. As she rubbed the fragrant paste on her breasts and thighs, Sivaraman Nair gazed for one fleeting moment, devastated; Narayani hadn’t changed in these thirty years she had been his wife.
She broke off in the middle of the song she was singing and turned to her husband with a caustic welcome, ‘Has my Nair’s frenzy passed? And how goes the war over the seedling house?’
Sivaraman Nair pretended not to hear, chanted a name of God and walked past her into the house. He called out to his daughter, ‘Kalyanikutti, my child, is there something to eat?’
Anklets tinkled down a corridor, bangles clinked softly, then hands went to work over hearth and vessel.
Narayani was still on the veranda ... It had begun thirty years ago, within days of their marriage. Narayani would bare herself to the sunny forenoon winds and smear sandal paste all over her body. Sivaraman Nair had objected. She had done it again. She wore a turquoise pendant over her breasts and walked across the paddies for a bath in the brook, and took a long time to return.
‘Where were you all this while?’ Sivaraman Nair asked her once.
‘The seedling house.’
‘What have you to do there?’
‘My mother told me paddy mildew is good for the complexion.’
‘I know of no such discovery.’
‘Mother knows.’
‘Let your mother keep her knowledge to herself. You aren’t going to that wretched shed anymore.’
But she went again, and again, until Sivaraman Nair confronted her.
‘Who was it in the tamarind yard of the seedling house?’ he asked.
Narayani looked silently and menacingly into his eyes. Sivaraman Nair repeated. ‘Who was it?’
‘Kuppu,’ she said, ‘Kuppu, the palm-climber.’
‘What did he come there for?’
‘He wanted fire to light his beedi.’
‘But where can one find fire in the seedling house?’
The years went by ... Sivaraman Nair recalled it all, the mildew on the breasts and the palm-climber’s quest for fire. He would look on Kalyanikutti’s face, on her eyes and nose and lips, sometimes in frozen horror, sometimes in sad and forgiving love.
There was an upper-primary school in the adjoining village, one that taught bad English and arithmetic, but this did not worry the mullah, as he was certain that not many Muslim children would walk two miles across shelterless fields to the school when it opened in June. June was the month of rain and lightning. This school was owned by Kelan, an untouchable, but one who had not forgotten his lowly birth; he had come to Sivaraman Nair and sought his blessing.
‘Prosper, O untouchable!’ the feudal chief had said—that was a long time ago and he had meant do not prosper beyond limits. But Kelan had prospered. Kelan’s wife came dressed in shining sarees and made offerings to the little gods of Khasak. Kalyanikutti, a sad spinster trapped inside her feudal home, looked out through ancient peepholes at the assailing silk and colour. Kelan’s school and his burgeoning property began to aggravate Sivaraman Nair; he denounced all teaching by the low-born, he talked ramblingly to the villagers and even more to himself. He was ill. The doctors in Palghat town strapped a pneumatic tube round his arm, took readings and put him under sedation ... When the new school came to Khasak, Sivaraman Nair felt revived. It was to be on his property, and would make a better school. He offered his seedling house to the District Board. The seedling house would henceforth be the school, and nobody’s rendezvous.
‘Where will you store the seedlings?’ Narayani asked in scarcely disguised anger.
‘Damn the seedlings!’ Sivaraman Nair said in reply. It was the night after the disastrous panchayat meeting; the mullah sat in his tiny strip of veranda trying to mend his broken sandal. Thithi Bi watched her husband’s labour, the frayed leather and the kitchen knife. She said, ‘The Sheikh will not forsake us.’ The mullah punched and stitched futilely. She gave him money to mend the sandal; instead, he bought her a copper ring embossed with a piece of honed glass.
‘Why didn’t you get the sandal mended?’
She stretched her hand into the tiny halo of the kerosene wick and stuck out the finger with the ring on. Allah-Pitcha turned towards her and smiled, and resumed the mending.
‘Great King of the Universe,’ she said, ‘protect us!’
Promises weren’t kept; many children joined the school, even the grandchildren of the red-bearded conservatives. A day more for the school to open. The last namaz was over; the congregation had consisted of just two old men. The mullah sat alone in the mosque a long while. The priest and his flock, and even this house of worship were passing through trying times; the mullah stroked his beard, a mere frazzle of silver and brown, as he did whenever he contemplated his own dissolution. From the mosque the mullah could see the school far away. Ravi’s bedside lamp burned bright, the schoolmaster was perhaps reading, as the learned do, to fall asleep. The mullah hadn’t seen him face to face. The women of the village said he was young and handsome. For a moment Allah-Pitcha contemplated visiting him, talking to him, but lost his nerve; what was he but an unlettered priest? From the school the mullah’s gaze turned towards Chetali. Beyond the mountain lay untrodden tracks. Great unseen rains fell on those timeless springheads and the waters avalanched down muddy and turbulent, leaving the silt of age on the enfeebled pilgrim.
The mullah stepped out of the mosque, leaning on his stick. His way home lay past the school. He crossed the yard and paused awhile at the gate of the mosque. He thought of the stranger in the seedling house with sympathy and love. Innocent wayfarer, what bond of karma brings you here?
Then the lamp in the seedling house went out.