It was the first day of school and Ravi stood beside the blackboard. Like the mullah he wondered too: what karmic bond has brought me here? What purpose, what meticulous pre-determination? Then came a gust of wind which threw open the window behind him. Ravi went to the window and stood looking out. The children left their seats and crowded round him to look through the window and see the beautiful thing their village had framed for their teacher.
It was the lotus pond of Khasak, proud in newly blooming purple.
‘Hey,’ said Ravi, ‘there is a little bird caught in the lotus meshes!’
‘A chick of the waterfowl, Saar!’ the children said, and looked up at their teacher. Did he share their excitement?
‘Waterfowl?’ asked Ravi. ‘Then it won’t drown.’
‘It might if it tires, Saar.’
‘Shall we pull it out?’ Ravi asked the class.
A dozen voices chimed together, ‘Let us!’
‘Wait a minute,’ Ravi said, ‘there are two more birds now ...’
‘Its Attha and Umma.’
The parent birds pecked away the meshes. Soon the chick, its parents on either side, was waddling ceremoniously along the bank.
It was a sunny day. Tiny wind-blown clouds floated by, their shadows moved like cows grazing over the pastures of Khasak. Ravi came back to his seat and called the class to order. He sat long in silence, sharing the memory of that framed vision with his twenty pupils who sat before him with postulant faces.
‘Maash!’
It was Madhavan Nair calling from the gate.
‘Can we interrupt the lessons?’
‘Welcome,’ said Ravi, ‘the school is yours.’
Madhavan Nair came in with two unkempt children in tow. He had been busy till the previous night, trying to persuade parents to send their children to the school.
‘Have you anything against savages?’ Madhavan Nair asked.
The two boys stood bewildered, their slight figures lost in immense thatches of hair and shirts as roomy as surplices.
‘Two more for your rolls,’ Madhavan Nair said. ‘Sons of basket weavers from the mountains. They tried to run away but I caught them and made them promise they would enroll. Hey, you!’
One of them had a running nose and was trying to breathe in the snot.
‘Blow your nose, you unclean one,’ Madhavan Nair admonished.
Ravi patted the child, and said encouragingly, ‘Don’t worry. The well is over there, draw some water and wash.’
The little savage bounded off and was back in a trice.
‘Ayyo!’ Madhavan Nair cried out. ‘This is catastrophe ...’ The child had washed his face first and then blown his nose, and now his shirt front was soiled. Ravi saw the mess on the shirt and the beatific smile.
‘The shirt!’ the tailor lamented. ‘It’s ruined!’
The fabric, not yet laundered, had the glaze of calendering, and would not absorb the water.
‘There goes my time and money,’ the tailor went on. ‘I made these shirts roomy enough for them to grow up in.
‘That’s a good boy,’ Ravi coaxed, ‘Shall I write down your name in this big book?’
‘Write them down, Maash!’ Madhavan Nair said. ‘This is Chatthan and this, Perakkadan, inseparable like Rama and Lakshmana. And if they stop coming to school, I’ll tear these shirts off their backs.’
Ravi wrote the names down in the register, and turned to the tailor, ‘You have all helped so much ...’
Madhavan Nair grew bashful and pretended not to hear the compliment; he stepped into the little aisle between the benches and began cheering the children as one would a football team. ‘Alam Khan!’ he called out, ‘Kunhamina, my beauty!’ he chucked her under the chin, ‘and goodness gracious, who’s this but Kholusu ...’ The class stirred in pleasant disorder. Madhavan Nair could well have taken over, but he chose to conclude the encounter with a little advice, ‘See this Master-Etta here. He has passed the fourteenth standard. You children should study like him and become engineers. You will, won’t you?’
The children chorused, ‘We will!’
Madhavan Nair left, and Ravi was alone with the class again; he opened the register and silently read the names. Then he reread them, names of caliphs and queens, indigent dynasties which had strayed out of desert sanctuaries and were marooned in Khasak.
The day warmed, the palm winds were blowing. It was the hour of the teacher. Ravi smiled upon his twenty-two children, and they smiled back, the caliphs and queens, until smiles filled the seedling house. This was the hour of myth, Ravi knew. ‘Let’s tell a story,’ he said to the children. They were overjoyed.
Ravi asked, ‘What kind of story?’
The children began chirping all together, and a ten-year-old in the front row raised her hand to tell him something. Her silver anklets chimed when she moved her feet under the desk, and her wide gaze was hemmed by exuberant lashes darkened with surma.
‘Yes?’ Ravi said.
‘Saar, Saar ...’ she said, then grew shy. ‘A story without dying, Saar!’
Ravi laughed, ‘What’s your name, child?’
‘Kunhamina.’
Ravi listened to the ballad of Khasak in her, its heroic periods, its torrential winds and its banyan breezes. There was no death but only silver anklets and her eyes sparkling through the surma. Ravi looked deep into those eyes; the story would have no dying, only the slow and mysterious transit. He began in the style of the ancient fabulist.
‘Once upon a time ...’
Ravi’s days went by in order and peace. Madhavan Nair had brought him a maid to sweep and swab and cook a frugal meal that would last the day. Abida was the daughter of Chukkru the diver from an earlier marriage. Her mother was found dead in one of the village wells. Some said Chukkru had drowned her, others believed it was the work of a jealous lover. Abida was a child when it happened. After the days of mourning, Chukkru ranged again through far-flung places to return home at the dead of night. Little Abida grew up crying. A wet glaze lay over her eyes, an orphan glaze, as though the tears hadn’t dried in them.
On days when there was no school, Abida stayed longer, tidying up the old seedling house as best as she could.
One Sunday Ravi became aware of the pallor on her face. He asked, ‘Not well, Abida?’
‘I’m well, Saar. It’s a mild fever which comes on sometimes.’
‘You ought to see a doctor, a vaidyan.’
She replied disinterestedly, ‘I suppose so.’
On another Sunday, watching her bend and sway at work, Ravi realized how short she was, and how slight.
‘Are you fifteen,’ Ravi guessed at her age, ‘or younger?’
‘Twenty,’ she said, her face sad as she answered him.
‘Abida, can you read and write?’
‘No.’
‘Listen, Abida ...’
‘Yes, Saar?’
‘I’m going to put you to school.’
She was on her knees, cleaning up a crevice on the floor. She rose, arms akimbo, and laughed.
‘Me, Saar?’
‘Yes. You could find yourself a job in Palghat, say, in a nursing home
She didn’t laugh now, but looked at him through her undried childhood tears. ‘I shouldn’t leave this village,’ she said. ‘If I do, there’ll be nobody to look after Attha.’
‘His wife ...’ Ravi began, and fell silent. Morosely Abida resumed her work. Attha had a beautiful wife, but he lived in loneliness, wandering from well to well, retrieving things fallen into the dormant slime. He had none save her, the child he had brought up in a well of loneliness.
But she had her people, in a manner of speaking, an uncle and her maternal grandmother in the faraway village of Kalikavu. The ancestral home on a hill was now in ruins, lines of mouldering brick sinking into the earth. Within these bounds stood a hut of mud and thatch in which the grandmother and uncle lived. The grandmother was blind and the uncle leprous. Sometimes, on a cloudless evening, the villagers below would catch sight of him, seated among the ruins, his stiff, flat palms held out to take the sun.
Ravi sat on his cot, leaning on a stack of pillows, and looked out of the window. The sun was setting. The grazing herd of clouds was gone. Soon it was dark, and the fantasy returned, the fantasy of the journey. The seedling house became a compartment in a train, and he the lone and imprisoned traveller. Dark wastes lay on either side; from them fleeting signs spoke to Ravi—a solitary firefly, a plodding lantern. The wheels moved along the track with soft, deceptive thuds. Then he heard the far rush of another track racing towards his own, the sorrow of another, futilely seeking comfort. The rails met for one moment, tumultuously, to part again. To race away into the many-mysteried night.