The natives of Khasak were not fond of travel, but the Pandarams were a visible exception. An immigrant community which had come in through the Palghat pass centuries ago, they were sworn to mendicancy and ascetic nomadism. Time diluted these observances; the Pandarams went back through the pass on their annual ritual pilgrimage. Clad in saffron, they were received with hospitality and reverence and given generous alms.
The Pandarams preserved some tokens of their history—the tuft of hair at the back of their heads, and the Tamil language which, mixed with the host language, resulted in hilarious oddities.
When on these pilgrimages, like the saffron they donned, they assumed new names as well—names taken from myth and legend—and acted like gods out of a long lost pantheon. The god-walk took half the year at the end of which the Pandarams came home to Khasak with their considerable earnings.
They had a secret skill which did not go well with holy mendicancy—trapping birds. In Khasak this caused no embarrassment. The wastes around Khasak were full of quail and partridge, and the holy mendicants spent the second half of the year living on bird meat and illicit toddy.
The Pandarams were great fabulists, because they had nomadic minds. They spun endless tales about the Tamil country while they waited in the liquor den for the quail to fry crisp on the fire. In these tales the pilgrim progressed over unrelieved chalk-stone landscapes under a relentless sun, but at the end of a day’s journey there was always a village, a woman, a god. Kuppu-Acchan joined the listeners sometimes, and even the mullah, to whet profane curiosity.
Gopalu Panikker, the village astrologer and teacher of the alphabet, was an incongruous presence in a liquor den, and more so as he sat listening to an unlettered mendicant. However, Gopalu had time on his hands now, since the astrologer’s teaching method found fewer takers with each passing day. The method belonged to the classical world; the children wrote out the letters on spreads of sand and chanted them in a dirge. They wrote with their forefingers on which they wore a dried gourd for protection. Eight long years of this unhurried ordeal, after which nothing short of decapitation could permit the scholar to regress on his phonemes. But the new school of the District Board made the child literate in a matter of months. Gopalu lamented in bleak prophecy, ‘What learning is this? Our country is ruined!’
The country was of course Palghat, from whose fabulous metropolis barefoot kings had reigned over a twenty-mile radius in olden times. That once-sovereign country now chose to learn the alphabet in six months instead of eight gruelling years; Gopalu sensed the end of civilization. Those who sat in the den and listened to his words of doom—Kuppu-Acchan, the mullah and the bootlegger Mayandi himself—were sorry for the country and its uncorrupted province, Khasak. But Mayilvahana Pandaram was not unduly concerned. He was an itinerant, and if Khasak was doomed, there was always the country of his origin to go back to.
Gopalu had questions to ask, the questions squirmed within him, he couldn’t voice all of them as that would amount to admitting to the collapse of the family’s guild. Casting covetous eyes on the browning meat, Gopalu, vegetarian and pundit, asked, ‘O Mendicant, what be the truth of your journeys?’
The truth unfolded in unending spectacle—villages over which gods stood guard, enormous terracotta gods painted bright against the austere rockscape. These gods came riding the East Wind and tapped awake the mendicant of Khasak.
‘O Astrologer,’ the Pandaram concluded, ‘it is a call hard to resist.’
On many nights Gopalu listened to the wind; there were only the deep growl of palm fronds, no god rode the wind for the distraught astrologer ...
Finally, he went to Palghat town to visit a fellow-astrologer to explore ways to restore the eight-year regimen to its old primacy. He stayed a week. When he came back home, he felt that something ominous had happened while he was away.
‘Where is our son Ramankutry?’ he asked.
Lakshmi, his wife, met him with stony silence.
‘Has he joined the Board’s school?’ he persisted, ‘Who got him enrolled?’
Not a word came from Lakshmi. Nor did she feel any guilt for what she had done when Gopalu was away. She had taken a step which brooked no turning back, she had taken the thimble off the child’s deformed digit and stormed into the school. ‘Maash,’ she had told Ravi, ‘teach him English. Make him a big man.’
She kept the image of the big man a desperate secret, hidden deep in her mind and memory—her town cousin Raghu Nandan who worked as a clerk in a government office. She wanted Ramankutty to matriculate in a suburban school and become a clerk like her elegant cousin. She wanted him to come home riding a Raleigh bicycle, wearing rimless glasses, a fragrant cigarette between his lips.
Intuition knows no secrecies; Gopalu Panikker confronted his wife, ‘Tell me who gave you this advice—Raghu Nandan?’
Lakshmi began to sob. Now it was Gopalu’s turn to be silent.
He did not pull the child out of school. The silence in the family lasted four days. On the fifth day he broke the silence to take leave of his wife, ‘Lakshmi, I shall return soon.’
He set out before dawn, his personal effects in a satchel, lighting his way with a palm-fibre torch. Lakshmi stood behind the gate, stood a long while, until both torch and traveller disappeared into the sunrise. ‘O my tamarind goddess,’ Lakshmi prayed, ‘be with him.’
Nobody knew where Gopalu had disappeared. Lakshmi gave perfunctory replies to queries, which nobody believed in any case.
‘I can’t see Gopalu returning in a hurry,’ Kuppu-Acchan spoke from the load-rest. ‘Not that it concerns me ...’
Aliyar heard this chance utterance and forgot it, but it came back in wild imaginings of catastrophe, in all of which the astrologer invariably perished. Gopalu owed the teashop a few rupees, this money would evaporate if those fantasies came true. So, slyly one evening, Aliyar chaperoned Lakshmi along the foot tracks unsolicited. ‘O astrologer’s wife,’ he said, ‘the good astrologer owed ...’
Lakshmi preempted Aliyar’s proposition, ‘You are not the only one,’ she told him, ‘he owes a lot of money to lots of people. I would have paid off everyone, O Aliyar, had I the money.’
When the mullah came to know of this he reprimanded
Aliyar.
‘I ought not to have done it, Mollakka,’ Aliyar admitted.
‘Put it down to Allah’s credit.’
In the third month Gopalu returned under cover of night, and by midnight a cloud of subtle odours lay over Khasak. They rose from Lakshmi’s kitchen. A fortnight, and Gopalu was gone again. And since Lakshmi was reticent, the others could not resist the temptation of the whispered word. Kuppu-Acchan quoted anonymous informants who claimed to have seen the astrologer work in the meanest of stations—as a butcher and pedlar of beef. Lakshmi ignored this purposeless malice, and walked about Khasak flaunting a necklet of gold with a pendant of phoney rubies.
The cattle broker Ramacchar was yet another exception to the inertia of Khasak; once every month he travelled to the Tamil town of Pollachi to trade in its famous cattle fair. He went by bus and barely managed to salvage the money spent on bus fare and food. The market was chaotic; countless animals were bought and sold, and in the dung and dust and whirling noise, the touts conned or terrorized, and snatched commissions from deals they had nothing to do with.
Ramacchar was an innocent tout; the deals he muddled that day left him penniless and famished in that alien town. It was then that he found himself face to face with the sage in saffron.
‘O Astrologer!’
‘Ha, Ramacchar, my countryman!’
Gopalu Panikker embraced Ramacchar and took him to a teashop where he treated him to the delights of Tamil cuisine—tea and roasted patta, ants that grow wings during seasonal changes. Ramacchar listened to Gopalu’s story.
‘I am widely respected here,’ the astrologer said, ‘for my healing spells.’
‘The ones that wouldn’t work in Khasak?’ Ramacchar asked with a mischievous smile.
‘True,’ Gopalu said in the humility of success and contentment. ‘Now let us go to where I stay. It is three miles away, can you walk?’
Ramacchar belched.
‘O Astrologer, your roasted moth has given me wings.’
In a settlement three miles away from the market a gentlemen-farmer had given Gopalu half of his sprawling manor to use, for counselling and sorcery ... Gopalu cut short his work in the market, and set out homeward with Ramacchar. On the way he cautioned the excited cattle tout, ‘Rama, none of our old familiarity in the presence of my patron. A little discretion ...’
Ramacchar took on an obsequious stoop as he trailed behind the saffron-clad one ... Gopalu walked into the farmhouse chanting mantras. He introduced Ramacchar to his host, ‘My old disciple Ramananda ...’ The farmer greeted them with folded hands and words of reverential welcome.
‘Your Master has been of great help to us,’ the farmer said. ‘He has rid this village of many evil spirits.’
Ramacchar, now Ramananda, bowed, ‘His spells are mighty. There are many more spirits to be exorcised, I presume?’
‘Indeed there are, holy one.’
The astrologer and the cattle tout lay down for the night, but neither slept, so they talked into the small hours. It was thus that Gopalu heard of his daughter’s illness.
‘It was typhoid, O Astrologer. She has recovered beautifully.’
‘Did she suffer much, Ramacchar?’
‘I hate to say it, but she did.’
Ramacchar told Gopalu how Kuttadan the oracle treated little Rukmini with his spells and later the mullah with Muslim spells, yet the fever raged. Then Ravi went all the way to the township of Kozhanasseri for those colourful capsules ...
‘Ravi who?’ Gopalu asked. ‘The Maash?’
‘Yes.’
What wandering, what weariness! The clay wick lamp thinned away. Gopalu thought of the children, the women and the withered elders; Khasak lay in the far reaches of the night.
‘O Astrologer, have you gone to sleep?’
‘No, Ramacchar.’
At that moment Ramacchar felt a tide of goodness rise and reach out to the astrologer’s sorrow.
‘I am finished,’ Ramacchar said and broke down. ‘I could strike no deal and I have spent my last copper. Save me, O Astrologer!’
It was thus that Ramacchar the cattle tout became Gopalu’s fellow-sorcerer. On the first day at the manor, Ramacchar rose early and bathed and, smeared with sacred ash, went into the audience room.
Gopalu, who came in a little later, was amazed. Ramacchar had put up a mighty montage of fetishes—fish bone, tortoise shell, betel leaves, red hibiscus flowers, many kinds of grain.
‘Who taught you all this?’ Gopalu asked in a whisper.
‘Your grace, O Astrologer!’
And they waited for custom. A dozen or so people came for trivial fortune-telling; the collection was modest. In the afternoon a Tamil woman came with a difficult request. Her husband had left her for a mistress, could the great sorcerer of Khasak concoct a love potion which would bring him back? Gopalu looked in disdain at the neat wad of notes the woman had set down at his feet. He cast the cowrie shells to divine the future, desperate about the present, helplessly listening to his fellow-sorcerer improvise mantras and compose a litany of conjecture.
Gopalu put the cowrie shells back, and addresed the woman. ‘We see a way out. Come back to us after three sunrises.’ The woman was gone. Gopalu sat distracted and looked up at the parodist standing beside him. ‘She wants a love physic,’ Gopalu said. ‘What shall I give her? Cartwheel grease?’
After the profanity of parody came a prayer; Gopalu poured out a ladleful of honey into a copper dish, he kept his hands on the dish and prayed to no god but to Khasak which breathed recovery into people; in that mute and wordless prayer Gopalu saw little Rukmini, the pallor still on her face. He had consecrated the potion with the sorcery of caring and sorrow.
He would give it to the woman when she came for the love potion.