Kuttadan, the oracle of the goddess Nallamma, sat basking by the brook. He saw Gopalu Panikker’s son Ramankutty moving suspiciously among the screw pine bushes. He walked over to the boy, and made conversation, ‘Is your father back from the Tamil country?’
‘Yes,’ replied Ramankutty.
Kuttadan could sense the boy’s caginess.
‘A pooja, is it?’
‘Well, nothing really ...’
‘Why then the lizard? Aren’t you hunting one?’
An eight-year-old, even if he is a sorcerer’s son, cannot keep a secret too long. So Ramankutty came out with the story, which Gopalu did not want revealed to the villagers prematurely.
‘One of those ghosts,’ said Ramankutty.
‘Oh—’
‘It has entered a man. A rich man.’
‘A man from the Tamil country?’
‘Yes. And he has a rice mill and a car.’
Something rose inside the oracle, something fluid and angry and tangible, like rancid palm brew, it exploded inside opaque memories. Overcoming it, Kuttadan said, ‘That is good news. So let us get a big one. There ...’
On a tree stump sat a fat lizard in all his regalia, a scion of the vanished saurians.
‘Let us get him, Ramankutty!’
‘Stay, fat-head!’
‘Charge!’
When the assault came from two sides, the lizard nodded his crested head and began clambering off the tree stump. Kuttadan cast his upper cloth like a net and caught the slow-moving creature. He secured it in Ramankutty’s cloth bag and said, ‘Tell your father it is a gift from me.’
‘A real big one,’ Ramankutty said gratefully, ‘like a crocodile.’
The sorcerer’s son went home, and Kuttadan climbed down the bank for a bath. The water was pleasantly warm. After the bath Kuttadan went to the mud-walled shrine of his goddess and sat before her grotesque image. It was in this chaste hungering, day after day, that he had worshipped her for ten celibate years ... As he sat before her that day a single thought spiralled through his mind: people come from far away to see Gopalu Panikker.
‘Read this, dullard!’
Kuttadan heard the the voice of his dead teacher Rama Panikker ...
Kuttadan could read letter after letter but he could never join them to build a word. Rama Panikker had not spared the rod, but it had only added to Kuttadan’s stupefaction.
One afternoon, pursued by disjointed skeletal letters, Kuttadan was walking past Rama Panikker’s house. It was in the yard of this house that the letters were taught in the morning. Lakshmi, the teacher’s daughter, was standing at the gate, sunning herself after her bath, the fragrant paste of sandalwood on her bare breasts, tiny in pubescence. She smiled at Kuttadan.
‘Shall I teach you?’ she asked.
The more he wrestled with words to fashion a response, the more uncouth they became, ‘We? Alone, together?’
‘Yes,’ Lakshmi said, her smile still serene. ‘There is no one at home.’
He followed her into a room that smelt of decaying palm-leaf texts. She made him sit beside her and wrote out the letters for him. The dismal veil was on him again, and he had failed to comprehend word and letter together. Lakshmi sought to punish him. Nimbly she parted his mundu and let her foraging fingers loose on his thighs. Then she began pinching him. It hurt, yet he wanted her to pinch him more.
‘Angry?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Where is it? Let me see ...’
She parted his mundu again, hungrily spotting the red crescents on his flesh, feeling them, counting them playfully.
‘Will you tell anyone about this?’ Lakshmi asked.
‘No.’
He gave up words and letters for good, and turned away from script to the mysterious unbounded sound, to the voice of his goddess that rumbled inside his unknowing self. Since then he had passed by that gate many times. Lakshmi was always there sunning herself, but she showed no sign of recognition. There was something he wanted to tell her, but even as the words formed, the phonemes slipped away.
Lakshmi became Gopalu’s wife ... A rich miller from far away was coming to Gopalu to be exorcised ...
‘Vango! Vango!’ Gopalu Panikker welcomed the miller in Tamil to put him at ease. The swarthy giant from the Tamil country looked cowed by the evil spirit that was inside him. Gopalu comforted him and seated him on a mat. It was the dark quarter of the night before moonrise. Cicadas and an assortment of insects drummed the night into muted unrest.
The miller and the astrologer sat down to eat. The miller looked greedily on Lakshmi’s wrist and palm as she ladled out rice and curries: the women of Palghat were bought off by rich Tamil men for their form and light complexion. The miller had heard about them, he had also heard about the sorcery of Khasak, about its cantos both black and benign.
Midnight. A tiny tongue of wild fire sprang to life on Chetali’s slope.
‘Good omen,’ Ramananda said.
‘Shambho Mahatman,’ Gopalu chanted in undertones, ‘Sayed Mian Sheikh!’
Gopalu, Ramananda and the miller made their way to the funeral marshes. At a signal from Gopalu, Ramananda began to call out to little gods and friendly demons, an insane invocation, coupled with dire threats to the spirit that possessed the miller. Gopalu waded into chest-high funereal vegetation beyond which were the renuncient grounds garlanded with bone and plastered with ancestral ash.
Ramananda had softened the miller with generous draughts of liquor and blinded and choked him with incense. Ramananda walked farther over the dried bank of the marsh and waited for the final command from the great sorcerer.
‘Go!’ said Gopalu.
Ramananda bent down and cast the offending spirit into exile. At that very moment the miller saw a small flame light up on the bank of the marsh. The miller looked on amazed at the exorcised spirit burning away as it fled.
The sorcerers and the miller left; a lone man rose like the truth from the marsh where he had lain hidden. It was Kuttadan the oracle. He picked up the lizard, that morning’s catch, and gently uncoiled the strip of half-burnt cloth from its charred tail. The oracle peered into the eyes of the lizard, into its ancient riddles. For one stupefying moment he thought it was not the lizard he saw but the transmigrant spirit. He did not want it to live, he strangled it.
Kuttadan stood on the marsh of death a long while holding the dead lizard. Then he felt that inexplicable effervescence inside his head again. He was seized with a wild desire to chase the miller and confront him with the lizard. But the next instant, the effervescence gave way to moonlight and mist’he saw the fine muslin and the red hibiscus. He felt the fingernails imprinting the little red crescents on his thighs.
‘Did it hurt? Will you tell anyone?’
The seal of secrecy on the unjoinable phonemes!
Kuttadan flung the little corpse into the night. It landed amid the mould and marsh of a million endings.