And summer was over; dew glistened again on the morning grass of Khasak. The school reopened.
Ravi glanced through the register lying in front of him; he had underlined some names in green—the names of those who wouldn’t be coming to school anymore: Vavar, Noorjehan, Uniparathy, Kinnari, Karuvu. He had only underlined the names, he couldn’t bring himself to cross them out. Like the fakir who kept his dead grandchild on the mountain and would not give her up to the grave-digger, Ravi kept the names. The lines of green became the little windows of his temple through which he gazed, listless. Outside, sun and dew, grass and palmyra, in repetition and rebirth, in endless becoming, sorrowless and without desire ...
Ravi looked up from the register at the places where the dead children used to sit. He did not call the roll that day.
During the epidemic Appu-Kili had gone off to the mountains where his hair had grown long and matted. He came back to school with lice multiplying in its knots. The lice grazed about and at times herds of them crawled out in search of other heads.
Ravi was teaching history and he thought the example would come in handy.
‘The Aryans came in exactly this manner,’ he told the children. ‘They came driving their herds of cattle looking for fresh pastures.’
The matter of the lice did not stop with history. That evening Cholayumma, Kunhamina’s mother, had given her a bath and was dressing her hair with scented oils when a louse jumped out.
‘Where did that louse come from?’ Cholayumma asked.
‘That was Appu-Kili’s louse, Mother,’ Kunhamina said. ‘It must have come like the Aryans.’
‘What are you blabbering about, child?’
Kunhamina told Cholayumma the story of the Aryans. It did not impress her. The next day Cholayumma complained to Ravi. Appu’s knotted locks must be shaved off, that was the only way to get rid of the lice. Ravi had no desire to offend the Parrot. So he asked Madhavan Nair to put the proposition to him as gently as possible. Surprisingly the Parrot agreed without resistance ... When Appu-Kili got to the barber’s shop one of the mendicants was having his head shaved leaving a tuft at the back.
‘Shall I give you such a tuft, O Parrot?’ the Hindu barber asked in passing.
‘See mine,’ encouraged the mendicant. ‘Do you know what—if you keep one they will give you their daughters to wed.’
The Parrot turned on his timeless grin, ‘Get a girl?’ He told the barber, ‘I wan a tuff.’
And when the Parrot was leaving tonsured, save the tuft dangling behind him, the barber gave him this advice, ‘If ever you fall off a tree, pull yourself up by the tuft.’
Appu-Kili stood before Madhavan Nair, the grin still on his face.
‘Look at me, Madhavan-Etto!’
Madhavan Nair was angry at first, he disliked anyone having a joke at the Parrot’s expense, but he couldn’t hold out for long against its charming absurdity. Matters of destiny, he said to himself.
‘Ayyo! My Parrot!’ he said. ‘One needs the thousand eyes of Inderjeet to see you!’
The next day there was chaos in the school. It became difficult to restrain children wanting to decorate the tuft with flowers and berries and silver paper. Only Kunhamina kept away—she was sad that her mother and the louse had brought all this on Kili.
Ravi was writing out a sum on the blackboard; when he turned round, he found Kunhamina in a state of distraction.
‘What is it now, my little one?’
She did not respond.
‘Tell me,’ Ravi said again.
She began tentatively, ‘Oh, Saar ...’
Ravi waited. Kunhamina found the words at last, ‘Do lice have souls, Saar?’
He paused, then said, ‘If we have souls ...’
‘We have, Saar.’
‘Then, I suppose, so do lice.’
Ramankutty interceded, ‘Lice do have souls, Saar.’ That decided the matter because he was the sorcerer’s son.
Kunhamina wanted to know more, ‘What will Appu’s lice be in their next lives?’
Will they be reborn as lice? Or will they return as people or wild elephants and whales or little microbes? Ravi’s mind suddenly went back to the jasmine-scented night when he had taken leave of his father in silence and stealth. Will you, my father, come back to me in another birth, if you have sins to wipe out? And who does not sin? Will you come back to me as the creature I detest most? There on the wall it clung, its eight legs stretched, looking at him with eyes of crystal in love and uncomprehending grief. He crushed a piece of paper into a ball and threw it at the spider. The spider ran around in wild circles, and again came to its mindless trance on the wall. Ravi swatted it with his sandal. It stayed on the wall, a patch of broken limbs and slime and fur. Ravi stood a long while in contemplation. Gratitude welled up inside him, the gratitude of procreated generations. He shivered and the sandal fell from his hand. What an offering to dead ancestors, what a shraddha!
And now he turned to Kunhamina’s question, ‘Frankly, my little one. I don’t have the answer.’
But the children had the answer. They knew that those who went away had to come back, and Vavar, Noorjehan, Uniparathy, Kinnari and Karuvu would be fair babies again. They told Ravi the legends of Khasak, of those who had come back from the far empty spaces, of the goddess on the tamarind tree, of Khasak’s ancestors who, their birth cycles ended, rose again to receive the offerings of their progeny; then like the figurines on the throne of Vikrama who narrated the idylls of the King, each child told Ravi a story:
Kunjuvella was the daughter of Nagan the toddy-tapper and Thayamma. When she was five they had gone to visit their relatives in Koomankavu. While there Kunjuvella died. The same year in Koomankavu, Kannamma, the wife of Ayyavu, gave birth to a daughter. They called her Devaki. Even as a little child Devaki would spend hours gazing vacantly recalling something real and inscrutable. Kannamma would put the child on her lap and ask, ‘What is the matter, my child, that you sit and brood?’ The child would say, ‘I am thinking, mother.’ On her fifth birthday she had told Kannamma, ‘Mother, I have another mother.’ Kannamma had not taken much notice of this. Five-year-olds knew no limit to fantasy. But Devaki kept insisting and weeping. She wanted to see her other mother. She led the way and the family came to the house of Nagan and Thayamma. ‘That’s my house,’ Devaki cried out from the gate. She recognized every nook and corner. She found an old peashooter hidden away in the attic and rejoiced at the sight of her old plaything. ‘Mother,’ she asked Thayamma, ‘where is Father?’
Thayamma wept. She stretched her hands across the awesome void to hold this child of hers. ‘Father has gone,’ she said, ‘he fell from the palm tree.’ The watching women wiped their tears; Devaki did not understand, wasn’t hers a simple home-coming?
She asked Kannamma, ‘Mother, don’t you remember that day at the pool?’
Kannamma asked, ‘Which day?’
‘That day, that day, many days ago when you were bathing, didn’t I come to you on pattering feet?’
Memories came back to Kannamma. She remembered bathing in the pool at sunset, and a funeral procession passing by. That was five years and ten months ago ... As Devaki grew up these memories weakened, soon they were lost altogether in profane and worldly torrents ...
Two days after Appu-Kili began to wear his tuft there was a Muslim festival. Muslim children, their heads shaven and scented, appeared in joyous and colourful crowds before the mosque. Appu-Kili would never miss a festival.
‘Hey, Parrot!’ the Muslims greeted him, ‘but what is this handle at the back of your head?’
‘Get a girl,’ the Parrot grinned.
‘Yaa Allah! What have the Hindus done to your head?’ the Muslim boys said. ‘Surely the mendicants are the culprits. With a tuft like that you will become a mendicant and that is not the surest way to get a girl.’
The Parrot stood bewildered, yet smiling.
‘Shave it off,’ the Muslims said, ‘shave your head clean.’
‘Get a girl?’
‘What have we been telling you all this while? You just shave that knot off and go ask Maimoona Akka to marry you.’
The Parrot grinned until his cheeks disappeared. The Muslim children took him by the hand and led him to the Muslim barber. When the tuft was shaved off, one of them said, ‘Now that it has gone this far and he is going to marry Maimoona Akka, why not convert him? How about it?’
‘Of course,’ the Muslim barber agreed.
Freed at last from pagan connections, the Parrot walked out grinning. Somebody brought a frayed fez cap and put it on Appu-Kili’s head.
In the evening Ravi had just lighted the lamp and got into bed to read when Maimoona stormed into the room.
‘Both master and pupils are becoming riotous,’ she said.
‘What happened?’
‘Keep that lunatic under control.’
‘Which lunatic?’
‘That Parrot of yours!’
Ravi shut his book and sat up. While he was raising the wick, she said, hiding her charm beneath her anger, ‘I won’t speak to you again.’
Madhavan Nair came in as she was leaving.
‘What did the houri come for, Maash?’
‘Something about the Parrot. We’ll find out tomorrow.’
Madhavan Nair sat at the foot of the bed.
‘Haven’t you heard it, Maash? The Parrot has been converted.’
‘My God! Into what?’
‘Need you ask? The Fourth Way, Islam.’
Through the window the Parrot jumped in, the fez cap on his head ...
The next day Sivaraman Nair walked through Khasak in great agitation. ‘Have the infidels gone this far?’ He coughed and stumbled, he stood before the school and called out, ‘Maash, this is not good. There is still something called Hindu civilization. That cannot be shaved off.’
‘But Sivaraman Nair,’ Ravi tried to calm him, ‘was it any of my doing?’
‘But this is definitely not good. You mustn’t be led astray by that Madhavan. He is the one who has disgraced the family. He is a Communist.’
At the foot of the big banyan tree in the square of Khasak, the people were merrily discussing the Parrot’s choice of religions. Massaging his feet with oil, the mullah argued that once a convert, neither man nor parrot had the right to go back. The Khazi declared, ‘We will go by the majority.’
The majority was yet to make its decision known. Appu-Kili sat in the front row of the class wearing the frayed fez cap. As a Muslim they had given him a new name—Appu-Rawuthar. Ravi did not call Appu’s name while calling the roll. He decided to wait until he knew the majority’s verdict.
Sivaraman Nair wrote out a long petition to the School Inspector. Ravi was creating religious strife in Khasak, leading minors astray. He concluded the letter with words picked out of an old petition: For which act of kindness it is my bounden duty ever to pray.
Within a few days the panchayat’s verdict was known. The Parrot was to be allowed the freedom of both religions. For certain days of the week he could be a Muslim. For the rest he could be a Hindu. If necessary, Hindu, Muslim and Parrot all at the same time.
When months passed and Appu’s fez wore thin, when his hair grew long and matted, the lice were born there again. They came pattering on little feet. Vavar, Noorjehan, Uniparathy, Kinnari, Karuvu and all. Their fathers and mothers did not know them. Among the karmic wefts of hair, they sat grieving and waiting.
Ravi lay down to sleep. Through the window, the sky shone and shivered. Oh God, to be spared this knowing, to sleep. To lay one’s head down, to rest from birth to birth, as forest, as shade, as earth, as sky ... The knowing eyes grew heavy, the lids began to close. Leaving their skies the stars descended on the screw pines to become the fireflies of Khasak. Out of these infinities a drizzle of mercy fell on his sleep and baptized him.