Early that morning the Khazi came to the seedling house. Ravi was awake in bed.
‘Maeshtar!’
‘Come, come, Khazi.’
‘A matter of some urgency,’ said the Khazi without stepping in. ‘Can you spare five rupees?’
‘Certainly.’
Ravi got up and took out the money. He did not ask what the money was for; the Khazi volunteered the information, ‘We are taking Mollakka to Palghat. To the hospital.’
Ravi remembered seeing the mullah two days ago in the fields, much to his own embarrassment—the priest was squatting behind the screw pine bushes to ease himself. He had looked helpless, his eyes dull like old porcelain ... Now Ravi asked the Khazi, ‘The lesion where the sandal pinched?’
‘The same lesion, Maeshtar. It will not go.’
‘Sit down, my friend. I shall come along with you. But let me make some tea.’
‘We can save time if we went over to Aliyar’s instead.’
So they had a hurried breakfast at the teashop.
‘Sivaraman Nair has spared his bullock cart,’ Aliyar informed them. ‘It is ready.’
Ravi and the Khazi were soon on their way to the mullah’s house.
‘Who cooks for you now?’ the Khazi asked Ravi, remembering the tea Ravi had offered to make.
‘I do it myself,’ said Ravi.
‘Poor Chand Umma! What a curse!’
‘Surely the curse must end some time.’
‘The gods are often more unwise than men.’
Sivaraman Nair’s bullock cart stood waiting in the mullah’s yard.
‘He has sent us his best bullocks,’ the Khazi observed.
Ravi had been to the mullah’s house before, but only now did he fully feel the poignancy of its decay ... The mullah lay on a mat, his toe bandaged with oil-soaked rags. Ravi sat down beside him and stroked his forehead.
‘We will pray that you get well soon, Mollakka,’ Ravi said.
A smile flickered across the face of the priest.
Thithi Bi spoke from behind the half-closed door, ‘This is what the old sandal has done.’
‘True,’ Ravi reassured her, ‘it is a shoe-pinch. Nothing to worry about.’
Even as he uttered the words, Ravi realized the lesion had been on the toe for many months. The Khazi undid the crude bandage, Ravi saw the bloodless and quiescent lesion the size of a silver rupee.
‘Does it hurt?’ Ravi asked the Khazi.
‘It doesn’t.’
‘It is the poison of the leather,’ Thithi Bi said, wanting to believe her own words. The mullah groaned.
‘Don’t hesitate, Umma,’ Ravi said, ‘if there is anything I can do ...’
Thithi Bi choked. She said, ‘You have been generous, Saar. He never tires of talking about you.’
The Khazi reached out to a shelf on the wall and took down a bottle of medicine. With much effort the mullah sat up, leaning on the Khazi, and drank the bitter concoction like an ailing child. He turned for a moment to look at the Khazi in grateful reminiscence ...
The cart returned at dusk, homing in on the village over the parched fields, tossing its hood as it climbed on to the square. There was a small crowd in front of Aliyar’s teashop—Madhavan Nair, Gopalu Panikker, Ponthu Rawuthar and some others. Madhavan Nair waved the cart to a halt, Sivaraman Nair’s fast bullocks reared their heads and panted.
‘Where is the mullah?’ the tailor asked.
Getting down from the cart the Khazi answered, ‘We have put him in the hospital.’
‘What did the doctor say?’ Aliyar asked.
‘He will medicate and watch, and then tell us.’
‘Accursed footwear!’ the outcaste Malli said in dismay.
‘Cursed indeed. It grew fangs like the hamadryad.’
‘The snake dwells in our sandals and our belts.’
‘Even our fingernails can become the fangs of the snake.’
‘Truly said.’
The mullah had been in the hospital for ten days now. Thithi Bi had moved to Palghat; she joined the many squatters on the veranda of the ward, keeping vigil day and night, snatching moments of fitful sleep leaning on the thin pillars.
Sunday. Ravi and Madhavan Nair set out for Palghat town. They found the mullah better. He could sit up, he could speak a little. Ravi held his hands, the mullah smiled.
‘Mollakka,’ Ravi said, ‘I have brought oranges.’
The mullah smiled again, the smile of a stranger.
‘I have no desire, Kutti,’ he said.
The smell of disinfectant canopied the ward like the scent of many flowers. Beneath it waited the weary travellers into the unknown. They did not know one another, they exchanged the obscure farewells of strangers.
‘I will be well in a week,’ the mullah said.
‘You surely will,’ Madhavan Nair encouraged him. ‘It is the work of an ill-fitting sandal after all.’
As they took their leave the mullah held them a little while longer—he needed to speak. Who was sweeping and cleaning the school? Ravi tried to put him at ease. But the mullah spoke on, each syllable drawn out painfully. He had taken wages and had not worked, but he would make amends, he would be back in a fortnight. Until then Ravi should ask Ponthu Rawuthar’s daughter Rokkamma to come and sweep. He must tell her it was the mullah’s word. Exhausted, the priest sank back. The mask of the stranger was back on and his face receded into the enchanted distance. The wages, reckoned across this void, became a karmic debt.
Outside the ward Ravi and Madhavan Nair spoke to the doctor. It confirmed what Ravi had suspected. The doctor told them that a tissue sample had been sent to the big hospital in Vellore for pathological examination, and nothing could be said until the result was known, but malignancy was a fair guess.
Ravi and Madhavan Nair got off the bus at Koomankavu and began the walk home ... Far away from Khasak, medicine men trained their all-seeing scanners on a cell of the mullah, the cell was an entity, a planet of the microcosm, it had its own aeons of time, and life sprouting on its land and in its water. This was cancer, the needless violation of inert surfaces. Even as the two of them walked along the winding footpath, through the palm groves and across rivulets, the earth-cell rejected the violation, and the cosmic toe twitched in deceptive, painless malignancy.
They were nearing Khasak.
‘Maash,’ Madhavan Nair asked, ‘what is this illness?’
‘Existence, civilization—’
‘Surely, you are not jesting?’
‘No.’
‘What is the remedy?’
Ashahado Anna la Ilaha Illallah wa
Ashahado Anna Mohammadur Rasoolallah.
The muezzin’s cry!
‘Who is that, Madhavan Nair?’
‘The Khazi.’
Hayya Alas Salat
Hayya Alal Falah
Alla ho Akbar
Alla ho Akbar
Nizam Ali was making the prayer call for Allah-Pitcha after seven years of estrangement.