The muuezzin’s cry subsided in Ravi’s dhyana, he now hearkened with his inner ear:
There is no God but the Omnipotent One
Come to this tabernacle and worship Him!
Ravi thought of Khasak’s house of prayer, the sad brooding mosque, its attic breeding bats and vermin, and its mullah silenced by a dreaded disease; Ravi heard anguished generations of priests calling to worshippers. The gravestones kept no count, they softened and crumbled over men changing to mould and marsh. Ravi could not sleep, he rose restless. He looked out: a dull moon lit the mist, the last of the ferries were torching through the night.
Ravi got out and walked into the sleeping village. He knocked on the tailor’s door. Madhavan Nair opened the door and then tottered back to bed.
‘Get up!’ said Ravi.
Madhavan Nair rubbed his eyes, yawned and smiled.
‘You, Maash?’ he said. ‘What is the time like?’
‘It is just eleven. And I am thirsty.’
‘I have nothing left.’
‘Then let us wake the bootleggers.’
Madhavan Nair tilted the earthen jar in the corner for a cupful of water and doused his eyes and forehead.
‘Is this journey necessary, Maash?’
‘Come, let us go.’
‘To the bootlegger?’
‘Not straightaway. Let’s go to your uncle’s.’
‘My uncle’s?
‘I want to go to bed with that cousin of yours, the cousin you didn’t make.’
Madhavan Nair laughed, a brief and bitter laugh. He said, ‘She is all yours.’
‘I am sorry, brother.’
They held hands and walked like children to Chathelan’s distillery and home. From a bare ten feet away came the sound of heavy breathing. Ravi fancied entwined and sweating bodies, he was swamped by the onrush of the images of sin.
‘O Chathelan!’ Madhavan Nair called out. The bodies disentangled themselves, the billowing breath fell into a softer rhythm.
‘Who is that?’ Chathelan’s woman asked.
A chimney lamp lit up in the veranda dispelling the deep-breathing mystery, and soon Chathelan came out of the hut.
‘Sorry, Chathelan, our Maash wants a drink.’
Chathelan was evasive—there was a bottle of freshly distilled arrack, but it was for the Village Officer.
‘Come on, Chathelan,’ Madhavan Nair coaxed the bootlegger, ‘the Village Officer can wait. Here is a rupee over the price.’
‘How can I deny the tailor and the teacher?’ said Chathelan and went back to get the bottle.
As they walked away with the freshly distilled spirit Ravi suggested, ‘Let us give Kuppu-Acchan a drink.’
‘Should we, Maash?’
‘Let us—’
‘If you so desire—’
Kuppu-Acchan sat up on hearing the footfalls; he scanned the night with his pits of darkness and listened; ‘It’s us,’ Madhavan Nair announced.
‘Madhavan? Maash?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is the night far gone?’
It was a pleasantry; Ravi was aghast.
‘Kuppu-Acchan,’ Madhavan Nair said, ‘we have brought a bottle of arrack. We would like you to share it with us.’
He smiled in the direction of the voices, and slowly felt his way to the door of the room where Kesi slept.
‘Get up, my child—’
‘Hai, hai! You won’t let me sleep—’
Madhavan Nair lit a wick lamp in the room. Kesi had rolled off the mat onto the smooth floor, her bodice and mundu had slipped from their places.
‘Kesi—’
‘Hai, hai—’
The moon had set when they left the house, the wind had cleared the mist and the stars shone as in a luminous nightmare.
‘Madhavan Nair, did you look at the old face?’
‘It was sad.’
‘Beyond the sadness—’
There was quite a quantity of the arrack left, and they decided to drink it beneath the palms.
‘There was something on that face, Madhavan Nair. Sights that the blind can see ...’
The roving eyes of blindness haunted Ravi, sockets of blood and rheum, the eyes of transcendent seeing. Faces surrounded him, each with its mask of indifference ... He remembered his journey to the ancestral village where his grandfather lived. The short walk from the road led him through picturesque countryside. Then, ahead of him, he saw his grandfather on his morning walk. Ravi hastened and overtook him.
‘Grandpa!’
The old man stopped and turned slowly.
‘Grandpa, it is me, Ravi.’
The old eyes groped for focus, and over the slavering lips spread the smile of an ancestor gone away.
What did that smile mean, Ravi was destined to wonder during his desolate journeys. Was it love? Or the ennui of recurrent being which amused and distressed the baby in its cradle? Or was it the passion of the seaside vigil, the wait for the last wave? Ravi did not seek to violate the mystery, he was content to recognize the mask of the stranger ...
‘Let us sit down here, Madhavan Nair.’
‘Hand me the bottle, Maash.’
They sat on the moist grass and drank out of the bottle.
‘Maash,’ Madhavan Nair reminisced, ‘it was here, amid these palms, when I was away studying Vedanta, that my mother played the harlot ...’
The east wind began to blow, it was past midnight. Khasak lay asleep. Madhavan Nair went on, ‘I slipped away when I was twenty-one. My mother was thirty-five, she had delivered me when she was just fourteen, and was widowed early ...’
She had not wanted him to go. She was young, looked younger than her years, and had a voluptuous body.
‘If you leave me and go,’ she had told him, ‘I will be all alone.’
But Madhavan Nair could not find rest in that house. He resembled his father down to the finest detail—his mother had once said this in joy, but soon he found her saying it in resentment and fear. In their little hut he could find no sleep, nor could she ... When he came back after five years spent with his blind Guru, there were guests in the house, drunken and riotous. When those men were gone, his mother had taunted him, ‘So you studied Vedanta, my son?’
Madhavan Nair thought of blind Kuppu-Acchan who had still not tired of seeing, and of his Guru to whom blindness had given the vision of peace. Madhavan Nair could not solve the puzzle, he was content with the day and night, he saw butterflies mating in the sunlight, he saw the rain, the brook, the mountain, he saw disrobed thighs vibrate with the rhythm of death. Each seen object drained away the meaning of seeing ... Ravi and Madhavan Nair were on a magic stairway to a house of sin when the cock crowed and the hour of enchantment ended. The stairway disappeared.
It was not yet dawn. Ravi rose and stood on unsteady legs in the palm grove. He saw the dark silhouette of the mosque far away. With his hands pressed against his temples, he bitterly called the muezzin’s cry:
Allaho Akbar!
Allaho Akbar!
Madhavan Nair was asleep on the moist grass. Ravi looked round, the abodes of God and men had vanished, there were palms all round, only palms, which once yielded the brew of forgetting and bliss.
What was left in him was bile, the residue of prayer. Ravi bent forward and retched.