Once every three or four years Khasak feasted its ancestors. Muslims and Hindus prayed and ate together. Then at night they congregated in the arid waste behind the mullah’s mosque and talked about other worlds. They felt the presence of their beloved Sheikh, he walked along the pathways of Khasak communing with the ancestors. Four years had gone by since the last feast; the Khazi went into retreat in the Mosque of the King. The privileged few who had access to the mosque brought back vivid accounts of austerities. On the fifth day of penance, a Sunday, the Khazi emerged intense and fevered, and ordained the fifteenth day from then as the day of the feast.
Khasak was astir. Frenzied troops of children came to the arid ground, they uprooted thorn bushes, they scared away the snakes with strong-scented tree barks. The animal to be slaughtered was chosen—Cholayumma’s black goat, which she sold to the village for half the market price.
‘But it is a eunuch,’ said Ponthu Rawuthar the village elder, ‘and can bring no luck.’
‘So what?’ retorted Aliyar, ‘We have got him for half the price, and that is luck enough.’
Aliyar agreed to keep the goat till the slaughter, since Kunhamina began crying over the animal as soon as
Cholayumma told her that it was to be sacrificed. Aliyar came to Cholayumma’s house and led the goat away. Let it be tethered to the load-rest, he decided, till the day of slaughter. Till then it would be his mascot.
The eunuch goat was a sweet-tempered animal, tame as a pet. Aliyar fed it dosas in the morning, and tea, which it drank in delicate sips. Mutthu Pandaram the mendicant asked Aliyar, ‘The goat has a credit with you, does it?’
‘Yes. And why not? If your cousin Karumandi Pandaram can have a credit here, the goat can have it as well.’
‘What be the truth of that, O Aliyar?’
‘Simple is the truth, O saffron-clad one. Your half-brother owes five rupees and a quarter for the buffalo meat he gobbled. He is on a pilgrimage, and I can get hold of neither the Pandaram nor the money.’
The goat soon became an attraction for the children. They slipped out of school to gather green shoots for it, and let out peals of laughter as the animal grazed their fingertips while nibbling greedily at the berries they held forth. Kunhamina kept away.
When the children left in the evening, Appu-Kili came to the goat. He brought it neither fruit nor flower, but only a cretin’s love. He stroked its condemned neck, gently he pressed his head against the goat’s and crooned consolations.
The Thursday before the feast the Khazi decided to go to the hospital and see the mullah.
‘I shall watch him till Sunday morning.’ he told Aliyar, ‘and if he is well enough, I shall bring him in a bullock cart by midday.’
‘Let him at least lie down before the fire of sacrifice,’ Aliyar said. ‘We could borrow the Maeshtar’s easy chair.’
‘I go now, Aliyar. And keep some money for the rental on the cart when I return.’
The Khazi set out for Palghat town ... Maimoona bathed and smeared herself with scented oils, and walked the square displaying the Champaka flowers she wore in her hair. She came to the seedling house. Ravi had not got out of bed.
‘Our teacher has too much sleep,’ she said, walking in.
Ravi sat up yawning and looked round for cigarettes.
‘Here’I have brought you two packets. Smoke away!’
Ravi took the packets, pulled out one and lit it.
‘Again,’ he said, ‘you have brought me the Tiger brand. It is firewood.’
‘It is the wood of the funeral pyre.’
As she said this, the cigarette burst into flame, and Maimoona looked on in amusement. Ravi spat it out and lit another.
‘Teacher-Kutti,’ she said, ‘your innards will burn out.’
‘Let them, no one will miss me when I go.’
She moved a pace closer, and said, ‘A lie!’
‘I am sorry, Maimoona.’
God, said Ravi, You gave me Your love, gave it with fond indulgence, yet it dies in the deserts within me. I am in flight, Merciful God: let me savour my weariness. Then through strange and wondrous Mandalas came the voice of his father: My beloved son, here I lie paralysed, awaiting your return.
Father, do not pine for me, said Ravi. I journey away to free us both from memory. I walk, an Avadhuta, a renunciate along the shores of the Infinite Ocean. Journeying, I let my slough of memory moult away. When I reach the last shore, when I wait for the last redeeming wave ...
His father’s voice said, I cannot die without my memories, death will be incomplete.
Ravi was back in gross reality. ‘Maimoona,’ he said, ‘what news from Palghat?’
She shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘No news.’
When the Khazi reached the hospital, he found Thithi Bi seated on the veranda of the ward, leaning on a pillar.
‘Umma, how is he faring?’ the Khazi asked her.
‘Asleep.’
‘Did the doctor tell you anything?’
‘Nothing, my child.’
The doctor and nurse on their afternoon round undid the bandage. The lesion was still on the toe, drained of blood, a cool and sanitized presence. The mullah lay in a daze. The Khazi suddenly came upon something moving on the bed, tiny as a paddy husk.
‘Lice,’ Thithi Bi said sadly.
‘These lice are dangerous, Umma.’
Thithi Bi wiped her eyes. ‘The doctor wanted the beard shaved,’ she said, ‘but Mollakka cannot let the beard go.’
Gently she stroked the old beard. The frazzled hair stood on beds of dandruff, the grey lice moved over the scaly crust, baffled and thirsty.
That afternoon the doctor called the Khazi out, and asked him, ‘Are you a relative?’
‘No, Saar, I am the Khazi of Sayed Mian Sheikh.’
‘Who is that?’
‘It is a spirit, Saar.’
‘Very well,’ the doctor said, ‘since you are close to the family, I shall tell you. It is cancer, and it is far gone. I suggest you take him back.’
The Khazi came back to Thithi Bi and said, ‘These English medicines are no good, Umma. Let us go back.’
He did not stay on to hear what she had to say. He walked out of the hospital and past the fort of Tipu Sultan; behind the fort the land was deserted. The Khazi stood on a grassy mound and looked at the mountain pass far away, he heard the birds and the thunder of a distant train. He was agonized, ecstatic: Khasak’s mullah was dying!
In the Mosque of the King. The early dark of its ancient interior. Cobwebs and dust.
‘I feel like a housebreaker,’ Ravi said. Maimoona did not say anything.
‘Here is a drink for you,’ he said, holding out the bottle towards her.
‘How does it taste, Maimoona?’
‘Warm, pleasureable.’
They lay down on an old mat. The night was a luminous blue over the gravestones.
Suddenly she tensed. ‘Do you hear?’ she asked. She rose naked from the silt of darkness.
‘What?’ Ravi asked.
It came through the lucid summer night:
La Ilaha Illallah!
La Ilaha Illallah!
‘What is that?’ Ravi asked again.
Maimoona said, ‘The dead body.’