THEY ARE ALL WATCHING me die.
My family and friends, brothers and sisters, sons and grandsons, nieces and nephews, daughters and their daughters … they all sit around me with moist eyes and long faces, intermittently staring at one another and shaking their heads remorsefully. Some bury their heads in the cup of their conjoined palms and shudder with silent sobs while others share hugs and counsel fortitude at this fateful hour. Some have walked over, some driven in from as far as two hundred miles … braving the rain and the cold outside. Others have been streaming in steadily over the last two days—friends, well-wishers, admirers and passers-by; people of different standing, different faiths and from different walks of life; people who knew me and those who didn’t. They have all found their way to this imposing brick building in the heart of town and stopped by to commiserate with my family, and relate stories of how I had, willingly or unwittingly, touched their lives. I watch them shake their heads and declare that my death will be a great loss to society and to the nation. I’m inclined to believe that their remorse is genuine, especially when I see the intense sadness that seeps into their faces as they stare into mine.
I understand—it isn’t just the thought but also the look of my demise that adds to their grief. When I float above my body and stare down at the shell of a human being lying in bed, I am struck with the notion of how different, how deathly I look. My seventy-two-year old face is craggy and skeletal, and deep hollows exist where my cheeks used to. My sunken eyes are red and moist from the constant irritation of misdirected eyelashes, and my open, edentulous mouth is crusted at the corners with dried spittle. Chemotherapy has robbed the hair from my head that age had spared and cruelly gifted me a few ulcers in addition. I have lost control over my bodily functions and a large diaper cloaks my hips to prevent any mishaps. The terrible indignity of it all is that I can’t even feel the mishaps. It’s when I notice amongst all the sorrow and sadness a few noses crinkled with uncertainty, I realize the deed has been done and someone will soon alert the servants to do the honours.
Metastatic cancer has done this to me. Its sly and relentless spread from my liver into every other part of my body has made it almost impossible for me to do anything other than lie in bed and wait for death. I know it sounds awful, but the funny part is that death isn’t as scary as it is made out to be. While my family sits around me grieving, and someone intermittently checks on my breathing, I wait and wonder with a sense of anticipation about what it will be like when it all stops. The sorrow with which we grieve the last few moments of life when the overwhelming majority of it has been as fulfilling as mine strikes me as delightfully absurd.
Perhaps you’ve heard of me … Dr Siddharth Kumar, the first backward caste doctor from rural Bihar who went on to become the Dean of Delhi University and inspired a revolution amongst the untouchables all over the country? Or how about the first backward caste doctor to receive the Dr B.C. Roy Memorial prize for his contribution to the country? Well, let’s see … maybe you’ve read my name on the presidential health policy panels of numerous governments or on the list of the recipients of the Padma Bhusan in 1998 and the Padma Vibhushan in the year 2003. No? Well, there is a library named after me in Delhi University and the Dr Kumar National Scholarship for Underprivileged Children … that ‘Kumar’ comes from my last name.
Which is a trifle misleading actually because Kumar isn’t my real last name. Or rather it wasn’t till my father deleted my ‘real’ last name in school, making Kumar—the popular Bihari middle name and a generic equivalent of ‘Master’—my last name by default.
Why, you ask? Well, that is a story in itself.
You see, I was born a Dom in Satihabad, a malignantly caste- ridden village in north Bihar, where other people would take a bath if a Dom’s shadow fell upon them. Were it not for my father’s determination that I wouldn’t follow in his footsteps of skinning carcasses of dead animals, I would have probably ended up as a landless, bonded labourer like he was. Penniless and illiterate he may have been, but my father was astute enough to identify all the important things in life that would help me avoid the shackles of poverty and the lifetime of servitude that young men from our community got ensnared in, fairly early in life.
It began at birth when my father named me Siddharth, after Lord Buddha—a princely name for one who was born a pauper. In addition to the covert mutiny of deliberately sidestepping the ‘Budhwas’ and ‘Bhaulas’ that so typecast our community, my name exemplified the lingering desire deep in my father’s heart to break away from the suffocating embrace of being a low-caste Hindu—something he could never find the courage to do. Preventing him was his fear of the societal repercussions that come from losing one’s religion. So, his subliminal frustration found expression in planning my freedom, my delivery from human bondage, in keeping with which, he got rid of my last name altogether, replacing it with Kumar, thus neutering any hint of caste in my moniker. But it was the next decision my father made that began laying the foundation for who and what I subsequently became.
He decided that no matter what the cost, I was going to get an education.
Every day, while other Dom children my age worked in fields or tended to animals or learned the tricks of skinning carcasses, I would walk barefoot for six miles, swim across a river after tying my books on my head, and skirt a forest to attend a school in the neighbouring village where the missionaries provided education (in English, no less) for a very nominal fee. It would take me two hours each way, and double, when the river was in spate. The school didn’t have a blackboard and we would sit on the hard, mud-paved floor to study. When news leaked out amongst the other students that despite my ambivalent name I was a Dom, they wouldn’t sit next to me in class or eat with me in the same room. Some parents even refused to send their children to school. Although the missionary fathers admonished such behaviour, it was impossible for them to monitor it on a daily basis. Even if they did, the upper caste boys would beat me outside school premises and then immediately wash their hands with water all the while accusing me of soiling their lives.
I tolerated twelve years of such taunts and trauma while my father toiled in his master’s fields, both of us feeding off of each other’s determination and resilience to see things through. Now, if I remember each and every one of those episodes of being beaten, kicked, abused, spat on and thrown out, it is with an absurd fondness. For, all those years of hard work, all those moments of quietly tolerating humiliation and silently swallowing my tears, all those memories of insults and denigration were wiped away by my father’s tears of joy when I informed him that I had secured a scholarship to study medicine in the city.
From then on there was no looking back.
And so, like I was saying, I don’t look upon impending death with fear or loathing. If life has been hard, it has been good too, and, in addition to all the public adulation, affection and admiration, I leave behind the greatest joy of all … my family who will immortalize me with their discussions about who I was and what I did. They will live in comfort, walk with pride and speak without fear knowing that I was the tipping point in this lineage for generations to come.
Pause.
Generations to come … that phrase, that expression, suddenly reminds me of someone and it fills my heart with sorrow. I …I suppose I shouldn’t gloat about my life without touching on its mishaps too. The mishaps I couldn’t address, the mishaps I didn’t see, the mishaps I’m not even sure are mishaps. That is the hardest part … knowing and yet not knowing, feeling but not feeling, seeing but not seeing. I know, I know, it must be hard to understand what I’m saying, but, at this hour, when the time of death is upon me, if there is one thing that I could do now, just one wish that some genie from a lamp could grant me, I wouldn’t want life or a cure for my cancer but just the opportunity to ask Narayana Namboodri for his forgiveness.
Which would be useless because Narayana Namboodri is long dead.
Narayana who? Well, that is another long story. But if you feel inclined to listen and have the time, I’ll be happy to tell you. After all, in these last few hours of life, I do have all the time in the world, don’t I?
Narayana Namboodri believed, rather fervently, that his first act in the morning often predicted how the rest of the day would come to pass.
Or at least that was what his wife told me when I was called to attend on him that October morning—early, very early, much before the first light of dawn had begun percolating through the inky fabric of the eastern night sky. The harried knocks on my door were the first clue that something big had happened to someone big in this sleepy little town. And I knew, barring a major calamity, the only person who could have dared to summon, at such an unearthly hour, the district’s only doctor with genuine qualifications on his nameplate, was, Narayana Namboodri.
I had woken up startled and confused, wondering what had become of the delicious slumber that had settled into my exhausted body the moment my head had hit the pillow. In the strength sapping heat of the plains, running from one suffocating mud house to the next, riding on bullock carts from one dusty hamlet to another, spending an entire afternoon performing minor surgery in a stuffy, airless room until it was too dark to see, would drain every drop of energy from me. Come nightfall, and in the sudden indolence of a day’s end in a lonely little town, where silence was the only sound I heard and darkness the only colour I saw, weariness would seep into my bones like ink blotting into chalk, making slumber all the more deep and desirable.
I was young then, twenty-four, fresh out of medical college, eager to take up my ‘rural posting’. Most medical graduates from big city medical colleges like mine called this mandatory assignment ‘rural pasting’; an evocative term to describe what usually happened to the body and spirit after spending six months in some remote, god-forsaken village, miles away from civilization. Not surprisingly, few, if any, ever found themselves anywhere close to a village—their French leave sanctioned by greasing the palms of some health department bureaucrats with a few hundred rupees. This practice was so prevalent that when I had shown up at their office and volunteered to spend three years in a village instead of the mandatory minimum of six months, they had made me repeat my request as though they hadn’t heard right. In their feigned deafness there was obvious disbelief.
It’s a tough examination isn’t it, to look back on life through a retrospectoscope?
I suppose I could blame it all on the coincidence of events at the time; events that conspired to puppeteer my choices the way they did. Two weeks before my final graduation exams my father died of snakebite while working in his master’s field. The un-staffed village dispensary didn’t have any anti-snake venom when he was taken there frothing and convulsing. And, what was worse, my family hadn’t even informed me of his demise, fearing for my emotional wellbeing at such a crucial stage in my career. When I had returned home with a buoyant heart, eager to share a hug with the one person who had made everything possible, I was instead met with long faces and tear stained eyes, and the dusty hookah lying forsaken on one side of his empty cot told me that my worst fears had come true. In the end, all I was left with were my memories of who he was and what he wanted me to be, and that was why I did what I did.
Perhaps to get away from it all, I chose a village far, far away from my native North Bihar. The place was called Dubalur, a tiny hamlet at the foot of the Nilgiri Mountains, where the northern sliver of Kerala, the southern tip of Karnataka and the western edge of Tamil Nadu kiss each other in a geographic ménage á trois. If, on a clear, sunny day, you should stand atop the Nilgiris and train your eyes northward, you would afford yourself a breathtaking view of the landscape and a bird’s eye view of the town I’m describing. You would first see the dense green forest underneath your feet creep down the hills like a sly army on the march and flank a sudden clearing in the distance in the shape of a gigantic horseshoe. If you narrowed your eyes some more and strained your vision even further, you would make out a haphazard collection of houses, both big and small, crammed into that clearing like a swarming mob waiting to break free. You would see a single road, cutting through this sea of green, zigzagging down the slopes through forty-two hairpin bends to end up amidst those specks of white in Dubalur’s only claim to fame: its bustling marketplace.
The marketplace was located adjacent to a temple built by the local king in the twelfth century, and the entire economy of Dubalur, right from its poorest to richest inhabitant, found an umbilical attachment with this place, however telescopic that relationship might have been. Although a lot of the temple’s architectural beauty had been usurped by creeping vines and espalier banyan roots, functionally it retained its singular importance as the purveyor of good auspices for all the truckers who halted next door after the arduous four hour drive down the slopes. Aside from providential blessing, the truckers needed rest and food and entertainment—needs readily serviced by the general stores, tea-stalls, auto repair shops, hair-cutting saloon, open-air restaurants and windowless hotels mushrooming haphazardly in the adjacent truck parking area. Dubalur’s sole cinema—Shanthi Talkies also competed in this scramble for the trucker’s attention, while, inside the marketplace, their cargo of spices, tea, coffee, nuts, fruits and vegetables—cultivated up on the mountains—was traded, marked, packed and readied for distribution. Come evening, and a convoy of trucks would roll out along the three roads diverging out of Dubalur like the heads of a trident, heading towards major cities in each direction. This was the uniqueness of Dubalur—its geography—that fashioned its economy, made up its history, sketched its society and roiled its politics.
And that was all that there was to the place.
The days were long and hot and the nights were warm and humid. If water supply was unreliable, electricity was almost non-existent. I bathed next to the well and slept out in the open courtyard of the compound. From inside the mosquito net I would count a million stars dotting the clear night sky till fatigue or the cool breeze from the mountains would put me to sleep. At night, I had been visited by foxes, deer and wild boar a number of times. But the scariest sight that convinced me to sleep with a butcher knife next to me was that of a couple of cobras performing a courtship dance in the moonlight on a small patch of grass next to the outhouse.
The villagers? Well, they were very skeptical about my intentions at first, waiting for that day when I would perform the sudden disappearing act like most of my predecessors. In the previous twenty years, I was the first doctor they had seen inhabit the derelict collection of brick buildings that everyone called, rather euphemistically, the ‘primary health office’. Two of the four buildings had been reduced to their foundations—the bricks and mortar likely stolen to construct homes elsewhere. Of the remaining two, large chunks of plaster had fallen off the walls—the resultant architectural motif reminiscent of a war- zone. Inside, the musty odour of stale air sat thick as soup while dust particles floated like lazy galaxies in the sunbeams streaking in through the numerous holes in the thatched roof. Years of disuse and neglect had rusted an old wrought iron exam table down to its skeletal framework that now best served as an anchor for the cobwebs stretching and straining from the ceiling.
But those were cosmetic, you know, nothing that a couple of days of scrubbing and cleaning wouldn’t fix. I was, of course, bursting with energy to do something, and that was what I did. Four days later I had a small examination room with an adjoining operating space perfect for minor surgical procedures. I had brought my own collection of instruments and some supplies stolen from the medical college hospital stores. And, as they say, I was ready for business!
Initially, thanks to the villager’s skepticism, the turnout of patients was low. But within a few weeks when word got around that I was the real deal, they began coming from all over, travelling on foot, riding on bullock carts and pedaling bicycles for hours to seek my opinion for everything from smelly burps to snake bites. Soon I had to hire an assistant: a thin, wiry fellow with a quick, dazzling smile named Munaf, who, during our introduction, spelled out his name for my benefit as ‘yem-you- yen-yay-yef. Munaf was a quick learner and soon graduated from handing out medicines and administering injections to assisting me with minor surgical procedures. I had to pay him part of my own salary to support his job; but I didn’t mind. There was so little to do or spend money on in a small village like Dubalur that whatever I made was good enough for us and then some.
Munaf turned out to be a real asset in ways I hadn’t anticipated. It was he who helped me understand the socio-political magma bubbling beneath the ho-hum indolence of this town. These were times of great change, he informed me in a conspiratorial whisper, his concern filled face looking around with suspicion. Unpredictable times had brought the strangest bedfellows together: the Marxists from the south and the low-caste traders from the north. Elsewhere in the state, their respective socialist and capitalist philosophies meant that two groups were constantly at odds with each other. But, in Dubalur, they had bonded over a common goal. Since the marketplace was the spigot of the entire area’s economy, the Marxists wanted to extend their influence into that sphere by unionizing it. The traders, on the other hand, were greedily eyeing the fountain of profits spouting there. An alliance had been forged between the two groups—perhaps as naturally as mixing oil and water—and it was this immiscibility that had caused a ripple of suspicion to spread through the other inhabitants of Dubalur. Munaf was quick to clarify (with some satisfaction I must note) that thus far, despite their best efforts, neither the Marxists nor the traders had managed to get their foot in the door; a door that was controlled—as had been for the last four hundred years—by the ancestral guardians of the temple who, in the course of time, had serendipitously transformed into its owners.
And, in Dubalur, the name of that owner was Narayana Namboodri.
For the first couple of months I avoided meeting Narayana Namboodri. Not because of any particular reason other than the fact that I was simply overwhelmed with work. Munaf had already hinted on a couple of occasions that it would be wise of me to find time and pay Narayana Namboodri a visit. As the town’s unofficial patriarch it was customary for anyone coming from outside to pay his respects to the man. This expectation of obligatory obeisance brought back unpleasant memories in me and may have even precipitated my somewhat passive-aggressive defiance. Sensing my disinclination to oblige, Munaf prophesized that one way or another, I would run into Narayana Namboodri. If I didn’t seek him out, Munaf assured me, Narayana Namboodri would.
Munaf was right.
The first meeting took place about four months after my arrival. Narayana Namboodri showed up unexpectedly at our health centre with his servant in tow. Seeing him waddling down the path that led up to the clinic, all the other patients waiting outside either stood up or dispersed to make way for him. Unmindful of this courtesy, Narayana Namboodri walked on without batting an eyelid. Clearly, the peasants’ consideration was his birthright not their thoughtfulness.
He was a big swarthy fellow, well over six-foot tall with a broad, plump face that merged with his chest without much of an intervening neck. A dark, bushy moustache covered most of his upper lip and shone with the same lustre as the well-oiled hair on his head. He wore a spotless white shirt and an equally spotless lungi, which, I learned later, was his customary dress code from morning till night. On his shoulder was a cream coloured towel that he used to wipe his face and hands every few minutes. Trailing him in a small procession were his attendants: the first one holding a bright blue umbrella with frilly edges to shelter him from the sun, while the last one carried a small bag like a lady would carry a purse.
He sized me up with a long, judgmental glance. I met his look with courtesy, determined not to show any hint of inferiority in my demeanour. Then he turned around and said something to one of his servants who stepped forward meekly and held out his arm.
On the scrawny fellow’s forearm was a square ulcer that looked like it had been there for a few weeks. The edges were dark, angry, and covered with some sort of a paste that I guessed was an indigenous combination of medicinal herbs. The centre was oozing with a yellowish-green fluid that spurted like toothpaste when I applied some pressure around it. A foul smell accompanied the burgeoning discharge.
How had he gotten the wound, I enquired.
The servant stole a fearful glance at Mr Namboodri before replying that he had accidentally scraped his arm against broken glass some weeks ago.
To me, the infection in the wound was as obvious as the fact that the servant was lying. The wound was too broad and too flat to come from glass and positioned at the back of his forearm—a site notorious for defensive injuries. But I didn’t challenge his version of the story … obviously the poor chap had his reasons. I just prayed that the infection hadn’t spread to the underlying bone.
It took an hour of debridement to remove all the infected material, after which I dressed it with antiseptic solution and bandaged it. I prescribed antibiotics, rest for that arm for a few weeks and, as an afterthought, stressed on the importance of prudence while working to prevent injuries like this in the future. The man nodded with a peculiar look of inconsequence on his face—the kind that people harbour when accepting irrelevant advice. Then he ran out hastily to join his master who had begun walking away without offering me so much as a thank you.
As soon as he had left, Munaf whispered into my ear that this visit wasn’t about the servant at all. It was just an excuse to size me up. He also predicted that another visitor would soon call on me.
As usual, Munaf was right.
The next evening a handsome young man paid me a visit. He was about my height with sharp, dramatic features and pale, intense eyes. By his clothes he looked like he didn’t belong in the village, and when he started speaking in polished, accented English, I had no doubt that he had been raised in the city. He introduced himself as Thomas Eappen the district coordinator of the Marxist-Communist Party of India and said he wanted to make the acquaintance of the dedicated doctor who had so selflessly decided to work for the poor and needy in such a small village. That I could leave behind the glitz and the glamour of private practice in the city, when I had so obviously been raised in the luxury of one, was inspirational to him.
I nodded my head and kept a self-deprecatory smile on my lips, letting him keep his erroneous impression for reasons I’m still not certain. Nevertheless, what I saw in Thomas Eappen was the slim hope of addressing my greatest frustration of working in the village.
The basic infrastructure was so terrible that most of the time I was struggling to find suture material to stitch lacerations, antibiotics to treat infections and IV fluids to treat dehydration. I had run out of my initial supplies and the government system of floating tenders from the district headquarters and evaluating bids was so horrendously slow and corrupt that by the time any supplies reached my doorstep, it was embarrassingly little for my efforts.
Could Mr Eappen and his Party help me improve this process?
Thomas Eappen flashed me one of his brilliant smiles, placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder and promised me that he would make it a personal crusade. This was exactly what their party wanted to do. Root out corruption in high places and restore power to the poor and the downtrodden. The downtrodden like Narayana Namboodri’s poor servant who had been whacked so hard with a belt by his master for daring to attend a Party meeting a few weeks ago that his wound had gotten infected.
I didn’t ask how he knew. It was fairly evident to me that The Party had sympathizers amongst the villagers who were standing outside the clinic that morning. I would sympathize too if someone suddenly promised me rights that had thus far been denied to me only because I carried the blemish of being a low caste peasant.
On second thoughts, I did carry that blemish … and much more. I just had to remind myself of it.
Dubalur was a three season town—hot, hotter and hottest. Winter was largely restricted to images on a calendar, although I did celebrate the fact that the stifling humidity of the earlier months had finally taken a sabbatical. Those few weeks the nights were marginally longer, although someone would have to point that out to merit awareness. The occasional northeasterly winds brought in dark rain clouds that thundered and squalled for a few hours before drifting away, leaving the sulking mugginess re-energized enough to bring further misery into my already miserable life.
Yes, I was miserable. The problem about being a doctor is that it isn’t enough to be one. You need tools much like a carpenter needs his saw and hammer. Gauze pads, bandage rolls, syringes, needles, autoclaves, antibiotics, suction, oxygen, stitches … all the things that would allow me to do what I wanted to do and actually be a doctor beyond carrying a certificate and a degree. Meanwhile, while I was left to twiddle my thumbs in this selfimposed banishment, my erstwhile classmates had finished their rural ‘pasting’ and gone on to enroll in postgraduate courses in surgery and medicine and orthopedics and pediatrics. And reading their descriptions, in long letters, of the complex surgeries they were performing and the challenging cases they were treating I was stuck with the terribly demoralizing thought that I had brought this quandary upon myself.
And for that I was even more miserable.
Thomas Eappen visited me a couple of times. Each time he rolled in from the city to assess the situation in Dubalur, he would make it a point to stop by my door. He would reassure me that ‘his men’ were looking into the matter of surgical supplies at the highest levels of government and that I would soon see results. He could understand my frustration, he would say sympathetically, but because the other party was in power, there was only so much he could do. He would encourage me not to lose heart and promised me that should the communists find themselves in government in the upcoming elections, he would ensure that such problems never occur anywhere in the state. And that was why he was working so hard to ensure their victory in the next elections.
I would smile and nod politely. Then, clenching my jaws and biting my lips to somehow cloak my angst, I would hold out a new list of all that I was missing at the clinic. In my heart of hearts, amidst Thomas Eappen’s lectures of the ills of dialectic materialism and capitalist pursuit, I couldn’t help but feel that if longing for a good newspaper to read, old friends to talk to and clean water to drink were capitalist pursuits, then I was, privately, willing to become one.
The curious thing was that after each one of Thomas Eappen’s visits, Narayana Namboodri would turn up at the clinic the next morning, urging my attention to some ailment he seemed to have developed while Eappen was in town. A terrible backache, a strained calf muscle, a persistent itch on his buttocks … nothing that ever seemed to be serious enough for me to do anything other than reassure him that it wasn’t serious enough to do anything. I had no illusions about his real motives even if Narayana himself was too proud to pose a direct query as to why Thomas Eappen had taken a sudden interest in the village clinic and what his level of involvement was in the affairs of the town Narayana considered his personal fiefdom. Once, when I accidentally let slip that he was helping me arrange supplies from the government, Narayana Namboodri’s face lit up and the next evening when I returned to the clinic after attending to a woman in labour in the neighboring hamlet, I found Munaf sitting amidst a few boxes of supplies, grinning like a Cheshire cat.
When summer blazed in the following year it returned with a vengeance, scorching the land and drying up the ponds. The sun beat down in a blinding haze right from the morning, prickling on one’s skin like a million superfine needles. In the afternoon, with the sun at its peak, Dubalur turned into a ghost town. The truck stop was empty, the cinema closed, the tea stalls deserted and the convenience store shuttered. The air was dry, laced with the smell of parched earth, and the empty road shimmered like a mirage in the heat. Leaves wilted in the sun and a few street dogs turned mad … from rabies or the heat I’m not certain.
I was going mad too … but for reasons of my own. I should have loved working in the village and helping the needy like my father would have wanted me to. But I could no longer ignore my true feelings or suppress them with self-defeating, idealistic rationalizations. The same issues that had bothered me earlier turned into nagging, carping thoughts and left my mind festering with frustration. It was disheartening to watch wounds I had sutured get infected without proper dressing changes. It was infuriating to write prescriptions that I knew they couldn’t fill. It was excruciating to watch children die because we didn’t have anti-snake venom. I wanted to do so much, but could do so little. I felt like a general, trapped in a soldier’s body, unable to reach beyond the perimeter of my self-imposed limitation. And yet, I hadn’t had a day’s rest or holiday thus far. I hated the food because everything tasted of coconut oil: oil that I was used to thinking of—in my northern upbringing—exclusively as hair tonic. I was surrounded by hopelessness of my own making, and it was in these moments of utter anguish that the thought that I could have instead been pursuing a post graduation in surgery would return, making me clutch and bang my head in despair.
And, to top it all, the heat … oh the heat.
However, in contrast to my private agony, my social standing in the village had rocketed like a meteor. The townspeople and neighbouring villagers were coming to me in droves, transforming my name into a household discourse. Seeing this, and taking me to be his natural ally, Thomas Eappen lavished attention on me, perhaps hoping that I would someday advocate his cause amongst the villagers. Such patronage obviously didn’t go unnoticed. To compete with Thomas Eappen’s attention Narayana Namboodri made me the victim of his largesse. It began with simple invitations for marriages and naming ceremonies and felicitations as the ‘chief guest’ on a few of these occasions. The hosts would fawn over me like they fawned over Mr Namboodri, often delaying the start of a function till I had arrived on the scene. Twice, because I was too busy to find time for the regular shows, Shanthi Talkies screened their movies at a special time for my benefit—which was all very nice but essentially a waste because they only screened regional movies and I had picked up only a smattering of Tamil and Malayalam during my stay in Dubalur.
Then, perhaps having spotted my disinclination in the affairs of the village, Narayana Namboodri appointed me to the temple board. To be on the temple board when all my childhood I hadn’t dared to see the inside of one was as exciting as it was scary. Now, more than ever, I didn’t dare reveal to anyone the truth behind my name—a consideration that led me to celebrate that moment of triumph privately. Suddenly, I had a ringside view of the workings of its attendant marketplace, and it gave me a terrific understanding of why and how it generated so much money. Ten per cent of all the money that changed hands every day ended up as offerings to the Gods—a delightfully clean collection for the Namboodri family. In addition, all the businesses surrounding the temple gave Narayana a cut of their monthly profits. Thanks to its Suez-like vantage geography, Dubalur’s marketplace was the epicenter of a distribution network for all that came down from the mountains. Controlling it meant wielding the scepter of power and profits and I began to understand why everyone wanted a piece of that pie.
Speaking of which, the number of skirmishes for control of the marketplace had steadily grown in frequency and intensity over the year. I would regularly deal with the consequence of such confrontations—stitching up lacerations, splinting bones and referring the seriously injured ones to the city. Inevitably they seemed to coincide with the times when I would spot Thomas Eappen hanging around tea stalls, lurking behind the temple complex, talking to the truckers and making passionate speeches to anyone who cared to listen. Watching him lead the charge, I was occasionally filled with guilt that I couldn’t find the enthusiasm to make his fight mine nor lend my voice to his cause.
I … I just wasn’t keen on taking sides.
My indolence wasn’t premeditated: it was simply a consequence of the state of my mind. What I couldn’t tell Thomas Eappen or Narayana Namboodri, or for that matter anyone else, was that what I most wanted was to get out of Dubalur.
This desperation drove me to write a letter to my college principal, wondering if there was any way for me to reduce my time commitment in Dubalur. As much as I loved working in this village, I wrote, I had realized that my heart lay in academics and that I wanted to complete a post-graduation in surgery sooner rather than later.
Because I made a conscious effort to stay away from the village happenings, Munaf would fill in the blanks of information for me. Apparently, Thomas Eappen had almost managed to organize a union of the workers in the marketplace till their leader was suddenly accused of having slept with some of the workers’ wives and drummed out of town. Public memory being as ephemeral as the Dubalur winter, no one questioned how the accusers suddenly found wealth in the form of six cows within a week of the union’s collapse. Next, when the Marxists tried to infiltrate the board by bribing one of the members, Narayana fired all of them and appointed fresh ones. One of Narayana closest friend disappeared and no one knew where or how. When the Marxists brought in ‘volunteers’ from the city to picket the marketplace, Narayana got a few of his men to throw poisonous snakes at them. Many of these non-natives who seemed to materialize exclusively during the disturbances, returned home with some combination of a bloody nose or broken bones or missing fingers. But all of them had a pledge on their lips to never venture this way again.
Nothing, it seemed, could shake Narayana’s grip on Dubalur. As Munaf explained it, if the villagers were ambivalent about Narayana and his tactics, they, without doubt, hated the low- caste outsiders.
And that statement terrified me.
Then, the burgeoning mayhem touched my doorstep. One crisp April morning Thomas Eappen showed up at my clinic and demanded I give witness in a police case against Narayana for having beaten a demonstrator and broken his hand. I expressed my reservation, stating that the man hadn’t implicated Narayana, or for that matter anyone else. That was just a matter of semantics Eappen argued, the truth was public knowledge. Then maybe they should use public knowledge to prosecute rather than focus on me, I suggested. We argued for a while after which Thomas Eappen left, promising me that I would regret my decision to not support his cause.
A few days later, on my way back from the marketplace that evening, a man stepped forward and asked me if I had a light. Just as I reached into my pocket, I felt my head explode with pain. The last thing I saw was the sight of another man coming up from my right with a bamboo stick raised above his head and a vicious look spreading rapidly on his face.
I woke up with a throbbing headache and to the sound of Narayana Namboodri’s voice, scolding his men for not following me close enough to prevent this from happening. Unbeknownst to me, Munaf had overheard Thomas Eappen threatening me and carried the news over to Narayana, who had immediately appointed two of his men to follow me around anonymously. Their failure to protect me adequately left Narayana feeling guilty and, as recompense, he informed me that he had appointed me to the Panchayatam—the august body of village elders who settled disputes and disagreement in the town before matters got out of hand. If I groaned to rue my deepening embroilment in the quicksand of village politics, Narayana interpreted that to be a result of my injuries and swore that Thomas Eappen would regret it should he even so much as dare to look towards the village.
That evening I wrote another letter to my college principal.
When the rains arrived later that year, they carried with them the whiff of a new event in Dubalur—an event that would twist this ongoing battle and change everything as we knew it.
Funnily, it was love.
Again, Munaf was the one who filled me in on the details. Narayana’s one and only daughter, Priyalaxmi, had fallen in love. And not just with anybody … but with Thiru, the son of the temple dancer. As innocuous as that may seem, the event was a tectonic shift in the social organization of the Dubalur. Thiru, like his mother, was from the lower caste and, in keeping with tradition, destined to become nothing more than a servant.
But that wasn’t where the story ended.
Folklore had it that the temple dancers carried a bad disease in their lineage. Many of the men born of these women didn’t live too long … most of them dying of some strange illness in their teens. While Munaf described it as the result of a curse bequeathed a few centuries ago by an angry priest when he had caught his favourite temple dancer fornicating with her lover, I could clearly see that it was an X chromosome linked disease where the women were protected because they had two X chromosomes—one healthy and one defective—while the men (or at least the ones who got the defective X gene) succumbed to it because they didn’t have the protection of the normal X gene. As a result, the temple dancers remained a unique clique of women—unwed mothers who found their acceptance in society by pretending to pray and dance for the Lord while serving the needs of men who desired some extra company … of the physical kind.
But the deepest ramification of this love story was the sudden shift in power that would occur should this marriage take place. As the heir apparent, Thiru, a low caste, would have control of the temple and the marketplace at some point in time, bringing the long drawn struggle of the Marxists to fruition with—to paraphrase—not a clang but a whisper.
Such, is the power of love.
Sensing the opportunity the Marxists threw their weight behind Thiru and his beloved, fighting a proxy war against the man they despised. Narayana was blindsided by this event, finding that his deep love for his only child had paralyzed him. And, amongst all the traits that he had passed on to his daughter, the one manifesting at that moment was his intensely stubborn streak. Narayana began walking a tightrope: while he was adamantly opposed to the marriage, he was particularly worried about coming down hard on his daughter and causing her to elope—an event that would permanently ruin his family’s reputation. Bursting with histrionics, the Namboodri household had turned into an emotional cauldron of threats, drama, counter-threats, charges, accusations and pleas—so reported Munaf.
Thiru appealed to the Panchayatam. With Thomas Eappen putting all his support behind him, they argued for the Panchayatam to declare both him and Priyalaxmi to be adults, mature and emancipated, and old enough to marry with or without the blessing of her father. Surprisingly, Narayana hit back hard, citing, of all things, his objections to this union on medical grounds. Given the curse that Thiru’s family carried, he contended, giving his daughter in marriage to him was like asking her to jump into a widow’s pyre.
Which was where I suddenly found myself—right in the middle of a mess I wanted no part of. For, it would be my testimony to the Panchayatam that would make or break the marriage.
Narayana’s favours weighed heavily on my shoulders. He had saved my life, honoured me and treated me with more respect than I had ever known existed. Even though such action may have been a consequence of his ignorance of the truth of my caste, the fact that he hadn’t ever sought a clarification or explanation before appointing me to the temple board or the Panchayatam was good enough for me.
Yet, I knew that I couldn’t, in good conscience, argue that the marriage was somehow medically unfit. Sure Thiru carried a bad gene, but show me one human being who doesn’t. To separate lovers on the basis of this bogey was not only unscientific and unethical, it was plain cruel.
That evening, on the day before the Panchayatam was supposed to meet, I had two visitors. The first to arrive was Thomas Eappen who suddenly seemed to have lost his fear of being harmed in Dubalur. He was confident he said with a smug smile on his face, I would do the right thing and not stand in the way of the lovers. It was important he reiterated that the people of the village trust the members of the Panchayatam and know they were impartial and honest and hadn’t hidden secrets like incomplete names that camouflaged their caste. Could I comprehend how sullied it would make them feel to discover that all those blessings administered at these high caste weddings and pujas was from someone who was supposed to be cleaning the temple toilets not sit on the board of one? He would obviously understand their anger should they resort to violence … wouldn’t I?
I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. All through my childhood I had been beaten, chased, humiliated and belittled: but, up until that day, I had never known such fear. The fear of a mob, the helplessness against a horde, the crush of a crowd … with almost no chance of escape.
Seeing my face Thomas Eappen laughed good-naturedly. Then, placing his hand on my shoulder he said that I shouldn’t worry so much—after all he knew I’d do the right thing. Then, as an afterthought, he said he had recently come to know through his cousin (who was really close to the general secretary of the Congress Party) that they were looking for good men at many key posts in Delhi University. To showcase their reservation policy, the Union government was desperately looking for backward caste people to fill those positions. One word from him and such a person could be out of Dubalur and on their way to Delhi in a matter of weeks, enjoying the luxury of a permanent government job with perks like a house, a car and servants. Would I be kind enough to inform him of any such person the day after the Panchayatam meeting should I have any personal knowledge in the matter?
Then with a smile and a nod, he walked out confidently, leaving me alone with my thoughts.
Much later that same night, even before I had had a chance to come to grips with my fear, Narayana Namboodri walked in, this time—and for the first time—missing his entourage. He had lost weight and his face was creased with worry. The trademark haughtiness and invincibility had given way to trepidation, and what I suddenly saw was a tired, ageing man struggling to hold on to the past even as everything around him was beginning to mutate uncontrollably out of his grasp.
He asked me what I had made of Thiru.
When I informed him that Thiru seemed healthy, Narayana shook his head with chagrin and asked me if I knew that they carried a curse in their family. Not a curse I informed him— it was most probably a defective gene linked to one of the chromosomes, a defect that targeted males. Yes, yes he said irritably, but didn’t it also mean that their sons would die early? Not so I replied, trying to allay his fears, explaining the concept of dominant and recessive traits, homozygosity and heterozygosity, and why there was a good chance that their progeny would be normal. As an example I offered Thiru himself who had survived despite being a male because of a phenomenon called ‘penetrance’ where sometimes the defective gene manifests only amongst an unlucky percentage of those afflicted. Did that mean Thiru was normal? No … just that his defective gene couldn’t evince itself, I explained. We went back and forth, over and over, each trying to rationalize a dozen ‘what if scenarios. I must have spent all my knowledge of genetics on him, using terms like phenotype, genotype, homozygous, heterozygous, dominant, recessive, gene and allele, in an effort to convince Narayana of the authority of my reasoning. But my attempts only served to heighten his anxiety. His arguments kept reverberating around the one point of trying to do what was good for his daughter. Not surprisingly, he never sought to justify his objection to the marriage on the basis of the threat it posed to his dominance in Dubalur, even though I was fairly certain it must have been lurking somewhere in the back of his mind.
Soon he broke down and begged me not to let it happen. He had saved my life once, couldn’t I return the favour? All I had to do was declare that their marriage wasn’t acceptable because they wouldn’t ever be able to have a baby. No one would understand the medical jargon besides me and so no one would ever question my authority.
So saying, he fell at my feet.
I recoiled with discomfort and quickly raised him by his shoulders. I tried to reassure him saying that I needed some more time to think it through.
Then, sniffling and wiping his tears as he prepared to leave, he said something that surprised me, and the significance of which I’ve only come to understand recently.
He said I made him proud of who he was, and walked away.
That was the last time I spoke to him. Actually, that isn’t accurate. I did speak to him again … even though he couldn’t speak to me. For, a few hours later, on that very night, I got woken up by those harried knocks on my door, with a pressing summons to attend to Narayana Namboodri urgently.
The Namboodri house was at the end of a dusty, unpaved road that worked its way through the mango orchards, fishing ponds and a patchwork quilt of small paddy fields. In contrast to all the modest mud huts I had passed along the way, it was a cement building, built in the style of old British bungalows. A driveway led up to the overhanging portico where an old Fiat sat cooling its heels.
En route, the anxious servant from the Namboodri household had given me a breathless narration of what had happened to his master. Apparently Narayana had been restless all through the night, finding it impossible to fall asleep. When his wife had woken up she had found him sitting at the edge of the bed, staring at her, mumbling continuously without making any sense.
Narayana Namboodri had, quite literally, turned speechless.
Stepping onto the expansive chair lined verandah, I could hear the panicked chatter coming from inside. It gave me an acute sense of the commotion inside the household even before I accosted it visually.
Narayana was sitting at the edge of his bed looking like his face would burst. It was red and swollen, and suffused with blood like someone blowing into a particularly hard, inelastic balloon. The veins in his neck stuck out like coiled cords that seemed ready to gush into his brain. His bulging eyes looked like they wanted to leap out of their sockets. His mouth was moving without a sensible sound escaping those dark, everted lips.
And yet, I could make out, that all Narayana was trying to do … was speak.
The minute he spotted me he I saw a glimmer of hope flit through his face. He signalled for me to come close to him and then made another attempt at articulation.
If I ever got to understand and appreciate the complex beauty in the neuronal circuits of the brain that allows one to speak, it was in the tragic drama of that moment. It was obvious to me that Narayana was having a stroke and part of its manifestation was the difficulty he was having making meaningful words. In a tiny part of his brain—an area smaller than a postage stamp—where specialized neurons had stored hundreds of thousands of words he had learned over the years, oxygen was in short supply, leaving the neurons crying out in panic. Everything else in the circuit was intact—right from his consciousness to the nerves that supplied his vocal cords, tongue and lips, enabling them to move in perfect harmony and produce the myriad sounds of a language. Yet, with a botched higher command, they were malfunctioning like an orchestra without a conductor, each instrument playing its own random note, producing noise, not music.
And that was what Narayana was doing.
He was huffing and puffing like a steam engine; he was pulling at his hair like he wanted to uproot them; he was squeezing on the bedposts till his knuckles were white and bloodless; but meaningful words refused to come out of his lips.
He was talking nonsense.
Neologisms, I explained to his panic-stricken wife, new words that the brain makes up in the throes of a stroke. The key thing was to get him to the city for urgent treatment.
Then, as his wife and I stood discussing the options, Narayana, in his state of blathering befuddlement, said ‘homozygous’.
Neologism again, I explained to his wife.
That was the last I saw, or heard of Narayana. He suffered a massive stroke on the way to the hospital in the city and when they returned from there after three days, he was a vegetable. He couldn’t walk or talk and had to be fed through a pipe stuck down his nose.
A week later I testified before the reconvened Panchayatam that there was no medical reason why Thiru and Priyalaxmi couldn’t marry. Another fortnight later I had an offer to join Delhi University’s surgery department as junior registrar. And before the month was over and winter could flash its nondescript presence, I was out of Dubalur.
Which brings me back to today and to why I feel the way I feel ^ about Narayana Namboodri. He wasn’t exactly a great man or even a good man by any application of virtue. He was a feudal lord desperate to maintain his grip on a town where, much like the seasons, he didn’t want anything to change. And I’m fairly certain he had no illusions about the fact that what he wanted me to do was just plain wrong.
So why would I want to apologize to Narayana …
Because, even today, as I lie on my deathbed, I haven’t been able to answer to my satisfaction why I called the last meaningful word Narayana uttered, a neologism.
In my defense, although ‘homozygous’ isn’t a true neologism, for a semi-literate man like Narayana, it was. His anoxic, tormented brain, having heard it only a few hours ago, had probably picked it out at random and spat it out without knowing its meaning.
Or had it?
Did I call it a neologism to avoid the true meaning of what Narayana might have been trying to convey in his moment of crisis? Did I pick up the secret message from the prisoner trapped inside his body and deliberately ignore it, tossing out a plea for help as silly, meaningless gibberish? Was I so afraid of Thomas Eappen’s threats and so desperate to get out of Dubalur, that I let my motives cloud my judgment?
Was his neologism really a neologism?
For, many years later, much after I had attained a lot of professional distinctions, I did visit Dubalur once. The temple, now almost completely overrun by wild weeds and trespassing trees, was even more decrepit than I last remembered it. The marketplace and its accompanying hubbub were gone, replaced by the silence and emptiness of dereliction. A straighter smoother road on the other side of the mountains had taken away all business. Except for Narayana’s ghost, no one lived in the Namboodri house anymore. Out of fear, Thiru and Priyalaxmi had moved to another city, convinced that Narayana had hexed their newborns from beyond his grave, because each and every one of the four children born to them had died before their first birthday.
And that was when I understood what Narayana was trying to say in his final moments of life. In the anxiety-ridden milieu of an evolving stroke that had robbed him of his speech, he must have been desperately trying to expose the low caste gene that he shared with Thiru using a word he had learned from me—homozygous. Homozygous: the pairing of two defective genes that would kill all his grandchildren and even sully his name posthumously. A gene that he knew had slipped into his pedigree somewhere in his ancestry a few centuries ago. If I entrust my imagination I can make up a slew of stories involving the temple dancer, her lover and the priest to guess the why, where and how that nasty gene had jumped ship, and it might even clarify how Narayana knew of the presence of that gene that carried—along with its code for a defective protein—the secret that his family was actually low caste. The secret he had spent a lifetime trying to hide from the rest of the world, only to discover that he couldn’t reveal it when he desperately wanted to … all because I—a man who had camouflaged his caste in his name—had labelled his last word a neologism.
Ah … onto more cheery matters. Death awaits.