Maria’s Scattered Thoughts, Dreams, Life
Aravind is not someone who has the capability or the inclination to deceive anyone. Still, when he thinks about Maria, something sticky rises up from his heart, something like guilt.
You are like a sister to me … Aravind tried to convince Maria, and himself. And yet, the way his heart beats when she is near…
The shiver that runs down his body when he touches her…
The way his gaze slips towards her body…
The heady fragrance that is all hers…
All of it troubles and energizes him at the same time. So, why not acknowledge what he feels?
This is what Aravind thinks whenever he looks at Maria:
O my Lord, O my Lord, how much I love her! She, the only woman I want to hold close to my heart. God is witness to the amount of tears I have shed thinking about us, me and her! The moment I lose her will be the single most significant moment in my life. I have often thought what I will say when she leaves me, and it always comes to this: My Maria! She is super nice! For Maria, everything is ‘super’ – super nice … super emotional … super fragile … super funny … super crazy … And me? I’m just a normal man. Super normal, in Maria’s words. When I try to remember all the intimate moments in my life, Maria is present in each of them. If I desired to share myself with anyone, it would only be Maria. But what, then, of my life? No, never. Like I said, I am just a normal man.
That is the problem. If he had felt the way he did with any woman other than Maria, Aravind would have acknowledged it. A hundred times over. But Maria … To think about marrying her and taking her home … It is great to be friends with someone who keeps harping on about an ancestor who taught magic to Kadamattathu Kathanar or about Karthav Eesho Mishiha who sought her company because He was bored. But marrying such a person…
There is something else. Maria had fallen in love with someone and married him, only to leave him after six months for no particular reason. ‘This is not what I want,’ that was all she said. Aravind cannot even imagine the thought of Maria leaving him declaring he is not what she wants.
That is the real issue.
Aravind had once asked Maria about her short-lived married life, and she said she didn’t remember anything. When Aravind pressed her, she said, ‘Honestly, I would tell you if I remembered. My marriage is a file that has been permanently deleted from my brain.’ From that day on, Aravind has lived with the fear that he, too, would be deleted from her brain one fine day.
Maria is thinking about Geevarghese and how he made arrack from cashew fruits…
Until the arrack he brewed with his own hands in his own compound was all drunk, Geevarghese would move his bed out into the yard, spending his nights there in the company of Kelan and Velayudhan. During cashew season, when Maria went to pick cashew nuts with Mariyamma, she would keep aside plump, juicy fruits for Geevarghese’s arrack brewing. Nuts for Ammachi and fruits for Appachan!
Eetha was praying. When the rest of the family said their prayers in the evenings, Eetha would be too busy in the kitchen. So, she prayed alone afterwards.
‘Our Bava who art in heaven! Hallowed be thy name … on earth as it is in heaven…’
‘Eetha, my dear, if earth became like heaven, where the hell would I plant my yam and taro?’ The question was from Velayudhan, who was romping on the bed in the yard with Geevarghese and Kelan, their stomachs full of arrack.
In response, Eetha picked up the broom and chucked it at him.
‘Oh, it all happened such a long time ago!’
With some difficulty, Aravind withdraws his gaze from Maria’s breasts and looks at her face.
‘What all?’
‘Ey, nothing,’ Maria says, ‘I was just remembering the old days.’
‘Why do you carry these things that happened in the past everywhere like a bundle? I feel like you are a person from the past. Not just your past, but the past in general.’
‘The past is fascinating, though, don’t you think? There would be princes and magicians and ghosts and kuttichathans … Such fun! Aravind, listen, could we go somewhere far away and live?’
‘But how will we live?’
‘Every time I come up with a good idea, you ask some lame question. Is living such a difficult thing? All the people all over the world live, don’t they?’
‘Yes, but they all do something in order to live.’
‘We will too. We could do yard work for someone. And when we make enough money, we could buy some land, lots and lots of land. We could cultivate that land, keep goats and cows and chicken, even an elephant if possible! And people will say, “Let’s buy our vegetables from Maria” and “Maria’s vegetables are super fresh and super nice!” and “Let’s buy our milk from Maria” and “The milk from Maria is super tasty and super white!”’
As she says these things to Aravind, Maria is under the impression that she is deeply in love, not with Aravind but with someone else. The honest truth is that Maria is confused about who she is in love with at any given time. This person, that person or that other person? By the time Maria thinks about it and comes to a conclusion, this person, that person and that other person will all have gone their own way. To Maria, love is as confusing as the thing with Becker and Federer. When Becker gave up playing, Maria cried continuously for four days, and on the fifth day, she made a decision: ‘I will not love any other tennis player like I loved Becker.’ For a while, Maria was able to stick to her promise, but then Federer beat Becker in straight sets, got to the top and sat there. Even now, on occasion, Maria finds her infidelity shocking. Aravind does not like tennis. He believes it is a game of rich people, and that since Maria is poor, she should not watch this game.
Aravind has been silent witness to so many of Maria’s love affairs. Each time a love affair came to an end, Maria fell into Aravind’s arms and wept, and each time he consoled her as best he could. Poor Aravind. After she ended one such relationship, in one of their drinking sessions, her lover wiped his eyes and said, ‘She is mad, truly mad, poor thing.’
Exhausted from weeping, when Maria went into the kitchen, Aisha was making toast with jam.
‘Aisha, can I have some toast?’
‘But you don’t like toast.’
Maria ate five slices of toast smeared with jam. ‘Aisha, toast is so tasty,’ she said. ‘I am amazed that I thought I didn’t like bread all this time.’
‘What did you have against bread?’
‘Oh, that. When I got divorced, I was broke, remember? I slept in this tiny little room on a mat on the floor. And all I had to eat was bread – a single loaf over three days. It went on for some time, and then I took a decision. I made myself vomit all the bread I had eaten up until that moment.’
‘And?’
‘And what? I went to Appachan and Ammachi. And ate Ammachi’s appam and chicken curry until I was full.’
Maria waits for Aravind at the beach. Aravind organizes these trips to the beach as a ruse to be alone with Maria, without Hari and Vinayakan hanging around. It is the tourist season and the beach is crowded. Local vendors pursue white tourists with handicrafts they assume they would like and, of course, also to ogle at the madammas and to scope a chance to touch them if possible. Most tourists buy their wares assuming that this is what tourists are supposed to buy when visiting this country, while others buy them just to get rid of the vendors. But will the vendors go away? The same vendor will appear before the same tourist within half an hour. Some vendors think that the tourist won’t be able to recognize them, while others end up selling to the same tourist because they couldn’t tell one white-skinned tourist apart from another. In either case, it is the tourist who gets harried in the process. No one pursues the local tourists, no one pays them any attention.
Maria watches a dog walking along with a madamma. It is obvious that there is a warm relationship between the dog and the woman. Every now and then, the dog raises his eyes and looked at the madamma with deep love and affection, and licks the white-white woman’s white-white shin. And each time he does it, the madamma kisses his snout.
Suddenly, a local man approaches them. From the look the dog gives him, it is clear that he knows the man and hates him. The madamma hugs the dog tightly, passes the leash to the man along with some money, and walks away looking back over her shoulder several times. The dog refuses to move and begins howling until, finally, the man drags him away by his leash.
‘Looks like the dog has taken to the madamma,’ Maria says as they pass before her.
‘Yes. Look at him, all fat and glowing.’
‘How much money did she give you to look after her dog?’
‘This is my dog, not hers.’
‘You’re lying!’
‘No, I’m not! It’s the truth!’
‘So, why does the madamma love your dog so much then?’
‘She took my dog on rent for a week. See, over there? That’s my house. The madamma was walking past one day when the dog barked. He’s a dog, so he’ll bark, won’t he? But this madamma, she came into the house saying the dog called her. Stared at his face for a while, and you know what she said? She said this dog was her husband from her past life! Crazy! But then, most madammas are crazy. Anyway, she began making a right old ruckus, wanting to take him with her. Finally, I said she can have him. Then she says she has to return to America in a week, so she’ll borrow him until then. She really wanted to take him with her to America, but what to do, it is very difficult for Indian dogs to get American visas. They think it might be a security risk. She has promised him that she will be back soon.’
‘So, how much money did she give you?’
‘She said she’ll give me two thousand rupees for a week. I said that was too little. She said two thousand was too much money to rent a dog for a week. So, I said, to me, this is a dog, but to you, it is your husband, and two thousand is too little for a husband. Finally, we agreed on three thousand and five hundred rupees.’
Maria is angry with the dog that forgot his loyalty the moment he saw the white-skinned madamma. Even dogs are looking for opportunities to piss off to America! What chance then for the Third World revolution!
Stalls selling fish, caught and cooked on the spot, are doing a brisk business. White tourists stand in front of them with their pale eyes oozing with desire trained on the fish that are turning into curry. The locals stay away – our crabs and prawns are meant only for foreigners after all.
Fish and prawns, destined to be white folk’s dinner, dance in the buckets of water displayed in front of the stalls. Their eyes reflect the bewilderment in finding their world suddenly diminished, and they die with their eyes full of incomprehension and confusion. Those who eat them do not look into their eyes, and so are oblivious to the traces of confusion still in them, even after death. Maria remembers the pot of fish curry Ammachi had thrown away because there was fear in the fishes’ eyes even after being cooked. A potful of terrified-fish curry!
Boats return from the sea; fishermen pile up the fish right on the shore and begin selling them. Fresh fish with gleaming underbellies. Maria had seen a particular kind of fish on TV a long time ago, fish that swam all the way from the ocean and up certain rivers to their sources in order to lay their eggs in a specific spot. We might wonder, ‘Oh, look, they have reached their destination after so much trouble!’ But no! Their troubles have only begun. The next thing they have to do is to swim up a waterfall from down below. As we watch them, we think, ‘There can’t be anything harder than that! This surely must be their last predicament.’ That is when we see a battalion of bears, waiting for them at their destination with their arms outstretched. Maria thinks that the only reason Karthav created them was to suffer. Since fish are, on the whole, a foolish species, almost all of them jump right into the arms of the bears. Only a handful successfully evade them, twisting their bodies out of reach or changing direction at the last minute, and reach their destination. And once there, they stand on one fin and lay their eggs, and promptly die. After taking all this risk! Some keep looking over their shoulder to watch out for bears even as they lay their eggs. Little do they know that, bears or no bears, their lives are about to end as soon as they finish laying their eggs. Still, not a single fish shows enough intelligence to observe what is happening around them, to understand that laying eggs means certain death, and go back without laying the eggs. Couldn’t they lay their eggs somewhere less risky, at least once? Was swimming up waterfalls and running the gauntlet of bears the only way their eggs would come out?
Maria is overcome with the fear that Appachan is getting more and more unwell. There are other worries too. Federer has begun to lose almost all his matches. Her lover has left her. And Aravind refuses to listen to her no matter how much she pleads with him to go somewhere far away to live. So, Maria weeps almost all of the time.
Aisha decides to throw her a party to take her mind off these things. Maria does not quite understand the difference between a party and their normal drinking sessions, but Aisha says there is a difference. On normal days, their drinking sessions are clandestine affairs, scared as they are that Saralachechi will find out what they are up to, even though there is nothing to fear from her as she nods off and sleeps like a buffalo in the middle of watching her 9 p.m. serial. On party days, Aisha powders up a couple of sleeping pills and puts it in Saralachechi’s food. They could then turn the whole house upside down and Saralachechi would be none the wiser. So, party days mean having the freedom to drink as much as they want, and dance and laugh and scream and bawl to their hearts’ content.
Radhika does not partake in boozing or smoking, so she goes off to bed early. Drinking, smoking, wearing skimpy clothes like Nimmi – these are all unforgivable crimes in Radhika’s estimation. She is always anxious about things like virginity and hymen. Aisha says that Radhika even walks slowly and carefully, worried as she is about rupturing her hymen. Maria knows she is exaggerating. Maria, Aisha and Nimmi have never had such fears. Aisha is of the opinion that what can rupture needs to rupture, and Nimmi thinks she must have been born with a ruptured hymen. And Maria … Maria isn’t even sure that such a thing exists.
Nimmi is puffing on the charas. It is Vinayakan who supplies her top quality charas that he procures in the Himalayas. Maria did not know they had such a relationship or how it began because, as far as she is aware, Aisha and Nimmi knew Vinayakan only as Maria’s friend. At first, Maria wondered whether Vinayakan was a partner in Nimmi’s sexuality research. Then she remembered that Vinayakan was not the type to make all that effort because, well, it took effort. Maria is in full agreement with Vinayakan on this. This thing, sex, it is only men who have never experienced it who give it so much importance. All the men and women Maria knows have complete sexual freedom, and because of it, none of them take it all that seriously. It is so everywhere in the world where there is sexual freedom. When they did a survey in America, the majority of the men said they would rather have a good cup of coffee than sex.
Plastered, Nimmi telephones Nimish – the son of their neighbour Makarandan chettan and an active partner in her sexuality research – and asks him to come over. Nimish appears at their first-floor door soon enough, shimmying up the mango tree by the side of the house as usual. Maria does not like Nimish. He has a sickly look with bulging muscles and a smug ‘I am so handsome’ expression on his face. And that pretentious name! Every night, Makarandan chettan takes off his clothes and walks around naked in his room, exposing himself to them, never suspecting, even in his dreams, that his son is with them at the time. An outraged Aisha wanted to inform Saralachechi and put an end to it, but Nimmi stopped her saying that watching Makarandan’s naked parade helped her achieve ‘better orgasms’.So, Aisha abandoned the idea. She is always supportive in such matters.
In the beginning, Maria had assumed that Aisha was a lesbian, and when she realized this wasn’t so, Maria asked her why she didn’t consider becoming one. Aisha said she couldn’t, because even though she felt mentally and emotionally close to women, she did not feel physical attraction. Maria feels the opposite, thinks it is easier to feel physically close to women. Who doesn’t like sucking boobs!
Sexuality research done, Nimish goes away, shimmying down the mango tree.
‘I am going to have a baby with him,’ Nimmi says, coming out of her room.
Aisha’s jaw drops. ‘But isn’t he only around twenty or so?’ she asks after a while. ‘And you’re nearing forty!’
‘Yes, he is in his prime years. And damn healthy. That’s why I chose him. The baby will be healthy too.’
‘And are you going to live together?’ Aisha asks.
‘Of course! We’ll be living together as husband and wife.’
‘For the life of me, I can’t imagine Makarandan chettan as your father-in-law.’ That is all Maria has to say in the matter.
Anyway, a couple of days later, Nimish is missing. Try as she might, Nimmi cannot find out anything about the whereabouts of her future husband. She walks up and down, calling out, ‘Nimish, darling.’ To stop Nimmi, who is only a few years younger than his wife, from becoming his daughter-in-law, Makarandan chettan has packed Nimish off, first to his brother-in-law in Bombay and from there to the Gulf. Nimmi goes to his gate and asks in her American accent, ‘Is Nimish in, Makeraanten chetta?’ ‘Spoil innocent little children, will you, you shameless bitch,’ says Makarandan chettan in response, but Nimmi does not understand him. Nimmi usually does not hear what others say, especially if it is in Malayalam. In any case, soon after, Nimmi finds another bulgy-muscled man and decides to have a baby with him instead. As Aisha says, it will be a miracle if Nimmi doesn’t leave the child somewhere and go on her way, oblivious.
Nimmi thrusts her fingers down her throat and vomits everything she has drunk till then, and begins to get drunk again from scratch. She does this often – drinking until her tummy is about to burst and, feeling unsated still, making herself vomit so she can drink again. She vomits easily anyway, what with drinking way more than she should, mixing up alcohols and brands, and to top it all off, eating all the old and spoiling food that is in the fridge. Aisha never gets rid of old food, just sticks it into the fridge saying, ‘Nimmi will eat it.’
Of all the people Maria knows, Aisha is the most decent drunk. She takes her time, drinking each drink slowly, sip by sip, accompanying it with the weirdest of snacks – fruit, salad, cheese and so on, like white people. Three or maximum four – Aisha never has more drinks. So, Maria has never seen her plastered or vomiting. Now, Aisha has gone to bed and Nimmi is wasted, and Maria is alone. She thinks of Aravind … and about the farm they are going to start.
Breathlessly, Maria talks to Karthav Eesho Mishiha, non-stop, about the beautiful farm she and Aravind are going to set up. Karthav has come to her to tell her that He is now fully prepared to start the revolution they had planned and that they should get on with it immediately, but here she is, going on and on about some farm.
‘Is the revolution more important to you, or this dookly Aravind?’ He asks, irate. (‘Dookly’ is a word Karthav has learned from Maria. He has picked up many such made-up words from her. One time, bored to tears listening to them reading the Bible in heaven – all they did there was read the Bible – Karthav had blurted out: ‘Can’t you put the stupid kunthappanaatti down for a while and give us all a bit of peace and quiet!’ An old man who looked like a grandfather had come forward from among the Bible readers, given Karthav a stern look, and said, ‘If I’d known this is what you were like, I would not have put myself through all the trouble for a hundred years down there.’ That old man was Kuncheriya.)
‘I was thinking,’ says Maria, ‘what if I marry Aravind?’