THE CALENDAR PAGES flipped; very many of them did. Several monsoons arrived carrying tempestuous downpours and departed like lambs while time traveled in its majestic chariot. A few thousand sunsets over the Arabian Sea followed so many sunrises over the Western Ghats. The year 1964 arrived.
Eleven years passed since Jaygust was born. After him, Ann gave birth to the last three of the family during 1955, 1956, and 1957. The hyperactive baby factory manufactured babies in rapid-fire sequence. The proverbial stork was kept very busy. The childbirth saga consisted of nonstop episodes of pregnancies, a soap opera that Thoma and Ann had coproduced. By the time they had ten children, they were saddled with unbearable burdens.
“Why did you stop at ten children?” Kumaran, the barber, asked Thoma during free haircuts to the family. The generous neighbor was logging in more and more free hours as Thoma’s children outnumbered the stars in the sky.
“It is Ann’s doing,” Thoma said.
“How so?” Kumaran asked.
Thoma let out a puff of beedi smoke.
“Ann can’t count without fingers. With just ten fingers, she wouldn’t count if she had more than ten.” The children broke into laughter. Thoma often extracted children’s laughter at the expense of his wife.
He couldn’t stand seeing Ann hanging around him with her bulging tummy. “Why didn’t you lay eggs and sit on them?” he asked her. He salivated at that possibility—to have had Ann out of his hair for a series of nine-month episodes in which she sat on an egg while waiting for it to hatch. He wouldn’t have to see Ann for long stretches of time.
Ann had never thought of the possibility. She wanted to know how many years her pregnancy months would add up to. She asked Kareena, who was good in mathematics. Kareena summed up, scribbling on a newspaper used as fish wrapping. “It is seven and a half years,” she said to her mother.
This answer gave Ann a jolt. She would have been decommissioned for seven and a half years sitting on eggs! That is, if Thoma had his way. She was saddened that she would have been out of sight of her husband and children and they out of her sight for so many years. It was too much of a sacrifice. She thanked God for offering pregnancy to women instead of making them roost on eggs. Women should spend time with their husbands during pregnancy, she thought. The loneliness of a series of nine-month ordeals, even with her family around, were heart-wrenching experiences, leave alone without them.
Thoma and Ann could not keep track of the names of their children. They remembered the names of their first six children: George, Rita, Kareena, Josh, Rafeena, and Wilma. That was it. After that, it became a torture to track the names. So, they numbered the rest of the children. The last four were called Number Seven, Number Eight, Number Nine, and Number Ten.
“It is your job to remember your children’s names,” Thoma said to Ann. It was as if he had nothing to do with their children and as if Ann had become pregnant through a miraculous feat, just like the Virgin Mother Mary had Immaculate Conception resulting in Jesus’s birth. He might as well have called her Ann of the Immaculate Conception.
o---o---o
Ann remembered the birth of each of her children as if it was yesterday.
“This boy is going to live far away from you,” said the astrologer immediately after Josh was born. He was fourth in the family.
The astrologer had a very thick moustache that hung beyond the lower lip, making it impossible for others to see his mouth when he talked. The moustache meshed with an overgrown beard, making the combination look like a black beehive. He had reviewed the positions of the planets and the stars at the time of birth before coming up with his prophecy. The birth time was very critical to the accuracy of the foretelling.
“How far away?” Ann asked with concern. Like any mother, she didn’t want her children to live far away from her. She was not sure how accurate the man’s watch was; she had her own doubts. If Josh’s time of birth per astrologer’s watch was incorrect, his prediction would be wrong, she hoped.
“The farthest from you—on the other side of the world,” said the man.
“You sure you got the right birth time?” Ann asked.
The astrologer lifted his left arm so Ann could see his wrist watch; he had an expensive Swiss watch. “See my imported watch? It is very accurate,” the man declared, putting an end to Ann’s hope. Still, Ann thought the man was a crook and believed he smirked after delivering a ridiculous prophecy; a smirk cleverly hidden behind the moustache. She didn’t want to believe that Josh would abandon the family and go all the way to the other side of the world.
The numbered children, Number Seven through Number Ten, would later become members of what was called the Gang of Four. They earned nicknames later in life, making it easy for strangers to identify them.
o---o---o
Number Seven was named Jaygust. Ann felt the story of his birth was too horrid, stopping people in their tracks when they heard it and making them abandon faith in the goodness of human nature.
As the pregnancy advanced into the third trimester, it became apparent she was carrying the elephant god’s son because her womb was abnormally large. Her tummy bulged out and gyrated, taking up quite a space in front of her. She struggled to manage her abnormal pregnancy; her sagging belly hampering her attempts to sit, lie down, or stand.
“You have ten jackfruits in your belly,” Bhavany said. They were in Ann’s kitchen. The good neighbor often visited Ann during her grueling pregnancy.
Ann gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. The girl looked just like Ann, and the boy like Chettiar. Ann watched the little babies with disgust, knowing well whose babies they were. The whole of Mannuthy knew; it was an open secret.
A few months after the delivery, Ann was asleep while the babies were huddled over her bare breasts. The boy was drinking from her right breast, and the girl from the left. The girl gravitated to the right breast; she was not getting enough from the left. She nudged the boy away from the right breast and sucked on it. As soon as the territorial fight advanced to the girl’s advantage, baby boy’s screaming woke Ann up.
She was surprised to see him standing, since he was not yet of the age when he could do so. And then she saw something extraordinary: he was covered in long body hair, like a baby wolf! With his tiny body covered in hair, he looked like a fur ball.
The boy fixed a malicious scowl on his face as only an adult could. He then wrapped his little hands around the girl’s neck and lifted her up, standing there like a mini Samson and strangling his sister with superhuman strength. The little girl stopped drinking, gasped, and let out a muffled scream.
Ann managed to roll out of the bed and pulled on the girl but couldn’t shake off the boy’s grip. Her hands slipped, throwing her backward. She tripped on the bassinet resting on the floor, lost balance, and did a backward somersault, landing against the wall and falling. When she picked herself up and approached the bed, the inevitable had happened. The baby girl was not moaning any more. The boy had strangled her.
Ann saw another extraordinary thing. Right in front of her eyes, the boy started losing his body hair, and he became his normal self. He fell asleep on the bed. She gazed at the sleeping baby boy—sleeping like a baby after committing murder.
Ann insisted on naming the boy Disgust because he was born from an act of disgust. This was such an outrageous name that the Mannuthy parish priest asked her to consider renaming. She eventually settled for Jaygust, an unusual name for a human being. She felt that justice was nevertheless done—the name retained the gust of disgust, and it would be a lasting reminder of the horrendous rape she’d surrendered her dignity to.
Jaygust was Ann’s seventh child, but not of Thoma. The sight of Jaygust, the permanent sickle mark on Chettiar’s forehead, and the man’s lost left eye reminded her of the unmentionable assault that took place in her sanctum sanctorum, her kitchen.
The boy Jaygust became known as Cradle Strangler.
o---o---o
Number Eight was a girl named Thalli, Number Nine a boy named Noman, and—last but not least—Number Ten a girl named Curly.
Thalli earned her nickname from the word thalli, which meant beaten—not because she was beaten but because her father was beaten at the time she was inside Ann’s tummy. Thoma was nine months behind in rent payment at a time when, coincidentally, Ann was nine months pregnant with Thalli.
The landlord, Chettiar, and his gang beat up Thoma occasionally, since Thoma was frequently delinquent in his rent payments. Chettiar’s confrontation with Thoma on those occasions had a method to its madness. The landlord’s hired hands gave Thoma as many blows as how many months he was behind in rent payment. Thoma ended up in the hospital’s emergency ward by the end of the beating.
Just prior to Thalli’s birth, Chettiar and his team confronted Thoma and beat him up, delivering head blows nine times. Ann was nowhere near, but her unborn baby Thalli became distressed and stirred frantically in her uterus at that time. The baby jumped nine times as if affected by the distant beatings. This was reminiscent of a spooky phenomenon of physics known as action at a distance, whereby an object responds to an act happening far away. The baby felt the pain through a psychic connection.
Unlike other babies who come to this world with soft moaning, Thalli produced such a high-pitched devilish shrieking that both Ann and the attending midwife screamed in terror. The midwife used forceps to extract Thalli from Ann. She then snipped and tied the umbilical cord, cleaned the baby, and placed her by Ann’s side. Ann looked at the baby and was petrified to see the ugliest baby of charcoal color resting by her side—a dark duckling. The baby had eight arms spread around her and was staring at Ann. Ann thought that the midwife brought a devil’s baby from the maternity ward in hell.
The baby was the spitting image of Bhadrakali, the idol goddess of Kodungallore Temple in Central Kerala. Thalli was holding the butchered head of Chettiar in one of her eight arms—just like Bhadrakali held the head of Asura, the demigod. As the days went by, six of the baby’s eight arms disappeared, leaving behind a normal baby girl. Ann worried that one day Thalli might kill Chettiar, that the bizarre scene was a premonition of the disaster that lay in the future. The mother felt that her newborn baby was psychic, demonic, and dangerous.
Thalli, the embodiment of wild animal looks, had a rugged dark skin. She was unlike Ann’s all other children, who were of wheatish complexion. She had long flowing black hair, which redeemed her overall repulsive appearance—it threw in a much-needed humanity. She was called Ms. Piggy by her siblings.
o---o---o
The nickname of Number Nine came to be Nun, referring to his false religiosity. The word meant that he was a male nun—if there was such a person. This name underwent further transformation and became Non, signifying that he was no one to pay attention to, that he was insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and that he lacked identity.
“Father, I don’t have a backbone,” he said to the priest in the confessional.
“Why, my son?” The priest asked.
“I can’t help following Jaygust’s footsteps,” he confessed. “I play second fiddle to him. I can’t help it.” His unfailing pursuit of Jaygust—come hell or high water—meant he had an unwavering will to live without a backbone.
“You can’t follow Christ and Jaygust at the same time,” the priest reminded Non. “They are different like night and day, like apple and orange.”
Non was given penance—recite one hundred rosaries.
“Be a man, my son! It is high time you got away from Jaygust,” the same priest told Non during a subsequent confession. Non had confessed the same old sin. As penance, the man of God renamed Non to Noman—not a man! This was to shame him into behaving like a man. And that was how Non became Noman.
o---o---o
Number Ten was the tallest in the family. She had sprawling curly hair that spread over her head like a weed. She was beautiful and shy. Her name became Curly to match her curly hair.
o---o---o
“My children are the accidental tourists who dropped by during my love festival with Ann,” Thoma said. His drinking buddies burst out laughing. Some of them drank to the veracity of the profound statement from a father.
“Keep the children with you as long as you like. I want no role in their upbringing,” he said to Ann. She suspected he was drunk.
“Oh my god. They’re your only children! Please treasure them like jewels,” she said.
“Hang them on your ears if they are jewels.”
“One day you’ll know they are the treasures of your life. They’re our gifts from God; treasure them and love them, Thoma!”
“Your children will amount to nothing. Mark my words.” Thoma qualified his children as your children to Ann; he believed they belonged to her and he had nothing to do with them.
“You don’t mean that, Thoma! I know you don’t. You love your children, but you are afraid to show it. Be bold. Loving is not beneath you; it makes you stronger.” Ann suspected that Thoma, despite his bravado, was a weak man inside. His macho mannerism was a facade concealing his troubling flaws in courage.
“Why are you afraid of showing love? Love’s display doesn’t emasculate you. The children love you, especially the elder ones. Please don’t drive them away. They are children today but adults tomorrow. It’ll be too late to show your love when they are adults.”
Thomas spat sharply at the yard.
o---o---o
Thoma and his boys continued to sleep on the porch. Jaygust slept alone occasionally in the attic. It was a creepy room, and the rest of the children avoided it. Ann and the six girls continued to sleep in the bedroom behind the porch. The bedroom was below the attic, connected by a staircase.
The girls noticed something. They sneaked peeks at the sleeping boys on the porch at night. Then they started counting: one, two, and so on. No, it wasn’t the boys they counted but their bulges. The erections became prominent as time went on.
Thoma’s children were growing up!
The exciting sight made headlines. Soon it became a topic of intense nightly discussion among the girls: those erect penises that stood in their nightly glory like the cannons of Tipu Sultan in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, which culminated in the Siege of Seringapatam in 1799. The boys’ canons stood erect and alert, ready to fire at an angle of forty-five degrees to give maximum range to the cannonballs per the laws of physics. The girls watched the nightly phenomenon, throwing modesty to the winds.
“Our soldiers are on duty; they are standing at attention,” Kareena said.
“They’re our nightly guards protecting us,” the girls whispered. They saluted the soldiers, admired their sleepless vigilance, and went back to sleep, feeling safe, convinced that the soldiers guarded them even when their masters were negligently asleep.
“The soldiers are awake, but the bodies are sleeping” they murmured, paraphrasing the famous Bible quotation, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak”2—from the scene where Judas betrayed Christ. Jesus was awake, but his disciples had irresponsibly fallen asleep during the night of his encounter with the high priests when he was given away by Judas, who handed his master to his enemies with a kiss on his face.
“They are upstanding soldiers; they are standing up,” Rita said with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes.
“Soldiers are standing up,” Subashini repeated from the cage.
The girls roared with surprised laughter at the unexpected announcement from the parrot. Subashini was a girl, after all. The always-vigilant parrot didn’t mince words to describe what she saw or repeat what she heard.
“Shut up, you little girl,” Kareena said to Subashini.
“Shut up, you little girl,” Subashini repeated.