Sometimes I am torn apart by two sorts of memories, two opposing ways of being towards the past. The first makes whorls of skin and flesh, coruscating shells, glittering in moonlight. A life embedded in a life, and that in another life, another and another. Rooms within rooms, each filled with its own scent: rosehips, neem leaves, dried hibiscus leaves that hold a cure, cow dung, human excrement, dried gobs of blood.
I come from there. That conch shell, that seashore, those bellies, that dung, those dried leaves holding a cure for the aching mind, all know me. The rooms, enfolded each within the other, the distant houses all have held me.
I see amma, her hands bent into brown shell shapes for the wind to whistle through. She holds up her hands in sunlight, in moonlight. She stoops to pick me up. I am two, perhaps two and a half. She lifts me high into the wind. I see appa’s hands, the veins rising on them. He is almost seventy now, his hair combed back on his head, streaked with silver, that handsome face whittled from within by a blood disease, time and sickness consuming the flesh that just about sustains him. He stretches out his hands to me. I want to dissolve, become a ghost myself so I can race to my father, into his outstretched hands.
Behind him, my mother stands in the doorway. She too has grown older, the laugh lines deepen on her face, the curly hair blown loose from her bun is gray, shot through with black. Now I see her in the half-darkness, the sari drawn over her head. They are utterly quiet, for there is nothing that needs to be said. They wait for me in the Tiruvella house with a sandy courtyard where the ancient mulberry tree blossoms in sunlight.
But the rooms of the house are filled with darkness. I am in that house, somewhere in between my parents, hovering as a ghost might. I cannot escape. This is the house of my blood, the whorl of flesh I am. It is all already written, already made.
Another memory invades me: flat, filled with the burning present, cut by existential choices. Composed of bits and pieces of the present, it renders the past suspect, cowardly, baseless. Place names litter it: Allahabad, Tiruvella, Kozencheri, Pune, Khartoum, Cairo, Beirut, Jerusalem, Dubai, London, New York, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, New Delhi, Trivandrum. Sometimes I think I could lift these scraps of space and much as an indigent dressmaker, cut them into shape. Stitch my days into a patchwork garment fit to wear.
But when she approaches me, this Other who I am, dressed in her bits-and-pieces clothing, the scraps cobbled together to cover her nakedness, I see quite clearly what I had only guessed at earlier: she has no home, no fixed address, no shelter. Sure, everything else looks fine. She has two hands, two feet, a head of long black hair, a belly, breasts. But it is clear she is a nowhere creature.
She babbles in a multitude of tongues: Malayalam, Hindi, Tamil, Arabic, English, French. Desert sands fill her eyes. Bombers spit fire down on her. She crouches right where she is, at the edge of the subway platform that runs under Broadway: uptown local, at 110th Street. She listens to the youth cry out through his harmonica, lisp out of the side of his mouth for a few dimes, the odd quarter: “She is a material girl, and she knows what she is, she is a material baby, she is an American girl, huh, huh,” he cries, pitching his voice as high as he can. Now the metal body of the train grinds in, people press bellies, thighs, elbows, fists shoving in the haste to enter. Thrust against a white ceramic pillar she crouches low, witnessing it all. As the train doors smash shut, she sucks in her breath. I am here she thinks. No elsewhere. Here, now, in New York City.
What does it mean to be born, to live in houses, to be held by the hands of mothers? What answer is there except to say, this is what shapes the fluid stuff of desire, warms it, till the very bedposts cry out for us to return and the past rises, fragrant, spiked with the bitterness of a nostalgia that can never be eased. Pothos, a homesickness that is never sated. When I think of homesickness, the Tiruvella house where Ilya lived rises up for me. Those corridors wind through my blood. But in dreams that house becomes one with the other great house of my childhood, the Kozencheri house that belongs to my father and his father before him. But neither was my first home literally, for I was born in Allahabad.
The literal is always discrepant, a sharp otherness to what the imagination conjures up as it blends time, emotions, heartbeats. In imagination I put out my hands and as a blind woman might, I enter the hospital room where my father lies. I breathe in the sharp scent of antiseptics, alcohol, the metallic stuff around the oxygen cylinder. I lean forward. I touch my father’s cheek. His eyes are open, worn with fatigue from fighting for his breath. He does not see me. I shall be as the warm air that billows you, the soft scent of your dead mother’s sari, I whisper. Become a ghost now, let me be as air, as water washing over your flesh.
Sometimes a katha is recited in a deep singsong voice, in a formal standing position. Sometimes it is told simply, with a child on one’s knee. Ilya had brought me up on recitations of the katha he made up for me. He was a learned man, and when he turned away from the Bible or the Mahabharata or stories of the Buddha to make up his own tales with a special girl, Susikali, playing the heroine, I was delighted.
Susikali had a knack for finding trouble. She raced through paddy fields in pursuit of rakshasis, those demon ladies with long black hair. Sometimes she stole food, or plucked the ripest mangoes in someone else’s orchard and black birds chased her all the way up the Nilgiris. Sometimes she witnessed fearful things. She saw a man of God from Patananthita, a priest of great faith, pick up his cassock, tuck it in at his waist, and chase after her. Or so it seemed at first. He had long iron nails held firmly in his hand. He swung a wooden mallet.
“Aaiou,” she screamed in delight as he slipped into a ditch full of fish. It was monsoon time and his face was as filthy as a water buffalo’s, all streaked with mud. But he hoisted himself out. He caught up with the rakshasi. Long hair making jagged spikes in sunlight, wilder than the thornbush by the well, the rakshasi raced just behind Susikali, like a mad shadow. Huffing and puffing the priest edged closer, stuck his hand into that matted hair. Not a moment too soon. In another half minute the rakshasi would have bolted three-quarters of the way up the great Parvatam Mountain.
Susikali crouched behind a tree. The man of God flung himself on the rakshasi, banged her head against the jamun tree, the fruit shook dark and bloody. Susikali trembled in excitement. With his right hand he raised up the first nail. He tugged at the dry, jet black hair. He banged the nail into her head. Her skull was not human. It was dried up turtle shell. He banged another nail and another and another into her. Her eyes grew dull. Her ugly eyelids fluttered. Susikali felt she wanted to cry. She leapt from her hiding place and ran and ran. She ran all the way down the lower mountains down the plains, all the two thousand miles back home to the front veranda and the steps where Ilya sat on a rosewood chair telling the katha.
In Ilya’s katha, after the rakshasi was subdued, Susikali had to get on with the next adventure. I made up the ending about her running like the monsoon wind, all confused. She didn’t like the look on the face of the man of God. That much was clear. She was me. I was she, Susikali, exact replica of my four-and-a-half-year-old self granted the boon of magical powers. But I was also the rakshasi. I loved the fierce glitter of that mad woman, the power that let her leap over the rice fields swollen with water, bolt up the highest Indian mountain.
And of course the man of God had to do his bit with his iron nails. I hated it. Quickly he shut his eyes. Oh so quickly, his thick finger moistened with spittle, he made the sign of the cross on his own forehead. In a trice, before you could say “Aaaiou, potho” or even “Ende Yesue,” an iron nail flashed in his fist. He banged it into her smooth brow. Her brow was made of turtle shell, or so it seemed, polished, squared out with the lines of persistence.
A turtle holds up the elephants that hold up the earth. I knew that. And her head was made of turtle shell. So how could she bleed?
She didn’t bleed, not Sarama the demon lady. Down, down went the nail. Deeper and deeper. As if the Vindhya Mountains were in her skull and the Indian Ocean too and the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea.
Sweating now, his cassock hitched over his thighs, he banged harder. He had a flint in his hand. Sarama was laid against rock and thistle. Her mad eyes rolled. “O bitch demoness,” he swore, “I’ll get you now if it’s the last thing I do.”
“I do, I do, I do,” he stuttered, all his prayers on the steel pin. It came from the edge of the wall that held up the granary. Filled with shining rice, the granary was carved and bolted in finest teak. No iron touched it. But the wall that held it up needed iron joints, hinges, nails. Surely all the gods had blessed that nail, all the saints in heaven, all the ancestors.
Down, down went the nail. Two inches longer than her skull, but it never emerged. How can a nail come out of the turtle shell that holds up the earth? Out of her mouth, from her long red tongue came a sigh, a little wind. That was it. Kaput. Katham. Finis.
Susikali was watching all this. She was hidden by the gooseberry tree. I saw the tree. I made it up in my head. I saw the shower of light that fell from the gooseberry tree. I saw the nail, its metal glint, and then the long red tongue of the demon lady. A rakshasi with the nail going down, down into her skull as out of her mouth came short sharp sighs. But Sarama refused to die.
Ilya’s voice was going on and on, about the Buddha. But I wasn’t in the mood for it. I considered creeping into amma’s arms but she was so thin, her upper body fitted into exquisitely tailored blouses. She wouldn’t have understood. I considered racing away through the long grasses that grew behind the well to climb the love apple tree. I loved swinging from the black branches that swung as low as the ground. Or perhaps I would crouch in the dust at Ilya’s feet right where I stood and watch the minute kuriaana with their ridged backs make circle after circle of dirt till they fell into their own holes utterly satisfied, fat bodies and dirty tails wiggling with delight.
His voice was hesitant, gentle in my ear. He had almost reached the Buddha’s conception, Maya’s dream of the white elephant as she stood there, clutching the sala tree. A great white beast with six horns entered her womb. I tugged at his dhoti, I prodded his feet with my toes. My toes were filthy, oozing mud from the garden. I shook my head so hard, my hair blew into my mouth. He laughed. He knew I wanted out. Anyway there were visitors at the front gate. They held black umbrellas in their hands, umbrellas with fine sculptures of horn at the handles. Our visitors were well shielded from the sun. Ilya rose, preparing to greet them. I couldn’t bear to stay and be courteous. They would surely notice my muddy legs and scratched knees, my mussed-up hair. And amma would be fearfully embarrassed. Quickly I pressed myself against Ilya’s knees then raced to the kitchen.
The cooks, the maids, and the ayahs were outside under the palm trees, in a clear area of sand. One of the cooks, Verghese, a young man who wore his checked shirt open and sported bright red lungis on his days off, was slitting a large swordfish for our dinner. Marya adored him. Whenever she could she brushed herself against his shoulder or his hairy arm. He was enamored of her milky white complexion. “Like a Kashmiri maiden,” I heard him whispering to the old man Sankaran, the chief cook. I watched them through the kitchen window and knew they could not see me.
I pulled up a wooden stool. Tucking my skirts in between my legs so the soot from the stoves wouldn’t get me, I stood on tiptoes and stuck my fingers into a big ceramic pot. My fingers touched the roughness of crystallized cane syrup. I eased a little bit out, rubbing it back and forth against the inside of the jar to break it off. I lifted its moist crumbling stuff and set it to my lips. As laughter floated in through the windows of the kitchen, and footsteps pounded closer, I screwed my eyes tight. I tasted the sweet glittering brown on my lips and tongue, it coursed through my blood all the way down to my muddy toes. I imagined myself turning as dark as that lump of gur so no one could find me till I was ready.
Suddenly I heard a voice through the kitchen window, saw Ilya beckoning me. “Come Kochumol,” he said almost gruffly, “let’s see how Susheela cow is getting on.” I ran towards him, wondering how in the world he had managed to escape our visitors. Susheela had given birth and it gave us both a great deal of pleasure to watch her lick her thin freckled calf as it inched forward on spindly legs to suck at Susheela’s speckled teats.
The cow shed was built of wood and brick with the plaster painted white on two sides to keep it cool. For the same purpose the wooden roof was raised on its high beam. It was just a few nights ago that, hearing cries in the darkness, Ilya had awakened, flung on his woolen shawl, and picked me up in his arms. He had promised to take me to see Susheela’s calf arrive. For days Susheela had ambled around hot and heavy, hardly able to summon the energy to drive the flies off her back with her stiff tail. The cool winds that blew in at night from the Indian Ocean did little to comfort her. “Her time is almost here,” Bhaskaran the cowherd would mutter with a worried little frown as he set about his tasks of tugging down fresh hay from the haystack that was high as three men, pouring fresh water into the cow’s drinking vessels, cleaning out the cow dung with a hard broom, then pouring out bucketfuls of water till the stuff ran rich and putrid into the ditch nearby.
Bhaskaran had a very personal interest in the matter. It was on his recommendation that they had brought in a white bull several months earlier. The bull was so fierce it came with two men to hold it down, one fitting his bare hands to its hot hump, the other tugging at the nose strings as the creature snorted and reared on its legs. The bull, which belonged to the Brahmin Govinda who lived on the other side of the bridge, had been led in with due ceremony and tethered to the tree behind the cow shed. Susheela, traipsing at the end of a nice long rope, was led out. He raced towards her, then halted, stomping around her, pawing and hissing. She made little mewing sounds such as I had never heard before and let her hooves fly. I stared from behind the tapioca bushes as long as I could. I had to keep still in case Chinna pulled me away. A grasshopper settled in my hair, ants crawled up my thighs as I squatted, staring at the curious pageant, the brown cow rock still while the bull humped her. The dirt from his hooves rose in puffs, his front legs butted at her shoulders. Afterwards her eyes were even more moist than before, and she let the cats and crows edge towards her almost as if she did not notice. Then as she lay on the straw, she made circular whisks with her tail, jutted her ears till they stood at perfect right angles to her head. I could smell the sweat on her and knew something had changed. The scent excited me.
Later, held in Ilya’s arms, in the circle of lanterns and the flare from torches lit with palm leaves, I saw the bloodied stuff that came from her, her great brown belly heaving. And out of the dark hole in her popped a head slippery with mucus. A grown man helped it out with his hands, for Susheela was having trouble. Finally it slithered out, all knees and hooves and huge black eyes moist like the mother’s. It lay there that night in the circle of her legs as she licked it with her tongue.
Now in broad daylight, Ilya and I stood by the sheaf of hay and watched the little thing tug at its mother’s teats. “See, Meena, that’s how we all were. Look carefully. Someday you will make this into a katha.” He smiled at me gently, scooping me into his arms so I could see the nest a bulbul had made in the mango tree just behind us, a gulmohar leaf freckled with pink.
And so he led me from sound to sound, from sight to sight, the moving surfaces of the garden exerting a pressure on his brain, a relentless consonance of sense, a shimmering thing that wrapped us both. It only struck me later, after he had died, that my childhood, coming so late in his life, must have seemed a rare gift to him. As for me, I could not conceive of life without Ilya. I drew nourishment from him, as a young thing might from an older being already gnarled with time. Even now as a grown woman, almost three decades after his death, I can touch a wall or a tree in the Tiruvella garden where we spent many hours together, and a stream of feeling will flood me. Sometimes in my dreams I cry out his name and wake up confused at so much longing welling up out of a grown woman.
Through his life he drew me back into an India that could only be history to me, a life of struggle and yearning, travels and disasters in foreign lands, a restless idealism that really believed the earth could be transformed.
In some ways, though, he died in the nick of time. Else we would have quarreled terribly I now feel, my own desires for freedom, for a fresh life, tugging me away from the gnarled roots that made his. And I was a female child, three-quarters of a century younger. The blood that skipped in me had another pulse. So I learnt early that the deepest loves bear a dissonance within them, a measure of the earth we are bedded in, where everything is fractured, plural, multiple. Else even the fluids that make up the vitality of our bodily substances would get thinned out, drying as the flesh does, in fanaticism, that unpleasant quality I sensed in the gaunt evangelical man who came up to visit us on his bicycle every third day, swallowing his bile, unable to tolerate Ilya’s high church creeds.
I was party to their disputes, having been inculcated very early in the finer points of the Nicene Creed as well as the various heresies. Within the hearing of the evangelical man, a member of the dissident Pathyam group, I sung out as if it were a nursery rhyme:
Who is the Lord Almighty?
Is He one substance or three?
He is only one.
What about me?
And in reply to the last, quite forgetting his theological colleague, Ilya would pick me up and point out the shining gooseberries in their halo of green, the silken threads in the love apple flower. “You are all that, my child, and an immortal soul too.” “What about the leper?” “The leper too. We are all God’s children, as far and wide as the eye can see or heart hear.” I laughed, my mind moving away from the poor leper who had squatted by the kitchen for his food, his metal dish in his stumpy hands, his feet bound up in rough cloth. I laughed at the thought that the heart could hear. “Yes, yes.” Ilya patted his chest “Most certainly sure!” Even the listening Pathyam man was mollified. Who could deny a child?
The Mar Thoma Church, in which Ilya had been ordained as a priest in his younger days, was going through a great crisis. Someone in the Pathyam group had shut the door on a visiting bishop from the Mar Thoma Seminary in Tiruvella. The slammed door reverberated in our house. There were all-night discussions about the finer points of ancient theology inherited from the beginnings of the church, from the days two thousand years ago when Saint Thomas the Doubter had come to Kerala, and, after him, the church fathers had followed the rough overland trail from Antioch and Babylon, bringing the liturgy, the details of the Syriac sacrament. What could the future hold in a church split and torn? How could the old heritage be maintained? Already I knew that the reformer Abraham Malpan was Ilya’s great-great-great-grandfather from his mother’s ancestral side. The Malpan was shocked by the lack of godliness in his congregations. They were far more concerned with lighting candles for saints, worshipping images of the Virgin, and counting up roosters with their heads torn off, fit material for a blood sacrifice, than in intuitions of a Godhead one might never see, nirguna, a Being without Qualities. Abraham Malpan had organized a protest movement two hundred and fifty years before to cleanse the church of idolatry. Then, too, a kinswoman had shut the door on the Jacoba Bishop, helped the Malpan tear down the ancient icons and cast them into the waters of the Pamba River. The reformation movement tore apart the centuries old Syrian Church of Malabar, dividing it into the older, Orthodox Jacoba Church and the reformed branch, the Mar Thoma Church.
When it came to my time, I was forced to stare at the beautiful white walls in the ancient churches of Kerala, with nothing but dull spaces where the treasured icons had hung. And gazing on that blankness, I felt as if I were in a perpetual hangover. I would have quarreled with the Malpan, but the Mar Thoma Church was part of my early life. I was baptized into the church in infancy and I was brought up by Ilya, one of its great theologians. And I took the theological disputes that surrounded my childhood all in my stride—the intense concern with substances and properties, the sparring between Sathyam and Pathyam groups about the precise symbolic nature of the Triune Deity or the status of the Malayalam liturgy as opposed to the ancient Syriac one.
Had Ilya lived longer I might have outgrown that world, like a skin that no longer fit, like a garment that was too tight. But as it was, the torment of his death plunged us into grief and rage. I think neither amma nor I have ever gotten over it. With the death duties and loss of the cardamom and rubber estates, our lives changed. A whole world shivered and cracked. The hoarse sounds of his last breathing, the rattle in his throat as he died, filled my ears.
It took me a while to realize that Ilya must have been a lonely man. I sensed that there had been a companionship between Ilya and his dead wife that appa and amma knotted together in an arranged marriage did not have. I saw my grandmother Kunju’s face through Ilya’s eyes and loved her. I knew she was beautiful. There was a large portrait of her in the drawing room, under the elegant teak ceilings that rose to a high point. Under those ceilings, in the profuse gardens edged by mango and bamboo and the clusters of gulmohar and laburnam blossoms, my childhood was free. I did what I wanted to and what I wanted to I did or so it seems now, harking back. While in Pune I had a mother and a father and was accountable to them. I knew I could not race out into the busy thoroughfare of Deccan Gymkhana without courting death. In Tiruvella I could run as fast as I wanted, eyes closed, heart thudding and no one would stop me. I felt I had no need of parents. In the large house in which Ilya lived, there were visiting relatives and cousins coming to call, servants and older aunts, multifarious visitors all bound together in the loose yet formalized functions of the family. There were crevices and gaps for me, places I could hide in and find myself again, utterly transformed in the magic of childhood, so that a bush laden with green berries or a goose flapping its wings could make me into that and I raced around crying, “Athe, athe—That, that,” as if that I was. “Tat Tvam Asi,” it says in the Upanishads and in my childhood I realized its truth. And surely the “I am that I am” of Hebraic religions is much akin and realizes in the child of mud and blood and skin an irremediable joy, the closest we get to any possible paradise.