When the frangipani blossoms, the thick sweet scent draws the cobras out and for this reason the trees with their gnarled trunks and thick shining leaves are set at a good distance from the Tiruvella house, near the edge of the kayala—a low mound of earth that divides the compound from the dirt road that runs towards the railway tracks. All during the summer I stood by the fence and watched groups of men with their turbans bound in red work away at the edge of the scarred run of earth where the tracks were laid.
Sometimes I stood close to Marya the maid, watching as the men worked, pickaxes raised. I stared as metal hit harder rock and gneiss, as fragments of quartz broke loose into the sunlight. Sometimes as the laterite soil of central Travancore tore free, I saw bits of granite once embedded underground, splintering, or laid plain for any child to see, a fault mass of reddish sandstone, the stone cracked by underground pressure, yet welded into a whole whose fissured surfaces made the water stream and drip.
The men rested to drink some water, or chew on a beedi drawn from the turban or the knotted waistband of a lungi. The beedi smoked for an instant before the burning tip dissolved into light and the men raised their voices high, in a ribald, bantering way. Sometimes they crowded into excited knots. Were they quarreling, sharing a joke? Who could tell from the middle distance where words split open as they fell, sense dissolving into the hot air with silk cotton seeds, whose soft stuff shimmered overhead, then vanished into the blue. Only the inchoate syllables remained, and over by the tracks, the hot, gleaming bodies of men, mouths open, laughing. Something in me wanted to slip under the fence made of fresh laburnam shoots, race forward till I was inside that knot of men, able to hear what they were saying, able to touch my cheek to a sweaty shoulder muscle, or the flat of my palm to a heavy metal rail they lifted up to the singsong chants of labor. But Marya gripped me tight and try as I might I could not work my fingers free of her milky clasp.
After the earth was smoothed out and the large wooden planks that were brought in all the way from Kayankulam were laid out, end to end, the metalwork began. Lorries lumbered in from the other side of the red welt of earth. Metal bodies shook with the burden of nuts and bolts and fish plates. Noon after noon they came in on the bridge over the Pamba River. The grove of rubber trees by Aswathy’s house burst open, smoking with the exhaust fumes of the lorries. Smoke from the back of the lorries mingled with the scent of the frangipani blossoms.
“The cobras love the smoke from the lorries,” Marya whispered as she held my hand, watching the work intently. “No, don’t be nervous, the footsteps of a child are enough to make them docile. But quick, move out of that rat hole.” Her movements were all quick and lithe. She was aware of the men watching her out of the corners of their eyes as she pushed my feet away from the squishy earth near a rat hole. I was standing there barefoot as I always did in Tiruvella, gripping Marya’s hand. She was a new, junior ayah, brought in to help out Chedthi and Chinna now that I was to have a little sister or brother. Marya had flashing amber eyes, and large breasts that tilted upwards under her tight chatta. Her hair was long and black and hung in a single plait down below her waist. It swished over her ample hips as she walked.
When Marya came out of the servants’ bathhouse at the edge of the five acres my grandfather had fenced around his home, her hair knotted high over her shapely head, the towel wound tight around her middle, men might have crawled out of holes to see her, as they do in the Malayalam film where the heroine slips in and out of river water, clad only in the sheerest of towels and hosts of men leap out of the rocky cracks in the ground by the river, wave their hands and fists in a loud male chorus of “Zindabad” at her beauty. And so quickly she becomes the Goddess of Liberty as the distant Delacroix had imaged it, and so quickly she shoots out four arms as Parvati did when Shiva, smitten by her beauty, bent low for her and raised her footsole and kissed it.
But no cobra ever came forward, hood raised, to kiss Marya. It may have been the heaviness in her milky white feet, for Marya had the coloring of a Kashmiri film goddess, or perhaps it was her eyes as smoky as a cat’s—puchakane they are called in Malayalam—light eyes streaked with amber or onyx or pearly gray, rare indeed, given the norm of black eyes that the poets have praised for centuries. Whether it was her eyes or not, no cobra was ever sighted in her vicinity. Whereas when old, wrinkled Chedthi approached to greet the schoolmistress who wanted to take a shortcut through the rubber grove, or when she hobbled out, bent almost double, stick in hand, to yell at Beshir the fishman for an indifferent parrot fish he had palmed off on us, the very soil shook with the little puffs of air let out by the cobras as they poked their heads out, or aired their flashing tails. Once I saw a whole forest of cobras surround Chedthi and the light was smoky vermillion with the power of their eyes. And out of their forked tongues they spat syllables, soft curling vowel sounds, the aa—ee—oo, au—um, ahas, I was being taught by the Malayalam tutor. And the syllables started slipping and sliding till they seemed to be English, Hindi, Arabic, anything, any speech at all. But when I mentioned this to amma the next morning, just after breakfast, just before she took out the black bound Book of Common Prayer to read aloud in her soft singsong voice, I could not raise her interest in the matter.
“You must have dreamt it, Meenamol,” she said, not unkindly, “a dream, that’s all.”
“Where does it come from, amma? And how does Chedthi have that power?” I insisted. But before she could figure out a reply, I leapt away from her, suddenly anxious that she might summon me to sit at her knees and listen to the prayer of supplication to the Lamb of God, who alone takes away the sins of the world.
Did Marya’s flesh have a voice that Malayalam or Hindi couldn’t quite match? Was her flesh sin that the Lamb of God would have to take away? Surely no one believed that, given all the delight it aroused. Yet there was something in the black book with its prayers and ritual supplications that made me nervous.
And I knew about the power of the sarpam. I had listened to Ilya read out the Genesis story in his pure Malayalam diction, and sometimes for fun he read it out in the Hindi translation, since Hindi was our national language and I was having tuition with Vaariar saar from the local college in my Hindi syllables and sentences. And a sarpam—who really was Shaitan—had taken the apple and given it to Awa who gave it to Aadam and he ate it since it came from her sweet hand.
And how sweet her hand was. It was the hand of his beloved holding out the apple, but as he bit into the sweetness all hell broke loose. And thinking of the hand of Awa, I thought too of Shakuntala, Kalidasa’s heroine, whose sweet hand had touched her lover in the forest. But when the ring he gave her slipped off, he forgot all about her, and her flesh lost its fragrance, and he could not recall who she was, and she meanwhile had borne him a son. And it was only when the belly of the fish that swallowed her ring of remembrance was slit open, that King Dusyanta saw and recalled their nights in the forest. Meanwhile how terribly she suffered, Shakuntala, her tears falling into the eyes of her beloved doe that followed her everywhere. And how Awa must have suffered with the weight of all that sin, forced to bear her children in terrible, gut-splitting pain. And how Shakuntala suffered, blocked out from the gaze of her beloved.
And sitting here in New York City, at my writing table in a room filled with dust, I recall my childhood fears about what it might mean to be born into a female body. Quite early I was taught how the sexual body enticed men and then was crossed out in the interests of a higher truth. Women had to bear the burden of all that sin, all that forgetfulness. Of course at the very end of Kalidasa’s play, Shakuntala was borne sky-high in the chariot and apsaras sang to her and the peacocks at the edge of mountain slopes spread out their fans and danced for her. But none of that took place till her lover King Dusyanta remembered, at the very end. I wondered how poor Shakuntala had borne the weight of memory, the terror of erasure.
Perhaps with Marya and the snakes, it was something altogether simpler. Perhaps it was just that the snakes sensed her deep disinclination to see them dance in sunlight. Her flesh was altogether too bound up with the burden of the human to be mindful of snakes or moles or rats or mongooses. That sort of fear washed over Marya with the bright red Sunlight Soap she used on her footsoles and the rough skin on her elbows as she squatted by the well side, giggling at the cowherd who stood staring at her quite helplessly, jiggling the long rope that was meant for the brown freckled cow. What Marya was concerned with was the line of working men, the loud laughter that came now from the fresh row of tracks. I think she might even have caught some of the words they chanted out as she stood there open mouthed while I tried once again to work my fingers free of her grip. Suddenly we heard a gruff voice. Someone, terribly thin with scrawny hair pulled back, a common towel draped over one shoulder in place of a proper cavuni, was yelling:
“Maryaee, keke, Mole kondu va. Ipum tirichu va!”
It was Narayani, freed from her task of sweeping the ashes into the ash room, who was sent out to summon us. Tea would be ready shortly and amma wanted me washed and clean, hair combed and tied back with a bow, for visitors from Kozencheri were expected. It was thought that grandmother Mariamma might come too, and she was always most particular about my appearance. After all, looking the way I did, my dress stained with tree sap and my footsoles all dusty, my hair uncombed and blowing about my face, not even a single clip in it, who could tell me apart from Chinna’s child, or Gomati’s child, or Bhaskaran’s niece. Indeed there was no way at all of telling me apart from any servant child, or the child of any Sudra who lived within a fifteen-mile radius of the Tiruvella house. Looking the way I did, I would bring nothing but shame to the family.
The Kozencheri family, appa’s side, was most particular about appearances. They were also very strict about crossing lines. Playing with a woodcutter’s child, or a milkman’s child as I did in Tiruvella, would never be permitted in the Kozencheri house. My Kozencheri veliappechan had large holdings of land that he inherited from his paternal side, sugarcane, paddy, rubber, and coconut groves. He had middlemen and overseers working for him, supervising the labor of large groups of peasants who plowed the rice fields, transplanted paddy, and worked with the rubber sap as, still warm, it poured out of the cut bark into the little coconut cups and then, after being bound into round, stringy balls, was transported to the rubber factory where they turned it into the ridged mats that smelt like vomit a day old, laid out in the sun to dry.
After the day’s work the laborers would come up to the house and squat outside on the sand as the middlemen stood by watching. With his legs outstretched veliappechan sat on the rosewood and rattan chair with the immense arms that he had bought from the British Resident well before the British were forced to leave India. In one hand he held the wad of chewing tobacco that he had pulled out of his leather pouch. In the other he held the wad of money that was to be distributed to the laborers for the day’s work. Watching him from the doorway, or shutting my ears with both my hands as he raised his voice, shouting in reply to one of the women laborers who’d shot her mouth off: “Hey, you owe us more than that” or “There were twelve bushels not ten there.” Then hearing him shout back in his deep throated voice, or spit, in a perfect arc of tobacco and betel nut juice, past the woman’s bent knee, where the spittle landed in a little bubbling mass, forcing her to move forward, I hid my face in shock and embarrassment. Already I was starting to glimpse the curse of property, the lines of power that held us all in.
Later at night as we gathered for prayers around his bedside kneeling, singing out the portions of the Syriac liturgy veliappechan had chosen, I watched the same man weep out loud as he recited the prayers for the salvation of the soul. Then in the impromptu prayers added on, he called upon the Lord to save all of us, entire and whole for the kingdom to come, called upon the Father in Heaven to rescue us from the Communists whose powers were growing. Surely the Almighty knew they had murdered a tax collector in the mountains to the north and three landowners in the east. And now they were threatening him too. We would all breathe loudly, in chorus, after the “Amen” that followed, while behind my shut eyes, my gaze doubly shielded by my clasped palms, I imagined young men and women with their hair tied up in red bandanas sweeping down at night into the Kozencheri property. I always shivered after these thoughts and moved a little closer to my grandmother Mariamma, and she, quite gently, would pull her silken cloak over me for protection. I knew she scarcely spoke to veliappechan and maintained a staunch silence in his presence. Surely the Communists would spare her.
It is in me still, her voice, her bearing: Kozencheri veliammechi, grandmother Mariamma, my appa’s mother who loved to scold me for running around in the sun as I did in Tiruvella.
“Only boys do that.” She raised herself magisterially on her carved stool. “Only male children; and the other thing,” she stopped, sniffing a little into her muslin handkerchief. She had a large, rather dashing wart at the tip of her strong boned nose, a bumpy grayish thing. She refused to have it removed surgically and gave a reason that made perfect sense to me, the logic of instant recognition.
“They’ll know me wherever I go,” said my grandmother, who never set foot outside her own compound. “They’ll know who I am when they come searching for me in the other world, ‘There’s Mariamma,’ he’ll say, your veliappechan, ‘there she is!’”
As she explained this, seated at the edge of her bed, gazing into the mirror I held up for her while she combed out her long gray hair, I had visions of her, upright, unbowed, her eyes looking straight at the Tree of Life I had learnt of from the biblical Book of Revelations. But the tree was almost hidden by the curvaceous apsaras, long-nailed rakshasis, rosy-cheeked angels with wings jutting out of their shoulders. These creatures who were part of the local population tumbled over and over each other, pouncing, tussling in the mud-colored stuff that filled the long tunnel between heaven and earth. Grandmother did not flinch as she stood there. Through the tunnel wafted the scents of lemon blossom and cigarette smoke, appa’s secret vice that she supposedly never knew about.
Try as I might, I could not hear veliappechan’s voice, crying out, “Mariamma, Mariamma,” as he sometimes did from the lower garden as he stood there with his overseer and the servant who held the black umbrella over his head. Then, wiping his chin with his handkerchief, he would mutter a little and send off one of the servants with a message for her. His voice calling her in the other world was reserved for her ears alone. Perhaps it is the privilege of lovers, who, imagining death in the very act of sex, set up echoes and doubling sounds, curves of sight, even cruel mirages so that the senses, playing at their own deceit can better accommodate the perishing surfaces of the body, sole sites of delight. Surely grandmother Mariamma had made love to no one else. She was a second wife though, for veliappechan’s first wife had died in childbirth, and the male child the first wife gave birth to had also died. It was then that the marriage with my grandmother Mariamma was arranged.
Her father was the celebrated Wilson Master of Kottayam. A philosopher and scholar of Sanskrit, he narrowly missed being censured by the church for having publicized his atheism, and was cursed, it was said, with seven daughters. My grandmother came somewhere in the middle of that long line of unwanted women.
“You know she married beneath her, you know that, don’t you? If Wilson Master hadn’t had his head so filled with papers, he would have taken more trouble with finding your grandmother a husband. She could at least have been the first wife then, instead of marrying a widower.”
Was that amma’s voice? Surely it was. She was explaining to me the circumstances of grandmother Mariamma’s life, a conversation we first had when I was approaching puberty, far away from Kozencheri, in Khartoum. Was it always the fate of a woman to marry beneath her? I did not wonder this aloud for I felt amma might be touchy here, since this would certainly seem to be the way she felt about her own life.
In Kozencheri amma tried hard to be the perfect daughter-in-law. She got up as soon as her mother-in-law entered the room and in her father-in-law’s presence she always had her head covered. Indeed she rarely entered the same room in which he sat, preferring rather to hover in the doorway. I have a memory of my mother, her head covered in her katau sari with the pink flowers printed in sprays over the border, her head covered, half-hiding her face in the doorway as the great man with his legs raised on the railway-station-waiting-room style of chair questioned her from a great distance. Isn’t that where the voice of God the Father is supposed to come from? From a great distance?
But there was no blue sky between them, and veliappechan was certainly not lodged in heaven, on a high rock at the foothills of Mount Meru. There he sat on the massive square veranda of the new house he had built for himself high on the hill. He chewed tobacco, he inclined his head as the servant who boiled his bathwater and rubbed him down with herbal oils, stood at attention, palmyra fan in hand.
“So, what does the letter say? Everything fine, fine?”
Amma said nothing. Veliappechan raised his voice.
“What did you say? Why don’t you speak up?”
How timorous she was. I leapt off my perch on the parapet and ran to her, to give her some courage. After all, the letter was from my father, from Khartoum. And it was only because of my appa that she was here, in the in-laws’ house.
“Yes, appachen,” she called out, stung to words by my insouciant behavior. I was making quite a nuisance of myself, pretending to crawl under her sari, and amma wanted to keep all quiet and decorous. “He’s fine.”
A little over two decades later, it was amma who had to speak louder again, for veliappechan was on his deathbed, and had almost lost his hearing. Just before he died, he lost control of his bowels and excrement poured out of him. With the help of Annokochu, who was the only other person there at the time, amma wiped him up and laid out his wasted limbs in fresh muslin.
“His lips trembled, Meena. He was singing Pathiravil, his favorite hymn. But no sounds came. I knew it was over then.”
Amma confided this as we sat side by side on the Tiruvella parapet.
“What could we do, or anyone, then? He had held out till his only son, your father, returned from Africa. After that he was too weak to hold on.”
She sighed, she looked down at her hands, at the left one with the heavy gold wedding ring on it, the ring she has never removed since the hour it went on.
“Not even when my fingers grew swollen with the last stages of pregnancy, it was Elsa then, remember, I was pregnant with and they feared I had toxemia. Not even then, though it marked the skin so deep, would I take it off.”
I looked at her hands. She was fifty-five then, and her hands, the same color as my own, had shrunk a little. The large vein was visible running forward from the wrist to the depth beneath the fingers. Blood raced through her body, as it did through mine.
“You don’t wear it much, do you?” She was curious, that was all. It was a moment of peace between us.
“Well, I like to do different things.” I held up my hands, the finger nails painted dark red, the latest Lakme color available on the main street in Tiruvella. No rings were visible.
“But David, I notice, always wears his.”
“Yes, well, it’s different for men, I think, don’t you?”
But she wouldn’t rise to the bait and rose hastily, to make sure the chicken was marinating in its black earthenware pot and to make sure that the fishman wasn’t calling from over the hillside.
“It was the fishman, do you think?” she asked anxiously. How different she was from her mother-in-law, grandmother Mariamma, who never showed her anxiety, who always sat like a queen, mundu laid out straight in pleats down her knees, elbows elegantly crooked, neck straight, even in those days when she moved her stool to the edge of the kitchen to listen to the chatter of the milkmaids and cooks, a basket of tiny blood-red onions in her lap for her to peel.
It was growing harder for grandmother Mariamma to see. In those last days I watched her as she kept peeling the onion and only stopped when the narrow-bladed knife nicked her flesh. She held up her index finger and off from it, almost as if it were a strip of human skin, rolled the pale, translucent bands of onion flesh.
The summer after I turned five, amma and I were in Tiruvella waiting for my sister Anna to grow to her full nine months in her nice warm lodgings under our mother’s belly button. Suddenly, veliammechi and veliappechan arrived for tea. In the bathroom, shivering under the cold water Marya slapped on my cheeks, I heard the car grind to a halt. When the door of the black Ambassador car opened, how carefully grandmother Mariamma put her foot down on the gravel. My Kozencheri grandparents made their way to the drawing room where Ilya was waiting for them. Veliammechi asked for me, her only son’s child. Anna, whom they all hoped would be male, was still three months away from birth.
I squirmed free of Marya, who was trying to clean me up. She was forced to rush into the garden, waving her arms. I hid in the love apple tree, the same hiding place I chose when I fled the arrival of the Malayalam tutor. The great green globe the tree made with its branches swooping down was the perfect haunt for a child. The thick leaves with pointed tips were interspersed with milky flowers whose petals were so light and feathery that if you set your tongue there and licked, your whole body would tickle, ever so sweetly. The bark of that tree was perfect too—smooth, not rough and cracked like the bark of the mango or jackfruit trees. I hung in the upper branches, parting the leaves to catch a glimpse of the car that stood in front of the porch with the pointed archway at the entrance to the Tiruvella house. Somehow Marya knew I was there. She stood below in the shade, peering upwards. I could see her breasts through the pointed vee of her chatta. “Meena, Meenamol,” she whispered, pleading with me. “Come down, Veliammechi wants you.”
Finally I took pity on Marya. I shinned down the tree like a monkey and allowed her to lead me off. Swiftly Marya rubbed the towel once again over my knees and cheeks and straightened my dress. There was no time to do my hair properly. She patted it down with her hands and pushed me forward till all of a sudden I stood in front of veliammechi, who had left the drawing room and made her way to the dining room with the huge teak table, over which Chinna had set the damask tablecloth.
Veliammechi seated herself quite precisely so that her cotton and silk blended into the pointed tip of the tablecloth. Catching sight of me, she sat up even more stiffly. She caught hold of me by the hand and looked me up and down. There was an instant when her voice quavered, an affection, a pity for me, something like that. But she needed to remind me of who I was and then prepare me for my future.
“Child, come here now.” She made me stand up close to her, looking straight at the wart on her nose.
“First, never forget the pure blood that flows in your veins, from the Kaitheyil kudumam and the Sankaramangalam kudumam.”
She deliberately omitted her husband’s family from the accounting of pure bloods. I did not let on I had noticed her lapse.
“Never forget that pure blood. Come here, child, don’t shuffle off.” She gripped me by the elbow, kinder now, having to break the sore thing to me, a child without beauty, a plump dark-skinned thing.
“The point is you are so dark. You take after your mother’s side in that.”
Veliammechi had no compunction in saying this. She would have said it even if amma were listening. How straight she sat with her immaculate form, her starched garments drawn upright as if a pin descended her spine, much as they taught me in elocution class years later. “Walk as if a pin were dropped through your spine and an invisible wire held you up to the ceiling.” Those words that came out of the Australian mistress’s mouth in Unity High School, Khartoum, might have been inspired by veliammechi’s gleaming posture.
My grandmother Mariamma was so fair skinned, I imagined all her blood coming from the Syrian side of the family. Her great-grandfather, sent to Antioch for spiritual training in the Orthodox doctrines, had married a Syrian woman and brought her back to Kerala, and many of his descendents had the pale skin and light eyes of the Syrians, or so it was rumored. But indeed there were many servants and others of lower status who were as fair as veliammechi.
She drew me close to her so that I could tell, young as I was, that by her side I seemed a different race altogether, and the whole of beauty lay with her. She drew me so close I could smell the fragrance of the herbs she boiled into her bathwater and the rosewater that was sprinkled over her silken cloak before she pinned it into place.
“Look child, you are dark enough as it is. How will you ever find a husband if you race around in the sun? Now it’s time to stop and do a little embroidery and let one of the maids plait your hair properly. See how terribly dry it is? Let her braid those velvet ribbons into it.” She placed two dark velvet ribbons in my hand. I trembled with pleasure, in sheer surprise.
Her words never left me. She spoke so little that those sentences constituted a grand speech and I could not forget them. Nor could I ever forget the confusion her words created in me. Already by virtue of what I was, dark like my mother, I was a cut below her and beauty was impossible. And I knew it was only because of the fine ancestral lines and the landholdings that she had permitted her son to marry such a woman. Then, because appa had gone to work in Africa, there was always the danger that I would become a jungli of sorts, ill-kempt, barbarous, impossible to tame. Furthermore, it was clear that amma, having been used to ayahs and maids all her life, had absolutely no idea of how to raise a girl-child properly.
Still, and this only added to my confusion, I was left with the sense that, if I tried hard enough, behaved well enough, I might overcome these faults, so grievous in me. In time I might even marry a handsome man with large properties. But decorous behavior, embroidery, and some musical skills were essential and what was I doing in that direction? What was I doing to overcome my deficiencies? In my grandmother’s eyes, I had to try very hard. I had to learn how to grow up as a woman. I had to learn my feminine skills, labor hard to grab hold of what beauty I could.
I comforted myself with the knowledge that in two hours the black car would have left for Kozencheri with my grandparents inside and I could return to my barefoot pleasures, tree climbing, hiding out in the ash pit or rabbit hutch, mango picking, tapioca tasting. On rainy days, in Tiruvella, with no one telling me what to do, I could amuse myself in Ilya’s study, pulling down heavy volumes of the Bible and its various concordances and translations, the lighter volumes of Marx and Engels and Gandhi and Niebuhr and Tillich. I could make them into an unwieldy pyramid of words and dance around them, pretending I was a rakshasi come down from the Vindhya Mountains or an apsara who had suddenly lost her wings and was forced to seek shelter in a human home.
In my early childhood in Tiruvella I could play with the children of the servants or watch the workmen sweating with the effort of laying the railway line, and remain ignorant of the labor unrest or the large-scale organization of workers that the Communist Party of India had brought about in Kerala in the mid-fifties. If over breakfast I heard Ilya read from the newspapers that five men had been killed near Kayankulam in a labor dispute or that twenty striking workers had been imprisoned, what did it mean to me, a small child, held firmly in her five-acre garden. The worried huddle of servants in the kitchen courtyard, words whispered about a fisherman who was too vocal in his demand for a fair price and had his tongue cut out, or of a whole family murdered by local goondas, meant more. There was fear then, in the air, some possibility too, of the wretched poverty in which so many lived being alleviated. But those words vanished in the security of tea and dinner and the order of silver plates laid out on the damask tablecloth grandmother Kunju had brought back from Ireland many years ago.
Ilya believed in the social gospel and the uplift of the poor. He had many friends who were Communists, including the great leader E.M.S. Nambudiripad who used to come when I was a child and take tea on the front veranda with Ilya. But Ilya was a staunch member of the Congress Party, which seemed to him, as the party Gandhi had founded, the best means to any truly Indian version of social justice. In any case he never questioned his own class basis. He came from an old feudal family with extensive lands in Niranum, and while land could be given away, as he and grandmother Kunju did during the years of the Nationalist struggle so that some landless peasants could be resettled, he never questioned the condition of his birth. Still, rather than live a traditional life, he went out, beyond its borders, in search of knowledge and truth. But at home there were always the house and garden and the estates of cardamom in the hills, the basis of property from which the new nationalism could emerge, what Gandhi had spoken of as “trusteeship.”
The thoughts about nationalism and the social gospel of Christ were those that Ilya forged in the company of other intellectuals of his time, in response to the pressing needs of the new nation. I must have been only five when he first described one of his journeys to me. As a young man, he had traveled to the United States, to Trinity College in Hartford to study for his divinity degree. Returning to India in 1913, he filled packing crates with his theology books and shipped them separately. It was 1913 and the height of the tensions preceding World War I. The ship that carried his books was torpedoed and all his student belongings sunk to the bottom of the sea. Ilya, who had traveled on another ship, was stranded in Britain. He made his way to Ireland and spent time with the Irish Nationalists there. In London in 1914 he met Gandhi as well as the poet Sarojini Naidu. By now Ilya was part of the Indian student groups pressing the claims of self-governance. On his return home, he threw himself into work for the Nationalist movement.
Almost seventy by the time I was born, he was well established as an intellectual and community leader, a spokesman for the Mar Thoma Syrian Christians of Kerala. From all those who came to call on him and from the numerous public speeches he gave, I learnt to accept his place in the world around him, his public power. I loved him more than I have ever loved anyone in my life—in that intensity that childhood brings, severing us from ordinary light, the daily bread of routine and orderliness. Still, I sensed that the very things he taught me about—love and equality and the sameness of all human beings in God’s sight—were what our lives in Tiruvella did not have and could not brook.