Our first dead open the door for us. We walk through that dark door to live our lives. Grandfather Kuruvilla was my first dead, and amma and I came from across the sea to be at his side.
How old was I at grandfather Kuruvilla’s death?
Ten, eleven? It was June, the heart of summer. The trees were burning with their burden of fruit and sun. He took a long time dying and amma became very tired. Once she fainted from exhaustion. She and I had flown back from Khartoum so that he could die in peace. At least that’s how amma put it to me. The phrase had an awful, sonorous tinge to it and felt to me like something she had learnt from the boarding school for Syrian Christian girls, where she had been sent at the age of seven so that grandmother Kunju could concentrate on her political work.
I was not new to death. Once in the reeds at the rim of the Nile, where appa took us for a drive in his Hillman—we often drove with the windows down to catch the evening breeze—I caught sight of a body with the hand curled up, a dark hand extending out of a white gelabiya, the whole of the dead man compacted into the bruise his hand made. A white egret pecked at the man’s head as if the heavy curls were dark fruit dropped down into dirt. No blood was visible, just the tired stain at the edge of the gelabiya, under the sleeve.
Amma put her starched linen handkerchief over her mouth and crossed herself. Appa just murmured “poor bugger” and got amma to light him a cigarette that he kept puffing as we drove towards the Grand Hotel.
There was great excitement at the Grand. They were preparing to film the movie Khartoum, and Omar Sharif had arrived ahead of time from Cairo. It was rumoured that he was taking the air on the balcony. In preparation for the filming, many of the regular guests had been moved onto the steamer Metamma, docked just across the road from the Grand. I felt a shiver of excitement on my thighs as I sat sipping my iced lemonade, my feet crossed demurely in what I held to be correct ladylike fashion. What if the devastating Omar Sharif were suddenly to appear? Once I thought I caught the flash of a white smoking jacket, a handsome head tossed back. There was a buzz in the air by the balcony. Was that him? The waiter thought so. No one else was sure.
Later as we drove back past the river, darkness had unpacked itself over the water’s edge and very little was visible. That night in my dreams I saw the dead man’s hand. All I could see was the dark brown hand that clutched the metal trellis of the balcony where Omar Sharif stood, a cigar stuck in his mouth. In my dream the actor decked out in his gelabiya turned to walk away, tripped over the cold wrist, and went flying.
What follows sent me flying and I have made it up as I could, mixing memory and dream. There is no other way I could do it. One word stands out. Sinking was the word that Uncle Itty used in the letter he wrote to us. The letter lay, a flimsy blue aerogramme, in the metal box in the stone post office the British had built in Khartoum. Mail was never delivered at home, and it had to be picked up when one could. Inside the box lay odds and ends of letters and airmail copies of the London Economist appa subscribed to. On this particular day all we had was a letter from my uncle Itty. It lay flat and dry inside. Appachen is sinking, old heart trouble, my uncle wrote. Then came the telegram summoning us, and amma and I were forced to catch the first flight back.
Memory is a red bird perched in a bush, a bush with roots swirling in a current of water that bears both the scent of the fallen flowers and the song that seems to have no source.
Returning makes a turmoil of its own.
Will the red-tiled roof look the same after the storm? Will the rosewood chest in the drawing room still stand a little askew from the wall? Will grandfather Kuruvilla still be alive, his breath hoarse, alive and waiting for me? Will he put out his gnarled hand and touch me? I am at the edge of puberty and feel a mixture of emotions I find hard to tolerate. I feel I want nothing more to do with my grandfather and cannot understand why.
In the Tiruvella house when amma and I arrived everything seemed, at first, to be much as it had been when we left it a summer ago. Ayah scraping snails off the kitchen steps each dawn, the cook wielding a huge spoon blackened with jaggery, Cousin Sosa in yet another new set of silk garments, pink pearls brought all the way from Tokyo clinging to her neck. But somehow I could not summon up my usual jealousy.
Cousin Koshy, who was back from boarding school, played endless games of rummy with me. The leaves glittered on the mango tree. And grandfather Kuruvilla changed utterly, lay propped up in a rosewood bed so visitors could see. He was often delirious, pumped full of morphine. Amma was exhausted with the whole ritual of visitors and doctors and her father’s illness. Sometimes she would throw up even the little kanji she was able to take in. That was when Uncle Itty decided that a time away for R&R was essential.
Just one day, he pleaded with amma, and finally one afternoon when grandfather was on an upswing, well enough to sit up and sip tea and receive visitors, Uncle Itty drove us off to the Kochi.
We approached the island in a painted boat, complete with two betel-chewing boatmen. It was a miracle we did not slide into the sea. We had banana leaves filled with roasted fish, fresh coconuts to slice and drink from, carafes of rosemilk, and sweetmeats wrapped in silver, a damask tablecloth, mats, wooden clogs that my grandfather Koruth needed to walk through the sands, my uncle Itty with his cheroot, my grandmother Mariamma holding her own palmyra fan.
The fan was made of leaves of palmyra and stitched with velvet ribbon. It cast a shadow, a winged thing. In the rocking boat, it kept the sun from my grandmother Mariamma’s face.
Time opens up in my face like a trapdoor. Am I confusing this outing with an earlier picnic, a time when we floated in a boat over the waters of Kochi bay on a day of the sun’s eclipse and appa’s parents were with us too? I cannot tell anymore. Perhaps the two boats have melted into one, so hot that sea we floated in. Everything goes very slow.
I see Cousin Koshy in his khaki shorts and Aunt Amu clutching a cheap romance novel to her chest, gently snoring as the scent of sweat and Chanel No 5 poured out of her.
Under Aunt Amu’s legs, packed in the wicker basket in oddments of cotton and felt, were the bits of smoked glass that were readied for our use. An eclipse of the sun was foretold, and a tiny island in the bay was just the right place to catch it.
“There is rock, right by the lighthouse,” Uncle Itty told us.
“We can climb up there and see the dark sliver of the sun. Imagine that, children, catching darkness visible.”
He was a learned man, my uncle, a barrister by training, and all kinds of phrases slipped into his speech. The only person who might have competed with him was grandfather Kuruvilla. But he was not with us. He was in the great house with the walled garden, ill with a heart condition, not sure if he wanted to die.
Neither was appa with us. In my time in Tiruvella I grew used to having a father who was far away in a desert town by the Nile. Often amma and I lived with him in the cooler months, when we slept on a stone terrace and needed the covering of blankets and even the thick razai amma had brought with her from India. In May, when the hot winds peeled off the belly of dry earth, amma packed me up and fled.
“It’s oven hot, we were not meant to live here,” she would say, leaving appa alone to manage his life. And she brought me back to a land where the monsoon winds bound us in a rain so heady that sometimes, for days on end, there was no breach in the sheets of silvery liquid that shrouded us, our clothing clotted on ropes that ayah wound round and round the back veranda. Even the chickens and drenched ducks from the kitchen garden scrambled into the grain cellar in search of shelter.
Where was my home? It was hard for me to figure out.
Leaning over the edge of the rocking boat, staring down into the flat and glassy waters, I wondered if appa, who was on the far side of the Arabian Sea, was thinking of me.
Was he driving his Hillman roadster to work, a silver thermos filled with coffee by him? Was a haboob approaching him? Did swirls of dust rise and cover the windscreen, the edge of the road, the white palace of the Mahdi?
Where was Khartoum? I could not tell. What was real was the cold water of the Arabian Sea and the edge of the boat that smelt damp and fishy. When I trailed my hand in the water I felt a tremble of delight, a sudden cold that turned my fingers into the silver color of flying fish.
“Have you seen flying fish?” I yelled out at Koshy over his sleeping mother’s head. Kozencheri veliappechan woke up from his doze, and rubbed his eyes and stared at me.
“Silly Meena, how can fish fly?”
Koshy shook his head. He looked unhappy.
“Why don’t you check the Encyclopedia Brittanica?” Uncle Itty pitched in to help. My cousin had a sulky look. I turned to him.
“They were silvery. Like new paise, you know the kind that veliappechan sometimes gives us.”
“With wings?”
“How else could they fly? Wings double up as fins. They can swim in the sky and fly in the sea.”
“The other way, silly.” He shook me by the elbow.
“Like what?”
“Fly in the sky and swim in the sea, you mean.”
I wasn’t going to give up on the flying fish. I had seen them with my own eyes.
I shook my head so hard my braids started spinning, making a black blossom. One of the braids flicked the sleeping Amu on her cheek.
“Stop it you, wild girl!” Koshy yelled.
Suddenly both boatmen cried out as the boat thudded against grit. My grandmother Mariamma leaned over and, with the edge of the silken fan, tapped me ever so gently on the knee. When I started stirring, she blew into my eyes, as if a grandmother’s breath might make me see.
As she led me out of the boat, we made a four-legged thing, a very old woman and a young child, her son’s daughter, a girl fleeing an old man’s death. A girl who would be forced to search out water and air for living alphabets:
that tell of fish flying in the southern skies
birds crawling backwards out of nests
reams of white paper
grey intercontinental landing strips, a no-man’s zone of transit lounges, no woman’s either. Where cups of coffee in styrofoam cups are bought dear, and riceballs leave a sweet aftertaste on the tongue, summoning up the everlasting palimpsest of desire.
Migrations of sense that take a lifetime to decipher.