As grandfather Kuruvilla lay dying, everything fled from my head: house, garden, red hills, blue sky. He lay on his bed and the veins in his heart grew hard. His arteries were clogged with sea salt.
He grew delirious:
Mahatma Gandhi save our nation! Lord Mountbatten, let my people go!
Burn the wild grass at the garden’s edge!
Kunju, Kunju where are you, why did you fly from me?
Jesus, take this cup from me.
His mouth grew dry. They fed him coconut water in a silver spoon, pumped morphine into his veins.
I wanted him to die.
Breath rattled in his throat. Dry seeds in a green pod, a tiny mongoose striped electric white, striking the ancient cobra.
They laid him out on the bench set out in the wild grass behind his library, stripped his clothes off, poured water over his chest. The ribs beat against each other. The skin fizzled like a live thing. His nails were yellow on his feet, his head was large, almost bald with all the pain he had gone through. They did not trim his nails. His stomach was sunken and down below I stared, shut my eyes.
They carried him into the house, laid him on the rosewood bed. The candles at his head and feet made pools of light. I bent over, saw the sun gleaming. The moon tilted in the dark sky behind the well.
The coffin, when they carried it down the steps, tilted and threatened to hang in the air. One of the men carrying it had one leg shorter than the other, no not Chandran. Someone else. A stout man in a fine white dhoti, who almost slipped. I was standing by one of the pillars of the veranda. I saw the black box—all night I had heard them hammering at it, stitching in the silk lining with little pins—tremble and slip.
When they hoisted the coffin down the red road that leads to the front gate, under the branches of the incense tree, I clambered into the branches. I let the leaves brush over me. I hung upside down like a night owl.
Then I opened my eyes so huge the sun would pour into me, make me not see. It has taken a lifetime to stare into the burnt hole in myself, to learn to see.
Forty days after he was buried, the Tiruvella house was cleaned with water. A ritual of passage. Streams of water poured out of the buckets borne by Bhaskaran the cowherd and by men whose faces I can no longer see. Buckets drawn from the well by the bitter lemon tree, buckets filled with water from a tap amma had installed by the outer wall of the house.
Water blossomed over the tiled floor, kissed the legs of the writing desk in the library. Mud poured over the threshold. An ancient woman, with snowy locks and skin falling off her bones, crawled through the mud, her white sari splattered with roses of filth: grandmother Kunju’s cousin. She waved at me.
The moveable parts of the household, rosewood mirrors that grandmother Kunju had received as part of her dowry, the teak boxes inlaid with ivory, the pewter pitchers, the metal trunks, had all been carried out and stood on the wild grass by the bamboo grove. A household without walls, furniture burnt by sunlight.
Barefoot I stepped into grandfather’s library. I saw a bookshelf lined with dusty cloth-covered books and, propped in front, a framed picture: all that Gandhi, grandfather Kuruvilla’s mentor, had possessed at the time of his death. A pair of bent wire spectacles, wooden clogs, a simple charka, a folded dhoti. Next to the picture was a book flat on its back. As I picked it up a yellowed slip of paper fell out. It was in a clear upright hand I recognised as belonging to my grandmother Kunju. A note she made to her self, household reminders:
Soap for washing 10 annas
Kitchen rag 5 annas
A pot of jaggery (to be taken to Sumati’s house)
On the flyleaf, in the same clear hand as the note, was grandfather’s name.
From the desk I picked up a pen and stared at it. “Pena,” I whispered, using the Malayalam word. Had my grandmother Kunju used that pen too?
I let the pen rest on my palm. I was twelve years old, my grandfather was buried. I set my notebook on my thighs and started writing. First I wrote words in English, the language of my common use, the language I loved. I made a string of words in my best hand so that ever after I would be able to read it:
Girl |
Book |
Stone |
Tree |
There were spaces between each of the words. I was glad I could not hear amma, that she would not call me. I stared at the words I had made. Soon other words rushed in, and barely thinking, I put down words in Malayalam, my mother tongue, the language of my dreams, and under it a string of words in Arabic, translating the first two, and then in French, which became for me a language of visible accomplishment. At home only my father and I could read French.
As I wrote I became someone else, not a girl whose grandfather had just died, a girl whose mother was in mourning. The writing freed me. I imagined the stone-eating girl I had seen long ago, listening to me as I read out the words.
Girl |
Book |
Stone |
Tree |
Penne |
Pusthakam |
Kalu |
Maram |
Bint |
Kitab |
Hajar |
Shajara |
Fille |
Livre |
Pierre |
Arbre |
In bits and pieces, without connectives, relying on the blank spaces between the words to set up an ethereal terrain, I composed a dictionary of desire.
I wrote in clear upright hand, conscious that the page next to it had been torn out and bore the jagged markings of rice paper that has been mutilated.
I had torn out that page, on a hot night on a ship when I was five years old and amma and I were crossing the Arabian Sea. I had crumbled up the page in my fingers, sticky with salt spray, and flung the white, shapeless thing into the waves.
Just as I did in grandfather’s study, after I finished writing I shut my eyes tight. Then I shut the notebook. The paper made a quiet thud, rice paper knocking against itself.
It was the very last entry I would make in my notebook of white rice paper, my first notebook, a notebook with cardboard covers marked with the sun and the moon and the stars.
I heard amma calling me. How long she had been calling I could not tell for I had an ability to block things out when I was writing.
But now I heard her loud and clear, calling from the front room to come and help her shift grandmother Kunju’s mirror.
“Come, mol, come quick,” she cried. “I do not want Bhaskaran the cowherd to move this mirror. It was something your grandmother received as part of her dowry. Only the women of the house must touch it.”
I set the book back on the shelf and walked out quickly, into the wild grass by the bamboo grove. I saw my mother shooing away the servants, her body bent with the weight of a great mirror she had covered with the rim of her sari. The top portion of that ancient glass was covered with a fine film of cotton, but the lower part reflected all that fell into the hold of light, stones, trees, clouds, and even my own feet as I stood there, arms outstretched, ready to help her.
I still do not know how it happened. But as it passed between us, grandmother’s mirror slipped and broke on black granite, the silver of its face shattered into a thousand and one pieces.
And each of those fragments, some still buried in red soil, will tell its own tale.