The river had a name. So did I.
At the high school, Raman Menon peered over his glasses and said, ‘Koman. That’s a pet name, if I may use the phrase. Doesn’t he have a proper name? And what about his surname?’
My father narrowed his eyes into slits. In the few days I had been with him, I knew the import of that look.
‘His name is Koman, with no tails, tags or suffixes.’ My father spoke softly.
The headmaster, who even in the heat of Shoranur wore a dark suit to work, blanched. I felt a chill blaze my back. He was the headmaster, but my father made him seem like a silly boy.
‘Koman,’ he wrote in a register. ‘Age?’
So there I was. Koman with no tags, tails or suffixes, age twelve, enrolled in a school and a new life. With a ready-made family: father, mother, two younger brothers. And a river that cradled me.
I ought to have been happy. But I had this ‘I’ to battle with. When I had referred to myself as Koman, I knew who Koman was. I asked no questions of Koman. I accepted that Koman was a boy whose mother was dead and whose father lived elsewhere because
he had a livelihood to earn. I ate, drank and slept, shat and peed, ran and swam, dreamt and prayed. I was Koman the boy, one among a million boys in the world.
Now Achan had decided that Koman had to be an ‘I’.
And this ‘I’, I needed to know. So I gathered bits of myself. From stray comments and conversations, from my stepmother whom I called Amma, from her glances when she thought I wasn’t looking and from my brothers’ curious questions I shaped the ‘I’.
When Achan and I drove to Kaikurussi where my mother and brothers were, my father asked me to wait in the car. He went up the steps of the house to where a plump lady with a sweet face stood. There was a red stone in her nose ring. Like a drop of blood, the dull red jewel was the only spot of colour on her pale face. ‘Where is she?’ he asked the lady.
She smiled. ‘Resting. I will tell her that you are here.’
Another woman stepped out of the doorway. She was plump, and her mouth spliced into a smile when she saw Achan. He returned the smile hesitantly. ‘I have something to tell you,’ he said.
So then I knew that my father hadn’t ever mentioned that I existed.
My stepmother was a good woman. Or perhaps she knew it was futile to protest and so accepted my presence without any recriminations. One day I was a near orphan. The next day I was a boy with a family.
Later I heard her tell Paru Kutty, the lady of the house whose face took its rosy hue from her nose ring, ‘He used to be married. She died. I should have known that a man like him would have a past.’
‘Better a past wife than a mistress in the present.’ The lady’s voice sounded as if she had bitten into a piece of raw bitter gourd.
I knew a certain relief then. My mother had been a wife. I wasn’t a bastard.
My younger brothers were seven and five. They stared at me when my father called them to meet me. They said nothing at first. Then the elder one asked, ‘Do you know how to play marbles?’
I nodded. I knew relief again. I played marbles. I could shy a mango from a tree. I could climb trees. I could swim and hold my breath under water to a count of sixty-nine. I could be a brother.
‘See these,’ the elder one, Mani, said. He pointed to a pair of wooden clogs. ‘Velliyamma’s,’ he said. ‘Let’s play with them. She
isn’t really our mother’s older sister—she’s a cousin—but that’s what we call her.’
‘Whose are these?’ I asked, stepping into a pair of clogs they placed on the floor for me to try on.
‘Her husband’s,’ the younger one, Babu, said.
‘Where is he?’ I asked, trying to walk.
The two boys looked at each other. ‘He has a new wife. They live there,’ Mani whispered, pointing across the road.
I stopped. The wooden clogs were heavy, but I knew lightness. So this was something men did. Discard the past and step into a new future—even if the past held wives and children. The owner of the clogs had, and so had my father. It had nothing to do with my mother. It was what men did.
I looked at my brothers. Mani’s face was a flock of birds. It never rested, lifting from one expression to another. His eyes enlarged and narrowed, his nostrils flared, his nose wrinkled, his mouth parted into a hoot of laugher or widened into a smile of singular sweetness. His teeth gleamed; his brow broke into a line of sweat beads, which he wiped away with the back of his hand. He was tall for his age and a little potbelly protruded from his middle. I am so hungry, he said all day, and later when he was an adult, that would still be his call to life. A hunger that was never satiated. A greed that demanded more and more.
In contrast, Babu was small and thin, with a pointed face that was fixed into one expression, and a wandering eye. When you looked at Babu’s face, you felt a trickle of fear. It was as though one eye went with you wherever you went, constantly looking, leaving nothing unturned, while the other stared straight and steadfast, constantly assessing. He picked at his food and wept easily. If he didn’t have his way, if he felt threatened, if he lost a game, he ran on his short, spindly legs with tears coursing down his cheeks and a tale to tell. His stories almost always ensured a whacking for Mani. Sometimes Mani didn’t even know what he was being punished for. But he took it without complaint, sure that he deserved the beating, if not for this imaginary misdemeanour, then for a real one perpetrated some days ago for which he had gone unpunished. They were my brothers and when they called me etta, I felt a sense of pride and responsibility. My brothers, my little brothers, I thought. But already
I knew who would be my favourite.
We went back to my father’s house in Shoranur. It was vacation time and we played all day. Sometimes I would catch my father’s eyes on me and would feel a shyness come over me. What did he see, I wondered. In the evening, the tutor would arrive to teach me Malayalam and everything else that would make it easier for me to fit into Raman Menon’s school.
One day, as the boys and I bathed, I felt them staring at my genitals. ‘What is wrong?’ I asked. ‘It’s not any different from yours!’
My brothers looked at each other. They did that a lot, swallowing words and exchanging thoughts with conspiratorial glances.
‘Is it all there?’ Babu asked. He spoke his mind more easily than Mani did.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, holding up my penis.
The two of them bent forward to examine my penis. ‘He is right,’ Mani told Babu. ‘It is all there. So what did Amma mean by asking us to find out if the tip was missing?’
I turned away. A great heaviness settled on me. Who was I? What manner of creature was I to have the tip of my penis missing?
Then Mani began to tickle me and giggling, I forgot all about missing penis tips.
School began. I was in the second form when I discovered that, while I would never be brilliant, I was better than average. Achan patted me on the head and said, ‘Very good. But what about arithmetic?’
I smiled. ‘It’s simple enough,’ I said, happy to be able to please this man who my brothers claimed was seldom pleased.
He patted my head again. ‘Good. To be able to run a business, you need to conquer numbers.’
I turned thirteen in November. There was a big lunch to which everyone was invited. ‘It is the first time I’ve celebrated his birthday,’ I heard Achan tell Amma. ‘I am thirteen years late, so we must try and compensate for the missing years. I owe that much to his mother and him.’
My father asked a jeweller to make me a gold chain, and the tailor brought me new clothes. My tongue was coated with the many flavours of the feast and my heart tripped with joy. My father loved
me. My father had loved his wife, my mother.
The next day, a stone fell into this calm pool of my life. Hassan sat on the bench next to mine. ‘Tomorrow is my brother’s sunnath kalyanam,’ he whispered.
My ears perked up at the word kalyanam. ‘Isn’t he rather young to be married?’ I asked with a grin.
‘Oh, it isn’t a wedding. That is a nikaah! This is his circumcision. True believers of Islam have their foreskins slit. It’s very painful, so they stuff his mouth with pori so he can’t scream through the puffed rice, and then it is done. It hurts awfully, but after that there is to be a biriyani lunch. You must come if your father will let you,’ Hassan said.
I said nothing. I thought of Mani and Babu peering at my penis. I thought of Amma asking them to examine it. I thought of the servant lady saying, ‘It is a wonder that he picked up our prayers so easily.’
I had thought that she meant my intonation.
Everything I had used to shape my existence had suddenly no truth, no validity.
That night we went to a temple. I had never been to a temple before. At the entrance to the temple was a signboard that said: No Entry for Non-Hindus.
I felt a vice-like grip on the foot I had put forward. I saw that Amma noticed me hesitate. I felt Achan’s hand at the small of my back, pushing me ahead.
I remembered suddenly what Mary Patti had once said. My father knew the Bible like no one else did, she said. I had assumed that my father was a Christian, like everyone else in Nazareth. Then I discovered that he wasn’t.
No one ever spoke of my mother. Nobody seemed to want to. Mary Patti, the doctor, and now Achan. ‘What is there to say?’ they said, when I asked. ‘She was a young girl who died in an accident.’
Now I know why they were so brief. They hadn’t known what else to say. That my mother was a Muslim. That I had no religion to call my own. That I wasn’t the ‘I’ I knew.
Which was why I had to be Koman with no tags, tails or suffixes.
My heart beat faster than the drumbeats that reverberated through the temple grounds.
I heard my father mutter, ‘What have you been telling him?’
I saw him glare at Amma. She had an aggrieved expression. ‘Nothing. Don’t blame me! I didn’t say anything.’
Achan’s eyes narrowed. ‘Quiet!’ His hiss crackled through the air.
‘Ever since he arrived, you’ve been different. What is it? Do you wish she was here? Look at me. I am Devayani. Not Saadiya, or whatever her name was. I am not her. I can’t be her.’
I walked on. I didn’t want to be sucked into the bones of their quarrel.
Mani and Babu came running. ‘Come on,’ they urged. ‘The performance will begin any time now.’
On a raised platform, in the centre, was a huge lamp. The wicks glowed. Two men held a multi-coloured silk cloth. The beat of the drums ground all noise out. The pounding in my chest intensified.
The singing began. It was a chant. What did it mean?
‘What is it?’ I asked Mani.
‘I don’t know.’ Mani shrugged.
I let the singing wash over me. What did it matter whether I understood or not?
The darkness of the night, the flickering wicks of the lamp, the shadows, the waiting. I wasn’t sure what brought it on, but it swamped me, the sensation of something about to happen.
I heard the tinkle of bells approaching. What would the dancers look like, I wondered. Suddenly I caught a fleeting glimpse. Behind the curtain were two majestic creatures, their crowns elaborate and their costumes voluminous. As the drumming began, they held the curtain and peered over it. Their hands moved the cloth this way and that in a rhythmic motion.
I knew anticipation again.
When the curtain was finally taken away, I saw them, those magnificent beings in their costumes. Beneath the proudly perched crowns, their faces were painted green. Their red-tinted eyes were shaped with thick, black lines and their mouths were an exaggerated red. Along the jaw from one ear to another was a white frame. Every inch of their being resonated with a sheathed-in power. They looked ready to conquer worlds, vanquish enemies and bestow blessings. My heart turned on its axis. Who were they? Men or gods?
They dwarfed everything around them: the people waiting to see
them perform, the singing, and even the deity within the temple.
‘Etta, you are hurting me,’ I heard Babu whimper.
In my excitement I had forgotten that his hand lay in mine and I was squeezing it.
Then Mani whispered, ‘Etta, Achan says we must go.’
I turned to where my father stood. ‘Please, a few minutes more,’ I implored with my eyes.
That night, my mind flitted from one moment to the other. The day had been compounded of many: Hassan. My mother. Amma’s anger. The temple. The drumming. Finally I arrived at the dancers, and there it settled.
Those glorious men who had pressed out my every uncertainty with the magnificence of their presence. Would I be as magnificent if I was one of them?
The next day was a Saturday and a school holiday. ‘Let us try something,’ I told Mani and Babu.
I gathered a turmeric root and charcoal from the kitchen. From the niche in the wall near the bathroom, where soap and other washing things were kept, I took some blue indigo used to whiten the clothes, and some vermilion from the puja room. ‘Bring me a basket, an old white cloth, and that red towel hanging outside,’ I told Mani, who could be trusted with the most complicated of errands. As for Babu, I sent him to find a piece of cardboard.