It was 1933, when this affair shook my life, and I remember it led me into smoking. As a teenager I always thought it to be a bad idea, but I was beyond twenty now, mature enough to test the thing’s reputation as a stress reliever. One would be initiated into smoking not with cigarettes then, but with beedi. If you are from my generation you’ll recall that cigarette was out-of-favour in the whole of India, in deference to Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘Swadesi’ call. I’d pass hours at my brooding-point under a clump of swaying coconut palms under the gaze of the under-repair Tangasseri Point lighthouse at Quilon, trying to emit smoke-rings, which was quite a task with beedies, given the measly amounts of smoke they produced. Peace reigned, to the sound of the emerald waves lapping on the shore, kites swooping down to pick up the stray matti that popped up like a cork now and then. Good old Quilon coast! I could watch these sights but not feel them inside, alas, given the prevailing circumstance.
The trademark red diagonal stripes of
the stately lighthouse were, I remember, largely blotted out by patches of
jacketing that served to mend the cracks that had sprung up here and there,
which, under the dying lights of the setting sun, looked like gnarled hands of
a bloody gigantic witch clasping the tower. And what was I doing at Quilon, I
was in attendance upon Acchachan, my grandfather, who lay very sick at
District Hospital, Quilon, which, on account of the skills and care bestowed
upon patients by the Swiss Holy Cross Sisters offered the best medical care in
the whole of the Travancore state.
But to fully appreciate what I relate,
you must follow me through the crazy maze of kinship that Kerala society once
was. Or like a bloody house of mirrors you may say. Vivekananda called Kerala a
‘mad-house of castes’. Even Malayalees of the present generations are surprised
to be told about unsavoury practices like Mulakkaram, or the breast tax,
and I suspect modern Keralites think it best to let the skeletons lie in
forgotten cupboards of society. But, this is what I feel, contemporary social
evils can all be traced to the Nambudiri bhumi atyagraham which
loosely means ‘greed for land’. And every social thing in Kerala is ultimately
traced back to Parasurama, who reputedly created the Kerala cosmos, and
planted Brahmin clans there. Detractors claim that the Nambudiri
Brahmins were created by him out of fishermen, by fashioning the fishing-rod
strings into sacred thread, that is the yadhnyopavitham, a claim not to
be taken seriously, for, in reality, they had migrated from the north. Parasurama
is still around, the Puranas say… niṅṅaḷ dirghakalaṁ jīvikkaṭṭe
daivam!
My Acchan, who harboured some
scientific curiosity loved to say that kinship in Kerala is as complex as the
theory of relativity. You’ll notice the laboured pun in the idea, concerned as
it was with ‘relatives’. Just to highlight our scientific temperament, Einstein,
like no other scientist, caught the fancy of the Malayalee mind, and it is a
matter of record, Albert Einstein was offered a Professor’s post in the
fledgling University of Travancore by the Travancore State Diwan, Sir
C.P.Ramaswamy Aiyar, for a fixed monthly pay of Rupees 6000.00! Alas he chose
Princeton over Travancore. Acchan, charlatan, thought that was brilliant
business, the pun and all, though I was not impressed. Not that Acchan
cared overmuch for others’ opinion. His manners, or as we say in Malayalam, maanyers
were highly boisterous, his right hand perpetually raised, seeking to imprint a high-five on the companion’s hand,
to the shriek of adipoli!! or kidduu!!!
But Acchan’s Acchan,
that is Acchachan, was the very opposite of that- restrained and stoic,
philosophical. Kind, profound…I am somewhere in between, but closer to Acchachan,
I fondly hoped once..no longer, as you’ll soon witness. Apparently his genetic
imprint, and his father’s, were so dominating, my Ammooma always said,
that in the clan, ceṟumakan mutt Acchaneaṭ samyamuṇṭ- boys take after
grandfathers!
Acchachan was a Nambudiri, so also Acchan,
like the Adi Sankaracharya, members of the Brahmin sub-caste considered widely
to be the acme of Vedic culture, very orthodox. A strict code of bloody
‘purity’ was built around themselves by the Nambudiris. Just to
illustrate, every lower caste was
prescribed a distance upto which they could accost a Nambudiri. For
example the safe distance to be maintained by fisher-folk was 24 arms-lengths!
But this holy whiff entirely bypassed me, in spite of my being a direct male
descendant of Acchachan! I was a Nair, not a Brahmin, but a kshatriya
technically.
Of course all this was to finally
change with the Madras Nambudiri Act 1933, and Acchachan was part
of the reform movement, as I shall shortly explain. But see how bloody mulish
are bad habits, here and there you will still find relics of Marumakathayam
or matrilineal ways in our language and culture- for example even today the
wife often addresses the husband as chetta, something like bhaiyya! So a Nair family consisted not of
husband, wife and children, but of brother, sister and the sister’s children
from the man who in turn inhabited in his family in his sister’s
homestead. If a Nair boy somehow happened to marry a Nambudiri
girl, for Nairs, their children would be, Nambudiri and vice versa, because the Nambudiri
was above the Nair in social hierarchy, even though the latter was much
smarter!
Acchachan, being the
first born, inherited the family estates as per the Nambudiri practices
and was the paterfamilias of the illam, that is the correct word
for a Nambudiri estate. Acchachan never used his caste title, but was known to everyone as
Kesavan, and would, impishly, sign as ‘K7’. Acchan, that is
dad, was spared of that responsibility, and he was the youngest of Acchachan’s
sons. Only the eldest son could have a regular marriage, so that the
pre-eminence of the eldest son remained unquestionable, and the younger sons
had to rest content with Sambandam, an informal arrangement basically
for procreation. A man could enter into Sambandam merely by gifting a mundu,
in the presence of an oil-lamp, to the Nair girl, who belonging as
she did to a matrilineal set-up, could say poda to her ‘husband’ by simmbly
returning the bloody mundu. My Ammachi, though, I should mention,
treasured her mundu and kept it along with her jewellery in a private
corner of the family steel cupboard! Such was their love, Acchan frequently
stayed with us…
All that ended with the Madras Marumakathayam Act 1933, after which no Sambandam
remained and the bloody thrill was gone! But while it prevailed, the maternal
uncle of children was responsible for their upbringing, not the biological
father, and the household or Tharavad was headed by the senior-most
lady, or the matriarch, though the real power still vested with the eldest
male, the karnavar..
So I and Acchachan were like
two parallel lines running close like rails of a railway track, never meeting
but drawn towards a common point. He had a certain fondness for me. One, both
of us were very fair, and I bore uncanny resemblance to the child Kesavan, Ammoman
used to say, which was of a piece of her formula of ceṟumakan muttAcchaneaṭ
samyamuṇṭ!
I and Acchachan had much in
common, both of us were equally drawn to literature and painting. The late 19th
century and the early 20th were the renaissance years for Malayalam
literature. Christian missionaries with their perseverance and curiosity were
the prime movers of this literary movement. The Samuel Johnson of Malayalam,
who painstakingly compiled the first Malayalam-English dictionary was German missionary, Herman Gundert. Acchachan
had a well-stocked library, and the most well-thumbed books in his collection were the
Malayalam-English dictionary by Gundert, the Abhijnanasakuntalam of
Kalidasa translated by Kerala Varma, and not the least, his beloved novel,
Chandhu Menon’s Indulekha, said to be the first Malayalam novel to be
written. It’s about Nair society, though the preoccupation of Acchachan
was Nambudiri reform, but as dad used to say, Nambudiris and Nairs
are two sides of the same coin!
If one has to summarise the social
changes that were in the offing, one has merely to remember Indulekha!
The British, steeped in Victorian tradition never ceased to be horrified with Nambudiri
excesses, Sambandam marriages, and the apparent promiscuity prevalent
in society. The Church was also in a ‘reformatory’ mode, even as the Queen was
not amused. The attempts to remould Kerala society in the British mould was
bound to succeed as the Royal House of Travancore (and Cochin as well) threw
its weight behind the movement. Basically the contradictions between a society
trying to emulate the patriarchal West,
and the matrilineal systems at home became too much for the Travancore royalty.
With their sharp intellect, the ruling class read the writing on the wall and
correctly concluded that the world of the future would be dominated by the
western mode. Queen Victoria, it is said, was delighted with the famous
Travancore queen Rani Lakshmi Bayi when she refused to divorce her husband
Kerala Varma, that is the writer of the Malayalam Abhijnanasakuntalam,
at the behest of scheming courtiers. Queen Victoria appreciated the ‘moral
fibre’ of the Rani and gradually Christian morality percolated downwards. The
writer Chandhu Menon was himself an employee of the British administration.
Madhavi, the heroine of Indulekha was
the new ideal for Malayalee womanhood who wouldn’t suffer Nambudiri
excesses. She is dedicated to her husband, and fights back when her virtue is
questioned. Her sensibilities are very English. My Acchachan would
illustrate his points with instances from Madhavi’s life with such fervor that
as a child I always thought Madhavi was some real handsome lady in our
neighbourhood! In fact, Madhavi was the heroine’s horoscope name and Indulekha
was a sobriquet lavished on her on account of her beauty by Krishna uncle.
However the name Madhavi is used only by her soul-mate, that is Madhavan!
Madhavan-Madhavi, you see!
Acchachan loved Raja Ravi Varma and his
paintings, every Ravi Varma tells a story he would insist. He is the creator of
the creators, and the images of various Gods that reside in the Hindu mind are
his creations! His favourite painting was Ata Acchan Varunnu that is,
“There Comes Papa”. The painting depicts Ravi Varma’s daughter Mavalikera holding
the baby Setu Lakhmi Bayi, the one who, as an adult happened to impress Queen
Victoria, as I told you earlier, with the family dog beside, waiting
expectantly for the father to arrive, as if, to complete the picture of a
modern nuclear family!
So basically Acchachan saw the
world through English eyes and therefore found allies in the reform movement.
He would talk about V.T.Bhattathiripad, the very talented leader of the Nambudiri
Yogakshema Mahasabha much his junior. Known as VT, he had, just like Acchachan
stopped using the caste-name Nambudiri. Somehow Acchachan often
visited Trichur, where he had occasion to watch the progress of VT, who studied
at the Edakunni Nambudiri School, where he also edited the youth
magazine Vidyarthi copy of which Acchachan invariably came back
with. Made me read the editorial note, which of course was of no interest to
me, I would rather trawl magazines with pictures, or read the Kaumudi..
The reforms attempted by the Mahasabha
revolved around the plight of unmarried Nambudiri women and Nambudiri
widows. The eldest Nambudiri son was expected to take on a Nambudiri
bride, or several of them, and the younger ones, like Acchan entered
into Sambandam with Nair girls thus leaving out one set of women:
the unmarried Nambudiri women who were cursed to remain life-long
virgins. A Nambudiri widow could not re-marry. Together they constituted
the bloody ‘Antherjanams’, or ‘people inside the house’, meaning they
could not step out of the household, and if at all they had to, they had to
move about in a formation more like a Roman phalanx, lest the eyes of a
stranger fall on them. The system, if it can be called so, resulted in a
matrimonial gender imbalance which caused social tensions, and created
opportunity for the Nambudiri male to revel in debauchery, while all the
time earning punyam, because all this apparently had the sanctions of Parasurama!
The slogan VT gave was “transform the Nambudiri into a human being”. And
Acchachan with his sense of compassion and equality of all human beings
became their torch-bearer in Venad!
Nothing is as powerful as an idea
whose time has come, and so it was with the Reforms .As a result of the many
Resolutions that were passed by the Mahasabha, the conferences and not
the least, stage shows, the Prahasanams, under their aegis, a number of
legislations were enacted by the Houses of Travancore and Cochin, though the
Kerala Nambudiri Act was passed after Independence.
A Plague raged in greater India in
1932-33, but thanks to the Public Health Department, which set up observation
stations at every entry point, not a single case happened in Kerala! However
fate had decided to corner Acchachan, and when he returned from the
Silver Jubilee celebrations of the Sabha held at Karalmanna near
Trichur, he developed cough, cold and high fever, which was later diagnosed as
Winter Fever, though there is hardly any winter in Kerala, only rain, rain, and
more rain! Perhaps the strain of the 300 mile journey, changing trains, from
Trichur to Sengottaii to Punalur to Quilon to Trivandrum to Attingal, got the
better of him. Of course as the crow flies the distance may be half of that. Acchachan,
though, was full of stories from the conference, boasting that one thousand Antherjanams
had participated, and was particularly impressed by the Prahasanam staged
by some amateurs, which he found more gripping than any Nambudiri Kathakali
show or any Nair Kalaripayattu show! My Ammooma administered to
him the usual turmeric prasadam, and the usual Nambudiri manthrams,
but Parasurama was unmoved, and
given Acchachan’s faith in Missionaries, it was decided to take Acchachan
to Quilon, which was, fortunately, quite close.
Naturally Acchachan’s choice of
companion fell on me, and I always had a sense of loyalty towards him. But it was
a sad journey. It was raining off and on and you can imagine what the Kerala
landscape would offer, looking out of the window of a train in gently falling
rain, an endless expanse of green, glassy rain-drops refracting myriad hues of
green, but that day the shade of clouds played on my gloom. The only source of
warmth was a wad of Rupees 5,000 which was entrusted with me by Acchachan
at the commencement of journey, not that I had designs on it, but this was the
first time I had touched so much of dough.
Acchan was a Bradshaw person, and would wait
like a crow on a tree for the latest edition to arrive, and he generously
donated one of his retired copies to us, according to which the rail distance
was 40 miles, and after 2 hours of travel we reached Quilon. The Mahasabha
guys were waiting impatiently for our arrival. A car with a TCQ number plate
was pressed into service, and the old man, who had survived the epic journeys
of the last few days was straight put on oxygen support. Apparently the entire
admission formalities were completed by Mahasabha volunteers, save the
mandatory what’s-it-called, which has to be filled up by ‘next-of-kin’. The
fund for admission had been arranged before-hand by Acchachan, when and
how remained a mystery to me.
The Quilon Hospital was a small
affair, only 15 beds. It was a revelation to me, how rich Acchachan was.
He was housed in the best room, with an ante-room for the attendant. Not that I
had anything to do with the treatment, the Swiss Matron Annali was around when
help was required. The main treatment as I learnt was Oxygen, for serum therapy
was not indicated in acute cases, it worked in early detection. Sulphonamides
and Penicillin were yet to be made commercially available. Fever would sometimes reach as high as 106
degrees F and Acchachan would become delirious. For fever, he would be
administered Salicin, which I suppose is same as Aspirin. The sisters would
resort to sponging if temperature exceeded 104 deg.
During one such bouts, Sister Marieli
rushed out of the old man’s room, I was lazing in the ante-room. They used to
call him Opa, like the Tamils’ Appa, I thought. Opa wants
you quickly she said. Opa was struggling with a bout of delirium. I was
so worried, I stood with my legs shaking. Acchachan was deranged and
unhinged, expostulating and desperate to tell me something and he waved out
Sister saying doore po! doore po! Vaathil adaikkoo!!! Door close
please!!
What he said next raised the hair on
the back of my neck. Does Thaathri know about my illness Mone! he
said, she will be very worried! A bolt of lightning struck me as I heard him
say Thaathri. A hundred years of the sordid existence of Antherjanams,
the meanness of Nambudiri society flashed across my mind. As it rose, it
abated. Relieved I remembered Thaathri was lost to Kerala 30 year back
and no, no, Acchachan could not have been one of her consorts.
I’m not sure about Indulekha,
but Thaathri was for real, the Kerala Joan of Arc virtually burnt at the
stake! Her life was not the subject of a novel like Indulekha by then,
but was living, earthy memory in the first half of the 20th century.
Only the previous year, that is 1932 had seen the demise of a prime character
in the saga, Rajashri Sir Rama Varma XV, who was the Cochin King during the Smarthvicharam,
Thaathri’s inquisition as per shastras.. The late King had aborted
the inquiry proceedings in 1905, allegedly as he was the next on the list of Thaathri’s
illicit consorts. He lent strength to this surmise by abdicating the throne in
1908. However as a matter of fact he had fallen out with the British Resident
and decided that he had enough.
Thaathri, is the Malayalam form of Sanskrit Dharitri,
earth goddess. She was a Nambudiri girl married to an old widower as a
mere 9 year old! Thaathri blossomed into an extremely beautiful girl,
apart from being wily, and so bold, I don’t think even Parasurama could
have looked her in her eye. But she burnt a hole in Parasurama’s
creation when she struck like a meteor! As a fall-out of her Smarthvicharam
conducted by a constellation of Namudiri priests, sixty-five
‘respectable’ citizens were arraigned, many were excommunicated, and a couple
of them even communicated suicide. She had painstakingly documented her
visitors’ capers, and could establish each and every intimacy, even placing
accurately the grandees’ bloody moles on thighs and all .
But ‘Thaathri’ from Acchachan’s
mouth..bhayamkara..ende ammo! It was perplexing to say the least…Anyway
in Acchachan’s incoherent blabber Thaathri got transformed to Chitra.
Chitra an ex-Antherjanam, Chitra, who had a big girl and
an unni boy and stayed in Arimbur or Nadathara was it, in Trichur. The
old man kept on raving incoherently and largely inaudibly. Something sounded
like kuṭṭikaḷe paripālikkuka and enne kapatabhaktan siksikkuka
Parasurama, admahatya ceyyuka, weeping in spells. Do you have a beedi Mone!
he entreated in between! In his moments of alertness he seemed to have caught
the smell of tobacco on my persona. The bloody long and short of it was
that Acchachan had what Tamilians
call chinna veedu, little home, back in Trichur and, he felt guilty,
entreating Parasurama to punish the hypocrite, and worried about the
kids who were supposedly Acchan’s truant step-siblings, assuming
whatever the old man was spouting was real! I was avoiding his wild gaze,
nursing feelings of betrayal, anger, sorrow, pity..and wondering why the bloody
hell I came here! “Thank God Chitru I met you before I came back from
Karalmanna”, he said..which I construed
as circumstantial evidence for the veracity of the story…must be all true for
he had just returned from Trichur. Ha ha, and so that’s why Ammooma used
to wonder why he always had one foot in Trichur!
As a result of the sponging and pills,
Acchachan’s temperature plunged, followed by my respect for my Acchachan.
The moment I dreaded arrived soon enough. Acchachan recovered in a
weeks’ time. Did he remember the Hamlet-like febrile soliloquy at all? Did I
really hear what I thought I heard? Was it a bad dream? Acchachan would
look on pensively at me, clear his throat and stop in his tracks, or so I
thought. His brain was made of sterner stuff, and on the evening before his
discharge he tentatively enquired, avoiding my glance, if in his unconscious
spells he had talked about Chitra. Yes, I replied curtly, and I am sorry
you are like any other Nambudiri yoke, that’s what you told me. Acchachan
sat back resigned, wisely refraining from fanning the fires.
The trauma was unbearable. Here was my
ideal, my beloved, my childhood friend, my Acchachan, revered Nambudiri
reformer of Venad, who fought for the rights of Antherjanams, confessing
to an illicit liaison with an Antherjanam, unbeknownst to anyone! It was
as if I was carrying a bloody live grenade on my body, and which I could not
cast away. So, what was I supposed to do? Tell Acchan- will he launch
into a high-five? Tell Ammooma? Write an anonymous letter home? How
could this trespass be forgotten and forgiven? At least someone apart from me
should know..
The journey back home appeared much
shorter than the up-journey. For the most of the time, I planted myself at the
bogie entrance, eyes trained on the telegraph poles and wires, on which could
be seen droplets of rain fall, tremblingly shuffle with the winds, coalesce and
drop down to the earth. On the illam, there was a grand reception, and I
was treated as a hero, who had pulled the old man from the jaws of death. Acchan
even had tears in his eyes, that was the first and last time I saw him like
that.
I was in a hurry to leave Attingal as
soon as possible. I graduated that year and got a scholarship to attend the Sir
J J School of Art at Bombay. I may have turned my head away from Acchachan,
but the values and aesthetics internalised since my childhood were like a reluctant
legacy. An exposure to the outside world inculcated in me a more balanced and
inclusive view of morality. Gradually, the feeling of betrayal lost its sting,
and grudgingly I admitted to myself that extenuating circumstances were possible
in Acchachan’s case. I had not sought any further information on the how
this chinna veedu thing could have come about, at what stage of his
life. The episode changed my mental make-up forever. Cigarettes started getting
manufactured in India in a big way after Independence, and I could bid farewell
to the beedi. I became more discreet, lest I should have to harbour
secrets of my own, which I could accidentally reveal to my as yet unborn
grandchild in a bout of Pneumonia!
The thought of spilling the beans on Acchachan
never arose in my mind. Our relation was sacred, I still believed, all said and
done. It would have been betrayal. But I never spoke or wrote to Acchachan
after I left Trivandrum. Acchachan could be carrying an apprehension
about my conduct, and worried about my depth to keep the secret known only to
me in the whole clan. Never did I have any interest in knowing more about our
larger family of Trichur, I ran from even thoughts about them!
One day I was to learn that the
curtains had still not fallen upon the story. Acchachan left us seven
years after the fateful days spent with Acchachan at Quilon. I did not
feel an urge to attend his last rites, and by then the clan had grown, and I
had outgrown the clan. Shortly
thereafter I got a letter from a solicitor in Quilon. Acchachan had left
a letter for me with him. I was requested to call the solicitor and fix up an
appointment which reluctantly I did. I was told to be there with my
identification papers. Railways were a lot better by then, less zig-zag, or as
we say sigg-sagg and I reached the law-firm’s office at Quilon at the
appointed hour. The solicitor was a busy man and quite impersonally handed me a
moderately heavy envelope, after checking my identification, took my
acknowledgement, then showed me up to the door, at last uttering a few words of
condolence, which I thought was kind of him. I went back to my lodge, envelope
in my coat pocket. I carefully tore open the envelope, and out fell a steel
key, a Godrej emblem etched on the bow. There was a letter in a shaky hand
signed K7. Acchachan briefly thanked me for being such a valuable
company at District Hospital and securing him from the jaws of death. This is
the key to my locker in Kutchery branch of State Bank of Travancore, he wrote.
Take the key with your identification papers to the Manager and take the
contents, and surrender the key to the bank. Do not share information about
this legacy with anyone please, Mone!
My return ticket was for the next
evening. At 11.00 I reached the bank and went straight to the Manager. Acchachan
was held in high esteem by the bank, and I was not told to come next day or
next week, as is the common practice. Go to Mrs. Thangammal, show her your
identification and access your locker, leave the key with her and take her
acknowledgement. You also have the option to get the locker transferred to your
name after opening a new account, we shall waive the Introduction, since you
already have an account with our D.N.Road, Bombay branch. We wouldn’t mind that,
that will be a blessing for you, there is a three year wait-list for our
lockers. The lady was quite efficient, had no difficulty in interpreting my
papers, took my signatures at roughly 18 places, and led me upto the locker,
and left after operating her master-key. Inside the locker there was another
envelope, which contained two wads of hundred rupee notes! Rupees 20,000!
My heart leapt! I looked at the vault door instinctively! The first time I held so much cash was also at the instance of Acchachan, and now after his departure. It should have been worth 600 tolas of gold! Or a palatial house in Quilon or why even Bombay! A wave of mortification swept through me! Narayana! Was I coveting those riches? I replaced the wads with their envelope in the locker. It was Hush Money no doubt. The reward of keeping the old man’s secret. It was accompanied by no message, no missive, no explanation. He must have spent the rest of his life under threat of being stripped of his status, his dignity. I felt sorry for him, and livid at the same time for assuming I’d be ripe for a reward. To the best of my knowledge about family affairs, nobody got a windfall from Acchachan’s testaments. That Money was, for me, untouchable, and sure I was bitter at being presented with such a dilemma, and so crudely!
Anyway I could also not leave the Money there, I was sure the bankmen would not pinch it, it would just rot, no? I picked the envelope and the bloody cash like a dead rat and deposited it into my coat pocket crinkling my nose mentally, unsure how I’d dispose of it. I informed Mrs. Thangammal of conclusion of my business on the way out, handing her over the Godrej key. She in return handed over the acknowledgement, which I would have certainly consigned to the waste-paper basket, had she not been around. Strangely, she accompanied me to the main door, and from the top of the staircase, pointed to a building. That’s the Quilon office of the Yogakshemam Mahasabha, she said. Your Appooppan was a famous Nambudiri man. My name may be Tamil, but I am a Nambudiri, sort of, she giggled. There is a photograph of your Appooppan in the office, the Maaaneger told me, you know, they have their account with us. Ha ha, the bank has nursed the Malayalee trait of knowing everything about everyone nicely, I thought. It was the idea of taking a glimpse of Acchachan’s photograph that hit me, I was so curious.
I walked up to that dilapidated structure, and after
hesitating a bit, walked in. Only one gentleman in a clean shining mundu,
reading Manorama. The Sabha had fallen on bad times, with a
running battle between the members and the office-bearers going on and on, all
reported in the press. It appeared the office had no cleaning staff either. I
froze when I looked at Acchachan’s picture above the side window. It was
a young Kesavan. Nambudiri Kesavan, the legend said. Would Acchachan
like the “Nambudiri” I thought . The VT culture had perhaps ended. The
man looked up questioningly and seemed apologetic about the disarray, and said
it is now like this only saar I sayyy… vera entha parayaa! Suddenly the
expression turned to one of astonishment. Looking alternately at the picture
and me he said are you the nephew of Kesavan Saar who was with him in his
illness in the District Hospital? I only drove you from the station! God, you
resemble him so much! It could be you picture, I sayyy..he he he ende ammo!
I’m his grandson I explained. Irikku! Please sit saar! Ninnaḷkk
keaphi kuṭikkumea? Coffee? Will take some time saar he he he! The picture
we got from his home in Attingal! We lost a very great man, your uncle, I mean
your grandpa I sayyy..! Tell me, what can I do for you!
In a flash it came ! A divine revelation! I
reached for the envelope with the cash, drew it out and placed it on the table.
A donation I said, for the Sabha’s work. He hastily took out the cover
and tried to comprehend the amount. Ammo! Tondy? This is more
than what I earned in my whole life! He ran for the telephone frantically, but
it was dead. He put on his slippers and started for the door, came back
breathless, saying what should I tell the Secretary, he is in Trivandrum today,
scratching his head. I said no, no, no please we don’t want publicity at all. I
have to catch the flight, give me the receipt and let me go in God’s name!
They call me Ammavan, I’m the
Treasurer, he said, rummaging drawers for the receipt book, which took a
while...nobody donates or cares for poor Nambudiri women now, I sayyy…so
the receipt book is…I don’t know…but there it is, he got it out of the drawer
and dusting it he bowed to Acchahcan’s picture, counted the Money, and
started writing slowly like a child. Even after he dies he remembers the Antherjanams,
must be the biggest donation anybody gave them I sayyy…What is he writing for
Donor’s Name I wondered, without asking me my name? Seemed impolite to me to
ask. Finally he blew on the ink, carefully folded the yellowing paper, placed
it in a decaying envelope and handed it over to me, eyes moist !
What a relief! I stepped out and after
walking a dozen steps, and ensuring that Ammavan had retreated into the
room, took out the envelope. I opened the receipt. It was filled in cursive
letters fondly. The Donor’s Name said “Nambudiri Kesavan”! What a
perceptive man, Ammavan, I thought. Knew what the situation demanded! Or
that I looked appropriately destitute!
So I had check-mated Acchachan.
The whereabouts of King Bali are not known, but Acchachan I’m sure is in
heaven and smiling at his Mone’s smartness and generosity.