Death is a terrible affair, hardly ever affording us the time to be prepared before the irrevocable finality strikes. I had known that mother was going to die; it was an undisputed truth that was accepted after her final test results were discussed by a doctor with a solemn face, an outcome of all the years of his treating terminally-ill cancer patients. But now that she has actually died, I am at a loss. Mother had wanted to be buried in the backyard of her home, a property that she inherited from her parents and which now belongs to an eco-tourism group intending to convert it into a natural resort or something. Instead, she was incinerated in a matter of minutes, inside the electric pyre of the community funeral home in town. Her burning body left very little odour, in fact very little of anything. A handful of grey dust was scooped into an earthen pot, which was secured with a red cloth, to be lapped up by the holy water of Thirunavai, whenever we visited Kerala next. Until then, it would rest in front of a lighted lamp, alongside an enlarged black and white photograph that captured her beauty at its best.
Two days later, I am attempting to peel off my veil of sorrow and to move on with life. Mother had occupied the guest bedroom of our 3-BHK flat. It still smells of kuzhampu – the thick paste that she smeared on her body every day before bath – her herbal hair oil, and clothes that have not been used for a while. Surprisingly, I cannot yet identify the chemical smell of all the allopathic medicines which were her best friends in the last few months of her life. She seems to have taken it with her, which suits me. The room today smells as it always had, of her and things she had owned and loved.
I set forth, intending to remove all traces of my dead mother from the room, which I am planning to convert to a study for me to store my books and read in whenever I need a respite. I pull out her clothes first; I have asked an old age home representative to come and collect it later in the evening. I throw away her left over medicines, oils and powders along with the dentures she had stopped using years ago when her gums swelled up too much, and all those innumerable brochures and receipts of offerings to temples in Kerala. There is also a photo album, with her photographs with father in the early days of their marriage, my brother and me as toddlers, our wedding pictures and in the final page, a family photograph with father and her sitting and the rest of us standing and smiling happily. It may have been my father's last photograph, perhaps mother's too. Several forgotten moments captured into the black pages of a tattered book – that was something to treasure. Finally, in a polythene bundle, I find a stack of blue inlands, my mother's letters.
I move to the sitting room, turn the fan on at full speed and sit on the cushioned settee, my feet tucked under me, and lean on the soft fabric, eyes closed. I do not know if am expecting to uncover her anonymous lover, as so often happens in stories and movies. I wonder if these letters secure the identity of a special someone whose love my mother had preciously cherished in the form of letters. I untie the red cord with enthusiasm and the inlands fall down, flying here and there under the wind from a fan running at maximum speed. I pick them, stack them again and begin with the first letter. But I am soon disappointed. These are nothing more than regular correspondence between my mother and her mother. After skimming through a few, I am bored and almost giving up, when a particularly wrinkled inland catches my attention.
"The last one," I swear to myself and open to read it.
The inland, posted 27 years ago from Ramamangalam post office carried the news of Nanupulayan's death.
***
"High enough, kochambraatti?" Nanupulayan asked me, calling me his little mistress.
"Higher Nanu mama, higher!", I shouted.
"Still higher kochambraatti?"he asked.
"Even higher, higher, higher!", I cried out.
I was touching the sky on the swing that Nanupulayan had tied for me the previous day on the strongest branch of our jackfruit tree. Tucking his mundu inwards, he had dexterously climbed up with a grade one rope, chopped a coconut stem for the seat, and had the swing ready in an hour. His daughter, Ammini, almost my age, joined me at my persistence and we hung our feet in opposite directions and swung. Beginning with the popular movie songs of the times, we sang Onam songs, boat race songs, patriotic songs, devotional songs, self-composed songs and even the national anthem until the swing was flying so high that all we could do was shriek.
Grandmother hated it when I played with Ammini. She hated it more when I addressed Nanupulayan as Maman (uncle). She complained to my mother that city life had spoiled me and that I was forgetting class while interacting with the ones Gods had created unequal by addressing them as uncles.
"But Nanu Maman is older than my father, how can I call him by name?" I asked grandmother, annoyed how she could overlook such an obvious and simple logic. She ignored the question, as she always did when she could not find an appropriate answer.
Ammini was going to school, a privilege that her parents and most of her friends did not have. She seemed to be doing well too. She confided in me that she wanted to grow up and be a doctor who treated poor people for free, like the Dr (Fr) Mathews who ran the community clinic. When I shared this with grandmother, expecting it to make her appreciate Ammini a little more, she said that society was degrading itself by admitting people like her to schools.
“If all the Parayans and Pulayans get educated and covet real jobs, who would be there to do the farm job and other work?” she asked, hoping to defend herself.
“Perhaps I should employ myself as Ammini’s maid when she becomes a doctor. Will it not be fair, considering that her parents worked for mine?” I told her in a tone unbecoming of a 12 year old.
Those were the days of acute casteism in rural Kerala, when the so-called lower castes including Pulayas were relegated to manual labor that benefited the upper castes of the state. Ammini’s mother and Nanupulayan’s wife, Theyipulayi, was employed by my mother’s family to do every domestic work that was asked of her. This included fetching pails of water, washing clothes, mopping the floor, cleaning the cowshed, bathing and milking the cows and almost anything else. Though I had not understood it then, Theyipulayi was consistently battling the amorous advances of at least two of my uncles who regarded it as their birthright to demand the services of the lower-caste housemaid in their bedrooms as well. Theyipulayi always covered her chest with a cloth, squatting in a direction opposite from where the men sat while she scrubbed the utensils, and to her credit, had four children who looked exactly like Nanupulayan, of whom Ammini was almost a xerox copy. When I once visited the family’s tiny hut at a corner of our stretch of farmland, I was amazed by how neat and tidy it looked in spite of the woman of the house being busy cleaning someone else’s dirt the whole day. I was sure then that Theyipulayi’s days had more than 24 hours and she had at least two hidden hands in some part of her body.
I must confess that I did not mind being Ammini’s maid. I was already bored of school and was not aspiring to anything beyond a 10th form pass and an early marriage to a rich, handsome man who would be crazy about me, buy me red and yellow chiffon sarees and would take me to movie theaters every week to watch the latest films and buy me peanuts and candy to munch on. Being Ammini’s maid was a viable alternative. Ammini was much more loving and affectionate than my own family and would certainly treat me well. I was sure she would give me free medicines when I was ill and let me watch the 7:30 pm teleserial every day. When I shared my aspiration with grandmother, she thumped my knuckles with the hot spoon with which she was sautéing vegetables and it really hurt.
After two months of mindless celebration and unadulterated fun, my vacation was over and we came back to the city to proceed with my normal, boring school life. On an otherwise inconsequential day, I heard mother talking to my father about the recent letter from grandmother. I listened only because I caught the familiar names in the discussion. It was about Ammini’s family. Nanupulayan was caught red-handed with an expensive item stolen from our house where he was free to enter anytime, and was beaten black and blue by my uncles and the other upper-caste Nairs of the locality. He was ordered never to set foot in the compound, and to vacate the hut he was occupying and leave the farmland before the next morning. That night he climbed the same jackfruit tree that held my swing and hung himself on the second strongest branch.
Theyipulayi left the village with her children. The shame must have been unbearable. No one has heard from them ever since, but I like to believe that Ammini is a doctor somewhere, giving free treatment to poor people, as she had always wanted.
***
Memories about Nanupulayan and my childhood make me realise yet again why I hate the village and my grandmother, long since dead. I had wept on the news of Nanu’s death and even waived my dinner for a day. I was sure he could not steal anything; I knew he was framed and tortured. I even suspected murder. Upper castes can get away with anything, I was sure. And in some way, I have associated my friendship with him and his daughter as a reason that could have prompted this crime.
Tonight I dream of Nanupulayan. I find it difficult to make others believe this, but I have the ability to communicate with anyone dead or alive through my dreams. For the fear of being branded insane, I usually do not reveal the details of these encounters to everyone. The experience is not always pleasant. I pinch myself and get up if I catch the white hair or the nasal tone of my grandmother because of my obvious dislike for her. I loved my grandfather more after he confessed to me how wretched his life was in the 40 years he spent with my grandmother, saying that even hell, where he was currently doomed to, was more pleasant. One of these days when I am ready, I might ask my mother to come and talk to me.
Today it is Nanupulayan, who comes uninvited to my dream but he is still welcome. I am sitting on the swing that he made me, but instead of forcing the swing from behind, he is sitting on a branch high up, beckoning me. I know that was the branch that marked his end because a rope with the noose was dancing in the windless night, light as a feather. I am pushing hard with my feet to swing high, to see him. But I cannot move. Suddenly the moon shines and I find bruises all over his face and body. So this was what my uncles did to him.
“Did you steal Nanu Maman?” I ask him.
He smiles, wiping away tears from his eyes with the right palm, the white teeth, a few missing, glowing against the coal black skin.
“What did you steal?” I ask, offended that he did not reply to my previous enquiry.
Nanupulayan opens his palm. Inside is a golden bracelet that my eldest uncle had gifted me during my stay there that fateful summer, which I had lovingly taken off to gift my dear friend Ammini a day before we left the village.
She had refused, I had insisted.
~Vidya Panicker is a writer from Kerala, India, and an editor at poetrycircle.com. Her work has been published in Feminist Review, Muse India, Eastlit, Indian Review and Contemporary Literary Review of India, among others. She won the second prize in the All India Poetry Contest 2014, held by the Poetry Society of India.