The Legends of Khasak Read online

  Khasak was astir. Frenzied troops of children came to the arid ground, they uprooted thorn bushes, they scared away the snakes with strong-scented tree barks. The animal to be slaughtered was chosen—Cholayumma’s black goat, which she sold to the village for half the market price.

  ‘But it is a eunuch,’ said Ponthu Rawuthar the village elder, ‘and can bring no luck.’

  ‘So what?’ retorted Aliyar, ‘We have got him for half the price, and that is luck enough.’

  Aliyar agreed to keep the goat till the slaughter, since Kunhamina began crying over the animal as soon as

  Cholayumma told her that it was to be sacrificed. Aliyar came to Cholayumma’s house and led the goat away. Let it be tethered to the load-rest, he decided, till the day of slaughter. Till then it would be his mascot.

  The eunuch goat was a sweet-tempered animal, tame as a pet. Aliyar fed it dosas in the morning, and tea, which it drank in delicate sips. Mutthu Pandaram the mendicant asked Aliyar, ‘The goat has a credit with you, does it?’

  ‘Yes. And why not? If your cousin Karumandi Pandaram can have a credit here, the goat can have it as well.’

  ‘What be the truth of that, O Aliyar?’

  ‘Simple is the truth, O saffron-clad one. Your half-brother owes five rupees and a quarter for the buffalo meat he gobbled. He is on a pilgrimage, and I can get hold of neither the Pandaram nor the money.’

  The goat soon became an attraction for the children. They slipped out of school to gather green shoots for it, and let out peals of laughter as the animal grazed their fingertips while nibbling greedily at the berries they held forth. Kunhamina kept away.

  When the children left in the evening, Appu-Kili came to the goat. He brought it neither fruit nor flower, but only a cretin’s love. He stroked its condemned neck, gently he pressed his head against the goat’s and crooned consolations.

  The Thursday before the feast the Khazi decided to go to the hospital and see the mullah.

  ‘I shall watch him till Sunday morning.’ he told Aliyar, ‘and if he is well enough, I shall bring him in a bullock cart by midday.’

  ‘Let him at least lie down before the fire of sacrifice,’ Aliyar said. ‘We could borrow the Maeshtar’s easy chair.’

  ‘I go now, Aliyar. And keep some money for the rental on the cart when I return.’

  The Khazi set out for Palghat town ... Maimoona bathed and smeared herself with scented oils, and walked the square displaying the Champaka flowers she wore in her hair. She came to the seedling house. Ravi had not got out of bed.

  ‘Our teacher has too much sleep,’ she said, walking in.

  Ravi sat up yawning and looked round for cigarettes.

  ‘Here’I have brought you two packets. Smoke away!’

  Ravi took the packets, pulled out one and lit it.

  ‘Again,’ he said, ‘you have brought me the Tiger brand. It is firewood.’

  ‘It is the wood of the funeral pyre.’

  As she said this, the cigarette burst into flame, and Maimoona looked on in amusement. Ravi spat it out and lit another.

  ‘Teacher-Kutti,’ she said, ‘your innards will burn out.’

  ‘Let them, no one will miss me when I go.’

  She moved a pace closer, and said, ‘A lie!’

  ‘I am sorry, Maimoona.’

  God, said Ravi, You gave me Your love, gave it with fond indulgence, yet it dies in the deserts within me. I am in flight, Merciful God: let me savour my weariness. Then through strange and wondrous Mandalas came the voice of his father: My beloved son, here I lie paralysed, awaiting your return.

  Father, do not pine for me, said Ravi. I journey away to free us both from memory. I walk, an Avadhuta, a renunciate along the shores of the Infinite Ocean. Journeying, I let my slough of memory moult away. When I reach the last shore, when I wait for the last redeeming wave ...

  His father’s voice said, I cannot die without my memories, death will be incomplete.

  Ravi was back in gross reality. ‘Maimoona,’ he said, ‘what news from Palghat?’

  She shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘No news.’

  When the Khazi reached the hospital, he found Thithi Bi seated on the veranda of the ward, leaning on a pillar.

  ‘Umma, how is he faring?’ the Khazi asked her.

  ‘Asleep.’

  ‘Did the doctor tell you anything?’

  ‘Nothing, my child.’

  The doctor and nurse on their afternoon round undid the bandage. The lesion was still on the toe, drained of blood, a cool and sanitized presence. The mullah lay in a daze. The Khazi suddenly came upon something moving on the bed, tiny as a paddy husk.

  ‘Lice,’ Thithi Bi said sadly.

  ‘These lice are dangerous, Umma.’

  Thithi Bi wiped her eyes. ‘The doctor wanted the beard shaved,’ she said, ‘but Mollakka cannot let the beard go.’

  Gently she stroked the old beard. The frazzled hair stood on beds of dandruff, the grey lice moved over the scaly crust, baffled and thirsty.

  That afternoon the doctor called the Khazi out, and asked him, ‘Are you a relative?’

  ‘No, Saar, I am the Khazi of Sayed Mian Sheikh.’

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘It is a spirit, Saar.’

  ‘Very well,’ the doctor said, ‘since you are close to the family, I shall tell you. It is cancer, and it is far gone. I suggest you take him back.’

  The Khazi came back to Thithi Bi and said, ‘These English medicines are no good, Umma. Let us go back.’

  He did not stay on to hear what she had to say. He walked out of the hospital and past the fort of Tipu Sultan; behind the fort the land was deserted. The Khazi stood on a grassy mound and looked at the mountain pass far away, he heard the birds and the thunder of a distant train. He was agonized, ecstatic: Khasak’s mullah was dying!

  In the Mosque of the King. The early dark of its ancient interior. Cobwebs and dust.

  ‘I feel like a housebreaker,’ Ravi said. Maimoona did not say anything.

  ‘Here is a drink for you,’ he said, holding out the bottle towards her.

  ‘How does it taste, Maimoona?’

  ‘Warm, pleasureable.’

  They lay down on an old mat. The night was a luminous blue over the gravestones.

  Suddenly she tensed. ‘Do you hear?’ she asked. She rose naked from the silt of darkness.

  ‘What?’ Ravi asked.

  It came through the lucid summer night:

  La Ilaha Illallah!

  La Ilaha Illallah!

  ‘What is that?’ Ravi asked again.

  Maimoona said, ‘The dead body.’

  The Flowering

  The buffalo cart hired from Palghat lumbered over the rough track. Beneath its yoke hung the mullah’s lantern. The Khazi walked in front, the lantern threw his shadow, black and serpentine. The cart came into the square and came to a halt before Aliyar’s shop. Raising his hands the Khazi called in a resonant bass:

  La Ilaha Illallah!

  Soon the villagers’ lanterns threw an arc of dull light around the cart. They closed in, their lanterns raised; the mullah lay in peace at last, his head on Thithi Bi’s lap. The Khazi gestured to the crowd, ‘Take down the mayyat.’

  In the light of several lanterns the Khazi gazed again on the dead face. The lice had gone. The hair of the scraggly beard, brittle and silvery, continued to grow on their livid scabs in the macabre after-life. The lice knew the coming of death, like seers who sensed the advance of the distant hurricane or the earth tremor. On the journey back from the hospital, they fled the strands of hair, they raced down the precipices of facial wrinkles, then across the interminable desert of the cart’s matting, and over the edge of the cart’s frame plunged into the infinite void beyond.

  The villagers turned towards Chetali with personal and inarticulate prayers.

  The Mosque of the King; Ravi and Maimoona stood in its haunted darkness.

  ‘Go,’ said Maimoona, ‘go!’


  Ravi stood dazed by the perils of the walk.

  ‘Go,’ Maimoona repeated, ‘go!’

  Ravi stepped out, and over sharp quartz and slippery rock he walked towards the lanterns of Khasak. He turned to look back—Maimoona was bathing in the haunted waters of the Araby tank ... Ravi skirted the square and reached the seedling house.

  The mullah’s body lay in the mosque, awaiting burial the next morning, the day of the feast.

  The women of the village sat round Thithi Bi, consoling her.

  ‘It is fortunate,’ Cholayumma said, ‘being buried on the day of the sacred feast.’

  ‘It is fortunate,’ Thithi Bi agreed weakly.

  ‘The Sheikh’s mercy.’

  ‘Yes. His mercy.’

  After the burial the villagers went through the ritual bath to cleanse themselves for another encounter with death—the ancestors. Night fell, oil lamps shone on the consecrated ground, their flames as wild as the East Wind that blew over them. Drums beat the clip-clop of the ancient cavalcade. Tonight the mullah would walk with the ancestors.

  The tattoo put Ravi to sleep, and dreams of peace came to him. He saw the mullah, now radiant, changing the litter in the school yard into flower-beds.

  The epidemic had unsettled the work of the school. There was an examination to go through, and the annual picnic. Then the summer vacation.

  ‘What examination is this?’ Madhavan Nair laughed. ‘The same class, the same teacher.’

  ‘Like human destiny, isn’t it?’ Ravi observed.

  ‘A lot like it, Maash.’

  ‘It is really misleading, Madhavan Nair. There are far too many classes in my school for any teacher to handle—’

  Pupils concerned with the rebirth of lice, with journeys in time, with dinosaurs, pupils who taught their teacher the lessons of wondering and belief.

  The day after the examination, in which the children shared the questions and answers, they gathered early for the picnic to Chetali. They set out with song and laughter. They crossed the big ridge and began the climb in the kindly sun. As they climbed higher they saw giant insects and plants with large leaves. The children broke ranks and went after these. Singing gave way to glad noises of discovery. Ravi kept anxious watch as he brought up the rear of this disorderly column. Kunhamina walked beside him.

  ‘Why have you children stopped singing?’ Ravi asked them.

  ‘These butterflies, Saar,’ came the answer, ‘so big, Saar!’

  ‘And these red spiders, Saar, with silken coats!’

  ‘And these dragonflies—’

  Appu-Kili had declined to join the picnic. Perhaps the tutelage had ended, Ravi pondered in sadness, and the Parrot was about to embark on a new and solitary quest.

  The children walked on chattering, squabbling. Someone had hurt a toe, another had stepped on a thorn.

  ‘Why doesn’t somebody sing?’ Ravi suggested again.

  The children prompted each other, nudging and pinching. They were noisy again, when Mangustan the youngest began a solo song, a high pitched melody.

  I utter the Bismi, my dear God, I have not forgotten the sacrifices and the offerings ...

  The children knew the song.

  ‘Saar,’ said Kunhamina, almost in tears, ‘Mollakka wrote this song and sang it.’

  It was the ballad of the Badr War, it brought the Badrins to Khasak, the battle raged in the palm groves ... Ravi and the children were on the top of the mountain. They stood round the Sheikh’s grave, the crypt guarded by minarets the millennial winds had carved out of natural rock.

  At noon the class sat down to eat, they shared and ate together. After that it was time to play in the rocky pool of Chetali.

  Adam told Ravi, ‘There is a water demon in the pool, Saar!’

  ‘Can we throw stones at it, Saar?’ asked Mangustan.

  ‘It comes up for air,’ said Khadija, ‘it changes form and flies out like a water fowl.’

  ‘She doesn’t know, Saar,’ Kholusu said, ‘it is a winged serpent, Saar!’

  A winged serpent? The sunlight flooded Ravi’s memory. A winged serpent with a diademed head, riding the mirage for a lonely child?

  ‘Well, my children,’ Ravi said, ‘don’t throw stones at the water demon. It is a gentle being.’

  Ravi drew away from the children as they played in the pool. He sat beneath a Vaka tree which stood in full bloom. He was surprised to find that Kunhamina had followed him there.

  ‘Don’t you want to play in the pool?’ Ravi asked.

  ‘I feel ...’ she struggled with the word, ‘shy.’

  She came close.

  ‘What is the matter with you?’ Ravi asked, looking into her eyes.

  ‘May I sit down, Saar? Near you?’

  ‘What are you sad about, my little one?’

  ‘Sadness.’

  Ravi stretched out a soothing hand. Kunhamina collapsed over him, delicately. And then she was on his lap, heavy and mysterious.

  ‘Go, little one,’ Ravi said, ‘join your friends.’

  She rose, she walked away a few paces. She turned and came back.

  ‘I am ill,’ she said.

  Her eyes brimmed over.

  ‘Ayye!’ Ravi said, ‘crying?’

  Kunhamina pressed her hands over her navel and bent forward. Ravi held her. Suddenly he saw them on the silver anklets and on her feet—crimson drops!

  Ravi clenched and unclenched his palm, where the lines of fate lay like desert trails; the crimson drops had fallen on them.

  Ravi gazed in amazement on the miracle, the first blood-flowers of womanhood!

  The Peace of the Lake

  Ravi’s mind went back to the mountain and to the girl bent over him in intimacy and pain. What lay, Ravi wondered, between the loss of innocence and rites for departed ancestors?

  The school closed for summer, but there was much paperwork to be done, work become burdensome through postponement. Almost every week there would be some routine query from the District Board on the strength of the school or on the level of literacy in the village. This had persuaded Kelu Menon the postman to visit Khasak every week. Kelu Menon, now grown old, chose Sundays for his weekly or bi-weekly visits, days when Ravi could spare time to talk to him. Ravi was the learned one and Kelu Menon took pleasure in conversing with the learned ... That Sunday, early forenoon, Ravi caught sight of the messenger coming over the big ridge. These walks, from village to village, were long and lonely, and were occasions for fantasy; Kelu Menon would jog along at times and imagine he was the mail runner from another time, a legendary hero with spear and bells and rucksack labelled ‘Royal Mail’.

  ‘At last, Maash!’ Kelu Menon called out from the gate, ‘You have a real letter this week. Not a brown envelope from the District Board!’

  The postman dusted his feet, came in and made himself comfortable on one of the classroom benches. He began rummaging in his bag, ‘I’m sure you have one. I can’t tell its contents, it is in English. Ah, here it is!’

  He handed Ravi the opened envelope. Ravi took the letter out, and began to read. The postman watched in mounting anxiety.

  ‘All is well, Maash?’

  ‘All’s well.’

  The delicate scrawl on classy parchment, the trusting message, and the imminence of it all, Ravi, this is me ...

  ‘It is good news, isn’t it?’ Kelu Menon repeated.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘The Lord of Guruvayoor be praised!’

  Ravi folded the exquisite blue parchment and slipped it back into the envelope. Kelu Menon, now at peace, settled down to gossip, ‘It’s elections in Kozhanasseri—to the panchayat.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘You sit here reading and teaching while things happen in the world outside. Kozhanasseri is all set to go red!’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Do they know about it in Russia?’

  ‘I suppose they do.’

  ‘Oh yes. They have their spies.’

  Kelu Men
on got up and shifted his shoulder-bag into a more comfortable position.

  ‘It’s getting to be midday,’ he said. ‘Let me get on.’

  Kelu Menon left. The winged serpents rose in the mirage and beckoned to Ravi with anxious passion.

  Ravi took out the letter and read it again:

  Ravi, this is me, your Padma. It was seven years ago that we lay on the cool sands watching the birds of night streak overhead. If I come again to disturb your peace, pardon me.

  I will reach Palghat on the tenth of May. The train reaches Palghat early forenoon. Here in Coimbatore, I am Jyoti’s guest. Remember shy little Jyoti, our classmate at Tambaram? He is District Collector here and has been of great help.

  Wait for me.

  Padma

  Ravi looked at the signature, looked long, absorbed, at that image of the self; his own signature was in disuse, it might have worn away in his loneliness. Its spirit might migrate to the whorl on the thumb before the final dissolution. Padma, gazing at him from that pictogram, tenderly! He gazed back in arid gratitude.

  Ten more days to go; Ravi was surprised to find that he was still capable of impatience.

  ‘You look drawn, Maash,’ Madhavan Nair observed on one of their walks. ‘Must be the heat.’

  ‘Must be—’

  ‘Monsoon is going to be heavy.’

  The usual gambits, repetitions.

  The ten days were over. Ravi rose early, he saw the Morning Star shine down in cool brilliance. He walked to Koomankavu flashing the fibre torch. Then the first bus to Palghat ... He was early. After coffee at a wayside shop, Ravi climbed over to the platform. The platform wasn’t crowded and at its ends there were trees and benches scented with coal and steam ... The train, a rickety ‘passenger ’, came in with the clatter of ancient pistons.