Diary of a Malayali Madman Read online

  diary of a

  malayali madman

  N. PRABHAKARAN

  Translated from the Malayalam by

  JAYASREE KALATHIL

  Contents

  Wild Goat

  Tender Coconut

  Pigman

  Invisible Forests

  Diary of a Malayali Madman

  Preface

  P.S. Section

  Acknowledgements

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright

  wild goat

  1.

  No one sees him; no one hears him. No one, perhaps, even knows about him. High up on the cliff, at the edge of the frightening drop, he is alone in the moonlight, a forlorn slice of darkness, a dream animal. He bleats. His gaze wanders the valley. In the countless lanes hidden beneath the undergrowth, he searches for me. Agitated wanderings, secret pleasures sprouting like new meadow grass, anxious thickets of thorn – his memories are endless. He waits for the moment when they will merge together in a brilliant dance, a moment like a drop of fire. In the intensity of his anticipation, he calls out, again and again.

  2.

  Tomorrow morning, they will wake me up and take me to the city. The jeep is already parked in the yard, and Pappachan is asleep on a mat on the veranda. He will wake up before dawn, wash the jeep, bathe and have his breakfast. He will cross himself and sit behind the wheel, start the jeep and bring it to life. It will crawl up the hill before racing down in a cloud of red dust.

  Riding shotgun will be Babychayan. Pailychettan will sit in the back with me, holding on to my arm and never taking his eyes off me.

  They’ll take me to the doctor. Leaving me outside, Babychayan will tell the doctor all about me, half of which will be lies. The doctor will know this. Still, he’ll call me inside, sit me down in a revolving chair and interrogate me. My answers will also be half-truths and lies. Then they will make me lie down on a high bed and look, kindly, into my eyes. And after that? Injections that will send me into the tender world of forgetfulness. ECT. Chains. Solitary confinement meant for dangerous patients. Actually, no, I don’t know, I have no idea what fate awaits me.

  3.

  Last year, on my way home for the Christmas holidays, I had an idea. I wanted to forget everything that I had learnt, and make sure that I didn’t learn anything new from then on. I didn’t spend time analysing why I had this idea. In fact, I was not able to analyse it as it had already taken root inside me and overwhelmed me.

  After the holidays, I went back to college, attended my classes, even took part in a play on College Day, performing the part of an old migrant man.

  After the last exam, everyone left and the hostel was deserted. I stayed on for one more night and then set out for home early in the morning. The bus was more crowded than usual. It was almost noon by the time the bus gasped its way up the hill roads and stopped in front of No. 1 Toddy Shop.

  As I walked home through the cashew orchard, I made up a game: Recite all the words I remembered one by one and spit them out.

  The sun-baked lanes were deserted, an uncomfortable silence waited for me around each corner like a rasping sigh.

  I began the game.

  Sublimity. Objective correlative. Syllable. Diphthong. Absurdism. So many words, so many concepts.

  By the time I was walking down the hill, my mouth was dry and my throat sore. I stopped the game. A thick fog of silence spread inside and around me, and followed me all the way home.

  I lingered in the front yard for a while before ringing the doorbell.

  Anniechechi opened the door and, with the usual, ‘Hi Georgootty,’ she walked back, calling casually upstairs, ‘Georgootty is here.’

  Babychayan was busy, his table covered in envelopes and pieces of paper. He handed me a file with a list of addresses and said: ‘Georgootty, write these addresses on these envelopes. I need a shower.’

  I washed my face and hands, hung my shirt on the clothesline and carefully picked up the pen. I’d finished writing the addresses on around twenty-five envelopes by the time Babychayan came back. Casually, he picked up an envelope and I saw his face blanch. ‘Georgootty!’ he thundered.

  I looked at him and was not afraid. I gave him a slow smile. He stared at me and, as I continued smiling, something like fear congealed in his wide open eyes. I had written my address on all of the envelopes.

  4.

  Anniechechi and I are of the same age, but she is very confident – arrogant even. Her arms are as strong as any man’s. Her substantial body radiates an energy that diminishes everything around her. Her eyes reflect poise and competence.

  She rules over this household. That’s not surprising, really, as there is no one else here to be the ruler apart from them – my brother Baby and his wife Annie. My duty is to obey them.

  5.

  Last year, on the day before Easter, our father passed away. Appachan had been drinking all day long. In the evening, he pigged out on beef, drank some more and went to bed. A little after midnight, he got up and vomited – not what he ate and drank, but a massive amount of blood. Then he keeled over and died, face down in that blood. The neighbours came first; they informed the priest. One by one, the whole community was there, crowding over the yard, veranda and the entire compound.

  The deceased – Varkichettan – was a man of consequence in our community. He’d migrated from Manimala at the age of forty-five, his only companion a young woman. It was he who paved the way for others from Ponkunnam, Kanjirappally, Ranni and so on, other migrants who made this forest their home.

  Hillsides that barely let in sunlight, ebony-skinned people, meadows where tigers skulked. Varkichettan, my father, fought the forest, the animals and the forest folk single-handedly, cultivated plants and trees strange to the hills, and created a thirty-acre rubber plantation. He was the first to step up to build roads, the church and the school. He fathered five children. The fifth childbirth took his wife’s life and, with that, he lost his vigour and his drive, and succumbed to a life steeped in alcohol and ganja.

  All of his five children were boys. The eldest two didn’t make it past their infancy. The middle son, Kunjukunju, wasted away his life drinking and whoring around until someone beat him to death. That left the last two: Baby and Georgekutty. People pointed at us and said, ‘That young one, Georgekutty – he is feckless. Won’t come to anything. But his brother Baby – he is a chip off the old block.’

  6.

  The task of analysing and differentiating between good and bad has always been beyond my capabilities. However, there is one thing I do know, and it is this: Love is a want, a privation. One can love another person only as long as that person is in some way or the other inferior to oneself. Otherwise, it becomes either a kind of uneasy dependency or a need for control disguised as affection. Anything else is just a fantasy. The only reason people enact friendship or closeness to one another is to overcome some sense of deficiency within them.

  Maybe these thoughts are just a reflection of the times I live in, a world view restricted by my current context. I would much rather not have any thoughts at all about the human condition, and get through life – like an ant or a musk deer – concerned only with the day-to-day needs of my small world, but I seem to be unable to do that. Even my own experiences seem beyond me.

  It is Babychayan who takes care of all my needs, makes decisions about every aspect of my life – the food I eat, the clothes I wear, where I go … I am in need of nothing, never had to wait for anything.

  ‘Georgootty, you have everything,’ Govindankutty, who is now dead, had said to me several times. His family were the rulers of this place once. It was from his ancestor that my father b
ought this land, paying six rupees for an acre. This whole hill belonged to Govindankutty’s family at one point but, by the time he was born, all that was left was the family home and the bit of land it sat on.

  Govindankutty knew privation, not having enough money for his favourite food, for clothes, for love … And he died stuck in privation. Imprisoned within that frail body, his heart simply stopped beating one day.

  I do not love death; I don’t want it to come slyly, uninvited, and steal me away. I will not allow God to humiliate me in that way.

  7.

  I was sitting behind Appayi’s hut, eating sweet potato. Dusk settled around us, the shadows under the jackfruit tree darkened. The dying embers of Appayi’s fire warmed us and cast a dull red glow on our skins.

  Appayi handed me a strip of banana leaf with a chunk of steaming, peeled sweet potato on it. He added a piece of jaggery to intensify its sweetness, and smiled at me like a naughty child. He ate all his food, even meat, cooked like this – directly on an open fire.

  Like most of the migrants here, Appayi was originally from Thiruvithamkur. He came up here with his wife almost thirty years ago. While the other migrants took root and put out new shoots, Appayi withered and dried. With no children to nurture and no relatives to keep them company, all he and his wife Sarachettathi had to show for those hard years was a hut and the ten cents of land on which it stood.

  Appayi was over fifty, his hair and beard were completely grey. His eyes were silver from long, endless days of sleeplessness. Exhaustion darkened the wrinkles on his face. Tethered to his barren life, his wife too had become a lifeless old wraith.

  ‘Let’s go into the forest tomorrow,’ I said, gripped by a sudden desire. He nodded idly.

  Appayi was the king of the forest. He knew it like the lines in his palm. For thirty years, he had lived off it, trusting in it and refusing to plant rubber, sell cashew or work for other planters. He was born for the forest. His skin exuded the scent of dry leaves soaked in dew. He was good at avoiding the forest guards when he went into the forest to cut rattan canes. He wove them into baskets and his wife sold them at the market.

  Appayi had no worries, no anxieties about tomorrow, not even about death. He spent days on end in the forest. No one knew how he survived in there. In the forest, Appayi had no enemies.

  Still, on that evening, in the light of the dying fire, I saw that his face was darker than usual. I heard him whisper the name of the Christ between mouthfuls. His voice was shaky. Something was troubling him but I didn’t want to ask him about it. So I sat there, silently sharing his anxiety.

  ‘Appayi … Hey, Appayi …’

  An anxious voice called out from the front of the hut. I recognized the voice instantly. Babychayan!

  As he got up and walked to the front of the hut, Appayi gave me a stern look telling me to stay put. I stood back and watched them whisper before setting off together.

  When they disappeared down the lane, Sarachettathi came out of the hut.

  ‘Looks like she is gone,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Rosily. Pathrose’s daughter.’

  I had no idea what she was talking about. Seeing my bewilderment, she said, ‘Your brother knocked her up. They gave her some medicine to get rid of it. Seems like it has all gone wrong now.’

  She stopped speaking and looked around, scared.

  8.

  ‘Anniechechi, who are you scared of?’ The question popped out of my mouth, unchecked. She was sitting across from me at the dining table, just the two of us. Babychayan had gone out.

  She stared at me, not quite sure what to make of my question. Then I saw her face darken, little by little, as the question spun around in her brain and she came to an unintended conclusion.

  An oceanic tiredness washed over me. I noticed that my voice was trembling and realized that I myself was not completely sure what my question meant.

  ‘None of us are really alive, chechi,’ I said, anxiously. ‘Every night, the moon fills our yard with light too, but none of us see it. We are too busy to appreciate it.’

  Anniechechi stared at me and, consumed by a desire to subjugate the sense of superiority implicit in her look, I persevered: ‘Take coffee, for instance. We drink our coffee. Babychayan runs around buying more and more acres of coffee plantations. You’ve seen coffee bushes, haven’t you? There’s purity in their shadows, a sacredness you cannot find even in the church.

  ‘Or take Mathan, the man who works in our orchards,’ I continued. ‘He might be a simpleton but he is still a human being. We don’t acknowledge that, do we? Or consider the deer and the rabbits. The weather cools down and we pull on our sweaters, huddle under our blankets. But the rabbit and the deer – they run around in the forest, in the plantations, frolicking in the cold. Or the whistling wind that rises in the afternoon. Do we hear its music? We don’t, because we sit in here, behind closed doors and windows.

  ‘You’ll soon have children. Would they be any better, have any appreciation for any of this? My father settled in these hills, cultivated rubber, made a whole heap of money, and we live in splendour because of it. There are others who’ve succumbed to a life of drunkenness and debauchery and violence, but not us! My brother is a smart man, a strong and capable man. He knows how to make money and he’ll become an even richer man than my father. We Punnakkunnel folk are at the top, what with our rubber and cardamom and black pepper, and our own jeep. We’ll acquire more land, expand this house even further. Still, chechi, how can we go on worshipping God and Mammon at the same time? I don’t know. I want to say … Have you looked east from our rooftop, chechi? The forest is right there, within grasping distance and, beyond that, the forests of Mysore. So many trees … So green, so achingly green that even the colour seems alive. And I feel like crying. All these trees … All these forests …’

  ‘Georgootty, stop it,’ Anniechechi interrupted in a stern voice. She was on her feet. Her nose was red, and I saw the flames of anger flickering in her eyes.

  But I was not afraid. I did not feel I had said anything inappropriate.

  9.

  In the evening as the light faded, Babychayan came home with a group of people. They sat on the veranda and talked loudly. I had no interest in their conversation, but I could hear what they were saying.

  ‘We have to grab the seat this time and not let go. If Babychayan steps forward, there is no reason why we can’t win. If they won’t give it to us, we’ll take it anyway – by force if necessary.’

  Someone laughed loudly. The ruckus continued, steadily increasing in volume as the drinking and card-playing carried on late into the night. Much later, they left and silence descended upon the house.

  I lay in my bed, sleepless, watching the moonlight through the open window. Gradually, an image took shape in my mind, an image of an owl, resplendent with silvery feathers and round eyes overflowing with a timeless wisdom. I watched carefully as the owl pulsated, alternately growing as large as the sky and shrinking into a tiny dot.

  A knock on the door brought me back from this spectacle. I got up and opened the door to find my brother standing there, swaying on unsteady legs.

  He grabbed me by my collar, and shouted: ‘So you’ve started smoking ganja now, have you?’

  He paid no attention to my denial and slapped me across the face. I tried to get away from him, but he punched me in the stomach and pushed me on to the bed. I watched his body grow big and terrifying right before my eyes. I couldn’t breathe.

  10.

  Anniechechi’s father was a businessman in Bangalore, an ogre with slabs of fat hanging off his cheeks and jowls, and thick, black hair covering his forearms. His thighs were hunks of meat struggling to burst out of his trouser legs, his pale tongue slipped out every now and then to slither over his lips. But the most disgusting thing about him was his voice – the baying of a greedy, hankering animal.

  We didn’t have a relationship that called for strong emotions, love or hate. Stil
l, I felt a deep-seated hatred for him from the very first time I met him, a hatred that only intensified every time I saw him after that. I was certain that he saw me as an enemy, and that every word from his mouth was a poisonous dart.

  Anniechechi was his only daughter and he came to see her often, laden with presents. He would hug and kiss her on her forehead and talk non-stop. In the presence of her doting father, Anniechechi changed into someone else, and the house reverberated with her happy laughter and conversation.

  On his visit last month, he asked, ‘Annie, dear, how is Georgootty doing?’

  ‘How’s he doing? As always. No change.’

  ‘Aren’t you scared of him?’

  ‘I used to be, at first. But he is harmless.’

  ‘Still. It must be hard to have a sick person living with you…’

  ‘Sick? Do you know what he says? He says everyone else is sick.’

  Anniechechi guffawed and her father laughed with her.

  ‘That’s not surprising, is it? What else would a mad person say?’ he said and laughed again.

  Like a cold wind carrying the stench of decay, his laughter hung heavily in my room.

  11.

  The fever has let up its assault on my body. I am drenched in sweat. A dry wind swirls in my head.

  I don’t know how long I had been lying in my bed, shivering, hugging myself under the blanket. But now, in the blessed relief of sweat, a gratifying tiredness takes hold of my body. It is peaceful, death-like.

  My body is as light as a piece of cotton soaring away to great heights, caught in the lightest breeze. But my heart? It has grown as wide as the earth, as high as the sky. It encompasses all living creatures – plants and trees, birds and beasts, and the millions of human beings ruling over all of them. The plants grow, the trees flower and fruit. Unaware of the changes around them, the birds and the beasts wander through the meadows and the forests, mate, reproduce and, fearful and submissive, live out their lives acquiescing to man’s supremacy, while he hunts and copulates and continues the relentless pursuit of greatness. Within and outside the borders of his own creation, he battles with his fellow men. The acrid smell of smoke and the screams suffuse my heart.