Theeyoor Chronicles Page 13

  ‘Oh, he does,’ Ravi said. ‘Just that he prefers to speak in sign language.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘No idea!’

  ‘Have you had any other experiences?’

  ‘Yes. There was this guy near my house. He’d been suffering from a constant stomach ache for nearly a decade. Even went to Kozhikode Medical College Hospital and Manipal Hospital for treatment, but nothing worked. Finally, he went to see Amu Jinn. Amu Jinn gave him a powder, told him to dissolve it in boiled and cooled water, and drink it on an empty stomach first thing in the morning for a month. It’s been four years now and my neighbour has been completely free of pain.’

  ‘You don’t think that could be the power of the medicine he gave?’

  ‘Possibly, but none of the doctors had been able to prescribe anything effective…’

  ‘True, but sometimes cures are found outside allopathic medicine. That’s knowledge, not divine power.’

  ‘It is divine power,’ Ravi said firmly. ‘There’s a small enclosure built in front of Amu Jinn’s house. He sits there and prays, chants mantras before treating people.’

  ‘Prayers and chants and mantras … Those are to turn patients into believers in his divine powers. What actually works is the medicines he gives.’

  ‘Okay, let’s say I agree with you. But how does he predict the future then?’

  ‘He’s not predicting the future. I bet people read his sign language in whichever way they want!’

  ‘Well, if you argue like that…’ Ravi laughed.

  I changed tack. ‘You said earlier that Amu Jinn is not as powerful as he used to be. What happened?’

  ‘He was tricked!’ Ravi said. ‘By some of those good-for-nothing youths from the beach area. Muslims they are, too. What they did was, they brought a young woman to him saying that she had epilepsy. In fact, there was nothing wrong with her. Then they spread a story about how Amu Jinn sent them away, took her inside the house and shut the door, and that she screamed and ran out escaping his clutches and so on. Total lies! Anyway, that was a big shock for Amu Jinn, and he stopped his consultations and helping people. Now he sits at home, silent and brooding. Eats something occasionally if his family presses him to, otherwise doesn’t do that either…’

  I refrained from asking Ravi how a man skilful in predicting the future could have gotten himself entrapped like that. Ravi seemed to be a true believer in Amu Jinn’s abilities. Or there was something dodgy in their relationship. Either way, I didn’t have to wait too long to find out.

  The sacred spot where Amu Jinn entered his trances was a roughly constructed shack thatched with palm leaves in the corner of a small yard around an average-sized concrete house. After taking me there, Ravi left saying he had to get back to his class.

  Amu Jinn and I sat across from each other quietly for a while. His eyes were closed.

  The shack, set in a depression surrounded by tall trees, was dark. Having come in from the glaring light of the afternoon, I could see nothing initially. My eyes were only beginning to adjust to the dimness inside when Ravi pulled the door shut as he left, further depleting the light. I was somewhat irritated, but soon my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I could make out Amu Jinn’s shape. He looked very old, with a straggly grey beard and a white cloth turban with a long tail on his head. His clothes – a white full-sleeved upper garment and a mundu – were somewhat dirty, and his face was suffused with an expression of sadness and animosity.

  ‘You’re a newspaper reporter?’ Amu Jinn asked suddenly, as though coming awake from a dream.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘And when you write the news, you write it like stories, yes?’

  The question took me by surprise, and I confined my response to a short, meaningless laugh. It also made it clear to me that Amu Jinn was a man of remarkable intelligence, and that he would not be persuaded to say anything that he did not want to. His voice was deep and resonant, and he spoke with his neck held at an unnatural backward slant, almost as though he did not want his words to escape his mouth.

  ‘What is it that you want to know?’

  ‘Everything,’ I said, trying to sound off hand and making myself comfortable in my seat. ‘From the beginning…’

  ‘Ah, the beginning that is common to all, yes?’ Amu Jinn laughed. He continued without waiting for my reply. ‘My home is near Thalassery. I was born fifty-eight years ago – to be accurate, half an hour before the Subh Namaz on a Sunday, the sixth day of the month of Shawwal in the 1360th year of the Hijrah. My mother was Amina of Parayullathil Cheriyakandathil, and my father was Ali. My name is Amu.’

  Amu Jinn spoke as though he believed that this information about him must be recorded with the certainty and accuracy of historical fact. I realized that his mind, rather than being affected by the obvious frailty of his body, was afflicted by an extreme form of self-regard. In an effort to reassure him that his words would not be squandered, I took my tape recorder out of my bag, the sight of which brightened his face. For the next two hours, he spoke as though he had forgotten his own self. Listening to him, one felt that he spoke openly and honestly, but after he finished I realized that he had divulged only what he wanted to, and that he would not be persuaded to speak of things he did not want to – not by me, nor by anyone else. I felt a stab of disappointment, but his story, unique and unusual in its narration as well as content, gave me an immense sense of satisfaction too.

  Amu Jinn’s life story is reproduced here in his own words. I have deleted a few passages that are beyond the scope of this book, and done some minor stylistic editing, but I have not made any changes to the content of his story.

  I had a brother who was six years older than me, and a sister who was four years younger. When I was six and my sister was two, my bappa died suddenly. He was a hawker who sold odds and ends in faraway villages, and at the time of his death he had nothing much to show for it in the form of savings. My ancestral family was quite wealthy, but when Bappa died, we got nothing much to speak of in terms of inheritance. My umma was a mild-mannered, simple person, whose only language of communication was the Qur’an. So she was easily manipulated by cunning relatives who played on her good nature and generosity, and made off with what little wealth we had. All she was left with were the gold ornaments Bappa had bought her over the years, and Umma sold them one by one to bring us up. By the time I was eleven years old, she had nothing left other than the alikkath adorning her ears.

  ‘I had forty-six pavans worth of gold ornaments,’ Umma would tell us. ‘A fortune made by your bappa through his hard work. And I’ve sold most of it to bring you up. Now the three of you are my fortune and my wealth.’

  As part of the settlement from Bappa’s ancestral family, we had a small piece of land – we called it Pallikkunnu – with a few coconut and cashew nut trees. We sold the harvest, and lived on what we made somehow or the other.

  I went to the local elementary school until class three, and then I told myself that there was no use in school education. To live, one needs a job. So I went and found myself a job at the beedi makers, binding the rolled beedis with cotton thread.

  2.

  In those days, weekly wages amounted to one rupee and twelve annas. My personal expenses came to about six annas, and I would hand over the remaining one rupee and six annas to Umma. You could buy five seers of rice for a rupee in those days, so our lives weren’t bad. During that time, my brother went to Bangalore and started selling oddments by the side of the road. Soon, he too began to send money home – five rupees a month. I had one shirt and one mundu in those days. I’d wash them every second night, and wear them again the next morning to go to work.

  I nurtured a dream – a stubborn determination, more like – deep within me. I would become a rich man, and buy my umma as many gold ornaments as she could possibly want.

  Life went on thus, until my sister was old enough to marry. I sold the Pallikkunnu land to pay for her wedding. We needed 8,000 rupees, b
ut all I could raise from the sale of the land was 4,000. I organized an additional 1,000 but had to borrow the rest. So by the time my sister was married, I was in debt to the tune of 3,000 rupees.

  I learned how to roll beedis and soon graduated from binding beedis to rolling them. As the workers sat together doing their work, the conversation was invariably political. I didn’t participate in these discussions. Instead, I recited the dhikr ‘Subhan Allah’ under my breath. I could recite up to forty Subhan Allahs in the time it took me to roll one beedi. By the time I stopped work at around half past five in the evening, I’d have made 1,300 to 1,500 beedis while others would not have managed even a thousand, and would have to continue working until 8 p.m. The overseer at the beedi company and the owners were very fond of me. This, of course, made my fellow workers jealous, and they teased me and bullied me, but I paid no heed and refused to get angry.

  Every week, I’d put a coin – a quarter of a rupee – from my wages in a tin. By the end of the year, I’d have a considerable sum. I’d take it out every year on the twenty-sixth day of the month of Muharram, and on the twenty-seventh I’d spend it on a Quthubiyyath. I was also in the habit of reciting a Fatihah in the name of Muhyiddin Shaikh after each of the five prayers of the day.

  Around this time, my brother came home from Bangalore for a visit. He was doing well there, his business was taking off, and of course people were keen to get him married. And so he did, to a woman from a family in much better circumstances than ours, and at the end of two weeks, he took his bride back to her home, and went off to Bangalore on his own.

  By then, I too was thinking of starting a business, and by the grace of God I found a way to do just that. Several people helped me with small donations and handouts. I rented a room that was vacant in a two-room shop near my home. The other room was a miscellaneous shop run by a man named Kunjappa who was a member of the political party Janasangham. He tried his level best to stop me from renting the other shop, and then nurtured a simmering resentment after failing in his efforts.

  Mine was a stationery shop. In the beginning, I had barely any stock and yet I was neck-deep in debt by the time I opened it. And as luck would have it, Umma, who had always suffered from asthma and breathing problems, became severely ill. None of the doctors and healers could do anything, and her condition deteriorated rapidly. It was pitiful to watch her struggle to take a breath, especially at night, and I was sure that she would not be with us for long. In the middle of all this, my sister gave birth to twins – a boy and a girl. So now I had to run the shop, look after Umma, do what I could for my sister, as well as look after the household including cooking and cleaning.

  I contacted my brother in Bangalore, and asked him to send his wife home for a few days to help look after Umma. He replied refusing my request. As I finished reading his letter, I took a decision. I was going to get married by the next night. Anyone would do, preferably a girl from a poor family.

  That evening, I was preparing the family’s dinner in the lean-to behind my shop when a friend of mine came in. My shop was only a compound away from my home. He asked me what I was doing. I told him everything, and also that I had made up my mind to marry a girl from a poor family. I’m not sure if he thought I was joking, but he said, ‘Then why don’t you marry my cousin, my mother’s younger sister’s daughter?’ ‘For sure,’ I said, without giving it much thought. His aunt was a widow, the mother of two boys and a girl. They were in dire straits, I knew, and yet I didn’t mind.

  ‘In that case, I’ll make all the arrangements for the nikah tomorrow itself,’ my friend said, and I agreed. That was on a Saturday. The nikah was to be on Monday night. I went home and told Umma. She was shocked, and begged me to reconsider, to think it through before taking a decision. I had given my word, I told her, and it was too late to pull out. I didn’t feel like letting my brother know, but I told my brother-in-law. By nightfall on Sunday, my brother-in-law arrived. He had come seething with anger, but as soon as he saw me, his anger evaporated and was replaced by a deep sadness. ‘You’ve struggled so much for the family,’ he told me, ‘and now you are entering into an unsuitable marriage.’ He gave me the money for the nikah and said, ‘I should be coming with you to hand this over to the bride’s family, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Give it to them yourself.’

  And thus, my marriage took place at the mosque just two furlongs away from my home. It was a small mosque, visited only by a handful of people, but it was the mosque where I prayed every day. There was a maqbara, a cemetery, to the east of the mosque, an overgrown place that everyone avoided after 6 p.m.

  On the day of my nikah, as I passed the maqbara, I was shivering. I could see my friend’s house from there. A large group of people had gathered in his yard, as though they had come to celebrate the wedding and to see the bridegroom. He had told me that he was only going to invite a handful of close family and relatives, and I thought he had lied to me. But as I approached the compound and entered the house, I realized that the crowd was a vision conjured up by my mind. There were only three or four people standing around in the yard in the light of a single Petromax lamp.

  By the time the ceremonies were over and I got back home, it was past midnight. Umma and my sister were crying quietly, and my brother-in-law sat on a chair on the veranda with his chin resting in his palm, a glum expression on his face. ‘None of us have eaten anything,’ he told me. ‘Have you?’ I said I had barely eaten all day, so we ate together.

  Afterwards, I sat on the veranda thinking that the house where someone had just been married felt more like a house where a funeral had taken place. It was 2 p.m. by the time I went to bed. As soon as I lay down and closed my eyes, I saw a house where a wedding was being celebrated. Guests walked in the brilliant light of a thousand lamps, wishing me well and congratulating me. The dream was so lifelike that it took me a while to get my bearings when I woke up suddenly.

  Custom demanded that the bridegroom’s family members visited the bride’s home the next morning, so we sent one of the younger children. I followed in the evening, and brought my wife home. Umma embraced her as though she was her own daughter, and welcomed her into our family. My wife took good care of Umma until her death four or five years later.

  Meanwhile, my business was not going as smoothly as I had hoped in the beginning. I became the father of two children, and with the expenses at home, the children’s health and other needs, and some old debts to repay, I struggled to make ends meet. The only option out of the situation I could think of was to sell the shop and go somewhere else to try my luck. My wife understood, but she didn’t want me to leave home and go far away. My brother-in-law took care of a lot of the household expenses. He was a porter in Thalassery town. My sister had four children from three pregnancies, and the increasing expenses were stretching his resources to the limit.

  Finally, I persuaded my wife, sister and brother-in-law, and sold my shop. With the money, I repaid most of the loans, took my wife and children back to her home, and got on a train to Mangalapuram. My brother-in-law had a friend who worked in a hotel there. I went to him, and although he found me a job in the same hotel, it was not the solution I had hoped for. It was a small hotel that did very little business. I persevered for a month, and during that period became friends with a man named Beeran from the Theeyoor beach area, who made tea in the hotel restaurant. One day, I told Beeran, ‘I don’t want to stay here any more. I have a wife and two children back home. I’ve got to go back and try and make it there.’ Beeran agreed with me, and so I got on the train and came back.

  How to describe how we survived for the next couple of years? When there simply was no other option in front of me, I left home for the second time. This time, I went south to Malappuram, and found a job as a dishwasher in a hotel. Another dead-end job. The owner of the establishment was in dire straits himself, and while he paid my expenses, he couldn’t afford to give me a salary. Still, I persevered for a year or two. Whenever I could, I’d v
isit the maqbaras and other holy places in Malappuram. It was a sad, depressing life, with no one other than Allah to depend on, and the thought of ending it all was never too far from my mind.

  One night, I had a dream that my brother-in-law had passed away. The next morning I received a letter from my nephew, informing me that he was seriously ill and was admitted in a hospital in Mangalapuram. My boss wanted me to go to Tirur to take care of some urgent business. As soon as I finished the task, I took a train north. It was dark by the time the train reached Thalassery. I walked out of the train station and had just reached TC Mukku when I saw people running here, there and everywhere. I stopped a man who was scurrying away and asked him what was going on. ‘Run,’ he told me, ‘run if you want to save your life.’

  This was towards the end of 1971, the day the Thalassery riots began. I had no idea what had happened. I reached my wife’s home at around 10 or 11 p.m., and saw a baying crowd throwing stones at the mosque. The man who used to run the shop next to mine, Kunjappa, was among them, and a few other acquaintances. When the police arrived the next morning, I gave them an honest account of what I’d witnessed. I was not afraid at all, but it didn’t take me long to understand that telling the truth was something to be fearful of.

  3.

  After the police left, four or five people – strangers – came to our house. They threatened us, said they’d kill us all if I gave evidence in court or if I told anyone else what I’d seen. My wife and sister were terrified, and my older daughter almost had an epileptic fit due to the fear she experienced. Then came our well-wishers, people from our community, but they too were of the opinion that I should have kept quiet. Everyone was afraid, and their fear was infectious. I didn’t leave home for the next few days. It was as though my family and my wife’s family were colluding to keep me imprisoned.

  I had no livelihood, no means of providing for my family, and now I had made enemies. Not knowing how to cope or what to do next, I found myself withdrawing into a world of fear and sorrow.