Theeyoor Chronicles Read online

  That day, Gopalan returned from Chenkara with a heavy heart, and as he walked past Kalappara and across the vast rocky expanse of Theevappara, he was bone-tired.

  In the old days, he would walk the seven or eight kilometres from Theeyoor to Chenkara to visit Devu edathi at least once a week. His brother-in-law Kunjikkanarettan had loved him like his own brother. Gopalan had been twelve or thirteen when his sister got married. Kunjikkanarettan was already beginning to make a name as a skilled medicine man. Even now, people sought him out to treat their children’s eczema, warts and boils, constipation and breathing troubles. But he had changed, and had become sour and stingy.

  After the wedding, as she followed her husband and his friends, Devu edathi had leaned on her sister-in-law and sobbed all the way to her new home. When it was time for her family to leave, she had held on to Gopalan, her favourite brother, and cried uncontrollably. He had visited his sister at her marital home regularly, first in the company of his father or older brother, and later on his own.

  It was on one of those trips that Gopalan had seen Kunjimani for the first time. Hers was the first house on the steep lane past Kalappara that led to his sister’s house. She was the only daughter of Policeman Chandu, and was at least three years older than him. Kunjimani had a stubborn streak. In those days, on the morning of the Vishu festival, children would go from house to house with a kuriya – a little bag made of palm leaves – collecting appam and other sweet treats. On one of those trips, Kunjimani met a young man named Othenan who flirted with her, and five years later, he married her.

  Othenan was a fashionable type. He was an agent for a handloom company in Kannur and had travelled widely – Bombay, Madirasi and so on – and subsequently, had come to be scornful of the local customs and traditions. On their wedding night, Othenan had laughed talking about how they had met. A couple of months later, on the night before Vishu, Othenan said to her, ‘You’ll be up early tomorrow, no? Don’t you have to take your little bag and go begging?’

  Kunjimani was offended, and the next morning she left Othenan and came back home. Policeman Chandu was a terrifying sort of man, but he worshipped his daughter. He tried to change her mind, to pacify her and get her to go back to her husband, but she would not budge. Eventually, he gave in and allowed her to leave Othenan and stay at home.

  It was this Kunjimani who had caused the first flutter of love in Gopalan’s heart. She would be waiting for him as he came down the slope past Kalappara. She was a close friend of Kunjikkanarettan’s youngest sister Madhavi, and on the basis of that relationship, she had introduced herself to Gopalan.

  They were at a volatile age. How swiftly their acquaintance, initially confined to the exchange of a couple of words, grew into a relationship with no secrets, mainly under Kunjimani’s initiative. The location of their rendezvous changed from the lane to the woods on the eastern border of her compound. There, in an arbour of vines, in the shadows cast by the westering sun, as she turned away from him with a flirtatious laugh, he had embraced her and gently laid her on the ground. The memory of it still set his heart aflutter.

  Gopalan had returned to Chenkara the very next day, but Kunjimani was not waiting for him in the woods. He cut the visit with his sister short, made some excuse and left. On the way back, he ran into Policeman Chandu who was on his way to the canal for his bath, his body smeared with oil. He called out, ‘Hey Gopalan…’ To this day, Gopalan did not know why Policeman Chandu had called out to him. He had run away without looking back.

  That night, Policeman Chandu shot and killed Koneri Vellen.

  When he returned from his travels, Gopalan had searched for news about Kunjimani. He found out that Policeman Chandu had continued living in Theeyoor for four or five years after he had killed Vellen. Later, he had converted to Christianity, taken on the name Joseph, and moved away to Chirakkal. Sometime before that, Kunjimani had eloped with a fortune teller with a parrot, a man from the Kuravan community. This man’s name, too, was Gopalan. This information gave Gopalan a sense of peace, and he ended his search.

  However, as soon as Devu edathi mentioned her name, once again Gopalan found himself swimming in a stream of memories about Kunjimani. He did not remember that she would be at least fifty years of age by now. All he remembered was her beauty and grace, and he burned with the desire to see her once again. He renewed his efforts and began making inquiries about his namesake, the Kuravan fortune teller she had run away with. He went to a Kuravan settlement in Kuniyankunnu, but the people there seemed suspicious of his inquiries and were non-committal in their responses. Finally, as he was leaving defeated, an elderly Kurathi, who was worldly enough to figure out from his demeanour exactly what he was after, came up to him. ‘You should know better,’ she told him as though she were telling his fortune. ‘Nothing good will come out of this obsession with her. She’s a hussy, a shameless hussy.’

  Still, Wardha Gopalan did not give up. He travelled to Kuravan settlements in Kuppam, Pattuvam, Mangad and Kunjimangalam, and finally, in Edat, he came across this information:

  ‘Gopalan fell off the train to Neeleswaram and died, around fifteen years ago. Kunjimani is still somewhere around there. Took up with a southern Christian. In dreadful circumstances, I hear.’

  Gopalan did not go to Neeleswaram, finally recognizing that the pursuit of Kunjimani was pointless. He came back home from Edat resolving never to spend another moment thinking about Kunjimani, or any other woman for that matter.

  2.

  Gopalan had not come to his decision to abandon the search for Kunjimani after carefully considering the facts available to him, but on an impulse. The person who told him the truth about Kunjimani in Edat was an old man, a hunchback with bloodshot eyes, chapped lips and big yellow teeth. The repulsion he felt towards the messenger quickly transferred on to the subject of his message, Kunjimani. In a matter of seconds, the Kunjimani in his heart, the slim beauty who had animated each and every atom in his body, metamorphosed into a haggard, old ogre. He could not, from then on, think of her in any way other than as the personification of all humanly vulgarities.

  His mind, now cleared of the love and longing for Kunjimani, swiftly turned to another pursuit. His new obsession was the desire to collect and collate every possible detail about Theeyoor’s past, an obsession that may have been fuelled by the old stories and snippets of folklore he had heard during his journey of inquiry that had ended in hatred and revulsion, as well as by the dwellings of the Kuravan folk he had visited, and their manners and speech that made him think of ancient ways of life.

  Gopalan did not step out of his house for five or six days after his return from Edat. He spent those days in the semi-darkness of his attic room, sitting on an easy chair with his eyes closed. At night, he hunched over a notebook and scribbled in it in the light of an oil lamp. When he emerged finally, he was a new man. He had made some decisions about what he needed to do with the rest of his life. He would find a suitable place in Theeyoorangadi and start a night school in Mahatma Gandhi’s name, and use his days to record the history of Theeyoor.

  Gopalan set about putting his plans into action with great alacrity. He rented the big room above Govindan Sraap’s shop in the market and hung a signboard – ‘Bapuji Vidyabhavan’ – in front of it, and set it up with four benches, a table, a chair and a blackboard. The classes would be from 7 p.m. to 9.30 p.m., and he would teach reading and writing in Malayalam, English and Hindi, and arithmetic – addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

  In the beginning, people scoffed and made jokes, and yet, within a couple of months, about twenty-five people enrolled at Bapuji Vidyabhavan as students. Most of them were over the age of forty, and included market porters, labourers, as well as those with no permanent or specific jobs. Gopalan had no difficulty with the teaching, but history writing, he realized as the days went by, was a whole different deal, much more than he could handle.

  Creating a cohesive narrative out of old government reco
rds and ancient artefacts turned out to be a task well beyond his abilities. He had no clue how they all fit together. He did not attempt to find out if anything was written about Theeyoor in existing history books. He toiled, instead, under the assumption that the information he needed was to be collected from the elders in the community. But their memories were chaotic, and as they did not consider that history might exist beyond their own memories, the things they told him were of little use to anyone but themselves. Still, Gopalan travelled across Theeyoor, Chenkara and neighbouring places, seeking out old people and listening carefully to their stories of times past, and returned to Vidyabhavan to write them all down. He worked hard to make some sort of sense and a viable narrative out of these disjointed notes that multiplied as the days went by. And yet, Gopalan’s book turned out to be one where historical facts suffocated, crushed between myths and anecdotes. The scope of the book was also limited by Gopalan’s assumption that the history of Theeyoor began with his own childhood.

  It took Gopalan seven years to complete the book which should have taken no more than four or five months. Finally, in 1960, on 2 October – Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday – the book was released by the headmaster of Theeyoor Lower Primary School, A.C. Kelu Nambiar, in a simple ceremony held at Bapuji Vidyabhavan.

  The price Gopalan set for the 400-page tome was a mere four rupees. In those days, Theeyoor, whose people were not averse to reading, had at least a hundred salaried people with jobs, such as teachers and office workers. Yet, Gopalan struggled to sell even a hundred copies of his book. He realized, painfully, that his efforts had made no impression whatsoever on anyone, and that he was surrounded by people who considered it preposterous that someone like him should take on such a task as writing a history book.

  In the seven years that it took Gopalan to write The History of Theeyoor, his mother and younger sister had passed away. When his mother was on her deathbed, struggling to take a breath, Gopalan was in Chenkara, visiting an old woman by the name of Chappila, and listening to her story of fisticuffs between Raman Kaikkor and Kunjappa Kaikkor in front of the sacred grove, Theeyoorkaavu.

  He was not at home when his sister passed away either. The sister had an affair with a schoolteacher from Palakkad named Madhusudanan, who lived in the house next door that he had rented. Often in the night, he visited her in her bedroom, a secret known only to the two of them. When she became pregnant, he put in for a transfer and quietly disappeared from Theeyoor. A week later, the sister ended her life, hanging herself from a cashew tree in the compound. Gopalan had left for Ramanthali the previous day, in search of the son of a Ramootty Kurikkal who used to run a kalari – a martial arts school – when he was a boy. It was only when he returned on the evening of the next day that Gopalan became aware of the disaster that had befallen his family.

  The disasters did not end there. A few months later, his brother’s wife, having had enough of his neglect and cruelty, took her two children and returned to her parents’ house. It seemed to Gopalan that his brother took this as a licence to do as he pleased. Stories about the altercations he got into on a daily basis reached Gopalan, although he barely saw his brother more than once a month.

  His mother’s death had a significant impact on his elderly aunt, whose already frail body seemed to shrink further. She became prone to frequent fainting spells, and Gopalan had to stop the classes at Vidyabhavan and stay at home to take care of her until Devu edathi arrived and took the aunt back to Chenkara.

  It was in the midst of all these mishaps that Gopalan had written The History of Theeyoor, a book, as it turned out, no one around him seemed to appreciate. He was tired. He’d had enough. He was thinking seriously about giving it all up and going away again, when one evening, unexpectedly, a man named Kumaraswamy came into his life.

  Gopalan had just finished the evening’s classes when the stranger came up the stairs to Bapuji Vidyabhavan, bade him a formal namaskaram, and sat down on one of the benches. He introduced himself as Kumaraswamy from Mattannur, and said that he had left home to be a traveller over thirty years ago.

  Kumaraswamy appeared to be around sixty years old. He was tall and skinny, and was dressed in a long piece of saffron cloth made by stitching together two mundus, a corner of which was flung across his chest and over his shoulder. With his long grey beard and hair, forehead smeared with sacred ash, a necklace of rudraksh beads, and a saffron bundle, he looked like a sanyasi, but he explained that he was merely a mendicant. There is no purer joy than wandering the world with no attachments, living off the goodwill of others, Kumaraswamy told Gopalan with an innocent laugh.

  Kumaraswamy asked Gopalan whether he could spend the night at Vidyabhavan, promising to leave early in the morning.

  ‘Oh, no problem at all,’ said Gopalan. ‘In fact, why don’t I keep you company?’

  They walked down the stairs together. All the nearby shops were already shut, so they went to the jetty in search of a glass of tea.

  That night, Gopalan and Kumaraswamy did not sleep. Their conversation, which began with stories from Kumaraswamy’s life, went on until the early hours of morning. Born into a well-to-do feudal family, Kumaraswamy was taught Sanskrit by his uncle, who had hoped that his nephew would grow up to be a scholar and live as an equal among the white sahebs who ruled the country then. Things should have developed exactly as he had hoped, as Kumaraswamy showed early promise and the acumen to be a scholar. However, the plans went awry after he joined Thalassery Brennen College for an FA – an intermediate arts course in those days.

  In Thalassery, Kumaraswamy – Kumaran Nair as he was then – boarded with a relative’s family in Nettur. There he met Narayanikutty, a young woman of his own age, a distant relative of the family, whose place in the household was that of a servant. Although sallow-skinned and painfully thin, she possessed a certain charm that tugged at the young man’s heart. After all, he was of an age when dreams abounded, and he fantasized about her, although he never actually spoke to her even once, nor she to him. Anxious by nature, she was skittish around him and quickly moved away whenever she ran into him.

  One day, when Kumaran Nair returned home after college, a crowd had gathered in the front yard of the house. There was a commotion inside, punctuated by an eerie wailing. As he walked inside, someone stopped him. ‘Don’t go in just yet,’ the man said. ‘The girl has been possessed. Happened last year too, exactly around this time. We’ve sent word to her father.’

  It was sunset by the time Narayanikutty’s father arrived, hitching a ride in a bullock cart carrying goods to Thalassery market. He took her away in the cart, and as she was being pushed and prodded into it, Narayanikutty resisted, her frail body displaying an unusual strength. Kumaran Nair could recall, as though it was only yesterday, her dishevelled hair, staring eyes and contorted face, as she sat between her father and another man.

  ‘Let’s not put ourselves through this again,’ the mistress of the house told her husband after they left. ‘They’ll bring her back in a week saying all is well and that she’s all right.’

  Her predictions came true. Within a week, Narayanikutty’s father brought her back. Her face was overcast like that of a child woken up from sleep. The relatives were adamant this time and refused to take her back, saying that they could not accommodate a young woman who fell ill frequently in their household any more.

  When she left with her father, carrying a bag stuffed with her belongings, Kumaran Nair was sitting on the veranda, holding open a book. She gave him a final glance. Her eyes were bloodshot.

  On that day, Kumaran Nair’s life lost its rhythm. His mind became preoccupied with thoughts of Narayanikutty and he was unable to concentrate on his studies. He did not have the courage to talk to someone about his feelings or to make a decision on his own. He failed his FA and quit his studies. With the qualifications he already had, it would not have been difficult to find a government job in those days, but he did not even try. Instead, he spent his time doing absolutely nothin
g. Eventually, he took over the responsibility of looking after the affairs of his household and agricultural lands, and consistently resisted all attempts by his family to get him married.

  Seven or eight years later, one fine day, he left home. ‘Just making a quick trip to Thalassery,’ he had told his family, at that moment not planning anything more than that. He had taken some money with him, and he would have been hard-pressed to explain the motivation behind it. When he got to Thalassery, he felt like travelling further. So, he boarded a train to Coimbatore, and after spending a couple of days there, he moved on to Pazhani. By then, the money had almost run out. The thought of going back home was embarrassing. He was feeling lost, not knowing what to do or where to go next, when an idea occurred to him.

  Pazhani was full of swamis. Saffron-clad, trident-wielding terrors with dreadlocks and eyes red from ganja fumes; abject beggars dressed in rags; thieving con artists … They were on every step of the stairs that went from the bottom of the hill to the temple on top. Without further ado, Kumaran bought himself a saffron mundu, a ball of sandalwood paste and a packet of sacred ash. He took off his ordinary clothes, smeared the ash on his naked torso and the sandalwood on his forehead, covered himself with the saffron mundu, and ventured forth from the foothill, calling out, ‘God, my Lord Muruka…’

  And thus, Kumaran Nair became Kumaraswamy.

  He did not, however, last long in Pazhani. One day, he ran into Raman Poosari, a neighbour from back home who was a yearly visitor to the temple, and he took off for fear of being recognized. A long and circuitous journey followed, which took him through almost all the holy places in India.