One Evening, Suhra

As she tried swinging in her grandfather’s rocking chair, Suhra scattered into hallucinations where her grandfather’s snores from the next room turned into words, and the words into bullock carts and contorted faces; a world which she ever often visited but could barely reconstruct even when the contortions of the real world with its unintelligible language, the unpredictable fists of laughter, rage and numbness and the confusion of ages her uncles succumbed to yearned for a story that she could say to herself. This was Suhra’s own world, and she couldn’t bear it. Everyday she wished for an intruder, for someone to penetrate her secret world, secret not by any jealous intentions but by the cruel coincidence of being torn apart from the rest by a language which was abnormal, unshared.

Her uncles defied the generations by their laughter, by their howls. They scratched on all things wooden in the house, fought with each other and their invisible enemies, chatted with the djinns, plotted with Satan. They were for Suhra caught in their own long mono-act, and each one presented all the moods. They were for Suhra inscribed in every setting sun and every shrieking cricket, in every drop of fresh rain of every-year tidings of an end and promises of a future and always caught in roles nullifying each other and themselves. Others say they are mad and she couldn’t decide if mixing up of ages, places and characters was insanity or just a game that just went too long because her grandfather forgot to terrorise them of the creatures of the night that haunts every child who plays in the courtyard at the dusk.

Bullock carts frequented her hallucinations. There was a bullock cart everywhere in that house—when her uncles would go, in their varied timings, into the crawling years of their childhood; in each coconut that were thrown to the coconut room every time the plucker was benevolent by his presence; when her grandfather, dead except for his snores at the siesta time and his demands for black tea at the waking hours, would then narrate the story of a long journey which was the beginning of it all.

Neighbours avoided visiting that house. The few times she overheard them, “God” punctuated the few sounds that were spoken as frequently as their sighs. But they all did utter “the bullock-cart driver”.
“a driver’s luck, what God wishes…”
“the luck to run a long way, God alone the giver of all the good and the bad”
“the driver who travelled a long way”
“Marakkar doesn’t actually deserve so much…God’s test I tell you.”

She was not out of their conversation either. “God protect her, it’s a girl”
“Heir to a treasure, but what to do, whatever God wishes, happens.” She had heard enough of the treasure already. What intrigued her was its location. It can’t be in this house, she knows every nook and corner of it. She has upturned the hearth, dipped the sandbag in the chimney an extra time each time she had to clean it off its smoke with the hope that a bag, a yellow silk bundle of gold and diamonds, might come to sight by an extra push. She emptied the overflowing coconut room but all she could find was snake skin peels. She even made Kanaran dig a few more pits in the pretence of planting a few extra plantains. ‘But it’s not the season’ he reasoned, but soon succumbed to the girl’s wish. He too knew of lanes beyond the reason’s beat.

But what did she need the treasure for? What will it fetch her which she is in dearth of? No one was going to accept her—the figment of sanity waiting to be flooded by the madness around her, the focus of many a story of djinns and seas and bullock carts, the magic word that evoked piety at the tea stalls and the women-quarters. She was just too painfully sane, realizing all of it by herself. She was beautiful, the bedroom mirror said so; she was sweet, or how else could she be loving the rains; and she was fourteen, and was as good since she was nine.

As she swung herself into the multitude of her hallucinations, she relived the story of the bullock cart. Marakkar’s bullock cart, the trader from Hadramaut, the long journey to the plains, the trader’s daughter, what does her face look like, the fists she got, the healer, the green curtain at the entrance, marriage…
No, the healer, the green curtain at the entrance, fists again, lashes, marriage…
No, fists again, lashes, instructions for immediate wedding, consultation with the cart driver, marriage….
No, consultations, refusal, lure, marriage…
A bullock cart, wheels of gold, piles of gold blocks, a girl, a goldsmith…
Suhra was there, her grandfather Marakkar, he was also a boy.
A long journey to the plains, green plains, yellow plains, the bullock cart, no one to drive, passers by shouting…Suhra was not there. A yellow bag falling off from the cart...
Suhra was the yellow bag…
Shouting, howling…

TEA. That was her grandfather. Suhra jumped up from the chair. It was forbidden to her except for the siesta time when her grandfather would sleep and wait for a dream and she would tread the memories that ever were. “Tea”, the voice was unmistakably louder. As she ran to the kitchen, she noticed there was life behind her. He grandfather, after years of being content with the one window and half-a-room view his rocking chair offered, was slowly limping his way to the kitchen. “Fronds,” he shouted, “bundle up some fronds fast, make me a torch of it.” His voice was feverish. Casting aside tea plans for the moment, she rolled up a torch immediately, and lighted it by the kerosene lamp at the kitchen sill. Her grandfather grabbed it from her, ran to the tallest coconut tree, pulled himself up to the tip of the coconut tree though the raindrops dragged him down a few times, grabbed the crown of the tree by his left and waved the torch-bearing right violently, “here, here, here”.

And then, he came down, limping than ever, showing signs of fainting, and signalling Suhra to help him to his bed. As she rested him on his bed, he told her in her ears, “I had the dream; they are ready to return it. They are on their way.”

Suhra hasn’t seen her uncles after that. In her hallucinations, her dead mother has taken the place of the trader’s daughter. The yellow bundle was taken by the two Arabs on the way. That evening they dropped by their house to give it back to her. They have been staying there ever since. Grandfather talked to them as if he knew them forever. Two Arabs dressed in white tunics and chequered lungis. At times she felt they closely resembled her uncles, but they talked in her tongue, and talked of her past.

And Suhra is yet to open the yellow bundle.

Shafeeq Valanchery

Short Fiction

It wasn't a premonition.
I knew for sure that she would do that, but wasn't sure where, when, at what fatalist hour etc.
The rouge in her lips had disappeared long time ago; she wasn't wearing my favorite chinos any longer.
Unconsciously I would have surely noticed these changes and was getting prepared.
I wasn't looking at her face when she ordered a cold coffee for her and a coke for me.
Rather I kept looking at the pink tissue kept on the table to avoid her glassy gaze.

"Let's part ways." She said.

As if waiting for this moment a bead of tear slowly darted its course from my eyes towards the pink towel and made it all ruddy for a second.
I couldn't say anything. Even if I wanted to, I didn't have anything to say.
The echo of her words—let's part ways—kept ringing in my ears and made me flush.
This was the worst moment in my life; from tomorrow I am alone.
Nobody will share the carton of juice that I drink in the mornings.
I will be free to do whatever I want; there will be no more routine walks with her in the evenings.

Why can't I say no?
Why am I not protesting or throwing the coke can on her face?
Why do I feel as if I am pushed to a corner where the only expression that I can muster up is exasperation, writ large on my face?
Why am I not reveling in the fact that from tomorrow she wouldn’t boss me around or that I can get back home whenever I want after a night of intense male bonding?

Basheer had talked about the paradoxical situation of the new freedom of a lover, especially after a breakup, in his novel Mathilukal.
In the novel the hero is imprisoned due to his involvement in the freedom movement. There he develops a relationship with a woman in the adjoining woman’s jail.
Although they cannot see each other, they talk and find infinite solace in each other’s voice.
When the time came for the release from the prison due to India’s independence—everybody waited for this moment to escape from the tortuous conditions—the hero asks in a state of shock—

“Why should I be free…who wants freedom?”—unable to accept his and the country’s new found freedom after almost 200 years of British rule.

My situation wasn’t far different from that of Basheer’s. I wanted to be bossed around. I wanted to find freedom by surrendering to her.
But she might have found my unconditional surrender a sign of my weakness; an inability to live up to ideal masculine expectations.
I was in a deadlock; I had to either surrender my masculinity or play it out with full affront. Either way this was going to be a disaster.
I threw away my coke can out of the window, and finding solace in my new found freedom, walked back to my room.
For, I knew that by keeping away from me she is letting me cling to her with my dear life. For ever.

James Michael

Ayisha

The festival of Puthiangadi was over. The elephants were back to the landowners; the green and red flags with inscriptions of divinity on them, after having fulfilled their mission of proclaiming the dynastic greatness of its bearers, will now be folded and be kept secure in the wedges of wooden blocks that roofed the aristocratic houses. Ayisha, however, was refusing to go home. The sight of the hawkers packing the remains did not subdue her resolve. She wants a balloon, an air-filled balloon, that goes up and up to the seventh sky.

“Why do you want that now? Haven’t you got all that?” her father Abdu was clear enough as he pointed to the ensemble of wooden dolls, glass bangles, a polka dotted faded red skirt and two pieces of aaraam number sweets, all that an eleven year old girl should be happy with.

“But I want that.” There is not much you can do when an eleven year old is unyielding.

“But it will fly away in a minute.”

“I want to see it fly away.”

“Want to see it fly away. What else did you see till now?”

Silence.

No answer.

Push. Won’t move.

Scold. Pretend to not hear.

Abdu took her in his arm. Ayisha was violent with her legs, but her father’s hands, though delicate even by the standards of those who made their living by writing, as he did, was strong enough to control her vehemence. For the last twenty one years the labour, he knew, confined to chronicling the ownership of land—…amsham…desam…taluk. Geography spun relations around it, land changed hands, sons killed father, neighbours fought over one-metre roads, roads turned plantain groves overnight, wells partitioned into septic tanks and malice which fed generations to come—twenty-one years of writing down lives, ending dynasties and changing borders, draining waters and unforeseen landslides. This vocation required a resolve to be indefatigable, be detached and credulous, depict the movement of time as well as be its guardian. To record the times, you had to be outside it. With seven children, six males and one, the youngest, female, Abdu didn’t show much of the years that lay behind him. His sun-burnt face featured loose skin below small and wide eyes, his thick glasses rested on his high cheekbones, but his jetty hair hid those features under a blanket of paused time.

Ayisha was familiar of her father’s persistence in his decisions, and she had inherited it too. But there are moments you let go, like this eleven-year-old knew too well. It was already dark and they had to cross the plains, trace the bridges—made by laying a single bamboo—over numerous canals, and they also had to be on the look out for swamps and snakes. Ayisha often wondered why they still had to fear snakes though they never failed to contribute to the sarpapooja held to appease the snakes in the sacred mangroves. Resigning herself to the situation, Ayisha decided to postpone her demand for the balloon for a further occasion and instead made allies with her father for the journey ahead. She made her way to his shoulders from his tight grip, and surveyed the surroundings.

“There, there!” She extended her hands to beyond what she could express.

Far away, perched on an electric post on the mountain, she saw iblees, the devil, one of the henchmen of satan. It had the body of a vulture, the head of a cretin, and had beaks instead of lips, long and curving upwards. Electric posts were then a novelty, and her uncle, Maimu, had told her some days earlier that these long poles with metal wires were devices of satan in his bid to outmaneuver the mighty Azraeel, the angel in charge of lightning, thunder and rain. They are instruments of the infidels; they are defying the Mightiest of all powers; they are the imposters of the final days.

“Who asked you to look there? Look down”

“Ppa, call them, call the warriors of heaven.” Maybe this was her sought-after occasion to witness the three hundred and thirteen mighty warriors riding on their swift and elegant white luminous horses as they battle the forces of evil of this world.

“Shut up, Ayisha, there‘s nothing there. Your mother, oh that woman! That woman has taught you all her folks’ ignorant ways.”

“I can see it.”

“Shut up, will you?”

Ayisha was desperate. She could see it. Her father’s obstinacy won’t wish it away. She tried to remember the prayers. Blank. The ninety nine names of God. Blank. The song of birth. Blank. The opening chapter… In the name of Allah, Praise be to him…

All the stories of iblees flashed through her, all the incidents of madness, the wailing ponds of the noon, the laughing kids who were turned into stones, the chained man of their place whom she has only heard of, the demon who stretched his legs from one river to the other and rained shit on all the houses between….

And then they heard the muezzin calling out for prayer. It was dark, the last prayer of the day. The voice of an old man crackling through the demonic plains. Away, a small dot of brightness testified to the known world. Ayisha saw the iblees fading away, first its toes, then its wings, then its body and finally the beak. Her father hurried to the lamp. On the mountain, the cross of the electric post stood as the lone witness.

Shafeeq Valanchery

It's Not all About Love—A Shower of Dewdrops From the Deodar Trees

Introduction: An excerpt from a novel that I may never write.

I was, till recently, thinking about how to manage my multiple lives. I wish to see my life though a mediated sheet of white paper or a computer monitor where it can be unraveled investigated and brought under control. Many of us have this uncanny ability to seamlessly tread between different roles that we have to routinely act out. Every morning many of us go to the office or to the library, do office work or research or do whatever we generally do and manage not to notice that life is gently caressing past us. Evening we come back, act out various roles assigned to us before going to bed. I have seen writers treading different roles—for example one has to act out the role of writing oneself out on a page, empathizing with the characters whose secret lives one has the power to unmake, and, as if nothing happened, has to suddenly switch back to one's day-to-day life written by some other invisible hand on some invisible parchment. Believe me, my life was getting muddled and it started buzzing past me leaving only a faint blur behind.

These were the circumstances during which you decided to come and knock on my door. I remember I was unable to get up from my mattress which was spread out on my floor. Before you knocked I was trying to get up and was unable to do so. All I could do was to stand in all fours like a dog and try and sniff out the world. Don’t think, by any means, that this is the first time that I am feeling alienated from the world. Not in the least. In my deliriums I have tried to eat the flowers printed on my bed spread. In the darkness of the night I have felt that my arms are tied from behind and have got into some dead lock. In an audacious attempt to regain a sense of the world I remember jumping at the switch board from my bed, with my arms locked behind, in a vain attempt to switch on the light with my head. This feeling is something akin to what one feels when one is ill. A general weakness of the body coupled with severe exhaustion. I think that, in this condition, if I cut of my veins wasps would fly out of it in vengeance.

Anyways, I felt great when I knew that you could push open the door and come inside to find me all naked and dry. You couldn’t exactly figure out why I couldn’t react or didn’t want to react even when you tickled me. I remember you sitting on my hips and wondering at the monstrosity of my growing tummy.

“A girl or a boy”—you had asked then taking my rotund tummy in the umbrage of your hands.
“What?”
“You expect to have a girl or a boy?”
I looked at your face, which was twinkling with the prospect of me getting irritated and answered—“A mother fucking bastard.”

I don’t know whether you remember the time when you first saw me. But let me go back to the first day, an evening in the month of January, when I actually noticed you. The sky was overcast and a wind was trying to escape the entanglements of a deodar tree when I saw you talking to a couple of friends in front of the university hostel. The moment is still etched in my memory and I constantly go back to it, like a wound that has to be constantly visited to see that it still exists, to only realize that the sanctity of the moment has survived to this day. Yes, that was the day when you came to my life like a shower of dewdrops from the deodar trees…

James Michael.

Introduction:

"I started writing the piece below (and gave up in my characteristic style) to possibly flesh out a screenplay from it. But instead of being able to make any headway in terms of plot, I ended up getting stuck on the characterization, my worst indulgence. Since I most likely won't go back to it, I guess you can just call this an excessive character sketch of a story that I barely began."

As it clattered its way up the sloping road in seeming aimlessness but at breakneck speed, the voice of a child piped up amidst the sleepy hush of the loaded ST bus. "Look at the stars daddy! So many..." Not one prone to reminisces, nor one to delight in them, A tried to brush aside a strong image from his past elicited by the child's excited remark. He glanced out his window and up at the sky as the bus hurtled down a precariously lit turning.

Perhaps the biggest curse of parenthood is one's inability to deny its entrenching influence on every subsequent moment of one's life. Such that, even when the very reason and proof of that privileged position is long gone, either through passive acceptance or rude interruption, one is left only with those cruel pangs of inerasable nostalgia and worse yet, an unremitting, selfless love. A could never have claimed an intimate relationship with his son, but believed they had shared an unspoken trust in their irrefutable presence in the other's life and an affinity for the infinite, the uncountable. The two spent many nights on the terrace of their apartment building in a musty suburb of Bombay, lying on straw mats laid out on the cement water tank and looking up at the stars, contemplating their barely graspable infinitude. In the summer especially, the regular power outages that darkened the city skies for hours provided the most conducive environment for star-gazing and even before the first teasing hoots of local ruffians and the exasperated cries of housewives left stranded midway preparing the night's dinner had died down, father and son would have grabbed their mats, a torch to negotiate their way up the flight of stairs and headed for the cooling summer breeze of an open roof. A would indulge his little boy (or was it the other way round) and they would begin counting the stars until one of them lost count or burst out laughing in good-humored frustration. While A, an official record-keeper with the Limca Book of Records considered this sometimes compulsive pastime an enjoyable professional hazard, he secretly delighted in his son's obvious pleasure in their little counting game.

In his career, A had won his indispensable place in the Collections and Numbers department of the organization with his almost superhuman patience when it came to counting thousands of minute objects at a time which ranged from stamps to rice grains to sugar particles to sewing needles lodged painfully on the squirming back of a deranged sadhu. He could, even in the most disorderly of arrangements, superimpose imaginary rows and columns on the entire mass to be grappled with, giving it a superficial sense of structure and unity before he went into the nitty-gritty of counting each and every single item that made up this mass.

For A was no mathematical savant- numbers didn't dance before his eyes in abstract brilliance before they magically fused into one single number, one categorical solution. A would probably have found such a unique gift unnerving, given the absence of the very deliberateness of purpose that he sought immense comfort in. For no matter how trivial or redundant the object of his calculations, A believed there was little else in human experience that so blatantly forced one to contend with the very gravity of existence symbolized in every infinitesimal creation of God.

A woke to the monotone chanting of sleepy-eyed tea sellers as they hauled their mobile tea containers over their shoulders, steaming with hot, milky tea meant to sweeten nauseous mouths and revive lost appetites. The bus station was just beginning to gain the ambience of disarray and confusion that would envelope it by late morning. A loosened his clutch over the suitcase that he had pressed to his chest all night long. As he made his way through the bus station, A was once again reminded of the significance of this trip. Having only a few months left before he was to retire from service, this was most likely the last excursion he was to ever make as an official record-keeper for the Limca Book of Records.

Uttarika Kumaran