MAUSHYAN U ORU AAMUKHAM ENNA NOVELILE ONNAAM ADHYAAYAM

Short story by Subhash Chandran

It was during the study leave before final examinations of ninth class that gins of
inspiration made Jithan write his first poem, on the blank leaves of mathematics
notebook. He was sitting by the squares of light with the shadows of windowsill around,
his book laden on a little table blackened by time. He turned a new leaf of the book, his
eyes fixed on the hibiscus towering beyond the window. Jithan who was willing to be
anything but a poet was excited by the smell of ink from the pen his father had brought
him for the exams. Like a fledgling that vomits blue blood and ides, it shivered in his
hands and surprising him, began jotting down these lines on the unruled sheet of paper:

Oh my teacher, mind seems but a well

I longed it to resemble a burning ocean.
You an ocean of wisdom, vast; I, poor scholar
Shivering like the soul of a little pond.

Though it had a touch of inexpertise and a needless adherence to rhyme and rhythm
under the influence of text book poems, Jithan felt that the poem in eighteen lines bore
something of his own: something strange to him till that very moment. At the same time
it was the literary embodiment of certain unknown miseries that sedimented down his
soul that was only thirteen years old. Accepting that it was beyond the comprehension of
any fellow students or the analysis of his Malayalam teacher, he closed the notebook after
scribbling beneath his debut poem that was so unfortunate to lay unread. And he opened
the text book to learn all those geometry and trigonometry that he believed will never in
his life do him any good.
Letters, people, numerals, animals: for Jithan the text book of mathematics was a vision
of such things. Closing and opening eyes upon them he created nights and days. And he
would leave his ears to graze away. Then opens another text book of domestic sounds:
Mother cursing here way from kitchen to the well and back, bucket plunging headlong
into the water, an iron pulley that lifts water with a wailing sound not mentioned in the
Physics text teaching about levers, the rattle of aluminium vessels, which father received
fro the factory as gift for its months of security, muffled tic-tic sound dripping form the
clock at the front room, a Philips radio which somebody opens for the films songs at
noon and closes with a curse at the beginning of the English news, crow-cries darkened
by heavy sun, and beneath all crickets chirping all night and day.
Jithan’s ears were large enough for all sounds to flow in easily. Like two big question
marks framed with mellow bones they spread on either side of his pretty big head. The
ear that, ages back while returning from the dinner in heaven attended together with his
elder brother, reserved a bit of rice for mother. While preparing for the journey back after
all the delicious courses the thought came to mind: I have nothing in store for mother
waiting at home! A bit of rice was sticking on the back of the washed hand. He stored it
behind the ear.
At home mother asked elder brother: “What have you brought for me?” He displayed an
empty hand and a face that betrayed forgetfulness. With a sigh she turned to the younger
one with the same question. Extending the bit of rice borne behind the ear he told
sorrowfully: ‘I could bring only this much.’
She was full with that. Touching the foreheads of the younger one she said: “Seeing you
will fill the mind of the beholder. May he rejoice how wonderful the moonlight is.” Then
her face darkened at the elder one who had forgotten the mother: “May them fear to look
at your face; and melt at the scorching heat!”
Earth was the mother; sun and moon were the brother. In that story that mother, at some
good ties, had told Jithan, it was he himself that bore the bit f rice from heaven.
Stories like these that come rarely from his mother, Amar Chitrakadhaas (comics that told
the stories of the great Indian epics – Puraanaas), detective novels illustrated in black and
white and published by a man called Kannaadi Viswanaadhan and the legends told by
Rampillayappooppan of the neighbourhood – all of them joined to give his childhood a
strength that only visionaries cherish. Rampillayappooppan was a policeman on the verge
of retirement. At noon on holidays, he told stories with a craft that was customary to all
policemen; his stub-tooth will be too visible on the dark face. Khaki knickers ironed at
right angles so that it doesn’t touch his thighs, khaki shirts sticking onto the body and a
coned cap with red at the top was his police uniform. It was in this costume that constable
Raman Pillai detained the black demon of Kaniyankunnu, the reddish leopard of
Chenkottukonam and the great gladiator of Mamallauram. Nowhere had he any need for
a fight. As he lashed the lathi that, for Jithans mind, resembled a flute – even as he lashed
it just once everybody had surrendered to him in prostration.
“You too should become a policeman when you grow up”, Rampillayappooppan told
every nw and then, laying his arms on Jithan’s shoulders: And you should beat everybody
flat.”
Jithan knew very well that a boy who got the blessing of his mother for bringing one bit
of rice behind his ear could not become a policeman beating people flat. So he replied
ony with silence to this wish of Rampillayappooppan. At a later time, to a similar wish
by Rampillayappooppan he replied with a query: “Will you be there when I grow up?”
The moment he asked the question, Rampillayappooppan recognized that Jithan had
grown up. Children do not ask questions about future. Anxieties about being and dying
are also not anything childish. Thus Rampillayappooppan began to evade stories of
demons and leopards and gladiators. And Jithan recognized that he had grown up the day
Rampillayappooppan dared to tell him of being scolded by his superior for losing th
Asoka mudra from his cap.
They walked together on holidays. Rampillayappooppan laid big bamboo traps to catch
the menacing rats. After laying the trayambaka rat-traps I planned locations
Rampillayappooppan mounted thorny erethrena plants and fell leaves for rabbits. Bloody
crimson flowers dropped from them to Jithan who had been waiting down. They together
made little houses for rabbits with soil and bricks - the very people who reveled every
morning at the sight of ant eaten carcasses of rats choked to death. In those days Jithan’s
mind had not sprouted the prickly question of how could nursing a cute little creature in a
cozy little house can be as equally joyful as laying traps and killing another creature.
Hence he could pretty well enjoy Rampillayappooppan’s role-play of Narasimham
dressed with petals of erethrena flower on fingers to bear semblance to demons. Even as
constable Ramanpillai yelled out pulling out the bowels of the father so as to save the
son, Jithan smiled with a fear within.
They were good days. Childhood of abundance filled with rain that blew like sunrays sun
that drizzled like rain. It was so simple and transparent like an interesting comic that can
be read through easily. It turned away fast and easy. But Jithan can remember every detail
of it till his death: the picture of world hanging upside down in the water drops that clung
to the rusty gates of house in the rainy season. It was a different picture in every drop.
Even the sweet sensation it made upon the dry palms sweeping through the drops was
different from one drop to another. Jithan will mostly be at Rampillayappooppan’s till
mother called out to him loudly at least two or three times. To that house with a small
verandah (ilanthinna), two termite-ridden pillars (it is from one of these that Narasimham
comes out) and a cool comfortable verandahm Jithan had a greater affinity. Despite that
there was no kinship between them, Ramanpillai became his Rampillayappooppan; that
house became his home.
He had not come of the age that divides world into one’s own and the others’. His days
were brightened by the thought that like the sky, the wind and the rain, everything
belonged to everybody. Time was for him a celebration of Today where there was no
Yesterday or Tomorrow. Hunger meant noon, school bell meant evening, sleepiness
meant night, waking up into another morning….
But around him were people unlike that. Father who, clad in white shirt and dhoti, sets
out to the factory early in the dawn; mother who gets u much before Jithan, awakens the
kitchen and the hearth and dives into chores which seems to have no beginning nor an
end; two sisters who wash menstruated garments all day every month and with an equally
weird ind reads textbooks and says prayers in front of the lamp at nightfall… everybody
seemed to be exhausted behind some particular job; some particular job which they were
incapable of conquering. Jithan was sure the world is not going to be any different if his
father did not go to the factory if mother did not get to the kitchen chores, if his sisters
did not go taboo. It would still hang upside down upon the droplets on the rusty gate, like
a bat; and dissolve into his palms as he swiped through. At thirteen, at the age of thirteen
filled with ill omens, beginning the life of an adult even while remaining a child in
everybody’s eyes, Jithan’s mind was more infested than other thirteen year olds. He sat
inside the toilet thinking of gods, the gods beyond temples and incarnation myths. While
offering Deeparadhana at the temple yard along with his sisters his animal instincts
trumpeted at the touch of girls smelling aanappindam. Even when hidden from other
people, he was initiated into the torments of being unable to hide from his self.
Since the tie of Paramahmsaas was past, he could not become a Narendran; and thence a
Vivekanandan. Even if he were to find one Paramahamsan Jithan might evade the chance
considering the meanness of becoming somebody’s disciple. But he had, strengthening
certain concepts of the greatness of man inculcated in him from early childhood, moulded
a guru within himself. And there is every reason to think that he had foreseen his ultimate
destiny of failing before every ordeal set by that guru.
It was this truth that Jithan tried to copy onto the unruled pages of mathematics notebook,
in the form of a poem. Those eighteen lines were drowned in the ocean of old books,
were rediscovered after may years at t rented house where he lived with his wife, and
were doomed to be submerged in the waste water that flooded into the house from the
drainage in a rainy season. But still those lines had a relevance and an originality in that
they were written by child for the human souls condemned to pull on their lives confined
to their physical bodies as well as their material circumstances.
Jithan was a boy; but he was a man to. It was more intricate than being half man and half
animal, or half man and half woman at once. But Jithan the thirteen year old boy is yet to
discover that it is the fate of every man to pass away premature; to discover that
adolescence, just a foreword to agonies is but a threshold to the unfathomable fortress of
worries.