Authors: Jose Thekkumthala
The meeting started with Bible reading. There were three elders who conducted the prayer. It was conducted at night. They turned off the lights and lit a number of candlesticks. People took turns to read Bible. All of us sat around a large table, making small talk. This slowly progressed into people describing their personal problems and how they were able to cope with them or not. The Bible scholar was able to quote page numbers that would contain appropriate reference suiting the experience under discussion. I was amazed by his memory that enabled him to quote the page number of appropriate reference. The important part of the meeting was not praying but analyzing personal issues. The Bible was used to lend support to the analysis offered by the pious men.
Very soon, another aspect of the prayer emerged. It appeared that one holy man was able to go into trance, and predict the future of the people assembled, as well as describe their past. It was clear
that a lot of what he said about the past was true. As for the predictions of the future, no one knew if those would materialize. I was quite intrigued by this aspect of the prayer. People could easily be hoodwinked by the man’s mannerism during the meeting, such as his propensity to talk in gibberish. I thought somehow he was able to read one’s mind. But how was beyond me. I made it a point to see a parapsychologist. I visited him prior to my departure.
His opinion was the holy man in question had some abilities, such as being able to read minds, as I suspected. He told me that when people were holding hands as they were doing during prayer meetings, they were concentrating so hard that thoughts could be transmitted and received. This explained how the holy man was able to describe the past. As for the future, a combination of desires, hopes, hatred, and inimical feelings would create a pudding of the states of mind of the attendees, and that would be captured by the holy man. What the attendees desired to happen in the future is what was predicted as the future outcome.
According to the parapsychologist, this interesting scenario creates a self-serving and perpetuating situation whereby the attendees always got the predictions they desired. The holy man projected what was in the customer’s mind—as simple as that. What was happening in these meetings was not totally voodoo, but a self-satisfying situation artfully crafted by the prayer men with the support of the Bible.
***
We gave our children normal names like Thomas, Sukumaran, Sameer, Rani, and Elsie instead of Kibi, Jomi, Pidi, and Bogi. I found the latter set of names were ubiquitous among the current generation’s children. Our generation did not understand the logic behind creating names taking half of it from one’s father’s name and the other half from the mother’s name. These names sounded appropriate for robots. The naming scheme looked to us like an alphabet game with jumbled consonants and vowels incoherently mixed and unevenly delivered, beating a smooth pronunciation. To our generation, a name represented something; it had a meaning, it evoked feeling, and it was not an amateurish alphabet soup.
Another intriguing thing about the new name convention is that one cannot discern if the person is a man or a woman. Bidi (the child of Biman and Diana) could marry Dibi (the child of Dismas and Bindi) and produce two children Bidi and Dibi—and none would know who the bride is and who the bridegroom; nor would anyone know which one of their children is a boy and which one the girl.
I wondered aloud if the scheme was a prelude to even more dramatic changes in a newer generation’s naming scheme, such as giving numbers to people—maybe in a robotic generation! If I came back to Kerala, say in another thirty years, would I be invited to a wedding reception where Bridegroom 3478 was marrying Bride 1245? “Now the bridegroom, 4456 may kiss his bride, 1187,” so might the priest (of the name Pastor 1111) blessing the wedding ceremony announce.
All along while I was mingling with the new generation and slowly comprehending the new way culture, customs, and lifestyles are changing, I felt like a fish out of water, because I was standing in the footsteps of my generation, unable to grasp that the page had turned to a new chapter. My predicament was partly because I was practically a foreigner there, having come back to Kerala after a long absence, but mostly because I could not cope with the generational recast. I was hit by a double whammy of cultural and generational transitions.
11
THE CLASS REUNION
I got up from the upper-deck sofa and started to walk around, watching the crowd to see if I recognized some of the guests. I joined a group of my classmates who were sitting by themselves, abandoned by their children. I met the group that included Jose, another Jose, yet another Jose, a Varghese, a Lonappan, and so on. Old memories of Amballore University, our alma mater, started coming back, flooding my mind. We compared notes among ourselves, engrossingly conversing to know who became who later in life and where everyone was currently residing. Toms had made sure old Malayalam songs served as background music. Mingling among ourselves, sharing old memories, and listening to our childhood Malayalam songs made us nostalgic.
One favorite topic of conversation was our professors. I came to know of the whereabouts of some of them, who used to teach in various disciplines. The English professor, Joseph, was no more kicking; he died just two years ago. I still remembered his dramatic presentation of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” During his class, he would descend from his elevated platform, join us—the students, the less fortunate souls, sitting in cheap chairs—and start shouting Hamlet’s words, waking up students in the back row. The presentation in his Barry White’s baritone voice was impressive enough to wake up Rip van Winkle from his years-long sleep.
Professor Joseph was the most famous professor at Amballore University. His interest in English literature is a story in itself. He was science graduate, and he got job in a national lab researching neurosciences. One fine morning, he saw the light and got disillusioned with research. He got religion, became a changed man, and decided to go back to the university to get a degree in English literature. He did very well in his new discipline and got a job as an assistant professor as soon as he graduated. “Always believe in second chances,” he would tell his students. “Your first chances are products of your upbringing and luck. Your second chances are premeditated and planned, and therefore they are
legitimate and will last long,” he told his class. He did not retire until he was seventy. He was the faculty chairman when he retired.
His specialty was Shakespeare. His presentations of Shakespearean plays were not just presentations; they were events. They were experiences never to leave one’s memory. He was not presenting; he was acting. Many students from other faculties would cancel their regularly scheduled classes and sneak into his class to partake in the experience. Soon, the class size became enormous, and his classes had to be moved to the university auditorium in the second floor. He made his students come to the platform and act out the scenes—rather than just describing the scenes like a conventional professor would.
He was usually late for his classes, maybe some fifteen minutes. The large crowd of attendees would be anxiously waiting for him and would be at their wit’s end, when the one-man phenomenon of Professor Joseph, weighing 250 pounds and six feet in height, would be heard making heavy footsteps on the stairs leading to the second floor of the gathering. He would have already started his class while climbing. The audience could hear his baritone voice breaking the silence of anticipation, since he would have started reciting Macbeth:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
By this time he would have reached the landing of the stairs, and his students would be joining his recital in a loud chanting. With the chorus in the background, he would resume his recital.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
He would have entered the class by the time the last line was in recital. It was a dramatic entrance, appropriately enough.
We, the students, would have been so much hyped up by this time that we would lend our ears to listen to anything and everything he had to say. It was a well-known fact that the professor came to his English classes straight from Judas Toddy Club. He would be drunk prior to his presentations, tottering his way from kallu shop. He would add another “tomorrow” to Macbeth’s lines and that was an indication that he was more drunk than usual. If yet another “tomorrow” were added, it would be a hilarious, out of this world presentation delivered by a professor legally drunk. If he recited the following lines,
“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,” it signaled a riotous presentation, a presentation that stayed in one’s mind all the way to his dusty death.
We named such classes TUI—teaching under the influence, rephrasing DUI—driving under the influence. Even his presentation of Shakespearean tragedies would be hilarious under such circumstances.
Needless to say, he was a brilliant professor. He was called a “mad professor” in recognition of his genius and creative ways of teaching such as acting out the play he was teaching. We loved him. No, we adored him. Every generation of Amballore University’s literature class worshipped him at the altar of English literature.
He would build his own drama team from his class unfailingly, year after year. The students in his English class would turn out to be famous actors and actresses, some of them crossing to the silver screen. His team would win most of the competitions held during the annual youth festival that was participated in by a number of universities. He also made appearances in those plays in cameo roles. His tireless endeavors would make the university very famous.
Professor Joseph never got married, and it was hard for him to
retire, since he knew of nothing else to do except teaching, his passion. The university administration let him teach beyond sixty years, the time at which the faculty usually retired. This was in recognition of his scholarship and the fame that he brought to the university. He was, however, forced to retire by the university principal when he turned seventy, over loud protests from the student community.
He became depressed after retirement. He would wake up in the middle of the night, get dressed, walk to the campus, and sneak into his old office using the keys that he did not return, enter one of the English class rooms, and start teaching Shakespeare to an empty room in the perfect pitch of darkness. He would shout in his grave voice, “I want each of you to remember the quote from
As You like It
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. “
He was quoting the last lines of “All the World’s a Stage”
He continued, “I want all of you to remember that old age is a second childhood. Life is a circle. You come back to where you start.” This statement would have merited loud applause if there were students in the class.
He would then light up a candle, pulling it out of his pocket. He would undress with no inhibitions. He would then pull out a sari from the paper bag he was carrying. He would dress up in that white cotton sari, which had “Lady Macbeth” prominently embroidered on it. He would abandon his clothes in the classroom and walk out of there, holding a lit candle and repeating Lady Macbeth’s lament:
Here’s the smell of the blood still
All the perfumes of Arabia
Will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!
He would walk through the campus and all the way to his home in the stillness of the night, holding a solitary candle, in perfect imitation of Lady Macbeth’s somnambulistic walk, and reciting her lament over and over again, like a broken record. He would culminate his nocturnal trek by entering his home and washing his hands of any imaginary blood.
The next day, the campus security would find an abandoned mundu and shirt in the English classroom. They would identify the nightly visitor after some episodes and therefore would be able to return the clothes to their rightful owner.
It was not clear if the drama professor was staging a nightly solo drama or if he indeed turned out to be somnambulistic like Lady Macbeth or had gone plain mad, dismayed as he was by losing his esteemed professorship, and sitting at home doing nothing. It was not clear if his passion of teaching and acting was slowly eating him to persuade him to stage his drama to a sleeping world, since the wakeful student crowd had been denied to him.
He would eventually be apprehended and handed over to the Amballore Mental Asylum where he was caged like a bird. He was seen walking the hallways of the mental institution back and forth at night, holding a candle and reciting Lady Macbeth. The warden was sympathetic to the professor and did not interfere, since it was causing no harm to the other inmates.
Then one night, he managed to get out of the asylum through one of the doors inadvertently kept open. It was night. He walked out of his room, down the hallway, and into the wide world outside. He was crossing Hell’s Highway while thus taking his nocturnal trek to the university campus, holding a candle and reciting Lady Macbeth’s lament, when he was struck by a speeding car. Even though the car was speeding, and therefore had to take the blame for the accident, the professor was in a somnambulistic stage, unaware of the surroundings, and therefore would have fallen prey to even the minutest of assaults, let alone a speeding vehicle. The dim candle he was holding did not shed enough light to be seen by the passing motorists. He died on the spot. So much blood drained out of him that all the perfumes of Arabia would not have
sweetened his big hand. He was ninety when he died.