Authors: Jose Thekkumthala
All along his life he had fought the demons, and therefore it came as a second nature for him to stare down them. But they still stayed in his yard as a constant reminder that one day they could win over him. They always appeared in front of him in his direct vision or his peripheral vision.
During those moments that he did not have a staring contest with the demons, no one really knew for sure what he was gazing at. Staring at the big nothingness was not foreign to his nature. He had always done that. To escape into long moments of inaction was what he achieved by sleeping with his eyes open. Even when big challenges loomed in front of him earlier in life, he had escaped into a cocoon of inactivity. He was lulled by this pointless staring at the void. He found it soothing.
The jackfruit tree wondered aloud at the attention given it by Thoma. But then, maybe only God knew that Thoma was staring at the vivid void beyond it. The coconut palm trees not far away from him probably knew what he was up to, since they always felt that his penetrating stare went right through their leaves without a care for anything but what was beyond.
“There sits the man with the penetrating gaze,” the coconut palm tree told his neighboring mango tree.
“There sits the man with the penetrating gaze,” the mango tree repeated to the neighboring areca nut tree with a wink.
The roosters repeated this message to the ducks, and the ducks conveyed it to the crows.
The message went from tree to tree, from plant to plant, from
flower to flower, and from animal to animal. Soon it was a topic of conversation among all the flora and fauna in the backyard.
The yard showcased green foliage and an abundant number of fruits and nuts such as jackfruit, mango, coconut palm, areca nut, cashew nut, pineapple, plantain, papaya, and black pepper. The backyard scene was a microcosm of the tropical paradise of Kerala and was a feast to the eyes.
The ravishing beauty of Kerala that was the pride of Indian tourism was a lavish treat to the eyes and mind, an elixir to body and soul. Just being able to watch the exotic beauty of Kerala, day in and day out, in itself was an ideal retirement treat. Sitting in his chair and watching the supernatural beauty gave him something to do every day, something soothing and refreshing to the self. At last in his life, he got time to stop and smell the roses. So did Ann.
Through his non-stop stare, Thoma was either building castles in the air or, more probably, just convincing himself that he was in the evening of life, meaning he already crossed the dream factory that manufactures the fantasies of youth and the illusions of life. He was convincing himself that he was in a stable, realistic-looking terrain of life, devoid of the traps of the youth and the slippery slopes of the middle life. He was ruminating over the multitude vicissitudes of life, over the various hard rocks life had thrown at him, over the various curveballs of life that he untriumphantly faced and retreated from. He was unlike Alexander the Great, who conquered challenges in his path tirelessly, giving rise to the expression “He came, he saw, and he conquered.”
As for Thoma, he came, he saw, and he returned. That is what he did with life: he just came back after seeing the challenges that life had prepared for him in a gigantic row. Not a tactful retreat but a cowardly, shameful, and disheartening retreat.
***
Ann was wearing a
chatta
, a mundu, and
mekkamothiram
which hung ceremoniously from her ears. The oversized chatta gave ample room for her drooping breasts to follow gravity and reach the level of her belly button. The earrings were given to her by her
parents when she married Thoma. It did not take too long for Thoma to pawn the gold ornaments and eventually sell them. It was after they moved from the rental home in Mannuthy to their own home in Amballore that she was able to buy new ornaments by selling part of the land Josh bought for them.
She was chewing on a betel leaf spiced with white lime paste. Adding flavor to the mix were areca nuts. She could chew on this mix like cows chewing on grass and that too, until the cows came home. She then spat out the red liquid into a receptacle made of brass and shaped like an hourglass. When the brass receptacle was not handy, she just spat into the backyard. Chickens and ducks assembled around the red spot Ann made to gossip about Thoma. It was their water cooler.
Thoma hardly took notice of Ann when she was moving about him, since his attention was riveted on the nothingness that lay in front of him, like an unending carpet. While he was sitting in his chair and staring incessantly at the vast sky, bare like a newborn baby, Ann to him was nothing but a shade moving in front of him like a character in the shadow plays he used to watch when he was a boy. She was always a figure out of his focus, or worse still, out of his view.
He preferred it that way. He could not stand seeing her hanging around him. He felt that his peace was compromised by her presence, especially when she was pregnant and was moving around slowly.
One day after their tenth child was born back in Mannuthy, Thoma told his wife, "I would have been better off if you laid an egg and sat on it for nine months to hatch. I would not have had to see you for nine months." This opinion came from a thoughtless and cruel man, as Bhavany, their neighbor would comment upon hearing this.
Ann made a quick calculation in her mind and concluded that if she were to hatch the egg, she would have been out of sight of her husband for ninety months total, nine months each for ten of her children. She realized with a jolt that the said time span translated to seven and a half years! That is how long she had been pregnant
with all her children.
She knew that she could not have survived sitting alone for such a long time on the top of an egg; she could not have pulled through not seeing her husband for such a long time. That would have been too much of a sacrifice, she thought. She thanked God in her mind for offering pregnancy to women instead of making them sit on eggs. She prayed for women to be able to spend their time with their husbands during a series of nine-month ordeals.
Thoma and Ann could not keep track of the names of their children; there were so many of them. They remembered the names of their first four children: George, Rita, Kareena, Josh. That was it. After that, it became an ordeal to track the names. From the fifth child onwards, they gave up calling the children by names. The last six children were merely tracked by number. The fifth child was a boy called Number-Five, the sixth was boy called Number-Six, the seventh a boy named Number-Seven and so on. Even though they had bona-fide names on their baptism certificates and school records, they were called by numbers by relatives, neighbors and friends. To complete the long list, Number-Eight was a girl, Number-Nine a boy, and last but not the least, Number-Ten was a girl.
“It is your job to remember the names of your children,” Thoma told Ann, as if he had nothing to do with them; as if Ann became pregnant through a miracle, like the Virgin Mother Mary was pregnant with Jesus. He might as well have called her “Ann of the Immaculate Conception,” with the biblical connotation to “Mary of the Immaculate Conception.” Ann was Mary’s mother, after all.
Thoma would have loved to place no claim on his children, hoping to wash away his obligation to bring them up, as his drinking buddies would attest. Thoma told his buddies: “My children are the accidental tourists that dropped by during my love festival with Ann.” They all would break into laughter upon hearing this.
He told Ann, “Why don’t you keep all the children with you for as long as you like; I want no part in their upbringing.” Ann was shocked when he said this for the first time. “They are our gift from
God; please treasure them,” she replied. Thoma was ready with an answer. “Why don’t you wrap them like Christmas gifts, if they are gifts from your God?” He commented sarcastically.
Her neighbor in Amballore, Annamma, often corrected her when she bragged that she got in Thoma a treasure chest of a husband. Annamma was very surprised to hear this, and she mentioned that Thoma was Ann’s sole source of misery. Ann vehemently refused to share this cynical view. Ann never listened to Annamma in matters related to Thoma.
Here was Annamma, a saintly Mother Theresa, never skipping daily Mass and living a highly pious life, proclaiming vehemently that Thoma was Ann’s sole source of misery, and her declaration was unbiased. There was truth in the statement.
However, Ann learned long ago not to be critical about her husband’s character flaws and mood swings. She learned not to pass judgment on him. She erected a formidable edifice at the border of reason and faith, never crossing to the land of reason, firmly grounded as she was on the land of blind faith. She fortified her unquestioned love to him through numerous sacrifices. She blindly stuck to her love toward her husband.
Thoma, on the other hand, was unable to display his love to his wife, even though he knew in the heart of his hearts that his heart belonged to her. After all, who in her right state of mind would stick to him when he piloted her life through misery, making her and their children wallow in insecurity, poverty, and insatiable hunger?
Theirs was a strange but unique team.
He was a man who sometimes tried to lead a principled life in the face of the untold challenges of raising a family of ten children. He sometimes tried to make amends to the bad life he led. Even though he crashed his life’s plane and orphaned his family, even though he unfailingly failed in meeting his responsibilities to his wife and children, even though he could give them no shade in the sun and no umbrella in the rain, he nevertheless tried to be a man of principle at times—though he failed. Old habits were hard to die—
by nature, he was not a man of principle.
Ann was a saintly woman naïve enough to unquestioningly and blindly put her trust in the goodness of human nature, an embodiment of human kindness, an emblem of infinite fortitude and a token of unassuming humility. She was simple enough to put unshakeable faith in the shipwreck of a man called Thoma, in spite of landing in devastation and destitution and street life ever since she cast her lot with him. She trusted people around her like a baby would trust his or her mother.
These two human beings being pitched in the same bondage is the stuff from which unusual tales are made. There may neither be books written on them nor Malayalam movies made on their lives. However, the combination of love, faith, and attempts to be principled that was the centerpiece of their existence was in itself a testament to the meaning they gave to their lives and was sufficient to build an enduring memorial in the hearts of those who knew them, and who loved them.
Thoma spat bitterly in a long stream. The assembly of hens was dispersed in a wild outburst of cacophony by this unexpected projectile into their midst. Their loud chanting of buck-buck-buck-buck continued well after the weapon of mass destruction landed like a missile of a drone strike. They were annoyed that their buffet meal consisting of leftovers of rice and fish curry was disrupted. Ann did not own a trash bin. Chicken, crows, dogs, cats, and an occasional duck or two pretty much cleaned up the backyard for her.
“Thoma spat,” Subashini announced from her castle.
Her cage was her castle; she was the undisputed queen of her castle.
“Thoma spat,” she broadcast again, just in case someone did not hear her earlier.
Her solemn announcement had a laid-back quality and yet conveyed the gravity of an imminent World War III or the reenactment of the ancient India-China war.
The brood of hens unhappily dispersed by spit was soon replaced
by a flock of crows who feasted on the buffet. Some of them squinted at Thoma suspiciously with cocked heads, anticipating the next round of the drone attack and readying for flight to safer grounds.
Ann did her cooking by burning wood in a clay oven. In those days of old, firewood burned in the oven was the main mode of fuel. She kept the wood fire in high flames by crouching on the floor and blowing ad infinitum into it. She could blow air like an inexhaustible fan to enliven the dying embers. Her face became darker and darker as time went on, as she kept blowing into the smoldering fire. Her face looked like the darkened cinders left behind after the wood’s final embrace of a dying fire.
She had to exercise extreme care handling her crumbly clay pots. This slowed down the process of dish washing. Clay wares had to be handled with tender, loving care.
Saintly as Mother Mary and resembling a female hunchback of Notre Dame, Ann kept the fire of life alive for those around her, just as she kept her oven fire alive. She had an undying smile she deployed to face any adversity. She was gifted with an easy smile, however grim the context could be. She neither knew how to get angry nor did she have the facial mechanism to display anger. At some moments that called for real displays of anger common to any human being, Ann managed, very feebly at that, to come out of her placid forbearance. She then shouted out words that easily got jumbled because of the excitement, making herself a laughingstock to the audience. If only to avoid the sorry scene, Ann learned not to display anger.
Thoma finished a cup of coffee that Ann had prepared in the clay oven. He then lit up a beedi and started smoking. Beedi is the ancestor of the cigarette, or its poor cousin, poisoning lungs through unfiltered smoke, used even to this day in Kerala. He puffed out a ring of black smoke. He then swung his arm to catch a mosquito. Now, Thoma had a habit of beating his wife with his powerful, swinging arms on the pretext of catching a fly. He blamed Ann for everything bad in this world, including flies, mosquitos, and moths, and concluded she deserved a beating once in a while.
Subashini, always vigilant and never missing a beat saw the beating was coming. She shouted, “Look out! Thoma hit.”
Ann moved fast. She narrowly escaped the assault.
The parrot was closely guarding Ann.
***
The front gate of Thoma’s home in Amballore opened, and in came a visitor. It was Rita. Rita’s arrival was announced by Subashini.