‘In the past, if one of them was ill, they would ask that I attend. Because I’m not one of them, they would bring the patient to a cowshed—if the house had one. The presence of chaani perhaps cleansed the air of my presence. I would have to clench my guts not to throw up for the smell of cow shit, but they wouldn’t have it any other way. If there wasn’t a cow shed, they would bring the patient to the side of the road and that’s where I would have to examine him or her.
‘Each time I went, I swore that I would never return. Then I would think of the patient and my Hippocratic oath and I would allow my anger to die.
‘But that isn’t what makes me so angry. It’s what they do while wrapping themselves in such rituals and customs. That the men marry their nieces and the widows are forced to shave their heads is something all of us know about. But this …this I wouldn’t have known, but for a patient.’
Dr Samuel liked stories. He liked telling them even better. Sethu often suspected him of making up stories. He had discovered that most of the tales owed their origin to not-so-well-known parts of the Bible. But he kept his discovery quiet. He was quite willing to let the doctor be Aaron: ‘I know that he can speak well,’ etc.
Sethu leaned forward to show his interest.
‘The woman was possessed, they told me: she claimed that she was the mother of snakes. That in her womb she bore baby snakes.
‘She was sitting in the cowshed. I had never seen anyone as thin as her. She was a skeleton covered with clothes.
‘I have to examine her, I said. The men backed out and the woman’s aunt stayed.
‘Her belly was distended and I could feel a few knots. If it had been anyone else, I would have instantly diagnosed it to be a tapeworm infection. But how could that be? These people were strict vegetarians. I was puzzled.
‘“Why are you wasting your time?” she said. “Can’t you feel it? Those are my snake eggs. I am their mother.”
‘When I said it wasn’t possible, she grew angry. She said the next time she gave birth to her snake child, she would show me.
‘The woman turned to the wall of the cowshed and wept: “I know I am barren. I can’t give birth to human babies. But the gods have blessed me. I am the mother of snakes now.”
‘I would like to have had stool and urine samples to help me with my investigation. But how could I ask? Nevertheless, I did. I will be back tomorrow morning, I said. I would come in the ambulance, a little makeshift lab in the absence of anything else. I would take my microscope and do a chamber study. I was intrigued, you must understand.’
‘And then …’ Sethu asked, knowing how the doctor liked to stretch a tale. If he didn’t hurry him, he would proceed to some other inconsequential minutiae.
The doctor frowned. He didn’t like being hurried. He stared into the distance as if collecting his thoughts. Then he sighed and turned to face Sethu. ‘The next morning, when I got there, her aunt who was perhaps the only one who cared about the woman, had the stool sample in a matchbox and the urine in a little mud pot. All very routine stuff. And then she whispered that the patient wanted to see me. She had something to show me.
‘The thought of that cowshed nauseated me. It stank of cow piss. But I wouldn’t let it stop me, I thought, and went.
‘The cowshed seemed darker than ever. I don’t know why it reminded me of a delivery room. I knew I was being fanciful, illogical even, but I couldn’t help it.
‘The woman was waiting for me. She thrust a cloth into my face.
‘“Here’s my child,” she said, opening out the cloth.
‘Seth, in my entire life as a doctor I have never seen a tapeworm that big. It was at least four metres long, and banded—you know what that means, don’t you? Like bands of tape stuck together.
‘“How?” I stuttered in shock.
‘“What do you mean how?” she demanded. “I told you, didn’t I? About my snake children. But no one believes me. Which is why I kept this one to show you. I usually put them on the termite hill to the south of the house. “Go, my babies,” I tell them, and every day I take a coconut shell of milk and turmeric for them.”
‘I stood there aghast. The poor woman probably had a cyst in
her brain as well. She was a walking trogle of tapeworms. If she was ejecting them through her vagina, it probably meant she had a severe recto-anal fistula as well. And that is a rarity by itself. But none of this made me wonder as much as the presence of the parasite.
‘I turned to her aunt and said in my sternest voice, “Tell me the truth. Has she a lover?”
‘The woman’s eyes widened in shock. “She is a married woman,” she said.
‘“Since when did that prevent a woman from taking a lover?” I asked. “You must tell me, for I have to know who’s been feeding her meat. She has taenia cestodes. That thing she’s swaddled in a cloth and calls her baby is a tapeworm, which can come only from beef or pig’s meat.’
‘What do you think would have happened in the normal course if I made an accusation of that sort? She would have beaten her breasts and made a ruckus. Called me names and had her menfolk throw me out for mouthing such heresy. Instead, the aunt wouldn’t meet my eyes.
‘“No, no,” she mumbled.
‘“Then how do you explain it? You get this infection only if you eat meat. And you are brahmins, vegetarians,” I pointed out.
‘She stared at her feet and said, “We eat pork.”
‘“What?” I cried in shock. I don’t think I had ever been so shocked by anything before. I felt my legs wouldn’t hold me up any more. These brahmins ate pork! I think I must have stuttered, “I don’t understand …”
‘“Many years ago, when the smallpox epidemic was raging, our priest had a dream. He told us that the goddess of smallpox, Periya Amman, said that if we wished to let the pox bypass us, we must eat pork. The thick layer of fat of the pig would serve as a talisman. It would protect us. It would keep us alive and our skins would remain soft and smooth, unpitted by scars.
“They almost killed the priest when he narrated his dream. But every night Amman came to him. He called a council of elders and said, You know that I have never swerved from the brahminical path. That I have upheld each one of our dictates. Amman has come for a whole week in my dreams. Every night, she gets angrier and angrier. Last night she was furious. She said, Is it that you do not
trust me, or is it that you think you know better? I will not appear again, but if you do not do as I say, in less that a month’s time your entire village will be wiped out.
‘“No one dared ignore his words then. But who would do the deed of buying the pork and cooking it? The priest suggested that we draw lots. You see, no one wanted to defile themselves. But before that happened, a group of young men offered to go. They said that when the pork was brought, everyone would have to eat it. So why worry about being defiled? They went away and came back with the meat and a recipe to cook it. The women were all summoned and told what to do with the meat. We set aside separate vessels to cook the meat and bowls to eat it from. None of us cared for it; we did it because it was a dictate from heaven and no one dared disobey. Ever after, every few months, our men travel to a place where no one knows them and bring back enough meat for the village. Smallpox, cholera, plague, jaundice, none of this affects us. As you can see, it works for us. We’ve never been ill,” she finished defiantly.
‘I said nothing. Their hypocrisy nauseated me. Nauseates me to this day. They think all the rest of us are untouchables. But to save their skins, they’ll eat even pig’s meat.’
Sethu shivered. This was one of the doctor’s finest stories.
‘How do you think they cooked the pork?’ Sethu asked.
‘How would I know?’ The doctor’s sarcasm made Sethu wince. ‘Not adequately, for how would they know how to cook meat?’
‘What happened then? Did you cure the woman?’ Sethu asked.
The doctor wiped his brow. ‘I hid my repugnance for them—or so I thought. I went back the next day with enough medicines for the woman and for the entire village. I wondered what the intestines of the others were like. Were all of them invaded by T. solium?
‘Perhaps, I thought, this woman was one of the poorest of the lot and had received no medical attention, while the others were treating themselves elsewhere, just as they got their meat from some distant place. That is a common enough occurrence, you know. Why, no one here in Nazareth would come to me if they showed any symptoms of leprosy. They would go elsewhere. Leprosy is endemic to this region. Did you know that? Last month …’
Sethu cut in with, ‘Doctor, what happened when you went back to the village?’
‘They wouldn’t let me see the woman. They said they had their means of treating madness and they didn’t need my services any longer. The woman’s aunt must have told one of the men about her confession. They didn’t want me coming there any more. And they said if I were to tell anyone about it, they would deny everything and say that I was slandering them because they had resisted my attempts to convert them.
‘“I am a doctor,” I said. “And a gentleman.”
‘“All that is fine,” one of them said. “But if we hear stories about what you know, we will ensure you never talk again. We have broken one dictate already and sinned. Do you think we are afraid of sin any more?”
‘That was what scared me. They are lawless creatures. Barbarians in brahminical disguise. They are afraid of nothing and that is frightening. That is the honest truth.’
‘So am I the first one you have told this to?’ Sethu asked, turning to look at the village. It seemed harmless. A small drab village in a tract of barren wilderness.
‘I told a few of my friends in Madras. I had to. I had to tell someone. But they wouldn’t believe my story. They said I should have been a writer instead of a doctor. That my imagination was better than my knowledge of anatomy …the fools!’
Sethu turned to look at the village. The doctor’s stories were normally parables. They had a moral at the end, a good Christian edict. That this story was free of it made him believe the doctor. What nature of place have I been exiled to, he asked himself, feeling more trapped than ever. A place where women are stuffed in urns and brahmins eat pork. Where Faith, Hope and Charity have feet and the landscape is a flat brown?
Then Sethu saw his first salt pan and knew that if he didn’t escape soon, he never would. For here, even salt was trapped by the land.
Sethu was not to know it then, but he was right when he thought that the land exercised a power that wasn’t easy to understand. It trapped all that which came into its periphery.
Long ago, or perhaps it is simpler to say, in the beginning, was a ship. A ship that had a prayer deck and sailcloths to harness Allah the Almighty’s blessings and the winds. A ship that charted its course
under the captaincy of the incomparable Malik, with its most precious cargo—the Sahabakkal: Abu Backer, Omar, Ali and Usman. Acolytes of the Prophet, ordained by the Caliph to set forth and spread the word.
In the beginning, they sailed the seas seeking new homes for the word. They sailed along the coast of Malabar, turned a corner and chose to cruise along the eastern coast. They hadn’t gone too far when they discovered the city of the holy diamond—the Pavitramanicka patnam. On one side, the sea flanked the town and on the other side was the river Tamarabarani. Malik said to the acolytes, ‘Here you can fulfil part of your pledge to the Prophet. Here you can wipe out all traces of the shaitan and do what the Prophet expected you to do.’
What that was neither the incomparable Malik nor the Sahabakkal knew. Nevertheless, they persevered.
When the acolytes began to despair of making even one convert, Malik decided to return. He had his men mend the sails and swab the decks and then he told the acolytes, ‘Look around you. Is there anything here that makes the infidels of this region think of God? Any God? Theirs, or ours? Perhaps we need to find fresh soil to sow the seeds of Islam.’
The acolytes stared at the scrubland, the heaving ocean and miles of sand dunes and felt a great pang of homesickness. They thought: There is beauty in our desert kingdoms. Here the desert is barren land. But they couldn’t give up. And so they preached all that they had been taught. When they left, their legacy to the land and the people was the body of Abu Backer, buried in a patch of land the villagers left alone. Thus, the acolytes sowed the seeds of Arabipatnam, the city of Arabs.
Two hundred years had to pass before the Kahirs arrived. They were Egyptians looking to navigate the seas for ports that would fill their ships with the fragrance of spices and their coffers with wealth. Mohammed Khalifi was not the incomparable Malik, but he too had his prayer deck and sailcloth and, more than that, he had a spirit of adventure that propelled him to go on. He ventured beyond the Pavitramanicka patnam and there he espied a natural harbour. One that would suffice for him to drop anchor. He saw that in the land that lay beyond the harbour his men would discover again that the
earth was flat and still under their feet. When they turned to the Kabaah to say their prayers, it would not heave and buckle under their bodies.
In the sands beyond the natural harbour, he discovered a tomb with an Arabic inscription. It was Abu Backer’s tomb. Mohammed Khalifi knew a sadness like he had never known before and in that moment he set out to build a mosque.