It took Sethu only a few moments to know that he would never leave again. This was home. From where he had fled, he had returned. He would have to sever ties with James Raj, who would have to accept that Sethu could no longer be parted from his home. Sethu began writing a letter in his head: It’s been two years since I went away from Nazareth. 1940 to 1942. But in all these years I never wanted to stay anywhere for too long. Now I have arrived at one such place.
Then for the first time in his life Sethu dredged from memory a biblical quote from the Psalms, a prayer for what would be his home, his life, his future: Thou which has shewed me great and sore troubles, shalt quicken me again, and shalt bring me up again from the depths of the earth. Thou shalt increase my greatness and comfort me on every side.
Sethu did what he always did by way of getting to know new territory. He took a walk. The station was busy. It was the most important junction that connected Malabar, Cochin and Travancore to the rest of the country. The Shoranur station hummed with movement. Engines and passengers, porters and vendors … the trains and the junction determined the life of the town and its people.
Outside, there was nothing. A few shops huddled at the tip of the barren land across the station. Sethu paused and drew a deep breath. All he had with him was a little bag. He could carry it with him, but first, which way ought he to go? The road to the left seemed more alive. So it was to the left he set his course.
He walked slowly, gathering the names and shapes of all that he passed. There was just about everything a town of this size would need. Aboo Backer Bakery. Cheru’s Grocery Store. Pappachan Textiles. Padmanabhan Nair’s Swadeshi Handlooms. And Kunju Mohammed’s Variety Store with stationery, shoes and toiletries.
There were schools. The Ezhuthachan School and the Basel Mission Lower Primary School. The St Theresa’s Convent and the Shoranur High School for Boys.
Sethu, as he walked, discovered that the road ran like a ring around the town. By the time he had navigated the ring, his mind was made up.
He would have to reinvent himself all over again. For that the only thing to do was to become a Janmi. A landowner, representing
continuity and old wealth. With land, he would acquire a lineage he didn’t have, and respectability. He would buy fields where he would grow his own rice and tracts of land where he would plant teak and rubber and coconut. He had money enough to do as he pleased.
To announce his presence, he would also set up a talkies. The town only had travelling talkies. He would give it what would be its first permanent home for the talking pictures.
Sethu went to the man who ran the small bank in the town. He asked to meet the owner and announced his intention with a deposit of a thousand rupees. The owner of the bank widened his eyes in surprise. Sethu could read that look: who is this man who exudes such authority and worldliness?
Sethu smiled. He recognized the type instantly. They bullied their inferiors and sucked up to their superiors.
‘I am Sethumadhavan,’ he said. ‘I come from Colombo. I am a businessman. I run a trading company, but I have always wanted to come back to my ancestral land. And this time I decided I would.’
‘Where is your tharavad? Your family must still be there?’ the man asked, in a voice striated with humility and curiosity.
Sethu looked into the middle distance. It was a look he affected these days when he talked of the past. It spoke of nostalgia tinged with some unmentionable sorrow. It usually left the questioner content with the answer he provided. But this one is wily, this beady-eyed shyster, Sethu thought, and in time will serve my purpose. So he waved his hand and said, ‘My family was from hereabouts but there is nothing left here. My parents never wanted to return. It is only I who have nurtured a desire to return to my land …’
The bank owner nodded his approval. ‘I am glad. This town needs people like you.’
So Sethu acquired land for fields and plantations and within the town he bought land to build his talkies upon. When it was built, he called it Murugan Talkies. The other big business in town was a bus service called Mayilvahanam. Sethu pondered on his choice of name for only a few seconds. Mayilvahanam meant peacock transport and the one who rode the peacock was the warrior god Murugan. By calling his talkies Murugan, Sethu thought the town would know that here was a man whose business was on a par with the Mayilvahanam people. Or perhaps bigger and better.
Then Sethu set about acquiring the other trappings of respectability.
The owner of the bank knew of a family who had a daughter of marriageable age. ‘They live in a little village called Kaikurussi. The girl is older than someone like you would normally choose; she is eighteen, but very pretty.’
Sethu didn’t let his relief show. Saadiya had been too young. That had been the beginning of their troubles. This time he wanted a woman and not a child-woman. He perked his ears to what the man was saying. ‘Her uncle is determined that she marries a man of means. None of these sambandhams that result in nothing but a handful of kids, he is rumoured to have said.’
Sethu nodded. He agreed with the uncle of the girl.
Sethu was the result of a sambandham. His father was from northern Malabar. He had come visiting and fallen in love with Sethu’s mother, whom he saw at a temple festival. He had asked for her hand and she became his wife.
His mother had never been a wife. She shared nothing of her husband’s life, except his bed. The word sambandham was perfect to describe marriages of this nature, Sethu thought. A bond, a sexual bond, and no more. Sethu had grown up not knowing who his father was. He had moved on, and another man had taken his place. It was considered perfectly normal for a woman to change her husband, if it didn’t suit either of them to continue with the relationship. A boy grew up looking up to his maternal uncle rather than his father, who was little more than a casual visitor, and the women sitting on the steps of the bathing pond talked about their sambandhams as if they were discussing glass bangles …It had made his teeth grit then and it did now.
‘I don’t think that will be a problem. I hope you have told them about me. Like the girl’s uncle, I have scant regard for these sambandhams. I will be very happy to progress with this alliance.’
‘Don’t be so hasty. Shouldn’t you see the girl first?’ the owner of the bank said. Sethu may be given to making snap decisions, but this was a little too rushed, he thought.
‘Should I?’ Sethu asked.
‘Yes, you must. They’ll want to see you as well.’
Sethu, accompanied by three other men, took the train from Shoranur to Vallapuzha. A little trek through paddy fields, past a
canal, and finally they were in Kaikurussi.
Sethu mopped his forehead and thought, when I come here next, it will be in a car.
So Sethu, man of means, owner of Murugan Talkies, married Devayani.
He came to the wedding dressed in a cream-coloured silk jubbah and a double mundu with a zari border. He wore a gold chain around his neck and two gold rings. The motorcar he sat in led the way, and at the back walked men bearing petromax lanterns. It was dark when they reached the village border. The car paused and the lantern bearers walked ahead. The entire village came to see this spectacle of a groom in a car, with lanterns leading the way. The villagers, who had never seen such sophistication in their lives, whispered, ‘Did you see that? Who would have thought Kaikurussi would ever see anything like this?’
At the wedding, he noticed a boy and a girl who vied to sit next to him. He smiled. ‘How old are you?’ he asked the boy.
‘Eight,’ he said. ‘She is eight as well.’ He pointed to the girl.
‘We heard that you have been to far away places. To Colomb across the seas,’ the girl said.
‘His father is in Burma. Tell him, Mukundan,’ she prompted.
But Mukundan merely smiled.
‘What’s your name?’ Sethu asked the insouciant girl.
‘Meenakshi. Is Colomb better than Burma?’
Sethu smiled. ‘I don’t know. I have never been to Burma.’
‘Oh.’ The girl looked disappointed.
The boy raised his eyes and asked, ‘What is it like outside this village? Everything must be so different.’ His eyes willed Sethu to say yes.
Sethu knew a strange sense of disquiet. ‘It is very hard to say.’ He tried to be cautious. What if the boy decided to run away from home, lured by the magic of the picture he painted? ‘Sometimes I feel it is the same everywhere. Sometimes I think just entering another room in a house is a different experience.’
The boy’s eyes pleaded for more. Sethu wiped the sweat off his forehead. The night was warm and sticky. ‘You must ask your father. What is his name?’
The boy mumbled, ‘Achuthan Nair.’
‘It will be nice for us to meet when he is here next,’ Sethu told Paru Kutty, Devayani’s cousin and the boy’s mother.
She smiled. Six months later, Sethu understood the meaning of that uncertain smile.
Sethu and Devayani went to meet Achuthan Nair when he returned from Burma. ‘He is a very impressive man,’ Devayani gushed. Sethu wondered what Achuthan Nair was like. Would he consider becoming a business associate, he wondered.
Murugan Talkies ran full house, but the real money lay in the black market. There was a shortage of rice and sugar. The adventurous and not-so-finicky ones ate macaroni that came from foreign lands and was readily available, rather than the vermininfested, worm-ridden rice sold in the shops. The poor ate boiled tapioca. Good rice could be bought only in the black market. Most people were willing to pay extra, for a meal without rice was almost inconceivable. Sethu’s profits were quick and large.
‘This will end when the war is over. Now is the time to profit,’ Sethu told Devayani.
Sethu wondered how he would broach the subject with Achuthan Nair. ‘This chap, Gandhi,’ he began.
Achuthan Nair stared at him. Then he reached forward and fingered the fabric of Sethu’s shirt. ‘What would you know of Gandhi or nationalism, given the fact that you are still wearing these videshi clothes? Your shirt, your car …everything shows your indifference to the freedom struggle. Why else would you flaunt your lack of patriotic spirit in these times when people all over our country, even poor people, are making bonfires of their foreign goods? And you wear a foreign, mill-woven shirt!’
Sethu flushed. He looked at Achuthan Nair in his hand-spun mundu and wooden clogs. He rose. ‘Devayani, it’s time we left,’ he said abruptly.
He could do without such pompous creatures. Sethu knew a familiar ire rise. He is worse than the doctor, he decided, and thereafter did nothing to further the acquaintance.
Sethu knew content again. Life was a plateau with no uneven slopes or pitted surfaces. Devayani was a good enough wife, loving and
considerate, and not given to emotional excesses. She smiled easily and seldom lost her temper. She ate well, slept well and loved well. Sethu would often look at her and think: she is not Saadiya. And only occasionally, he couldn’t decide if that was good or bad. He would think of his son growing up in Nazareth. I must bring him here, he would think. Then he would postpone the decision, telling himself that it would affect his reputation to do so at this point. Besides, he would need to introduce the idea to Devayani first. So time went by and Devayani gave birth to two boys and the moment to bring home the child in Nazareth never arrived.
Then came a whiff of scandal from Kaikurussi. The boy Mukundan had gone away to work in Trichnopolli and the father had taken a mistress.
An invitation came to visit Paru Kutty.
‘May I go?’ Devayani asked.
‘Do you want to?’ Sethu asked.
‘She is very lonely and very unhappy. This mistress business is very humiliating.’
‘What would you do if I took a mistress?’ Sethu asked.
Devayani searched his face. ‘I don’t know …’
‘Go and get ready. I’ll take you to Kaikurussi.’ Sethu smiled.
The boy’s head came to his chest. Sethu pressed him against his breast and with that gesture, tried to erase the sin of neglect. ‘Who did this to you?’ he asked, touching the boy’s crown of hair.
‘Mary Patti,’ the boy said. ‘Faith Akka’s mother. I was very ill some months ago. Then Mary Patti made an offering to St Francis Church on the cliff that she would have my hair cut. There are a few other boys in the village near the church who have a similar haircut. That’s what Mary Patti said. But I heard Mary Patti tell a neighbour that she had prayed that if I was to be taken back into your care, she would have my hair cut.’
Sethu ran his fingers along the ring of hair. Do you blame me for this, he wanted to ask the boy. I am the reason you have had to endure so much in twelve years of life. This ring of hair must have come with enough torment and humiliation. How could I have been so irresponsible?
Sethu now did what he had never done before, when faced with trouble. He decided to confront it.
He tilted the boy’s chin and said, ‘First, I am going to send for the barber. He will shave your head so that you don’t have to walk around with this ignominy of a haircut. Then we will go to Kaikurussi and pick up your …’ Sethu wondered what he ought to say and then decided, ‘your mother and brothers.’