My father’s house was new. Its attic held no remnants of the past. It lay vacant and quiet, trapping sun motes and dust. And it was here that I fashioned my destiny.
I made a paste of the turmeric and indigo to make a passable green. Trying to recreate the faces in my mind, I applied it to my face. I drew the charcoal around my eyes and mixed the vermilion with water to tint around my mouth. I cut a hole in the bottom of the flat basket and wedged it around my waist. I draped a cloth around myself and slung the red scarf around my neck. I cut the cardboard in the shape of the frame the dancers had worn around their jaw. I made two holes at either end of the fan-shaped piece, drew two pieces of thread through them and wound them around my ears. Then I peered at myself in the shard of mirror I had. I wasn’t the man-god I had seen yesterday. But I wasn’t the ‘I’ I knew.
I could be anybody. I could be god or demon. I, Koman, age thirteen, with no tags, tails or suffixes, had a face I could recognize.
‘What is happening here?’ Achan said, walking into the attic.
He stared at me. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. His voice emerged low and hollow, as if the climb had robbed him of all air.
‘I …’ I said. The ‘I’ rolled off my tongue easily. ‘I was seeing if I could be a kathakali dancer.’
‘And?’
Achan looked at me. I had never seen him look as sad as he did just then. ‘You are too young to know.’
I didn’t offer an answer.
‘You might change your mind when you are older,’ he added, filling the attic with the extent of his doubt.
‘I won’t,’ I said. I touched his elbow and murmured, ‘When I am a veshakaaran, I will know who I am.’
‘What is there to know? I can tell you who you are.’ Achan’s voice rose.
‘It isn’t that.’ I paused. He knew what I meant, but it was his place to protest.
For two long years I clung to my dream and denied Achan his right to impose his will.
There were frequent arguments. One evening, I heard about a performance at a temple nearby. I sneaked out when everyone was asleep and stayed there all night till dawn broke and the performance was over.
My father was furious. ‘I will not tolerate this. I will not let you grow into a vagabond.’
‘But, Achan,’ I protested, ‘I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I just wanted to see the performance.’
‘You didn’t think it was necessary to ask my permission?’
‘I didn’t think you would let me go,’ I said.
‘When you knew that I wouldn’t approve, why did you do it?’ Achan’s fingers pressed into my shoulder.
‘I can’t help it,’ I said. ‘When I hear the drum beat, all I know is I want to be there.’
Another time, he found me practising expressions in the mirror. ‘Why are you making faces?’ he asked.
‘I am not making faces,’ I said. ‘I am trying to practise expressions.’
‘What do you need to practise expressions for? Are you going to be a clown?’
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘I will be a veshakaaran.’
My father struck the flat of his palm against his forehead. ‘What am I to do with this boy? Why won’t he see sense?’
He grabbed me by the shoulders and pushed me away from the mirror. ‘Go, go to your room and work on your algebra. That is what you need, to do well in life. Not this facility to make faces. Get that idea out of your head. Do you hear me?’
Raman Menon sent for my father. ‘I can’t help him if he won’t help us. He is clever and has a good mind, but he isn’t interested. What is wrong? I have asked him, as have all his teachers, but all he will say is “My father knows!”
‘What is it that he won’t tell us? If we knew, we could do something to help him. You know the proverb: you can take a horse to water but twenty men can’t make it drink. Koman is the horse.’
Achan looked at my face. He sighed and said, ‘He wants to study kathakali.’
Raman Menon tried to check his features from contorting into a grimace.
He turned to me. ‘Very well. Do your matriculation first.’
‘It will be too late. I will need to study for at least ten years before I can even think of performing,’ I said.
When the school year finished, Achan took me across the river and so began my tutelage as a wearer of guises.
My days followed a pattern. A programme of order in which every nerve and muscle in my body and every sinew of thought had only one purpose: to enable me to transform myself.
‘You must withdraw into yourself. Shut your mind to questions and the need to know why. Later there will be time for all that. But for now, you mustn’t let doubts prey on your mind. Do as I say and only as I say,’ Aashaan said on my first morning there.
Aashaan. His face was all planes and shadows, with its broad forehead, high cheekbones and stern jaw. Aashaan had a face that said it would not tolerate insubordination of any sort. Yet, his eyes
gave him away. They were the softest eyes I had ever seen. Luminescent, but soft. Mostly, he narrowed them in displeasure at what we were doing, and then they looked like black ants scuttling over our bodies, determined to seek faults. Aashaan, our teacher, whose voice belied the strength of his palms and the expanse of his chest. Aashaan, who stood six feet tall and whom everyone knew as a veshakaaran who couldn’t be matched but for …
‘But for what?’ I asked Gopalan, a second-year student.
‘You will find out one of these days,’ he said cryptically.
What did he mean? I knew Aashaan had a temper that would make even a raging elephant seem like a gambolling lamb. Was it that?
One morning, during the preliminary exercises, my eyes wandered to a tree outside the kalari. The classroom was open on three sides and there were huge old trees around it. Trees that were home to many birds and squirrels. I thought I saw a streak of blue. Was it a kingfisher? I didn’t realize that my rhythm had faltered.
I knew when I felt something strike my shins. The pain was excruciating and I yelped. It was Aashaan’s stick, which he used to beat rhythm on a wood block. I paused. The rest of the class paused as well.
Aashaan rose from where he was sitting on the ground with a little leap. He came towards me, glowering and snarling. ‘Where was your mind wandering, you fool? If you can’t get your basic taalam right, what kind of a dancer will you be? Rhythm. Don’t forget that, ever. You miss a step and you’ve ruined it all. Do you understand?’
As if Aashaan couldn’t contain his anger, he reached out and slapped me. ‘I’ve been watching you. Do you think I don’t know what goes on in your mind? You think you love kathakali and that should suffice. No, it doesn’t. You have to work hard at it, or you are just a dilettante playing at being an artist. A true artist is someone who knows that every step has art and craft sculpted into it. That is how you acquire your style. If you can’t work as I expect you to, I don’t want you here. Do you understand?’
I felt my eyes fill. I was fifteen years old and no one had ever humiliated me so. Aashaan looked at me for a moment and then his attention shifted to a boy in the line behind me.
‘Ah, there you are. Sundaran. The handsome one, who thinks a
handsome face is enough to become a handsome dancer. I suppose you really think that is true and so you needn’t abide by the rules of practice,’ he said, moving towards Sundaran. ‘I saw you playing the fool this morning at the kannusadhakam. The eye-practice session is for you to strengthen your eye muscles. If you prefer to bat your eyelids like a sixteen-year-old girl, you might as well give up and join a drama troupe. Or study a woman’s dance. This is kathakali. Kathakali is for men. It needs a man’s strength and conviction. Even when you perform the coy Lalitha or the gentle Damayanti, your eyes will have to remember the rigours of all you have subjected them to and from that tutelage learn to be a woman’s eyes. But first, your eyes have to be trained to do as your mind desires. A widening eye is abhinaya. You are depicting an emotion. A widened eye is merely a static expression. Kathakali has no place for static expressions.’
I never missed a step again. And despite the humiliation of that day, I didn’t bear Aashaan a grudge or hate him. How could I? He was a veshakaaran who gave his interpretation of each character a dimension no one else could. And yet …The unspoken words emerged when he performed. Aashaan was almost always drunk when he performed.
He never missed a step. His mudras were masterly. His interpretations were the most erudite. His vigour was overwhelming. But he walked a tightrope of control. One more drop and he would be tottering, and each time he performed, his reputation was at stake. ‘When he knows he can ruin everything, why does he do it?’ I asked Gopalan.
Sundaran and I were watching him as he applied make-up to his face before a performances at the institute. Aashaan was sitting outside, smoking a beedi. He had been drinking all afternoon.
Gopalan shrugged. He was disinclined to talk. ‘He should know better. That is all I can say.’
Aashaan knew better than anyone else the sanctity of the stage. That is why it baffled me, his tendency to risk everything.
Two days later, in class, Aashaan would pretend none of us had seen him in a drunken stupor in the green room after the performance. He would look us in the eye and he would say, ‘On the stage, you are not you. That should be apparent in your rhythm and expression.
Don’t think as you perform, or your performance will be a cerebral activity. Let your body speak who you are. You are the brahmin Kuchelan, now. You must be done with your thinking and imagining before you arrive on the stage.
‘For now I will teach you how to become Kuchelan. Imagine that you are a pauper. That you have nothing, no hope of anything or anyone. Your sole hope is that Krishna will remember that you were once friends at school. And it is that tenuous link you hope to appeal to. It is with this on your mind that you visit Krishna. You have been told by your wife to ask him to help you. To give you something you may feed your hungry children. So you go to him, but when you see him, you realize that you cannot ask him for anything. All your expectations are in your mind, your eyes, but you dare not speak them. Now think of a similar experience in your life.’
I closed my eyes for a moment. I thought of the first time I stood on the railway bridge at Shoranur station. Clutching at a tenuous link and no more …
Slowly, over the next eight years, I discovered the different aspects of being a wearer of guises. To match gesture and expression, to perform intricate footwork, to be both nimble and vigorous, to enact emotion without words, to add layers of interpretation to a single phrase, to raise myself from a performer to a character.
I was grounded in the nine faces of being. Love, contempt, sorrow, fury, courage, fear, disgust, wonder, peace.
In that congress of body and mind, beat and word, I knew myself. Luring memories and possibilities, drawing on dreams and imagined happenings, I learnt to live the character I was to be. I learnt that beneath the guise, I was the character. For me that was the only way to be.
In the years I had been away from home, much had changed. Mani and Babu were almost men. Mani was a tall, strapping eighteen-year-old with a deep, gravelly voice that boomed out of his barrelshaped chest and a thick moustache he devoted himself to. He worked scented oil into it and combed it so it adorned his mouth, black, bristly and gleaming, with its ends curving upward on either side. Mani thought he was a man twice over for possessing a moustache like that.
As for Babu, he wouldn’t ever match up to Mani’s physical magnificence. He remained the child he was. A weedy sixteen-year-old with a sunken chest and a voice that couldn’t make up its mind whether it was a whisper or a shout. His eye still wandered, despite the correction glasses he had been prescribed—which he never wore. He didn’t sneak any more to our parents. Instead, he used his tongue to shred even the most inviolable self-esteem to ribbons.
Amma still smiled the smile that spliced her face, but she no longer allowed Achan to walk all over her. When his opinion displeased her, she said so, and she had learnt to stare him down. Achan looked the same, except that his hair was streaked with grey and when he had walked some distance, he paused for breath. He complained of aches in his legs and was given to long silences as if he were wandering in a world where none of us had a place. More and more, his conversation was spiked with ‘When I was your age …’
I went home when the institute closed for vacation three times a year. Two short breaks during Onam and Christmas, and a long one during the summer. But I felt myself an outsider more than ever. It wasn’t that they didn’t welcome my presence, or didn’t include me in the mechanics of their lives. It was me. I found them and their interests limiting.
How could they be content to live like this? I repressed a shudder. Their thoughts seldom rose above the mundane: Father’s business and the three meals they ate, titbits of gossip and the happenings in town.
Amma being so, I could comprehend. She was a woman, after all, and women’s lives didn’t need to go beyond the kitchen and pretty trinkets. It was my brothers and fathers who disappointed me. The presence of a new pomade in the market had Babu in raptures. Shrimps on the dining table or getting the screening rights for a new film in the talkies excited Mani. As for Achan, he spoke of a dent in his car as if he were Nala pondering how to go about wooing Damayanti, constantly asking himself, ‘What am I going to do?’