OUSEP IS NOT DREAMING, he is sure about that, even though he is asleep and what he sees is a world in which Unni is not dead. Unni is not dead because he is not born yet. The world before Unni Chacko, according to Unni Chacko himself, ‘is the strongest evidence to support the ridiculous hypothesis that life will continue as usual after I am dead’.
Mariamma is young, beautiful and has been married for three months. She goes through these days with somewhat exaggerated glee, like an amateur lover. When he cracks a joke she runs away covering her mouth, she serves him food with a flourish of her hand, cleans his ear with too much care, as if she is repairing a watch. She lives with him in a large house that smells of red earth and bananas, and is surrounded by high palms and plantains and jackfruit trees. It is the office accommodation of the
Weekly
in Kottayam. He is among the brightest journalists in Kerala, and the youngest columnist anyone has ever known, whom politicians and bishops visit. Priests quote him in their Sunday sermons, even Protestant priests. Publishers, who have read his hugely popular short fiction in the Sunday magazines, beg him to write a novel.
Mariamma enjoys her new life, she sings love songs to herself, names the calves born in other houses, reads anything she can find. She translates
One Hundred Years of Solitude
into Malayalam. Small portions actually, and she does it out of love for the great Marquez. Her translation is good but there are words she skips; she says those words do not exist in Malayalam. He tries to think of synonyms to impress her but she is right,
those words do not exist. And some objects in Marquez’s story remain blank gaping spaces in her prose.
She forces Ousep to go to church with her every Sunday; they walk together in their best clothes on narrow, wet, winding roads, talking and laughing, and fully aware that neighbours are watching from their windows – narrowing their eyes, craning their necks, fanning their stomachs, moving their jaws and whispering things to others. Ousep feels vulgar to be so happy in plain sight; he feels as if he is walking through a famine, eating a large fried fish. But then that is how they were, Ousep and Mariamma, young and happy in an unremarkable way. Who would believe it, once they were like anybody else?
She is shameless when they make love, which is often, and when they are this way the air is filled with the calamitous sounds of a woman who appears to be mourning the destruction of furniture. She stops now and then to give precise instructions on how he must proceed. But when they lie spent, she turns quiet and melancholic, even bad-tempered, and she is the first to leave the bed. That, innocent Ousep imagines, is how women are. He imagines that he fills her with so much tumult that she must retrieve herself in private. He begins to strut around his life thinking that there is something extraordinary about him as a lover, a suspicion he always possessed. How else can a girl collapse so completely in his embrace? When he sees new brides walk with their men, he is surprised at how they can be so happy, as happy as Mariamma Chacko. It seems odd to him that other men, the simple men, men who are not writers, they too can make their women laugh, make them glow.
Relatives and friends visit every day, there is much laughter and happy commotion in the house. Some evenings, white
Ambassador cars with red lights on top are parked outside their home. The deputy collector asks Mariamma, not entirely in jest, ‘Considering everything, how tough the world is on women, would you still like to be a woman in your next life?’ She gives a gentle tilt to her head and asks, ‘And what is the other option?’ There is an explosion of laughter in the room.
Too much happiness, she tells Ousep. She says it with a hint of fear in her voice. She is sure that some visitors, his relatives especially, leave behind enchanted things to bring doom to their home and end their joys. She is right, she finds black coins and chicken bones hidden in the nooks of the iron gates of their home. There are things written on them, threads tied to them. She laughs because she is not superstitious. She collects them and puts them in a box. One day she finds a copperplate with inscriptions buried in the land that runs around their home. Another day she discovers a vial of dark oil in the grounds. She collects them all, keeps them safe, as if they are precious relics of human nature. Which they are, in a way.
Ousep goes to work around noon every day; Mariamma stands at the gate and watches him go down the red-earth path that runs in the shade of immortal trees. He looks back several times and they laugh, always, at their juvenile love. They are the couple who would stretch their arms and run towards each other in a sunflower farm, though they have never done that.
Ousep has stopped drinking. It is a tradition among Malayalee men to stop drinking after marriage. But slowly, like the rest, he resumes with small innocuous nips. Mariamma does not mind because she is yet to know him well. She has not seen him on buckling knees, seen him sway like a fool or on the arms of other men. But there is a lot about her that Ousep does not know. She too has abandoned something that really cannot be given up.
The first time he hears the voice is at dawn. He is stirred from his sleep by the unfamiliar sound of a woman’s deep whispers that break into soft howls and more whispers – ‘Just a girl, I was just a girl, Mother, a girl can tell her mother some things, can’t she?’ Ousep follows the voice, which leads him to the kitchen doorway. He sees his young wife standing with her lips curled inside her mouth, her head tilted. Her finger wags. Nobody has told him that she becomes this way sometimes. It is now clear why the rubber merchant had given away his daughter to the son of a pauper farmer. He was not mesmerized by Ousep’s prose as he had claimed. He had found a fool. But what Ousep feels at that moment as he stands outside the kitchen is a wounded affection for his woman.
Mariamma is studying the burnt bottom of a large aluminium vessel and she is saying, ‘You could have said something, Mother, just anything. So what if the boatman heard?’ She is shocked to see him in the kitchen doorway. She is so ashamed she begins to cry. He asks her why she is this way. He will ask her the same question in the months to come and, on occasion, in the years to follow. She will tell him that she was always this way, she will tell him that she cannot help it. ‘But I am not mad, I am actually a happy woman,’ she will say. She will try to control herself, be the girl she was in the first light of marriage but she will slip into the trance every few days, especially when she imagines she is alone.
In time, Ousep stops loving home, he becomes the other men, men who sink into the company of other men, the veteran husbands, men who drink late into the night with their friends, men with frail thighs who have never played football but talk about football, and at other times about the superiority of Marx over Keynes, and about the unattainable prose of the new Spanish writers.
Mariamma knows he has changed. She tries to make her home as beautiful as possible, she wakes up at dawn and grinds things in large stone boulders, stands sweating in the charcoal fumes of the kitchen and cooks for hours so that she can watch him eat like a boy. She tries to be happy enough so that she does not enact the moments from another time. She makes love to him in the mornings. But Ousep has gone too far the Malayalee way. In the mornings he does wish to be a good person, a decent man, but in the nights he returns as a corpse. She becomes bitter and angry. To punish him she takes the tailoring scissors and chops off the sleeves of his best shirt. They have a big fight. He holds his amputated shirt and calls her names, which makes her cry. He returns that night drunk. She chops off the legs of his best trousers. He continues to return drunk and she continues to cut his clothes. She stops cleaning the house, leaves things lying around, puts things in disorder, arranges the furniture in crooked ways.
Ousep’s tiny avian mother has been waiting to torment Mariamma by right, but he has never let her stay in the house for too long. She smells trouble in his home, so she is persistent, says she wants to live with her son, her great writer son for whom she has toiled all her life, milked buffaloes on so many dawns. Eventually, he gives up and the woman comes and straightens the furniture, cleans the house, cooks for her son. His nine parasitic sisters too move in, one after the other, to harass the weird girl who talks to herself. They insult her, treat her poorly in her own home. He does not know how he allowed it but he does not deny he did – he does nothing as they torture his wife every day. Those petty women, he let them do all that. She suffers in silence but she does not forget. Their full Christian names enter her insane monologues, she repeats what they tell her, hangs their memories on the wall
and asks them pointed questions. Even now, after all these years, she says almost every day, ‘You got away, Annamol, you got away.’ That is at the heart of Mariamma’s lament, the grouse against all who committed crimes against her and got away.
Mariamma abandons her proud rationality. She throws away the enchanted items, she calls a controversial Catholic priest to purify her home, who utters things in Sanskrit. But nothing changes.
Ousep and Mariamma are not ethereally fused any more, they drift apart, but when they attain a distance between themselves, from where they cannot always hear the other but can still see, they drift no more. They begin to orbit each other, like two equal planets that cannot let go. The distance separates them in their bed too, but there are times when they collide, searching for flesh.
The night Unni is born, Ousep comes fully drunk to the hospital, he goes to the wrong ward and abuses the baby in the crib, calls it an ugly monkey. The new mother screams for help. Men and women hold him by his arms and carry him to Mariamma’s bed. He mumbles something to her but leaves without seeing the baby.
Around this time he gets a lead from an altar boy that the powerful archbishop is a paedophile. Ousep chases the story for months, convinces several boys and parish workers to speak to him, promising them anonymity. When he finally files the story, the editor, a venerated old man, calls Ousep to his office and asks him the identity of his unnamed sources. Ousep is reluctant. ‘I am not asking you to give it in writing, Ousep,’ the editor says. ‘Just tell me who these people are. Their names would dissolve in air. I’ve a right to know, you have a duty to tell, it is journalistic tradition.’ Ousep reveals the names. The story is then killed. The archbishop had long known of the
story, and had been waiting patiently to learn the names of those who had ratted on him. Ousep gets drunk one night and tries to break into the archbishop’s residence to beat him up. He loses his job in disgrace. To his surprise, he finds himself unemployable. He has suddenly acquired the reputation of being an arrogant, uncontrollable young man, who fabricates stories. There are tales about him in the newsrooms, most of them exaggerations of things he has said and done under the influence of alcohol. The men who were waiting for Ousep to fall, including some friends, ensure that he will never rise again in Kerala. He finds a modest job with the United News of India, moves to Madras, and begins to live in the midst of austere vegetarians.
NOT FOR THE FIRST time since he was brought here, he wakes up and accepts that he is in an impressive hospital ward and that he has not slept on a better bed than this. He is probably heavily drugged; everything around him is in a tidy white haze. He enjoys his own physical frailty, which reminds him of a sleepy rainy day, enjoys the fact that he is being cared for by strangers to whom he owes nothing, especially money. His body is too feeble even to think, he is filled with what has to be deep serenity, and he is worried that he has been transformed into someone better. Is this clarity? Is clarity a single transparent thought or is it the absence of thought? Was Unni right after all – could it be that thoughts are truly the corrupt dominant species of the world that have colonized man, relentlessly mutating into increasingly complex ideas and making him do things so that they can finally intrude into the material world as marvellous objects?
Ousep loves the drug the hospital has given him, but then his palm circles his hairy chest, which means what he needs now is a small nip.
The white door opens and an almost beautiful nurse enters the ward holding a pen over a notebook as if she knows what she is going to write but will not do so until she sees it with her own eyes. Unlike the older nurses she does not seem lampooned in the starched white frock and white stockings. She looks forbidden and unattainable, even important. As the door shuts behind her, there is something deeply carnal about the decisive click of the knob. It is the first time in years that he has been alone in a sealed room with a young woman, and he feels he must do something inappropriate. The eyes of the nurse fall on different objects in the room, including him. She makes some quick notes in her book and leaves.
He does not know whether it is night or day, or how long he has been here, lying like a transvestite in this ridiculous green gown, but he decides to stay awake and wait for Mariamma. He has a feeling that she is somewhere around, she would not leave him alone in a hospital ward. There is a lot that they have to talk about – that is, if she is willing to answer his questions.
He sits up on the bed and leans his back against the massive pillow. He tries to remember when exactly he had seen the apparition. A few hours ago, days ago? He is not clear what had woken him up at that moment but when he was awake the first thing he saw was Sai Shankaran standing in the doorway of the ward, meek and harmless, his hair wet and immovable as always in the mornings. Even as a sudden apparition, Sai was incapable of giving a fright. When he finally walked in, the room was filled with the smell of Lifebuoy soap.
‘Have you come to kill me, Sai?’
‘No,’ Sai said in a way that turned Ousep’s jest into a reasonable question.
‘Sai.’
‘Yes.’
‘Will you help me urinate?’
Sai looked terrified. So Ousep lied. ‘I was just kidding.’