Gopi Chandroth
sweet well water
The
house of my childhood has been demolished. I am told that the staircase,
complete, is for sale. It is solid teak, of excellent quality, impervious to
termites. Someone said that one of us should buy it.
Buy
a staircase? The million times I ran up and down those stairs, chased by my
brothers and sisters, running up to complain to father, running down for dinner.
If I buy that staircase, with its brass fixtures and its knurled banisters, will
I hear father coming down in his wooden clogs? See the emerald green of his
eyes? Will my mother give me refuge from the persecuting siblings? Will I hear
the gentle shuffle of her feet?
I
see the deer-heads and their disproportionately beautiful antlers, the punkha
and its pulley. The day I challenged God to place a bicycle in the punkha room
by the next morning, as a condition for continuing to believe in Him. That very
room where I permanently lost my faith when bleary eyed and sleepless, I ran in
the next morning and saw no shiny new bicycle. The car shed with its deadly
repair pit where I challenged the lurking spirits to either get me or leave me
forever in peace. The forbidden woods of Thiyerankunnu with its granite alcoves
dedicated to serpents both mythical and real.
The
airy portico upstairs where I learned Malayalam and Maths from a tuition master.
‘Draw a loaf of bread’, he would say, ‘now cut it diagonally in half’. I learned
how to write Ma of Malayalam while learning about diagonals and the abstraction
of three dimensional objects into their orthogonal projections. The cool breeze
from the Arabian sea tickled my hair and filled my nostrils with the smell of
imminent rain.
Where
is the ghost of the old maid Maadu gone? Still whimpering in the dark store
room, now devoid of walls? I sense the darkness of the under stairs granary, the
hide and seek favourite for the brave amongst us, with its heaps of raw rice and
unhusked coconuts. I peep into the prayer room. Where, oh where, will those poor
Gods go? Mahavishnu and his serpent bed; Siva in his resplendent leopard skin
flaunting the menacing trident; Saraswati and her lute; Mahalakshmi and her
lotus.
What
about the delivery room where countless babies across several generations were
born? And yes, the room downstairs with its bed of ebony and rosewood, where my
ancestors have breathed their last? Now Gods and ghosts, wander lost and
untethered. No walls to hang from, no people to spook. I must house them before
I am done with this story.
I
can see the beads of perspiration on my dear aunt’s forehead as she toiled with
the smoking wood fire in the kitchen. I hear the rhythmic snort of Kuttappan as
he split the hefty logs for firewood, his muscular torso heaving with each
downward swing of the axe. I remember with fondness the young boy employed to
look after me. He was only a few years older, but his wild stories enthralled us
while the monsoon rains serenaded a magical lullaby
outside.
Fast
forward some years to the machete wound one of us inflicted on his arm while he
ground for dosa on the well-worn mortal and pestle. Granite stone turned to
marble with decades of grinding. The beads of blood seeped out from the muscle
just near his elbow. They looked like little dew drops on the grass. He looked
murder, but exercised serious self restraint for a hundred different reasons.
One of them perhaps the helpless poverty he would return to, had he
retaliated.
Cricket,
played with balls woven from coconut tree leaves and bats shaped from the base
of the palm frond. Wickets of sticks, on laterite stone, blood colour red dust
mixing in with grazed knees and elbows. It was the evening after school and
before dusk, almost every evening, before the sun set and the sisters emerged
with oil lamps invoking the Gods. Having lost faith, I smirked silently and
wished the dusk wouldn’t interrupt the day which had potential for endless
cricket. We had invented a new score, or rather adapted an existing one. It was
a century if we could hit the ball over the gate and onto Thiyarankunnu. A full
hundred, if one had the strength to hit that shot.
Was
it not on such a cricketing evening that I saw my first white man? Botha van
Ingen, coffee planter client, stepped out of his Austin, door held open by his
driver. Emerging polished brown shoes, khaki trousers, white shirt, smoking
pipe, khaki hat with a brown silk rim. We were frozen like still shots from an
old documentary film. Father emerging from his office on to the portico and down
to the car porch to meet his old friend and client. Botha’s face, I had
registered, was blood red. I hadn’t seen a face like that ever. Redder than the
Hibiscus in our garden, and boy the Hibiscus was some red. As he passed me, he
patted my head. The spell broke. Cricket continued.
I
blush to remember the curious incident when I was caught fondling another under
the piled law books? Indeed what about the law books and what about the law?
What about those countless clients and peons and poor relatives who used to
haunt the office space and its veranda? Or the discreet domestic messages that I
took from mother to father as he lectured his clients on points of
jurisprudence? My ears ring as the wooden floor upstairs resonated with the
patter of children’s feet. Father’s political speeches echoed across town and
ricocheted in our ears as we prepared to sleep.
Deep
and mysterious well, swallower of cricket balls, provider of sweet water, I see
you are still standing. You remember with me, the red tropical frog in the
bathroom camouflaged as LifeBouy soap. Smoke from the water-heating stove
diffusing and scattering the weak light from a shade-less low wattage bulb. I
grab the frog, mistaking it for soap, and it leaps out of my hands, scratching
my palms with little claws. I give you my story for safe keeping, for I know you
will stand forever.
There
is no fuss, there is no resentment. Only a hollow feeling that somehow the
ghosts of my past are out in the streets. Where shall I confine them? How shall
I fill the void?
The
problem has suggested the solution. I have now built a house in my mind and I
have connected it to the well that still stands. All the little memories, the
big fears, ghosts, spirits, and bicycle denying Gods now live there, happy and
comfortable, in an ever after sort of permanence. And, no. I don’t need that
staircase. This mind house has only one storey.
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About the author
Gopi Chandroth is a freelance writer. His day job is investigating marine accidents.
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