Another peep into Farook's world

Din of rain in Kayaloram


When Farook opened his eyes he heard the din of rain. It fell lustily on the roof tiles. It was thick and rhythmical.
The green blanket was warm enough to make him comfortable. For years, the old blanket was his grandmother’s. On his sixth birthday the previous month, she gifted it to him. For Farook, its smell was the smell of her snoring sleep.

He turned under the blanket, rolled his eyes around. It wasn’t morning yet. The darkness of dawn cluttered here and there. He looked to his left – his father was snoring. He leaned across him and looked at the floor. His mother was there, among the big wrinkles of the mattress, asleep. His sister was in the clothe cradle that hung still from the metal hook on the ceiling.

Farook liked to breath in his father’s warmth. But at times he could not find him next to him. He would wonder where he had gone. Soon he would find him sleeping with his mother on the floor. It unsettled him. He would turn and groan and be restless till his mother woke up and made his father sleep on the bed with him. Through the corner of his eye, he had seen her adjusting her blouse before pulling a sheet all over herself and going back to sleep.

The pale light of the morning seeped through the sill and the carvings in the ventilators. Someone was talking in the backyard. Farook knew it was the Vedas, the tribals. They came early, no matter rain or shine. They came and waited in the shed in the backyard till Grandmother woke up and segregated their duties for the day. The vedas were tribals, living in huts either at the foothills or, like Nallan’s family, at the outer border of his master’s land.

The rain began to pound down half past eight last night and continued its steady course. Abdullah, Farook’s mother’s cousin, came running into the house from the darkness. He was on his way back home from the mosque after Isha prayers.
“The monsoon has started. It was raining heavily in Thiruvantharam yesterday,” he said, while washing his legs with the water from a bronze jug kept on the steps. He wiped his feet on the ‘welcome’ mat.
“You went to Thiruvantharam?” Farook’s mother asked. Though every one knew the name of Kerala’s capital was ‘Thiruvananthapuram’, they all said ‘Thiruvantharam’.

He nodded and went into the house, in search of Grandmother to share some family gossip.

Monsoon!
Farook jumped out of the bed, across his father. He was happy to welcome the wet days! The whole place around Kayaloram House was flooded, and every small pit a puddle with its own ecosystem. Tiny, shiny frogs floated and dipped imitating the grown-ups.

Rainwater ran down from the roof, somersaulted and ran merrily into the dark interiors of the creaks and fissures. Farook thought about the snakes and toads living in them. They must be all wet, he thought.

It was still raining hard. The vedas kept coming in dribs and drabs. They wore palm hats. Raindrops thudded on them and splashed around. The eldest of the vedas, Nallan, came in with a soil-coloured thorthu draped around him and a palm hat tucked low.
“Nallan, is it raining on the hills too?” Farook asked him. He smiled at him showing his betel-stained teeth.
“Yes, it is, appi. The canal is full,” he said with respect. He must have been above 60 but not a single strand of his curly hair was grey.

Thick drops of rain fell in the puddles and splashed around. The clogged, muddy water simmered with enthusiastic ripples. Farook walked along the veranda, feeling the droplets on his face, and watched the rain falling on the banana leaves and the wet ground beneath.

The vedas could not go out to work. They all sat in the veranda next to the kitchen and chewed betel leaves with areca nuts. No one went out of the house. It was, according to Farook’s mother, the heaviest rain for some years.

That rain lasted for a week. The river and the backwaters overflowed. The joy of the farmers and others in the village was transformed into unforeseen misery and tragedy. Roads were washed off, paddy fields turned into backwaters, and the villagers had to resort to rowing small boats from one house to the other.

It was on the third day that the big tamarind tree behind the kitchen fell in a strong wind from the west. The joint family of storks in the tree, where they had been living for many years, was scattered. The nests were destroyed and the cumbersome legs of the chicks broken. Though Farook had fancied pelting them down with stones, he could not bear to look at them now – the spot of the accident was visible from the kitchen window through the smoked, dark wooden bars.

Suhail and Ibrahim watched the birds wriggling in pain and, finally, die. Ibrahim even described the scene aloud for Grandmother, who was sitting at her usual spot in the open veranda next to the kitchen.

“Al Hamdulillah!” Grandmother heaved a sigh of relief. “Allah saved us,” she said aloud.
She had a reason to feel relieved. If the tamarind had fallen a few metres to the north, the kitchen, her usual sitting place, and, perhaps, even she would have been no more.

The rain did not stop for a week. It just wavered between drizzles, and then came back with vengeance and determination.

“This is the end of the world,” Grandmother said. “It has never rained like this before,” she looked out and spat out red betel juice; the red saliva was carried away by the arrogance of the rainwater, leaving no trace.

The bridge that connected the village to the nearby Kamana town collapsed. No one knew when it did. But on the fourth morning, the villagers found the bridge broken into two. And the river was furious. It took away four shops. The pandanus that had dominated the riverbanks were gone. People said they had been washed away.

The backwaters behind Farook’s grand old maternal house had also begun to swell. Water rose to knee level, reached the backyard and waited. Grandmother said it was because of the virtues of the ancestors that the water did not wash away the house.

But, the house was not in the best of health. There were cracks in the roof and two rooms next to the central hall were in a mess. Water dripped from the ceiling and an unbearable stink spread around from the rotten mangoes kept in a sack.

* * * *

Many things floated in with the water. A sewing machine, an old wooden box with some soaked currency and a few coins, a disfigured velvet doll and an iron knife.
Rumours too floated in.
Some said dead body of an old woman was tangled up in a mesh of roots, some distance off. They said her skin was loose and decayed and that she was short and frail. She was drowned when her hut, in which she had been living alone after her only son was taken away by the police for gambling, was washed off.
But no one even claimed to have seen the dead body. But somehow, the news spread.

The sewing machine was an old one but Kabeera aunty worked on it and later stitched beautiful frocks for Shabnam. Farook kept the velvet doll near the chimney for two days to dry. One of its thin hands was twisted and its nose smashed back. He thought of the little girl who had played with it. She must be missing it now. He felt sad for her.

Grandmother looked at the knife and said it was tempered well and was still good for use. But she was not sure she could use it, because she thought it was the end of the world. And she prepared to die, remembering relatives, friends and the people of the village. Nevertheless, she dried the currency notes and kept them along with the coins in her box and locked it.

The plantains and drumsticks in the backyard were wrenched by the persistent winds. In the evening the day the bridge collapsed, there were only drizzles, and Farook’s father left for Trichy, where he was teaching English literature in a college. People went out to their fields and took stock of the damage. The paddy fields were completely flooded.

The night was again stormy and it rained with purpose.

A terrible truth broke out the next morning. Saif was drowned. And the body was not yet found. The whole village shuddered and was deadly silent.

Saif was a few years older to Farook. Though they were not playmates, they knew each other as their houses were on opposite sides of the road. He was a spoilt child as his parents’ idea of how to bring up their son as a role model backfired.
Saif’s father was in Singapore for many years, like most men from the village, and made a lot of money. Saif was the only son and his parents did not let him play with the boys in the neighbourhood. He grew up to be an introvert.

He was sent to a boarding school in Kollam, a town north of Kamana, and he came back with the habit of smoking beedi. His mother was possessive about him and wanted him always around her. But by the time he was out of his teens, he began to go out in the evenings, either to the remote coconut groves by the backwaters or to the hills where the vedas lived. No one knew what he was doing or who his friends were for a very long time.

It was Saif who taught Farook how to catch frogs from the small canal in front of their houses, using the hangman’s noose. He would knot the noose at the tip of a long, flexible stick (preferably a part of the palm frond) and dangle it near a frog. And the moment it darted its head into it, he would flick his wrist and there, the frog would be dancing, stretching all its limbs, suspended midair. He had caught quite a number of them this way and was considered a master frog-catcher.

All the frogs in the river must have celebrated the fall of their common enemy, Farook thought. And he was sure that Saif’s body was not found because the frogs had tied him in a big noose and dragged it away. But Farook did not tell this even to Rabiya.

Saif jumped into the river and never came back, people said. He had two friends with him who said they had warned him of the unpredictable undercurrent. He might have seen colourful flowers on the riverbed, and the fish dancing and inviting, Farook continued to imagine.

“He was high,” said one of his friends. Farook did not understand what he meant. Of late, there had been whispers about his visiting veda huts at dusk. And truly, veda girls and women were beautiful: dark, chubby and shapely. Many people in the village had nightly contacts with them. There were brown babies crying out from the makeshift cradles while their veda mothers worked in the nearby paddy fields.

It was only two days later that the body was found. The place where the river joined the backwaters was turbulent with furious whirlpools of undercurrent. There were twigs, sticks and stumps, and one such stump blocked the body. Otherwise, Saif’s mother would not have got a chance to see the apple of her eye; his father with a walrus moustache and bloodshot eyes would not have kissed the coffin; and his sister, who came in time for the funeral from abroad, would not have touched the edges of the coffin and turned back heavy and broken.

The body had decayed and was stinking. The doctor from the government hospital seemed to be inhuman with his clinical approach to the dead body. He was not touched by the grief of the parents. The post-mortem was carried out near the backwaters – the spot was visible from Farook’s house – at the edge of a long strip.

Many people attended the funeral, apart from the whole village. They came in taxis, and the drivers took back the news and spread it in the town among the many other things they had heard and seen while on hire.

The mosque, near which Saif was buried, was a two-minute walk away from his house. His mother could see the mud hump and the tombstone from her kitchen window. The coffin was shrouded in white cloth and a green velvet sheet with holy inscriptions was draped over it. Saif’s cousins from distant towns and his jet-lagged brother-in-law carried the coffin on their shoulders to the cemetery with a train of people following them, whispering their prayers in Arabic. After funeral prayers in the mosque, all of them threw in their share of wet, red soil into the square pit of the grave, dispersed and lived as they had been living before.

No one could remember when the rains had stopped. The tragedy had erased everything else from the village’s memory. When did the paddies dry up? When did the backwaters withdraw from the waterfront? No one seemed to remember these things.

But Farook remembered how Kariman had barked continuously, staring at the spot where Saif was cut open by the doctor from the government hospital. And he remembered how fast Rabiya and he had run back to the house. They never went to that spot alone again. That was where Saif lived, they thought.

Though the rain had lost relevance after Saif’s death, the relevance of the bridge continued to be significant for it connected Kayaloram village to Kamana town. Now, with the bridge broken down, the buses from the town plied till the other end and people had to use a makeshift bridge made with a few planks of a coconut tree to get to the other side. It was like rope walking. The planks were narrow, and one had to be sure of one’s steps because the river beneath was still frenzied and murderous.

Yet people went to the town every morning like a ritual. They went to collect letters from the post office, not waiting for the postman to come to their houses in the evening. They went to buy fish, to see people and for nothing in particular. The majority of the men went to the town because they had nowhere else to go. No one from the village had an office job, except Farook’s father and one of his maternal uncles, Javad. Most of the villagers were farmers and if one could not become a good farmer, he was sent to the Arabian Gulf.

When the waters receded, Rabiya and Farook along with their three cousins – children of Jameela aunty, Farook’s third maternal aunt - went for sightseeing rounds near the backwaters. There were many curious creatures in the swamp. Insects of all forms and sizes stared at them in their misery and from their refuge. Under every piece of log there was a wide variety of them.

Farook was sad; not because Saif was dead, not because the rains had stopped or the insects were hapless. But since the rains had receded, the three cousins – Ramiya, Shanavas and Shakkir, who had come to Kayaloram with their mother for summer holidays – had to go back. Monsoon marked the end of summer holidays and beginning of a new academic year.

Farook did not want them to go back as it was fun to have all of them together. But they had to go, his mother said. “They will leave tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” he asked her, curling the hem of her sari.
“Hmm.” She was reading a magazine by the window. The air was still moist, the breeze thin and cool. He looked up at the sky, through the foliage of the big mango tree in the front yard. The sky showed signs of brightening.
“Tomorrow,” he said to himself, walking into the dark, central room.

* * * *

The next day, his cousins and Jameela aunty carefully crossed the makeshift bridge and waved their hands from the other side. They were going to their distant village to collect more stories to tell Farook and Rabiya during the next vacation. That’s what his mother told Farook when she found him sad.

While walking back along the slippery paddy fields, Farook recollected the good times they had during the vacation. He also noticed the sleek little frogs diving into the mud-pool, keeping their triangular heads and bulbous eyes above the water. They seemed to be ridiculing him. He tried to kick them from the edge of the narrow mud track but they dipped into the water.

Back home he was left with Rabiya and Ibrahim. Suhail was too old for them. Ibrahim preferred to play only with the boys of his age. And that left him with Rabiya, who was two years older than him.

They made paper boats and sailed them in mud-pools.

By evening the sky began to rumble. Farook was always scared of lightning and thunder. It was a fear he picked up very early in life from his mother. But most of all, he picked it from the old woman who sold fish in the village, a friend of Grandmother. They called her kudukudu for her peculiar way of whispering and chanting prayers in Arabic. She had many tricks up her sleeve – like a magic thread against possession and secret prayers for various illnesses – but nothing against lightning and thunder.

Whenever the sky rumbled she hid below the kitchen table, closing her eyes and ears. It was said her friend had died struck by lightning when both of them were talking, right in front of her. It was a kind of strange pride for Farook to know somebody who had seen someone dying at such close quarters. After selling fish she came back to Kayaloram House in the evening to spend the night. She was from a distant village and went home only twice a month. She and Grandmother talked about other women and their secrets. Though Grandmother smoked heavily, her friend did not.

There was a peculiar kind of fragrance about her. The scent of genie, Farook used to believe. Whenever he was down with a mild cold or high temperature, she whispered her strange prayers into his ears and he loved to feel the tickling scent of her breath. But he was not allowed to be playful, a look from his mother would bring him back to seriousness.
“My little darling will be all right tomorrow,” she would tell him, running her thin, bony right palm through his hair.

Somehow, she cared about only the youngest among the children. Farook’s cousins were already out of the age group and he too was when Shabnam was born five years later. But by that time she had become very thin, weak and old. She had stopped selling fish and the white spots of leucoderma had spread to her limbs and face making her a frail elf, wafting along with the breeze. She had become intolerably silent.

By seven in the evening, the lightning and thunder reached a terrifying high. Farook’s mother, sister and himself were in the portico. Grandmother was in her room, praying aloud, Kabeera auntie was in the kitchen, Rabiya and Ibrahim were in the central room and Suhail was not yet home. Kabeera auntie did not hear the claps of thunder as she was completely deaf.

Each time the thunder made the windows and sills vibrate Farook, somehow, imagined the night to be a big tree, shivering with electricity. He anticipated death every other moment and tried to visualise his burnt body and wailing Mother. It seemed, though Grandmother was prepared to succumb to the floods, she was pleading with Allah not to die struck by lightning.

The lightning was so close that the flash squinted Farook’s eyes and he could see Saif’s house glowing, still silent with memories of its dead inmate.
“Farook...” his mother called out when lightning and thunder exploded together with a clang and when he turned back he saw his mother collapsing. He screamed in the unintelligible language of shock. The house buzzed with commotion and no one knew what had really happened to her. A few minutes later she regained consciousness and told them that she saw a ball of fire coming towards her. That was all she could recollect.

In fact, many things happened in the house with that lightning and thunder. The supporting wooden stick of an old easy chair was twisted and thrown a good few metres away. A yellow, plastic comb melted and stuck to a bookshelf in a new shape. The pregnant cow, Sundari, gave birth to two calves and Kariman stopped barking for six months.

But they came to know of all these things only the next morning, which was still and silent. Two coconut trees were struck and one of them had its top completely burnt.

“It was the best yielding one,” Grandmother told her friends with an air that suggested the family was wealthy enough to do without its best yielding coconut tree. “My great grandfather had a buffalo and when it died he buried it near this tree and ever since it has been giving us the biggest coconuts in the village,” she said. “Tell Panu to come and clear this off tomorrow,” she said to her constant companion and aide Kochira, a veda woman.

Panu’s name was Bhanu, and he was the bravest of all coconut climbers. He was the only one who could climb the highest coconut tree in the village, which stood at the extreme corner of Kayaloram House’s compound, next to the backwaters. “Listen, I can see Thiruvantharam from the top,” Bhanu often told the children every time he got down from the tree.

He even said he could see the Kovalam beach and the colourful umbrellas spread out there. For some time, Farook dreamt of the day he could climb all the way up the tree. He had even imagined the tourists in red and blue bikinis out on the beach and about how dizzy he would feel at such a height.

During the monsoon rains and winds, the coconut tree arched and swayed as if it was being physically tortured. Farook used to look at it through the slanting rain from the porch at the back of the house. He could never see its top in the rain.

Bhanu was short in stature but muscular. Well-shaped muscles rippled on his hands with every movement. His broad, sharp knife was so much a part of him that it was considered to be part of body. Farook feared the day Bhanu would turn violent because he could easily chop down a few men in no time.

But on the contrary, when he lost control over his senses all he did was laugh. And he laughed from the top of every tree in the village. He smiled at everything and everyone.

He had been smoking ganja for many years. Farook met him only once after Grandmother had stopped taking him for work. Farook looked at him and he laughed, “hi, hi,” which he continued for minutes. Bhanu climbed every coconut tree in the village except the biggest. And people began to keep vigil to shoo him away from climbing trees in their compounds. Within three months what they feared happened. Bhanu fell down from a slanting jackfruit tree and died. He had no injuries, but he had wounds inside his head, Farook’s mother said. Farook thought it was a good way to die, if one had to die at all.