Chapter 1
In that house where sand trickled from the roof and nocturnal creatures ushered in their entry, I and my aunt Mauna lived our days rather sheepishly. We would wake up at the break of dawn and scamper about like rats with nothing to do but forage for food literally. It was the house of aunt Mauna’s father Muniswami. She bequeathed it from him years ago. Not that he is dead. He is very much alive. And he pays us his visit once in every year. Today was the day of his visit.
Muniswami was over hundred years old. It’s a bloody miracle that he is still alive. Last year, if my memory is anything to go by, he argued about the present status of his house. ‘Oh! How so royally antique the doors once were’ he said in an exasperating tone when aunt Mauna patted his back and he was on his way home. I don’t quite know where he lived. Aunt had always been very secretive about her family. Where did I come from? My parents? Don’t even begin.
In the rainy season, the roots of banyan tree overhead brought portent to our house. They snaked through the girded windows and wound round the lintels and door knobs. The house was flanked tight all around by the flared ends of cord wraps. We shoveled our way through the roof when mud covered the apertures, skylights, after a rain or a storm. The silver beaded chandelier now hung like scrawny shanks of a reptile. Its beads were all but lost and a trammel of spider cobs now waxed its munificence down to pale brown sediment.
‘To live in nature’ aunt Mauna told me when I was about eight years old. Apparently, the old man, her father, had made his life’s ambition, to join the woods and live in cohesion with nature. After his wife’s death, Muniswami was seized with a well of complex emotions that washed ashore his civilized conscience and left him clear of vanity. On his fiftieth birthday, he set about to build his present home. He sold what little possessions he had, acquired an army of slaves, and trundled along to find a home.
He and his ninety slaves explored the deep regions of the jungle. Their journey took them into the jungle where the thick canopy of treetops wailed with a cornucopia of monkeys. Some men were lost in dealing with the confrontational monkeys. Insects, thousands of them, buzzed about incessantly and marked their territory by pressing their bulbous puny heads into the dark pupils of Muniswami’s slaves. Some went blind while others worked out a solution. The trick was to distract them with firelights little further down the road.
The army mooned about in delirium for over seven months until Muniswami found a home. It was an island located in the middle of a thick marshland. To reach there, Muniswami sent his men one by one. It was a tough job; the marsh was so viscous that to cross the hundred meter marsh, the first one took four days. Some men grew weak and stubbornly leaned their hands limp and had to be welted with coconut cord. Even the strongest of men lugubriously drooped like a heavy tree had been felled over them. To raise a leg that was wedged hard in the marsh, to take a step, to cross the waist high sticky pool… cost Muniswami about half of his army.
When, after a long time, while the pearly round overhead turned from the full moon it was to a hair thin crescent presently, the army crossed over. Only thirty slaves survived the marsh. Here on the island was a great banyan tree. It covered the whole island with its many hands that dug into earth each in their own way.
It was dark as the dead of night throughout the day. At night, a distant coo of a nocturnal creature and the nearby stir of an upturned leaf frequented the silence. The marsh surrounding the island rendered it very hospitable. The only creatures that lived there were the birds (and there were very few of them, what with the pregnant night looming around all year long) and insects (that seemed to feed on bat droppings) and rats (that seemed to live life to the fullest, why wouldn’t they? There were no land mammals to eat them up).
What was the home to be? Where was it to be? Muniswami began by parading his men around the island to collect dead barks and felled tree trunks. The house was erected on the top of a landing where three branches comingled to form a flat bed. It was a tedious process but the man was not happy with the final result. The house was outside; on a treetop. It was not an accomplishment for him. So he redid the house; his men, who were growing weaker by the day, began by shoveling out mud from underneath the roots of the tree. They dug burrows; when the wooden handles of the shovels were coming loose from their fixtures, the men took to digging with their bare hands.
And in the end, a house was erected inside the burrow under the banyan tree. The house was flanked well on all the sides. Inside, the house was lit by suspended lanterns that burnt of a slimy green fluid that oozed out of a tree on the island. When the last of the cord flanks were erected to cover the precocious roots of the monstrous banyan tree and it was time for the slaves to return, Muniswami had one last task for his men to perform. To mount the chandelier- the slaves rode on each other’s shoulders to reach the roof that was dripping mud. A sheath of web-like material found on the island was used to plaster the roof. Two days later, another coating was pressed hard with bare hands. And the lovely chandelier was finally suspended to the main root of the banyan.
So there it was. And Muniswami lived on like a ghost haunting its own shadow. His slaves were about ten in number when they reached home eight years later. Aunt Mauna, who was still a pigtail-wearing fifteen year old girl, put together what little bits of navigation she could from the slaves that managed to return. ‘And what was nature?’ she asked herself. One day, when she was going round and round on her heel, the gown billowed around her. Up, up, up… it went until the ornamented pleats of the gown rose like frilled belts around her flatly.
Oh, but she unconsciously bared her glistening milky white thighs. Her shanks, like tapered glinting stems, rose up to meet the roof of the broad lotus leaf shaped gown. And one of the slaves, who wore horn rimmed chest armour under his chin, strained his eyes through the narrow gaps of the shifting grass stalks around.
Here, the past blurred. Aunt Mauna’s memory failed here. On the chronological scale, she reacquired her memory around the time when she was fifty years old and decided to ‘go natural’ herself. In her chest drawers were the rough charcoal scribbles of a fifteen year old on the back of the rough grained slate. She consulted what was to be her map, and set out to meet her father. The jungle had lost none of its valour. It was thick, and it stung with its nipping mosquito mouths and hissing snake fangs.
‘At one point I thought it was a bad idea to go natural,’ aunt told me again and again when she emphasized her resolve ‘the jungle thickened like suffocating dark wings of an invisible monster that closed its wings around you.’ I never understood what she meant by that. It was supposed to evoke horrifying thoughts. But I thought it was natural. You see, I was born here. I knew no other world but this.
When she got there, she was confused. Her thirty years’ old map indicated a swamp. A marsh so sticky that one should avoid it at any cost… ‘But, where was it?’ she asked her father. It dried up. So did her father. He looked like the dry bark of a tree himself.
The journey squeezed the life out of her. She slept long and hard. When she woke up after a long time (how long? She could not tell, it was the same there, nights and days, all the same), her father had left the place. He never left a message. Aunt ran amok on the island for days until she flopped to her feet like a vine plant whose support had been whisked away. Weeks passed and she ceased looking for him. Months later, she was living alone in the burrowed cave under the banyan tree.
And Muniswami returned the next summer. Apparently, he found another home, more natural than the present one. Could she go with him? No. he was to protect the sanctity of his natural settings. No one, not even his own child was to infiltrate the ‘pregnant nights’ around him. Since then, he returned once in every summer.
Chapter 2
Muniswami’s grey beard was long and had grown stiff under a drain of saliva that drooled off his limp limps. The hair on his head had grown long and he wore it overhead like a chignon. His face was mottled with mosquito bites. His left eyelid grew out like a mushroom head, must be an insect bite. The mushroom eye lid was fat enough to cover the eye under it. So, it’s conceivable that he nearly tripped at the doorstep. He was holding a cane; a tree bark that he must have chosen carefully, for it accommodated its crooked head under his palm so well that he leaned on it fully to hide his limp.
It was an emotional time for Aunt Mauna. Her father had grown so old that it might just be his last visit. Why won’t he stay with her? He was so old and nearing his death. It was ‘unnatural’. Muniswami declared.
The morning after his arrival, there was a huge wind that wafted the woods hither and thither. Our old roof rattled and the pale brown cord flanks wore marks of distress. Mud sank through the new holes. Once impeccably plastered, the roof presently reeled with holes and mud slipped through the roof like it was a sieve. Aunt and I, we fixed the roof as best as we could.
Soon after our work together, Aunt Mauna ran into the kitchen. It was a mess. A lot of work over the next days would be needed to fix up the kitchen. Slanting heaps of mud funneled through open slits. Muniswami came to a halt behind us. He was too weak to venture an opinion. But I could tell from his eyes. It became obvious. The ‘natural life’ had to come to an end. Either we found a new home soon or die in here. The house was beyond repair. And, it would take many hands to repair. Two pairs were just not sufficient.
So it was that Muniswami declared ‘come with me. To the new home’
It was a bizarre journey of ages. A nine year old boy, fifty year old attractive lady, and a hundred year old foolish man…
And there we were in the new home. It took us about a month though. The new home was on an island just like the last one. Only, the marsh surrounding this one was alive; it was so sticky that sucked in even mosquitoes if landed on its surface. A bridge of coconut cord was erected on top of the marsh that ran along the radius of the marsh circle to meet the house at the center. Here, a myriad of trees greeted us. Unlike the old burrowed house that was manufactured by an army of slaves, this one rested comely in a natural burrow. And, it was naturally flanked on all the sides by rocks, big and small.
Inside, the house looked more or less like the previous one. And there was an addition to our family. A tall lady who seemed to identify everything around her with a mood of compunction; around her waist and neck, she wore chains strung from sea shells. Her gait was like a man’s; she stood before us with her hands rested on the arched pelvis. She was of the same age of aunt Mauna but looked a tad older than that.
‘This is your aunt Maulya’ the old man introduced. She dragged me closer and pressed my face to her sea shell ornamented bosom. She smelt of sea; the embrace lasted only a second but it nauseated me to the point of a concussion.
In the days that followed, aunts Mauna and Maulya got on with each other quite well. They never left each other’s side. In the mornings they went to collect red worms outside together, and at nights they brewed seed oil together. I found it rather amusing until Muniswami’s natural life came to a halt. We buried him under a eucalyptus tree. The day was spent in much gloom; aunt Maulya plucked the shells out of her ornaments and cast them away one by one until we grew hungry and the cold weather pressed us back home.
A week passed and things were coming back to normal. Aunt Mauna found Muniswami’s chest and rummaged through its contents. Squatting before her, Aunt Maulya singled out one object after another, raised it to meet her eyes and dropped back. Nothing of import was excavated. Mostly they were the relics of his past life. An amulet that he wore on his first journey into the woods; a copper slate with his name chiseled on its face; and wool, natural wool…
Well, what with the gloom and all. Aunts decided that they would burn all of Muniswami’s objects. The objects were of no use, they were only bringing them inescapable gloom. So they set about axing it. In the process, I found on one of the discarded backs of a drawer that I intended to use as a plaything, a plastered bump. It was plastered by the same resin that was collected on our old island. Aunts ripped it open with a shovel and inside it was a charcoal scribbled map on a slate.
The map was drawn by a learned hand. On the left were two daubed marks that indicated the two islands. Between the two island spots were drawings of mountains, trees and dark zigzag lines around the spots. From the familiar route around the islands, aunts discerned that the zigzags meant marshes, crowned straight lines meant trees, and the curved lines mountains. Laying over the interpretation to the right half of the map, we set about a journey. Into the unknown…
Chapter 3
That was over fifty years ago. It all seems so distant now. I will try and recollect to the best of my abilities.
When we arrived there, where the map ended, it was a relief. A sea! It was lovely. The ensorcellating sound of the waves, the wind and the sun….oh the sun. The route that took us over mountains and river valleys introduced me to the sun. Where hitherto we lived our whole lives under the rich canopy of the forest, here on our journey, the jungle thinned and gave form to a dim light at first. Then shafts of light impregnated the ‘pregnant night’ of the jungle and there it was - the lovely glinting sun. And the mornings and the nights; the unbending cycle of day-night and the newness of the sun absorbed me for a greater part of the journey.
It took us a good thirty days and thirty nights to get to the sea. But what was it? Why did the old man preserve the map so dearly?
The answer came searching for us in a big steamer. Heavily built men from a foreign land dropped their masculine feet on our jungle. They brought with them objects that confounded me at the time. About thirty men descended with their spades, spears and tents. They rested their healthy heaving bosoms on our desolate land. They seemed to have acquired a different taste for language. It made no sense to me.
Aunt Mauna was the first to react. A slender limbed old lady that she was: approached the heavily armed masochistic sailors. She was a plaything for the sailors; they went round and round; pelted rocks at her; and some went as far violating her until a very old gentleman stepped outside. We were watching the scene unfold from a safe vantage point.
When he spoke, his voice came out as a cackle between gasping blows on his lungs. He was as old as our Muniswami was. It turned out that he was our old man’s twin brother. When aunt Mauna waved for us to step out of the rushes, we cautiously ambled about until we neared the old man and his features wore a striking resemblance to Muniswami.
So here is where the foggy history becomes clearer. I will begin with the point in time where the twin brothers were about forty years old. Apparently Muniswami was impotent and failed to impregnate his wife. His patience wore out and over the years of trying for the baby, he turned into an irrational fool. He isolated himself, tore himself away from the society, and was barely able to face his friends. He futilely skirted the corridors of haggard witchy women who rolled their eyes over crystal balls. There was no escape. Everyone around him had children; lots of them, some coupes actually had over nine children. But he was no man. ‘Ah! The poor thing, why did she marry him?
His wife however had an ingenious plan. She could live without children but the misery life had brought on her husband pained her. She could not stomach it any longer. So she did the daring thing that no woman she knew ever did before. She shared her bed with the twin brother.
The twin brother had a family of his own. He was a father of four children himself. It was an arranged relationship. He was going to help his brother find his way back to normalcy. He hoped that this unthinkable routine, although immoral, would scoop out his brother from the dark grips of morbid fantasies. The last time he saw his bother (Muniswami had grown neurotic and did not allow anyone to see him at home), he peered long and hard at obscure cloud patterns and said something about them. Muniswami repeated every word thrice. He was losing it. So the twin brother agreed.
The arrangement was to meet at Muniswami’s home. The twin brother was to sneak in at the break of dawn, in the pretense of a morning walk (so his wife won’t suspect), wait outside until the latter left into the woods (as he did every morning in search of solace), and slip into the house. The first few days were the most awkward ones. Muniswami’s wife, despite her resolve (remember! it was her idea), could not get herself to bed her husband’s twin brother. So the man returned.
For the next two days, he visited patiently until he suggested on the third day - it won’t work. He explained to her how it was an insane idea and why they should refrain from going down that path.
But Muniswami’s condition worsened. One morning he left and returned after two nights. When asked where he was, he could not recall – not one bit. It was a nightmare. So the wife approached the twin brother for a second time. This time, the looming darkness over Muniswami broke the wife’s reticence and the arduous routine began. It lasted for about a month.
A year later, Muniswami turned into the happiest man of his world. A baby girl was born. But the happiness was not to last long. The twin brother’s family was unable to feed seven mouths. In a frenzy of greed, a mouth that was to keep itself sewn shut, spoke. Apparently, the twin brother’s wife knew about it all along. He confided in her about the strange entreaty from Muniswami’s wife even before the routine began. She understood.
No. now, she did not understand. She grew greedy. Her children were dying of hunger. Seven of them; one was as young as Muniswami’s new born. But her daughters grew weak and were underfed while Muniswami’s family wore a beaming pride. A pride that was not theirs to have…So she spoke and all hell broke loose.
Muniswami chased his wife down a steep river valley, where she tripped, fell, and died in the landing. Would you believe it? That was the sole reason for Muniswami’s abandonment of life. ‘Live natural?’ Aunt Mauna fed me lies throughout my childhood. And to think that I believed her all along!
Apparently, when Muniswami left for the woods, his twin brother could not forgive his wife for what she did. Ah! Now this is interesting. The chance love routine cast a spell on him and he loved Muniswami’s wife more than his own. So he pressed the baby girl to his bosom and tore himself away from his wife. That girl was to grow up into aunt Mauna and the girl that grew under his original roof, with the original wife, was to grow into aunt Maulya.
You must be wondering why aunt Mauna had to run into the woods. When she grew old and it pained her that she must have been the product of such emotionally testing relationships, she felt the need to see Muniswami. So she consulted her charcoal scribbled map and went in search of Muniswami.
What was aunt Maulya doing in the woods? Well! She dragged herself into the woods, for her mother’s mind reeled with compunction and she sent her daughter to find the man who lain there, somewhere in the forest, as the living embodiment of her irrational behavior.
Who am I? I don’t know. I must have been an orphan.
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