a town like ours ~
a town like ours
kavery nambisan
1 Cross the road as soon as you get off at the main bus station and, it being half past three or four in the afternoon, have tea and a Maplah biscuit at Balan’s Onti Angadi. Loiter briefly beneath the neem tree for a smoke, and for relief from a certain internal distress, go behind the aged wall. We have miles and miles of such uncomplaining barriers of brick-and-mortar—and where would men be without them? Ask not why a wall is built and then left to crumble over the years; ask only that you be permitted to stand facing it with your elbows loosely flexed, your index finger and thumb doing the one manly duty learned early in childhood, which is to direct your micturary arc at a specific spot. (There’s no such expedient for women. They cope by avoiding fluid nourishment until within shouting distance of home.) Etched on this particular wall in black charcoal are advertisements for gas reducing tablets and English Tutorials—make note, you might need either or both. Now that the day-old sweat on your body has cooled, take a local bus to the heart of our town. Ask anyone. Anyone but that thirtyyear-old widow (now fifty-four) who will talk you into helping her reclaim her lost dentures costing eight hundred rupees that she actually got for free and without which she cannot chew the boiled buffalo bones that she gets for a pittance outside the slaughterhouse. Buy a ticket for two-fifty from the conductor (either Shambu or Jayadeva, rascals both, so please count your change) and get off opposite Dignity Sweets near the main market. You’ll eat no dust as you speed past the Polytechnic, the Girls High School, the Milk Depot and the Veterinary Hospital. It is an all-tarred road.
Start here on what we call Big Street, to the south of the Detergent Factory. Fight the temptations of the stomach as you walk past Dignity Sweets (you are about to confront dignity of another kind) and take the second turn into the side lane with its bewilderment of shops, shacks, hutments, a cattle shed and a two-wheeler repair shop. At the end of the street is a shaded alley where the temple is. This is an area so quiet you can hear the crunch of your chappals and the soft thud of a mango falling from a tree. When Basappa, the potter who lived on the next street, went down with consumption, some neighbours could tell his gradual decline from the pitch, rattle and duration of the coughing bouts, some even knew the long searing note which meant he was coughing up blood. He’s been silent now for eighteen months, Pingakshi bless his soul, rotten as it was. In any case, we no longer need earthenware pots, we no longer need Basappa. Peaceful it is, our temple, with its dark pitted walls, quietly burning lamps and the comings and goings of the prayerful. The goddess does not blink. The pujari takes care of every coin and rupee note that falls into his brass plate without letting slip a single word of the religious babble that so mesmerises the devout. He withstands, poor soul. He must have his wife’s womb cleaned out or they’ll end up with a sixth non-essential encumbrance. One must pity this man who came all the way from Malanad when barely seventeen, climbing the hills along with his child-bride who’s now a crone with an unfortunately fertile womb. What to do. Enter the temple premises, seek the blessings of our goddess (if you must) and turning left, head for the farthest corner. Here next to the outer stone wall is a room. It is mine. I will see visitors—if you don’t mind sitting on the edge of the mattress that’s been padded with two prison blankets to protect my delicate hams. You are small enough to manage, everyone is small enough. The air is stale, yes. The squarish gap in the wall is the only opening for some air. I am the chudayil with the red light on my tail. Visiting me does not necessarily link you to whores, although in the eyes of some 4
Kavery Nambisan
people it might. Kumari is my name. The doctor who has been to England to fail an exam calls me Princess (and wastes his half-degree by teaching me words like micturary in a language I do not speak). You see, I used to be a beauty once. Just nine years ago. How it was those days! One touch of the elbow, a hushed glance, a yellow smile, a scissored cat-footing zigzag chase across the street to a neglected shed behind the big hotel where a once-blue car was slowly giving up its ghost. There, with pointed stalks of marigold springing from beneath the hand gears, through the cobweb netting between seats, on that rexine love couch made smooth by a thousand slow writhes of whore bottoms, in that gap between heaven and hell, many fell, never to recover. The truth is somewhat less dangerous and more ugly. A mere nine years have passed since the days when all of me was soft, firm and shapeful. My eyes were quietly bright, like candle flames, one touch of my lips and men wanted to be born again and again. My charitable thighs never refused a man except for reasons of honour and comportment. Now I’m not a day younger than forty, a hag in a long white skirt and a short chemise that barely hides my fatness. Ah yes, in the queendom of whores where living flesh is pawned every night, Time works quickly. Murderously. Forty means old. My loosely hanging lips are fit only to suck the noxious fumes of bidis, besides tolerating whatever nourishment comes my way. My voice is distinctive, with a masculine gurgle that arises from my gut—from beneath the ‘breast bone’, the doctor said. (What? A bony breast? A strange language, this English.) When I speak softly, I sound like an old nib wounding paper. But this fine, soft, shining hair tied with red (sometimes blue) ribbon is still a genuine black— no insinuations, please, about artificial colours. Years ago when I became the weekly habit of the temple priest he gave me this corner room where, screened by gunny, I have shelter, dignity and respect. A young woman need not be respectable but an older woman must always be so. I continued for some time to A Town Like Ours
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provide for the best of men, the godly ones with caste marks of sandalwood paste on their effeminate limbs. By then I was myself free of lust, and I gave without holding back. Thus. A roof, a floor, gunny-sacking for a door, and a little window—make note of this window, my passport to the outside world where I once belonged. A few of my old faithfuls still come to me out of politeness and a need to cling to the past by the thin thread that no one else sees but everyone knows of. The only intercourse that is now possible is in words. The men converse with me while standing a decorous distance from the window, and go away sighing with regret. My one true friend—besides my cow and the widow minus her dentures—is Saroja. Now there’s a woman to meet . . . What cow, you ask? Look no further than outside the miserable little window. She used to be a tender white calf that grew up into a disappointingly gaunt, dirty-grey heifer, quite ordinary-looking but for the stark whiteness of her underside. Over the years her hide began to darken like a cloud gathering moisture, her hips widened, her shoulders filled out, her unremarkable horns curved and flattened like sickleshaped knives. She is one of the many wonders you’ll see here, the animal that was clearly a cow and is now a superb boulder of a buffalo. But she must always be referred to as ‘the cow’, I will not stand for my dear companion being discredited in any way. We are a pious people and we pay attention to omens. A cow on the temple premises is befitting but a fierce-looking buffalo, no. What I believe is, her mother fell in love with a buffalo and the rest of it happened naturally. She came to me a baby cow, and a cow she will be, my Kanda. Two categories of people live in this town. The older generation think of it as a village where eight varieties of paddy, four of mango and ten types of banana are grown. Indeed, scoff the chicklets and the baby goats whose voices haven’t broken yet. This is a feverish, high-decibel, boom-boom town evolving right before our eyes. We 6
Kavery Nambisan
have tarred roads, girls with painted toenails, two high schools and a college—and we haven’t even got anywhere near some of the star attractions: Sugandha Enterprises, a multi-limbed divinity comprising four factories, with its vats, kilns, boiler units and lorries that ply in and out of the walled boundary of the 3.5-acre property; Dignity Sweets, which hardly ever needs introduction; and Pingakshi in the holy sanctum of the temple. May I also modestly add that a good many visitors are satisfied only after they have paid me a visit? The goatlings are right about this being not a village but a busilyrising town. That other world of twigs, grass, bales of hay and cartloads of bananas requires a long and painful backward glance. But there are persons, even now, who wear their eyes on the back of their heads and have their feet turned front to back. One does not mess with them.