Valia Thampratti sighed every time she heard the rain. And rain fell often, rattling the old structure of the house, and sometimes, as if by mistake, leaking into the house through gaps in the tiles on the roof. A whole spectacle will then begin, with servants running helter-skelter to pick up brass pots and pans to put under the leaking roof at various spots around the living quarters to collect the pools of water. Valia Thampratti would sit on the wooden swing with her legs outstretched and watch the show while indulging in the only vice time has allowed her now, chewing of paan .
She must have been pushing eighty then, and her hair, silvery with that musty smell of antiquity, was finally cut short so it was easy to manage. That made her look like an old man, with even a few overgrown white whiskers under her chin. How times change a person! From all accounts, she was striking in her youth. She had to have been, for she was the stuff of legends; even then, the stories of her youth are whispered and not spoken loudly and shared by mothers and aunts to their daughters and nieces. I was just an unintended recipient of these family heirlooms, like most other things in this family, collecting them from behind closed doors and from unseen corners.
Valia Thampratti did not become a legend, a keeper of secrets overnight. There must have been many rainy evenings and dark musty nights when she listened to her shaky heart and reached out to things that she should not have, knowing well that often the consequence of these transgressions was death. May be not her own, but that of those who aided and abetted her misadventures. She was protected both by her place in the world and by the antique teak doors that firmly kept all the evil spirits out, and all stories of those deadly adventures in.
In the village of Valia Kunnu where I am from, my family ruled over the smaller denizens with contempt and condescension from this house on the hill, and the patriarchs that presided over its affairs from grand easy chairs in our front porch looked upon this as benevolence. They dispensed justice and issued orders from our front porch when they were otherwise busy entertaining each other with Sanskrit shlokas and grand stories. Their ringing laughter, accompanied by generous undulations of their bellies, traveled into the house and kept us all in check. I was a mute, weak-sighted boy, just a little insignificant part of the large cobweb that was our family. My being mute suited everyone just fine, which meant their secrets would be safe with me. In my presence and secrets came pouring from all directions; sometimes right in the middle of the day, the chaste women shared inappropriate stories of desire with each other, the stories that revealed feelings that have been long denied to them in public. Their words became serpents and hung on my neck at night, choking myself with great guilt for the pleasure I took in them. Doors that would be closed to the other children, were thus opened to me; I became the keeper of their secrets, even if they didn't intend it that way, and in my boyhood, however inadequate that might have been to the truth-knowing adult women around me, I must have stood as a surrogate pleasure check, as if being able to speak in front of me without reservations somehow freed them from the guilt of having the thoughts at all. Valia Thampratti was pointed at and mentioned, and even with my weak eyes, I could see that the name evoked strong reactions, pity and jealousy at the same time, in the speaker and the listener, as if it was she that started them on this path of vocalizing, even if they didn't dare follow her path of self-discovery.
My fellow-children in this large rambling house of co-sharers of misery and maladies grew up with other guilts. They grew up indulging in physical discoveries, climbing walls, perhaps thinking and talking about the great things that they were going to say and do when they too became adults. I didn't have to be anyone when I grew up; what could I be, mute and near blind, so I watched them through my weak eyes and grew inwards. The secrets of the house became my escape, my own pathway into the otherworld, where adults opened their mouths, disrobed their niceties, and exposed their vulnerabilities. It was in this world that I belonged and wanted to be, even after my eyesight faded away completely. I wanted to belong. And these stories were going to be my guide to the dark insides of the nalukettu when I would wander its halls alone, in perpetual darkness, long after the seeing-speaking children have gone off as adults into the adult world, seeing and speaking; doing all the great things, they were sure they were going to do.
I will stay with my stories. Like this story of Valia Thampratti.
Valia Thampratti grew up here, with many other children, all together and yet all unto themselves, noisily in the company of each other and silently in front of grown ups. With a father unusual in his interest in his daughter’s welfare, she blazed the trail for being the first girl allowed out to study from this matrilineal family, became the first to swim in the open pond with Lilly and Lotus blossoms, and the first to challenge her place, her very existence. Perhaps all these firsts got her a reputation that was to haunt her when her patriarchs went looking for a groom for her.
She was beautiful: jet black hair oiled and scented, heaving bosoms that grew and fell to the sighs of onlookers, fragrant skin uniformly the color of wheat, and a luminous smile. She sang well too, when persuaded by the womenfolk thirsting for some diversion.
She was wed when she was eighteen, late for a girl of her time. Her husband, Nilakanthan Namboori, was fourty-seven and it was his third marriage. Namboori was a phlegmatic, complaining sort of a man with yellow skin and a receding hairline, in his own world of spiritual autocracy and was not all that interested in the prospect of acquiring another young bride. The financial equation made sense, the family was renowned and what was the harm from this alliance? It was not as if he had to support her or even be a companion to her. If she was in need, she had her family to take care of her; he was a bedfellow, a visitor to the sleeping quarters of the big house after dark, with his paan box and his fan made out of palm leaves. I don’t know if Thampratti ever saw him during day light, on the wedding day she was surely too shy and uncomfortable – disgusted as well, I have heard others mumble, but I don’t know-- to look at him directly. At night, when the only light indoors being the faint glow of oil lamps, she couldn’t have seen him that well, which explained the seven children, three still-born, that were born to them. Shortly thereafter, he started visiting less and less frequently, I don’t know when, but somehow, somewhere along the way, it was taken as a matter of course that she was alone once again. Nobody really cared one way or the other, this was how things were, and anyway, it really mattered little, since he wasn’t much more than a sire for the children.
She still blackened her eyes with kohl and reddened her lips with betel leaves and laughed the same way she always did, bosoms heaving. Her sandalwood fragrance never left her and her freshly starched white clothes remained clean and well cared for.
Nobody knew why.
Nobody really cared. Well, they would have preferred if she laughed a little less. Nobody liked a married woman laughing like that. It was not proper. May be a little at night, once the lights went out, if she was with her husband, but not otherwise.
She laughed nevertheless but was careful to confine her laughter inside the house out of the earshot of the patriarchs to give them cause to worry if she was up to something unthinkable.
But in her laughter lurked a secret. A secret that made her happy in a way most other women of the house were not. Nobody, even after it was revealed, knew when it had started. Without anyone to tell their stories from their memories, the beginning got addled and atrophied under the weight of the end.
I have to guess that it might have been during the rainy season, when the weeds grew with a wild passion and the relentless beating of the water made everything slippery. Kadatha was called upon to pull out the weeds from the house grounds. No respectable home could allow wanton grass to grow anywhere in its property, not even a stubble of grass, and there was no proper way to dispose off the grass than to pull out each blade with hands. As it was the custom, the pulaya women usually did this work; the grass fed their goats and the grounds stayed clean even if the women of the house and the pulaya women stayed out of sight from each other. But this was the year when the Goddess, Bhagothi got angry and the women folk were the first to feel the worst of her wrath. One by one, they fell and succumbed, leaving a only few behind to nurse and bury the ones that departed. The women, that survived were too weak to come out and face the light, lest Bhagothi should get mad at them again. Our patriarchs, sure in the knowledge of their place in the world and therefore the importance of clean grounds in the scheme of things, resorted to ask Kadatha to come and do the work his women would otherwise have done. Kadatha came with his nephew Kannu, strong and dark as ebony, with deep blue curls like Krishna himself and with a clean strength.
The scent and memory of death was fresh in Kadatha’s mind. While he saw only the grass that needed to be picked and the sun that stared at him intently from above, Kannu was distracted by the laughter coming from inside the walls. When Kadatha busied himself on picking the grass blades, Kannu dreamt and fantasized. Dreamt and let his fingers work and wander on the grass and his mind escaped its shackles and wandered into dark corners of forbidden knowledge. He worked, listened and dreamt until, his sweat and fantasies together brought upon a fever that couldn’t be named, couldn’t be spoken of; he shivered in the silent denial of his passion and exulted in its presence.
Kadatha was scared. He thought Kannu was glanced by the angry eyes of Bhagothi too, just like the others in his family. His fever, flushed face and wandering, listless hands worried him. But Kannu knew that it was the laughter and the feeble sound of songs from inside the house that made him feverish, the sound of an invisible heart, full of passion seeking him out. Even if the voice didn’t know he was there to listen, he could feel in it a longing for him.
It was a fortnight gone before Kannu worked up the courage to find out the reason for his fever. He knew he was about to do something unthinkable, next only to insulting the Goddess, perhaps worse, but he had to do it for he was driven by nothing else. It was not a choice, but a burning compulsion that made him mark his body with small cuts from the edge of his sickle, and watch the blood drops fall. He carved his memories with those small cuts on his thigh. With each passing day, and each unconscious laugh, his thighs burned from fresh cuts. When the rest of his clan mourned loudly in rainy, moonless nights for their dead, Kannu wandered the house grounds, quiet as a mouse, lost in his cause, drenched and weary. The house walls were covered with heavy green moss, characteristic of the rainy season, and made the skin of the walls slippery but soft like a woman's skin as he imagined it. He stood near the walls caressing its textured greenness, panting, and listening for any noise from the inside, when the whole world slept. The wrath of a potential discovery did not intimidate him; he didn't think of it at all.
The rain intensified as the days went on. The ground under him had melted into clay where he stood every night listening and he felt his feet digging into the soil. He heard his breath over the noise of rain hitting against his body, crickets, frogs and all the nightnoises that came alive around him. He scaled the wall without any premeditation, slipping, falling and scaling again, each time reaching higher, with the determination of a madman and the skill of a lizard. He climbed drawing a green and brown line on the mossy wall under him slipping and scratching struggling to reach the top.
Thampratti thought she was dreaming. That night the whole sky had poured into the courtyard and she couldn't see a speck of light. She woke up with a jolt as if a feather had touched her, or a breeze had kissed her all over. Gathering her clothes about her, she walked up to the corridor and stood there holding on to a pillar, as if waiting for something to happen, someone to appear. There was a sense of anticipation, driven by instinct. She felt her feet getting wet from the raindrops and her hair feeling the leaking drops from the tiles. She chewed on a thought or two and smiled to herself, her teeth shone, even in the darkness, in their pearly whiteness.
He stood right behind her, still bleeding, wet from head to toe, eyes burning, breath muted. She had to have known, how could she not? When she turned around, she didn’t scream.
Even when the rains receded and the moon changed cycles, even as silence descended on the grounds save for the noise of crickets and frogs, they continued to meet, under the omniscient silvery moonlight, away from sleeping eyes, away from all the walls, their skin knowing each other the way they were not meant to. His skin smelt of fish and fields, hers of sandalwood paste and turmeric. For the first time, she learned of the passion men felt for women and somewhere within her a dam broke and she washed the mud and dirt on his face with her tears. They never spoke, not a word; when they communicated, it was in grunts and animal noises; they had nothing say to each other. There was an urgency in each encounter that they didn't want to waste in words. Perhaps, in the absence of language, they sought and understood all that was needed to be understood. Perhaps without speaking, without naming what was between them, the fear was kept at bay. Whatever the reason, they drank passion from each other; the more she drank from the forbidden well, the thirstier she got.
Until the Goddess lost patience and unleashed her vengeance upon Thampratti. For fourteen days and nights she lay burning, moaning, half conscious, suspended between life and death, and delirious; she slept with one name on her lips, feeble as it was, it was spoken with a firmness and resolute conviction that her caretakers understood her. She called for him unconsciously, intermittently, even as her lips were wetted with Ganga jal to prepare her for the journey that was about to come. She called for him, with a familiarity that was frightening at once for its contempt of the norms and the tenderness that only absolute deprivation brought.
In her memory, Kannu was re-reborn as a human, equal to her with a name and not just a marker, with an identity, with feelings. Unbeknownst to him, he came through the wombs of her words and startled the walls of the house, the older women of the house shuddered, cried, praying quietly for her death. They paced and wondered. They whispered in horror.
First, only to each other. The husbands heard it next. The news traveled slowly to the front porch and the patriarchs heard it, as they sat decisively in their grand easy chairs, wearing their sacred threads and gold chains, clutched their rudraksh beads. As they deconstructed the meaning of the cryptic message from inside they turned pale and ashen. They too paced and whispered. More people were consulted. Decisions had to be made, lessons had to be taught, stories had to be suppressed, examples had to be set and most importantly, the Goddess had to be appeased. They understood the wrath of Bhagothi completely and that fear grew into anger and anger was manifested as hatred. Money changed hands. Hands were washed. Then the patriarchs went back to their evening prayers and grand dinners and as night fell, they slowly sneaked into their mistresses' quarters.
The moon rose and settled. Kannu, without much warning or even the knowledge of what happened, paid the price. Nobody saw anything, but even if they had seen anything, they would have been well advised to forget anything they might have seen. Kannu perhaps went away for a long journey, perhaps slipped and fell in the river while cutting reeds, perhaps became a victim of the angry Goddess. Nobody talked, not loud enough to be heard by others anyway. It is not good to talk, to speculate about these things. These were matters of the big house.
Thampratti didn’t die. She work up from the disease weak and forlorn and after many nights of waiting, learned what she one day would have discovered. The patriarchs, in their wisdom, sent her packing, to a far away house; to rest and relax, to grow out of the weakness from the illness, far far away from home. In the nights, however, she still moaned Kannu’s name in half sleep.
When she returned, many monsoons had come and gone and many festivals were celebrated and forgotten. The house had changed; the faces sitting in the front porch were different, but just as stern. Nobody in the front porch acknowledged the memory of this tale of minor inconvenience. Except perhaps at the edge of our Valia Kunnu village, where Kadatha and Kannu had once lived. Deep inside the entrails of the house, where her nieces and cousins bored in their monotony, whispered it to each other, adding and augmenting the story, retelling the story for further effect, perhaps even after I had heard it.
The burden of being the witness.
I picture Valia Thampratti still sitting there, on her chair, chewing paan and laughing. But somewhere inside her, a cruel jester turned the wheels, laughing when she ought to have bene crying and crying when all is silent and quiet. They said she had gone mad. I know somewhere deep inside, where light and sound are frustrated by the tall, slippery green walls of her mind, she was trying to reemerge, frantically trying to communicate.
I don’t know. I am just a witness.
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1 Coll. Address for a Matriarch of Noble birth
2 Betel Leaves with paste of lime
3 Big Hill
4 Couplets
5 An architectural style for traditional homes in Kerala with the rooms facing an open courtyard inside. Rooms would normally have no windows on their external wall.
6 Brahmin
7 A Dalit (lower caste) community
8 Goddess particularly worshipped by lower castes, Coll. For Bhagawati.
9 Small pox
10 The Shepherd God
11 Water from the Ganges, often given to the dying to prepare them for death
