Amballore House (2 page)

Inasu said that Thoma and Ann convincingly established that the earth was round, because they came back to where they started; they came back to Amballore. As for Ann, it was for the first time that she learned that the earth was round. All along she had believed that the earth was flat.

The saga of Thoma and Ann victoriously returning to Amballore was reminiscent of the triumphant return of Napoleon to Paris from the island of Elba, a return to freedom from exile. So the citizens of Amballore believed.

***

There were three of them in the house: Thoma, Ann, and Subashini. Subashini was the parrot who was caged and kept near Thoma to give him day-long company.

Subashini lived with them and never left them. She filled their empty nest literally and figuratively. She was their lifelong companion, having gone through thick and thin—mostly thin—with them and never abandoning them. Casting her lot with them was against her better judgment. Subashini was smart enough to know this, though a birdbrain.

She came to their lives long ago, in the year 1960, to be precise. Vareed and Eli, Thoma’s parents, donated Subashini to them. She was a macaw, a breed not usually found in Kerala. She was a fifteen-year-old teenager when she flew into their lives. Now she was in her forties, old age for that species.

She was a very smart fortune teller once upon a time. She picked cards to predict the futures of folks who visited the family. Thoma kept a deck of cards at his home. The feathered friend would appraise the visitors, sending a critical, quizzical look at them, as if they were under cross-examination and she was the prosecution lawyer. She then picked a card out of the deck Thoma held in his hands. This card foretold the futures of the visitors.

What started as a pastime soon became a means of livelihood for Thoma. He started making serious money when hordes of visitors, including friends, acquaintances, and strangers, visited him to learn what kind of fate the future held for them. The pair became popular fortune tellers, because the bird was able to correctly pick cards that predicted the future and described the past equally well.

Subashini became sensationally famous for her astounding skill. Everyone was impressed. Some of them regularly visited the pair.

As time rolled by and as she became old, she started making mistakes. People attributed this to her advanced age. She started having memory loss like an Alzheimer’s patient.

The last straw for Thoma was when the feathered friend picked a card and claimed that the client was the mother of ten children. The client was, in fact, a man. He belonged to the local police force, and he was unmarried, let alone with ten children. Thoma immediately pulled the plug and decommissioned Subashini from fortune telling business. She had come a far cry from her golden days of youth,
when eager crowds waited to know her predictions and accepted them like the words of the Holy Bible, with no questions asked.

Thoma, however, loved to have a talking bird as his constant companion, whether she accurately foresaw the future or not, whether she was affected by memory loss or not. She was given her new job as Thoma’s companion.

“You are better company than Ann,” Thoma told Subashini. “None is worse than Ann,” he emphasized by rewording the first sentence.

He meant to make the bird happy through these introductory pleasantries, unaware of the convoluted way of rolling out a welcome red carpet to his new employee.

The birdbrain, no pun intended, immediately broadcast the news. “None is worse than Ann,” Subashini repeated loudly after Thoma. His wife was livid, but she dared not confront him.

Thoma put down Ann occasionally because he thought his masculine pride got a boost by that act.

Subashini constantly watched him, staying close to him in her cage, which hung from the ceiling in the circular hallway. Her cage was her castle, her paradise. Thoma and Subashini became close buddies. She imitated him and anyone who came near him. She made public announcements on Thoma’s day-to-day activities like a live news bulletin. She greeted visitors.

She successfully imitated Thoma in all his speech and actions, except in spitting. When Thoma spat, which was often, she tried to spit, and a shrill, whistling sound came out of her. The birdbrain did not know that she was not biologically programmed to spit.

“It takes a real man to spit,” Subashini repeated Thoma, who made the statement upon her failure to imitate him.

“Birdbrains cannot spit,” she repeated after Thoma.

Thoma had a feeling it would stay that way with his feathery friend, since it was hard to teach an old dog (or an old parrot, for that matter) new tricks. Thoma knew he was inimitable when it came to the art and science of spitting. He was the undisputed king of the
spit world.

***

Rita was their eldest daughter and second child. She married Tim years ago and settled down after marriage in a nearby town when Thoma and Ann were living in a rental home in Mannuthy. People believed that Rita was leading an unhappy life. This was because Thoma could not offer Tim the dowry money he had promised. This caused rift between the father and the daughter, and some unpleasantness between the newly-wed Rita and her husband.

Rita and Tim were unhappy, because the couple did not have a child. It was a natural expectation of parents at that time in the sixties that the newlyweds would have a child when ninth month rolled around after the wedding. Both Thoma and Ann were concerned. Ann prayed daily for them to be blessed to have a child. She promised to the patron saint of Mannuthy church that she would donate one thousand rupees once a child was born. She kept on praying and waiting, only to come to the bitter realization that she did not have to donate the promised thousand rupees to the church. Ann was well aware of the rising heap of unresponsive prayers she routinely offered to the patron saint, and this added one more to the pile. Disillusionment was the outcome of the unanswered prayer.

“Your patron saint and God will dump your prayers in their trash bins,” Thoma, the atheist, mocked his wife.

Thoma’s latent hatred toward church and its rituals intensified after this disheartening episode of his daughter’s life.

He had a habit of coming up with some reason, sensible or senseless, to blame the church priests who used to walk along the road in front of his home. His common complaints were that they were not fighting for the common man’s cause and not representing the downtrodden in front of God. Eventually, he started blaming them for every piece of bad news that he heard on All India Radio. Naturally, he blamed them for Rita not having children. He started shouting at them, prompting them to walk fast or sprint uncontrollably when they walked close to his home.

“Listen, you sinners! You may run away from me, but remember, you have to answer to your own God for the bad things you do,” Thoma screamed at them whenever they took to heels while approaching his rental home.

He concluded his verbal abuse with a spontaneous overflow of powerful spit, reminding the priests of Wordsworth’s immortal definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” The spit emanated from him in long streams, as a second act to his vitriolic comments. His repressed emotions surfaced as agitated froth that would miraculously transform into speedy spit jets. The whole scene had the magical quality of poetry according to the customers of the nearby toddy shop.

The toddy shop was located two houses away from Thoma’s rental house and it was his second home, a home away from home. He spent most of his time in the shop, especially on the days he did not work. The shop’s patrons were his best buddies.

His spit rained on his adversaries — in this case, priests — like the manna that descended upon the Israelites in the Old Testament. The spit fountain marked a triumphant assertiveness of his words conveyed to his adversaries. It was his partner in crime, an accomplice to his words, and became a second nature to his existence. Bhavani, the neighboring barber’s wife, claimed that his spit was worse than his words, rephrasing the expression “barking is worse than biting.” With assistance from a moderately powerful wind, his spit could reach the target, giving him a shower of his lifetime, a shower in its whole untold glory.

The unlucky target of the spittle was not confined to the ministers of the church. His manna rained upon the Mannuthy government school teachers as well. He screamed at those teachers who happened to pass by his home in the morning just before school commenced. His anger was usually directed at reminder letters from the school requesting him not to send his children barefoot to school.

The teachers had an unpublished name for Thoma: the Spit Mill of Mannuthy. Conversation about him was enough to set peals of
laughter ringing among the teachers. They doubled over with laughter when they discussed Thoma in their staff room.

The school headmistress, Sreedevi, was a favored target of Thoma’s unruly outbursts. One day, Thoma was raging mad when said headmistress kicked out two of his sons from school for coming to class in torn shirts. He simply did not have money to afford essential things like clothing. He was forced to divert grocery money to meet the headmistress’s demand. He and his wife and children went hungry for the next couple of weeks, a supreme sacrifice to satisfy a trivial stipulation from a trivial woman, as per Thoma.

He was hungry and angry.

One certain day two weeks after the children’s humiliating dismissal, the headmistress was walking to school as usual in the early hours of the morning. She was dressed in a faded yellow cotton sari with gold borders. Her path to school took her through Thoma’s home front, which she considered a punishment she was awarded for her sins in the past life.

Her sari on that particular day was the same color as a haystack. She looked like a walking haystack of the harvest season, parading along the road leading to Mannuthy School. At least, that is what a bullock pulling a cart lazing along the same road thought.

Thoma was sitting barefoot on the floor at the edge of his front porch, smoking a
beedi
and dressed in a
mundu
and a torn white T-shirt. Subashini was in her cage hanging from the ceiling, right above him. They were both watching the traffic flow in front of the rental house. The crowd mostly consisted of the teachers and children heading to the morning classes.

As soon as he spotted Sreedevi walking towards him maybe five houses away, Thoma tossed out the
beedi
he was smoking and got ready. He hurried to the front fence and threw a temper tantrum. He showered her with screaming spiced up with obscenities. His screaming, needless to stay, burst the tranquility of the countryside morning, making many a head turn toward him and the target of his agitation, Sreedevi.

“How dare you walk along my road, you shirtless woman,” Thoma screamed at the headmistress. Thoma claimed the road running in front of his home as his own and considered the pedestrians that walked in front of him as trespassers. It was left to the imagination of the public to know why he called the teacher shirtless in a disparaging way. For one, a female did not wear shirt; only a male did and therefore there was nothing derogatory about a shirtless woman. Per opinion from the nearby toddy shop customers, Thoma assumed that he was insulting the teacher by giving tit for tat, since the teacher blamed his sons for not having proper shirt and Thoma, in return, was blaming the teacher for not having a shirt at all. Unknown to him, his comment ‘shirtless woman’ made many heads turn towards Sreedevi, some overwhelmed with consternation at the audacity of a woman to walk naked in the public and some others eager to see the unusual sight of a naked woman on a public road. However, the latter group was disappointed to see Sreedevi dressed properly in a sari and the former were relieved that a scandalous scene was avoided.

Sreedevi had yet to walk past him to get to school. She raced as soon as she heard the insult showered on her, in order to get past him as soon as she could. As soon as she came close, Thoma spat. How she ran to get away from the rocketing spittle that came out of Thoma! Her sari flung violently over her shoulders in her hurry to get away from the angry man. The scene of her frantic race from Thoma was in sharp contrast to the peaceful, gentle breeze of the morning that was caressing the yellow trumpet flowers on the roadside.

In her panic-ridden sprint, she unwittingly gravitated toward the bullock cart that previously passed by her and was across from Thoma’s home by now. The cart driver was singing a romantic Malayalam song to cheer up the sad bunch of school children heading to the school against their best wishes. The bullock on the right side of the cart eyed her hay-colored sari as an Onam feast of a haystack. The sumptuous meal of this fluttering haystack was more than what he could have bargained for, and he thanked his patron god, Lord Krishna, for delivering it right to his feet. He
started munching on her sari merrily. The alert cart driver stopped the cart to let the headmistress gain distance from the dangerous bullock and get away, hopefully with her sari intact.

The speeding headmistress was unaware of the bullock-breakfast episode taking shape on the rustic gravel road. The moment she felt that someone was tugging on her sari, she panicked, thinking Thoma got hold of her sari. She started running even faster without looking back, frightened as she was.

The bullock was unaware of the broader drama being played out between the two-legged animals, Sreedevi and Thoma, and kept on munching on her sari, pulling her toward him in the process, blissfully unaware of what he was doing. Her sari being caught in the powerful jaw of the hungry bullock, sprinting Sreedevi started spinning like a spinning top, being ceremoniously stripped off her hay outfit by Lord Krishna’s four-legged friend.

Only when she came face to face with the bullock after spinning some umpteen times did she realize what was happening. Her sari was in its mouth. Its no-nonsense style of voracious eating declared to the world that bullocks eat breakfast too, just like human beings. But then it was too late to alter the course of events. She had been stripped off her clothes.