Amballore House (7 page)

Thoma lost two upper front teeth in the encounter, a lasting memorial to the tragic falling out with Chettiar. Everyone got used to his gap-toothed smile and funny way of pronouncing Malayalam words. His children imitated his new pronunciation in a skit they presented at the Mannuthy School’s youth festival. It was hilarious.

“Even though the number of your father’s teeth is reduced, the number of his bones has increased,” Ann said proudly to her children in a rare display of humor.

God, in his infinite wisdom, did not forget to endow her small brain with a sense of humor to put up with Thoma. Or did she acquire it after her marriage to Thoma? Possibly. The children laughed loudly hearing the unexpected joke. They then repeated it to their friends at school, who laughed even more.

Even though Thoma was beaten and thrown into the gutter like a dead dog, humiliated publicly and especially in front of his family, he continued to live in Chettiar’s rental house, because he had nowhere else to go. Chettiar himself had reached the end of the road as far as Thoma was concerned and gave up on him, taking rent whenever he could.

Meanwhile, Thoma’s family was growing so much so that the size of the rental house became inadequate to accommodate all of them. Ann was delivering babies every year with the predictability of a sunrise.

The rental house was becoming increasingly smaller and smaller as more children appeared on the scene. Thoma drilled a hole in the low ceiling and moved the family belongings upstairs to the attic— illegally, of course. Chettiar was mad like hell and came with his sons to Thoma’s house to vacate them but with no success. “This is against the rental contract,” shouted Chettiar and his belligerent sons. Thoma did not have the contract with him to check out the details, because Ann had burned it as cooking fuel to prepare
kanji
.

They were accused of illegal occupancy by a lawyer hired by Chettiar. The case filed against Thoma never did reach a court of law. Chettiar’s lawyer made a big bundle of money, and nothing else happened. Ann considered this as a sign from God. They knew
that the Mannuthy rental was going to be their permanent abode. It was their promised land, Ann reminded her husband.

“We are like the people of Israel who reached their Promised Land; this Mannuthy rental house is our Promised Land and ultimate salvation,” she repeatedly told Thoma.

***

The house in Mannuthy had one bedroom, one kitchen, and a front porch. That is all. It was called a shotgun house, having all the rooms in a single line, forcing one to go through every room to get to another room. The simplest architecture in the world! It was called line-room architecture. There was no connecting hallway.

All the boys and Thoma slept on the porch, while the girls and Ann slept in the bedroom immediately behind the porch. Behind the bedroom was the kitchen. The toilet and bathroom facilities were out in the open, in the backyard.

The four girls in the family sneaked a peek at the boys sleeping on the porch at night. Then they started counting their erections: one, two…six. The exciting sight grabbed headlines from the girls. Soon it became a topic of intense nightly discussion among them, those six erect penises, which stood in their nightly glory like the cannons used by Tipu Sultan in the battle of Srirangapatna of 1799. They stood erect and alert, ready to fire at an angle of 45 degrees. This specific angle gave maximum range to the cannons, per the laws of physics.

“They are our six nightly guards standing to attention, eager to protect us,” the girls hollered out and burst into uncontrollable giggles. They saluted the erect soldiers, felt safe by their presence, and went back to sleep, admiring their sleepless vigilance to guard them while their owners were negligently falling asleep. “The body is sleeping, but the soldiers are erect,” they murmured to each other, paraphrasing the famous Bible quotation, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” at the scene where Christ was awake, but his disciples were falling asleep during the night of Christ’s encounter with the high priests, when he was betrayed by Judas, who handed over his master to his enemies with a kiss on the face.

It was Ann who brought the scene of the upstanding soldiers to the attention of the eldest, Rita. Mother had given a strict warning to the eldest not to reveal the nightly scene to the younger ones, lest it would pollute their minds. Rita was surprised that a pious woman like Ann paid attention to the erect penises and then brought them to other people’s attention, especially to her own daughter.

“It will be our own secret; don’t tell any of your sisters of this,” Ann warned Rita.

Rita promptly informed the next sister in line, Kareena, about the nightly sentinels. Naturally, the news spread through all the sisters, who then made it part of their nightly duty to greet Tipu Sultan’s guns and bid good-bye to them before settling down to sleep, relieved that they were protected the whole night.

***

Thoma erected a palm leaf curtain on the porch to get privacy and to shield them from the glare of the streetlights while they were sleeping. The curtain came up at night and came down in the morning.

Chettiar’s children and the other children in the neighborhood looked at the newly erected curtain curiously and joked that Thoma was a stage manager directing a daily Malayalam drama called “Thoma and His Family.” They claimed that Thoma, Ann, and their children were actors in this Mannuthy drama, a cast of two adults and ten children. Their performance took place nightly, in spite of the fact that they could sell no tickets.

The neighbors claimed that when the curtain was drawn at night, a drama unraveled and it lasted the whole night, until the final curtain drop in the morning. The drama played out behind the closed curtain was the parents’ lovemaking. The children had no role except to pass comments on this act and to uncomfortably watch the scenes, pretending not to see it at all.

God’s answer to the perennial question from the children, especially the elder children was this drama. The conversation of the elder children went like this: “Since father and mother are sleeping separately, how do they make new babies?”

The nightly drama explained how Ann was able to deliver babies like clockwork, like in an assembly line in a factory.

“No stork ever delivered any baby to our house,” Ann said proudly.

The clay oven and pots in kitchen and a cross hanging on the darkened kitchen wall bore witness to their passionate lovemaking behind the backs of the sleeping boys and girls. Some nights they scared away the lizards and rats in the kitchen. The neighbor’s dog that usually materialized in the kitchen through a hole in the door barked loudly in protest and exited, giving them the privacy they needed. Subashini, in the hanging cage in the kitchen, closed her eyes, pretending to see nothing, to hear nothing, and determined to say nothing of the night spectacle.

The raw sounds and moans of love-making alerted the rooster sleeping on one leg in the backyard. He woke up and involuntarily cried out “cock-a-doodle-doo” as loud as he could. This usually woke up Bhavani, their good neighbor. She immediately woke up and started preparing to go to temple for the Morning Prayer thinking that morning had broken. She attired herself in sari, applied a bindi on forehead, and carried a bunch of fragrant jasmines to dedicate to the temple goddess.

When she opened the front door, the creaking sound alerted sleeping Kumarettan, her barber husband, who immediately got up and restrained Bhavani from visiting the temple at midnight. “Come back to bed, hon. Goddess can wait until morning,” he told his wife and dragged her to bed. The fragrance of freshly picked jasmine flowers that adorned Bhavani’s hair had made him drunk with passion. Bhavani would give birth to her second daughter nine months later.

***

The rain was battering outside the rental home in Mannuthy. The day looked dark because of the collected clouds yet to rain down. Thoma was out, and the children were in the school. The chickens and ducks in the backyard had taken asylum on the verandah to escape the rain. Ann was alone at home. She was sitting in the kitchen, looking outside, watching the rain. She then took out the
sickle and started cutting tapioca to make curry for supper. She was crouching while she kept herself busy cutting tapioca.

That is when Chettiar walked in to collect the monthly rent. It was the first of the month, and rent was due. He made himself comfortable, sat on the bench in the kitchen, and stated the reason for his visit. Ann did not have any money. Thoma had not given her rental money when he left home earlier on in the day. Whenever he was able, he used to hand over the rent to her, delegating her to give it to Chettiar. But today was not such a day.

Ann told Chettiar, “I am sorry. I don’t have the money.”

Chettiar said, “’Sorry’ does not cut it. I need rent. Need to pay bills, you know.”

He was drunk and ready for a fight, even with a helpless woman who Ann was.

Ann said, “When my husband comes, I will ask him.”

Chettiar suddenly stood up, cursing her and Thoma. He closed the kitchen door. In the darkness that enveloped, Ann could barely make out the figure of the unwelcome intruder. The fire in the clay oven fought to dispel the darkness in the room.

He approached her.

What happened next still stays in her memory as a bundle of jumbled events. To the best of her memory, the next thing Chettiar did was to bend down to get hold of her long hair and stand her up by pulling her by hair. Then he beat her so hard that she reeled. She dropped the sickle and tapioca. The force of the beating landed her against the wall. She recoiled and collapsed on the floor, crying pitiably and screaming for help. There was no help coming, since the neighbor, Bhavani was out. Ann was alone in her kitchen with a dangerous man.

He dragged her over the floor, pulling her by her hair and standing her up again. Ann had by this time gotten hold of the fallen sickle and she did something unimaginable. She swung the sickle at him in desperation. Chettiar started bleeding from the forehead. He cursed and beat her again, this time on the head and so hard that she
blacked out. This time, she did not get up from where she fell.

When she regained her consciousness, she was alone. She was lying on the kitchen floor, legs spread apart, totally naked. Her
chatta
and
mundu
were on the floor. They were ripped so badly that she had to wrap herself in a bath towel until she retrieved a new pair of clothes. The violation of her body by a cruel man filled her with disgust and humiliation. At a time when female dignity was of paramount importance, she was concerned if anyone would have known of the rape. Fortunately that remained a secret between her and Chettiar.

She took a quick bath and dressed in fresh clothes and finished cooking in time, prior to the arrival of her children and Thoma. Her biggest worry was if Thoma so much as even suspected what happened. If Thoma knew what happened, there would be a funeral at Chettiar’s home. She prayed to God Almighty for Thoma for what Thoma did not know, because Thoma was one of God’s most dangerous creations and he would have stopped at nothing to seek revenge.

There was someone watching the entire scene other than God. That was Subashini in the cage hung from the kitchen ceiling. The poor thing had tried to fly out of the cage and defend Ann any way she could. She had been unable to fly out and so had to stay put. She had squawked loudly while the atrocious incident was taking shape, to attract someone from the street—the best she could do under the circumstances. But her efforts were of no avail.

When Ann’s near and dear ones started arriving home in the evening, Subashini broadcast, “Ann attacked Chettiar” reversing the subject and the object of the sentence, displaying bad grammar. Ann’s curious children and Thoma were puzzled that a saint-like woman would attack anyone and therefore ignored the bird’s talk.

The next day, during the few minutes of freedom that Subashini was accustomed to getting daily, she flew out two houses down the road and settled down on the ceiling fan of Chettiar’s house. The fan was just outside the main door of the house. When he came out in a few minutes, Subashini was ready.

She flew down like a speeding kite and started pecking on his left eye relentlessly, braving his arm-swings directed at her. She ducked his blows, danced around and out of his attacking arms, and doggedly went after him. She went after his left eye, and boy, did she ever get what she wanted! Chettiar became one-eyed from that day onwards. Subashini lost a few feathers, but she refused to get her feathers ruffled.

“Next time, other eye will be lost,” Subashini warned the landlord, delivering a grammatically correct sentence this time. She then flew back to Ann’s kitchen.

Ann would give birth to a baby boy nine months later, and she insisted on naming him Disgust. This was such an outrageous name that she was asked by the Mannuthy parish priest to consider renaming. She eventually settled for Jaygust, an unusual name for a human being. She felt that justice was done by the fact that the name retained the ‘gust’ of ‘disgust,” a lasting reminder to a horrendous rape she had to surrender her dignity to. The painful memory never left her.

Only she and Chettiar knew that her sixth child was not from Thoma. Jaygust was also called Number-Six. He was the sixth child of Ann; but not of Thoma. She was thankful that God kept the secret well-guarded. The sight of Number-Six, a permanent sickle mark on Chettiar’s forehead, and his lost eye thanks to Subashini reminded her of the belittling episode.

***

Mannuthy life represented the bad old days whose undying images haunted Thoma and Ann even after they moved to Amballore and moved on with their lives. Old images came back to life when they were ruminating over their past. They came back like old friends dropping in for a cup of coffee. In a strange twist of life, those bitter images appeared consoling, and their reminiscences reassuring, if only because the couple knew they had crossed that bridge and never would have to confront old days again.

Even though their children knew that they came to a dangerous world because of Thoma and their misery was perpetuated because
of his inability to support them, they were sympathetic to him because of the struggles he went through. Well, some of them were; not all. There was a redeeming quality to the battles he had to stage to set things right, so the thought process went; the thought process of some of his children, anyway. The struggles that Thoma had to endure after he was kicked out of his ancestral home were very many. He struggled to be good in the menial masonry work he had to embrace in order to earn a livelihood, and he braved unexpected layoffs occasionally. He broke his right leg while doing his job, an employment hazard that he was not insured for. There was not a single relative that stepped up to help him or his family. The list of his woes went on and on. Therefore, the lion’s share of his children was sympathetic to him.