The Legend of the Rice Mother
We, members of the Thykoot family, have all
been witness to the legend of Rice Mother – Chor Ammachi – since childhood. She
is the unquestioned guardian angel of our family, little known elsewhere except
in the village of Kidangoor, a small rustic place in the west of district
Patthinamthitta, Kerala. Our family name Thykoot, meaning “a group of saplings,”
is descended from one of the Syrian Christian families of the area. Our ancestral
house stood on a hilly tract, far from the village square, in a piece of verdure
where there was a new meaning to silence, and a great surprise at sound. Below these
hills were our rice fields, rice being our staple food. Since the house stood
on a slope, against the backdrop of the hills, it had an imperious appearance because
of its two peaked turrets, the imposing roof of burnt tiles, two Grecian
columns at the entrance, wood-latticed verandah, and a deep well that never
dried in summer. Grandfather had built the house from sturdy jackfruit wood,
and around the house he had laid a big courtyard strewn with sand to discourage
snakes. In a corner of the courtyard sat a well – said to be the biggest in the
village – which was wide as well as deep. Almost ten acres surrounding the
house belonged to us, a considerable landholding in those days, where up to
five acres was the norm. Those days, houses were constructed facing the east,
towards rice fields, and prosperity was measured according to how much the
fields yielded every harvest season. Farming was the main occupation, and the tradition
of working in organisations for a living was started by my grandfather, who was
a superintendent in a tea plantation. Later, his sons followed the new
tradition set by him, that is, they never worked on the fields.
The terraced plots on hard ground were
cultivated for tapioca, greater yam, and malanga root and the soft marshy land
was cultivated for rice. It’s not known how Chor Ammachi got her name. One
explanation could be that she always asked us children if we had eaten rice.
“Chor oondo makkaley? (Have you eaten rice, children?)” was her query to all of
us. If we said “no” we were sent with a slap on the back, and a gentle
admonition, to the kitchen. Chor Ammachi insisted that rice should be eaten
hot, straight out of the boiling pot, along with the gruel, or, it lost its nutritious
ingredients.
Chor Ammachi came to live in Kidangoor as a
bride when she was twenty years old. “I came here as a bride forty years ago,”
she would say in my childhood days, “I came when there were no no roads, no vehicles,
walking the distance from my home ten miles away.” A house gecko trilled as she
said this. “Hear that? The gecko says I am telling the truth.” Then marriages
were conducted early. She came with a big wooden trunk that stood on four long
legs, to ward off insects. We didn’t know what was in this wooden chest as she
kept it locked all the time. However, we found it a convenient place to us to squat.
Many times I had asked her what was in it and she gave evasive answers. We
would often sit on this trunk when Ammachi cleaned rice, or, ground grain into
batter on the mortar and pestle. But, as we shall see, she brought with her
many talents which women of a later generation didn’t possess.
Family lore has it that five years after
she came to live in Thykoot, her husband, our grandfather died. As already
mentioned, my grandfather was a superintendent of a tea plantation in the
Nilgiri Hills and would be absent most of the time from home. When he came home
on vacation Ammachi and he would have fights over simple things like his bath
not being prepared on time or the sambhar having too much salt. “I am tired of
this man,” Chor Ammachi would say, in such times. But she loved grandfather. One
evening when his dead body arrived unannounced in a Jeep Chor Ammachi couldn’t
control herself and wept all night. There was an accident, he fell down and
died when he was on his rounds in the plantation. Well, that was the
explanation given by the estate management, his employers. Some people in our village
– he had employed many of his cousins and nephews in the plantation – said that
he was a hard taskmaster and, therefore, was murdered. Overnight, Chor Ammachi had
two sons and a daughter to look after and no income except that from the
fields. We had an indentured family, headed by Thiruvanchan Pulayan (called
“Thiru,” in short), who did the farming for us. Pulayan was his caste name. The
system of indentured labour prevalent till then, was abolished by the
government, still, the family continued to serve us, perpetuating the tradition
of their forefathers, owing mainly to the benefits that accrued from it.
From then on life was hard for Chor
Ammachi. When grandfather was alive he would send Rs one hundred every month
for the family’s expenses – a big amount at that time. If he sent less than
that Chor Ammachi would return it, writing “Refused” in the communication part
of the money order. Contrite, grandfather would send back the right amount.
Those were the good days for our family, we had plenty to eat, and money to
splurge on toys during the Maramon Convention, a Christian convention and fair at
Kozencherry. After grandfather’s death the pressure of running a household
began to tell on Chor Ammachi. She rose to the occasion, working hard on the
rice fields and the land, keeping enough for ourselves and selling the surplus
to raise money. She would often supervise the work of the rice fields, standing
with Thiru and the workers, getting things like planting, weeding, and
harvesting done. Her imposing figure – she was almost six-feet tall – dressed
in white would dominate the field. Thiru and the workers were afraid of
incurring her displeasure, as she didn’t like shoddy work and would berate them
if something wasn’t to her liking.
My uncle Cheriachen, who separated from us
to live independently in a neighbouring plot bought by grandfather, offered to
be drafted into the Royal British Army during World War II when he was
thirty-five years old. He did this without Chor Ammachi’s permission. One day she
found her son packing a trunk when she returned from the rice fields and was
alarmed to learn that he was going to join the army. Ammachi was furious. She felt
her son should have consulted her – his only surviving parent – before he took
the decision. However, she hid her disappointment. That evening he left with a
friend to an army base. The image of his form disappearing into the trees,
followed by Thiru carrying his trunk on his head, was the last she saw of her
elder son.
He was stationed in Singapore during the
halcyon days before the Japanese invasion. From there he wrote a weekly letter to
Chor Ammachi detailing his life and how happy he was. She would look forward to
his letters and receiving one was the high point of her day. In one letter he
wrote that he was very happy he had taken the decision and he was enjoying life
in Singapore. Indeed, life on the island was one long celebration – wine,
women, and wantonness – before the Japanese invasion. In one letter he wrote
that he wanted my father to be drafted into the army as well and sent to
Singapore. “My elder son, Cheriachen, he holds his head high, he is a capable
man,” Chor Ammachi would say proudly to whoever she met, “He will make a name
for himself, just you see.” Compared to him my father was a layabout and, being
the youngest, was spoilt by Ammachi. He didn’t take an interest in the running
of the farms and went away to Bombay to work as a stenographer leaving his
wife, my mother, and his three children – including me – in the care of Ammachi.
When Singapore was captured by the
Japanese, Chor Ammachi stopped receiving letters from my uncle. She became
distraught and cried at the second loss in her family: first her husband and
then her beloved elder son, on whom she had reposed all her hope. She was
inconsolable and for days she didn’t go into her rice fields. “Where is he, why
isn’t he writing to us? Has he forgotten about me, his mother? I was against
this army business. Look what he has done.” she would sit on the steps leading
to the verandah and ask. Her grief was confirmed when a letter arrived from the
Royal British Army stating that Cherian was missing in action and was presumed
to be dead. In actual fact, which became clear later, he was captured and made
a Prisoner of War by the invading Japanese army and made to work on the Death
Railway linking Thailand to Burma. This was revealed to us by his soldier
friend who had escaped and had come back to India. He said that the Japanese
army was unbelievably cruel and didn’t allow any letters of the prisoners to be
sent to their families, fearing that their atrocities would then be discovered.
All letters were burnt. That explained the missing letters. This was grief
beyond what Chor Ammachi could bear and she went into depression for months. “My
son, what have I done to deserve this?” she would constantly ask.
Later on, reading about the Death Railway
from novels like “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” by Richard Flannagan and
after seeing films like “The Bridge of the River Kwai,” I learnt about the life
of the prisoners who worked on this infamous railway. It was an ambitious line constructed
to link India to Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia. The workers were severely
starved, beaten, and made to work even when they were sick to achieve the
Japanese target of completing the bridge in time to invade India. The men who
had enjoyed Singaporean life with wine and local women, were now sick prisoners
working days and nights in rags, their bodies emaciated to bare bones, their
innards wracked by disease. My uncle is rumoured to have died of starvation,
vomiting blood, and was given no medical aid, as there wasn’t any. If he had
taken my father to Singapore, as he wanted, he would have been dead, too, and I
would never have been born. This was the family legend before real
understanding dawned on me. It was only later from reading books and seeing
movies that the picture became clearer about what had happened.
I didn’t tell all this to Chor Ammachi in
her final years, though I could have. She was a sentimental person and I didn’t
want to disturb her equipoise. After months in depression, when she would spend
days on the easy chair in the verandah staring at pictures of Cheriachen on the
walls, she recouped enough strength to go into the fields. The legend of Chor
Ammachi continued, though it had to be halted for some time due to depression
over the loss of her son. “I want to hear my rice plants grow,” she would say,
“they are like my children.” Now, she has to provide for two families with
whatever she could get from the rice fields and what my father would send from
Bombay. Of course, my aunt would get a pension, which wasn’t much in those
days. Money was a constant worry and Chor Ammachi struggled to feed us and
maintain the farm in those days. My mother was inexperienced in managing a big
estate and a family.
One day she was really hard pressed for
money – the grocery bill had mounted and had to be paid off – and the only way
she could get cash was by harvesting the coconuts in our field. She sent for
Thiru. However, he had gone to Kozencherry on some errand. “You won’t get him
when you want him,” Chor Ammachi said, “I will have to do it myself.” Thus
saying she wound her loin cloth between her legs like a man and slipping a ring
of coir rope around her feet, clambered up the coconut trees with a machete
tucked in the folds of cloth on her back. She felled all the coconuts, climbing
up all the trees in the field, and slid down the trees with the ease of a
trapeze artist. Then she sold the coconuts to a trader and counted the cash paid
her creditors and was satisfied by what she had done.
When she had the time she would tell us
stories about her childhood. That was when the boiled rice was laid to dry in
the sun and we children would sit with her to shoo away the hungry hens, which
would sneak in to usurp our grains. On any day our courtyard had two or three
sizable bamboo mats laid with rice or tapioca shavings spread on them to dry. She
would tell us how she was an only girl child and was brought up like a boy by
her father, a doctor, teacher, and water diviner. Great grandfather could judge
where to dig a well to get water, and, therefore, was called water diviner. She
has a brother who now lives in their ancestral home in Kaviyoor. Great
grandfather was, of course, another great man who taught her to live without
fear. He taught her how to swim, fish, and climb coconut trees. Great
grandfather and great grandmother were a hardy couple who had the toughness of
pioneers. She had inherited their toughness and enterprise. “The boys in my
neighbourhood were afraid of me.”
It was Chor Ammachi who taught me to fish.
We would go to the canal across the house with our fishing net strung on a
D-shaped piece of bamboo, early in the morning. She would position the mouth of
the net near a small inlet so that all the fish swimming downstream would be
trapped in the folds of the device. Then we would wait till the sun rose to
check the contraption and it would be full of struggling snakeheads, eels, and
smaller fish. The taste of fried freshly-caught fish lingers in my mouth even
to this day.
In Chor Ammachi’s kitchen there would
always be something to eat. Sometimes it would be tapioca sliced and dried in
the sun and then boiled; other times it would be a mixture of boiled tapioca,
greater yam and malanga root, to be eaten with a concoction of salt, onions,
and chillies mashed in coconut oil. Yet more times there would be tapioca fried
in coconut oil, or, boiled tapioca with fish curry.
Tapioca grew plentifully in our fields. All
it needed was tilled soil and a piece of a stem to be inserted in the soil. Little
weeding or watering was required because tapioca grew easily even without
water. The morning dew was enough to dampen its roots. It grew everywhere and
had only to be protected from our cows, because cows became bloated after
eating tapioca leaves and then died. Over time it became the staple food of the
inhabitants of Kidangoor.
Her relationship with her adiyans, indentured
labourers, like Thiru and his wife Thali was also the substance of legends.
Thiru and Thali were given a plot of land by Chor Ammachi where they had built
a house, to the north of our field. Thiru and Thali both drank and all the
money they made was lost in night-long revelries of eating and drinking. The
next day they would present themselves at Ammachi’s door asking for food. She
would feed them and then give them enough rice, tapioca, and greater yam to
last a few days. During the harvesting of rice Thiru was given a share of the
paddy which he had harvested according to a time-honoured system of sharing. It
was a benevolent system and both families benefited from the arrangement. When
their son Unni needed money to pay his school fees, they came to her and she
undertook to pay his fees. Unni went on to become a conductor in the state
transport corporation. Thiru’s family depended on Chor Ammachi for their
sustenance.
Everyday there were three servants helping
Ammachi in the kitchen: pickling mangoes, preparing batter for dosas and idlis,
grinding curry paste in the mortar stone, and cooking food for all of us and
the farm labourers. And there were, at least, five of them in the fields:
pumping water to the rice fields in summer, weeding, and tending to the tapioca
and other tubers in the terraced land. She was skilled in managing them and
paying their salaries, accounts of which she kept in her mind as there were no
books or calculators at that time. A festival atmosphere prevailed. There was singing
of Malayalam folk songs by the women when they worked. They called these songs:
“Vadakkan Pattu,” songs of the north. When it was pay time, usually on
Saturdays, she held court in the vast rectangular yard, sitting on the highest
step in the porch leading to the house, her servants sitting beside her. She remembered
how much each worker had to be paid.
“Di, you had borrowed Rs five from me last
Wednesday, so here’s your ten rupees for the week, and take some rice for the
family,” she would say to Thali. “Di, when are your returning the hoe you
borrowed from me last Friday?” She remembered everything to the last detail. She
was known to be a generous lady never overpaying or underpaying her workers,
and most importantly, paid on time. So, people liked to work for her.
It was late March of the year I turned ten and
the exams were about to begin. My eldest sister was appearing for her degree
examination and need around Rs one thousand to be kept as a deposit. It was
late in the night when she told my mother that the money was needed the next
day, the last day for payment. There was no money in the house and it was too
late to see if anything could be sold to raise the money.
“Couldn’t you have told this earlier,” my
mother shouted.
My sister began to cry.
“Don’t shout at my children. I will find a
way,” Chor Ammachi hugged sister and consoled her.
“How can you find a way when the day is
past? When people are already in their beds sleeping? Can we disturb somebody
in their sleep for money? People are superstitious, they don’t deal in money
after they have gone to sleep,” mother said. But, secretly, in my heart, I knew
Chor Ammachi had a way figured out if she said so.
“You go to Thiru’s hut and see if he is
awake.”
Mother went in the darkness to see if Thiru
was awake and found him fully drunk and sleeping.
“No he isn’t. He is drunk and in no state
to go anywhere.”
“These men! They will not be there when we
need them,” Chor Ammachi grumbled.
“Okay, you make two torches of coconut
fronds. I will get ready.”
“Where are you going in this pitch dark? There
are no buses at this time. The land is infested with snakes and wild animals. Besides,
thieves and drunken men roam outside.” Mother said.
“You do as I say and don’t ask questions.”
Mother prepared two separate torches of
dried coconut fronds tied in the centre by a single leaf. I was shivering in
the night from all the excitement.
Chor Ammachi dressed and took the two
torches from my mother. She lit one and held the other as reserve.
“Where are you going? How do we know if you
are safe?”
“I am going to my brother in Kaviyoor. I am
sure he will give me the money.”
“That is ten miles away; it will take the
whole night. Be careful of snakes.”
“Don’t you know snakes will not come near
if they see this torch? Besides, I know a short cut that will reduce my journey
to seven miles. I will be back by morning.”
Thus saying Chor Ammachi set light to one
torch and disappeared into the night. She wore no shoe or sandal on her feet,
as was customary in those days. Only the flame of her torch, which she swung to
avoid it from being extinguished could be seen through the trees, before it
disappeared altogether. Her courage in undertaking the journey amazed me. The
darkness seemed particularly fearsome that night. We didn’t sleep. Mother kept
praying for Ammachi, and we sang devotional songs till morning.
Chor Ammachi had to cross several hills,
fields, and canals on the short cut which she was taking to Kaviyoor. In one
such canal something coiled against her foot. In the wan light of her torch she
saw a water snake slithering away. Luckily it had not bitten her. This shook
her a little bit, so she waited a while to catch her breath. She identified it
as a checkered keelback, called a “neerkoli,” which was not known to be
poisonous.
Kozencherry was her first stop. It was the
closest town to Kidangoor, where the shops had closed for the night, except
those selling liquor. There were several drunken gangs loitering around after
they had finished their drinking binges. Seeing this towering woman in white,
swinging a coconut-frond torch in the night, they were more afraid, and
recoiled from her. To them she must have seemed like a yakshi, a witch, out to
drink blood. Some even ululated to ward off the evil eye.
She crossed hill after hill, stream after
stream, familiar territory, as she had navigated them several times during the
day. The hills had paths trodden by many feet, but the streams were difficult
because she couldn’t gauge their depth in the dark. Those days, people were
prepared to walk if there were no available buses. The final stretch included a
forest named Chavakadu, deathly forest, and a hill named Mudinja Mala, meaning,
cursed hill. Chavakadu and Mudinja Mala were inhabited by snakes of all types
and therefore nobody dared to live there. Only this area intimidated her a
little because there were stories about people who died venturing into the
forest and the land was rough and there wasn’t a path she could follow. If she
stepped on a snake, it would bite her and there would be nobody around to hear
her cries.
At the crest of this hill she heard a
voice.
“Arha?” The voice asked.
“Ningal arha chodikaan?”
Who?
Who are you to ask?
“I am somebody from this area.” The voice
said.
“Truth be told, even I am from this area.”
“Aiyo! Is it Kochu Thampuran’s [little
lord’s] sister Elikutty?”
“Aiyo! Is it Thevan Pulayan?” Relief
flooded her.
“Uvva,” so saying her Adiyan from her
father’s house emerged from the darkness and came into the misted moonlight. He
was weaving as he spoke and she knew he was drunk.
“Kochu Thampuratti [little mistress], how
come you are in this place at this time?”
Thevan, the head of the Adiyan family of
her father said. He had grown old and his hair was completely white. He still
called her Little Mistress though the customs had changed and indentured
families were given freedom by the government.
“A family need brings me here. And you?”
“Oh, I was just passing by after the
festival at the Kaviyoor temple.”
“Did you imbibe water?” Imbibing water
implied whether he was drunk.
“Oh, no! Come I will escort you.”
Ammachi ignored the lie. Ammmachi’s last
torch had died out and she was in total darkness. Therefore, she was glad she had
her Adiyan’s company.
When they reached her ancestral house her
brother Paulochen was already asleep. Hearing her voice at the door he woke up
in a disoriented state. Thevan waited outside.
“You, here, at this time? Are you mad?”
“No there’s some urgency. I need some
money.”
“You must be mad walking in the dark in
hills, embankments, and streams. What if something had happened to you? Who
would have known? Have you any idea what the world has become?” Paulochen was
older than her; he had the right to scold her. He ran a hardware shop and
always had money with him.
He gave her the money and asked her to wait
while his wife made coffee. Chor Ammachi rested on a chair for a while before
she drank coffee. She asked Paulochen to make two coconut-frond torches for her
return journey.
“You are not going today.”
“No. The money is needed tomorrow morning.”
He called Thevan who was waiting outside
and told him to escort his sister back to her house.
“No. It’s okay if he comes as far as
Kozencherry.”
So that was settled as Chor Ammachi wanted
it. Again she set out in the night. It was past midnight and the mist had
lifted and the moon was brighter now. She walked in front waving the torch and
Thevan walked behind her, talking the local gossip about who had become rich
and who were ruined. It seemed he was an expert on the squandering of family
fortunes. The rich were always the ones who went to foreign lands, they returned
with their purses full. Things were always better in those distant places,
which he referred generally as Persia. So speaking they crossed Chavakadu and Mudinja
Mala without incident.
“But my son went to a foreign land and I
didn’t even get to see his dead body, Thevan Pulayan.”
“I know. I heard.”
“Nobody knows a mother’s grieving heart,”
she said.
For the rest of the journey as far was
Kozencherry Chor Ammachi was silent. Thevan didn’t disturb her thoughts. Her
heart and feet ached, which was compounded by her feelings for her favourite
son, the one who was her first born, the one about whom she had a lot of
expectations. At Kozencherry she said goodbye to Thevan and continued on her
journey. When she reached back home it was 6 a.m. the first effusion of light
had coloured the horizon. She handed the money to my mother and went straight
to sleep, almost falling on her bed from exhaustion.
There are many more stories that make the
Chor Ammachi legend, only a few of which I am narrating here. Once an ewe from
our sheep pen fell into the well. There were no men around as they were all
working in a rice field which was in the neighbouring village of Mezhuveli.
“I knew it. They aren’t around when you
need them,” Ammachi said, as she wound her loin cloth between her legs, as a
man would do. Climbing on the well’s boundary wall she lowered herself gingerly
on to the first of the rings that surrounded the well. Slowly she descended,
careful to watch for moss that would have made her feet slip. It was a wide and
deep well, which, according to legend was called Thykoot Kinar, because of its
depth and width which even expert men demurred from descending. When she
reached the bottom, she called out to the women to lower a bamboo basket on a
rope so that she could send the ewe up to safety. Her voice reverberated in the
narrow confines of the well. The bleating ewe was pulled to safety and Ammachi
then, as carefully as she had descended, ascended the treacherous rings of the
well. Thereafter, in the village square, she was known as Thykoot Kinar Ammachi,
because of her daring feat. Women of the village were particularly fond of recounting
this incident of Chor Ammachi.
It was a time of land and labour reforms in
Kerala. The state of Kerala had democratically elected the first socialist
government in the world. The old system of serfdom, like that of keeping
Adiyans, was proclaimed illegal by the socialist government. Of course, Ammachi
didn’t know any of this. It came as a shock to her when her servants demanded
government-determined wages and a bonus for Onam if she wanted to employ them.
Ammachi couldn’t afford to pay them a daily wage and a bonus. Thiru’s son Unni,
whose education she had funded, became a conductor in the state transport
corporation. Thiru, goaded by his son, became irresponsible, absenting himself
from work. Another son of his went to the Persian Gulf as a painter and sent
him money, which met all of the Adiyan family’s needs. The two sons became
insolent and accused the Thykoot family of having exploited them for
generations.
One rainy day Thiru, drenched from a
shower, came back from the field and asked for his wages for the week, though
it was only Thursday. Chor Ammachi usually paid them only on Saturdays. Words
were exchanged, angry and cruel words, which Ammachi had never ever heard
uttered in her presence.
“I don’t want your work, I don’t want your
charity,” so saying Thiru hurled the sickle in his hand into the damp soil of
the courtyard. I was an interested viewer of this drama, through the window of
my bedroom. The sickle wooshed, spun in the rain, and crashed on the wet earth
impaling itself into the mud.
“You ingrate, you treat me thus?” Ammachi
asked.
Thiru didn’t reply. I could see that he was
drunk and was goaded into doing this by somebody.
“How could you forget that your house
stands on land that belongs to me? Have you forgotten that I paid your son’s
fees?”
That was when Thiru came to his senses.
“Forgive me Kochu Thampurati [little
mistress]. I am drunk, I don’t know what I am saying,” he was weaving as he
spoke.
“There’s a limit to what I will tolerate. You
threaten me by flinging my sickle at me? You will leave this house, this
minute,” her wrath boiled in her words.
“Kochu Thampurati, forgive me, Adiyan said
those words when he was mad, drunk... and mad. I ask your forgiveness.”
“Get out of my house. Your feet should not
touch this courtyard or its surroundings. You speak thus after all I have done
for you?” Chor Ammachi was wild with anger and was pointing her finger towards
the gate. Thiru went away and, fearing Ammachi’s wrath, never stepped into our
courtyard ever again.
The work in the rice fields continued. Chor
Ammachi gave her workers the government-determined wages, though she was not
getting much from selling the surplus rice now. She was one to adopt customs of
the times, whatever they were. The income was not even balancing the expenses
on labour and fertilisers. A big frown creased her brows in those days, and her
face became hard and wrinkled.
One day, on her reconnaissance trip around
her rice fields, she noticed a parcel of land where the rice plants had drooped,
and the paddy wasn’t growing on the stalks. She, who claimed, she could hear
rice grow, couldn’t hear a sound. On enquiring with neighbours she didn’t get
any leads as to the reason behind this occurrence. It was the domestic help
Janaki who reported what people were saying in the village square.
“Thiru’s sons and his friends are poisoning
your rice fields.”
Chor Ammachi took umbrage at these words.
She marched to Thiru’s house towards the north of our field, and standing in
the courtyard, delivered a homily on gratitude, loyalty, and respect, the words
of which resonated in the silent air, through the trees, substance of which I
don’t recall in exact detail.
That was when she stopped cultivating the
rice fields. Over time, the weeds grew thick in the fields, so much so that
they could not be cultivated even if she tried. She would wander around the
fields, though, caressing a few rogue stalks of paddy, listening hard to hear
the rice growing in their pods. But there was silence all around her. As she
wasn’t making much money, the house, too, fell silent. There were no servants
singing Vadakan Pattu in the kitchen, only the steady wheezing of Ammachi’s
breath.
One day I saw Thiru as he circled our field
and stood for a long time staring at our house. Then he went away. The next morning
a great wailing erupted from his house. He had committed suicide, eating
Kurdan, a fertiliser, which was also an effective poison. Thali followed him
into the grave a few weeks later. Thiru’s conductor son Unni’s wife quarrelled
with him and left with his children to her own home in Mezhuveli. Thiru’s other
son, who had prospered in the Persian Gulf, bought a house further away and
went to live there. The small hut to the north of our field stood forlorn,
inhabited only by Unni, who absented from work and drank all day. He was soon dismissed
by the transport corporation when a female passenger complained that he had
tried to molest her.
Our house, which resounded with the talk of
servants, and the singing of folk songs as women ground grain, or, winnowed
paddy also became silent. There were no bamboo mats spread in the courtyard
with things to dry in the sun. With no rice in cultivation we had to buy rice
from the market, which seemed the only alternative. The kitchen also fell
silent with my mother slaving all alone to feed the family. My father sent
money, but, that seemed inadequate. Coconuts brought in some money, however,
the price of coconuts had fallen. Our lands had become hard and successive
monsoons leached the soil. No cultivation was possible now. It was whispered
that a curse had fallen on our family.
The village also changed. There were bus
services from it to Kozencherry and nearby towns. There were primary and
secondary schools in the village, and a police station was rumoured to be the
next addition. The farm labourers regularly attended classes where Marxism and
class struggle were taught. The socialist government, when it came to power,
gave farm labourers plots of land and money to build houses and toilets.
My mother constantly complained that she
had to do all the work and Chor Ammachi was not doing anything to help. This, I
felt, was unfair to Ammachi. She was old and she needed her peace and quiet. She
had breathing problems and wheezed all the time. She would spend her days lying
on the easy chair in the porch, a distant look in her eyes. I begged her to
come fishing with me, but she refused. She wouldn’t even tell us stories as she
used to. The silence of the place had entered her heart, she began to seek out
silences, away from where people congregated.
In a few years she took on the appearance of
a very old hag: her flesh loose, hair uncombed, a haggard look on her face. The
incision on her ears to hang her heavy gold ear ring had become big fleshy
drooping loops. She would wander on the bunds of her rice fields, her brows
creased, trying to recreate the sound of rice growing in their pods. Her once
faultless memory was also failing and she failed to recognise father when he
came on his annual holiday.
Then she fell down. She was in her eighties
and I was studying in college. She would take a bath regularly and on the way
to the bathroom with pot full of hot water in her hands, she stumbled and fell.
Luckily she only fractured her thigh bone, and, in spite of threats from the
doctor, refused to lie in a hospital bed. She was brought home and never walked
after that, though she would sit up to eat food. Her memory became
progressively worse, and she failed to recognise me. I could sense an era
ending, a legend coming to a close, a soul retreating into solitude.
One night, when we were sleeping, we heard
her singing a devotional song she particularly liked. It went thus:
Naleyey kondu en
manassil lava lesham bharamilla
Oronalum deivam
enney kakkunnu,
thante kaikalil
jyan dinamthorum charunnu.
My heart is not slightly heavy about tomorrow,
Each day my God guards me;
I lean on his arms every day!
This was followed by a prayer, which was
full of references to her grand children.
After this she called out to my mother, who
was already by her side.
She gave her the key to her secret trunk
and said:
“The trunk contains the gold my father had
given as dowry. I haven’t touched it. I have kept it safe for my grandchildren.
Look after them well.”
My mother began weeping, hearing which my
aunt and her daughter came running. When all of us were gathered around her,
she lifted her arms to her chest, and a few heavy breaths issued from her. She
stopped breathing after that. The woman who had walked twenty miles in the
night and had descended into the deepest well in the village had departed from
her body. Chor Ammachi’s soul, if there is a soul, must have forsaken her
beloved rice fields, and ascended into heaven.
After the funeral my mother, father, and
aunt opened her trunk with the key Ammachi had given her. It contained fifty tolas
of gold, in jewellery: bangles, necklaces, ear rings, nose rings, all made in
the heavy clunky style of those days. From that day we didn’t have to be poor
anymore. Chor Ammachi had seen to that.
Chor Ammachi loved us, her grandchildren,
as much as we loved her. Her legend will live for ever in our hearts.
