Tears in His Eyes Burnt: To My Children 4

I have been portraying my father’s picture in dark colors. In fact he was not a bad man. I should say he was a strict man; strict about his ways, strict about his beliefs, strict about his passions and so on. He was adamant and ever since I came to know him as a man, not just as my father, he was suffering from many illnesses. Today, you would call all those diseases as ‘life style diseases’. He was always busy and he always came home late. His food habit was erratic and he did not do any exercise. Perhaps, most of the time he was not fit enough to do any exercise.

My father’s name was K.Lakshmanan. He was the eldest son of the family. People called him Vakkom Lakshmanan as Vakkom was the name of our village. He had taken the responsibility, along with several other people, of reforming the village. I would delve deep into the historical importance of our village some other time. Here I would just state that he was so much involved in those reformation activities that he did not find any time even to get married. There must be several reasons for that. As I said earlier, he was the eldest son of the family and he had this responsibility of marrying off his sisters. By the time all the sisters were in safe hands, he had already in his late thirties.

I remember a story about him told in the family circles in a hush hush manner. The story was about his elopement with a girl from the neighboring village. He was in his twenties then and was quite popular in all the near by villages. He used to travel around, delivering speeches on the impending revolution. Our ancestral home was said to be the hiding place of many of the important politicians who later became ministers in the Kerala government. I had heard my aunts talking fondly about those ministers who used to come and spend time at home, reading, writing and discussing politics with my father. I was not surprised to hear the story of my father’s love escapades. Any girl would have loved a man with big eyes, sharp wit and aggressive nature.

Somehow the elopement did not turn into a marriage. The girl was brought back to her home by her relatives and my father went back to his social activism and teaching. He used to teach in private colleges, which were generally known as tutorial colleges. And even during my college days, tutorial college teachers were the heroes of the girls. I know it for sure because I also used to teach in tutorial colleges. The front benchers are always attentive and studios. As the benches progress inversely in the space of the classroom, the girls become more attentive about the features, looks and style of their male teachers. As our country was not opened for global economic interventions, a youth like my father or even like me had nothing much to aspire than teaching in a tutorial college till we got some job in the government departments.

My mother always used to tell me that I inherited this quality of flirting and seducing women from my father’s genes. My mother always got panic attacks when I uttered the name of any girl twice at home. She knew what was in the offing. I used to teach in tutorial colleges when I was a graduate student in Trivandrum. I was specializing in English literature and in the tutorial college I taught Malayalam literature for graduate students. It was funny that I was their contemporary and a student elsewhere and I was teaching them a subject in which I had no qualification. But I was a diligent student of Malayalam literature in my own ways and I used to publish stories and poems in the local magazines and newspapers. I used to teach them with a lot of confidence because I had a better physique and facial hairs than my contemporaries who were my students for the time being. My classes were full and the girls used to like this particular teacher a lot.

I don’t remember me falling in love with any of my students. But my father’s love interest was his student, I was told. I think that angle remained a permanent angle for him because my mother was his student once and later they taught in a tutorial college together, where I had the chance to teach years later after I took my masters from Trivandrum University College. This tutorial college was located in Attingal, a town near my village. My parents taught there and when I joined there as a teacher, the principal of the college took me under his care as he knew my parents very well. Today, this parallel college namely ‘Universal College’ is not there now. In its place there stands a shopping complex and to my surprise I came to know that the shopping complex is owned by the same principal who used to own the parallel college. Today, thanks to the education reforms and syllabus modifications, the business of tutorial colleges has gone down. Many who used to run such colleges now relocate themselves in other businesses.

Yes, I had fallen in love with one of my students. She was my cousin and she used to come to my home to learn English from me. I was living in a rented house in Trivandrum. I used to wait for her to come with her friend. During the initial days, teaching and learning went off well. Then she started coming earlier than her friend. She would evade her friend and reach home a few minutes before so that she could talk to me in private. She was studying in one of the high end schools in Trivandrum and to see her in school uniform was really interesting. In our college time, unlike these days, scandals were always waiting in wings. If a boy and girl met somewhere or if they talked in public, there would be a sudden eruption of scandals and gossips. This relationship with the girl also ended up in one such familial scandals and it was contained soon by her family members. That was the first and last time I fell in love with a student. And I firmly believe that falling in love with a student is not a good thing for a teacher. The relationship between a teacher and student is more ideological in nature than cultural. In this ideological relationship the student always comes secondary to the power that the teacher exercises over the student. His looks, nature and arrogance could be attractive for an unsuspecting and weak student. The student is always emotionally vulnerable before the teacher. Hence, falling in love with a student is not a good thing for any teacher. But there are several incidents of teachers falling in love with their students and later establishing very successful married lives. Exceptions are everywhere.

My father fell in love with my mother’s elder sister who was also a student of my father. My mother was, as she has always been, sentimental and kept herself secondary to everything. My father expressed his wish to marry my mother’s sister and she turned him down as she was already having an affair with a man from a nearby village. My mother was silently watching all these and finally she became my father love interest. Finally, with the consent of the family elders and members they got married in the village temple. By that time my father had left his active membership from the RSP and was more concentrating on village reforms. When I say about his love and marriage, you may think that their families were very complicated and they all were looking for opportunities to fall in love or elope. But this has been the hallmark of a society, which was morally controlled. Kerala was a society (and still is), with lot of moral hypocrisy. It corrupted people and poisoned their minds. The social control was so strong that everyone was a living pervert. Outside everything looked extremely decent and pruned to perfection in such a society. But inside it was like hell; everyone was living in their personal hells.

When my father finally got the opportunity to get married, he was already in his late thirties. I was born when he was forty and when I was fifteen, and he was fifty five, his life was already over. My experience with my father was a very short lived one; only of fifteen years. And during the initial years, he was always away. And when I was growing and he found out time to be around with us, he was already ill. And whenever he was out of illness, he was engaged in helping me to develop my interest in writing. He taught me English language and each time he sat to teach me all the hell broke loose. He was impatient with me. He thought that I should pick up lessons very fast. When I failed to do so, he caned me till I fainted out of pain. In those sessions of teaching and torturing or to put it rightly in those sessions of torturous teaching, however, I learned English than any one else could do in those days within the given situation. I started reading books in English when I was in the fourth standard. Today’s world is different. Children could read in English the moment they are born. Even some parents shift the delivery to England or any other English speaking country so that the child could listen the first noises in English language itself!

My time was different. I studied in a local school and in Malayalam medium. You may remember me saying how Quixotic was my father’s action to shift us back to the village when we were about to start our schooling. We could have joined any English medium school in Trivandrum. But my father, inspired by his new social and Gandhian ideals shifted us to Malayalam medium. Perhaps, he might have got intimations about his own health which was failing slowly and he wanted to be with his mother and relatives. But he compensated the lack by teaching us English and he did it commendably though the torture was an unavoidable part of it. Looking back, I don’t have any reason to complaint. If I could write in English, it is because of his teaching.

Both my father and mother strived a lot to bring us up as culturally inclined kids. As they were government servants, they could join some installment schemes of the publishing houses and by the end of every month we got bundles of books sent by them. They took me to the village libraries and the libraries in the neighboring villages. They took a great pride in me as I was inclined to writing and reading. However, they were worried about my body fat. I was called ‘elephant’ by my friends. I could not pick up any game seriously because I was fat. But my father was perceptive. He invited a few young guys from the village. These boys used to run a gym like place for their use. My father enrolled me there at a very young age itself.

My tryst with gyms started because of my father’s interest. A village like Vakkom couldn’t have afforded a great gym. The gym where I went had a cross bar tied with rope between two areca nut trees. There were a couple of dumb bells. With these primitive facilities, these boys worked out very well and they had fabulous bodies. They taught me basic exercises and asked me to lift the dumb bells once in a while. They used to hang me from the cross bar and they believed that hanging there would increase my height. Though I did not touch six feet, by the time I reached my high school I was physically fit and I could play a bit of football at the school level.

Whenever I think of my father, I think of him as a Lion. This started happening after seeing the animation movie ‘The Lion King’. In the presence of a father, you always become a cub; you are meek and submissive, and you enjoy that status. I lost my father when I was fifteen, the ripe age when a boy needs his father around. And even few years before, my father had already started showing the symptoms of the final surrendering. But he was a fighter. Thought occasionally he yielded to his failing health, he gave it a good fight. I remember him going to his recreation club with a plastic tube jutting out of his stomach and a pouch at the end of it. He was going through dialysis then. He got an appendage done so that he could fit all those tubes and pouches in it and tie around his belly and walk to the recreation club. His friends helped him to sit up and play his game of cards. And I used to wait for him to finish his game so that I can accompany him back to home.

When my father died, I did not feel much of a loss. I was rather numb. I had even this feeling of relief because I was literally living in a hospital veranda for almost a year when he was admitted there. Ward number 22 was meant for the patients with failed kidney functions. There was saying that whoever got admitted there rarely went back alive. During the one year I spent in the hospital as a bystander for my father, I became friends with so many patients and their relatives. I spent time with them, helping them in doing daily chores; I was fourteen then and I was an errand boy for most of them. And the sad thing was that once in a while I was woken up from my sleep in the middle of nights and was asked to accompany someone back to home. When I came out of sleep completely, I recognized the fact that a patient whom I started calling ‘uncle’ or ‘elder brother’ had died. I was supposed to go in the ambulance with the dead body. I did it several times. Hence, when my father breathed his last in one evening, I did not feel much. I took it very easily. After finishing the formalities, I went to fetch the ambulance, accompanied my father’s dead body along with other relatives.

You may understand why I felt relieved when my father was finally freed from his pain. He was just fifty six years old. And today fifty six is not an age. It has something to do with the Kerala mind set and the age of retirement. A government official gets retired at the age of fifty five. For the society as well as for the family, then he/she is a retired person, a person whose active life is over. Biologically a person is not inactive at the age of fifty five. The feeling retiring from the active life is a socio-cultural construct. Suddenly one becomes useless for oneself. They become a part of the easy chair in the veranda. They feel that they don’t have anything to do in their lives now. So they become old and they die. My father was quite active despite his illness when he was in service. He was even in love with a woman in his office. He used to send me with some letters and papers, which he claimed were official documents, to this woman’s house whenever he was not well and was not going to office. In fact, the fights that used to rear up at home after such incidents, made me aware of the nature of those letters and papers. Those were my father’s love letters for that woman.

I don’t say that my father was morally a wreck only because he sent his own son to his woman friend’s house with love letters. Nor do I think that he was doing anything wrong by falling in love with another woman. He was ill and he wanted his mind to be revealed to someone. There is a limit of revealing things to ones own wife. Wife is a practical companion. When you are very into practical life, romance and dreams may not gain the same space and claim the same importance in that life. You love your partner a lot but still you find it is difficult to share everything. If my father was writing love letters to another woman, he was expressing his love and romance and the hidden anxieties, ambitions and unfulfilled desires. It was one way of extending his love and life. He was living a virtual life of health and happiness in that affair and perhaps in those letters.

My eyes well up when I think about one particular incident that is known only to him and I till this date; till I write this. No one in this world knows about it. Today I want to tell it to you. There were a few incidents in which my father had expressed his real anger for me. One day I took out his injection it and he warned me before I took the syringe out of it. And as it was inevitable, it slipped from my hand and broke. He beat me black and blue. He was seething with anger and rage. One day I put dettol lotion into the well in order to ‘clean’ the water. When he came to know about, he did not take it lightly, he caned me like a demon. On another occasion, when I was running I started falling down for no reason. I could not understand what was happening to me. I got up and ran and I fell down again. My father watched me falling. He might have had a feeling of the worst. He might have thought that I was getting some polio affliction. He came towards me with a cane and started beating me. I got and ran, and whenever I fell, he came there and caned me. I ran and ran and finally I stopped falling. The caning had its psychological effect. Till date I don’t know what my father thought when he caned me as if I were an animal.

But that is not the story I am planning to tell you. The story is terrible and shameful. I had not seen my father crying. Whenever he beat me, my mother told me, that he used to come when I was asleep and touched the bruises that he had caused. He used to caress me and go back to his bed. It was a way of apologizing. But I never saw him doing that. But one day he cried in front of me and I cannot forget that moment.

As a part of his social services, my father used to run a circulation bureau. He pooled in all the magazines and weeklies, and he sent them to the houses in the village. Women never got the opportunity to go out and buy books, and even they did not have the economic freedom to buy magazines. This circulation was meant for those women and old people who stay back at home and were interested in reading. My father hired a local boy to circulate the magazines. He came in the morning collected the magazines and went to distribute them. By afternoon he came back and returned the old magazines.

One day, I was playing alone at home. My father was not around. And this guy came home to return the old magazines. After assuring that none was at home, he took me to back veranda and started groping me. I was surprised by his move as I had never thought of him as a bad character. He was groping me all over and he touched my private parts. I knew what was going to happen as I had fairly good idea about such things thanks to my reading and some uncanny experiences within the family circles. He raised his dhoti and took his organ out and asked me to touch it. I was doing it and suddenly my father appeared there from nowhere. I was shell shocked and I was sure that was the end of my life. The guy, seeing my father jumped out of the room and scaled the heights of the boundary wall and escaped.

I closed my eyes and waited for my death to embrace me. I was expecting my father’s transformation into a demon. He did not talk to me for a while. Then he went into the house. I followed him with my head hanging in shame. He left me there alone and went outside. I was crying. After an hour or so, he came back. I knew that he went to settle the score with the circulation boy. I didn’t know what he did to him. I was waiting for my father to come and beat me. I wanted to get out of that limbo. Finally he came. He hugged me and then sat in a chair. He held me in his hands and looked into my eyes. And he was crying. He was crying. He was crying like a child. He hugged me again. I too was crying. Then he wiped my tears and told me this much, “Your mother should not know about this incident.”

Then he dismissed me. He behaved nothing had happened. He was the same man again. Aggressive, passionate and intelligent. When he left me he was still aggressive. He even threatened a fellow patient whom he thought was ogling at my mother.

I am ready to forgive my father for whatever wrong he had done to me in the process of preparing me for this life because he had forgiven me when he caught me sinning. And he washed me clean with his tears, which he had hidden from everyone throughout his life.

Touching a New World of Objects: To My Children 3

When you, my son, turned one and a half year old, I saw you touching everything. And your great achievement of that year was spoiling a double deck music system, which had been my pride possession for a long time. But I did not scold you or try to save the music system from its untimely destruction. Once you were happy with what you had done, you turned your attention to the audio tapes which were generally known as cassettes. I had a huge collection of audio tapes and to my dismay you started picking up one by one and pulling the tape out of its spools. The act seemed to have given you a great pleasure. I was ready to put up with your spoiling spree for while and eventually I too grew tired of saving my tapes and finally I decided to pack them in a box and hide it inside the box coat, which by now has become a treasure trove of memories.

My daughter, you didn’t have that chance to spoil my cassettes. But I don’t think you are deprived of spoiling something related to music. When you were one and half year old, music had gone from cassettes to CDs to pen drives to iPods to mobile phones. You might not have even seen something called audio cassettes and floppy discs. We grew up with technology and technology overtook us like a sprinter in the track. We tried to run our best but could not catch up with it. When you read this, I don’t know when it could be, the technology must be totally different from today. Anyway, you were spoiling all my CDs. And I allowed you to spoil CDs without any prick of conscience because any music that I wanted to listen was available in the YouTube.

However, both of you were united in one thing; spoiling books. Initially when you started picking up books from the shelves, we as proud parents thought that you too were going to follow our profession; you were going to become writers, if not art critics. But that was just an illusion. After pretending that you were reading with a lot of curiosity or flipping through the pages to wonder at the illegible shapes of the letters, by forcing our amusement to transform into despair, you started tearing the pages off from the books. Then it was our duty to stand guard to our books, painstakingly collected over a period of two decades. Had the books got life of their own, they would have run to some shelters to save themselves from the ultimate form of innocent vandalism. So for a few years, till you became mature enough to understand the value of books, the lower decks of our shelves remained empty or filled with broken Chinese toys. I always imagined the books looking at you from the upper decks of the shelves with wide opened eyes.

What I am trying to tell you is the way you both used to touch things around you. Children know their world through touch. Scientifically speaking, a child for the first time in his/her life negotiates the world by touching the mother. Through mother’s touch the child understand a relationship that cares, feeds and protects. This sense of touch, affinity towards tactility remains in an individual’s constitution throughout his/her life in various forms. But during the growing up years, children feel like touching anything and everything. They see the objects around them, smell them, taste them but above all they touch them. Children generally don’t eat their sweets so soon. They keep it in their hands, touch it, feel it, smell it, see it, again touch it until either it falls down or snatched by an ogling sibling or friend. Children want to touch everything and in the process they spoil a lot of things. And through trial and error of touching, they comprehend the world to their satisfaction.

Children negotiate the objective world or the object world through touching them. Touch, for them is the route to familiarity. Through touching and caressing, I feel, they understand each object’s property and also validate its difference from the touch of their mother. Touching is a sort of negotiating the mother figure in the object world. Also, touching helps the children to distance themselves from a world where mother, only mother is a looming presence. By touching objects around them, they push mother from their vicinity and in the newly formed space they accommodate a new object, which could be a temporary surrogate for the mother’s touch/presence. I noticed how you both clutched your toys or books, whenever I bought them for you, at night and pushed your mother away from you for the time being. And in the world of sleep, where the objects melt and disappear, you came back for your mother’s touch. I am sure that children all over the world find their surrogate mothers in the objects during the day time and at night they go back to their mothers. Slowly, as they grow up, the object world fills them up with images and the memories of touches, and the mother is pushed to the fringes. Mother is often recognized as a memory, a narrative around touches and tears. Mother is the only notion, which is tactile, I believe.

Recently, when I was watching a video work titled, ‘Conscience Keeper’ by Gigi Scaria, I was taken back to the memories of innumerable touches I had during my childhood. I was trying to negotiate the objective and object world around me in a village where I was brought to live the rest of my life, though I moved out from there after eighteen years. In Gigi’s video work I saw one circle of light moving across and around a dark screen. The work told me about the ways in which the hegemonic agencies watch over our lives through surveillance cameras and other monitoring devices. Simple but strong in its medium and message, Gigi’s work evoked certain memories in me about the touch. How could I think about a tactile feeling while looking at a moving circle of light, which is not at all tactile? Suddenly, my childhood appeared before me as if in a vision. I could see things very clearly.

My grandmother’s house was comparatively big and it had a thatched roof. From the minute holes in the coconut leaves used for making the thatch, sunlight came inside the rooms. In the morning, they came from the east side and they laid golden eggs on the walls. During the vacant hours (as you know a child has got all the time in the world and vacancy is his perpetual state of being) I followed these golden eggs made out of sunlight. I knew, by experience that it came through the roof and those were not golden eggs. Still, every day, when the sunlight came in through the holes, I tried to pick up the eggs from the walls and put them into my pocket. I spoke to them and followed them. They moved, as the sun moved. Yes, we used to think that sun moved from east to west and the earth remained stable. It took a few more years for me to understand that it happened the other way round.

I picked up the eggs or pretended that I was picking up eggs and storing them in my pocket. And now I understand why I did that. I was trying to touch the light, even if it was a futile exercise for many, I very sincerely believed that one day I would be able to pick them up. Hence, I followed the eggs and to mock me, they changed their shapes continuously. By noon they took the shape of perfect circle. During those two hours, when the elders ate their food with appetite and children like us were force fed, these luminous eggs looked at me and they had a very special brightness during those two hours. And by evening, when the four o’ clock flowers bloomed in the thickets around the land, those eggs once again turned yellow and then to red. Then they faded, leaving my efforts to catch them and hold them in vain.

I used to move between the bodies of the elders who were taking a nap in the afternoon. Sometimes, I saw one egg perfectly residing in the open mouth of my sleeping grandmother. Once I pushed my fingers into her mouth to pick the egg out and she woke up with a terrible howling only to find out me standing before her with my fingers stretched at her face. At times, I saw eggs residing lasciviously around the neck of cousin, who was studying in high school at that time. The thin golden chain around her neck was glistened like a snake at the touch of these luminous eggs. I always felt an intense urge to touch her neck and the golden chain. Every time I thought of doing it, the image of a snake came to me. It too was golden in color and was lying in a bucket of water.

That was quite a sight. My mother was going out to pick up something from the backyard. Suddenly she started calling out various names in the family. Everyone rushed to the spot only to see my mother panting in fear. Her face was pale and she was pointing her finger at bucket of water. We looked into it and found something like a golden threat moving inside the water. It was a small snake and it reminded me of a yellow thread that my grandmother used to extract from the stem of the plantain trees in order to make flower garlands for adorning the idols in the small temple. I thought that it was one of those threads and I felt this irresistible itch to touch it. I moved forward and someone pulled me back and my mother was still screaming.

Some grown up men from the neighborhood came to the scene with sticks and other weapons and within no time they killed the snake. One of the men picked it up with a stick and I could see the ribbed pale white colored belly of the reptile hanging helplessly and lifelessly from a piece of stick. Its upper side was golden in color and had some faint dark spots on it. They took the small dead snake to the main road and they went to the junction in a procession. People who never had much to do with their lives joined the procession and the commotion was over by the time my father came back from his social activities that included playing a few rounds of cards in a private recreation club formed by him and his friends.

Though I used to resist the urge to touch my sleeping cousin’s tender neck because I was reminded of a snake and its sad demise, I did not stop my touching spree. I used to touch everything and as I told you earlier, I even used to climb over people to touch things which were kept above the sills, door frames and shelves. Audio cassettes were a rarity and one of the grown up cousins had a mono cassette player. I used to look at the turning spools from a distance when the machine played out music. I could sit and watch the turning of the spools endlessly and each time I watched it I killed my itch to touch them. I had to control that urge because whenever I was around my cousin was all alert and he did not want me to touch anything belonged to him. Perhaps, it was in his room, I smelled some new smells that I had never smelled before. But I could not recognize that smell and I could not find any object that brought that smell out.

One of my expeditions to see and touch new objects in and around the house had put me into a very embarrassing situation. One day, I remember it was a Sunday because my mother was at home so were the cousins who were studying in schools or colleges. My father had settled in his chair with his Sunday newspapers and tea. I was on the floor touching and caressing things and supported by my belly I was literally crawling from one room to another. In this process I found abandoned bobbins, buttons, spools of thread etc. These are all objects related to sewing. We had a sewing machine at home and most of the members in the family knew how to stitch their ‘stuff’. Like a true communist and revolutionary, my father also knew how to stitch up things.

Father used to stitch some under pants and petty coats. Sundays, for him meant stitching, preparing some home medicines, washing his dhotis and so on. The first half of the day went in all these. One day he decided to stitch a pair of trousers for me. Even today I don’t know why he decided to do that as he knew very well that his expertise in stitching did not go beyond stitching some underpants, which genuinely did not demand any kind of sewing expertise. He got some cotton cloth. I still remember the color; pale green, almost becoming yellow at places. Today, looking back, I am sure that the cloth came from some old box which had been lying neglected for decades till my father’s curiosity reached it.

The pair of trousers was ready in a couple of hours. And I was already in school; in first or second standard. It must be second standard because unlike the children of today, I knew what shame was at that time. I was reluctant to wear that atrocious piece of clothe but my father, as I told you, was the sole dictator of terms. He asked me to wear it and I could see my own contours through the pale old cloth now in the shape of pants. And do you know, we were not made to wear underwear at that time. Underwear was a piece of cloth that used to appear in your life when your mother realized that the unconscious erections the boys had was too visible to be wished aside. So I went to the school wearing a pant with nothing but air underneath it.

The tragedy hit by the afternoon. The whole first half I was alert on my situation. After all I was a child and I lost control when I found my friends jumping in and out of the classroom through the windows. I controlled myself for a while and after sometime I forgot about the special dress that I was wearing on the day. Following my mates I too ran and jumped out of the window. I heard a creaking sound and I thought it was the window panel moving. But the sound was coming from my rear and it was bit weird and unfamiliar. It sounded like a cloth being ripped apart. And I touched around my back and lo…there my bums were now experiencing the direct touch of the school air. Before many could see the sorry state of my cloth as well as my bottom, I sneaked back to the class and sat there like a stone. Slowly, the whole class came to know about the ‘wardrobe malfunctioning’.

Children are many times cruel than the worst kind of sadists. The moment they came to know about my state, they started moving around my back. They started singing and poking me. The teachers had a difficult time to extract me from the hands of my own friends turned foes. They booed me and I hanged my head in shamed and walked back to home by holding the handbag as a cover. I walked and the bag hit me the uncovered cheeks of my bums. It was like an ongoing punishment, which I seriously thought, should have given to my father for putting me into such a state. The children followed me as if they were taking part in a carnival and I was the best and funniest float they had ever seen. That was the end of my father’s experiments with stitching pants. He remained an occasional maker of underpants and petticoats.

I recovered many items from the floor, from under the coats and I was touching everything and deriving pleasure that was immense. Finally I reached the kitchen on my belly. The women there were unaware of a silly creature coming by. They looked at me as if I did not exist in their world. They were gossiping, talking, joking and laughing. The kitchen charade was so engrossing for them that they did not even prevent me from getting under a platform where the stoves are kept. My mother threw many things under this platform. I used to wonder at the treasures that my mother had thrown in there. It was the right time to explore all those secrets. I moved further.

A college going cousin was standing at the platform and preparing something on the stove. She was wearing a semi-long skirt that reached up to her ankles. I moved between her legs and proceeded to the hidden treasures under the platform. Suddenly I felt like choking myself and I found myself caught between the legs of my cousin. I changed my position. From my belly I shifted to my back. None was giving any damn to my moves. They were laughing and talking. From there, I had this earthworm perspective. I looked up. Two white columns were going up. I could see golden hairs coming out of her shanks. The white pillars went far and high and I wanted to see the end where these pillars met. I could not see anything. There was total darkness. I looked hard to see something.

With a scream she jumped aside and called out to my mother. She was all read. I had just touched her thighs by lifting my arm up. Her jumping was caused by my touch. My mother came and pulled me out from the cavity below the platform. I thought she would hand over me to my father for inflicting higher forms of punishment. It did not happen. She settled it in the kitchen itself by giving me a hard pinch and a tight slap. They all knew what I was up to and I hanged my head in shame and walked out to the light outside. Things were changing in my life. I was touching more and more new objects and I started understanding a world that was quite unfamiliar to me before. I was walking towards light and sin.

The Age of Darkness: To My Children 2

Darkness. I think of my childhood and a kind of darkness that sticks on to your fingers like an abominable sap oozing out of some wild plants that you accidentally snap while going into the bushes in search of the secrets that as a child you think are hidden somewhere amongst the plants and creepers growing at the backyards of your house, envelopes me from all the sides. It used to push me to the corners both real and unreal. I thought that the places were created out of corners and children had no escape from those ominous corners. Darkness came out from everything, from the sky, from the courtyard, from the well, from the elders and their gazes and words. Life used to be a perpetual exodus from the dark gaze of the grown ups.

Don’t think that my childhood was all about darkness though I speak about it a lot. It is/was a sort of feeling that you would like to shrug off but refuses to budge. It is like some thorny seeds; it climbs on to your clothes from nowhere and the moment you try to remove it, it sticks stronger and harder till you lose patience and literally tear it off and in the process get hurt yourself. Today, I believe that the all pervading darkness of my childhood was a general state of the childhood experienced by all children. The more they experience the world the more they come to see the light.

As you gain experience, the shadows and dark objects that threaten you from all the sides start getting clear contours. They shed the magic mantle of remoteness and strangeness and appear before you as mundane objects. The shadows in the backyards lose their illusionary grip on you; they let you go. They let you look back. So are the grown up people. As you grow up, they let you look at their faces, into their eyes, into their secrets and into their dreams.

Throughout my childhood, I was struggling to come out of this darkness. I was not confident to stand before the grown up people. Their gaze pinned me down. I fell into the dark depths of their hollow eyes. I struggled to escape from their clutches like a rabbit from the menacing grip of a butcher. Each time I learnt something about the world, I should say about the grown up people and their ways, I realized that a part of my dark world was getting lit up by some ethereal light. Once I understood that the best way to dispel the darkness around me was to learn more and more, I goaded myself into new systems of knowledge and then I did not think that some of them were bad and some of them were good and socially acceptable.

Many years later, as an adolescent boy, I got a chance to watch a movie titled, ‘Tin Drum’. Directed by Volker Schlondorff, this movie was an adaptation of a novel by the same name written by the well known novelist Gunter Grass. In the first scene of the movie, we see Oskar, the protagonist who remains to be a stunted child throughout his life, coming out of his mother’s womb. The camera moves from pitch darkness to the sharp light of a forty watt bulb hanging helplessly above the parted legs of his shrieking mother. And Oskar says that the forty watt bulb was the first vision that he ever had in his life. Oscar also enters into a world of darkness since his first confrontation with a light bulb and the darkness is the growing fascism in Germany.

I did not know the political nuances of the movie then, though I was fascinated by the dark scenes depicted in the movie. When Oskar’s father forces his mother to have fried eels taken out of the stomach of a drowned dog, a family friend intervenes and consoles the lonely woman and while pacifying her, he forces her into sexual relationship. Oskar is a witness to all these and he sees his mother visiting her boyfriend in the city. He realizes that he could scream and break the glasses of the buildings. He sees his mother committing suicide and his father seducing the maid servant. At the same time, he too seduces the grown up girl. She delivers a child, who the father thinks is his child and Oskar believes that it is his child.

These dark scenes of the movie made me to go back again and again to my childhood memories. There I witnessed scenes similar to those episodes from Tin Drum. I wanted to forget the movie but the more I tried to push it out of my consciousness, the more it came back to me with a sort of vengeance. Nobody would believe that the German experience in the novel as well as in the movie cannot be possible in a small village in Kerala. But wherever there is human life and wherever one man exercises power over the other people around him, similar incidents could happen. Power and cruelty are intricately connected and compassion and sex are intertwined with all their complexities.

I don’t want to portray a very pessimistic picture of my childhood. However, the dark realities burn you in a different way and bring you out as a very transparent human being. But you need to will it. Generally people say that children growing up in a very bleak context could become very pessimistic, anti-social and bad people. The negative feeding of their childhood could prove detrimental to their proper spiritual growth. I don’t subscribe to this idea. A child growing up in a very good situation could become anti-social when he grows up. A robber’s child need not necessarily become a robber. He could become a police officer. But our society is such that it expects the robber’s son to be a robber, a cobbler’s son to be a cobbler and a doctor’s son to be a doctor. Society, blinded by its age old beliefs, wants to be led by conventions. There couldn’t have been a Malcolm X had he not been baptized by the fires of black experience; there couldn’t have been a Martin Luther King Jr. had he not been tortured by the dark life of his fellow black people. There wouldn’t have been a Gandhiji or Nelson Mandela, had they not been gone through the darkest of experiences in their lives.

Nor do I want to insist that one should have black thoughts and dark experiences to become a good human being. Most of the world renowned writers have gone through the most hellish experiences in their life time. Orhan Pamuk portrays his childhood days in dark colors. Most of the twentieth century writers have gone through hellish experiences in their lives. I would cite M.T.Vasudevan Nair to Jean Genet to Paulo Coelho for proving my point. Even the writers and artists from the bygone centuries have talked about the dark experiences in their lives. Shakespeare was a stable boy. Christopher Marlow was a bawdy character. Charlie Chaplin was the son of a senile actress. Again I am not asking you people to nurture dark thoughts in your mind. Also I am not asking you to go through the hellish experiences to realize your heavens.

Unlike Oscar, I don’t remember anything about my birth. My mother had told me that that I was born in a hospital in Trivandrum. The first three years of my life were spent in Trivandrum. I had my first accident when I was three years old and interestingly I remember the incident very clearly. My mother was just stepping out of the backdoor of the house. I think she was going to the bathroom located behind the house. In those days even in Trivandrum city bathroom and toilet were not allowed within the houses. Those were built in the backyards. I desperately wanted to go with her as I was afraid of the darkness inside the house. I felt long dark hands coming out of the thick layers of that darkness. They tried to pull me in. I was screaming and my mother, totally unaware of the predicament that I was in just walked off leaving me behind.

I jumped out of the room and I could feel myself getting tossed up in the air like a doll. I came down in a fierce pace and down at the threshold there was a granite block, which had multiple uses. At times it was used as a stepping stone and at other times my mother used it as a plank to peel off the husk of coconuts. When my sister or myself fell ill, we were given hot water bath on this granite block. I was coming down and I could see the granite block approaching me in the same pace. Finally, I landed on my head. A piercing sensation went through my head and blood started oozing out from the deep gash on the left corner of my head. I was not feeling the pain but I was afraid of the hands that were coming behind me. They only caused my fall, I thought. And I wanted my mother to come back and relieve me from those hands.

I saw my mother running towards me and she was screaming like a wounded crane. I could hear her wailing and her shrieking brought the neighbors to our compound. I was taken to a nearby hospital. I remember the doctor as someone who came directly out of the advertisement of Colgate Toothpaste printed in black and white. I did not know that the man in the picture was a dentist and what I was seeing before me was a surgeon. He gave me a benevolent smile. I was holding my mother’s hands like a monkey and my eyes were looking around to see whether those long hands were still following me. I did not see any hands that long. But I did see some long pale fingers handling a lot of steel plates, wads of cotton, lotion bottles, antiseptic creams, a needle with a curve and a satin like thread. It was a nurse. She was not as benevolent as the doctor. She, along with my mother held me tight on the desk, which was covered with a white sheet.

I clearly remember an earthen pot with some nozzles puffing out steam. I remember the something piercing around my wound. The doctor was working on me and the wound was stitched and I was taken back to home and surprisingly when I reached there I did not find any long dark hands coming out from the darkness. Even today I wonder why my father was not around during all these commotions. Only thing I remember about him around this mishap was his anger on my mother’s carelessness. He came home to scold my mother and every one. And when he loved us he loved like a bear. He was beating it hot and cold. May be all the fathers behaved in that way when it came to the family matters. They were all democratic in public places and ruthless dictators in domestic spheres. But as a child I did not care whether he was democratic or dictatorial because my mother gave me all what I wanted; care, love, protection and security from those demons that came from the darkness.

Looking back, I realize that losing my mother to someone was a real fear for me at that time. I always thought my mother was going to go with someone, leaving me behind in darkness. She was a government official. Every morning she left us in a play school nearby and went to the office. And in the evening she picked up us from the school and went home. In her lunch box she brought us some sweets. During the weekends she went to Chalai, which is a huge open bazaar in Trivandrum and brought us a plant with a lot of green flowers in it. These green flowers could be filled with air from our mouth and when it is broken by force it made a cracking sound. We liked to play with it and the sour taste we got on our tongues when we chewed the edges of this flower to make it like an air valve still remain fresh in my memories.

The play school where I was sent to spend my days was also a dark space. I don’t think it was dark as in night. It was dark like as if it was always under a cloud. There used to be a lot of children. One of the major time pass for us was to keep chair one on the other and climb on the top chair. The nanny of the school helped us to heap the chairs and I thought that it was the tallest structure in the world. And climbing on it was a mammoth task as I was an obese child. I was fatter than everyone else. The teachers in the playschool (they must have been hardly twenty years old) liked me for my baby fat, mischief and the dimples. They touched me all the time and I liked their touch. I wanted them to touch me a lot. Once they finish caressing me, I anxiously waited for my mother to come.

As if in magic the darkness in the playschool used to turn into light (clear sun light) by noon. The light source was an open square in the ceiling. By noon sunlight came through like a miracle and we sat around this light and had our packed lunch and bottled milk. The teachers used to give us plastic tumblers to pour milk. When you pour milk in plastic tumbler and drink you get a strange smell of plastic. Your nostrils refuse to take this smell but it was a daily ritual: drinking plastic smelling milk. Each child took a lot of pride in having a plastic tumbler of his/her own. And also we were proud of our lunch boxes. I still remember the day a crow came directly on the open square at the ceiling and shat right into my lunch box. Nanny threw the food through the window. I saw my rice and potato fries landing in the waste. I cried and cried till my mother returned from office in the evening.

As I told you earlier, the fear of losing my mother was always there and I believe the image of darkness came from this fear of losing my own mother. Now you could explain it away in terms of Oedipus complex and so on employing a lot of Freudian theories. But that time like any other child I was not aware of Freud or Oedipus or his complexes. My world was around my mother and the very thought of losing her to someone or something frustrated me beyond imagination. I didn’t know why I thought so. I did not have any logic at that time. One cannot expect hardcore logic from a three year old.

It was then my father took a very important decision; a decision to relocate the whole family back to his mother’s property, a part of which by then he had inherited from his family. This decision was Quixotic, I still believe. When other parents were dying to migrate to the cities in order to give their children the best education possible (read English medium education which was available only in cities at that time), my father was taking us back to a village which was almost forty kilometers away from the Trivandrum city where I was born and brought up. Had I got the capacity to argue with my father at that time I would asked him to leave us alone in the city. He could have left for the village. But children were treated like mindless people. They were not allowed to express what they really felt. But if you think in a different way, children never thought differently from their parents. They would go to any hell if their parents are with them. I have read somewhere, when children are forced to face unbearable situations they overcome it by sleeping.

I was sleeping when we were taken to my paternal grandmother’s house. My paternal aunts and uncles were living in and around the same house. The house was always full of people; cousins, visiting relatives, neighbors, father’s friends and many children from the neighborhood. I liked the place instantly though I found a lesser version of darkness residing in all the rooms. I looked at the three photographs on the veranda of that old house and tried to emulate their postures. Later on I came to know that those were the pictures of John F Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru. Those pictures were there still on that wall when I turned a teenager and till that old house was demolished. I never understood the logic of having a Kennedy picture there though later I was told that it was my father’s decision to have those pictures at home.

My father became a presence and an important figure in my life when we came to live in the village house. My father was a government official and he was a public personality. He was one of the founding members of the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) in Kerala. Most of the time, he was out there with his friends, discussing political matters. His word was like the first and last word for most of the people in the village. He gave public speeches and his sisters (my aunts) went to the temple grounds to hear him delivering political speeches. My mother never had time for all those meetings. Once she was back from office, either she attended our things, watered the plants or read some books. She was not in tune with the life in her in-laws home though she was also born and brought up in the same village. We did not know that there was something called Mother-in-law – Daughter-in-law conflict. I had heard my mother speaking about hidden sugar bottles, unfed kids, deliberate harassment and so on. But I did not have any clue and the rising confusions were dipped in the din and joy of playing with other kids from around.

There should have been light instead of darkness as the life in the village home was rather going smooth. But no river can flow without hurdles. My grandmother filled in the ears of my father when he came back after his office works and public service and he took out his anger against my mother and his sisters. So when he was around, he was like a dictator. Nobody dared to go near to him, only we, the kids were allowed to approach him. We were like oracles. Mother spoke through us and father in turn spoke through the same medium. My father’s hostile and impatient behavior caused me a lot of pain. The darkness started coming back to my thoughts. And the initial enthusiasm of living in a new place gave way to my primordial fears. I was going to lose my mother, I thought.

Two things tortured me in my thoughts. One, I thought my mother would go away with someone. Two, once my mother was gone I would be left to the long dark hands of monsters. Hence, I started literally searching for darkness because I wanted to tell my mother that we need to put some light there. And I could not find any convincing darkness. They were laughing at me all the time because I refused to from one room to another alone. I refused to go to bathroom alone. I refused to walk alone with in the family land. I was afraid of walking from the gate to the verandah even in the day light. In the south east corner of the property, they told me, there was a grave where my grandfather was buried. There was a huge plant in that corner and it was full of red flowers all the time. I did not even want to look at that corner. Right in the middle of the property there was a small temple where my grandmother worshipped several gods. I thought all the darkness came out from that small temple. And I was running away from darkness and I thought my mother also would leave me to the darkness.

I followed my mother everywhere. One day she fell ill and was taken to a local hospital. I screamed all the way and at the dispensary the doctor asked me to stand outside with my relatives. I made a scene there. I thought my mother would never come out of that room and the doctor would take her away from me. On another occasion, in another hospital again I felt that same. The doctors were conspiring against me. They were planning to take my mother away from me. Or was my mother also a part of this conspiracy which I was not able to understand? Were they planning to fool my father?

You may find several answers to my confusion. You may interpret the incidents and the darkness with your theoretical and practical tools. May be, I can see things very clearly now. I can analyze why I hated darkness and why I saw only darkness in places and things during my childhood. I don’t remember any particular incident that made me think my mother being unfaithful to my father. On the contrary, as I grew up I saw my father keeping parallel relationships in his life, while my mother suffered silently.

Slowly, I adjusted myself with the new life. I tried my best to be normal like any other kids. Still I feared the darkness in the rooms, in the bathroom, in the toilet and in the land. It took many years for me to dispel this darkness through logical and emotional negotiations. I think I could do it because I tried to understand the objects around me. I started recognizing their physical, aesthetical and spiritual qualities. Then I started writing them down one by one, first in my memory, later as I grew enough to ‘write’, in notebooks. Today I can dispel any darkness by projecting a real or imaginary object into the field of darkness. I negotiate a dark zone through love and care. I can speak to the darkness at its face as in Seventh Seal.

The Language between You and Me- To My Children 1

Sometimes when I sit to write I feel this enormous fear raising its head in my mind. It lingers on there like the shadow of a tree, which is seen at the other end of my childhood memories; against the brick walls that run along the length of the land, this tree stands waving its foliage as if it were caught by the same kind of fear that as a child I felt while looking at it from the dimly lit verandah of my home.

I feel this fear especially when I think that you would know very little about me as your friend, father and companion; you would not be able to understand me as a person who also had a childhood, youth, dreams, fears, anxieties, frustrations, passions, trusts, betrayals and above all memories. You would not know about all those intimate things that had been haunting me, traveling with me all these years unless I write about them to you.

Generally the legacy of the parents is conveyed to children orally. Often children speak the same language that their parents speak. When there is no disparity of language between parents and children, legacies are passed on within the same ambience created by the linguistic unity. When parents speak different languages and the children speak one common language, which neither the language of the father nor of the mother, the children come to have a third language as their mother tongue. And this mother tongue is provided by the ‘location’ in which the children find themselves growing up.

This must be the case of many parents. Location makes a lot of difference even if the parents speak the same language. As they grow up, children pick up the dominant language of the location and mold their ways/life through that. Children of Indian parents (even if both of them are from the same linguistic group), born and brought up in the US pick up American English as their language. Even if their ‘mother tongue’ is notionally any Indian language, practically their mother tongue would be ‘American English’. This cannot be wished aside. Language remains to be a barrier as well as a machine that removes all barriers.

When people ask me, do I teach you Malayalam, I say, I don’t. They question me why I don’t do that. I tell them that I am married to a woman whose mother tongue is Marathi and her practical mother tongue is Hindi and her professional language is English. And my notional mother tongue is Malayalam and thanks to the location where I live, my practical language is Hindi (though I don’t speak it very well) and my professional language is English.

During my college days, when I met my future wife, had I opted to speak to her in Hindi only or had I insisted that she learned Malayalam to become my life partner and had we decided to speak in one common language, as our children you could have picked up one language, either Malayalam or Hindi, as your mother tongue. But remember, we were studying in Baroda where the official language was Gujarati. We were not forced to speak in Gujarati but we were supposed to know Gujarati, at least to do some basic bargaining with the local vendors. Perhaps, Gujaratis were/are not too parochial and they never insisted that we should speak in Gujarati to live in Gujarat. By now you must know, many people who go to Bengal to study or work pick up Bengali quite fast. I don’t say that Bengalis are very parochial and they don’t speak to you in any other language than Bengali.

Bengalis take a lot of pride in their language and Bengali is the dominant medium of education. Bengal has a very strong cultural history and to be part of it and to be one with the Bengali life, one definitely needs to learn Bengali language. At times I think that Bengali is one language in India that anyone could learn very deeply (so deeply that you understand the culture of the land so well) within one year or less than one year. I also believe that Bengali language has a special rhythm that helps the people to learn it fast. Besides, I think that Bengali is a very easy language. Whatever be the case, people who live in Bengal for more than two months, they start speaking Bengali language.

May be any language is like that. I have a few friends who dropped out from school. They went to different places including Mumbai and Gulf countries. Some even migrated to the United Kingdom. When I visited my village with my wife, your mother, they came around to meet me (I think, more than that they wanted to see her and come to a conclusion about my choice), once they came to know that she did not speak Malayalam and spoke Hindi, they all spoke to her in Hindi very easily, that too to my dismay because I was not able to speak in that fluent Hindi even after spending a few years in the North. The dislocation of those boys had helped them to learn different language. Had they been to Spain, I am sure they would have spoken Spanish too.

Then, why didn’t I speak or learn Hindi or Marathi or Gujarati? Or in that case, why didn’t your mother speak or learn Marathi or Malayalam or Hindi? Why we opted to speak only in English? Was that a part of our snobbery? Or were we trying to impress each other with English? Or did we consider speaking in a regional language made us lesser mortals? Obviously, I wouldn’t have spoken to her in Malayalam nor she in Marathi to me. In India, as you know, speaking in any South Indian language generates some sort of curiosity and scorn amongst the listeners. Any language that doesn’t have Sanskrit/Aryan roots/origin is not treated well in this country. Both South India and North East India face this linguistic status in the general discourse of our national life. Anyway, I will talk to you more about this some other time. What I want to tell you is this, even in my profession, a person having a clear regional language affinity is not treated as equal to the ones who speak only in ‘English’. Knowing ones own language is a big problem in this country.

Still, why I did not make you or force you to learn Malayalam, which is my mother tongue or Marathi, which is your mother’s mother tongue. The reason lies not in the false belief that knowing a regional language would make you less attractive in future or you will have lesser chances in the job market or professional market, where you will have to actually sell your talents. The reason lies in our own firm stance on giving complete freedom to each other. I did not insist her to learn Malayalam because we believed that erasing one’s own tongue and inscribing with another language is a sort of violence. I am not sure even after taking this very conscious decision whether we were less violent in our relationship or not. That is another matter. Also we believed that forcing another language was ideological and anything ideological would have negative implications in our life. So we decided to speak in English even in our future life. English is our professional language not a personal one, hence slowly we started using fifty per cent English and fifty per cent Hindi at home. You cannot get much personal with your professional language.

During those years of linguistic choice, discussion and resolution (all of which happened quite violently and organically. Anything organic has an embedded violence and anything violent has organic manifestations) we were not thinking about both of you. We were thinking of living a life of difference or a life with some difference or a life that is different altogether from that of others. Youthful days are like that; whatever you think looks fresh and radical at that stage. Your silly sentiments look colossal tragedies to yourself. Your petty happiness looks great comedies. You find life taking the shape of a carnival and you don’t understand a thing about the theoretical notions of carnival. Still you believe that you could change the world and bring change unto yourself.

Finally, you happened. First, you my son and after five years, you, my daughter. People were still asking why we did not teach them our mother tongues. If not both, at least one; none told us to teach the kids Marathi, which is your mother’s tongue. Everyone told us to teach you Malayalam. It is like that. Father’s language is the dominant language and you call it mother tongue. Isn’t it weird? If I insist that you both learn Malayalam, I would be moving away from my declaration of faith/trust on linguistic issues (though I have moved away from trust and faith in the marital sphere, quite a few times, which I would recount later, with necessary glossing over) within the marital sphere. Even if I had insisted that our children my language, it would have ended up in sheer violence and bloodbath. Language creates wars both in public and private realms. When a country is divided on religious lines language is not affected considerably. But when a family is divided linguistically, even religion could be affected drastically.

Hence, we stuck to our own policy of keeping you illiterate on our mother tongues. And we found a solid reason also for that. You grew up without grandparents. Your mother’s parents passed away when you were just infants. You, my daughter, have not even seen them. My father passed away when I was just fifteen years old. I grew up almost alone, rebellious, frustrated and sad. Happiness came to me when I went to college. I felt I was a grown up man. My mother too remained sad for a long time. She became happy when my sister was married off and settled. She again grew sad thinking about all what was negative in the world. When you think too many negative things, they start appearing in your life. So think positively.

My mother came when you, my son, were born. She stayed for a while and the climate in Delhi was not treating her well. I should say that she was not treating the weather with some amount of clemency. She was fighting with the weather. The moment you fight with it, it would start attacking you. You should always the weather to weather you; you become weather coated slowly. When my mother came to see you, it was too hot here. You were born in May and you know the North Indian heat could prove a great irritant for a South Indian woman, especially when she is very irritable. She left after a month and never came back to stay with us. She also started insisting that you guys speak Malayalam. You speaking in Malayalam could have been possible had my mother stayed with us and spoken to you in Malayalam. That too did not happen.

You may consider that you were deprived of having one more language or a couple of languages. The deprivation came from us, your parents. But don’t feel bad. We also thought that forcing you to learn a few languages would be too much for you and we did not want to put any additional burden on you. Today, you, my son, can speak Hindi and English and we consider Hindi as your first language and I am sure that in the coming days you will get more accustomed to English and that would be your first language soon. May be like any other parents, we too want you to speak in English, the global language, the language of future and the language with a future. It could take you to places. And you, my daughter, you have not yet even started calling me ‘papa’ and your mother, ‘mama’. But I know sooner than later you will be speaking in English than in Hindi because you have a model in your brother to emulate and by the time you start speaking, he will have gained the abilities to speak in fluent English.

So here we are; a father, mother and two kids, conjoined by love and separated by language. May be we are joined by the languages, Hindi and English and one day I am sure you are going to ask me what my language is and what is the language of your mother. It is quite natural. You, my son, have already started asking me about the nuances of Malayalam as I catch up with some Malayalam television channels. You have some information that your mom’s mother tongue is Marathi. May be your schooling is such that the teachers there ask you specific questions and you give specific answers and you learn those specific answers as the guiding principles of your life.

In literature and cinema, I have seen those kids who are deprived of their parents’ language undertaking journeys meant digging up their cultural and linguistic roots. From far and remote shores, they start searching their ancestors and their languages. There is too much of optimism in such imaginations though it happens in real life too. But how can I expect you to come back and look for my language. That’s where my fear lies. I am afraid that you would never know your father and his intimate feelings, the circumstances in which he grew up, the locations that changed him, the incidents that proved his mettle as a professional. I don’t want you people to be left in total darkness about my childhood. That’s why when I think about you and your future I feel this perennial fear of doing injustice to you. But I think more than the fear of injustice, I am led by the fear of being missed out, of being excluded from your life, your imaginations and your cultural make up. May be I am being too ambitious here by forcing my past on to you. However, I feel that it is important to speak those intimate things to you.

I am afraid of being misunderstood too. I write a lot of things in Malayalam. I am appreciated by my Malayali readers. I write a lot of things in English too. I am appreciated and lauded by English readers also. What I write in Malayalam cannot be received in the same fashion by my English readers even if I translate all of my writings into English. The same way, I cannot give the same effect of English writings to My Malayali readers as translations always miss out that something, which is called the ‘life essence of language’. I am saying this with some sort of right because I enjoy translating literature from English to Malayalam. And I know that many a literature that comes in English belong to other language, which are adequately translated in English for the global readers. These English translations are efficient ones and they give the impression that they could be better than the original ones. But as we are not reading the original and the translation side by side, we cannot make the final judgment. When I translate the already translated, I know how much I struggle to convey the original feelings.

One day, when you read these words and try to figure out what I am trying to tell you, you may wonder why I made an effort to write all these! I have an answer. Considering the present scenario of the linguistic choices that you have and have been given, I don’t think you would even have a chance to read me in Malayalam. So you would be reading me in English. And who knows you want to read my writings at all! You may become someone who does not have anything to do with art or literature. You may become someone who does not require read my works at all. Then there would this curiosity for knowing one’s father. That could be the only reason, which could attract you to my writings. You would never get a chance to know me closely even if you read all my art criticism in English. You would deduce that your father was an aggressive writer who never minced words. His art criticism was done in good faith but was taken differently by many. You will think that your father was a much maligned monster who did only art criticism and wrote a few pieces outside his disciple in his blog.

That would be terrible for me, not only as a writer but also as a father. I want you to know me a bit better, a bit closer and with a bit more kindness that I deserve not only as a father but also as a writer. So I make this attempt to reveal myself, my intimate fears, dreams, hopes, aspirations, sorrows, joys, passions and so on. I have expressed a few things about myself in some of my Malayalam writings (a few of which are still in manuscript form when I write this), which I am sure you will not be able to read. Hence, I want to tell you about myself. You may visualize me, in these writings, not as your father, but as someone who were aspiring to be your father one day, even without knowing about it. I am very happy to have you as my children. I believe by now that you have always been in my dream and hopes, and you took your avatar in order to alleviate me from my false fears. In Sanskrit, putra and putri means someone who alleviates the father from the hell called ‘pum’. You have finally arrived and I am here to tell you about my heavens and hells.

I go back to my home, where darkness lingered all the time. And the darkness was not negative. I understood this darkness as the play of lights coming from different sources. And I was afraid of darkness all the time. During those days I intensely wished that my world be filled with light and more light. And as you know, the day I wished for more light, my life changed; changed for sure. Soon I will recount those stories for you.

Reassurance: Celebrating the Lost/Loss

(Delhi based Madhu V's solo show 'Reassurance' opened at the Gallery Blue Spade, Bangalore on 26th November 2010)

(Allurement, soft pastel and charcoal on paper, by Madhu. All works illustrated here are in the same medium)

‘Progress’ and ‘Development’ are two foundational principles on which the modern civilizations have built themselves up. The spectacular nature of civilizations somehow camouflages the displacements and damages caused by these foundational principles. In the civilizing and civilizational process, whether the beneficiaries and agents of it want it or not, certain object systems are violently pushed out of use, certain linguistic structures are savagely collapsed and certain noble notions of life are unceremoniously swept under the carpet of vanity. Civilization and its production/productive agencies suck in human beings, mould them, alienate them and throw them into a different object world, ironically caused and resulted by the very alienating process itself, rendering almost all of them into the position of ‘ineffective angels’ who try to withstand the force of history caught into their wings like raging storms.

(Inn)

Madhu Venugopalan, an Indian contemporary artist, articulates this displaced and camouflaged world of progress and development through the evocation of an object/ive world that exists only in memories, sub-cultures and in the underground acts of cultural resistance. In his latest suite of works, Madhu speaks to the audience/viewer, using a different linguistic system, which sounds apparently archaic but alluring, remote and silent but intensely captivating. The objects depicted in these paintings tickle our memories with a sense of familiarity and at the same time they poke at our ignorance, which cannot exactly locate these representational images within a familiar linguistic system. The artist subtly forwards a challenge before the viewer; a challenge to identify the objects and more importantly, the contexts of their existence and alienation.

(Glow Bell)

The objects and their poetic juxtapositions with the very familiar urban imageries connote a system of living that is almost experienced and forgotten by the contemporary world. Seen against this backdrop, Madhu’s paintings trace back to the history of two important junctures of civilization; the agrarian and the industrial civilizations. As an artist, Madhu understands it for sure that these paintings or the evocation of the objects/tools from these civilizational points would not bring back those so called golden moments of history. However, he feels the necessity to highlight those junctures as they could provide the contemporary human beings with a backdrop in order to think about their unmindful and aggressive desire for progress and development.

(Docile I)

Without raising an accusatory tone or even without emphasizing on the ‘loss’, Madhu paints this object world with a sort of earnestness and compassion, which he completely believes would ‘reassure’ the role of human beings on this earth as ‘effective angels’ who could withstand the violent storms of history. He calls it ‘Reassurance’. Through the evocation of an abandoned linguistic system, Madhu reassures the possibility of alternative thinking and life styles, which are more conducive for the endurance of qualitative human lives and co-existence with the other beings. Madhu is not an advocate of agrarian economics or primitive industrial technology. On the contrary, he looks at objects/tools/images from those bygone days as an effective contrast to the spectacular lives that we have created today in the name of progress and development.

(Docile II)

The apparently innocent looking objects and tools help Madhu to establish two points which are pertinent to understand the contemporary politics and culture. The images that Madhu creates are the images of tools or machineries that were used in the primitive industrial societies where small scale industrial productions helped the workers to earn for their lives either by bartering their products or through engaging themselves into a self contained commercial market. These tools were a part and parcel of their lives and the workers were not alienated from what they used to produce. In the works titled ‘Docile I’, ‘Docile II’ and ‘Sanguine’ we see such industrial machines, simple, accommodative and less aggressive. Madhu, as a young boy had grown up in a situation where these machines were part of his surroundings. People made coir, clothes and organic fiber out of it. Today many people do not even know what these tools were used for.

(Sanguine)

By monumentalizing their images or giving an iconic status to these objects/tools/machines, Madhu attributes them with the status of a language or the constituting units of a language. And through this monumentalizing, Madhu subtly reminds the viewer of such linguistic systems that we have pushed out of our parlance as we progressed and developed throughout the years. Madhu does not speak just about the displaced languages but for him speaking about it is a ploy to narrate the lives of all those people who have been pushed out of the mainstream societies along with ‘their’ tools/objects. If one looks keenly at the aforementioned paintings one could see, how the artist has very skillfully placed these monumental images against the symbols of urban progress and development such as bridges, buildings that connote power and authority and the industrial landscapes. Through this contrast Madhu makes the difference between these two linguistic systems shrill enough to be heard and heeded.

(Reassurance)

History tells us how the erasure or neglecting of a linguistic system and the resultant displacement of people to the fringes is a mutual process. When the state that is expected to protect its citizens and their life styles, pushes the citizens to the fringes and the wastelands of the mainstream society, in the name of progress and development, the patterns of life that these people have developed over the periods of ‘civilization’ too get displaced and abandoned. There is a great amount of injustice in this act of the State. Madhu, in his work titled ‘Reassurance’ makes an ironic, witty but poignant statement on behalf of these displaced peopled. In the background we see the simulated image of the Supreme Court of India and in the upper foreground we see a garland of crackers horizontally hung as if it were about to be lit up to celebrate the ‘justice’ handed out to the people.

(Manure)

There cannot be a stronger ironic visual statement than this where the celebration is suggested as the achievement of ‘justice’ but the people who are supposed to be celebrating this victory are not seen in the vicinity. Instead, what we get is a deep feeling of silence; the silence of erasure/of erased people. The precarious hanging of the crackers apparently represents the un-anchored position of the displaced people not only in our country but the displaced and dispossessed ones from all over the world. Either the State is deaf or the people are silent and in both case the justice is delayed, denied and buried.

(Recluse Sonata III)

Madhu has been working on the images from his intimate memories, which are the memories of several people from the social fringes. People from the social fringes do not necessarily stand in for the people who are evacuated from their rightful lands or properties. It could be people who are self-exiles from their own mainstream abodes and live a life from the fringes with alternative philosophies. Madhu as an artist belong to both the categories. He is a displaced one as he moved from his home state in Kerala to Delhi. He is a self-exile as he discarded his mainstream comforts and chose to live an alternative life style. Madhu believes that people like him live in a permanent state of ‘hanging’, sort of unanchored life. They belong and do not at the same time. Most of the works by Madhu show this hanging nature as they are seen horizontally suspended.

(Recluse Sonata I)

Even within this scheme of images of unanchored life of the self exiles and the dispossessed, Madhu envisions a past where certain social securities held the simple lives of the people together. In the work titled ‘Inn’ Madhu draws a set of hanging mats, which were once used by the people to sleep. The arrangement of these mats shows how the family is structured; mother and father becomes the base for the children to find comfort and security. Today, they are hung above an urban street where the vehicles are stuck in a traffic jam. When a family unit is uprooted through the obsolescence of their indigenous systems, they cannot but lose their language, land and labor, and become permanently hanging migrants in urban backyards. The poignant and precarious life of displaced people is depicted in the work titled ‘Allurement’ where we see a set of rose flowers hanging above a road jammed by vehicles. The children of the migrant poor become the sellers of ‘allurement’ at the traffic junctions, sans language and dignity. This suspension of anchor is re-enacted in a series titled ‘Vernacular Suspended’ also.

(Recluse Sonata II)

The absence of language is a sub-conscious thrust point in Madhu’s creative life. He undergoes several days of ‘maun vrat’ (penance of silence) as if he were deliberately doing away with the languages he has learned in the process of ‘civilizing’ himself. In the three ‘Recluse’ Sonata’ paintings Madhu uses the surreal juxtaposition of disparate images in order to bring forth the ‘music’ of silence. The base stack of two coconut trees placed in a library, a series of loudspeakers hung from a bamboo pole and two traditional horns hanging against a nursery of coconut plants are the images in these paintings. Sound of silence is incorporated in all these works. This silence should be read out as the silence caused by the erasure of a tongue thanks to the forceful evacuations. And Madhu calls it (ironically and consciously) the ‘Recluse’ Sonata’; the songs of the retreated or the retreat itself?

(Catalogue essay written by JohnyML, reproduced here with the permission of the gallery and the artist)