He could see his Bible, childhood’s text – yellow, paper crackling, backbone frayed, faded leaves and flowers of a long gone summer still keeping place.
‘Annama, the disease will wipe me out, the bomb will wipe out the earth. Where is Jesus in all this? I’ve got a translation of Orwell’s 1984. Here, take it.’
‘Jesus will be there. I believe. The sheep will be separated from the goats.’
‘You be the sheep and I the goat?’
‘No, Ivan, you are a good man. You will not be sent away.’
‘Don’t forget, I want the cheapest coffin, and no lining. Mango wood will do, and no cross.’
‘Ivan, you will go as befits the status of Kochumathu’s son.’
There was no arguing with her. He would get up from the table. The pain beginning to sear him again had become a blinding preoccupation, an obsession, a desire for calm that would never be satisfied. In some strange way all that remained of his days in this old house in the ancestors’ village, were the memories of childhood overlapping with the pain that engulfed everything.
When the end came it was early in the morning. He saw the sun rise, and felt the air cool on his body. The trees were dark and soft with rain. The earth would be wet. He had a sudden longing to walk barefoot to the canal, and to look into the water for one last time. He heard Annama moving around – shuddering into wakefulness. He saw the purple orchids, the large white spider lilies, heard the fluttering of pigeons. And that was all.
When Chako came to live in a small village in the hills of North Malabar, the people took to him at once. He was a tall man, thin, a little stooped, and his beard was so long it touched his chest. That was unusual in that area, where men were clean shaven. He found a place to stay in a household which consisted of a man called George, and his little daughter Anna. Chedathi, an old woman living in the outskirts of the village, could come to cook for them and wash clothes. The house was never dusted; it was always dark, littered with clothes, Anna’s books and papers, many stray cats and George Saar’s leather-covered account books. Strangely enough, there were no flies.
George Saar had never known Chako before, but while climbing down the slope from the church, where he spent every evening doing the accounts, he heard a slither behind him. Chako in his clean white mundu, hitched above his knees, umbrella under his arm, had slipped over some red gravel.
‘What is it, missed your step?’
‘I come from the paddy lands. Not used to this.’
‘Who do you want to meet?’
‘I’m a doctor, a green herbs man.’
‘You won’t get any custom here. Everyone makes their own medicines.’
‘No, no, I have come to collect them.’
‘Don’t you leave that to your assistants?’
‘I’m writing a book. Everyone in the West wants our knowledge, we must share our ancient texts. I’ve come to draw pictures of the plants, and then if I find a nice place to stay, I’ll do the writing here as well.’
George Saar took him to his house, and then almost at once asked Chako if he would like to live with them. Chako looked at the man. He had a strangely effeminate face, eyes very large and melancholic and a blue haze on his morning-razored face. It was a face that seemed to float in water, drowning in some unformed and congealing grief.
Chako said he would pay him two hundred rupees a month, which George Saar refused. He said, ‘It’s enough that you are a man of knowledge. And widely travelled. Not many people in our village can speak English, and we need some correspondence handled in a court case against a chemical company. A proper doctor is always useful. Which church do you belong to?’
‘Anglican.’
‘No harm in that, you can come to worship with us. We are Mar Thoma. The subscription is thirty rupees a year, and I’ll take that from you now.’
While George Saar took out the little yellow receipt, Chako looked around the house. He would have preferred to stay in a larger house, perhaps by himself. But then, for a start this would do. He put his small blue canvas bag on the bed, and was removing his broad-strapped Bata shoes when a cat suddenly jumped on his shoulder. It had been sitting unnoticed on the mosquito-net bar over the bed, and while it startled him, he was not averse to cats and put it gently down.
There was a small window at the side of the bed. The wall was made of thick brown teak wood, and from the window he could see acres of green banana trees. The leaves were thick, green, mottled with yellow in places, and the maroon cone flowers with their ivory nectar thick stalks pushed out from every one. It would be a good crop. A child’s head appeared at the window – an untidy child, but a pretty one. He noticed she was wearing red beads around her neck, and that her hair was cut very short. The long skirt did not match the blouse, for both were made from different cloths, different textures by perhaps different tailors.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Anna. Why are you sitting on my bed?’
‘I thought it was mine.’
‘Achennae! Achennae!’
The child ran screaming for her father.
He met her again at dinner time. George Saar, it seemed for all his penury, had one weakness, which was for candles. He had lit six, where two would have done. They made a bright warm glow, penumbras merging into each other. The child ate well, though a cat sat on her lap and made small quick movements with its paws every time she picked the fish on her plate. Sometimes she would look at Chako, and there was a strange darting awareness when she did that. He was surprised, because he was forty years old, and though he knew he was attractive to women, he had not expected a child to express these shadows of desire.
At night, as he slept near the window on the other side of the house, which overlooked a small rounded hill beyond which there was a narrow stream, he saw in a dream Anna and George. They had encircled him with bamboos, which were bare of leaves. They would not let him leave. He turned then before his eyes, into a magnificent golden snake – large, convoluted, flecked, yellow and tame. He woke to a sense of shame, the room in which he lay dark and heavy, the night sealing him in.
Anna brought him his coffee in the morning. They had a cow, it seemed, for the milk was thick and smelt of grass, insects, and he could almost see the softly ruminating cow. The fireflies, which at night had encrusted the wall and the windows, were now pale green worms. Looking at Anna he remembered the dream. With a child’s licence she got into his bed and put her arms around him, nuzzling his beard. He was frightened, repelled, and he pushed her.
‘I must start the day. Haven’t you got school?’
‘No, it’s the holidays. Can’t I come with you?’
‘Where?’
‘Father said you were going to look for herbs. I’ll show you where they grow.’
‘All right. I’ll be ready in an hour.’
When she had gone, he took a switch of palm leaves and swept out his room. He straightened the worn grey sheet on the bed, and hung his coloured sarong which he had slept in on a plastic rope above the bed. He washed on the verandah outside his room, where bronze vessels were kept filled with water. There were ants and small leaves floating in them, but it felt chill and clean.
‘Mother committed suicide you know. She hanged herself in the back room where you are sleeping.’
Annama was holding his hand as they walked through the dark glades of rubber. Blue birds flew toward the water. There was something strange about the light, a little ominous, an alienness