image courtesy ‘Palm Leaf’
Unannounced, the train had come to a stop in the middle of the tracks even before it left the platform. From my window, I could still see my father’s forlorn looking figure waving me goodbye. He would have to now go back home alone. Only the white of his mundu was faintly visible; it gratefully received and reflected the moonlight that cascaded onto the station and the areas nearby—that yellowing shimmer granted his form the solemnity of an ancient monument. Ever since I was born, I have known him, his gentle ways, and every time I bid him farewell, it feels like I may never see him again. Perhaps, I reasoned with myself that I am growing old and sentimental and foolish. Or perhaps, I was beginning to see him—and behind him, in the distant horizon of my moral imagination, my mother’s presence—more closely. My boy-like awe for my parents had ceased to be and, instead, there now grew an awareness about mortality and the tenderness of fleeting hours.
Next to where my father stood on the platform, there sat a few passengers who, in that in-between worlds of sleep and wakefulness, valiantly fought to stay awake even as their bodies surrendered to sleep, and every so often nearly lost their hard-won balance and nearly tripped. Near this scene of unintentional comedy, a litter of mongrel-pups snuggled and yawned under the same bench these men sat. As I watched this trivial conflict between physiognomy and the exigencies of time unfold, unannounced, this concatenation of carriages began to lurch again, and without any notice, steadily slipped out of the Tirur station in Malapurram district in Kerala. Darkness swallowed my father’s moonlit presence and I deceived myself into thinking that I could still see his waving hand. Over the last few years, the shape of my parents’ life’s histories had begun to acquire a density in my mind, not in the manner a child’s heart collects the seashells of admirations or seaweeds of resentments, but in the manner of a young person who had themselves been battered and wounded by life’s bearable injustices, but injustices all the same, and therefore begun to see life and others anew. I began to find within myself the reserves to imagine my parents as individuals, as a couple, and eventually as parents. I became, in a way, an historian of their early lives—they who had started their married life together after great hesitations and a torrent of love letters to each other. In her youth, my mother wrote letters from her heart in prose that was both purple and passionate. My father wrote back with gravitas, declaring that she should forget him—he was barely employed and she deserved a stable life. But the fires in the hearts of young women are hard to douse with the waters of banal pragmatics. So, love must find a way; and if he was hesitant, she would make it happen. And eventually, when they did set out, they did so not knowing what reefs and shoals they must swim past. Life in India had begun to sever from traditional joint families which provided the carapace in the past. So, like many others of their generation, they had to reinvent the institution of marriage. They began their life's swim together, as a young couple, from one shallow end, where the waters were quiet and yet deep. The exuberance of their youth would guide them past dog days, of which there were plenty—days with failing health and anxieties about money, of days filled with self-doubt and the impossibilities of togetherness despite living in the same house. They recognized days could be just as dark as nights and darkness at noon was indeed a real thing. I showed up as the firefly in their life, now here, and now nowhere to be seen, casting a few lights. But, in the ultimate calculus, they had only each other. The more they swam through life, through their middle ages, the more they recognized that their roles was not to complete the other person to form a mythic wholesomeness; but, instead, for my mother to be the custodian of his solitudes and for my father to be a voice of calm in her enthusiasm for life. The more they swam together, they recognized that nights could be just bright as days. They learnt to be independent, to look out for each other as to where the waves were rough, where the sharks lived, where a spot of sunlight had warmed the waters more than the other. The older they got the more confident they were about the other's intuitions. They learnt that to be correct is less important than to be kind towards each other. To forgive is indeed the greatest virtue. Words of affection that the frenzies of their earlier love letters could not speak of, pour out in their silences in the evenings when he reads his newspapers and she recounts which cousin ran away with whom. They recognize now what they didn't know when young, that no two lives, however closely shared, can get past the inviolable uniqueness of an individual. A marriage that sought to fill the other's inadequacies was bound to cause despair. For men and women need their sense of partialness to feel themselves, to find meaning in their own strivings. Over time, they have learnt—as all good marriages inevitably must—that they are mere shepherds of each other, guarding and nurturing each other. If their marriage had a body under the sun, they have learnt to play flesh and shadow together, to alternate their roles, to let him be the stillness to her movement, to let her be the sunshine to his shadows, to never let the other vanish from the horizon of their mind's eye. In this freedom and independence, under the great Indic sky, they slowly discovered they are one, brought together, not by Providence, but by patience, forgiveness and love that resides in all human hearts, but one that manages to shine past the clouds of being in only a few.
* * *
The train pressed forward silently, as if ashamed of disturbing the night’s tranquility, like some chicken thief returning home empty handed to his sleeping wife. No trot or metallic screech followed. Perhaps a polite train driver had decided to refrain from blasting the horn that would have disturbed the light sleepers. Amid the daily reneging of public norms for private gains, Indians can also be surprisingly thoughtful about ignoring layers of government stipulations in the name of public good. If prolixity, as Amartya Sen says, is an Indian trait—then independent, even if inconstant and inchoate, thinking is the grounds out of which that trait and this precariously coherent Republic of India is perched upon. During the evenings, as I was on my way to the railway station, when a cold wind replaced the heat of an early summer, I watched sumptuous clumps of papayas, mangos and hibiscus sway freely from the car. Occasionally, from afar, they seemed to come together in a conference of voluptuous succulence. The Sanskrit, and Tamil, word for such a clustering is “kuntalam”—a pendulous coming together of all sizes. And it is this coming together, this possibility to witness formation of an oneness that otherwise would have been split asunder, under the watchful eyes of the climatological deux-et-machina that also makes train travel in India a private delight. One merely needs to look carefully in order to see a world beyond the visible.
* * *
In the dark, as the train rumbled on towards Thiruvananthapuram, the capital city of Kerala—I could see in that moonlight, which accompanied us, clusters of jackfruits that stood still—pregnant with their sickly sweet odor and, as the poet Anita Thampi writes in one of her verses, lumbering like the breasts of old matriarchs who bathe bare-chested in the temple pond. Elsewhere the reddened bouquets of hibiscuses and withering green of the bamboo—both now colored dark by the night— lived amicably together. And on the grounds, the clamor of life which was represented by creepers, insects and palmate shrubs was everywhere. A few feet above, the swooping pinnate leaves of coconut palm groves wafted alone in an imperium of solitude even as its leaves splayed outwards, extending itself like the fingers of lovers separated on either ends of the platform as the train begins to move, eager to touch each other, offering themselves, unselfishly, to the other and the world, as a canopy of shade for a weary traveller when the sun hits high noon. Their fronds and distended leaves, I had told myself as a child, were the eyelashes of the Gods. Gods who, perhaps unsurprisingly, resembled Kathakali dancers to my young mind. As a child, I wanted to be a coconut tree climber or, his more disreputable cousin, the toddy tapper. What a splendid view of the world it must be from the top! Yet, as I discovered years later, theirs was a lonely job. At best they could be voyeurs, perched amid the loneliness of their high offices.
* * *
At around one a.m., a groaning metallic cough rose as the train glided into some station. Thrissur, somebody whispered to nobody in particular, perhaps to assure themselves. Waves of mild irritation lashed within me, as I struggled to get some sleep—but I was unable to. The train’s muffled stirs were the only sign of life, for the rhythmic sway and shudder of the train over the tracks had now given way to a disturbing calm. I couldn’t tell where we were as the windows were clamped shut to keep the cold winds out, to control the banshee-like swirls that would otherwise come howling in. This was yet another night of Sisyphean struggle in the tropics to control Nature. An effort that was only intermittently successful as someone, somewhere down that compartment had kept his windows open. In the berth below me, a mother and her infant son were fast asleep and they had clung onto each other. As she gently snored, his thumbs were neatly tucked away under her chin and his legs cradled between her breasts. The gossamer film of her head scarf has come undone. Perhaps, she was a young Muslim wife traveling to Kottayam or Kollam or Thiruvananthapuram, heading to visit her sisters or extended family after a long time in Malabar or perhaps she was traveling to meet her husband who worked for the Government in the Secretariat. In her sleep, I could see that she had that distinctly oval and lean face with high foreheads and light skin that a few Muslim families in Malabar bequeath to their offspring. The remains of genetic blessings from centuries ago when the monsoon winds carried Arab trade and Islam to Kerala. But, before long, my eye wandered from the mother and child to the metallic coop that was this compartment. The plastic coated upholstery that covered the berths smelled of mildew. Humidity and sunlight had conspired to work against synthetic products in manners that were unexpected. The desire for durability in public goods which had led some railway infrastructure committee to decide upon such a choice of synthetic material were met by their indefatigable enemies in the shape of weather and climate. Humidity and heat begged to differ with the ambitions of the Indian State. The seams of the upholstery had slowly come undone. The ambitions of watchful men and women who kept the machinery of the Indian State moving along—constantly mindful of the metaphors and metaphysics that animate the Indian mind and the various nations that comprise it—were steadily foiled. There was no shame in this defeat. It had always been thus. Government committee proposes, Nature disposes.
Next to the upper berth, where I sat, like some gargoyle on the sides of Notre Dame, an innocuous red chain dangled unassumingly. That was to be pulled in case of emergency which would bring this behemoth locomotive to a stop. I am not sure if this one worked. Yet, the conceit of the idea was staggering. A small tug to this metallic knob could, arguably, stop this impressively gigantic locomotive. I wondered if anybody tested the functioning of these little contraptions. Does it really connect all the way to the driver’s engine? Who knows if the driver is listening to it? So, seemingly tenuous were these wiry passageways that connect these islets of passengers—each trusting, while asleep, that this train will eventually reach its promised end. While there is the inexorable lure to describe India as a million mutinies, as Naipaul did, to me, amidst all this metallic grime and morning breath, India seems like a concatenation of a million compromises. Each process, mechanism and tradition is carefully juxtaposed, aligned and calibrated against another, just enough to provide the perception, illusion and ultimately proffer a tenuous reality of a functioning system, all the while as life under that tropical moon trickled into an uncertain tomorrow.
* * *
From the skies, Kerala is a slender swale of land ensconced between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea: a cartographical sleight-of-hand that an overwrought imagination might mistake for an upper lip of a young woman. Yet, down here, in the dark of a speeding train, when the moonlight vanishes behind the clouds, Kerala is barely recognizable as the green vegetation rushes past us as dawn approaches. This could be any part of south-central India, from the lower reaches of Orissa to the wild brushes of Tamil Nadu; from the aboriginal regions of Dang in Gujarat to the other tribal belts of Todas in the Nilgiri hills. A few centuries ago, the same place through where these train-tracks run today were unmarked areas. Peripheral portions to larger tracts of geographies with names like Valluvanad and Ernad, which roll, hesitate, and stumble on the tip of our increasingly Anglicized tongues. These names contain within them accretion of aesthetics and times different than ours. And further back in time, nearly two millennia ago, right around the time when the second and third Sangam era—that festive concordance of Dravidian poetic sensibilities and prosaic symbolisms that began around 2nd century in the common era and had withered away by the 8th century—these lands belonged to an assortment of empires, kingdoms and vassaldoms who emerged from the Tamil country. And beyond that, well into the Paleolithic era, Kerala vanishes from all records. Lost in the annals of modern historiography and undiscoverable by forensic techniques that demand evidence. And that evidence argues against Kerala’s ability to have any self-sustaining Paleolithic community since Kerala had no meaningful levels of quartzite—a metamorphic rock used in tool making. And heading further down into the labyrinths of geology— this land on which these train’s whistle rings through on a dawn such as this—Kerala and much of India ceases to have an independent identity.
Around 54 million years ago—tectonics-experts tell us—a landmass drifted upwards from the southern seas, traversed through the waters and eventually crashed into another northern landmass. A violent union that gave birth to the Himalayas: that magnificent child born to an unstoppable wandering land mass and an immovable Northern plate, which now acts as a geological praetorian guard of the Indic civilization. And less violently, the remains of that fateful union eventually became India. Like those born of improbable unions—one of the two siblings, the stoic Himalayas, had taken the role of a protector of the other, the fragile Indian land. Saving the latter from Arctic chills, gales from China, denying monsoon clouds any room to meander out of India and, in more recent times, keeping at abeyance many casual invaders, including the great Genghis Khan. Over the past 54 million years, edges of this triangular landmass that now is called India has frittered away into the waters they emerged from. And as if redressing some geological karma the oceans had given way to naturally reclaimed land elsewhere and on which sit India’s megalopolises and hamlets.
This geological duality—of the rise and fall of land—breathed life into nationalist imagination of the 1800s. Experts and cranks found in tectonic shifts that the exigencies of their colonial present denied them: an ability to dream up their own independent histories. For some, the Lemuria hypothesis’ claim that there existed, a priori, a landmass that connected Madagascar, Southern India and Australia was spectacularly useful. This hypothesis, for the Tamil ultra-nationalists like Devaneya Pavanaar, allowed for visions of Kumari Kandam—the purported massive land on which rose the Tamil empires. On this, by now submerged landmass, supposedly grew cities, sugarcane fields and the elegance of the Tamil language. Somewhere in the middle of what is today the Indian Ocean, this imagination insisted, an empire of horses and dancers, ziggurat like temple scaffolds and sacrificial hymns to improbably many-faced, omniscient Gods who spoke Tamil thrived.
And when faced with the reality of India in the 1900s—materially impoverished and under the jackboot of the British Empire—such mythical pasts offered a way to make, at least psychologically useful, claims of a hallowed past. A distinctive kind of greatness that remains unsullied by the details and inconsistencies that history and geology imposes or the internal consistencies that historiography demands. Remarkably still, borrowing a chapter out of such long forgotten reveries of nostalgia, the much feared Liberation of Tamil Tigers Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, every so often, floated claims of an expansionist Eelam, a homeland, that included southern India, parts of Malaysia, and Sri Lanka. Whether this made tactical sense or not is now irrelevant. But in some way, this claim of a greater Tamil land—part lebensraum, part myth-making—appealed to the Indian mind of the twentieth-century, who lived, and continues to live, in a highly constricted public space with a cacophony of identities to reconcile with. Since the days of its original myths, Kerala too has been negotiating its right to exist amid socio-political legends alongside with the elements which are as capricious as the Gods themselves. Rain and inlets, floods and rivers—all threaten to drown this tender patch of land from the outside.
* * *
By around three a.m. the train had whistled past Ernakulam and was well headed into the southern stretch of Kerala. The much fabled land of backwaters, canals and tourism were all well upon us. Or so, I imagined as every once in a while the winds carried with them a whiff of salt-and-brine from the oceans. But slouched in the upper reaches of this berth—surrounded by the embryonic throbbing of the train—one could do nothing more but get fidgety within that pharaonic resting space. Or, head out and stand near the ledges of the compartment door and watch Kerala and India pass by. It was an unusually pleasant morning and sleep would have been delicious—but I had struggled.
I got down from the berth and walked past others squirreled away in their own sleep. Indians and a smattering of white-foreigners, all continued to catch that delectable early morning sleep before the frenzy of day, like bandits on a highway, descended upon them and robbed them of this otherworldly peace. Many had their luggage fastened to their seat, others had their suitcases acting as a pillow, and women had their sarees carefully pinned to their blouses. And underneath their berths, a mound of slippers and shoes—from the basic rubber flip-flops that most Indians wear to an occasional sneaker that rappers in Los Angeles flaunt—had gathered thanks to the trains’ rollicking motions. Nearly two or three generations ago, most Indians rarely wore footwear. Today, there are footwear makers who are dollar-millionaires; magazines tell us of tanning castes in Uttar Pradesh who have gone to establish gated communities for their residences; and Bollywood actresses espouse virtues of applying anti-dryness creams to one’s heel. When I was in primary school, slipper thieves in trains were endemic and much feared. They now seem to be a dying breed. India has moved on, or so it seems to me. Cheap shoes and slippers from manufacturing units run by local and Chinese producers had virtually changed the podiatric habits of a nation. So surreptitious are changes in a nation’s habits that few notice that we are no longer who we were.
The train speeds and slows and the cold wind every so often acquires a soot filled flavor whose origins I cannot identify. Standing by the ledge of the compartment, and straining myself to see in the early morning dark, I watched small houses at the edges of railway tracks slip by. What must their lives be like—to have lived near the coming and goings of these metallic leviathans. Their ideas about time must be intricately linked to the schedules of passing trains. In the distance, there were ramshackled structures with roofs made of polythene covers and tarpaulin, which were held together by bricks and rope. Inside them, faintly lit petromax lanterns flickered and dotted the otherwise pervasive darkness. The acrid burning smell of their firewood to keep them warm at night wandered in the direction of the train. In there, amid this terrifying poverty, there were men and women who made love, fought, made up, raised children, and nurtured some hope about their future. Their inner worlds were ciphers to me and even my efforts to discover empathy for them were often forced. In my childhood, such transient housings were simply ignored as belonging to the migrant workers who wandered in and out from Tamil Nadu during the agricultural or construction season. But, these days, workers from the northern and eastern most reaches of India trickle southwards to earn their living. Among sellers of bangles, collyrium and lipsticks at village fairs, workers in plantations and at construction sites, one can hear Oriya, Bengali, Bhojpuri and Telugu in the Palakkad and Ernakulam countryside. In restaurants across Kozhikode and Kochi, one can meet young women from Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya, who speak English, wear trousers, and project an exterior form of modernity and independence that many Malayali women, and their families, in Kerala’s small towns and village still find unsettling. In many ways however, these labor movements bodes well for India—ideas and people, cultures and thoughts percolate and push against local prejudices without a top-heavy interventionist move by the State. Converse to the trend that had been in vogue for decades—when Southerners went over to work in North India—the present trend of a North Indian heading South is a new phenomenon in many ways. Not since, perhaps, the days of Harshavardhana and Pulekesin II, has there been such cultural and economic flow to the South. And that India stands—as a political unit—despite such churning is a testament to the suppleness of the mind that a democratic process can engender in its citizens. Despite the rise of ‘guest workers’ in Kerala—nativist murmurs and xenophobic arguments are yet to emerge in Kerala in full force. A quietly unconcerned acceptance of non-Malayali workers in Kerala is on the rise. Housewives who spoke only Malayalam till now, have begun to learn a smattering of Hindi—acha hain, nahi nahi, and kitna?— to converse with these itinerant workers. A late-feudal agrarian economy has enabled the coming-togetherness of its citizens in the most unexpected of ways—far removed from the glare of political one-upmanship and the conspicuous stare of academic shibboleths. This quiet transformation of the relationships between India’s citizenry is not just a facet of Kerala—but increasingly all across India. And still these changes are born not because of some enlightened perspective, but often from the bone-deep penury of great many, as old ways of being—as sharecroppers, as pastoralists and as fishermen—have come under increased threat.
* * *
Like armies on the move at night, I watched the lights from these provisional houses of these non-native workers flicker and faint in the dark. Even in that indigo colored dawn, one could make out faint movements of their silhouette. Lanterns swayed, as men and women, with a pail of water and an hurried pace, sought to find a place to defecate with self-respect before sunlight rendered them naked. This aesthetic of everyday life that demeans individuals is a tawdry outcome of the frenzied path of economic growth that modern India has embarked upon. Like chimney sweeps in 18th century England, who were often children of men and women afloat as social detritus, thanks to legislative provisions like the Enclosures Act, urban India is awash with labor that wanders from one construction site to another. Their material provisions are few, their health often shockingly poor, and their social networks to the agrarian lives they have left behind are remarkably tenuous. Floating between one city and another, one farm to another, they belong to nowhere. They appear and vanish like detritus of our economic desires. They form no political constituency and predictably they remain outside the periphery of India’s political caste-system. In a bit of historical irony—these men and women who could belong to any caste and religion these days, given the economic upheaval, are the true ‘dasyus’—those who do not belong to the four-fold political caste-system of India. Neither the Left, nor the Centrist, nor the Rightist or the Nativist regional parties speak for them. For they all know, before long, they will vanish or another cohort will take over. Their companions amid this great upheaval of life are cell phones and inexpensive phone plans which allows them some form of belonging to their far away homes in Bengal or Bihar. Their labors and presence will be unrecorded in Kerala and will be barely remembered. All this perhaps no different than the innumerable Malayalis who have labored to build the palaces and boulevards of the Gulf Emirates and petro-Arab kingdoms.
Every so often, political graffiti positions itself, incongruously and inchoately, amid the vegetation on a wall. These ill-drawn political iconographies seem like natural consequences of such social tumult. Slowly, unbeknownst to myself, my thought drifts to the smell of early morning coffee that arrives as the train enters into Kollam station, the penultimate stop. The faint hum of the phrase—‘uthithistho uthithishta...” (‘arise, and awake….’)—from the Shri Venkateswara Suprabhatam from a radio meanders in the air. Somewhere deep down within me—despite this rickety back-and-forth movement of the train there is a moment of stillness. A feeling of belonging, a sense of union and oneness with the cultural environs from which my being has emerged.
Millenia ago, in a similar Dravidian night of quiet the poet, Paatumanaar, wrote in what was to become the ‘Kuruntokai’:
“The still drone of the time past midnight.
All words put out;
Men are sunk into the sweetness of sleep.
Even the far-flung world
has put aside its rages for sleep.
Only I am awake.”
In a few hours, this subcontinent of humanity will slowly arouse itself from their private dreams into a public life. Along the way, the memories of this early summer night will have vanished. But till then, as I await Thiruvananthapuram, which is another hour away, it is just me and this vast blue quiet under the Indian skies. []
This was originally published in ‘The Palm Leaf’, March 2022.