Life Among the Scorpions Read online

  Ammu Amma had earlier watched every performance and personally encouraged every dancer, but now she was stuck in bed. Undaunted, however, she decided that my cousin Vimala and I should be taught an item from Kuchelavritham and present a Kathakali performance for the Kollengode public. This most amazing ability to take a pioneering decision such as this by a speechless and paralysed seventy-year-old matriarch established the love for Kathakali and a ‘women-can-do-anything’ attitude indelibly in my life.

  Vimala was to play the man’s role of Lord Krishna while I would be his consort, Radha. No one complained about going against traditions; even Ashaan the master guru, didn’t refuse to train young women. Our male cousin, Baby Ettan, who had been compelled by his grandmother Ammu Amma to learn Kathakali from the age of ten, was made to take us through our paces after Ashaan left at lunchtime. For two months we had lessons in the mornings, practised in the afternoons and lay in bed at night enacting our mudras in the dark and in our sleep. Our minds rang with the rhythmic beats and we endlessly repeated the accompanying shlokas and practised our steps in the bathhouse too, driving everyone else crazy. ‘Kathakali Madness’, the aunts reported to Ammu Amma, had consumed the two of us completely.

  A dress rehearsal had to be held in Ammu Amma’s room, by her bedside. Her eyes shone, she nodded her head and gurgled non-stop as she tapped her misshapen fingers to the drumbeats on the side table. She rewarded us with a set of fresh new mundu-veshtis, red silk blouse pieces flecked with flowers woven in gold thread, and a gold coin each. After the performance, as we went to remove our costumes and make-up, Vimala discovered that her monthly period had started. She was utterly mortified. In those days, women in such a state were considered impure and had to live in seclusion for five days till they had had a proper kuli. During meals, their banana leaves would be placed a little apart from the others’, and a maid delegated to be in attendance separately would remove them, after which they would have to bathe. All hell could have broken loose that day as the entire paraphernalia of costumes had to be sent to the washerman and reconsecrated to remove the ‘pollution’, since the costumes transformed dancers into the manifestation of the gods and were thus sacred. Ammu Amma didn’t bat an eyelid. She let it be known that the public performance would take place after the five days of mandatory separation of Vimala from the rest of us, and nothing more was to be said about it. And that is how it happened.

  The townsfolk came to the open courtyard inside the palace to watch our presentation. Owing to Ashaan’s impeccable and stern training, we managed a perfect performance. We returned the loud applause of the audience with namaskaram (palms folded in a formal ceremonial acknowledgement). We were filled with a sense of achievement and elation perhaps never felt before or since. There was no press or publicity, no printed invitations, no critic to write about how a bit of a history was made that day by a disabled old woman and two young girls because we were women and had performed Kathakali. Nevertheless, it certainly happened.

  ~

  My mother’s eldest sister, Kamalam, whom I called just Valiamma, was a tall, beautiful woman with large, mournful eyes and a slim figure that got more matchstick-like as she grew older. She deliberately flushed her dentures down the toilet at the age of eighty-five and died at ninety-one. She was a living symbol of the distortions that could creep into the system of matriliny. Valiamma was married to T.C.K. Kurup, a fair-skinned—always a special attribute—articulate, Oxford-returned, handsome barrister. She got married at the age of fifteen, and became a mother at sixteen when she preferred to play badminton and go for bicycle rides with her brothers. Her husband, Valiachan (as we addressed him), was a bully par excellence who had managed to crush his wife’s spirit by the time she was twenty. It was because of her misery that my grandfather built the house in Trichur, so that his daughters always had a home in which the husbands could stay only if the wives wished. Matrilineal laws did not entitle his children to anything except affection at Vengunad Palace. One fine day, Valiachan decided to give up his practice and stay home to become a sadhu. He shed his barrister’s robes and transformed himself into a bare-chested holy man, wearing only saffron-coloured mundus (or dhotis) with matching saffron-hued G-strings and wooden khadauns which clattered loudly as he strode the floors in them, silently counting his rudraksha beads. It was quiet only when he was in his prayer room. For the rest of the time he roared at the maids or at Valiamma for some fault or the other, sending them scuttling in different directions. He insisted on bathing in water heated in a large copper vessel by the rays of the sun. The poor maids had to draw water from the well, carry the buckets a few hundred feet to where the copper vessel was strategically placed to catch the morning rays of the sun and then haul the heavy vessel to the bathroom every day. He would fling the banana leaf across the floor whenever he felt the food served was not warm enough, and hang his G-strings all over his room to use when he wished. The maids crinkled their noses and muttered in disgust at the sight of them. My outspoken mother had asked him why on earth he could not keep his wretched ‘prayer flags’ out of sight. He tolerated her taking liberties with him as he considered her the baby of the family. She took advantage of this till she was over seventy by ribbing him at every opportunity. When he finally died at a ripe old age, much to everyone’s relief, we thought Valiamma deserved a medal for having fed this holy husband of hers and given him shelter for well over sixty years without a word of complaint. Some matriliny, you might say.

  During all those years, Valiamma withdrew further and further retiring into herself and avoided contact with most of the world, and especially her husband, by disappearing into her prayer room from breakfast until lunch, and then from teatime until dinner. Only once, when sixty years old, did I see a glimmer of something different. I was cycling around the long gravel driveway at the centre of which is placed a mounted bust of my grandfather. She was taking a stroll to stretch her legs before going back to the prayer room. I asked her whether she had ever learned to cycle. ‘Get off, let me show you,’ she laughed. Before I knew it, she had hopped on to my cycle, smiling, and was pedalling furiously around the driveway, barefoot, dressed in a white mundu, with her torthu mundu instead of a proper veshti draped casually across her chest, her three-diamond nose-pin catching the light, and her big, horn-rimmed spectacles sliding down her nose. As she got off and wheeled the cycle back to me, pleased that I was gaping at her with astonishment, she unconsciously broke off a flower from the jasmine bush and tucked it into her always carelessly bunched-up hair knot.

  Valiachan slept in a large bedroom on a decent sized four-poster bed, while Valiamma chose to sleep on a hard wooden divan placed in the open verandah just outside her prayer room. It was a bright, open spot. This was where I loved to sit, and read or write letters when we went to Trichur for part of the summer holidays. During the monsoon, I would watch the rain pouring down noisily, making deep rivulets on the red gravel below.

  ~

  All matrilineal families were not feudal, but all Nairs had a mode of living and a graciousness of manner which they practised even if they were not economically well-off. Neither were all men happy to sit around entertaining themselves in their wives’ homes. My father, who was distantly related to my mother’s stepmother, when he came courting at Kollengode, made it quite clear that he had no intention of living there as a man who was not expected to do very much amongst a gathering of women. It was another matter that he had come to view Gouri Valiamma, but had changed his mind when he saw my mother, her younger sister, and decided to marry her instead. According to my mother, this was much to my aunt’s everlasting pique. She would attribute her sister’s stiff, unemotional manner, her occasional lack of generosity and many other little flaws, to jealousy. Even in her eighties, my mother enjoyed believing that it was the early rejection of Gouri Valiamma by my father that had made her a bit sour, even though she was found an excellent partner in the shape of a talented lawyer, P. Neelakanta Menon. The latter went on to become
a respected chief justice of the Kerala High Court. He was also the maternal uncle of a young boy called Balan, who became the famed Swami Chinmayananda, and set up many schools, colleges and hospitals; he travelled all over the world giving his famed discourses on the Gita to thousands of disciples.

  ~

  My father’s side of the family, despite being highly placed and connected to one of the best known names in Kerala like Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair, was elevated intellectually. This, despite the fact that many of its members did not have enough money for bus fares. It did not really matter to anyone, since in those days merit and background counted for more than the social, psychological and material influence of money. Everyone, rich or poor, servant or master, of high or low caste, ate off banana leaves, sat or slept on the floor with equal ease, walked barefoot inside the house, and wore the same cotton mundus and veshtis—creamy, with narrow coloured or gold borders when new, and bleached white after laundering. In fact, it is perhaps the only part of the country where men and women both traditionally wear plain white cotton clothes at all occasions, draped waist downwards in the same manner, irrespective of status or age. The equalizing factor offered by these aspects of Kerala’s culture is far more important than anyone has cared to note.

  Sir C. Sankaran Nair was a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council and my father’s grand-uncle. He was elected Congress President in the 1897 Amravati session of the party. He was the only Malayali to ever hold the post. The government even brought out a four-rupee postage stamp on him some years later. He was an iconoclast of sorts who had his own ideas of how the freedom struggle should be carried out. He challenged Gandhi’s views and strategies, but was no less a fierce nationalist even while working with the British. His sister’s daughter was my grandmother, Parukutty Amma. They hailed from a tiny village called Mankara near Ottapalam in south Malabar. I only ever caught a glimpse of the small family house where my father was born, tucked behind heavy fronds of coconut trees, as the train from Madras, now Chennai, stopped for a few minutes on its way to Trichur. My paternal grandfather was a clerk in the Madras Secretariat and cycled seven miles to work every day from their small home in San Thome to Fort St George. Since they had no car, ‘Sir C’ would send his coach to pick up his relatives for Onam lunch at his home.

  My paternal grandmother was an outstanding woman who was president of the Women’s Association of Madras and a close associate of Annie Besant, the English woman who fought for India’s freedom and rose to be President of the Congress party. She was the sheet anchor of the family and saw to it that her four sons, Govind Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Shankara Krishna and Rama Krishna—all famously known by their initials throughout their lives—received the best education possible. She was also proud to see each have a car, for which the porch of their small house proved too small.

  In Tokyo, in 1951, as India’s first Ambassador to Japan, when my father first bought a Cadillac, we went for a drive to get a feel of the car. He told me then, how he had walked to school as his father could not afford the bus fare. The wit with which he recounted the stories of his early days, and the dignity, refined taste and understated elegance with which he lived his life, never allowed his experiences of financial inadequacies to affect me negatively. That day, the joke (in the context of which my father told me about him walking to school) was about a young boy who boasted that he had saved his bus fare by running after the public bus to school, to which his father retorted, ‘Foolish boy, you would have saved some more had you run after a taxi.’

  Apart from creating a sensation while coming out on to the fields to play hockey and tennis at college, the young Chettur brothers—all above six feet tall, well-built, with thick mops of hair—were extraordinarily brilliant. My grandmother persuaded ‘Sir C’ to send GK to Oxford University where he published prose and poetry and was a friend and contemporary of W.B. Yeats and S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike of Ceylon; he was also a member of the Lotus Club in 1922 when Rabindranath Tagore visited it. He passed with a First but upon his return to India was so influenced by Sarojini Naidu, that he refused to sit for the Indian Civil Services (ICS) examination and went into academics instead. As Principal of the Government College in Mangalore he wrote College Compositions, a seminal text book that, I believe, is still in use to teach English to Indian students. He died at the age of thirty-eight of stomach cancer before I was born.

  My father did not go to Oxford for lack of finances, but saw to it that his younger brother, SK, did. He returned from Oxford and entered the ICS. In 1942, as Collector in Trichinopoly (now Thiruchirapalli), he had to deal with a thousand students who had gathered outside St Joseph’s College. They demanded the right to protest in solidarity with Gandhiji who had gone on yet another fast against the British. The situation turned ugly as the British Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) refused to allow the students to carry out a procession. The Principal telephoned S.K. Chettur. As the collector and the civilian authority, he was ultimately responsible. My uncle arrived and spoke to the president of the college student’s union, Ratnaker Rai, who later became Inspector General of Police in Karnataka. Some students lifted him on to a wall to announce to the restive crowd his decision to allow the procession. The English DSP tried to argue with him and wanted to act tough with the students.

  ‘Mr Martin, you have got your orders. Now carry them out,’ shouted SK from atop the wall. The protest passed off peacefully as the students had promised my uncle. He went on to become the Chief Secretary of Tamil Nadu and the author of the famous Steel Frame and I (1963), a must-read about the civil service. He consistently refused to ask for a posting to the central government in Delhi which he thought was a hot bed of bureaucratic intrigue, dishonesty and file-pushing to no useful end. He also wrote many short stories which were published and read widely. Some were slightly bawdy, which made my mother frown and grumble at her brother-in-law. He laughed uproariously, as was characteristic of all the Chettur brothers. He knew that with her Kollengode background, she wouldn’t mind a bawdy comment or two, but only in the company of her own choosing, and only, if she was the author.

  RK, the youngest brother, became a doctor and joined the army. He was the introvert among the brothers, and his frequent postings to remote places possibly caused a lack of communication with the rest of the brothers and their families.

  After my mother died at the age of eighty-seven on 23 January 2000, I came across some newspaper clippings tucked inside one of her household account books. They had become pinkish-yellow with age; I had never seen them before. They were roughly torn-off sections from The Spectator, Malayalam Manorama, Swarajya and the Madras Mail of 13 February 1930. The last had a headline spreading right across five of its six columns: ‘The Marriage of a Rajah’s Daughter—A Brilliant Reception’. The caption said, ‘AN INDIAN SOCIETY WEDDING—A brilliant gathering was held at “Kushaldoss Gardens” on Tuesday in connexion [sic] with the marriage of the daughter of the Rajah of Kollengode, Srimathi T. Meenakshi Ammal and Mr K.K. Chettur of the Indian Audit and Accounts Service’. Separate photographs of my mother and father in formal poses flanked one of my grandfather’s sitting at a table for tea with my parents and a couple of obviously important English ladies in those fashionable hats of the 1930s.

  These clippings, well-preserved and well-travelled, for almost seventy years, told me things I had never known before about my parents’ wedding. We discovered that, ‘the function was an unqualified success’, that, ‘although in the early part of the evening the weather was threatening, there was fortunately no rain’, that ‘Afterwards, refreshments were served both in European and Indian style by Messrs Harrison and Co, and a musical entertainment followed’. The Swarajya reported that ‘The precincts were so tastefully decorated that it looked like fairy-land’ and that ‘There was a huge concourse of guests, including, Dr. Annie Besant, Dr. James H. Cousins, Mr. and Mrs. Jinarajadasa, Dewan Bahadur T.R. Ramachandra Iyer, Maulana and Begum Yaqub Hasan Sait’, after which the guest l
ist, which went on for another three inches of column space, ran out of breath and finally ended with, ‘and others too numerous to mention’. I also discovered from the Spectator which had titled its story ‘Wedding in High Life’ that, ‘After partaking of the refreshments provided on a lavish scale, the guests moved to the hall upstairs where the couple cut the wedding cake to the English fashion’. Rather conversationally it then confided to its readers that ‘We understand the bride and bridegroom are going to England for their honeymoon’.

  Coming across these pinkish-yellow scraps of paper fourteen days after my mother had died, almost exactly seventy years following her wedding on 12 February 1930, was like finding a family treasure. Amongst the hundreds of true, mythological, sad and funny stories she had told us all her life—some repeated many times over even if we reminded her that we had heard them before—my mother had completely omitted everything about her wedding day.

  However, we had often heard some classic tales of a honeymoon that could only have happened to someone like her. On the honeymoon voyage, she asked my father whether the meals served in the opulent dining room of the British ship were made by Brahmin cooks. How could she eat if they weren’t? My father told her she had better learn to do so as the alternative was to starve. She discovered a co-passenger, a conservative Tamilian gentleman who was accompanied by his Brahmin cook on the steamer to England. She decided to befriend the cook, until he confided that not being able to bear perching himself atop the English commodes in the tiny toilets on board the ship, he had found a way out: he would squat on a newspaper, wrap his deposits in it and throw the parcel overboard every morning when no one was looking!