by Ram Govardhan
Ram writes the tale of a gritty mother’s hope of finding her lost kid against impossible, cataclysmic odds.
Maran, a born-again Christian, drew his fishing boat into the estuary at wee hours. The weather felt atypical, but the calm bay was reassuring. Unusually, not too far from the shore, half an hour yielded three plump lancet-fishes, typically found on high seas. Given the misty conditions, Maran assumed the haul to be useless shore-fish. But, as a yolky sun rose, cynical of the fortuity, he gave his eyes a spell of rubbing; the three were worth much more than his cumulative weekly proceeds.
Maran moored his boat at the quayside and lugged the three fish home. The bounty and his abrupt return mystified Sita, his wife. Holding one by its high dorsal fins and gaping at its lustrous eyes, she said, ‘Undoubtedly…spoils of someone’s toil.’
Hugging Sita, he grinned, ‘You never trust my fishing skills, honey. Anyway, God has chiselled too perfect a face to entertain such grave misgivings in your mind…’
Struggling to wriggle out, Sita asked, ‘But why did you bring them home…quacks die to acquire such rare things?’
Charlatans from Pondicherry procured lancet-fishes, at prices that verged on exorbitance, for their aphrodisiacal properties.
‘I don’t have to…when such is the catch, the market-place would come to me…,’ Maran said, ‘I’ll take a nap…fry lamb’s testicles for lunch.’
Sita left the house to buy lamb’s testicles and some of Rasa’s syrupy tea; everyone adored the saccharine pungency of his tea, obtained by endlessly stewing the brew.
‘So early today…have relations turned up?’ asked Rasa, without awaiting an answer, for this one benevolent question had kept him in business and thrown rivals out.
Sita returned with tea and testicles and stirred up a snoring Maran. He gulped the tea and tapped the testicles, saying, ‘Fry them just right.’
Leaning against a wall and supping tea in sips, Sita rejoiced in what she saw: Kutty, their four-year-old, curled up in Maran’s embrace.
She then tickled the child awake even as he protested: ‘Let me sleep…Christmas holidays…no school…’
She dragged a drowsy Kutty onto the stone slab in front of the shack and soaked him in soap. Warning Kutty to stay put, she went in to fetch a towel.
At the door-sill, she sensed an unearthly tremble but blamed it on the drumming of hooves of a flock of buffaloes. She rubbed Kutty dry and, as he slipped into his favourite red shorts, made her way to get breakfast from Rasa’s stall.
On her way back, she felt the trembles again, and within seconds, she heard deathly rumbles and shrieks from afar. Even before she could make out what was happening, a giant wave scooped her and the breakfast basket away. The tidal waves carried her a long way away from the shore and slung her down with a thud. Another spate of waves monstrously soared over her; one took her up, another down, and the biggest one heaved her. She was gliding for a few moments before she collapsed. This time, she wasn’t alone; there were several bodies, both dead and dying.
She shuddered to think anything nasty about Kutty.
She lay on the shore for several minutes, gasping for breath, her ears ringing. She then squeezed herself out and looked about to find her bearings – she then saw the tip of the church spire jutting out of a mound of sand. Braving snakes and scorpions, she marched on towards home with a prayer on lips. After hours of staggering, her legs declined to budge, stomach gnawed and head spun. Just as she crashed, she stumbled upon an all too familiar piece of corrugated sheet: the awning of the tea-stall. The cataclysm had devoured Rasa, his wife and two kids.
Overhearing feeble cries, she upheaved a bulky block; Tantony, her dipsomaniac neighbour, came out writhing.
A while later, as the waters receded, with Tantony wobbling behind her, she trampled through mounds of rubbish to reach her hut. All of her effects were washed away, leaving no trace of her hut.
Had the waves carried away Kutty too?
‘Something tells me…Kutty is alive…by all means,’ Sita told Tantony who was sure that she was hoping against hope.
Out of an adjacent heap of debris, she heard faint cries. Even with Tantony’s help, she couldn’t move the concrete blocks. A couple of military trucks passed by but Sita’s scream, at its shrillest, was drowned by their clankety-clank. At twilight, switching on headlights, firemen heaved the heavy concrete blocks. Eight mangled bodies of children, women and men emerged.
As firemen departed, elbowing aside the mutilated bodies, Maran walked in, battered and bruised. Spurning first-aid, both of them scampered in search of Kutty. In pitch darkness, they wandered through the devastated landscape hoping to pick up moans out of the flattened earth.
In the morning, volunteers handed out tea and biscuits. While Maran sipped tea, Sita rebuffed every one of his efforts to feed her something.
Around noon, as she walked around the remnants of her hut listlessly, Sita felt something fleshy right underneath her foot. She dug and found Kutty’s arm, severed from the shoulder, in horror. Gripping it, she cried and wiped the dirt off the little arm with her mouth. Maran began manically thumping his chest.
‘Kutty’s body must be somewhere close by…’ gasped Maran.
Offended by the assumption, Sita cried, ‘He must be alive…don’t kill him in your dirty mind…’
After wandering around all day, Sita sat vigilant all night cuddling the arm, while Maran slumbered away out of cynicism.
As search resumed at dawn, Maran implored her to have some tea. ‘Until I see Kutty, I am not going to…let me die…’ Sita yelled.
Then they were told about a mass burial site. Maran and Sita reached the large pit that was surrounded by men. It was a huge, crudely dug-up ditch. Scores of bare, mutilated and mangled bodies were being hauled down. As they stared at bodies of children, someone said, ‘Go to the Christian burial site, this one is for Muslim interment.’
Clenching Kutty’s arm, which thinned by the hour, they got to the Christian site. While a lonely policeman tried to control the unruly kinsmen of untraced people, bodies were being dumped in twos, fours and, as impatience spread, in their dozens.
Among the eleven bodies flung down from the fourth truck, Maran caught sight of an armless boy’s body sandwiched between two large corpses. As he screamed, outstretched to jump, the policeman reined him in. When Sita jostled and almost hurled herself into the pit, she too was tugged back.
Out of the blue, a gravedigger plucked Kutty’s arm out of Sita’s hands and threw it into the pit. Sita shoved forward with rage but this time, onlookers wrested her. Forcing Sita’s face to his chest, Maran stared at Kutty’s arm until it vanished and a wet grave-mound of sand cropped up over the burial site.
***
Sita and Maran languished for three months in a tent village until they were given a tiny concrete house. Brooding over Kutty within the four walls, Sita grew deeply disturbed, talking to herself and crying out Kutty’s name endlessly. As weeks turned to months, Maran tentatively tried to persuade Sita for a reversal of her tubectomy.
‘Don’t pester me, I know Kutty is alive,’ she insisted. ‘I’ve been hearing many stories of much younger children being restored to their parents by the police…haven’t we informed the police?”
‘Perhaps he is alive…in heaven,’ Maran retorted.
There was no let-up in his efforts and, as the anniversary of the tsunamic devastation neared, Maran hysterically annoyed her.
‘It’s permanent…it cannot be reversed,’ Sita cried.
Maran visited the new rehabilitation centre to know more about reversing tubectomy.
‘Well, it is possible, but it can be done only in Pondicherry. It is highly affordable…even to a common man,’ said a doctor.
Armed with the ‘highly affordable’ information, Maran bullied Sita continually for over a month; she did not budge. He then presented the deadly threat Indian husbands issue: divorce, on account of denying an heir.
‘An heir? What do we have to bequeath? Something tells me…Kutty is alive…don’t harass me,’ Sita screamed.
‘Kutty is absolutely dead and buried…you are nuts…there is no point in living with a hare-brained woman anymore,’ Maran cried.
‘Then get someone of your fishy wavelength…’ Sita cried.
A day before the first anniversary of the devastation, rumours raged that a tsunami was about to hit the shore again. As radio, television and the tsunami observation centre alerted everyone, amidst the sirens, villagers were evacuated to Panruti, a town twenty kilometres inland.
Hours after reaching the improvised shelter, when an exhausted Sita fell unconscious, Maran rushed out to find a doctor. On the way, he saw a boy fully bent over the sand house he was patting into shape with one hand. Maran ran his eyes over the face and the tiny stub jutting out of the shoulder. Even as a panicked Kutty cried, Maran picked the kid up and rushed inside where Sita was just coming out of her blackout. Even before Sita could see the face, the kid galloped and cocooned in her lap.
Ram Govardhan’s short stories have appeared in Asian Cha, Open Road Review, The Literary Yard, The Bangalore Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Indian Ruminations, Spark, Muse India, The Bombay Review and other Asian and African literary journals. His novel, Rough with the Smooth, was longlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize, The Economist-Crossword 2011 Award and published by Leadstart Publishing, Mumbai. He lives in Chennai. Email: ram.govardhan2010@gmail.com
