MY  ADOPTED   GRANDFATHER   AND  ME                                                                                  Part IV
A Short Story... By Ravi Anbil  

My days at the  hospital were bad. I was traumatized by nightmares where Maymay cried helplessly  with blood gushing out of her severed head, her red glassy eyes searching for  the rest of the body by the bus stop, around the post office and all over the  town market. Several severed heads of cows, donkeys and dogs also infrequently  appeared asking the police constable to please find their bodies. Apparently I  had been running a high fever where the mercury in the thermometer hit crisis  levels causing my father to fray the floor with his pacing and my mother to weep  like the Jamuna.

The only  benevolence out of the whole episode was my father holding me tight telling me  not to be afraid and my mother sleeping next to me nestling me in her arms for  the first time that I could recall. I liked all the attention and felt that my  status had improved from a second-class citizen to a platinum cardholder. But I  was still haunted and perplexed by the concept of death. My questions worried my  parents who consulted the doctor to know why I was so obsessed with death and  how they could get my mind off of that subject. Consequently, I was given a few  comic books to read which were in English. I liked the smell of the paper and  the colorful caricatures. My father had to be at work and my mother at home. The  nurse pretended to know English by explaining to me what the story meant which  made no sense at all. So upon my quizzing, she became red-faced and left in a  huff. What a calamity, I thought!

When I  finally returned home after a couple of weeks, the first sight that caught my  eye was that of an old man in loin cloth sitting by the entrance, his naked body  showing a hollow ribcage against the morning sun. Once I was inside, I felt like  a soldier returning from war in that everyone from my grandmother to my baby  sister hugged and kissed me. While a part of me relished the welcome, a part of  me wanted no part of it. I badly wanted my second-class citizenship back!

As I went to  wash my feet by the backyard well, the usual gossip was in circulation. My nosy  grandmother was getting feedback over the fence from our neighbor, a century old  lady missing most teeth and some hair, who knew the resume of the old man  sitting outside. "He is a consummate runner!" was her remark which aroused my  curiosity. It seemed appropriate to me that a man with a concave stomach and  streamlined body must be quite a sprinter. My eavesdropping was interrupted by  the noise of a strange woman thwacking wet clothes on a rock. Suds of soap flew  in the air and birds took to the sky. Only then did it dawn on me that she was a  new servant and the leaf-chewing, blood-spitting woman was no longer on our  payroll which was a relief for I no longer had the courage to see another Maymay  head roll out of a gunny sack. As I looked back, the grandmothers were now  talking in hushed tones giving me the cold eye. I knew the sign and made a quick  exit.

Inside the  house I noticed a battle brewing between my mother and father in the bedroom. My  mother was giving him the third degree for having given two dhotis, a blanket  and a coir mat for the naked old prune outside. Despite my father's pleadings  that the items were all used and raggedy, and the old man was a scholar-cum-sadhu  proficient in English, Sanskrit, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu...even Hindi,  having come from Paalgaat, my mother pounded her gavel of justice and asked for  silence. Such battles were commonplace but they usually revolved around two  topics--one, my backboneless father allowing his mother to play bursar holding  all the purse-strings and, two, the sheer stupidity of not being able to add  onion, garlic or radish to the diet simply because the old woman was orthodox  wielding control over the daily menu. Now this old man had entered the playing  field throwing a googly. I was impressed.




Next