Endearment (தனுமை) by Vannadasan

 

This is an English translation of ‘Dhanumai”, a short story written by Vannadasan. Translated into English by Saravanan Karmegam.

***

Dhanu is always going by this bus.

The bus was old. It had been three days since the bus started plying to the colony. On Sunday morning, the bus, with its shaking tin sheets, had its maiden run. The officers of the new mill colony were sharing their lighter moments inside. Jnanappan felt uneasy at seeing all these. While watching the smoke emitted by the bus getting thin and covering the road, he had felt that he lost the relationship he had built fast with that colony lying in between the umbrella thorn trees and the sand stretch of Theri’¹.

Dhanu could now board and get off the bus near her house. He was happy about it anyway. Earlier, she, as if as a charming gloom, had to drag her weak limbs and walk that distance. Now, she didn’t have to wait, along with the inferiority of her defects, for the bus that used to stop at the entrance of his college. Now he wouldn’t be able to see her.

Now Jnanappan didn’t have to come to the shade of trees in the orphanage, carrying the books in his hands. He could now go into the umbrella thorny woods as earlier. Everywhere sand and thorns. Garden lizards would scuttle here and there. Some of them, grown into bulky iguanas, would sway their heads back and forth. The evening sky would descend deep and turn to crimson in the solitude. One could find bones, thorns, and bushes everywhere as if lakhs of men were buried there. The aroma of palm sugar being boiled was coming from the hut fenced with serrated palm trunks. Chicken would loiter around. The body of the girl, hauling the thorny twigs with snail shells sticking to them like full-sized gooseberries, would get his attention diverted from the lessons. The dark legs of the girl with anklets, who could now bring a smile to her face after tireless attempts at being coaxed, would lug the sand while walking.

Dhanu, who struggled even to walk, could have realised belatedly that she would be able to reach the college entrance gate, where she could catch her bus, if she took a shortcut through that orphanage. He came to know her name that day. “Dhanu, can we take this way?” The boy, her brother, who used to accompany her, pointed to the way. For the girl in uniform, he was her little companion.

Jnanappan came to the orphanage to study that day, accidentally though. He needed a beedi to smoke while returning to his hostel after studies. He was standing there for some while. Sitting on the yoke of a hoodless cart with tyre wheels standing under a small neem tree, his eyes were fixed as if he was keenly watching the flag mast in front of the school building. 

Wild Indian almond flowers were found planted in the centre with the bricks horizontally fixed in a circle around them. He had seen those flowers and plants since his childhood days at the railway station, where he would get off to reach his village. Canna lilies were not known in those days. His heart was in his village, the chilly rail tracks gleaming like a contour under the moonlight, the rest house with lanterns, the fireflies—only when he was ‘watching’ all these in each flower, he heard that sound: “Dhanu! Can we take this way?”

He pulled down his lungi and jumped off the yoke. The ropes tied tightly around the yoke squeaked. Dhanu and her brother were standing on the other side of the barricade that was placed to regulate the movement of carts, resembling a blockade made of bamboo sticks in the cattle shed. Suddenly her brother bent down, sneaked below the bamboo stick, and came to this side, leaving her standing in the whopping solitude for a moment. In the backdrop were found an oddly standing expanse of sand and umbrella thorny trees. Here she, Dhanu, was standing, exuding a mild fragrance of umbrella thorny flowers.

Jnanappan pulled the bamboo stick gently, as if opening a royal gateway, and moved aside to give her way to come in. In those fretful moments when his interiors found a succour deep inside, the bamboo stick fell onto the ground and shed the termites sticking to it. Dhanu’s brother said, “Thanks.” Dhanu rebuked him with a strong hiss and pulled him inside. The lustreless red and yellow of zinnia and marigold flowers that started running in a line on both sides of the orphanage seemed to have become lively for the first time as Dhanu, in her slender frame of a girl, was walking. They looked beautiful now.

Deisy teacher was coming in front. Probably due to the absence of pimples on her cheeks, she was unlikely to experience this profoundness of feeling. Well-toned, rounded frame being unmarried. When she threw her eyes around with the sharpness of a dark horse, Jnanappan would feel the shudder in him. Today, fewer than the usual number of those who came there to study also had a chance to relish the tautness of her body.

While Dhanu’s face remained as a floating water flower in Jnanappan’s heart, other thoughts went along in the water current and just disappeared. Deisy teacher, who could enter the pitcher as a hibiscus that floated in the river, is now trying to come out by slapping the reluctant fingers. He had known about her since last year.

It was a month of December. The sound of the harmonium filled the air. A boy, who could muster some nerve, was pressing the keyboard one after the other amidst the noise made by a bevy of about ten or fifteen boys. Starting from left to right. When he started from the left, fixing it at the middle of triplet beats, his fingers squeezing the accordion forgot its role, leaving the harmonium to snort with a grunting noise. Everyone laughed at it. When Jnanapan reached there, the boys gave him the way.

Jnanappan smiled. He knew how to play the harmonium, not very professionally though. He could play movie songs in it. Many voices coaxed him to try his hand with songs. Trying the song “Thattungal thirakkappadum” (knock on to get it open) in a low inflection, he asked them, “Which song should I try?’ as he stopped playing it. “Tell me which one I must try.”

“I know.”

“Let me help you, sir.”

“Intha nal unavai” (This virtuous food)—try this song, sir.”

Jnanappan was astounded at those words from the boy who spoke last. The unbearable image of boys sitting with an aluminium plate and tumbler singing the song, ‘intha nal unavai thantha nam iraivanai vanankuvom – let us all pray to the god who has given us this virtuous food - waiting for some wheat upma and corn porridge, came over his mind. He kept watching the boy’s withered, spiritless face, who could immediately relate to this song, which in fact made those orphans feel more orphaned when Jnanappan played the harmonium.

Jnanappan couldn’t recollect any other Christian anthems. He felt that all the Christian choir songs had a similar pattern of cadence. He played the first two lines of Ellam Yesuve enakkellaam Yesuve—Jesus Christ is everything; Jesus is everything for me. When the boys followed him singing the remaining lines, it made him shudder.

Jnanappan was singing as though

- all the neem flowers in the orphanage were singing in unison.

- the sound made in the backdrop of people's feet, who had visited the church in the town.

- the song sung by the gardeners standing in rows drawing the water with empty milk tins.

- a grieving boy, thinking about his mother, whom he couldn’t see while sitting, giving the back of his neck to the old barber who visits his house every week for a haircut.

- a prayer of children to get rid of the flaky eczema, caused by an unknown nutritional deficiency, that had stuck onto their skin like wall posters.

- a voice of compelling desolation that had been writ large on the faces of those who were bathing nude, taking off their trousers, and pouring out the salty water from the well.

- the spintop dreams of children who are maniacally pumping out the water from the well to trace out their missing two-paise coin in it.

When Jnanappan lifted his head as he grew too lethargic to sing further, he saw Deisy teacher standing in the doorway. The boys dispersed and went away. Deisy teacher, praised his singing and threw a cozy grin at him while holding the doorframe.

Jnanappan thought of finishing her in one strong blow. Jnanappan had to endure similar eyes like Deisy teacher—the eyes of an English girl who used to come there on her bicycle. One could see her at least a couple of times a day during holidays.

People were hurrying, carrying their food boxes in their hands, with half running and half walking, to attend to their morning shift duty. There were people drinking sweet toddy. There were people who would nearly snatch the vada with pickle as soon as they heard the first shot of the factory siren. There were men who were reading newspapers without even dusting their heads of cotton fibres at tea shops. The food boxes would be hanging on their cycle bars. The entire family of this girl would go to the church by bicycle amidst these people. Everyone, be it her mother or father, had a separate bicycle. With her body ostensibly grown heavier for her school-going age and bigger thighs that get squeezed while driving the bicycle, Jnanappn would find her utterly loathsome—an unwarranted distaste, though. 

Dhanu would arrive in there as if with an aura to cleanse all these. Now he wouldn’t be able to meet that Dhanu very often. It was better to pick a beedi instead of a cigarette and roam around with a folded lungi. Since the orphanage was the place she used to come earlier, it wouldn’t be possible to avoid coming there. Amid all these, what would I study?

Calling the boys who were collecting the fruits falling down from the neem trees standing in a line into their tin boxes was a worthless attempt since none of them would speak to him. They wouldn’t find the happiness, of collecting the lump of neem excreta from the birds perching on the palm stalks planted as football goalposts, in speaking to him.

Among these people who were collecting butterfly eggs and larvae from milkweed plants densely grown in the middle of the burial ground that looked dilapidated with salty layers on its walls, and were totally indifferent to the thick smoke emanating from the burning dead bodies under the shed lying on the other side of the partitioning wall, what else would I be able to study in the absence of Dhanu?  

He found it arduously difficult even to sit with other boys. He didn’t even like to call the turkeys loitering around with their rusty snorts displaying their wattle near the garbage bins and toilets meant for upper-class people. He thought that it would be alright if he could become indifferent like those ‘high-class’ people. There were students from that area studying with him in the class and college wearing white full-sleeved shirts and dhotis. Are they also orphans? He felt that he had become an orphan when he realised his absence in Dhanu. He sank into deep despair.

He thought of going to his village. The face of his father, who had devoted his life to fields and agriculture, happily inquiring of his son, who bore the signs of the family line, about studies, with the lemon-sized lump on his forehead swaying back and forth and his occasional sulks about the futility of studies, came over his mind in myriad forms. The innumerable faces then became one and then became that of Dhanu…

He stopped the boy who went near to him to pick up the ball and kicked it to the edge of the ground. Instead of flying horizontally at a greater distance, it went up, forcing him to look upwards to see the azure sky before his eyes came down. Even after his eyes were now looking down, his eyes were still filled with the azure sky.

It was a blue flower. The blue flower he had kept inside the book. The flower, which, in all probability, might have changed from red to blue. It could have been a flower that had lost its paleness and turned its bluishness into black. Jnanappan had every reason to believe that it was actually dropped by Dhanu, though he didn’t have anything to prove it. He knew very well that it had grown behind the church, which once stood within the boundary of the orphanage and was now standing in a dilapidated condition. Yet, he liked to believe that it fell down from Dhanu.

He remembered the broken walls of the church. The graffiti, names, and abusive words were found scribbled on the wall as though the orphanage was meant only for males. He had seen the names of those who were studying with him being drawn in dark pictures. Even Deisy teacher found her place in one of those sentences scribbled on the wall with the spelling errors deliberately made.

He kept the blue flower spread across the sheets of the book and closed it. Now he had to study. The shade was fast disappearing. He washed his face at the well, leaned against the wall of the school veranda in the rear, and then read the book aloud. He needed this sound so as to escape from the quietness around him.

The cackles of Master’s turkeys were waning after a yelp. The noise of children playing on the ground slowly went afar. A pigeon perching somewhere on the beams was making a dull grunt. The sound of the bell newly fixed at the colony’s Lord Ganesh temple was heard faintly. The sound of the running spinning mill was heard from a distance.

Will it rain?

Last monsoon was bountiful. It rained as though at the whims of the sky. Every evening, the lights would be lit in the hostels before sunset. Jnanappan would have come out, unable to bear the sultriness inside the room. It rained so heavily that he couldn’t return to his hostel. The aroma and the heat of the ground got him choked for a second. The palm trees, getting wet on one side, looked pitch darker. The pigs were loitering aimlessly. The indigo plants bloomed like a sprinkle of sandalwood.

Jnanappan ran to the orphanage doorway and stood near a tree, yet he couldn’t avoid getting wet. He then ran to the building in front. It also had classrooms like the ones on the rear side. Only after getting into the building could he make out it was from sixth grade to eighth grade. Deisy teacher was also standing there, holding the hem of her sari between her teeth, covering her head. She must have come before getting drenched.

A kid of a goat was standing along the wall, turning its head towards the road.   A lump of dung was found below. The old watchman, keeping the dustbin beside him, was smoking, curling his body as if he had grown tired. Deisy teacher, having fixed her eyes somewhere blankly outside the compound wall, was standing without making any movement. The heavy rain outside seemed to have kept her away from her innate temperament. Deisy teacher looked new, bearing the clarity of a silhouette seen through a thin, translucent screen.

The bus came to a halt on the road, splashing the water like a boat throwing water on its sides. The water fell down copiously from the canal atop the canopy covering the top of the bus. Soon after the bus came to a halt, Deisy teacher ran towards it. ‘Unlike Dhanu, can this Deisy, who is in her middle age, behave in such an indifferent manner?’ Jnanappan stood a second, confused. The goat climbed onto the wall with a tiny, creaky noise.

Still, there was sufficient time for Dhanu’s ‘College to College’ bus that used to leave from her college. It might get late due to rain. A couple of mothers were waiting with umbrellas to receive their children, who would get off the bus along with their aluminium boxes. The palm leaves used for drinking sweet toddy were found in green heaps soaked in rainwater near the college.

The yellow auto-rickshaws splashing the water sped through the wet road, towards the colony. Jnanappan smiled, waved his hands at children who waved their hands sitting in the auto-rickshaws, and walked down to the college's second entrance gate. He saw the hostel tailor standing with the machine at the entrance. The sound of the mill was clearly audible.

While delving into the book and reading it in silence, the silence melts and turns into waves, and Dhanu is standing amid the waves. When he resumed his single-sentence empty reading from scratch, like the one climbing onto a slippery wooden pole from the bottom after one big jump, he saw Deisy teacher climbing on the veranda and coming inside. She grinned at him and said, “Got busy with studies? I forgot my umbrella,” as she removed her sandals. The imprints of her leg fingers were found in silky smoothness on her sandals. She opened the lock and kept the key and lock on her handkerchief as weight at the window on the left of the entrance and went in. She then asked Jnanappan, holding the umbrella, “Do you need a chair?”

“No… I don’t. It is already late. I need to go now.”

She pulled the lock once and carefully examined it again. The handkerchief had then fallen down.

“If it gets late, why don’t you switch on the light?” She said, holding the kerchief, and pointed at the switch with her twitching nose.

“No…not needed.” Jnanappan stared at her intently as he stroked the book.

“You need only Dhanalaxmi. Don’t you?” She came forward a step, hugged Jnanappan tightly as though she had crushed him against the wall, and then walked down.

When he peeked out of the orphanage that stood in the bit of darkness and light, the bus had already left leaving its trail of creaking noise.

Even if there was no bus stop, Deisy teacher would definitely stop the bus on the way and get into it.

 

                                                            ***Ended***

Note:

Theri: A semi-desert stretch in Tirunelveli district, Tamil Nadu.