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 ran 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.
