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  What are the other things that I like about this house, thought Shiva. Nobody had taken him to see the pond so far, he had heard a lot about it. In his bedroom a window opened to the backyard, but the pond was still far away, not visible. He had heard that it was his mother’s secret place as a child. I would love to sit on the steps of that lotus pond the way my mother did, he thought. Noon inside the house was unbearable; especially once the sun soared high, the smell of drying grass would fill the insides of the room with the odour of damp and suffocate his olfactory senses. The bed sheets and pillowcases were fresh, but something about the smell was just not right, something he hadn’t been able to adjust to so far. The maid said that was the smell of the starch on the clothes and the incense sticks they kept inside the cupboards. She said they also put anti-roach tablets inside the shelves, which had a strong, unpleasant smell; though she liked the smell of it, some people might find it repulsive. The cotton-filled bed had been dried in the sun one week before they arrived.

  I will tell Amma not to put anti-roach tablets in the shelves, he thought; he was allergic to it. He also wanted to tell his mother that he didn’t want starch on his clothes. But where was she? He hadn’t seen her since they had come here except during breakfasts. Once, she had come to his room, but she retreated faster than she’d entered, and she didn’t even bother to wish him or say something. She looked bleak and tired. Sometimes, when they had visitors, she accompanied them to his room, but she didn’t speak to them or him—it was as if he were a show piece and she a tour guide—and left as soon as they did.

  Nights were manageable. But how long could a person stare at the wood-panelled ceiling? Even if he kept his windows open it was not much use, there was nothing but darkness outside. He wished some lamps would be lit on the path that led to the pond. Sometimes he felt afraid of the windows that were opened to the darkness, and it was a difficult task to close the heavy wooden shutters. He made Aadi close them, though he said he needed air, that he had claustrophobia and felt he was suffocating. Both of them wished they had separate rooms again.

  In the mornings, Aadi cautiously wheeled him towards the padippura, the entrance, which had two rooms on either side. It was an effort to climb the steps, but somehow they managed it and reached the gate with the conviction that they had scaled an important height. What they liked most was the mound of red laterite loosely cemented together outside the gate, which was not a structure or a seat or something with a definite shape. It was just a heap of stones, made with the purpose of building something or maybe just found like that, with the roots of proud ancient trees running across them, running out as letters of the earth, stretching towards the ground, the red earth. When poked or scratched with fingernails, the surface of the roots oozed water; there was probably a small pond inside the roots, or a river. That would be more correct—‘river’ was the right word, a milky, luminous stream. And above them, on the branches, birds chirped incessantly. Now and then Shiva said, ‘What a nuisance!’

  From there, sitting on the roots, they could watch smoke rising from the chimneys, enjoy the smell of smoke and fried shallots blending with the early mists. Side by side, they would sit, their fingers intertwined like roots. Every house in the neighbourhood had a chimney, like those they had read about in comic books as children, where a woman comes down through the chimneys to the living rooms with her lovely umbrella. They could also see the road sloping down to where smoke rose without chimneys and they wondered how. There were no houses, they were sure. But they could see smoke lingering on the treetops on either side of the path. Aadi said that it was a crematorium, a place where they burned dead bodies. Shiva had also heard of that, though he had but a vague memory of it. When he was a child Aadi would go and sit on the same roots, counting the vehicles, carts and people passing by, while Shiva played near the well. But, except for that large piece of land and the trees outside, he couldn’t see anything from there, any activities taking place in the crematorium. The possibilities suspended over the land, the ideas formed, the knowledge gathered, were all enough to keep them company for the night anyway, for the fear children long for in their beds while they sleep. Kamala used to tell them that they were all fables people made out of sheer fancy, that the land was just a barren piece of earth which happened to be very large and desolate with no real owners. People burnt their waste there in the early morning or during the night, hence the smoke. The children didn’t like her elaborate explanations; they preferred it the other way round, as a place for burning real flesh. Three paths diverged from their entrance gate: the straight one led to the junction of a small township, the left towards a vast and beautiful field bordered with fragrant screw pines and patchouli, and the right sloped down towards the river bank, near the cremation ground.

  That was the place where lives that had turned cold with the touch of death were enveloped in blasting flames and burnt to cinders, where the earth was heavier, unlike under their feet. The smoke that rose from there was the smoke of burnt-out thoughts and memories.

  Shiva wished he could see that place, but Aadi had no confidence in being able to wheel his chair down that slope. If Shaly agreed, the three of them could go together. When she came, Shiva said, ‘I want to see the burial ground. I want to go there and see human beings getting reduced to ashes, and nothingness thereafter.’

  It was a shame to hear someone declare something so awful but Shaly smiled and gave him a nod of consent.

  An old woman—must be a distant relative—had come the other day and sighed at the sight of Shiva in the wheelchair. She said she remembered how sprightly he had been as a child, and said, ‘Don’t you worry, my child, in the next life you will be running as a sprinter.’

  ‘The thoughts of this life are responsible for the next life, Aunty. The next life exists only in our thoughts,’ said Kamala.

  Looking at the smoke rising from the nearby pyres, Shiva said, ‘And such thoughts are burning in grounds like this.’

  29

  The three acres of land near the river had been granted for the crematorium by the rulers of what used to be the medieval kingdom here long ago. Anybody who didn’t own six feet of land for the burial of their near and dear ones could carry the corpse there and cremate it for free. But if they wanted to observe Hindu rituals they had to pay a small, a very nominal amount for the services of the priest. The incense sticks, ghee and the choice of wood would be an add-on. If they wanted a mortician, that would be extra. People of the neighbourhood, Shaly found, were happy to share whatever information they had, bemused to see a woman asking such questions.

  Cautiously, they wheeled Shiva down the slope. It was not as steep as it had seemed from a certain height. But towards the river it became really steep and could be slippery as well. They decided not to go to the river. But Aadi said he was going to the riverbank as he was afraid of the land of the dead.

  After the end of the crown’s rule came the Panchayat Act and, thereafter, responsibility for the funeral ground fell to the local Panchayat-level jurisdiction, but the land remained under the autonomous authority of the state. With the development of information technology, cremation became a quick and easy process and bodies started coming from far and wide. Local people were against cremating a large number of bodies, or bodies that didn’t belong to the community, but the local rulers claimed full right to the dead bodies, causing endless arguments and skirmishes.

  ‘How much does a cremation cost?’ Shiva asked.

  ‘Three thousand rupees including wood and other materials. People bring only the corpses, the rest of the materials are provided here,’ said the manager.

  ‘The rest of the materials?’ So the body was just a material? Shiva expressed his uneasiness at this.

  Shaly wanted to know something else. The pyres they saw around them looked graceful, burning properly and peacefully like at the end of a peaceful death, exquisitely perfect. But what she had seen and experienced the other night was something horrible. She descr
ibed the restless skeleton that had risen with the flames and sat upright on the heap of burning wood and the deafening noise it had produced, and how she had run for her life. The manager and the mortician laughed.

  ‘Have you ever seen a wood-fired stove?’

  Bemused, she looked at him.

  ‘Everything runs on a systematic basis here, but there can be exceptions. Everyone who visits the Guruvayur temple does not make offerings, does not feed the elephants; some people go there to pray and some to visit. Likewise, some people come here and burn the corpses themselves—either they don’t care to pay the mortician or they are too poor to conduct the funeral rites. But try to understand that people do not burn corpses on a daily basis. While it is not something to be practiced to achieve perfection, the task does demand a certain expertise, a certain kind of intelligence and the ability to calculate. The body is built with five senses, five essential elements, and there is a mysterious proportion, an estimation, in which the fire spreads and devours it. The body, the flesh, will struggle inside the fire, and if things do not fall in line, the skeleton or a part of it may spring up. Such incidents are not common though.’

  ‘There was this deafening bang . . .’

  He cut her off. ‘No, no, good heavens! It is true: there will be some noises, of the skull or the other calcified parts breaking up, but nothing like what you described. No, it is your fear, the fear of the unknown.’

  Shaly left the cremation ground feeling lighter; she whistled at Aadi who was standing near the river bank, and when he saw them coming out of the cemetery gates, he gingerly walked up the slope. On their way back, Shaly noticed the long row of beech trees which she had failed to see on her first expedition. Now, she saw vividly the trees and the smoke caught in the branches, she felt the hot air that passed by them.

  Nothing remains for us to be frightened about. What was there before life? What follows after life? All the sorrows, dolorous unhappiness, fears of rejection, bitterness, abandonment lie within life. What was there to be afraid of at the grounds of the dead? But the voice had been there. She had heard it and it was real, nothing magnified, not a figment of her imagination. Inside the flames, in her brain, it felt like a sun bursting noisily.

  It was getting dark. Shiva asked, ‘Will Amma be angry with us?’

  ‘No, why should she?’

  It was becoming increasingly difficult to deal with Kamala, especially since they had arrived. Recently, even the children had begun noticing the change in Kamala’s behaviour; her anger, withdrawal, anxiety and the way she was transforming the house into a place unsuitable for living. If they asked her something, or if the phone rang insistently, she would not answer, instead she would give them a cold, severe look or make an unearthly gesture until they would feel uneasy and retreat. Perhaps she would scold them if she learnt that they had been to the crematorium. She had been there too, not exactly to the crematorium, for she had never entered the gates—she didn’t want to enter—but to the riverbank. As a child she had preferred to walk down the slope like every other child of her age, rather than see what was happening inside the land of the dead, covering her ears with both hands whenever she passed by the gates of the cremation ground. God knew they grew wings that in an instant helped them fly till they landed on the riverbank. They went to the water not to see their images reflected in it, the way the prehistoric nymphs had done, but like a snake drawn to the charmer; they were cajoled by the ribbon-like golden-yellow flowers of the fragrant screw pines that lined the banks. They made knots tied with two loops and two loose ends that looked like pieces of decoration on a fondant cake, which they cautiously put on their hair with a hair clip. How happy they had been, for they were children and once they flew back and perched on their windowsills they told the story of the dancing ghosts and the grinning ghosts and laughed aloud, savagely out of tune, and cried all night, desperately shaking in fear. But her children, she believed, were invalids. What if they got frightened, seeing something awful?

  ‘We will not tell Kamala,’ said Shaly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That we have been to the crematorium.’

  ‘What will we say then?’

  ‘We will tell her that we went for a walk.’

  As it turned out they didn’t have to explain anything to Kamala. When they reached home, they saw an old man sitting in the entrance hall talking to her. Though he tried to smile at the children, he had a severe grimace on his face which was not easy to countenance. He was particularly unhappy to see Shaly, but unmindful of his uneasiness Kamala said: ‘This is Madhavan’s father, my uncle. He says he will buy the house and the other properties. Obviously, if he buys this it will still go to his grandchildren, but I don’t understand why he is making such a fuss over all this. I can’t afford to sell this property at such a low price, it’ll be making a huge loss.’

  ‘What guarantee do I have that you will be giving the properties to my grandchildren, especially when you have so many parasites around you?’ said the old man.

  Embarrassed, Kamala looked at Shaly.

  ‘Is this the woman who is going to sell the house to me? Look at me and talk,’ he said to Kamala. Gesturing to the children, he added, ‘Go inside and do something.’

  The grandness of the seventies, thought Shaly, Kamala should not have explained all this to me in front of him. She was gripped by a feeling of unease. She went outside and walked towards the caracole stairs, her fingers playing on the wooden pineapples for a while. She heard shouts from the entrance hall. They are not talking about me, she realized, it was money and land that mattered. You could not tell whether there was any family feeling in their voices, or stark business.

  ‘I cannot dispose of it like that. Let me see if I can get another buyer.’

  ‘Who on earth do you think will buy this property which lies so close to that crematorium?’

  Kamala knew he was arguing for the sake of it, out of his greed for more. She had researched the matter, enquired about the value of the land earlier; she had connections with some land brokers in the neighbourhood. Her dreams revolved around selling this old wreck and buying a brand new apartment in town. It goes without saying that those who want to sell their land, particularly out of desperation, cannot hope for too much; money flows in only when we wear an air of nonchalance. Maps are written and rewritten every other second; the land she wanted to sell would not be the land in the broker’s handbook. Last time also she had tried to sell a portion of it, but her uncle—or if not him directly, then his men—had blocked the buyers from proceeding, informed them that the place was haunted, had poor water supply and what little there was, looked yellow, that the land was not suitable for digging septic tanks etc. She wondered what he meant. How could anyone sully such pure water?

  The earth was good, pure and gold; it should travel down the bloodline, through Madhavan and his children, or his sisters and their children. The tension over the deal was unbearable. It had started before her mother died. Kamala had wanted to settle in Cochin, in Kadavanthra town, a long time ago. She had said she would take her mother with her after disposing of the properties. But that didn’t happen, and then her mother died. She could have handled things more easily if her uncle had not interfered. Madhavan had tried to negotiate with his father; over the phone he had said, ‘It is not easy to buy a flat in Kadavanthra. She should get the full amount. Don’t forget that the children belong to me as well.’

  All those who sit under the bodhi tree do not become Buddha overnight. Restlessly, Madhavan wandered in his mind all day, and at night he lost his sleep thinking of her. It was the wedding chain that she didn’t bother to wear any more, which set his words free. He had been acting like a mad person, a cruel person who, after throwing his invalid children away into a dark forest at the mercy of wild beasts, was trying to find solace in bars. At times, when his friends gathered around him, as he tried to contain his sadness within pubs, his sorrows multiplied. Endless talk proved to be of no use. He
couldn’t love the woman for whom he had abandoned his wife and children, and the woman in turn harboured a bitter hatred towards him in her mind, for all the ways he had ill-treated her in the past, for denouncing her, marrying someone else.

  ‘Can’t you just try to get some sleep, Madhavan?’

  ‘I am thinking of buying some land.’

  ‘What land? Why do you need land in the middle of the night?’

  ‘Kamala is selling her land.’

  ‘Aha! Now I get it.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘What do you need my opinion for? Obviously, you have decided everything. You want to help your ex-wife, so go ahead with that. She probably thinks that you are very rich. No shame, that woman! Do what you must, but don’t expect me to be here any more.’

  Kuljeet nurtured an intense dislike for Kamala, and took great pleasure in stirring up trouble. She knew Kamala had never loved Madhavan, even though they had played some sex games together, some sort of nightly exertion. Her biological weirdness she could very easily forgive, but still she hated her. Whenever he spoke of Kamala, she was overwhelmed with irritation, marked by an unwanted curiosity. She was vengeful; for it was because of Kamala that she had been forced to live a useless life, this life, with a husband always pining for his two sons. If only Kamala had loved him, he would not have abandoned her and her children; Kuljeet, for her part, would have married someone good, someone from her own community, someone who grew a beard and wore a turban— the gift of the Guru, and become one half of Mr and Mrs Singh.

  She had sent a letter saying she was pregnant on the fourth day after her abortion, which Kamala received the day before her wedding, running short of enough time to act. It was not the loss of Madhavan but the rage one woman felt towards another which pushed her into this nothingness. She wanted no other woman in her place, no one else to share the violence of her desire. Nothing would discourage her, neither unhappy consequences nor the storms of wrath. Even after his wedding, she continued her affair with him; she started using him as a toy, a mere dildo that satisfied her physical and mental itch. She would persuade him to travel with her in secret, and on the way back she would deliberately leave an earring or hair clip in his car. But to her great disappointment the telltale signs remained unnoticed wherever she had deposited them—in his pockets, bags, and car. She prayed for the day when they would separate, but when it happened all of a sudden she regretted that there was no more game left to play. The fruit called Madhavan had lost its flavour; it no longer appealed to her appetite, in fact, it had become a burden, an obstruction in the food pipe.