The village of Irumi sits on a small bluff rising out of a valley floor, enclosed by the Eastern Ghats and the Krishna River, beyond which the Nallamala jungle spreads, clinging to the mountainsides like moss. The farthest mountains in the range are blue, and as they grow nearer and nearer to the valley, embracing Irumi, encircling it, they plunge into hill ranges of darkest chlorophyllic green, hiding sandalwood, crawling with tigers and tiger cubs.
Seasons distorted Irumi, as though the village were a living human face, each season bringing out a different feature, a different expression. In the winter, a fog descended from the Ghats and the villagers heard but could not see hundreds of monkeys, swinging from hill tree to hill tree, chattering like inseparable old women. In the summer, the earth cracked, the dry riverbed showed. But when the monsoon arrived, the Krishna rose and overflowed into Irumi’s paddy fields, and the villagers stepped into his rushing waters holding jasmine strands, camphor lamps, their toes slipping on mossy river rocks.
On a cold winter morning in 1970, as dawn broke over the Ghats and a feeble orange light flooded in, a row of severed human heads were discovered hanging on pikes in a paddy field in Irumi. There were five of them, fat, clay-like, swollen.
When the paddy farmer showed up for work, he dropped his iron plow and shouted for the others. Soon, most of the village had descended on his field. His crop was still young and the farmer asked the villagers to tread carefully, to not damage his seedlings. Wet land was precious, and he’d sown chitti mutyalu, a variety of sweet-smelling rice that needed gentle handling. But in their hurry to get closer to the severed heads, the villagers ignored him, they trampled his field, shoving, jostling, indiscriminately flattening and snapping the tender rice stalks.
The mounting curiosity amongst them was not about the identity of the victims; they all knew who the dead ones were, nor about the identity of the perpetrators; they all knew whose work it was. The only question that remained, therefore, was who had seen it happen. Usually, there was an audience for this kind of thing – they had heard tell – an audience and a hearing supposedly came before the execution. A “people’s court,” it was called. Judgments passed, wrongdoers punished. As they surveyed one another’s faces, they paid no attention to a boy standing mutely just beyond the edge of the field, watching them.
The boy’s name was Kanakam. He was eleven years old, and he was the only one who had seen it happen. He alone had seen the Deshmukhs die, seen their faces, the settings of their brows and eyes and lips and teeth in the fleeting seconds before life drained out of them.
Kanakam looked no different from other children his age, ribs protruding from beneath sun-beaten skin, a round belly, and those genes that gave him hair, eyes and gums, all the spectacular colour of midnight. The villagers ignored him because even though he was from Irumi he did not truly belong there. He lived in a hut just beyond Irumi’s boundary, in a small settlement abutting a shrine for Katta Maisamma; the village goddess tasked with protecting its borders. He’d lived in that settlement from the age of four – when his memory begins – to his now weatherbeaten age of eleven. Eleven was considered prime youth in his settlement. Death usually came around thirty.
In appearance, the huts in his settlement were no different from the two hundred or so huts in the rest of Irumi – low mud walls, thatched roofs made of dried coconut fronds and palm branches, earthen floors beaten smooth, an open area at the back for planting runner beans and sponge gourds in the winter. There was nothing in the outward appearance of this settlement that set it apart, and yet, the rest of Irumi shunned it. They shunned it because of the blackened earth beneath it. Polluted and ruined for perpetuity, the settlement sat beneath ghastly shadows of dead tamarinds and scavenging clouds of vultures. An intolerable stench rose from it – black tar pits, rows upon rows of curing animal skins folded with their flesh sides together, fat collecting in mud pots to be used for eating and for burning, chemical dye reacting in metal drums, decaying cow and pig carcasses, drying bone marrow, drained blood, sinew, and the rank hum of boiling animal flesh. It was a tanning settlement. Then too, the villagers had been taught from birth, to shun, to ostracise, and to not touch those born there.
Kanakam’s father, like his father before him, was a tanner, and by that definition, a leather worker, a cow slaughterer, a dye master, a cobbler, and also, half-blind from adulterated country liquor. Death for him too, was coming at thirty, just as surely as it was to come for his father and had come for all the men before him. For reasons that the midwife from Irumi could not explain, Kanakam’s mother died even sooner. The only thing he knew about her was what the midwife had told him: that she’d chosen his name months before he was born. That name – Kanakam – meant Gold; impossibly precious, a material of mythical significance, one that commanded desire. That had been her wish for his future, to be desired, touched, wanted. That he had caused the death of his mother, that she would be alive if not for him, was a thing imprinted on him, like a barbed tattoo against his wide cheeks and high forehead. But despite that, and despite his malnourished appearance and the ragged scars he bore on his back, Kanakam was special. He could, for example, perfectly skin a cow. Then, he could wash it, brine it, tan it, dry it, dye it and make a pair of perfect, full-grain leather shoes. He was capable of doing all of this with no help from his increasingly blind father. Even in that settlement of thatched huts, everyone remarked on his skill in his family’s ancestral profession. Perhaps, they said, he was gifted.
Excerpted with permission from The Fertile Earth, Ruthvika Rao, Penguin India.
