At Thiruvattar, at my father’s ancestral house, apart from the popular portrait of the Maharaja half-turned and in his bejewelled crown, the only pictures that hung on the walls were of the two matriarchs. The elder one looks as though she were commanding the photographer to get it done with. She stands bare-shouldered, a gold-bordered dhoti tied tightly around her chest. The lobes of her ears are stretched in the fashion of the day, with heavy, traditional earrings. The other matriarch, her daughter, my father’s mother, wears a jumper with a fine dhoti casually thrown over her shoulder. She looks into the camera, her head slightly tilted, scornfully dismissing the cameraman.
When she first visited the house, after walking along the length and breadth of it, exploring the rooms, the verandas, the courtyard, the kitchen and the attic, Arunmozhi asked, “Why are there no photographs of the fathers?”
I had asked my grandmother the same question when she was alive.
Her response was, “This is my house. Why should I keep their photographs?”
When grandmother went away into the house, her current consort, Kaipalli Gopalan, slammed the coconut he was dehusking on the digging bar, took off the towel he had tied around his head, wiped the sweat off his face, smiled broadly and said, “Even if she wanted to keep them, she will need a photo gallery like the Pappanavaram Palace, young one!”
She had many sambandhams. Most of her partners were Brahmins.
When Arunmozhi repeated her question once again, I replied, “I’m still searching. Once I find all of them, there is a possibility that I will compose an autobiography like Alex Hailey’s. For Hailey, the issue was his roots. I don’t have any issue with that. I am more concerned with the birds that lived in the tree for a brief while. The novel will be called Birds. What do you think of the name? Jokes aside, I have every intention to write an epic about my lineage. Eight years ago, I even announced its name – Ashokavanam. In fact, there has been a lot of discussion among the Tamizh literati about this unwritten novel! Meanwhile, I’ve finished three large novels. For some reason, Ashokavanam is yet to materialise. The matriarchs appear reluctant to talk in Tamizh. Now I have completely stopped trying to write it. Maybe one day it will come.”
Arunmozhi could not take her gaze away from the photographs. She said, “They look like men.”
I was astonished. I knew grandmother when she was alive. She died at the ripe age of ninety, when I was in college. As far as I remembered, she was extremely beautiful. Her mother, my great-grandmother, too looked just like her.
“Why do you say that? Aren’t they beautiful?”
Arunmozhi had difficulty explaining what she meant. “Of course, they are beautiful. That’s not what I meant. It’s their demeanour. It’s a man’s demeanour.”
I couldn’t comprehend what she meant. “What demeanour?”
“If you hang my portrait along with theirs, how will it look?” she asked.
A light flashed in my mind. Arunmozhi would never hold her head in the manner they did. She would never look straight into the camera the way they did.
Her gaze and her manner would be tinged with shyness, like the touch of ruby on a green mango. I didn’t know what to say.
“They are women, not pathivrathas. They don’t owe allegiance to a single husband,” I remarked generally.
I talked about these matters extensively with her. In a photograph of Kavimani Desigavinayagam Pillai, he and his nephews are all seated on chairs. On the floor, smiling with her toothless gums, wearing pambadam earrings, sits his wife. There is a family photo of UV Swaminatha Iyer in his autobiography. His father is sitting on a bench, wearing rudraksha and holy ashes, holding a holy book in his hands. Below, on the ground, sits his aged wife, worshipping her husband with folded hands, almost like Hanuman in the image of Rama’s coronation. In family photographs from Tamil Nadu, you can see long-dead women, their eyes dark with the pain of restless souls. It was this that impelled Subramania Bharathi to have a photograph taken of his wife sitting on a chair while he stood behind her. And if you look at Chellamma’s face, you can be sure that as soon as the photograph was taken she would have burst into tears.
After her marriage, when my mother shyly stepped into the house for the first time, the marriage garland still fresh around her neck, this photograph must have greeted her – the photograph of her husband’s grandmother looking at her, her dark, thick eyebrows curved upwards, unimpressed – the deathless look of scorn. If she was alive, I’d have asked Mother whether she was frightened. Her family is from Nattalam; their house is very close to the famous Shiva temple. My mother’s father belonged to the Vellalar caste. Those days, among the Vellalars, those who followed the matrilineal system used to stay at the bride’s house after their marriage. Padmakshi amma, my mother’s mother, had eight children. Soon after the eighth child was born, she was afflicted with paralysis and was confined to bed. Her husband, the Vellalar, was pretty incompetent. Her cousin Dakshayani amma, the daughter of her aunt, came from Trivandrum to look after the kids. Padmakshi amma had asked her cousin, “Elder sister, shall I die?” Her cousin answered, “You die peacefully, my little one. I am there for your children.” Padmakshi amma died and Dakshayani amma brought up eight children along with her own twelve – twenty children in all!
Nattalam is not Thiruvattar, where the river flows benignly. The land in Nattalam was elevated, the soil red. The only thing that could be cultivated there those days was cassava. Dakshayani amma brought up the kids on dried cassava and the plain white rice received from the temple. She died only after the eldest daughter got married and took over the responsibility of the family. In memory of the one who brought up ten kids per hand, the only thing that remained in that house was a huge cauldron. “Mother used to fill this up with water and lift it all alone on to the stove,” my aunt reminisced.
My mother, growing up on dried cassava, stopped going to school after the third standard and started caring for her younger brother. She taught herself Malayalam and Tamizh and devoured novels in both languages. Along with her eldest brother, she too became a communist. The poverty of the family reduced after the eldest brother began to earn. It was only then that there was enough money for my mother to be married off. Among the aristocrats, the custom was not to marry off the daughters. The men arrived home to get married to the girls. But my father, an officer in government service, insisted that he wanted to bring his wife home. He didn’t mind if the girl was born to a Vellalar father.
When my mother first stepped into her marital home holding a lighted lamp in her hand, her head bent as she was too shy to look up, her mother-in-law had exclaimed sharply, “What are you searching for on the floor? Have you lost some money or gold? Walk with your head held high!”
My mother could never do that. When my short-tempered father shouted at her, she’d stand, dry-eyed, staring at him, and however much he thrashed her, she wouldn’t take a single step back. She didn’t know how to talk to people. She sat in the dark all night long, talking to herself.
Since there was hardly any money in my mother’s family, the womenfolk in that family remained satisfied with just one husband. Around our house, there were homesteads with extensive landed property. The women in those houses had multiple liaisons, multiple sambandhams. It was quite common for two husbands to coexist in one house. The children called them Elder Father and Younger Father. I realised that there was something odd about this practice only when the Tamizh boys in school teased me about it. The grandmother at Arapurakkal had two husbands, one to pursue the cases in court and the other to take care of the farmlands.
“Is the job of the other one to hold a lamp?” Chidambaranathan had asked.
I didn’t understand what he meant. So I asked Mother. Mother said, “Chidambaranathan is a very bad boy. You should not speak with him ever again.” She made me touch water and promise her that I would never talk to him.
Excerpted with permission from Of Men, Women and Witches, B Jeyamohan, translated from the Malayalam by Sangeetha Puthiyedath, Juggernaut.
