Long before Appacha became Appacha, he was called Eesho. It was the night before Christmas when Mamma Mollykutty’s labour pangs reached a crescendo. The night carollers crooned their way through the dusty streets with their homespun drums, petromax lamps, and a rough-hewn star, mouthing film tunes, extemporised ditties, and some Christmas choruses perfunctorily wedged in between. Twice a year, the procession would make its rounds in the neighbourhood—once during Christmas and another time during Thiruvonam – with the only distinction being the replacement of the hero of the jamborees. During the latter, a fervid man would pull off a frenzied puli kali and during Christmas, it would be a mostly skinny Christmas Appooppan.
Puthenpurackel Thommi Tharakan strode up and down the veranda of the house, oblivious to the drunken rumpus created by the revellers outside, questioning if he had imperilled his 32-year-old wife by doing the deed nine months ago. She was a comely woman, and he couldn’t help himself. But comprehending that it was too late to undo what he had done, he could only pray that she was resilient enough to deliver the baby. No one gave birth at that age. His mother was fifteen when she had him, and she didn’t even realise she had birthed him. People said she simply got up and walked about after he came out, browning cashews and raisins for the payasam that was to be distributed to the neighbourhood that day.
His mother was nine when she married his father, and she was carried on her father’s shoulders for the wedding, which she imagined to be a kind of children’s play. After they got married, the newlyweds would sit and make sand cakes, digging their fingers in the dirt, and climb mango trees like all children. That was a different time. But he wasn’t sure whether time could defy age.
Both Tharakan and Mollykutty had previously been married to others, but they succumbed to complications from TB. They decided to stay widow and widower until the families arranged for them to be married once more as they thought they would bond over misfortunes of a comparable kind. But the two never spoke about their other lives. They didn’t like picturing their new spouse with someone else. They bonded as their families had anticipated. But it was over their unarticulated lives. As Tharakan paced up and down, twiddling the end of his mundu and shooing away the moths that danced dangerously around the kerosene lamp kept on the veranda, he told Philipose Achen that he would donate twenty kilograms of rice to Jerusalem Marthoma church (his parish in Niranam. There were no Marthoma churches in Jerusalem) if the baby came out fine. Forty, if both the mother and the baby were in good health. He even thought of throwing in a gold (plated) baptismal font if everything went well. Philipose Achen was satisfied with his offer and kept Tharakan company as he paced up and down. Philipose Achen always visited people in times of need, especially because they could be expected to call on God and make offers that would benefit God’s people. This time, what the Marthoma church needed was land for a cemetery.
Though the site where the Niranam church stood had been handpicked by St Thomas, and the bathing ghat where he baptised the men and women still flanked the old church, there was no place to bury the dead; they had to be taken all the way to the Thiruvalla parish in hired bullock carts. Philipose Achen believed it was not fair, as the people had the right to be buried in the land they had worshipped in for years. Moreover, the cemetery would look beautiful next to the church and the parsonage, and Philipose Achen could, from his sitting room, keep an eye on both the living and the dead.
“Maybe you could also buy that land that we have been considering for the cemetery,” he told Tharakan.
“Why are you talking about the dead when my wife is about to give birth? It is not right to talk about it now. It is a bad omen,” Tharakan said. But he knew that he would have to part with some more cash as he knew Philipose Achen would bring up the topic of the dead at a later stage. Philipose Achen didn’t believe in invisible omens. He only believed in what could be seen. Though his father had named him after their forefather, Kayamkulam Philipose Ramban, the Syriac scholar from the Malankara church who first translated the Aramaic-Syriac Peshitta Bible into Malayalam in 1811, while growing up, Philipose Achen didn’t believe in the Bible or in God. Till the day he saw God. This is the account Philipose Achen gave the people of the parish.
“I was walking home one night after visiting one of my friends who had just lost his father. It was a moonless and misty black night, and I waved my torch in the air to keep the fire going. But a gust of wind took away the fire. I knew the way home, and I kept going in the dark. Suddenly, I saw a face in front of me staring at me through the mist. It was the dead father. He was an evil man who used to beat his wife and children. So, the spirit was definitely evil. I wanted to run, but I knew one could not outrun evil spirits. So, I stood there and prayed to the God that my mother had told me about. ‘Our father who art in heaven…’ Soon, another face appeared in the mist, and it was more powerful than that of the evil spirit. The new face gobbled up the spirit in one mouthful. That face was God’s. God appeared to me as he appeared to the apostle Paul. I was blind and now I can see.”
That day, Philipose decided to become an Achen.
Excerpted with permission from The Remnants of Rebellion: A Novel, Ponnu Elizabeth Mathew, Aleph Book Company.
