trust

a story of remembering and understanding

                                                                   TRUST

      

Trust  (noun)   a" Assured  reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something  (Merriam-webster dictionary)     

                

   

I kept driving in the rain , the road winding up the hill washed every moment by the sky as if it were  a  tireless cleaning corporation established by God himself. In the music system, Don mclean was singing softly, starry starry night , an ode to Vincent van gogh. 

I loved country music . I don’t know why.  I have almost lived my entire life in the city. Many a night, I have just stared into the depths of the vast dark sky wondering if it is true that certain feelings and desires   are in the blood. Is it possible that my  love of country music is only  one aspect  of my desire or longing to live  in the hillside village that my family traced its origins from. Or was it just the reactionary inside my mind who abhorred the city life’s adrenaline like anybody else ,  who has  seized upon the fallback option of living in a beautiful mountain village that history had bestowed upon my family.  

Grandpa is in the deathbed. My dad is  away on a tour of the united states and  I doubt if he would turn up to see grandpa anyways. How long has it been? Dad and grandpa stopped talking to each other  fifteen years back and we have never visited them ever since. We even did not invite them in person  for my marriage last year. We only mailed an invitation . Ilakkiya  was crying and trying to struggle free out of  Rochi’s arms when I left home in the morning today. Rochi has some work in the office and she would come a couple of days later.  

What to talk to grandpa and grandma? What would you talk after fifteen years , when you have passed your most important part of life without them?  How would I compensate for the innocence lost when I last saw them and where would they pick up the thread that took me to fatherhood from being the little boy of the family fifteen years back. As in  most  families in india, it was  a land dispute. The details of the actual dispute is now lost in the pages of wind and time that had blown strongly and firmly after that. Only the distaste of the fight, or rather the distaste of  the knowledge of the fight remained. 

It was regarding the land that was  to  have come to dad but  which had gone to my little aunt because grandpa changed his mind in the last moment. I think we were in financial crisis at that point of time. The land would have helped. As if adding fuel to the fire, this little dispute had escalated into a war of words, with both dad and grandpa saying some forgettable words  that shouldn’t have been uttered between a  son and father. That was that. 

Sometimes certain wounds last longer than necessary and after that , they refuse to heal. With a sigh, I kept driving. The signboard read , Adalur , 8 km ahead. 

 

******************** 

Grandma was waiting outside the little house by the road.  Two of my aunts were with her.The eldest aunt  and the little aunt . Grandpa was sleeping and his face showed a lot of pain. I don’t know if he was dreaming . He could have been. It had began to darken and we lit a fire in the backyard around which we sat. Nobody wanted to talk about the past . They asked me about Ilakkiya and  they broke into a big laughter when I told them about her little exploits. 

Our village was at a relatively good height, probably 6000 feet high and near kodaikanal so it got colder and colder with darkness. Now, grandma was blowing into the fire with that long pipe of hers that I still remember from my childhood. I wonder if it was the same one as twenty years back.  But I did not  ask. Once when I was in primary school , I was left with grandma by my parents for some ten days because my vacation had started and I must have been a troublesome kid  to manage then  with both the parents working. Those days, grandma used to tell me of our ancestor who patrolled   the village  in a white horse protecting us and the farmlands  against the thieves and thugs who roamed the night along with leopards , wolves and bisons. It was a village myth obviously.  

I remembered that and smiled to myself.  She asked me what I was thinking.  

 “ I was thinking about kottai thatha”, I told her. 

She smiled back and I realised her teeth were still intact , at this age too. 

“ How is grandpa ? do you think he will pull through?” 

“I don’t know. I have never doubted him. Not when I was thirteen when he married me and not now, when I am eighty” 

I don’t know if my eyes  betrayed any incredulity. But she did not seem to pay attention as her eyes fixed at some point in the night sky and it was as if she was gazing into the past through the transcendental orb that the sky had become.  

“ your grandpa was twenty when he started business. Everybody warned him. Those days , it was not an easy thing to do. You had to collect the oranges in baskets and then carry them on a convoy  of mules to the plains to make the daily sale. You have to be on horseback the entire day and you know the roads then, actually, there were no roads. Only the mountain trail. 

We have come so far because he knew what he was doing. Once , he came down with a fever and nobody knew what it was. The doctors turned us down. 

Even your aunt, was not born at that time. I was only eighteen.  I did not know what to do. The entire day, I kept crying.” 

At this, her eyes became a cloud of tears hiding her cataracted lens as she looked down and pulled at the saree pallu covering her arms as she took in deep breaths as if  in a fit of emotion. Was it the past or the inevitability of grandpa’s death that she did not want to talk about? 

It was then that I saw the   tattoo  on her exposed right arm. 

I went and sat near her to take a closer look at it. It was a green tattoo , of some complicated design. There were five chambers inside a box and on the left hand, parallel to the other tattoo was a green scorpion. 

I looked at her, perplexed.  

Before she could explain, the rain intruded. We all rushed indoors and into the kitchen where there was a permanent hearth during the winters. 

The elder aunt went to make coffee and I sat with grandma. The other aunt went to check on grandpa who was still sleeping in the front room. 

“ your dad was hasty. Your grandpa loved him so much but being as he is, a rough and tough man , he spoke the wrong words. Your dad was equal to him in that. Both fools!!, “ she said, suddenly steering towards the conversation everyone wanted to avoid. 

   

“ What would one do if a daughter comes with tears in her eyes , blackmailed and tortured by a drunkard husband?”  she asked quickly, looking into my eyes. 

“ You could have told my dad about that. He himself would have given up the land” 

“ Yes. We could have. But we didn’t..” she sighed.  

“ We all make mistakes. How can a man be that spotless. There is always a bit of stain on your shirt. “ , she replied, quoting a village adage I haven’t heard before .  

“At that time, he thought he could hide the problems in your aunt’s family from the others . But it backfired “. 

I nodded.  

“ All you need in relationships  is  a little trust. Your dad could have trusted your grandpa  that he would not do something without a reason. Anyway, what is the point of talking about  it now? ”, she sighed again like a cave in the mountain that  let the breeze pass through .She seemed to accept the fact of time  suddenly.  

                                 Outside, the rain had stopped. We were sipping hot coffee. As if suddenly remembering it again, ( though it was on my mind all the time ) I asked her again about the tattoo. 

Waking up from a confusing past, she too looked at the tattoo. , “ oh! Ithuva ? “  

“ when your grandpa was sick and down with fever, the doctors had turned him down saying there is no treatment for it. I don’t know what it was exactly. We had brought him back to home.  Then, there was a country physician, actually an old man who had good knowledge of herbals and such things, he was only looking after your grandpa.  I was so distressed but he used to calm me down saying it was some insect bite and the fever was because of that. You know,  he said that it was something peculiar to the hillside people. “ 

“ Of course , how could city bred doctors understand the diseases of mountain people?” ,   my aunt intruded, sitting down with her  own cup of coffee. 

“Since  I was very scared, he told me  he had a good remedy. He said  your grandpa will get up soon but to prove that he said he  will make a tattoo on my  arms. An Anjarai petti  ( a kind of spice box with five chambers ) and a scorpion.  

The scorpion will guard the Anjarai petti  and keep the spices and  the prosperity in your family over flowing. And as long as both of them do not fade, there will be no threat to your husband’s life. 

To be doubly sure that it didn’t fade, he asked me to make him  some rice and chicken korma  .   

If my heart is filled with your hospitality , my trade will ensure that the tattoo sticks. 

The next morning, your grandpa woke up,  fully fit to go  to the orange market ,“ my grandma looked at me with eyes that were very sure.   “ I know your grandpa, he will never leave me alone,”  She said.  

 I looked at the tattoo again.  It was hard to not believe it. The spice box was overflowing and the scorpion was fresh as the day it was inscribed.  

    

GLOSSARY 

Kottai thatha " a village myth meaning the ‘fortress grandpa’. 

 Adalur- a hillside village in tamilnadu, in the palani hills , twenty kms from kodaikanal. 

Reviews

[vivekanand]

it is a rendering based on my own native place..though most of the events are fiction... the scorpion and the spice box are , however as fresh as the day they were inscribed on my grandma's arm