Confessions of an Alienated Malayalee

(This is a post from my pareltank blog.I wrote a poem more than 3 decades ago which i have hesitated to post on account of the venom it has. This post explains why it is so venomous.I still haven't decided whether to post it or not)

yes. that’s me. I call myself that ’cos of my indifferent competence in my mother tongue. I think in Malayalam, but have no confidence to write in that language. I sometimes think if I could write in the language I think and feel in, I’d become the Shakespeare of Malayalam literature. Don’t laugh. this is how I console myself when I fall into one of those fits of depression at my inability express myself comprehensively – thoughts, feeling s and their nuances. The English language does not have corresponding terms to express malayalee feeling. Or, I am not competent enough in this angrezi tongue. So there is a huge gap between my sensibilities and the only language I can write in. Frustrating, isn’t it?

How did this happen? it’s a long story. I was born less than ten years after Independence. So guess I can call myself post independence generation. Those were days when people believed that future belonged to people who received education in English. I was a victim of that false notion. But, I did have Malayalam as a subject till 4th standard. But the Malayalam teacher took a dislike to me for a reason I don’t want to go into here(I have written a poem on that – so intense was my resentment towards that teacher who alienated me from myself). Unfortunately, along with me, that teacher was also promoted to the middle school. As soon as this news was confirmed, I went home and wept and wept till my mother agreed to switch my second language to French! With that, my connections with Malayalam text books, therefore literary Malayalam, were severed forever and ever.

Thus it is that my imagination was shaped completely by the angrezi language. They say if you learn a language, you tend to identify yourself wiith the culture of native speakers of that language. So my childhood imagination was filled with Jack and Jill, Polly putting the kettle on (I used to go around our kitchen looking for the kettle I saw in illustrated nursery rhyme books- found none), sixpence and pocket full of rye (thought that rye was the higher denomination of sixpence). Must say I used to be fascinated that the English could bake blackbirds in a pie and still keep them alive. Fortunately for me, I had a lot of neighbours, cousins from whom I picked up kakey, kaket, koodevidey?, Omana kuttan, govindan, ayyappandey amma, neyyappam chuttu. I sang these with full throated ease and felt I belonged. But when I sang the English rhymes, my imagination got activated and made me yearn for things I knew nothing of. Like they say, unheard melodies are sweeter. As I reached primary school, Enid Blyton was my staple food. and also all those comics – Three Stooges, Totem, Tin Tin, Classics, Richie Rich, Little Lotta - - - - . my horizons widened and without my quite knowing it, I moved away from my roots into a world I had never experienced. Along with it, an attitudinal change crept into me – a feeling of superiority over those who didn’t know the Famous Five and Captain Haddock!!

Soon, I started reading romances. Mills and Boons told me how the westerners fell in love, how hostility was an imperative prelude to love! How men had to be dark and tall ( I didn’t know then that, that dark was not our dark), that when men fell in love, they snapped at their lady loves for no reason. But i didn't know how people in love behaved in my culture! I soon got tired of Mills and Boons but Georgette Heyer remained my favourite for a long time. How she fired my imagination! her novels transported to a still more remote world - the Regency period, Victorian age - - -and I moved with wide eyed wonder among powder and patch, frills and gloves, lords and ladies and fops - --- Humour so pervaded her narration that I fell in love with the English language! My alienation from my own language was complete.

My estrangement from the imaginative world represented by Malayalam literature is the saddest thing that has happened to me. As I grew older, I moved into the world of English classics and poems. The breathtakingly beautiful paddy fields of Kerala skirted by beckoning coconut trees made me search for Wordsworthian terms to describe them. No muse works that way and the poet in me died. So did whatever creativity I had. Now I realize that one can create only in the language one thinks in, feels in - in the language that shapes one’s day to day life. I was trapped between two worlds – and was not resourceful enough to find a way out of this trap.

Today, I feel like a half baked creature. I fully realized what I lost when I got my first employment in a college in mid Travancore. my colleagues seemed to be at home with such a rich literature and culture. Jokes had to be explained to me and I didn’t find them funny. The humour was lost in the translation. Philosophical ruminations in Malayalam seemed part of the daily diet of my English department. And my colleagues felt guilty when they saw me trying to pretend I understood. Fortunately for me, my spoken Malayalam was extremely good. so I belonged as long as the conversation did not move into higher planes. But it did. too often. That is when I wrote that vitriolic poem about my Malayalam teacher who was instrumental in uprooting me even as I remained physically rooted.

Revelation

Outside the college gate

He sits

Fingers, toes and nose

Eaten.

Burnt out, though

A malady

That haunts.

Children driven away from the gates

Purification of gates infected by their touch.

'The sickening sweet smell'

of the valley in Ben-hur

The mythical ailment

That felled Paul Gauguin.

But he smiles

Outside the college gate

Young ones of now

Exchange pleasantries with him

Provide flowers

For the glass tumbler.

Hibiscus and Cosmos

Beam from glass tumbler

Half full with water.

Some parcel breakfast for him

Others lunch

Or snacks.

But my friend and colleague

Talks to him

As she talks to me.

Subtly notes his needs

Clothes, blankets

Delicacies

Notices his absence

Outside the college gate

Wonders, worries

Shares anxiety with me

Happy when he turns up

“At least, he’s not lying somewhere

Dead

Unseen, unsung, uncared ”, she says.

I judged you once

My friend.

Forgive me.

You taught me

To leave Judgement

To the extra terrestrial.

Haiti

Earth shrugs
Humans cease
His creations crumble
Those safe in the Ark
And lived to tell the Byzantine tale
Of Mohen jo- daro and Harappa
Fail.
Beat their wings in the void.
And humans are back
To bickering.
Oh God, what fools we mortals be!

The Coconut Tree

she was five
when sitting on the step
of the veranda
behind the kitchen
she bent her little head
at right angle
to see the top
of a coconut tree
and the branches
swaying in the wind
beckoning to her
to join the birds
and the crows
disappearing into it
or flying out of it
and soar into the sky
soft in the dying day
and wished she were those birds
and could fly high
and wander into the heavens
and say hello to the angels
and then return
and disappear into the coconut palm.

Now five decades later
she looks down the eleventh floor
of a high end apartment
in the capital city
at the riot of coconut trees
at her feet.
Watches the birds
playing hide and seek
among its branches
and envies the birds
and the crows.

And when she roams
in lands without coconut palms
her heart swells
at the colours of fall
at strange trees that flourish
in softer climes
and looks for birds
and crows
and feels stirrings in her heart
and mind
and her whole being
and looks for her coconut trees
in vain.

The Terror of Absence

The presence of absence
permeating the silence
turning oppressive
becoming tangible
in the aftermath

of the brief disruption
of its humdrum reign,
by invasive Presence
fun and frolic in tow.

As though it resents
the destabilising

of the peace of Limbo.

It wreaks vengeance
with the torture
of the deafening sound
of Silence.

outside the box

Inertia of thought
like death that breathes
conflict free
peaceful
uneventful

This life in death
death in life
is it worth it?

Better to have thought
and struggled to create
and suffered
and died

than flow along
without thought.

The Moment

The Moment of release
From Time

A moment in a millennium?

Released by a strain
that rings a bell
in some far-flung zone of consciousness
Or by the cool breeze
flowing gentle and silent into the balcony
brushing my cheek
in the late hours of the insomniac night
to the accompaniment of the stirring day

The Moment
Suspended in time

of release from the known and comprehended
poised in a bizarre ambiance of freedom
confronting truth measureless

A flash of recognition
like a bolt of lightening

And then it’s gone.

The aftermath of the glimpse- - -

Where is THE word?