Letter from our ex-President
Letter from our ex-Prime Minister
Letter from our ex-Ambassador & ex-Governor(Also ex-Chief Minister)
Letter from ex-Chief of the Army Staff
Letter from Shrimati Maneka Gandhi
Paper Cuttings
K N Pillai
Ex- marketing consultant, now in his late sixties. Was in the government service for a few years before his joining the private sector. Though only for a short period, once a full time teacher who continued to teach management & school/college English texts to students during his leisure time wherever he lived.
THE FISHMONGER AND THE FELINE
I
The bicycle-fishmonger pedals
every morn to the teashop
just close to our house-gate-east
on his enroute to Thakazhi
(who knows to which other places?).
Stoked by a frisson of hunger
every dawn, his bicycle is escorted
by a fourlegged denizen 8
right from our west front-culvert
to the teashop where the fishmonger halts
his two wheeler, ramshackle and rickety. 11
II
The tomcat stray, coalblack, scraggy
and famished but broadeared and
gimlet eyed (but soulful), every dawn hopefully
lies in wait among the hedges and thickets
of grass, mushrooming on our frontroad’s 16
outer periphery. Hungering and yearning
for the sight and sound of some fishmonger’s
speeding bicycle and its screeching to a halt
at the teashop’s front. 20
III
The fishmonger wizened in his sunset years,
lanky, barrel chested,waspwaisted, gaunt and haggard,
a scarecrow in tattered, grimy and matted ‘dhothi’,
bedraggled and grubby and gingy shirt, goaty beard
(looking wispy and straggly), mutton-chop whiskers
tinged with grey, courting on to his chapped cheeks,
capacious forehead, bugeyed but puffed up,
grizzled eyebrows dangling above the eyes, 28
buck teeth protruded, face pock-marked and
wrinkled, dour and grumpy, a mop of sandy
and flaxen hair, frizzy and tousled but
spiky and silver leonine, secured by a reddish band
and wrapped with an yellow towel. A megawatt
but saturnine and insouciant smile, spindly legs,
limping in his bone’s frame. He opens his large box
fixed to the rear seat of his bicycle, unfolds 36
his towel, hangs it loose upon his one shoulder.
Then starts his trade, haggling of his fish.
His face then wreaths in a puff
of some of his favourite beedi’s smoke.40
IV
The cat widly thumps its pencil-thin tail,
circles feverishly around the fishmonger’s legs.
In a tissy, it pathetically looks upon him,
frenetically mews and mews and whines and
whines and yowls and yowls at the fishmonger
who on occasions throws down one or two whits
of fishes from his box (which it ravenously
gorges and gobbles down in a trice). But 48
sometimes, livid, in his husky voice, he yells
and screams at the poor creature and in fury
kicks it away. When it writhes and groans
and moans and in a jiffy,flees from there for its life. 52
V
Who knows, by next day’s morn
or a few days hence, both the fishmonger
and the cat won’t end up mangled under the sod,
rolled over by some speeding vehicles (a common
occurence nowadays). When a few kith and kin
of the fishmonger somewhere might lament for him.
But who will mourn for a dead stray feline.
What’s there to script and scrawl about it? 60
When human beings themselves get forgotten toto even by
their own siblings and offsprings soon after their
obsequies end or for a few years more remembered during
their annual rituals when their names and birthday-stars
are chanted amidst hymns and bells in the temples or
in their homes or at the beaches of rivers during holy festivals.
Or in the churches during consecrations and supplications and
genuflexions or ablations.Nevertheless, a few forebears are 68
exceptions (lucky?). They continue to outlive their contemporaries
dead by appearing themselves inside many an obituary column
of print-media in their old pose even a quarter or half a century*
or more after their deaths. How long these great grand progenitors
now deluged in their prelapsarian equipoise, will continue
to be remembered through these ‘in-memoriam’-columns of newspapers,
inserted by their descendants still endeared to them and now alive
in this earth. Just to treasure, cherish and nourish and to perpetuate 76
the reminiscences of their ancestors and to celebrate
the ephemeral and the eternal and the immanent and
the intranscendent bond and bondage and its mystique.
I have waffled only bits of ordure and bilge! 80
August 12 – December 15, 2008
REFERENCES
Line 71 * A few obituaries referred to, 25 and 50 years after deaths,
inserted by the relatives of the deceased.
Hindu-2003 oct 11, 2007 march 22, Nov 8
New India Express-2006 Apr 2
Mathrubhumi-2006 Feb 26, Apr 23, May 28
Malayalamanorama-2003 Mar 20, 2005 Aug 21, Dec 25, 2006 Jan 14,25,30, Feb 19,22,23,Mar1,10,17,30, Apr 9,10,16,22,23,27,28, May 1,4,10,15,16,20, Aug 19,sep 13,15,Oct 2,3,23,25,27,29,Nov 18,21,24,27,28,Dec 3,7,12,19,20,24,25,28,29,31,2007 Jan 1,2,3,4,7,16,Feb 7,14,16,18,23, Mar 1,11,13,20,27,Apr 3,14,15,22,27,29, May 10,12,15,16,21 Jun 4,5,7,8,10,13,Aug 10,12,14,July 8,9,22, Sep 12,Oct 16,20,Nov 23,Dec 1,9, 2008 Feb 24,Mar 24,31,May 11,28,Jun 1,7,8,10,24,30.
The nomadic feline
I
It now and then hares
in to our veranda.
Eats and licks up from a dish
which I have laid aside for it.
Afterwards it meditates as if in a trance.
Then climbs atop our chair’s cushion
to doze off for a while snug and nestled.
Is it the same Cheshire cat 8
on its perennial roaming?
A Mona Lisa smile flashed.
And uttering Delphic pronouncements.
Or a reborn Van Dyck cat
of the St. Peter’s museum?
(Where ‘Declaration of the museum cats’ rights’ was drafted)
Or just another cat nomadic.
Certainly, not a diamond eyed one
like that of Thai King Ramon V’s. 17
II
Our house is not in its itinerary
for its night halt and sleep.
It skulks out in to the Stygian dark.
Who knows to where, may be to pursue its adventures amorous.
At times it suddenly scoots from our premises.
To resurface only after a few days.
(A puzzle uncanny that is still ticking over).
I would always then gawk at our gate. 25
Rake around and crane my neck.
For the sight of any feline shadow
creeping through its bars.
Quite fetishistic and whacky!? 29
III
On occasions bruices and gashes
and sores fester through its face.
And head. (perhaps bitten or mauled
by others of its own ilk.
Or lashed at by some unkind bipeds
here and there). But my assortments
of antidotes (all date expired)
do heal the quadruped in speed.37
How long the bonhomie
between this curmudgeon frail
and the animal stray could last?
(Any time one or both of them
could end up rotting under the sod).
Why can’t we humans cotton up
to these hapless and dumb creatures as our own co-inhabitants
and drip a wee bit of compassion up on them.45
I have gone bonkers and unctuous!
REFERENCES
1. Hindu 13-11-1993 (lines 10 & 11)
2. Hindu 3-1-2001 (lines 12 & 13)
3. Indian Express – 29-10-1998 (lines 16 & 17) 4.Hindu young world 6-4-2002 P-2(line 
May-June 6, 2004
A feline-muse I
I
As in a trance catatonic
early dawn yesterday froze.
Our house roof echoed with
squalls and yowls and bawls. (4)
Mews and pules and wails and
squeals and groans and moans and whimpers
filled the air till our pussy squirmed
and bumbled and hobbled down (8)
into my palms’ fold
an hour or two later.
A black Sunday morn weird
and baneful loomed large. (12)
When the distraught animal’s growls
and howls slowly ebbed away.
II
What has striken the poor tom?
Scrawny but stockily built.
Perked up ears, agile . (18)
Deep chested and trim.
Fluffy and bushy tailed.
Sparkling and blazing eyed.
Calm and poised, cuddly featured. (22)
Jet black, so named Blakky.
(My canine buddy of ninetees
also monikered so).
Perhaps a vet in time
could have eased its death throes.
Hadn’t the day been ill-fated
to be a holiday-Sunday. (28)
III
Could it have been bitten
by a reptile or by some other being?
Or by another quadruped
of its own ilk (perhaps rabid!). (32)
Or someone from our own species,
a biped, lashed it black and blue.
Or poisoned it with a bait decoyed. (36)
Or some kind of pleurisy
or a septicemia virulent
knocked it down?
Or is it my pseudo-vet therapy
which I then had dabbled and peddled with (40)
wrought fatal end
to the poor kitty this time? (42)
IV
Albeit on occasions few
in the past my anodynes
and antibiotics have indeed healed
a few canines and felines. (46)
Here and there in the streets open.
Also in and around our home too.
For a solace, shouldn’t I now rue,
atone and redeem for the folly (50)
I might have then committed
unwittingly upon the poor dumb creature.
By at least solemnising a funeral
befitting. With lamps lighted and incenses burnt. (54)
And flowers showered upon
the little moggy’s inert body. (56)
And by saluting the animal
at its last bourne.
When bidding it adieu
to the nether world. (60)
Obsequies and rituals
are sometimes consecrated
for the pets by their masters
bereaved. Both in our country and abroad. (64)
(certainly not many!). Why not
perform it for our mongrel cat too.
(Bizarre and crazy !). Whose ancestors centuries
hundreds ago were deified in Egypt. (68)
where they were honoured too.
Posthumously with ritual burials. (70)
REFERENCES
1. Times of India 21 April 1995, Hindu Supple. Page I, 22 Sept. 1995, N.I.E. (Youth Exp.) 30 June 2000.(64)
2. Encyclopedia Americana International Volume 5, Page 808 Edition 1927, Hindu Supple. P-IV, 12 Aug. 1995, Hindu 11 July 2005 P-11.
28.11.2005 ( lines 67 to 70)
The feline muse II
I
Only to feed them twice
or thrice or to clean
their room or to switch
on or off the light
in it or to release
them for an hour or so, (8)
to gambol and play
outside on the backyard.
Their room’s only door
is opened when in unison
they jump down from their
gunny-sac’s top and dash towards
the human in hare’s speed
and perhaps imbued with some primeval hope. (14)
II
The kittens, in all, three,
orphaned just in a month.
One , a fascimile of its mother,
jet black, short tailed, pencil-thin,
the other two striped, biege,
long necked, broad chested, bulging-
eyed, cuddly, may be dittos of their sire
unknown. The mother disappeared to somewhere(22)
that day morn a month ago.
After she suckled them last.
Perhaps wishing, the householder
will not throw her litters out
and will care them with compassion
as he sometimes (foolishly) does to her species. (28)
III
Has she lost her way?
or was she poisoned or thrashed
mortally by some ailurophobes or
maniac-sadists or she herself willed and abandoned
this human’s abode, succumbing
to her instinct innate, to roam
born-free and to starve or scavenge
through the trashes here and there. (36)
Often chased by her two legged
co-inhabitants and run over by
some vehicle and turned
in to heaps of bones and pulp of flesh
and blood, and then to get pecked at
and eaten by crows and vultures. (42)
IV
The little pussies too when grown up
will replicate their mother’s life cycle?
A nature’s marvel. Our feline co-inhibitants
now domestic, in some of our homes atleast
might soon turn in to an endangered species
in this southern most state of ours.
(if not in other parts of our great land-Bharath)
Like dinosaurs that succumbed to their fate (50)
much before years five and sixty millions
slipped in to the yores. Like tortoises
too now struggling amidst their death pangs
for years two hundred millions.
How many more centuries, will pass
before our moggies too will no more be (56)
seen gamboling in any of our households
and any where in our state,Kerala. (58)
Perhaps only a few more, certainly not many!.
Unless our present and future generations
in this state turn in to a more kind hearted populace
sympathetic towards our fellow-non human denizens.
What could be the generation-like in future?
Perhaps a more hostile lot? Who could augur? (64)
Except a runic legerdemain-figure?
15th Jan to 2nd Feby 2007 .
The Feline Muse III
The summer heat this year
has now almost withered
the four ‘Thulasi’ stems
which I had ritually planted
in our courtyard – front west_.
An year and a half ago, the first one.
The other three, just before months two.
These were intended to burgeon 8
at the funeral – sites of our four kittens.
The rationalists frown upon these rites
as damn superstitions, retrogressive and crass nutty.
(Obsequies for the humans too). What’s there to rue
about these ‘Thulasi’ plants now already wilted out.
And about those four ‘petty’ four legged creatures too.
Now already dead and decayed! 16
When we too ourselves any day
will forsake all our kith and kin.
And be wised up to our last bourne.
Sans any lien or feel.
28 March – 28 April 2007
A feline-epitaph
I
If scribbled at all
by someone, my epitaph
will echo like this.
“In a jiffy it’s all over,
my human companions.
My earthly sojourn too short.
Only one and a half year’s.
But many a proverb 8
coined by you-humans
in both your vernacular
and in other languages
often contains pithy words
about us, the felines.
In one such aphorism
you have bestowed
upon us nine lives. 16
Does it imply
we get procreated in to
and do exist in this earth
for centuries hundreds and hundreds.
To perennially suffer
a hellish life here in this planet.
Through ages and ages.
To end up always 24
in pathetic and violent deaths.
Or else do you connote
some other meaning too
-mystical- for your maxim.
About us. That in our
one life we boldly face.
And suffer nine lives’ miseries.
But in stoic endurance. 32
II
In this great land of yours
our species are not loved
and cared for as much as
our brotheren – quadrupeds.
The canines. Unlike in the west.
In ancient Persia and China
we too were favoured animals.
We were deified in Egypt 40
and were even honoured
posthumously with ritual buruials.
In many countries abroad.
We are showered
with affection and compassion.
And are praised and respected.
And even are officially honoured.
For our being endowed with 48
a sixth sense
which has (had) enabled (is still enabling) us
on many an occasion
to correctly forewarn
various calamities and catastrophies
and disasters later expected to happen
in many a corner of the world.
( In Great Britain during World War II) 56
III
Some governments abroad
benevolent and animal loving
have protected our lives
and those of other creatures
by enacting exemplary legislation
and by meting out
deterrent punishments
to the perpetrators of cruelty upon us. 64
IV
Around Rome’s ‘Protestant Cemetry’
and ‘Lorgo Argentina’.
The burial and death spots
Of Poet John Keats and Roman emperor
Julius Caesar and in innumerable cities of Italy
The Roman law favours
and statutorily protects our lives.
We cann’t be displaced or evicted by any one 72
from any of our hundreds and hundreds
of colonies located all over Rome.
V
(75 to 92)
In your great motherland also
in recent times our species too
have started winning the hearts
of many an animal lover.
We are characters in many a fiction
and play and poem and in what not. 80
In all literatures of many languages.
Many authors and great statesmen
are ailurophiles.
Sir Walter Scot, Byron, Montaigne, Samuel Johnson,
T.S.Eliot,Henry James,Carlyle,Mathew Arnold,Petrarch,
Victor Hugo,Balzac,Mark Twain,O.V.Vijayan,
T.Padmanabhan,Theodore Roosvelt,Abraham Lincoln,
Maneka Gandhi and many many more. 88
Cat-haters and ailurophobics too exist.
Goldsmith,Boswell and so on.
We don’t know how Napolean Bonaparte’s name
is mentioned under the latter category.
VI
A decade ago one among you, masters
a British film director Duncan Gibbins
got burnt and died
while trying to rescue his pet, 96
a family-member of our species.
From Southern California-Maliban fires.
Herein, I pay homage to him.
VII
Till recent times, it was believed
that our species became domesticated
much later than our canine family.
But new archeological evidences
from Cyprus indicate otherwise. 104
We too had become mankind’s friend
even from much earlier times.
Peeling off ten thousand years or so.
VIII
I hope our ‘purring’ sound
would soon turn in to a medical tool
in the treatment of Osteoporosis.
As the result of various scientific research studies
on the topic so far indicates. 112
If our hopes are fructified
we would turn into benefactors
for the mankind who will perhaps
then cease their perpetration
or cruelty upon us.
IX
I wish the mankind
all joy and peace in this earth.
If at all I happen to be reborn 120
let it be as a human.
Who should then work
for the welfare of the dumb creatures.
But in human’s guise
who can predict what
I will be like?
REFERENCES
1. Femina 8th Jany. 1995, Hindu young world 6-4-2002 p-2
N. Indian Exp. – 24th Oct. 2004 Supply P-27
2. Lines 38, 39 Hindu 6-10-2001
3. Lines 40, 42 The Encyclo. Americana 1927 Edition Vol. 5 P-808.
Hindu supply, 12-8-1995 page IV
Hindu 11 July 2005 page 11
4. Lines 43 – 45 Malayalamanorama 7-10-1996 p.14
Hindu supply Young world 2 Sept.1995.
5. Some philanthropists have donated their huge wealth for their cats. Times of India 29 Dec.
1993, Hindu 30-12-1993, Mathrubhumi 18-6-1995, Mal. Manorama 26th May 1996, Hindu
7th May 2003 P-9 (Lines 44-45)
6. Lines 46 – 56 N. India Exp. Page 15, 31st July 2002.
‘Rasthriya Sahara’ Lucknow Sept. 1993 P-169 to 171 M.M. Sun. supple- 21 Nov. 1993.
7. Lines 57 – 64 Hindu 9 Aug. 1998, I.E. 3 Sept. 1999
Hindu 18 May, 2002 P-14 N.I.E 30 Aug. 2002 P-12
Hindu Supple-Young world 6 May 2005 P-3
Line 60 Sun. Times 15 Sept. 1996 P-11, Times of India 21 Sept. 1996
P.13, I.E. 21 Dec. 1995 P-10, Hindu/Madhyamam 31May 2002,
New India Ex.19 Janu. 2003 P-10, Hindu 20 Feb. 2003.
8. Line 65 – 74 Times of India 24 Jan. 1995, P-13
9. Indian Communicator 27 Aug. 1995, Hindu 3 Jan. 2001
Hindu 6 May 2005.
10. Lines 75-92 Illustrated Weekly of India Sept. 11-17, 1993, Sunday 29 Aug. – Sept. 4,
1993 P-78, 79, Sunday Times 19 Sept. 1993, Mal.M. 28 Dec. 1993 P-7,
Times of India 11 Jan. 1994 P-5, Indian Exp. 27 March, 1994 P-10
Sunday observer 28 May-June 1995 P-1, Sunday Times 12 June, 1995,
Sunday observer 20-26 Aug. 1995, Hindu Supple- 2 Sept.1995,
Mathrubhumi 7 Sept. 2003 P-2, Hindu Supple. Sunday 22 Feb. 2004 P-4
Hindu 25 May, 2005 P-2, Mal.M, 19 Oct. 2005, Mal.M. “SREE”
27 Nov. 2005 P-8 to 11, Encyclopedia Americana P-808
Mal.M.21 Nov. 1993, Hindu Supple. 6 Oct. 2001.
Line 86 O.V.Vijayan -Mal.M 21 Nov. 1993 Supple
88 Maneka Gandhi – Illu. Weekly of India 5 June 1988 P-3
‘The Independent’ 14 Dec. 1993 P-3, T.I. 11 Jan. 1994 P-5,
Hindu 25 Aug. 2002, P-16, N.I.E. 27 Oct. 2002 P-23, N.I.E. 10 Nov.2002,
N.I.E. 8 Dec. 2002, P- 23, Sunday N.I.E. 19 Jan. 2003, P-23, 16 Feb.2003,
22 June 2003, 6 July 2003, 13 June 2004, 28 Sept. 2003 P-23,
14 Dec. 2003 P-23, 29 Feb.2004, 18 April 2004, Mathrubhumi 21 Sept.2003.
And hundreds more articles in many publications.
11. Lines 93-99 M.M.4 Nov. 1993, Hindu 5 Nov. 1993, “The Metropolis” on Saturday Bombay,
Nov. 6-7 Week End 1993, Mathrubhumi 12 Nov. 1993.
12. Lines 100-107 Hindu 9 April 2004 P-23, Sunday Express 25 April 2004,
Hindu 11 Jul.2005,-P-11
13. Lines 108-112 N.I.E. 27 Oct. 2002
28th Nov,2005-18th March,2006.
The Spider
I
It appeared
To be a gaffe.
A tithe of a spoof.
Warped and weird.
Or a passel of gimmics
to be blinkered off.
With the collage of a laugh.
Like a garble of comics
On any Sunday daily’s page. 9
II
You’re an architect of wit
and grit
but lick no wage
from none.
You spin your mesh
out of your own flesh.
All over your ken. 16
And through the interiors of our houses.
To ambush and ensnare your quarry
who straggle and flurry
their way in to the gauzes
of your woof
and web.
To be peptonised with your grub
and savoured like a caviare-loaf. 24
III
A weebit of us
endorse your net.
As a Nature’s pamphlet
decoded not yet by science.
Which nonetheless will be done.
Any time not afar.
Certainly without a bar. 32
Through spectrometers’ and photometers’ yawn.
By a few now burning the midnight oil
and haring for their victory leap.
Or legging it for a lauereateship.
Only they could stake on this quiz sans any toil.
- How could your gossamer
leaner than a hair
be embryoed with a hardware
that will dimmer 40
by five times sequel
the power of a filament.
Of steel. In bend
and gauge equal.
Which will elongate too self.
Like an eel. By a percent
of thirty with no dent.
It can block safe
but dead. An aircraft
Boeing 747 in this track.-
Who will back
all this sham in this draft? 52
IV
‘Black Widows’ one of your female species
(we confer upon them this title.
A moniker. As they throttle
their mates cruelly and tear them in to pieces.
Before gulleting them in. After their moment
of enjoyment conjugal). Lethal by instinct natal
their bites are fatal.
As had befallen to a Kazhakasthan-lady in time recent.60
V
You frequently invade
our dwelling damp and rickety.
By a kamikaze-jump in to our settee
and then scuttle athwart as in a raid.
Before lurking untraceable
away from my looks.
When I doze upon the books
lying scattered on the table 68
stumped in my tuition room’s midline
where swarms of mosquitoes
gallop and boom in tows.
And to where no learner has paced in
for long. Occasionally I do sweep
you arthropods away from my path.
To escape from spouse’ wrath.
Shouldn’t I now puff deep 76
into my mind’s hearth
at least a whiff of wonder
as to how you creatures spooky and odious yonder
could baffle even the masters of genes and genomes in mirth. 80
VI
Centuries many ago
shoals of octane-charged waves
squirted. From one of your progenitors’ caves.
Into an exiled Robert I Bruce’s ego.
Which enthused him to fight.
And win over Edward II, the English king.
Victor of Bannockburn. Historians link
him to the Stuart Rule. Though he never basked in the light.88
VII
For quoting in the role
of adages you are sought.
More often than not
in times of man’s downfall.
And in his resurrection and resuscitation
even during this age unstable.
Albeit a rump and vestige of a fable
the humans feel no sensitisation 96
towards you. In their eyes
you are only another pest.
To be zapped at with a jest.
And to be hewn off like flies.
Damnmed but not bid yet
from this earth your farewell.
(Indedd! A Nature’s marvel!)
Unlike dinosaurs that already succumbed to their fate 104
much before years five and sixty millions
sank in to the oblivion.
But you are luckier. As also are tortoises. Which in vain
are struggling but in nonchalance.
For years two hundred million. How long more they will.?
Like you?. Who can augur
all these?. Except a runic legerdemain’s figure.
You continue to maneuver with skill. 112
All your feats and gymnastics.
Like an acrobat ubiquitous.
But have you ceased blipping at the cerebral meatus.
Of the hobbits, the fatalists, the pessimists, the iglooed and the jeremiahs. Or you’re
now spurring only the mystics?
November 2001
REFERENCES
Lines 1 to 52 Hindu 5-3-1995 Supple XII
II Manorama daily 9.9.1996
III Hindu Sunday supplement 18.03.2001
IV Hindu Sunday Supplement 7.6.2001 B.S -5
V. N. I. Express 2-6-2002 P-11
VI. Sunday Exp 6-4-2003 P-16
VII. Hindu 11 Sept 2003 Page 16
VIII. Sunday Exp. 21.2.2005
IX. Hindu 11.8.2005
X. Hindu 18.6.2009 P- 16
XI N I Express 23/01/2002 page 11
Lines 53 to 60
Hindu 5.3.1995
Hindu 25.8.2001 Supple scan P 2
The ‘Formiciday’ and the prelapsarian equipoise.
I
Upon all nooks and corners a swarm of them descend in lot.
Their manoeuvre could be across my cat-food saucer left off on the floor.
Or through the grains of sugar and victuals spilt over.
Inside the kitchen and the cupboards. And where not!
Bulimic gourmets (gluttons?) of sweets, they gallop in haste.
And savour the manna. Then carve and cart a mite of it through our house-pillars
and rafters. In to the cracks and chinks dented athwart our corridors and cellars.
Rickety and musty. And bunkered with many a mound of ant-nest. 8
II
A whale of these in legions are dumped in to our courtyard’s bay.
Oodles of times under the hose-pipes’ squirt and torrent.
Insecticide-marinated, the formicaries are broomed, off and on. Then at times I do lament.
Hazily like a doddering cretin. When their colonies get wiped away.
In a trice. Nonetheless they reemerge everywhere out of the blue.
(Resurrected mystically and uncannily?). In hordes upon our windows and ceilings.
On occasions, they double up too. As carnivores of living beings.
Who rot sequestered here and there, mouldy and desiccated. In prelapsarian equipoise and whitish hue.16
30th December 2003
The titubant mutons and His synonym.
I
Father, when you returned from the pestilential war
after a three and a half year ratcheting Nippon’s incarceration
you ablated my mother-blent school maiden name
and appetently transplanted in to its cannelured hollow
a patronymic simulacrum.
By such an act
perhaps, who knows, you consecrated
and homaged some old vow of yours
and venerated the memory of your late father,
the then Trivandrum Native High School-English teacher 10
who used to disseminate Vicar of Wakefield
and Shepard’s parsing and syntaxes
to generations of young Trivandrumites.
A few among them, if alive today
must be nonagenarians or still older.
And might still be remembering
his sobriquet of ‘Vikkan Narayana Pillai Saar’
and about his jumbo-palmleafed
and long-legged
and unfoldable umbrella 20
which he ubiquitously spread over him
while he perambulated from Manakkad
to Sri Padmanabha Swamy Temple
to perform his quotidian morning worship.
II
Grandfather, today, I do not have
in my frazzled beehive-like memory cells
even a microzillionth tone of reminiscence
about your vignette.
Albeit, I might have glimpsed at you
from a distance, 30
perhaps, as a puling and suckling and wee-weeing
and diapered and toroidal bone and flesh,
then wriggling through
and wetting my mother’s aproned lap.
But mother has long ago transfused
into my neurons
your little silhouettes and postils
and crayoned them under diacritic rubrics.
That you were a taskmaster
to the recalcitrant pupils 40
who were shepherded in to your house
by their parents
to bear the brunt of your
excoriating spanks and weltings
and ramrodding up on the wooden benches.
All which, they endured
groaning and grinning.
But much after
they cut their wisdom teeth
and later when years moulted cryptic 50
and catacombed in to decades,
some of them moored in to polysemy of noetic
and corporeal cornucopia.
Many spoored to the elementary axioms and equipose
of their souls’ mathematics and supererogation
and some transmuted in their alchemy
the grotesque in to the sublime.
Craquelures fissured in to
and plastered across the flamboyant baroques
and the arcane chiaroscuros 60
which many had arduously created
on their lives’ microcosmic canvass
and magical figleaves.
Some groped in the dark for their roots and radices.
Many tilted at windmills.
A small number walked the plank too.
A few also spooked
and detritioned in to scarecrows
when butterflies pupated in to caterpillars
and frogs hunted down the colubrines. 70
Their golden dawns manque
shrouded and catafalqued
and never crimsoned in to
orange cream sunsets.
Patina of age wrought crescent and hoary
and waxed meredian
through their plaza-like and alopecoid
but furrowed temporal fosse.
Their once stubbled and pubescent faces
sheened no more gleaming and radiant 80
but were tanned and callused.
Some sported luxuriant but grizzled Vandyke and goaty beards
and tautened-handlebar and harpoon-like
and drooping walrus moustaches.
A wee bit of them strutted hirsute and unkempt
and sprouted amusing Piccadilly and Dundreary whiskers.
The timbre of their soprano voices had androgened in to
raucous and rattled and gravelly strained.
Once in a way
during their yearly sabbaticals and sojourns 90
they used to drop in to your abode
and resmouldered the embers
of their old unrusted bond with you
when they also merrily raconteured
about the lashes and swishes
they had once suffered from your thongs.
III
Like a puritan – exorcist grammarian
wielding his lituss
and pattering glibberish from abracadabra
and congealed himself 100
on a cowdung-smeared floor
to conjure up
and defang and expurgate
all native patois-ghosts and poltergeists
bogyed in and haunting
the then king’s English jotted down
in a paraphrased passage of a tenth class student,
hadn’t you ruthlessly curfewed
an immaculate and vestal peridrome
and decreed a taboo 110
on leather strapped footwears
in and around the corridors
of your meditation room.
Inside it, one day, mother saw you
procumbent and discalced.
And sandal paste daubed
on your temple and forehead and forearms.
Hymns and verses recited from Holy Puranams
echoed in and out.
Camphor and other incenses 120
were burnt in the thurible.
Sambrani sticks holed up inside the wall-cracks
were lighted.
The fragrance whiffed redolent across the courtyard.
And you paroxysmally loured upon
and scowled minaciously at my mother,
then a greenhorn bride at your house,
for her scurrying athwart your sanctum-periphery
and innocently blinkering at one of you canons.
Mother told, she squealed and petrified then and there 130
and never violated your codes again.
IV
Grandfather, haven’t you atavistically perfused
your agnate and vestigial titubant mutons
to your this grandson palingenetically and gametically
which you and your great-grand male progenitors
in the stemmata
might have been perpetuating fortuitously
through a myriad of procreations
much before DNA and its algorithms
of Watson and Crick or Mendel had seen the light. 140
V
Father, you always asperged paens of hosanna
in praise of God’s omnipotence
through the pulpit of your letters to my mother.
And perhaps, you unstitched my mother-spun name
from the drapery of my life
for, it might have boggled you
as too mundane.
(But isn’t it still more sonorous and euphonic to me
than the one embossed by you?
And don’t in my sombre moments now and then 150
I still feign, puerile, upon its extirpation.
Although more than half a century has now rolled up,
since then unweaned
and playing the taws.)
And you remantled me
with one of His omni-chanted syllables.
By this solemn act, had you intended
to invoke on your callow-infant son
the whole gamut of His benediction?
(But which, ironically, He never even puffed on me.) 160
Like grandfather had named
you and your brothers
as Krishnan, Govindan and Parameswaran.
(But I am sure
the pantheon didn’t grace
all the three of you alike.
Would I have turned in to another
mannequin different if I had continued
to be carapaced with
my first mother-blent name only. 170
Who knows, some runic-legerdemain could now augur about it!)
VI
Or was it that
you were determined to diphthongize His name
before you gasped in to your finale-apnoea,
the solemnisation of which, you might have believed,
would amortize you to your ‘mokshaw’.
And also to simultaneously alert your son to you.
For dripping blobs of holy Ganges-water ochrous. In to your rictus?
VII
But father, when you might have fallen bed-ridden
agued or comatose 180
or etherized and cannulated and catheterized
inside some caliginous and eerie I.C.U.
and after healers and feelers in starched whites
and holding scalpels and tenaculums
sashayed up and down wreathing stethoscopes
and corrected your serum sodium
or monitored your arterial blood gas levels
or later when coddled or recuperated or weaned away
or while you were promenading and wending your way
through some Katugastota-street of palmera-swaying Ceylon, 190
the kernel of your body’s hardware
might have conked out premature
and necrosed time-warped
in to a cold mass of reddish-brown turgid ball
and your aortic valves all of a sudden might have jibbed and reneged
after sputtering a mere two thousand million openings and closings.
(Your son’s have already revved up
another one third of it plus,
how long more it will tick
before a sudden glitch of it 200
will teleport him across the tunnel
to enable him to rejoin you and mother
and all our departed loved ones?)
Then you might have billowed undirigibly
in to a gush of death-throes
and a whirl of deific languor
but not prior to your catalepsing
into an apoplexy and aphasia.
VIII
But, before death lassoed you, wrested
and wrenched and rivened you out of this cosmos, 210
had you lisped out in susurrus
His four syllabled name
or sibilated its feeble guttural elison
or one of its chiastic analogues or anagrams?
Or atleast uttered my two syllabled pet moniker
which you used to disembogue
from the title page to the colophon
in all your battle scarred Singapore
and censored – Eastern Netherlands P.O.W. Camp letters.
And or beckoned me to your bedside ? 220
IX
On your day of quietus,
through your lips then puckered up and contorted,
what all decibels might have wisped
in plexus and reflux but catalectic
and which soared up and hovered above you,
are only my will-o-the wisp-like
and lugubrious but wistful phantasmagoria.
Brambly – deciduous and deadpanned
and mired and galled.
And pigeoning out 230
through the frieze and fresco
of my dysphoric and cavernous mind
as if, when peeped in to
an unlighted stroboscope
through an opaque orificed diorama
by someone at the fag-end of his
sinuous and labyrinthine life. 237
August – October 1998.
GODS AND CODES I
I
We hooted like owls.
Mewed like cats.
Scampered like rats.
And perched like fowls.
Since a gossip
in the kitchen (6)
creepered like a lichen.
Before it pupated in to a scoop.
That you had left.
For some pilgrimage.
When knight of the sable just pooped out.
From that day’s rummage. (12)
As a son devout.
To consecrate your father’s post-obsequial rites.
For this happened to be your first arrival here.
After his death. When you missed to light his pyre.
And anoint the fire. At the Manacaud sites. (16)
II
I skived in amusement.
Every law you made.
Without fear played.
Hide- and seek. In merriment.
I no longer
bawled gibberish.
Six and twenty alphabets of English.
As by a singer. (24)
Two into three times.
Morning, noon and night.
Daily. Exact.
To the clock’s chimes.
Which you had prescribed.
As a pill for my stutter.
Repetitions. As punishments later.
For any goof tricked. Herein. Underscribed. (32)
III
Varanasi is also referred.
To as Kashi. By the older generation.
It’s niched in veneration.
By most Hindus. As sacred. (36)
This became your destination.
Too. Which I came to know.
Only after a caboodle of years’ row.
From mother’s rumination.
we had hoped.
To see you back.
Not before a few months’ block.
When we leaped. (44)
In frolic. Away from your lashes.
And whacks tight.
When we could eat without fright.
Of your bashes. (48)
That will be pummelled
on me. With a frown.
If I flopped in the tone.
Of my intonation. Or if it gravelled. (52)
When I glumly dictioned.
Nonstop. In one breath all the twenty six letters. As a moron. (54)
Does in his daily sermon. (55)
Which some author could have perhaps
in a few tales mentioned. (56)
We could as well forget.
The pujaroom prayer.
To be lilted in a choir.
Of ‘slokas’ and hymns. To let (60)
us invoke. Through our minds’ bands.
‘Bhagavans’ and ‘Bhagavathies’. And all the gods.
Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma. And other Lords.
To the nudge of a timepiece’s hands. (64)
IV
After a few weeks you returned.
with corban, ‘Prasadam’ and temple-ashes.
The viands were delicious.
A story was then gossamering around. (68)
That in a transfigured form
an ‘Yakshi’ or ‘Madan’
was stalking behind you. Like a setter Gordon.
When you were walking home. (72)
Through Neyyattinkara highway in dark.
At mid of night stark.
Scowled at by coiffeurs of the black.
When pariah dogs even didn’t bark.
Thereupon in meditation.
You sat. (78)
As in a ghat.
After cremation.
Legs-crossed. Like a yogi’s bait.
And chanted in a volley.
Paens of ‘mantras’.Cryptic and holy.
Whereupon the apparition melted off quite. (84)
V
In Kashi you must have dipped.
In to the Ganges many times.
To oblate. In mimes.
Umpteen vows. Some lipped.
And others skipped.
You also would have carried back. (90)
Its water. Ochrous. In a pack.
Of pot. Perhaps of copper. Wrapped.
Tightly. Without any gaiter.
To hallow. And sanctify our family’s death throes.
By blazing a trail for the spirits’ course.
To amortize them to a ‘Moksham’s’ platter.
Further you might have conjured up-
Through your mental equipoise.
Our ancestors’ souls. In numbers.
Stoked. And rekindled the embers.
Of their bonds with us. (100)
VI
I continued to propitiate the gods for years.
In front of their photos.
And in the temples. Without mottos.
Sans any lairs.
Of your umbrage.
By the prodding of mother. (106)
And grand mother.Who both did bother.
More of the gods.Than about their own leverage.
Even at seventy five plus.
Mother used to barge in to our nearby temple.Wet.
At the strike of five .In quiet.
Unlatched its door. As by a reflex. (112)
She used to keep its key in her custody.
Oniy per chance.It fell upon my eyes’ bend.
In one of the dawns. During her quotidian morning temple round.
Years nine have catacombed since that day. (116)
VII
I’ve forgotten many of the hymns.
For years .Haven’t iterated it.
Before any deity.
To reach after death. The heavens. (120)
And also appetently hankering for a pie in the sky. Despite I walk.
Through the premises of the Sree Krishna Swamy temple.
Every other day. Humble.
And watch the devotees and their ilk.
Thronging towards. And rushing out. In haste.
From the sanctum sanctorum.
After praying in decorum.
Sandalwood paste smeared. And
with bared chest.
An occasion recent
when I too at night joined. (130)
As Bhagavan Krishnan’s protege. To stand.
In a queue. In front
of the idol. In a cocoon of piety.
Was along with two companions.
Both out of the hold. Of religions.
Barbara Slan Leat (of Yeats’ land.) and Bhup.
Both from London city.
While Kate Cornish stood in the peridrome outside.
All of us later enjoyed the rhythm and dances.
And music. In’ Easter 1916’ And ‘Among School Children’.
And yeats’ romances.
Tempestuous. With Maud Gonne. In our house. Beside. (140)
Where we ate cake. And drank tea. In lot.
When the taxyman reminded.
It’s running late. He was wanted.
With bookings.- Which cooled off our poetry hot.
It was a rendezvous.
With women caucasian.
Man brown. All of them exuding. And beaming with affection.
In December now over. On the day of Christmas.
A night to remember. As dear.
New faces and voices. (150)
Which sweetened even the stone vaces.
When decibels and scripts from far and near.
Of kith and kin.
Have by the gross diminished.
Some have already vanished.
Whether these too will wane.
And wither away blank.
After a monsoon tide.
No runic-legerdemain can scry astride.
Unabashed and unstung (160)
VIII
Now and then. In my monologues.
Nocturnal. My id chips in- why not you too become more numinous.
-And anagogical. Both externally and inhouse.
As in a catechism. Or like the dialogues.
In some ‘Puranams’. Genuflect and bow down. As in a vacuum.
Bhagavan Krishnan, the Almighty.
While passing as a laity.
Through the propylaeum.
Include as a chore routine.
Thursday’s worship of the evening. (170)
Inside the sanctuary. After leavening .
Yourself with ‘Bhakthi’ nay incandescent.
And genuine.
Not as a hypocrite. With its mere livery.
Go around the peridrome.
At least three-four times. As a norm.
Without becoming weary.
You have trekked.
To Sabarimala temple. Only once.
In mother’s aegis. And presence.
A Hindu virtuous will get pricked. (180)
In his heart’s cockle.
If he doesn’t repeat.
This ritual umpteen times neat.
In his life – cycle.
Although you stayed.
In Tirupathy town.
For a few days’ sojourn.
Then company-paid.
You skipped. Lord Venketeswara there.
Like Shirdi Baba’s shrine. (190)
Close to Ahamed Nagar city’s sign.
Which was marked. For more than a year.
In your itinerary.
No follower then.
Of any saint. With a beard and a mane.
But a mere business-fiend. And
fiery (Now ‘weary’ only).
You used to attend the Holy Mass.
In Bombay’s Mahim-Chruch.
For months in stretch.
Where the paupers and the princes
sacramented in mix. (200)
On Wednesday’s litany. Supplicating for their cause hard.
When they besought for favours.
Which were often granted (only to believers?). As benediction.
with savours.
Of your two accompanying friends. Each received his reward.
Prosperity in cornucopia. Corporeal.
Emigration to Ellikot and Brooklyn cities.
You spooked into a humdrum. Imbued with only negatives.
Of antinomies and antipodes. Star crossed and surreal ––.
IX
My last worship all agog.
In front of a god’s abode. (210)
Before I bade audieu to Bombay. For good.
Was decades two ago.
On top of Jammu’s hill.
At dusk. In sree Sankaracharya temple.
When life jinxed and genied in to a gamble.
It befell on a day in December. During peak of snow fall.
When it also rained torrential.
Even the pine leaves evergreen and needle shaped. Shivered in cold chilling.
Thunder and blizzard gusted yelling.
As if they hawked deaths and floods. For the terrestrial. (220)
I quivered in trepedition.
When the priests sacerdotally pious.
Condescended themselves for a photopose.
But not before they heard. In attention.
The whirls and swirls of my travails. Nightmarish.
When by the skin of my teeth only.
I missed. (Not a few will grin. If told). Uncannily.
From being popped upon. As a bull’s eye-finish.
By a Jammu A.I.R.station guard.
Who glowered at me. As a saboteur. (230)
When I clambered. And shinned up. Their wall-outer.
In panic. Babbling scared.
“Temple” “temple”.
I’d jump inside-
Rear, nook or front. No pride.
I convulsed. In a fit of tremble.
As by a Parkinson. Terrified. On the structure.
Of the building. My mind cast a blank. And the mood of the sentry.
In a jiff. Was to cock up in symmetry.
His rifle’s trigger. Without any lecture. (240)
But after a howl.
His fingers halted in the middle.
Providential. As he listened to me in a muddle.
And the word ‘MANDIR’. “ I’m none to foul.
I traipsed zig-zag. When I lost my way. To become stranded.
from U.N. Observers’ post.
Treading through the groves. Sinuously. Like a ghost.
When the sun pretended.
As if gorged. By a hoodo.
And sealed off. Its circuit. (250)
All of a sudden. Stopping every light.
I trudged. Serpentine. Through this jungle-pseudo.
Of horticulture. To wade through the copse.
And what all routes.!
In a downpour of cats.
And dogs. When I felt in a haze.
I’m trapped in some dingle.
The world’ll be out my ken.
BY crack of dawn . (260)
I won’t twinkle.
My eyeballs. After being dumped.
In to some dell. Or in to a ravine.
Half frozen.
Or as a corpse benumbed.
Rotted or bloated.
After disembowelment by some terrorists.
In one of their head hunting feasts.
Like an oasis. Then floated.
In the dun. A flicker of hope. And a simulacrum.
Auroral of a temple.”
All which the guard in toto relied. (270)
Not a whopper. Or a fibber. He pointed me to a field.
Still away. To where. I legged it. Without a fumble.
X
I don’t recall feeble.
In my mind’s petridish.
If I’d pattered in a hush.
Even a gabble.
Of a line. From any scripture.
Nor crooned in susurrus. Or lisped out a few words.
From any ‘Puranam’s verses.
While I hanged in rupture. (280)
Bat-like. Funicular. On the wall.
Of the A.I.R. station building.
Or when I’s on the run. Bidding.
For my life. And groping among the woods. Like a mad foal.
But during months of Monsoon.
when thunder and lightning shake our house.
I’ve been. From school days. Sibilating in my doze.
‘Ram, Ram, Ram……. withal, the abracadabra or the analogues and anagrams
of ‘Arjunan, Bhalgunan, Parthan and Vijayan …….’ (289)
September 2000
Gods and Codes-II
In a berth culled by a genie of sleep he was anchoring supine.
In grime and soot on a tea-shop’s floor uncemented and bare.
Clothed in tatters from foot to cranium like a corpse draped before the last bourne’s line.
Which sight is not rare these days of wear and despair.
He might have been wallowing through a mare of a lair.
The sun had just then flagged off its chariot-ride from the eastern horizon.
On a Thursday cold months ago this view shook my heart’s node.
To board a bus to Aleppy on that early morn I had legged it there.
With memories galore burrowing in to my mind’s scroll sans any code.
At the temple’s front by our house in the Eastern Nada road. 10
II
He doffed his attire’s top and gawked grim.
In to the sky infinite. Eyes riveting and flinching.
Then upon the tiles and rafters above him.
Like a baby cradled. Fretting and self-pinching.
When it awakes in a tantrum out of its siesta. Befuddled to weep. 15
Quivering in his rags what made him babble in that twilight dim?
A few paens of adages in to the tympanum of this block?
One five buck-green dropped in to his lap might have twiriled his lip.
A ‘bonanza for sipping a cup of tea atleast. Though even a trible of it cann’t muffle the rumbling of his stomach.
A weebit of a cash spurred him to patter a joke and a mock at me in that hour of the cock? 20
III
I have landed here from Nedumudy. (By foot or conveyance?)
(Or from some other hamlet far off? This only enroute?)
To supplicate and edify at this temple in Bhagavan Krishnan’s ambience.
At dawn early. (The first puja was by then already sacramented, no doubt.)
(Are you a devotee- fiend, a die- hard worshipper under song and dong?)
( And a beneficiary there of His?. At least in transcience?)
Why should god’s bounty be displayed upon my life’s wing.
When my soul is still lively and kicking. Though my body has been flotsamming for long.
Have so far weathered beyond sixty Octane-powered. Only by His blessing.
What more I require from God is beyond my guessing. 30
IV
Wasn’t he a mere waif. Gaunt and scrappy. Born with a begging bowl?
A vagrant sinewy and rickety. Once a man of steel riped but abandoned while greying.
By his kith and kin as a pariah. No more a fudge to scowl.
An entreprenur morgued. Or a tycoon fleeing
far and wide on mortgage of his home total. Now indigent and bankrupt.
A fugitive in exile. Smouldering like a hot coal.
In his heydays a Romeo of young blood. Besotted by a love.
Charred and unrequited. For scores of years a decript.
Also insane. Who can he be otherwise?. A hack bedraggled and a scarecrow. Lugging a treasure trove.
Foxed and holed?. An atheist or agnostic in his youth. Now oblating in gibberish mimes of God’s vow.?
Or He himself incognito. To feel and gauge the devotion of His believers high and low. 41
(By K.N.Pillai)
2.2.2002
SUSY’S LAST DAY.
I
On Tuesday dawn, I felt a trance
while passing through North Station
after tea and peeping through its entrance
where I saw a sight bewildering that stopped my motion.
There I saw Susy lying on the floor,
ten to fifteen men half dressed, half bare, all snoring
around her and in the same hour.
All in slumber but Susy staring
and looking for intruders, for, she knows,
will be many, all with two legs, walking wide (10)
well dressed, but who will assault her with vows.
Such a man gazing her now from outside!.
She was lean and smart, all in grace
her body naked dazzled bright, up in height,
she was in no teenage but had a blushing face
but, in this world of monstrous wind, I knew, she will fall down a battered kite !
II
On Thursday morning I thought
I will pass by the Station side
and look for Susy; then I saw her coming out
and suddenly getting caught by a man in the road wide. (20)
I saw her dragged to a nearby telephone post
and to it by a wire tied, a cruel crowd enjoying all her pain,
her jumping up and down raising a lot of dust,
her crying all in loud and all in vain.
The monster carried a syringe ready
and pulling her one leg down, two feet back, he stepped,
when I saw him pushing it in to her body, forcing it steady.
She tried to bite him, but he cleverly slipped
and somehow, the cyanide, I think, worked little.
She didn’t fall dead, he felt wild (30)
and again injected shouting, ‘I will finally settle’.
This time she slowly fainted, cursing ‘all humans all demons velied,
all enjoying my brutal killing’!. With a last tremble
I saw Susy’s body turning rigid, she closing her eyes, her head down
all in a minute, all over, all simple!
all done for man? This dome only his own!?.
III
I talked to the crowd as a pastor
of dogs’ virtues and walked to the station.
In a group of porters, I saw, one was Susys’ master,
of course, casual and he was in an oration! (40)
‘I used to share my food with her’.
‘Susy welcomed me by hugging’ the other one told.
‘Her going with me inside the station was not rare’
another one lamented. An old porter felt, she was too bold.
IV
I told the porters, in Delhi where I had been to, recently
dog catching was temporarily banned
by a court order. Silently
had I then prayed for Maneka Gandhi who has earned
by now, in her own right, a saviour’s name
for her adding special regulations to Cinematograph Acts and her crusade in saving (50)
camels, horses, cows, monkeys, all creatures – blind and limping -untame and tame,
treating them in Sanjay GandhiMemorial Animal Care Centre, waiving
all charges, picking up those wounded from roads.
I haven’ yet, met her, last time, in Delhi, I missed her place.
Jain Bird Hospital in Delhi, they too, I mention in this ode
for I understand, they too do yeoman service, all for God’s grace.
I have heardabout capt: V. Sundaram, an ace pilot
who started Blue Cross and is doing
a great service in Madras. A recent news – highlight
that was about him, is all in my knowing. (60)
I give in this verse a place for him too.
I saw by chance, a write-up and a photograph, in times recent
of a great animal lover N.W. Alimchandani, a name new
to me, but to the wandering scent-masters, a man god-sent.
He founded in Bombay “Welfare of Stray Dogs Trust”,
a clinic, ten kennels ans saved hundreds of dogs from dog-pounds and entitle
his name and his Trust now added in this verse, with all my zest.
In news papers recent, I just read about Bombay’s B.S.D. Petit Hospital
for animals, with great philanthropist J.R.D. Tata as its patron,
doing selfless service to the animal-bird world, (70)
caring stray and abandoned ones; blind horses, three legged cats and dogs, all in pathetic pattern
and sick camels, cows, bullocks, kites and elephants; their deeds worth tons of gold.
Now I belatedly mention them herein and add the name of Col. Nageshkar of the same hospital
and of Sillu Mody and also of late Naval Godrej and London-Jain community, all such names be
inscribed in golden titile.
Just lately, new names have jingled in my ears, my joy not little
and I record here all information vital.
Jiggesha Thakore of Bombay, a classical dancer, staying in a high rise flat in Worli
who rescued from purblind destitution Ekashi, a one eyed cat
and feeding sixteen stray dogs wandering in her place daily.
In Delhi, Geetha Sheshamani of Friendicoes, Animal Welfare Board’s shelter-affiliate (80)
has three hundred animals looked after against all odds,
fifty cats and eighty dogs, buffaloes and other poor creatures
mostly hit and run and picked up hurt on roads
or abandoned by their loving masters!.
She laments, some cattle often losing shelters’ hopes
and in the dark reaching butchers’ gate,
local ruffians stealthily leading ropes!,
we all must grieve their fate!.
Lt. Col. Patney of Sanjay Gandhi Memorial Animal Care Centre,
for his dog shelters find monthly average thirty adoption homes. (90)
With anti rabies-immunisations, follows up them with care tender
and happily looks after abandoned camels, horses and cows, wounded and all in bad forms.
Rashi Sharma and Rashmi Singh both of Delhi
doing service gracious for dogs.
In Pune, Diana Ratnagar of ‘Beauty without cruelty’
with Maneka Gandhi’s support, arduously fought animal traders and rogues
then merrily doing claw- clipping and mouth-stiching
of tigress Uma Devi, six hundred films’ veteran
and ‘InsafKon Karega’s darling
all for storing vulgar wealth, a sad human pattern! (100)
I also mention here Prof. N.S. Ramaswamy of Cartman, Bangalore, in these four lines.
A past director, I.I.M, Bangalore and N.I.T.I.E., Bombay, animal lover, writer-renown,
his innovations in bullock cart designs
and crusade for animal welfare, all well known.
V
Adopting and caring, but not turning to butchers those strays and stranded,
these all are in our scriptures!,
but in that pedestal, we few have landed!.
A few Trusts and some noble souls,
I remembered in this verse (110)
but such hundreds more are beyond my calls,
their mottos selfless but funds too scarce.
In this country of ours far and near
a day should not be rare
when a few philanthropists here
and there would bequeath and spare
a part of their wealth’s share
for the welfare of the dumb creatures
to douse their miseries’ fire
like Anna Morgan’s or Eleanor Ritcheyor’s recent overseas features. (120)
Today again, belated though, I add with zest
two more names familiar to the Madras City ways,
those of KrishnaVenkatesan of K.V.M. Animal Welfare Trust
and Rajalakshmi Mani, both succour to the local strays.
Let the noble deeds and names scrawled herein
waft across generations and be commemorated immortal. (126)
1993-1994
References – Lines
Maneka Gandhi ‘Metropolitan’ 14-12-1993
48 – 54 “The Independent”
Times of India 11-1-1994
57 – 61
Capt. V.Sunderam Times of India 11-1-1994, P5
N.W.Alimchandani Blitz Weekly 29-5-1993
62 – 67 Sunday Times of India 19-9-1993
‘Metropolitan’ 14-12-1993
Illustrated Weekly of India
Sept. 11-17, 1993
68 – 74
Petit Hospital for Animals, Bombay
J.R.D. Tata, Times of India 2-8-1993
Sillu Mody, Col. A.R.Nageshkar
Naval Godrej, Jain Community-London
Jiggesha Thakore, Bombay Illustrated Weekly of India
77 – 79 Sept. 11-17, 1993
Geetha Sheshamani
Rashi Sharma, Rashmi Singh ‘Sunday’ 29 Aug – 4 Sept., 1993, Bombay
80 – 88, 93 – 94
Lt. Col. Patney 89 – 92 ‘Sunday’ 29 Aug – 4 Sept., 1993, Bombay
Diana Ratnagar, Pune
95 – 100 Times of India 11-1-1994
N.S.Ramaswamy, Bangalore
101 Hindu 10-12-2000
Anna Morgan of Seattle
120 Hindu 30-12-1993,p 28
Bequeathed her estate worth
dollars five lakhs for animal welfare
Eleanor Ritcheyor had one hundred
and fifty dogs in her house.
Bequeathed eight million Australian Hindu 18-5-1993
dollars for animal welfare.
Lines 123 & 124
KrishnaVenkatesan-
wfe of a deceased Senior I.A.S.Officer
(Home Secretary of Tamil Nadu
1961 – 1969). She distributes eatables
on the streets to the strays and treats
them free in her hospital. So also
Rajalakshmi Mani -wife of a deceased
Senior Manager of S.B.I. Both preach for
animal compassion in Madras city streets. Indian Express Sunday 27 March 1994, P-10.
A Road side surgery on a stray dog
I
A motley crowd on a day bright
all peeping what this man mad
with a street dog holding on his right
in a road side lane, he stood sad. 4
He ran in to a cycle shop near by,
they saw, he carried back a cutter.
‘He brings a cutter’, they asked, why?.
One yelled! ‘he is mad, going to gutter!’. 8
The dog, he held, had its neck
all oozing out in puss.
‘What this crazy nut will eke’?
Another yelled! ‘with a stinking dog, he makes a fuss!. 12
A starving but hefty one
with his kinds living in a backyard.
The owner on old man and his son
both were kind, the son a derange dullard. 16
The neighbours threw all their waste
the municipality too dumped their garbage
all in to the oldman’s land haste
his land became a drainage. 20
Many a time on my office – slog
the hefty one, I had watched.
The left off biscuits from a Kochi-dog,
I had carried once in a pouch. 24
That was three weeks prior
When I had given it once and once only.
The dog had a swollen neck, I saw from the rear
and I forgot it as the hungry one gobbled the biscuits lonely. 28
II
That day I noticed a coil thrust
deep around its neck, flesh loose.
The poor dumb creature with its neck burst,
the crowd poohed! ‘it had jumped a dog-catcher’s noose’.
Acting fast with a few samaritans’ help
I held the dog tight, cut off its coil
and pulled it out through the flesh; with a yelp
it screamed, dashed and fumed, a petrol engine without oil!. 36
Tetracycline capsules, I bought, mixed it with fish
brought from a nearby arrack shop.
The dog ate it all, it relished the dish,
for a week, Furoxone to its wounds, it recouped top. 40
On an ‘Onam’ day, after a month
with a pouch of rice from our Tripunithura house,
caught a bus to Palarivattom ten miles length
to feed that poor starving dog; for him, none to grouse!. 44
From Palarivattom I walked further looking for a hotel
to get some non – veg curry. That being ‘Onam’ day
only one in Kalur opened, others closed total.
The petty wayside hotel man surprised and gay. 48
“A man coming with rice, for mutton, today on ‘Onam’ day?”
I said ‘it is for a dog’, he laughed, thought me a nut.
I reached the kennel back, searched it bay,
it was not there, I went searching the old man’s hut. 52
Its friends all wagging tails around, they smelt mutton.
I asked neighbours, ‘You saw the big one old?
Yes, one told, ‘today the dog catcher, a man rotten,
he caught lot of dogs here’ I shreiked cold!. 56
III
Only he, a true companion in distress and joy, in this dome.
YamaRaja followed ‘Dharmaputrar’ till his last journey’s end. In his disguise only. But cruel and sadistic, we treat- him doom. If all legs sliced, still with its tail bent
he will wag at his tormentor and caress his face.
We are barbaric to him, he patiently suffers his fate.
He can starve for days but lives with grace.
Yet if man wants his blood, he will for that wait.
We throw him out in rain and cold, old and ill!. 64
He served us young in sleeps and walks.
He is caught for spreading rabies, we shout, ‘kill! kill!”
but rabies’ deaths are thousands less than cars’ and trucks’!.
Hasn’t he a right to live like us?
All creatures have. He eats what we throw.
In streets and lands, he guards, sleeps and lives.
Why cann’t we humans love him, let him with us die and grow?. 72
1993
The dog and the abattoir.
I
I was guilty that I didn’t halt
that little dog, we were feeding
while it came with me, by my fault
to Cochin north, when it was leading.
For, on return next day from my Calicut function
I knew, the dog was missing.
To the Corporation office, I rushed, at Cemetery Junction and then to the Health Officer’s office Kalur, near to the city’s abattoir, with- all wild guessing. 8
There the Veterinary Health Officer, became my friend.
He told, “the dog catching van
had gone that day to your house-front
and some dogs caught by hs man,
all killed in groups after cyanide inject,
your dog also must have met the same fate?”
He told “forget it, it is routine for my object”.
The dog-catching squad’s leader too became my a acquaintance late. 16
II
In the abattoir, I saw lambs, goats and sheeps all under butchers’ knives,
all fat and skeleton, young and old, blind and limping, thirsty, starving, cows, oxen and buffaloes,
they all look at you pleading with weeping and parting eyes.
“Have mercy and save us from human monsters, all breaking nature’s laws 20
We are the same creatures who gave you milk and whom you then loved.
you sold us for currency notes when we got old, weak and tired.
Born and grown in your own abodes, we gave you fodder and your land we ploughed.
But to all fellow creatures you turned gourmets attired. 24
This hall is now partly filled with our heads, eyes, jaws, brains, necks, intestines and horns and bones.
Most could be delicacies in your menus and components
for many a human remedy, for new dawns
in science- research, though humans rarely utter about us in songs or sonnets. 28
Albeit this hall every day echoes with our groans.”
1993
An Epitaph of a dog.
I heard a loud shreik, a transport bus hit a dog,
that was a morning at Palarivattom bus stop three years ago.
The dog I saw, writhing in pain, the bus passed off with a driver rogue
its front legs both crushed, the poor creature crawled vague.
I went back to my office, five minutes walk
brought a tube of Terramycin ointment
massaged the dog, all its body and legs stiff – chalk,
the quadruped’s legs all spread with broken ligaments.
I shifted him from the main road to the temple compound
asked a kind petty shop fellow to care him
on urgent company work, I got in to a bus Kochi bound. (10)
Hundreds like this, around, why human kindness getting dim?.
Humans, animals, birds, all creatures
a symbiotic existence, that was His wish.
But man is selfish, he asks why four legged features?
why flying and swimming wonders? All we can relish good dish!.
Back in M.G. Road, I got Thrombophobin ointment,
with that, I rushed to the Raja Rajeswary temple compound,
there I saw the dog bewildered lying in judgement
cursing all the mankind ungrateful who slowly are wiping off all their ancestral allies around. (20)
With Thrombophobin application three days
the dog partly regained its mobility,
its inflammation and ligamental haemorrhage though not fully healed in all ways.
It ate my food too, still limping and in debility.
Next day, the petty shop fellow told
its master came searching and took it along
he took Thrombophobin too, it was for him gold.
The dog was lucky, it had a master loving long.
After six full moons I went to the master.
His shop was at Kacherypady, a work of upholstery. (30)
He was happy to see me, I felt a morale booster
could save a dog, a Creation’s mystery.
If your dog accompanies you and sees you off in the bus-stop
you are taking it to its cemetery.
For, the master’s bus might run over atop
and you can prewrite its epitaph in symmetry.
“Going with my master,
served him all my life,
I am universe’ mystery
of love and strife.
Have sixth sense too.
Howling and wailing,
I monitor the spirits.
My head crushed wheeling,
I weep, I leave my dears
knocked out near my master’s knee
if you do have tears
just shed one for me” (48)
1993
The Boxer and the ‘duchess’.
(By K.N. Pillai)
With a glittering chain on her neck, a fierce looking Boxer there landed,
She was crossing the busy Shenoy Junction and was then, stranded.
She came from Convent Road and some speeding vehicle just missed her hitting by a dot.
I thought, I will take a risk, and by her collar caught
and brought her fast to the pedestrain lane near by a bakery’s front.
I bought a rupee’s biscuit for her, but to it, she was indifferent
for she was perturbed. A motley crowd assembled around and booed.
They whistled and laughed. ‘a dog with a nut,’ they poohed!. 8
With the right hand on the dog’s collar, I walked straight
and a samaritan with biscuit pack on my left, I got in to ten houses in the lanes tight. 10
‘Is it your dog?’ ‘Is the Boxer yours?’ ‘Any dog missing?’
‘No, no,’ every one told, no. ‘Can you keep it for some time?’ ‘No, no,’ every one told fussing.
Some one told, ‘You try that house, gate open wide.’
Yes, I had passed that way but the dog didn’t go inside.
Yes, I tried again, it was theirs, it had sneaked out through a door jut
when it was fed, the gate, a visitor hadn’t shut.
I gave the biscuits to the lady inside ‘you keep the door closed’
‘I will come again, then you must give me a puppy,’ it looked she was dozed. 18
X X X X X
At A-F. A., I told this story to Nelson, he laughed merrily.
I didn’t know, until late, the Boxer lived next door nearly. 20
Has it recognised and enjoyed the loud voice of its saviour in its cage?
When echoes of my M.A. lectures on ‘Othello’ and ‘Duchess of Malfi’ from the hall reached its rage?.
February 1993
March
Gods and codes III. The snakes.
1
During my stay in Singapore last year I was informed over the telephone
that Mony passed away after a snake bite.
In Haripad. I became nonplussed. In to my tympanum the tone
of his words grated. He had talked about shifting the present site 4
of his wife’s family-serpent deities from Ambalapuzha to a snake shrine
in Amaida near to Tripunithura. Our conversation had taken place at a family wedding function in one noon.
Few months before my trip abroad. The scene entire
is now knitted around my piamater like a curved vine. 8
The consecrated and hallowed family serpents’ spirits were invoked by priests and later transferred to Amaida under holy puja fire.
And mantras. But in a fortnight’s period, one Haripad- snake despatched him in to his own pyre. 10
2
In periodicals and scores of books’ pages
I often read-only very few snakes are venomous.
Most of them are harmless, they have been assisting the farmers for ages.
By their feeding on rodents and pests. Make life harmonious
and symbiotic to the peasants and villagers.- 15
But newspaper reports and figures belie these adages.
In their letters bold. Of a warren of snake-bite deaths occuring daily.
All through our country. Not only of farms tillers, but also of voyagers.
And housewives. Who else not? When they walk gaily.
Around their villages and town houses. Or about their escape providentially. 20
3
From snakes’ fangs. Modern antivenom treatment was unknown.
in grandmother’s time and any posionous reptile bite
then would always have apported the victim to the Yama’s world. As had happened to her sister’s son.
In his pink. Her narration about this incident might have been the first snake tale- diet. 24
Dripped in to my mind’s sap. Anecdotes about ‘flying snakes’.
In Assam-jungle’s deep heard from my late army-uncle were no fun.
Both these narratives sowed germs of fear in my mind about the snakes. The Puranam-tales about king Pareekshith and Thakshakan, Kaliyan and Anandan and Vasuki and Garudan and so on in gilts.
And suicide of Cleopatra by a snake’s bite, the snake in the Garden of Eden, all these hook the reptiles to my mind’s rakes.
In our play-age we used to hear in gossips about some snake bite-healers’ mystical feats.
When they conjured up in the midst of their mantras’ fits. 30 The culprit-snakes. Which were commanded to barge out.
From their hiding pits and dart towards the conjurer’s abode.
When they were forced to suck out the venom in draught.
From the victims’ wounds. After this act the snakes would fall dead. 34
In front of the master-healer. The victims lying without sensation and comatose will awaken as if from a sleep. And will coolly walk away fit. 36
4
During my knicker-wearing years snake charmers carrying cobra baskets
were a common sight on the roads. I used to join their by-lane shows in mirth..
When cobras used to hiss and strike at their pipes and jackets.
They fought at times with mongooses and often met with their death. 40
‘Mannarsala’ near Haripad has turned in to a by-word in serpent- worship.
Perhaps it would have been the destination of mother and grandmother and our other Nannoor house inmates. During ‘Ayillyam’, ‘Sivarathri’or ‘Thiruvathira’ and other fesival days. 43
Memories of my accompanying them (if at all done) are now beyond my piamater’s whip.
But I do remember my genuflecting there once to supplicate and edify following spouse’ pace.
Decades two ago. Within a week or two of the launching of our wedding phase. 46
5
When spouse was active throughout. By dropping coins and currency notes. 47
In to the boxes kept in the temple premises. And by procuring receipts of cash.
For sacramenting various corbans. She also fulfilled her past vows by dots.
And might have mimed new ones in meditation awash. 50
For generations, the temple- priest there, has been a female. How? wondered.
Many. She is known venerably as ‘Mannarsalil Amma’. Neither a ballot of votes. 52
Nor a dictat of a body temporal would affect her title’s sacredness.
As she inherits her seat by a tradition. Familial and kindred.
Devotees pay obiescence to the deities and to her. Leavened by “Bhakthi’s” blessedness.
As spouse always does. Which I have yet to imbibe in its credence. 56
My eyes weltered every where. To bump in to some surpents in that temple.
They are characters portrayed in a few ‘Hindu puranas’. Whose hymns are iterated by many a devotee.
Pencil-sized, coloured golden and in temperament humble.
Non venomous. Hardly they bite. Nay,any of the laity. 60
They crawl and creep around the temple periphery and through the shrine freely.
Unhindered. My cousin few days ago told so without a fumble.
He encountered two of them, one in ‘Amma’s room.
The other one elsewhere. A manifestation witnessed rarely.
Both were found hanging upside down. During those days of Amma’s gloom.
Soon after her life partner crrossed the end of his world’s loom. 66
7
At Rameswaram. Unexpectedly. Before a period of four to five decades blew offits rage.
When my cousin- narrator, a regular worshipper-fiend
happended to go there as a toddler. Under his mother’s umbrage.
He also affirms, a few serpents there had then met with their lives end.
By banging their heads on some rooms’ walls. Mere myths or folklores?
or a worshipper’s beliefs diehard.? His wistful phantasmagoria? who can gauge?
Any how no serpent-alive, I sighted any where there.
But only their idols, erected on the floors.
At present I cann’t rejuvenate my neurons’ dead layer.
To ride through it and probe. whether these stone carvings had been then unctioned by their
devotees dear. 76
8
With ‘Noorum palum’ on days of temple’s festivals.`I must check up. 77
With my cousin devotee. After this draft is over.
Reminiscences of the temple-rounds we further made that day now lie bogged under my mind’s gap.
Too hazy to be sieved and retrieved, from my cerebral bower.
But only the ‘pulluvan songs’ melodious are still remembered.
The ‘pulluvan singer’ too was paid. With a fiddle in his lap.
Sitting (or standing) he sang in praise of the serpent-deities many.
The aged singers dying away, the shelflife of these songs appear to be numbered.
Who will continue to stoke the fire of this tradition? None with a penny.
In this pocket. When many a job varied is streaking like a genie. 86
9
And when these are also kept waiting for the downtrodden. 87
But there is hope ! Even a few of the once dreaded Kerala-Naxalites
and torture maniac ex-police personnel have turned to warden
themselves the ‘holy house of ecclesiasticals’. While some of the ex- revolutionaries have donned black gowns in court-fights. 90
Others became social activists, writers and leaders of trade unions. And what not? 91
One transformed himself into an ideologue. A political thinker. Not a present day politician
of the garden.
He opted for a toiling school dropout-lady as his life partner. To keep up his motto.
Which only few socialists or communists or pseudo social reformists have ever sought.
Once I had detested and condemned him as a rot. In toto.
But now I admire him. For his utterings bold.Not a ditto . 96
10
Serpent- deities are worshiped near to Tripunithura too. 97
In an Amaida temple. Which I once visited.
A decade ago. Along with spouse as a cue.
I have already forgotten the names of the deities listed.
In that holy sanctuary. I had never bothered about it then.
About their numbers and names. The same? Or only a few?
Or different entirely from Mannarsala’s gods?
They might not vary much. Like a den and a pen.
But this Amaida-serpent temple sparked my minds’ nodes.
When a few years later one of the pages of a newsdaily pop-eyed at me out of its folds. 106
11
And hummed about one ‘Pulluvan-singer’ there.
Unlike the Mannarsala’s ilk, the inheritors 108
not much climbed up in schools’ and colleges’ ladders. One here has a graduate’s stare.
Once he had roared among his college campus fire spitters. 110
Also had queued up in a race for a gown black. But stumbled. Later battled against his own leader. For a chair inside the Assembly’s focus. 111
But lost. He was witness to murder and mayhem bare. 112
In and outside his college. Now a God’s functionary. 113
With a fiddle. In his locus. 114
Like the Naxlite-reformed-born again missionary. 115
During 1995 in the Amaida serpent temple-periphery he stood and hymned aloud verses from His dictionary.
12
My visit to that spot sacred had taken place much earlier. 117
Who knows, he still paens hosanna to the serpent gods?
Or left them for good ; unrewarded or angrier?
To better his prospects mundane and temporal. Within human codes? 120
I should be able to find out the answer one day.
In 1967 I was wading through a different career.
In the Government. When one day from Mount Road I caught hold of a ‘Snake Swallower.’
Then exhibiting his skill in the street. I brought him to our Recreation Club like a jay.
To show off his trade along with his one follower.
When he gulleted in snakes umpteen in our front and spewed them out later as from a roller. 126
13
Reptiles have bitten millions to death. In guise and without a bias. 127
In this world and in ‘Puranams’-tales. In History’s pages too.
I haven’t yet collected the figures (Which I should do one day). To prove it wise.
P.Krishna pillai, king Pareekshit, Cleopatra, to quote a few. 130
In this group the human was bitten by the snake same .
Which perchance he happened to see the day previous.
In the courtyard of a house he was then sheltered. As a communist revolutionary undaunted. 133
In spite of the full-proof measures preventive, the king had chalked out to protect himself, Thakshakan burnt for ever his name. 134
The queen consigned herself to the fangs of an asp unwanted. 135
A reptile-bite few years ago dumped an acquaintance of mine in to an hospital for months.For a lengthy kidney-dialysis treatment stranded.
14
Isn’t it paradoxical or ironical that a snake
which can finish off any one to death
or terrorise and shake even a phalanx of army in a battle’s depth
(-Pampennu Kettal patayum natungum.-) 140
has mutated in to a persona for veneration by the humans.?
Indeed, in every religion one’s devotion or ‘Bhakthi’ towards a Supreme Being will awaken and
awake
his or her spirit inner or soul to self illumination. 144
Even if the many rites and sacraments accompanying or following this process spiritual might appear to be mere blind or irrational sermons. 145
The pagans too should have experienced themselves a similar glow inner.
In their rumination. 149
After their rituals’ and festivals’ culmination. 148
15
I have watched Bombay’s serpent deity-believers celebrating ‘ Nagapanchami-day’ 149
in the month of August every year. When cobras in wicker-baskets opened.
Were placed adjacent to the Matunga-bridge’s way.
(such sights were common throughout the suburbs of Maharastra too). From their lorgnetted hoods to the tails’ end 152
they were smeared with vermilion. Saucers of milk were found 153
laid in or outside their containers. My hair was then not at all tinged with any shade of grey. 154 Nor did it look silver leonine (As is now except when dyed). No goatee beard then wisped from my chin. My neck was tightened under a knot. 155
Coloured and striped. Most of the milk fed in to the cobras’ mouths used to spill over to the ground.
A few onlookers and devotees threw currencies and coins in lot.
I don’t recollect, I put in to it any coin. Later I read somewhere, milk is an allergen to the snakes.
Like a rot.
But to make these reptiles thirsty and force them to sip in milk they are starved without a thought.
For days at a stretch. Which creature living and any terrestrial will not then lap up even poison’s draught.
And slake its thirst? The poor snakes will later blow off by their bellies. Like balloons hot.
Man’s cruelty. Perpetrated under guise and umbrage of religious festivals. A source of succour for
him to quench the rumblings in his stomach’s slot.
Oh, what otherwise should these snake charmers, a starving lot do? To bob themselves through their lives’ moat. 163
16
A few snakes (venomous or not, who can tell?) I have seen 164
in and out of our house. That day one of them crawling up 165
our front side-mango tree, on another day, a different one sliding down one of our coconut trees.
Both long and lean. 166
A friend told, they were innocuous, ignore them like owls scowling and fooling from a house top.
A third one was regularly darting east to west through our land. 168
In front. Southward near the fencing. For months it was away from the scene.
Suddenly one day it reemerged. Slithering down in to the canal water on the western side. A sight. 170
Which goaded me to scare it away. By my showering a few blows upon it. With a long stick. Then a few loud howls of taunt. 171
That might have been a ‘Pulavan’ or a ‘Chera’ in fright. 172
During rainy seasons, frogs croak in might. 173
17
When my cerebral neurons will pip-some of these will be mouthed in soon. 174
By the ‘Cheras’ or ‘ Pulavans’ dwelling in the near by bush-. 175
My forecast often becomes right. After I hear these amphibians cry aloud in a tone. 176
Shrill and pathetic. I usualy get up from my seat. To hoot in a gush. 177
By this time the poor creatures are dragged away by the predator 178
Some times I am able to save a few of them by throwing a stone. 179
At those revenous and wicked snakes when it would leave its prey and vanish away. 180
But a few among the frogs (ill fated?) will end up themselves later. 181
As a caviare inside the stomachs’ alleways’. 182
of the reptiles. After they persisted with their musical melody at the same spot (against my wish). In a fray.
18
Spouse three-four years ago had informed me, the northern yard of our Ambalapuzha-house was once a ‘snake shrine’. 184
So no trash or wastes should be thrown down there.
Our ex-tenant was observing the rules fine.
I sometimes dump the rubbish in to that place and spare
my energy kinetic and walking time excess in legging it to our western canal side. 188
This act of mine perhaps irreverent would have galled the serpents’ codes and also stained their red sign.
Have I antagonised the serpent deities. By my occasional desecration. 190
Of their ancestral shrine? Has it spurred them to despatch a variety of their tribes in to our
house as in a raid. 191
And to warn me of serious deprivation. 193
19
If the family serpent – shrine is continuously defiled. 194
Now I have become more discreete. One day two-three years ago I saw a snake creeping inside our store room. 195
I told spouse about it. It might have been a non poisonous one or not and I smiled. 196
On hearing me she rushed out somewhere in a fume.
Was it to some clairvoyant. 198
Hadn’t my mood got spoiled?
She might have gifted away some cash to him. 200
Who might have advised her to do a ‘Puja’ to propitiate the deity-serpent.
I have feigned many a time to be as bold as a soldier.
But for months many I stopped entering that room. Until one day I recouped my courage and paced in to it again like a dodger.
20
But never after the clock banged six in the evening. 204
Till many more months hopped away. Another one lengthy and thin was found wriggling
insidethe front hall. 205
After a few weeks during one night. Under our sofa. It disappeared by next day morning.
A few fortnights later in one of our corner rooms unused and vacant for years, I noticed a pit. In which were found. Snake eggs and hatched ones small. 209
I called in outside help. For a thorough cleaning of the the rooms and for a mass killing.
This matter cooled off in my mind sans spouse’s knowing.
Till a few months ago. When she pointed out to me a moulted snake skin. 210
Of length less than a foot (small ones are venomous?). Hanging between a drainage hole and a
cement-filling. 211
She insinuated that I never produce in the house any sound or din.
(Except when she happens to be there!). I rarely switch on the T.V, otherwise the reptiles would have
sensed at least a few decibels of sound-spin! 213
In and around the house. And they would have been tempted to flee soon from the scene. 214
21
She tuned the T.V to the maximum pitch.
A set pretty old. The mechanic had only a few weeks ago cautioned me about its speaker.
Defective. Which he had already once repaired. Still I dared not make any hitch.
On the occasion. With spouse’ maneuvering. But after a week of her leaving, as a
‘news-looker’ 218
I laid my hands on it. No sound and picture!
Both had vanished. Like sight and speech. 220
Lost by a patient. After an illness. In which situation the cost andcourse of medication will be known.
Here too these were estimated. But were found to be dear to some one wihout any fixture.
The set was dumped in to a mechanic’s godown.
Where it lay comatose for months gone. 224
22
But after this episode until today only one snake appeared before my eyes. 225
Weeks three ago it was crossing our eastern side-fencing in a hurry.
From where it descended, is a mystery. Long in size.
Thin. Yellow in colour. Might have been a ‘Manja chere’ without a fury.
I stopped my riddles of English grammar and lessons. Which my standard four student could not.
swallow and digest. But which her school thought wise.
She should grasp even at her age tender. She too raced along with me like a scout.
With her mother. To the spot.
A time happy for her. Off from my screech and shout.
Her mother then narrated, years ago while asleep, a ‘payyani-snake’ had wound around her hand like a root. 234
23
She had escaped then unbitten. By throwing it away with a force mighty.
Her mother killed the snake later. 235
The ‘Manja chera’ disappeared in to the other compound.
After which the ‘grammar and lessons’- battle with the student continued. Like a tussle between a silk piece of cloth and a mechan ic fitter. 237
A couple of days after wards I heard a few school boys in a group chorusing in a loud sound.
In front of our house on the road (“ Manja chera malarnnu Katichal Malayalathil marunnilla”) an adage with bells. 239
Until I left for my trip abroad last year, it was no matter.
If our torch-light remained without any battery for months in tow.
But when I returned, spouse had already filled it with new cells.
The Haripad-snake bite – death might have prompted her to do so.
Nowadays I seldom go out of our house without closing all our doors as in a vow. 244
And at night never move out sans a torch’s show.
Though the cells being an year old any reptile can strike me unnoticed in its light low.
Is it by a chance incidental, a reptile jumped down (or perchance fell ?) in my front out of a tiles’ row. 248
From atop our house. On the day last of this draft’s finishing like an arrow.
To warn me about its prowess with its jaw? 249
Wasn’t it in news recent that a cobra finished off a whole family of seven in
Burdwan in an year’s go? 251
Didn’t I encouter just a week ago, the Haripad- victim’s son himself walking out of the Mannarsala-serpent temple with a face beaming in ‘Bhakthi’s glow. 252
It is high time, I too should opt-worship or hate the serpents- And not just perch over the
fence like a crow. 253
Hadn’t on that night three-four years ago I booted and stomped and stamped and hooted and shouted for a reptile’s jaw? 254
25th May/4th July 2002 (By K.N.Pillai)
REFERENCES
Section Lines Topic Publication
4 to 8 41 to 87 Mannarshala
Temple Festivals M. M daily 12.11.1995
Hindu daily 26.10.2002
MM daily 30.10.2002
MM daily 31.10.2002
MM daily 19.10.2003
MM daily 20.10.2003
MM daily 21.10.2003
MM daily 6.11.2004
MM daily 25.10.2005
MM daily 27.10.2005 MM daily 08.03.2005
Mathrubhumi 23.10.2005
Bhashaposhini April 2003
8 81 to 87 ‘Pulluvan Patt’ Mathrubhumi 7.5.2002
10,11,12 97 to 121 Manorama daily 5.6.2005
15 149 to 163 ‘Naga Panchami’
Festival Times of India 31.7.1995
Times of India 6.8.1996
Hindu 31.8.2002
Hindu 3.8.2003
I.E. 3.8.2003
Hindu Suppli 11.9.2004
13 130 P. Krishnapillai M.M 15.8.1998
Manorama “SREE”
Weekly 13.8.2006
9 92 to 96 K. Venu “Malayalam Weekly
19.9.2003
“Malayalam Weekly”
March 2006 page 93,94
‘Mathrubhumi daily sunday 28.8.2005
“Viplavam Kazinju
Eni Sangeethathinte
Rathrikal Pakalukal”
10, 11, 12 97 to 121 graduate -“Pulluvan Singer” MM 16.05.1995
Miscellaneous articles on snakes
M.M. 4.2.2003
M.M. 5.2.2004
M.M. 15.9.2005
Hindu Sunday Supplle 23.5.2004
N.I. Express 18.9.2005
N.I. Express 3.10.2004 (3.10.)
Mathrubhumi Weekly
11.6.2003
Mathrubhumi Weekly 24.8.2003
P-41
Malayalam weekly
1.4.2005
Maneka Gandhi’s article…- Mathrubhumi sunday
24.12.2006
Illustrated weekly of India P-42
24.1.1988
Hindu (letter to the editor) 7.8.1997
N.I. Express 15.5.2002
Punjab is Recouping
I
1. Rejoice, rejoice, Punjab is recouping from its
blood curdling horrors and fits,
blood of martyrs was flowing and flowing !
At last, now Peace has started glowing. Innocents, infants, nannies and mothers, 5
grannies and grand fathers, sisters and brothers,
brides and grooms and their groups in revel,
crying cradle babies, sick and blind, old and well,
teens and youths, all shot
burnt and buried; the terrorists dug graves in every spot !
Umpteen families wiped out, hundreds massacred 10
deep in hamlets and farms, dogs too not spared !
that the poor dumb creatures not bark
when speeding killer jeeps park
to start a shooting spree and rifles’ crack. 15 Ministers, M.P.s, M.L.A.s, Judges, Lawyers, all killed in day and dark.
Poets, statesmen, priests, engineers, sportsmen, doctors,
granthis, journalists, school children, teachers, writers,
office goers, farmers, sleeping gypsies and famished tilling soil’s sons,
all, like flies, fell to the butchers’ guns ! 20
II
Commandants, S.P.s, deputies, inspectors, subedars
constables, jawans, kith and kin, havildars,
S.P.s Taiwana and daughter Ravneet, Gobind Ram and his son,
in Sports Institute stadium Patiala, jogging S.P.s Gill and Brar, both track suits don
Akasa Vani, Medical, Bhakra Nangal-Beas
Talib, Manchanda, Ranbir Singh and Maj. General Kumar, all its chiefs, 25
D.I.G. Ajit Singh at Taran Taran, in Golden Temple
the barbarians shot D.I.G. Atwal praying humble.
General Vaidya, chief of staff
of our great Army that always reaps laurels in global strife, 30
he too fell to the terrorists, but is now immortal in history.
All were valiant and heroic, still chanting a chorus in mystery
“India is one and one nation”
“We should fight till end to finish the terrorists, to keep our country off any faction” 34
III
Indiraji, our great Prime Minister, world leader,
socialist and reformer, betrayed was she, we shudder !
By her own body guards, she too became a martyr.
Heavenly emitting and kindling a fire
in us for burning the fundamentalist-terrorist devils into ash.
Luminous she in our sky, as a pole star and not a flash ! 40
Longowal, a saintly leader, he was butchered
by AK 47-demons, he too for a cause, martyred !
Lala Jagat and his son Romesh Chandra, news paper stalwarts,
daring, impartial, undaunted by terrorists’ threats,
fought until their last breath 45
with their rifle-pens, unafraid of any mourners’ wreath.
Hind Samachar group lost more than fifty workers
editors, subeditors, reporters, agents and hawkers!
And uncrushed by Dragnovs and carbines
still spreading peace and amity, in our History, this be embroidered in golden lines. 50
IV
The terrorists used LDR, night vision devices for ambushing,
RTD for remote trigger bombing,
night imaging and night goggles fifty metres
range, rocket launchers, three frequency transmitters,
detonators, hand grenades and fire incendiary bullets
piercing one inch thick steel armour plates !
Infrared beams, UZI, AK-74 and AK SU 74, AR 15 and AR 16, G3 rifles automatic
Kenpro KT-ZZ frequency synthesisers, explosives semtex plastic, RDX and PETN. Looting crores from banks and sneaking across through borders they return from their umbilical base, as weapons, gold and currency hoarders ! 60
V
The marauders ambushed trains and buses attacking,
they shot passengers lining, all shrieking.
Ludhiana-Badowal, Sohian train massacres were tragic
Lalru Batala, Sidhwan Khurd bus carnages were barbaric. In shops, markets, paddy fields and rail junctions,
wedding halls, factories, parks and bus stations,
in temples, schools, colleges, hospitals and play grounds,
gymnasiums and kindergartens, everywhere killed hundreds. Amritsar, Sangrur, Terai and Pilibhit, Daburjy and Seelonkalan mass massacres all yell shame on our age, the perpetrators born from and in perpetual doom for hell ! 70 Guru Nanak, Guru Gobind, Guru Arjun, founders of peace
and Brotherhood, you will not pardon killers like these.
VI
On 23rd June 1985, thirtyone thousand feet above the Atlantic, Emperor Kanishka exploded
caused by a bomb terrorists had planted and they celebrated it merrily and its horrors applauded.
And, deep into cold Atlantic, it vanished, 75
The melting metal fused with flesh, the sea turned red, ravished, and perished into the sea, the crew, capt, Narendra and all the three twenty nine passengers dead.The terrorist vultures circled, flew above, their flocks ahead,
they were not scavengers alone but vampires and cannibals too!
The monsters, blood thirsty, they had concealed another bomb from view. 80
In a bag, sent through “ Canadian Pacific Airlines 003”
destined to “Air India 301” to create a twin air crash history.
But thank Almighty, it exploded at Narita airport
before reloading it in to Air India, thereby killing only a few and some hurt
and saving lives of three fifty; let us for that praise Him by heart. 85
Ten summers have crossed since I was a visitor
to punjab and j&k. That was then a booster
to my spirits and Golden Temple was in my itinerary.
Cleansing myself with Holy water and covering head, I made my entry
in to that holy monument to offer obeisance and prayer 90
to the great Gurus, then chantings in air
of prayers from devotees reverberating everywhere.
Thrilled was I reading the lists of heroes of war
of those brave Sikhs, their names in large numbers inscribed in the inside walls.
But afterwrds, this holy place, the terrorists desecrated as wells, 95
for storing weapons, missiles, bombs and rockets
and after killing sprees as hiding pockets !
Operation Blue Star, the only last resort, evicted the desperadoes,
that was a wise decision, already overdue and deserves Kudos. 100 True to their army tradition great,
our Jawans and officers didn’t return fire at
the Holy Harmandir Sahib where the fanatics were hiding,
defiling the Holy place and shooting. Generals Sunderji, Renjit Singh Dayal, Brar, Colonel Issar and commandos,
officers and Jawans, all deserve high commend and mementos. 105
For, their speedy meticulous operation
forced the killers surrender in desperation.
VIII
From Golden Temple, I proceeded to Jallianwala,
that was to revisit the bullet ridden walls
and to pay homage to the unarmed hundreds, 110
all partiots then assembled, for a dear cause kindred;
and all started running helter skelter, slogans chanting when General Dyer’s soldiers began sharp indiscriminate shooting.
“Alas!The time changed drastic, insignificant we are! ”
murmured the peeping bullet holes! “now, Jallianwalas and Dyers
in hundreds are spread in Punjab everyehere !” 115 Then, I further journeyed to the great Bhagat Singh’s village
near Indo-Pak border, with memories of his courage
and valour flashing in my mind. I walked across his ancestral
home and saluted his marvellous glory celestial, ethereal and pastoral. From his birth place, a stone’s throw, musing, 120
I saw Pakistan Rangers, through binoculars glancing us and changing guards, still fantasying
Kashmir as theirs and for a misadventure always fancying which, they don’t sense, can uproot in toto their nation’s present fencing! 124
IX
In a decade, the terrorists slaughtered civilians ten thousand and more 125 police personnel and relatives two thousand over.Widows, widowers, orphans and weeping parents and refugees in exodus now not
a news in our dailies’ pages !
A“Dark Age” indeed in this land of saints and sages !?
I wail in this verse loud for all those hapless victims in this national disaster.
Such ethnic or communal mass man-slaughter anywhere else heard in history’s roster? 130 I commend all security staff alive and killed
their kith and kin kidnapped.S.H.O. Makhan Singh willed
and rejoined duty at Dhariwal, when two hours just growled
he had in his village house seen blood spattered bodies, seven, all his family now only in past scrolls ! Inspector Sukhjinder Singh of Gurudaspur had his sister, 135
mother, nephew, all killed, his house too burned, the monsters. ` Head constable:Mukhtiar Singh in Bakhatgarh lost six kin,
D.G..P. Mangat his son too, to innocents, the terrorists committed so much sin.
Many many bereaveds, Mangats, Makhans, Sukhjinders, Mukhtiars in Punjab Force
all now hunting for terrorists’jugulars, for nation’s cause. 140 Deep in villages, farms and lands, hundreds, hundreds
all fight hand in hand against these dreads
with weapons obsolete, from roof tops and backyards
from cellars and bunkers, paddy fields and grave yards and hospital wards. In Jangala Village, Aparsingh and Kewalsingh, brothers 145
Gopu in Kashitwal, Basheer in Batala, all with winning feathers. In Bhikiwind village, Balwinder singh, his beloved Jagdish Kaur and son Gangadeep
just walking four years, but an expert in filling sten magazines, all peep
through their wall-holes in shifts, day and night.
Making their house a fortress and firing at a shadow’s sight, 150
they faced rockets and bombs twelve times, learned life’s hard lesson,
Major Singh five times,M.S. Bitta more than a dozen. ‘Wood Rose’ ‘Black Thunder’, ‘Rakshak 1&2’ liquidated large number of bandits, remaining most, ‘Night Dominance’ and ‘Final Assault’
too exterminated.Three cheers to Ribeiro, Mangat, Gill and Chibber, all now in Victory grounds. 155
With dare daring officers and men with them, they finished Punjab-terrorists to their last rounds,some surrendering, hiding underground, now killing innocents stray.
They have lost their diktat, and we pray
in Punjab, soon the menace be over, and everywhere peace will portray.
Rejoice, rejoice, trumpeting, it heralds a beaming ray. 160
1900-1992
Bibliography compiled during January to March 2005.
31 March 2005. by knpillai
REFERENCES
Bibliography
Abbr
P – Page
Times of India - TI
Hindustan Times - HT
Indian Express - IE
India Today - IT
The Week - WK
Illustrated Weekly - IW
of India
Sunday - SU
Malayala Manorama - MM
Mathrubhumi - MB
Deshabhimani - DM
Metropolitan - MP
Sunday Observer - SO
Frontline - FL
Hindu - HU
Kerala Times - KT
Mangalam Daily - ML
Lines Reference
1 to 3 WK June 17 – 23, 1984 P 15, 22,23
5 to 12 IE 8.10.1992
TI 28.10.1992
12 to 15 (Dogs too not spared….)
IT 15.1.1991 P 24
TI 13 11 1992
16 to 20 WK May 6 -12, 1984 P 18, 26
June 17- 23, 1984 P. 20
IE 9 12 1992 SU 15-21 Nov 1992 P78
FL 20.11.1992 P. 30-32
TI 2.6.1992, FL 8.10.1993
IT 15.1.1991, P-28-29,
IW 5.6.1988, P – 31, IE 9.12.1992
DM 1.11.1992 FL 20.11.1992 P-26
TI 11.11.1995 P-13 MM 4-6-1995 P-6
TI 2.6.1992, HU 9.10.1997 P-8
WK Aug 23 1992 P-31
21 – 22 (Jawans, Kith and Kin)……..
TI (By) 25.5.1993 TI (DEL) 25-2-1993
WK 23.8.1992 P-31 TI 28.8.1992
FL 8.10.1993 P 17 to 28 IT 15-9-1992
P-58, IT 15.1.1991 P-29,
IT 15-11-1991 P75
-23-
R.S. Taiwana SP FL 8.10.1993 P-19
& his daughter
Ranveet Kaur were
killed on 4.4.1991.
Govind Ram S.P.
was killed on
10.1.1990 at an
explosion in PAP
complex Jalandhar
(His son too was killed)
24-K.R.S Gill IT 15.9.1992 P- 56
and A.S. Brar
S.Ps were killed
25, 26
M.L. Manchanda AIR TI 2.6.1992, TI 2.12.1992
Chief, Pattiala
Killed on 27.5.1992
R.K. Talib AIR Chief
Chandigarh.
Medical Director
Health Services
B. Ranbir Singh.
Excise Taxation
Secretary
A.K. Misra killed on
5.5.1992. Next day
Agriculture Costs and
prices Board Chairman
D.S. Thyagi was killed
Bhakra Beas Management FL 20.11.1992 P-32
Board Chief Maj-Gen.
Kumar was killed in 1990
28
DIG A.S. Atwal was shot WK May 6.12 1984 P-26
down inside the Golden do. July 22-28 1984 P-36
Temple premises during
April 1983 do. 5.6.1994 P – 49
IW 5.6.1988 P – 26
29 to 31
Gen. A.S. Vaidya, Chief of IW 5.6.1988 P 31
Army Staff shot dead on HU P-8 27.4.97 FL 20.11.1992
10.8.1986. His assassins P 26 – 27 WK 5.6.1994
Sukha and Jinda were hanged
on 9.10.1992
35
Indiraji then PM was Supplements of IE & MB of
assassinated on 31.10.1984 31st & IE, MB, MM, KT, HU
at her residence. Her of 1.11.1984
assassin and conspirator Week July 15.21, 1985 P 25-27
were executed on 6.1.1989 IT 15.8.1991 P 85, 87, 89
41 to 42
Longowal (Akal Dal President)
Santh Longowal was killed on
8 August 1985.
WK June 17-23.1984 P 16, 18, 19, 20, 22.
WK July 15-12 1985 P 26
WK July 22 to 28 1984 P 36 IT 15.8.1991 P-87, 91, 94. IT 15.9.1992 P 58 WK 5.6.1994 P -41, 45 to 48
43 to 50 Lala Jagat and his son……….
Lala Jagat Narain, owner and Chief Editor
of Hind Samachar, Group of News
Papers was killed on 9.9.1981. His son Romesh Chander too was killed on 12.5.1984. On 18-7-1990 their vehicle was stopped in Jagaron, news Paper parcels were destroyed. The driver and cleaner were killed. In all, their 63 human lives were lost.
P-35 WK July 22 – 28 1984, TI 29.10.1992,
WK 5.6.1994 P 40 IW June 27 July 3 Vol CXII (Year not known)
MB 2.3.1997
51 to 59 Terrorists used LDR………. and PETN
WK June 17-23 1984 P-18 WK July
15 to 21 1985 P-27 IW 5.6.1988 P-30 IT 15.1.1991 P-30 FL 20.11.1992 P-31 WK 23.8.1992 P-33, TI 24.11.1992 FL .10.1993 P 17, 20, 24, 18.
HT 30 or 31 Jan 1993 MM 15-3 1993.
59 Looting crores from banks………..
WK June 17-23 1984 P-22 IW 5-6-1988
P 31 IT 31-10-1992 P – 95, 96
59, 60 Sneaking across through borders they
return..
WK 23-8-1992 P 38, TI 29-10-1992
Pakistan aided terrorism
MP 10-11-1994, HU 11-12-1994, HU 5-2- 1995 HU 7-2-1995 TI 21-5-1995 IE 27-5-1995, (Letter to the Editor) HU 19-5-1996, HU 22-10-1997 P-9 IE 5-8-1998 HU 7-10-2001, IE 10-10-2001 and 15-10-2001 HU 23-2-2001 – IE 15-5-2002 HU 26-5-2002,HU 14-7-2002 IE P-1 7-8-2002 HU 25-11- 2002 P-1 MM 24-11-2002 P-1 MM 25-3-2003 P8 HU 25-3-2003 P-11, 1 HU 26-3-2003 P 1 HU – MM 23-7-2003 IE 31-7-2003 P-9 HU 29-8-2003 P1, 12MM 29-8-2003 HU 18-10-2003 P 1, 24, 3-1-2004
P 1, 10, 3-2-2004 P 1, 26-4-2004 P-11, 24-5-2004 P-1 27-6-2004 P1, MM 24-5-2004
P-1,
61 to 64 “ “ SIDHAWAN”” ‘KHURD’ bus passengers’ Carnage in 1992. More than 16 Gunned down and 30 seriously injured .TI 2-12-1992,
“LALRU-BATALA” Bus passengers’ massacre in Dec 1990. More than 60 passengers killed and many seriosly injured. IE 8-10-1992
“LUDHIANA- BADOWAL” and SOHIAN- Train passengers’ massacre. More than 125 killed and many seriously injured on 15.6.1991. WK June 17-23-1984 P-22, IT 15.8.1991 p-94, HU 1-10-1993, TI 22-1-1994 p-16 TI 16-9-1996 p-10
65 In shops, markets-45 people were shot down at random in a crowded place in Amritsar during May 1986. IE 8-10-1992
69 At Sangroor near Ludhiana many Engineers of Indian Acrylics Ltd gunned down on 2.3.1992 FL 20.11.1992 P-30,
69 Terai and Pilibihit (in U.P)
IW 5-6-1988 p30, 31 FL 8.10.1993, P-17,21,28
69 & 19 Massacre in ‘DABURGY’ & ‘SEELONKALAM’ in Ludhiana Dist. 25 Bihari immigrant farm labourers were gunned down on 30.10.1992 while they were sleeping and cooking. Su 15-21-1992 P. 78, 79 DM 1-11-1992,
70 Shame on our age ………. TI 29.10.1992
71, 72 Guru Nanak, Guru Gobind, Guru Arjun…
HU 23-5-1999 IT 15-8-1991 P-90
IE 18-12-1997
73 to 85 AIR INDIA’S EMPEROR KANISHKA’S Crash on 23.6.1985. IE 7-8-1992 IE 16-10-1992, 28-3-1997, P-12, HU 13-10-1992, 2-6-1995, P-14, 10-1-1997 P-15,4-10-1998 ,29-10-2000 ,12-7-2003, P-12,12-9-2003 P-12, 22-12-2003 P- 13 2-5-2004 P-9, 20-5-2004 P-14, 18-3-2005 P-1 & 11WK 23-8-1992 P-38, FL 20.11.1992 P-27,MM 14-2-1994, 12-2-2003 P-12,
TI 25-6-1995 P-28 ML 19-8-2002 P-12-X
87 My visit to punjab and J& K in early 1980
89 Golden Temple (Its foundation stone was laid in 1606 by the 6th Guru Har Gobind) WK July 22-23 1984 p-36,38. WK July 15 to 21,1985 p 25,26,27, May 6-12,1984 p 26,27, June 17-23, 1984 p-15, 19,22, 5-6-1994, IW 5-6-1988 p-26 to 29 IT 15.8.1991 p-88, 93, 94, FL 20-11-1992
P-30
98 Operation Blue Star. Military operation codenamed so undertaken to evict the terrorists from the Golden Temple.
WK June 17-23,1984 p-15 to 20, July 22 to 28 1984 p 24 to 27,37,11 July 15-21, 1985 P-26, 5-6-1994, p48,44,IT 15-8-1991,p-88,89,93,94, HU 20-6-1993 (Book review)IE 18-10-2003 p-11,mm Supple 15.8.1998 p 2 IW 5-6-1988 p-26 to 29. FL 20-11-1992 p-30, TI 29.10.1992
101,102,103 Our Jwans and Officers …..
WK June 17-23-1984 p 15,16,17,19, July 15-21 p 25,26,27,1985,
102 Harmandir Sahib p 27 to 28 IW 5.6.1988
16 to 20 Some of the prominent persons who fell to the terrorists’ bullets.
1. B.J.P General Secretary Dr. Baldev prakash
2. Punjab Minister Maniderjit singh Bita.
3. Minister J.P.Pandey
4. Dr. V.N.Tewari, Rajya Sabha member (Killed in 1984)
5. Lalith Makkan and his wife and Arjun Das (both congress party leaders of Delhi) also BJ P and shiva Sena leaders Harjans Lal, H.R.Sethy, Sudarsan kunjal, Belwant singh solanki, Rema Kant jalotta, Addl. Judge R.P.Gyans, Gyani Gurbachan Singh and so many.
104 Lt.Gen.Sunderji, Lt Gen.R.S.Dayal. Lt.Gen.K.S.Brar, Lt.col.Issar
WK 17-23 June 1984 P-15, 16, 17
WK July 15-21 1985 P-26-27, IT
15-8-1991 P-88 HU 27-4-1997 P-8,
HU 20-6-1993 (Book Review of Operation Blue Star by K.S. Brar.)
108 to 113 My visit to Jallianwala Bagh in early 1980.
IE P-10 24.10.1994, Massacre,
HU 7.6.1998 HU 6-9-1998, Supply 4,
HU 23.1.2000 Supply 5
113 General Dyer – HU 7.6.1998 Supply 4
HU 23.1.2000
116 to 119 My visit to Bhagat Singh’s native place near
INDO PAK Border and the Wagha check post.
Bhagat Singh WK May 6.12.1984, P-18
Sunday Times 6.11.1994 P-10 HU
(Supl) 6.9.1998 HU (Sup) 23.1.2000, P-5
120, 121 From his birth place I saw Pakistan
Rangers…… (Wagha Check Post) IE 17-8-1997 P-7MM 31-8-1997 P-3 (Supply)
HU 10-1-1999 21-2-1999 P-1
121, 122, 123 Through binoculars glancing us still….
124 fantasying Kashmir as theirs…..
SU 2-8-1992 P-19 to 23 FL 20-11-1992
IE 7-3-1995 SO April 30 to May 6
P -16 1995 IE 31-7-2003 P-9.
Pakistan aided Terrorisom in J & K
HU 13-4-1997, 12-6-1997, 9-8-1998,
21-2-1999 14-7-1999, 22-3-2000,
2-8-2000, 3-8-2000, 27-8-2000, (Supply)II 10-9-2000, 22-7-2001, 3-10-2001,
IE 14-7-1999 P-10, 22-3-2000, 2-8-2000,
3-8-2000, 22-9-2001, 3-10-2001
MM 2-8-2000, ML 19-8-2002.
125, 126 Civilians 10,000 or more
TI 28-8-1992, 29-10-1992, TI (Delhi)
25-2-1993 TI 25-5-1993, TI 11-11-1995,
HU 1-6-1997, HU 26-5-1997 P-9
FL 17-7-1992, 20-11-1992, P-27, 30 WK
23-8-1992 P-31, IT 15-9-1992 P 58
IT 15-11-1991 P-75.
126 IT 15-1-1991 P-30
127 Widows, Widowers, Orphans……
IT 31-12-1992 P 90 to 95
132 S.H.O Makhan Singh
WK 23-8-1992 P-33
135 Inspector Sukhjinder Singh of
Gurdaspur………
WK 23-8-1992 P-30
137 Head Constable Mukhtiar Singh………..
IT 15-9-1992 P-59
141 to 144 Deep in Villages………….
HU 6-8-1993
145, 146 In Jangla Village……….
All with winning feathers
WK 23-8-1992 P-30, 32,36
147 to 151, 152 In Bhikiwind Village Balwinder Singh,
his beloved…. Major Singh five times
IT 15-1-1991 P-30 WK 23-8-1992 p- 37,Union government honoured Balwinder singh by conferring on him the title ‘Saurya vir chakra’.He has also been featured in a few television films.IE 21-05-1996 p-9
152 M.S. Bitta more than a dozen…..
The then All India Youth Congress
President. On Sept 11, 1993 at the
Raisina Road, New Delhi office of the
A I Y C he narrowly escaped from an explosion aimed at him. More than 6 of his security men were killed. Many injured. Many vehicles were blown off.
TI 22-1-1994 P-16, FL 8-10-1993 P-17,
19, 20 to 24.
153 Operation “WOODROSE” (from July 1984 onwards) P-30 FL 20.11.1992.
“Black Thunder” (From May 15,
1998 onwards) WK 5-6-1994 P-38
- 45. IW 5-6-1988 P-26 to 29 IT
15-8-1991 P-90 TI 29-10-1992
153 “Rakshak I” (From January 1991) P-30
of FL 20.11.1992
“RAKSHAK II” (From November 1991)
FL 8-10-1993 P 24 to 26 IE 5-4-1992
FL 20-11-1992 P 29, 30 IT 15 Sept 1992
P-56-59.
154 “Night Dominance” (From 25-8-1992)
TI 28-8-1992 “ Final Assault” TI 4-12-1992.
155 “Julio Riberio, DGP IW 5-6-1998 P-28 IT 15-8-1991 P-92, IT 15-10-1991
P- 161HU 6-8-1993 WK 5-6-1994 P-46
155 & 138 D.S. Mangat D G P, IT 15-1-1991,
P-34, IT 15-8-1991 P 85 to 96. WK 23-8-1992 P-31, FL 8-10-1993 P-20
155 K.P.S.Gill, D.G.P, IW 5-6-1998, p 28,29 IT 15-11-1991 p.75, WK 23-8-1992 p-30,31, IT 15-9-1992 TI 29-10-1992 FL 20-11-1992, p32,27,29. FL 8-10-1993 p 17,19,26,28. TI 29-10-1992 IT 31-10-1992 p-95 HU 6-8-1993, WK 5-6-1994 p-49, HU 22-9-1994 p-16 HU 1-6-1997.
155 Lt.Gen.B.K.N.Chibber, Security Adviser to the punjab Government. FL 8-10-1993 p-26.
157 Some surrendering………..
WK 5-6-1994 p-47, IE 5-4-1992 p-1
31 March 2005. by knpillai
Venad and The West And their diadems and scepters.
(1)
But for my last year’s train journey to Trivandrum
along with a few French tourists
that spurred me to converse with them
about their motherland’s epochal periods
From Voltaire and Rousseau to De Gaulle and Mitterand
and their probing about my own reminiscence
of our country’s Independence Transfer Days,
these accompanying pages might not have seen
light of the day
and my answer to them was, 10
I still remembered those events as in a haze,
the swirls and eddies of those Phrygian-redolent white caps
and the fluttering tricolour flags swaying and marching
like whirling dervishes in a razzle-dazzle delirium
and jostling and shoving and their vociferous shoutings of slogans,
some irredentistic and millennianistic and others
anti-monarchic and anti-dewan
and now flitting down to the clammy innards
of our memory-beehives,
aren’t those same inane addled vacuities 20
then frenetically rent the air
and billowed in the heat and dust of our great country
now reresonant after five decades
in the damp and murky barbed alleyways
of our present honky-tonk realPolitik bedlam and behemoth
but against the new succubi and carapaced rulers
cloistered behind the moats and dykes
and bogs and quagmires of limpeting ‘ machtpolitik ‘
now moulted in to dysgenic leviathans and their ilk
and sozzling and weltering in ravenous chasm 30
of esurient demagogy
and don’t a few Laputan-politico-die-hard petards
of our country now and then pirouette and screed
under the diacritic rubrics
of procryptical and chauvinistic jingoism
from the podium of every proscenium, they climb
not only what the then dewan Sir C.P.R Iyer
and six other Princes Chamber members fifty years ago
had demanded
but are’nt they also bellowing about 40
the living examples of a few large countries abroad
which willy-nilly have already split into smaller states
during this half a century period ?
Hasn’t the edifice of our newly pullulated democracy
now become chinked and craquelured with massive fissures and concussions
and its cluttered and zombied mishmash repertoire
already turned hegemonic and miasmal too?.
Albeit our new babelish political mandarins and pontiffs
still patter gettisburg scriptures in stentorian voice
and roll hubris of ‘non –pyrrhic’ victory paternoster, 50
aren’t they merrily quaffing and rivening in internecine
and purulent byzantine political feuds and repostes
and like the brontosaurus had once trampled down
the mastodons in to their perennial annihilation,
now delving in the midseas of herbaceous dregs and dross
and banely uncaulking the seams and sinews
of our adult suffrage’s wobbling ship
which we had atavistically inherited
from the congealed Westminstrian bondage
through our former colonial masters’ great grand sires
who themselves had redeemed it from King John in 1215
and which they had further ligamented 60
with a frena of a ‘Glorious Revolution’
and later symbiosed it with
and metabolized through a ‘Bill of Rights’ 0f 1689
but haven’t all the afferent capillary lymph vessels
of our democracy’s limbic system
now become histoid and sclerosed
and its cerebrum almost thrombosed and thanatosed?.
II
Although Travancore state was ruled for centuries 70
by the Royalty through their seignorial rights
and both the Sri Mulam Assembly and Sri Chitira State council
were manacled and styptic trunks,
still, weren’t both these Institutions
the harbingers of our present day democracy’s
steel and concrete and rattling and jangling echoing halls
and aren’t at least a few of us now wistful
for some aperient and diathermic reforms
in our present day Election Juggernaut
for keeping its hallowed precincts and august citadels
out of bounds for the tainted mildew and the imbrued 80
and also to restrict the terms of office of our rulers ?.
Weren’t at least a few statutes enacted
by the then Royalty
like Rani Gowri Lakshmi Bhai’s
and Uthradom Thirunal’s
Slavery Abolition Laws of 1812 and 1853
and Sri Chitira Thirunal’s Temple Entry Act of 1936,
swingeing model revolutionary legislations
when similar antislavery laws in British India 90
and the Crown’s colonies and in Lincoln’s America
and in Latin and North America
were enacted only years later
and so also,
despite the then Dewan Sir. C.P.’s autocratic regime,
hadn’t he laid down the foundation
for industrializing the Travancore state even fifty years ago
and wasn’t he as Chairman of the ‘Committee on Regionalism’
during the post Chinese-war period
architectural for incorporating 100
a cardinal Constitutional Amendment No 16 of 1963
To Article 84
which only de jure nipped in the bud
the fissiparous and secessionist prowl
of many regional political parties across our country?.
Had our Chera Kings and Queens ,
hoary ancestors of Sri Chitira
wantonly dug out tongueless and spooky caverns
and goggled concretepill boxes and death retching foxholes
and zigzag and sinuous Serbonian bogs and saps 110
and soddened bunkers and hypogea
in our verdant land of paddy fields and coconut groves
and meandering estuarine waters
and swamped on the littoral of our country’s alluvial soil
with fire spitting cannons and camouflets
and mowed down its vital trunks and limbs
in to infernal cesspits and ponds and lairs
or floating torsos and rotting heads and pouting eyeballs
like perpetrated for centuries
by the crowned and sceptred
in Europe and the Mughal Empire?. 120
III
Not a whit, albeit they too battled wars
and won many diadems
against Pandya King Arikesari Mara Varman.
At Kottar and Vizhinjam and Karakkudy.
And King Ravi Varma Kulasekharan, a Vishnavite Scholar and poet
conquered South India and uprooted Vikram Pandyan’s forces
across the Sahyas
and King Udayan Cheran and his son Nedumcheralathen 130
had quirted and capitulated the ‘Kadambas’
and the ‘Yavanas’ in many naval wars
and had truncated and crippled the Cholas and the North Indian kings
and reigned like a blazing sun
from Kanyakumari to the Himalayas
but he was condescendingly gracious to the vanquished
and a great benevolent patron to all the religions.
Bhuthala Marthanda Varma whose coins, 140
many had exchanged even at Thirunelveli
and whose writ ran from Kollam to Kanyakumari
and up to the port of ‘Kayal’ in the south Pandya Kingdom
and to whom even the king of Ceylon used to pay vassal –tax,
had extirpated the Pandya’s army at Thamravarni River-bank
and later the Vijayanagar kings too
and isn’t it during the next king Veera Kerala Varma’s
winning war over Vijayanagar kings at Kotar,
some believe, St. Francis Xavior also happened to be present
In the battle field?. 150
His next successor, Veera Ravivarma too
had maimed Thirumala Naiken, an usurper-descendant
of the last Vijayanagar king, then the Mathura-Chieftain,
when our king’s captain Eravikutty Pillai
was deceitfully decollated by the enemies in the battle field
but his head was bravely retrieved
by his aide Kelu Nair
and wasn’t it, Mankammal, the Mathura-Queen
who was forced to flee from Nanchinadu suburbs 160
by the next king Ravi Varma;
and aren’t the grandmas of South Travancore
Still wafting across
and transcending these heroic tales
through ballads and folklores and lullabies
from one generation to another?.
(IV)
But none of these battles had cauterised
our chequered History
nor were they barbaric and sanguinary
as when king Ethelred, the Unready 170
treacherously scuppered all the Danes in Albion
and William, the Conqueror in 1066 decapitated Harold II
by a nefarious stratagem
and Edward IV dethroned Henry VI
and locked him up in the Tower
and Richard III, the regent-king bumped off
his ward Edward V by tumbrelling him to the gallows
but who himself was later doomed to the same fate
In Richmond’s hands.
And hadn’t under the dazzling altar glint 180
Henry VIII tied six nuptial knots
To Catherines and Annes, those cherubic royal brides
who new little
they were wedded to a tyrant-maniac
like those Royal Scottish heirs, all Jameses
whose grinning heads and humerie,
he had riddled with gunshot holes.
Hadn’t his daughter Elizebeth hanged Mary Stuart
in stonecold blood after locking her in the dreaded murky tower
for twenty demented years 190
after Mary herself had by hired assassins
plucked off her second husband Lord Darnley’s soul?.
How many hundreds, Catholic and Protestant martyrs
like sir Thomas More and Cardinal Fisher
whose bleeding head was impaled on the London bridge,
had Henry VIII and Elizebeth
trundled off to the gallows
and hadn’t she to quell the Northern Rising,
erected gibbets in every village North of England
and hanged Catholic rebels in hundreds ?. 200
Can we forget the Catholic Queen Mother of France
Catherine de Medici, a womb of terror
who massacred on a sombre midnight
before Bartholomew’s Day, 426 years back from today
thousands of innocent sleeping Huguenots
by waking up all of them at midnight
and then throwing down their bodies cut asunder
to the street of Paris
which, by next dawn, were filled up with gambrels
with corpses hanging on all of them 210
like dangling bats
and hadn’t the River Seine then become clogged with
thousands of drowned Protestants’ putrid cadavers
and swirled red and raging
and over flowing through its banks?.
Can we now etherize or glitch our memory’s grey docket cells
or jam the whirring shrieks and wails
of hundreds of slaughtered Protestants
still emanating from the Alpine Village of Piedmont
and from their massacred brethren 220
In the Ulster Rebellion of autumn 1641
and again the screams and yells
of the two thousand Catholics hunted down
after eight years
by Oliver Cromwell at Drogheda
when hundreds were also shipped off to Barbados.
And during his reign as Protector,
hadn’t one third of Ireland’s population perished
from war or famine
and weird banshee calls echoed 230
from every Irish home?.
In a hundred years of that tsunamic malevolent
and blackholed sanious age, hadn’t Europe turned
prehensile and Mephistophelean over religious schism
and become pandemic and stenching fetid
and mephitic from the smouldering and rotting corpses
and carrion and even maggots slithering
and wriggling out of the graveyards
and charnel houses used to pug and pugil
and gnaw and snip up and madly devour each other.
And hadn’t the continent by then 240
witnessed 1660 outbreaks of similar mayhem
among Protestants and Catholics and their sects and subsects
but during Venad Kings’ reign of Travancore
have we aver heard of any spitting gunshot fires
hitting eyeball to eyeball
from a horde of roaring pilgrims
of one religion to another
as in Wars of Crusades
or smelt half burnt Joans shrieking from the stakes
as in Marian persecution-bigotry 250
when “Bloody Mary’’ had burnt out Protestants in herds
and Cranmers, Hopers and Latimers and Ridleys
and Mathew’s Bible-Rogers too
in salamandrine fire,
all to stamp out Reformation
which she still failed to consummate
or seen any religious rabid massacres as perpetrated
during Cromwell’s time
or any blood splashings as in Chapels burning-Gordon Riots’ of 1780.
On the contrary,hadn’t Venad’s ninth century king Ayyanatikal Thiruvatikal 260
and a later Kulasekhara ruler Bhaskara Ravivarma I and Venad’s other
ancestral and descendant- Kings in Keralam graciously permitted St. Thomas
and other Christian missionaries and Jews and Arabs and Muslims to settledown
in Kodungalloor and Kollam and other places and to put up churches and
synagogues and mosques and also to carry on their religious missionary work
unhindered from first century or even earlier onwards
like Attingal Rani who too later allowed preaching and proselytizing
by the Portuguese in her state
and Rani Gowri Parvathy Bhai who liberally assisted 270
for the establishment of the Church Mission Society
and their college both in Kottayam;
aren’t all these cornucopian noble deeds
an acme of secular and catholic vision of Travancore Royalty?.
Shri Chithira’s ancestors never romped and ramped
In the glutinous and ravaging muddy sea
of religious persecutions
and ‘anti-recusant creeds’
as torrented by Albion on Ireland
from that day 280
when baron Strongbow sailed across St. George’s Channel
from Pembroke and Henry II took the title
Lord of Ireland
and when Charles I ruled it
through the pillary of Thomas Wentworth
and when Earl of Desmond with 600 Spanish men
in Munster were mowed down
and Viceroy Mountjoy quelled the Tyrone rebellion
at Ulster by mercilessly starving the Irish countryside
which action turned some of them even cannibalistic. 290
Aren’t the majority of the present Irish Americans
the descendants of the famine refugees of 1840‘s
and those settlers in Massachusetts
the offsprings of the Puritans migrated
under Arch Bishop Laud’s tyranny
and those in Plymouth
the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers,
the Puritan exiles
who were forced to leave from Plymouth
and who crossed the Atlantic on September 1620 300
i-n ‘Mayflower’ during James I’s reign
and hadn’t in the early 17th century
the Crown colonized the Northern Celtic Ireland
with Scots and even now on every year July 12
doesn’t the Protestant ‘State’ of Ulster
celebrate the anniversary of the Boyne
and during the Orange March in July 1996,
didn’t the police fire ten thousand rounds of
plastic bullets at the rioters up and down
the streets of the Bogside, the town’s Catholic area 310
when the procession passed through Garvaghy Road
and the rioters in retaliation attacked them
with petrol bombs in Londonderry
and don’t invisible lines still divide
the Catholic and Protestant sections of Belfast
and don’t we every week read in bold newspaper headlines
of Sinn Fein and the I-R-A and the bomb-burstings
and the blood spewings and spoutings
from the severed and dismembered heads and limbs
even now taking place in those trouble-prone territories. 320
Has any of our Venad Kings so far imposed
a ‘Eleven years of Tyranny’ rule
and let loose a blood curdling civil war
or beheaded any other king
or dug up any interred bodies of their predecessors
from charnel houses
like Cromwell’s and Bradshaw’s and Treton’s
which were later beheaded and skewed up
atop the Westminster Hall
except a Marthanda Varma 330
who fiercely battled and annexed other territories
of Thekkumkur, Vadakkumkur, Chempakasserry
and Kottayam and Desinganadu
and who decollated the rebel claimants
Pappu Thampy and Raman Thampy
In his Nagercovil palace
and other merceneries at Nanchinadu and Kalkulam
and Tripthy and Sucheendram and later subjugated
another Pretender the Desinganadu ruler
after defeating and inadvertently slaying 340
the latter’s ally,the Kayamkulam king
and in the subsequent wars at Attingal and Kayamkulam
subdued the slain king’s brother-ruler
whom the kings of Kochi and Chempakaserry
and the Dutch had assisted.
He also uprooted a conspiracy of the feudal lords
and that of the newly crowned Kayamkulam king
to assassinate him at the ensuing temple-‘arattu’
procession when the king always accompanied it on foot
and arrested and detained all the collaborators 350
and conspirators and executed some of them
and banished the Brahmin-men among them
after ostracizing and ‘outcasting’ them
and deracinating and annihilating all their families
by abandoning their women flok and children
to Thurayil fishermen
and later demolished and razed to the ground
every conspirator’s dwellings
and confiscated all their belongings. 360
But Marthanda Varma too
hadn’t exhumed
any interred bodies out of a sepulcher
nor he beheaded any corpse and skewed it
atop his palace-spires
although such a barbaric and cowardly
and vengeful act of dangling by halter
a patriot-rebel Velu Thampy’s headless body
at a public place at Kannamulai in Travancore
was perpetrated 145 years after
Charles II’ men commited similar heinous crime 370
on the Republicans’ dug out bodies after Restoration
but somehow,here in Travancore
the vaulted bodies were left off in situ and peace
and not disturbed from their eternal sleep
both by the British and Venad rulers
nor the dead men’s trunks were lopped off;
but such dastardly acts perpetrated in plenty
in medieval Europe continued to be commited
even until 275 years earlier by Henry VIII
and later by the Catholics both on the New David 380
and the Anabaptists of New Jerusalem
in the city of Munster
and in 1711 by Peter,the Great
when he gibbeted hundreds of rotting and putrid cadavers
of Streltsy conspirators outside the Kremlin Walls
for months together
and in our own times in this twentieth century
during the dead-black three and a half years of
carnage by the savagious Japanese occupying forces
both on the civilians and the prisoners of war 390
in all their conquered Asian territories
including in Andamans and Nicobar Islands
where thousands like Diwan Singh Dhillion
were forced to dig up their own graves
and then shot by them on 13/1/1944
when tragically, Subhash Chandra Bose, then heading the I.N.A.
had nonchalantly visited Port Blair,the Cellular Jail
and Ross Island, only some months later
as an ally of Nippon and the Nazis
and haven’t we seen in August 1996, 400
a newspaper-photograph of a similar macabre scene
reenacted in the streets of Kabul
by Taliban fundamentalists,
there the victim being none other than
a former President of Afghanistan,Dr.Najjibullah?
But Velu Thampy’s lifeless limb
from which he himself had shuffled off his mortal coil
by self-evisceration
and a further ripping-slash 410
of his still writhing and twitching neck,
inflicted by his own sobbing brother
unwillingly forced to do this cruel act
by that great heroic patriot,then feebly souffling
and in his last stage of apnoea,
whose only desideratum then
was to prevent his chevying and hallooing foes
and baying white hunters
from catching him alive 420
when he was already tracked by the spoor
to the Mannady temple,
was so hanged unashamedly at Kannamulai
not by any Venad King
but by a British Resident Macaulay,
although later,
this gruesome act was severely condemned
by the then British Governor General Minto.
But such stray incidents of cruelty
perpeptrated by individual British officials in isolation
should not muffle our conscience 430
to also appreciate
the fairplay of British Justice meted out
on many other occasions
by way of their censuring and reprimanding
and punishing the derelict and the delinquent officials
of the empire like
in Robert Clive’s and Warren Hastings’
Parliament-impeachment sessions,
the former charged for his unholy liaison
with Meer Jaffer and the latter 440
for his ironhanded autocratic regime in India
and the Nuncomar incident,
some historians feeling, both the accusations
were falsely foisted on them
but the trial on both by the Mother Parliament
went on for years, in the latter’s, for seven years,
Edmund Burke’s “philippic” and peroration
even now talked about
and in General Dyer and Governor O’Dwyer’s
Jallianwala mass shooting cases 450
when the British parliament was rocked over the incidents
and Winston Churchill himself thundered against them
and the Liberal Party led by Bannerman,
a later Prime Minister, denouncing General Kitchener
in the Boer War when Salisbury was the Prime Minister.
While condemning king Marthanda Varma’s vengeful acts
of reprisal against his conspirators,
weren’t they far less severe
than that was meted out
to the Duke of Monmouth
when he was hanged with his three hundred supporters 460
and 840 banished to West Indies
or to the Earl of Desmond
and a body of Italian soldiers and Spaniards
sent by the Pope Pius V and Philip II
or to the Earl of Surrey
and his father Norfolk
whose neck narrowly escaped Henry VIII’s dazzling axe
just by a day only
since providentially, the king had gasped last 470
on that ominous day
or to the Earl of Essex, then the Queen’s paramour
who had superseded Sir Walter Ralegh
who too later languished for thirteen wrenching years
in the blood whirling-tower
where he had created ‘History of the World’
and whose fate also slumped quailing
like that of Essex
or to the Earl of Strafford
scaffolded without trial 480
under the lynching eyes of
a two hundred thousand jeering
and blood thirsty begotted crowd
after passing a ‘Special Bill of Attainder’
by the Long Parliament’s Puritan majority
or after four years
to the Archbishop Laud, Strafford’s staunch ally,
all of whom had been brutally executed for treason.
Unlike the English King
who had pilfered a ‘Stone of Scone’ 490
from a vanquished state,
or dumped them
by a glossectomy-‘Act of Union 1707’
or by some Treaties of ‘Troyes’ or ‘Nanjing 1842’
or by a ‘Diktat of Versailles’
and who with France had waged
a ‘Hundred years’ of War’ against each other,
wasn’t the Travancore Monarchical rule
more peaceful
except during the reign of Marthanda Varma 500
who had waged intermittent battles
and seized many neighbouring kingdoms
by subduing their rulers
including the rebellious King of Kayamkulam
who had revolted many times against Marthanda Varma
even after his few earlier defeats
and who finally surrendered
only after Marthanda Varma recaptured
his Kilimanoor Fort’, then situated inside
the Travancore Kingdom 510
but which the Kayamkulam king had earlier attacked and captured
with the Dutch-assistance .
But ,this feat, Marthanda Varma could accomplish
only after a sixty eight day-siege of that fort;
the present and future Travancore history fossickers
can delve and dive through the 250 year old
battle scarred Royalty manuscripts
now perhaps both aestivating and hibernating
in some palace’ dank and dusty cellars
or inside some musty museums 520
or manuscript archives
and compare the military tactics and manoeuvres
of this 1743- Kilimanoor siege
with similar others like
Clive’s defending Arcot for fifty days
against Dupleix
or the three month–Bataansiege by Nippon
or the Allied siege of the Volcanic Island of
Iwo Jima in March 1945
or the fifty five day-Boxers’ Peking siege of 1900 530
or the six week-Doon Kalunga fortress siege
of 1814 by the British against Capt-Thapa’s Gurkhas.
V
If Marthanda Varma had a feral falcon’s
carnivorous gobbling mind
he certainly could have easly taloned off
the whole of Kochi too
since he had already captured a vast territory
of that princely state
by stomping across his way
through Udayamperoor, Mamala and Karappuram 540
and Arookkutty and had reached up to
a cock’s crow from Kochi’s capital
when their king Ramavarma obsecrated for peace and ceasefire
to which Marthanda Varma nobly acceded
since it was not a feat of arms
for a Venad king
to become a ‘Kochi-phagostate’ and a ‘Perumpadappu Swaroopam’s’ extirpator
or turn himself a phagedenic
but only after Ramayyan, his dewan
had dejure annexed the 24 mile-territory 550
from Arookkutty to Alappuzha .
So also the king Ramavarma, his successor
could have whipped up his suzerainty
over the Samudri’s Malabar too
since as besought by the Kochi King Veera Kerala Varma,
he had chased out the former’s forces
from Perumbavur and Chavakkadu and Thrissur
and Chalakkara and Kakkad and Paravur
but Samudri too later entreated for peace
and signed a peace-treaty with him 560
in June 1763 at Padmanabhapuram.
VI
Has any Venad monarch flung with slings
his mother and consort in to any dungeon-cell
or rattled their stuttering barrels at their cranium
like the Elector of Hanover, later king George III
an English king still with Saxson tongue
who gruesomely shut his queen Sophia Dorothea
inside a Stygian-black cavernous German castle
for thirty scorpioned years
or like queen Isabella who treacherously plotted
a stratagem with the conspirators against Edward II 570
or like her son who later incarcerated her in the Tower
except a king Ayilliam Thirunal Rama Varma
who detained his brother in law,
Kerala Varma Valiyakoyithampuran for five years
in Alappuzha and Haripad Palaces
but certainly not in any hideous-howling tower.
VII
Have we ever heard of a selfclaimed-‘Divine’ Venad monarch
like James I of England
who expressed his doctrine of Divine Right
in the Preface to the ‘Authorized Version of the Bible’
‘Great and manifold were the blessings, 580
most dreaded Soverign, which Almighty God
……………………..
……………….when he first sent your Majesty’s
Royal person to rule and reign over us’.
And who reminded the members of the Commons
that their privileges were derived from ………………..
………………………………………………………….
…………… ‘the grace and permission of our ancestors and us’.
Or like the Japanese Emperors from Mutsuhito to Hirohito
who claimed Divinity
as descendants of God king of Shinto State religion
and when in the Great War just ended, 590
with their defeat and surrender,
like their suicide planes were christened as
‘Kamikaze’ the Divine Wind
that had ramped and thwarted
a 13th century attempt of Mangol invasion of their land,
and their soldiers while charging at the Allied lines
in the battle fields
and after the war, facing the firing squads,
as war criminals
were shouting ‘BANZAI’ 600
‘ten thousand years of longevity to the ‘Divine Emperor’.
Until their myths were irrevocably shattered
by General Mac Arthur
when the then Emperor Hirohito
was forced to renounce his Divinity
but still allowed to rule
sitting on his Phoenix Throne
from I January 1946
and in Albion too, hadn’t their kings
lost their Divinity 610
when James II, the last of the Stuart Kings
was forced to flee to France in that ship
after his defeat in the Battle of Boyne ?.
VIII
But for the valiant
and still peaceful kings of Venad
like RamaVarma,
wouldn’t have those Ogres of Mysore Sultans,
Hyder and his son Tippoo,
ghoulish usurpers of Wodeyar Kingdom
and marauding vulturous ravagers 620
and rapacious foragers and savagious raptors
and cockatrice-monsters and calderal bigots
and truculent oodlers of fiendish wars,
fanging and spitting venom
and cleaving skulls and scalps by battle axes
pithed and devoured Travancore by head and front?
After Tippoo had declared himself
in favour of the French Revolution,
as an ally of Napoleon Bonaparte
whose imminent attack on india
was then subject of every man’s talk 630
and who had already subjugated
the Samudri and the Kochi king
and had minaciously advanced towards Travancore
raking forts and temples and churches on the way
with whinging bullets and shrieking cannons
and whoosh and crash of shells
and forcefully proselytizing
more than four hundred thousand xxx
and enslaving and butchering thousands
and uprooting hordes of inhabitants 640
as a jetsam of destitutes
and decrepits and shrivelled swarms
of refugees to Travancore
where they all were happily and magnanimously sheltered
by the noble Venad king Rama Varma.
This enmasse migration from Malabar and Kochi
to Travancore during Tippoo’s pillaging
and sword and sickle rule,
although it bears no verisimilitude
to the stream of Tibetan refugees’ influx
to our country along with their spiritual Head 650
the 14th Dalai Lama who was welcomed personally
at our Indian Border on the 31st March 1959
by Jawaharlal Nehru himself
and who were given home and shelter by us
at Dharmasala and in more than eleven states
and fiftyfour Tibetan settlements
and who are still in our country
or to the stark nightmarish exodus of emaciated
and flotsammed and orphaned Kashmiri refugees
to Delhi and other places 660
threatened by the Pakistani-sponsored terrorist attacks
and massacres and mayhem and anarchy in their State,
can still spur the present and future historians
to scour and scout for other analogies of such exoduses
in other parts of the world, if there are.
Now, no one in this twentieth century
can augur without a scrying or an Aaron’s rod
as to what all drastic
and irrevocably warped changes,
we would have witnessed 670
in our today’s chronicles and acculturation
and geographical maps of Kerala and of south india
but for the meridian-military prowess
fusilladed by the brave and steely
but pious and sagacious
Venad kings Marthanda Varma and Rama Varma
and their rectricial and protean dewans
Ramayyan and Ayyappan Marthanda Pillai
and Raja Kesava Dasan whose life had ended tragic
during the next king’s reign 680
and whose last moribund days
had recently reechoed
at the March 1997 Kochi-Seminar
of the Neurological Society of India.
And but for our winning the Kulachal War
on August 10, 1741 and the surrender
of the Dutch army and it’s captain Delanoi
to the King Marthandavarma and
Delanoi’s long tryst and
valorous role with Travancore ‘s great glories 690
and victories and with its two regimes
until his death in 1777 (whose last remains
are interred at Udayagiri, fort).
IX
It was indeed a riding on the crest
for king Rama Varma’s soldiers
to have successfully defended Coimbatore
from the manslaughtering Tippu’s attack,
along with the British forces
and later battled at Sreerangam
in the 3rd Mysore war 1792 700
under the personal command of General Cornwallis,
the then Governor General of India
and later Viceroy at Dublin
who some eleven years earlier
was a victor at North and South Carolina
but who had later surrendered at Yorktown
to George Washington’s Franco American Army
in the War of American Independence,
and defeated Tippoo
who himself seven years later
gallantly fought the 4th Mysore war 1799 710
and met with his heroic discomfit and death
fighting to the last rale in his ausculation
at the eerie tableau of the gory battle field
like Hotspur
in the Battle of Shrewsbury,
who wanted ‘to pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon’
and ‘pluck up drowned honour by the locks’,
ironicallly ,his then victorious British commander
was none other than General Arthur Wellesley 720
who at Waterloo, fifteen years later
distinguished himself as Lord Wellington,
the Victor of Napoleon
and an old ally of Tippoo’s
and his once besought saviour
but who could never set sail for conquering the East
and instead perished acronychal at St. Helena,
after twentytwo years of Tippoo’s death.
X
In the recent months’ news from Russia,
haven’t we heard about the proposal 730
to canonize Tsar Nicholas II
and Queen Alexandria and their five children
who had been massacred in 1918 by the Bolsheviks,
at Peter and Paul Cathedral, St. Petersberg,
that great city whose name was changed to Petrograd
after the Revolution and then to Leningrad
and now back to its original name
and from Bengladesh,
about the return to power of Sheik Hasina
daughter of the assassinated founder of their country 740
Sheik Mujibur Rehman,
as their new Prime Minister
after twenty one years of her whole family’s
enmasse slaughter by the Revolutionaries
and now from that turbulent,
and mountainous Balkan Republic of Albania,
about the veridical return of their old-king Leka
after fiftyeight years of his
and his father king Zog’s exile
since Benito Mussolini’s invasion 750
of that country in 1939
and after fifty years’ hardline communist regime
till 1900.
Haven’t the whole caboodle of yesteryear
blood-spattering procrustean Revolutions
and its pogromed and morganatic relics
been blown off like a giarandole
in the blizzard of Time
or irretrievably been chymified
with the cud and crud of History’s 760
acidulous ebb and flow
and aren’t their only present surviving vestiges,
the bawling and wauling
cacodemonic-human skeletons
and the cloven hooves
now tumbling down
from the ramshackle cupboard of the past?.
XI
Who knows, not a too distant
but, more humane and discerning
Future Polity and Academia 770
will not graciously excavate
the dumped up and the buried and the forgotten
Royal sashes and the regalia and the fasces
of our pious but valiant Venad Sovereigns
from the mausoleum of the whirligiging past
and offer for their warp and woof of memory
at least a few finger-counted pages
in our kids’ text books
lest our posterity should ride
oblivious to Venad’s Heritage. 780
March/May/1997
By
March/May 1997-
REFERENCES
Lines 37 to 39
95 to 105 about sir C.P.R.Iyer
Hindu 26-11-1995
Hindu 20-04-2003
New Indian Express 09-03-2003
New Indian Express 23-03-2003
Hindu( letter to the editor) 25-04-2005
Hindu 31-07-1997
Malayala Manorama 31-07-1997
Lines 70 to 76 ABOUT SREE MULAM ASSEMBLY & SREE CHITIRA STATE COUNCIL
Malayala Manorama 22-10-2004
Patippura ( Malayala Manorama) 03/13-08-2006
Lines 679 to 684 ABOUT RAJA KESAVA DASAN
Mathrubhumi 03-03-1997 MM 17-03-2005
Lines 685 to 693 ABOUT KULACHAL WAR & CAPTAIN DELANOI
Patippura( Malayala Manorama) 04-01 or 11?-2007
Malayala Manorama 25-10-1995 – 1993?
Lines 714 to 717 ABOUT TIPOO SULTAN LIKE HOTSPUR…………………………..
Shakespear’s Henry IV part I Act I Scene III
War ! ? or Peace?
I
From atop the cumulus
one day centuries ago
did alight to Kyushu
in the Land of the Rising Sun,
Sun Goddess Amaterasu’s grand son
Ninigi-no-Mikoto
to designate and perpetuate
a rule of man in his Land.
His primeval descendents harried their way
to Yamato 10
and begot his great grand son,
the first emperor ‘Jimmu’.
Dank and clammy was Tokyo on a September 6
two score and sixteen years back.
A Phoenix throne in the palace
sheened like a speculum.
Upon it was propped up
Emperor Jimmu’s big great- grand son
Hirohito, Potentate-Divine
124th down in the genealogy 20
and who ruled his Empire
in a pristine billowing glory,
through a ‘Reign of Showa’.
A gold screen in his front glinted
like an unscathed scimitar.
Up and down steened
his fingers calligraphic
but the pen diabolic
through an Imperial rescript
but not before he dribbled 30
a spoof of portmanteau-platitudes
on ‘Showa’
composed by his grand father Emperor Meji.
II
As by a leviathan
terror mazed incandescent
and a Deaths-cape thunderquaked triphibious.
A Charbydis of monster
spouted Armageddon and holocaust
and in a gush of inundation and cataclysm
bellowed like a behemoth 40
and stormed out
of his Imperial Jimmu-Juggernaut
to spew Gotterdammerungs
and spires and domes-high spread of corpses
all over Asia and the Pacific.
III
For Malaya
December 7, 1941 gored out procrustean
and was swathed in deaths and mayhem.
Hadn’t on this day
set sail from Indo China 50
a Jap 2nd Fleet
of men twenty four thousand
for a raid and raven there
during next
four and forty months.
It was akin to a China ravaged
when eight hundred years back
another Scourge of God, Gengishkan
and his grand son Batu
and their Golden Horde of Barbaric Tartars 60
had mopped down
the whole of Balkhand and Samarkhand
into a graveyard
and advanced Westward
by crossing the Urals.
Same day,
three hundred sixty Jap bombers
and fighter planes swooped down
in to Pearl Harbour
and in a trice 70
zapped more than half
of U.S. Navy’s Far East Aircraft
in to splinters and debris
and vaporised umpteen of their vessels
in to papulous but floating scrapyards,
who knows,
were smeltable or not,
in to crude rawmaterial
sufficient to mould
trillions of razor-blades 80
and also hurtled down
hundreds of its brave men
in starched whites
and aurated braid
in to the deep Pacific.
IV
Singapore sky not far from Malaya
flashed in tandem
with Japanese Spit-fires and tracers
as if many hundreds of giant-girandoles
had cracked above that city. 90
Next day
a Brigade 22 of Australians
was mowed down
by 5 and 15 of the invaders.
December 10 scythed up
aguish and livid.
In the Eastern Coast of Malaya
the sea gorged in fury
Britain’s pride
Prince of Wales and Repulse 100
and its masters eighteen hundred and more
when they darted down hapless
in to the innards of
its sulphurous belly.
V
Like many filibusters and autocrats
who in hubris
prance and declaim
and when later doomed subliminal,
reel off a swan-song
and toll their own death knell 110
before they swallow-dive
into a casus belli
to imbrue themselves,
with a brand
and a whip of megalomania,
for catapulting their hegemony
and later, a world-conquest,
Adolf Hitler, too banged a war
on an America.
Which nonetheless 120
until then
was neutral.
VI
Aerial bombardment in Penang
blew off dead so many hundreds
but Britain still vaunted
as in a charade.
-…….. Singapore, its Eastern Gibralter
is impenetrable …….. -
Their Allies
and Singapore- denizens too 130
iterated it in a euphony
despite Bankkok, Southern Burma
and Hongkong
all closeby
had tumbled down askew
one by one.
Father, Great Britain
then being your paymaster
and moral booster,
you too had hoped 140
in ‘tout ensemble’,
Britain would post-haste
sweep off the invaders
and Singapore could never be stonkered
albeit your own house
at 223 River Valley Road
was often writhing in tantrum
and shells and rockets
were swishing over the crest
and roaring like locomotives 150
above your city.
What else otherwise
could have spurred you
to pen us a card
even on a date as late as
15th of that month
that too
on a black-out night
under dim light
and to mail it to us post-haste. 160
Kindling our hopes
of rejoining you soon.
But, hadn’t Fate
bedevilled itself
and swooped over us
like a tirailleur
and scored a bull’s eye
when by January 10
Nippon advanced further
and ports of Kulalampur and Swetenham 170
and northern and central Malaya
too suddenly capitulated.
So too fizzled out our plans. To sail back to Singapore to join you.
VII
In a new logistical maneuvering
Archibald Wavell, then Commander in Chief
and a later Viceroy of British India
took reign of the newly constituted ‘ABDACOM’
and headquartered himself in Java
effective 15th January 1942.
A five-day whirlwind visit to Malaya 180
prompted him
to wire General Ismay in London.
-Singapore bombed twice that morning
by fifty Jap planes each time…..-.
Next day, a hail of rapid fire
from a bevy of Jap-Zeroes
crushed five British Hurricanes
in to a cavernous Jumble-mismash
of smouldering nuts and bolts.
Winston Churchill cautioned Wavell 190
-No question of surrender to be entertained
until protracted fighting among
the ruins of Singapore City …..-.
Wavell tactically ordered
immediate retreat of the Allied Forces
to Johore.
on 23rd Australian Prime minister Curtin
sullenly reminded Churchill.
-After all the assurances we have been given,
evacuation of Singapore would be regarded 200
here and everywhere as an inexcusable betrayal.
………………………………………-.
Britain replenished Singapore Royal Air Force
with fifty five more Hurricanes
but they were no match
for the more versatile Jap-Zeroes.
By 31st, Manila, Brunei and
North and East Borneo
all grovelled under Jap suzerainty.
-A crumbled Malaya 210
screamed in anguish
when the last British soldier’s
wilted-shadow
marched past in egress.-
-Grating a feeble stomping sound
and abandoning her
to a Tojo Hideki’s
three and a half year tyrannical rule.-
-Nevertheless, leaving her spell bound
when two pipers skirled ‘Hielan Laddie’ 220
and the demolition charges exploded
sluicing the waters of Johore Strait
through a sixty yard gap in the causeway.-
VIII
Father, by now, many of your kith and kin
had been cindered in to slag-heaps
of bones and skeletons
and among them
was Kelu Nair, our frequent family visitor.
In one of the bizarre
and deadly air-strikes 230
hadn’t death’s head and humeri
grazed you by a whisker
when you providentially wriggled out
from its prognathous
but tensile and proboscidean tentacles
by the skin of your teeth
only because you petrified yourself cataplectic
where you were.
Unlike some full-term Chinese ladies
in your flank 240
who swerved and scrambled
to an air-raid bunker
at a defilade right
when in a split-second
they were charred ablaze
and strewn across the road
as mere hewed up hunks
of brawns and bones
and chorions and amnions.
And as levigated pulp 250
of moted ligaments,
chymed with umblici
and marinated in clumps
of agglutinated blood.
All which were squirted and splotched
at your person
then standing stupefied
and paroxysmal.
IX
A burst of cannons hit
the hull of Empress Asia 260
and the torpedoes ripped it asunder.
Like a tornardo
440 heavy guns enfiladed
a battle-scarred Singapore city.
Still Singapore’s General Arthur Percival
stubbornly proclaimed on 7th February
-we would resist up to the last man
………………………………..-.
In Malayan swamps and sleets
deaths fiddled swift 270
and macabre
on a group of wounded Australians
and Indians
then lying huddled around some trees.
Slaughter by beheading and disembowelling
rammed upon the newly arrived
two Australian battalions.
Nippon pilloried and tridented
all whom they had enslavened
with a sword and sickle entwined round 280
and a spear and meat-axe
hinged upon it.
In every country
it conquered
all faucet-drips turned sanguinary”
and wrought gruelling upon
the esprit of the Allies.
Pendulum of the British power
still tick-tocked
but its ding-dong 290
had ceased
days earlier.
X
Father, you scuttled off
to some unknown island,
that was
on 3rd February 1942
Just five days before
the marauders landed in Singapore city.
By now, I presume,
although you must have tail-spinned in to 300
a reneged and cataracted shadow
of yourself
and were time-fused upon
a powderkeg,
you were still winched up
with a Dunkirk spirit
when you wrote us
as if apocalyptical
on the same day
from that city 310
which had now turned into
an eerie tableau
of a gory battle field
that if no letter
were forthcoming from you
for a few months continuous,
you were to be counted
as a tare and tret
of the war game
and consequently 320
we would receive
from Britain’s escrow account
all the posthumous eligible solatia.
Now hadn’t panic progged you
and revved up
through your cerebral meatus
and all the gossamered
thistledowns of optimism
so far wafted across
in every syllable of 330
your letters previous,
all of a sudden withered in to
a trismus of despair.
And after perching on a precipice
you plummeted
in to a terminal moraine
of a desert-hopping
lost traveller’s
ever-haunting mirage.
After your letter was dropped to us 340
from that beleaguered city,
You must have sailed across
some enemy submarines and torpedoes-scouring
and mined sea
and landed in a Dutch-ruled port
as I distinguish so
from the postal embossings
on your card of the 11th February 1942
despatched from there
and whose hand scribbled fading name 350
your son has now
after half a century
presbyopically deciphered
as Bantemzorg
whose topography
he groped and scouted,
like a fossicker
through a passel of atlases and maps
and History-tomes.
Since then but all in vain. 360
A wuthering time-warped
two and forty months
had galloped past
comatose and astigmatic
when as a bolt from the blue
one day we heard your name
readout over the radio
and saw in small prints
as one among the thousands
recovered from the Japanese P.O.W. camps somewhere in Java 370
a few weeks after Littleboy and Fatman
plunged down from Enola Gay and Bock’s Car
had cratered Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in to boiling cauldrons
and after which only
your first letter reached our hands.
(Besides the two censored P.O.W. camp-mailed post cards too.
Just before or after that.)
XI
A torrent of Japanese-stonk
knocked out Singapore’s principal defence 380
of 15” coastal guns.
-Many dead lying in the streets
burial impossible …………………………..
pestilence may come …………………….-.
So cabled on 14th
Singapore-Governor desperate.
Sunday loomed large and grotesque
and contorted.
Nowhere church bells
clanged in chime. 390
A haggard Percival
wired Wavell.
-water, petrol, food, ammunition practically finished.
Unable therefore to continue fighting any longer …………………….-.
Viscerated and dismembered
were putrid human carcasses
that stood impaled
and retted miasmal
and wide in the highways.
Others bloated turgid. 400
All were yellowed like lumber
and clogged the sewers.
Singapore city stank foetid.
An acrid smell stenched out
from mounds of rubber burnt.
Odour of gunpowder and
high octane fuel
reeked the island mephitic.
Colonnades of smoke
balooned up 410
from torched buildings
and spiralled Everest high
like erupted fumes
from a steaming volcano.
Columns of dust knotted
and swirled all over labyrinthine.
Uprooted and enmeshed
were the city’s electric
and telephone cables.
Piles of gutted rubbles 420
and masonry
and mountains of tangled steel
and iron-tetrahedrons
and barbed wire entanglements engulfed
and wrung out the thoroughfares and traffic-arteries.
The city already blistering under jungle-heat
now scorched itself
by tread of fire
from rivers of burning oil.
Overturned buses and trams 430
were concertinaed
with rows of passengers sitting in.
Necks of many
had been chopped off.
Some were hanging down mangled
but their limbs were glued
to the seats.
A few had already started rotting
and were pecked at
by crows and vultures 440
that barged in and out
at their will.
Inside the aisles of the carriages
frothing crimson blood-clumps
tinged toad-ochreous
when it got dyed
with the human excreta voided
by the dead commuters
in their rictus-bouts
of sphincterismuses 450
and retches
when they all suffered
torture-deaths
braced to their seats.
Pests flitted across
and merrily waltzed and quaffed.
Ants and termites feasted on the carrion
and tasted a caviare
in their new victuals.
XII
For a while 460
General Percival and Australian General Gorden Bennette
conferred in the bomb-proof conference hall
under Fort Canning.
The partly destroyed assembly plant
of Ford Motors shook in ruckus
when a brutish, burly and callused
General Tomoyukki Yamashita strutted in.
And to whom Percival
in a frazzle
laid down his side-arm weapon 470
and the shoulder epaulettes
across a bare wooden table.
XIII
Boom of guns and bombers
came to naught at 8.30 P.M..
Union jack was hauled down.
In its place
a Rising Sun fluttered.
Yamashita, a quivering mass of conniption
hemlock-smiled
and anthropophagus-like 480
and crabbed with victory
proudly celebrated convivial
the saphires of his glory
over dried cuttle fish, chestnuts and ‘sake’
and toasted with cups of wine lifted
and faced northeast toward Tokyo
like Admirals Ushijima
and Nagumo, a Pearl Harbour-strategist
did after two and a half years
in Okinawa and Saipan 490
when both of them on their defeat
committed harakiri.
Now Tojo Hideki’s men
merrily trolled
in the Bay of Bengal too.
Winston Churchill broadcast
-Here is the moment to display
calm and poise
combined with grim determination……………..-. 500
More than 62,000 British, Australian and Indian forces
groaned as Prisoners of War
until General Seishiro Itagaki
enfeoffed to Lord Mountbatten
on September 2, 1945
by when
half of them had wallowed
unsnorkelled
in to a five fathom – deep moss of Time
never to resurface above thereafter.
So far History produced none 510
except a Napoleon Bonaparte
who had annexed
in the first six months of his military crusade
a million square miles of area-
a feat now repeated
only by a Hirohito
after one hundred and fifty years-,
the total conquered land equalled
to the entire Western half of the Pacific.
But for colonising an equivalent territory 520
of length and breadth
hadn’t the caucasians
fought across the world
for long two centuries !?
And which
Japan hammer-nailed
under blood-bath
in six lunar months !
XIV
Father, that during some night-marish odyssey
you were bobbing up and down 530
the sea waves
staving the plankton
and buoyed up alive miraculous
for a few days
in the damp-chill water
clutching only at
your life-jacket
and perhaps nestling
under the lee of
a flotsam and jetsam 540
eddying around you
which happened
now I presume,
when your ship must have been
bombed or torpedoed or mined
when you were further sailing from Bantemzorg
after dropping us that letter of the 11th February,
was the latest scoop
I recently heard straight
from the horse’s mouth (of Singapore) 550
after half a century of
its happening (could it be fully true?!)
And now shedding light
as a levin
on a perdu
that had waked sinuous
out of my chinked hobbit-mind,
eversince I vaguely listened to
mother and grandmother conversing
hushed-up 560
with neighbours and visitors
in the kitchen and the corridors,
about your
and your shipmates
jettisoning
and abandoning
all your bag and baggage
in to a growling sea
prior to some tsunamic malevolent
and infernal evil 570
conflagrating and swallowing your ship,
when you were sitting in our house-veranda
penning down letters and letters
with your Parker pen
and knob-screwing ball pencil
having cut-leads of refills
stored inside its cap,
a rarity in those days,
(even now so and perhaps already obsolete)
and smoking and puffing 580
endless number of cigarettes,
picking them out
from the tin-containers
which you had brought in plenty
all the way from Singapore
and offering them
to whoever came to chat with you.
While nostalgically raking up and stoking
the embers of desideratum,
from among the rusted smithereens 590
and rumped crannies
and lair-holes
entombed over a noman’s land
in my iglooed mind,
about our halcyon days
with you in Singapore,
although not long
and of which
now I haven’t even the faintest memory
(except through mother’s reminiscences) 600
and also about
your prewar-evacuation days
and your P.O.W.days,
by flicking through sheaves of
your handwritten letters,
still hibernating
inside the blind-dark of my boxes
and which have now become smeared and daubed
by a hack-sawing
and haltering 610
and ever-gnashing Time,
and by browsing
and reading
and munching
and ruminating over
and now
while vetting them
through the contours of thick History-tomes,
I stumbled upon the names of
Atkin and C-W-Pulford and E-J-Spooner 620
and Frampton
who too were evacuated from Singapore
in thirty little ships
along with three thousand men
on 13th and 14th of February
just after ten days of your
sailing from there
and who too flailed through the same agonies
as of yours
when all but Atkin’s group 630
perished half starved and diseased
while marooned in Tjebia Islands off Sumatra
by April and May 1942
and Atkin with few others
taken back to Singapore
as P.O.W.s
and you landed up
somewhere else
or were picked up from the sea itself
by the Japanese 640
before or after the Battle of Java
and the subsequent Dutch collapse on March 8
of which
Winston Churchill commented:
-……………………. the end could not be delayed.
Many thousands of British and Americans
including 5,000 airmen with their commander Maltby,
over 8,000 British and Australian troops
were surrendered by the Dutch decision of March 8 …………………..-.
‘I would I know’ 650
like Kipling
how and where.
Perhaps you could.
As a promachos-tutelary,
unravel it anagogical
and achromatic
in one of my quotidian lucubrations
or fugacious scryings.
XV
Father, while incarcerated
in one of the three hundred or more P.O.W.camps 660
in the Eastern Netherlands archipelago
or in some other Nippon-occupied territory,
had Tojo’s bogles
leached off your spleen and bronchi
as a leeching nematode does
after it burrows in to
and squirms through the blood and lymphatics
or you arcanely were let off
from their lassoes
as a reward 670
for some in-camp pedagogic duty
performed by you,
as it reverberates so anodyne,
in the warren of my thalamus
which perennially pips
with the echoes of
the rumps and remnants
of your half a century old narrations,
which you then had
entered in to 680
with my mother and grand mother
and grand father and uncles and acquaintances
and decibelled in your stentored voice,
these are even now docketed in
the mnemonic woofers
of my axons and dendrites
when simultaneously
the radar screen of my hospiced mind
also blips
with your silhouetted image 690
in full uniform, epaulettes and lanyard
and boots, hat and baton
and a large watch
fob-chained to your trouser pocket
and your cuddling and snugging and hugging me
with your thick coppice-mustached
and stubbly cheeked face
and chain-smoking
and cigarette-smelling mouth
and lifting me 700
high-up above your head
and then ensconcing me
in your lap,
all which,
although lasted
only for less than a few fleeting moments,
half a century ago,
on that memorable day
you returned to our house
after a three and a half year 710
pestilential war
and your internment,
and all are still niched in my mind’s patio
as if it just happened
in an anabiotic yesterday
and for a repetition of which
I still foolishly pine,
if not here in a yonder tomorrow
but in a palingenesis later.
XVI
Father, were you in the know of 720
ovens of horrors
then being pelted on your co-P.O.W.s
and inhabitants
of Malaya and Singapore
and other Nippon-shackled nations
like those on the sixty five Australian nurses
and twenty five English soldiers
who were lynched
and butchered in cold blood
on 16th February 1942 730
in the Eastern Coast of Malaya
even after they raised their hands
under a white flag
and from among whom
only one,
a Sister Vivien Bullwinkel
was lucky to save her neck
or about the Alexandria Military Hospital carnage
between 8th and 15th of February
in which the bedlamite Japanese army 740
went berserk
and bayonetted
and massacred
the doctors and patients and other staff alike
in all, more than three hundred.
In Singapore Island
on the 18th,
weren’t five thousand prominent Chinese citizens
hunted after like quarries
and slain like pigs 750
with hands tied down behind their backs.
In Malaya too
out of seventy thousand transplanted Chinese citizens
arrested after the fall of Singapore
weren’t many of them roped together
and sardines-like squeezed in to boats
and transported
to the midseas
and then shoved off
and flung in to the waters 760
or driven off to the sea-beach
and mercilessly machine-gunned.
And many schools and public halls
in Singapore and Malaya were
converted in to brothel-houses
for the Japanese marauders.
XVII
Father, had you been evacuated
from Singapore on 13th or 14th
instead of on the 3rd
wouldn’t you too have been ratcheted 770
through the ostrium of Tjebia Islands
as happened to Spooner and Pulford
and Frampton and the other hundreds
or perchance as a fugitive escaped
and wandered
half mad and recluse
in some reef or ridge
of a ravine in that Island
and later recaught as a P.O.W.
and carried back to Singapore 780
like Atkin
or faced the dichotomy of death
in its iron portal
during the 3½ year captivity there
as one among the half of sixty thousand P.O.W.s.
or rifle-shot like Rodney Bravington
and Victor Gale of Australia
or Harold Waters and Eric Flecher of Britain
who faced the firing squads on September 12, 1942
or grisly executed on August 4, 1945 790
like the twenty two Americans
at the Singapore naval base
and buried at Nivusum airport
but whose interred remains were hurriedly exhumed
and recremated at the Barracks Square
and whose ashes were stealthily scattered off
into the sea on August 15th
immediately after the same day’s
mid-noon surrender broadcast of the Emperor,
all done covertly 800
to abrade every evidence
of these ghastly crimes
or survived
until the war ended
like
The Singapore-General Percival
who had been transported to Manchuria
or like K.P.Kesava Menon,
a later Indian High Commissioner to Ceylon,
then a civil prisoner for one and a half year in Singapore 810
or like the Australian Kenneth Harrison
or like the Britisher Eric Lomax,
a latterly-bloomed author of ‘The Railway Man’,
afterwards deported to
the Thailand Burma Railway site at Bampong
where fifty thousand Allied P.O.W.s
and a quarter million Malayan, Chinese, Javanese
and Burmese and Indian Slave labour had perished
unsung and unheard
under terrible brutality 820
while struggling with
steel and concrete structures
wearing G-strings
under tropical-blazing heat
and looking like cadaverous starving wretches,
skeletal and feverish
with sunken eyes and tonsured skulls
and keen ears and parched throats
and where since July 1957
a hundred mile stretch in it 830
and a Memorial Cemetery at Kanchanbury
became a pilgrimage route
and congregation centre
for the widows and children
and other dear ones
of the Allied P.O.W.s from far and across the world
and also for some in Japan,
now greyed and mellowed,
but once seismic-dreaded
as Devil’s own executors and torturers 840
who later repented
for their antediluvian
and antipodal barbarities fifty years ago perpetrated by them
and who now honed for atonement and contrition
and compunction and attrition
and penance and expiation
and to where
a Thailand Tourist train has been plying
from Bankok every morning
since 1987. 850
XIII
Father, isn’t it due to
a skittering windfall
of a grinning Destiny
that you beached ashore hale
out of a Nippon’s welling-up immurement
sans a Bampong site
and sans a firing squad. 857
REFERENCES
1. Lines 23 and 32 - ‘showa’- Enlightened peace.
2. Line 177 - ‘ABDACOM’- American, British, Dutch and Australian Command.
3. Lines 371-374 - ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fatman’ were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasakki on 6th
August and 9th August 1945 after which the Emperor Hirohito personally broadcast Japan’s surrender on 15.08.1945. Japan formally surrendered to General Douglas Mac Arthur on board the U.S.S. Missouri on 2.9.1945.
4. Lines 808-810 - (i) Pages 63-66 of ‘Sayyanna Chinthakal’ by Sri.K.P.Kesava Menon.
(ii) ‘Mathrubhumi’ Sunday Supplement Page II 26.09.04 and 22.8.04.
(iii) ‘Malayalam’ Weekly- November 2004 – Page 6.
September 1997
April 1998
An Umbrella, a jester
An umbrella is aphonic unlike a fiddle.
It turns a jester number one
Some times. When carried as a shield from sun
and drizzle. By a medley and caboodle
of walkers and stalkers.
During rain and heat.
Nonetheless a weebit
of them are fakers.
Who want their fears and beards
figleafed and blinkered from the stare of a few roads and boards. 10
15th December 2001.
An umbrella and a bone crumb.
I
Scores of umbrellas have tottered in height.
Unrolled above his head. As a lee
from rain’s drips and sun’s heat.
In those years of the spree.
Through nooks and corners of this country.
Until a month ago their imprints lay detritioned and blanched beyond his eye sight.
They have now gusted into his id. As lumps and rumps of memories’ mote
and dart out of his mind some times in a quandry.
Like the kites once thought to have been torn asunder and lost but really not.
Which had nose-dived only instead. In to the mysteries of the heavens. 10
And reemerged after years intact. Out of a cumuli’s mouth.
II
A ‘folding type’ -fancy hadn’t been imbued in to his sense.
While in the North and the South.
Only during his Bombay period later, this trend zoomed. When it squared in to vogue.
‘Mini’ seems to be our logo for men at the moment. In dominance.
Unlike in a passel of towns abroad where it is preferred by the eves mainly.
A good number of these have long back deserted him, thanks to his cerebral fog.
In itineration, at libraries and where not. Compliments ‘foreign’ mostly. 18
III
Fixed with a button-lever of cash bill recent (not a gift) one of them is closeted safely.
In his bedroom. Like a bone rump possessed by a dogl!
Seldom taken out anywhere but in situations intensel!
Lying supine and craning his neck he panns upon its hand-knob. Day and night both.
Like a mendicant counts and recounts his day’s alms, though a mere pittance.
Lest he should whittle away his worth for basking in a new one’s mirth. 24
31st December 2001 (By K.N. Pillai)
Time, the tirailleur.
Time’s tirailleur
who’ll spot us even through
the steel and concrete of our house cellar. 3
To mark us as its bull’s-eye.
If or whenever we cast
a single wrong die. 6
It spawns and warps primevally.
Beyond any compass. To waft through blackholes and moholes.
It perforce wrenches and rivens wombs and tombs perennially. 9
It wrings everyone’s neck without mercies.
To smother and asphyxiate
the victims. Through their nemesis.
May 2000
Gripsacks wrenched and lost.
I
Madras Central Railway Station platform
decades four ago was not a warren of a crowd’s lair.
As it panned to later.
While away from home
in the weehours of a dawn
he gulped its air
like a somnolent bear.
Withal, still-dreaming. As an air borne- (8)
officer-future-of the railways in might.
If he got ranked in tests fardel.
In a three hour-scribbling deal
at a Madras college in fright
where the passel of his neurons glitched and he quaintly tripped.
As though he quaffed in a booze.
After a wandering spree by him in Madras heat and blues,
a station master starched white and walrus mustache-cropped (16)
luckily recovered his suitcase.
Which he had on the platform littered.
(Like his knicker and shirt dumped during his toddler days unfettered.
Into the river-bank sand before he plunged in to the water with ease.)
While he sashayed to eat his lunch
at the railway canteen
on that day noon before years umpteen.
When he entrained from Madras to Dadar, then Bombay’s haunch. (24)
“Don’t ever you forsake your bag and baggage”
A stentor’s like voice boomed grim.
“-A slew of your stars though in configuration prime.
won’t apport back your luggage-”.
II
Seconds ticked off into minutes.
Which galloped away as hours.
They spawned and loomed large per force.
Before billowing in to the abyss of days and nights. (32)
Shoals of these inundated through the eons of yore
and swirled in to weeks and months’ tears and wears.
Then they surged across the indraft of years
and catacombed in to a haze of decades four.
Only then he whetted for a rummage.
Of his life’s labyrinth
through its width and length.
And groped for his bag and baggage. (40)
Of years forty. To gawk like a jay.
Upon a stationmaster’s skeleton. In the freize
and fresco of his mind’s cavernous phase.
But nowhere any gripsack! Perhaps it got wrenched and warped on the way. (44)
May 2001,
A halter still chuckles.
He bobbed circular
Hinged by a rope.
Noosed in to a loop.
Through his jugular.
From one of the clamps.
In his abode’s ramps. (6)
As if a rump
of a scarecrow
hovered like a straw.
Gaunt, numb and dumb.
Also bare. But for a knees’ width
of loin cloth. In length and breadth. (12)
The same towel.
The old man venerable had worn.
At the previous dusk’s fawn.
Before hours twelve had crawled in to their bowel.
When he strolled back.
In to his dwelling. A burnt out Jack. (18)
Through our old house.
Western hall, my study then.
During his “Post riverbath-walk” quotidian.
No malice or grouse
lay perdue in his mind. But only empathy.
A twenty-around youth then had hollered to him in sympathy. (24)
“Chetta, a small amount to you, I’ll remit.
Every month. Without fail. To ease.
Your money problems a little bit and to give you some peace.
After I start earning a bit.
From some job somewhere.
After my studies are over. Now, this I swear. (30)
Then I might be stationed somewhere out of your look.
Or under some code.
Of fate. Here itself, or abroad.
or in Madras or in Bombay. Or in some nook.
Far off. But wherever in future, I am settled.
At least, a chunk of your scorns and thorns will be skuttled.” (36)
To which he responded.
In gusto. By a grimace cryptic and aphoristic.
And beamed a Cheshire cat’s smile vatic.
But only to somersault later. With a halter rounded.
When he himself jumped down. Rictus grim and rigor mortis. Bravely.
Or gibbeted such cruelly. (42)
By someone in a rage.
Momentary. Like a child’s bite on a testament’s page. (44)
April 2001
Second Night in the serpent-room
It was months before, in this room, I killed that serpent,
today, I am again here, now with all my feelings spent
this time, without my mother to tell, if it’s a poisonous one
or not in case I kill one, or to cry for me if I am bitten and for ever gone! (4)
Not all house-green lizards have disappeared. Outside a few still are scurrying in the sand.
Couching in my easy-chair, I felt something creeping on my hand.
I am no more afraid of anything, it was the same creature.
It calmly jumped off. Now, it has within me absolutely nothing to capture. (8)
At night, I slept on the same mosaic floor bare.
The breeze was blowing through the open grills. I saw a peeping moon stare.
The dead serpent’s mate from some nearby pit might smell my flesh?.
And crawl across and turn me in to a hush?. (12)
I am already a wreck and if the reptile struck me blue
I am happy, I could reach wherever my mother flew.
That is far far place behind the cloud
and I hear her voice loud and loud. (16)
March 1993
Musings-Madras and Bombay.
A
The city of Madras has a heritage. Redolent.
Of Pallavas and Cholas. Hemmed in
by a-pearls and pebbles-studded necklace. Vibrant. 3
And resonant. The beach of Marina. It germinated
in his mind. As in a petridish. The embryos
of fiction, monoacts and plays. Marinated. 6
By spills of romances. That panned out in to lugubrious and unsprouted.
On which Time decreed. In its kangaroo court. -These are only evanescent and trite.
Winking and fugacious and puerile. Which it then slowly got extruded and rooted out. 9
In that city he narrowly won.
By a single vote-majority, honorary secretaryship
of the office recreation club, then no fun. 12
Dumped upon his table those days. In vanity.
Were office files and what not. A lot of placards too.
Which he himself pasted. In every wall of the vicinity. 15
Of Mount Road and Haddows Road. With all hype.
Scribbled by himself.
With ink. In bold type. 18
Deep in his Neanderthal skull.
(who knows it’s not Homo Habilis?)
Years thirty bellowed only after he experimented
himself with a Sardarjy turban in full. 22
A moustache walrus.
Beards Vandyke and goaty. Both patchy-grizzled.
All which illfitted him like a clown in a circus. 25
For a body emaciated, head conoid.
And a face gaunt and scraggy. And pock-marked.
And rickety. Of any lively spirit devoid. 28
Monoacts were concocted in various functions and fixtures.
Antony with Brutus.
Othello with Desdemona. In bizarre mixtures. 31
Three plays were cooked up tight.
Staged indoors. In one, half through
the audience suffered a brown-out. 34
To fit in to every main role of his creation.
He found himself to be photogenic.
His only one Madras – blent fiction 37
is now foxed and dotted with holes.
Rust clipped and daubed. Its fabric of love sublime.
is drowned in the glory of mothballs. 40
Like the typed sheets of his plays too.
Weathered and spiderwebbed. And comatose.
As a funerary monument in woe. 43
B
An agitation against increase in price
of ‘Idli’ and ‘Dosa’ and tea and coffee. And what not.
Brewed up in the City of Madras once. 46
Was it a raise for a tea cup from 25 to 35 paise and for piece
of other items something different? Decades more than three
have withered away. Sans any lease. 49
He was then fullblooded.
Not a force-spent. As on today. To shout hoarsely
and stentorian-like. No emblems had he then wielded. 52
Neither Left nor Right.
Men and women with flags jostled.
Which were the Trade Unions? Now all out of my light. 55
In mammoth processions they marched to fight.
Through Mount Road.
And other routes. In might. 58
Chroniclers of Madras city Corporation
could scan through the old newspapers (was it of 1964 or of 1965 ? no month and date!?)
and radio-broadcasts of that day for information ! 61
About that day noon’s one procession.
And delegation. Which called upon
a political heavy weight and Minister in person 64
at Fort St.George.
Like a sardine he too squeezed himself in to the motley group
that thronged in the Corridors of Power at large. 67
Hadn’t the scheduled time already crossed.
By a few hours. Three, four, five ……………
The clock chimed. When everyone he cursed ! 70
How could the party cadres freely flow
through the back door all this time ?
When a green light’s glow 73
flickered. And with it a liveried and crooked smile.
The agitators rushed in like a jet.
As if they crossed the Rubicon or Nile. 76
A throne-like chair sheened in height.
Like a speculum. Upon it he sat.
A king of kings. The Minister. A hyena in white. 79
Dotish. And pot bellied and pottle bodied. He sniffled and snivelled. Then swivelled.
A half circle. To receive. In obeisance.
The muted gargles of protest. His lips shrivelled. 82
They puckered up and contorted. And then drivelled.
Our delegation petered out in minutes five.
Paens of hosanna-To our present day democracy, Laputian-bedevilled. 85
The price of tea and coffee and all rocketed up.
By leaps and bounds. Wasn’t it from paise twenty five-thirty.
To fifty to ……….. Rs. five per tea cup. 88
Might soar further tomorrow.
Who knows to what extent ? 90
C
By the time thirty bade audieu
he had killed
as his due. 93
One by one. All his geese.
Which had been laying him.
The golden eggs. In hubris. 96
Just for a bee
in his bonnet.
And for a knee-jerk’s spree. 99
Before he entrained from Madras to Bombay.
Enroute. To sail by a steamer to the port of Murmagoa.
To have a rendezvous with a Whiteman’s bay. 102
More than thirty summers have already refracted.
Behind the Time’s ken.
After his Madras-halcyon days longback retracted. 105
D
Twilight of Bombay panned him as a hippie-back bench student.
A night doubled up. As a pedagogue-charlatan.
And as a spoof of a grammarian. Who gave vent. 108
To his mind’s scrub.
In daytime. As a marketing and management rogue.
Who always ended abrupt. Through his final rub. 111
He’s a Quixote. Jotted down a mariner.
Once to his Bombay-father. While in the Atlantic
navigating his liner. 114
E
A rolling stone.
Which carried. Till this day.
Neither moss nor corn. 117
What can it
garner now
as his quest 120
for the Holy Grail
has long ago crabbed
towards his own trail. 123
That sowed the seeds and reaped its bale.
But like hope of the thaw, he still hankers for a windfall.
Of a mare’s nest. Or for a Godot’s bail. 126
May 2000
A Waif
A harridan, a vixen or a shrew.
Weasel faced or a skunk. Such epithets are misnomers for her.
A mere sight of even her view
from behind far used to scare
my nerves. Beetle-head, conoid and alopecoid. Thatch of white hair
tousled and shaggy. Spooky black. 5
Face tiny, dour and frosty. Gruff and grumpy. Triangular. Wrinkled too.
Cheeks chapped. Cleft palated and cross hatched lips. Stooped, stunt
and gaunt.
Buck toothed. Yellowish. Like a jagged tack.
Saurian eyes. Droopy and squinted. Nose flat. Barrel chested. A taunt.
And odious for every one. A walking mummy. Haggard. Sans any bond. 10
II
On the roads and lanes near to our house site.
A skeleton rickety and barefooted was wonted (even so now). And familiar
to all.
For me too. During these years of my blight.
A mere fossile. Her waspish waist used to be clipped to a towel mini.
Ragged and tagged. A bones’ ball.
Once she used to mow grass in our compound. 15
With her sickle. Those days I bobbed through an itinerary tight.
Only a short-day lodger in this house. I had in toto abhored her then.
Like a toad. Or a bandage putrid on a festered wound.
Never had I looked straight at her face. To me it panned like a den.
Or a fen. Grotesque and ghostly. Too ghoulish and cavernous. To be
peeped at even by a hen. 20
III
After years waned away I am iglooed now at the abode same and in my quiet
keeping.
Like a frog holed up in a pit dry and muddy. Nowadays I come across her
face often.Wry and morose. More melancholic and crabbed
than it was before years ten.
These days she lumbers around our house doing a bit of casual sundry
piece of manual work. – Our ground’s sweeping-.
Until an year ago she continued to be an anathema to my ken.
With a two digit pittance from ours, how could she survive in this world,
I never pondered. 25
From two-three more houses she might be earning a few extra bucks. But this
petty drop in her bucket would not stave off even a mite of her stomach’s griping.
Should I scribble or not the line next? My mind hovers. On a few occassions,
she might have pilfered a few of our cloth and a whit of our sundry things.
Through our western hall’s northern bay.
The door of which often remained unlocked and unhindered.
(Till I smelt a rat). When I used to attend to my cooking-chore during
many a mid day.
If a stomach billows and wrenches in the abyss of hunger who will not
masquerade as a pilferer?. Jean Valjean filched a loaf of bread
to douse the torching hunger of his sister’s kids. Every terrestrial
will do that way. Perhaps not, a celestial in heaven’s quay. 30
IV
Slovenly and untidily she broomed, I observed of late.
Why you leave that side untouched? Near the fence-
I used to hector and bark at and point her to the extreme end of the gate.
All the scraps are still residued there-she used to straddle away. Dead-
panned and mum-No sense. 35
Ingrained in you-I railed at her shadow distant.
One day she wanted rupees ten straight.
-Sarrei, I haven’t sipped in ‘Kanjivellam’ for three-four days. Giddily
two-three times today, I tripped down.
Where and when- I didn’t probe. But the tone and timbre of her gutteral
decibels (raucous and rattled) and her woes and throes and anguish
which jetted and spewed out through her eyes and her cleaved and caved
‘Jaws and cheeks’-bones’ rasping and scrunching and her tautened and
crotched veins on her temple bared the pathos and agony that hooted and
howled through the innards of her gut. A tenner, I handed her instant.
To her such entreaties (few only) I make no frown.
But often respond with a few coins or small digit currency-notes. Except
when I myself happened to be sinking and floating worn and torn. 40
V
An year snaked away. Or a few months only. I don’t recall.
One day she was with her broom in wife’s presence. I railed and reviled
her in a pitch.
-You haven’t cleaned the entrance side at all-
which nowadays you never do. What can be the hitch?-
I strode to the corner where the rubbish lay heaped. In a fury. 45
To which spot she too stared like a doll.
Yet she appeared to ignore my comments. Continued to broom.
Only near to where she stood. Wife interjected in a hurry.
-The woman is purblind, partly deaf too. She hollered to me in a boom.
-How does she then trudge her way daily to and fro and around ?- I
queried as through a loom. 50
VI
I noticed her slogging and squelching all the way. After she groped through
our front side trees of mango and coconut. As her indicator.
Then exited out of our premises after a hard ten minute struggle and
labour and gasp. In to the main road.
It pricked me like a thorn did. How she wended herself back to her
living sector.
Wife hissed-she can just sense and feel a few objects only by her
instincts’ code.
It is only during these days recent her eye sight blighted to this extent. 55
So far, I had failed to observe this catastrophe in her eyes.
From then onwards like an inspector
I began to watch her movement. Her propelling on the road. When she groped.
And stopped and stooped and gasped. A jetsam of miseries in a pent.
How long can she survive in this world uncrushed by some vehicle? Before
she gets roped.
And lassoed by Yama’s men. And apported to the other world. I hopped back
in to my room as if fully doped. 60
VII
For a week more she straddled and paddled and waddled and hobbled and
wobbled and propelled to our house. Like a scarecrow trode and
tramped and tripped and bobbed and tottered through our gate’s hoop.
-Why not you rest yourself in your house? and do some treatment?
-How could I then lap up at least a few mugfuls of ‘Kanjivellam’ four-five
times a week?-An opthalmic charity-camp was held here a fortnight
ago. Sponsored by a philanthropists’ group.
Why didn’t you treat your eyes there?- I didn’t know about it. To the hospital of the government.
At the Kacherypady junction, I had plodded a week ago. They wanted me to
undergo an eye surgery in the Alleppey Medical College. 65
-Yes, you should do it fast-I blurted as though inspired by a scoop.
Wife interrupted- who will accompany her to attend to her personal needs?
it is no wit,
-Who will sign her mandatory papers through every stage?
For performing a surgery on a human the rules are indeed strict.
So that both the patient and the hospital are legally protected. No
fault in it- 70
VIII
-Where you hail from?- Near to Thakazhi in some interior.-
She drawled and grated to my queries stoically in her husky and tubby
voice. As in an interview.
-I have never squished through any school’s front or rear. -Have no sibling. Of my age, I could guess only. Sixty or so-indeed
it appears to be true by view.
-My name hasn’t so far appeared in any card or list-ration’s or voters’.
Now I dwell at some Ambalapuzha suburb. 75
Alongwith a few kin of mine. Can’t read or script. But can jot and
scrape bare my name’s three alphabets’ exterior.
-I hold no document to prove that I now live at all. I am de jure dead,
condemned. Though de facto alive.
-My kin don’t want my name inked on any paper. So much is my blurb-
No quizz about her wedlock poured out of my mind’s beehive.
To a waif like her what would have been a matrimony but a welter of
miseries. Dripping more fuel in to the fire of her catastrophes
and calamities. I consoled her, another eye-camp, some one would
organize here soon. Her eyesight should then certainly revive. 80
IX
Like a bolt from the blue, a good samaritan will descend on her house
premises and succour her? A hobbit like me?
Who has grumbled, fumbled and tumbled and stumbled all along.
Still hopping and whooping and stooping. Now gawking towards the far ……..
for a lee? to the sea …………….?
Her gait tottering. An ordeal hazardous. Pathetic to eye at. Ended
one day. Like a song.
Which petered out in a radio. Whose circuits had been damaged. 85
Till that time I had never bothered to enquire about her dwelling hut.
Nor had I cared to know at least its one sign or key.
-Some road-accident? Maudlin or crocodile tears? A good riddance? Did I
mawkishly hone for atonement and contrition, compunction and attrition
and penance or requital. Or expiation and compassion.
Months snailed away. Her tottering bone and skin baroque frame
occasionally used to roll silhouetted through the frieze and fresco
and the penumbra of my mind’s mesh. In my front suddenly one day she emerged.
Bug-eyed and befuddled I stared at her. As if she appeared through a resurrection. Epiphanic? A dark
coloured goggle and a wimple fixed on her face and head. Her vision.
Restored. At Alleppey her surgery was performed with precision. 90
X
Back again, she. To her sweeping duty. Mussed up. And irregular!
As slatternly as she had performed. When she waggled and groped. And
weathered during her embalmed and eerie dark period. Nowadays,
haven’t I started to loath her again? As I feel towards any other
similar mundane and quotidian human sample?
Once in a way I notice her lumbering along. To the nearby temple. Through
our front road.(Which act she had been doing previously also). Like
a marionette tottered and trapezed over a string. Every time singular.
(Which human would want to pace along with and talk to her?)
Yesterday perchance, I heard, she is partly insane too. Who in our earth
is not so? Who can reason why she didn’t mutate in to a bedlamite
so far ? Any one else would have. I have heard her soliloquizing.
A few times when she was sitting or dozing on the floor bare in
our premises uttering gibberish only. Who doesn’t talk to one’s
self when alone? ( Not only Hamlet) Who knows what for and why she
supplicates and edifies in front of the deities? when she wallows
and whirls and squalls and weathers through a torrent of her stomach’s grumble.
To thank Him for His benvolent act in having restored her eye sight? or
is it to spur her kin to include her name also in their ration card? 95
Or to secure her an old age pension? (sans the card). Through some
political or pseudo-social service juggler?
(Who among them is interested in a waif? Such hundreds are living around us)
or for her winning a prize from a ticket of lottery?
(Has she ever purchased one? When she cann’t afford to buy daily even
a quarter kilo of rice.) Or who knows in the nimbus of her id she
is cryptically waiting for a Godot. In the temple yard.
Through where nowadays I too ramble often. Mazed and in a mood jittery.
Or is it to amortize herself to her soul’s equipoise and salvation that
she genuflects in front of the numen? Might be, she also supererogates
and hankers for a rebirth in the purple? After her immediate inciner-
ation (self?). Or after her burial unmarked (Who will do it?).
Being a Hindu how in a cemetery? 100
- 4/9/2002 8/10/2002
The blind waif and a Peripatetic.
The tempo of their wail merged.
With the cacophony of sound
that blared in the bus terminal unpurged.
Some vagrants’ daily chore. None found
anything to babble about it.
Inside a bus at the junction. Months have converged
since. In to an year’s base.
Only one passenger craned a bit
of his neck. To squint for the beggars’ pace.
When he spotted the gaze. 10
Of a blind man sinewy and gaunt. Hair shingled.
Face pock-marked. Goatee bearded and jowly. High bridged nose
jutted forward. Perky triangled.
Trousers baggy. Worn out and torn. A scarecrow’s pose.
From his navel to the foot.
Its pepper and salt fabric jungled.
No vest or shirt he wore.
While he sweated in the sun hot.
A lady in a bones’ frame and no flesh tagged him as in a lore.
She propped him up with her hand right. In a choir 20
of a whimper. They whined and begged aloud for alms.
When the traveller dropped
a paltry half a rupee coin in to their palms.
He himself was then mopped-
off all currency notes. A broke.
Worse than a rag-picker of some farms.
More than decades four have already oozed away in front of both these men.
Who once used to frequently butt into each other’s walk.
One had then with him his books and a pen.
The other a begging bowl. He bandy-legged it in shorts. With patches ten. 30
Or more. In a dwarf’s gait.
Though purblind then, he was in the pink. Robust and grand.
To the commuters those days, not at all a pathetic sight.
But only a scene ubiquitous and perennial in our land.
His iris nerves might have been congenitally dead.
Or conked out later. A more than forty years’ plight
and scourge in this terrestrial-inferno would have necrosed his lens.
And cornea. ‘Sand’ and ‘gravel’ might have spread.
To ‘stone-blind’. Who can live not blind and in sense.
Today in this world; even a hermit has to close his eyes upon the fence. 40
23-02-2002.
THE OLD WOMAN AND HER DEITIES.
Morning
In Oachira, last week Friday morning,
in the sacred premises of the deity, amorphous and sanctumless
the divine ‘Parabrammam’, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent,
hunkered down a woman wizened,in her seventies.
Gaunt and, scrappy, in clothes tattered and yellowish
on the floor cemented, raised up, around a baniyan tree’s
roots and bottom, eating her charity-’Kanji’ with gram
(which as a temple-custom, are daily offered gratis to every one 8
rich and poor alike who needs it).
Tender and nurturing were her gestures and words
towards her companion (life or peripatetic), a mere walking skeleton
and no flesh. Who for supporting himself carried
a long stick in his right hand. She was then feeding him
with her own right hand (as a mother does to her child)
in all cornucopia of love and bond before he stepped out
with his begging bowl and wended his way to commence 16
his quotidian morning rounds.Beside her littered,
a few cloth bundles ragged and sooty which she shoved
in to a corner. Never could be she in her youth
a vixen or a shrew or a harridan but a lady gentle
whose golden dawns manque might have shrouded
and catafalqued and catacombed and never crimsoned in to
any halcyondays’ orange cream sunsets. When butterflies
might have pupated in to caterpillars and frogs hunted down 24
the colubrines.She might have tilted at windmills
and might have walked the planks too.
Noon
Ambling around the ‘Parabrammam’ precincts, I too
meditated for a while. To propitiate the diety
many a devotee genuflected and offered special pujas.
With no lodging in my easy reach, for a short rest
I sauntered again to the same baniyan tree floor.
Sleeping and snoring around the spot were a lot motley.32
Yogis and pretenders, mystics and pessimists, atheists
and agnostics, paupers and indigents, lovers charred
and heartbroken, politicians doomed or downed and fugitives
from law. Also tramps and waifs and vagrants
and decrepits. Die-hard devotees and pilgrims too. No space
for me for a siesta but only a seat sardine-like cramped
to nap. When one of the occupants vacated. Fiery and furious,
screeched and screamed, the old woman, now carping about 40
something. And rummaging all her cloth bundles.
Perhaps, the only asset of her whole life’s, sofar lived
and accrued. When she trembled hysterically
and vented her spleen in a tantrum and yelled out.
At all mankind and all her deities too.
“Who has pilfered away my soapbar
bought only yesterday for seven and a half rupees.
Out of my that day’s alms-total,48
a pittance of coins, of elevan and a half.
Could be that ‘mottachy’ who slept beside me
last night. Nowadays, who’snt a thief
or a crook, they rule the roost everywhere.
Dam-mit! Doesn’t even the ‘Parabrammam’
theses days hibernate perenially in torpor.
And could always be comatose too.
Sans any power divine. Otherwise how could 56
my soapbar be stolen inside its own precincts,
under its own eyes.”
25.12.2008-2.2.2009
The wool and the mule
I
Till noon yesterday I was trapezing through the manuscript
of Gods and codes III, the snakes, whose lines
of more than two hundred, I had hop-stepped already. Sans a craft.
Let me now digress from gods ‘ and snakes’ alliances
to beggary and penury. Ravening a caboodle of our population. Near and distant.
For in my front now loomed a fossil of seventy plus. A graft of mere skin and chin
upon a shaft.
In rags tattered. Which seemed to have been not wetted at all by water for months gone.
(why and for whom should he attend
to the needs of his garment?. When his belly is grumbling like an engine’s groan.)
The scarecrow dogged himself for making a hearth. Of stone-blocks on the footpath
opposite to our lawn. 10
II
And diagonalled to my study. He limped it slicing the main road.
Then propped by his shoulders carried these slabs. Picked up twigs and grass dry. From the periphery. And stoked these in to a fire. After lighting them stored.
Water, he dripped in to a vessel from a tap adjacent to our land’s boundary.
I pointed out him to the lad sitting in my front chair.
And babbled-Adolf Hitler had propounded the ‘Final Solution’ to the likes of this man gaunt and rickety,. By the ‘gas mode’.
One reprint of the dictator’s skull bullet-ridden is now hanging on my wall. With a
raging photograph of his.
The waif squatted in front of the fire. Cooked something in an aluminium ware.
I legged it to the veranda, the kid followed. Both of us returned to my study with a hiss. The man wizened tottered up and gawked at us. Then loured upon a house.20
III
In front, Gate locked, motor car in. There live the kin of an America-employed neighbour. To his left, he cock-eyed at the compound wall. The house in belongs to a Professor-politician late.
I gibbered my throughts to the boy. The gypsy, was he planning to step in to our house
at this lunch hour?
For a platter of rice, cooked or raw, curry or for a few coins. Yes, like a circus mate
who rope-walked. He reeled and dragged his bones and joints.
Towards us. Quivering (Parkinson’s?) below one of our coconut trees ‘ cover
full trottled he gasped and jabbered in Tamil. “Koncham mulaku Kodayya” a phrase
similar to care.
A few years of my Madras city-dwelling and Tamil Nadu Jaunts
haven’t yet empowered me to converse or at least jot down a few words spare.
In that language. Which I had bitten and chewed to shout and swear. 30
IV
In one evening . Decades three ago. Through Mount Road and which all roads.
‘Anna Durai Ennache, Arivila ennache, Venkataraman ennache,
Venkkaivavilaennache’
These slogans of protest even now at times echo in my tympanum’s nodes.
But never had I bothered to imbibe that language’s sap and consummate my bond with it. The Pallava-Pandya-Chola beauty. To become a match.
Or at least a stray paramour of hers. Like French and German both which I wooed.
In Madras and Bombay. And which too deserted me unrequited. Hindi too has already vanished from my tongue and pen as if by a curse of the gods.
My short four year Northern India-honeymoon with that enchantress spurred her to become my lee.
Despite my having parted with her company throughout my college days. Got ensconced herself as my girl Friday. During my brief stint of a North Indian school teaching. When I was never booed.
By any of my pupils. Scores of post cards jagged and scribbled by some of them in that language(even addresses too) once used to be-
delivered at Mount Road one, two, three. 40
V
A bunch of these are even now lying tagged in one of my table drawers wafting a fragrance. That whiffs redolent through a grove of decades four and its memories. 42
Most of which have begun to ooze and fade away. For relighting its embers, I should entrain to the North far befitting. 43
Perhaps only a desideratum. Which too, who knows will not wane and vanish soon, As will be the fate of many a human wish in all the histories. 44
A bulk of those pupils in that school would have by now greyed and furrowed themselves in to grand mothers. 45
And grand fathers. Hadn’t most of them been dumped in to their wedlocks for meeting
the customs societal and familial then prevalent in the North. (Is it still so?). When during childhood 47
infants (or even while they were just embryos only) used to be traded in the marriage market like peacock feathers. 48
Or like bartered food. I was then pottering away. In search of the wood. 49
Bypassing the trees. Or perhaps the other way as it stood. 50
VI
My vocabulary of Tamil, though sparse, smelt this man’s need. He required only chilly. Red chilly powder?. Wife busy in the kitchen shouted. ‘Green’.
Four-Five of these, I picked up from the fridge. Passed on to him willy nilly.
Shouldn’t I offer him a gourd of rice too, that remained as ‘leftover’ from night previous
(which I alone eat, not wife). It should mean.
A respite for him. Atleast from that day’s begging spree in the violet hour. But spouse hissed no. who knows the cause?
Is it because Thursday happened to be a day inauspicious for giving off rice (stale) for vagabonds silly.
She observes minutely all rules of omens and augury. ‘Rahukalams’ and what not.
Doesn’t visit any one ill.
On certain days of the week. I might have violated all such codes. And might suffer the curse
From many a pantheon. In the other world. But what is there to suffer more. Than the dirge, purge and scourge which are ruling the roost here itself in its fill?
She is at times generous. One day a worker mason-gypsy, who told us, he had trudged all the way to here from Cherthala (twenty k.m.) was given food to his will. 60
By her. Also his transport fare to Chalakkudy, his native place. But this day her mood was off to the sill.
VII
Head protruded and glued to his neck like a coconut freak, he lumbered out of our compound happy and gay.
Towards his hearth. He straddled across the road. Like a jay.
Why should he bother about the traffic’s way?
If one of the vehicles rammed. And crushed him down by its sway.
He could untwine himself for ever.
From all his miseries’ knots. And get himself disembodied from the abyss of his
hunger’s bay.
He sat upon the floor and gulped in full.
Whatever he steamed or boiled. Kanji or rice or tapioca. His staple diet. In fervour.
Might have squeezed the chilly green in to it cool. 70
To continue his quest (By begging? Who knows, in search of a Godot or a God?) he balled his rags in to a roll, Unabashed and unbent. Not like a fool.
Or like a log. But as a Riley* did.- Succour and benevolence to the poor- These both are taught in no school.
Only airs and mares of bilge and vitriol are permeating ubiquitous in our land. Don’t expect wool.
Even if you are frozen to your gills. Beg only for rags of cotton. Lest you should get whipped like a mule.
REFERENCE * line72-Riley-is a character that appeared in a song authored by Pat Rooney in 1890. ’know your English’-column of Hindu April 09,2002.
22 March May 2002
The mad
I
Last week’s one midday hot sun
scorched the hub of my id 2
rather than the epidermis of my outer physique.
For, on the pavement then and there
close to the Ambalapuzha – Kacherymukku Junction – taxi stand 5
stood a lady mid-aged. Stocky.
And plump. Seething in demonic fury, menacing too.
Raging like ‘Bhadrakali’ the diety, but clad 8
in rags. Baring part of her torso and limb.
II
From her right hand fist upside down
hanged a tiny creature. A puppy, dappled. 11
Rust brown and mauve. Rickety and scraggy.
Might have been just a month old or even less.
It howled and wailed in fright and flight. 14
III
A crowd hooted and booed and encircled her.
“Don’t poke the damn iron rod in to the puppy’s sore”.
Someone hollered. “She bathes her puppy, 17
then cleanses its bruises with that spike”.
“What a hellish torture you are inflicting upon
this poor quadruped”. My tirade least tempered her. 20
Her burning stare froze me. Not a whimper spilled
out of her lips. The puppy’s whine swelled through the air.
IV
I should nonchalantly skip the scene? 23
Forget the sight of human flotsams
across our country’s nooks and corners everywhere.
But prodded by an instinct innate 26
I got myself dragged to a nearby pharmacy.
“How much it will cost for a wound-healing antidote”?
With a seventeen rupees priced ‘Neosporin’ ointment tube 29
I legged it to the spot in haste.
Wiped off the water from the shivering animal’s fur.
The woman nestled the puppy as in a trance. 32
The jelly, I massaged, through its gash.
The tube then was passed over to the lady
who clung it under her grip. 35
V
Someone shouted – “Throw away that handkerchief-
The whelp could be a rabid one.
Its coat is a breeding pan for lice and fleas. 38
She is a beggar-’wutt’
loitering here in the streets these days.
The puppy, she bathes, daily with water. 41
Dripped out of her bottles, then dries it under the sun”.
VI
Could she be deaf and dumb?
Or when swirling and whirling in hunger’s sea 44
ten fathoms deep and wallowing in cauldrons of miseries
what is there for her to babble about?
A ten rupee – biscuit packet 47
and a currency note of rupees twenty,
I further handed to her in gloom.
Both these, she clasped with her palm. 50
And in her tantrum she looked eerie and weird.
Perhaps, she might have even cast off
all my paltry alms to some nearby ditch. 53
VII
The homes and abodes for her
and for swarms of her ilk
are the dark alleyways and gullies 56
and sombre bylanes meandering
far and wide across our great land.
Who among these hapless multitudes 59
will not mutate into this woman’s genera?
3rd May 2005/2nd June 2005
.
The white lady and an invalid.
Inside that public waiting shed
to the west of our house
and to the temple’s close.
Ochre-robed, bald, clean-shaved, unabashed
a dweller, he had been there for long. To pause.
And probe, I dared not. Enmeshed.
Though I hankered. When and to where one day he decamped?. No toss.
Perhaps gypsied like his mentors in tows.
Who too had once trodden and straddled there in rows.
And lemming-like whirled in to Time’s deluge and maelstrom. And got drowned in the abyss of quagmires and death throes. 10
2
Up on his two crutches the old man used to hop around everywhere.
What has bedevilled him and his legs both.?
A remedy botched up after a Hippocratic oath?
Or a road-accident victim’s wear and tear?
Sandalwood paste-smeared he usually donned tidy cloth.
At night squatted down and iterated hymns aloud in praise of God’s care.
When his abode clanged in depth.
By sounds of temple conches, drums, cyambals and peals of bells in mirth.
And awash with candlelight. He must be worth.
His salt. Eating and praying and sleeping in the open. He never might have been a sloth. 20
3
An English literate. Was he?
Who babbled it fairly.
Or he just drawled and grated it. Or diphthongized its phonemes barely.
A sight that day noon bewildered. And petrified me.
Momentarily. Someone whom I remember dearly.
Now and then. Caucasian. Like a fairy.
Athwart our frontroad’s end, transverse, west. Clearly!
Was it my illusion merely?
Or a simulacrum, Just an analogue of hers. Or had she herself descended upon there entirely.
Gesticulating and conversing with him squarely? 30
4
That white lady philospher. Enchanting.
During our train journey and in this house.
Alongwith her two companions we spent only a few hours.
Inside the temple too. Chitchatting.
What all not! Literature of course.
Poetry of Yeats, Maud Gonne. About her parting-
with and forsaking most of her religion’s customs and mores.
Though umpteen of her syllables hadn’t crossed my tympanums’. doors.
Being London accented. Across the Atlantic, I had besought her to unravel the riddles in many of her words.
“Till we meet again” -her only script. Short but not terse.
The fourth Xmas is ahead. I should wait and tenderly nurse.
29th April 2003
(February – April)
