Usha goes along the railway line. The railway engine is kind to her. When the wind blows in gusts, and the monsoon comes pouring through the coconut trees, the train blows and blows the whistle, and says: ‘Child, child, I am coming. Please keep away from the railway line. I am your mother. I protect you, even though you see me come and go. I dream of you in my roundhouse. In the Trivandrum roundhouse there are many old hags. They were all made in foundries before this era was born. But I was born in 1921. I have grown up among coconut trees. I have played with the Kanchi and Kali rivers. I know every bridge by its sound. I whistle past Kartikura House. I know the sound of my whistle wakes up the wildcats on your roof. They have such bright eyes. I come to protect. I am the thread of your lives. What would you do without the railway line? How will you go to school otherwise? The signal is my eldest daughter, the shunting hand my granddaughter. Children, children, who go to school, keep away from the railway line: I am passing.’ And the engine floods the line with milky light.
Man is protected. You could not be without a mother. You are always a child. The wife is she who makes you the child. That is why our children resemble us men.
And no sooner is the mind made up, than the hand does. For one morning — or was it evening? — it must have been evening, for I could see him with his body bare down to the waist, fresh with a cool bath, a cigarette in his hand (he would not smoke before his morning meal), Govindan Nair came to see me. Fat in his big presence, he stood at the door not wanting to disturb me with his smoke. I adjusted my glasses and looked up. (I must have been at my Malayalarajyam. I was away in the Hitler wars and Churchill communiques.)
He said: ‘Sir, it’s done.’
I said: ‘What?’
‘I say, sir, it is done. The thing is done. You have it when you want.’ I think I understood. But I was not sure. I was afraid to know lest the knowing be false. So I said: ‘Which?’
He said: ‘That.’
I was dumbfounded. ‘And that is?’
‘That is this,’ he said as if he had said everything. He loved, because of his big heart, to say obvious things in parables, and make you think it was all such a small affair. He was like Bhima.7 You want the flower of paradise? Why, here I go and come. And Hanuman himself will help, Hanuman his half-brother, unknown unto Bhima. Everybody is half-brother to you, man and thing. So why worry? That seemed the principle on which Govindan Nair worked: I am, so you are my brother.
‘It’s done.’ And he placed the book in front of me. It was covered with yellowed newspaper. It looked like a school exercise book. He had copied Astavakra Samhita,8 and he often carried it with him. He liked to recite ‘Aho Aham Namo Mahyam Yasyame Nastikinchana.’9 He opened the book and started reading it out to me in beautiful Sanskrit. Though a Brahmin I knew less Sanskrit than he. And I understood even less. He recited verse after verse. (Shridhar brought us our coffee.) He read several chapters right through as if they said what he wanted to say. Then abruptly he closed the book with his left hand and started looking at the newspaper. He liked politics. He admired courage. He always loved people who went in search of the paradise flower. It meant you became half-brother to mankind. Govindan Nair loved slipping in two rupees and five rupees through windows where a child cried. He thought his intentions would help. Fortunately his wife had lands, and the rice came in plentifully. Otherwise, how to live on forty-five rupees a month, a second clerk in Ration Office No. 66? Or buy houses, you understand.
Life is a riddle that can be solved with a riddle. You can remove a thorn with another thorn, you solve one problem through another problem. Thus the world is connected. The ration shop is meant to fight famine, and famine is there because there is war, and war because of the British, and the British because of whom? Danes, Normans, etc., say the textbooks. But actually who cares? If you fight the British in the ration shop, you solve the British problem. If you have the British bubo, you take the horse-dung medicine of Narayan Pandita Vaidyan. You get a disease from Benghazi and Narayan Pandita Vaidyan cures this unknown. The unknown alone resolves the unknown. So, brother, work and be merry, distribute cards in Ration Office No. 66. ‘Shridhar, go and tell your mother my friend is languishing because he has no strength in his limbs. His flower of paradise is coffee bean. When it is burned black and its powder is made into a collation, its effect on limbs and mind is excellent, for intellect and heart. Sir, let us go on to our Astavakra.’
Govindan Nair sat on the veranda of my house. He forgot his food. My stomach was bubbling with demand. Fortunately the coffee had come in once again. Till nine o’clock, he read the Astavakra Samhita from any where to the very end, and then he said: ‘I have done a good job. I have explained to the Brahmin what Brahman is. “Brahmin is he who knows Brahman,” etc., etc. Ruling princes taught sadhus the Truth in the Upanishadic times. Now Nairs alone can teach the Truth in the world.’ I knew at once he was right. He was right. He is right. He will ever be right.
‘Isn’t it time to be coming home?’ whispered Tangamma from the wall. ‘The children have gone to sleep.’
‘Good night, sir,’ he said as if he had said what he wanted to say to me, and jumped across the wall — there was such flowing moonlight on the bilva tree. I walked thoughtfully along the road to the Home Friends. Would they still have chapattis. A hungry stomach is a bad friend. It smells bad. There were chapattis, Ananthkrishnan said, and I felt good.
Ration Office No. 66 is just above Ration Shop No. 181. As I told you, it is on Statue Road, between the Secretariat and the General Hospital, beside the mansion of Justice Varadaraj Iyengar (the man known in Trivandrum for having hanged more people in his lifetime than any other living magistrate. For him evil was concrete, and he had it removed from the mass of mankind. So he gave the best punishment. ‘It makes our daughters hope for better marriages,’ he said. And it did). Varadaraj Iyengar, of course, as everybody knows, finally died, and he died far away and well, in some Himalayan hermitage he had constructed overlooking the young Ganges. Nobody did him any harm. People knew he was just. He lived like a hermit, with but one family servant, and he died peacefully reciting some mantra. His ashes were flown to Benares. Thus he died a happy man.
Just next to this mansion, almost touching his casuarina tree at the door, is Ration Shop No. 181. It is an old garage of Mr Shiva Shankra Pillai, the retired Tahsildar, who himself married from Mavelikara, that is from just where Her Highness the Maharani comes. Shiva Shankra Pillai had two sons and both of them turned bad. One enlisted and went to the wars a subaltern. The other opened a cloth shop at Chalai, and is doing good business. The daughter married well; she is the daughter-in-law of Kunni Krishna Menon and she lives happily. All that is old is stable. Otherwise how could you say it is stable? It is stable because it is traditional. So Kunni Krishna Menon, with huge estates run well, continued the tradition of his ancestors. He and his wife amassed a fortune — thus Shiva Shankra Pillai’s daughter was happy. Her children often came to see their grandfather and usually went through the ration shop up to the ration office. The garage had drivers’ quarters at the top. This and the garage were extended so that the ration shop and office ran all over the pentagonal shapes, with four rooms at the top and five at the bottom.