Dreamy tale (கனவுக் கதை) by Sarvagan

 

This is an English translation of Kanavu kathai, a Tamil short story written by Sarvagan. Translated into English by Saravanan Karnegam.

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When we went to the National store, there was no crowd.

It was the comfort one enjoys at Natesan’s shop. Usually, one would find no crowd there. Peppermints in black, green and red, rubber balls, cheap pens, ink bottles in different colours (Bottles with no specific measurements), soaps, combs, (National Store didn’t have looking glass) to groom one’s face before and after shaving, dyes to blacken the hair, umpteen note books – a pair of noses drawn in grids, completely unruled, and lines drawn perpendicularly and horizontally, pencils and innumerous sundry items, were all waiting for the buyers. It was we who used to buy them.

Natesan would greet us, “Please come…Please come,” with a smile. He wouldn’t show his betel leaf- stained teeth. But his teeth were actually very white. He had no habit of chewing betel leaves. Only cigarettes. But he wouldn’t smoke in his shop. He had no habit of drinking liquor, visiting brothels, playing rummy, betting on horse races, and taking stamina- enhancing lehiyam. He had no knowledge of politics, art, language or religion. His life was only about himself and his shop. Anyone could buy anything from his shop (except grocery items, medicines and milk powder). Purchase should be on cash. People who were very close to him might enjoy purchasing on credit. When we went to his shop, he would greet us with ‘please come’ but would never ask us what we wanted. He knew that we wouldn’t have money to buy anything. He knew well that we would ask him anything if we ever needed it. He knew the psalm from the Bible – Ask me, I will give it – though he had never read the Bible.

When we went to his shop that day, we found naughtiness dancing in his eyes. His face carried a sly smile, like the colours spreading in waves when the oil is sprinkled on water. We entered his shop. Only Sivaprakasam spat out the spittle in the gutter before entering. Natesan wouldn’t like it if anyone spat inside the shop. Seeing us, he greeted us as usual, “Please come”, and picked an item from beneath the table like a magician and asked us, “Tell me what it is?”. He was glancing at us, visibly beaming with pride.

I was shocked for a moment seeing his unusual behaviour, and then asked him “what’s it?” after regaining my composure. Rengan picked that item up in his hands.

Nothing special was found in that item. I thought that it must be an ordinary weighing balance used in shops. Only when Rengan weighed the items with that balance did I understand that it wasn’t an ordinary one. On one side, it had a disc, and on the other side, it had three discs clubbed into one, one below another. I couldn’t understand what it was.

“If you can correctly say what it is, I will offer each one of you a sweet,” Natesan said and dropped a proud smile. Sivaprakasam and I accepted our defeat, telling him that we didn’t know the answer. Rengan examined those discs a couple of times, flipping them over and again. Perhaps it was due to his penchant for sweets even at the age of forty. He too finally surrendered and said “It’s startling” as if declaring a truth to the world and returned the weighing balance as a mark of defeat.

Natesan was immensely happy. “No problem. It doesn’t matter even if you don’t know”, he took out some toffees from the peppermint bottle and gave them to us. As Rengan picked two of them, I collected one, for the sake of courtesy.

Sivaprakasam flatly refused to take it. He was diabetic. High sugar level in blood. He wouldn’t eat sweets, nor cooked rice.

“You can eat it. These sweets don’t contain sugar.” Natesan coaxed him, but Sivaprakasam was still adamant and told him to keep his part with him. Natesan didn’t take his part, nor Sivaprakasam’s part. It must be either that he might not have liked sweets or that being frugal, he mightn’t have wanted to spend two paise.

After putting those toffies back into the bottle, Natesan explained, upon our request, the mystery behind the three discs in the balance. It was an instrument that would reduce the waste of time and resources by weighing the same stuff in one go when three people demand it simultaneously instead of weighing it for each person every time, he reasoned. “How is my smart idea?” he proudly threw his question.

I had been watching him since the day he established his shop. Not a single day did I see three persons coming to him at the same time, fighting for the items to be supplied immediately. I just kept quiet, not wanting to ruin his enthusiastic mood. Rengan couldn’t control himself and expressed openly, “I couldn’t really believe that our Natesan would have such a brilliant idea!”. That time, a man came to the shop.

Neither was the visitor looking like a mendicant nor a family man. He must be about forty years old. Well-built body with toned muscles. His hair was completely black, long, and falling on the back of his neck. Thick eyebrows were looking like two caterpillars stuck on his forehead. His eyes were glittering like two black diamonds. The stubble on his face must be two weeks old. Naked torso. Four ‘muzham’ dhoti on his waist, folded upward, revealing his knees. The dhoti looked saffron. Only God knew whether it faded or turned brown from being white. Stains of lime mortar were found on his arms to the elbows. A vermillion mark of a fifty-paise coin size on his forehead.

That man, with the eyes that shone as sparklers, said hoarsely in an authoritative voice, “Get me a kilogram of peppermint. Quick”. His voice was thick like that of a large bell, gong.

Natesan was composed and said, “One kilo five rupees,” and was looking at the visitor up and down without moving.

“It’s okay…it’s okay. Make it quick”, the visitor ran his fingers on his waist, untied a knot and took out a five-rupee note folded eight times and gave it to Natesan without unfolding it.

Natesan received the currency note casually, kept it on the table, picked the weighing balance, removed two discs from three, kept one kg weight on the remaining disc, placed some peppermints on the other disc and cautiously measured it as if it was gold. When he was about to stuff them into a paper bag, the visitor yelled, “I don’t need them in the paper bag. Give it to me on a piece of paper. His eyes looked like the tongue of a snake. He received those toffees given on a piece of Tamil daily, and sped off along the clock tower.

Getting curious about what he would do with it, I, Rengan and Sivaprakasam followed him at a distance.

The Municipality clock tower was standing at a distance of nearly a hundred and fifty feet from Natesan’s shop. Neither did it show the year nor the date. No one knew how long it had stopped working. It always displayed twelve o’ clock. Even when the city went dark in the evening, it showed twelve. One could find a small empty patch of land only around this clock tower, the central attraction of our city’s main market area. It was sufficient for persons to sit to chit-chat in fours. Moving a little further would put you at the risk of birds’ poop falling on your head. The clock tower didn’t have that problem.

The visitor with the peppermints stood by a small podium near the clock tower and thrust them into the hands of the men who were sitting there. “Eat it, eat it. It is the offering from the god”, he offered Natesan’s shop’s peppermints to some more persons.

The news of an unknown man distributing sweets near the clock tower spread across the bazar within half a second. The people thronged to the clock tower like a flood flowing towards the gorge. I, Rengan and Sivaprakasam, while about to reach the clock tower, were nudged by elbows and buttocks forward, and eventually pushed away from the crowd. The sound “Sir…toffee for me…toffee for me” overwhelmed the screeching noise of birds hovering above head.

Until that day, I had remained unaware of the fact that the people of my town loved peppermint that way. Other than the children who occasionally came to Natesan’s shop which never saw any crowd to buy peppermints, I had never seen the elders running like this to get a piece of peppermint -Men with white shirts, men with dhoti lined in its borders, men wearing dyed dhotis with no shirts on body, Terylene vests, men with wrist watches, men with thread tied on their wrists, men with silver bracelets, greyed moustaches, bald heads, the toothless old lady selling murukku and her grandson- her agent, women with shining nylon embroidered blouses carrying infants in their hands, nomadic women, those who came to the petty shops to buy beedi, cigarette, soda water, betel leaves, banana, and tobacco, naked children- both boys and girls- who were running through the legs. A big crowd had assembled there in a fraction of a second. A buzzing noise around like the bees in a hive.

The peppermint man jumped onto the podium, holding the paper with peppermint like Hanuman. Despite the distance, his eyes were still visible like fire. “Don’t make noise. You will all get it if you listen to me” he announced loudly. The crowd, which was till then shouting suddenly fell silent. Thousands of faces in the crowd stopped breathing for a second, raised their jaws, and looked up to him eagerly under the blue light of the municipal lamp. Those faces were looking green in that light.

“Pay your big Namaskaram to the god Perumal living in this clock tower.”, the order came from the peppermint mendicant.

The crowd, which was standing like a corpse for a moment, regained its life with a jerk. It fell onto the ground. The entire crowd prostrated like a pack of cards with the heads sitting on the legs of those in the front, and the legs sitting on the faces of those in the rear. “I” fell onto the dungs of pigs, cows, and horses, stains of spittle and urine, banana peels, empty cigarette packets, the stubs of beedis, dirty sand of the streets, shells of peanuts, countless imprints of legs, as the eyes remained closed, and the hands folded, without discriminating male or female, menial or grand, youth or elderly treating everyone equally. It fell onto itself one after the other.

That saint who had never been a saint chanted ‘Hari Om’ aloud and threw the peppermint paper on the back of the crowd. The rain of peppermint on the crowd!

The crowd lying prostrate on the ground realized itself like a stirred beehive. It shook itself with the warm sighs and belches. The boys, elders, young women, older women, Tamils, Telugus, Hindus, Muslims, Christians and atheists alike – all penetrated the ground like beetles. They scratched the floor pushing each other away. Snatched from others, tasted, and then parted. They looked up to the man who threw peppermints. He was not there. He must have fled away through the rear of the clock tower after tossing the paper with peppermints.

In five minutes, the crowd dispersed the way it had assembled. We returned to the National Store. Natesan, standing outside the shop to watch the pandemonium, entered the shop and smiled at us. “They look mad. Don’t they? But it isn’t a problem for anyone. Right?” Natesan said as he scrupulously unfolded the five rupees note the peppermint man had given him, flicked it carefully with his index finger and kept it in the drawer. We acknowledged his words, “Yes…yes…” Sivaprakasam rose, went out of the shop to spit.

*** Ended***