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