Neethu shook Bineesh’s body sprawled all over the bed and woke him up. A ripe smell emanated from his day-old clothes and the alcohol as well as the sheet someone had covered him with against the recent rain.

‘The rest you can give me later,’ he said as he pocketed the money Neethu handed him, having given her a full and detailed account of petrol charges and other expenses. ‘It needn’t be in the form of cash. If you delay, you’ll only find it difficult to pay the interest.’

‘I am a cheapskate,’ Neethu declared.

In a single manoeuvre, Bineesh had the vehicle on the road as neighbours and relatives busied themselves gathering the chairs and taking down the marquee. Neethu watched the westering sun and felt that it was neither day nor night. As the vehicle splashed up the rainwater on the dirt road, a magic tail extended out from its back and wound itself around her waist.

kavyamela

When I first became acquainted with Soordas, I was living under the name Vasuvannan, running a biriyani shop in a place that was neither a village nor a town at the edge of Dindigul. My shop had a name board with ‘Hotel Anandabhavan’ and ‘Dindigul Thalappakatti Biriyani’ written in Tamil and English in letters larger than the shop itself. Strings of decorative bulbs lit up the name board in the evenings. In order to hoodwink customers into thinking I was a direct descendent of the Naidu who began the tradition of Thalappakatti biriyani, I tied a long cotton towel around my head. The towel concealed my rapidly progressing baldness, and I also used it to wipe my dirty hands.

By around 4 p.m. when I would have some spare time, the most troublesome of the few Malayali young men who attended the Chechiyamman College across the road from the shop would come in, and watch me slice, at lightning speed, the onions for the next day’s biriyani. I would swipe a rag over a table, disturbing the house flies, and they would sit there happily playing cards. Sometimes they would pool their money together and give it to me to procure them a bottle of alcohol. It was good to make friends with people younger than oneself.

Still, when they would start talking about the young women who were their classmates, a tremor would rise up from the earth through my body and into my head. I would rinse off the soap I used to remove the smell of ghee from my hands and rush towards them in anger.

‘What the hell have you all come this far for? If you wanted to chase after women, why didn’t you stay put at home? Is there any shortage of lovely, butter-skinned women beyond Kumali?’

Glancing at the photographs of the goddess Chechiyamman and Our Lady of Good Health at Velankanni, and of Ettumanoorappan keeping them company on the wall, I would continue: ‘I too came here to study at this college, and look at me now! Don’t let me catch you talking about women here again.’