Hooting with laughter, the youngsters would press me to repeat the story. My life was a cautionary tale that passed from batch to batch of Malayali youth who studied at the college, duly embellished in each telling with spicy details that even the hero of the story was unaware of.

As is wont to happen with such tales, I have forgotten how it all began. I lived in the college hostel, and in the evenings, I would come to Vellayamma’s paan shop that stood at the spot where I now have my biriyani shop. Occasionally, her daughter Selvi would be at the shop, helping her chop the chewing tobacco. I wanted to give her the banana chips and chakkavaratti that I brought from my home back in Kerala. Within a few days, one night, Selvi let me in through the back door, and I went in with the anxiety of a first-timer.

‘The next morning there was a wedding right here. The joyful bride was all decked up with marigolds in her hair. The bridegroom—me—had been tied to that tamarind tree over there all night.’

‘You could have taken off later, no?’ everyone asked at this point in the story. ‘No one would have known.’

‘The next time I saw Kerala was after I had two children,’ I would tell them. ‘And that too with two of Selvi’s uncles keeping an eye on me, armed with the type of swords you would see in a Sasikumar movie. I should have spent my life married to a Chovathi or Nair woman, but instead here I am with one who bathes only on rare occasions!’

‘So what if Selvi chechi is dark-skinned? She’s gorgeous even now . . .’

‘With that one night, my happy sex life was over. Now it is like the last meal of a man going to the gallows in the morning.’

When the college closed for Pongal holidays, with no youngsters around or biriyani to make, I was whiling away the rest of a pointless day after a meal of a watery curry of cheera and parippu over white rice made by Selvi. My head supported by my left arm, I lay on a bench in the shop for what seemed like an eternity. The road was dead with no vehicles. Sun and shadows alternated, and on the neem tree outside, fruits set, ripened and fell off. A young man stood on the road, facing the shop and holding a white stick in his hand. The stick, the mistakes in the way he had tucked his shirt into his trousers and folded up its sleeves, and his face that seemed to be smiling even when he was not smiling, gave him away. He was blind.

‘Do you know who sang that song?’ His question was aimed at me.

I realized that he had been standing there listening to the song from the radio I had switched on. It occurred to me that I was the blind one, and deaf too, because I hadn’t noticed him until then or realized that the radio was on.