A Place Within (48 page)

Today, Calicut is a modest little port city of roughly half a million inhabitants; it is Cochin, its ancient competitor to the south, that is the larger port, is more developed and attracts more tourists. Calicut has the added disadvantage that it is further away from the
capital, Trivandrum. But its compactness makes it accessible, and it has a bustling market downtown which you have to wade through to get to the ancient spice market, the famous Big Bazar.

In the Big Bazar this late afternoon, just before sunset, the spice wholesalers relax outside the shops and warehouses. Business is over for the day. The Big Bazar has existed at this place for centuries. The spices sold in this market were craved by the Europeans. Pepper was like black gold. Towards the end of the street, and all along the beach road which it meets, are parked dozens of trucks in a row ready to take away the produce. But that will be tomorrow morning. There is a Gujarati school on the beach road and a few Gujarati businesses. Gujarati merchants, in numbers small and large, like the Arabs, have been ubiquitous in the Indian Ocean ports for centuries. I imagine the antecedents of the local Gujaratis going to welcome Vasco da Gama as he arrived, in 1498. Portuguese accounts mention the “Guzaratis” in various places as far as Macao. Vasco da Gama’s last stop before arriving here in India was Mombasa, where my mother grew up, where, according to legend, he picked up two Indians, presumably Gujarati, to guide him to their homeland. If not for them, would he have arrived here? There is a small, nondescript stone plaque to commemorate his landing on a beach called Kappad further up from the city. In Mombasa, the Portuguese built Fort Jesus and fought against the Arabs and the Swahili. In Malabar, too, they carried on a bitter rivalry against the Arabs.

As I walk along the road out of the Big Bazar and next to the beach, there occurs a coincidence, a personal little epiphany: two of the businesses facing the sea bear, as their proprietors’ last names, my own surname. What’s in a name? For me, much. Vassanji is not a common name, not even in Gujarat. What does it signify, here, on the signs of two businesses in this Malabar port? It is not a family name, being my grandfather’s first name, so I cannot claim
a clan connection. The connection must be regional (Kathiawar, Gujarat) and generational (my grandfather’s). Calicut, the ports of Kathiawar, and those of East Africa were all linked through the Indian Ocean trade. In my grandfather’s generation there were other Vassanjis, a few of whom travelled from Kathiawar to Calicut, others to East Africa.

The sun is setting and people are arriving to stroll down the boardwalk, or sit on the parapet looking out, as citizens of beach towns everywhere have always done. The ocean conveys a sense of faraway places. Young Muslim couples, the women in loose hijab, sit close to each other; this is their private space. Some of them couldn’t be more than teenagers. There is no abashedness, I observe; a couple fondle each other, another stare long into each other’s eyes. It’s only the headcover that gives them away. The sun goes behind clouds, sets, the crowds begin to thin.

A little further south from the Big Bazar is the Muslim area called Kuttichura. It is a quiet old village around a large pond; there is hardly any traffic, and the place seems curiously untouched by the bustling life outside. The only commercial activity is the odd village shop, a coconut stand, a fish market. The ocean is visible in the far distance. Here, the women are in full black burqa, many of the men wear white lunghis and Muslim caps. Features vary from the very fair to the typical dark that one associates with the south.

There is a mosque close by, a few hundred years old, I am told by a young man from the area who walks along with us. The sloping roof is red-tiled and flat-topped, in traditional Keralan style, which is unlike the typical Middle Eastern domed and arched style now common to new mosques in Kerala, and indeed everywhere. We go to another mosque, where the tops of the walls are trimmed with colourful floral designs. There are Quranic inscriptions etched on the walls inside. On one wall, however, an unpainted area of one by two feet contains an inscription. No one can say what the
script is, what the language. No one cares. But we are brought an old Quran with beautiful calligraphy, partly coloured, on yellowed paper. A thousand years old, I am told, but it looks, to my admittedly untrained eye, not more than two hundred. The young man with us, fair, handsome, and of medium height, is called Aziz. He sounds cynical about the old folk, sings a popular Hindi film song as we walk, though his knowledge of Hindi and of English is next to none. At the mosque, he easily introduced my companion, a Hindu, as Abdullah, thus avoiding complications.

He takes us to his house, which is a traditional one, I gather. It is walled, and the entranceway has a red-tiled roof. Inside the entrance is a courtyard, beyond which is the house, which also has a red-tiled roof. The house has a verandah, and large spacious rooms, some of them empty of furniture, and it is cool and dark compared to the sun-drenched street outside.

From here he takes us to the home of a prominent local family. There is a somewhat surreal quality to the experience. The young man speaks in Malayalam, my companion translates in the simplest of terms, and I follow where I’m taken. For the guide I am a “foreign,” someone special, and perhaps this is how he gets us admitted to the house of an eminence. At the entrance there are two photos of ancestors proudly displayed. On the verandah wall are more photos, and framed letters. The verandah has chairs to sit on, and a telephone. There is a mosque adjoining the house. We meet here a father and son, both very fair, wearing lunghis. They claim descent from the Prophet, their ancestors having arrived from Aden about a thousand years ago to preach.

There is an old bench in the courtyard, where, it is claimed, the eighteenth-century Mysorean Muslim ruler Tippoo Sultan once sat. The old shaikh whose home we are in is some kind of a doctor, who heals mental cases.

The Sultan of Beypore, as he is affectionately called, is the other grand old man of Keralan fiction: Vaikom Muhammad Basheer. There is a photo I have seen showing Thakazhi grabbing Basheer in an affectionate armhold around the neck, from behind; another shows these two and a few other writers all seated, wearing milk-white lunghis and overshirts, staring at the camera. This would be after India’s independence, the writers are in their forties. Basheer sports a black moustache.

His fiction is modernist, with dialect and multiple voices cutting into the narrative. The stories and novels are short and full of humour and irony. There is a facility in his style, an easy grace, that makes even the presence of a goat in a story into a revelation about family and communal life in Kerala. In his stories he scorns convention, albeit in his charming way, and perhaps this is not surprising, for it is convention and tradition of which he has been a victim. In their backgrounds and life experiences, the two friends, Basheer and Thakazhi, could not be more different. If Thakazhi has the mud of his ancestral land on his feet, Basheer has on him the dust of city streets, British jails, and the highways of India.

Beypore is a settlement a little to the south of Calicut, where I arrive at mid-morning on the passenger seat of a motorbike to pay my tribute. A single telephone line leaves the main road, goes to the writer’s house, which is typical of the area, with a garden and a raised verandah in the front. He sits bare-chested on the verandah on a makeshift bed with sheets and three pillows, looking emaciated, all skin and bones, the collarbones bulging. The very sight of him is intimidating. “I am about to die,” he says matter-of-factly. He is quite bald, with only a few hairs at the back of the head and a grey stubble on the chin. He leans forward as he sits, his long arms outstretched, his knotty fingers spread out. He reminds me so much of Gandhi. Every little while, he stops, looks distracted, and seems to hum a tune; but it is to breathe that he does this. He suffers from acute asthma.

We sit facing him. Behind us is a breathing apparatus with some odds and ends. Beside him is an oxygen tank. A built-in cabinet in the front room of the house is full of medicine bottles. The smell of medicine predominates.

His wife brings us some tea. He barely manages to gulp down a couple of sips, spits out some, puts down the glass partly full.

He’s been here about thirty years, he says, having moved from Vaikom, the family home. This is his wife’s home. Her parents had died and there were her siblings to care for. The house is nice outside, but inside it is very modest—no rug or linoleum, old, makeshift furniture, no fancy lighting or artifacts.

He says there are two books he would still like to write. One, a book of stories; another, a book on creation. But he can’t, physically. He’s on the verge of dying.

He brings out a spray and inhales. It’s not much use, his wife says.

No, he’s not travelled much outside India, except for the Middle East and the coast of Africa—he’s vague about this, reluctant to say much, I sense. But he travelled ten years throughout India, up to the Himalayas, became a sanyasi, someone who’s renounced ordinary life. Then he returned and became a freedom fighter, followed Gandhi. He went to prison several times, many times spent nights in the lock-up, was beaten and tortured. For that, along with other freedom fighters, he receives a monthly pension from the Indian government.

I ask him about the recent “disturbances,” the violence following the destruction of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya.

“I didn’t give it a thought,” he says. “Fifteen years ago, when the question of Ayodhya came up, I said give it back to the Hindus. No Muslims live there. In Spain, Muslims ruled for some hundred years, what happened to the mosques? Ayodhya is a silly affair.”

“There’s no difference between northern and southern Muslims,” he says.

How mistaken he is, I think; there are different kinds of Muslims even in Kerala. But perhaps this is what he would like to believe. Like Thakazhi saying there is no difference between the north and the south. A refrain repeated much more in the south than in the north.

“Muslims are fools,” he goes on. “Out of one country they are now in three countries which are enemies with each other. Jinnah was not a Muslim. He drank, ate pork; he came from the Bohra community, who can marry their own sisters…” Here he displays an ignorance and a prejudice. Jinnah was not a Bohra, and the Bohras in any case do not marry their sisters.

“God bless you,” he says, as we take our leave.

On my last day in Calicut I go to visit my companion’s family. The father is a simple middle-class engineer, fair and lean, somewhat proud to be a Namboodiri Brahmin. According to him, many of the Muslims in Kuttichura are converted Namboodiris, the conversion having happened as recently as the early twentieth century due to a conflict. He proudly shows me the special features of his house, designed by him using basically sound principles: windows without frames but with bars, inner doors decorated with a laminated printed cloth, tiles on the ceilings, a high ceiling in the centre of the house to let the warmer air rise up. The dining area is a raised platform at which the three of us are served, vegetarian of course, the women keeping to themselves.

Fifteen minutes to my train’s departure time, my companion is ready to take me on his motorbike to the railway station. We seem to be cutting it close, but to my great surprise and irritation the father brings out his own bike and suggests we stop on the way to listen briefly to a music concert. I am the type who arrives at a train station half an hour early, he is obviously the type who arrives just on time, and I get anxious. This last-minute plan seems to court
disaster; if I miss my train, I will have to re-book, spend another night in a dingy hotel, and delay or cancel my plans in Trivandrum. But there is no choice, and so we race through the evening traffic on our impossible venture.