Chamor , livre ebook

SHEBA JOSE

CHAMOR
a novel
PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Shalomi House
Varsham and Olam
In for the Long Haul
The Mother of All Storms
Lekky Dips
The Tale of an Overlong Tail
Jency: One of a Kind
The Usual Suspect
M M to the Rescue
The God Gene
The Mad Heat of April
The Charm of December
Inside the Mill
We Were Struck
So Went Daily Life
The Turning Point
A Pitch in the Dark
Back Home but Not for Long
Pneumonia: The Best Thing That Happened to Me
No Dearth of Words
The Flower Girl
Off to Vranni, at Last
On the Train, Again!
Left Behind
The Story Continues
The Next Morning
Sudheeran
Chaachi and Ajju Get Visitors
The Call of the River
Aunty Manoma
A Lunch to Remember
Old Friends, the Snehans
Out on a Limb
My Father s House
Thus, the Great Escape
An Angel Shows Up
Hostilities Begin
A New Best Friend
Finally, They Give In
We Get on Baalan s Case
The Game Is up for Chamor
Grandfather Bids Goodbye
Second Shot at Life for Someone
Medeth Sunny
All Things Must Pass, Especially the Good
Thinking Back Thirty Years
Baalan Is Lost . . . and Found
Acknowledgments
Follow Penguin
Copyright
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
Sheba Jose tells the story of Chamor in such vivid and nuanced detail that it becomes, for the reader, a shared experience-as they subconsciously amalgamate memories evoked from their own past with events that affect and shape the characters that emerge from the author s mind. Expectations, values and emotions form the core of relationships. Chamor is an engrossing rendition of human nature and of the significant role of chance in all our lives. Storytelling at its best! Highly recommended - Dr P. Thiaga Rajan, minister for finance and human resources management, Tamil Nadu
Sheba Jose s Chamor is both delicate and disturbing, an acutely observed evocation of a young girl s universe on a family plantation in Kerala. In the intricacy of relationships-with family, servants and the natural world-is contained the heartbreak of change. In vividly drawn scenes and fluent dialogue, the novel captures the transition from the simple pleasures of childhood to the pain of a lost paradise - Sunil Sethi, columnist
An engaging tale of innocence, love and humanity set in the enchanted garden of childhood. Sheba Jose tells her story of a remembered life in charming south Indian locales with passion and conviction - Paul Zacharia, writer and columnist
Kocha
This is for you Brother
RIP
Shalomi House
Vranni, a tiny region within a sliver of a state called Kerala, near the tip of southern India, is a land lush with rivers, mountains and a whole lot else. After the rains, its loamy soil becomes so rich with moisture and mineral sediment from the hills that one would just need to throw down a green stick to see it sprout. I am standing inside the old sheet house , into which, in the days of my youth, buckets of warm, foaming rubber sap used to be brought in from the plantation to be processed and sold by the quintal. Today, more than three decades after they closed it down, vestiges of my grandparents cottage industry-which traded in commodities like sugarcane, cocoa, peppercorn and other spices besides rubber, their main cash crop-lie neatly stacked in a corner.
I glance nostalgically at the two presses, cans of congealed bitumen, glass jars, unhusked coconuts so shrivelled that they look like large walnuts and books of labels printed with the legend A Shalomi House Product below the picture of two elephants with their trunks meeting, in honour of the two beloved working giants, Ruki and Shara, who had once been part of the family for long years since Grandpa s youth. On the rough wooden tables sit large aluminium trays containing dried sheets of rubber, curled and browned at the edges with age, the acrid tang of the latex still hanging in the air.
My late friend Chamor, the doughty youth whom my family had depended on for its day-to-day well-being at the time, had rejoiced at the crash in rubber prices that caused many small offshoots of the industry to down their shutters. Such crashes were caused by any reason like excessive rains or unfavourable trade policies and they brought much hardship to thousands who depended on rubber for their livelihood, as they still do today. But Chamor, in the face of widespread alarm at the thought, expressed his hope that the prices would never recover, so that what he saw as the brutal exploitation of the rubber tree and the destruction of diverse wildlife-when natural forest was razed for monoculture plantings-would stop.
Varsham and Olam
Through the window I can see the cashew nut grove and, beyond it, the realm of wildflowers where roams, I am sure, the indomitable spirit of Chamor. In the centre of that verdure is the pool that he had built by enclosing the pebbly bed of our rain-fed stream, Varsham, and channelling into it a thread of water from a nearby brook, which he named Olam , meaning ripple or wavelet . Olam had been an exciting find for us, and this was how we chanced upon it: For quite a few days before we set out to investigate them, there had been reports of movements on our western boundary, where the red laterite rock embankment rose high above the seldom-used mofussil bus route, on which plied a total of two buses every day, on a round trip each. Of course, this kind of interference at that edge of the property happened every so often, and my grandmother easily guessed the cause-fallen coconuts from the trees in that line. The sheer height of the ridge wall never deterred the intruders who seemed to have amazing rock-climbing skills. Thieving mountain goats, my grandmother used to call them, her ire roused because the income from coconuts was crucial to the profitability of her modest enterprise. They are lucky that I am against keeping a dog, but if they force my hand, I will get the biggest, baddest dog I can get! she threatened every time, fooling nobody.
Inevitably, it fell to Chamor to respond to the situation and do the needful. So, carrying a sack and a machete to cut the brush, and with me in tow as usual, dragging my own sack, and Rosa, the maid, whom Grandma decided to send after me with a bowl of breakfast, Chamor went thither early one morning to start the practice of picking up all the coconuts, nutmegs and other fruit that had been shed by their trees overnight, so that wayfarers and foragers familiar with the seasonal windfall would have less motivation to climb in and wander about. If my grandma thought he would surrender the booty to her, she was mistaken, for Chamor only intended to distribute it among the workers.
I heard a sound, like a continuous, low hum, as we stopped to take stock and listened in puzzlement, not knowing what it was. At this point, having failed to make me open my mouth to eat, Rosa lost patience and ordered me back to the house, picking up a stout stick to help steer me in that direction, as if I were a goat. But Chamor, promising to get me up to speed later, followed the sound and, clearing a path, found the flowing water hidden amid the thick underscrub. I rejoined him soon enough, after giving Grandma the slip, and shared his delight at the find. Back at the house, he talked about his find to Grandpa, who dismissed it as possibly being some newly broken vein seeping out of a rock somewhere upland, one among many such that happened every day.
But for Chamor, Olam was a miracle. He liked to imagine that the bubbly little rivulet, about two feet wide and two deep, was of ancient provenance, beginning its life as no more than a filament, flowing unobserved by generations of my forebears, gathering pace and size until it had attained the speed and dimensions at which we had stumbled upon it. He immediately made plans to conduct a survey of it the next day, which was a Sunday, when he expected the household to be in church all morning. But it so happened that Grandpa chose to stay home, which made it difficult for Chamor to spend more than a couple of hours on this secret mission of his, without arousing his interest. Still, in that time, he did manage to backtrack the stream a fair way up the long, imperceptible incline leading into some desolate, interior woodland where no bus went. And again, the day after that, attired in his khaki long pants and armed with some lemons and salt to tackle the leeches, Chamor set out early under some pretext. Returning suspiciously late in the evening, he fobbed off everyone else with some story but claimed to me privately to have traced Olam to its single-point source-a tiny, but vigorous, spring on top of the Charu hills.
But all that happened a long time ago. Today, the Chamora, as I christened the lovely pool after his passing, looks calm and reflective-like a pond of standing water, which it would have been but for the underwater drainage system that Chamor had carefully engineered, explaining to me as he worked, how it was important to make sure that his touch be light and minimal, scarcely to be noticed by Mother Nature. He said that he would have to divert the channel in order to be able to work on the ground over which it spread. He toiled for days, removing no more than a few shovels of mud, which he patted back into place along the sides, to give the floor a gradually altering slope, slower than that which came down from the Charu, after which he restored the channel to its original track, shoring up the guides on the banks with nothing more than clay, live stakes from trees and the sturdiest grasses he could find in the surrounding meadows, to ensure that the water was always on a slow, onward move.
The last thing he did before we invited my grandparents for the surprise reveal was wade neck-deep into River Shruti to pick up two jagged rocks, which he carried back home, staggering under their weight. They were to become valuable additions to the pool. When he saw