19/03/2016
A woman relinquishes her four-year-old son to tourists passing through town. Losing him, she loses the story of her future. A world away from her, the boy becomes a man without the story of his past. Decades on, the mother struggles on her deathbed to find the story that will release her from life; the son’s struggle is for the story that will allow him to live.
This is an excerpt from the novel Not Only the Things That Have Happened, by Mridula Koshy (HarperCollins Publishers India.)
If the freshly shaven Father Paul, rocketing down the highway to the head office in Palai is to have a chance of making sense of himself, much less of making sense to his Superior, he knows what he needs to do. He must rehearse, practice, crack the books as he never did the textbooks in Rome, by which he means he must crack his thoughts, or at least marshal them, and his arguments, of course. Rehearse, he commands himself. Head down to protect newly exposed and sensitive skin from the grit flying at him from the road, Father Paul does just that: he rehearses.
Paul Vadakel here. Father, may I enter? Good evening, Father Thayiparambil. Thank you, Father. Yes, Father. Well, Father. They are also well, Father. Father, I have come with regard, Father, to speak with regard, to explain to you Father—a certain matter. Father, you know me for the last twenty-two years. From before I came to the church as a small boy of fourteen you know me. I thought this was a way for me to choose my own family instead of having to live with the one I was born into. All of us boys after the lights were turned out, joking together. That Tharackan fellow was so good at doing imitations. Such a hunger we had to be together. I came three years in a row to summer camp. I am sure you thought it was the result of the good work you were doing to help us recognize our calling. Refugees—that’s what we were.
No, no, no. This isn’t right.
Father, I hail from a family devout in their adherence to the church. You have been present for long years in my formation as a priest. Through the difficult times when I returned . . . when I was returned . . . when I came to this parish. Never mind that business in the past. No one else even remembers it. Start over again, Paul.
You must take me seriously, Father. Father, you know me throughout my formation. So you will take me seriously, Father, when I announce to you my resignation. Your expression is clouded. You are troubled, Father. You don’t know what to make of this news. It is, Father, because I know well what decision you will take with regard to a controversial parishioner. You have objected to—have been objecting to—my continuing interest in her spiritual welfare. Her presence is no more, Father.
You are laughing at me Father. You, who know me for twelve years of my formation. You will take my resigning from this hypocritical institution seriously. This grave decision.
Start over, Paul. Enough of trying to speak in English. Start over in Malayalam.
In Malayalam then: it is I. Father, I bring news of the passing. The passing. A parishioner. Passing. No, not of our sister Rajamma’s. Her suffering continues. Yes, she is still refusing the medicine. She suffers such pain. Her people are very concerned, but I believe their admiration contributes to the miserable state in which she is choosing to spend her last days. I counselled her family to accept morphine, but immediate tears from her. Like a waterfall.
What is this? Not supposed to be about Rajamma’s suffering. One more time.
It is I. Father, I want to inform you that Annakutty has died. Annakutty Edanolil, wife of the one-legged Thambi. The church helped him find employment with the loan for the vehicle, Father. Father it was a quick illness. There was no time for the anointing of the sick. This should be no problem. I have prayed over her body and others from the neighbourhood have joined in praying the rosary. I have taken her sister’s phone number. I have phoned her sister to inform with regard to her demise.
What is this? English again? Stick to Malayalam, Paul.
Her sister has taken the news well. Actually, her sister was most concerned about her daughter. The child is about twelve years old. The child was being raised by Annakutty in the absence of the child’s mother, who is in the Gulf for some years now. Actually this woman did not take the news well, Father. I am not sure what made me tell you that she had. In fact, she had not. She kept demanding that I put her child on the phone. Of course, seeing as I made the call from the ISO booth at the Junction, there was no possibility of my placing this child in connection with her mother.
I assured the mother the child was being fed and in other regards well taken care of by the many women who have come to oversee the preparation of the body. Numerous times the call was interrupted Father by a loud crashing. Then this sister of Annakutty’s would take the phone up again and explain to me that she had just thrown it at this or that person.
Yes, Father, perhaps it runs in the blood.
No, Father, I am not expecting you to be concerned about the arrangements. I am simply informing you, Father, that I am handling my duties as per my duties. I mean that I am handling myself all of the duties. Just to inform you the vigil is throughout this night with a funeral to be tomorrow, myself officiating. We are only awaiting the arrival of the family member whom I just mentioned.
What do you mean you will not allow the funeral, Father? Father, this woman was baptized in the Catholic faith. In the Kochi diocese, I believe. But she’s been in our diocese since her marriage to a member of my parish. He was himself a member of our parish since his birth in these parts. He was born in 1929. I remember the details of his death certificate that I was witness to. He himself passed away just a year ago, Father. Myself officiating at that funeral, my first funeral.
No, Father Thayiparambil. I have not seen her baptism certificate. But in my time spent with her, I have come to know the details of her life. Such particulars as her birthplace in Kochi and then her mother’s passing, and the difficult life she lived without her mother’s guidance.
No, Father Thayiparambil. The church-given marriage certificate does not exist. This is as it is, as you know from the grief it caused you when Thambi chose for the marriage to be held outside the church.
No, Father Thayiparambil. The marriage was not registered afterwards with the church.
Yes, Father Thayiparambil, it is Annakutty I was having difficulty persuading to allow the girl in her care to attend Sunday school.
No, Father Thayiparambil, I was not able at the last instance to persuade her to allow me to pray for her soul.
Nineteen forty-five, she was born, Father. If you can imagine.
Of course, Father. You don’t have to imagine. You were yourself born prior to that. But my point Father was how difficult those times must have been. How much more difficult those times, forming people so they have clung to mistaken precepts. Not you. Of course not you, Father. But surely the times were such . . . such . . . what she must have had to live through were such events as would make faith, not impossible, Father, never impossible, but yes, difficult.
The truth about her marriage, Father? She refused marriage in the church.
It was a legal marriage.
I am certain, Father.
There was never a sense of her hiding anything from me, Father, so I never felt the need to probe.
You are right, Father. She refused every sacrament the church offered her. She refused the sacrament of marriage, the sacrament of redemption, finally the sacrament of absolution.
But Father, this is one truth. There is also the truth of her hunger, Father. For justice. To hunger and thirst for justice, as she did, is at the centre of our faith. She embodied this spiritual hunger. Father, I myself have not let food or water pass my lips since the news of her passing. In fact, my last meal was yesterday afternoon as I had withdrawn to my room prior to the dinner bell with the intention of pursuing some private reading.
No, Father, I have not made a practice of withdrawing.
What you have heard from Father Kuriakose is not true. Father Kuriakose has ulterior reasons for speaking poorly of me.
Father, it is simply that this is the only time when I am not either teaching at St Anthony’s or working with the upliftment effort at Little Flowers.
Yes, Father, the work with the tribals is going well.
With regard to my choosing to not eat. I am choosing hunger as a way of struggle. The immediate struggle, Father, is sometimes greater than the spiritual struggle. In this instance, the struggle is against social injustice. My faith calls me to this struggle. It calls me to hunger.
Father, I shall undertake a hunger strike, with your permission Father.
Until?
I shall strike, Father, until there is a resolution to the question of truth that you have raised. You ask what truth there is in Annakutty’s life. I shall fast till I can ascertain this truth, present to you this truth, expand our understanding in the church of what truth there is in the suffering lives of our brethren. Our sister, Annakutty.
Father, it is you who wish to exaggerate. You wish to exaggerate the precision of history. You wish to exaggerate the order of the life she lived. What came first, second and third. Perhaps Father, for her, third came first and second came last and the first was the middle.
No, Father, it is not my hunger that makes me speak, as you say, in a muddle. Life does not have a pure grammar, Father—a past, present, future, strung one after the other. She whispered to me, Father. Yesterday afternoon, she whispered the greatest truth there is. She said she never stopped loving her lost son. She said this erased all distinctions of time. Hers was a life lived in the constant. A continuous tense. No grammar for her. She said her past was her present, her present was her present and her future was her present. Don’t you see, Father? Have we ever been called, Father, to anything else? To anything less than immutable love?
Yes, of course I see the danger in obsessing. By obsession, you mean that she was living in the past.
Not the past? You say—in the past that could have been. Again, you exaggerate. You play with words. You invent grammar. I do not know of any such tense. You say she was trapped by the idea of a life that could have been. But, Father, hers was no obsession with what could have been.
In that event, she would have wanted nothing less than to rewrite her past. This is what we in the church have done. We have rewritten the past. In our version, she should never have had the child, so the child disappears.
He was stolen, Father. And aid was given in this matter by our own church. There was a desire to wash our hands clean at the expense of the spiritual tie of a mother to her son. It is we who wish away the sins of our past. Not she. Even today. I understand that even today a certain person continues as an ordained priest. Despite the role he played. And this role, it is known to all—he fathered the child. I have said it now. There, I have said it. Is this inevitable that he should continue as a priest? Even today, I would say this is not inevitable. It was her faith that called Annakutty to act as she did, to act even against the church.
Yes, I am unclear about the circumstances. It was never from her that I heard these matters. But I know as everyone else does. I do not judge. Rather, I commit the grave error you ascribe to her of wishing away what cannot be wished away. I wish the church never . . . She, on the other hand . . . How can I explain this to you? She accepted the past. But it was never inevitable for her. She accepted the present, even the future, but never as inevitable. Don’t you see, Father, we choose what determines us? There is nothing inevitable in any moment we live, nothing that says we cannot love as she loved her son, even in his absence. Isn’t this what I have been working to convey at Little Flowers? Yes, yes it is. But I never understood it till last night, never understood it when I was preparing for my ordination, no, not till this moment. And now I cannot make you understand.
What application for us? The application it has for us is that we can choose what we want to do. Even I, I can choose. We do not have to adhere to anyone who tells us that she is an outcaste from the church. And I, I can determine who and what I am in the church.
How can I make you understand, Father, what I saw yesterday afternoon. I saw a woman who lived on hope. Because if there is nothing inevitable about any moment we live, then surely you see, Father, we have every reason to hope.
I will tell you something that perhaps no one else knows. She told me last night that she placed her hand on his back. Can you imagine that back—a child’s back is such a small thing, a small part of what is already small. She must have stooped to place her hand there. With her hand there, she gave her little son a push toward the future. It was at a railway station. She gave him the push that sent him away from her. She set him on the road he was to travel. The road she has travelled. The same road. It binds them. They have never been apart since. She and he have travelled this road since. Can you imagine?
She said the moment his back moved away from her hand, she knew it was a mistake. And she is convinced that he too feels the error. That he is surely angry at her. Annakutty told me that she knows her son will not accept their separation as inevitable. She said to me that if she set him on that road, then surely it leads back to her. Can you imagine that? I cannot. I spent the night trying to imagine how he would return to her in the short time she had remaining. I was shaken to think that she could imagine it.
You know, for the past year, she has been advertising in newspapers. Yes, she did this years ago as well. I thought last night, her faith will be rewarded. She will surely live till she sets eyes on him again. Until this moment, here and now, I had not understood—her reward is her faith.
Is this not an exemplary life—a life lived in faith?
No, her faith was not in herself. Her faith is demonstrated in a life of peaceful struggle against oppression. It is the same faith we are all taught to uphold, and few of us understand. I too wish to protest as she did, and will begin with a hunger strike.
Until?
I will undertake this hunger strike without your permission if necessary, until the church agrees to granting Annakutty Edanolil a Catholic burial.
No, her faith was never to my knowledge a faith based in the name we have given our saviour, Jesus Christ. She herself told me her god was in the return of her son. I understood this to mean that she saw god in everything: in the presence of her son before he was lost to her, in his absence afterwards, and in the idea of his return. Her god was in the love that was constant through all three of these periods of her life. I see no inconsistency in understanding god as a creation wherein each of us is to bear faith to our inner nature and to the god within.
You can buy the book here: http://www.flipkart.com/not-only-things-have-happened-english/p/itmdezenm5zfr4yx?pid=9789351069980&ref=L%3A9030363667677531175&srno=p_4&query=mridula+koshy&otracker=from-search
http://www.amazon.in/gp/product/9351069982?redirect=true&ref_=s9_simh_co_p14_d0_i1
(Photo credit: abhi_clickz via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA poonomo via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
Cycling man via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
brainseizer2 via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
peevee@ds via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND)