Now, seeing Lenin in the flesh, Big Ammachi is so thrilled that it doesn’t cross her mind that the holidays are far away; school is still in session. She embraces Lenin. The handsome boy has all of Lizzi’s best features. Word spreads to the other houses that “Lizzi’s boy, the Baby Achen, is here.” Everyone wants to see him and talk about his mother; no one mentions Kora.
Lenin, with little prompting, recounts the story of the pestilence that descended on Manager’s Mansion and took his family. His powerful voice and the vivid imagery in his speech will suit his priestly calling. Lenin says as the days passed and only his mother clung to life, he was sure he would die, but of starvation, not smallpox. His father’s last words on earth were “Follow the straight path.” His audience is moved by Kora’s repentance and contrition as he was about to meet his maker. Mariamma looks on, a little jealous of this newcomer, her fifth cousin, but as caught up as everyone else in his tale. In desperation, Lenin says, he determined to set out on a ruler line wherever it took him. A landowner in the big house he was approaching told him to stop or he would let loose the dog. At that point, a woman appeared. “I think it was the Blessed Mary appearing to be a pulayi. Just as it says in Matthew twenty-five, she fed me when I was hungry.” Another sigh from those listening, for who didn’t know that parable? “She sent word to BeeYay Achen and his monks. They were caring for those with smallpox in the village. I don’t know why God spared me. BeeYay Achen says that I don’t need to know. He says, for everything there is a season, and a time. God saved me. I am to serve God. I know that much.” Decency Kochamma is overcome by his testimony and hugs Lenin to her considerable bosom.
Someone asks how Lenin likes living in the seminary. For the first time the boy’s confidence falters. “I liked it better in the ashram with BeeYay Achen. I don’t like the seminary. I had some . . . misunderstandings with them.” Uplift Master asks if school isn’t in session now. “It is. I had some misunderstandings at the school. The principal of the seminary said it might be better for me to live here and go to school here. He only sent me.”
“By yourself?” Big Ammachi says.
“An achen traveled with me. We . . . had some misunderstandings,” Lenin says reluctantly. The answer is insufficient. “When we were on the bus, I saw we would be passing two miles from Manager’s Mansion. I wanted to visit. The achen said no . . .” Lenin’s face turns dark. “So I left him on the bus and I walked there. Then I walked here. I walked all day.”
There was a kappa patch where his family’s shack used to be, Lenin reports. The landowner from the big house—the same one who had threatened to turn his dog on him—came over carrying a stick. He had taken Lenin for a thief until Lenin explained. The landowner said the land was now his because Kora had borrowed from him using the land as surety. Lenin disagreed, saying it was his inheritance. The man said Lenin could file a case if he liked. Lenin asked to see Acca, the pulayi who had fed him; he wanted to give her the crucifix he was wearing, blessed by BeeYay Achen himself. The landowner told Lenin to keep the cross; he said Acca and her husband got big ideas from Party meetings, and felt that since they tilled the land, they had a right to it. He said they’d forgotten that the paddy in their stomachs and the roof over their heads was a result of his generosity; he said he chased the couple off his land and set fire to their hut. Lenin’s face is clotted with anger as he recounts this.
Philipose asks the question that’s on all their minds. Lenin says, “What could I do? If I were his size, I would have beat him with his stick. So I said, ‘One day I’ll find blessed Acca and give her all your land and your big house because you are a thief and one of her is better than a hundred of you.’ He came after me. But with that belly of his he had no chance.”
A few days later, they get a letter from the achen who had been assigned to escort Lenin to Parambil and had tried to stop him getting off the bus to visit Manager’s Mansion. Lenin had waited till Achen fell asleep and then tied his sandals together. Achen woke up when the bus stopped to let Lenin off. He stood up to give chase and fell on his face. Lenin shouted that the Achen had kidnapped him. Achen concludes, “No doubt Lenin made it to Parambil. Give yourself two weeks and you’ll be looking for a place to send Lenin, but kindly don’t send that devil back to the seminary.”
Lenin adapts to school and life in Parambil very quickly. But when he discovers that Decency Kochamma has razored out “indecent” pages from his favorite Mandrake the Magician comics in the lending library, Lenin substitutes the missing pages with drawings of naked men and women, labelled: ORIGINAL DIRTY PICTURES IN THE COLLECTION OF DECENCY KOCHAMMA. Once she finds out, the arthritic, rotund woman, now almost seventy, comes after him, moving faster than anyone thought was possible. The sight of her bearing down on him is sufficient trigger for Lenin to “follow the straight path.” He plows through rice drying on mats, tramples a paddy field, walks through nettles and into the young goldsmith’s hut, trying to exit through the back. The original goldsmith has passed away, and the son is middle-aged, but is still referred to as the “young” goldsmith. As Lenin later explains, once activated, his straight-line compulsion ends only when he meets an insurmountable obstacle or gets a sign from God. The young goldsmith is both, because he gives Lenin a sound thrashing. He drags Lenin back to Big Ammachi by his swollen ear. Lenin is covered with hives. The young goldsmith says, “This one is just as crooked as the father.” Mariamma has made her own observation: Lenin’s crookedness mostly happens in the daytime; at night he loses his cockiness, his steps become uncertain, and she has even seen him stagger like a drunk. While she often pleads to stay up later, Lenin can’t wait to get to his mat.
As punishment for the last escapade Lenin is confined to the house for two weeks. Mariamma says, “Why don’t you try climbing instead of this straight business? You might break your neck, but at least you won’t destroy property.”
“Aah, but the trouble with up is that too soon you reach the top.”
A few days into Lenin’s confinement, a fierce lightning storm descends on Parambil. The walls shudder as heaven’s thunderbolts hunt for prey. In the midst of this, the “blessed boy” is missing. They spot him outside, on the roof of the cow shed. It’s a terrifying sight: Lenin’s face upturned to the heavens, his arms raised, his hair plastered back, looking like Christ at Golgotha, deaf to their screams and swaying as the wind and rain buffet him. Thunder rattles the house as the clouds sparkle and glow. A lightning bolt strikes a palm twenty feet from him, its thunderclap instantaneous. It splinters the tree, and a branch knocks Lenin off his perch. The blessed boy wears the cast on his wrist like a medal. He claims to Big Ammachi that he was on the roof looking for “grace,” but to Mariamma he admits he wanted thunderbolts to enter his body and give him the power to unleash lightning from his fingers, just like Lothar in Mandrake the Magician.
A month after his arrival, Mariamma and Podi find it hard to remember life at Parambil before Lenin. Podi is Mariamma’s best friend, and about the same age. When they were boys, Podi’s father, Joppan, and Philipose were also best friends. Podi means “tiny” or “dust.” She and Podi agreed on most everything until Lenin came along. Mariamma resents Lenin for being “blessed” and for being fearless and for being a hero to all the children around, including Podi—though Podi denies it. Lenin is unconcerned about Mariamma’s opinion, which makes it worse. She can’t admit to anyone that though she detests him, she feels compelled to keep him in sight, in case she misses what he does next.