Philipose felt guilty hearing this, because Shamuel had been proud of Philipose finishing high school and going to college. It bothered him to think Shamuel held Philipose to a different standard than he did his son. Father and son were often going at each other. But they had come together to save Philipose when he was at his opium-addled worst. One morning, soon after Elsie’s drowning, with Big Ammachi’s blessing, and after enlisting Unni and Damo, they carried Philipose out of his room. Damo had snatched him up with his trunk and swung him up on his back, where Unni grabbed him, and he sat sandwiched between Shamuel and Unni, while Joppan rode alongside on Philipose’s bicycle. They went to Damo’s logging camp, Philipose screaming and begging the whole way. From there Damo headed up a trail into the interior to the hut where Unni kept his pots of pungent salve, huge metal files, and sickles to keep Damo’s nails and footpads from overgrowing. Whenever Damodaran decided to roam free in the jungle, that hut was where Unni waited, often drinking himself silly. Over the next six weeks, Joppan came and went, but Shamuel stayed with Philipose in that hut the entire time, putting up with his accusations and curses, nursing him through his cramps, hallucinations, and fevers until after two weeks his body was free of the grip of opium. Still they kept him there. He was ashamed. Long and heartfelt conversations with Shamuel allowed him to see how much the little wooden box had disrupted his life. The temptation never entirely vanished, but more than anything else, the thought of disappointing Shamuel, Joppan, and his mother was what kept him on the right path.
“Joppan, my mother and I want to make you an offer, though from what you just said, you will probably decline. But hear me out.” Philipose said he and Big Ammachi owed Shamuel so much. Shamuel had guided him in every way in the daily running of Parambil. Without Shamuel he was lost both as a human being and as the manager of their lands, not coming close to filling Shamuel’s shoes. “This is strictly a business proposition. It’s not stepping into Shamuel’s shoes. We’d like you to become manager of Parambil, make all the decisions in exchange for twenty percent of the profits from the harvest. We’d also pay a small monthly salary so that if we had a bad year, you’d still have income. If you choose to cultivate any undeveloped land, it’s more work for you but more profit.” Joppan was silent. “Twenty percent of the profits is substantial,” Philipose added, “but it’s worth it to me. I could write more. I’m not cut out for this.”
The silence was getting uncomfortable. Joppan seemed to hesitate before speaking. “Philipose, what I’m about to say to you, I couldn’t say to Big Ammachi. I have too much respect for her, for the love she had for my father and has for me. This will be hard for her or you to understand, but I’ll say it anyway. The money in this passbook . . . ?” He paused to study Philipose.
“It’s many cows?”
Joppan nodded. “Yes. But . . . also far fewer cows than my father deserved. If you think about how my grandfather helped your father carve out all these acres. Then consider how my father toiled here from when he was a child until the day he died. All his life! And at the end of it, what does he have? Yes, many cows. And his own plot for his hut—a rare thing for a pulayan. But just imagine if he were not a pulayan. Say he was your father’s cousin. Say he worked side by side with your father. Then, after your father’s time, say he continued working selflessly for Big Ammachi and for you for thirty more years. Every single day! What would be that cousin’s due for his lifetime of labor? Wouldn’t it be much more than what is in this passbook? It might be as much as half of all these lands.”
The saliva turned sour in Philipose’s mouth and glued his tongue to his teeth. “Is that what you’re asking?”
Joppan looked at Philipose with annoyance, or was it pity? “I’m not asking for a single thing. Your mother sent for me. I wouldn’t know of this passbook otherwise. And then you asked me to sit down, remember? I warned you this would be hard for you to hear. Your mother and you both said the same thing: how much you owed my father. He was family. I’m making a point to you as my best friend, as someone who speaks for the Ordinary Man. I thought you might really want to understand the truth. And the truth is that not everyone sees it the way Big Ammachi or you do. If you gave this relative of yours who worked his whole life here the same reward—a plot for a hut and his accumulated wages—everyone around would say he’d been exploited. But if it’s for Shamuel pulayan . . . then it’s generous. What you see as being generous or as being exploitation has everything to do with who you’re giving it to. It helped that my father believed it was his fate to be a pulayan. He felt he was lucky to be working for Parambil! He felt rich at the end of his life, his wages adding up, and a plot for his hut and one for his son and now one more.”
Philipose felt as though he’d walked into a hidden tree branch. The word “exploit” pierced him. It pained him to feel he’d taken advantage of Shamuel, a man he was willing to die for. He thought of himself and of Parambil as caste-free, above such considerations. Yet he had only to look at the face across from him and recall the thwack! of the kaniyan’s cane on Joppan’s flesh and remember the humiliation of the boy who’d shown up so earnestly for school for the children of Parambil.
“Because you loved my father, this is harder for you to grasp,” Joppan says. “You see yourselves as being kind and generous to him. The ‘kind’ slave owners in India, or anywhere, were always the ones who had the greatest difficulty seeing the injustice of slavery. Their kindness, their generosity compared to cruel slave owners, made them blind to the unfairness of a system of slavery that they created, they maintained, and that favored them. It’s like the British bragging about the railways, the colleges, the hospitals they left us—their ‘kindness’! As though that justified robbing us of the right to self-rule for two centuries! As though we should thank them for what they stole! Would Britain or Holland or Spain or Portugal or France be what they are now without what they earned by enslaving others? During the war, the British loved telling us how well they treated us compared to how the Japanese would treat us if they invaded. But should any nation rule over another nation? Such things only happen when one group thinks the other is inferior by birth, by skin color, by history. Inferior, and therefore deserving less. My father was no slave. He was beloved here. But he was never your equal so he wasn’t rewarded as one.” Joppan shook his head. “Some of your relatives here, in fact many of them, were given generous plots of two or three acres, more than a pulayan gets for a hut. It was enough land to do well. But honestly, other than Uplift Master and a few others, who has really made a success of it? Imagine if my father had been given one acre of his own to farm. Just think how well he’d have done.”
The sophistication of Joppan’s argument surprised Philipose. But even to think of Joppan’s argument as “sophisticated” was exactly the kind of blindness Joppan was talking about. “Sophisticated” implied that people like Joppan or Shamuel were not entitled to use history and reason and their intellect.
Philipose said, “I take it the answer is no.”
Joppan said, “I love Parambil. There’s not a field here you and I didn’t play on, or I didn’t help my father harvest at one time. But I can’t love it the way he did. Because it’s not mine. But there’s a bigger issue. Call me manager, reward me well, but for your relatives I’ll still be Shamuel pulayan’s son, Joppan pulayan. The one whose pulayi wife weaves ola and sweeps the muttam of Parambil. I can’t do much about being called a pulayan. But I can choose whether I want to live like one.”
Soon after their first conversation, Philipose had gone back to Joppan with a second offer: they would give Joppan twenty acres of rough-cleared land that had never been cultivated, land that would be his very own. The deed would be held in escrow for ten years, during which time he would manage all Parambil lands, getting 20 percent of profits but without a monthly salary. After ten years he could move on, or they could negotiate a new contract for more land. Joppan was shocked. Big Appachen had laid claim to over five hundred acres, more than half of it rocky and steep or consisting of sunken swamps. He’d rough-cleared about seventy acres closest to the river and half of that was under cultivation. Joppan would own more land than any of Philipose’s relatives.