Joppan had flashed his famous smile. “Philipose, if my father heard this, he’d call you mad.” Joppan said he needed a drink and he pulled out a bottle of arrack. “Your offer means that you listened. You understood, painful as it must have been. It’s very generous. I may regret this, but I’m going to say no.” He took a large swig. “I’ve worked so many years with Iqbal, weathering tough times. Countless nights sleeping in the barge, looking up at the stars and dreaming of a fleet that can move in a quarter of the time it takes now. Yes, we’ve run into a setback with the motorized barge. Not water hyacinths tangling the propeller, but the entire proposal tangled in red tape. But we’re getting closer. Even if I fail, I have to try. If I let go of my dream, something in me will die.”
Philipose had felt himself shrinking, recalling his dreams before he went to Madras, his dreams when he met Elsie, when they got married, when she left and came back. He gulped down the arrack to dull the pain. He listened dully as Joppan talked about “the Party”—which always meant the Communists. That word “communists” might be anathema in many places, synonymous with treason, but in Travancore-Cochin-Malabar, in Bengal, and in more states in India, they were a legitimate party, real contenders. In Malayalam-speaking territories, the Party stalwarts were young former Congress Party members who felt betrayed once Congress came to power and gave in to the interests of big landowners and industry. The Party’s membership wasn’t just the disenfranchised and poor, but intellectuals and idealistic college students (often upper caste) who saw the Party as the only group willing to undo entrenched caste privilege. That year when Shamuel died—1952—the Party won twenty-five seats to Congress’s forty-four. The merger of Malabar with Travancore-Cochin to form the state of Kerala was imminent, and it would bring new elections.
“Mark my words,” Joppan had said as they had parted that night, “one day Kerala will be the first place in the world where a Communist government is elected by a democratic ballot and not by bloody revolution.”
As Philipose recalls this conversation of almost a decade ago, he’s humbled to think that Joppan had been right: only a few years later, the Party won the majority of the seats in Kerala and formed the first democratically elected Communist government anywhere in the world.
CHAPTER 60
The Revelation of the Hospital
1964, The Maramon Convention
Malayalis of all religions doubt everything, except their faith. Each year the need to renew it, to be reborn, to drink again at the source, draws Malayali Christians to that great February revival meeting, the Maramon Convention. The Parambil family is no exception.
Ever since the first convention in 1895, held in a tent on the dry riverbed of the Pamba, the crowds have come in greater number every year. Not till 1936 did they acquire a microphone, a gift from the missionary E. Stanley Jones of America. Before that, “relay masters” stood like tent poles at intervals, stretching into the satellite tents and into the crowds on the riverbanks, repeating what the speaker said. But it is the Malayali nature that the relayers felt it their Christian duty to question and improve the translated message. E. Stanley Jones’s admonition that “worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life, and faith is the oil” arrived at the crockery stalls as “Oh ye of little faith, your head is full of sand and there’s no oil in your lamp.” It nearly caused a riot.
From human relay, the Maramon Convention has gone to amplified excess, or so it seems to the Right Reverend Rory McGillicutty of Corpus Christi, United States of the Americas, as men shinny up palms, hauling up more speakers. As he waits offstage, his eardrums are threatened by hellish feedback and rifle-like pops that send the pariah dogs fleeing, leaving urine trails in the sand. The electrician lisps, “Teshting onetoothree, kekamo?” Yes, he can be heard at the back and even across the Palk Strait in Ceylon.
Reverend Rory McGillicutty’s eyes are as overwhelmed as his ears. It began with his first glimpse of the mass of humanity and the sprawling tent city. He felt like a single locust in a plague as he struggled to keep up with the earnest chemachen escorting him. This crowd dwarfed anything he’d seen at the Tulsa State Fair or even the State Fair of Texas. They clutched their Bibles against their white clothes and were as serious as the business end of a .45. They were here to hear the Word, and the majority were not distracted by the food and bangle stalls, the magic shows, or the “Bowl of Death”—a huge hemisphere carved into the ground, its walls smoothed out, in which two motorcycle riders with kohl lining their eyes chased each other around at terrifying speeds, their motorcycles, defying gravity, climbing to the bowl’s rim, almost parallel to the ground on which the observers stood looking in.
The biggest shock for McGillicutty was the crippled honor guard lining the approach. The lepers were on one side and the non-lepers on the other. For the latter, there was no common denominator other than misery. He saw children barely recognizable as such: one had fused fingers, a face like a pancake, and eyes where his ears might be, like an exotic fish. The chemachen said that these children were mutilated in infancy by their minders, who displayed them the length and breadth of India. “But,” he said reassuringly, “they’re North Indians,” as though that mitigated the horror. Now, waiting backstage, McGillicutty is as nervous as a fly in a glue pot. It doesn’t help that he’s a last-minute replacement for Reverend William Franklin (“Billy”) Graham, whose fame extends to the Maramon Convention; his hosts are less enthusiastic about the standin. All the same, Rory McGillicutty’s biggest worry is his translator.
His worry is legitimate. If the measure of English fluency is the ability to trot out a poorly recalled phrase from a third-form primer, like Why ees the doug fallowing the mushter? then many feel qualified. After all (they argue), to translate one only needed to speak Malayalam fluently, not English. Even the achen trained at the Yale Divinity School proved a disastrous translator, because he acted as though the speaker’s words were not faithful to his translation.
Rory needn’t worry; the convention has a proven translator, discovered by Bishop Mar Paulos at a Village Uplift event years ago when he saw him interpret for a grain expert from Coralville, Iowa, America. He translated just what the speaker said, while calling no attention to himself.
On the morning of the convention, this veteran translator sat before his mirror, trimming the caterpillar mustache that trekked below his nose and a quarter inch above his upper lip, owing allegiance to neither, emancipated from both. For a Malayali male past puberty, it’s unmanly to be without one. The forms to choose from are legion: bottlebrush; upturned Sergeant-Major; downturned Brigadier; bushy, fascist nub . . . The secret to the translator’s caterpillar is to cozy up to the mirror, balloon out the upper lip, and use the naked razorblade pinched between right thumb and index finger, while the left hand pulls the skin taut. With miniscule downstrokes, one defines the upper and then—most critical—the lower margins. If he were to write a manual, the translator would say the strip of shaved skin below the mustache, the separation from the vermilion border of the upper lip, is the key.
Shoshamma watched her husband’s punctilious edging. She said teasingly, “Uplift Master’s mustache has a downlift on the left”—causing him to nick himself.
“Woman, why mock me? See what you’ve done?” She said sorry, but she was giggling. He struck his chest. “You’ve no idea of the passion burning here! Passion!” Her shoulders shook as she retreated. Passion without the normal conjugal outlet because of your stubbornness! That was his fault. He’d sworn to wait till she initiated things. He was still waiting.
The bus they took was so packed that it skipped its usual stops. Near Chenganur, a familiar figure made a death-defying leap onto the running board and pushed inside, saying, “My ticket is as good as yours! No caste system here!” Lenin was fourteen. He’d been packed off to a strict religious boarding school at ten. They’d seen him the previous holidays but already he was taller, with a faint mustache and an Adam’s apple jutting as far forward as his chin. But his scalp looked as though a goat had grazed on it, and his face was bruised. He was thrilled to see them.