Another day, it’s a gaunt man speaking on behalf of his silent brother. The brother’s wife threw herself and their children into a well, seeing that as a kinder fate than slow starvation. One girl managed to pull away, and she stands there now, imprisoning her father’s hand, while her uncle tells this story and begs for food. Philipose identifies a new scent: the fruity, acetone odor of a body consuming itself, the scent of starvation.
Tormented by these sights, Philipose drags out to the muttam the great brass vessel used for Onam and Christmas and sets it on bricks. With Shamuel’s help, he cooks a rice and kappa gruel, mashing in bananas and with coconut oil in place of ghee. He readies banana leaf packets that can be handed out discreetly to select supplicants. If word gets out, there’ll be a stampede.
A few weeks after Philipose’s return, glum relatives gather at Parambil after church, drinking tea. Philipose listens and lip-reads, following the gloomy conversations. The visitors, who don’t really lack for food, talk only about how the current hardship affects them. Surely, they have also had starving people coming to their houses to beg.
“Did you hear about our own Philipose?” Manager Kora says in his usual jocular tone, as though to cheer everyone up. He wheezes chronically and chops up his sentences to take a breath. He speaks as though Philipose isn’t there, while grinning at him. “Philipose came back with a radio! But problem is radio needs electricity. Aah! If there’s no electricity in Travancore, how can it come to Parambil?”
His words get under Philipose’s skin. Kora’s father had the honorific “Manager” bestowed on him by the maharajah for his volunteer work when he lived in Trivandrum. The father deserved the title even if its only privilege was to be addressed as “Manager.” The title isn’t hereditary, though Kora insists it is. The poor father cosigned a loan Kora took out for a business that then failed, and the father lost his Trivandrum property. He would have been homeless had his third cousin—Philipose’s father—not gifted him a house plot at Parambil. After Kora’s father died, Kora showed up at once with his bride to claim his inheritance. It was in the same year that Uplift Master and Shoshamma moved back. Kora was younger and seemed the more outgoing of the two men; Philipose would have guessed Kora was more likely to succeed. He was utterly mistaken. Kora is full of schemes, but nothing comes to fruition.
Everyone adores Kora’s wife, Lizziamma, or Lizzi, as she is called by most. Lizzi is an orphan, convent-educated through pre-degree. She’s good-natured, beautiful, and the spitting image of the goddess Lakshmi in the Raja Ravi Varma painting found on so many calendars. Varma was from the Travancore Royal Family. His foresight in having his own printing press allowed him to widely distribute prints of his paintings. He portrayed his Lakshmi with distinctive Malayali features: a wide cherub’s face, thick, dark eyebrows framing doe eyes, and long wavy hair that reached beyond her hips. Given Varma’s popularity and shrewd business sense, his Malayali Lakshmi is the Lakshmi embedded in the consciousness of Hindus all over India. Philipose thinks Lizzi has no idea how pretty she is; she is humble and quite the opposite of her boastful husband. Big Ammachi adores Lizzi and treats her like a daughter. Lizzi spends a lot of time in Big Ammachi’s kitchen, and when Kora is gone overnight on some new “business” of his, Lizzi sleeps with Big Ammachi and Baby Mol. The only good thing one can say about Kora is that he adores his wife; for all his failings, one must grudgingly admire his devotion to her.
“Kora,” Uplift Master says, “with your maharajah connections didn’t you know that Trivandrum has electricity? The diwan has a campaign to electrify all of Travancore.” The diwan is the chief executive of the maharajah’s government.
“Who said?” Kora’s tone is challenging, but it’s clearly news to him.
“Chaa! There are thermal generators already at Kollam and Kottayam! And here I thought you had your fingers on the pulse of Trivandrum.”
Georgie, sitting next to his twin, says, “Kora’s fingers were in Trivandrum’s pockets, not on the pulse.”
Kora’s smile won’t stay on his face. He makes his excuses and leaves. Philipose doesn’t know whether to feel pleased that Kora was put in his place or to feel sorry for the man. But Kora’s “joke” still bothers him because he knows that what he spent on the radio that sits gathering dust could have fed so many.
He’s haunted by the faces of the starving who show up every day. The packets of gruel he dispenses are just a salve. We must do more. But what? He comes up with a plan and enlists Uplift Master to help him with the execution.
They put up a thatch-roof shed by the boat jetty, then borrow large cauldrons from the Parambil houses, the sort everyone keeps for weddings. They seek out old Sultan Pattar, the legendary wedding cook, who is reluctant until he sees the shed, the stacked wood, the four firepits, and the polished cauldrons. The old man’s blood stirs. Pattar concocts a cheap, nutritious meal with kappa as its base, because every household can donate a few tapioca tubers.
Soon the “Feeding Center” opens. Each person gets a mound of kappa, one dollop of a thoren of moong beans, a dab of a lime pickle, and a teaspoon of salt on their banana leaf. An animated Sultan Pattar is unrecognizable: clean-shaven, shirtless, bouncing on his toes, and barking orders at Pattar’s Army—the enthusiastic Parambil children who are pressed into service to chop, scrape, ladle, and clean. Pattar entertains them, dancing with mincing steps, his breasts jiggling while he belts out songs with sly meanings.
On the first day, they feed nearly two hundred before they run out. After two weeks a reporter visits. He describes Pattar’s simple meal as one of the best in memory and gives Philipose credit for the Feeding Center, describing him as a young man who found it hard to witness so much suffering and not act. Philipose quotes Gandhi: “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of food.” The accompanying photograph shows Sultan Pattar, Uplift Master, and Philipose standing behind Pattar’s Army, the youngest of whom is only five, the oldest fifteen. The article triggers donations, volunteers . . . and more hungry people. Inspired by their example, other Feeding Centers open up across Travancore.
At the end of each day, Philipose writes in his notebooks, trying to capture the conversations he overhears at the Feeding Center, the tales of misery and sacrifice, but also of heroism and generosity. He’s surprised by people’s capacity for humor in the face of suffering. The writing is an exercise, not a journalist’s report, and so he can conflate characters, invent elements that weren’t in the original telling, and make his own endings—“Unfictions” is how he thinks of this genre. He thinks often of Elsie as he writes; is she doing just this with her charcoal stick, trying to make sense of these uncertain times? He closely studies the stories and essays he admires in the Manorama’s weekly magazine. What he’s writing feels different. He decides to submit one of his Unfictions to a short story competition in the Manorama.
SATURDAY COLUMN: THE PLAVU MAN