TRANSLATED FROM THE MALAYALAM BY K. M. AJIR KUTTY

 

LOVE IN THE TIME OF TYPHOID

or

THE SPRITE THAT LOVED THE FISHERMAN

– K. REKHA 

Translated from the Malayalam by K.M. Ajir Kutty

As an adolescent, Alamelu had plodded through a lot of literature dealing with unhappy marriages. As time advanced, she became disgusted with that world filled with sex and passion. She was, after all, brought up more or less on good morals to be courteous and polite. Afterwards, whenever she happened to read such stories, she began to feel the same disgust as she had while reading questions of the sort ‘Doctor, my breasts are shrunken. Hence, my husband doesn’t love me. What shall I do?’ published in ‘Ask Your Psychologist’ columns of popular magazines. The reason why Alamelu thought about such stories now is set forth below.

Alamelu married a month ago. A fortnight after the marriage, they went their separate ways – the husband to his place of work and Alamelu to the place where she studied. Meanwhile, the husband was hospitalised with typhoid fever. Though she was pained to hear about her husband’s fever, Alamelu arrived in the fond hope of spending some time with him. In room number 269 at the hospital, only Alamelu and her husband were there at that moment. Now read on:

As she carelessly turned on the faucet, water gushed out, drenching her completely. When she spun around to face her husband, she found his eyes already locked on her, burning like two pieces of coal.

“This…this faucet…” Alamelu stammered.

(Her husband had told her a number of times since her arrival at the hospital that water from the faucet would gush out unless it is opened carefully.)

“How many times have I warned you about this…? What number of warning is this? Utter carelessness, nothing else. Just consider the number of people visiting here…! For you to appear untidy like this…?” Even his words were feverish.

Alamelu suddenly felt embarrassed. Was she dirty and shabbily dressed? Alamelu introspected whether she had any bad mouth odour which would make the pair in the ad for toothpaste repel his partner or had any body odour which would keep even the bird in the deodorant commercial at bay. After she had made sure that she was neither seedy nor sleazy, she went up and sat on her husband’s bed beside his outstretched legs.

The husband, who was lying with his hand on his forehead, suddenly got up and said: “How many times have I told you to not sit on this bed? Are you out of your senses?”

Alamelu was disappointed to hear that. He always thought about others first, considering his friends and colleagues whoever came to inquire about his illness. He imagined his wife, formally dressed and with reserved behaviour, standing at a distance when they visited. This was just one example of his own biases and perceptions about everything.

Should one ruin their own moments of pleasure for someone who might pop in at any time? Alamelu could not understand why his thoughts had such an orientation. Blaming herself for not adapting to his capricious nature, which she had tried to navigate for well over a month since their marriage, she sat down on her bed.

As she sat looking out the window at the highway to Wayanad, her mind was still preoccupied with the concerns about the listlessness that had gripped their marriage. She remembered a friend of his whom she had met on the train while travelling with her husband from his remote village to her place of residence. It was only a week since their marriage had been solemnised. The friend had said then:

“I find it hard to believe that it is only a week since your marriage took place. From the very sight it would appear that you had been husband and wife for a long time.” When she heard that comment, Alamelu had laughed within.

The friend must have said by implication that the love and excitement which one found among the newlyweds was absent between them. Without dwelling on his words, Alamelu had hoped to find solace in the belief that the reason there wasn’t a surge of love between them was because they had married without conflict or obstacles, even after being in love for over six years. Even now – the impetuous girl innocently believed that it was to avoid being infected with typhoid that her husband asked her to keep away from the bed. Alamelu had decided upon certain things when she got ready for the marriage.

That she would not create problems by blowing trivial things like this out of proportion. And that she would not complain unnecessarily.

She had also decided to not trouble her husband by asking him to fulfil her larger than life desires. And that she would not interfere in his private matters.

She would not desire for presents.

That she would love his kith and kin as her own.

Despite her best efforts to adhere to the agreeable principles she had learned from books and familiar circumstances, Alamelu often forgot the reality—that she had to endure frequent periods of despondency and pain following their love marriage.

“Everything can be against your expectations. But, without grieving over anything, you should try to keep pace with the time as if you were in a trance – that is what is called married life.” Those yawn-inducing words were from Alamelu’s bosom friend Smitha. As Smitha gathered and walked away with the urine-soaked clothes of her baby, she reassured, “You’ll get used to it, there’s no need to be apprehensive.”

Alamelu was thinking inward right at that moment – ours would never be anything like that. Is it worthless to be in love for so many years, patiently waiting for the marriage to happen? And that too it all happened without causing any trouble to anybody, winning the cooperation and blessing of the families in an ambience of decorum and tastes. Alamelu’s mind was filled with a different kind of pride. She was thrilled to recall his promise that their marriage would be filled with love and affection, which made his reserved nature and insistence on silence between them seem more understandable…

Now when she tried to fit all the pieces together, Alamelu experienced some kind of restlessness within her mind.

Alamelu recalled the time before her marriage.

Strolling through the city and eating at local joints with Jyoti, watching a highbrow film or embarking on a journey with Kavitha, and discussing and analysing all aspects of life with Sandhya… Not only these memories but also the incident of smoking a cigarette on a bet some time ago came to mind.

The Italian goalkeeper of the past Jean Luc falling in love with Plabli Luca and Plabli sending him a letter saying ‘I love you Luca, my husband…’’

And while studying in grade four, she fell for an actor who always took the role of tragic heroes in movies….

These could have been avoided.

It would have been better if I had married the engineer employed in the Gulf whom my parents and relatives had chosen as my groom earlier. He was fairly good looking. Though I would have been bored to the core listening to his empty, pompous talk…and I might have fallen foul of his sensibility…o this sensibility! It was this damned word that destroyed my life. Was sensibility greater than love?

Sure, life could be full of unexpected things, but Sarath was not so bad. He was loving, after all. ‘Your large, rounded eyes and that slight slant in your gait are unforgettable,’ he would say. His sweet words were pleasing, but the truth was, I had no fascination for him. All my fascination lay elsewhere. After all, that is human nature – we crave what doesn’t easily come to us.

But the time we were in love was not that boring either.

Whatever it was, she had to go hang onto a thread of curiosity like that…

She was always ready to go for an aimless walk with him when he came to Alamelu’s village once a month. And she also went along with him frequently to a temple at a faraway place where both of them liked to pray together.

Like that it was filled with all the mundane aspects of an ordinary love affair.

Alamelu suddenly grew nostalgic. In order to bring solace to her mind, she opened her bag and took out her diary and the photos.

It was raining heavily outside.

Alamelu’s eyes fell on an old letter kept in the diary. That was a letter written by a writer friend of Alamelu who had died of cancer. She had written:

“May Ammu be blessed with a man of her dreams and imagination. However, don’t rush into it- let some time pass before it is fulfilled. First, focus on securing your life. In haste, I wish you all the best. Perhaps, by then, I may have…’

She was right. She did not live on to greet her in person…Alamelu sighed.

The rain-sodden wind blew in.

Alamelu sat gazing at the rain, lost in thought, wondering why her dreams and imagination didn’t merge into the perfect reality she had envisioned.

Suddenly a beautiful looking nurse entered the room and checked whether the medicines were given on time.

“You haven’t taken these tablets yet, have you?” she asked the husband.

The husband looked at Alamelu pointedly. The nurse took the tablets and put them into his mouth as though she were challenging Alamelu. Alamelu could not but laugh. Seeing that Alamelu was not at all moved by what she did, the nurse, as though she were not ready to give in, took the thermometer and put it into the husband’s mouth. Alamelu noticed that, while doing so, the nurse’s hand touched his cheek softly with her body slightly bending over that of his. Right then, Alamelu felt some kind of uneasiness. At the very next moment, Alamelu turned her face away, pride swelling within her. She thought with a tinge of meanness that a smart girl like herself shouldn’t let her mind get tangled in mischievous thoughts.

She listened to the nurse, who, before leaving the room, placed her cold hands on her husband’s legs and said, “If he develops a fever, let me know.” Her husband softly responded with an “Oh.”

Alamelu glanced at her husband, as if she had some questions lingering in her mind. Despite being down with typhoid, he still looked handsome. She walked over to the washbasin, aiming to catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror above it, pretending all the while that she was going to wash a dish under the faucet.

Alamelu was not any less charming. She had her own kind of beauty, of course. Yet, since their marriage, she had been plagued by a sense of inferiority. Where was the confident Alamelu of the past? What had happened to her?

She tried to recall the words of praise from love letters she used to receive occasionally, as well as the compliments from the older women in her family who had admired her beauty. But still she did not feel comfortable.

“It was because you did not give me the medicine that the nurse had to come in and give it to me.” Alamelu was enraged when her husband said that with a wicked smile even as she was coming back to sit by the window.

She made up her mind that she would take revenge on him by looking lovingly at the middle-aged doctor when he came on his rounds at noon.

However, it was a young doctor who came for rounds. Alamelu did not have the courage to look at him whose eyes appeared to be lustful.

Alamelu thought about stepping out of the room for a stroll as she was sitting bored to the hilt. By that time, the husband had for company a colleague of his who had just returned from a tour of Japan. The husband did not notice her at all as he was all ears for what the colleague was saying about his tour.

Encountering the charming nurse on the veranda, Alamelu ignored her, grimacing with displeasure, and instead smiled at another nurse wearing glasses, whom she hadn’t seen before. At that moment, a familiar, lowly thought crept into her mind, chiding her for harbouring such pettiness despite being an intelligent woman.

A Muslim woman, a Umma, in the room next to theirs was standing on the veranda trying hard to pacify her wildly crying grandson. That twenty-day old stubborn child was in no mood of giving in. Alamelu drew close to the woman praying to the Lord that she may not be given a child as stubborn as this.

The woman told Alamelu so many things which she, nonetheless, could not make out. But Alamelu listened to the woman’s words with a smile, believing that the woman’s empathy was a sign of mutual affection and understanding.

By the time Alamelu came back into the room with the woman in tow, the man who had come after a tour of Japan had gone.

The woman put her hand on the forehead of Alamelu’s husband. ‘Yes, yes he has a running temperature; you must be careful and maintain a strict diet.” When the woman reminded them thus, the husband turned his face away in uneasiness. Sensing that he did not like her presence there, the woman quickly went out of the room.

“This is a fault in your character. Getting acquainted with total strangers thoughtlessly and bringing them along into our room without thinking a bit about who they really are…” The husband did not hide his displeasure.

Alamelu heaved a deep sigh and sat at the window. She was now sure that none other than a rustic man would have been suitable for her as her husband. A man soft in approach, words and looks…before meeting this man, Alamelu had nursed the idea of marrying a simple and loving school master given to Kathakali and music hailing from Palakkad.

Alamelu had visualised her as a comely woman of exemplary qualities who would cater to his likes and dislikes and act as a driving force behind him… to her that was an attractive dream.

It was before hitting upon such a man that this man… came with a calm and dignified bearing and attractive mannerisms…

All these were lost; nothing remained…what was the point in thinking about them now?

It was raining torrentially.

Alamelu recalled a (silly) poem that she had written about rain.

About the rain in June…

Her going to school for the first time through the June-rain, crying and trying to free herself from her mother’s hand… and in another June doing the sacrificial rituals, getting thoroughly wet in the rain, for the departed soul of her father.

So many such things…

At last, it was also in one such June that she had started life anew holding the hand of this man.

Alamelu turned sentimental.

As she felt her nerves growing tense, she went and turned the TV on with a lowered volume hoping to allay her tension.

The husband lay thinking about something deeply. As she watched him recline bewitchingly, she felt like planting a kiss on him but immediately withdrew from the thought, not wanting to make a mess of everything and continued to watch television.

She remembered her husband’s prank at home trying to make her angry by opening the fashion television channel filled with gorgeous women. However, she would watch the show pretending to be angry without really getting angry.

It was a sports channel in which two hefty wrestlers were locked in a tight, a fight that she got. Although it was not pleasing to watch, Alamelu decided to not change the channel.

After a while, the husband turned to face Alamelu, his soft smile faltering as his gaze drifted to the TV, where a wrestling match had caught his attention.

“You are such a careless girl. You are out of sync with what is called life. The reason why you are lazy is because you have never experienced any hardships in life. Look, have you ever turned the pages of this book which I have bought for you? Is it because you think you can live confined to a place like this?” Alamelu saw the veins on his forehead rise and his lips grimace in anger.

It was just then that her eyes fell on the fat book on the table. Crestfallen, with a sense of guilt, Alamelu walked toward the table. She could not fix her mind on it even as she turned its pages.

‘This man must be experiencing some kind of sense of guilt for having married me. That is why he is trying to make me read books like these with the intention of making me knowledgeable so that the loss suffered could be made good.’

He was thoroughly dissatisfied now, it was certain.

Alamelu knew that the petals of love and expectations within her had fallen off and despair was deepening in its place. She knew that her throat was caught in a tangle of grief, inferiority complex and sense of guilt; and the moisture on her tongue was getting dry. Alamelu, exhausted and heavy with grief, rose from her seat and walked towards the bed, her body and mind drained.

She lay face down on the bed, feeling something within her begin to sob. Trapped between the constraints of the bed and her own body, surrounded by the encroaching darkness, the sobs grew deeper. Alamelu felt herself plunging into the endless depths of suffocating sorrow.

When the intensely warm hands touched her, she woke with a start and sat on the bed.

The husband, with his hands stretched out towards her with a smile dripping with affection, was sitting on Alamelu’s bed.

Alaamelu began to cry, realising how easily she lost herself in his embrace, how his touch erased her doubts and fears, if only for a moment. She hadn’t cried like this in years, and the tears flowed mingling with the warmth of his hands.

Outside, it was still raining, steadily and unrelentingly – the rain in the dark and famished month of Karkkidakam.

 

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Also, read Some Words about poetry : A conversation with Hélène Dorion by Marilou Brousseau, and published in The Antonym. 

| Some Words about Poetry: A Conversation with Hélène Dorion — Marilou Brousseau

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