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Quiet

Thomas Palakeel
A Boy's Death
 

Back home in Kerala, when a school boy addressed his teacher, the
strain of respect and dread made the word sound so servile it
could be spelled "Saar!"

Much of the universal dread for our teachers resulted from
their whippings, severe, arbitrary, always condoned by parents.
Of all my torturers, my second grade teacher remains the most
memorable. Yes, we called him "Saar." He was a big, clean man, a
high caste Hindu, teaching at our tiny church school, aptly named
after the tortured martyr, St.Sebastian.

As a little boy, I suspected Saar might be a reincarnation
of some wild animal, for he was so unusually gruff and hairy and
eager to jump on his students. In his mirthless demeanor, I
detected certain similarities to a bear that came to our village
with the Great India Circus.

Sitting in the second grade class, I often studied my
teacher while he drilled us arithmetic tables and Malayalam
spelling. The thick black mustache and the wisp of wiry hair
sticking out of his earlobes instilled much fear in me. But I
also felt drawn to him after my sister Molly explained that as a
high caste Hindu, Saar could be reborn after each death while all
a Catholic boy like me could expect after my death was a final
judgement.

Saar himself was a judge of his students. Our daily judge. A
harsh judge. He had no favorites. He punished everyone with equal
injustice, although I alone was fated to repeat the ordeal of his
tutelage for an additional year after I failed second-grade.

In my repeat year, I sat with little kids who were promoted from
the first grade. All my friends had moved to third grade,
including CJ, who would die before the end of the term.
In my repeat year I was given a spot in the school's team of
water carriers. Every morning, the team fetched drinking water
from an ancient well, as it turned out, located in CJ's family
land, right across the street from our school.

The previous year, when the older boys lowered the large
brass pail on a coir rope into the deep well and drew it up on a
pulley, I used to look down into the well for the sights and
sounds of the primordial earth-milk falling through the air. Huge
water drops would fall like flints of glass through the well
shaft covered with lush ferns and lichen. Then the falling water
drops would crash on the round shield of blue sky at the bottom
of the well, and as the waters stilled, we could see our snaky
images coming into clarity alongside the glowing shadows of fern.
After the boys emptied pail after pail of the purest
wellwater into a gigantic aluminum vessel, they would form a
circle around it. A dozen boyish hands would raise the round
vessel and a dozen bare feet would take cautious steps toward the
school, howling and spilling water all the way, their feet muddy,
their trousers and shirts wet. All of us on the scene, including
me, still a second grader, felt immense joy. When I was chosen to
the team, I was hardly aware of the dishonor when every morning,
proudly I joined the team and marched to CJ's well to bring water
for the school.

CJ and I were not close friends, but we were alike in a unique
way: both of us suffered ear-infection, and our ears smelled.
The boys who sat near us often moaned in protest: "Oh!
Jesus! Ho! Smell! Hm!"

The year CJ and I were in the same class, Saar moved the two
of us to a corner. We spent the rest of the year together,
cornered. Still, CJ and I did not become friends, for CJ always
looked distant, sad, almost wounded.

As the first term of my repeat-year progressed, I did not
think at all about CJ, for he had passed to the third grade while
I remained in the same corner seat.

I worried only about myself because Saar was busy inventing
new techniques of torture. His verbal scourges were as sharp as
the thumb-nails with which he needled us in the back of our
thighs. If his ear-pinching didn't exact recitations from us, he
reached for his infamous cane, his most lethal instrument, second
only to his owlish eyes with which he poked around our souls.
No wonder death seemed so appealing to me during those two
years, for it would have brought me a release from suffering.
Every day of the repeat year, I sat in my corner, quiet,
afraid to speak, mumbling prayers to Infant Jesus, wishing to be
made invisible. Neither death nor the magic of invisibility was
given to me. Instead of becoming invisible, it appeared I was
becoming too visible. Laughably vulnerable like a mute clown in a
garish patch-work robe. If I ran into an old classmate or a
relative or an elderly neighbor, I quickly moved behind a tree,
pretending to take a leak.

A middle-aged neighbor who thought he was very funny stopped
me in the street and said I must try to pass second grade before
I grew a mustache. Drawing me nearer to him with the crook of his
umbrella, this man gave me free advice: "Fetch him a good paddle
so your teacher can give you a nice thrashing."

I ran away from my good neighbor.

I was willing to die, if I could come back as a ghost and
pay back to such good neighbors, for I had been counting so many
transgressions. At least, I wanted to teach my own teacher! Saar.
I fantasized about attaining the ghostly power that would make
his own canes turn against him, whipping and scourging him the
way he whipped me. Mandrake the Magician did this; he put fear of
God in his enemies by turning their own gun-barrels against them.
As the barrels hissed and snarled at them like outraged snakes,
the villains dropped the guns and fled.

After all the fantasies, the cold fact remained that I had
to keep facing Saar, day after day, and unfailingly, when he
called upon me to recite the multiplication tables. No angel or
ghost came to my aid as I was being scourged in the name of
mathematics and correct spelling. My chest ached, my legs turned
numb. My whole body was becoming a liability for me, bloated with
shame and pain.

Then, one bleak morning, I noticed the nuns walking up to the
school, holding a flower wreath and a little paper crown.

"What's it for, Sister?" I asked.

"Haven't you heard? Our CJ has died!" Sister Mary, my first
grade teacher, said.

"CJ died? He died?" I said, with a blank expression.

All my ruminations about death had not prepared me for the
event. Growing up in our little Thidanad, so far away from the
big world that generated news and history, I had no opportunity
to understand what it meant to be dead. No wars, no pestilence,
no starvation, no traffic statistics about teens or about the
brave or cowardly. Life was stable and stale. I used to think
that only old people died. On occasions I had watched solemn
faces marching past the gate of our ruined cemetery and tried to
understand their sorrows. But all I found was blank skies of the
mind. Now, CJ's death threw open the gate of death for me.
Many years later I would reconsider this event as my great
epiphany, the first clear moment in my life.

The entire school--about 50 boys and girls--walked across the
street to CJ's house for the funeral. The nuns walked in front,
and Saar followed us in the back.

I felt a stillness as I passed the well, brushing against
the ferns and wet grass and enormous leaves of taro and banana.
We entered the sand-filled front yard of the old house; its
Chinese roof was thatched with palm-leaves instead of red tiles.
The boy was laid out in a small coffin on the veranda.
His mother lamented. The two nuns moved behind the coffin
and started the Syrian Christian requiem:
"...seeds sprout in the fields when it rains
when the trumpet is sounded, the dead awake...

Mourners joined the nuns in the death chant, but CJ's father
stood at the feet of the coffin, rather too straight, with a
steely demeanor, untouched by the chants, clearly lost among the
crowd of school children.

Incense and rosewater conjured up the smell of death.
We waited for the arrival of the parish priest, the sexton,
the bearers of parasols, and most importantly, the bearer of the
skull-flag. Finally, when the skull-flag appeared at the front
steps, the crowd became silent. The chanting ceased. The tasseled
parasols opened like flowers. The priest bowed low as the sexton
dressed him in white and crimson vestments for the last rites.
Our headmaster, cat-eyed Mr.Varkey, ordered the crowd to
line up outside the front yard, and he beckoned the relatives to
come forward to place the silk and flower wreaths in the coffin.
I liked Mr. Varkey, who never married. It was he who gave me my
first slice of apple, and years later, when I saw him lead a bad
woman into a dark alley, I had an instinctive understanding of
the puzzling scene and I revealed it to no one. Now my eyes
following every gesture of Mr.Varkey; he beckoned Sister Mary to
place the wreath on the coffin.

The beautiful nun with the easy smile stopped her chant and
came forward, her veiled head bowed down. I saw how gravely she
laid the wreaths, for she was acting on behalf of the entire
school. I knew she had made the wreath by herself. Actually, she
made wreaths and bouquets for all the brides and all the dead in
our parish, and later in the year, she would make the paper crown
for my first communion, not unlike the one that CJ would be made
to wear next moment on his final journey.

That morning Saar was very quiet. Although I know he was
truly, truly grieving for CJ, being a high caste Hindu, he must
have felt out of place among the Christian chants and the skull-flag
and the burial, for the Hindus cremated their dead.
When I saw Saar in the crowd, I wondered what he thought as
he watched the final scene. What did he think of the mother's
wailings while her son lay in the coffin? Did Saar count all his
whipping and pinching and the verbal insults he inflicted upon
the dead boy? Was he sorry? Would he stop beating us after this
funeral? Being dead, would CJ himself remember such particulars
of his life? I knew I would.

The funeral chant switched its rhythm. Slowly, it turned
into a farewell prayer of the deceased and then into a touching
plea to the Lord of the Judgement:
"...Lord, do not count my sins that are countless
do not judge me according to your count..."

As CJ's schoolmates, we were allowed to line up behind the
coffin during the last rites. I stood in my place, studying the
body, wondering where CJ was at that moment. I could see the body
at face-level. He was lying there, of course, a distant friend.
Eyes closed, arms crossed, holding a cheap rosary. His two thumbs
were bound together with a white ribbon. His mouth was bound
shut with a tight thread which ran underneath his chin. Yellowed
cotton swabs were stuffed in his ears and nostrils.

A man sprayed rosewater, giving him a last good smell. I
wondered whether he had become a pure spirit or a mere smell. I
even felt some relief when I pondered about his soul. CJ will go
to heaven, I told myself. His soul deserved heaven. The
imperishable, invisible soul of the boy who always had a wounded
look on his face while he lived.

As stood there, I was closely watching the man who was
giving final touches to the coffin. For a moment he had trouble
slipping in Sister Mary's paper crown properly. The coffin was
too small. Perhaps, he didn't wish to disturb the body or crumble
the paper crown, so he stood there, sweating. If somebody lifted
the body a little, he could insert the crown easily. No one
noticed the problem, except our headmaster, Mr.Varkey.
"Raise the shoulder. Not just the head. Raise the shoulder,
all the way," the headmaster said, loudly, to the nervous man.
Then the headmaster himself dipped his big right hand
inside the coffin and raised the body, saying, "Like this!"
When Mr.Varkey raised CJ by his shoulder, his whole body
emerged out of the coffin, out of all the ceremonial silk and the
flower wreaths and it rose up like a lever, like a dry stick.
I stepped back, startled by the momentary vision.

Fearfully, I looked again at the risen body and understood a
truth about death. CJ's tiny body had ceased to be human; it had
attained the material quality of a log of wood, very light wood.
Indeed, the man was able to crown CJ properly. Meanwhile,
another man quickly sprinkled generous quantities of rosewater
inside the coffin, and then, the headmaster gently lowered the
body back into the coffin.

Shaken by the death's deed, I stepped out to the front yard,
feeling a wooden stiffness in my own body. Standing underneath a
banana tree, I reflected on what I had seen. True. With my own
senses I had experienced death, the woodenness of it. What I had
seen was a simple sight. A boy's body turned into a twig by the
transformation, and now the twig itself was about to dissolve
into the earth and air and water.

The funeral procession began. As we followed the bearer of
the skull-flag and entered the mud path that led to the parish
cemetery a mile away, I started to shed tears.
The ruined cemetery at our parish stood in the midst of a
three-tiered churchyard. The clergy and the rich were buried
inside the old church building itself; the common folks were
buried outside in the open, their graves exposed to rain and sun.
The murderers, heretics, suicides, and the Communists were thrown
together into a pit behind the cemetery, called the Rowdy Pit.
Every time Saar punished me that year, I began to tell myself,
"To hell with this life. I, too, want to die."

I thought death would make Saar reconsider his attidue
toward me, for I had noticed his grief upon CJ's death. Though I
saw little advantage in such grief, I often desired to be shut
inside the coffin, beneath much silk and flowers, sprinkled with
rosewater. Perhaps, I saw respect come to the deceased. Or was it
invisibility? What else could a failed boy dream of in a world
dominated by teachers and neighbors and many a similar terror.

In the years that followed CJ's funeral, we spoke often about
death and burial and about being invisible. Once I said to my
friends that it was a fitting punishment for Saar that upon his
death his bearlike body would be burned. How odd that the man who
reserved a rebirth after every death had to burn in fire!
The heat alone would teach him a lesson, another boy said.
Once, an older boy, a Hindu, who heard it interrupted us and
remarked that what awaited all the Christians was much worse.

"What awaits us upon death is Heaven," I insisted.

"Heaven! What heaven? Won't you be shut up in a coffin and
buried in the dirt?"

"What's wrong with that? It's a nice coffin. With silk and
flowers and rosewater," I said.

"But you would be buried in dirt," he said.

"What's so bad about dirt?" I asked.

"Nothing bad about dirt? Nothing? What about a thousand
thousand worms that will crawl all over your body?" The Hindu
boy tickled me with his little worm-like fingers and gave me a
Christian's life-after-death experience.

I was beginning to understand his point. I wished he hadn't spoken
about worms. While CJ's coffin was lowered into the grave, I hadn't
thought that worms would creep inside the coffin into all those
sheets of silk and flowers and myrrh that filled up the grave.

"Yes, the worms will eat you, bit by bit. Until you're
finished. Then you will turn into the wormshit. What a pity
the worms will shit you out soon, back into the dirt!"
"And you and Saar. Both of you will burn in fire. With oil
and all, astride a mount of firewood."

"It's clean fire," he said. "We use sandalwood or the wood
of the mango tree. It is nice and clean."

"That's what happens in hell. That's our hell. Burning and
burning. Clean or not. Hell. Don't you understand?" I asked.

"There is no hell," he replied. "You just come back. You
are reborn."

Suddenly I thought it was a big lie. This rebirth business.
In spite of some similarities between Saar and the circus bear.
"There is no rebirth. You will all turn into ashes. That's
all. How about that? Ashes?"
"Tell me what's better? Turning into feces of worms or
turning into ashes? I'd prefer ashes! Any day," the older boy
said. I knew he was right. Even for us ashes were sacred, and we
marked an ashen cross on our foreheads on every Ash Wednesday.

After CJ's funeral and the many arguments about ashes and worms
in the years ahead, I began to realize that I did not want to die
at all. Ever. So I tried in vain to resist the picture of CJ
rotting away as the Hindu boy had portrayed it.
Yet, images of the inevitability of death kept forcing their
way into my sleep and wakefullness. Often I would lie under my
blanket, imagining that I was a dead body, a dead bird, a
worthless log of wood. Any itching on my body I took to be the
stirrings of termites and ants and worms. My ears I took to be
two wood-mushrooms; my penis and all the secret instruments
nothing but rotting branches on the log, abandoned too long in
the dark backyard, and I felt such grief about living with the
knowledge of death. While every boy seemed certain that he
wouldn't have to die, I feared that I would be next and refused
to accompany my mother to funerals, even though they were among
the few entertainments in our village.

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