On the Banks of Manika Gangai

Capped in his palms, for the first time, I felt my breasts. They were firm and tender and unfettered with a matter of fact existence.

In our running around routes on the tree-dressed banks of Manika Gangai and across her shallow waters, we had run into his father more than once.

He would come to a complete stop, I guess, in his show of respect to his father. I would stop a few feet away from him frowning upon the villain that was his father straight into his face. He paid no attention to me, making it easy for me to examine him.

His compact statuette and its humble arrogance resulting from his total knowledge of the very meaning of his existence raised in me a feeling of helpless hate.

If he wanted to be suspended in the air by symmetrically placed metal hooks piercing and pulling his muscles on his back, thighs and calves, with all those vile hooks roped together on one end of a swinging pole that kept a cruel rhythmic up and down motion of the dreadfully stretched muscles, I had no problem with that. Well, it was one of those grownup's dismal choices.

To deny his son the choice of inserting, rather not inserting, silver vels and silver cobras through his cheeks and, probably, through his tongue, after a holy bath in the revoltingly abused waters of Manika Gangai, to accompany his imprudent father on his thula kawadi nonsense raised in me an empathetic responsibility.

I had to talk this little guy, whose face did not stay in my mind over these years but the warmth that he aroused in me, out of his folly and his slavish attachment to his people.

We shared the same space, an inferior dwelling place on my mother's insistence. It pissed off my brother, the elder one, and he hardly stayed in.

The younger one was blissfully away from these pettish affairs of the world. That was however the very thing that brought us to Katharagama in the first place.

Amma wanted to set accounts straight with the God at Katharagama for not budging, in response to everyone who knew my mother imploring the God to do so, from holding my little brother away from our usual world lined with toil, achievement, highs and insecure satisfaction.

Amma could not wait any longer. She was consumed by hope, placed in Pandora's box, with an afterthought, among the dreadful ills of the world.

According to her, hope was bitterly more a crushing burden than the situation she was in with my little brother, who was not only invalid in many sense but also totally inaccessible, except for those brief moments in which he would try to reach out for the roasted peanuts held in my clutched palm against his chest by digging his forefinger through my determined tight fingers demanding his acknowledgement of my very existence by him.

He would giggle as he reached the peanuts, the only earthly pleasures that he seemed to be considering worthy of his entry to our world.

We all shared in. He was Amma's burden, however. She carried it very well. She was not one of those sacrificing type of mothers.

If she were we would have been burdened by the guilt of her sacrifice, in addition to my little brother's condemn situation. Thanks God.

She was not confinable, not even by her revered motherhood to a desperately needy child. She never kept him needing anything but her total self.

She needed it to herself, it appeared, to live her life, a life devoid of pretentions and cheapish moralistic dramas.

In that sense and in many other senses, she was quite unlike my father, a well respected gentleman of fine character and great values.

I have a vivid memory of my father jumping out of his own existence in total disbelief seeing a man running through our house dragging his foot while trying not to tip over his own trousers that he was frantically trying to buckle in place.

He was a stranger to my father but to us for he was a frequent visitor to our neighbour's wife during office tea times. He had occasionally hurried through our house featuring a cheapish smile on his face.

Amma was indifferent to him and to neighbour's wife, yet she would not bar him from using our home as his emergency exit route as though it would be bad manners to do so.

Apparently, my father had a different view on that. Amma was not going to argue on that, as she knew rights and wrongs very well though they might not always be synchronized with the rights and wrongs of chaste men and women.

Despite their cosmic differences in the values of the world, they both were in unison in not pointing out to me that a flimsy nightgown might not be a proper attire when one with the budding breast was no longer on her bed.

They both appeared to have thought that any solemn sermon on what I must wear or do could cripple my joyous, innocent, unbounded soul.

Nakedness of the soul and its encompassing honest body are, however, the most comforting possessions of my life.

When he held my breast with his uncertain palms, I was at my ends in my many attempts to persuade him to not insert those unholy silver wares through his cheeks and tongue.

I was momentarily interrupted from my persuasions, which I realized, were never heeded anyways for he, like his father, was very certain about what he must do with his life.

Such conviction, in view of the accompanying evident pain, was inconceivable to me. I realized that I was not going to be the cause for him not sending cheap silver vels and cobras through his cheeks, and frighteningly enough, through his tongue.

I needed to distance myself from him for the certainty of his not so distant physical pain started to give me excruciating sporadic spasms in my stomach.

My losses would be heavy as he made the running down those uncertain terrains of the bush-ridden, tree-crested, cobra-hosting heavy slopes of Manika Gangai felt like a glide of an majestically airborne eagle on the naturally occurring currents of rising air despite she being heavier than air.

But I couldn't help walking away from him as the future held only the premise of recurring pains every time the Katharagama God and the love of his life would have their feast.

As he grew up to be man enough to be hanged by the loathsome metal hooks for an unsightly swinging ride around the Katharagama Gods, I would cross my endurance for the suffering of others.

The very thought of numbness for others' pain was so overwhelming even for me.