Nelycinda and Other Stories

Susan Visvanathan

Description

A collection of fourteen stories, Nelycinda & other stories, presents a woman's perspective of society thriving on trade and business. Lyrical and poignant, these stories take us to a world infested with the aroma of spices.
The world was always opaque and something about the nearness of the sea made it more so. Susa began her day with the smallness of things, sea sand, which appeared as dull as the day, and the colours in the translucent shells, each catching the first light of the morning. How curious that the sand and salt and the ambitions of the sea creatures could create these colours. She walked to the seaside, wishing that the fisher people were about, but they had dived for pearls earlier than was usual that morning because of the impending storm. A great silence filled the ocean that brought to her the occasional screech of birds wheeling, and the whorls of the sea shells which produced their own sounds. Prison was a place which enclosed one and brought the world much closer by what one could imagine. It was where silence was the only companion, where the routines of the day allowed one to build a small world based entirely on ones thoughts. It was the shelter of the moment to work with the grandeur of the unseen. Imprisoned by the minutes, and allowed to fly when the tasks were completed. She looked at the beach, for the inlets were full of birds and moss and climbing purple flowers, and that was where she would go. To the river that, in its sureness of the life of the people, would bring her conversations and the calm of everyday tasks.

Sujets

• River
• Sociology
• Friendship
• Anthology
• Fishery
• Fisherman
• Fishing
• Spice
• Beach
• Seaside
• Short Stories
• Society
• SEA
• Fiction
• Prison
• Océan

Informations

• Publié par: Roli Books
• Date de parution: 18 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351940258
• Langue: English

Extrait

Susan Visvanathan is Professor of Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is the author of The Christians of Kerala; Friendship, Interiority and Mysticism; and The Children of Nature. Her books of fiction include Something Barely Remembered, The Visiting Moon, Phosphorous and Stone, and The Seine at Noon.

OTHER INDIAINK TITLES
Anjana Basu
Black Tongue
Anjana Basu
Chinku and the Wolfboy
Anjum Hasan
Neti, Neti
Ayesha Salman
Blue Dust
A.N.D. Haksar
Madhav & Kama: A Love Story from Ancient India
Boman Desai
Servant, Master, Mistress
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Shadowland
Claudine d’Ison
Hira Mandi
C.P. Surendran
An Iron Harvest
Haider Warraich
The Auras of the Jinn
I. Allan Sealy
The Everest Hotel
I. Allan Sealy
Trotternama
Indrajit Hazra
The Garden of Earthly Delights
Jaspreet Singh
17 Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir
Jawahara Saidullah
The Burden of Foreknowledge
John MacLithon
Hindutva, Sex & Adventure
Kalpana Swaminathan
The Page 3 Murders
Kalpana Swaminathan
The Gardener’s Song
Kamalini Sengupta
The Top of the Raintree
Madhavan Kutty
The Village Before Time
Pankaj Mishra
The Romantics
Paro Anand
Pure Sequence
Rani Dharker
Anurima
Rakesh Satyal
Blue Boy
Ranjit Lal
Black Limericks
Ranjit Lal
The Small Tigers of Shergarh
Ranjit Lal
The Simians of South Block and Yumyum Piglets
Raza Mir & Ali Husain Mir
Anthems of Resistance: A Celebration of
Progressive Urdu Poetry
Sanjay Bahadur
The Sound of Water
Shandana Minhas
Tunnel Vision
Selina Sen
A Mirror Greens in Spring
Sharmistha Mohanty
New Life
Shree Ghatage
Brahma’s Dream
Sudhir Thapliyal
Crossing the Road
Susan Visvanathan
Something Barely Remembered
Susan Visvanathan
The Visiting Moon
Susan Visvanathan
The Seine at Noon
FORTHCOMING TITLES
Tanushree Podder
Escape from Harem
Sumedha Verma Ojha
Urnabhib



ROLI BOOKS


© Susan Visvanathan
Odd Morning was first published in Kerala Kerala, Quite Contrary , edited by Shinie Antony, Rupa & Co., New Delhi, 2009
Pepper Vines Entrail My Hair was first published in Why We Don’t Talk , edited by Shinie Antony, Rupa & Co., New Delhi, 2010
All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real characters, living or dead is purely coincidental.
First published in 2012 IndiaInk An imprint of Roli Books Pvt. Ltd M-75, Greater Kailash II Market New Delhi 110 048 Phone: ++91 (011) 4068 2000 Fax: ++91 (011) 2921 7185 E-mail: [e-mail]; Website: www.rolibooks.com
Also at Bangalore, Chennai, & Mumbai
Cover : Ritika Rai
ISBN: 978-81-86939-66-6

Dedicated to
Kin, Clan and Mariam Paul (nee Thomas, born 1917) and to the memory of many happy summers with my father's family, in Niranam, once known perhaps as ‘Nelycinda’ to the Greeks, and for Edie Saberwal for giving me her copy of the Periplus, and for Meera and Saagar Tewari, Sandhya and Malli.

Contents
Nelycinda
An Incomplete Travel Diary
Shopping in Paris
Maramon Magic
Correspondences
Further Away from Paradise, Returning Home
Hibiscus Wanton in the Garden
In the Fraction of a Moment
Gulf Baby
Allapuzha
Ambalavastu
Pepper Vines Entrail my Hair
Sludge without Sun
Odd Morning

‘You know the terror that for poets lurks Beyond the ferry when to Minos brought.’
W.H. Auden ( From Letter to Lord Byron )

Nelycinda 1/20
W e set sail from Hormuz; it was dark, and the waters rent the air with a loud and terrible noise. Egypt lay behind us, and India ahead. The whale was behind us now, and so were the blue skies. Food was in plenty since we had stored bananas, which we dipped in batter and fried in hot oil that sputtered to the sound of water. There were pineapples too, and sweet coconut water, which we had left in the hold for several years without spoiling.
We sailed over water that was so deep and dead that it had no depth. Whales appeared; we speared them and ate flesh of fish, flaccid and white, for weeks after that. The days were without end, and no one realized that one year had come to an end, and another had begun.
Nelycind was still weeks away. Muziris had appeared in the first dawn of morning, chill and sunny, with trees looming before us without end, the perennial season of coconuts hanging heavy like heads, which had been decapitated from the bodies of men. We had seen that, too, in the warm desperate days of haggling for hot bodies in ports, the hot bodies of slaves in Arab and African ports. Our memories of those bloody fights were as coarse as the imagination could serve. We were guilty. Not like the slave traders were, but guilty nonetheless, for we had sought battles after tedious weary days at sea, as if they were food for the limbs of the mind. Those slaves were sold like yams in a country market. They lay tied and trussed like goats for slaughter, their hands, legs, wrists, arms and necks bearing striations like those on tapioca stalks, knobbly, strange, goat horns of time amid the tangle of teeth and torso. I think of those markets with fear and loathing, for some of those slaves, —black children of strange fathers and lost mothers—were untied and brought to our boats for pleasure. I flagellate myself, my monkhood disrobed by these thoughts, but then, we are witnesses to history, describing death and life with equal felicity.
Our cargo was, among other things, last year’s pepper, and our payment was in gold coins, amphorae of beetroot wine— cheaper than grapes—that stained the teeth, and was had in sunny sea-side towns, as easily as salad oil in the countries which turned the coast at the heel of the shoe. We travelled this way and that, unafraid of the tides, of the rain, of the hot sharp stench of sudden death. We were the bringers of songs and perfumes, of light cotton and linen, of goat’s meat and sheep’s wool. Sometimes, we forgot to speak, lulled by the sound of water, and the questions we could not ask one another, we forgot to speak. We left everything for the last, sitting on the dry sand, near clear blue water, waiting for the boats to take us to the ships.
In some odd way, my ravaged past appeared before my eyes, ancient in the sense that manuscripts and irises of eyes caught the tinge of the sea, rimmed in blue ink, sometimes providing anodyne to the soul. The warm winds were trapped in the warp and weft of tides, rain would fall, we would be caught for a while in the coldness that could descend in the tropics when the sea smouldered. Romans we were, to the last hot breath, waiting for the tide to turn, longing to see the egrets which would bring us news of fresh water and the sound of boats swishing on the surface like the sarongs of the women. Nelycind was where the heart was at peace, where the Pamba awaited us, where the gnarled knots of trees were polished by waiting into fine furniture, and the reeds in the river floated alongside the black water snakes, and where the women swore they were faithful to us. Our religion was the same as theirs, and the Greek they spoke to us as rough as the fishermen’s Greek in those of our lands where the Lord’s word was remembered. By the sign of Pisces they made themselves known, and swore fidelity to their saint, Thoma, who had brought them news of the Lord. The Lord’s going was now more than a century, a hundred years of war and death and blood, but to us, who believed, the time of tomorrow was never fearsome.
Nelycind was where I had left my tunic and sandals, at the house of a merchant. His home was made of wood. It had rained every night when I slept there last year in the month of Augustus. Coconuts fell with a sound that would have woken armies from their troubled sleep, but the family of Thoman, the merchant, slept soundly. They fed me the food of their forefathers, sang for me their lullabies of the wisdom of King Solomon of whom they knew much. They feared nothing, not even my speeches on the world that was to come. The sweetness of their rice fields and their mango orchards was sufficient for them, making their sugar from dates brought on ships from far away countries of which they knew little.
‘How do you know the songs of Solomon, if you knew nothing about his land?’
‘Songs come with wanderers,’ Thoman said, smiling at me a little foolishly for he hated being asked questions. ‘Tell me about your country and your name for God.’
I was aghast by his question, but then, he lived like Indians do, with many others for friends.
And so, several months passed in the company of wise people. They were farmers and the pepper vines with the heart-shaped leaves grew around the trees; the pepper itself was green at first, like tiny well-rounded grapes—small, hard and clustered, then like stones dried by the sun, white inside, black outside, and when crushed they released the aroma we craved in our food. Far out at sea, on my return home through the green waters of the Aegean, where monsters lay in wait for us, goring us as we slept with their slimy horned tales, the fragrance of pepper would haunt me into wakening. I would reach out for the sea snake, pull out its hot and steamy tongue, and then I would vomit green and terrible bile into the silver spittoon. My eyes would open, I would see the stars embellishing the sky, lovely women would appear, each as distant as the cold moon, and I would look away, for the custom was that we could never marry or bear children, and so, were free to celebrate the Lord’s body. I had always been a religious child; boys who served the Christ were not many. We lived in small bands, singing songs and learning the rituals, which would save the world from poverty. Poverty of the spirit, I mean. We were never short of food, and what we