I am nearing the end of my struggle, like a kalam painter who has portrayed life with the colours of pain, tears and alarm. Something always remains behind, even when trying to console oneself that all that has happened is inevitable destiny. Among the dark colours and lighted lamps, this artist becomes lonelier by the second. I have aged, and need somebody else’s help to walk. Every outstretched hand showers kindness on me.
It was raining heavily last night. Lightning peeped through my window in silver flashes. It might have been late; the rhythm of deep sleep was around me. I was at my daughter’s house, where the window opens onto a pond. The water was shining in the lightning. Rajan comes into my memory now. He comes into my memory as shadows, moonlight and rain. One friend asked me, which is denser’ the pain of the father at the death of his son or the pain of the son at the death of his father? I have no answer. My world has become empty. My sun has set. My stars have gone. Any father can cry out for his son, getting wet in radiant memories.
At some point I start believing in the existence of the soul after death. A burned soul is crying out, from which mysterious wilderness I don’t know. He would have been here if this soul had sight to know the way. Here was a mother whom he loved and who walked away into the eternal darkness remembering him, and me, a father, left behind. This weak father can’t move about without another’s help, but these hands are still shivering. These hands, which lifted him up and hugged him close to the chest, are still shivering. Why are you not coming, my little child?
The feeling that the rain aroused in me during my childhood, that rain lashing over the roof late at night in my sleep, has faded away. That rain, falling on the slanting roof, had music. Now I feel that the rain is telling me unheard stories; I go back to sleep, deep in the rhythm of pain.
In my childhood, the communists reached my native place of Cherpu drenched in these rains, shivering in the cold wind of the month of Karkidakam. Behind every burning torch that appeared at night on the other side of the vast paddy fields, there was the heartthrob of a communist and his sympathiser. The thoughts and feelings of these communists were very bright, even on those rainy nights, against the symphony of frogs and crickets. I still remember the shining light I saw in their eyes those days. Mr. Achutha Menon was one of them. That Mr. Menon with tired eyes and unshaven face woke me up from sleep at midnight, his eyes raining intense and fascinating compassion. But later-
The heavy rain never stopped. Seasons came and went. Those who learned about the country, its people and soil, later forgot the rain and those wet green fields. The cries of the frogs and crickets, and the heat and light of the burning torches, became strange to them. Mr. Achutha Menon was one of those too. He became a stranger to me. Those who loved and adored him might have been able to recognize and follow him. Let them pardon the distorted vision of this old man, but I cannot say thanks.
I don’t feel malice towards anyone. Let me hold close to my heart those tired eyes and that unshaven face, which rained stars of compassion. My memories are faded, but I can’t forget many things of the past. This life trained me to go down deep into the whirlpools of human existence. I saw cruelty, and the helplessness of losing everything. I saw the high peaks of love, too. As if after a short dream, Rajan’s disappearance awoke me from the natural indolence of a Hindi teacher. It was an odyssey from then on, begging for the alms of human awareness and compassion.
***
Koru, Benhar and Chathamangalam Rajan told me about Kakkayam camp, shivering while narrating stories of bloodclotting torture, as if trying hard to forget. I never asked; I never wished to know. Still they told me all.
Mr. Jayaram Padikkal would sit on a chair and pass orders, while police jeeps rushed in and out and youngsters were dragged forth. They were beaten, and then tied to a wooden bench with their hands and legs down. A heavy wooden roller would be rolled over their thighs; many could not stand the pain, and fell unconscious. To prevent them from crying out, the police pushed cloth into their mouths. Afterwards, they would be bought before Mr. Jayaram Padikkal. While questioning them, he would roll a sharpened pencil in his hands; suddenly he would stab the pencil into the muscles worked loose from the bones on the thighs of the tortured. Koru said that at that moment you thought it would be better to die. The cries from being stabbed with that pencil could be heard outside the camp.
Why torture so much? They were shivering while describing all this. When one gets over the pain of the body, more wounds are born in the mind.
My son Rajan was tortured first. They asked him where the rifle was that had been stolen during the attack on the Kayanna police station. He had never been beaten even once in his short life, so with the first round of torture he became weary. Then he was tied to the wooden bench and rolled. He cried out for his mother; they stuffed cloth into his mouth. At the end of the torture, to get away from it he told them that he would find the rifle. Then he was taken to Mr. Jayaram Padikkal, who told the policemen to take Rajan to a jeep and go in search of the rifle. Then he cried again. He told them that he was not aware of the rifle at all, and had said that to escape further torture. Mr. Pulikkodan Narayanan began kicking him in his stomach with his heavy police boots. With a loud cry he fell back and writhed on the floor, then became quiet and motionless.
The policemen started to worry when they were sure that Rajan was dead. Other youngsters overheard some of the duty guards murmuring that one had been killed during the day. They packed Rajan’s body into a sack and took it away in a jeep. They burned it in the midst of some forest with sugar, to ensure that not even the bones would be left behind, so it was said.
These are all stories told by the children who got out of the camp alive. When they showed me the never-fading scars of torture on their bodies, saliva filled my mouth and darkness, my eyes. A whistle echoed in my ears. For a moment I remembered the son who would have come back with an engineering degree, the son of my expectations.
The light went away. No, it didn’t go away; it was beaten away. Somebody said that Rajan was begging for his life before Pulikkodan Narayan kicked him to death. Enough children, enough-enough of these stories of my son begging for his life. His tender face comes into my mind, begging for life with hands pressed together. Oh my son, please pardon this helpless father, I cry out.
The world of stories is going away. In every piece of knowledge there is the echo of truth. The hunters are continuing the hunt. The victims are begging for life with pressed hands.
***
I went around Kakkayam camp with Advocate Ram Kumar and Mr. Appukuttan Vallikkunnu, a journalist. The waves of the Emergency had receded. The building where the camp was run had been deserted. It was in a remote place. I felt sure that its remoteness was the reason that Mr. Jayaram Padikkal selected it from which to run the camp. Maybe he decided that the cries from the camp should not even reach the clouds.
Mr. Appukuttan Vallikkunnu brought out the inside story of Rajan’s case through a series titled ‘Kakkayam Camp Kadhaparayunnu’ (‘Kakkayam Camp Narratives’). The war he waged through the Communist Party mouthpiece Desabhimani is a model for the struggle for democracy and human rights. He had been deputed to report the Coimbatore hearing, and he was very precise in informing me of the details. He correctly predicted beforehand that the witnesses would change sides. His ability to study and observe the details and to analyze issues struck me with wonder. Within a short time there developed a strong emotional bond between us. He treated me like his father.
I felt emotional as we went around Kakkayam camp. When we entered the room where Mr. Jayaram Padikkal used to sit, I imagined him in that chair, rolling a sharp pencil in his hands. It was in this room that my son bid farewell to this good earth. It was in this room that he writhed with pain after cruel torture. What might have been in his mind during the last moments? He might have cursed; he might have cursed all the green freshness of this world before death- no, it could never have been like that. How could he remember his mother who waited for him every day, his father who held him as he walked around, and all his dear ones, with a wounded mind? My eyes started getting moist in memories.
Both Mr. Appukuttan and Mr. Ram Kumar kept quiet. When they talked, they took care to talk only about the case. The crickets and other tiny insects were still crying out from the silence outside the camp. I have read of great men who have talked of life, and struggles from the other end of death. It is sure that death will never be a burden to those who have crossed those great worlds of ideas and ideals. But I don’t believe that Rajan had imbibed those fresh winds of faith blowing through the country after the Naxalbari uprising. When I asked a Naxalite friend of mine whether Rajan was one of them, he replied that he was only a sympathiser. That would have been the truth. It would have been beyond Rajan to attack a police station and snatch away a rifle. He was so weak in mind that he would not even have been able to think of that.
One story is that there was a Rajan among those who attacked the Kayanna police station, so the police picked up all youngsters with the name Rajan, brought them to the camp and tortured them. I could not reconcile this within my sense of justice. The rolling torture was done in front of other inmates, I was told. Going through the dark alleys of torture, they were also made to see and hear the writhing of the tortured, the loud helpless wailing and drained eyes. As one prey was writhing, the next was waiting for his turn.
I came to know that Rajan yielded himself silently to the torture. I have read about people being called to their deaths in Nazi camps. As an officer called out names, others were queuing up, waiting for their turn. They even took care not to call a husband and wife together into death; Hitler knew that the pain of separation and getting lost was more intense than death.
Mr. Paul, the proprietor of the famous spare parts dealer, M/S Popular Automobiles, was an inmate at Kakkayam. His father contacted Mr. Karunakaran, and got him released because he came to know of it very early. Mr. Paul had Rs. 500 on him, and when leaving the camp he gave it to the other boys. After influencing someone, they bought food; up till then they were all starving. Rajan was not able to stand hunger; such a boy would have been burned in its forest fire. His mother could not even feed him a handful of rice before his death. Nor could I offer one to him in funeral rites after his death. That still weighs on me. When I hear him calling ‘father’ in the heavy rain some nights it is the cry of hunger. Thinking that my child is hungry, I too never escape hunger, however much I eat.
‘We must be able to face everything; must be able to face all that happened with a balanced mind. Only if you are able to do that will we be able to do our social duties,’ Mr. Appukuttan Vallikkunnu consoled me. I understood that. The struggle against such brutalities had to begin with Kakkayam camp after the Emergency. I should not leave the new generation to that wooden bench and the rolling.
I fell silent. There were no signs of the police camp left in the building. The wounds that the thirteen-day-long camp inflicted on the bodies of those youths had not been posted on its walls. But those walls knew Rajan’s sighs and cries. They stood silent and detached, watching the young men writhing with pain. There were cobwebs on those walls. There were termites in those closed windows. I opened one of them, and light entered the room. In which mysterious wilderness is my son’s soul still wandering? I pressed my face against the iron bars. Oh, my son, here is your father’
The sunlight outside blurred my vision. If the soul has eyes, he will be seeing me, I thought. He will recognise my throbbing eyes. Is there a sound coming out of the dry leaves on the ground outside? Whose footsteps am I hearing? I set my ears to listen.
I had to face the question of whether or not I had vengeance towards those police officers responsible for Rajan’s death. This question pulled me down into doubt. I grew up among Hindu beliefs. To one born in a house guarded by a temple, prayers, offerings and religious customs, the feeling of vengeance is quite unnatural. But whenever I saw Mr. Pulikkodan Narayanan on television, arguing heatedly with his curled-up moustache shivering vigourously, vengeance flashed through my mind. I remembered the helpless and painful moments my son faced. Unconsciously, I start thinking of settling the score. A previously unknown anger entered my mind. Whenever I think that I have forgotten everything, I remember it more clearly.
***
‘You didn’t care for him,’ his mother said to me on her deathbed. Then, I had the face of a father who ran around the country like a horse, running through the days meaninglessly. But as time withered day after day in Kakkayam camp, her comment about the helpless father who couldn’t get his son might have been meaningful. I still have tears in my eyes to weep. This body still has weak throbs of life. So please, my dear ones, pardon this cursed father if I have pained you all.
Advocates Eeswara Iyer and Ram Kumar, Mr. Vahabudeen the principal, Mr. Appukuttan Vallikkunnu’ there were so many who tried to cheer me up when I went down into darkness. With which birth will I repay them for their outstretched hands, among those unseen and unknown experiences? Thanks, friends, thanks.
My path is ending. The rain that lashed all over will thin out soon. I feel blessed that so many were drenched in that rain for me, and along with me. Let me hold this feeling close to my heart as an offering.
Rajan used to sing well. When I wrote that he sang only when his mother asked him, my daughters got angry. They said that Rajan used to sing for them too. He never sang for me. I had no time for his songs. So he might have decided that his father should hear his poorly recorded songs only after his death. Oh Rajan, how sad those songs were that you sang while alive, and which I never heard then. I see in them something that meditates for death. Did you hate life so much, my son?
I shall stop. The rain is still lashing out. I remember my son when this heavy rain drums my rooftop, as if someone is opening the locked gate and knocking at the front door. It is not right to write that a living soul has no communication with the soul of the dead.
I hear his songs from a cassette on this rainy night. I am trying to retrieve a lost wave with this tape recorder. The good earth is getting filled with songs till now unheard by me, this crude man. My son is standing outside, drenched in rain.
I still have no answer to the question of whether or not I feel vengeance. But I leave a question to the world: why are you making my innocent child stand in the rain even after his death?
I still have no answer to the question of whether or not I feel vengeance. But I leave a question to the world: why are you making my innocent child stand in the rain even after his death?
