Gained in Translation: The girl in the rain

There was one person who used to repair umbrellas during the rains. A tall, lean and dark man, whose face gave the impression that he was already old when he was born.

Written by E Santosh Kumar | Updated: August 19, 2018 8:25:18 am

If we got an extended break, we could walk up to the top and return. From the top, we could see far out, and far down. (Illustration: C R Sasikumar)

(Written by E Santosh Kumar)

A classmate I was meeting after a long time asked: Where are you now? Haven’t seen you for long. I shifted from home some time back, I said. I had been in Bombay, then in Pune. When did you move? he asked. Three monsoons back, I replied. It was easier to remember the rains than the date and year.

Even when we are away from home, we follow the monsoon in Kerala. This year, the rainfall has been severe. Several dams are overflowing after years. Thunder rolls down from the sky everywhere. Streams that were rivers only in memory have returned to their true forms; villages and towns are at their mercy. In some places, they have found new routes to flow in. Landslides and floodwaters have consumed human lives, animal lives, houses, crops, roads. A soldier, a little child in his arms, running across a bridge just as it goes under water has become the face of the rescue operations. The flag of humanity still flies high.

The monsoon this year has been heavy in Bombay as well. Traffic comes to a stand-still in the rains. A colleague once told me about an episode of being stuck in the Bombay rains. The train stopped moving at Goregaon. She had to go till Malad, two to three kilometres away. The streets had water up to her hip. She tried wading through the waters for some distance, but then saw that she was near a friend’s flat and went inside the building. The parking area was already flooded. She climbed to the first floor. But as time passed, the water rose to the first level as well. The residents moved to the next floor. The water slid up the stairwell, as if a giant snake pursuing its prey. With the ascending water, the number of people having to move increased. It had entered through windows and doors, filled out the insides, and made itself at home.

Malayalees still talk about the flood of 1924. They recall the story In the Flood by Thakazhi. As my colleague was narrating, I remembered the helplessness of the canine in Thakazhi’s story, trapped from all sides by water, without hope of escape. The residents of the apartment complex had to go all the way to the terrace, where they then stood shivering in the rain. They feared for their lives; but they also contemplated the possibility that what they had earned over long years in that difficult city might have been washed away. Once the water drained, the bodies of dead dogs and snakes appeared. The vultures from near the Parsi bawdi in Malabar Hills started flying over other parts of the city.

It doesn’t rain so much in Pune, where I now stay. The rain falling on the lorries plying on the Pune-Bengaluru national highway reminds me of the vehicles that used to move on the highway that ran through my village. The road was surrounded on both sides by paddy fields. During the monsoon, the fields would be inundated, and the lights from the vehicles would reflect on the water — a ghostly procession of light. The ghosts used to shimmer and sing mysteriously. Vehicles by day are different from vehicles by night; the night has the ability to reconstruct things.

My village was at the foot of three hills. Till Class 3, we used to stay right beneath the hills. That year, there was a huge landslide. Many houses were swept away. Four children from my school died. Before the next rains, many people shifted from the hillside to the plains. From there, we could see the trees on the hills trembling in the storm. Sometimes during the day, it would rain even when the sun was out, and the children would tell each other it was ‘the fox’s wedding’. After watching Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, I realised that this was something that children across the world knew.

Our school was also near the hills. If we got an extended break, we could walk up to the top and return. From the top, we could see far out, and far down. We saw that our school, house, village, fields, people and vehicles were all very small.

Many poor children studied in that school. I realise now that many kids used to go up the hills because they had no lunch with them. They satiated their hunger with the view from the hilltop perhaps. Their parents earned their living doing odd jobs in nearby places.

There was one person who used to repair umbrellas during the rains. A tall, lean and dark man, whose face gave the impression that he was already old when he was born. He used to sit by the roadside, outside a tailor’s shop, the eaves of the shop protecting him from the rain. He used the light from the shop as well. He would slump over the umbrella he repaired and not look at anyone. He was surrounded by umbrellas and handles and faded fabric.

His daughter Alli was in my class. I never saw her after I left school. Or maybe she left even when we were in school. One rainy season, I went to her father with two or three broken umbrellas. It was some time after class, but Alli was still with her father. She didn’t look at me, but was looking out at the rain. It took some time for him to fix three umbrellas. After he finished with my set, he gathered the rods and fabric from around him and made a bundle, which he put near the top of the shop. The father and daughter then got under one umbrella and stepped out into the rain. Was it because they had only one umbrella that Alli had waited for him? It wasn’t rare in those days that children didn’t have one. But Alli’s father repaired umbrellas for a living.

I got out behind them. They lived some distance away, I think. You had to walk past the fields and along the highway. The edges of the fields were covered with water, but they were able to walk along them due to habit. I can still see two shadows walking beneath an umbrella sweeping aside the water with their unprotected feet. The big trucks driving past on the highway brought them into sight now, and washed them away next.

After a few minutes, I couldn’t see anything of the two. Behind them rose the shape of the hills. Behind the hills rose larger the night.

E Santhosh Kumar is an award-winning Malayalam writer best known for his novel Andhakaranazhi. Translated from Malayalam by Gautam Das.

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