This is an English translation of "Pulariyil Maraintha Manjal Kadal," a Tamil short story written by Theivigan Panchalingam. Translated into English by Saravanan Karmegam.
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The wind gusting in the mustard field lying behind the burial ground blew across the granite wall and entered in. It hit the big trees swaying under the evening sunlight. The sprawling Corymbia trees stopped their movements with some mild jerks. The epacris flowers standing in rows near the graveyard shed their leaves onto the ground. Some of them fell onto the epitaph tombstones that carried some intense elegies and details of birth and death, fixed under the anointed circular-shaped pictorial stones.
Sitting worn-out due to work in front of the cement-walled hut in the southeastern corner of the graveyard, I was frittering away my time blowing saliva bubbles. It went up in the air, broke, and then disappeared.
There had been no death for the last two weeks in the vicinity. I was thus burdened with less work. But Stuart couldn’t afford such a thing. He had entered into an agreement with the council to maintain this graveyard located eighty kilometres away from the Melbourne metropolis and had been running it for the past twenty years. The council’s income was dependent on the number of dead bodies coming to the graveyard. A part of this income would go as a salary for Stuart, and he would give me wages out of his salary. So, Stuart’s penchant for a good number of deaths could never be his fault.
The area where the graveyard was situated had been surrounded by vast stretches of fields—hectares of mustard and jute fields were found like a yellow carpet around it. There lived a handful of families of Macedonians and some Italians. The remaining majority of them were Australians. Summing it up, there would be some hundred families living there.
Most of the people in this area would keep a car outside and a gun inside their home for their personal security. Though they were ready to accept their natural death, it seemed that they were very firm in not permitting non-natural death to approach them.
There was a pillar near the granite wall of the graveyard in the north. Looking from afar, standing on the pillar would offer you a view of a park that always lay empty near the highway. Sometimes, very occasionally, some elderly men would throng that park in groups, shoot the birds dead with their guns, and burst out into laughter. It offered them a sort of happiness, simultaneously appreciating their skills in shooting birds and keeping a refreshed watch on their growing senility and clogged guns.
While those men were defying their destiny to live their lives at any cost, playing with their grey hairs in the winds blowing across mustard fields, Stuart’s livelihood was looking up to those hundred families eagerly waiting for, at least, a death from them.
2
It had been one hundred and twenty-one days since I came to this place. The Australian Immigration Department, which rejected my refugee application after three years, had called me to appear in their regional office in Melbourne City.
“They are definitely going to repatriate us to our country. I wouldn’t go there, Machan,” I told Paranthaman.
Paranthaman boarded the ship along with me from Indonesia. We had been friends in Malaysia. He left Colombo by flight for Malaysia and worked there in an Andhra hotel for three years to gain entry into Australia. Later, probably out of sheer luck, he joined me when he boarded the ship for Australia. He was also looking for asylum like me.
“I must go to Australia to find some work to, at least, earn something to get back the land my father mortgaged at the village to send me abroad. When I was in Malaysia, the agents conned me out of all my money,” Paranthaman said while we were standing near the car park in Kabali Restaurant. He had been my roommate ever since we came to Australia.
As arranged by Paranthaman, we set out on our journey that night to a place as far as about eighty kilometre from Melbourne city. When we reached that graveyard after navigating many vast stretches of land, it must have been about eight at night. Paranthaman explained everything while travelling in a car that almost left me haplessly struggling to swallow my own saliva. But the place we went had no police patrol around. Only after he assuaged my fears with a series of assurances that the one who maintained the graveyard was his owner’s son and a very trustworthy person did I grow confident of working there. The journeys with bona fide intentions, though undertaken through illegal ways, were not new to refugees anyway.
The trees standing tall, thickly grown on the premises as if fully covered with black polythene sheets, got me intimidated as we entered the graveyard entrance. The car rolled away in slowly, as we opened the gates, on the track. The tombs on either side of the track were much more intimidating than the seas we crossed by risking our lives. Some of the crosses planted there were shining in the beams of the car’s headlights. All the ghost stories I came across since my childhood did run their flashing rehearsals once in my mind and then vanished. The saliva seemed to be oblivious of the throat that dried up.
Paranthaman could understand my fears and anxiety. It was his immense trust in me that made him believe that my life could be secured only in accepting such travails. Since his faith was not wrong, I did accept his trust as well as my fears.
Stuart, whose face was almost buried in beard, came out of his office in the graveyard, which was hiding in the darkness. His warm reception proved that he had met Paranthaman earlier. He looked white even in that darkness. He was wearing a dirty shirt and pants, the colour of which was not at all matching with his shirt. Since he was the one who would give me succour at this juncture, I gave him a warm smile, earnestly thinking of erasing all negative thoughts about him from my mind. He didn’t mind it seriously at first and then conveyed his regards in his own way, bobbing his head up and down.
Once the brief introductions were over, Paranthaman told him to send the agreed wages of mine, two thousand dollars, to his salary to be sent to my father. It was Paranthaman’s plan to send the money to my family. He shook his hands with me, reaffirming once, and said, “This is what we had planned. Right? Let’s go now.”
The buzz of trees above the head was still strong. The intense blares of night were very annoying. He led me a little distance from the corner side of the office. I and Paranthaman trailed him behind in the torchlight he was throwing in the front. The very thought of someone being buried under the land where we stepped on had brought an uneasy prickle in the feet. But Stuart, seemingly aware of my uneasiness, was walking a little slowly so as not to allow me to run fast.
We reached out to a place that somewhat looked like a hut in the dark with cemented walls. With a bed, toilet, and kitchen, the hut had been kept ready for an emergency stay. The walls had been crafted with holes to enable the occupant to throw his eyes out during his furtive stay inside the hut. The light coming from the office was visible at about four hundred metres from the hut.
Stuart told me not to use mobile phones and turned to Paranthaman and inquiringly nodded his head as if seeking endorsement of his suggestion. He said in a lowered voice that it was he who had taken such a big risk. The telephone in the office could be used only during emergencies, he said. As soon as I trooped into the hut, I looked around out of the corner of my eyes. I acknowledged Stuart’s words of counsel with mild nods of my head. I felt that all the warnings that he uttered through his beard, though they sounded intimidating, were spoken in an earnest spirit for my security.
My eyes welled up with tears when Paranthaman bid me farewell. Stuart went along with him and boarded his car. Paranthaman must have seen my glistening tears in the car light. He came to me again, hugged me tightly, and told me he would be visiting me once a week and get my house owner somehow convinced with some excuses. “Don’t think too much of anything. It is also just an experience,” he said, and went back to the car.
Everything became quiet, and the sounds of night and darkness did surround me now. I could understand the curse of my life, which burnt down all colourful drapes of life; I had now been forced to seek a hideout in a crematorium full of pyres. The night was awake, staying up with me without sleep. The howls of wind outside resounded with its colossal proportion into my ears.
I decided resolutely that I wouldn’t open the room door under any circumstances. ‘What if someone happens to see me moving around?’ I clenched my frozen hands tightly and closed my eyes.
The earth received its first light of the day. Hearing someone knocking on the door, I ran swiftly and opened the door only to see Stuart standing at the doorway, smiling through his white beard. He looked buoyant, unlike yesterday.
He asked me to put on a thicker jacket among the clothes I brought. I brushed my teeth and went behind him with a coffee he gave me. First he led me to the crematorium, which looked like a bakery oven. He said that the last funeral rites were rarely conducted at the graveyard and further explained where to lay the dead body given for burning, how to push it inside the crematorium, and how to initiate the burning process by pointing to an electric button. He threw away a plastic tumbler he had just sipped coffee from into the furnace and showed me how it catches fire. The heat of the fire nearly scorched my face. Stuart assuaged my apprehension, telling me that he would do it himself and I didn’t have to do that task; he just showed it to me as a part of getting me accustomed to it.
Quick spurts of broken English pronunciations and foul words usually found among Australian villagers were generously falling off his mouth. After that, he showed me the full-time work I was destined for. He taught me tasks ranging from digging out the compost manure near my stone-walled hut, spreading it at the bottom of Jacaranda trees grown thickly along the stone wall, watering it, and other tasks such as watering the saplings planted neatly near the tombs, trimming the overgrowth of green trees, and, importantly, collecting the dead leaves falling from tall Corymbia trees and dumping them into the compost pit.
3
As soon as Stuart left that day after teaching me the tasks, I started doing them scrupulously. After completing all the work, I came back to my room before darkness swallowed up the graveyard. I soaked the noodles Stuart gave me in hot water and made my dinner. I got frightened and annoyed with the noise the decanter made when I put it on for making tea.
As I was engulfed with tiredness and anxiety, soon I fell asleep.
That time—
That sound rising from the graveyard’s boundary walls penetrated the night in a moment, taking the form of yellow waves. The roars of those waves were scary. I peeked through the circular-shaped stones of the hut.
The entire graveyard is gleaming like forenoon under the moonlight. The crosses planted all over the graveyard are rising above, floating in the yellow sea that gushed into it. The flowers of a distinct sampling among them are still blooming. At last, the yellow waves devour my stone hut too with their unquenched frenzy. The shapes scaling up in the floating graveyard are cutting a swathe through me. Both men and women, shedding their mortal remains onto the waves, are asphyxiating and laugh loudly. The Crosses, which rise above, join their hands. They thrust it like oars and come near to each other, hug, and kiss each other. Another mammoth wave rises high and falls off.
I become unconscious, lifting my chest above and struggling for breath. The water of the Yellow Sea enters through my nostrils and squeezes my eyeballs out of their sockets. I open my mouth wide and try to call out to someone, but no sound comes out of it.
At that moment, an old woman comes near to me, swimming across, and leans me on her shoulder. I hug her tightly and sob. My sob doesn’t have sound either. My mouth opens and closes like a fish. Soon after my body snuggles into the old woman’s hands, it becomes warm. The old woman, looking at my face closely near to hers, smiles at me. The lock of her hair, neatly combed with a parting, hasn’t gotten wet in water. Not untidy due to waves. But, now she gets me scary. She seems to plan to harm me. I fall into the sea again, releasing myself from her clutch. When my hands started aching after falling into the sea, I felt my body sweating, lying on the icy floor. That time too, I was breathing like a fish with my mouth opening and closing.
The wind was furiously noisy outside, and I could hear the nearby mustard field wrestle with the ferocity of the wind. I felt my body losing its weight and a coolness spreading in me.
Those who were floating on the yellow sea some while ago did suddenly appear to be closer to me. My heart declined to believe that I was standing along with them that moment. In a spurt of a moment, a light flashed in me as if this land had preached a magnificent epic. I couldn’t believe that it was dark outside. I was standing there on a brilliant day.
My heart started yearning; it wanted to get closer to all the things that got me scared some while ago. This land was showering me with a bond that was beyond the night and day. I went inside the hut, made a hot tea in the decanter, came out, and sipped it, relishing the moist air heaved by the tall trees around.
4
Stuart had told me that he wouldn’t come that day. He had instructed me to shift the gravel stones with intricate carvings to the western corner of the graveyard with a pushcart. By the time I completed shifting those stones from the doorway, my T-shirt was completely soaked in sweat and stuck to my back. I placed them under the rose plants planted at equal distances on the outer edges of the tombs, dug up some pits inside, and buried those stones half their heights. If those stones are planted with their semi-circular heads visible above the ground, it would add up to a beauty of flowers made in stones, and thus the tombs lying near would receive a new sheen.
I was digging pits, moving in reverse along the stiff rope tied straight at its ends, and dumping the sand out in a line like a ridge. As my back was aching, I straightened my torso, keeping the spade aside, and turned back.
The old woman of the Yellow Sea!
I fell off behind on the heap of sand. She was standing bright under the sunlight. Apart from my lips, my hands too grew frozen. I couldn’t get up.
“I haven’t seen you around here. Are you new here?”
When she began asking a question I was relatively familiar with, I felt that it couldn’t be a dream.
“I have come here to place flowers on my husband’s tomb.”
The same voice of the old woman who cuddled me along her chest last night.
The dreams in her eyes were dried up. Eyelids that bore a look of umbrellas tapered off. Fully greyed hair. Her grey hair was gleaming whiter in the sunlight. A curved spine running up to her neck from the middle of her back seemed to have permanently settled with her old age. Her black blouse, stitched with red-coloured buttons decking it on its edges, was neatly worn without disturbing the folds of white embroidery she was wearing.
I got up from the ground on my hands as I kept looking at her. Her image from the dream last night was now showering a profoundly meaningful fear on me. She walked in tiny steps toward a different direction without getting overtly bothered with my fear.
I was very annoyed with Stuart for not informing me in advance that such visitors might visit the graveyard without prior announcement. Getting unduly intimidated with the sudden appearance of that old lady and keeping myself alert always are, in fact, proving my sense of freedom I had acquired till now worthless.
Leaving the spade where it was, I just trailed the old woman pacing at her speed of walk without adequately knowing what to serve that new guest. She stopped in front of a big, shiny cot-like tomb made of black marble. I remembered Stuart saying Japanese tombs had such appeal and comfort. The Japanese had the custom of building tombs to the sizes of the cots the dead were lying on before their death. That broader, black tomb looked very beautiful, with its head resembling a thick moustache carved splendidly, with its curled ends looking skyward.
The old woman’s tiny steps grew slower as she approached the tomb and stopped as if she didn’t like to wake her husband up sleeping in the tomb. She gently threw away the pink flowers she had brought at the foot of the tomb. Without seeking my assistance, she steadily spread those flowers onto the tomb’s surface. Then, she extended her one hand as much as she could to the middle of the tomb, touched it gently, mildly patted her wizened lips with those fingers, and got up.
When she was standing in front of the tombs, she looked more beautiful. She was standing proudly pondering over the bond she had with the tomb. The thoughts that were reeling in her heart must either be a profound music or an intense prayer or perhaps a silence without anything.
“Rascal, he left before me,” she said, turned, and looked at me.
Dusting my hands of sand, I tried to grin at her for the first time. She must have understood the perplexity writ large on my face.
“Himari”
She held her hand out as if inquiring my name. The moment I told my name, she started speaking as if she had waited for my response. I couldn’t find any trace of relations between her age and words. She had married a soldier in the Australian army, which came to Japan during the Second World War. She pronounced the words ‘love marriage’ with an exquisite stress so as to ensure that her old age should not tamper with the fullness of its meaning. She kept a tinge of her shyness and smile in it.
Her eyes still sitting on the tomb kept bolstering that their love had not yet died. She now started walking out. I followed her. I saw her car standing outside the office. She sat slowly on a circular-shaped bund in the middle of the graveyard and asked me to sit beside her. I could feel a trace of tiredness in her breath. It announced her age.
5
Paranthaman came the next week itself as if waiting for it. He came by Stuart’s car without arousing any outsiders’ suspicion and got off. He brought some food stuff for me. He was surprised to see me adapted to that land and surrounding. As though being aware of my ability to adjust to any situation to live a life as a refugee, he threw away a lot of queries perceptibly from his inquisitiveness to know how I could change that place into a place of my liking in a week.
I led him to the stone hut and described to him the visit of an old Japanese woman and his dream in which she appeared. The immigration department officials had come to his house in search of me, and he told them that I had left his place and gone somewhere, he said. My house owner believed his version of the reply that I had gone somewhere far away in search of livelihood and didn’t ask any more questions, he said.
The tender flowers of acacia trees were flying in the wind that gusted across there. With a deep breath, I blew on a flower that came near to me. Paranthaman, visibly amazed, kept looking at my eyes, smiling at the flower flying away from me.
“Every place has given us different experiences. But some places get into our souls and become one.” When I was speaking, Stuart came out of the office.
“Don’t cook anything in the morning. It is the time the wind blows across towards residential areas. People will be scared if they get to know any smell from the graveyard. The wind would blow in the opposite direction during afternoons towards the woods. You won’t face any problem that time,” Stuart said.
Stuart seemed to have been alert in his office, seeing the foodstuff Paranthaman had brought in his car. We both laughed. Through his unsuccessful attempts at being very busy with his frontal baldness, his witty remarks spoken earnestly would sometimes remain a humour such as this.
“Isn’t it good if people around here think that Stuart had gotten familiar with cooking a corpse and eating it? Everyone will be scared of you. Right?” Paranthaman countered it by cracking a joke.
That old Japanese lady, the beauty of the graveyard that looked like an island surrounded by a yellow sea, the wonders that were lying in it, and the ecstasy it evoked in me—I explained everything to Paranthaman as much as I could recollect.
6
“I am just his lady love, his wife. That is it. I was a secondary citizen in this country till now. Do you know that?” –When Himari asked me that question, I just looked at her intently, blinking as my eyes trembled, without understanding the depth and reason behind her question.
“Son, I know that you are doing something illegally here. Or you must be hiding here illegally. I could see it from your eyes.”
She continued: “There is no need to tell me that reason because you are also a refugee like me. I am very much aware that it is utterly an indecent act to dig out the secret lying in your heart. This country has been treating me as a second-class citizen even after fifty years of my marriage with an Australian who had left his country so as to serve it. So this country won't treat you, who had just come here a day ago, like an Australian to keep you on the throne.”
She turned to her husband’s tomb, giving out a smile of contempt. Her face was shining with oily makeup usually worn by Asian ladies. The preciseness of the eye lines she had drawn along the edges of her eyes without shaking of hands proved the power she inherited to make an Australian fall in love with her. Even today she had worn polish on her neatly clipped nails. A beautiful lady.
“Within a month of his death, they got me registered with a government accommodation and shifted there. They had snatched away the house we owned, where we lived, from us, fearing the possibility of a Japanese lady owning that house. What has been left for me at last is just this ash of him. The life that I got from that bowl of ash has been keeping me alive till today.”
Melancholy and tears were vying with each other in her. She struggled to speak out to some of them. Her misery seemed to flow down as tears through her wizened muscles under her eyes. Her words fell off as the pain of love and sigh of eternity from a refugee who had been stripped of her identity standing beyond life’s utter vulnerability. She breathed heavily as deep as she could, parting her parched lips.
“The wife of a soldier is unable to fight for her rights. Isn’t it? Though you were born in Japan, you belong to this country. Aren’t you the citizen of this country?”
She raised her head visibly in resonance with the wind, with a smile.
“I don’t know which country you belong to. You don’t have to tell me that. Let it remain as secret as you are. But you must understand one thing. Your identity assumes pride as long as you live in your motherland. It would be treated just like jewellry in other lands. That is it. You can’t decide yourself when to wear it. You will be tired of wearing it again and again, hiding yourself, and one day you’d start hating yourself. At last, you will then die as an orphan stripped of that jewellery. The fight for a cause, which you have just mentioned, is often fought by a great crowd of people. Who would I, a simple soul pulled in by the tiny force of love, fight against? These people? Fighting against the people of this country who would ogle a foot below the moment they see my face?”
“You speak as if no one in this world who left their land for other countries as refugees is living a happy life. Don’t you?”
“You must live a life like me to understand what you would get from pawning what and when you would understand the benefit of pawning. You’d come to know more about me after my death. Sometime you will know what I had gone through for the mistake of losing my identity. If you don’t know it, it is good. If you know, it is still better.”
I kept watching her, unable to distinguish her words that sounded almost like a riddle, whether it was plain frustration out of her old age or some profound truths of her life no one was aware of that she wanted to leave behind.
“You could have gone back to Japan immediately after the death of your husband. Couldn’t you? You could have, at least, regained your identity.”
Her intense glance at me revealed that she had faced such questions from many in the past.
“Son, I don’t want to wrong my husband the way this country wronged me. Even if I go back to my native place, I will remain an Australian widow there. They won’t celebrate my presence as a Japanese woman. I don’t want to carry my husband’s name and his thoughts over there and let them feast on it.”
Many a story was springing from her heart. Her pain was visible in her shivering lips and shaking eyes. She kept on speaking, evidently satisfied to have found out a refugee like her before the death swallows her up.
“All my desire is to lie with my husband in this tomb where he is sleeping.”
Though I was aware of the custom prevalent here where people could reserve spaces in the graveyards for themselves to be buried after their death, it was only after my arrival here, that too from Stuart, that I came to know that people could reserve spaces in the tombs of their spouses who die earlier by giving more money for them to be buried beside their dead partners.
“Once I go into this grave, he can’t rest in peace,” she said, laughing merrily, shaking her facial muscles. After Himari’s death, they would open a black marble slab of this tomb and bury her ashes in it. The Greeks and Italians followed a ceremony of burying dead bodies after embalming them. But Himari said she would be very happy if her ashes were buried with her husband.
Himari comes there every week. She cries her heart out at her husband’s tomb as to why she is still living. She cries, sulking about how much longer she has to wait to come to him permanently. She tries to absolve her guilt of living by way of showering flowers.
I wasn’t very sure if it was just a coincidence; she would come there only when Stuart was not around. She would come only when I was alone. When she came last, she gave me a handmade fan made in different colours. She held it out to me with her trembling hands, keeping it in a red bag with a white flower drawn on it. It just looked like a black stick while taking it out of the bag but spread with a colourful plume when opened except for its hilt. It had colours everywhere. Every fold of that fan had a distinct colour. The gush of air that hit the face while fanning it across descended into the heart with the warmth and coolness of a mother’s cuddle.
The day I last met Himari is still living in my memory as a picture.
7
I got up late that morning. Stuart had come early in the morning and completed some tasks. Sometimes he used to come early in the morning and do his daily chores. We heard the sound of a big vehicle coming into the yard. The fatigue of the previous day was so oppressive that it didn’t permit me to get up to see it.
Stuart knocked on the door and said that he needed a little help. I went behind him, without even brushing my teeth.
The upper side of the black marble tomb of Himari’s husband was found half opened. Stuart asked me to help him to lift the heavy marble slab fully.
I shook my hands as if every end of my nerve had caught fire. The boughs of Corymbia trees made a crackling sound as if falling off. I heard the roars of the yellow sea readying up to jump over the rear compound walls of the graveyard.
“She had been a prostitute in this area. She is dead now. She is a Japanese bitch. She wanted her ashes to be buried in her husband’s tomb,” Stuart said without looking into my face, holding one end of the black marble lid and waiting for me to hold the other end to lift it.
That time, the yellow waves that gushed into the graveyard swallowed up the entire graveyard. I was thrown up to the heights the trees stood and fell back onto the ground. Everyone was laughing, hysterically, along the rows of crosses. Stuart was not found anywhere.
My body shuddered thinking that darkness was going to swallow up the graveyard that day. The fear that had crept into me since the day I arrived here was now crawling like leeches through my legs. The enormous sound made by the Corymbia trees appeared to be a rehearsal to throw me up. The tender fibres of Acacia trees flying around in the air looked like ghosts attacking me. Stuart’s repulsive remark, ‘She is a Japanese bitch’ kept smacking the interiors of my heart again and again.
I picked the red bag with a white flower drawn on it and kept it in my big bag. I stuffed all my inessential items into it. I ran to the black marbled tomb, kneeled before it, touched it reverently, and sobbed mildly, “Amma…” I felt that my hands were shaking beyond my control.
I jumped over the rear compound wall and ran across the mustard field. The rays of the evening sun were strewn on the forbidden path of this refugee. The paces of the old woman strode along with my shadow and spread across, filling in the land. I gathered up my tears, swallowed it, brought it up again, and spat it out onto the ground.
***Ended***
