A Place Within by M.G. Vassanji Read Free Book Online

known to each other. At around eight, all go home, as do we.
    This search for local Muslim history and lore has turned out not only fruitless but also somewhat disquieting. Hussein promises to send me some information by mail. That very promise says a lot. I suspect the conversions in this area to be recent, class and caste reactions, a seeking out to break the bonds of ancient barriers—and what better way than to deny everything and start afresh? But what to replace the everyday culture with? What songs to sing?
    We return to the village on the scooter, my heart in my mouth, a bus in front of us and another behind. The shops are closed. Hussein puts the scooter in an empty store he rents, pulling out the door panels in the same way they did in my grandmother’s shop in Dar es Salaam long ago.
     
    Hussein’s wife is a shy woman, and bigger than him. She hardly talks, makes gestures to him from another room that he easily translates for me. Even as we eat at the table, he and I, the food appears from the kitchen area brought by the son. I sense a certain embarrassment in my host.
    (To eat with the hand: one only has to do it once to feel comfortable with it again, it is quite natural, easily reacquired. But there is no point in trying to eat curd and condiments—served in their separate plates—the way they do here, in one swift motion following the helping of rice and chicken, with the quickness of an assembly-line operation, the flick of a hand or finger; and trying to roll down a boll of rice to the palm and involving the whole hand is a habit that’s been lost for more than a generation and had better stay that way.)
    By this time I’m wearing a lunghi and borrowed shirt; we sit watching news; he shows me paragraphs from Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope .
    To get a job in a Muslim college, Hussein tells me, he was asked to give a fifteen-thousand-rupee “donation” to the institution, which he could not afford. So he had worked in an office until he found a job at a government college. Now he’s doing a Ph.D. on the work of Michael Ondaatje. He’s desperately looking for a copy of The English Patient . Ondaatje, I tell myself, should feel honoured to be the object of study of this dedicated academic who’s just lost three weeks’ pay in pursuit of his study.
    The older son is in college, studying botany—not out of interest but because he had no choice. A more popular subject would have required an unaffordable “donation.” The middle child, a girl, goes to the village school, where the language of instruction is Malayalam. The youngest, a boy, goes three miles away to an English medium school and to perhaps better prospects than his sister. All the children have Malayalam names, unlike their father and mother, who have Arabic ones; one begins to wonder.
     
    Morning: crows crowing, rooster calling; waves pounding on the shore as the tide comes in barely a hundred yards away; coconut leaves rustling; a song on the radio welcoming dawn, another comparing dawn to the child Krishna. A young rooster makes bold to walk in through the open front door, looks left and right, walks out.
    It is a beautiful, peaceful, rural scene. My host contemplates leaving it, he’s told me, wants to sell it to buy a house in urban Trivandrum. He feels embarrassed by this rural setting, the village life. He has academic aspirations. How long, I tell myself, before someone builds a tourist hotel here?
    Morning ablutions: cleaning teeth with charcoal powder, the kind we bought back home for economic reasons, called Monkey Brand, made in India. A shred of coconut leaf to clean the tongue.
    A frog leaps out of the bathroom.
    It is not easy, after so many years, to get used to getting up from a crouch in the privy.
    In the morning the wife, still extremely shy, comes to say goodbye. It’s all smiles and shakes of the head. She asks me to enquire to my mother, my wife—meaning, in local usage, convey regards to them.
    While