Amballore Thoma by Jose Thekkumthala

Author:Jose Thekkumthala [Thekkumthala, Jose]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781984516770
Publisher: Xlibris US
Published: 2018-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

The Evening of Life

ANN JOINED THOMA and Subashini in the hallway, emerging from her kitchen dressed in chatta and mundu. The oversized chatta gave ample room for her drooping breasts to follow gravity and reach the level of her belly button. She, the woman with jingling brass earrings, wore those humongous ornaments ceremoniously. They were the size of newborn babies’ heads. Those collector items touched her shoulders. Her parents had gifted them to her as dowry when she married Thoma. It had not taken too long for Thoma to pawn the gold jewelry and eventually sell them.

Thoma was now aged seventy-six and Ann was seventy. They were in the evening of their lives, their closing chapters. Ann very well knew by now what evening of life meant. Since coming to Amballore, they had enjoyed the rare phenomenon of peace and tranquility which had evaded them in Mannuthy. Embracing retirement was like reincarnating into a new life where peace showed up with a shining lantern. It was an antithesis to their war-ravaged past. They were now like mountaineers safely on the ground after an adventurous hike, able to look back and see what they had scaled. They had looked forward to their old age as sanctuary away from the cares of life and prelude to its ultimate closure. Deep in their hearts, they had fervently hoped the evening of their lives would be peaceful and brimming with happiness.

The retirement played out in the form of ruminating over their past. Often those memories rose like monsoon storms and refused to die down. They felt that those reminiscences relieved them of the past pains, letting them relive the past—without pain this time. Like old friends dropping in for chitchat, memories came visiting. Old images came back to life now and then. In a strange twist of fate, those images proved to be consoling and reassuring, if only because they knew they wouldn’t have to confront them again; they had already crossed the bridge of life. However, Thoma needed reassurance now and then that the boiling ocean of life was behind him.

“There sits the man with penetrating gaze,” the coconut palm told its neighbor, a mango tree.

“There sits the man with penetrating gaze,” the mango tree relayed the message to the neighbor areca palm and winked.

The interchange was about Thoma, who often relaxed at his home sitting in his chair, turning his back to the world, and staring ahead into his backyard. It was not the scenic beauty before him that held his attention, even though the yard was a mini Kerala of tropical beauty. “Kerala means ‘land of the coconut palm,’” he remembered his Malayalam teacher explaining in primary school long ago. He was accustomed to intently staring at or across the yard, often holding a cup of coffee and at other times smoking beedi. The chair had been conveniently placed in the hallway of the wraparound porch, with his beloved parrot, Subashini, caged above him.

Roosters relayed news of the staring man from the trees to the ducks, and the ducks conveyed it to the crows.

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