Chapter Text
What kind of world is this, where a madman tells you you should be ashamed of yourselves?
NOSTALGHIA, ANDREI TARKOVSKY
The first game Russo and I ever played was Begum-Sultan. It is the only game we play to this day.
I do not yet know you well enough to tell you about this game.
The game lies beneath a floorboard in the kitchen of the house he and I share.
I do not yet know you well enough to tell you which.
I did not plan the stunt I pulled at my father’s funeral. I only said what I said because I had nothing else to say.
The nothing-to-say-ness was the issue, I swear to you, not the planning-to-say. I was hemmed in, see, and I knew very very little about most of the people staring up at me. I was no public speaker. I was a dancer. In terms of logic, whatever I was doing up on the stage was entirely unnecessary and utterly pointless. I could say anything. Nothing I said would matter. There was quite literally nothing I could say in a eulogy that would make any difference to the fact of my father’s death.
At least that was what I had thought, coming to Kochi. That nothing a zoologist said or did made any difference to the hard fact that chimpanzees and gorillas walked on their knuckles. And so, I thought, that would have to be the score. Bishop Fingolfin, whom I loved and who loved me fiercely, had brought both joy and misery into my life, and then he died. When he died, the joy and misery remained.
Though there was one silver lining. I very quickly discovered, five or so seconds after I received the call from Aredhel, that it was indeed possible to feel estranged from a corpse. Consider that my contribution to the field of psychology.
Let me tell you of one little piece of my father’s house, the house in which dance-master Finnu grew up as the vicar’s son: there was a painting of a Sultan, locked away in the attic room. It was only a little Sultan, fifteen or sixteen, astride a great charger, beetling black brows and intense dark eyes. You might think it was Russo, but it was not Russo. The painting was installed in that house at least ten years before either of us were born, though it was only taken up to the attic once I was sixteen. And Russo’s eyes were green. The Sultan’s hand was gentle on the horse’s hard mane, and the kind slope of his brow as he contemplated the little boy who should not be playing in the dusty attic and so catching all manners of diseases were also strangers to the often-boorish Maedhros. To tell you the truth, I never knew anything about the painting, and I never really cared enough to ask.
Perhaps my father liked horses in his youth, or perhaps he liked people to think he liked horses in his youth. We were wealthy, our money older than most, and so animal life to us at that point was primarily decorative and connected deeper to class than a true adoration of nature, curated just to showcase our appreciation for the things that don’t figure into the lives of the ordinary Indian. Perhaps it was a tacky piece of decoration for gaudy rich folk. But at least we were not like Feanor-uncle, and his four indoor European-style lavatories plated in gold, with Mughlai designs on the wet-room walls.
He was a beautiful thing, that little Sultan, but it mattered very little. Both my father and the Sultan were but thin echoes now, flickering in my memory like a flashback in the low-budget B-grade monster movies Maedhros dragged me to every Saturday. When was the last time I saw the little Sultan? When was the last time I saw my father?
The correct answer was, every day. Every day, when I was tired or worried or afraid, there he was, pursing his lips. And then I would remember to take a breath, and the room would be emptied of his presence, and I would feel relieved and lost and bereft all at once. The morning of the funeral, after a cats-and-dogs argument, Russo clasped my anklets around my feet and said, at least this, you must wear. I was dressed in mourning white and my hair was brushed back cleanly. After he clasped the anklets, he made a sign over my head and pretended to spit off to the side, thrice. These superstitious Muslims, thought my father.
I clung to the image of the little Sultan, at the funeral.
I also did not intend to lie in my father’s eulogy.
Well, I did. I did intend to lie. I meant to say: he was a very good father to a boy like me, and intended to stay relatively quiet about the fact that I saw him once a year at Christmas for ten days, and even that only because Turgon and Aredhel made his life hell if he didn’t extend the seasonal invite to me as well. I had also planned to pepper in several little lies to make the great big one seem more plausible, even made up a series of fatherly anecdotes without the help of Maedhros, who was of course so well-versed in the telling of ridiculous tales and far-fetched fancies that he had once firmly convinced his twin foster-sons that mice were capable of laying eggs and that they only refrained from doing so in front of the twins because the two of them were too naughty to be allowed the privilege.
Maedhros did not help because he agreed with Cousin Finarfin for once. They disagreed with me being the one to give my father’s eulogy, even though I was the eldest son, and it was always the eldest son who gave the eulogy. So yes, I planned to lie, and all the lies were my own. It was more that the specific lie I ended up telling was entirely unplanned.
Why did I tell that lie?
Firstly, because it was a beautiful day.
The funeral service was held at St George’s Syro-Malabar Church, which had been my father’s seat as the Bishop of Kochi, and Maedhros had made the eight-hour trip from Kozhikode with me for the week, ostensibly for emotional support though I suspected that, much like Cousin Finarfin, Maedhros just wanted to make sure Bishop Fingolfin was actually dead before they started celebrating the event. That, and it had been a few months since Elros’ death and Maedhros was bored of being on bereavement leave and spending his days taking apart his motorcycle and fitting in new and increasingly more convoluted gears.
St George’s was in Edapally, built in the sixth century and was one of the oldest churches in Kerala: we used to visit often when I was a child, my father having had dreams of bishophood even then, and it was just as remarkable a building as it was today. It was a vast octagonal structure, coated in imported gold foil with long rows of traditional stained glass windows.
The sun had filtered in through the stained glass windows and provoked by the beauty of the day and the darkness of the coffin, the light had become briefly animalistic, unclothed and blinding, ricocheting around the nave and hitting me so hard in the throat that I just had to lie. It was reflexive. Which leads to the second reason, I suppose. I was very good at reflexively lying about little things like the weather. I was very good at reflexively lying, point blank.
It was a beautiful day, though. It even smelled beautiful, or perhaps I was breathing too shallowly to notice it didn’t. I breathed differently in churches, and perhaps you should too if you knew how seldom they dusted under the pews. But even through my half-breaths, the day was alight with wood-dust and frankincense, even the dead dragonflies and beetle wings hanging over the windowsills only augmenting the stained glass windows. Like their dead limbs were resurrecting the saints themselves, animating them against the light of the sun, or like they were a smaller, separate stained glass window in themselves. Such a sight only added more proof to how momentous the occasion was. Bishops did not die every day. Or perhaps the dead wings were there every day and did the same thing on all those other days too, turned into enormous projectors that forestalled our hearts and pricked our minds into other directions.
Before I stepped up onto the stage to deliver the eulogy I moved over to the closest window and wiped away the insect wings, because that was all I could do. In the corner of the sill, there was a small, shy spider, cowering away from my handkerchief.
The strung up wings must have been his handiwork, a montage of his most wonderful moments, the fullest his belly had been at the expense of those beetles and dragonflies, over and over, making visible the absence of these glorious, iridescent lives. We all tell our stories in glass. And I had shattered it, without knowing, turned the windowsill into an emptier landscape. I had pulled back the curtain and made it watch what it truly had done, laid bare the artifice of its existence. I dusted my handkerchief off on a pew, walked up the steps to the stage, and lied my sweet little lies.
Why did I lie?
Because there was little else to do. There was never anything I could do.
Because there was no fixing either Fingon or Fingolfin.
It was always so. No amount of good behaviour at dinner could ever hide the fact that my fingernails were painted, and no number of kind words could hide the fact that my father was fucking disgusted by them. And so like all estranged pairs who must share a dinner table, we developed a careful, bloodless language of our own, designed to let us both survive my childhood without ever having to truly look at each other.
Back then I thought it was what all clergymen did with their sons, those little moments of fucking disgust. I had looked at his pained face and assumed holiness to be this immense burden, a too-tight collar, and that there must be all manner of rituals my father had to perform each day just to keep from being strangled, and that the majority of said rituals happening to involve the ways in which he interacted with me was sheer unfortunate coincidence.
Or perhaps it was because he loved me most of all.
Perhaps that was why.
A suckling infant places his hand upon his mother’s breast already expecting some yielding, some give, because the human body was designed for reciprocity. All children wait to be seen. Not all are looked at. There was a phantom limb feeling to this specific breed of rejection. You might just learn to live without the weight of a heavy hand on your shoulder, but the shoulder might just go on unbalancing itself, seeking the counterweight, regardless of whether or not the hand in question was clawed.
And standing at that podium, bound to the eulogy by birth order, with both Maedhros and Finarfin glaring at me from the pews, I felt as though across my life, my entire body had turned into that missing hand, attempting to make up for the loss. My chest, the broad palm, each limb a sharp, accusatory finger pointed right at the coffin behind me, right at my father’s heart.
When you point a finger to accuse another, he’d said when I used to listen, four fingers are pointed right back at you.
Each searching talon, gilded in the prettiest of pinks.
Perhaps only a stupid child might believe that, but did I, who once cheerfully wore flowers in his hair to an undercover dogfight in a gangster den, ever lay claim to brains? I, who visited Maedhros in a men’s prison for four years straight, with bells on my ankles and a sway to my step (like the song goes, if you recall the song), have never once in my life claimed to be dictated by rationality.
The lie was, like the vast majority of my life choices, pure id.
It started out fine.
I stood on that stage within St George’s, and told the stories Russo refused to help me curate. I weaved an idyllic tale. An invented, if not inventive, boyhood of church festivals and frankincense threaded through my hair, splashing through clay puddles in the monsoons, a father who took us three siblings (and often Russo and Cousin Finarfin, though never both at the same time) to the Koyenco Bazaar on Saturday mornings where we drank kattan-chai and cooldrinks from steel tumblers and glass bottles and to top it all off, drove us to the beach in the evening to wave at the fishing boats coming in. None of these were lies. The story was not false but false-bottomed, all the real, grimy treasure pressed into a greasy, salty lump at the bottom. It was a true story. It was a Kozhikode story.
Then, still not-really-lying, I said Bishop Fingolfin’s commitment to his faith made me the man I was today. I said he forgave my youthful waywardness. I could not bear to meet anyone’s eye as I said that. What I am trying to say to you, is that it was a fantastic eulogy up till that point. It was the kind of eulogy every congregation expected from a sermon, the reassurance that harshness was simply devotion wearing an unfortunately necessary face. A few of these people had seen me walk in that Good Friday parade when I was almost twenty, and here I stood, giving them permission to forget what that did to me, containing theologically-inflicted suffering within the borders of a family’s private correction.
Youthful waywardness. How carelessly I spoke of it, as if it were a passing breeze. Waywardness had arrived like a fever when I was young: sudden, consuming, then breaking into sweat-soaked clarity before subsiding into a chronic febrility I learned to live with. And I was right in that my father was a star, or a lighthouse, during this particular storm, because he was good and kind and woke me with sugar-dosa the mornings, and I spent years swimming toward that beam, convinced it would guide me home, and it took a very long time until I understood the light wasn't to guide me at all, but to warn me away from the rocks where people like me have wrecked themselves.
I stopped swimming then, right in the middle of my youthful waywardness. The rest of them moved forward in a sluggish column and I treaded water for a while, singing for bread and swallowing brine, but somewhere along the way a man hoisted me up into a gaudy red boat and steered me into wild, unmapped territory. The compass spun uselessly and grace turned from destination to condition. The most beautiful man in the world turned into my father’s greatest fear, hollow-eyed and strung up, clad in a crown of thorns.
Who was Fingon now without the lighthouse?
A man lost. A man free. And even so, a man bereaved.
Very few at the funeral understood any of that. To the mourners, it looked only as though I forgave Bishop Fingolfin in turn, and thus reassured them that even the greatest of wounds to the heart could be retrospectively pardoned. Up until that point, I spoke only of his kindness, and so reaffirmed the foundational dishonesty so many of us in that room had built our lives around: that the father was ever waiting at the gate. That we all need the foundations of lighthouses gently gored into our hearts, for how else could we get to the gate? Without such incisions, how could we wayward sons navigate the remarkable wilderness of life? What more direction do we need, than the father’s arms opened wide?
But believe me Finnu, Finarfin had told me earlier that morning as he threatened to break my jaw, it wouldn’t have been half as bad for either you or your goatfucker beloved, had your father not made you parade before the town that Easter. With Mother Mary in your arms and ribbons in your hair. Come, come all, stone this child! The cunt! What a different life so many people would be living if the Vicar Fingolfin didn’t wake up that weekend and put an enormous fucking kick-me sticker on his firstborn son’s back. I’ll say it. I’ll say it because nobody else will fucking say it. Your goatfucker beloved would not be on bereavement leave today, had your father not made you walk in that procession that day.
And then what Maedhros said last night as we were walking home from Gondolin III, him having never met other homosexual men up to that point, let alone stepped foot in a gay bar. He’d had the time of his life, I knew, he’d enjoyed himself tremendously even without touching a drop of alcohol, having miraculously if temporarily shed his chronically conservative prudishness, playing up flirtatiously with the queens and flexing his pecs every time they catcalled him with hey uncle, flash your muscles again! not to mention the rapport he had struck up with Legolas, a youth so ridiculously flamboyant he made me look like Gandhi. He had then spent a full hour bragging about his granddaughter, Elrond’s daughter, and how she was the hockey captain of her school and a shoo-in for Oxford University (conveniently leaving out the fact that Elrond taught there) to anyone who would listen, to the point they all started calling him achacha, or grandpa, which delighted him in a way that surprised everyone aside from me.
And yet when I asked if he’d like to come along to Gondolin III again the next time I visited Kochi, he’d said no. I can’t bear it, he told me, his eyes hollow and devoid of their earlier delight. I can’t bear to keep visiting the world in which my Elros would have still been alive.
That was why I could not meet Maedhros and Finarfin’s eyes. So instead I looked for Turgon, and found only his freshly ironed suit jacket because obviously Turgon was at the door ushering in latecomers, probably handing out little Gondolin Biryani business cards to anyone not clad in vestments or arriving in unmarked cars. There was Maeglin beside the suit jacket, looking up at me beneath his heavy lashes and raising his eyebrows at me like he was calling his uncle a little liar whom he had lost even more respect for.
Beside him sat his mother, a strange, intense expression on her face.
Aredhel had wanted to remain in Bangalore after Eol’s mysterious death-by-snakebite three years ago, and had refused to return to my father’s big house in Kochi and join Turgon in micromanaging Gondolin Biryani until Achan bought an attached plot of land and bribed her with a snake sanctuary. Aredhel was the kind of woman who could be bribed by a snake sanctuary. So she returned home and nursed my father in his final years and opened up her snake sanctuary and had taken to walking around it barefoot every morning as if to prove that the cobra did not bite Eol because it was a cobra but rather for a reason that they clearly did not see in her. She drove grooves into the red earth, over and over each morning, concentric circles of reclaimed territory. Achan kept dying. Aredhel kept walking.
Maeglin walked alongside her at times, and those were her best dawn walks, I know, much better than when I went along and pointed out all her lapses in enclosure design and foliage dispersal, as if she didn’t have two degrees in zoology and I hadn’t flunked my 12th standard exams so dramatically the biology examiner, out of pity or due to being a member of my father’s congregation, gave me a kindly handful of marks for writing my name and class correctly on each page.
Maeglin was her world, at least then, Maeglin and her snakes. Motherhood (to both boys and cobras) had become survival itself for her by that point, because it was in Maeglin’s heavy-lidded scrutiny and the snakes squirming up her shoulders that she could confirm she was still present, that Aredhel’s voice still carried when she spoke and some version of herself remained coherent enough to be argued with. A tether against disintegration, a wall to lean on when suffused with the sense that she was coming apart, that was what his adolescent presence and their serpentine comfort offered, however sulky or venomous. Motherhood was everything to her, though for just long enough for the other things to matter once more.
Two nights ago, as I’d been sitting on her porch attempting to write more than five lines of the eulogy in one go, both Bible and Malayalam thesaurus beside me, Aredhel had sauntered in from her snake sanctuary and perched beside me, reading over my shoulder just as she used to do as a child.
“You know I don’t like our beloved Comrade, don’t you?” she’d said abruptly, and clasped my hand.
“Surely not,” I snorted. “I’d gone all my life thinking you adored him so much you’d try to steal him from me. Kind, gentle soul that he is.”
Of course she didn’t like our beloved Comrade. Aredhel held two degrees and most women with a functioning brain tended to be repulsed by Maedhros because Maedhros, as much as I loved him, was naturally repulsive to most women. When Daeron had made the decision to live as a woman, Maglor had (after anointing her with a mid-morning visit for ‘sitar lessons’ so that she, like all the other reasonably good looking women in those parts, could get well acquainted with his insatiable cock) claimed he had always suspected she was truly a woman, because she had never really liked Maedhros even as a little boy, and often went to great lengths to avoid playing with him. And all this for good reason, mind you: Maedhros was the kind of man who once put ‘ban ladies from riding motorcycles’ on the first election manifesto he ever drafted after becoming Branch President, a choice made all the more ridiculous by the fact that the candidate for whom he wrote the manifesto was a woman.
Just the day before, our beloved Comrade had ambled into the living room like a bear scenting honey whilst the die-hard tennis fan Aredhel was watching a telecast of the women’s portion of the Wimbledon championship. And because he technically viewed Aredhel as a sister in law due to her being my sister and didn’t extend to her his policy of not speaking more than necessary to women he wasn’t related to, he’d proceeded to sit right beside her and grab an enormous handful of hot roasted peanuts from her bowl. He had then spent the entire time offering unsolicited criticism of the athletes' serving styles (he had never touched a tennis racket in his life) muttering darkly about the length of their skirts (it was summer so he had been, at that precise moment in time and temperature, not only shirtless but had folded up his mundu twice so it only came down to mid-thigh).
So if Aredhel had liked Maedhros, I would have wondered about her sanity.
“Good,” she nodded, and patted my hand. “I just wanted to make sure you knew that I find him rather horrible.”
“This is no surprise to me, Riddhi,” I rolled my eyes, using her childhood nickname. “What is the point you’re trying to make with this?”
“My dislike of Maedhros isn’t the point I’m trying to make. It just enhances the point I’m trying to make. Which is that I used to dream of him, you know.”
“What?” I choked, eulogy-writing forgotten. “Of… Maedhros? Why!? I know he’s good looking but you’ve seen him, what, five times since you all left Kozhikode, he didn’t even speak much to you when we were children and I…”
“Yes,” she cut across me, looking at me with the same intensity she wore at the church. “I don’t give a crap about what he looks like. But I used to dream of him. When I was with Eol, when things were at their worst, I used to dream of your Maedhros every night. Not him at our house when we were children or whatever Commie sellsword he’s become, but him on the day of that Good Friday parade, the very last one before we left Kozhikode.”
“When he took me away on his motorbike.”
“Yes, that. That, and how Finarfin had tried, kept trying, in his way, and how it had bought some time until your Maedhros arrived, and how he’d helped by grabbing the altar from you. And how Maedhros snatched you away and it was like you were never there at all. That was it, most of the time. Your Maedhros barrelling down the hill on his terrible motorbike, that awful, rude boor who irritated me every chance he got, racing in like a knight on a white charger. And Finarfin, grabbing the altar and kicking out at him. I dreamed of those two every single night. Your Maedhros, racing down the hill on his bike, hair flying behind him. Over and over again, the very same picture, down to the colour of his scarf.”
“Do you still dream of it?”
“Of course I don’t. Christ, could you imagine? No, of course I don’t. I returned here, which is to say I exiled myself once more, and only took the one thing I was allowed to take: my son,” she let go of my hand, slipping off her shoes to head indoors. “Some time passed, and I realised what an insane dream that was, and how much pain I must have been enduring, to lie there every night dreaming about that man of all people. And Finarfin. Christ. Thank god I stopped. No. No. When the haze cleared, I realised that it cleared because I stepped away. Because I, er, let the snake explore Eol’s study, shall we say? Because I ran and took Maeglin with me, and never looked back. Because I negotiated with Achan so he’d get me the snake sanctuary, and I chose to live here, as I do, in exile from the life I was meant to lead. And it was then I realised that all my dreams weren’t about what Maedhros did, or what Finarfin did, but what you did. It was you who did what I dreamed of doing.”
She paused, sniffed the air, and then suddenly asked me to go check on the snakes after I was done on the porch, before continuing. “You shouldn’t have had to do it, but you did. But that’s the point I’m making. Do you see, Finnu? What I’m trying to say is something I cannot prove, but know. That a person can survive their own exile, and it is only through that survival that they can find in themselves the ability to call it freedom.”
Perhaps that was when the lie came to me, though I did not know it at the time.
She’d gone inside and I had put on my boots because I was not my sister and simply did not trust a sanctuary of venomous snakes as far as I could spit. Like Aredhel demanded, I checked on the snakes, though I wasn’t actually sure what I was looking for. I was rather bored, Russo having point blank refused to come along with me (he and Finarfin were deathly, and probably rightly, afraid of snakes), though I did appreciate the general design of the place. It was a sanctuary in the modern style, hedges, walls, moats as opposed to cages and wires. Some snakes ended up slipping through cracks and winding their way up your leg.
I wasn’t convinced at first, by the way she was running things. I thought she was projecting, see, though I suppose it was rich of me to make such an observation. To me there was a modicum of mercy in the old ways of keeping dangerous animals, the small enclosures, the limited territory, the illusion of safety purchased through rigid confinement. But what grew in those cages wasn't contentment, and at some point the creatures would learn to pace, develop strange repetitive motions, turn its aggression inward or go eerily still. You could argue that these newer sanctuaries, like the one Aredhel was running with a modicum of success, the vast acreage, the attempt to approximate wildness, the acknowledgment that some needs can't be domesticated, were dangerous, that unwalled freedom bred only chaos.
That might be so. But by the time I got to the third wall and peeped into a hedge to figure out what on earth the python was getting up to (it turned out to involve both mice and mischief), I began thinking about the problems with convincing living things that their own nature was the problem, and thus a clamp is a piece of armour. Such damage never announced itself cleanly. But the animal might begin to pace. Might start throwing up its food. Damage would become the creature’s entire relationship to the world around it, to its own body, to the concept of elsewhere. By the time you learned enough about zoological welfare to open the gate for a few hours a day, the creatures would no longer remember how to walk through it. It would turn its back on the world, crawl into the old cage, and pace in circles.
It was only then I realised what Aredhel had been trying to tell me.
That was the nature of truths such as those. A person could spend years, decades locked in a house, believing the concrete walls are fixed, are immovable, and then some fucker comes by and says hey, isn’t that a window?, says you don’t have to live like this and suddenly, the shape of the possible world shifts entirely. The known world stays the same, and the knowable world expands.
Beside Maeglin sat four year old Idril, whose feet did not touch the floor, neither silver nor flesh. Just that morning she had made us all laugh by chirping bismillah before she drank her glass of milk and alhamdulillah when she put it down, because the cackling, incorrigible Maedhros had put her up to it just to see the shock-horror on poor Turgon’s face at the words. We’d laughed until Turgon too had joined in, because bismillah was just that out of place at the bishop’s breakfast table, no matter that the bishop himself was dead. It was 1972 and Kerala was Communist and things like that did not matter to us because our bellies were full and someone else laid the food out across our table. Bismillah, said little Idril at the breakfast table, and how we had all laughed.
Perhaps it was her fault.
“And yet, there comes a time in the life of every man of faith,” I said quietly, looking away from my family and shuffling my feet. “Where his faith is tested. Bishop Fingolfin passed almost every single test that the Lord put to him.”
There were sympathetic nods from the front row, though I could sense Cousin Finarfin's ears pricking right up at the word almost, standing at attention like he were Bugs fucking Bunny. I still couldn’t look at him or Maedhros, not even for a second.
This time, I was afraid I’d laugh.
“It was at the final moment, his last few days,” I muttered into the microphone. “That he was tested for the final time. I was there with him.”
Aredhel leaned forward, her eyes widening, because I most certainly was not there with him. I was two train exchanges away in Chennai, picking out costumes for the Youth Festival troupe I was training that year. I had in fact been surveying a selection of nail varnishes at the precise moment my father hit his Biblically-sanctioned expiry date of three score and ten and, well, expired. And because I did not know that my father had just died, I’d not only bought the varnish but had spent his final moments actually haggling for the thing, though I had decided to refrain from wearing it until after the funeral out of belatedly applied respect.
“And that was when he made his final confession,” I explained, placing a hand on my heart, biting my lip uncertainly. “To me, and begged me to allow him this dying wish. And so, I made the phone call myself. How could I look my father in the eye and watch him beg?”
I could see Turgon scratching his head comically in the corner of my eye, because my father’s dying wish was to for the love of Christ, boy, get Tweety Bird out of the room, I can’t bloody breathe, having been irritated by the canary’s incessant chirping, and it was Turgon himself who had apparently enacted the wish in question by placidly carrying out the television set. I almost felt sorry for him. But then again, it was Turgon who pushed me to deliver the eulogy, stating it was improper for anyone aside from the eldest son to do such a thing.
“It was I who called the imam, to sanctify my father’s conversion. Or perhaps I should say reversion, as that is apparently how they refer to it in Islam. For that was his final profession, as my brother and sister can confirm,” — I didn’t dare look at either of them — “his final wish. Achan wished to die a Muslim. He had been toying with it all his life, ever since his childhood friend introduced the faith to him, restraining himself out of the fear of societal judgement. Out of the fear of what you, my friends, would think. And who was I to deny my father? Who was I to refuse to set him free?”
I did not plan this. But now that I had done this, there was no turning back and there certainly was no stopping because the minute anyone stopped for a moment to consider whether Bishop Fingolfin, the youngest to be made bishop in the whole state, let alone Kochi, would truly choose his deathbed to convert to Islam? It would be over for dance-master Fingon. And dance-master Fingon had at least two more Youth Festivals to take champion troupes to, not to mention the stellar choreography he had planned out for the Christmas concert, so the only thing I could do was power on. And power on I did. I raised my head at last, and looked at Maedhros for the first time since I opened my mouth to do this eulogy.
And there, for the first and last time in my life, I was glad for Maedhros’ complete lack of anything approaching a sense of fashion. By complete lack of anything approaching a sense of fashion, I mean there were probably multiple people in this world who genuinely assumed that Maedhros was wearing a dark cotton shirt, a white or red mundu (navy if he was feeling particularly adventurous), a plain white scarf around his shoulders, leather clogs on his feet and a taweej around his neck at the moment of his birth. There were no two ways around it. The man dressed like a koya (a colloquialism signifying Muslim country bumpkin, generally from the north of Kerala) every single day of his life. Normally, all this was a source of great embarrassment for me, being a person of excellent taste. Today, however, his koya status would prove useful in a crowd where the majority had no clue who the fellow was.
“Mohammad, could you come up here?” I reached out to Maedhros, who gawped back up at me in utter shock as if Mohammad was not printed on his birth certificate. I ignored him, looking at the throng of mourners instead. “As the only member of my father’s newfound faith present at this gathering, my friend Mohammad Razul will join me here to deliver the Islamic funerary rites, as per my father’s final wishes.”
Poor Mohammad Razul walked awkwardly up the stairs and stood next to me, scratching the back of his head in the manner of a man who had clearly expected complete passivity from me, let alone the ability to pull off something like this. As Maedhros tried to send me questioning glares, I heard a resounding bark of laughter echo throughout the room, clearly originating from a single source, and I finally looked across as Cousin Finarfin at last. Aredhel had a firm grasp on one of his wrists and Finrod had a similar death grip on the other, clearly to stop him from jumping up in his chair, whooping and whistling through his fingers at whatever the hell was going on up here on stage.
(Hysterically, let me digress: for someone who had a healthy and by no means neurotic fear of rabies and reflexively crossed both the road and himself any time he saw a stray dog, I was unfairly surrounded by men who approached life as if it were a single extended dogfight in which they had no betting stake and only attended due to being of unsound mind.)
“Finnu!” Russo hissed out of the corner of his mouth, his cheeks twitching with the effort of maintaining the polite smile he levelled at the mourners. “What the fuck?”
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “Just. Um. Just cover your head and do what I said you’d do.”
He looked at me silently for a moment before his polite smile turned into a grin and, if I wasn’t mistaken, there was a glint of pride in his eyes.
“Thank you all kindly, for joining me in this prayer for Abdullah-ikka,” he cast his eyes down before addressing the congregation, his shoulders shaking because calling my father fucking Abdullah in the confines of one of the oldest churches in Kerala was a level of carnivalesque mischief even he had never considered. There was a sawing sound from the Finarfin direction.
Like a bull let loose in a field, he grabbed a brocaded cloth off the altar and tied it about his head, before lowering it and starting up what I assumed was the Islamic funerary prayer. He, it must be said, played his impromptu part admirably, if not entirely deliberately. Which is to say that he was trying so hard to avoid bursting into uncontrollable laughter on the spot that his face was bright pink, his voice wavered on the prayers, there were tears in his eyes, and all this conveniently happened to resemble the expression you might wear at the funeral of a man who had finally embraced your faith.
Very few people knew Maedhros in Kochi, and thus very few people were aware of the fact that he was only nominally Muslim at best, and happened to be the sort of fellow that had most imams begging him to embrace atheism. Certainly not a candidate to deliver anyone’s funerary rites. Not to mention my father, the bishop, would have died a thousand deaths before converting to any other faith, let alone Islam. Most people there knew that, I think. But nobody said a word throughout the entire charade, and they even politely muttered amen at the end. Nobody stopped me as I stepped off the stage afterwards, making a beeline for the doors blinded by tears because Fingolfin was still my father and my heart was breaking behind the bars of its cage.
Because Bishop Fingolfin was still my father, though I never had a father. Because he was my father and I loved him and he loved me too. For that was the worst part of it all: that my father and I bore such, such love for the other. That he fenced me off from joy not because he disliked me but because he adored me, not despite his love but because of it. And so I never had a father. The church had not taken him from me. He had gone willingly, my small, trusting hand clasped in his, like those first few Good Friday processions where I barely came up to his knee, afraid of the crowds and singing and spring storms and of getting lost in the bustling parade. I never had the father I should have had, but whatever it was that bore his name, I loved him ever so.
Even when the best day of my life brought him to such bitter tears, I loved him ever so.
Why was I allowed to lie at my father’s funeral?
Why did nobody stop me?
To answer that, you must know that when I was twenty years old, my father made me walk at the head of the Good Friday procession and nobody, aside from Finarfin and Maedhros, had done a thing to stop it from happening. It was an entirely different congregation to this one, thirty years and seven hours away in Kozhikode. We had all looked so wonderful in our starched white cotton and freshly ironed trousers. At the back of the procession they were whispering about whose daughter was studying where and the children were comparing their new gold bangles and the day before, my father had caught me giggling in my bedroom with Russo, my mother’s dazzling dupatta tossed over my head.
His hand was gentle on my shoulder and he steered me towards the right paths, the chembarathi bushes were drooping over our heads and I had flowers in my hair. It was deathly quiet aside from the singing, and the silence had swallowed me and who could blame everyone else for singing on? The hymn was pleasant to listen to, and they were allowed on that day to sing in the street instead of only within the church. And on such meager consolations did contentment often rest: people built entire lives on permissions so small they'd embarrass a child. I could not blame the singer. But nor could I blame the song. Could you truly blame a small routine honoured, or a minor principle upheld by a held tongue, for being just enough to convince someone that their life sufficed?
Perhaps I would have too, let myself be twisted into that heaving network of branches carving hymns into the sand. Perhaps I would have gone on all my life as the blunted relic I was being fashioned into that morning, chasing the promise of deliverance until I dropped dead, just another petal trod into the mire. Perhaps I would have been dance-master Finnu, the vicar’s son, all my life, had I moved along with the procession.
I would have. If Finarfin hadn’t tried, and Russo hadn’t arrived.
But they did. And so, I didn’t.
When I left, the procession closed around the little gap I had taken up, and continued placidly along their path. From behind, they looked as beautiful as they looked from the side, or the front, as beautiful as they’d looked from within. That was why they continued, as though in a trance. And that was why this congregation allowed my father to be humiliated before their eyes. Because, having witnessed the spiders’ display in those windowsills all their lives, they had learned that splendor could be built from small murders, and that what caught the light most brilliantly often had bodies tangled in its foundations. The ability to be mesmerised by the appalling was perhaps the only honest way we had left to look at anything at all.
Why did I lie?
How?
How could dance-master Finnu lie so cruelly about a man he loved as deeply as he loved his father?
Because dance master Finnu had, very early on in his life, learned to separate love and kindness from each other. He knew there was love that required no kindness just as there was kindness that required no love. There were bonds that didn’t involve mercy just as there was mercy that arrived only through severance. Not all earth was made to shelter. Mired in the swamp and born with wings to soar across the world, where would the heron be if he mistook endurance for virtue? For him, what was more honest than flight?
Dance-master Finnu lied at his father’s funeral because dance-master Finnu was bound for life to a man who made him smaller and smaller and smaller. He lied because of the spider, the snake and the heron. Dance-master Finnu lied because he was once the vicar’s son. He lied because there was no living forward until we do unto others what was done to ourselves.
On the day Russo and I first joined our bodies to each other, we had seen a heron from the Kumarakom flock, drifting from the sky to our lakeside haven in Mananchira Park. Only Russo and I were present, but to me, the whole world had been watching us watch the heron.
The heron stood in shallow water and we all watched from the bank, ankle-deep in our own convictions. He coolly considered the silver channels between paddy fields, the endlessly shifting channels where fresh water meets salt. He found his way across the wetlands by a succession of instincts. We stayed mired in the earth, and to make such an arrangement tolerable we constructed elaborate mythologies about why our limbs shouldn't be trusted, why the skeleton that strained toward elsewhere must be evidence of defect rather than design: a structure built for a life we've convinced ourselves we have no right to live.
The seduction of scripture was that it skipped over the parts where you decided what straying truly looked like, the moment you stopped believing, the wonders of the unknown world. Blasphemy, apostasy and damnation arrived fully formed in the text, complete with lakes of fire, and the actual process by which a soul disintegrated required no documentation. And so, we filled in the blanks with our fears. The heron was mentioned only twice in the Bible, in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and only ever as birds named too unclean to consume. What could be worse than the heron? What bird was more abased? What was more terrifying than the open channel between the spreading of the wing and the shrinking of the earth?
Russo and I turned to each other then, and made love for the first time in the Admiral’s Folly by the lakeside. At some point, the heron had flown away, cut through the air and circled dizzyingly over our heads, before dropping even the thought of us and springing off into the distance, not an arrow-struck bird but the arrow itself. The essence of the heron was to move swiftly toward certainty through a terrain of doubt, carrying with it only what it could carry.
Was that not faith?
I am a dancer. Action and actor, the only alliance that matters to me. The prey must learn to bare its teeth. What is done must have the finality of a door slamming in an empty house. Hesitation dissolves everything into grey. So much of our lives, we waste on negotiation. The hardest thing is to look directly at what you cannot have and dream it aloud. I am a dancer.
I am in Gondolin III, and it is last night. Russo is being dragged around the second floor by Legolas, but I am here alone, because I want to watch Beren and Lúthien. I have watched Beren perform as Laila and Lúthien as Majnu at least two dozen times and yet every time feels like the first. The past peels, punctures the present, and I am there on the stage with the two of them. I free-fall through its layers. I dread when I must come up for air, swim to the surface of time and cling tightly to the present.
Inhi logon ne le lila dupatta mera, goes the song. Humri na maano bajavya se poocho. Humri na maano, saiyaan.
These people have taken away my veil, Beren mouths along. If you don’t believe me, ask the cloth merchant who sold it to me. If you don’t believe me, beloved.
When the show ends, the lies begin.
If you don’t believe me, beloved.
Every step Beren and Lúthien take away from the stage, the lies widen the gap between the two of them, and between them and the world. In some upbringings, the lies one tells their parents are the first signs of adulthood, the way juvenile birds’ plumage begin brightening as they approach their first mating season. In some childhoods, lies enable a longed-for exile, a desertion from constraint, a flight towards freedom. Lying becomes a primal instinct, sweetening the thrill of desire.
Why did I lie?
Because I am a dancer. Because I exist in the same full light as Beren and Lúthien, carrying the same bright terror. Because twenty minutes after I watch Beren and Lúthien, I realise whom the Little Sultan resembles.
I see him, there and then, painted as the painter might have imagined him, feathery brushstrokes laid bare, the light swimming across his gentle hand, his intense eyes. The hills in the background of the painting seem synthetic and artificial when set beside the vividness of the boy, the realness of the horse, the two subjects too large for this perfect square of light, too reminiscent of the wild, fleshy world to be muted by the foliage of a watercolour landscape.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see a swift splash of white flit across a skirting board, the hem of a dress, or of my father’s robe, which I try to cling to.
If you don’t believe me, beloved.