Trying to figure out whether he was Kandanar Kelan at that moment or the fine young man of twenty-six that I knew was perplexing. Unsure, I walked towards him, scrutinizing his dazed expression and warm brown eyes.
‘Arjun . . .’ I called. It came out as a whisper, and even then I regretted saying it out loud. He looked at me, his tired, droopy eyes telling me that he had had enough for the night. I retreated.
Bali Theyyam is a popular dance form performed in small temples of northern Kerala, and Arjun was a Theyyam performer. Artistes like him are trained from an early age to carry out this divine profession. Years are spent learning the skills required for each part of the tradition. I knew him well, and I knew that he put his heart and soul into what he did. Arjun was tall, dark and handsome, with rough, masculine sandpaper hands. Outside of Theyyam, he was a different person altogether. His voice never lost its enthusiasm, his eyes were constantly observing in and out and his right cheek gave out dimples when he smiled.
It had been seven long months since I had met Arjun; it felt like forever, really, and one thing was certain—I was irrevocably and unconditionally in love with him.
I first ran into Arjun at a public library. I was surprised he liked to read. I was smitten by everything about him—his deep voice and warm brown skin, the way his nose twitched and the way he gestured with his palms as he talked. When he talked, his eyes bore right into you, as if deciphering every thought passing through your mind. It was mesmerizing, to say the least. He invited me to his temple shows and, soon, it turned out to be a routine affair for me. I grew to appreciate the brilliance of both the performance and the performer behind it.
The riverbank beyond the paddy field turned out to be our favourite place to loaf around. Early mornings were often swathed in silence, except for the mooing of the grazing cows with the egrets incessantly picking on their backs. Some days there would be sudden downpours and we would saunter in the softness of the monsoon rains as the wet mud gave away a fresh earthy scent.
We met behind moss-streaked walls and stole kisses in the corners of the overgrown gardens of the countryside. We watched sunsets together as he traced his fingers along the nook of my elbow. He would narrate mythical stories from the past as I leaned against his shoulder, letting the legend of the god of the Aasharis sink in.
Arjun was a wonder. He made me laugh and he made me think. He told me how this divine profession had been handed down to him through his family line and that even though he didn’t exactly choose it, it was an integral part of him—something he could never let go of. He told me how turning into Kandanar Kelan was a state of trance, a state of frenzy, and that nothing gave him more ecstasy than being taken over by an ancient spirit that people worshipped to this day.
Some days Arjun liked to dive head first into his notions and I secretly loved the way his eyebrows knit together when he was in deep thought.
‘Theyyam is a cultural war cry,’ he would say, sipping on his hot kattan kaapi* in the early hours of the morning, ‘against firmly rooted notions of caste hierarchies.’
‘Basically, Theyyam continues to raise pertinent questions between the equations of the higher and the lower castes in Kerala,’ I would chime in, trying to sound intelligent and oh-so desperate to impress him. Arjun would nod.
‘It is no more a dying art,’ he would add slowly. ‘It changes with time.’
Once, I noticed a dab of orange paint from the previous night’s performance still smeared on his face. I reached down to wipe it and we both laughed light-heartedly.
I used to attend all of Arjun’s performances at the kshetram†, and several days I even stayed back after the show, despite him pushing me away every time. He liked to be alone right after the show but I liked to push it. It just didn’t feel right to leave him alone then.
‘Please go home, Lilly,’ he would whimper softly in between breaths. ‘This metamorphosis isn’t going to get any easier if you stick around.’
It was painful to see the struggle, the staggering combat between his true self and the raging Kelan, who was killed hundreds of years ago.
That day was different, though. I had told him that we had to talk, that I had overstayed my visit, that it was almost time for me to head back home and that we needed to sort things out. I knew it was sudden, but at some point I had to tell him. We were two people from really different backgrounds and we both knew that right from the beginning.
Arjun was unusually quiet. He didn’t ask me to not leave. He didn’t offer to talk to my parents about us. He didn’t even react to the quiet agitation in my voice. He did none of the things I had expected him to do. He lifted the corner of his crisp white mundu*, crossed his leg and merely nodded at what I had said, as if I had lightly mentioned something that didn’t concern him at all.
Something broke inside me. I bit my lip until I tasted blood. I felt a sense of betrayal. And, for the first time since I had been with Arjun, a pang of remorse pricked me inside.
Later that night, we met by the ebony river. Words did not escape either of us. The air was thick and the silence was unusually deafening.
We sat by the riverbank like we always did. The river pulsed behind us, glistening in the moonlit night. His arm was cold, unfamiliar, and his eyes were down—unsmiling, lost and pondering. He was in pain—I could feel it.
The calm of the night reawakened our senses to new melodies and we wrapped our arms against each other delicately, as though sheltering each other from the pain that was seeping in. Two brown bodies—a man and a woman enchanted by love yet divided by the brutal differences that societal normalcy teaches us.
Yet what do they know about love? They teach us that love is financial stability, that love is the union of two families, that love is a flimsy match between two matrimonial profiles.
They don’t know that real love is blind, that it sees no caste, no gender, no race, no colour, no age, no materialism.
And yet how far was it worth to get hurt, to get jeered at, to get lectured—for love?
Was love worth all the pain, all the torment, all the misery?
Something inside me whispered ‘yes’ and yet I didn’t trust myself with it.
‘Lilly,’ Arjun whispered, his soft marble lips on my ear, breaking me free from my tangential thoughts. Perhaps he knew what I was thinking. Perhaps he, too, was thinking the same things. Perhaps he could read my mind. I liked to believe that we had that charismatic connection between us. I liked to think that it was what had brought us together in the first place.
‘Lilly . . . Lilly . . . Lilly . . .’ he kept mumbling my name like it was the last time he would ever say it. Like he was discovering unique ways to utter my little two-syllable name. Every time he drawled my name with his tongue, I felt warm inside. I felt like my name made more sense. It felt precious; I felt precious. It felt so surreal, like we were both in a dream—two goldfishes, swimming surreptitiously in calm blue waters, swishing our long, flowy mermaid tails, serene and carefree and blissful.
‘Hey,’ he said softly, snapping me out of my thoughts again. His softness made me wonder if his exceptional avatar was all a big lie. How could a human being so gentle transform himself into a screeching god plunging into flames at the drop of dusk? It was all a big mystery to me—a mystery that was better knotted up and dropped into the bed of the ocean and never thought of again. After all, all questions don’t have answers.