The Last Song Of Savio De Souza

By Binoo K. John

In his first novel, journalist Binoo K. John returns to the land of his birth - the magical, sensual, about-to-be-drowned tip of Kerala. Within moments of meeting Savio, the young man whose voice weaves magic in the lives of those around him, we are plunged into a story of undying love and great loss wherein church and mosque and temple vie for believers, young love finds its moorings in tragedy, and friends must earn their rites of passage. Set against the backdrop of the 2004 tsunami, this is a gripping novel about ordinary people who survive against great odds to carve their indelible stories on sand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jul 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9789350292501

Binoo K. John

Binoo K. John is the author of the best-selling Entry from Backside Only: Hazaar Fundas of Indian-English. His travelogue Under a Cloud: Life in Cherrapunjee, Wettest Place on Earth was termed 'one of the finest pieces of Indian travel writing ever'.

Book preview

One

When Savio de Souza cleared his throat and sent his eyes around the crowd that had gathered to hear his last performance on the silvery sands of Our Lady of Our Heart, in Vettukad, with the distant shimmering of a miraculous tropical aurora borealis—a clear sign of an approaching tumult of the seas—his mind jerked back to when he had first sung in front of a crowd.

But then he was a boy and that was not really a crowd, to be honest. They were just the few sisters of Holy Mary’s Convent. The chapel of the convent was closed to boys, lest the unpredictable thoughts that flit through their adolescent minds violate the sanctity of the grotto of Our Lady near Sister Regina’s office. The school was pure and virginal, like its occupants, and it was only his golden voice that gave Savio de Souza admittance to that holy place, the school chapel, at the age of fifteen. His sister Silvy was another reason. It was she who had told the sisters of Holy Mary’s how well her brother could sing, and that his voice had the crackle that came only when angels fluttered their wings, and to add to that, a ricocheting bass that was like the rumble of an approaching wave.

‘If Savio sings, the angels will flutter their wings,’ Silvy had told Sister Adelaide, with a confidence few people who worked in that convent could summon in front of the senior nun. But Adelaide had her own reasons to let Silvy have her say. She was among the most promising girls that the Order of Benedictine sisters had taken into the nunnery. She was a good girl and her smile had a swell of innocence decorated with a string of jasmines, thanks be to Mother Mary. Also, her family was poor, which was the most important qualification to be taken in for lifelong service to the Lord. Silvy’s family lived in a small house which had broken tiles on its roof. So she could not nourish ambitions of going around with a stethoscope. Much easier and closer to salvation, in any case, to have the rosary decorating her neck.

In any case, Savio and Silvy’s family had a long connection with the Benedictine Order, for their father had been the driver of the school bus for thirty years. He, Simon de Souza, had driven the school van all around Puram, and once every year, all the Sisters huddled together in his snout-nosed Chevrolet for the thirteen-hour journey to the Velankanni church on their annual pilgrimage. The journey had a spiritual quest written into it, but for the Sisters it was a veering away into the material as well. For it was their only journey out of the cloistered confines of Holy Mary’s. They all sang and peered at the world outside, and Simon listened to the pleas of the younger nuns to stop in front of one of those buildings which housed many shops that sold necklaces and chains made of the pearls of Hyderabad, the type of which the Nizam of Hyderabad wore.

From a wayside shop in Nagercoil, Simon bought a packet of Charminar cigarettes(a luxury for a beedi-smoker like him) and one of the nuns always asked him whether they could see what it was that he hid in his hands. He passed it to them over his shoulder and it came back two cigarettes less, and Simon knew which of the Sisters would smoke while he drove his bus along the coast, listening to the winds of the seas blowing the blood-soaked, salty fragrance of the many wars the Portuguese (his ancestors), the Dutch and the English had fought along this coast. But along with it came the unmistakable smell of cigarettes which the Sisters would be sharing among themselves, coughing with the inexpertise of novitiate smokers.

Savio could not forget the song he had sung in the chapel of the Benedictine Order, which he would sing again in another five minutes as the first song of his last appearance on that godly platform. There were enough indications that the church, after nearly two decades with him, would not invite him again for its annual festival which fell on the day after Christmas, the culmination of a week of uproarious celebrations and frenetic praying.

It was a Yesudas song that he had learnt at the feet of his poor mother, who, in the agony of her poverty, had taught her son some songs in the hope that at least his mind would be happy even when his stomach was empty. That song he had mastered in a short while, as he sat every evening by the flickering oil lamp kept out in the verandah of his house:

Edayakanyake poovuka nee

Eee anandamaam jeevitha vethiyil

Edaraathe, kaal edaraathe.

Shepherdess Mary, go lead us on

In life’s eternal paths lead us on

Virgin Mother lead us on, with unwavering steps….

The crowd was getting restive, for they had been waiting for over an hour for Savio’s session to start. It was December 2004 and already 4 a.m., and the candles which the faithful had placed on the pedestal of Mother Mary had become contorted gargoyles and clumsy wax figurines, sending out the dying whiff of flickering flames that would soon pale into insignificance as the sun rose just beyond where a fidgety Savio stood.

The crowd of fishermen was tired after the excesses of the past week, when many of them had not even gone out to fish. Festival week was when miracles occured in Vettukad church, which was completing seventy-five years of existence. The crowd was littered with lepers with overflowing pus and stubs where their fingers once stood, the deranged, the mangled, the leukaemic, the arthritic, the lame, the polio-stricken, the kidney-less, who had come to Vettukad in the hope that God’s hand would touch them and give their febrile bodies some comfort.

They stayed there on the beach all night. The deranged with metallic chains around their ankles were locked to the granite stones and iron girdings that bordered the Church of Our Lady, lest they rush out into the sea, mistaking the deceptive cerulean of the Arabian Sea for an unending platform of marble on which they could dance the midnight salsa. All of them waited through the week of the festival and, on Christmas Day and sometimes even the next day, they got to eat appam and mutton stew tinged with whole pepper from the Idukki high ranges, which the church served so they would not be hungry when the hand of God touched them, and could easily join the huge chorus of hallelujahs that would lash the coast as if the waves too were touched by the divine hand.

Even if no miracle took place, they would all depart with the songs of Savio echoing in their ears and the deranged would have a smile on their face.

‘Even if Mother Mary did not bless you today, at least you heard Savio’s song’ was the usual comfort line of the uncured faithful, the ‘failed beggars’ as they gathered their sheets and bags and the remnants of their faith and started from Vettukad on their journey back up the coast, some by bus, others by the Kollam passenger train which stopped at Kochu Veli, from where they could manage without tickets. Some just walked and begged all the way up to Kollam, to Thankaserry, some even as far as Vaikam, a few going south all the way down to the tip of the peninsula, Cape Comorin, where they earned good money from the tourists. Their sores still bled and the stink of pus pervaded the train compartment, but they were all sure that Mother Mary would intercede on their behalf and cure them if they kept going to Vettukad, if not to Velankanni on the other side of the coast, where the mighty peninsula tapered off into the confluence of three oceans.

Over the years, the many unhealed and failed beggars sought succour in the Sufi saint who presided over the nearby Bheemapally mosque. They walked the five kilometres from Vettukad to Bheemapally, where the mosque surrounding the dargah of a Sufi saint had healing powers. Bheemapally had grown in reputation in recent times because many of the violently deranged people who had been brought to the mosque in chains had gone back like lambs, mumbling the praises of a strange saint. Everyone who had heard the hordes of mad men and women shouting indecipherable words in strange languages was shocked to hear them mumbling the name of the saint. Those living in the vicinity of Bheemapally suggested that it was the name of Nizamuddin, the peripatetic sixteenth-century Sufi saint, who was believed to have reached the coast after escaping the life of a slave from a Portuguese ship during the third and last voyage of Vasco Da Gama to India in 1516.

Whether it was Our Lady of Our Heart or the Sufi saint, a cure was what mattered to the many hundreds who roamed the coast from Vettukad to Bheemapally, all the way up to Velankanni. They were all freelancers in faith, looking for answers to the struggles of their body rather than wanting to get direction in their spiritual search. But many were touched by the voice of the Bheemapally saint who sent them on to a new life.

Those who hadn’t heard the magical timbre during the cusp between total darkness and the first searching rays of the sun, which rose to the right of the mosque, spent many years roaming the coast. Sometimes, when it became unbearably hot, they went into the mosque. The iron chains dangling from their bleeding ankles created a disturbing chorus as they walked around the mosque, the marble-stoned borders of which were carved with Urdu verses.

Some, like Ayesha Bivi, had dragged their chains along the floors of the mosque for twenty years before they heard the pre-dawn baritone of the saint ringing in their ears, and the third syllable ‘oooooo’, a breathless, deep echo, with neither a beginning nor an end, like when you hold a seashell to your ear.

When the news spread along the coast, in the years before Savio’s debut in Vettukad, that Ayesha Bivi too had heard the voice of Nizamuddin, ten years and fifty days after her father had left her there and vanished, there was a huge commotion. People could be seen rushing along the Shanghumugham beach towards Bheemapally to hear and see the sane Ayesha Bivi, who, after ten years of mindless raging against the forces of nature and her father, had finally found peace and was now resting in the god-sent tranquillity of the mosque. It was the same place where her inseparable appendage, the iron chain, dragging along the floor of the mosque, had created disturbing music for more than two decades.

Ayesha Bivi did not look up, but her eyes were closed and her hands held up in a prayer of thanks. It was a spontaneous show of gratitude, and people waited near the tiled shed where the mad were housed for the moment when she would come out and repeat ‘Allah O’, so that they could repeat the magical words after her as they did whenever a madman became whole and cured.

Amidst the crowd that day in the mid-1980s (no one could remember the exact year) was Father Vattukattil Joseph, who was then the vicar of Vettukad. He had heard the news in the afternoon and, realizing the debilitating effect the Bheemapally cure would have on the miracle business of Vettukad church, had decided to go across and see for himself.

He went wearing a cap—a thin disguise, for everyone along the coast knew him by his jet-black beard, which he kept caressing proudly. His cassock, which blended the smells of the sea and the stink of sweat that always ran down his neck, had been left behind at home on its tusk-shaped hanger made of one piece of mahogany carved to a nicety. He had to survey the scene at Bheemapally and report back to the bishop whether there was any threat to the popularity of Vettukad church, from where there would be an exodus of the deranged during festival days if the story of Bivi’s miraculous cure were indeed true.

The crowd had already swelled and was waiting for the call of the muezzin, which could be heard at 6 p.m. every day, when the twilight painted the horizon ochre and the setting sun sometimes turned into a red ball that reflected the trauma of the deranged and the mangled, before it buried itself in the boisterous confluence of the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean.

When the muezzin called that day, there was a whirr of expectation. The rumour was that Ayesha Bivi would come out of the mosque in a blazing white gown, like a ghostly apparition reclaiming its place among the living. The process of mythifying ‘Ayesha the insane’ had already started. The faithful raised their eyes and hands towards heaven.

John Lazarus, he of the walrus moustache who owned the well-known Famoos Sherbat Juice Centre (‘one minute relax, all life happy’) right outside the mosque, confirmed that this was the biggest news to come out of Bheemapally in a long time, during which the mosque had been losing out to Vettukad church in the miracle stakes. Lazarus had known Bivi over the many years she had spent loitering around the mosque, hoping for the call from the saint. He was also the one who first saw Bivi as the reborn lady touched by the light of the saint. He saw her walk with a different gait, and she spoke to him at dawn when he was just opening his shop: ‘Now my mind is clear.’

These were the most understated words Lazarus had heard in all the years that he had spent selling sherbet and lime juice to the deranged and the mangled and their relatives, most of whom disappeared leaving their mad children or parents in chains in the many-pillared, mud-tiled hall outside the mosque.

Father Vattukattil Joseph positioned himself near the shop, among the many hundreds who had come there that evening. He ordered the palm fruit juice called nongu, which not only fills the stomach but also keeps away thirst for twelve hours—the reason why it is a favourite of the fishermen.

‘Has the miracle happened?’ Father asked Lazarus, wiping the remnants of the palm fruit off his beard. Father always got a large glass for the price of a medium, considering his elevated status. Also, Lazarus would someday need his intervention.

‘Believe me, Father, it is the greatest miracle I have seen in all my life. Ayesha Bivi had a brain full of viruses and now she is cured! The devils had possessed her all these years and I am a witness. She used unspeakable language to abuse her father, and even the small boys who played football on the beach were scared of her. And today, oh my lord, she came to me and asked for the apricot juice which I had served for only one week, about ten years back!’

Suddenly there was a surge in the crowd and both Father and Lazarus, from their ringside perch, could see Ayesha Bivi walking out as if she were emerging from a time warp. As hundreds watched, she walked towards Famoos Sherbat Juice Centre and again asked for the apricot juice.

‘Oh Bivi, I do not have apricot juice any more. The last time I served it was ten years back.’

‘How can you say that, Lazarus? Wasn’t it yesterday that I sat here and ordered the juice? One anna. One anna, and how sweet it was!’

For the second time that day, it was confirmed that Ayesha Bivi had been blessed by the holy Sufi saint and cured of her madness. Father Joseph was lockjawed and, for half a furious second, he wondered whether he should lift his hands, mumble a prayer and then appropriate the miracle to Our Lady of Our Heart. But by that time, the people around him had started mumbling ‘Allah O Akbar’.

The miracle was now out in the open and Famoos Sherbat Juice Centre was the stage where the Sufi saint, after many years, again imposed himself on the minds of the people. Everyone there was a proponent of a divine cure, and even the two neighbouring shopkeepers who sold beedis and fly-encrusted sweets and were generally cynical about any talk of miracles, were now silent witnesses.

‘Bivi, where will you go now?’ Lazarus asked, placing a large glass of nongu in front of her.

‘My father just went back yesterday. I will write to him to come back and pick me up,’ she said, celebrating her emergence from two decades of madness. Two decades during which she had journeyed in a vacuum of filth and faith. Hers had been a life in death and now, life had recaptured her.

It was time for Father Vattukattil to retreat. He could not hold the attention of a crowd here, like he did so effortlessly at Vettukad. He slipped a two-rupee note to Lazarus, the price of a small glass, and then withdrew in amazement and a bit of shame as well, as people rushed in from all corners to bear witness to the miracle of Ayesha Bivi.

Father Vattukattil’s steps back to Vettukad church were slow and measured. His eyes were turned downward, rather than straight ahead as they normally were, his mind weighed down with many worries. He felt comfort in caressing his unkempt beard. He loved the jet-black colour of his beard: it reassured him that he would have a long life in the service of the Lord. He would not grey for a long time, not until seventy at least, he comforted himself. And that was ten years away.

He stopped at the tailoring shop to find out if Peter the tailor could mend some curtains for him. The winds from the Arabian Sea had torn them to shreds but where would he, a priest, find the money to buy new curtains for the window of the vicarage. It was difficult enough for him to get the commode of his toilet changed. All expenses had to be presented to the church committee and many members nursed a serious grouse against the priest, who, they felt, led an easy life and ate mutton and pork and fish every day, while they, poor fishermen, had to be satisfied with chutney made of salted fish dried on the beach, eaten with boiled tapioca or inedible rice provided by the government of the people.

When the proposal for fitting a Western commode came up before the church committee, the reason cited was that the ageing sinews of the vicar made it difficult for him to squat on an Indian-style shit hole. Immediately, a member stood up and asked: ‘Are we to believe that all these years the priests of Vettukad gave Holy Communion without shitting in the morning?’

The proposal, which would entail an expenditure of Rs 350 including labour charges, was kept pending. The details of the meeting came to be known and, for many weeks, people guffawed at Father Vattukattil and passed nasty comments when he went by on his evening walk along the beach. ‘Father, did you crap today?’ ‘Holy shit!’ some rowdy children lounging around the beach shouted at him before they ran and buried themselves in the protective swirl of the waves off Shanghumugham beach.

The length of the sermon that Father Vattukattil delivered every Sunday began to shorten—he cut out the prayer at the very end—and the Mass began to lack the soaring spiritual effect that they were all used to. In general, there was a constipated atmosphere in church.

Fernandes Bruno, the man who had blocked the proposal with his spontaneous statement, was well known in the area. He was a veteran fisherman who was the first to fix a Yamaha outboard engine to his dugout. A relative of his, who had gone to the Gulf, had loaned him the money. Fernandes knew the movement of the waves as if the upheaval took place within his own body. ‘Every breath of mine is a wave,’ he bragged to his friends.

Fernandes’s catch was the envy of the other fishermen living on the coast that stretched from Veliathurai pier to Vettukad. He rode the waves with the confidence of a marauding general, but every day before he went fishing, he lit a candle before the statue of Mother Mary in Vettukad. This gave him the confidence that if the waves soared above him, as it happened just before the monsoon, he only had to raise his hands towards heaven and say, ‘Oh Mother, pray for us. Mother Mary, be with us.’

Vattukattil was aware that Peter the tailor had a monopoly over the Christian business on the coast. They all came to him because he had a statue of Mary that had been blessed by the priest of Velankanni church, where the mother of all miracles occurred every year.

‘Curtains, no problem, easy easy, very very easy,’ Peter said, offering Father Vattukattil the lone chair in the shop, which was reserved for important visitors. The fisherwomen smelling of dried fish, the lonely widows, the arthritic fishermen who had hung up their oars, all had to wait at the door before they were summoned in to be measured for shirts or blouses which would have to last many years of a grinding life. Often, the cloth they brought with them did not have the requisite length for a shirt or a blouse—the textile shops would have cheated them. But Peter was ready with patchwork solutions. That was why they all came back to him, though he did not offer them a chair to sit.

‘Where is good cloth available? The curtain must withstand the perpetual lashing of winds from the Arabian Sea,’ Father said.

‘Father, why you worry? I am here, no? Blue colour with white stripes I will get you from Parthas. Blue of the sea, blue of the Arabian Sea. Who can match the depth of that colour, no?’

‘Not much of expense, remember, Peter.’

‘Don’t worry, Father, if you don’t pay I pay, no? You pray for me, I pay for you, no Father?’

Father Vattukattil plunged his right hand into his shirt pocket, and pulled out some notes which added up to Rs 110. ‘Keep this. The rest I will give later when I come to pay. You know the measurements.’

‘Don’t worry, Father! Father, did you hear of the miracle? What a mad woman she was. Fully mad, no Father? Some days I could not work because she came and abused me, no?’

‘Do you think anyone other than Mother Mary can intercede on our behalf and create miracles?’

‘No, Father. But it is a big thing for Bheemapally, Father, this Ayesha Bivi miracle. Some Sufi master, they are all saying, no Father? All the mad will come here and my tailoring business will be for only mad people. What will we do, we people with full-healthy brain?’

‘Why, do you think people will stop coming to Vettukad?’ The possibility of a deserted Vettukad church, of people flocking to Bheemapally instead, hit Father Vattukattil like a thunderous wave. He was the parish priest with the huge responsibility to summon divine help for cures and keep the crowds coming back to his church, at least during the festival season. His face suddenly took on a sullen expression. Peter, as usual, had a patchwork solution.

‘Nothing to worry, Father. Mother Mary will guide us. A bigger cure than Bheemapally will come to us, Father, just watch, no.’

‘We must do something,’ Father said, his face turning grimmer by the minute.

‘Why worry, no Father, try other techniques. Deepavali technique. Bring fireworks from Sivakasi Fireworks Company. Fifty bombs in single rocket, one by one, till it reach near the outer space. Almighty bomb. Sooperhit.’

‘Mmmm.’

‘If you don’t like that, try mimicry. All will come and laugh. Alleppey Ashraf. One hour he charge only Rs 750. Sooperhit. Big crowd.’

As he laid out possible strategies for the future of Vettukad church, now confronted with the irrefutable Sufi miracle of the Bheemapally mosque and the prospect of dwindling crowds of the demented and the gnarled, Peter the tailor was cutting out the blouse pieces which would be stitched that night, when everything was quiet on the beach and even the fishermen slept on the twinkling sands of Shanghumugham, before they set out at dawn.

From the corner of his eye, Peter the tailor saw Clara the fisherwoman waiting at the entrance. A smile came to his lips but he feared that Clara might enter the shop while Father Vattukattil sat there right in front of him, discussing miracles and strategies. Nothing wrong, but what if she betrayed her real emotions towards him in front of reverend Father? You could never trust these fisherwomen, you know.

‘Not ready, not ready, can’t you see how hard I am working to get your blouse ready,’ Peter shouted to pre-empt the entrance of Clara, whose very appearance at the shop sent the blood thrashing around in his veins.

Clara stood still, biting the ends of the towel which she had thrown across her bosom, like all fisherwomen did. Peter, from the practised corner of his eye, could see the upheavals of the towel as if a storm were brewing within Clara.

‘What is this? You make me come every day,’ she complained.

‘What other work