The Wall

By Sowmya Aji

Drawing its narrative strength from several folk forms, Sowmya Aji's novel is an engrossing amalgam of intense love, jealousy, revenge and unrealised dreams. The reader is transported to another world, one both like and unlike ours, where the presence of the titular wall is as real as it is metaphorical.

-Vivek Shanbhag

A stone wall at the periphery of a village somewhere in Karnataka guards a dangerous mystery. Yet, four generations of women from the headman's family - helpless and spirited, headstrong and weak with desire - have a wayward fascination with it. And with Annaiah who comes, some say, from across the wall.Tradition and subversion coexist with superstitions and the slow advent of modernity in this powerful novel where time is a wilful beast and the gods walk among us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harper India
• Release date: Jun 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9789351777298

Sowmya Aji

Sowmya Aji answers to female, atheist, liberal; no other labels. She works as a journalist, and lives in Bengaluru. She is also the author of Delirium (HarperCollins, 2013).

Book preview

PROLOGUE

he wall has been there for as long as anyone can remember. Like the fire, the wind, the rain, the earth and the sky. About twenty feet high, five feet thick. Looming over everything, brooding. A wall that keeps everything out. Or in.

The top layer of the wall is jagged stone, sharpened to slice anything that crosses it. Four, maybe five, kilometres long, it stretches along the entire village and its fields. Where the wall appears to taper off on either end, there are tightly interwoven thorny shrubs, seamlessly blending with the surrounding hills.

The tales of the wall go further back than the farthest ancestor anyone knows of. As if you can climb the wall, say the villagers. That’s common sense. Oh, and he thinks he climbed the wall – sarcasm. He has gone over the wall – a euphemism for death. Moral stories end with: don’t try to climb the wall.

Time has wrought a few cracks in the wall, tempting hot-blooded youths to try and climb it. Almost everyone who climbs the wall falls and dies. The few that survive become impotent and their entire bloodline gets wiped out. They talk dreamily of what lies behind the wall: a sea of colourful flowers mixed with dark shrubs, as far as the eye can see. The brilliance of those colours and the smell of the flowers make them delirious for life.

The villagers point out that these are portents of the gumma who lives beyond the wall. The gumma is spoken of in trembling whispers, with prayers to all known gods to ward off ill. For young children, gumma is the rakshasa who swoops down and carries them away forever if they are bad. For youngsters who are just becoming aware of each other, gumma is the most desirable boy or girl who taunts them to transgress. For the older folk, gumma is the one who kills his own brother for a paltry piece of land, or the son who throws his old father and mother out and enjoys their hard-earned house and property with his wife and children.

Gumma, whisper grandmothers, is handsome, virile, flowing with strength. He has velvet dark skin and is desired by all women. Women who have been with him are forever after dissatisfied with their partners, whether god or human. Goddesses give up their powers to him in return for his favours.

Once every seven full moon nights, the gumma makes mind-numbing sharey, pouring unknown ingredients into a pot over a huge, blazing fire fuelled by the limbs of men. The gumma’s naked chest ripples in the wicked glow. As the liquid boils, he dips his goatskin pouch into the pot, scoops out the sharey, throws his head back and guzzles it down. And he roars out ancient words of destruction that everyone fears to explain: Kamanna kattige, kattige ge kolu, kolige benki, benkige dahana. The world reverberates with them.

As the fire rises up, the black night bursts into colour: red, golden-yellow, ochre, orange, pink, magenta, blue, green, mauve, purple, violet, indigo, brown, silver, grey. If he throws red into the air, all is destroyed. If he throws green, all is fertile. Indigo racks the world with pain and black, of course, is death.

The servants of the gumma are evil spirits – beautiful women who roam freely behind the wall. The locals fearfully call them kolli devvas. They are said to have just one aim: snag young men for the gumma’s fire. They were once women whose love was unrequited or who pined for a lost lover. They died of desperately broken hearts and submitted to the gumma in their afterlives. The gumma turned them into these wandering bloodthirsty things that understand only lust.

The devvas are ravishing. They have exquisite red eyes that mesmerize. They wear white, flowing seeres, with hems high enough to show off glittering, harshly jangling anklets on inward-turned feet. They have long sheets of gleaming night-black hair.

Any youth that roams the old forests and hills around the villages is waylaid by the devvas. They confuse his sense of direction and lay a path for him to their own place in the land behind the wall. From then on, he is in their power. Ultimately, exhausted by their demands, the young man dies in the sexual act, and the devvas go off to trap another for the gumma’s fire.

The devvas too are cursed by the gumma – they must cook food for the youth they have trapped by burning their own legs as firewood. As they cook, they scream with pain that is a thousand times more acute than anything humans can feel. As soon as the food is ready, their legs are restored and unblemished, all the pain gone. But the devvas know that they have this reprieve only until the next meal that the man must have, every day, until he dies and is fed to the gumma’s fire.

The villagers believe that some unknown god, long ago, built this wall to keep the gumma, his sharey and his kolli devvas away from their village. Everyone knows the tales, passed on by grandmothers in every generation. And everyone keeps away from the wall.

1

THE BANYAN TREE

y Annaiah’s period, there are deep cracks in the wall, despite the contempt for time that the stone gives off in waves. The villagers fear it less now, and their paddy and ragi fields extend almost to the shrubs. Still, when they sow the seedlings, they stop about ten feet short of the wall. The fact is, nothing grows beyond that line.

The men are curious about how the shrubs have managed to grow. The women don’t bother: not only are they too busy running homes and working in the fields, they know very well that there is evil behind the wall. Many a woman feels a shiver run up her spine when she, desperate to relieve herself, goes into the multi-row thorny shrubs. Some gossip in whispers about the wall and its evil, but most would rather not talk about it.

As time goes by, cows break open a portion of the shrub wall. On the heels of the cows, some cowherd boys – later soundly scolded by headman Doddegowda – venture in. They report that for about a kilometre behind the wall, the thorny shrubs have to be hacked through with a sharp knife or axe. These implements soon grow blunt and they come back disheartened.

By Annaiah’s time though, to the villagers’ shock, a tender, green-leafed banyan tree sprouts on their side of the wall, a little distance from the village. Other than the shrubs, this is the only vegetation that manages to grow there. Oddly, birds do not nest in this tree. Nor do animals go near it, be it the cows, bullocks and goats that graze in the vicinity, or the village’s dogs, cats and fowl. Even rats and reptiles seem to avoid that tree, while no one has seen bats or owls on it.

The tree is beyond the two caste-wells, one upper, one lower, from which the village women draw their daily water. It can just be seen from Dasegowda’s house, the last one in the village.

To the villagers’ amusement, this tree has come up in the exact area which Doddegowda has just claimed for himself. He is contemplating putting in some more paddy. With prices plummeting in the market town seventeen kilometres away and his family increasing day by day, Doddegowda thinks that he needs more land. Also, some inglees people have been claiming chanda from him for about ten years now, because they think that they administer the village, not him. All these years, till his father Hiregowda’s time, the village has been giving some amount of their harvest to the local Raja’s men, but that is almost as if nothing is given. The Raja’s men came very rarely, as the path reaching their village is rocky and full of weeds.

But the inglees on their big white horses don’t seem to mind the rocks. Doddegowda has been trying to figure out why he should pay them chanda. What has happened to the Raja? Whoever he speaks to says that the Raja is also there but the inglees are ruling the land. He doesn’t understand at all.

The headmen of neighbouring villages tell Doddegowda that they are also paying chanda to the inglees. Twice a year, a person sent by them comes unfailingly for it, like the gumma. The problem is, the inglees only want chanda in coins, not in harvest. Doddegowda has to sell the harvest at the market and give it to them, and he needs more crop to get enough coins. Of course, he doesn’t tell his brother Sannegowda that he is trying to raise more money for the inglees’ chanda. Sannegowda has got his head turned and has joined the swarajya chaluvali, along with some other youths. They talk of a Gandhi thatha who is rousing ordinary hardworking people like them to make the inglees go away. Well, Doddegowda agrees, the inglees gummas have to go, but who will pay the price they demand to do that? Doddegowda is not willing to lose his brother over this. Sannegowda has already started wearing a white topi and speaks heatedly when anyone mentions the inglees.

Sannegowda also goes on about something called a Kannada state. He wants all the people who speak Kannada, living in far-off regions, to be part of it. Doddegowda likes people in general and he definitely likes it when they speak his own language. But where is he to get the money to support all these new people who will come in? They need land, they have to eat, wear clothes, build houses, find livelihood, survive … It is nice that Sannegowda wants to join hands with so many people, but he never thinks beyond the ideal. That is always Doddegowda’s job, as headman and elder brother.

Doddegowda’s problems suddenly get solved when Sannegowda gets excited about a new idea – drawing water from a well and pouring them onto the fields for the crop to grow, rather than waiting for rain. When he hesitantly raises the topic of acquiring land next to the wall, Sannegowda says that is a good place to dig a well and try his watering idea. Doddegowda sits back, happy to have got his way.

The banyan tree, however, puts paid to all these plans. Not even in their dreams will they uproot a banyan tree that sprouts on its own. It will bring terrible bad luck for generations. And whichever way Doddegowda tries to figure out the acreage around the tree, there is not enough, unless the tree is cut. He gives up. The tree grows rapidly and reaches a greater height than any other that the villagers have seen. And when it is 20 feet high, it grows a branch that goes, as though ordained, clear across the wall and puts down a root on the other side.

This branch is the way into the forbidden land. Doddegowda, like all his forefathers, has expressly prohibited everyone in the village from going near the wall. He dimly remembers his grandmother’s tales of a shape-changing man, a gumma who takes away the souls of young girls, and other tales of red-eyed spirits with inward-turned feet that waylay men.

But many people are quite interested in the other side. To the village boys – all younger than Doddegowda, whose grandmothers have not been impressive enough in their spirit tales – the area behind the wall is most intriguing. They are particularly drawn by stories about the rare and exquisite flowers that grow there. If sampige and kanakambara can get one aani for a strand the length of an arm, what price will these exotic flowers command? The villagers just shake their heads.

The only one in the whole village who can identify these flowers by name and qualities is Annaiah, the priest at the Kamadeva temple, which he has built with his own hands on this side of the wall, some distance from the banyan tree. Built overnight, whisper some people, staring with awe at Annaiah who, with his flowing dark hair and beard, looks like an exotic fakir.

Habitually, the entire village suspends work after sundown and sits around at the temple, listening to Annaiah. Any visitor to the village is also taken straightaway to be initiated into his tales.

In his deep, resonant voice that always leaves echoes and shadows, Annaiah sings. The songs are in an alien language which the village hears from him every day, but no one is familiar with. No one knows the words, but somehow everyone understands. No one dares to ask how or why. What if it is black magic or something? With Annaiah, one never knows.

Once the song is over, he starts a story in their language. Perhaps the one about how, once in seven full moons, Kamadeva, the god of love, comes and searches among all those flowers beyond the wall for his five flower arrows: the quiet mango flower, the wonderful asoka, the deep kamala, the mysterious neela kamala and the ethereal mallige, which Annaiah calls the swetasanchari.

Annaiah’s names for the flower garden on the other side of the wall are gospel. He reels off ancient-sounding names: nagakanye, amarasugandhi, suramohika, jayatilake, ananyamohini … Even Sannegowda’s great-grandson, Krishnegowda, who goes to the market town to study botany, generations later, does not dream of calling them anything else.

Annaiah says Kamadeva’s swetasanchari is not the regular mallige that grows on this side of the wall. The village girls can string up mallige and wear it in their hair, but not the swetasanchari – that is not what it’s for, he warns them. It has a heady fragrance and delicate white petals and should be used only to garland the green-skinned Kamadeva.

On every seventh full-moon night, for hours on end, Kamadeva searches for his potent flower arrows of love. He peers under shrubs, digs the ground with his bare hands, gazes hopefully at the trees, seeks the tinkle of a waterfall, sniffs the air … At last, almost exhausted, he makes his way deep into the dark, fertile Aranyaka forest. And asks, in his mind, for help from medicine woman Deyi Baidethi, who is Earth in female form.

Deyi Baidethi, who bore her twin sons through Kamadeva’s divine grace, takes on the form of a herbal garden as soon as he thinks of her. There the mango and asoka trees grow, laden with lush bunches of sunshine-yellow, orange-yellow and red flowers, in plentiful profusion, enough to gladden the hardest heart.

Kamadeva’s hands reach out desperately. Deyi Baidethi nods. Vivid flowers drop down and his hands glow sunshine-yellow-orange-red. He has got his first two flowers, the mango and the asoka. Happier, he goes forward and finds, in the middle of the garden, the deep peaceful lake that no sound betrays. Two more flower arrows, the white kamala and the blue kamala, float there in majestic beauty.

Then Deyi Baidethi smiles and Kamadeva picks the glowing swetasanchari from one of the shrubs around. He blows at this final arrow and the yellow pollen flies away into the wind, carrying the power of all the other flowers. Kamadeva laughs with abandon, joy sparkling in his eyes. The pollen flies on the peals of his laughter to land on the nearest suryavamsi bud. The suryavamsi blooms bright red.

2

RAMANI’S STORY

ost people get bored with the flower story around this time. So Annaiah introduces the love interest. In a haunting intonation, he says: The king’s daughter, Rajkumari Ramani, the most beautiful woman in the world, is staring dreamily at the water fountain in her palace garden when she hears Kamadeva laugh.

It draws her like the call of the wandering jogi for whom even the content married woman leaves behind her child and husband forever. Without a thought, Ramani runs through the imposing dark-grey gates of her father’s seven-walled fortress, following the waves of that laugh.

On and on she runs, barefoot over hills and dales, over thorny paths and sharp rocks, her feet bleeding, her anklets tinkling anxiously, wending her way through dusty paths, uncaring of wild beasts or watching devvas.

She reaches our wall. But there is not a crack in it, not a single way in. She needs to get to the other side. She can hear the constant tormenting laughter there, calling her. She traces the wall, presses it from all angles, trying to find an opening. She even hits the hard stone with her soft fists, crying