Tobias’s Saints

They stood, numb, staring as crabs crawled between Mariya’s small thighs that lay like torn petals on the sand. A moment ago, they had been standing with their mouths open, ready to yell at the sea pulling back into itself. But, when the towering waves returned, what they laid on the shore was Mariya’s tender body. Like a foaming, frothing wave, Victoria, who had run into the crowd looking for her daughter, crashed onto the seashore. Victoria’s sister, Dorothy, rushed from the shore to the sea and the sea to the shore as though she were a hurricane. The sea gusted from Dorothy’s body, sent the crabs flying, and set the crowd tripping and swaying.

It was Dorothy who had held Victoria’s baby close to her chest and raised her. She had never married. Her parents had not lived long enough to give her away. No one came asking for her hand, ready to forgo the dowry. In all the time she went from door to door selling fish and putting together the dowry for Victoria’s marriage, it was the child her sister would give birth to that Dorothy had dreamed of.

Dorothy was the valyammachi, the auntie, whose dream, the one that she had held close to her heart for seven years, now lay like a ripped piece of paper on the sand, soaked and wrinkled.

That afternoon, when Dorothy jumped into the water, the sea was black, and the sky dark. Moments later, police jeeps came speeding through heavy, sweeping rain. As they got out of their vehicles, they saw the sea-faring men running into the waves after Dorothy. Some policemen started sneezing, drenched and shivering in the rain. They sneezed and sneezed until their noses turned red. The women circled them as they stood blowing their noses, pointed to little Mariya and roared and surged like the sea, demanding that they find the one who had done this to her.

By then, those who had disappeared into the sea came back up and held Dorothy out to the police as if she were a blackened oar. It was the old man Camelios who said that she could be saved if they quickly took her to the hospital.

Thinking that they would have to file a case of attempted suicide if she survived, the police hurried her to the hospital in their jeep. The remaining jeeps screeched across the seashore, looking for the culprit, and the police rounded up a dozen or so young men playing cards behind screens of coconut-fronds and took them to the station for a detailed interrogation.

Camelios looked around, sitting wearily behind the policemen standing guard over Mariya as she lay like a shrivelled cuttlefish, pale and drenched. He calculated idly that had Tobias been among those who jumped into the sea to save Dorothy, they would have gotten her to the shore quicker.

At that moment, Tobias was sitting in the front yard of Camelios’s house, ripping up earthworms. He despised their sliminess. Tobias pulled apart their white blood, their flesh, their very essence, and threw them away into the seaside wind.

The screams of the women pressed themselves into the sea, then suffocated and drowned. When the rainwater came gushing like their chorus of anguished wails and started pooling around him, Tobias got up and started walking.

When Tobias went to the police station and turned himself in, he was more dispassionate than anyone would have expected. But later, when facing questions from the media, he covered his face and wailed in deep despair and despondency.

This is how Tobias became a news story.

A small story that could be read to the end while steam still wafted from a cup of tea, or watched on TV while sitting at the dining table.

‘How old are you now, Tobias?’

He did not say whether or not he knew how old he was.

People said he was probably fourteen.

‘What is your father’s name?’

He did not answer that question either.

People said many names.

But about his mother, no one asked him a thing.

Everyone knew the woman, Sarah, who died when cholera had cast itself across the coast. Tobias was four or five then.

This is how the story actually began.

After Sarah died, some people took little Tobias to the church’s orphanage. With that, the seaside forgot all about him.

It was Camelios who had first noticed him, this boy of around fourteen years,  who came to the beach every day for two weeks. Camelios curiously watched the boy lying blanketed by the sand like a son of the sea as the waves caressed him and sang him to sleep.

And this is where Camelios entered Tobias’s story.

Often, as he woke up from his sleep in the sand, it was Camelios’s staring face that he opened his eyes to.

‘Tobias…’ Camelios stroked the boy’s forehead. It was a kind of touch that Tobias had never felt until then. Camelios had begun to harbour quite an affection for Tobias. He felt as if a son had been born for him on the sand, grown up right there and walked up to him. His heart swelled with fatherly affection as he took him by hand and led him home. Camelios did not have sons, after all.

From the day Tobias came home with Camelios, Camelios’s wife, Leenamma, began serving him more rice than she gave the others, and the best pieces of fish. Tobias began to think of their three daughters as his own sisters. He learned to think of Camelios and Leenamma as his appan and amma and loved them like their daughters did.

And just like that, Tobias got taller and his limbs grew long and plump. Every day, he went to the sea with Camelios, and soon took on the hardship of the work alone, letting Camelios rest. Tobias’s movements carried adventure. Leaping to the crest of towering waves and diving low into the water’s depths, he invited the sea to spar with his valour. Still, he obeyed like a little child when Camelios told him not to take such risks. Even so, Camelios could never swim deep enough to reach Tobias’s heart that was like the deepest chamber of the ocean.

Camelios noticed that Tobias was possessed by a rage, like the wrath of the sea itself, when he saw crabs crawling around inside a net or on the beach. Apart from those moments, he was a child in Camelios’s presence. Just a child of fourteen.

To other boys his age, Tobias was some incomprehensible sea creature. They stood admiring his long, sculpted legs and his broad shoulders that looked poised to spread a pair of wings and fly. Tobias did not walk or run after the crabs, but flew, they told one another.

They huddled far away whenever they saw Tobias sitting by himself in the middle of books he had stuck upright in the sand.

As for the older men, they pushed him away with curiosity as well as disdain, not considering him as one of them but as the fruit of the seed that some Suriyani Christian saint had sown inside Sarah.

‘You can’t save the children of sin, Camelios!’ Father Aloshi scoffed ever since he began seeing Tobias with Camelios.

Father Aloshi was new at the parish. Whenever he called out to them, Tobias would simply walk faster, quickly leaving Camelios behind and not looking back.

‘You have to bring him to the church!’ Father Aloshi’s admonitions were aimed at Camelios.

Camelios was also upset about this. But what if Tobias ran away if he forced him to go to church?

The church used to be home to Tobias.

The church’s orphanage was where he had learned to read and write.

The church’s chapel was where he sang melodious hymns perfectly in tune.

How often he had eaten his fill in return for the singing!

This is where the course of the story changed.

Because it was there with the church’s priests that he had, one night, eaten crab legs for the first time. It was there that he had first realized that their clothes smelled like earthworms. Before he could even finish his meal, he had vomited. And every time he threw up the crabs, they had forced him, again and again, to eat. Tobias had felt that there were wet earthworms crawling all over his small body.

It was after the night he had vomited up the crabs and fallen into an exhausted sleep that, for the first time, he dug his hand into the muddy castings in the kitchen yard at the orphanage and pulled out an earthworm. He had been seven years old then. He would catch hold of them one by one, rip them apart, crush them and grind them into the earth. Tobias did not remember now how many earthworms he had squeezed and ripped apart in his life at the orphanage until the age of ten. It was exactly to forget all of it that Tobias had run away from the orphanage in the darkness.

Tobias had headed to the city that Kennedy, who brought vegetables to the orphanage, talked about. To its busy streets and its crowds.

The city carved the lines of abandonment more darkly into his face. He paid no mind to his hungry stomach and walked for the whole day, looking for some clean space to sleep. No clean place accepted orphans. At night, the tempting smell of appam and meat curry from the street stalls burned its way into his eyes and nose. Tobias walked on, watching the lorry and auto-rikshaw drivers, people returning from the cinema and pedestrians chewing their food.

The verandas of the shops on the side of the road were empty. He did not see anyone sleeping there. Was Tobias the only orphan in this world? 

His friends from the orphanage suddenly came to mind. His tears streamed onto the little books he had been clutching to his chest. He did not see anything for the rest of the way. He kept walking until hunger and sleep exhausted him and laid him down somewhere. Tobias had passed out somewhere dark, beyond the searching eyes from the police vehicles that were all around to pick up the beggars and orphans of the city and dump them in the corporation’s shelter.

Before it was morning, two young men putting up cinema posters woke Tobias. They fed him maidakurukku, the unsalted mixture of plain flour that they used to stick their posters to the wall. Starving, Tobias ate it quickly, dead worms and all.

The boys looked at the books strewn around him, and told him about a bookseller they knew and that they would buy him children’s books. One of them wiped off the gruel on his lips with his fingers and flicked it onto the breasts of the actress on the poster. The other poked at his sunken cheeks and looked around, whistling. In that silent night, as Tobias saw a hooting train speeding between his ears toward him, he scrambled up and ran. But their long, thick arms picked him up and placed him in front of them, and ordered him to do whatever they wanted of him.

After they left, he felt the worms from the maidakurukku writhe in his stomach, and he collapsed from the pain, thrashing and squirming.

In his initial days in the city, lorry drivers and street thugs came looking for him. They smelled like the cooked meat from the food stalls. After that, others were beside him, each one smelling of something different. Tobias got to know the smells of policemen, Hindu swamis and Muslim mollakkas, students, wayside vendors, travellers and street prostitutes. They offered him all the porotta and meat he wanted, or gave him spare change, and then took him into the darkness of alleyways, into the urine-reek of public toilets, into vehicles parked along the roadside, into lodges, and, sometimes, even into the bedrooms where they slept beside their wives. Putting together the measly pocket change he was given, Tobias bought children’s storybooks, read them quickly, sitting amidst the loud calls of street vendors, and took them everywhere he went.

It is at the end of those four long years in that city that yet another shift happened in the story of Tobias, who now had the smell of a child prostitute. And it had happened only two weeks after he left the city on one of its busiest days and arrived at the seaside.

Camelios found Tobias lying flat on the beach, his face pressed into the smell of the sea. Hearing that Tobias had given himself up to the police, Leenamma beat her chest and screamed, ‘You did this … What the hell did that child do to deserve this … My God…’

They would never see their neighbour Victoria’s daughter playing on the beach again, climbing in and out of the boats resting in the sand. 

The three girls, Camelios’ daughters, did not cry or speak, only looked at one another in shock. Camelios sat with his face buried between his knees. He looked like an aged ostrich.

‘Why did Tobias do this to a seven-year-old child?’

With no answer to give, Tobias only sniffed his own hands.

‘Tobias is behaving as though he is mentally unstable…’

This is where the story ended, with the police and juvenile court taking on the responsibility for Tobias’s body that reeked of the unbearable stench of earthworms.

But the sea is still not calm.

It is turbulent enough to bring to the surface the sea-blossoms that broke off in the depths, to set them afloat like the little chemise that was shredded into petals, leaping with the unruly waves, flowing without course.