The Owner

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Margarita, hunched over in an ochre saree and reading the Holy Bible, sat in a secluded spot near the grindstone. Emerging from the waterlogged riverine mangroves lining the sodden riverbank and the river swollen from days of unrelenting monsoon rains, Amichan, a slender dog, stepped through the lush green meadow and into the yard. Ignoring Margarita, he stood still, gazing at the crowns of the four or five coconut palms near the house.

Margarita’s father, Vettiplavil Pappachan, had acquired Amichan from a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Kushalnagar. Despite his advanced age, Pappachan undertook the long train journey to Kushalnagar, driven by tales of the renowned obedience and ferocity of Chinese dog breeds.

One of the lamas had called the dog a name that sounded something like ‘Amitaw’. Missing the intonations of an unfamiliar language which he was unable to decipher as Chinese or Tibetan, Pappachan reorganised those syllables into Amichan. For the initial two or three months, Pappachan was in love with the pooch. However, once Amichan started to grow, his adoption of the Buddhist way of life annoyed Pappachan to no end.

Pappachan reminded his daughters repeatedly that vegetarianism, all-day meditation, compassion towards its fellow creatures and so on were not traits that behoved a member of the canine family.

‘A dog should bark. When necessary, it should bite too. We keep a dog for these qualities. How is it that you girls alone cannot understand that pets should behave how their owners desire them to behave?’ Pappachan counselled his daughters, who loved and pampered Amichan.

Pappachan tried valiantly and in various ways to bring Amichan around to toe his line. He had the parish priest Father Illikkal recite novenas for Amichan. When the prayers went unanswered, unknown to any other soul, he mixed chicken blood—which the shaman Nanu had put a spell on and passed on to him—in Amichan’s food. Amichan, in turn, did not even deign to smell the red-tinted rice, coloured by black magic and violence, and slinked off to take a nap somewhere else.

‘Every dog will start to bite people once he tastes human blood. Give it a try.’

The advisor was Meeshakunjappan. The very next day, Pappachan put it into action. He made a cut on his youngest daughter Anciya’s pinkie and forcibly held the bleeding finger in Amichan’s mouth. The pooch slurped up all of the blood drops as they fell.

Two days later, to check if Amichan had turned into a ferocious hound, Pappachan let him out of the kennel when a group of Bengalis – the catchall term for migrant workers in Kerala – were trooping past his house.

Leaping out of the kennel with unbridled enthusiasm, Amichan did not, however, bound towards the Bengalis, but made a beeline for Anciya. He nuzzled against her legs with an affection heretofore unseen in him and continued kissing and licking her hands.

Realising that in her thirty-nine years of piety and prayerful existence, she had never received such wet kisses, Anciya squatted down and put her hand over his shoulder. Where he had been expecting a terror- and pain-filled scream, this disappointing sight dismayed Pappachan so much that, in that instant, he decided on Amichan’s fate and destiny.

That night, eyes wide open, as Amichan sat up meditating in the moonlight, certain ill-omens started to appear in the scrolls of enlightenment from the heavens as they unrolled before his eyes. When he woke up from his meditation and looked up, Anciya, with a bowed head, was standing in front of his kennel, gazing at him. She opened the door of the kennel and let him out. He came out only after planting a slurpy-wet kiss on her forehead as she knelt down in front of the kennel. From that day on, granting audiences only to Vettiplavil Pappachan’s three middle-aged daughters and avoiding him like the plague, Amichan lived an Avadhoot’s detached and renunciate life.

Margarita was now reading the Bible that she had read from cover to cover fourteen times already. Her father had, decades before, dedicated her life to Bible-reading. He had brought up her older sister Jacintha as the handmaiden of the rosary. He decided that his youngest, Anciya, should dedicate herself to the service of St Antony. All three women lived only to fulfil their father’s desires. Only their mother could see how her prayer-filled, room-bound daughters’ hairs were greying. The white-haired lady was still carrying the weight of that sorrowful realisation, when she made her own horizontally-borne journey to the cemetery.

‘Amicha, appan is around. What’s the meaning of this recklessness? Why have you come now?’ Margarita asked in a hushed tone.

Amichan was deaf to Margarita’s warning. He stood gazing as the aged, wheezy wind that blew in from the river riffled the palm fronds. It was below those very coconut palms that Vettiplavil Pappachan had interred all the dogs who failed to rise to his expectations.

To his daughters, Pappachan explained the reasons for his penchant for canicide, ‘If you bury a dog under a coconut palm, then for the next three years the tree needs no manure.’

On that day, as the scudding clouds strained light, Amichan perceived many other unspoken reasons as they unfurled before his eyes in the scrolls descending from the skies.

The first vision he had was of a dog named Chemban.

As the dog tried to snap up the half-submerged porotta from the rice-water bucket placed for the benefit of cows in front of the teashop, Vijayan, the shop owner, flung a broken glass tumbler at him. Chemban did not take to his heels. Instead, barking menacingly, he moved in a crouch towards Vijayan. That brave-heart move flipped Pappachan; bribing him with a porotta, he took Chemban along with him.

After reaching Pappachan’s home, for one week Chemban ate to his heart’s content. He barked at passers-by and even nipped a couple of guys who trespassed. His reward for these exertions was in the form of balls of boiled fat extracted from beef and resembled snow white halwa.

Losing himself in the love and attention that Pappachan showered on him, Chemban became complacent and decided that his station in life was settled and secure. One evening, with his tummy filled to the bursting, Chemban pondered about his own identity. At the end of his cogitation, he came to a conclusion that he needed to lay down a few markers in his life.

Late in the evening, as the church bells tolled, Chemban began to howl. At first, Pappachan dismissed it as mere coincidence. However, as Chemban’s howling—which people believed to be an omen of death—became a regular affront to the sounds of devotion from the nearby places of worship, Pappachan decided to intervene. Despite his efforts to reform Chemban and repeated orders to stop, the howling continued unabated.

Thereafter, every time he howled, he was whipped with a thorny stick. After each lash, he looked at Pappachan and howled louder and longer. One late evening, when he barked at and lunged towards Pappachan as he stood with a raised stick, Pappachan smacked the thorny stick on the floor with an air of finality. And sentenced Chemban to death.

As he lay trussed up below the youngest coconut palm in that plot, the reality of his imminent fate dawned on Chemban. He summoned the last ounce of his strength, raised his head, and, as if heckling some unknown person, started to howl again. To Pappachan his howling sounded like defiant slogan shouting.

Pappachan retrieved a specially forged sledgehammer from his shed.

It was an antique piece that belonged to the family before they had migrated. One of his patrician forefather’s name along with that of their tharavad had been inscribed on its head. Forged from iron immune to rust, the weapon had lain unused and unbloodied for years. But when his hands grasped the hammer, a surge of his family’s legacy of power and authority coursed through him like an electric current. He dusted it off and restored it to a serviceable condition.

Chemban continued his relentless howling even when he saw Pappachan approach him with the hammer. Pappachan first paid his obeisance to the sledgehammer. Then, mouthing incantations as if in a ritual, he smashed it down on the dog’s head. The skull was crushed and blood gushed out through the mouth that had ceased to howl. Thereafter Chemban, who collapsed without even a yelp, bided by Pappachan’s wishes. With his spine curved like a sickle blade and his legs tucked in like a mesh, Chemban’s body lay in the pit dug beneath the coconut palm, a display of order and obedience that perfectly matched Pappachan’s grim resolve.

Although Amichan raised his head to give vent to a howl that was churning his insides like a hurricane, what escaped him was not sound, but something imperceptible and intangible like life breath. As he stood there reliving that ineffable spiritual experience, pollen from the coconut bloom overhead dropped on his head like downy, silky hairs. The pollen had the same fragrance as the bitch named Rani.

Palakuzhi Leelamma had come with a marriage proposal for Jacintha. The boy was employed in a tailoring shop.

Lying on his easy chair, Pappachan minced no words, ‘Everyone alleges that I have no interest in marrying off my girls. Not one bugger tries to find out why. When a Vettiplavil girl’s hand is being given in marriage, it should be done with the pomp and dignity that the tharavad merits. I don’t have that kind of money. In another four to five years I will have that kind of money. Or what’s the point in me praying so devoutly?’

When Leelamma was leaving, mentally complaining to her own God that no business was likely, Pappachan said, ‘I heard you have a litter of puppies at home. I want one.’

‘People have taken all of them away. There’s only a female puppy left.’

Although he replied, ‘Ah, then I don’t want it,’ after some thought, he followed Leelamma and brought home Rani.

Inspired by her striking beauty and a white crown of silvery hair, Jacintha named her Rani. Running about busily on the veranda and barking with authority she announced herself to the neighbourhood. Since Pappachan was convinced of her pluck, he watched happily as she grew into a fetching bitch as they moved into Kanni, the month in which dogs go into heat.

Perturbation over the unseasonal flowering and swaying of light red lilies that resembled Jacintha’s pink full lips led to Rani’s maiden walkabout to the boundaries of the plot. As she sauntered lazily drinking in the fragrance of the flowers, the dogs standing at attention on the other side of the fence growled in a musical cadence. Dazed by a kind of music she had not heard before, throwing backward glances she walked towards the house. Pursuing her, the dogs reached the yard, squeezing through the thorny bamboo fence, getting their bodies scored and cut and spilling blood.

Panting and flustered, Pappachan hurled whatever he could grab at the canine Romeos, all the while racking his brain for a way to fend off the persistent romantic intrusions.

The next day, a new kennel was built for Rani. Lying inside the cage built with poison nut tree frames and iron bars, she gazed at the lily flowers near the fences. Her stoic acceptance of the incarceration without a whimper of protest only made her go up in Pappachan’s estimation.

Then, one yellow morning, his misapprehension that her barking at the dogs lurking at the plot’s boundary was out of hostility ended abruptly.

The sky that was progressively liquefying lay exhausted on the earth. Saying a silent prayer that the damp softness of the sky should not stir her emotions, Jacintha, swaddled in clothes that hid all of her person, started to sweep up the lily flowers littering the yard. When she reached Rani’s kennel, a sight that she was certain was vulgar held her gaze and arrested her progress. However, for some reason, she did not close her eyes.

After extreme contortions, a nameless mongrel which had penetrated Rani—who now stood her with hind quarters pressed to the bars of the doghouse—was dangling from those bars, unable to extricate his engorged heart from his new-found love. Jacintha was transfixed by the vision for a short while. Pappachan too did not miss that she stood and watched.

The same evening, Rani whose profanity had defiled the sanctity of the Vettiplavil House was found trussed up at the base of the coconut palms. When, bearing the rust-free sledgehammer, Pappachan approached her, Rani wagged her tail affectionately. Her world was still filled with the fragrance of lily flowers. Therefore, she saw the descending hammerhead only as bunch of flowers that was bowing down in the wind. It painlessly made red lily flowers bloom on the crown of her head.

A month later, on the cheeks of the palm under which Rani was buried, pale red inflorescence blooms appeared and, without being pollinated, fell off the palm.

Amichan felt that the lily flowers’ fragrance was still rising from the earth. Attracted by that irresistible fragrance, Amichan buried his nose in the soil and using his nose did a canine pirouette. His nose brushed against a tiny cashew sapling that stood nonchalantly, holding up two leaves against the might of the wind. The little sapling had got rid of the cotyledons and was striking out on its own. On its tender leaves, Amichan smelled Chaannan.

Pappachan first saw Chaannan when he had gone to buy banana bulbs from Avira who had been farming for long on the Attiyoli Hill. A black energetic puppy that barked, ran and leaped all around the place. While handing over Chaannan, Avira had only one instruction, ‘Don’t chain him. Mark the boundaries for him. He’ll never go anywhere.’

Avira had spoken the truth. Within the boundaries set for him, Chaannan behaved sensibly at home. However, it was only after several days that Pappachan noticed the food left for Chaannan in a dented aluminium dish on the small veranda outside the kitchen door had gone untouched. A few more days of careful observation revealed an astonishing truth.

Chaannan does not eat any food.

After doing his duty of protecting the land during daytime and playing the sentry below the daughters’ bedroom window at night, Chaannan lived without having a morsel of food.

‘Dogs, after all. They must be catching mice or some animal from the land or foraging on something else they find there. Consider yourself lucky that you have a found a dog whom you don’t have to feed,’ Father Illikkal found a facile explanation for Chaannan’s behaviour. Soon, Pappachan stopped worrying about it. Chaannan was on good behaviour whenever Pappachan saw him.

Until one moonless night many months later.

At 3.30 a.m., a centipede bit Pappachan on the inside of his right thigh. As he screamed in pain and leaped up, he noticed that the lights in his daughters’ bedroom did not come on immediately. He opened his window and, when he noticed someone scurrying away from near the window of his daughters’ room, forgetting his own pain, Pappachan shouted, ‘Chaanna, get him . . . get him.’

There was no Chaannan present and voting to get anyone. The absence of Chaannan was manifold more painful than the centipede’s bite. Early in the morning, when his daughters were getting ready for the church, Pappachan inspected the fences for any break in them. Chaannan was found lying below a tall, spread-out jackfruit tree. As soon as he saw Pappachan, he got up and got busy with his duties.

Thereafter, Pappachan lost faith in Chaannan’s patrolling. He left his window open and spent sleepless nights to find out if anyone was approaching his daughters’ bedroom window. Certain that some paramour would appear, as he kept listening for his footsteps and watched, what he saw was Chaannan’s extraordinary night life.

Until 3 a.m., Chaannan stood vigil beside Pappachan’s daughters’ window. Then he took the main road to the town. To find out the purpose of his nocturnal excursion, Pappachan followed him with the enthusiasm of a private detective. Chaannan’s destination was the town’s line of butcher shops. He filled his tummy with the offal thrown away by the butchers. Once he had his fill, he retraced his steps back home. And then he continued to do the quotidian duties of a dog.

Lying on the armchair and reciting his prayers, Pappachan pondered over the lifestyle of his mutt. The dented aluminium dish he keeps for him lays spurned, visited only by a swarm of flies. And, in search of food, he goes to others who are not his owners.

The easy chair rocked from side to side.

What is the connection between a dog and humans? The food that the owner gives. A dog who refuses his food is independent of the owner.

The easy chair stopped moving.

Chaannan was chained to the window bars of Pappachan’s daughters’ room using a chain with oblong links. He lay in silence gazing at the compound where he used to roam freely. He watched green shoots of plants sprouting from the ground; the flowering vines that were climbing on the fence posts; crickets and silver-winged insects hopping in between grass stalks and taking flight; little birds resting on the broad yellow leaves that resembled fallen stars dropped from the wild jackfruit tree which had stopped growing vertically in its keenness to branch out. The sights were so wholesome that his stomach forgot its duty of giving rise to and registering hunger.

Many intruded into the compound, breaching the fences. Chaannan was unaware of such happenings. Whatever the daughters served on the aluminium dish remained untouched and rotted. He rejected the food that he considered was not his with a certain smugness. Pappachan reiterated to his daughters that Chaannan was an arrogant and highly intractable dog. He needed no further justification to kill him.

Chaannan too was hog-tied and left beneath the coconut palms. When he started to walk carrying the sledgehammer, Pappachan felt an unfamiliar heaviness. He looked at his arms with their sagging muscles and wrinkles and wondered if he were seeing them after a long time. The growing wrinkles on his body did not trouble him. However, the realisation that he no longer possessed the strength to deliver a life-ending blow on Chaannan made steam rise in his eyes and spill over as scalding tears.

In despair, after dropping the hammer, he sat on the ground and looked up. Above him was a dhaman tree with low branches. Pappachan threw a rope over one of the branches. He made a noose on one end and slipped it over the tired and drooping neck of Chaannan. After addressing the phlegm that was screaming from inside him with a demure hawking and spitting it out, Pappachan started to pull the other end of the rope. Without much writhing, Chaannan swung from the end of the rope like a scorched, blackened long bean. Once the swinging stopped, Pappachan took him down, laid him in the pit and shovelled soil over him. The snaky roots of the coconut palms soon covered the body.

Amichan dropped to the ground. The grains of sand that went into his ears turned into laments. He felt he could not go through such insufferable torments any more. A wind from the west was approaching, pulling rains in its wake. Deciding to head back to the river that was breaching the banks and encroaching into the Vettiplavil lands, Amichan stood up.

He could not decide if he was hallucinating but suddenly as if released from Noah’s Ark, they started to arrive from different directions – big chameleons, skinks, snakes, squirrels, chipmunks, monitor lizards, civet cats, palm civets, hares, rabbits and many other unknown animals. Like the wavelets in the waters flowing around him, they caressed and kissed Amichan and passed along. Their murmurs contained the name Chanthu.

Initially, Pappachan could not understand why toddy palms had started to sprout all over his land. He also did not know it had a connection to someone getting into the chicken coop, biting the necks of his hens and drinking their blood. Only when he saw civet cat droppings containing toddy palm nuts near the well he realised that his property was playing host to this creature. While he waited for the civet cat to show up in the night, Pappachan realised that many others were slipping into his property uninvited and unknown to him. Creatures who knew not of human languages, boundaries, or ownership rights. He needed a dog to stop them.

When he brought the piebald black and white dog from the Chekkeyeri Kurichiya Colony, famous from the times of Pazhassi Raja for its hunting hounds, he did not bear a name. Pappachan christened him Chanthu. Among the dogs he had reared, Chanthu was his most favourite. The animal had all the characteristics that he wished for in a dog. It barked; it bit people; it ate only foods that he gave him; it never left the compound. During daytime, he bit, smashed on the ground and killed the hares, squirrels, monitor lizards and mongooses that ran into the compound and placed their bodies before Pappachan as evidence of his toils and offerings to his master. Every day, Pappachan’s disgusted daughters had to remove the bones of a different animal from their dining table.

On a moonlit night, hearing sounds from near what was locally called the matchbox tree, Chanthu ran in and started to bark. Droppings of a civet cat trembling in fear from the top of the tree fell near him.

Although his old age tried to trip him up on the way, shining a high-power flashlight, Pappachan managed to reach the tree without falling down.

When he shined it up the tree, the beam hit the civet cat’s eyes precisely. Pinning the animal with the high lumen spear, Pappachan screamed for his daughters. As was the practice, they arrived and shook the tree trunk. Disoriented by the high beam and unsettled by the shaking of the tree, the civet cat lost its hold on the branch and fell down. When it saw Chanthu dashing towards it, dithering only for a fraction of an instant, it bolted from what was a certain death. When Chanthu set off in hot pursuit, Pappachan returned to his house in peace, convinced as he was of Chanthu’s hunting skills.

The civet cat was the fastest animal Chanthu had encountered till date. Speeding over fallen rubber leaves, untilled patches under the coconut palms and through nettles, climbing over stone stiles, hopping on the resilient branches of kaivan shrubs, leaping from one rock to another, the civet cat ran onto a narrow promontory on a hill framed by the full moon.

Once it reached the tip of the promontory, the civet cat vanished. After scampering and sniffing around for a long time and still unable to locate the animal, for the first time in his life, Chanthu admitted defeat and walked back, a very disappointed dog.

As he descended the hill, walking among the shiny boulders that lay bathed in the moonlight, one of the smaller boulders he brushed against started to roll down the hillside. As he stood watching its progress downhill, astonishing him, the stone stopped suddenly with no visible obstacle on the way. Next, it came alive and stood up on its feet. Chanthu realised it was no boulder but an old, scaly anteater.

Pawing the hard black rock, Chanthu sped towards the anteater. However, contrary to his expectations, the creature did not turn tail. It swivelled and stood facing the moon. From its eyes, powerful beams of something other than light hit Chanthu and immobilised him.

‘Who are you?’ the anteater asked in a voice as serene as the night breeze on that hill.

It kept its gaze fixed on the stunned Chanthu and asked again, ‘Why have you come here?’

‘To hunt,’ Chanthu replied without reflection.

‘Is it to quell your hunger?’ the breeze again.

‘No, I’m doing it for my owner.’ This time Chanthu did not have to think twice.

‘Who is your owner?’

Before Chanthu could reply with ‘Vettiplavil Pappachan’, the next question swooshed in.

‘Can a living being own another living being?’

‘What?’ Chanthu growled.

‘Who is the owner of life?’ the anteater asked with unwavering eyes.

As he looked into those eyes, Chanthu thought of his owner. Deepening his confusion more, the anteater said in a low tone, ‘Only corpses have owners. Look below us, at that tamarind tree which sheds its leaves. By whose command do its roots grow deep into the earth or its branches shoot up into the sky? When its roots are hacked and its life is extinguished, it becomes timber – the corpse for the owner. Tell me, are you a corpse or a living being?’

Chanthu was stumped for an answer. Without waiting for his reply, the anteater shut its eyes, turned itself into a ball, and slowly rolled down the hillside.

As Chanthu lay in the yard mooning at the promontory, for Pappachan he had turned into a stranger. His animosity towards Chanthu – who had returned a defeated and craven dog – coiled and twisted inside him till it spun into a hangman’s rope. Chanthu too ended up swinging from the dhaman tree. Pappachan’s daughters dug his grave.

Amichan looked around the compound. Those who had grazed and passed by him were now enjoying as liberated, unowned spirits of the earth, branches and skies. He rose to his feet weakly. As he started to move towards the riverine mangroves that were nervously watching the approaching high winds, he saw Margarita – three-fourths of her hair grey – by the side of the grindstone. Puzzled why the despondent look on her face that had taken it over years ago was still unchanged, he changed direction and went towards her.

Before her gesture with a tilt of her head to flee from there could register, the lasso Pappachan had thrown around Amichan’s neck tightened. The tired old man turned energetic as soon as he found another dog to kill. When he was dragging the mutt towards the river, Anciya came out of the house and said, ‘Appa, let it go. Let it go and live somewhere else.’

At that moment, a loud thunderclap drowned out the string of diamond-encrusted obscenities her father hurled at her. Sensing that he lacked the strength to haul Amichan up the dhaman tree branch, he had worked out an easy way to kill the dog. Tie a stone to his neck and push him into the river. He had chosen and kept ready a suitable stone on the highest point of the river bank. Since he wanted to do the gruesome act himself, he sought no one’s help.

Shuffling feebly and dragging the mutt in the drizzle that started after the thunder clap, huffing and puffing, he managed to reach the meadow on highest point of the riverbank.

He tied the other end of the rope to the stone. Convinced that the rope had to be passed between Amichan’s forelegs and under his body or the knot would loosen when the dog was pushed into the river, he untied the noose from Amichan’s neck and, holding tightly the dog’s dewlap, started to make another more secure noose.

From their window, the daughters strained to see what their father was up to. The rain became heavier. A bolt of lightning blinded the women momentarily and the skies opened up. In a cloud burst, a deluge of water fell into the river. The powerful current swept tree branches, reeds, rushes, grasses, and sedges along.

Through the snatches allowed by the driving, sleeting rain, the daughters watched the meadow on which Pappachan and Amichan stood slide and disappear into the river. They heard Amichan’s frantic barks as he tried to stay afloat in the surging waters, and saw him manage to swim out and scramble onto the riverbank. Inexplicably, none of them cried or wailed. Anciya and Margarita started to recite excitedly the Last Rites prayers which they had learnt by rote without their father’s knowledge a long time ago.

Meanwhile, Jacintha stepped into the yard, entered the shed, picked up the sledgehammer that was still untouched by rust and walked towards the riverbank in the torrential rain.