Read Online One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan - Free Book Online Page A

had been several years since he had slept peacefully. Even when the body is ready for deep rest, the mind keeps irking it just like the ant from this tree. How can one sleep like that?
    The barnyard occupied his mind wherever he was. It was only there that he felt safe. It was enough just to be there and talk to the cattle. When he was alone in the fields, someone would come at night to keep him company. Whenever Uncle Nallupayyan came, Kali was delighted. He was a distant relative of Kali’s and must have been over fifty. And he always spoke with great excitement.
    Uncle Nallupayyan never married. It was all because of what had happened in his youth. He did not get along with his father. They stayed in the same house, but they tried not to see each other. He found his father’s voice as bitter as neem fruit. The moment he heard it, he would run far away. When asked what exactly the problem was, he smiledas he explained, ‘When I was a child, he took me on his shoulders to see the temple chariot. Everything would have been fine had he come straight back home after seeing the chariot. Instead, he went to the prostitutes’ street, carrying me along. He sat me down on the porch and went inside one of the houses. I waited for a while, but it seemed like the man was not going to be out soon. So I walked back home on my own. I must have been five or six years old. Did I keep quiet about this at home? No. I told my mother that it happened like this, like that, and so on. Even my mother did not mind the fact that the little child had walked all that distance alone. She took umbrage only to the fact that he went to a prostitute. He came long after I had returned and said, “The boy got lost in the crowds. There is nowhere I haven’t looked for him. That is all our bad luck.” My mother rushed towards him with a broomstick and hit him on the head. She screamed, “You want a prostitute? If you come into the house again, I will chew off your neck.” It appears that my mother never allowed him near her after that. That made him angry at me. Whenever he saw me, he would grimace like he’d just drunk some castor oil. As for me, I could never forget how he sat me down at the entrance to the prostitute’s house and vanished inside. So, we don’t get along.’
    When Nallupayyan was fifteen or sixteen years old, the father and son got into a massive fight. Standing in the field, his father threw a ball of sand at him, and in response he threw the spade at his father. It cut into his father’s calf and the old man collapsed, screaming, ‘Aiyo!’ Scared that he would becaught, Uncle Nallupayyan ran to the house and took money from his mother’s purse, which she kept hidden inside a pot. He then ran away from the village and did not come back for six months. When they finally got over their anger at his stealing the money, they looked for him here and there, but they could not find him.
    Six months later, early one morning, when his mother stepped outside the house, she saw her son sleeping there. She made a huge scene. He could not answer any questions about where he went and what he did. He had grown dark and gaunt. But within a week he improved a little in his mother’s care.
    ‘I cannot believe I named this wretched dog the “good” one,’ his father murmured, brooding over what ‘nalla’ in ‘Nallupayyan’ meant. ‘I should hit my own head with a slipper. A dog that steals from his own home can even drop a rock on your head while you sleep,’ he fumed.
    Uncle said to his mother, ‘Is your husband suggesting that I go steal from other people’s homes?’
    When others asked his father about the son, he would say, ‘That barbarian was not born to me. Who knows for which bastard she dropped her clothes to beget this one?’ But he made sure he didn’t say any of this within his wife’s hearing. He could never forgive his son for earning him the reputation that he sat his own child outside a prostitute’s house and