Testimony of Crazy Bridge(REAR WINDOW)

Mannanam and Kaippuzha are siblings separated at birth by just a ferry. In due course of time, plans to bridge them began materialising.  Pillaring, concreting of girders, construction of approach road, scrutiny visits of engineers from Kottayam. ..All became household discussions in the locality. Amidst the general enthusiasm, some   added oomph. That the bridge to have solid footing human blood needs to be shed was widely propagated.‘ Testimonies’ of such bloody sacrifices in other sites were also in circulation. Parents and teachers found it as a practical ploy to frighten away children from loitering near the hazardous work-site. Finally, the bridge was completed, with a leachy pace, though. But when heavy vehicles crossed over, it had a slight jerk and shake. A jocose fellow tied it to a coconut palm with thick coir. Since the bridge was ‘put in chains’, as was the customary practice Vis a Vis mentally-challenged people ,  it got baptised as kirukkan palam  meaning, crazy bridge. Apart from the jerk and shake, the bridge made another hitch. The regular service boats could not ply under it, their top hitting its bottom. The solution for this problem was the next step on the crazy path: Take off the stern of the boat on approaching the bridge and row the vehicle to the other side like a canoe. Once the crazy zone is crossed, put the stern back and be a motor boat again!

Since it suits the occasion, let me recall a speech I made of another bridge, while I was secretary to the chief minister. He put forth a suggestion that we should take up a big project beneficial to the adivasi community and implement it. Thoughts boiled down to a ferry which happened to be the only link the forest dwellers had with the mainland.  A bridge on the concerned spot was the final idea. The permission was immediately granted with Rs. 10 crore to the project booty. As usual, the construction leech touched the finish line in three years exhausting 30 crore. At last, came the moment of inauguration. The CM and other dignitaries accompanied by a battery of television channels got ready. One of the scribes suddenly turned sceptic: ‘we don’t see the adivasi chieftain around.’  Scuttling a  ‘breaking news’, the local village officer , somehow found out the culprit and presented him, in the typical ethnic attire, delicious for the hungry cameras to devour. Some among the reporters asked the chieftain whether he liked the bridge, to which he said: ‘’very much.’’ The scribe probed inquisitively: ’’Why, that much?’’The old man explained: ‘’…before the advent of this bridge, we had to swim over to the other side wading off sultry sun at noon. Thanks to the bridge, now we can swim along its shade.’’ In the name of development government has built up many such adivasi bridges that tend to be non beneficial to the people and detrimental to the exchequer. The crazy bridge at Mannanam belongs to this category.

Once, my brother’s daughter Hema was driving alongside the ferry in Athirampuzha. She has been living abroad for long. Nearing the ferry, she told her little daughter Chinnu: ’’while I was young, this place had dry fish in plenty.’’ The six-year old asked: ‘’ dryfish lives in this pond?’’ She thought of dry fish to be some special breed of fish. Everyone in the car laughed. Chinnu could not get, why.  So she whimpered. ’’No pristine happiness and no ephemeral sadness as the childhood’’– Mulkraj Anand, it was.  Looking back at my childhood, that is what the crazy bridge testifies.

It was in my younger days that the NES blocks were established in India.  Jawaharlal Nehru and S.K.Dey brought up community development as a big national movement. Dey had put it accurately. That, instead of conducting government’s programme with the help of people, community development is all about conducting people’s programme with the help of government. Ettumanur block’s head quarter was at Mannanam. The B.D.O  in pants and dark goggles, roaming in an office jeep, stylishly putting a leg out;  the Vet doctor not far behind in full-sleeve shirt and pants  and other high-brow officials following suit  became the VIPs of  the village. To attest a certificate, all you needed was to reach the block office. For, the BDO was a gazetted officer.  If the cow or sheep fell ill, the Vet would come to your house. The employees of the block office began door to door visit to make compost trenches and to persuade households to plant cassia on hedges. Best quality seeds were distributed to farmers. If anything, it was a development festival through and through. Rural roads and traffic signs began to come up. People on their own volition gave away lands required for road construction. The supervision of these public works was left to local enthusiasts from among the public. Or else they came forward and took up the cause. When officials and citizenry joined hands, the pace of development accelerated. Generally officers were addressed with a suffix—Saar (sic for sir). Thus BDO Saar, Suprendt Saar (for superintendent) etc were knighthooded in a vernacular way. But, how to hood the unofficial supervisors?  The jock-pack of our mofussil invented a special status for them: chumma saar (chumma=for nothing) . In fact these nothing- knights were doing a vigilant, real time social audit on public works, accepting virtually nothing in return.

My education up to graduation level was at Mannanam, which was an educational centre. It continues to be one with a bunch of institutions like primary, secondary and English medium schools, post-graduate college, teachers’ training college etc. The church established by  Fr.Chaavara Elias Kuriakkose-the Beatified One and the educational institutions  including  the one in his name(K.E. College) launched by the church paved the way for our life and future. Future was the farthest thing from our minds then, Einstein providing the credo: ‘’I never think of the future. It would come by sooner.’’ However, the priests of Mannanam considered it their duty to prepare children for the future.  Fr. William, his long beard grown grey, lounging in the court yard of the B.Ed College was a regular sight. A soft man of equanimity, he was especially fond of children. Like Jesus, Fr. William too spoke to people through similes and parables.  Once he asked us about the attainments needed to fulfill a life. Education, health, money, wealth, good employment.. ..Our answers went on. For each answer, he would put a corresponding mustard seed into a jar and asked whether the jar became full.   After all the answers the jar was still not full.  He then decanted some water into it and asked,’ what of now?’ Everyone got the point. Big things in life are okay, but it is the so-called small things like love, sympathy, kindness etc that make it rich and full. I still remember Fr.Ladislavoos’s words on an American who dragged his life from failure to failure. At 31 he became a pauper after his business broke.  At 32, he tried his luck in electoral politics and failed. Two years later he had a ferther try at business and the result, the same. Thinking that a marriage would bring a change of fate, he got engaged to a woman. Unfortunately his would-be had an untimely demise. At 33, he had a brain hemorrhage. After a long tussle with the illness, he recouped and contested for the Congress, and lost. Two more attempts with the same results. Waited for 7 years and contested for the Senate this time. Hard luck!  At 56, he contested for the Vice Presidency. The result,no need to mention.  Again contested for the Senate at 58, and lost. Two years later, he won (ya! won) an election and became the President of America. The world calls him by the name Abraham Lincoln.

At school, seminary students were also with us for the general class as boarders.  Staying at the hostel and studying for both theology and common curriculum, they were formally called aspirants. Though teachers and fellow students called them achan kunjungal (father kids) Devasya Manimala sir, our Malayalam teacher would jokingly give them names from the school textbooks. S.K. Pottekkat’s essay Balidweepile visheshangal had  in it, Balinese vernacular names like Chokorde, Agungmas  etc. Thus we had an aspirant called Agungmas.  Normally the aspirants were calm and soft-spoken boys with navy- cut hair and a uniform full sleeved white shirt and white dhoti. This one begged to differ. Like the non-seminary students, he was a little bit ‘worldly’, enough to invite gossips. Suffocated with the guilt of smoking in secrecy, our Chekorde once asked the Father Superior whether it was wrong to smoke while praying.  The father said, ‘’wrong, wrong. God’ll damn you.’’  Later, Agungmas poised it in a slightly different way: ‘’ is it wrong, Father, to pray while smoking?’’  This time the response had a world of difference: ‘’how pious!  Thinking of prayer even while smoking! God’s grace will be upon thee.’’   Father Hormis was in charge of our moral class. No flimflam would work with him, sort of a tit-for -tat  guy.  After each lesson he would ask the aspirants about its inference. Whatever be their answers, he had his stock conclusion–God is the righteous one.  Once Agungmas asked him,’’ Is He that just? ‘Father invariably said,’’ Yes. Why doubt?’’ Agungmas had in fact, worked out a ploy. ‘’ look at that finch. It needs just one or two beads of cereals.  Still God has given it wings, so that it can fly anywhere and pick up as much as it wishes. Now think of the cow. It needs plenty.  But no wings. Is this justice?’’ Agungmas looked at the father as if he had his man. Father seemed clueless. Later in the day, he went for the usual evening walk with the aspirants. On the way, a crow over -flew them and practiced exactly what it was notorious for. This time the blessing was on Agungmas’s head.  Father gave him the belated answer for his query on divine justice: ’’now you know why cow was left un-winged’’

Crazy bridge has many stories to tell.  It had pellucid paddy fields on both sides. When paddy was full bloom, it was sheer green all the way. When water-logged, it would present an oceanic ambience.  The array of coconut palms along the side formed a raised ridge, spreading a soft grass bed just perfect to sit relaxed.  Sit indeed we did, and relaxed, though in a style slightly at variance with the Walden romantics. To us, i.e. my cousin Sankardas and me, those evenings were too exquisite to keep mum. So we talked, talked and talked. He proved to be the ideal company for the occasion. And he still proves to be one, not just to me. A senior journalist in Kuwait, he is one of the most sought after persons there. Like they say, he has become not a person but a ‘movement’ itself for the visiting movers and shakers of India’s social, political and cultural spheres. In the younger days too his was a nature that could saw only goodness in others, readily extending a warm heart and a helping hand to one and all. Hailing from Kaippuzha, my paternal homeland, Das joined me at the K.E. College, Mannanam for pre-degree. Thus our world grew, overlapping the two sides of the crazy bridge.

Inter alia, James Joseph joined me at the same college. In later years, when plus-2 education was introduced in Kerala, the state government’s chosen one to head the new department was James. Even by the pre-degree years, he had become a hero of sorts. His photographs and related news items were quite regular in the Malayala Manorama daily at that time. He was the winner of the state-wide elocution contest conducted by the daily. As part of the prize, he could go on a nation- wide tour. With James too joining, our evening gang near the crazy bridge became more vibrant. The trio discussed anything and everything under the sun, taking care not to exclude the sun. As Graham Green says,’’ In childhood, there is always a moment that let in the future by keeping the door open.’’  That door to our future was opened during those squats near the crazy bridge; the wish to get into the IAS included. It was not just the three of us; there have been many varied personalities that climbed up the ladder of life plying trough the crazy bridge. The prominent one being Cyriac Joseph, former judge of the Supreme Court.  Another one is Ramesh of Thadippuzha house. Ambitious from the beginning, the IAS and such employments were not at all his take. To become a business magnet was his dream. Without any such family tradition to back up, he really became one.  His dedicated efforts to build up the Gulf Mart, Kuwait’s largest retail chain, serving him in good stead to make that dream come true. The promoters of the retail giant have placed him at its helm. Theophin who runs a food chain giant in America  and  the IFS (Indian Forest Service) man Kuruvilla Thomas, who became the chief conservator of Uttar Pradesh  too climbed up in life through our crazy bridge.

This mute witness to generations of lives around has a tragic story as well to tell. In those times, the village could witness the advent of certain wild fellows, once in a while. Toddy shops served to be their grazing grounds. Finishing the tom tom there, they would take to the street.  Time for some sabre-rattling with ribaldry as the back ground score. Passers-by would run for cover, as households shut doors and vendors pull down shutters. While the bridge was under construction too this abhorrent scenario took place, once. At first sight itself, construction workers, supervisors and onlookers hurried to safety. A young man, the site engineer in charge of the construction was the lone exception. He stood there bothering only his duty. Enraged at this ‘arrogance’, a cantankerous fellow who was on his wild march thrashed him like anything for quite a while. Finally, the hapless victim was left alone on the road, unattended, till the police came much later.

One enigma stands unresolved even to this day. Why did no one come to his rescue? Due to fear?  There had been instances of local nobles interfering to save such victims, before. But this time no body moved. Was it because of the belief that to solidify the bridge, human blood had to be shed? Was the poor engineer the victim of that belief? However, the bridge was not at all getting solidified. On the contrary it was shaking. Or it was shaking certain beliefs. Crazy bridge is not crazy; heady beliefs are.