Odollam Grove

By MJ Dally

Madhu craned his frail neck over the wall of elephant grass, then waded across the little brook to

the corral of the chained girl.

He could hear her call out for him under the noon sun.

“I’m coming Asifa!,” he would reply in song.

The elephant grass’ white feathery florets swayed like unhindered fate. The heat was screeching.

She looked the weakest that day. Her hand reached out to him like a written plight, her chains

sounded as feeble as her muscles.

“I’m hungry bhaiyya. They haven’t been giving me gruel.”

Madhu’s eyes widened in consternation.

He looked around in a recurring disbelief for the world’s detachment to her case.

“I don’t have rice, bachchi,” he began, only to rephrase at the sight of her imploding in

resignation.

“I’ll get it for you Asifa, in any way possible! I’ll ask around, or ask my new friend!”

“Who’s that?“

“Liga. From Europe. She’s come to see the sea.”

“When will you help me escape, bhaiyya?”

“Soon. That’s all I want to do.”

He trudged back to town. The sky was a tug of war between pink and yellow pricks of heat. It

would take time for dusk to wash them out. There’s a crowd, he saw, of men dressed in nice

smelling clothes that cover their entire torsos, even beneath the knees, that too in assorted colors;

they must be as generous as their abundance, he thought. They must own these supplies.

“Rice! Can I have some rice? It’s for Asifa,” he pleaded walking into a dingy provision store that

reeked of Areca nuts and rat urine.

“So you won’t be having any of it yourself, lowlife?,” a generous man asked from underneath a

red and white T-shirt, blue jeans and clean cut beard over a plump white face.

“Yes, for me too.”

He shooed Madhu away with a dismissing gesture of the hand and went on to declare he knew

Madhu wouldn’t be having any money on him.

“But I’ll pay later. On top of everything else, that poor kid is starving to death.”

No one’s response seemed befittingly human.

Madhu grabbed the first sandbag of rice within his arm’s reach and began walking out.

The sun shone upon him obliquely, casting streaks of lambent honey sifting unto his oily brown

cheeks through the tight coils of his dirty hair, and a pinch of salt rolling onto his tongue from his

skin, from fear for life, through a corner of his mouth. He felt like an odd hero. He felt a fleeting

peace.

Three whole seconds later, the first hand fell on his back.

A pain rang through him like a fever and he was turned around by brute force, from many more

hands that joined.

“Leave me. This is about hunger.”

But they wouldn’t; they tied his hands on either side of his waist with a long rope: there was no

way he could untie it. They took his pictures and called him a thief. He felt rough hands frisk him

for life, its source, as if to seize it, along with the sack of rice they didn’t believe he had any right

to. Heat exploded on his skin where the hands left, blood sprouted silently where stones and

bamboo rods lashed.

“Stop it. I just want to feed that child.”

But the blows kept coming like bouts of epilepsy in a frenzy of nails, a spray of spit, a gush of bad

angry breaths, and entitled rage boiling out of heinous economic and political arrangements.

“Stop. I am human. Stop!!!”

Madhu’s final bellow was not even human. It tore through the forest, the township and this bruised

world, like a harbour wave. And they stopped. The rope fell loose.

He surveyed himself as the men retreated, panting like bloodhounds. In the grey mist of

everything else, and his consciousness, he stood, an Adivasi Jesus bleeding from the wounds his

people gave him, each gash crying bright red tears of indignation, crawling down his skin like

lizards of agony. But the sandbag was still clutched in his hand; his little crucifix.

He walked on towards the sea, limping, then hurtling like a blackbird with a fractured wing; one

that narrowly flew out the King’s pie. He reached the Odollam Grove in the swamp.

She sat there pensively, in a plain orange shirt and loose white pants. Her sight was a fishnet cast

in the sea, across the mesh of bog trees, their low hanging boughs and the deadly green orbs of

Odollam.

Her golden hair disappeared into the afternoon sky’s glow. Her lapis eyes bore a sorrow as thick

as the sea she had flown across in search of joy.

“Liga,” he whimpered.

She turned to face him. Her pupils dilated behind their bright glass. She saw his blood.

“Oh, Madhu, what happened?”

He saw her hand, and the clasped half eaten Odollam fruit in it.

“No ! Liga! I told you not to eat that fruit!”

Madhu felt crestfallen. He began sobbing, smearing his sweat and blood over his eyelids as if

praying, as a disinterested world lingered around in stillness. He dropped his rice. He fell on his

knees.

“But,” Liga began. “This is an antidote to all uncertainty. That’s what they say.”

“The antidote to uncertainty is certainty. And the only kind of it we can ever have is death, Liga,

can’t you see? Oh Liga, I don’t have the strength to free Asifa by myself. Who’s there for her?

She’s just a child.”

“There never was anyone, Madhu darling.”

The wind swooshed past in rhythmless howls.

The waves hurled waxing and waning repartees.

“Bhaiyya!,” another voice echoed in their midst.

Madhu turned to see Asifa standing there, beaming in a renewed luminescence, as though in the

last trails of a dream. She looked redeemed.

He crawled on his knees to hug her. He wailed like a child on her shoulder. Liga joined and

touched the little girl’s head where the hair parted.

“How did you escape the chains, and those men, darling?,” Liga wondered.

Madhu clenched in helpless attention.

“My hand just grew white and the chains fell off. I felt some strength rise up me through the sand

and I could suddenly stand up and walk.”

Madhu and Liga smiled.

“Maybe I should finally make you some gruel,” Madhu remarked, to which Asifa replied:

“I am not hungry anymore, Madhu Bhaiyya.”

Liga went back to watching the sea silently; things were jumbling out of place for the three of

them, the sky turned into water, their feet into cotton, the wind into clay, time into wind, clothes

into bone, hair into light and history, into a massive mural of brutal, brutal sins they and their likes

were forced to suffer.

History is an endless tangle of errors, after all.

She smiled at the other two saying,

“It’s a shame we had to die.”

Based on real characters and events from 2018:

Madhu: Young tribal man lynched to death in Attapadi, Kerala over a handful of rice.

Asifa: 8 year old Kashmiri girl held hostage and gang raped till death.

Liga: Latvian tourist who went missing in Kovalam, Kerala only to be found decomposing 38 days

later, with forensic evidence of rape and murder.

By MJ Dally