Ferry’s riveting narrative on the question of good and evil
Excerpt from Ashok Ferry’s a fictional narrative that leads its protagonist to confront some of the most significant conundrums of what it means to be good.
By Ashok Ferry Penguin Random House India 296 Rs 399
Iwas born ugly. That’s what my mother always said. “Sonny,” she said, “when are we ever going to find a girl good enough to marry you?” A cunning choice of phrase, because by good enough she didn’t mean would the girl match up to my exacting standards, but rather, would she be goodnatured and kind enough to take me on. It made me sound like a charity case or something. I had visions of a girl in pinafore and plaits. (All good Sri Lankan girls those days wore plaits, also heavy glasses.) My mother had a smile in her voice when she said this, as if she were joking, but I could see the glimmer of shrewd assessment in her eyes — the look a butcher might give a lame horse, possessed of some vital secret known to all but the horse. As with all secrets, the import of it had seeped into me long before her meaning became plain and I grew up N TIO FIC — this was back then, in the eighties — with this great burden of ugliness upon my shoulders.
I had thick curly black hair and flat features. But I had lustrous, velvety skin, even if it too was rather black for my mother’s refined Sanskritised tastes. My one great feature was my smile — it truly lit up the darkness I seemed to carry around with me — and it was surprisingly popular with the girls. Naturally, I smiled an awful lot. As expected, the only woman who was immune to this smile was my mother. Because of this ugliness — or, perhaps, in spite of it — I was attracted to beauty in all its forms. The special incandescence that seemed to emanate from anything beautiful: I could feel this glow burning up my fingers till they began to vibrate, the resonance of like calling to like. (Or in this case, of like calling to unlike.) This resonance fed and nourished me: it was enough for me to stand in front of something beautiful — even if it was only a beautifully appointed room — for me to be subsumed by it. It did something to my brain, it filled the cavity of my stomach with a fluid that was equal parts joy, equal parts sadness. Joy because this beauty was so alive, all fresh and tingling like a shiny, round fruit in a market stall.
Sadness because the fruit said, look at me — look, but don’t touch.
At the age of six I contracted a particularly bad throat infection. Nothing that a course of antibiotics would not have cured, but my mother decided that it was plain to anyone but a moron that a demon had entered my body which, quite obviously, needed to be exorcised. Her Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a hospital with more than twenty years’ experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she’s been reassigned to another patient. The parents don’t want Ruth to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day, the baby goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is alone in the nursery. Does she obey orders or does she intervene? case was strengthened by the fact that my voice had dropped an octave and I could only speak in a growl. Add my looks to this, and could you blame her? Those days, there were many demons said to be flying about the hillsides of the Walauwa and I had a big mouth, so it was quite possible that one had just slipped in while it was open.
The exorcism ceremony was quite a complicated one. A bamboo-and-thatch structure was set up on the terrace in front of the house. The people on the mountainside worked for days. Costumes were brought out of storage and mended, drummers and dancers hired, the whole thing being as much a theatrical performance as a medicinal remedy. People came from far and wide to watch.
The exorcist was a man by the name of Kodivina Peiris, a distant relation of my mother’s. Kodi, as he was called, worked himself into a trance to the beat of frenzied drums and, at its height, took a long, rusty sword and slashed in half three limes on a single stalk: the reasoning being that the demon had been tricked into leaving the comparative four-star safety of my throat to enter the limes, and was then disposed of. But I was curious to see that other people too felt free to gibber and squeak, shiver and shake, finding themselves “possessed” during what should have been my command performance. Once they had taken a turn or two around the dance floor they fell back exhausted, writhing and moaning
At the age of six I contracted a particularly bad throat infection. Nothing that a course of antibiotics would not have cured, but my mother decided that it was plain to anyone but a moron that a demon had entered my body which, quite obviously, needed to be exorcised.
occasionally to show what good sports they were.
This ceremony lasted the entire night and I was truly shattered by morning. (“Naturally he’s worn out,” snapped my mother irritably, “the devil’s hardly going to leave without a fight, is he!”) But here’s the strange thing: we learnt next day that just about the time Kodi was preparing his lime juice cocktail, our family GP, Dr Dep — he who would have prescribed the antibiotics had we only consulted him, as my aunts had suggested — fell down the stairs of his home and broke a leg.
“Serves him right,”said my mother, “for trying to inflict his Western mumbo jumbo on us, the charlatan!” Excerpted with permission from Penguin Random House India