Once I Was Prince - Part One

for Granny Letchumi (b. fin 19th C. - d. 1978) Once i was a prince in your highbeamed palm-thatched house timber and stone of hardened mud and cold green shiny cement in your village ribbed with drying splintering palmleaf fences buttressed by ferns palmyra jackfruit mango trees standing solitary sentinel in compound corners then just for a month i was a prince in your eyes i hazarded the Bay of Bengal on a lolling steamer and watched in unbelief naked children dive for coins in the Nagapattinam offshore anchorage just to be with you still a teeny dreamy youth and there you were afraid that your village ways might irk me make me want to go back before time the day i arrived a double murder in the island a day or two earlier another vendetta vengeance wreaked in blood for slights of caste contraventions other threats other life-taking threats for mere unintended insults innuendoes injuries to the state of one’s birth to the validity of one’s finance one’s moral upstandingness one’s looks one’s genealogy a longdrawnout court case for the plucking of a ripe mango from an overhanging branch in the neighbour’s compound sitting squat on your two firm broiled scarred feet your coarse borderless demure saree stretched to its apparent tatters your stalwart all-bearing sturdiness masked in that humble crouching posture your rough-rolled cheroot smouldering on the edge of the kitchen-patio cemented mudfloor and rolling off the corner of the wallbacked seat from where you listened to the swish swish of my coming down the fine sand-filled path rising swiftly furtively only to prepare the ceremonial washing of my feet hands face with the natural coolness from your own ancestral well the chembu as you reverently tilted it giving off just that much of thrashing water into my upturned cupped hands your meloncholy dreamy gaze riveted on my face my hands my hair my feet recalling perhaps the husband you moaned and whom I had never seen not even in a word-picture your eyes those bee’s full-trusting warm honey-coloured ensconced within sharply falling epicanthic folds watching without imposing but who knows how nostalgically your fear of touching me with those toil-knotted fingers lest I recoil worn yet tender frail still strong from serving two husbands over half a century lest I inadvertently even make a gesture that might make you feel unlike someone of your highborn bridal glory (Continued in Part Two)