Memories of the Tide

Long before dawn the backwaters of Kuttanad lie like a sheet of ink beneath a sky still deciding whether to be night or morning. On the verandah of the old Nalukettu house, its laterite walls breathing the night’s final coolness, Devassy Kurian keeps first watch with a brass lamp and an enamel mug of chukku kaapi. The lamp-flame draws fireflies; the coffee draws memory.

His grandson Adithyan will arrive before noon, the first visit home since joining an aeronautics programme in Bengaluru. The boy’s phone calls are full of jet engines and software internships, yet each end with the same Malayalam lullaby Devassy once hummed to him beside a cradle fashioned from a rice-sack and coir rope. The old man whistles the tune now, soft enough not to wake Ammachi inside, and watches the river darken into indigo, then blue.

Across the water a country boat appears. Raman the ferryman stands aft, the bamboo poles a metronome against dawn. He nods; no words are needed. The village still speaks a language of gestures and half-smiles. Cattle egrets rise from paddy ridges, white streaks against the first saffron of day, and the scent of toddy-palm blossom drifts over the bund.

By noon the courtyard fills with tyre-crunch and laughter. Adithyan leaps out, lanky, sun-bleached, cheeks roughed by a Bengaluru beard. Two friends follow-Nihal from Malappuram in a football jersey, Samira from Thrissur with a camera slung across her shoulder. Devassy's stoop straightens. For a moment the eighty-year weight of bones and losses slips off like a shawl.

They eat on the floor as always; matta rice, mango curry, pearl-spot fried crisp, and Devassy's special payar thoran. Samira photographs the spread; Ammachi clucks-food is meant for the tongue, not for framing-and yet she lays out banana leaves at a diagonal because "the frame should be neat, alle?” Everyone laughs.

Afternoons in Kuttanad are slow as coconut sap. The friends borrow Thommachan’s dugout canoe, promising to be back before candlelight. Devassy watches them push off, Adithyan in the prow humming a new love song that wanders down the canal like a kite on a loose string. The old man’s eyes mist, as if the song is an incense stick filling rooms long closed.

A monsoon cloud, dark as tamarind, muscles across the sky earlier than the met office promised. Wind slashes the palms; sudden chop flecks the canal with white. By dusk only the smell of wet earth and panic remains.

Raman races to Devassy’s gate, breath hitching: “Appooppaa… the boat… overturned near Pallithode point… fishermen diving, but…”

Words scatter like dry leaves. Devassy’s mind runs instead of his legs; memories sprint past: the boy’s first toddle on this very courtyard, the grin when his paper boat outran real ones during floods, the day of college departure when he turned at the bus-door and blew the same lullaby back at his grandfather.

Night falls without mercy. Kerosene lanterns bob on the river where villagers search. Temple bells, usually sweet at this hour, toll as if they too have slipped. At last-somewhere between one prayer and the next-fishermen return bearing silence wrapped in a cotton blanket. Adithyan’s wrist still wears the red thread Devassy tied last Vishu.

Grief is a quiet animal; it curls at the pit of the stomach and refuses to be coaxed out. The household speaks in whispers. Samira’s camera, saved from the river, now rests on the dining bench, lens fogged. Ammachi sits on the floor, grinding holy basil leaves though no one asks for medicine.

On the thirteenth day, after rites on the sand-bar, Devassy walks alone to the small island that surfaces in low tide-a spot Adithyan once claimed would make a perfect helipad “when Ammavan finally buys a chopper.” The old man folds himself onto the wet sand. Waves nip his ankles like pups; the horizon burns orange. He sings the lullaby, voice rasping. Each note is a coconut shell set afloat toward the Gulf of Mannar.

Behind him footsteps hesitate. Samira has followed, clutching the camera. She kneels, wipes the lens with her dupatta, and wordlessly shows him the viewfinder of the camera. The last image taken before the storm fills the tiny screen; Adithyan standing at the canoe’s prow, wind in hair, laughing into pure sunlight. Two cormorants arrow past above his shoulder, wings outstretched exactly like the paper planes he once folded on this veranda.

Devassy’s heart trembles, yet in the photograph the boy remains forever mid-laugh, eternally between river and sky. The old man presses the camera to his chest. Tears earthward, smile skyward-rain and sunshine mingling in one fragile moment.

Samira slips a memory-card into his calloused palm. “For whenever the song fades,” she whispers. Devassy nods. The lullaby may crack, but here is another spool of music; pixels that breathe, that keep tide and wind alive.

Months passed. A framed print of that photograph hangs above the dining table. Schoolchildren from the nearby parish often stop on their way home; Devassy invites them in for sweet plantain slices and stories of a boy who wanted to teach the winds to behave. Some evenings he plays the recording Samira gifted; Adithyan laughing, cajoling the breeze-until sunset paints the walls gold.

One such twilight, Raman the ferryman ties his canoe and finds Devassy mending a fishing net he will never use. “Appooppaa,” Raman says, eyes humid with river-spray, “you sit here alone, but the whole village hears that boy’s laughter now.”

Devassy smiles, knotting the final loop, the lullaby humming under his breath. Loss, he has learned, is not an emptying; it is a room whose walls keep expanding to fit all the echoes love refuses to surrender. The back-waters shiver silver under a waxing moon, and somewhere, perhaps just beyond hearing, a young man’s song returns with the tide.

 

Epilogue: If this post reminds you of another story from Padmarajan, then you are right! This one is adapted from ‘Moonampakkam’ written and directed by the master storyteller himself.