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Good Friday is one of the red-letter days in Fingon the dance-master’s calendar, but let it be known that it is not the day itself that I mark.
What I mark is its passing: rung bell, closed wound, a day that comes, yes, and most importantly, goes. I do not bookend it with Maundy Thursday or Easter Sunday. These days, Good Friday has no more weight than any other day, aside from the choice I make to stand at the gate every evening and watch the procession go by, transporting the idol of Mother Mary from the west-end of the town to the east. I don’t stand at the gate for too long: it’s not a self-flagellation ritual, mind you, I’m not Maedhros beating himself bloody at the mosque every six weeks.
Today hurts, yes, but it spills only enough blood for a thumbprint. A tiny, pinprick crucifixion. But to know why I mark Good Friday with such intensity, you need to know about The Admiral’s Folly. And if you are to know anything about The Admiral’s Folly, then you need to know how inextricably that little structure is linked to the ancient friendship between Maedhros Feanorian, currently the Kozhikode District President of the Communist Party of India and Fingon, the town’s most in-demand dance master, and the former vicar’s son.
Before the CH Overpass scraped an arc out of its sky and the CSI complex turned it into a fistfight between a dozen slightly-different bakeries, Mananchira Square in the centre of Kozhikode boasted an enormous freshwater pond with a salt-crusted shore. The pond was initially built in the fourteenth century to serve as a bathing pool for the feudal ruler of Kozhikode, the Zamorin. Zamorin was not the name of a single person or family, but rather a title taken by the ruler, much like Sultan, or Shah, and centuries ago they consolidated Kozhikode into a kingdom and introduced it to the world.
Though these days it’s little more than a sleepy, rustic district with scant political relevance, Kozhikode was once among the most important cities on the western coast of the Indian subcontinent, and retained the title all the way up to the late 1500s. Perfectly situated on a wide, flat tidal bay with an unbroken shoreline, it had long been a land of arrivals. “The City of Spices,” the old books called it, where traders from the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, and China converged and set up trading networks. The cloth calico is, in fact, said to derive its name from the anglicised form of Kozhikode: Calicut.
The region’s rise was consolidated in the thirteenth century by the Zamorins, the Hindu rulers of the Malabar coast who had grasped what the other feudal lords of Kerala often refused—and still refuse—to understand: that the sea respected neither caste nor creed, only weather and resolve. Survival, they knew, would have to come from pact rather than purity. So they forged a centuries-long allegiance and personal friendship with the Marakkars, who were a Muslim naval force sworn to defend the North Malabar coastline against Western aggression, inscribing their maritime power into the Indian Ocean long before India-the-Country was even a glint in the eye of time. Their leader was the Kunjali Marakkar, a term which, like ‘Zamorin’, was not an individual name but a militaristic title, and the Marakkar, meaning the Admiral, would serve as the Zamorin ruler’s right hand man on both land and sea.
The Muslim Marakkars were wild, sea-faring naval chiefs, closer to outright pirates than privateers: fierce warriors who knew the coastline like the back of their hands, who met and matched large foreign armadas in battle as well as lured enormous galleys towards dangerous, rocky shores and left them there to sink. Surviving descriptions from Portuguese records recount tanned, bearded men with dark, lined eyes, salt-crusted hair worn loose with small braids around their face.
More often than not, the Kunjali Marakkar himself would have light, reddish hair from constant exposure to the sun and salt, having spent much of his life on ships, and the Marakkars tended to be taller than the average Malabari at the time, due to the line’s Arab heritage. They were trusted admirals and beloved friends, not merely tolerated but welcomed as and raised to the status of kin. More often than not, the eldest son of the Zamorin and the eldest son of the Marakkar would grow up together, playing under the same roof, with their respective strongholds being a short carriage-ride away from the other.
The Zamorins lived in an opulent palace in Mananchira: today, it is the site of a large park housing the old feudal bathing pond and gardens. The rest of it had been burned to the ground three centuries ago, when the last Zamorin king set fire to his own palace and himself alongside it, self-immolating before Hyder Ali’s forces from the North could sack the city. These days, very little remains of the old palace besides the bathing pool. Almost nothing, except a small stone folly tucked away within the park. Kozhikode natives called it the Admiral’s Folly, for it was built in the old Islamic style, with a curved dome-style roof, in sharp contrast with the rest of the stone fortress as depicted in old paintings, which had been built in the Hindu feudal-style.
That was where Maedhros and I first met in 1923, at a pondside alcove in Mananchira Park, where Thomas-uncle’s very-unofficial sweetshop used to stand. We were around four or five years old, and from that day on we moved through the rest of our lives together like halves of a breath. He was very beautiful, even then. His mother used to joke he was carved from the cloth of the Sultans of yore—or the Marakkar himself, a displaced warrior resurrected into a family of artisans. I was much older when I realised such a comment had not been simply an ode to his beauty. Russo’s every footstep was a verdict, every laugh of his was a blade, even then. Unfortunately, of course, the flip side of resembling the Sultans of yore, was that it would be very easy for certain labels like, say, terrorist, to stick, later in his life.
“Did you know,” he told me that first day, pinching me instead of saying hello like a normal child. “Did you know the Zamorin was thirty feet tall and just as wide? And you know this pond has a crocodile? I know, because I fought it twice already.”
“You shouldn’t pinch people,” I let him know. In hindsight, it was probably saying such things that made me such a pinchable child. “It’s a bad habit.”
Obviously, he pinched me again. He was very fair-skinned, I remember, because he was too young then to have spent much time running about in the sun as much as he does these days. He pinched people for no reason except that he could, had oddly greyish green eyes and a vaguely commanding air to him that I didn’t at the time realise was the result of being a first-and-doted-upon son, so initially I assumed he was one of the British sahib children. And then his mother called out in Malayalam, telling him not to pinch people he’d only just met (as if it was fine for him to pinch people he knew well), and I realised he was, unfortunately, one of our own. He pinched me a third time, irritated that his mother had caught him at it, and I cried because being pinched thrice for existing in this horrible little boy’s vicinity was too much for my five year old self to bear.
“Don’t you want to know why the Zamorin was so tall and wide?” he asked, as I followed him across to the pond because I didn’t want to play with my baby sister, but still crying because he had pinched me. And at some point he must have gotten tired of my hysterics, however, because he shoved a whirling palm-frond toy into my hand and told me to get a grip.
“Don’t play with it too much,” he informed me kindly. “I found it near the public toilets. You could get sick and die. You know cholera?”
As if cholera was his close personal friend.
“Then why did you give it to me!” I asked him, chucking the toy into the pond. “I don’t want to die! I’ll go to hell!”
“I’ve never seen someone get cholera,” he explained, like it was a normal thing to say. “It would have been quite exciting, we could become friends and then I could watch you get cholera. Sad for you though. Anyway, what’s hell? Can I come?”
I blinked. Being the vicar’s son and a regular accessory of his twice-weekly church-excursion, never had I met another child who didn’t know about hell, let alone one who was almost definitely destined for it already. I explained it to him, told him all about the demons and fire and even exaggerated a little to impress him, telling him that my uncle, Dickhead Cousin Finarfin’s father, once went on a visit and came back perfectly fine because he was blessed by St Thomas himself. And that if I were to get cholera today, I’d be dying right after I feigned a tummy bug to avoid church the week before, simply because I was tired of sitting next to Cousin Finarfin who was even worse with the pinches than this Maedhros, and so I would go straight to hell.
“Will you?” Maedhros asked mildly, looking over the pond to where my father stood chatting with Fëanor and Nerdanel. “That’s great. So your father is god?”
“No, he’s the vicar, stupid. So he knows everything.”
“Ah, the church father! Tell him your Good Friday parades look really fun and I promise to be quiet if he lets me come on one, just one time. My Ammë says I can’t, because I bite people. But I like biting people. You should try it sometime. Now, sit down and shut up about hell, it’s boring. Same ghosts and all are there in Meenchandha fishmarket on Saturday morning, just go and see. Let me tell you about the thirty-foot tall Zamorin. Much better story than your stupid one.”
He was, obviously, lying about the Zamorin. He told me a very complicated story about why all kings and sultans were, in fact, kings and sultans because they were the tallest and widest people in the kingdom. Perfectly spherical, apparently. The bigger the ball your shadow made, the more likely you were to be selected as a king. I asked him about queens and he shrugged, saying who cares. Then, because he had a congenital inability to sit still, Maedhros grabbed my hand and dragged me to the little copse of trees behind the pond.
Standing barefoot on the hot grass, he pointed across at a strange, listing stone folly with a round roof, hidden in the trees. “The Zamorin built that for the last Kunjali Marakkar, because they were the very best of friends,” he said, with a grin too wide for a true story. “And that’s why that folly still stands.”
“Why? Because the Marakkar was a Muslim?” I frowned, thinking he was trying to insult my father’s religion. “That’s not true! You know the Sistine Chapel? That’s older!”
“No, stupid,” he dragged me forward to look at it. “Who cares what he was. It’s unburnt because they were the very best of friends, and that’s magic, I said!”
At the time, I laughed because he made it sound like the end of a long inside joke that children with friends outside the church would know, or a complete lie that I didn’t want to offend him by disbelieving. I was too young to know then, but there was good reason to disbelieve his little factoid.
For the Marakkars had been rendered entirely obsolete decades before the fire. After centuries of friendship, the last Kunjali Marakkar began styling himself as Lord of the Seas in a similar style to the Zamorin’s Lord of the Shores. Technically, he had the right to such a title: the Marakkars were, after all, the sole line of maritime defence the Malabar coast had, and an extremely successful one against the multiple Portuguese incursions.
However, being granted a title like the Lord of the Seas and granting oneself a title like the Lord of the Seas were two different things, and the Zamorin could not have the latter. Bitterness grew at the sight of the Marakkar’s success, and the friendship grew tense. The Portuguese, humiliated and hungry for control, smelt the divide and returned to the Malabar coast with more firepower and a new offer: allegiance against the Marakkars, and a promise to make the Zamorins the sole rulers of the region, in exchange for trade agreements and territory. This time, the Zamorin accepted.
And so in 1600, Ahmed Ali, the last Kunjali Marakkar, was arrested and taken into custody—not by the Portuguese invaders he had bested time and time again, but by his own king and close childhood friend. Betrayed under a flag of truce, Ahmed Ali was dragged from his stronghold in Kottakkal, handed over to the Portuguese, and executed in Goa. His body was quartered and his bones displayed as warning. No hymn was sung over him, and nobody knows where he was buried, or if he ever was. The Zamorins remained the sole rulers for just over a century, but without a native coastal defence, they turned into sitting ducks for anyone wishing to invade by sea. And so, by promising a series of warships that were never actually delivered, the Portuguese slid neatly into the power vacuum, and established another foreign stronghold in the subcontinent.
But now, looking back, I think he truly did believe that the old stone folly was built by the Zamorin for the Marakkar because they were the very best of friends. That the Marakkar wasn’t hung, drawn and quartered by the actions of his dearest friend. Maybe stories like that only survive because they forget what they were supposed to be. Maybe that’s how people like us survive too: by leaning slightly, forgetting slightly, standing tentatively.
“You named him Mohammad Razul? Mohammad? Isn’t that your god’s name?” I asked Nerdanel, as she wrapped up my bleeding knee the third time I went to play at the Fëanorian cliff-house, so named because it was, well, built on a cliff. “Why on earth would you do that?”
This time, Russo had convinced me to climb up the old banyan tree next to Azchavattom bus stop with him, knowing full well there was an enormous bee hive with extremely territorial guardians around seven feet up from the ground. Obviously, the moment I saw it, I did what any normal child would have done: let go of the branch, dropped seven feet, skinned my knees badly in the process, and like any normal child, howled the place down. Equally obviously, Russo jumped off on purpose, landed on his own knees, and looked at me, scowling. “It doesn’t even hurt! You’re just trying to get me in trouble, aren’t you?”
Nerdanel-bibi sighed as she looked over at her firstborn, who at that exact moment had been lying in the dirt cheerfully kicking his legs, no care as to his own skinned knees, his sole attention focused on the two carefully kidnapped bees cupped in his chubby hands.
“Bite each other please, please, please, just one bite,” Maedhros beseeched them, in the way most other children wheedled for sweets. “Go on, do one small fight at least. You bite him. Or you, you go put your backside stick inside your friend. Or else I’ll feed you to the cat. Or to Baby Maglor, he has a massive mouth and very sharp teeth. And it’ll probably shut him up, he’s so noisy. Please do some killing, just one time for me. One bite, Allah, You bless me and make them do one bite, please?”
“Mohammad is a prophet for us, Finnu-boy, not a god,” she told me, before wearily shaking her head at her son. “Although I take your point. Calling this one by such a holy name feels blasphemous, especially when he’s doing things like… well, that, every time I take my eyes off him. Maybe that’s why we started calling him Maedhros. Mohd plus Razul, say it fast, and you get Maedhros! So hopefully, the prophet doesn’t come back and confiscate his name from mortal use.”
Maedhros paid no attention to either of us, caught in the grips of the then-undiagnosable. “If you, bee number one, don’t start killing bee number two, I will count to five and then feed you to an even bigger bee I’m best friends with.”
I turned back to Nerdanel. “Do you think he’ll go to hell?”
Nerdanel looked confused at my fixation on the matter before her face relaxed, remembering whose son I was. “Oh, almost definitely,” she said breezily. “Sometimes I feel like putting him there myself, generally when trying to get him down for a nap.”
I understood the impulse, doubly so once Russo scaled the tree once again to collect a fiercer set of bees, and made me hold them while he scampered back down so that I was then stuck in the tree holding two bees he swore to me were trained warriors who would sting me if I let go of them.
And very soon, I also understood the Fëanorians’ relationship to their religion, because when you’re the vicar’s son, you notice things like that very quickly. They were a family of artists and nominally Muslim, even following a few of the rules here and there: for instance, never have I seen a single person in that household touch a drop of alcohol, and Nerdanel enjoyed curating a selection of very pretty headscarves. But for the most part, they had a very casual approach to it all, blaspheming as and when they pleased. They also painted the idols in the temples and churches, Nerdanel-sahiba doing the murals in the Krishna temple and Fëanor both carving and installing the church-steeple which even my father remarked upon, saying he’d never seen Muslim artisans take on such work, because it was absolutely forbidden for them.
It wasn’t like that for me. My father Fingolfin, like I said, was the vicar, and when I was young I was very proud of the fact, because it meant he knew everything. Generally speaking, married men were not allowed to take the cloth due to reasons of celibacy, but when my mother died giving birth to my youngest brother and took him with her anyway, my father saw a silver lining within his grief. If he couldn’t have a fourth child calling him father, then he would make the entire town call him Father. And they did, his widowerhood giving him a grim dignity, letting him move through the world sanctified by sorrow, as if he had personally bartered earthly love for divine authority. Though I had to share him with everyone else, Kozhikode playing host to a healthy-sized population of Nazarenes, otherwise known as Syrian Christians, a religious umbrella in Kerala spanning across Eastern Orthodoxy to traditional Catholicism to Pentecostalism, Achan always had time for us. And he was always, always good to me.
He never said the word. Not once. Not in anger, not in a whisper. But the word, whatever word he feared might live in me, hung ambiently in the rooms between us, like frankincense. He never named it, but he did not need to; the holiest things are communicated heart-to-heart and soul-to-soul. There was a way he averted his eyes whenever I lingered too long at the mirror. A gentling of the jaw when he heard boys mutter Sister Finnu beneath their breath. And Achan never corrected them. That, too, was a kind of liturgy.
And yet, Achan always had time. A hand on my shoulder when I did my homework, always the first ladle of stew while my siblings waited, the longest stories. The smallest mercies. My father gave me all he could and made sure I knew how hard it was for him to give it to me, despite the way I was. He gave me his love parsed through the syntax of his belief: careful, conditional, and inescapable, world without end.
Maedhros wasn’t wrong about the parade, because it truly was a splendid one, and the highlight of my year. Good Friday, one of our holiest days, and its procession was the great and magnificent unfurling of our collective guilt. We would gather under the dusk-bruised sky, and in a slow-moving procession on foot, we would carry an altar of the Virgin Mary from the West of the town to the East, a procession meant to symbolise the spreading of Christianity from the west to our humble east. The most beautiful journey in the world, my father called it.
And though I was never a particularly pious child, at least by vicar’s-son standards, I simply adored the procession for its pomp and elegance. And most importantly, because it was my father who solemnly carried the altar at the head of the procession, a position reserved for the most important member of the Syrian Christian community in the region. Crowned in sapphire silk, the Virgin would rest sorrowfully in his arms, and I had always been a little boy who loved splendour and spectacle (I am, as you know, a dance-master), and I longed to be the one who carried her through the town. Even then, I knew exactly what I’d wear when I finally got the chance.
“Can I hold her this time?” I’d ask my father every Lent, and always he would laugh, place me on his lap, and say: one day, Finnu, it will be you who carries her through town. But till then, I could walk by his side looking up at her, holding tightly to my little sister’s leash (she was best friends with Russo’s most terrible brother, Celegorm, and had a similarly feral-monkeylike approach to life). And the entire procession would sing behind us, the same few old hymns.
Ente paapangal thanne njan marannu polum
Thante karunayil enikku snehavum tharum.
Even as I forget the weight of my sins,
She gives me love in her mercy still.
We would wind through the narrow streets, and people would come out to their gates to watch us pass, giving no thought to caste or creed in the face of such spectacle. The town was a wound, and it was we who stitched it shut. Fëanor and Nerdanel would always be at their gate, waving pleasantly and nodding approvingly at the various sceptres and props carried by the crowd that one or the other of them had carved. Or at least, they were there waving pleasantly until Fëanor turned his eye from craft and towards politics, by which time he had no time for anything at all. Still, I was young, and it was the best day of the year for me, walking beside my father, imagining myself in his brocaded shoes. Even as I grew older and more uncomfortable with doctrine and the lack of space it had for me, I still enjoyed the procession itself. I didn’t have to look at my father to know he prayed for me with every step he took. He didn’t have to look at me to know I prayed for him to not need to do such a thing.
Once we started school, Maedhros and I were strict and loyal backbenchers: if the term is unfamiliar to you, know that it refers to students who, by virtue of preferring the back seats, tended to be lackadaisical in their attitude to education. I, let it be said, was a born-again backbencher: I’d draw in my notebooks, stain my nails with henna (thanks to Russo, I could do such things without fear of too much retribution, as you’ll soon see), or simply just sit staring out of the window. Russo did all the same things, minus the nail-painting, whilst pretending not to listen to the teacher: but the truth was, he was insufferably clever. He was the class topper without fail, term after term, his somewhat lacking marks in English not mattering very much as it was a locally-run Malayalam-speaking school and his father’s attitude to English was hostile at best and terrifying at worst. The teachers didn’t know what to do with him, the way his brilliance brought up their reputation and his belligerence brought down their self-confidence.
For Maedhros was terribly behaved, no doubt about it. He was “a right little shite”, as Elrond liked to put it years later, would backtalk every adult he came across and do everything worth being punished for just to see if they would actually punish him. And he was the bunker of the century, cutting every single class he didn’t feel like attending: and because my painted nails and I couldn’t ever bear to face school without Russo, my attendance record was as equally abysmal as my marksheet, much to my father’s dismay. I was also, doubling my father’s dismay, a fantastic dancer.
I had always been a soft-spoken stereotype. It showed up impressively early in me, whatever it was that made others recoil from people like me. A precocious, lisping deviancy. It worried my father deeply, drove its way right into his heart and stayed there until he could afford to buy me a house so he could cast me out, a good Samaritan to the end. But even he could never bear to stop me, and so from the age of three I ran about in my little sister’s anklets and at every wedding I attended, and I would beg them to let me stay up and join in on the dancing the night before.
At home I was Sister Finnu and Sissy Finnu at school. Years later in my art diploma classes, we spoke English, so I was Finnu the F-word, said just like that, and everyone who heard it knew exactly what it stood for. I liked girls, I had little crushes, and I thought a handful of boys were handsome too but never could anyone, ever, compare to Maedhros, whom I had loved since we were five. I’d never thought of anyone else at all. I hadn’t known it could be any different. I had assumed the problem with other people was that they did not have a Maedhros to hold everyone else up against, and I pitied them for it. It seems almost embarrassing to admit it now, but I never thought it was truly possible for men to only love other men, or women to love only other women. Yes, can you believe it?
We went to a boys’ school, which you may think would be less than pleasant for a boy who wore ribbons in his hair and enjoyed dancing at weddings and painting his nails. That much was true. It was at school that they came up with the song schoolboys sing ‘for’ me to this day, only back in the day they swapped dance-master for boy-dancer, though the rest of it stayed pretty much the same, thanks to the Feanorians being avowed Marxists since the Party was illicitly established in India:
Dance-master Finnu with the ribbons in his hair,
Our dance-master Finnu, the Vicar’s son!
With bells on his ankles and a sway to his step,
He dances to the beat of a Marxist drum.
He undoes his ribbons and preens in the glass,
As he readies himself for his midnight mass.
Then he bends towards Mecca, head to the ground,
And worships our Mohammad all night long.
Yes, dance-master Finnu, the Vicar’s son!
It wasn’t, however, as bad as it could have been, nowhere near it. And perhaps that was why I continued wearing ribbons-in-my-hair well into adulthood and will probably die an old man with them still braided in. The reason for such confidence was not the fact that my father was the vicar and thus an important figure in the town. No, quite the contrary. My father never said a word about the ribbons or the anklets or the dancing, even when Cousin Finarfin’s father told him that all I needed was a few good slappings: the vicar’s primary public virtue was his kindness, and that mask didn’t slip for a second, not even behind closed doors. He never said a word about the ribbons, and pretended not to notice. And like I said, when boys followed me about singing about the ribbons in question, he never said a word, and pretended not to notice.
No, it was because of Maedhros. His fists operated on a strict zero-tolerance policy. He didn’t so much protect me as he violently discouraged alternative ways of interacting with me, and his idea of diplomacy was breaking someone's nose hard enough to make a point echo. The last time anyone called me a chaandupottu—sissy boy—in class, he wound up swallowing two of his teeth and all of his pride. Russo never gloated, or even called attention to the fact that it was me he was defending. He’d just wipe the blood off his knuckles and go back to whatever book he was pretending not to read. No one dared touch me as long as Maedhros was around.
Church was another war zone, though with better acoustics, and Dickhead Cousin Finarfin the Nutcracker presided over it like the bootleg saint of back-alley justice. It wasn’t that he was actually saintly, or that he personally never called me Sister Finnu. He only ever called me Sister Finnu, peppered with every other name under the sun, and regularly pulled out the ribbons in my hair, but god help anyone else who tried. One time a visiting boy snickered chaandupottu under his breath and Cousin Finarfin waited patiently until the sermon was over, before showing him exactly why he was nicknamed the Nutcracker. When his father took him to task for it, he claimed it was “the Lord’s wrath, delegated.” Dickhead Cousin Finarfin the Nutcracker, even before he turned into Daddy Finarfin, local politician and leader of the Kerala Congress, was a capitalist through and through: if he mildly terrorised me, it was character-building for the both of us, but if someone else did it, they were infringing on a franchise.
The two of them, as you might know if you’re aware of the political rivalry between ‘Comrade’ Maedhros and ‘Daddy’ Finarfin, did not get along, even then. Though they attended different schools, Finarfin being based at the expensive boys’ school across town, the rift was metaphysical rather than logistical. Russo, with his revolutionary zeal and tragic intellectualism, carried himself like a prophet on furlough from some higher torment; Finarfin, meanwhile, wielded his fists and scripture with the reckless ecstasy of a pathological arsonist. Their mutual contempt wore a thin veil of familial jest: Russo called Finarfin “Father Fondler”, while Finarfin returned fire with “Jihadi Goatfucker”. And yet beneath the volley of insults and regular public beatdowns, there was the strange, reluctant reverence one sees between rival saints, both convinced the other a heretic, both incapable of indifference. If I didn’t know Finarfin was almost concerningly heterosexual, I would honestly have been quite worried.
When Maedhros was sixteen, Fëanor unceremoniously pulled him out of school and told him that he was needed to head the family and join in the leftist resistance against the occupation, for by then, the British Empire was gasping its dying breaths and the Marxists weren’t the type of people to wait until Gandhi pulled off his seven hundredth fast. Kozhikode was the centre of the Communist Party’s activities at the time, and Maedhros was taken along to multiple resistance gatherings a week, the majority of them illicit.
The following month, Feanor doused himself in kerosene and lit a match before the town hall, an act of protest against the Empire that was so austere and wordless it turned into an enormous looking-glass for everyone who watched. That unfortunately included his firstborn son, who had been standing in the crowd by the express instruction of his father to guarantee that he would follow in his footsteps, and the fire successfully burned my Maedhros into the bones of Kozhikode’s political sphere. He started attending illicit Communist Party of India meetings, throwing bottle-bombs at British soldiers and organising rallies after any given instance of colonial brutality (of which there were many).
Aside from worrying about Maedhros, I worried that school would become unbearable without him: he was, among other things, the bluntest form of insurance for the ribbons in my hair and the henna designs I’d started to wear on my hands. I feared I might have to tuck-in my edges, make myself small and unbeatable. After all these years with Russo by my side, I didn’t think I could do that any longer. It was hard enough to tone it down at home, keep it to when only my siblings were around and make sure I took the ribbons and earrings out when the bishop came for dinner. However, it just so happened that I didn’t have to worry about school at all.
“You call him a pansy again and I… no, you say one more fucking word to him ever again in your life and I’ll tear off your cock, tie your fucking foreskin in a knot and use it to go fucking fly-fishing,” roared the sixteen-year old Maedhros, accenting every syllable with a backhand to the face of the boy he was straddling. “Understand me, shithead? Understand me?”
“Get off, get off, for fuck’s sake, I understand! Let go, Razul!”
“I don’t think you do. Tell me what you did, then say sorry!” Maedhros gave him another slap for posterity. “Now. You have ten seconds. Answer my question. What did I just thrash you for?”
“I called Fingon a pansy for drawing with henna on his hands like a girl,” the boy muttered churlishly, his cheeks flushed with the imprint of Russo’s large hand. “I told him only brides do it.”
“Good boy. And how many times have you called him that today?” Maedhros pulled on his ear. “Hm? Am giving you a maths exam now. Answer me. How many times did you call him that?”
“I don’t know! Fuck off, you brute!”
“All fucking day you followed him around saying that, didn’t you? Like you’re a fucking rat with nothing to do except shit in decent people’s houses. Rats also can’t count. Fucking asshole. Apologise now!”
“Sorry, Fingon,” the boy choked out. “Sorry! I won’t do it again.”
“Call that an apology?” Russo kneed him, right where it hurt. “Again!”
“OK! Sorry, Fingon, I apologise!”
“No, you know what? Fuck your apology. Your shit-eating face pisses me off. Finnu, you have that tube of henna on you still?”
“Here,” I was worried but had to laugh as I handed the tube over, because was he… oh, he was. Maedhros grabbed the boy’s face, holding it steady as he bent over him, using the tube of henna to carefully write out the phrase MY MOTHER FUCKS CATS on his forehead in beautifully neat Malayalam script.
“Maedhros, it’ll stain!” I pointed out, properly laughing now. “He won’t be able to get it off for days!”
“It better fucking stain,” Maedhros gives the boy another whack. “You ugly fucker, don’t you dare wipe that off until… eh, Finnu, how long does henna need to set?”
“Two-to-three hours for a good stain. After that, add some oil and lemon juice and moisturise the area. The design will be dark and long-lasting.”
“Hear that, shit-eater? You better do exactly what Finnu says. I see you out here on Monday without the words MY MOTHER FUCKS CATS on your shitty forehead brighter than any bride, I will be going to the mosque and using the prayer call speaker to announce to the town that your mother fucks cats. Then I’ll come to your house and give you a thrashing ten times worse. Got it?”
Russo jumped up, kicked him once more as a reminder, before turning back to me.
“Didn’t your mother say she’d skin you alive if you came home fighting again?” I cried. “Look at your shirt! And oh, Russo, you’re bleeding.”
“Not that bad at all,” Maedhros admired his bloody knuckles. “Very stylish it looks. As if I’m a bandit, like Kayamkulam Kochunni. Fucking the rich and sucking the poor. And don’t worry, Ammë won’t mind once I say he was teasing you and made you upset. Skinning comment was just because I tied our old teacher Thingol to a tree for half a day last week because his voice annoys me. Plus, she’s being very nice to me nowadays because of, you know, Baba setting himself on fire and all that.”
“Still. Sorry you hurt yourself, Russo. I didn’t mean to get upset. But he really was saying it all day, and I couldn’t help it.”
“Yes, because he’s the catfucker son of a catfucker mother,” Maedhros brushed the dirt off his untucked shirt. “He tries it again and I’ll write a whole story on his face, about how his mother had an affair with Salim the fisherman so she could fuck the cats that follow him around.”
“Why cats?”
“Look at his stupid face, look at my knuckles cut on his shitty sharp teeth. Half cat he is! I hate cats. Now. Forget that catfucker’s son. Come, jump on my cycle, let’s go to my house for dinner,” Maedhros beckoned me, shoving down the rear platform of his bicycle. “I think Ammë is making erachi pathiri today, you like that don’t you? We’ll go fuck around near Kidson after, Kalanthan’s should be open. Then we’ll go to our Folly as usual. There you make one of these henna drawings on my hand also, just like yours. Let’s see how long I can keep it.”
“Absolutely not!” I laughed, getting on the back of the bicycle and raising my legs over the wheel bracket as always. “You can’t sit still long enough, Russo. Besides, they’ll laugh at you too if you wore something like that.”
“Good, then I’ll knock their teeth out so spectacularly they will be shitting bridal henna for weeks,” Maedhros responded. “You draw it for me. Make it be matching with your one. Then, if someone says something to you again, I’ll pretend to be double offended because they’re insulting my hand also. Double thrashing.”
“Oh, you’re awful. Do you even like henna? You’re not exactly the adornment type, no offence.”
“Show me,” Maedhros stopped his bicycle halfway and hopped right off as he tended to every time he found something noteworthy (leading commute-by-Maedhros to be a rather unreliable mode of transportation). He clapped twice. “Your hands, please!”
“It’s the same design on both hands, Russo,” I laughed at his inquisitorial examination, nose almost pressed to my palms, because I was a somewhat stupid teenager. Sixteen-year-old Fingon spent multiple hours a day thinking about how handsome Russo was, how nicely his curls sat on his shoulders, how tall he was, how green his eyes were and how good he looked when he wore the sleeves of his shirt pinned up, claiming it made him look like a bandit, and… well, you get the picture. And yet somehow I didn’t realise that Russo’s sudden interest in holding my hands in his had very little to do with the quality of my henna designs, and everything to do with him wanting to hold my hands.
From then on, we got closer and closer in all the ways we shouldn’t, until one day, Russo kissed my cheek and told me that the only thing in his heart was “his Finnu”. Just like that, because that was how Russo did things: irreverently, with no care as to all the ways in which we were screwing ourselves with such an admission. Life went on, as it did for us. He would wait for me outside school every day, glaring at anyone who even thought about looking at me, let alone saying anything to me. He and I would catch the American pictures at the new Crown theatre each week, and I’d balance precariously on the backseat of his bicycle, because I could never cycle fast enough for his satisfaction. I’d stay at his and he’d stay at mine, and we’d fumble around awkwardly with each other, not knowing where to put our hands or what to do with them, not even after Russo started stealing Maglor’s terrible erotic French magazines and treating them as scripture.
And of course, the world turned around us. Russo got involved more and more with the violent aspects of the anti-British resistance, and when he was almost seventeen he threw a pipe-bomb at a British officer who tried to lathi-charge a corralled crowd of women, losing the officer a finger and getting Russo a terror-charge that never went to court. It didn’t go to court because I begged my father to pay to get him out, and Russo only lost a hand and not his life, because I was with him in the crowd when he froze, holding the small, homemade grenade close to him with a hypnotic expression I came to recognise and fear throughout my life. Because I, seized by terror at his stillness, slapped his arm so hard he tossed the contraption away just as it detonated, catching the officer’s side, and Russo only lost his hand. That, of course, was why my father paid to keep the charge quiet for the time. For in a way, it was my fault, for wanting to save his life.
When he was nineteen, Maedhros engineered a crowd-charge against the British Viceroy’s car convoy, and ended up acquiring two English baby boys displaced by the violence, grey eyed twins named Elrond and Elros.
Russo as a father was the funniest thing. Maglor did the vast majority of actual parenting, thankfully, but Russo’s ridiculous reserves of energy proved their worth in this department, and he would crawl across the floor on all fours for hours and hours with boy-twins on his back, roaring like a tiger, trumpeting like an elephant. He would twist around suddenly and toss them worryingly high into the air and catch them on his shoulders, cackling “silly pigeon-child”. The children adored him to bits, and they would have been entirely mad, probably either institutionalised or put into a zoo, had Maglor not been there.
Russo loved the children effortlessly and wholeheartedly, certainly. But Maglor made the effort to understand them in a way that would have confused me, had I not known how close he’d been to Nerdanel-sahiba. He taught them to read very young, and yet read them everything he could, alternating the twins between himself and Maedhros. Maglor answered to Abba like it had always been his very own name. It was wonderful to watch this scrapheap of a family, and even more wonderful to be included.
Always though, Russo and I would go to our Admiral’s Folly whenever we could. And when we were in the Folly, we had no time for the world at large. We learned new and forgotten things about each other every day, our curiosity about each other never diminishing. We fought and quarrelled and had phases where we didn’t speak to each other, but they never lasted for more than a day. Our reverence for the Folly was just as undying, and we crafted and acted out story after story after story of the Zamorin and the Kunjali Marakkar, none of which were true, though all of them were real. How many boys like me, born at that time in that way, could say such a thing? That our childhoods weren’t marked purely by discontent and repression? Not to say I didn’t have plenty of that too, but oh, so much of it was Russo and I in the Admiral’s Folly, our evanescent adolescence, laughing and loving as the Empire died around us. The shape Russo’s grin took as he got to a particular grotesque part of the Zamorin’s tale, just one of the thousand talismans he gave me that I carry within me to this day.
It was never spoken of. But then, in our house, most things weren't. Not when they mattered. My father noticed, of course, Russo’s presence in general had the subtlety of artillery, and it was much the same when it came to his presence in my life. The boots left by the door, thick with red earth from the seaside cliffs. The low, masculine murmurs that drifted from my upstairs room at odd hours, not frantic enough to be the casual chitchat of best friends. And most of all, the way I began to vanish in front of my father, day by day, in the way sons disappear when they begin to live by laws not written in any book their fathers had ever read.
He didn't confront me, because he wasn’t a cruel man. He didn't need to confront me. His disapproval was atmospheric. It built itself into the house, crept in through the cracks in the walls. I began to feel watched even when alone, even when Russo wasn’t around and I wasn’t even thinking of him, as though the wooden saints on our mantel had opened their carved eyes and looked right into my heart. The silence between us swelled and calcified, a fossil thick with bones he refused to pick at and I refused to relinquish. At dinner, he would reach for the salt but not meet my eyes. I was not simply wrong anymore, with my bells and ribbons; Russo’s queerness legitimised mine in his eyes, making it impossible to ignore. I was no longer mistaken, I was profane. In sermons, he started speaking more often of purity. Of Sodom and Gomorrah. Of thorns in the flesh. And so, everyone else did too.
By the time I was nineteen, I had trained myself to read Achan like scripture. I knew that a clipped nod meant he had seen Russo's bicycle leave the house early that morning. He was always allowed to stay over at mine and I was always allowed to stay over at his, because to disallow us meant to acknowledge us. A longer prayer at the dinner table meant he could tell that Russo had kissed me on the lips that day—we never went much further than kissing and awkward fumbling, because I would freeze as though held back by invisible chains.
It began to unmake me. Not quickly, not all at once, but incrementally, politely. I found myself swallowing my words mid-sentence, folding my hands compulsively, scrubbing harder in the bath. I dreamed of fire and brimstone and woke up sweating. And still, I loved Russo. I loved Russo, and I never let anything come between us, because he loved me too and I never wanted to take anything away from him. And still, I attended the yearly Good Friday parades, and though they were uncomfortable, I did not despair in that crowd, my sister and brothers beside me and my father before me. Which was to say I kept returning to the site of my own damnation with something like devotion. Still, life went on.
And then one day, when I was nearly twenty, my father offered to send me to university in England out of the blue.
“Why?” I asked him. “I’ve never scored more than fifty-sixty marks in any class, and even that was after Russo helped me with the work. Sending me to college here itself would be a waste of money, let alone England.”
“It’s a good opportunity, Finnu,” he explained. “I could sell some land, gather the fees. The bishop’s son went to the same university as Nehru, you know the Congress fellow? Such fantastic opportunities it opens up for them.”
“Acha, I was terrible at school, and that isn’t going to change even if you send me to heaven.”
“Stop that,” he said sharply. “Finnu, I let so much slide with you, but open blasphemy, I refuse to allow it.”
“Sorry, Acha.”
“It would make it easier for you,” said my father honestly, shrugging. “Your… in England, they’re not so fast to tease, about the dancing and long hair and all that. It would be easier for you to… be how you are there. “
“Who said?” I shot back. “Boys are the same everywhere, and if you send me to England I’ll be staying in a hostel—“
“I’m not sending you, I’m offering—“
“And the hostel would be all boys too. You’ve been there, you know they’re just as bad. Worse, even. At least here they don’t go too far because I’m your son, and because Russo would batter them.”
“Always, Finnu. Always it is Russo with you.” My father’s voice shook. “What is it, then? Between you and Mohammad? Tell me.”
I stuck out my chin. “Tuition class. And why are you calling him Mohammad? He’s not gone by that a single day in his life.”
“I’m calling him that because that’s his name! Do you think I’m stupid?” My father rose, raising his voice for the first time, shoving a finger in my face. “Fingon, you know people are talking, don’t you? You know that you’re both not as discreet as you think? Your sister is almost of age for proposals to start coming in, you think anyone in the church would ask for her hand if you’re running about with that Muslim boy? I’ve turned a blind eye—“
“Like hell you have!” I cried, getting up myself. “You keep acting like you’re bearing the cross with my name so bravely, like your kindness overshadows your disgust. But that’s bullshit, acha. You let me run around with anklets and ribbons, yes, turned a blind eye so kindly, and turned a deaf ear every single time boys follow me around singing that bloody song! Even Finarfin has stood up for me more than you have! How many prayer camps did I agree to attend? People are talking? How many of those preachers and counsellors did you tell of my… what, affliction? How many times did you tell the bishop? People are talking because you get up on that pulpit every week and beg them to!”
I had never in my life raised my voice to my father, just like he had never in his life raised his voice to me. A tiredness crept across me, one worse and wearier than anything I had ever known. I could sink into it. I could sink into it like it was an abyss, quaking with tiredness, looking like winter-faces in English picture books. A winter-face with no new-fallen snow or storybook-snowballs, just naked, biting coldness clawing its way across me.
“I’m sorry, Acha,” I told him, sitting close to him. Close enough that our thighs touched and fingertips brushed, close enough that he moved away almost imperceptibly. Like it was catching. “I’m sorry I shouted. But I won’t go to England. I won’t go anywhere.”
“Oh, Finnu,” my father closed his eyes, took my hand in his. “What am I to do with you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why do you want to stay here?” he asked. “You’re right. I’ve heard what the boys say about you, and how unhappy it makes you. So why do you want to stay? Tell me, Finnu. Do you love us so much? What if someone came with you too? Perhaps Aredhel, she would like to see Europe, I’m sure. Would you go then?”
Perhaps I could sell some land and a daughter to send you to university in England, wouldn’t you like that? It would be better for you there, I hear. The foundational doctrine of the Syrian Christian church was, after all, a simple theological appropriation of reverse psychology. Love the sinner and hate the sin was not so much a precept as it was a practiced maneuver: love your nasty, horrible, disgusting little freak of a son so much that you send him to a very expensive camp every summer. His finest act of yearly charity had always been to make a larger donation than normal for my attendance, so that they would pray extra hard over his bonny baby boy. Perhaps I could sell some land and part with my daughter to send me, who had never exhibited a shred of academic potential and didn’t have a clue about any mathematical concept more complex than long division, to an unaffordably elite university in England, was simply a way to say this is the price I am willing to pay so my congregation no longer have another sinner they must love.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell him why I wanted to stay, and that it had nothing at all to do with him or my family. I was not that kind of person. I was not like him. I could not just deal a wound and just go on living, certain of forgiveness. I had known very little of such a thing. Instead, I went out without a word and called at Russo’s, and the two of us went over to Mananchira to have another swim and not talk about things. Just look at him, I wanted to tell my father. How intoxicating it is to sit and watch the water roll off his shoulders. Why don’t you try it sometime? The sun was folding itself into the palms behind him, light stretched thin across the surface like a film of oil, or rolled-gold, a perfect glaze atop a perfectly frozen moment. And then Russo stood in the water and time ticked forth. I was still Fingon. I began to fear I would always be Fingon. That days would pass, weeks would pass, the occupation would end and I would still be me, pacing in circles, rattling the bars of the vicar’s son.
A heron circled right over Russo: one of the Kumarakom flock, clearly very lost. He looked up at it, delighted, nineteen and a new father-of-two and still inordinately excited at the sight of a rare, enormous bird. I could almost hear his thoughts: Finnu, Finnu, look at this massive fucking chicken! Its wide, skeletal wings cut through the sky like it were paper, then it folded into itself, turning smaller and deeper as it circled lower and lower. And then it curled into the muddy shallows between Russo and I, its feet sinking from sky to water to mud, breaking the barrier between longing and life with such impossible ease.
I stood there staring at the bird, barefoot and bewildered, thinking: here is a creature that can pierce both water and sky, and yet still chooses to descend into the dirt. And then the heron turned from Russo, and looked me right in the eye with a cautious, curious invitation. An eye filled with the whole world’s sky, all seven continents and every drop of every ocean, and I, Finnu, laughing in its waterlit rim.
Look at this, I wanted to tell the world. Look at this heron, who carries the entire universe in its eye and still chooses to look at me, to count me within the expanse of its gaze. What a tragedy it is that human beings are born with so much love to give, then forced to live lives too small and sparsely furnished to ever accomodate more than a fraction of it. How devastating that we spend our earliest years learning how to fence away and leave fallow the most promising fields of our hearts.
Then the heron lifted off, and only Russo and I were left. He walked towards me, put a hand on my waist, standing so close I couldn’t help but trace the water rolling off his hair, down his chest, further down than I should. “Finnu,” he said quietly, following my finger with his eyes. “You know why the Zamorin built the old admiral’s folly for the Kunjali Marakkar?”
I shook my head. “Because he was his dearest friend?”
“Because he loved him,” he said. “Because he wanted to stay beside him all his life, and nothing at all would matter without him. In the folly, at least, if nowhere else.”
“Is that true?”
“It could have been,” said Russo, and spun me around in his arms so I was staring at the little copse. “Just look at it, Finnu. Still unburnt, isn’t it? So it could have been. No, it must have been.”
Like in a trance, I walked with him towards the Admiral’s Folly. And then, the sun sank across the pond and varying bird-calls and prayer-calls ricocheted off the water. All I could hear though, was the echo of our own voices, glancing off the stone walls of the folly. Like we were not right in the middle of the town but in a vault beneath it instead, the soft copse of trees and relative irrelevance of the building serving as a spell to keep anyone from seeing or hearing us. Enclosed within a vast bell, ringing with us, with only Finnu-and-Russo.
It was I who was always enspelled by his beauty but it was him, here, who knelt at my feet, baring his neck. Just like that, my dearest friend, my oldest friend, mine and mine alone, set me alight. And still. And still, I was Finnu, Finnu the vicar’s son. I was almost afraid of the hollow ache between my hips, a spiritual womb, feeling as though I might die if I did not cleave or was not cloven unto. And I was almost afraid of Russo, six-four, fists of thunder, kneeling in such frighteningly effeminate submission. For a moment, the Folly felt like an oubliette of everything awful and twisted and wrong in me, everything that curls and aches and burns. But Russo could read my thoughts there too, like he could everywhere.
“Unburnt,” he said softly, his hand running up my thigh. “The folly is unburnt, Finnu. The mark of the love between the Zamindar and the Marakkar, to this day stands unburnt.”
Unburnt, yes. And I loved it, and I loved him. I loved him so much I could have wept, but I laughed, shameless, uncaring as to the fact that we were, technically, out in public. But Russo was laughing too, below me, behind me, his laughter sweet and dark, not frantic as it so often was in the dark days after his father’s death, lapping up my pleasure from the very air. There were moments, when he pressed himself behind me, fingers trailing down my abdomen and I couldn’t see him, where I almost panicked again, wondering if I had but created this phantom out of my own sodomitic desires, if this was simply a fever-dream. A dream come true. How often could anyone say they’ve had a dream come true?
“Unburnt,” Russo reminded me again, quietly, kissing the nape of my neck as he draped himself over me. “It remains unburnt.”
“Because they were the very best of friends?” I asked again, twisting the question so I could hear the answer anew. I had let him in, and he was holding so perfectly still, so the moment would last. His deepest breaths were mine. “Is that why, Russo?”
“Because they loved each other,” he corrected me as he started to move behind me. He was everywhere at once, his teeth grazing just under my ear as he took me in hand. “Because they loved each other like this. Like us, Finnu. Like—oh, just like us, Finnu.”
Perhaps we were just being children, still, playing our old games in a new, adult way. The love story of the Zamorin and the Kunjali Marakkar was pure fantasy and fable, after all. But it was a fable difficult to dispute, for the story of the Zamorins and the Marakkars, the true story of the rulers and their admirals, were taught in no national curricula.
It was, of course, no accident that this story was carefully excluded from the idea of India. In a nation already beginning to be rearranged by communal fictions, a line of Hindu kings with adored Muslim admirals was an inconvenience: proof that history was not always as obedient as ideology demanded. The story of Kozhikode shattered the neat binaries necessary for bigotry to thrive: invader and native, Hindu and traitor. It offered instead a portrait of strategic kinship, a coastal cosmopolitanism of sorts. In a country increasingly allergic to its own history even as it barrelled towards the most momentous point of its contemporary history, forgetting was just as political as remembering: forgetting was a public show of private obedience. So in the schoolroom histories of India, the story told of a Kunjali Marakkar who was less an admired admiral, and more the Zamorin’s sea-dog, who showed his true colours and bit his master in the end. For dogs, no matter how good they may be at walking on their hind legs, would always fall back on all fours and remind us of their beastly origins.
When it was over, Russo held me close to him in a way that would infuriate some far more than our lovemaking, and crafted yet another love story between the two, just as fantastical as all the others. It was dark by then, and I couldn’t see much of him, and once again it felt as though I were not truly there, not truly within my own body and he not in his. That we were dead, or perhaps not-yet alive, skin-to-skin in the damp heat of where we might have been before.
“You don’t think these stories are true, hm?” he asked, and I heard the real question through his heart, for my ear was pressed tight to his broad, scarred chest.
“I wish they were, Russo.”
“I keep telling you, Finnu. They could be true,” he said quietly, barely a whisper and only for me. “Perhaps they loved each other, and nobody wished to write of it, because they didn’t have the words. Because they didn’t want to learn the words. Perhaps that’s why this is all that remains, this folly of ours. Because always, always something remains unburnt.”
The Admiral’s Folly, unburnt. Like all the other unburnt things in the world. A sheaf of poetry in an old cave, stoppering the neck of a wine barrel. Saints who touched each other for too long to be immortalised in stained glass, generals with cold marriages, admirals and their follies, flickering on and on behind paintings and busts and martyrdoms with their unmistakable silhouettes. Neither ghosts nor saints: just people who would not live the right way, and thus were not allowed to die the right way. The unkillable stories that we try and try again to bury.
When I returned from the folly, my father was waiting up for me, as he often did. I could see the apology prepared behind his lips, the justification and benediction. But I was later than usual, and it was past midnight, and I was sweating and floating on my feet and kissed and kissed and kissed. The apology died, along with things I couldn’t bear to watch die.
“Finnu,” his voice broke, and his lips trembled. “Oh, Finnu. Did you lie with him?”
I could never tell him an untruth. “I did.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s my dearest friend.”
My father stood before me, wise and wounded, and for a second, I swear to you I caught the breathlessness of discovery in his eyes. The warm curiosity of the heron, the open invitation to a thing unfamiliar to yourself, that splendid thirst for wanting to know that we were all born with. How remarkable it would be, to spend the rest of your life knowing your son just that much more: a small thing to you, yet everything to him. And then the shutters closed, and the ecclesiastical betrayal sunk in: the fear that even if you suffered and sacrificed and performed your piety every year upon the streets, you might not attain the object of your prayers.
His eyes filled with tears, and he began to weep right before me, a shaking hand pressed to his mouth. I had never seen him in tears before, and I never would again. My mother, the love of his life, died in childbirth, and he lived in a country under foreign yoke, where unfairness and torture and death were everyday occurences. And this was what he chose to weep over. I was what most grieved him. How could one ever forget a thing like that? My father never lay a hand on me, and never raised his voice. He was not a cruel man. He did not need to be.
I understood the concept of understanding a parent, viewing their circumstances and their upbringing with aloof adult eyes. I understood the way my father was brought up, and the confines through which his mind moved, and I understood that he loved me very much, in his way. That objectively speaking, he loved me more than he loved my siblings, and it was only that the love took a different shape. I understood that for him, faith was comfort. But the comfort of one can be the undoing of another. And this image of my father’s overwhelming grief at my undisguised joy inextricably worked itself into my everyday life, my everyday self, until it became the all-encompassing image I had of the vicar. How do you forget that? How do you view a thing like that objectively?
“Acha, please. Please tell him not to.”
Cousin Finarfin glanced over at me and my father, frowning at the look on my face, then called out to the visiting bishop, who was robing himself prior to the procession. “Hello, micro-Pope, you’re asking Finnu of all people to carry the altar when I’m standing right here? Go in, give it to me, I want to carry it. Haven’t cracked a single nut this Lent.”
I gave him a grateful nod for his valiant, if characteristically awful, attempt, before turning back to my father. “Please. Please, the bishop won’t do it if you ask him not to ask me to do it. Please, I’m begging you.”
It was six months later, and the plans had been laid. My father was not a cruel man. He could not forbid me from my life. And so, he sold some land, sold our house, and bought me a small, one-bedroomed half-terrace on the other side of town. The sale had finalised weeks ago, and preparations had begun for me to move out of my family home and into that little house away from the rest. And then, just days before, came the cost, for everything had a cost: my father would be taking himself and my siblings to Kakkanad, Cochin, over nine hours away. They would live there, he said, because the new Scottish bishop of the Cochin diocese had offered him a position at a church there, and perhaps, in the future (for the British leaving India had by now become a matter of when, not if) recommend him for the seat he presently occupied.
That was the official reason. But everyone, including my devastated brothers and sister, and everyone who sat in my father’s congregation for the past few years, and everyone who knew of the perverse friendship the vicar’s son had with the terrorist’s firstborn, knew the bishop’s promise had very little (though not nothing) to do with the move. No, Father Fingolfin was moving away because he could not bear the sight of his son wandering so far down the wrong path.
The truth spread like a water stain across the town, soft and pervasive and inviting rot, no matter how many bishops and their offers gilded the story. Everyone knew. Except for the bishop himself, who visited for the Easter weekend and Good Friday procession to watch my father in action during his last service, and had the fantastic idea—realising that I would be staying behind in Kozhikode as my father and siblings left to Cochin, but unaware as to the real reason, being a newly transplanted foreigner—that I should be the person to carry the altar in the procession.
It would symbolise continuation, said the very blonde bishop, and I had, according to him, a particularly “innocent and godly face” and though dread filled me down to my toes I didn’t blame him, for he wasn’t to know. I knew that my father would save me from this, for he was not a cruel man. But to my surprise, he inclined his head graciously and accepted on my behalf, looking at me beseechingly as I shook my own head.
“Finnu, what’s the problem?” my father asked quietly. “You’ve come on the procession every year, even after you… what is it suddenly about carrying the altar? You used to beg to be allowed to carry it.”
“I just…” I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, determined not to cry in public for fear of looking even more contrite than I would be made to look. “It’s Mary, Acha. Mother of… who forgives sinners, who… you know this. You know this.”
“But the bishop doesn’t know you, Finnu,” my father moved me away from the crowd so we wouldn’t be overheard. So he wouldn’t be overheard acknowledging, through words unsaid, that his son was indeed a sinner. “That’s not why he’s doing it. He’s from Cochin, you know this. He’s just asking you to do it because you’re my son, and I’m asking you to do it for me, your father. How much have I given you, Finnu? This is one thing, a small thing I ask in return. I promise you, it has nothing at all to do with what I think of sinners.”
And there, again. Truth-by-omission. It was always truth-by-omission when it came to people like me, all around the world.
“But I’d be walking at the front of this procession, carrying an altar of blessed Mary, the refuge of sinners, while you all sing about… about… you know what you sing about. About penance,” I couldn’t breathe. I wanted Russo, but of course, of course, he couldn’t come anywhere near all of this. “Acha, please, please understand. Everyone in town, everyone knows how I am. Everyone knows about me and… about me and Russo, they’re just too scared of him to say anything. It’ll be so humiliating, Acha. Everyone will see it as a walk of shame. And Russo isn’t here, so they’ll... It’ll be so humiliating, please don’t make me do it.”
I saw in my father’s eyes that he got what I was saying, that flash of human understanding and curiosity dawning in his eyes again for a split second. That was the worst part, the fact he understood. What it would look like, and what people would think, and what I would feel like, paraded around like that a week before one of the most important members of the diocese left the district for good. And alongside foresight, pity: he truly did feel sorry for me, and what I would be made to do. He placed a hand on my shoulder. “Just keep your eyes on the ground. I’m there with you, aren’t I?”
“Please tell him I can’t do it,” I sobbed, losing my head at the prospect. “Tell him to ask Finarfin to do it. Please, Acha, please.”
“I can’t, Finnu,” he raised his hands, ran his fingers under my spectacles, looked me right in the eye though his face blurred before me, I knew the kindness of his visage. And yet. “If I tell him, then I’ll have to tell him why. I can’t lie. And I can’t tell him why. You know I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
He shook his head at me, pressing his hands into mine. “You know I can’t, Finnu. Just one thing.”
I wish I could think of those minutes with cool indifference, that it hadn’t been so significant to me. That in this world of war and bloodshed where people were dying violently every day, dance-master Fingon didn’t still wake sometimes thinking of the gentleness with which his father wiped his eyes and brushed his hair back. Placed a beautiful brocade robe, his own, his first, over my shoulders, and how his hands lingered on mine as he placed the altar in my hands, as if binding me to him. I wish it was mysterious and unparsable, that I didn’t know what he was doing and why. But I did.
Even now, I try to frame it neatly: a moment, a lesson, a thread. But the more I pull, the more it tangles. There is no clean cut, no single cause, only the softness of my father’s hands as he publicly pretended to unmake me in his image. We set off together on the most beautiful journey, his shadow and mine mingling on the hot pavement.
I stared at my own face in the glass case: pale and pinched, wide-eyed, lips pressed tight together. I looked very small and very frightened. As desperate as I felt. I did not want to be there. I did not. The vicar’s son, the nail in the cross. Step after step I took, and when my eyes began to burn again, I hated how perfectly penitent the tears must make me look, but I couldn’t hold them back. Step after step we all took, baptised by the sun, which shone for us and because of us. I kept my eyes down, followed my father’s footsteps beside me because even though I’d taken this exact route at least over a dozen times, I didn’t know the way. I didn’t know very much at that moment. I knew I was in despair. In the moment, it was all I knew. I was the figurehead at the front of the procession, the lonely angel at the tip of this enormous, slow-moving, bleak mass, people standing at their gates, eyes-wide and understanding. I was in despair. It was all I knew.
Even as I forget the weight of my sins,
She gives me love in her mercy still.
Then he bends towards Mecca, head to the ground,
And worships our Mohammad all night long.
Yes, dance-master Finnu, the Vicar’s son!
Public executions, like hangings and beheadings, relied not only on gory spectacle but also the natural deterrent that came with looking into the eyes of the condemned and almost recognising yourself. The crucifixion, I knew from the moment I was old enough to lisp the word, was never a punitive act against an individual. Political assassinations were a dime a dozen, even then. If all they wanted to do was neutralise a single aberrant figure, they could have struck when the son of god went downstairs to make breakfast. They could have stabbed him where he slept and let him go on being horizontal for the rest of his life. But they did neither of those things. Jesus Christ was crucified in the vertical. When it came to public punishment, perpendicularity was the point.
We kept walking.
Soon, I couldn’t even think of the heron’s eye, or the coolness of the Mananchira pond-floor under my feet, thoughts I often turned to when I felt consumed. I couldn’t think about all the worlds’ skies and all the billions of living creatures on this earth. I knew I was in despair. They were singing hymn after hymn around me, this vast and wonderful chorus with its golden hues, and only silence rang in my head. I felt as though I would never see another living thing again. I could have laid down arms in that moment, laid on the road and waited to die. I could have capitulated fully in that silent hymn-place, let go all thoughts of self-assertion and yielded myself unconditionally. A total surrender to doctrine. But then, a cry cut through the silence. Almost like a great, sea-skimming bird-call, and I thought of the heron at once, gasping breathlessly. But then the call came again, loud and blaring and strangely mechanical.
“Is that a bus horn?” asked the bishop, looking confusedly at my father. “Have the road clearance directives not been filed?”
“They have, as they always are,” my father scratched his head, then jumped as the call blared once again. “But you’re right, it is a bus horn, though this road isn’t even on any bus route…”
The procession stopped.
“Is that…” Finarfin’s eyes widened, and he started to cackle, actually daring to pinch me right there in front of, well, not Jesus, but his mother at least. “Finnu, Finnu, Finnu, just look! Look, just fucking look at that! Isn’t that your Razul?”
Your Razul, he said, even there, right in that crowd, knowing full well my father was right there, what he wanted to keep from the bishop and what leading this procession was doing to me. Say what you want about ‘Daddy’ Finarfin. But you couldn’t deny he had balls. To this day, I find it impossible to hate the bastard.
“Language!” snapped my father, glancing at the bishop before craning his neck to look anyway, because Maedhros was one of the very few people bullish enough to disobey the road clearance directive whilst also being capable of obtaining a bus from god-knows-where. Achan looked at me accusingly for a moment, before remembering that this had been sprung on me at the last minute so it couldn’t have been I who caused whatever disruption this would be and whatever radical Communist cabal Russo would be leading behind him.
It was indeed Maedhros cresting over the low hill. But not Maedhros driving a bus or even Maedhros leading a crowd. It was Russo alone, riding the most terrifying contraption I had ever seen in my entire life. He was straddling one of the enormous Enfield motorcycles the British sepoys whizzed about in, clearly either blagged, nicked or misappropriated from a departing officer. He’d replaced the unobtrusive bike horn with an actual bus horn as I found out later, spray-painted the entire body a horrible shade of maroon, and—I laughed aloud at this on the spot, despite the circumstances—had managed a feat of pointless engineering where he’d extended the single-seat into a double by welding his old bicycle backseat onto the existing seat. I saw Achan heave a sigh of relief, because Maedhros was clearly just returning home having forgotten the road clearance directive, and would turn into the cliff-house gate several yards away from the actual procession.
But he didn’t do that either. Maedhros kept barrelling forward, actually accelerating once he passed his gate. He had a scarf tied around his hair to keep it back from his face though the rest of it whipped around him, tangled and fiery and liquidly magnificent. He revved even faster as he approached us, and as I blinked the tears and dust from my eyes I could see the unbridled wrath written plain across his countenance.
“Fuck me to the moon, it’s the Crusades!” hollered Cousin Finarfin, eyes sparkling with mirth as the contraption sped up. He placed two fingers in his mouth, letting out a short series of whistles. “Here come the Saladins with their scimitars! Allahu Akbar, my brethren in Christ, it was wonderful knowing you all! Jihad, my brothers, Marxist jihad has come to Kozhikode at last!”
“Finarfin, for the love of god, watch your mouth!” his father hissed, ignoring his protests about how Lent was, technically speaking, over, so he could swear as much as he wanted. He looked over worriedly at the bishop, then at Achan, who was looking just as perplexed as his brother. “Father—should we move to the side? That boy, he was the one who threw that pipe bomb at the British sahib, his father was the one who self-immolated… we should probably move, shouldn’t we?”
Despair stopped scoring at me for a moment, and Russo came speeding down the hill, and through my eyes it looked as though the clouds themselves were fleeing from his fury. To what I am certain was the bishop’s surprise, Russo did not go barrelling through the crowd, of course he didn’t. What Maedhros looks like, and what he is, has, is, and always will be indistinguishable for those who do not bother to look truly at him. Russo stopped the bike just feet away and jumped off it, stalking towards us, the scarf falling off his hair to be crushed under his feet.
And he was crying, face twisted with grief, tears running down his cheeks right there before me, before his brothers and his stolen children, before the entire procession. But as awful as the sight was, I cherished it in a vaguely guilty way, the only way I knew to cherish anything. The knowledge that Maedhros, who watched his father use his own matchbox to set himself on fire before his very eyes, had tears to spare for me and my little church-mouse humiliation, and chose to shed them before this cruel crowd so they did not feast on mine. I put it in my pocket like a sweet saved for later, or a heron’s vast, universe-swallowing eye.
“Give that here,” he snatched the altar from me ungraciously, shoving it across to his right arm and grabbing my hand with his left. “Finnu, we’re going, get on the bike.”
“What’s going on?” the bishop walked over, blinking at the commotion. “Why are we stopping? Who is this fellow?”
“Maedhros, get off the road,” my father hissed at him, trying to block off the bishop’s approach. “Go now, you can’t be here!”
“What will you do if I don’t?” snarled Russo, turning to him. “Nail me to the cross and parade me around town after you’re done doing it to your son?”
“This isn’t a…”
“Shut your fucking mouth, don’t try to tell me what this is. You think I’ve spent so much time with your son and don’t know what happened on this day?” Russo roared, having truly lost his temper. “Crucify me, cocksucker. I fucking dare you, just try it!”
I gasped, and so did my father, having never heard Russo swear in his presence. I could see Finarfin, standing near us, frantically pressing a hand to his mouth to stifle a choking shout of laughter, tears standing in his eyes as he shook. And I couldn’t move, watching Maedhros actually square up to my father, who reflexively moved aside as the bishop came closer.
“Boy, why have you held up the procession? What is going on here?”
Maedhros turned to him, and he was in such a state that even I started worrying he would do something he couldn’t talk and punch his way out of, especially considering the bishop was white and Russo, understandably, had far more of an issue with that than most in this procession. But he just took a moment to parse the bishop’s accent, another to try and formulate a response in English, before his eyes landed on Finarfin and I could see the idea dawn behind them. He bowed slightly to the bishop, altar under one arm, and said carefully, in his faltering English:
“Jihad, sir,” he inclined his head, smiling politely. “Holy war.”
I thought I heard Finarfin pop a vein from stifling whatever horrible shriek of laughter possessed him.
Did my father know that the average tilapia fish was more likely to commit an act of jihad than Russo-the-blasphemer, the atheist of atheists? Absolutely. Did the new Scottish bishop know such a thing? Absolutely not. His blue eyes widened, horror-struck, as he took in Russo in all his glory, before they drifted slowly to our joined hands, then all the way up to my face, which he had, of course, called innocent and godly not an hour ago. If there was one thing worse than homosexuality in the eyes of the clergy, it was, once again quite understandably I suppose, jihad. And to think of the vicar’s son… the bishop turned his accusing gaze towards my father.
And to add insult to slapstick, Cousin Finarfin chose that moment to put into motion what he would always (though mostly in private) refer to as the funniest ten seconds of his life and snatched the idol back from Russo, kneeing him gloriously in the crotch as he did so. Then, he turned carefully so that neither my father nor his could see, winked at me, jerked his head, and mouthed—chellu, Finnu-chechi! Run, Sister Finnu! So I ran. Russo, half-bent from said knee-in-the-balls, nodded a swift thanks to the Nutcracker, grabbed my hand tighter, dragged me over to his monstrous motorbike. And off we sped, just like that!
I looked back, of course. I could hear my father’s heart breaking, though I couldn’t see him at all, the procession having closed ranks around the altar again, and beginning their slow march away behind us. The second time I looked back, they were too far off to see properly, Russo’s discarded scarf the only indication that I had been there at all.
Whenever anyone questioned Cousin Finarfin on why he did what he did during the procession, and believe me when I say my father spent the rest of his life questioning him about it at various moments including the wedding of his daughter Galadriel, the man would only ever say one thing: “Divine providence. You know how many years I have been praying to get the chance to kick that fucker Razul in the nuts? I know a blessing when I see one. Secondly, did you hear what he said? Jihad, uncle, jihad. What am I but a humble crusader? Besides, I told you I wanted to carry that altar. But of course, you never let me, and favoured your godless son instead. So technically, uncle, it was entirely your fault.”
That was Dickhead Cousin Finarfin in a nutshell. He spent the rest of his life carrying that altar, and revelled in it. He was no vicar: he enjoyed wanton violence just as much as Maedhros, and rose to the top of the Kerala Congress with his fists just as quickly as Russo rose to the top of the Marxist Party, titling himself ‘Daddy Finarfin’ very soon after Russo became ‘Comrade Maedhros’. And neither was Finarfin a reformist in any way, shape or form: the conservative nature of the Church benefited him personally and politically just as the tribalism and insularity of the Kozhikode Mappila Muslims benefited Russo’s vote share, and he absolutely held onto that. The difference for me was that Finarfin’s employ of tactical Christianity was uncomfortably honest and too self-aware, and such honesty laid hypocrisy bare. When you walked behind my father on Good Friday, you felt as though you were a penitent on a pilgrimage. When you walked behind Finarfin, you felt like an underpaid political lackey out on a campaign march. And somewhat ashamed of yourself. Like I said, I’ve always found it impossible to hate that cousin of mine.
Russo manoeuvred his bike across side-streets and main roads, all emptied by the road clearance directive. People thronged at the gates of their houses, just in time to catch the reverse-procession, the dust left by the procession, Russo and I on his terrible motorcycle, hair flying in the wind. Kozhikode unspooled around us, thread by thread, as if shaken loose from its spool. We curved through older and older streets, fish markets and jewelry-sellers, coin-shops and bakeries. We were stitching ourselves into the city, and because Maedhros had always been a performer, he made everyone else bear witness. His hand on the throttle, both of mine around his waist, winding through story after story, making room for ourselves.
When we got off the bike at last, we were at my new house, in which I hadn’t yet spent a single night. I pretended not to notice that Russo was sniffing and scrubbing his face on his shirt, and chose instead to walk ahead of him into the small courtyard where I stopped short, blinking. There were two enormous suitcases before my door, and Russo, having gathered himself, ignored them in favour of wheeling his bike into the tiny garage. “What are you doing? Are these yours?”
“Your bedroom is fucking massive, I peeped in through the window when I was dropping these off earlier. Such a big bed too, your father is so generous to me,” was all he said, lifting one of the suitcases. “Open the bloody door, Finnu, you think I can carry this till the sun sets? I’m a man, not a bear.”
When I opened the door, Russo shoved his suitcases in, and then dragged in a large couch he’d apparently secreted away in the garage as well. It was shabby but looked surprisingly comfortable, and he kicked away the wicker chair I’d put in, pushing the couch into its old place. Then he brushed his hand off, grinning at me. “Nice, isn’t it? It’s called a love-seat. Because two people can sit on it together.”
“What’s that, a housewarming present?” I tried to make light of it, though my voice shook. Russo beckoned me over and pulled me down on the couch beside him. “Exactly that. Though I’m not sure it counts as a present if I took it from outside one of the sahib houses near the beach. And I’m not sure you’re allowed to give yourself a present.”
“Yourself…?”
“Myself indeed. Tomorrow you should go and thank your father for buying me my very first house,” Russo toed off his shoes, christening the tea-table with his bare feet. “Not for nothing, of course. On the weekdays we’ll both stay in the cliff-house with my brothers and the twins because if I’m not there, Maglor would run it like military school, and put our babies through basic training. But you’ll be there as well. Because that’s your house too now. Also, look how close to the Crown Theatre we are now! We can hear every time King Kong takes a shit. Like we have a newspaper subscription, but better.”
We, we, we.
“Oh Russo,” my eyes filled. “You don’t…”
“I want to,” he frowned at me, pulling me closer so I was almost sitting on his lap. “I want to. Who wouldn’t want to? Don’t cry, Finnu. I hate seeing it.”
“You did though, earlier,” I dared to ask. “Why?”
“Probably because the freak of nature that you call your cousin bashed my nuts in,” he grimaced, shifting around awkwardly. “I’m sure I can’t father children anymore, even if I wanted to.”
“Stop fucking around. I meant before that. Why were you crying?”
He sighed, shrugging as he laid his head on my shoulder. “Because you were. Because they were eating you alive. Because I was furious that you were made to do such a thing. Because I couldn’t look at your father’s cruelty laid so bare without thinking of my own. But mostly, Finnu, because you were.”
It didn’t actually change anything, of course, in the grander scheme of things.
Achan was still leaving, and I knew why he was leaving. But word spreads fast in Kozhikode, catchier word spreads even faster, and you’d be hard-pressed to find words catchier than crucify me, cocksucker. And Russo, having been dragged into it at sixteen, knew both politics and performance just as well as my father did. It took the town only a few summers to go from thinking fondly of Father Fingolfin, who left the district because of his degenerate son, to thinking with mild amusement about the old vicar, who was stopped in the middle of the street by Kozhikode’s most notorious gangster, who told him to crucify him, cocksucker.
I was allowed to visit them in Cochin, of course. My father was not a cruel man. I was allowed to visit once a year, at Christmas, for precisely ten days.
Today, Maedhros sneaks up on me as I’m trying to deal with dinner, Maglor having gone to pick up the twins from school and lumping me with the enormous pot of mutton biryani he decided to make for some reason. He pops up behind me, having come home very early from work without any pre-empting, wrapping his arms around me from behind. “Oho, mutton biryani? What’s the occasion? Have I forgotten your second birthday?”
“No, the occasion is ‘Maglor realised that his brother and his ridiculous daytime fasting routine eats enough to feed a small cow every evening so decided to make an entire tub of rice lest he gets snacky and starts eyeing up the neighbourhood cats’,” I tell him, elbowing him sharply as he starts poking around the dish with a ladle, a familiar sight for anyone familiar with Maedhros’ somewhat unhealthy preoccupation with the meat-to-rice ratio in biryani and equally abnormal hostility towards there being eggs in said dish. “Stop poking around, Russo, nobody’s put any eggs in.”
“Good boy. Only when my sins finally catch up with me and I turn into chicken’s asshole will I appreciate eggs in biryani. How many kilos of meat? Maglor always skimps out on the meat. Must be a 50-50 ratio, or else it’s just rice with an extra testicle. Actually, you know what? Let’s go upstairs. Come answer my questions in the bedroom, I have a serious issue.”
“I’m meant to watch the biryani, Russo, that’s the only reason I’m in the kitchen in the first place.”
“Rice won’t burn if you don’t sit here muttering spells over it like a little witch,” he wheedles. “My issues are more urgent.”
“What on earth could your pr…” I trail off as he grins, pressing himself even closer to me from the side, because oh, for fuck’s sake. “Russo, you’ve not even been home for five minutes, you degenerate. Normal people at least say hello and, can you imagine, maybe even have a cup of tea first, instead of snapping straight to attention the moment they walk into the house.”
“Is it my fault that the sight and smell of mutton biryani lights a fire inside me?” he counters as he presses even closer, nosing at my neck to distract me from his wandering hand. “Oof, feel just how worked up I am, Finnu. You know why that is? Because you followed the correct 50-50 meat-to-rice ratio, and didn’t put in a single egg.”
Before I know it, even with Maedhros the walking distraction following me around making his frantic jokes, it’s time for the procession to start. Like most other people in town, I head out to the gate, waiting for it to pass. Dusklight spills from the sun, laying out a red carpet across the road, flooding the wound and I with hot blood, and though the evening is cool I am drenched in sweat. I feel my heart thud faster and faster, the hymn pressing into silence all around me.
The procession crawls across the street, Finarfin at its prow, staring straight ahead because he does not approve of my public display of masochism. It’s by choice, I try to tell my Dickhead Cousin telepathically. This, if nothing else, is my choice. The hymn rises. It weighs me down and holds me there, all discipline and kindness, like living in a room full of objects you cannot bear to throw away. The old weariness sinks into me like clockwork, spreading through my bones. There you are. There you are, my oldest friend.
And then, of course, Russo steps up behind me, for this is why he returned from the office so early. He never had called attention to the fact it was I he defended, not even when we were children. There was simply no alternative.
Behind me he stands, his tousled head on my shoulder, arms curling around my waist, and the anchor lifts. Behind us, the old cliff-house. Maglor in his lurid pink apron, the vat of mutton biryani just another of his silent, apocryphal kindnesses. Beside him stands young Elrond with his wide grey eyes, taking in our stance against the world. And all around us breathes our Kozhikode, as it did on that bike ride ten years ago, still caught in the maw of empire, though now perched at the back of its tongue, ready to be coughed up into another set of entangled cruelties. And in the centre of it all, Finnu-and-Russo, the Admiral and the Zamorin, always and always. Trees and diesel and rivers and seas, and he and I. There was a Finnu-and-Russo before there ever was an India. There you are. There you are, my dearest friend.
And then, like every year, it passes.
Maedhros doesn’t move from behind me, obnoxiously holding me even tighter as the neighbours head back inside their own houses and kissing my neck as the sky suitably darkens. He never does such things, not normally. He can’t, not with his position in the Party, the public scrutiny he’s always under. But on Good Friday, for the procession, he performs his deviance as defiantly as he can. Perpendicularity, visibility, is the entire point. I gather myself, half-turning to quickly kiss him back.
“Thanks for coming out here with me,” I tell him as always, though I never need to. “And for getting back from work… well, beating people or whatever you’re supposed to be doing, this early.”
“Shove your thanks up your arse,” and then he cackles to himself, though remembers to lower his voice. “Or I can do it for you. Let’s go to our place. But after dinner… I want to get at least half that vat of biryani inside me. I tell you, Finnu, it’s an aphrodisiac. Fires me up like nothing else.”
“Why do you want to go to ours?” I yawn, leaning back into him. “It’s getting late, and, well. We can just do all that here, hm?”
“Because, Finnu, as always on this day,” he presses another kiss to my cheek, then lowers his voice to a whisper. “I want to fuck you in the bed your father paid for.”
We both jump, hearing a violent, performative retching.
“Oh my god, Russo,” I turn around, half-laughing, half-horrified, though the horror increases as thirteen year old Elros makes his way up to the house, coughing and putting a finger in his mouth to mime continuous gagging. “I told you to shut up, didn’t I? Now look at that, he heard you, the poor thing.”
“Baba, you’re disgusting, I have ears,” he grimaces as he sidles past, trying to hold the spanner he was carrying neatly behind his back. A fruitless endeavour considering we were walking right behind him. Russo bullishly hangs onto me as we head inside, just to irritate Elros more.
“Next time those ears listen to something they shouldn’t, I’ll make sure you don’t have them any longer. Also, what the fuck are you doing out at this time with a spanner?” he demands. “Science project? Your brother is upstairs doing his homework like a normal child, why are you so committed to putting your fathers in the ground early? What have you been tweaking with that thing, hm? If it’s my motorbike again, I’ll tie you to it and put a rock on the accelerator.”
Elros winces sheepishly, holding up his ill-gotten spanner. “I was hoping you forgot that. But no! Finrod parked his Jeep so cleanly outside the Congress office. Something inside me itched to loosen his tires. And I knew he would be at that procession so I managed to get all four in one go.”
“Oh, fine, that’s very good,” Maedhros nods, impressed by his initiative. “Political science homework. But now get the fuck upstairs and copy your maths off Elrond before I have bloody Thranduil crawling up my ass telling me you can’t read or whatever it was he had an issue with last time. Scram!”
That’s just how Russo is, a different shade through each lens.
With me, he is a sop. A drama queen, a theatrical madame. He gets annoyed if I forget to kiss him before I go to work, sulking in the evenings until I kiss him twice. He likes to sit very close to me, like a cat, and calls me venilaave, which means moonlight. On Sundays, we go to the Crown and watch terrible English films about walking crocodiles or talking rats or whatever it is that American studios consider entertainment these days, because Russo, so loyal to his beloved Kerala in all other ways, cared nothing for the regional film industry. I once stormed right out of the theatre when we went to see King Kong for the fourth time, because Russo clambered up onto the seat and started whistling and cheering when the bloody monkey turned up, and even I have some standards when it comes to public decency.
I am not saying that this is Russo’s true self. It isn’t, and he would be even more insufferable if it was. And I am glad he isn’t like this with any other. For this is the self that he created for me to keep, and this Russo is mine and mine alone.
One might wonder why a man whose entire career rests upon people’s justified fear of him would publicly cheer at sharks, pretend to bite his sons’ toes off or lose his mind over dachshunds, but all such things do is heighten said people’s fear of him. Political gangsters are a dime a dozen. Russo, on the other hand, is an ottakannan, a term directly translating to cockeyed, and regional signal for ‘fucking deranged’. He was a diamond in the rough as far as unpredictably violent freaks were concerned, I’ll tell you that much. The Party adores him. And unfortunately, so do I.
On scorching evenings like this, when Russo is at his most restless, he and I still jump the fence of Mananchira Park, where I watch him do laps around the pond as if he owns every inch of it. His strokes are frantic, driven with purpose, like he’s still hunting for that old crocodile all these decades later. After he climbs out, hair stuck to his shoulders and clinging to his back, the two of us sit quietly pressed against each other, breathing in tandem for hours on end. He and I do not hold hands on our way back to mine, of course we don’t, because we can’t. But I sit behind him on his motorbike as I always have, pressed so closely that we might as well have been holding hands, the air between us thinning to nothing in places. We speed past the socially-utopian cinematic clichè that is Kozhikode, spires and carvings touched first by Uncle Fëanor and then by the sky.
There are days I feel as though the little house my father paid for is not a part of India but a parting gift from an erased page of history. Not the history of India, for the history of India only began a few years ago, that swiftly-sewn quilt of colliding and obscured pasts. But this gift comes from the history of Kozhikode, though soon we will no longer be able to call it entirely our own. A present from the Zamorin Ravi Varma, to Ahmed Ali the Kunjali Marakkar, his right hand man. His dearest friend. A little stone building, left unburnt for centuries. And it was after those old fantasies that the two of us named our little house ten years ago, nailed it onto a slim, metal plate just outside the gate that only we could see. The Admiral’s Folly, it says, as we finally get home, fumbling the keys in the lock as if we were entering the home for the first time, like newlyweds. The Admiral’s Folly, unburnt. It is wishful thinking, I know. But men like Russo and I, we are used to wielding wishes like weapons.