I do not know where they went, the vampires of my childhood. Yakshis who wore rustling linen with gold brocade; their hair redolent with jasmine and fell like a black waterfall; their lips redder than blood and kohl lined eyes as dark as hell.
They lived on top of the palmyra tree — or karimpana — hiding among the rough, fan-like leaves that whispered fables in the wind. They governed the vast landscape of emerald paddies darkening in the night, gaze surfing for a traveller. They would slide down like pale moths, and appear at the wayside asking for betelnut and vettila leaf. The victim, enchanted by the seduction of dark magic acquiesces and is doomed by the contract. He is borne aloft to the vampire’s nest where she feasts on his blood, after a robust night of lovemaking — or so adolescent fear excitedly presumed. On full moon nights, yakshis sat beneath frangipani trees combing their long, long hair, bare backs turned towards you. The night would be redolent with sorrowful, heady fragrance. Beware, if a yakshi turned and looked at you with her large, luminous eyes, you would be drawn to her waiting thirst.
In the 1970s, the landscape of my childhood was heartbreakingly beautiful. In the evenings and on holidays, with a football in the basket, I would bicycle down the winding vermilion path to the football ground. It seemed to lead into the sunset. Passing the bamboo thickets and emerging into the openness, I would find myself pedalling through an expanse of green paddy fields stretching away almost into the lap of the mountains that encircled the town. The fields would be ridged with a million small walkways. Along their sides palmyra trees grew by the hundreds. Homes of the yakshis. My grandmother, that spinner of magical
stories, had told me that a copy of the Ramayana was enough to stop the vampire; at the sight of the holy book she would screech and fly away into the sky. But carrying around a copy of the Ramayana was highly impractical on the way to a football field. The field was a paddy threshing ground that belonged to a friend, with huge mounds of yellow hay that sufficed for goalposts. Ringing the field itself were more palmyra trees.
But today, when I travel home, most palmyra trees in the Palakkad countryside have vanished. Many have been chopped down to make place for coconuts; they are more profitable. Today, the green fields of yesteryears are planted with ugly, multi-coloured houses or apartment complexes. The football ground is a mall.
Nostalgia is a curse that haunts the past. But it can also redeem. Along with the years, an entire landscape has been lost. But all is not. Sometimes I hear the wind rustling in the karimpana leaves, and the sigh of the waiting yakshi. Sometimes I smell the frangipani. And I know as long as I live, so will the yakshi combing her hair in the witching hour of an aromatic night.