In each one of us, there is a place in our thoughts associated with forbidden diktats, a willful act of disobedience, a journey of secrecy and a moment of epiphany.
In my grandmother’s home in Shoranur, the attic could be accessed by a simple wooden ladder from the rear of the top half of the house. As children we were told there was a monster there with a preference for young children. The monster especially liked to suck on the bones of young children just as we loved to suck on the marrow bone in the mutton curry.
The wooden ladder had no banisters and my grandmother didn’t want us breaking our necks. My cousins kept away. Perhaps it was the thought of the monster. Or perhaps as they lived in that house, it was of no particular interest. But the ladder and what lay beyond held a curious and intense fascination for me.
One afternoon when everyone was napping after an enormous lunch, I climbed the ladder and entered the attic or thattumporam as it was called through a hatch in the wall. I stepped onto a floor of mud covered with a layer of sand. The attic was only about five-and-a-half-foot high and it had a little window which kept it airy and bright. For the first time I saw the beauty of dust motes dancing in a beam of light. Much much later I discovered it had a name: the Brownian movement and is a phenomenon involving colloidal suspensions but at seven years of age I thought I was in heaven and angels were leading me in.
The attic existed for two reasons: to keep the rooms below cool, and to be a dumping ground for everything from old cracked pickle jars to gigantic bronze utensils to a trunk of knick-knacks left behind by a sailor uncle to books and papers to a set of wooden chairs waiting to be mended to a wooden chest of odds and ends. I squatted on the sand floor and began foraging through. The attic thus came to mean to me hidden treasures.
In the house of literature, there is a space filled with magnificent voices and stories albeit forgotten. Someone just needs to discover them, dust and wipe the neglect away and bring them out into the sunlight. Increasingly what I read, and want to read hover in that space. There are enough readers out there who follow the herd to clutch to their bosom the celebrated books; and airport trash. They don’t need me to bulwark their presence or sales.
But take this: Lovely Green Eyes by Arnost Lustig [translated from the Czech by Ewals Osers]. The story of a 15-year-old Jewish girl Hanka who chooses life over the gas chamber at Auschwitz. But a life in a SS brothel where everyday she must have sex many times with the murderers who condemned her parents and brother to death. This is a story of a young girl who survives because of her Aryan looks and her fundamental belief that ‘‘life belonged to the living. For the dead, there was only honour, all the honour she could give them.’’
This is the premise and promise of the attic and literature.
Anita Nair can be reached at info@anitasattic.com