You too, Barber!

Fiction

I had just finished reading Ponkunnam Varkey’s short story about a priest, his sexton and their sex lives when the TV news registered the address of Bishop Franco for sexual offences against a nun. The bishop was in news for quite some time and so his arrest did not come as a tremor to me though later I learnt that it was incredible to many Catholics in Kerala.

“What is incredible?” My friend Tom asked me. He is a blogger with quite some conceit. His conceit had attracted the attention of the Catholic clergy time and again in the past though of late they seemed to have given him up probably as a hopeless case. I don’t like his conceit either. But I tolerate it because I’m more conceited than him according to my wife. Long before the arrest of the bishop, Tom had written a blog about him titled Why Franco Mulakkal should be a saint. When I questioned his prejudiced condemnation of the bishop as well as the Church, he suggested Ponkunnam Varkey’s story to me.

There is this parish priest as the protagonist of the story. As soon as the morning mass is over – which he said without any interest – he asks Anthony, his sexton, “What happened to Annamma today? She’s not present for the mass.”

“I too wondered about it,” answered Anthony with a feeling that was apparently a mixture of wistfulness and scorn.

That night the priest prayed and prayed before going to bed. But he could not sleep. He got up, picked up his torch and came out of the presbytery. It was past midnight. Annamma would be sleeping with her long, thick, black hair spread out on the pillow and her parabolic bosom heaving rhythmically to her sweet breath.

As soon as the priest came out and shut the door from outside, a lightning splashed the burdened sky. An ominous thunder followed. The priest thought that he saw the face of Jesus somewhere in the sky.

“I’m sorry, Lord,” he muttered before turning back to open the door and return to his bed.

The thunder had woken up Chacko, Annamma’s father-in-law. He thought he heard someone open the door of the house. The children were fast asleep. And Annamma’s husband was far away in Dubai minting money from sand grains. Who could it be at the door?

Chacko peeped out through the window and saw a figure walk out of the house wearing a Catholic priest’s soutane. But it was not the parish priest, Chacko was certain. He was very familiar with the priest’s physical features and the gait. Another lightning revealed the man’s identity. “Have you too become a priest, Anthony?” Chacko asked. Anthony did not hear it. Or he pretended that he did not.

The story reminded me of a retreat that I had attended recently in which the preacher preached eloquently about the cardinal sin called lust and carnal desires. “Lust was the sin of Eve and Adam,” he said. Whenever they spoke about that first sin – the original sin, as it is called – they mentioned Eve first because she is the wretched origin of all human sinfulness.

“The Semitic religions are bastions of men,” Tom told me once. “There’s no hope for women in it.” On another occasion he quoted Saint Augustine: “Women should not be enlightened or educated in any way. They should, in fact, be segregated as they are the cause of hideous and involuntary erections in holy men.” Then he added cynically that Augustine had his unfair share of women before he understood the might of the Church’s priestly celibacy.

Tom’s conceit and irreverence had as much method to it as Hamlet’s madness had. But it became clear to me only when I visited my barber yesterday.

The barber used to complain to me every time I sat on his chair with the air-conditioner purring clemently somewhere behind it. “You see, chetta, these new gen children, how vulgar they want their hair to be cut!”

“Can’t you advise them to look dignified instead of keeping their hairs erect all the time?” I asked.

“Do you think I don’t do it? I always tell them that beauty lies in conformity.” Then he went on to give me a lecture that lasted till the end of my haircut about the aesthetics of conformity. “Even a girl looks most beautiful when she wears the traditional attires,” he concluded.

Having put aside Ponkunnam Varkey, I decided to relax in the barber’s air-conditioned salon and listen to his preaching while I got a haircut. I was not fond of thick, long hairs like Annamma’s.

My jaws dropped when I saw the barber, however. He had got, what he called later, a facelift. His hairs stood erect like a porcupine’s quills and the sides were closely cropped. He looked just like those young boys whom he had been trying to educate in the aesthetics of conformity. He went on to preach to me about the changing standards of conformity.

Note: Ponkunnam Varkey was a maverick Malayalam writer who died in 2004. He did write a short story similar to the one referred to in this story. But the details may be different since my memory is not entirely reliable nowadays.