The City of Nocturnal Terrors

 “For the city, his city, stood unchanging on the edge of time: the same burning dry city of his nocturnal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty, where flowers rusted and salt corroded, where nothing had happened for four centuries except a slow aging among withered laurels and putrefying swamps.”

-   Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in Times of Cholera

In Gabriel Marquez’s Macondo nothing happened for four centuries, but in the small town of Kidangannor, a lot had happened, most of which unnoticed and undocumented. It was so small and rustic a place that to buy a tube of toothpaste I had to travel four kilometres to the nearest town of Kozhencherry. The very social fabric had changed from one of respect for the neighbour to one of hatred. The town changed, as all places should. If you go there today you will be stared at, sarcastic comments will be made, and even caustic questions would be asked to your face. Such was the transformation that people who once returned for its idyll stopped coming, others went to distant countries to settle down as migrants and never come back. They had outgrown the town.

It could all be attributed to the discontent growing among the poor and dispossessed. The once subjugated ones had risen and created their own political affiliation and demanded better terms for themselves. Farming ceased to exist as a driving force of the economy, and unpredictable weather made it difficult to plant anything with any success. The labour rates went sky high and one-time farmers were making losses on their crops.

Consequently farm labourers turned themselves into gangs of thieves, raiding uninhabited houses, and geriatric homes where the old house owner and his wife were the only residents. The children were in far-away countries, working at their unforgiving jobs, affording a holiday to the native land only in two years or more.

My father was one who had come back from the great city of Bombay to settle down as a gentleman farmer, facing heavy odds. He gave up farming when his health declined, or, was it the other way around, I don’t know. I used to regularly visit my parents in my home town, out of a sense of duty. That was until the day it happened.

We – my wife, son, and I – were sleeping in our house, beside our ancestral house. Those were pre-ATM years and I had carried a lot of cash to do some maintenance work on my house. The robbers somehow entered the house, burgled all our money, even extracting the money from my wallet without disturbing my return ticket. Then I woke up and found the night light off and asked my wife if she had done so. She said she hadn’t. Then I thought maybe it’s a power cut of which there were many. But then glancing up I saw the fan whirring and, suddenly, I became alert, I knew something was going on. I switched on the light to see the extent of the burglary. The money I had kept for repairs in a leather bag was all gone, so were a lot of accessories including: sun glasses, deodorants, and a few saris of my wife.

I never imagined I would be the victim of a robbery in my own home town, a small place where there wasn’t a police station or even a movie theatre. The precision of the theft startled me. Such was my shock. The robbers had executed everything carefully, having studied and planned everything. They knew how and from where to enter the house, where I kept my money, and where we slept. All this meant that they knew us and our routines well. Immediately my suspicion went on the maintenance workers who came to my house to carry out repairs. They were all trustworthy people with whom I had worked before but you can’t look at a person and know who is a thief. Maybe, their economic necessity was dire, they were dissolute, and they needed the money to survive.

From that day I withdrew from my village of my birth, Kidangannoor. Years passed, my parents died, and I lost touch altogether. These days I pass by it, look at it, and remember all the good days I had enjoyed in it. It had grown distant and had become for me the “city of nocturnal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty” as Marquez wrote. The nocturnal terror of that night had made me wary. I had enjoyed its pleasures, and bathed in its canals and walked the hills, but it held no more charm for me now, because I had moved on in life.