Mukundan and the Art of Letting Go

Today, as I was having my lunch, my eyes went to a well drawn tattoo almost completely under the sleeves on his triceps, of my colleague sitting across the table. The tattoo was of a horned gigantic male sheep, ram. I asked him, what importance does it carry in his life and he was more than happy to explain it to me, giving an impression that not many must have asked him the question. He told me, when he was growing up, his family owned a lot of rams in the village, and that, he considers them very brave and powerful.

This took me immediately to the time my dad used to come to me doing “hmm hmm” when I was as young as only 6 years old until I was about 16. He used to come to me some days when I was studying, and make “hmm hmm” sounds, squeezing his lips inside his mouth and pressuring my finger nails with his tight fisted knuckles. It was around my early adolescence I suppose, I once asked him, “Why do you keep doing this pappa? The sounds you make and the pressure to my nails.” He replied, “When I was a boy, probably even younger than you, I had a big black goat, Mukundan. I would come home, from school, fling my bag lazily and sit down, to have my mother serve me hot kanji. Once I silenced my tummy sirens, I would wait outside for my friends to call me play. One day, Mukundan came pouncing on me as if, challenging me to fight him.” He further added, “Mukundan was huge and powerful. He loved rubbing his sturdy grey curved horns against my little nails making the hmm-hmm sounds, as if inviting me for a rumble by displaying his gigantic strength, and trust me Sanju, more often than not, I lost them shamefully.” “I will always trust you every time you say you lost pappa”, “Poda!” came a spontaneous reaction.

“What happened to Mukundan pappa?” He carried on, “Thus, we played many days together in the evening, and he started becoming more of a playmate to me than my other regular friends. I was no more waiting for them coming from school. Me and Mukundan would lock horns and also sometimes chase each other laughing in extreme excitement. The bouts kept getting stronger and more intense and I was enjoying it more than ever until one evening. 

One usual evening I came home from school and I was waiting for Mukundan,  just this time I kept waiting and waiting. I was looking for my mighty playmate everywhere, shouting his name in all my desperation, when my mother stopped me and asked, ‘Are you looking for Mukundan?' 'Yeah', I said. ’This afternoon your father butchered the animal for meat’. My heart broke into pieces and I was crying as loud as I could turning my face up to the open sky, when my friends hollered my name from a distance. I wiped my tears carelessly, smearing the now more visible dirt across my face and ran to the open fields of freshly harvested paddy, rejoining my friends once again.” I asked, "Did you stay up the night thinking about your Mukundan, did you miss him in the later days?", he smirked with a sigh and said, “Sanju, let's just say, when you are that young, things don't stay in your head for so long.”

The irony is, he never let it go. He may have piled up layers above the terrible incident but the situation involving his friend he was so attached to was never processed in the manner it should have. And even today when the undigested memory comes back to him he becomes Mukundan, his horned playmate.