Pookku Vayil Ponvayil
A Collection of 15 stories.
There is a story with an exclusive theme of the father of a child who had given one of his five daughters away in adoption to a distant place; to a place they talked strange language. The father missed his child and followed her to the place accepting a job of toiling on a farm.
The story goes: “Somebody knocked at his closed door through out the night. It pained him. At last in the early morning, the ear breaking thunder aroused him.
Bal Dev, are you still asleep? Are you not ready for the trip? He folded out the rug and the blanket separately. He told himself. I should come back.
Then why are you going away?
To lift down a pain; to breathe longer, to cry, lying in the hands of Gangaji. To receive the touch of her cloth. —–
On the first day when he was mulching the rubber trees with Joseph, he shuddered with a thought of his baby girl standing in front of him with drops of milk on her lips.—–“The Return Journey” ends, thus,
The little girl cried, “Pitaji, Pitaji,
He shut his ears with his fingers, the cry screaming through thousands of slits, hunted him. He ran through the city street, leaving his bundle of belongings on the lawn in front of the big house.”