Mullan. That’s what my father named me. Mullan Menon, in full. I can picture my father having a heated conversation with the nurse in charge of filling out my birth certificate. “Yem”. “You”. “Yell”. “Yell”. “Yay”. “Yen”. “Mullan”. “Got it?”. The nurse, in her pristine greens, looks flabbergasted as she frantically tries to comprehend my father’s thick Malayali accent. Giving up, she would shove the forms on to my father’s arms, crossed in perfidy to his smiling head. Left; Right; Left; Right; my father’s head would bob in uncertain approval. “Sir, Could you please write her name down for me. I did not understand any of those letters. Yell? What the hell is yell? I need alphabets, Sir. Do you speak a lick of English?” My father was used to similar tirades from buxom bartenders at the drinking hole closest to the store he made his living in, while he made his daily request for ‘wheesikey oan dee roaks’. He smiled and accepted the hospital forms with such an alarming alacrity that the nurse walked away in a hurry, sans a louder whimper. ‘University of Pennsylvania Hospital’, proclaimed the form, in a dramatic header. My father surreptitiously wrote down eleven letters in a frantic haste onto the parched sheet of hospital paper, lest my prying eyes revolt and zap fire onto the parchment. Six letters that would torment my childhood. Five letters that would always cower in shame. Mullan Menon. Mullan, in my father’s Malayalam, meant ‘pokey, pricky bones’. I was sickly looking at birth. My father would, in a few years, tell us at the dinner table that the doctor felt like he was pulling out a bag of bones. He told me that was why my mother cried so much for the nine months I was inside her. If my father was ashamed about creating that dastardly name, I wouldn’t have the wildest clue. He certainly made no bones about it.
I was five when I really couldn’t take it anymore. They’d jeer. All of them. The Whites. The Blacks. The Hispanics. The Asians. I despised my alarm clock for waking me up from my dreams. I would always dream in color. The real world, on the other hand, dutifully reared its ugly head in monochrome. I remember seeing a Discovery channel show one day about fish. How they only saw a small section of the color spectrum and spent most of their life perceiving life around them in shades of grey. That was the day I stopped eating my mother’s always splendid fish curry. Anybody who had ever sampled her Karimeen, her Mathi, her Ayila, or her Veloori spent days on end lauding her with unblemished glory. She would stock up on her ‘Malayali Malsyam’, as she liked to call it, every time she saw a special at her favorite Korean supermarket. Jung Lee, the portly man who cleaned and cut the fish she picked, always used the same black marker to write “Malsyam for Mrs. Menon” on the brown bag stocked with fish he handed her every visit. And she would smile, unfettered by the fact that entrails and other nasties clutched on for dear life to Mr. Lee’s black marker. She smiled a big, white, toothy smile just like the ones the dead fish had as they stared at you through Mr. Lee’s murky glass shelves. For my mother, on her third visit, had taught Mr. Lee that ‘Malsyam’ meant ‘fish’ in Malayalam. And Mr. Lee never forgot.
They’d snatch at my long ponytail and drag me through the sand in the playground. “Don’t you ever straighten your horrid hair, freak?” That would be Ashley. I loved staring at her luscious blonde hair when she had her back turned to me. Did I envy it so? It was always straight, always perfect. The wind, in all its goody glory, would try its hand on handing out a severe dollop of revenge. As she ran past the trees, her hands outstretched in a feeble impersonation of an airplane, the wind would vomit its fury in a deluge of brashness. Alas, the wind always failed. Ashley’s hair, without fail, would always plop back into its unnatural state of perfection. Ashley would then raise an eyebrow at the sky, as if petitioning for a rematch so she could crush nature’s frail attempts again. I loathed her beauty more than I abhorred her abuse. She was the ring leader of the rat pack. Created by the devil to be his servant on the ground just so he could watch in fascination as a child was slowly broken. The devil would designate Matt, Justin, and Vincent to be her minions.
There was nary a day when they wouldn’t obey her will. I would be pelted with stones just so Ashley could see if I bled red. When liquid the color of a million sparkling rubies gushed out of my forehead, they’d kick sand onto my face in a confused attempt to stop the deluge. I would lay there screaming, clutching at whispers of sand as they hurried out of my lifeless fists, until a gentler soul would carry my bony body to the school infirmary. On kinder days, my ‘boxes of glop’, as Ashley called them, would be spit on as I held back a rivulet of tears in a shabby attempt at bravado. My mother’s exquisite cooking, rice, spiced vegetables, and brilliantly cut chicken samosas, could easily be the envy of a parade of school girls in my home country on the other side of the world. My lunch, pre-contamination, always smelled like a smorgasbord of gastronomical greatness. However, with large helpings of Justin’s saliva mixed in, as Ashley clutched her stomach in uncontrollable laughter, suddenly my lunch’s ethereal beauty disappeared into thin air. Ashley would then reach into the dark crevices of her evil mind and pummel me with the K.O. punch. It was a song, beautifully renditioned though remarkably deranged.
Snarky, ugly, Mullan!
Beastly, freckly, Mullan!
You are so boney, you should be so lonely,
You’ll never be one of us, Mullan!
And I would then hear a cacophony of cheers. Ashley, Philadelphia’s finest citizen, would provide her audience with her customary bow. And always, her hair stood still.
Every day, I would run back home in shabby disarray. My mother would console me as I pleaded with my father to bring up my suffering to the school. My father would stand helpless as he watched me storm back into my room after he enunciated the single word I did not want to hear. “No”. He claimed he was being persecuted by immigration officials, that they wanted him to leave the country. To rouse trouble at school could portend disaster. I would have none of it of course. My world was collapsing and the candle in my heart that burnt so strong the day I was born was now reduced to a whimpering excuse for a flame. I was all alone in my quest for survival. My heart was weak but my spirit was stirred. I dreamt a beautiful dream that night, as did the fish I so loved. Only we knew how we would capture back the light in the real world the next day. We dreamt in full technicolor, the fish too, just to be safe.
After school on the day before the brightest of days, I turned left rather than turn right. Going right would have led me to my parent’s modest house in South Philadelphia. Going left, though, would lead me to Mr. Lee’s supermarket. It was not his supermarket of course, belonging most likely to a South Korean business tycoon. I liked to think of it as his, however, for Mr. Lee would soon be my savior. My portly knight in shining armor. As I crept up a step-ladder and faced Mr. Lee, he would glance at me knowingly, as if auspicating my sinister visit. As I was requesting the fish I so desperately wanted, I said a silent prayer for the sacrifice the fish had to make. She had come to me in my beautiful dream the night before and volunteered herself for my most sacred mission. Selfless, I would name her, and I promised to recite her name with furious vengeance as I carried out the deed. Mr. Lee took out his delightfully filthy black marker and wrote four unforgettable words. “Malsyam for Mrs. Menon”. Mr. Lee never forgot.
Mrs. Menon was delighted to hear that my friends at school no longer made fun of her cooking. I wouldn't eat the fish I brought her from Mr. Lee's store but if she could soak it in her special sauce, cardamom, ginger, coriander and all, Ashley, my best friend, would surely be delighted. I promised my mother I would teach Ashley the way. Selfless was a tricky little thing after all.
I waited patiently for Ashley and her minions to walk into the cafeteria on the day of days. The brightest of days. They arrived every day with suspicious punctuality and today was not an exception. Ashley strolled toward me with the arrogance of a sinner and smiled that deathly smile. Just as she motioned Justin to come over to my table and do her vile bidding, I raised my palm up and calmly challenged the enemy. I laid out a crisp $20 bill on the table and told her she could have my money if she took a bite out of my Malsyam curry. Of course, Ashley was not Mr. Lee. She didn’t know what Malsyam meant. I told her she had nothing to be afraid about, all I wanted was for her to like my mother’s cooking just as much as I did. I mean, to her, it was just a giant plop of brown in an ungainly lunch box anyway. Ashley, being Ashley, said she would take my silly challenge up any day. I watched in gleeful delight as she took a giant bite out of Selfless, all 350 bones included. As Ashley clutched at her throat in anguish, I yelled out Selfless’s name over and over and over again for all of the school to hear in a booming oratory of madness. Stinging barbs pierced through Ashley throat as blood, fiendishly violet in color, spewed out of what was left of her punctured vessels. Selfless’s biggest bone dutifully punctured the roof of Ashley’s reviled mouth and slit her inner recesses like a knife sliding through butter.
Six seconds is all it took. Six fascinating seconds that I would never forget. “Mullan!”, I yelled out. “Mullan, you filthy insect, is the type of fish that can decimate you. Toothpony is its English name. Pony up, pony up, pony up your innards you pretty little princess. Mullan, you precocious tyrant, is also my name. The name you deboned into submission every second of my two years in this school. The name that will always live in infamy.”
Finally, her hair wrinkled up like dry grass under a deathly sky. Horrid. Freakish. Ugly.
Mullan. Six letters that would torment my childhood. Six letters that would reignite my life.
I was the architect of chaos. In full technicolor.
©Govind Mohan – http://govindmika.blogspot.com. All rights reserved.
