Fiction pick: A ‘partly mad, partly sane’ man’s nonsense rhymes delight the village children

Local gossip simmers in my tongue-twisting village, Kondappanayakkanpatti, much like our spicy curries that cook at the smoking point.

Words, volatile and like wildfire, vapourise and spread not only across our village but throughout the entire district of Salem in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Villagers whisper about our neighbour’s middle-aged brother, Gunasekhar, whom we all know as a man with two heads and hence two minds, retta thala and retta mandai. Although he has never set foot in school, they say, he is the originator of the nonsense verses.

Of the gibberish rhymes swiftly acquiring cult status, thanks to its recognition by academic scholars in the city as “serious writings”. These men of learning and distinguished linguists appear to have set aside their reservations about the rules of form and language that suppress anything that deviates from the norm.

A person with two heads and minds, you ask? Villagers say Guna is partly mad and partly sane.

Doctors in the city label his illness as schizophrenia. Something to do with the head and mind. They describe this condition as having no equivalent term in the Tamil language. To me, as a ten-year-old who has a smattering of English, this word “schizophrenia” sounds far more nonsensical, jumbled, and devoid of any clear meaning. Even more of a tongue twister than our village’s name and far more scrambled than any of Guna's verses.

“Gunasekharan’s poems use simple words to convey life’s complexities,” reads Chinnaswami from the newspaper he is holding.

Dressed in a vesti, the white, unstitched, cloth wrap for the lower body, folded double over his knees, and a sleeveless cotton vest, he adjusts his spectacles for emphasis.

The men gathered around his thin, reedy frame in the village’s central courtyard, beneath its banyan tree with many tangled roots, are greatly energised by his transcription.

They fizz, in chorus, like outraged flies, flapping their hands and vestis.

Arulmozhi says, “Instead of honouring our Kondappa, a nayakan of this patti, outsiders are now choosing to recognise our village idiot and his mannagatti.”

Iniyan comments, “Guna’s verses are more ridiculous than the antics of our artists at the annual therukoothu, with their exaggerated dance, song and music and their outlandish costumes and make-up.”

A third man, Selvan, speaks up. “His audacious words, topsy-turvy grammar, his trashing of people and talking of things that resist rational interpretation, of social taboos, are corrupting our young.”

We children, however, thoroughly enjoy singing these unconventional rhymes with an unselfconscious ease, loud boisterous camaraderie, and a complete lack of ill will. This is because the songs are not burdensome in any way and possess a lovely musicality.

Besides, these songs are hilarious to us. Deliciously dirty. Weird. Clever. Silly. Sly. Twisted. Teasing. Absurd. And…oh, they present just so much more entertainment on demand. We sing them until tears of laughter cascade down our cheeks.

Thatha, thatha tai, thatha sootha nai, nakki pata pi! (Dance, oh grandfather, dance. Is that clarified butter on your backside? Oh no, upon licking, we know it is shit!)

Doo doo tupaki, police karan poondati. (Doo, doo, a rifle that whizzes bullets past a policeman as his wife fires at him)

We children, understand it to be a reversal of sorts: a naughty, unclean grandfather who is not any of ours but some grandfather; a fierce authoritarian, a policeman’s craven fear of his wife. Perhaps it is not meant that way. But, to us, this is what it is.

In the orderliness of our village, where one day is in danger of being the same as the following, such verses stir up tremendous excitement.

For us, children, it breaks through disciplinary boundaries. It takes us into a world of fun: unpredictable and unfamiliar, just as it does to a world of unseriousness, where everything is funny, carefree, and celebratory.

Instinctively, we know there is no sense in the multitude of such lyrics. It makes perfect sense to us, though, when we sing them.

What does Guna have to say?

He neither denies nor admits to writing the verses.

Instead, he says, “All of you want perfect endings in life. But life is about the imperfect, about the impermanent, about not knowing what's going to happen next. It is like a wildcat that jumps this way and that. Isn’t making light of life’s unreliability, rather than living with fright and sorrow, a better way to handle such surprises? So why worry if verses don't rhyme, make sense, poke naughty fun or have no beginning, middle and end.”

“Each of you reminds me every day that I have two heads and two minds. So, is there anything wrong with keeping one under my control while casting the other into the unknown? We all understand that the real dangers are those we do not foresee, prepare for, or even recognise. I openly admit this, even if you don’t. Only a madman thinks he has everything under his control.”

Dikki dikki dikki dikki dat a dat, Dikki dikki dikki dikki dat a dat, we children sing to this, tapping our feet to the rhythm of our own words. Our own nonsense lines. We jump like wildcats, this way and that.

Chitra Gopalakrishnan is a journalist and social development communications expert.