January 8th, 2008

THE MAKEOVER OF COCHIN COHN by Michael Chacko Daniels

Part I

Israel’s Dwarf Hermit sees India’s god-bird Garuda in San Francisco.

Ab Ben Cohn’s very large, jet-lagged right pinna quivers.

“What’s this, Ab——you’ve taken on a new moniker? My favorite relative is now called ‘Israel’s Dwarf Hermit’?” Aunt Esther Stein says, blowing and spraying into his auditory canal. “I’ll have none of that, Ab. Won’t do at all! And what’s this——you’ve taken to talking to yourself? All the way here, I hear this. You prefer to converse with yourself, like your grandfather in years gone by. May he rest, and may it be in eternal peace!”

How like Mama! Ab thinks. The Steins’ greatest love——remolding the Cohns. Keeps the Steins in good fettle.

Over a foot taller than him, Esther Stein Weinberg straightens; short, bony fingers, armed with oversized jewelry, lightly ruffle her wispy, grey hair.

Her voice stirs with sand and gravel. “My last big project, darling Ab: to help you——”

Ab steps out of range, but curbs the urge to clear the moist invasion by stuffing his handspun cotton handkerchief into his ear.

“Sorry, darling,” she says. “——Help you break that hard shell.”

He smiles and retreats to the window on his very short, powerful legs. He can’t wait for the jet lag to fade so that he can flee from his beloved Aunt and dig into San Francisco’s underbelly.

Why is she whispering? Ab wonders. There’s no one else in her vast, two-story home. All her contracted workers who maintain its immaculate state of American grace have come, labored, and gone. In any case, she hires workers who only know Spanish, one of several languages she speaks fluently.

Perhaps the notorious former celebrity hunter, a wolf in her prime, fears that the walls have ears, all busy sending instant messages to his mama in Israel, her sister, Liz Stein Cohn.

Through the wide-scope window, Ab looks down at the flowers and glittering-fluttering leaves in her garden of dwarf trees——lemon, orange, and persimmon, all secluded from the street. He replaces them with papaya, jackfruit, mango, tamarind, cashew, and banana. Papa Cohn would love that.

In the distance, past the fog that hasn’t burned off yet, he can see the rare trio: golden bridge, deep blue sky, bluish water. The sky, Aunt Esther had said, hid its blue for most of March and relented only after his arrival from Israel.

A bird sweeps across the sky. Garuda? The big bird that Papa said had watched over them on their journey from India to Israel, over a quarter century back?

Garuda? Here, in the Golden State?

Ab turns to point out the big bird. If anyone in America would appreciate Papa’s favorite god-bird, it’d be Aunt Esther.

Her brown eyes gleam. “My plan, my darling nephew? Take you mainstream.”

He holds back; Garuda isn’t quite the stuff of Main Street, not by a long shot.

The way she sweet-talks him! Darling Ab this and darling Ab that. No one else he knows does it. The closest in words of endearment is Papa, when he says in his native Malayalam, “My golden son.” But never in English.

Not possible to whip up anger toward either of them.

He returns to the window. Is Great God Vishnu’s carrier, big-bird Garuda, really out there?

Did his mind just do what Mama calls an India-flip?

“Mainstream? Only jocularly, Ab. Jocularly? Yes, very much so.” She laughs and her single, large ear-globe does a pendulum swing. “I’m a gossip journalist. Anything but mainstream. However, while I thumb my nose at society’s nobs, nabobs, and all, don’t forget I remain in society and not out of it. Life is too precious, too short to spend it as a hermit. Enjoy San Francisco for a while, Ab darling, and you’ll understand.”

Garuda, he finds, is no longer within the picture window’s telegenic frame, which snaps in bridge, sky, water.
But Ab, better known in Israel as the Dwarf Hermit, Son of Cochin Cohn of India, is pleased that he has seen Garuda, even for a moment, in a California sky.

Now that Garuda is with him here, all will be well. No matter what happens. No matter what Aunt Esther intends. No matter what anyone else does.

~ ~ ~

A couple of days later, Aunt Esther says, “Your mother and me? Twenty years . . . a world of difference separates us.” On stick fingers stones flash and sparkle. “Best way to say it, Ab: See the Buddha, kill him. At the very least, knock him out.”

Aunt Esther doesn’t waste any time, does she?

Despite all his knowledge of her twists and turns, she has surprised him. He should’ve followed her advice of long ago: not been so accepting; scrutinized more.

Now, he’d have to look beyond his ancient aunt’s words, the artful dodges, the body adornments, the paraphernalia and accoutrements for subterfuge——but most of all, the emotions. Especially love.

His brown eyes grow even larger in his big, round face.

Go ahead, Aunt Esther, de-sanctify all you want. Help kill Liz Stein Cohn. And, in time. . . .

Ab gives her a vigorous nod.

“One would think she’s the older sister,” Aunt Esther says. “Lizzy was far more fun when younger and we, Bronx Broads, knocked the Brooklyn Boys straight into the next borough. But she was Lizzy-Dizzy then. Before the decade-long interval in India on the road to Jerusalem sapped the joy out of her. There’s a lesson for you.”

Okay, so first Aunt Esther reveals Mama’s clay feet, then she flows with vinegar.

“I would’ve flourished in India; love it to this day. And Cochin, my fabled spice-trade destination, filled with history, romance, and adventure, where your father’s ancestors settled in ancient times, is my all-time favorite city outside of San Francisco.”

She pauses, gazes out the picture window. The blue sky holds, but no sign of Garuda.

“I’ve said it a thousand times——your dad got the wrong Stein. Lizzy and I should’ve exchanged husbands. She’d have loved to have remained in San Francisco with Weinberg of Weinberg & Weinberg fame, and been a part of the Bay Area, design capital of the world.

“Cochin’s Jews made Liz uncomfortable. She expected them to bite; they didn’t. She wanted them to soar; they didn’t. She went to India seeking lions, saw mice. I told her once, ‘Lizzy they’re lions who look like mice. How else could they have survived all these centuries? But they are also like Ganesh, and Hanuman, and Garuda.’

“She replied, ‘They look like mice. They sound like mice. Don’t accept everything Ab’s father says as God’s truth. The Sanskrit manuscripts have addled his brains. He’s more a Hindu than a Jew.’”

The son of Cochin Cohn wants to say, “Aunt Esther, the chasm between you and Mama Cohn now exceeds the biological twenty,” but his decision not to make any revelations about his mother to Aunt Esther stops him.

~ ~ ~

At her double-steel doors, Aunt Esther gives him a resolute push. “Go, my beautiful, younger sister’s handsome son! Go down, Ab, to the Tender—loin!”

Her words roll out with the accustomed ease of a nervy broadcaster. What a febrile, inventive head!

His pulse quickens for an instant, anticipating the adventure that must await him.

But now, he must rise to her grand manner.

Don’t try to be an American, he reminds himself. You are from East of Suez——if not in the Israeli style, then Go India! Do an India Flip. Not to worry. Mama’s in Jerusalem and this is Aunt Esther’s city, where even the weird sounds okay.

A bony hand on his shoulder stops him. “Don’t be taken by surprise, Ab. In Baghdad-by-the-Bay, as my late-great friend Herb Caen baptized San Francisco, dwarf tossing is a sport among local rotten-culture deviants.

“Homeless bashing, bum fights, and fight clubs stoke their appetites.”

But Ab is already pumped to say, “You are wise and beautiful, Aunt Esther. Just as the Dwarf Sage Agastya helped the gods demolish demons in ancient India, I will help destroy their modern-day avatars, civilize these parts.”

“Sure you will, darling Ab.” A bauble-heavy digit ascends. “But remember: the Dwarf Sage first drank the oceans dry to expose the demons the gods hunted. Our demons inhabit the city’s soft underbelly, our purgatory——our naraka loka——in the Tender-loin and South of Market, and are soaked in firewater and other drugs. Don’t even think of sucking that one dry. It’s not the same. . . .”

“I’ll come up with something, Aunt Esther.”

“I’m sure you will, darling!”

Her firm grip delays him.

His confidence——mere hubris, he thinks; strong only on this side of her double-steel front door. No matter what he pretends to be, he’ll remain forever a recluse.

Aunt Esther knocks the President’s follies, skips to slit open local rotten-culture deviants, and then sings the praises of the anti-oxidant properties of blueberries——the last a recurring subject, larded with Kaiserspeak.

She disappears in search of a pamphlet on food that will prevent infirmity, premature aging, and early death, one of the many she has given him. She tucks it into the pocket of his blue windbreaker and suggests he read it over a cup of fair-trade herbal tea at Peet’s.

And then she adds, “Before you fly away, Cochin Cohn’s golden son, to probe San Francisco’s underbelly, here’s a quiz.”
At last, she has revived her true self, the Aunt who had won his heart years ago with her quizzes.

“Ready?”

“If not for a quiz, then what?” he asked.

“It’s guaranteed to stop premature dementia in its socks.”

“All set, Aunt Esther.”

His notebook and pen are out, just as she trained him during the summer two decades ago when she visited his parents in Israel.
“Which American actor opines, ‘We’re all nine!’?” Her eyes are full of childlike glee.

“I know the answer,” Ab says. “There’s only one person who’d say that. Your quizzes, Aunt Esther, are getting easier or I’m getting better. Or a little bit of both.”

She chuckles. “You think you have it? Well, don’t be hasty! Ponder your answer. Call me before the day’s done. A prize for the right answer.”

Once outside, as Mama’s words bounce through Ab, a fresh thought interrupts her litany: Why would only one person say, “We’re all nine!”?

Part II

Cochin Cohn explains to Ab Ben Cohn the path to samadaanam (peace) in Malaya-illa-la-la-illa-am.

“Ab, take it from me, I know what I speak of,” Liz Stein Cohn had said in Israel, after speeding back on Google’s magic carpet to the city of her adventurous twenties, when she heard of her son’s decision to go to San Francisco.

“I should know——I lived in Fog City. Outside of the earth shaking under you, its most characteristic feature since the Gold Rush——people passed out on the streets.

“Don’t let your Indian bleeding heart turn you into a vegetable, as it has your father.”

Mama Cohn’s long, thick finger turned in the hot, dry air toward Papa Cohn. He was bent over a Sanskrit manuscript at his Kerala teakwood roll-top desk; she shook her finger from side to side until her elbow creaked.

“When you’re there, don’t aspire to become a good Samaritan. Have you ever wondered why the Samaritan’s are now a dead race?” Her jaw thrust forward. “Only a fool would follow that lead. Focus on yourself. Don’t you have enough to worry about?”

Mama has a lot of fire left in her, Ab thought.

“And Esther’s fake Orientalism! Her Gurdjieff-Ouspensky days were insufferable. Her sacred dances! Her stop-action examination of herself! All that chanting and meditation! Thank heavens they passed with menopause. Whatever her latest fashion in fascination, fugheddaboudit!”

“You say that like an American, like a New Yorker, Mama.” That line had often worked well for him.

“Don’t be cheeky! I can still whip you. I am both! I remain forever American and a New Yorker.”

“This is true,” Ab said, an expression he’d heard his father use often with her. He looked at Papa Cohn. Was his father going to come up with a diversion so his son could escape her attention?

“Follow my piece of motherly, New York wisdom and you’ll remain sane around my sister. Fugheddaboudit works! I grew up in Esther’s shadow, I know all about her. That’s not to deny that having continents between us helps!”

“Pashu,” Cochin Cohn began, and then stopped; it was his term of endearment, retired for over two decades. “I mean Lizzy; I forgot, forgive me, that you hate the Indian word. The Samaritans aren’t all gone.” His jungle-thick, grey eyebrows rose; his thin body, curved like a sickle, straightened. “Dead race? No. Dying? Maybe not. There are about 700 of them in Israel. Some attend Jewish synagogues but don’t consider themselves Jews; others go to mosques, but don’t consider themselves Muslims. Flexibility for a modern world. We have a lot to learn from them.”

He smiled.

Papa loves to confound Mama, Ab thought. She will surely ride a mean streak all night, maybe even drug him with sugar so that he falls asleep at his desk.

“And with modern medicine and genetic diagnoses, the Samaritans may never die out.”

“’Lizzy’?” she inquired. “You haven’t called me that since our San Francisco days. Has our son’s departure to the Golden State unhooked you from your fruitless Indian studies? What will you tell your Maker when you meet Him face-to-face and He says, ‘The first of your family in millennia to return to Israel, and how did you spend your time? Studying Sanskrit? Calling your wife, Pashu?’”
She toppled her chair and barrelled out of the room.

“I remained silent,” Papa explained to Ab in his Malayalam, “about the ‘Indian bleeding heart’ reference and other comments——deliberately only, you understand. She throws these barbs only to get a rise out of me. Should I oblige and attack in kind? Perhaps.”

Barbs? More like incendiary devices, Ab reflected.

“Why would I want to rob her of her greatest satisfaction,” Papa Cohn continued, “that her criticism of me——of many years mind you——are cent-per-cent true? Most comfortable, your mother, with the very private knowledge that I will not, at any cost, mind you, come back at her from my end. Best this way for me. Very much so. I don’t have to conjure up from the humidity-free air abuse of equal or greater weight. Thanks be to the God of Israel and the gods of India, I can devote my precious time at home away from work to my Indian studies. This is the way of peace, of samadaanam, at home. What’s the use of all these ancient Indian manuscripts to me, or anyone, if I don’t apply some simple lessons from them?”

His hand rotated with great vigor, his thumb flapped as if it beat an imaginary drum. “No action, no reaction, at least for a while,” he said.

Mama returned, pressing a cushion to her middle. “Do I hear that incomprehensible sing-song, Malaya-illa-la-la-illa-lam language again? What are you muttering about me to my son in that dark corner, your mini-la-la land? You fill his head with sing-song nonsense. He’s almost forty and he’s a hermit. What did I do to deserve this?”

Papa’s hand made a small turn, slowly. “Nothing important was said, dear.”

She ignored his words. “Lonely places, he haunts. Three yards between him and other pedestrians. When that’s not possible, takes a cab! A hermit in a cab! Never travels by public transportation when other means are available. And if he can manage it, he never goes out on the street when children are crossing town to go to school or return home. That’s my son! Do I deserve this? You have filled his head with nonsense all these years.”

“Just talking to our son about Garuda, Lord Vishnu’s great bird,” Papa said without looking at her. “Remember Garuda is also called Vinayak, a name he shares with. . . .”

“Enough! Enough of that nonsense. I had ten years of that from you in la-la land. Now that my son is going to California, your mind has flip-flopped back to Hinduland,” she said.

Again, the door slammed behind her.

~ ~ ~

Papa had first met Liz Stein, a New-York-born Russian Jew, in 1968, at the Lantern Residence Club, a low-end Fog City room-and-board establishment at Post and Hyde. She was studying graphic design at a small school, now known as the gargantuan Academy of Art University, and he, computer programming at City College.

The exotic blend of the dissimilar attached to the familiar was hard to resist; they co-habited in the Summer of Love and got hitched in Golden Gate Park. An itinerant, radical rabbi conducted the ceremony, a prayer shawl over a branch of a tree acting as the chuppah, and above that the real dome of the sky——a brilliant blue that day, which both Cochin Cohn and Liz Stein said predicted a happy marriage, though some of those present said, “Fog and rain are better if you are seeking good omens.”
In a departure from tradition——a righteous addition, the rabbi said——Cochin Cohn had translated the ketubah, the marriage contract, into chaste Sanskrit.

Soon after Ab was born in San Francisco in 1969, the family’s long, slow migration to Jerusalem began by way of that ancient safe haven for peregrinators and the persecuted: Cochin, India. They lived there for ten years, until, with hopes of opening up better medical and educational opportunities for Ab, they were among the last to join the exodus of Kerala Jews to Israel.

Of the three Cohns, only Mama was dry-eyed.

“India is for the birds,” she said, her New York accent sharpened to perfection to sever Papa from his Kerala and India ties. “Garuda and his flock can have India, but not my son. And Shiva can dance eternally on his dwarf of ignorance, but not on my son.”

Papa’s hang-dog look disappeared as he prepared to defend the land that had welcomed his ancestors.

“What you’re saying?” Unable to rise in English to challenge his New York wife when she was girded for battle Papa reverted to Malayalam. “It’s all symbolic, only. Anyway, do you know that Garuda is God Vishnu’s official carrier? Do you know that the fifth avatar of Vishnu, the compassionate preserver, is a dwarf?” Mama turned a deep red, a color rarely seen on Indian faces. Papa, on a roll, didn’t notice. “Do you know Garuda is also known as Vinayak, a name he shares with God Ganesh? What that means, I tell you, my dear Pashu, is that the one-and-only god-bird Garuda is able to remove and destroy obstacles. Don’t forget that in his fifth avatar, Vishnu as the dwarf Vamana defeated the demon king Bali. . . .”

“Stop! No more. I don’t understand a word. No more. Enough. Bus! And stop calling me Pashu. My name is Elizabeth. It’s a fine American name. A noble Jewish name. What is Pashu? It’s a cow. I come with you to this goddamn country of too many gods and you’ve reduced me to a cow?”

“It’s only a term of endearment. . . ,” he said in English.

“Endearment-scheerment-figment! Call me Liz, Beth, Eliza, or Elizabeth, or diddly-squat. I marry a computer scientist, a Cochin Jew, and what do I get? A Hindu cultist? Okay, I can take that. A New York Jew with Russian parents raised on compulsive-gambler Dostoevsky and vegetarian-yoga-performing Tolstoy can take anything. Even a Hindu cultist.” Mama’s head had jutted forward, which always rocked back in mock horror the female vendors in the Cochin bazaars.

“Did I complain when you sat up late, pouring over Sanskrit and Hindu religious texts instead of the Talmud, or, better still, being in bed with me? No. I encouraged you.”

“This is true,” he affirmed in the language he loved to the woman he loved, with a vigorous, loving nod, and then reverted to his old, worn-dog look.

For a moment his total agreement stumped her, as it invariably did. She often complained, in those days, that one of the things she missed was the vigorous back-and-forth of a New York argument. People argued in India, she admitted, expressing every shade of opinion, changing positions at will in order to confuse opponents of the moment; but no one was willing to take up verbal cudgels with her, not even her husband. Even after ten years in India, everyone treated her with deference——a foreigner, a guest who shouldn’t be contradicted, no matter what drivel she came up with to get a rise out of them.

Ab understood that the subject of leaving Kerala for what she called his “medical needs” was too important for her to leave to the practice of politeness. Her lips parted and she continued, teeth bared, jaw thrust forward, in anticipation of agreement on a far more important matter.

“Despite all your proper namastes, namaskarams, vanakkams, and prostrations to gods that incarnate as dwarfs, yes, and your reverence for the Dwarf Sage Agastya, this country is positively medieval when it comes to dwarfs.”

Papa’s eyes dimmed.

“What? That hit home? Think your Pashu lives in myth and legend? I bleed, I sweat. So does my son. You know what they call him, here? Do you? You would, if you pried your eyes from those miniature paintings and Sanskrit tomes.”

Papa’s eyes glowed. “You know, wife,” he said in English, “some of the best Sanskrit scholars in the world are Jews. A few more years, I could be one of them.”

As fast as his eyes had lit up, they faded. “But, I know I have been selfish,” he admitted in Malayalam.

Then, once again, his eyes flashed light, and he continued, “You are like Shiva stepping on the dwarf of ignorance. Our son is like Vamana fully endowed with the fire of knowledge. He will destroy the ignorant!”

“Enough!” she screamed. “I don’t understand a word. I’ve had it. I leave with the boy within the month. Come with us, if you can tear yourself from your beloved country.”

She had him in the crosshairs of her no-nonsense gaze. He was accustomed to her eyes shooting him down, shredding and incinerating him.

He looked out the window at the papaya, jackfruit, mango, tamarind, cashew, and banana trees. Parrots he had released over the years carried on an excited conversation; a crow told them to get lost, while a cow tethered to the mango tree munched undisturbed, her tail in a slow flog.

“I’m sure you can pursue your Sanskrit studies in Israel. Jews, as you say so often, are the world’s foremost Sanskrit scholars.”
He began to cry: no sound, just tears, a steady stream.

First Mama’s eyes softened; then, her whole face.

“I know, I know,” she said. “It breaks your heart to go. Broke mine a long time ago, knowing one day we must. There! That’s why I never allowed myself to accept this country. It’s next to impossible not to fall in love with it.”

They went to Israel. Mama flourished, no one treated her as a guest, and she had every opportunity to debate and argue from every angle she chose. Papa missed all things Indian, until he signed up for a Sanskrit correspondence course and joined an association of Jews who had migrated from Kerala, with whom he enjoyed talking in Malayalam about a land they had never left in their memories.

Part III

Ab Ben Cohn, Israel’s Dwarf Hermit meets the big man.

Ab Ben Cohn comes upon the big man in a prolonged sidewalk kiss near a gently sloping park on one of San Francisco’s artery-busting hills and breaks his march to the Tenderloin, where he plans to taste the grits in its underbelly.

Ahead and below, as far as he can see, the street falls; in parts the drop is sharp, lending an illusion of steepness to all of it. He wants to spread his thick arms and his web-like fingers and float down into the open-faced buildings lining them. A vast army of bay windows thrusts out like pumped-up chests and breasts. Occasionally, sunshine brushes them where the fog cover has been blown off by micro-puffs of wind.

He hears a banjo, slowly strummed somewhere in the fog-girdled hills.

Whose Goliath is this?

His large brown eyes return to the giant, just before his nose gets whammed with a whiff of the big man’s smell of Yardley, terror, adrenalin, and pig’s meat, and he almost chokes as Aunt Esther’s kosher cooking whooshes back up into his throat.

Ab covers his mouth with short, thick, knobby fingers and swallows the uprisen remains of a hearty repast of organic heirloom grains and five portions of cancer-fighting vegetables and berries——all guaranteed, Aunt Esther had promised, to make him thrive and age gracefully. Unlike his mother.

He de-escalates the food backflow, returns it to hydrochloric acid pits, wipes his lips, and takes a deep breath. He has to get this fallen Goliath some help. No one has stopped to help the poor man. Surely, there’s a cell-phone human nearby.

His large, round eyes squint; he does a 360-degree turn.

No one.

He looks again. Four eyes glimmer at him from the verdant park.

A man-in-the-moon smile sidles from left to right on Ab’s broad face. Papa would say, “Watch out, my hermit son. Yama, the Lord of Death, is on the prowl with his four-eyed dogs.”

Mama would say, “Almost three decades in Israel and we aren’t free of those Hindu superstitions.”

Wings flap above the Dwarf Hermit, as if a cloud of carrion birds is about to descend on the fallen giant. Ab’s eyes seek the source of the sound just in time to glimpse a huge bird disappear into the fog.

There goes Garuda! Howdy, big bird! Are you going to be the remover of my obstacles? Are you flying alone?

The Hermit’s ears, attuned to the whisper of insects, catch the echo of wings flapping, merging with the banjo’s strum.

Just as the big-bird sounds fade, he hears a faint:
Stay with me!
Stay with me!
Stay with me!

The plea floats in, joining the banjo vibrating in his ears.

Impossible, he informs himself. I’m imagining things. It’s only a voice in my mind.

Peering at the mountain of flesh struck down on the otherwise peaceful San Francisco street, the Dwarf Hermit’s big heart pounds in his short, muscular, knobby body as if it’s ready for wing-swept flight.

~ ~ ~

Ab hesitates. Wasn’t there something about the big man’s call to stay with him? Can it be that Aunt Esther’s wizardry, in her campaign to turn him from the Dwarf Hermit into hero material, had begun to take effect? Is this just a scene she prepared as part of her magical act in his makeover?

How many times have I told you——don’t dabble in esoteric Indian gods and goddesses? he hears Mama Cohn say.
He tries to shake off the matriarchal brio, but it keeps coming at him.

Have you forgotten how they taunted you in your father’s God’s Own Country, that damn, insect-and-vermin infected, tropical cesspool, Hindu-haunting-chanting, Sanskrit-prakrit, mullah-bullah, Palayoor-Paravoor-Cranganore, Malabari-Paradesi, Nasrani-byriani Kerala?

Does he remember what they called him? How can he forget?

Mundan-kunnikkuru: dumb dwarf. The name stuck, a chanted taunt. Yet he remembers, in Kerala, the tropical Paradise he loves, that the Dwarf Sage Agastya of ancient times is venerated for his wisdom and compassion.

I warned you not to fall under the spell of my sister Esther and her Eastern mysticism. She, who still has the hots for my husband, your Third-World father. Listen to how your heart pounds! Shheee! Look at you, not even four feet tall! Is there anyone worrying about you? When will you learn——this is not your business? Now is a good time, better than any, to follow my lesson: Mind your own business and have a business to mind.

Run, Ab, son of Stein and Cohn.

Under a blazing Middle Eastern sun Mama has a chilling effect; in Fog City’s Mark-Twain weather, she grows even stronger.

If not now, when, Mundan-Kunnikkuru? Run as fast as your little legs can take you. If a man so huge could be laid so low, what could befall a dwarf one-fourth his size? Wouldn’t it be proportionately worse?

Can Ab Ben Cohn run?

He knows that terrible events happen. Decades in Israel had reinforced his early boyhood experience in India. Inevitable, such events; but generally they occur in places that team with people, not where he, a lover of smart silences and lonely landscapes, makes his home——a remote Israeli farmhouse.

This is Esther’s Baghdad-by-the-bay, not your Israeli farmhouse.

He feels the cold slush in his veins.

Yet his feet feel like a couple of dwarf elephants are sitting on them, holding him in place. He knows he isn’t going anywhere.
The idea of running from danger distresses him.

He looks around and beyond. Everywhere. He identifies nothing less than the Most Beautiful City in the World.

If not him, Ab Ben Cohn, who will help this man?

~ ~ ~

Now, there he is:

The lone human with a fallen giant as far as his eyes can see.

He wants to run. He wants to stay and help.

The giant’s smell, as strong as he is big, repels the Hermit.

The big man’s voice in his brain, as sweet as he is big, holds him in thrall.

Ab shuts out his doubts, flourishes his large handkerchief, covers his nose, and inquires, “You okay, down there?”

He is a complete fool. Who else but a complete fool would ask such a question of a man face down on the sidewalk?
At thirty-nine, he feels that he has fully graduated to being a complete fool, not unlike a royal fool except for living in a democracy, albeit one with citizens of different classifications.

The Hermit asks himself, Don’t you know, even a giant could not be okay in a prolonged sidewalk kiss?

At that moment, as he sits on the sidewalk, wishing he hadn’t left Aunt Esther’s home to explore the Tenderloin on foot, Ab’s face moves like a moon over the giant’s face.

What would sweet old Aunt Esther recommend he do about the giant?

She has an opinion on everything, very much like Mama; but unlike her, Aunt Esther can shift from topic to topic with mind-boggling speed, in the classic style of the three-dot journalism she practices.

She’d lift his chin with a wrinkled hand sparkling with baubles, and say, “Darling boy, listen to your heart. If it says, ‘Get out of there,’ then, that’s what you should do. And if you do, there’s nothing to stop you from calling for help from a safe distance. On the other hand, your heart might say, ‘Remain and help the sidewalk giant!’ In which case, you know what you must do, don’t you?”

~ ~ ~

The Big Man

Stay with me, I say, breaking into the Good Samaritan’s mind.

Stay with me, reach into my jacket for my cell phone, call for help.

Just stay with me.

Speak to me.

Who are you?

Speak to me——I’m a good listener.

And a good writer.

What brought you to me?

Are you an angel?

My guardian angel?

“It’s all right, man,” the Samaritan says. “I won’t leave you. I’m no angel, but my name is Ab Ben Cohn of Israel and India. In Israel, I’m also known as the Dwarf Hermit, in India as the Mundan-Kunnikkuru, the Dumb Dwarf.”

Heck, man, I say, don’t let those name-calling slime-balls get you down. My name is Joldersma, but you should hear what they call me. The JollyGreenElephantMa is the kindest. It’s true, as you were thinking: When everything is said and done, we are all nine, and eight, and seven . . . but especially nine, always nine.

Ab Ben Cohn

I sense a warm flush; I’m holding the big man’s hand. There must be a meeting of minds. So as we await help, the hermit in me blocks out the surrounding world and prepares to occupy Joldersma’s mind with my story. I find the world slowing down——as if I’m astride Garuda flapping in slow motion.

“Children can be cruel in a big city.”

I hear you! Joldersma says. Tell me about it!

“In Cochin, an ancient port city in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala, where I spent my early childhood, among Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, the children taunted:

‘O, Mundan-Kunnikkuru!
O, Dumb Dwarf!
The evil eye wrought you
before you entered the world.’

“In Israel, when I was a teen, young and old alike would whisper loud enough to be overheard:

“’Too much in-breeding will produce such deformities. . . . Better to marry a non-Jew than one of your own tribe when there are so few of you. . . . Some people will never learn, especially not in uncivilized lands filled with dark, half-dressed savages living among pythons, crocodiles, and other wild creatures that can swallow you up whole.’

“They’d quote bearded, very old heads, foretelling, with the authority of inherited knowledge that I’d come to an unfortunate end and bring pain and misfortune to others.

“Truth and nature’s idiosyncrasies often play out independent of our fantasies.

“No genetic inbreeding in this Stein Cohn.”

Don’t stop, Joldersma says. Tell me more.

I do.

Part IV

The Son of Cochin Cohn of India and Israel prays for the Son of Jeru-Salem Kahn.

“Reach for the sky. I mean: Put your hands behind your head,” says a squeaky, sharp voice.
Half-digested food chokes my throat once again, before my heart does. I freeze in knees-touching-concrete benediction. I should have run from the scene a long time ago, as my voices had advised. Although San Francisco has the second most-educated population in the country, I have read and Aunt Esther has lectured me about the well-researched finding that this city has its share of cops who get off on their addiction to abuse.

We are all nine——always, I recall.

Once more comes the order, voice turning shrill.

I freeze.

My heart pounds at the center of the turmoil. Blood at this hyper speed, I can do without.

Cold metal rings my wrists.

“Help is here!” I say aloud to Joldersma, trying to loop him into the information. I know what it’s like to lose heart on the outside.
The big cop’s narrow eyes tense into slits.

He hates that my voice could fill a cathedral. Plenty of effort and training behind it, I want to tell him. No, “Stand on the table when you speak so that we can hear you!” for me.

I’m yanked. All three-foot-and-some inches. I dangle. Shoulders scream. I wriggle.

Joldersma says in my head, Hang tight, Ab Cohn! Hang tight!

Back on knees, a few feet from the fallen man, my hands cuffed.

“Police brutality!” A woman’s scream.

Big Blue’s eyes ascend to an upper story of a building across the street. His massive finger, like Brahma’s mythical danda, pokes skyward, and he says, “You! Come down! Now!”

“Can’t. . . .” The rest doesn’t register.

Big Blue summons an ambulance.

“What did you do to the man?” he demands.

I ingest Big Blue’s stink of pepperoni, cheese, garlic, onions. A lifetime of experience fails to help holding down my food.

“I did nothing,” I protest, proud that my voice retains its strength under attack.

Joldersma tries to say, He comforted me.

His voice in my head is faint.

Big Blue turns to look at the fallen man. “I would have sworn he spoke to me,” he begins, then shakes his head as if to clear it, and pokes my chest with his Brahma danda.

I fall. Adrenaline pumping, my head clears, and a mousy voice, I did not know I had, says, “I told you, I did nothing! I did nothing.”
You’re punishing the Good Samaritan! Joldersma tries again, but his voice only registers in my brain and quickly fades away even there.

Big Blue picks me up as if he’s handling a rag doll. His little smile turns into a laugh. “I’ve always wanted to do this! Better fess up, now!”

He tosses me on to the park’s grass. A thud and a crack share audio space. I scream.

I’ve never known such abuse. All I can think, as my mind tries to block out this unfortunate turn in my life, is what my Aunt Esther’s Doc often tells her: “Everything has to begin sometime.”

If what hasn’t happened to me will now happen, I’m sure I don’t want Big Blue to be the person doing it to me.

He orders the four on-lookers, who’ve magically materialized, to stay back; checks out my fallen friend; and says, “He’s still alive.”
I say, “I thought so, too.” I disregard the pain, offer a smile, fall back on my tried-and-tested agree-and-smile routine.

He ignores me.

I look up into fog-bound heavens and pray, Whoever’s up there in charge right now for Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Yahweh, whether it’s the Archangels Gabriel or Michael, or Yama——the God of Death, or Garuda———the remover of obstacles, or Sage Agastya, it’s time to intervene.

If not now, when?

A large, wet tongue slathers all over my face.

I close my eyes to protect myself. By the time I turn around painfully, whatever that was is out of my line of vision.

One of Sage Agastya’s tricks?

“Victim: Joldersma,” Big Blue reports, examining my friend’s wallet.

“Yours?” he inquires, his Brahma danda stabbing toward me.

“Abdoul Ben Cohn,” I reveal, not wanting another bone-in-flesh encounter.

“Abdul bin Kahn,” he says aloud into his mike.

Completely lost, I say, “Not Abdul bin Kahn. My name is Abdoul Ben Cohn.”

“That’s what I said. Pipe down or I’ll administer another. . . .”

I go silent. Well, why not try that wisdom? Yes, I go completely silent; no corrections, no witticisms.
He dispenses “another.”

“Which one is your Christian name?” he inquires, one eyebrow raised strategically on his bulldog face.
Oh, that! I think. That’s easy.

“I’m not Christian,” I tell him with a calming smile.

He parts lips, too. I notice the discolored teeth.

At last, I think, I’m making contact. Undoubtedly, living a reclusive life has made my social skills rusty, although as a child in India, despite the mundan-kunnikkuru taunts, I was known as a Dale Carnegie go-getter, making friends and influencing people.
But that outsize finger deploys.

A shot of fear radiates from under my navel. I avoid “another,” by quickly adding, “Abdoul.”

“Abdul,” he transmits. To me, he says, “You can’t hoodwink me. Trained by the best, I strip camouflaged identities.”

“Abdul bin Kahn of Jeru-Salem. Islamic name, says headquarters.” He scowls. “At first glance, would’ve sworn you’re Armenian. Fresno. Saroyan country. I figured . . . one of the darker Armenians. Sneaky, but fervent anti-terrorists.”

Fresno? Saroyan? Sneaky?

I’m sure diligent observation will make everything plain as day, the Fallen Man Mystery included.
Unless it gets stranger.

“Not Fresno. Not Armenian. Israel and India.” I throw in mental flashes of far horizons.

He has tuned out.

The ambulance crew arrives, rolls out gear, works quickly, efficiently.

“Barely alive,” a medic broadcasts as they leave.

“Beg St. Jude and St. Christopher he lives, or kaput,” a bystander says, finger slicing his neck.

“A squirt like you, a big guy like that!” comments Big Blue, shaking his head, and patting me down. Not finding a weapon, he rifles my wallet.

“David and Goliath,” explains a voyeur. Big Blue, busy pocketing my ID, ignores him.

Another police car arrives. A male and a female emerge, settle their holsters, tighten for urban battle.

I feel the reply from above to my prayer is, It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

“Abdul bin Kahn of Jeru-Salem,” reports Big Blue, reviewing his findings with his backup crew.

This nightmare must stop. “Not Abdul bin Kahn of Jerusalem!” I spell Abdoul Ben Cohn, son of Cochin Cohn of India and Israel.
The Female Cop observes, “Middle Eastern name, features, accent. Database checks.”

My eyes fix on her hand on her holstered gun. In my cowboys-and-rustlers phase in tropical Cochin, I’d longed to rest my hand in just this style.

Her face stretches into a gargoyle; she saunters over, taps my crown with her wand, and says, “Keep your eyes to yourself, you no-good, little midget-crap!”

The pain is unbearable, nevertheless I manage to hold back the scream and say, “Little man, not midget. You can call me dwarf, if little man doesn’t work for you.”

“Shut your trap! Zip your lip!” she says and administers a spangle of stars, enough to fit a banner.

I struggle to wander back. She shakes and tosses me.

“I had nothing to do with it!” This time, I scream with pain, loud, unambiguous.

She dispenses a kick.

“He had nothing to do with it!” This scream from a young blonde.

“You his friend?” demands Big Blue; he twirls his wand.

She shakes her head, points to the building, and says, “My mother can’t walk. She watches the loose dog, spots this man walk by; she had him in her binocular sights all the time. The big man was down long before this man showed up.”

A huge beast enters my line of vision.

“Are you the one who accused my partner of ‘police brutality’?” demands Female Cop; her wand twirls.

Big Blue raises his.

The beast leaps, a white bolt of lightning; two eyes flash into four. Yama’s dog strikes.

Hell breaks loose.

The audience cries out collectively, scatters.

Jaws clamp tight on Big Blue’s neck.

Adrenalin and fear flash over the area.

The other cops blast the predator, some of their shots wound the prey. A tangle of hands, legs and heads. They try to free Big Blue.

The dead bull remains glued to Big Blue’s neck.

“Whose goddamn animal is this?” The Female Cop waves her wand. “Yours?”

I shake my head, prepare for the worst; every part of me screams with pain.

She strikes. More stellar explosions.

I try smiling, again.

Bad timing.

Fury bloats her face, she pulverizes my groin.

Her wand strikes. Galaxies.

Male Cop says, his voice shaking, “Officer down . . . ambulance . . . reinforcements. Perpetrator down: pit bull. Suspected owner: Abdul bin Kahn of Jeru-Salem.”

“Ya-ma’s dog,” I say.

~ ~ ~

For eons afterwards: sirens. In, out of my head.

When I wake, I’m chained to a bed. Holding charge? Confusing officers at crime scene, intending to cause death and mayhem.
I, Abdoul Ben Cohn of Israel and India, son of Cochin Cohn, exceedingly thankful for not being shot for what I’m not, repeat:
I’m not the son of Jerusalem Kahn.

I pray, in these dangerous times, for the son of Jerusalem Kahn.

Peace be to him.

~ ~ ~

I imagine Aunt Esther’s Doc saying, “If it can happen, it will happen to you, if you live long enough. If it’s done, it will be done to you, if you live long enough. You have lived thirty-nine years, nothing much has happened, what this means is what did not happen to you will start happening to you.”

She and her Doc, they have interesting conversations, within Kaiser’s time limits for each visit. She gets around Kaiser’s in-one-minute-out-the-next system by checking in with him often and picking up where she left off.

~ ~ ~

Aunt Esther says over the phone, “I’m coming to get you out, Ab.”

“You, and Garuda, and Vishnu, and Yama. . . .”

“All of them and my lawyer. She’s working on it, as we speak. . . .”

“Maybe I’m better off in Israel or India. . . .”

“Your Dad’s coming. Says he’s going to return with you to India. Turns out he never burned his Indian passport or yours. Lizzy wanted him to, but he never burned that bridge. Still, he’s got to renew them.”

“What do you think I should do? America doesn’t take to me. They see me, they see Arab.”

“Darling, it doesn’t matter whether America takes to you. America needs you. The question is: Do you take to America?”
“I got to think about that one, Aunt Esther.”

“You know, I won’t live forever. But don’t let that influence you.”

I don’t say anything while I think.

“I’ve thought about it. This is what I think. . . .”

“Hold it, right there, young man. . . . You’re not going to get away so easily. I want the answer to my quiz. . . . You’re nine, always. Now, doesn’t that say everything? You’re nine, always. The good, the bad, and the ugly. All of it still nine. Who said that?”

~ ~ ~

My reward from this close physical contact with America is that the voices in my brain have fled. Does this mean abuse therapy works?

Oh, and a video that shows it all has surfaced. Better than reality TV, says Aunt Esther. Her lawyer sees big bucks. Meanwhile, the Police Union’s attorney, who has a most novel interpretation of it all, wants me charged with interfering at a crime scene with some sort of great eastern fakir-fakery-doggery nonsense. This is not what I wish to spend much time on.
All I can think of is that when Joldersma comes out of his coma, I’ll have an all-American friend.

No one says anything about Yama, the Lord of Death, and his dogs. Or about Garuda.

2 Responses to 'THE MAKEOVER OF COCHIN COHN by Michael Chacko Daniels'

1. Supremo @ January 18th, 2008 1:01 am:
   

   Strange and powerful stuff!!

   
   
2. Esther Baxter Pic @ February 15th, 2008 5:06 pm:
   

   Esther Baxter Pic…

   Thanks for the nice read, keep up the interesting posts…..

   
   

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